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10 Shifts From $100k To $500k As A Solopreneur

Monday, April 7, 2025 / Rich Webster / Watch on YouTube / Listen to podcast​

Reaching $100k/year is a free for all.

Try a lot of things and see what sticks.

Eventually, you’ll make money.

Reaching $500k+/year is a different beast.

You need a strategy.

I’ve scaled two businesses well past the half-million mark and helped numerous clients navigate this transition.

Here are 10 shifts to break through to $500k/year and beyond as a solopreneur:

🛣️ 1. Pick a path with leverage.

A $100k/year solopreneur is usually:

• Maxed out on time.
• Maxed out on money.

The reasons are simple:

• Too low prices.
• Too many clients.
• No time to address it.

But these reasons are SYMPTOMS of this deeper cause:

You’re trying to do both fulfillment AND marketing at a high level.

And having a strategy of “do everything at a high level” is not a strategy.

Especially when you’re building a lean, profitable solo business.

You need to pick a path:

1. Expert Business: Scale with PRICE (high-value, deep expertise)
2. Marketing Business: Scale with SYSTEMS (zero fulfillment, all marketing)

The danger zone?

Stuck in the middle.

Both work.

But you can only pick one.

📈 2. Path 1: Scale with price. (Expert Business)

Path one is to scale your business by charging more.

Instead of spreading yourself thin across dozens of low-paying clients, you concentrate on a select few who value your expertise and pay accordingly.

If you’re fully booked right now, that’s not a good sign.

It’s a signal from the market that your prices are too low.

Here’s how it works:

• The business scales by increasing price and value.
• You’re involved in client fulfillment as the “expert.”
• You do minimalist marketing (focus on referrals, relationships, long-term contracts, etc.)

Your main growth levers are: Price, Sales, Expertise.

This path could look like:

$500k Agency Business:

$500k Consulting Business:

In both scenarios, your deep expertise is what makes this work.

📣 3. Path 2: Scale with systems. (Marketing Business)

Path two is to scale your business by growing distribution.

In this path, you’re not involved in fulfillment.

You can sell 10 or 10,000 units with the same effort.

You build systems to design yourself out of the business.

Here’s how it works:

• The business scales with marketing & systems.
• Your product needs to be excellent.
• You do maximalist marketing (large audience, daily content, funnels, etc.)

Your main growth levers are: BIG Audience, Content Machine, Systems, Product Alignment, Consistency, Messaging.

This path could look like:

$500k Productized Service:

$500k Digital Products:

If you love marketing and creating content, this is the path for you.

🌟 4. Level up yourself.

Once you pick a path, internal challenges will emerge.

The next three shifts relate to the path of scaling with price.

You need these to level up and charge higher prices:

1. Expertise

You need to develop DEEP expertise in your field and combine it with broad context about how it fits into your clients’ world.

When you’re an expert, clients don’t tell you what to do, they ask you what to do.

Instead of waiting for orders, tell your clients: “This is our focus right now.”

This positions you as the expert partner rather than an implementer.

2. Sales

As you scale with price, sales becomes the bottleneck and relationships become the number one lever for scaling.

Understand the sales process and advocate for your clients’ goals.

If you can’t confidently say big numbers, you won’t earn them.

3. Conviction

You must believe you deserve a fair percentage of the value you create.

This isn’t about charging “what you’re worth” as a person, but advocating for your work’s market value.

You need to believe you’re worthy of happiness and success. (more on that in #10)

🏦 5. Level up your clients.

Your $100K client roster won’t get you to $500K.

You need to target clients who can gain more value from your work.

Think of your expertise as fuel.

The same fuel can power a lawnmower, car, or rocket ship, but the value created is vastly different.

• Same fuel in a lawnmower = mow a lawn.
• Same fuel in a car = travel between cities.
• Same fuel in a rocket = go to space.

Better clients = bigger impact from the same work.

The exact same service can be:

• Worth $1K to a solopreneur
• Worth $10K to a small business
• Worth $100K to a corporation

The work doesn’t change.

The value does.

🔍 6. Solve better problems.

I worked with a client who positioned themselves as a “deck designer.”

