Who This Is For
This is for coaches, course creators, and membership owners over 40 who want a business that supports the life they want to live.
You have real expertise. You have real clients, students, or members, and real wins you can point to. You’re good at what you do, and you didn’t get good by accident.
Your life is also fuller than it was at 30. Maybe you have kids who still need rides to practice. Your parents need more from you every year. And some days you’re done peopling by 1pm (and you’re not sorry about it).
Your calendar fills up without asking your permission. You’ve probably tried strategies built for 25-year-olds with no responsibilities, and you’ve noticed they don’t fit. You believe simple beats complicated. And you’d never trade your family for a bigger revenue month.
If that sounds like you, friend, keep reading.
One note on numbers before we start. Every figure here about our business belongs to Michelle and me. They’re our numbers and our experience. Your offer, your audience, and your work decide what happens in yours.
Introduction:
Why This Is Finally Possible
Picture a Wednesday morning.
It’s 7:40. Your kid is on the couch with a blanket, a fever, and a look that says they’re not going anywhere. You have a client call at 9, another at 11:30, and a third at 2. Each one was booked 3 weeks ago by someone who has no idea your kid is sick.
So you start the shuffle. You write the apology message and read it twice to make sure it sounds sincere and not frazzled. You offer Friday at 3, then remember Friday at 3 is a game. So you offer Monday and feel next week get a little heavier.
Or picture a different Wednesday. You look outside and it’s awesome out. It’s the first real beach day of the year, and you can’t even go for a walk because you have a call at 1.
Life lifes. It does that. It sends a sick kiddo or a beach day, and the only question is whether your business bends or breaks.
For most of the people I know in this industry, it breaks. Or more honestly, it makes you do the breaking. You cancel, reschedule, apologize, and make it up on a weekend you didn’t have.
The old constraint
There’s a reason it worked that way for so long.
Your value is your lived experience. It’s the thing you can see in 3 minutes because you’ve spent 20 years learning it the hard way. For a long time the only way to hand that to another person was to get on a call with them at a time you both agreed on.
Selling worked the same way. Someone had to talk to you, hear that you knew your stuff, and feel safe enough to say yes. So we booked sales calls. Then marketing turned into posting all day and replying to DMs all evening, so we could earn the right to book those calls. And then delivery meant more calls.
Every fixed call on the calendar is one more thing to move when life happens. That’s a structural limit, and for a long time everyone was stuck with it.
What changed
A few things shifted while most of us were busy.
People got comfortable with voice notes and messages. A 2-minute voice note from someone who knows what they’re doing can help more than a 45-minute call where half the time goes to catching up. Recorded things became normal to buy. A paid 60-minute workshop became something people happily show up for, and the replay became something people happily pay for.
And AI changed what’s possible. A year ago, if I’d asked for a list of every single person who’s bought any of our products, it would’ve been a data analyst’s full-time job. Now it’s one prompt.
Years ago, supporting clients without calls was hard because it relied on a way of working that didn’t scale. Now AI takes over the parts that used to eat the time, and the actual 1:1 part happens in a couple of hours a week. We get to use it with discernment and with a real human in the loop, in a way that wasn’t possible a year ago.
Together those shifts remove the old rule that said your expertise could only travel if you did. Now it can travel without you.
That’s why I say this is finally possible. You can get paid well and still be on the couch with the sick kiddo on that Wednesday morning.
My week in the hospital
In October 2026 I got to test that the hard way. I spent pretty much a full week in the hospital needing an emergency procedure and surgery (all went well, and I’m home and feeling good. Modern medicine is a marvel).
At the time we had 64 active clients in Freedom40. All of them kept making progress. 4 new people joined from 3 different continents, and nobody needed a sales call or a coaching call. I didn’t have to move a single call.
The one thing that did move was our $5M Workshop. We pushed it back a week and sent everyone a personal email with the option of a full refund. 164 people had grabbed a ticket, and 0 of them asked for one.
64
Active clients, all still making progress
4
New people joined, from 3 continents
0
Refunds asked for, out of 164 tickets
I didn’t have my computer with me. I just sat there and thought. And I kept coming back to how privileged I am to go through something like that without the stress that usually comes with running a business.
I want that for you too.
What’s inside
Part I is what we believe and why. Part II is how Freedom40 works. And Part III walks you through the steps, one phase at a time, in the order we’d take them if we were starting over.
By the end you’ll know how to build an offer people buy without a sales call, support clients in the gaps of your day, and get paid to find the next ones.
I’m going to be plain with you all the way through, including about what this doesn’t do. We’ve tried the loud way, and we have the numbers to show for it. So let me start with how we got here.
Prologue:
We Are the Proof
Here’s the honest version of how Michelle and I got here. The polished version would be less useful to you.
Michelle and I are both in our 40s, and we’ve been married over 17 years. We have 2 boys in competitive soccer (which means fields all over our city), parents who need us more every year, and 2 dogs. I work from a little backyard office we call the Bunkie.
I’m the one you’ll see on our workshops and in your private coaching channel. Michelle builds the products, systems, and tech that keep everything running (and you’ll never catch her on a Zoom). That split works really well for us.
Early 2020
In early 2020 I had 20 years of video behind me, zero people on my email list, and a couple hundred friends on Facebook. I’d recently sold out of my last business and moved back to Canada, and honestly I felt kind of lost. Video had been my life, but nobody knew who I was.
I’d used some of the money from that exit to join a mastermind of about 30 or 40 people. So I asked them a simple question. Does anybody have a group where I can show up, talk about this, be helpful, and see what happens? 2 friends said yes, and each of their groups had about 200 people in it.
I showed up for 60 minutes and taught people how to go live on video with confidence: what to say, what not to say, and how to look on camera. It was simple stuff I’d learned slowly over 2 decades. Then I invited them to a paid mini workshop called Click Go Live.
I sold my first 100 tickets that way, just by being helpful in other people’s groups. No sales call. A few weeks later the world moved onto Zoom, and suddenly everyone needed to know how to go live. Click Go Live made over $300K in its first 8 months.
I’d love to tell you I planned the timing. I didn’t. 😅 I had a useful skill, I showed up helpful in the right places, and the world happened to need what I knew.
Wake Up To Freedom started as a side project. We thought it would be a fun business to run. Then we committed to it in 2021, and it shot up.
Mini Workshop Magic
That summer we showed other business owners how we’d sold our workshops, and that became Mini Workshop Magic. It sold 7,759 tickets. At checkout we offered a bump (a small add-on right on the checkout page) and an upsell (a bigger offer right after someone buys).
The workshop itself made $208,823. The bump and upsell made $268,753 together. That’s $59,930 more from the add-ons than from the thing they were added to. A $27 ticket became a $59.78 checkout on average.
Yes, really. And that one fact ended up shaping everything that came later.
The Freedom List
Through all of this we had no launch calendar, no quarterly projections, and no KPIs. What we had was a list of things we didn’t want to do anymore. We call it the Freedom List:
The Freedom List
That list was our mission from day one, and every decision went through it. If an idea needed something on the list, we didn’t do it. It didn’t matter how smart it sounded.
The first rule held. We’ve sold over $5M since 2020, and we’ve literally never taken a sales call.
Then we forgot it
We had good timing, 20 years of practice, and a partner who builds what I can’t. We also made some expensive mistakes. You might be getting told to make the same ones right now, so before I tell you about ours, let me start with you.
Part I: What We Believe
Nobody Wants a Business That Competes With Their Life
You’re good at something. You’ve helped real people get real results. And at some point, growing an online business came to mean posting all day, DM’ing all evening, and squeezing sales calls in between everything else you do.
