I'll make a decision when I have more clients
THE MOST EXPENSIVE SENTENCE IN A SOLO BUSINESS
It's Tuesday, you have one client call later this afternoon and the rest of the week looks suspiciously empty.
Three different services are still sitting on your website because removing any of them feels dangerous to your survival. The niche you've been thinking about for eight months is buried somewhere inside a Notion document called "Positioning_v6_FINAL_final." The higher price you wrote down back in February on your vision board still hasn't made it onto the page.
And the new offer you keep talking about launching is somehow still "almost ready." So you tell yourself the same thing again:
"I'll decide on this once I have more clients."
Look, it sounds sensible. You can't afford to narrow down while things are inconsistent. You can't raise prices while leads are slow. You can't launch the bigger offer half-finished and not tested. You can't afford to scare people away right now.
So you keep every decision open, about the services, the client types, the pricing, the positioning. You take what comes in and tell yourself you'll clean things up later, once there's more stability, when you feel more secure.
The problem is that "later" quietly becomes another year in reactive mode. You get busy with clients that are not really what you want, but pay the bills, stealing precious time from building a sustainable intentional business. And the little free time you have now, you keep editing prices, website, LinkedIn profile, but you never really make a choice or take a decision. And that brings more wrong-fit clients because saying no still feels scarier than an empty calendar. Inevitably you will become tired, frustrated and questioning if having your own business is really for you. Every sales call becomes this strange exercise where you try to make a vague offer sound sharp enough for someone to care about it. You keep explaining more and more, but less confidently.
Meanwhile the clients you actually want never really show up because you still haven't clearly said who the work is for and optimised your business for that. It's an infernal loop of not getting the right clients, feeling insecure about the future, keeping everything open and vague to not miss opportunities, which brings the wrong clients, making the decision of what business to build harder.
Waiting doesn't make these decisions cheaper, it makes them more expensive, and eventually the runway gets shorter and your ability to choose properly disappears with it.
At month one, narrowing your positioning feels uncomfortable. At month twelve, it feels financially reckless.
At month one, raising your prices feels vulnerable. At month twelve, it feels impossible because now you literally can't afford to lose anyone.
The decisions are the same, but the emotion and financial reality of the timing are very different.
A client said something on a call recently that explained this better than I have in years:
"It's either pain now, which is actually a good pain, or desperation later."
That's really the choice underneath all of this. Like it or not, you will be pushed to make a decision. The question is which version of yourself gets to make them. The version that still has enough energy, runway, and confidence to absorb a few uncomfortable months while the new positioning settles? Or the version that now has to say yes to whatever lands in the inbox because the math is starting to look worrying?
"I'll fix it once I have more clients" is the worst thing you can say at this point. It's actually the opposite. The clearer positioning, narrower offer, stronger pricing, and more decisive messaging are usually the things that create the better clients in the first place, not the reward you give yourself afterwards.
That's what last week's newsletter was really about too.
The three clients I mentioned there didn't suddenly become more confident because business improved first, they made the uncomfortable shifts first and then the business changed around them.
You can do this alone, plenty of people do. But it's much easier when you're inside a room where other people are making the same decisions at the same time instead of sitting alone with seventeen browser tabs open trying to redesign your positioning for the fifth time this month.
That's what the Solo Accelerator is for. An environment where people make these shifts while they still have the ability to choose them properly instead of waiting until desperation chooses for them.
Let me ask you this: Which important decisions are you not making? How much longer do you want to keep paying the cost of avoiding them?
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