Where We're Heading In 2026

Hello.

Hello everyone and welcome to 2026.

If no one else has welcomed you to 2026, yet, let me be the first to do so.

I assume I am not the first to do so, but it is my first day back in the office after the holidays.

I'm guessing there are several of you or many of you who are in the same boat.

Some of you might have been working a little bit last week already.

regardless of the situation, I wanted to record a quick video here, kind of giving a overview of where my head is at, both related to my business but also the work that I am going to be working with people on.

over the coming year.

I have, I mean if you have been engaged in the community at all or reading my emails, I've been probably publicly working through a lot of the progress or the direction that I'm heading in over the past three to six months, I would say.

And now a lot of it is becoming a lot clearer in where I am going and where I want to help people get, which are very aligned in most cases and also the specific steps that need to happen on how to get there.

And one of the interesting things that I've realized is actually it's a very slight adjustment in some way with some, maybe some more emphasis placed on certain areas.

but very similar to what I've been helping people do all along, what I've been doing all along, just more specific focus, kind of cutting some of the fluff and stuff that doesn't really matter and looking at the most efficient way to get where we are all trying to get and well we'll talk more about that in a second but I will say that like we all have our own unique goals, but most of us, what I would say when we're talking about like where we are trying to head here, one of the things that I'm wanting to do a lot more of in the new year is, is drawing.

I bought a drawing course over the year so we're going to be using the iPad a lot more this year I think.

So the goal that I think a lot of us have is what we want to build is I margin businesses.

And so when we're talking about high margin, the way that I'm thinking about this is basically two slash threefold.

The first is profit.

And so looking at, I mean income, yes, but specifically profit, not revenue profit.

We are looking for businesses and actually I don't have the graph right up here somewhere.

But I charted out the years of my business, going back to the agency days till now.

And there was a time I think my second year in business made something like $250,000 in revenue.

maybe it was like, it might have even been more of that.

It might have been like 270 or something like that.

And it made like $20,000 in profit.

Like it felt so good when I looked at that top line revenue number.

And then things felt really tight and I was like, wait, what's going on here?

I'm doing, I'm getting all these sales and things are going so well.

The business is taking off.

And I realized like I'm making almost no money.

And I scraped by on you know, like 1500, $2,000 a month, whatever it was, basically because I was outsourcing everything, had a ton of contractors, had a ton of costs and the business was not very profitable.

It was not a good business.

And I didn't really understand anything about profit margin at the time.

So here we are aiming for profit, not revenue.

and over the years what has essentially happened for my business is that the revenue numbers have basically gone down, or they did for a series of years like this.

But at the same time the profit went from this to this to this to, you know, actually.

And now where we're at is revenue, is over the next few years as PMA started to grow.

Whoops.

PMA now makes more in revenue than the agency ever did.

And the profit margin is much higher up here, compared to basically the opposite when we were looking at over here.

So what we are looking for is a business much more like this one where there is, sure there's a lot of revenue, but what we really care about is profit.

And what was interesting is we can see here revenue at some point, even though revenue went down and it was about half at some point of what it was at its peak here, profit was actually much higher.

this is probably not actually a good year.

This one, is more accurate to where things went to.

So, interesting, kind of like two ways to look at things.

So when we are looking at our goals here, again we are looking for margin in profit.

And so we have adequate profit coming in to be able to reinvest in the business, and you know, to pay ourselves a great wage.

The second piece of margin that we are looking for is time.

Most of us, I would say.

And so we don't want to have to be working 60 hours a week, let alone, you know, 70, 80, whatever.

again, if I look back on my business, the least profitable years I was working the most.

And part of that is, you know, just at an earlier stage of your business, you have to do a lot to get things going.

What's funny though is that I was running a business that was making $250,000 a year plus that was not really generating the profit.

It's like I was actually doing things to get income in.

I just had the wrong business model in many ways.

And so there were things that then, now I've corrected that over the past, you know, five plus years.

but you know, this is something that we want to focus on also.

I realized like I didn't need to be working that much now I work much less and I'm looking to continue to work less going forward.

But these I would say are the goals that most of us have as the core fundamental things.

We want a business that has a surplus of profit so that we can both reinvest in the business, but also we have bandwidth.

And one of the things I don't really, I haven't shared a lot of this publicly or even really in the community other than some one on one conversations.

I have always been very conservative financially with the business.

And so main I think a lot of people actually are and I've heard, started to hear more and more business owners talk about this where it's just like it's so hard to feel safe in your business when you're self employed.

You don't know where the next dollar is coming from.

You have a really great client month and then you have nothing coming in the next month.

And so that's been my reality for 10 years now.

And so I have always been, I live very cheaply generally personally and you know, which is, is good.

I think that that's something that Kelly and I want to get out of just like being so, so cheap.

she's much more of a spender than I am.

But I am just have a programming to live frugally.

I don't really want a lot of things and so I live very cheaply generally which can cause frustrations in a relationship when you're with somebody who is the, the opposite.

I think we both probably help each other out a little bit there.

But I have basically kept most of my profit in the business over the years.

And so at this point I, I now have.

There's something like one, hundred fifty thousand dollars in just retained earnings in the business, which I only really like.

I looked at this at the end of last year and I like, because it's in several different accounts in different places, some of that set aside for taxes and whatnot.

So it, like a lot of that will get paid out.

But I looked at this and I realized, oh, man, I'm actually in a really good place.

And I have felt a level of scarcity my whole life as a business owner, and which is what has led me to hoard that cash.

And then I started hearing talking with more business owners and other people who were like, yeah, I keep like 500 grand in my business account because that's just what makes me feel safe.

It's not a good financial move, but it is like the thing that I need to make me feel like, okay, I could last a year if no new work came in or whatever, or more, keeping all my team expenses and all the business expense, whatever.

So this is something that I think is, is interesting to talk about.

and one of the things that I realized is at every stage of my business career, when I went from being, having a job to going, full time on my business, I had some cash, wasn't that much.

It was like maybe, maybe five to $10,000.

And I was like, okay, I can survive, pay my like, thousand dollars a month living expenses when I was, you know, 23 or 24 or whatever it was, and, and I can still survive if this doesn't work.

And then when I switched from the agency to going on to podcast marketing academy, I had some cash, not so much, but I had a little bit there.

I had like, yeah, maybe 10 to $20,000.

and also I had recurring, you know, clients coming in.

And so I had that kind of space to be able to move into and explore, allocate more time towards the, kind of coaching, consulting, education side of the business.

And now where I have a lot of cash, which kind of like knock up on me and still had that feeling of scarcity, now I'm kind of like, oh, I'm in a really great position to experiment with things to reinvest in the business.

And so these two things here, profit and time, these are, these are correlated here.

but now what I'm looking at is like, okay, I've got a lot of profit, that the business is very profitable.

I've actually worked it to a point where it's like, there is, it is taking much less time.

And now how do I use this profit that I've accumulated to you know, make buy back even more of that time, but while also growing the business.

And so these are really the things that we're, we're looking for here.

a bit of a detour there on the cash saving side of things.

we can talk more about that for anyone who's interested, in any of the, the calls.

but I think being in a place where you feel secure to be able to allocate your time and your money in ways that like, might not pay off immediately, you don't need things to pay off immediately, that puts you in a really great place with the business.

And so the goals that we are going for here that I really want to be helping, Myself work towards and also my clients work towards and everybody in the community is the.

These two things.

More profit, more time, having margin on both of those things so that you're not strapped all the time working to the limit, of like always needing to get the next kind of deal client in and like not having time to allocate to anything outside of like just doing the work and constantly being on the hamster wheel.

And those in my mind open up the real thing that I want.

Like these, these things I both really do want.

But then there's this other thing that I think a lot of us, we actually optimize for first when it's actually is a byproduct of doing these things well, which is these lead to this third one which is creative margin.

And so this like, I recognize this 100% of myself.

I know Kelly and I, we talk about this all the time where we, A lot of times, like creative business owners, we do the thing that we want to create, even if it comes at the expense of these two things.

And I have done so much of this in my career and I'm kind of like at the point where I'm like, no, let's.

I'm going to optimize for these top two things.

First up here on Optimize for Profit and Optimize for Time.

And that's going to unlock my ability to take bigger bolder swings on my creative work.

And one of those things is like my new show Killer concept where at this point I've spent 40 hours on the first episode that's gonna, it's longer and there's gonna be another 10 hours for sure on it.

It's.

Yeah, I've had to redo it twice now essentially, after getting feedback and whatnot.

So it's gonna take longer than most episodes will.

But realizing that like oh I, this doesn't need to be the most efficient thing I do.

I can actually invest more time than I would on general content.