You did it for a while. Maybe you’re still doing it. And somewhere in there you noticed something uncomfortable. The business you built to give you freedom has started to compete with your life for the same hours.
What the old way costs
The cost is time, and it’s also the quality of the time you have left.
It’s answering a DM from the parking lot while your kid walks into school without a goodbye wave. It’s the 4pm sales call you think about from the moment you wake up. And it’s a Sunday evening that never feels like Sunday because Monday has 7 calls on it.
Maybe you’ve said something like this out loud: “I had to reschedule 3 client calls this week because of my mom.” Or this one: “My calendar looks organized. My life is chaos.”
Every fixed call is one more thing to move when life happens. Those costs show up in your week long before they ever show up in a spreadsheet.
The Freedom List, again
Michelle and I wrote our Freedom List as people who’d felt all of this. Instead of a business plan, we wrote a list of refusals.
You can write yours before you read another page. It takes 5 minutes. What do you never want to do again? Be honest. Be petty if you need to (“Friday anything” made our list, and I bet you can guess why 😉).
What we did next
After Click Go Live and Mini Workshop Magic, we did what everyone tells you to do next. We launched a membership. I’m telling you so you can skip it.
By 2021 we had a team of 8 and our biggest year ever: $1,505,758. About two thirds of it came from the membership (that was also COVID, when people were spending more money and more time online, so some of it was a natural spike). On paper we were doing great.
Every month brought churn, cancellations, and members to manage. A business that big needs a lot of feeding, and we were the ones feeding it.
Fast forward to 2022. We realized that this business, while making good money, wasn’t serving us. It wasn’t the offer stack we wanted, and it wasn’t what we wanted to do. So we slowly turned it down.
Membership sales were $164,893 in January 2022. That December they were $23,387, and that drop was a choice. When we finally closed it, we refunded every yearly member for their remaining time. That came to almost six figures. It’s a strange thing to walk away from something that’s working, but it wasn’t where we wanted to go.
Around the time I turned 40, we took the calls out of coaching. We only get so much time with the boys, our parents, and each other, and we didn’t want to spend it on a fixed schedule of Zoom calls.
But we did it the obvious way. We sold access. We called it the Freedom Hotline, with the line “Wanna have us on your speed dial?” It added $17K a month from a couple of emails.
Then came the 17-minute voice notes. Then came the Sunday emergencies.
It was a good offer on paper. People wanted it, and they paid for it. And it was terrible to fulfill. Signing a client used to be exciting. Now it came with a different feeling: “Dang it. Now I have to onboard them and show up for coaching calls.”
That sentence is the moment I knew something was wrong. A new client is supposed to be good news.
Banging our heads against the wall
We spent 2022, 2023, and 2024 trying to figure out what came next. We didn’t want super high ticket, and we didn’t want another membership. So what could we do that used what we’re really good at and still built a business that supports the life we want to live?
And we kept launching. A big launch could give us a six-figure day, and the day after could bring $3,000. Launch weeks meant late nights, tech stress, and refreshing the sales dashboard like it owed us money. Then the launch would end and I’d think, “Well, crap. That was a fun little jolt of energy, and now I’ve got to figure it out again.”
It didn’t work for our energy, and it didn’t work for our nervous systems.
We’d hit our seven-figure goals. We’d also built the exact kind of business our Freedom List was written to avoid.
Nobody did that to us. We built it one reasonable decision at a time. Each step made sense. All of them together didn’t.
If you’ve ever looked at your business and thought, “How did I end up here? This isn’t what I meant,” you’re in good company. It happens to smart people. I think it happens because the default advice is built around growth, and growth never asks whether you’re still enjoying your life.
Good news for you: you get to skip the 3 years we spent banging our heads against the wall. That’s what the rest of this is for.
So what do you have that people will pay for? More than you think.
The Result You Know How to Produce
When I ask experts what they sell, most of them list formats: a course, a program, a coaching package, or a membership.
Those are just the containers. What they’re really selling is a result they know how to produce. And for people over 40, that result is usually worth more than they think.
3 minutes and 20 years
Remember the line from the start? Your value is the thing you can see in 3 minutes because you’ve spent 20 years learning it the hard way. I come back to it all the time.
A client shows you their offer, their schedule, or their sales page. You look at it for a few minutes and say, “Move this. Cut that. You’re explaining something nobody asked about.” You don’t have to think hard. You just see it.
That’s lived experience. It’s pattern recognition, built by getting things wrong in your 30s and getting them less wrong in your 40s. And lived experience has never been more valuable than it is right now.
It’s your ability to see around the corner, to spot what’s coming up next for a client when they can’t even see it yet. Clients are paying for a result like that. They’re not paying for a number of calls or a number of hours of your labor.
This is where the shape of your business starts to change.
If your value is the 3-minute insight, it doesn’t need a 60-minute call to deliver it. A call can carry it. So can a voice note, a short written reply, a recorded workshop, or a well-built action plan. The insight is the valuable part, and the container is just the delivery truck.
For a long time we assumed the truck had to be a live call, because that’s how everyone else was doing it. So try this question on your clients. Would they rather show up to a fixed appointment to get the result, no matter how they’re feeling, how their kiddo’s feeling, or whether they woke up with a migraine? Or would they rather get the result with nothing added to their calendar?
Most people would say, “I just want the result.”
Once you see that, you can ask a better question. What’s the easiest way to get this result into this person’s hands?
That’s Rule 1 of the 8 rules we run our business on (Let everything be easy). You’ll see all 8 next.
Who this helps
This works best for a certain kind of expert, so let me be specific.
You’re really good at what you do, and you already sell something, whether that’s 1:1 coaching, a course, a membership, or a program. You want your business to actually flex around your life. And people are already paying attention to you: past clients, students, members, or a list.
That audience doesn’t need to be anywhere near as large as most people think (I started with a couple hundred friends on Facebook and 2 friends’ groups). What matters is that some of them already trust you.
Technical skills, natural sales chops, and a love of social media are all optional. So is being young (thank goodness).
What you do need is a willingness to do fewer things on purpose. That’s harder than it sounds.
What we want is a boring business by design. One that fits around the life you have and bends instead of breaking.
We call the way we build it Freedom40. But first, here are the rules we run it on.
The 8 Rules We Run On
Every decision in our business goes through 8 rules. They came out of the years we spent getting it wrong, and they’re more habit than framework.
1
Let everything be easy
What could be a simple email to a pocket of your list (“Hey, I’ve got 2 spots to help people”) turns into a 6-week launch plan. So we don’t do that. We want clients? We send a couple of emails.
2
All roads lead to Rome
Rome is the offer you want people to end up in, and for us that’s Freedom40 (you can swap Rome for whatever yours is). Every workshop, email, and post points the same way. It doesn’t have to lead there directly, as long as you know there’s a path. This keeps your business from turning into a pile of unrelated things.
3
No single-use plastics
Nothing gets used once. A live workshop becomes a replay. A voice note to one client becomes an email that helps hundreds.
4
Dials, not switches
You turn parts of the business up or down as life changes. Too many people blow up things that are giving them peace of mind. A dial lets you adjust without a crisis.
5
Default to action
There’s no replacement for taking action, and sometimes the action is uncomfortable, like putting out a workshop idea or inviting someone privately to work with you. Then you ask a better question. Skip “What do you think of this?” and ask, “I put this out there, and here’s the response. What’s my next step?”
6
Data and vibes
Fit counts as much as the dashboard. Your best clients will work closely with you, so vibes matter, and you don’t want a bad apple in there. There isn’t a single energy vampire in our client channels.
7
Repeat, then recur
Sell something with an end date first, and offer the ongoing version after. A repeat is something we can stop. A recurring payment is a promise we have to keep.
8
No emergencies
None of us are saving lives with our offers. We run our business without emergencies because life has enough of those in store for us already. Whatever feels urgent today probably won’t matter tomorrow. Next week it probably won’t. Next month it definitely won’t. And in a year you probably won’t even remember it.
All 8 of those have led us to $40K-plus months working a handful of hours every single week. You’ll see them show up everywhere from here.
Part II: How Freedom40 Works
The Freedom40 Method
The business we run now was hiding in an old win.
We used to run money-making template drops. We’d make 100 available for 2 days at $150 each, and they’d sell out. It was the easiest $15,000.
So we tried doing the same thing every month, the way a membership would. But instead of a recurring charge, each one was a single payment, and people were far more likely to sign up. The next month was an easy sell: “Hey, you bought last month. Do you want first dibs on this month?” It acted like recurring revenue, about $15K a month, without the churn, the member management, or the calls. That’s where repeatable revenue came from.
It still took us a while to see the bigger picture.
The 3 questions
Going into 2025 we sat down with years of sales data and asked 3 questions. What worked? What didn’t? And where do we actually want to go?
What worked best was what we started with. Live mini workshops that we barely promoted brought in as many premium clients as our biggest launches. We also found 4 ways we’d already made sales without launching. Most of them were things we’d tried once or twice and never repeated.
What didn’t work for us was the membership, the launch roller coaster, and selling access to ourselves (that last one was a cool offer that was terrible to fulfill).
The third question became the test every decision has to pass. Does it get us closer to the life we want, or is it just more? Run everything through that: a new offer, a new platform, or a new partnership. If it’s just more, the answer is no. If we’d asked ourselves that question more often, we’d have had fewer offers and gotten to the business we have now a lot faster.
So we ran an experiment. For one month we tried one of those 4 things each week: a 60-minute Zoom workshop, a simple upgrade offer after it, the replay as a product, and something we’d already made turned into a paid offer. Sales came in every single week. That month became our rhythm.
That’s when we cracked it. For years we’d run one signature workshop. In 2025 we ran a new workshop every month alongside repeatable revenue, and our sales grew 82%. The workshops themselves have only ever brought in about $600K of our sales, but they feed everything else.
We’d closed the membership by then, and we walked away from 6 offers that had brought in $1M together. They didn’t pass the test, so they went.
What Freedom40 is
Put all of that together and you get Freedom40. It fits in 3 lines.
We support clients call-free (or close to it), so there’s no calendar chaos.
We get paid twice to get clients, so finding clients makes money instead of costing money.
And we have systems and AI doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
So what does the 40 mean? Freedom40 is for folks over 40 who want a business that fits around their life and the season they’re in. And it’s about making around $40K a month in no more than 40 hours a month, so you can always be there for the people you love.
I used to say about 10 hours a week, which is true, but some weeks are a little less and some are a little more. You get to decide how it flexes around your life, and everyone’s version looks a little different.
The 3 phases
Freedom40 goes in one phase at a time, and each phase has 3 moves.
1
Call-Free Clients
You sign, onboard, and support clients without calls. First you build a call-free offer, which starts as a sprint: a short program built on the 5 Ps: a promise, a path, a process, a platform, and a price. Then you fill each round of clients (we call a round an intake) with emails and a one-page invite doc instead of sales calls. And new clients start on their own and get support in the gaps of life instead of in fixed meetings.
2
Get Paid Twice
You get paid to find your best clients. A paid 60-minute workshop draws the people who’d be perfect for your sprint. Action plans let people buy a plan from you before they commit to the bigger work. And something you already made gets sold again every month.
3
Repeatable Revenue
You get the systems that do the heavy lifting. Your Freedom Brain holds everything you know, so you stop carrying it all in your head. A monthly rhythm repeats what works. And a few times a year, a chill campaign goes to people who’ve already bought from you.
Those are the 9 moves. On our scorecard each one gets a light: a big gap, needs work, or runs with ease. When all 9 are green, every move runs with ease, and that’s the goal.
Inside Freedom40 we build those moves with you. Clients get our AI plugins loaded with our frameworks, a system for capturing client wins, and tools that help their own clients get unstuck without waiting. You’ll hear about each of those as we go. And you can build every move here without them too.
Here’s what all of this gives you back before we get to the steps.
The Math of Your Time
I love data. So let’s do some quick math on what your calls actually cost you.
What a fixed call costs
Say you work with 25 clients and meet each one twice a month for an hour.
Multiply 25 clients × 2 calls a month × 12 months × 1 hour each and you get 600 hours a year.
And that’s just the calls. Prep, follow-up, and rescheduling all come on top. So does the 4pm call that sits in the back of your head from the moment you wake up.
Now put those 600 hours back on your calendar. That’s 15 full work weeks. A summer is about 13 weeks, so that’s every week of summer back with 2 to spare.
Picture what goes in those weeks. Beach days, tournament weekends, lunch with your mom on a Tuesday. Heck, even just a nap.
One of our clients, M, went from about 16 calls a week to 3 at most.
That’s 13 fewer calls every week. Over a year it adds up to 676 hours.
13
Fewer calls every week
676
Hours a year back
80+
Days of her life back every year
Think how many hours that’s saved her. It’s over 80 days of her life back every single year. Count it in weekdays and it’s almost 4 months that used to belong to Zoom.
Your number depends on where you’re starting. So run it with yours. Multiply your clients by your calls a month, then by how long each call runs, then by 12.
If you’re on 16 calls a week right now, you already know what that feels like. 🫠
Another client told us:
Only worked 2.5 days last week and got to go on a trip with my family.
Our numbers
Our sales used to swing from six-figure days to $3,000 days. It was an exciting way to live and a terrible way to plan a week.
Now our floor is $40K a month. A floor is the number a month doesn’t drop below. Every month since March 2025 has cleared ours (19 months in a row as I write this).
Some months we do $80K or $90K, and honestly I don’t care. I’m not going to strive for more. If it happens, it happens. The floor is what matters, because below it is where all the unnecessary stress lives.
Our sales in 2024 were $453,110. In 2025 they were $825,938. That’s $372,828 more in one year, or 82%.
We did it working fewer than 40 hours a month. That works out to about 10 hours a week.
And we got there by letting things be simple. It took less work, less complexity, and nowhere near $50K a month in ads.
And the growth came after we’d closed the membership and walked away from those 6 offers. We did less and sold more.
We also had an audience that already knew us. Audience size changes how fast this goes. A bigger one makes it quicker. A smaller one makes it more of a flywheel.
The number I’m proudest of is zero. That’s how many client calls are on my calendar every single week.
My calendar now only belongs to my family. Mostly that means soccer fields all over the city (2 boys in competitive soccer will do that) and being there when my parents need us.
We only get so much time with the boys, our parents, and each other. Those are the numbers that never come back.
That’s the belief and the method. The rest of this is the path, in the order I’d take it again if we were starting over. You can build every step on your own. And if you’d rather build it with us, that’s what Freedom40 is for (more on that at the end).
Want the details?
Get the detailsPart III: The Steps
Phase 1:
Call-Free Clients
This is where you sign, onboard, and support clients without calls. It takes 3 steps: the offer, the invite, and the delivery.
Step 1:
Craft Your Call-Free Offer
If you want to sell call-free, you don’t sell call-free. You sell the promise and the outcome.
That’s the first move in Phase 1: an offer that delivers a result without fixed calls. If you already have a call-free offer, the job is to tighten it and fill the next round. If you’re building one, the structure is the same.
4 ways to bring it into what you already do
Whether you coach 1:1 on calls, sell a course, or run a membership, there are 4 ways to bring call-free into your business. You can go 100% call-free, run a hybrid, bolt a call-free option onto what you already sell, or start with a time-based sprint. We’re not big on absolutes around here.
If you run a membership, think about who actually shows up to your live calls. Chances are it’s less than half, maybe even a third. The rest still want the result, and life keeps them off the calls. Some of them would happily pay 5, 10, or 20 times your membership price for support that never asks them to show up.
If you sell a course, you can build the sprint around it. Include the course in the sprint price, and students get your eyes on their work while they go through it.
The sprint is where we’d start, because it’s the easiest one to sell.
Why a sprint comes first
This is one of the most useful things I’ve learned, and I paid for the lesson.
Repeat, then recur. A repeat is something you can turn off, and you’re in complete control of it. A recurring payment is something you can’t turn off, because someone is paying you for it every month.
That’s Rule 7, and it’s also the reason we closed our membership.
A membership feels great at first. Money arrives every month without a launch, and it looks like stability.
But each member is a promise. You have to show up for them, create for them, and answer for them, month after month. You saw what happened to ours. Every one of those members was still a promise while we turned it down.
Too many people start a recurring offer before they’ve repeated it, and then they hate it. They have to fulfill it, and it drains their life. For most people, anything recurring adds complexity. It’s harder to sell, harder to deliver, and more of a mental toll once churn and cancellations show up.
Memberships are a great fit for some people. For us, with the boys, our parents, and our own limits, a promise we couldn’t pause was too heavy.
Our rule is to sell something with an end date first, and offer the ongoing version after.
Nothing recurs until you’ve repeated it a few times. We ran our monthly workshop on the second Tuesday at 2pm because we tried it a couple of times and thought, “We like this.”
That’s why the first offer to build is a sprint. It starts, it ends, and everyone knows what happens in between.
Compare that with selling everyone an open-ended commitment up front. You have no idea if the offer fits, and neither do they. A sprint is how you both find out.
The shape of a sprint
A sprint is a fixed time, a fixed outcome, and a fixed dollar amount. Spoiler: that’s the easiest, fastest, simplest way to sell call-free.
Every call-free offer is built on the 5 Ps:
1
Promise
2
Path
3
Process
4
Platform
5
Price
That’s it. At the end you keep working with the people you like working with. Nobody signs up for ongoing out of the gate.
1Promise
Pick one outcome. Just one.
This is where experienced people struggle. You could help with so much, and you want to include all of it. But a bigger promise is harder to fulfill and even harder to sell, because most of us have bought something from a big promise and realized it probably wasn’t possible.
So I think about most people. How can most people get this thing done? A sprint isn’t built for the unicorn. “Within the realm of possibility” is the missing part of a lot of irresistible offers.
Your sprint doesn’t even have to be the first part of the process. Look for where people get stuck the most, and help them leapfrog that part so they can keep going.
If the outcome still feels too big, chunk it down. Say you help people with their finances. You’re not going to get all their books up to date in one sprint. But you could get last year’s books sorted.
Give it a name that’s 2 or 3 words, easy to say, and easy to remember. It should signal who it’s for or the result. It doesn’t need fancy words to sound premium. Ours are called Call-Free Fast Track and Sprint Sprint.
2Path
At a max I wouldn’t go above 12 weeks, and honestly 8 weeks is a great max. It’s a forcing function that keeps the promise small.
Give yourself more buffer the first time you run it, then shorten it as you build resources. Our sprint started at 8 weeks. Then it went to 6, then 4, and now it’s 2 weeks!
Every week has one milestone. That’s what makes call-free delivery work. When the path is obvious, people don’t need a call to know what to do. They know this week’s milestone, they work on it, and they send questions if they get stuck.
Our Call-Free Fast Track runs 4 weeks with one thing each week. In week 1 we nail your offer. In week 2 we create your invite doc. Week 3 is your self-starter onboarding. And in week 4 we find the people in your existing audience and send them invites.
Each week’s check-in covers that one thing, and it gets a traffic light: red, yellow, or green.
Open no more than 5 spots per round. That’s what we do, and it’s what we recommend to our private clients. Spike loads take off, and then you’re like, “I hate this.”
A round of 5 every couple of weeks is plenty.
3Process
Process is your life-proof boundaries. I used to call these life-friendly boundaries. Then life wasn’t so friendly, and I was like, dang it! So now they’re life-proof.
Before anyone buys, decide on your availability, your response times, what kinds of requests you take, what format messages come in, what feedback looks like, and what falls outside the offer. How many requests can a client have open at once? We do one thing at a time.
“Message me whenever you want, and I’ll reply whenever you need me” sounds great and is really easy to sell. It just isn’t life-proof.
Set your boundaries for real life. Zoom out 60 days and picture what could actually happen in that time. Then you can respond faster and surprise people, instead of slower and disappointing them.
This showed up for me when both my parents fell on the same step, and my mom broke a little bone in her back. I spent all day at the hospital with her. Not once was I like, “Oh shoot, my clients.”
The first time life lifes and nothing on your calendar has to move, you’ll get why we’re so obsessed with this.
4Platform
Platform is where the coaching happens. We use ClarityFlow. It’s not our platform and we don’t own it. It’s just a tool we use and really like. A lot of our clients use Voxer, Slack, or WhatsApp.
It doesn’t matter what you use as long as you’re intentional about it.
5Price
Let’s talk numbers, because this is where experts undersell themselves.
Most sprints land somewhere between $500 and $2,000 a spot. That’s the price for the sprint itself. Offer pay in full, plus a split or weekly payment. If it’s $2K for 2 months, you can also say it’s $250 a week.
Your ongoing offer (what people move into after the sprint) is priced monthly, and that’s where your enough number comes in. Say $40K a month is your magic number. That could be 40 ongoing clients at $1,000 a month. You wouldn’t start at $1,000, though. You’d start at maybe $500 or $600 a month with a group of 5. The people who stick around keep that price. The next group of 5 gets a slightly higher price, and it stair-steps up from there.
This is a premium offer. There’s only so much of you to go around, and you control the supply.
If your offer runs on calls today, the price can stay exactly where it is. Say you sell 6 calls for $750. Take the calls out and it’s 3 months of call-free support for $750. The price is the same, and so is the outcome.
You also have 2 dials: price and time. You can make more without charging more by shrinking the time someone has access to you. Most people will pay more for a faster result, so it ends up working in favor of everybody (you and your clients).
After the sprint
Only when someone has gotten through the sprint do they hop into your ongoing offer. 2 weeks before it ends, ask, “Do you want to stop here, or do you want to keep going?” It’s the easiest upgrade you’ll ever make. I aim for 40 to 50% of people to keep going.
If they say yes, you keep going. If they say no, you go your separate ways as friends, and they leave happy.
I like to think of it as an install. First you install the result. Then, if it makes sense, you offer continuing support.
The first result matters because it builds trust. Someone who finished your sprint knows what you’re like. They’ve seen what you do, and they have a win. When you invite them into something ongoing, you’re offering more of what they already had.
Once an ongoing offer has earned its spot, it becomes your floor. Say you break a bone and can’t run a sprint that month. You can still support your ongoing clients. So the goal is to grow that recurring revenue, but only after you repeat.
That’s how your floor grows. Say your sprint is 8 weeks for $1,000 and you sell 10 a month. If some of them keep going at $500 a month, your floor rises month over month.
Now you need people in it. And you can fill it without a single sales call.
Step 2:
Sign Clients Without Calls
Before driving up to the lake one week, I wrote 2 hand-raiser emails (emails where people reply to raise their hand instead of clicking a link). Each one took about 15 minutes. They went to 2 small segments of our list, and 11 people became new Freedom40 clients.
