A different "why" question...

Well, so do I.

Fair warning, I've been drinking. A lot. It's terribly irresponsible for me to be posting in this state.

There are three things you pay for when you get a coach. First, you have to pay for the coach's time. Second, you have to pay for the coach's loss of what he could be doing if he were not coaching you. And third, you have to pay for the future value that you receive from the coach.

It's these latter two things that make the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur. The employee says "my time is worth $60 an hour." The entrepreneur says "my time is worth $60 an hour, PLUS the $7,500 I would make if I were not coaching you, PLUS the $7,500 you are going to make from my coaching that you would not make without it."

So the employee mentality leads a coach to say "pay me $2,000 for a month's coaching." The entrepreneur mentality leads the same coach to say "pay me $17,000 for a month's coaching."

And then, like a good salesman, the coach places value on all the intangibles - and reduces the price. You're going to remove all the risk for me; I don't have to produce the sites myself, you'll do it. I consider a 30% margin acceptable, so let's remove 2/3 of the $7,500 value I get, and cut it to $12,000. And then, because I get the money up front, I think that in a month's time I can make a 20% return on the fee... so I'll drop it to $10,000.

The entrepreneur is all about opportunity cost. It's not just what he gives, but what he loses, and what you get. It's why the same site I might build an AdSense marketer for $200 would cost a multi-million dollar corporation $200,000. The marketer will drive a few thousand people to the site, and make a buck from each of them on the average. The corporation will drive a few million people to it, and make three or four dollars from each. It might look like I'm ripping off the corporation, but they're actually getting greater value for the money.

I'm a massive economics geek. Pretend I drew a lot of complicated graphs here about why and how that happens, because I'm way too drunk to actually draw them.

I think this is what people are going for with the $1 trial to $97 a month membership sites. Anyone can afford a dollar, right? And then you have a month to meet people. To be part of a community. To participate. And you get attached to this.

Now here's the end of the month, and you have a choice: give all that up, or pay $97. And if you give it up... well, now you have to admit something. You have to admit you don't want to pay $97 a month to be in that community.

And you simply can't leave. Leaving is like announcing to that entire community, "you aren't worth $97 a month." You simply won't do that. These are your friends. They've helped you. How can you say that to them? Ever?

You can't. And that's what makes the membership site such a powerful model - you don't have to force continuity. People crave it. They will give up more than you realise for it. We're conditioned that way, not just by society, not just by culture, but by evolution and genetics. It's in our DNA.

There is a part of me that still thinks this is cheating. I'm internally arguing with it. Once I convince it, I'll start doing a lot of stuff in membership sites. Robert Plank and Lance Tamashiro have already won that argument with themselves. Ewen Chia and Eben Pagan have already won it. I'm still trying.

There's a part of me that thinks this kind of arguing with oneself is like giving in to the Dark Side of the Force. I think I have to win that argument first.

That's called an "internship." They're very common in the art community; less so in the technical and engineering communities. I had interns when I was running my software consulting business; I could get a dozen whip-smart young programmers from art and IT schools around the area, and have them build me all kinds of profitable projects... for nothing. All I ever had to do was write a couple letters to their schools talking about what a great job they were doing.

They got A's and college credit for the experience. And over the three years I did this, the interns grossed over three million dollars for the company. Not a bad trade.

I could have paid them each an $80,000 annual salary and still made a profit. Instead, I paid them nothing and worked them like dogs, sometimes over sixty hours a week. They still loved the experience and sent me their resumes when they graduated. A few of them actually didn't send their resumes anywhere else... they wanted to work for me, end of story. And being a huge sentimental arsehole, I simply had to hire all of those.

(Sometimes I wonder if they knew that, in the second and third years. I did tell my two first year "only for you" applicants that their dedication and loyalty touched me, and I simply couldn't say no. I got rather more than two in the following two years. And that was, in retrospect, a bad business decision. I've made a lot of those.)

It might seem odd, but in some industries, the newbie honestly loves the work. It fascinates and captivates them. They stay up nights doing work. They look for more work to do. They invent work where there was none before. And what has always frustrated me is that once they start to get paid for it... the wonder goes out of it for them, and it becomes work. The dirty-word variety of work, that one should avoid as much as possible.

I don't know how to fix that. I simply can't find a way to reliably make people feel the way I do about my work: wait, you're going to pay me? Really? I mean... wow. Whether I'm writing an article, or building a website, or developing software - I love this job. It's like getting paid to play.

Do what you love, the money will follow. Or - more correctly, to my mind - when you honestly don't care about the money, it will come in torrents.

Kind of like women. When you go out and try to get laid, you won't. When you just stop trying, the women come out of the woodwork and beg to sleep with you. And then people come running up and offer you anything to teach them how the hell you do it. But even when you tell them, they can't. The fog of desperation around them is like ten feet thick. They can't stop trying. They don't know how.

"How you doin'?"

Best. Line. EVAR.

That's the main takeaway I'd expect from coaching: that you can then go out and replicate the same results yourself. If you can't take what you learned from a coach and improve on it, either your coach sucks, or you suck.

Bad wording, actually. Everybody sucks. We're just on different levels. Once you stop sucking at this level, you graduate to the next level, where you really suck. My sensei Jeff Culley used to say "Becoming a black belt doesn't make you an expert. It just means you suck on a whole new level."

Crap, what did I do, write a book here? I have squeeze pages to write.