They could expect to earn between $20-200/hr.

She raised her rates by repositioning as a “deck consultant” and helping with strategy and messaging.

Now, as a consultant, she charged $5-10k per deck.

The breakthrough came when she positioned herself as someone who “closes deals” through pitch decks.

This enabled five-figure fees because the outcome (funding) was worth millions to her clients.

Do you see the lesson?

Stop selling deliverables.

• No one wants design.
• No one wants a website.
• No one wants strategy.

They want the outcomes those things create.

Sell that.

(Note: That doesn’t mean don’t ever DO deliverables, just don’t focus on them during sales conversations).

You also need to understand how your work relates to business outcomes.

Do you know how your client makes money? Tell them.

• If you’re talking to a startup, show them how you get them more users.
• If you’re talking to an agency, show them how you get them more leads.
• If you’re talking to a nonprofit, show them how you get more donors.

When you dictate strategy instead of executing someone else’s plan, you can charge 5-10X more for the same work.

⏰ 7. Your time is gold.

As you scale to $500k and beyond, your time and energy will always be the bottleneck.

Two key lessons:

1. How you spend your time matters.

Not all tasks are equal.

Your to-do list is not your priorities list.

• An email is less valuable than business strategy.
• A DM isn’t as valuable as your next project.
• A coffee request is less valuable than finding clients.

2. Create idea space.

The more money you make, the more time you need to think.

Create “idea space” for strategic thinking instead of constantly working in the business.

When we’re focused on work, we miss conversations, opportunities, relationships, ideas, insights, and perspective.

These are the real things that move the needle.

🛠️ 8. Systems Builder Mindset

Every task should be systematized.

Systems extend your productivity beyond your time.

You can complete projects, goals, and tasks without working more hours.

You’ll need 5 types of systems:

• Strategies (What you do.) Your strategy is the #1 system (offer, process, market, etc.)
• Policies (What you don’t do.) Anything that removes decisions or sets boundaries.
• SOPs. Anything that can be made into a checklist.
• Templates. Repeatable/reusable elements.
• Tools. Time-saving apps/programs.

You should build systems for every business area: marketing, sales, fulfillment, communication, retention.

Example: Initially, my weekly newsletter took 8-10 hours to produce and distribute. By building systems (which took 10-15 hours upfront), it now takes 90 minutes/week. The difference (435 hours annually) is time I can reinvest in other areas of the business.

💸 9. Spend money to buy time.

Another huge mindset shift: See money as a tool.

Rewire your brain to see money not as something to hoard, but as a tool to buy back your most precious resource: time.

You can deploy money to buy time in two ways:

1. Education

Don’t hesitate to spend money for perspective.

You can spend money to skip MONTHS of trial and error.

Some of my best insights have come from paying experts for knowledge.

2. Delegation

I teach my clients 80/20 Delegation.

This process is simple: You handle the first 10% (strategy) and last 10% (polish) of projects, while delegating the middle 80%.

This leverages your expertise and maintains quality, while freeing your schedule from busywork.

🌡️ 10. Calibrate success thermostat.

The final shift?

Your “success thermostat.”

We all have an ‘inner thermostat’ for the amount of money we feel we “should” earn.

When we earn less than that number, we scramble to earn more.

When we exceed that number, we can self-sabotage or ease off.

If you’ve been stuck at the same revenue for years, this is likely your issue.

The first step is awareness.

You may need to do deep work, such as journaling, therapy, etc.

It’s useful to work through this with others.

Helpful things:

• Accountability.
• Being around people who’ve broken through your ceiling.
• Deep internal work on your relationship with success.

I've learned that the biggest bottleneck to growth isn’t “more information.”

It’s your internal issues and beliefs.

• You can’t sell because you don’t believe in yourself.
• You can’t market because you’re stuck in procrastination and fear.
• You can’t charge more because of your stories about money and wealth.

Address them and watch everything fall into place.

🔄 TL;DR - The Path To $500k

The path from $100K to $500K looks like this:

Raise prices → Build systems → Get better clients → Increase value → Delegate more → Raise prices again.

Time to get started.

If you want guidance on your journey to $500k/year, here are ways I can help: