16:19Greg Hickman · Talking Head
I Quit My $1.5M/yr Business To Grow A Better Way
A 16-minute founder autopsy: five problems that nearly broke a $1.5M/yr machine, and the leaner model being built to replace it.
June 18thThe argument in one line.
Scaling a team and stacking offers can leave a business bigger but fundamentally shrinking, and the fix is a lean model built around a clear premium offer, the right clients, and AI-powered delivery.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A coach, consultant, or agency owner running a team of several people who suspects the business has become more complicated than it is profitable.
- A service provider thinking about adding low-ticket products, memberships, or events and wondering whether they will actually feed the main offer.
- An expert wondering how to package a done-for-you service now that AI can handle much of the manual delivery work.
SKIP IF…
- You want a step-by-step tactical tutorial; this is a reflective update video, not a how-to.
- You are pre-revenue and have never managed a team, so the scaling and downsizing story will not map to your situation yet.
The full version, fast.
Greg Hickman scaled a coaching business past $1M a year with a team of nine to twelve, then cut it in half in late 2023 and found his most profitable years, even as the business kept shrinking. Two years of experiments with low-ticket books, memberships, and events worked briefly, then faded, because they pointed at an unclear core offer. By late 2026 he is back to a near-solo operation. His four lessons: it is easy to overcomplicate a business, he used the wrong offer container in a collapsing middle of the market, he attracted clients unwilling to market, and AI makes premium done-for-you services newly viable.
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00:00 – 00:49
01 · Why 2026 has been the hardest year
Cold open admitting the difficulty, even struggling with content ideas, and framing this as an update rather than a lesson.
00:49 – 03:18
02 · 2023: a business I didn't enjoy
Scaled past $1M with a 9 to 12 person team, four closers, three setters, but spent all his time in meetings, echoing the corporate agency life he left.
03:18 – 03:56
03 · Cutting the team in half
Late 2023 cuts turned a loss-bound year into one of his more profitable ones, and 2024 became his most profitable.
03:56 – 05:34
04 · Falling back in love with in-person events
Retreats in rented houses worked for him, but four events a year was too much for even diehard members.
05:34 – 07:22
05 · Two years of experiments
A $7 book with bumps and upsells, memberships, ascension offers, and no-call sales all worked for 30 to 60 days then faded.
07:22 – 08:07
06 · Profitable but still shrinking
Zoomed-out data showed the business slowly shrinking despite record personal pay.
08:07 – 10:12
07 · Back to just me
Let go of an 11-year employee, now working with a few part-time helpers and one-on-one clients.
10:12 – 12:10
08 · Takeaway 1: it is easy to overcomplicate your business
Every experiment pointed at a core offer that was still unclear, so each one stalled.
12:10 – 15:39
09 · Takeaway 2: I had the wrong container
The barbell model: ultra premium and ultra scalable thrive while bundled middle-priced programs collapse.
15:39 – 16:57
10 · Takeaway 3: I was attracting the wrong clients
An ICP mismatch: people who wanted to monetize expertise but never marketed and did not want to.
16:57 – 19:03
11 · Why teaching marketing is so hard
Building audience and distribution is a learnable but slow skill, and many service providers resist it.
19:03 – 20:03
12 · Takeaway 4: AI reopened the door
Codified methodology can guide AI to do manual work, giving a lean team more output.
20:03 – 20:41
13 · The biggest opportunity for service providers
AI-powered done-for-you service beats teaching people to do it themselves.
20:41 – 21:06
14 · What is next
Rethinking how he packages his work, plus a request for feedback on raw, unpolished videos.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A business can be your most profitable ever and still be fundamentally shrinking, so zoom out on all the data before trusting a good year.
- Low-ticket offers and memberships only work when they point at a clear core offer that drives the revenue and profit.
- Early success of a new offer in the first 30 to 60 days often just reflects people already in your world buying, not real market demand.
- Offers are splitting into a barbell: ultra premium access and done-for-you on one end, ultra scalable and cheap on the other, with the middle collapsing.
- A program that bundles premium access with scalable content makes members pay for ingredients they never use, which drives churn.
- Four events a year is too many when members travel from all over the world, even for diehard fans.
- The best clients for a productization business are the ones whose delivery is too manual to take on demand they already have.
- Teaching someone to become a marketer is slow and often fails when they never created content and do not want to.
- Growing a service business requires audience and distribution, meaning content or ads, every single week.
- Scaling by hiring away your own work can recreate the exact corporate meeting-heavy job you left.
- Codifying your own methodology gives AI a roadmap to do manual work, letting a lean team produce far more output.
- People would still rather have a service done for them, so AI-powered done-for-you is a bigger opportunity than teaching people to do it.
Four lessons from shrinking back to solo
WHAT TO LEARN
Adding people and offers can grow revenue while shrinking the business, so clarity of offer, client fit, and lean delivery matter more than scale.
022023: a business I didn't enjoy
- Scaling by hiring out your own work can leave you in meetings managing people, recreating the corporate job you left.
03Cutting the team in half
- Bloat can turn a growing year into a loss; cutting overhead made 2023 and 2024 his most profitable years.
04In-person events
- Four events a year is too many when members travel worldwide, even for the most loyal ones.
05Two years of experiments
- Low-ticket books, memberships, and no-call sales worked for 30 to 60 days then faded, driven mostly by existing audience.
08Takeaway 1
- Every experiment must point at a core offer you are sure about, or it stalls.
09Takeaway 2
- Bundled mid-priced programs collapse as offers polarize into premium and scalable ends.
10Takeaway 3
- The best clients cannot take on demand because their delivery is too manual and hands-on.
12Takeaway 4
- AI plus a codified methodology lets a lean team deliver more done-for-you results.
Terms worth knowing.
- ICP
- Ideal customer profile. The specific type of client a business is best suited to serve and whose traits make them a good fit.
- Productizing a service
- Turning custom, hands-on service work into a repeatable offer with a defined scope, price, and delivery process.
- Barbell offer model
- A market shape where demand concentrates in very premium, human-delivered offers and very cheap, scalable ones, while mid-priced bundles lose ground.
- VSL
- Video sales letter. A sales video used in a funnel, often to book sales calls for a high-ticket offer.
- Order bump and upsell
- Extra offers presented at checkout or right after purchase to raise the value of each sale and help a cheap front-end product pay for its own ads.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
13:10
“Everything in the middle of the barbell is collapsing in some way, shape or form.”
00:08
“2026 has been the most difficult and challenging year that I've ever experienced in business.”
Word for word.
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All right, so 2026 has been the most difficult and challenging year that I've ever experienced in business. And I've been in business for myself full -time since 2014, so 12 years. And it's been so challenging that even content has been, I've been struggling with content, coming up with ideas last six to eight months.
And so I'm trying something different here today. I've got some note cards on some things that I want to talk about. And I want to share a little bit about like an update.
So this is more of an update video than it is a lesson video. But if you've been following me for a while, I'm sure there's going to be plenty of lessons that you can pull from what I'm going to be sharing here today. So this kind of actually goes back to 2023.
And I built a business that I... didn't really enjoy and that no longer was fitting my my lifestyle so i had scaled my you know coaching consulting business uh to over a million dollars a year uh our team was with fractional people i think like somewhere between nine and twelve people and we were really pushing to get over two million and through all the gurus, all the courses, all the mentors that I've worked with at the time, like the most logical path was to like remove myself from certain things, bring in more talent, bring in more people.
And we had actually been pushing towards that 2 million for the two years leading up to that late 2023. So 2021, 2022, 2023, we were like between one and 2 million and really trying to crack the code there. All the while, I felt like I was building something that wasn't mine.
I was really good at following to -do lists, following other people's models. And I scaled myself out of all of the things that I didn't enjoy. And all of my time went towards meetings, coaching sales reps, all the things that, quite honestly, I really didn't like doing at all.
And it kind of reminded me of scaling. the very business that I left when I was in corporate. I was a decade in the agency world, finished client side.
And these are large organizations. And it's just like a lot of people, a lot of meetings. It's like you spend most of your time in meetings trying to get other people to do stuff.
And when I went into business for myself, I really was looking always to have something lean. But as we started getting traction, you know, You want to scale.
And we kept pushing and hired a sales team, you know, four closers, three setters. I had someone running our ads, a consultant helping the person running our ads. We had client support team coaches.
you know ops people assistants there was there was a slew of people to get this thing going and try to push it over that hump but like i said i kind of hit the point where i realized i didn't really enjoy that business so the end of 2023 late 2023 i cut my team in half a little bit more than half and entered 2024 and because of the cuts uh 2023 which was on track to be you know a a year of loss actually became one of my more profitable years because we were bloated and 2024 my most profitable year the year that i've paid myself the most while also falling back in love with certain parts of the business which was in person so pre -covered we used to run multiple in -person events a year i loved getting clients in town and so into 2024 i committed to doing these retreats we rented houses all across the country we did fun events we went atv snowmobiling hiked a volcano but also did mastermind stuff and that was really fun the problem though was that as i was shifting towards the business that i was you know trying to reimagine um it just wasn't growing very quickly couple that with i think this is when things were really starting to you know take shape with
You know, AI was really starting to come into the scene. And maybe I still wasn't as in love with the model that I was trying to grow, but we just couldn't grow fast enough. And we were also hosting four events a year.
And our diehard members, even the most diehard, were not coming to all of the events. And getting people to want to travel four times a year to the events was a little bit difficult. So one quick lesson is four events a year is probably...
too much especially when people are traveling all across the world so I knew that I was in love with the event piece and getting people in person and we wanted to figure out a better way to really just like acquire clients without having to do sales calls which we've experimented a lot of different things and really 2024 outside of like the core group that I was serving, we tested a lot of different things.
So 2024, 2025 were really a slew of experiments. And many of them worked until they didn't. We had a low ticket book that did really, really well.
We tried kind of like membership tiers, having a lower ticket offer and ascending people up into the higher ticket. In the beginning, the first 30 to 60 days of these offers, it felt like they were working because people in my world were moving forward. They were buying these things.
And those early results made it look like it was going to work always. But when we looked at the data, it was really just the people that had been in our world for a very long time.
All of these little experiments worked for a little bit, but then they didn't. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about why I think that's the case and the underlying issue, because I'm not trying to say that low ticket into high ticket doesn't work or memberships don't work. There's plenty of examples of these things working.
But in an attempt to fall back in love with my business, I. committed to just trying more things. And in doing so in those experiments, I did learn a lot.
Like I had always done high ticket funnels. And so we always did like VSLs to sales calls. And I learned how to, you know, do a $7 digital book and then have, you know, order bumps and upsells to make that, you know, profitable on acquisition.
We figured out how to sell without sales calls in a couple of different formats that worked that, you know, probably should have kept iterating on some of those. And despite 2023 and 2024 being my most profitable years ever, paying myself the most amount of money, if you zoomed out on all of the data, the business was still fundamentally shrinking.
And this is my dog, Rocky. He's hanging out next to us. And so when we zoomed out on all of the data, things...
actually didn't look like they were going that well. I was learning a lot, which was great, and I felt like it was very needed, but the business was very much slowly shrinking. Enter, you know, 2026 with a lot of those experiments, a lot of those learnings, and what felt like not a lot of traction.
Just recently, and this is, I'm recording this, you know. November, the beginning of November of 2026, I just recently downsized back to just me. I let go of one of my longest standing employees, 11 years, who I still love to this day.
She's a rock star. And she's off doing her own thing and seeing her start to get some clients is awesome. But I brought it back to just me and a couple people part time as needed, like a video editor, although I'm going to try to test some.
less edited videos here and things like that. And I'm very quickly learning a lot of things about what I enjoy, what I don't enjoy, how to think about building things back in a lean AI first sort of way. Not that like I think AI is the savior by any means.
I'm not that sort of person. And I'm not anti -team either. starting to give myself some of this space to really explore without the weight of all of the other things that I had going on that were complicated.
That led to I wouldn't experiment because I needed to cover certain overhead or things like that. And so that's kind of like a quick update. I'm happy to share more if you have specific questions, just drop them in the comments.
But I want to share a few things that I've taken from all of this now that I've been starting to reflect on how I want to position what's next. Because I'm very much in the phase of I'm working with some one -on -one clients and really enjoying that. And I think there's some...
some really awesome opportunities that I'm extremely excited about that I'm going to be exploring. But let's let's switch up the scene here. All right, we're coming outside for a little bit, even though it's a little bit chilly.
So let's let's jam on some of these things. So the first takeaway is that it's really simple to overcomplicate your business as you're trying to grow and scale it. You know, historically, you add more stuff, you add more people, you, you know, increase ad spend, you create more content.
And very quickly, things get over complicated. And like I said, I experimented a lot, low ticket membership, Ascension, workshops, free webinars. And, you know, this little graphic here shows you that, you know, some of the experiments worked, and some were okay.
And honestly, some didn't. But the reason is, all of these experiments, The point of doing low ticket or a membership at the heart of it is they all need to point to something.
At least this is what I've found. There are very few exceptions of people that like scale very big businesses off of low ticket products. Most of the people that sell low ticket, it's just a step in the right direction towards you being sold, you know, the bigger thing.
unclear because i was still working through the container that i really felt like would be the one that i would i would enjoy and so the experiments would work for a minute but then they'd stop because they didn't move people into the main thing that was really the revenue and profit driver of the business and uh so Yes, they all can work, but if they're all pointing to something that is still unclear and that you're not satisfied with or that you haven't figured out or that you're trying to pivot on, that becomes really difficult.
Which leads me to, you know, sitting here now, the end of 2026, we're all, you know, experiencing the AI boom and all that stuff. The container in which I helped people. I feel like has been the wrong container.
And I drew a barbell here because I think we're starting to see this barbell approach. On one side, you have like ultra premium offers, which incorporate access to the expert or the consultant or done for you services, taste, judgment. The things that only humans can do are on one side of the barbell.
And then on the other side of the barbell are the things that are like ultra scalable. and either free or really, really low ticket and affordable. And everything in the middle of the barbell is, it seems like collapsing in some way, shape or form.
And many of the high ticket coaching and consulting programs that I've been in have blended the ultra scalable and the premium and the price kind of falls into this like middle gap. Most of the people that run these models, and there are definitely people that run them successfully, so I'm not saying that this isn't the right for everybody, but more times than not, inside of those programs, the person running them is really good at either the...
content and the training which is the ultra scalable or they're really good at like providing access and or done for you services on the premium side or running masterminds the input like the in -person side of things which again you can only really do you know human related stuff in person or best and so that means parts of the program that are premium are really good but things that like you tap into more more often like the digital training or the the community lack and or vice versa and so when you have kind of a program that combines all of these things and there's and people are only in there for one or two of the elements of or ingredients of this whole recipe when something's not working or they want to grow and evolve it's like they're kind of paying for a lot of features that they're not using or not getting value from and so they churn out And often with this barbell, you find these programs being kind of like priced in between the ultra premium and the super affordable.
And so, you know, many of the big masterminds that I've been in charge a premium because these are people that have been around a long time. They have a solid reputation. And, you know, because of their demand and their reputation, they have the ability to charge a premium.
But a lot of the ingredients in there are not worth that price point. It's only like you're paying a premium for a few of the ingredients that you don't get to access very frequently. And I don't know, for me, that became kind of an issue because I would have stayed in programs longer.
But if I have to spend another $20 ,000 a year to travel to the events. you know, to get the value of the in -person, it kind of starts to become not economical, especially in my stage of life where I have a family and I don't even want to be traveling that much. So anyway, I felt like I've been in this wrong container because we've kind of merged all of these ingredients, some of which we could be charging a premium for and some of which should be ultra accessible and scalable.
Another lesson was that I had like an ICP mismatch. I'm not even sure if you can read these on the camera, but we, in an effort to scale, we started attracting a lot of people that wanted what we were able to help with, which was turning their services into products and productizing their service and monetizing their expertise in different ways.
But they've never marketed themselves a day in their life and they didn't want to. And so one of the things that I realized is my best clients were always in a position where they actually couldn't. take on more business because their team was bloated, their processes were too manual, there were no systems or automation in place, and the delivery was just like too hands -on and they needed to create more leverage inside of their delivery and increase their capacity to take on the demand that they couldn't actually take on.
And what I found was that in an effort to scale many, many businesses at some point, end up taking on clients that are either the wrong fit or they um like have some of the ingredients of a perfect client but not all the ingredients and one thing that i've learned is that it's really difficult to teach someone to become a marketer that has never created content and sometimes is unwilling to create content and having worked with agencies and service providers for you know over a decade now in all shapes and sizes many of them are not good at talking to camera and the ability to become a good marketer which is totally possible and a learnable skill takes a lot of time and so you know you help them solve the immediate problem and then they got to go build an audience and learn how to run a webinar and you know really learn new skills that you know does take time to learn and to get right.
And that just always led to like a lull in our ability to continue to help clients. Because for me, it was very easy to always talk about what I was learning and what I was doing. And I just naturally wanted to share what I was learning.
And in my experience, that's not the case for most service providers, like going out and building an audience and making YouTube videos and doing Instagram reels, which at this stage is very much a requirement or at least be willing to run ads which is also content is a requirement if you want to grow and scale a service business like you have to have audience and distribution to bring leads and opportunities to you every single every single day every single week every single month if you want to grow and i've just come across many people that you know aren't willing to do that and That's on me of my marketing and messaging and really just being willing to hone in on only the people that are already in demand but are trying to free up capacity, which means kind of going up more upmarket to establish businesses, which is what I've been doing the last six months behind the scenes working with the people that I work with one -on -one.
And the last lesson on this is really just that, you know, With this whole model, as we all know, AI has reopened the door. And I'm going to make a separate video on this.
But what I want to share here is that, you know, as an agency owner, as a service provider, one of the really the only way to grow your business, if you didn't want a big team, which was kind of the traditional model, is to transition into selling information or courses or coaching or some sort of a hybrid like that, where it's like.
courses plus group coaching calls and things like that but now with ai you can actually if you have if you know your process and if you have codified your own methodology you can use that as a roadmap to get ai to do a lot of the manual work and you can get more output more revenue more profit from the team that you already have or with a lean team and When I think of the biggest opportunity right now for service providers or people that know how to think and do, it's some sort of done -for -you service because people still would rather have you do it for them, but using AI to power that service.
I'm not saying become an AI consultancy or whatever, but use AI to help deliver the result that you're really capable of doing. In more of back to a done for you service kind of capacity versus trying to teach them how to do it. And so, yeah, that has me rethinking how I'm going to be packaging up what I do and what I'm capable of helping people with.
Because despite this being the most challenging year that I've ever faced in business and arguably the last couple of years, I'm still super excited. And so. very long video but i just want to give you a quick update hopefully you found some value in this if you've been following me for a long time i'd love to know like what do you think about some more raw unpolished videos i got a couple more coming they'll be shorter than this i promise but let me know in the comments what do you want to hear more of
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
After twelve years in business for himself, Greg Hickman opens with an admission that 2026 has been his hardest year, then walks through how a seven-figure team-based coaching business shrank back to one person and what he learned.
Named ideas worth stealing.
13:20model
The Offer Barbell
- Ultra premium: expert access, done-for-you, taste, judgment
- Ultra scalable: free or very low ticket
- Middle: collapsing
Offers are polarizing toward premium human-delivered work and cheap scalable products, while bundled mid-priced programs lose members who only use one or two ingredients.
Steal fordeciding how to price and bundle an offer
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
20:45link
“Let me know in the comments what do you want to hear more of.”
Soft comment prompt asking for feedback on raw, unpolished videos; newsletter and 1:1 links sit in the description.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Visual structure at a glance.