The vast majority of our list never even saw those emails, and they caused zero unsubscribes. The people who were ready raised their hands. Everyone else just got a chill email from me that week.
That’s the second move in Phase 1. You fill each round with emails and an invite doc, and nobody gets on a sales call.
I know. If you’ve been told for years that you can’t sell without a call, this sounds suspicious. I get it.
Why we skipped the call
When any of us buy something, we just want to feel confident it’s the right thing for us. That’s what a sales call is supposed to do. I don’t do them.
We’ve sold over $5M at Wake Up To Freedom without a single sales call. Some of those sales were $20, and some were $20,000.
The questions people ask on calls are usually the same handful, and you can answer them in an invite doc. When someone really wants to see the plan before they buy, that’s what an action plan gives them.
Start with a one-page invite doc
An invite doc is a one-page doc that explains the offer and invites people in. Start there, with personal invites. A call-free offer is a very personal offer. The moment we tried to turn ours into pretty, productized sales pages, it lost the magic of “this is you and me working on this thing together.”
The first 50 to 60 1:1 call-free spots we sold came from nothing more than a doc.
So don’t over-engineer it. A lot of the time, over-engineering is just procrastination. It’s a fear of judgment.
The doc says, “This is what it is. This is what we’re going to do. Here’s how it works. Here’s who I’m looking for. Here’s how much it costs. Do you want to grab one of these spots so we can get this thing done?”
It has a few short sections:
The frame. The opening lines set the lens people read everything else through. It’s the same offer seen through different glasses. Our first one was a founders frame for our very first group: “Get your call-free offer live with our hands-on help. 10 spots available.”
How it works. The weeks get grouped into phases. We like 3, and it can be more. You just don’t want it to feel like a bunch of work.
The timing. Why it makes sense to join this round.
Why join. This section is named after your first group, like “Why Join the Founders Round.”
Who we’re looking for. There’s always a floor (what someone needs in place to reach the outcome) and a vibe check. We look for people who share our values around freedom, kindness, and running a no-emergency business. If someone isn’t going to take action, I’d rather they not buy.
The price and how to join.
See how simple that is? It all fits on one page.
Your invite doc should say plainly who the offer is for. If someone reads it and thinks, “That’s not me,” that’s a good outcome. You both save time.
This is Rule 6 (Data and vibes) in action. We look at the numbers, and we also look at whether the people joining are people we’re excited to hear from. A full dashboard is worth less than a private channel full of people you enjoy.
We have wizards for the invite doc and the invites, plus fill-in-the-blank templates for anyone who’d rather skip AI. Give them your offer details, then edit until it sounds like you. You know your people. The tool doesn’t.
How people join
People join by replying. They never book a time.
The first message doesn’t even include the details. It sounds like this: “There’s a new way to do this thing. It’s 1:1, and there are no calls. I thought of you, and here’s why. Would you like me to send along the details?”
Those messages go to perfect pockets. A perfect pocket is a small group of people who share the exact situation your offer solves, like past clients who finished a program or the buyers of one workshop. It’s usually 200 people, maybe 50, and sometimes I’ve done pockets of 10. One month I opened 12 Freedom40 spots and worked through little pockets of our list until they filled. The vast majority of our list had no idea.
If there’s a real deadline, the invite says so. That’s the only kind we use.
If your clients are on calls now
If you have call-based clients today, invite them first. The note can be as simple as this: “I’ve been making some shifts in how I do my coaching, and because you’re a current private client, I wanted to share this with you first. Instead of saving everything up for a call, you can reach out in the moment and get support as things come up.”
Notice it never says “call-free.” It’s all about the outcome. The outcome doesn’t change. The delivery does.
This is Rule 4 (Dials, not switches) in real life.
A switch is on or off. A dial can sit anywhere in between. You turn up the dial on the parts of your business that give you freedom, and you turn down the ones working against it.
We turned the membership down slowly before we closed it. Nothing got burned down in a panic.
The same goes for the clients you have on calls now. You don’t have to blow that up. The next time life lifes and a client can’t make their call, offer them the call-free version. Turn one down while you’re turning one up.
Your business should have more than 2 settings.
Why those 2 emails worked
Those 2 lake emails worked because everything behind them was already in place: an offer people understood, an audience that knew us, and workshops that had already brought the right people into our world. When that’s in place, a sales push can be 2 emails before a trip to the lake.
And when the first yes comes in from a doc instead of a call, a new client gets to be good news again.
Once someone says yes, the fun part starts (it’s also the part people worry about most).
Step 3:
Deliver With Calendar Freedom
I once bought an async program that cost about as much as a small car. I signed up, got access, and was left asking, “Where do I go?”
That’s the worry most people have about call-free, and it’s fair. Most people who say they’d never do async again bought an offer like that one. It gave them access without a path or a plan.
So we built the opposite. This is the third move in Phase 1: new clients start on their own and get support in the gaps of life instead of in fixed meetings.
How it works for us
Clients join from an invite and a reply. They start without a kickoff call, they get a path with a real result laid out week by week, and they’re coached through voice notes and messages.
They can message me anytime. I don’t care if it’s 10 o’clock on a Sunday night. I reply on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, typically within one business day. Tuesday is my workshop day, and I certainly don’t reply on weekends.
Even replying 3 out of 5 days a week, you’re effectively doubling or tripling your availability for your clients.
Clients have lives too. I’m in 2 high-ticket programs myself, and both are call-based. With the boys’ soccer running across 3 different circuits, I can’t make any of the calls.
I’d bet most of your clients don’t want more calls on their calendar either. With call-free, everybody gets their life back.
The boundaries show up 3 times
Clients see the boundaries before they pay (in the invite doc), when they start (in the onboarding), and every day after (in a pinned message in their channel). That way I’m never the bad guy. I’m just saying, these are the boundaries.
Voice messages are 4 minutes max. People who’ve been with me for 6 or 9 months send 14 seconds, maybe 60 seconds max. 😆
Every message also starts with 1 emoji, so I know what it is at a glance: a lightning bolt for a quick, specific question, a thought bubble for a big strategic one, and a pencil for a feedback request. And clients send one thing to review at a time.
Self-starter onboarding
New clients get the world’s shortest confirmation email. Then the onboarding walks them through 5 things: getting into their channel, how working together works, what success looks like for them, their first action items, and how to keep moving between replies.
Their first action is a short welcome message (bonus points for a video) that answers 2 questions. Why did you join? What does success look like for you? Then they come back and type the word “done.”
We ask every single client, because there’s never one shared definition of success. And there’s something really fun about the first time a client types “done” before you’ve said a word.
Each week Michelle runs a check-in where clients give that week’s milestone a traffic light: red, yellow, or green.
Support in the gaps
This is the part I love most. There are little pockets of time we all have, and most people on this planet doomscroll them away.
I answer quick questions in those gaps of life so the rest of my life is mine: the 10 minutes before practice starts, a lineup at the post office, or the line at Costco. I could doomscroll, or I could be helpful and then spend the rest of my day with my kiddos.
The bigger stuff gets batched at my desk, well caffeinated with a fresh pour-over.
About 70 or 80% of my replies are just audio, because there’s so much captured in the voice: my excitement, my mannerisms, and my pauses.
A client sends a 4-minute voice note. I listen while I’m out on a walk anyway, send back a 3-minute voice note, and they’re off. Instead of a 60-minute block for a 4-minute question, it’s a walk and 3 minutes of my time.
And because I’m never answering on the spot, they get my best response.
That’s how 40 to 50 clients fit into a couple of hours of my week.
A client put it well:
I spent the morning at the animal shelter walking all my pals... I can be outside getting stuff done while my own dogs hang out in the yard.
Every repeated answer is a signal
When I give the same answer twice, that’s a signal. I save the reply (without the person’s name) and turn it into a resource. The next time, it’s a 51-second reply with a link instead of 30 minutes of explaining from scratch.
Every 1:1 call-free client adds nothing to your calendar, and everything gets easier the more clients you have.
We also have AI tools that help clients get unstuck without waiting for us.
Say a client is working through their weekly milestone at 10pm and hits a wall. They can ask a tool that knows our frameworks instead of waiting for a reply day. Often that’s enough. When it isn’t, they send a question, and I answer on my reply days.
That removes one of the old reasons for fixed calls. The old assumption was that clients need live access because they get stuck and need help right then. Often they need a nudge and a next step, and a good tool can give them that.
What a reply day gives you
Reply days are a simple thing that does a lot. They give you a boundary without a wall. Clients know when to expect an answer, and you know when to give it.
And because we run a no-emergency business, there’s no SOS button. When I’m traveling I add an urgent option for that trip, and that’s it.
Time off is just as simple. We want a vacation where we don’t respond to clients? Cool. We add an extra week to everyone’s contract. They get one more week, we get a week off, and nobody has to cancel anything.
That kind of move only works when you control the timeline of your offer. With a fixed call schedule, a week off means rescheduling every call. With a sprint, it means one line in an email.
Another client described it like this:
I was able to return after 2 weeks away and serve every client with joy and balance, zero overwhelm.
Capture every win
Delivery is also where your proof comes from. Every time a client has a win, it’s a small piece of evidence that your method works. But wins are slippery. People mention them in a message, you feel good, and then they disappear into your inbox.
Living Proof is our system for capturing wins while they happen (with permission) and filing them so they’re easy to use. Over time it’s what makes your next round easier to fill. When you need a testimonial, you pull it from a library.
One client told us:
I delivered my first two action plans today. Then sold my first call free offer. Paid in full ($1850). Yay!!! I am so happy! This was so easy and fun!
It’s a short message, but notice what it tells you. Someone made something, delivered it, and sold the next thing, all in one day. That’s the kind of win you want to catch while it’s fresh.
The path does the work
Call-free delivery works because the path is obvious. The weekly milestone does a lot of the work. If your sprint is vague or sprawling, clients will have too many questions, and you’ll end up back on calls.
So if delivery ever feels heavy, go back to Step 1 and tighten the offer.
And once your clients are taken care of, finding the next ones can start paying you.
Phase 2:
Get Paid Twice
What’s the best way for someone to find out whether you can help them?
Most people say, “Have a call.” That’s the old answer. A free call is where you offer a taste, the prospect decides if they like it, and you decide whether to make an offer.
There’s another answer. Let them experience your method for real, and let them pay for it.
This is Phase 2 of Freedom40, and the name is literal. You host a workshop and you get paid. Then someone from that workshop becomes a client, and you get paid twice.
So we’re never paying to get clients. We’re getting paid twice.
Workshops and action plans are the 2 main ways we get paid to get clients. They’re designed to put the right people in front of you so you can find your ride-or-dies. The money they make is house money, and we use it to fund our audience growth. If I make $10K in a month selling workshops, that’s $10K to grow my audience before the next one. Some days I’ll lose $700 growing the audience, and it doesn’t matter to me.
Your premium offer is the money you depend on.
A lot of people look at audience growth as a cost. What if it were free?
Why paid beats free
Think about your last 10 free calls. How many of them became clients?
Say it was 3. That’s 7 hours you spent with people who were never going to buy. If you could’ve spent those 7 hours with someone, who would it have been?
For me the answer hangs on our wall. It’s a picture of us and our boys at the base of a giant redwood in California.
Free calls, free webinars, and free challenges feel generous, and they are. They can also attract people who were never going to buy.
Paid has a filter built in. When someone pays to attend a 60-minute workshop, they’ve decided your time is worth something. They show up, pay attention, and do the thing you teach. That’s better for them too, because people value what they pay for.
The 3 ways to get paid first
There are 3 ways to get paid before someone becomes a client, and the next 2 steps walk through them.
A paid workshop is 60 minutes of real teaching for a small ticket price. And yes, that’s live Zoom time. We chose it on purpose. We’re call-free about how we sign, onboard, and support clients, and we keep a small amount of live time where it earns its place.
An action plan is a plan someone buys from you before they commit to the bigger work. You’re detaching the plan from the execution. You can say, “Here’s exactly how you’d get from A to B.” And then the invite is, “Do you want to do it together?”
Existing assets are things you already made, sold again (remember Mini Workshop Magic, where the add-ons out-earned the workshop).
Workshops and action plans do most of the finding. Existing assets turn work you’ve already done into cash. And all 3 pay you up front.
So the front of your business stops being a cost and starts being a source of income. That’s a calmer way to run things, and it’s the foundation for everything that comes next.
Step 4:
Teach a Paid Workshop
Free webinars tend to see 5 to 10% of people show up. Our paid workshops see 60 to 80%.
That gap is why a paid workshop is the first move in Phase 2. It draws the people who’d be perfect for your sprint, and it pays you up front. It’s how we started, and it’s still the front door to our business.
It’s a non-negotiable around here. Do you have to run one every single month? No, but you should. It runs 60 minutes, and it’s actually useful.
What a mini workshop is
It’s a live session on Zoom, about an hour long, that teaches one useful thing. People buy a ticket, then they attend or get the replay.
It’s real teaching. Someone should leave with an idea they can use that day, even if they never buy anything else from you.
Price it at an impulse price for your audience, somewhere between $10 and $100. It’s the kind of purchase nobody has to talk to their spouse about (we’re not attached to our price either. We started super low and raised it with every 100 tickets sold).
Click Go Live was a mini workshop. I taught people how to go live on video with confidence, and it’s where all of this started.
Pick a topic that points to Rome
This is Rule 2 at work. So the lens for every workshop is simple. How does this get people to the offer I want to move them to?
It doesn’t have to lead there directly. You just want to know there’s a path from the workshop to your sprint. Whether you coach, sell a course, or run a membership, the best topic is one piece of what your premium offer helps people do, like part of your method, your framework, or your curriculum.
The easiest place to find topics is the micro problems that keep coming up in your client questions. If you’re running a workshop every month, you don’t have time to create demand. So teach what people already want help with.
We’ve tested workshops that were only about audience growth or cash flow. A workshop is only worth running every month if it leads into your premium offer.
The upgrade is your sprint
You host a live workshop, and you move a percentage of those people into a sprint. That’s the upgrade.
The invitation runs before, during, and after the workshop, so there’s never a ton of pressure on one big pitch. The right fits hear about the sprint a few times in a natural way and raise their hand when they’re ready.
Remember Mini Workshop Magic. The bump and upsell outsold the workshop itself. People who say yes to one thing are often ready for the next.
So watch your upgrades as closely as your ticket sales. If a $10 ticket brings 50% more sales and nobody upgrades, that’s something to consider.
Sell the replay
After the live workshop, the replay goes on sale for a limited time, usually a day or two. Ours are ready the same day, and that takes about 2 hours now.
The live Q&A stays a bonus for the people who showed up, so there’s always a reason to be there live.
This is Rule 3 in action. You teach it once and sell it more than once.
If you’d rather not be on camera
Some people would rather not be on camera, and that’s fine. There may be other ways to give people the experience, like a recorded workshop or a written plan. Letting people experience your method before they commit matters more than the format.
A good workshop with a focused topic and an honest invitation can do a lot with a few emails. We’d rather send 2 honest emails than run a 6-week campaign.
And if you’d rather skip the camera altogether, the next move might be your favorite.
Step 5:
Sell Action Plans and What Already Exists
We sold our first 20 action plans in a few hours, from one email, with no sales page.
It was a December email to people who’d bought our workshop, with a link to a checkout page. That’s it.
Action plans and existing assets are the other 2 ways to get paid before someone joins your sprint. They’re both optional, by the way. Think of them as a choose-your-own-adventure. Some people run workshops, some sell action plans, and some do both.
Action plans
An action plan is the first step of working with you, sold on its own. If this person came on as a 1:1 client, this plan is what you’d do with them first. You’re unbundling it from your client offer and selling it for a couple hundred bucks.
The plan is the map. Working together is the guide, and that’s the upgrade for the right fits.
Years ago our action plan was just helping people pick a workshop topic: “Here’s your action plan, your next 5 workshop topics.” It was one page.
A client wrote:
We ended up selling 2 action plans (which was my goal) and delivered both of them. One of them bought a course.
Notice the order. The action plan came first, and the bigger purchase came after. That’s the pattern.
People want to see the plan before they buy. That’s what a sales call is supposed to give them, and an action plan gives it to them for real. Working with you is the fastest way to close the trust gap.
There are also a lot more people ready to invest $200 than ready to invest $10K. For $100 or $200, someone gets to experience what it’s like in your world.
How to build and sell one
1
Start with the first step of your client work.
2
Build an intentional intake form. Ours gives people 7 days to finish steps 1 to 3, and it takes them 20 to 30 minutes.
3
Set up a simple checkout page and automated onboarding.
4
Create your first 5 to 10 plans by hand.
5
Turn the decisions you keep making into a decision guide.
6
Deliver every plan with the reason behind each decision, plus a short personal video.
7
Invite them to the next step, a few different times.
That’s it.
Keep them fast. An action plan is designed to be something you can fulfill in less than 30 minutes. You can’t charge $150 for a custom plan that takes hours and keep it up at scale, because you’ll cannibalize your effective hourly rate. That’s where our Paid Action Plan plugin comes in. You answer a few questions, and it builds the plan and the client deliverable for you.
In one 90-day stretch we delivered 80-something action plans, and I recorded a 5- to 8-minute video for every one of them.
Start with your warm audience, the way we did with that first December email.
After that, an action plan works as an upsell on a low-ticket offer or a freebie, or as a bonus on your main offer.
Existing assets
The third way is the easiest one to overlook. We call it turning dust into gold.
Think about what’s sitting in your Google Drive or inside your premium offer that nobody else knows exists: old trainings, client calls, worksheets, a course module, and that Loom video you recorded once. Some of our best-selling existing assets have been the most basic things we were already doing, like an SOP we already had or a message we’d already sent.
The ones that sell give instant access and save time. Each one was created for a specific purpose. Your clients have already shown it works. And the price is a no-brainer.
Packaging one up takes about an hour. You need the asset, a reason you’re running the promo, a short sales page, a delivery email, and 4 or 5 promo emails over a week, a weekend, or a couple of days. Sometimes the first email is just a quick note I write in my phone’s notes app.
The reason matters. Maybe you’re updating it, retiring it, or raising the price, or a client result inspired it. Pick one reason you’re running it and one reason to buy now.
One of ours was a workshop sales page template we’d built for our own business. We sold it for a few days, and then it went back into our private client vault.
Where it fits
In our monthly rhythm, the last week of the month sells action plans or something we already made. Before you make anything new, check what you already have. The answer is usually more than you think.
At this point you have a sprint, an invitation, a way to deliver without fixed calls, a paid workshop, action plans, and existing assets. That’s 6 of the 9 moves. Notice that none of them need a launch calendar.
The last 3 moves make all of this repeatable, so you can run it without reinventing it every month.
Phase 3:
Repeatable Revenue
This phase has 3 moves: your Freedom Brain, the monthly rhythm, and a few chill campaigns a year to people who already bought from you. The Freedom Brain comes first because the other 2 run on it.
Step 6:
Build Your Freedom Brain
It all runs on one raw material you already own: your experience.
The little recorder on my wrist explains this better than anything.
I wear it and just talk (nothing creepy, I promise). When I’m coaching clients call-free, it records what I’m saying. Then a Claude plugin turns that into what we call coaching to content: emails, posts, and proof of what my clients are getting done.
The idea came from a thought I kept having. If only people knew what I helped my clients with, I’d have more people.
I record on walks too. It gets transcribed automatically, goes into my second brain, and pulls out content, emails I could send, and ideas for resources and wizards.
I did the work once. It pays off many times.
No single-use plastics
This is Rule 3, and I like it because it’s a little silly and completely true. Nothing gets used once.
A lot of folks have really complex businesses because they’ve got a bunch of one-off things. You can’t systemize something you only do once.
A live workshop becomes a replay that sells for years. That voice note to one client becomes an email. Client questions turn into sections of an action plan, and action plans turn into parts of an offer. Even a client’s win becomes proof that makes your next round easier to fill.
Most experts are sitting on a mountain of single-use material. Every call they’ve ever done, every message they’ve ever written, and every time they explained something perfectly to one person at 9pm. It was good work, and it vanished.
When you’re 25 and short on experience, you have to make content to be seen. Over 40 you have the opposite problem. You probably have plenty of material, and not much of it is organized.
Whether you coach 1:1, run a membership, or sell a course, you’ve already got more of this than you think. So the job is to stop throwing it away.
The Freedom Brain
That’s the idea behind the Freedom Brain. It’s one place for your offers, your voice, your clients, and your proof, so your business stops living in your head.
What goes in is anything that’s your IP: transcripts from your workshops, coaching sessions, and Zoom calls, past course material, and emails. Anything that shares your lived experience goes in too, and so do the details about your ride-or-die clients (the things that make a dream client).
The habit is simple. When you make something, it goes in the Freedom Brain before you move on. I update mine every single day, and everything you feed yours from there makes it sharper. Ours is synced on my laptop, my Mac Studio, and Michelle’s computer, so we all work from the same brain.
What it gives you is the ability to ask, “Have I explained this before?” and find the answer fast. That sounds minor. In practice it changes how fast you can write an email, build a workshop, or answer a client.
What you’re really building is a record of your own judgment that can travel without you.
That record is the real asset. And it’s exactly what AI tools need to be useful.
Where AI comes in
Every voice note I send a client comes with my ums and uhs, my kids in the background, and the dogs barking. There’s no AI there.
And yet AI does a ton of work in our business. I think as AI tools go up, the human side goes up with them.
Michelle builds the systems that keep our business running. The AI side is mine. I build our plugins and wizards myself (a wizard is a step-by-step AI helper that asks you questions and writes the first draft), and every one gets built for our own business first (when I test a new wizard, I give it the most unhelpful answers I can think of to see what it does with them 😅).
We’ve built plugins for Claude and ChatGPT that are loaded with our frameworks. Think of them as a very patient assistant who has read everything we’ve taught and can help you apply it to your own business.
You can ask one to help you name your sprint, draft an invite, outline a workshop, or turn a voice note into an email. It does the first pass. You do the judgment.
You choose which ones you want to use. If you don’t love writing emails, use our email plugin and spend that time showing up for your clients.
Not techy? That’s fine. We design the plugins for folks who aren’t techy and folks who are super techy.
The plugins never replace your expertise. If you ask an AI tool to write something and you can’t tell whether it’s right, you have a problem.
A lot of people are using AI to make AI stuff, and it’s basically garbage in, garbage out. If you actually have things that work, you can do some really awesome things for your clients.
This works for experts because you can look at the first draft and say, “Nope, that’s wrong, and here’s why.” That’s the 3-minute skill from Part I.
An AI draft is a starting point. Your 20 years is what makes it good.
What stays human
The coaching stays with me. Clients get voice notes and messages that I answer personally, and the private channel is full of people we’re excited to hear from.
What we hand to systems is the stuff that never needed a human in the first place, like finding last year’s explanation, drafting a first version, reminding someone of a step, sorting wins, and formatting an action plan.
It’s a simple rule. If a task needs your judgment, keep it. If it only needs your attention, let a system hold it.
I call this “heavy lifting” on purpose. A lot of what makes a business tiring is the small repeated labor around the big decisions: searching for a file, rewriting something you’ve already written, and remembering what you promised a client 3 weeks ago.
When systems carry that load, you spend your hours on the parts that need you. That’s what makes the 10-hours-a-week goal believable.
Then all that’s left is a rhythm to run it on.
Step 7:
Run Your Monthly Rhythm
We haven’t had a week without a sale in years, and every month we run the same rhythm. It’s grown since that first experiment, and this is what we run now:
1
Week 1
One live workshop
2
Week 2
The replay, available for a limited time
3
Week 3
A focused week of promo for your sprint
4
Week 4
Action plans or something we already made
That’s the month. Some months have 5 weeks, and those are our freedom weeks.
I wouldn’t change the workshop to replay to sprint part. It’s what we’ve found works consistently, every single time.
Your version will look different. What matters is having a pattern you can repeat without thinking too hard. When life gets busy you do the minimum version. When things are calm you do more (dials, not switches).
Cash Campaigns
A few times a year, roughly 4, a chill campaign goes to people who already bought from you and invites them to take a next step. It could be a Week of Sales (2 to 5 days with a few daily deals), or a really chill buyers launch, where a next-step invite goes to specific people who already bought.
We don’t map out every quarter in January, either. That would stress me out.
I use the word “chill” on purpose. It’s a friendly invitation to people who already know you, like you, and have a reason to trust you.
What it does on a hard week
Rule 8 says no emergencies, and the rhythm is what makes that real. The week I was in the hospital, nothing in it had to stop. Clients still messaged me anytime, I still answered on set days, and the month kept running.
I’m not 20 anymore. There are responsibilities. So nothing in our business gets to have a downside that hits our life, even if the upside is great.
Before we finish, I owe you the honest limits.
The Honest Limits
I’d rather you leave this with accurate expectations than with a good feeling that fades. So these are the limits, in plain words.
Call-free, or close to it
I kind of regret calling it call-free, because it implies you never have a call with any client, ever. If I told you that you’d have 50% fewer calls in your life, you’d probably be pretty happy with that.
When I say call-free, I mean how you sign, onboard, and support your clients. Some Freedom40 clients are 100% call-free, and some keep a few calls on purpose. A 15-minute call when someone’s really stuck, a kickoff call, or an off-boarding call to capture a client’s story can all fit.
Paid workshops are live too, and we chose that time on purpose. If you hate live teaching, you can find your own version of that step.
Inside Freedom40 there’s a live weekly Jam Session for both tiers where we build together. It’s completely optional, and you don’t need it to make progress. The Private tier also includes in-person events.
Your results are yours
Results take time. How long depends on where you are in the journey and how much work you put in.
Your results come from your offer, your audience, and your work. Our figures (the $40K floor, the 82%, and the 10 hours a week) are ours. Some people will get there slower, and some faster.
Who this is for (and who it isn’t)
This works because you’re the expert and your judgment is what clients want. I’m here to support you, and I’m not here to do the work for you.
If you need a live call to feel supported, Freedom40 isn’t for you. Some people really do like call-based coaching and benefit from it, and that’s great.
And if you want the biggest business possible at any cost, that’s a real strategy, and plenty of people choose it. We just don’t have the map for it.
The plugins and the tech
We design the plugins for folks who aren’t techy and folks who are super techy. If you get stuck, you ask a question like anyone else. AI tools also make mistakes, so read everything before it goes out.
Silly simple
My mission is to make this as silly simple as possible: a sprint, an invite, a workshop, a plan, and a rhythm. You don’t need special talent or secret knowledge for any of it.
But simple and easy are different things. Simple asks you to say no to things that feel productive. You’ll need to trust your own experience when the industry tells you to chase something newer. And you’ll need to stick with a boring business on purpose, even when someone else’s loud one looks exciting.
A fair question
Before you go further, ask yourself something. Is the life you’re protecting worth a few uncomfortable changes?
For us the answer was easy. The business we’d built was getting in the way of the boys, our parents, and each other.
If your answer is yes too, then we have something to talk about.
Epilogue:
Be There
I started with a sick kiddo on the couch and a beach day with a 1pm call on it. I want to finish with what I think those moments are for. They’re the reason for the business.
Our mission is pretty simple. We want to make the money we want to make, work the hours we want to work, and always be there for the people we love, regardless of what’s happening. We’re not chasing the 8-figure business or the shenanigans that come with it.
The boys will play competitive soccer for a limited number of seasons. There are fields all over our city, and one day we won’t be driving to them anymore. I want to be there for the seasons we have.
My parents need us a bit more each year, and I think about how many years we have left with them. Michelle drove across Canada with her mom and our 2 dogs to help her mom move out west. It was 40-some hours of driving over 10 days, and I’m so glad the business kept running while she did.
And Michelle and I have each other. We’ve been married over 17 years, and I’d take a business that leaves room for that over a bigger month.
I’m just a normal person. I’m a bird nerd, a Lego nerd, and a soccer dad who drives a station wagon around the suburbs. You’ll find me in line at Costco like everyone else. I don’t need 10,000 people inside Freedom40. 100 people and I’m good.
What the method gives you
Freedom40 is a way to be in your life. It lets you say yes to the school play, the hospital visit, the long drive, and the beach day without worrying the business will fall apart while you’re gone.
That’s all it is. A business that bends instead of breaks.
You’ll still have hard weeks. Clients will still ask questions, and workshops will still need prep. But the weight is different. Nothing feels like an emergency, and the people who matter most get the best hours of your week.
Your Freedom List
If you haven’t written your Freedom List yet, do it now. Put it somewhere you’ll see it. Then the next time an idea tempts you, check it against the list.
If it needs something on the list, say no. If it doesn’t get you closer to the life you want, say no. And if it makes your life lighter, say yes and try it.
That’s how we got here.
Closing Invitation
So if you’re ready to build a business that bends when life does, so you can be on the couch with the sick kiddo (or at the beach on a Wednesday) without moving a single call, Freedom40 is your next step.
Inside Freedom40 we build the 3 phases with you, one at a time:
We get your call-free offer built and your first round of clients signed.
Then we set up your paid workshops or action plans, so finding your next clients starts paying you.
And the monthly rhythm and the systems take over from there, which means a hard week doesn’t stop the business.
You’ll have our plugins and wizards, a weekly Jam Session (completely optional), and a community of other Freedom40’ers building the same kind of business around the same kind of life.
There are 2 ways to join. Group gets you everything above. Private 1:1 gets you all of it, plus me directly in your own private call-free channel, in-person events, and accountability.
Another season is going to go by either way. The question is what your calendar looks like when it does.
And if now isn’t the time, write your Freedom List and run your next decision through it. That alone will get you a little closer.
If you do want to join, here’s what happens next:
1
You choose Group or Private 1:1.
2
We map your $40K-in-40-hours version of the business first: what stays, what goes, and where your first call-free clients will come from.
3
You work through the moves, and you ask questions in your channel or the community.
4
On the Private 1:1 tier, I answer on my reply days.
Want the details? Head to Freedom40.
Thank you for reading, friend. Go be there for your people.
Justin