But this is going to be a flagship showcase kind of show for me that I think is going to bring in a lot of new clients.

But it also is just a fun thing that I have now earned the margin to be able to dedicate to that because I've spent the past year or so maybe two years really dialing in some of these other things related to profit and time.

And so when we do those things we get more bandwidth and to really start to flex our creative muscles.

We have more profit to invest in team, we have more time to invest creatively.

And so we actually get to do like the way to get to the really impactful, really interesting creative work is first we take care of some of the business fundamentals with profit and time.

So these are the things that we are really working towards that the kind of like direction that I am heading in that I think Most people in the community already are heading in.

Whether you see yourself as a business owner specifically like an expertise based business owner which is, is a lot of the people, I would say well over half of the people who, who I work with probably like 70, 80% or you see yourself as more of a like pure creator who the content is the first thing in the business gets built on the back end.

Both can work but this is what we're ultimately working for.

So beyond this the then the path or the sub goals that we are looking to, basically the things that we, we check off these milestones in order to get to that high margin business are at as follows.

So these are some of the things that I, I'm going to be talking about a lot going to be focusing on over the coming year.

The first thing we need to do is unlock an abundance of opportunities.

and by, and specifically we do that by becoming the top mind or becoming top of mind as the go to expert for solving a particular high value problem.

There's a few things here.

When we have more inbound opportunities, more demand for our services, we are then able to unlock premium pricing and and so if we work with, have the capacity to work with 20 people a year let's say but we only have 10 people knocking on our door, it's hard to charge a lot for that.

Whereas if we have a hundred people knocking on our door who we are constantly referred to as the go to person for solving that problem.

We can still work with those same 20 people but we can charge a lot more.

And we get to be very picky about who we work with.

We get to dictate the terms of the relationship.

So we work on these things in this order in this capacity within this program that we've developed because we know that it gets the result.

And that allows us to basically create take much more control of the relationship and the process and all the parameters of people working with us because we are the prize that people want to work with because we have shown that we are the person who is kind of irreplaceable.

We're not interchangeable with other service providers.

And so we'll talk about how we do that in a second.

But that's what we're trying to do.

We are trying to increase the, the demand, the abundance of opportunities giving us the opportunity to say no to almost everybody who wants to work with us in order to charge a lot to get great results for a small number of people who will get those results with our help and who are willing to pay to work with us.

So we'll talk more about how we become top of mind in a, in a second.

That is largely what we're creating podcasts and content for as well, which is kind of one of the core pieces of why we're all connected here together.

But this is the goal that we're working towards here.

So unlock an abundance of opportunities specifically again go to expert for solving a particularly or a particular high value problem.

This is a core piece, this high value problem.

If we solve a problem that is not really high value to people, if they don't really care about it, if it's not urgent, if they are, it's not worth investing in.

We're going to have a hard time achieving any of this.

Now.

This a lot of people immediately think well I don't help people make more money with my my work.

And so that's off the table for me.

I know tons and tons of people who have high ticket programs for all kinds of stuff that does not earn income.

There are, I've had many clients who charge 5 or $10,000 for fitness programs.

Fitness programs that do not bring in any income for the people who sign up for them.

And they build huge fantastic businesses around those with a small number of clients.

There are people in learning language, learning.

There's people.

I saw one guy who had a $10,000 program that sold, well for teaching people to do handstands.

I don't remember what all this sales, messaging and marketing was, how he framed it, but it is possible in many, many spaces.

Probably every space, this does.

There is some nuance around like cultivating the right audience and framing, choosing the right problem and framing it in the right way in a way that makes it feel valuable to the people that you are searching, for.

but it is possible in, in almost every place.

And so that is something that is very important.

This is not possible to, it's not to say like just any product and any problem that you solve is possible.

Building this business, that is one of the variables that you need to take into consideration is, is this something people are willing to pay a lot to have solved for them to help me solve?

And most people could reframe their general expertise and package it in a way that it does address a very high value problem.

And if not, that's something then too that we look at.

Okay, how do we build the skills and the knowledge to be able to do that for people?

Because none of us are born with any of this ability to solve any specific high value problems.

We all acquire that some way or another, whether that's intentional or not.

And so one of the things that if you are stuck in a business that does not allow for this kind of setup, one of the things we want to do is say, okay, how can we develop the skills, and the expertise and the knowledge, to be able to address this problem?

In my case with Podcast Marketing Academy, I did not know anything about marketing.

I did not.

I was scared of marketing.

I didn't want to do it.

But I had clients in the agency side of things where I was cared more about the audio, technical side of things, asking me, how do I grow my podcast?

So over like three to six months, I did probably a hundred interviews with various podcasters, my existing clients who were doing well, the ones who weren't.

And basically at the end I was like, oh, this is how you grow a podcast.

This is all the fundamentals here.

This is clearly all the people who are growing are doing these things well.

And when I examine the shows, I see some aspects, some characteristics about them.

The people who are not growing are doing these things.

Oh, it, it becomes obvious.

And so within three to six months you can become a legitimate expert on a lot of topics that are high value to people.

If you go out and seek to acquire those, that knowledge and that expertise.

And so that is certainly possible and it doesn't really take that long in the big scheme of things.

so when we then we've unlocked the abundance of opportunities, by becoming the go to expert for solving a particular high value problem which, that unlocks premium pricing and then that allows you to either increase margin or reinvest in the flywheel.

And so here you can either say, okay, great, now I need to work with fewer people to earn more and maybe I just take that time and I only work 20 hours a week and that's that.

or and maybe you maybe it's like maintain my current profit but I work less or it's saying oh, I can work more or potentially work less and earn more and reinvest that profit back in the business.

And so for me this year, after basically being very cheap with many, many things in my life, including the business, now I'm looking at this, I had some conversations with ChatGPT, a project to be my, my essentially CFO, talking about like modeling financial projections, all these things.

And then talked to a few other business owners and was like, ooh, I am probably like holding way too much cash that I should be reinvesting to grow the business.

Like this is not, it's not a smart financial decision to sit on that much like you should be putting that money to work for the business.

And so now that's going to be my, one of my goals this year is how do I reinvest that in a way that grows the business.

I'm going to be looking at some things, potentially some hiring, some outsourcing, but also looking at ads, and a bunch of other stuff.

So that is, is the kind of milestones that we're working towards here and then looking, getting even further down into the weeds on how we're going to do that.

This is really like, this is kind of some of the core PMA materials already.

but it becomes clear how these things lead to the other results that we are working towards and ultimately a high margin business.

So the first thing we need to do is sharpen the positioning and point of view.

And so essentially what this does is it when we narrow our focus and in our publicly like external messaging and our point of view and our positioning that brings to us a series of narrow opportunities.

And so when we say we help this specific person achieve this specific result, that means we're regularly going to get those types of people looking to achieve that result, which gives us more practice, more expertise, more case studies, all in this narrow field that we be very quickly be, develop a kind of body of work and a level of experience and knowledge that is almost impossible for anybody else to match because we have such narrow.

We're not like, it's not like every new client that we work with is something totally different.

It's like they're all really narrow.

And so we become unrivaled in our depths of knowledge around that specific thing.

So when that's one of the things that is, is why we want to develop and sharpen that positioning is because it brings to us, similar opportunities that allows us to develop deep knowledge and expertise, connect the dots, become experts at pattern matching related to this, this very specific problem that people solve.

And then we become more and more in demand and less and less interchangeable with other experts who have broader positioning.

So once we develop and sharpen that positioning and point of view, then we want to develop the IP around that.

And so that's going to be some kind of model or framework or methodology.

Lots, of you have already worked through this with me together.

Lots, of you are in the process of this as well.

But this is basically when it comes to ip, One of the things that I've noticed is that a framework, let's just call it a framework, which is easy to understand when you have a core framework that is, generally visually, you have some visual representation as well as a way of talking through it.

This makes you feel really safe.

And so people see this and they're like, oh, Jeremy has a process that addresses all of the things that I know I need to do.

And it just feels like, wow, he didn't just like, he's not just like, BSing me on the sales call.

He like, has this defined, it's published on the website.

All this content is around it.

It must work.

And like, how would he have come up to this kind of, framework that addresses all the things I already know need to be done, unless he had done this many, many times before?

And so it essentially makes it de risks you in the eyes of the client, where they become highly confident that you know what you're doing and that you have a proven process to help work them through that.

This also is a big part of your moat when it comes to competition.

Very few people, there are a lot of experts out there, very few of them come up with compelling frameworks in the end.

And they kind of like, they do have a process, but they don't formalize it and package it in a way.

And so this becomes a big Advantage and something that people only can come to you to get, even if it is a generally similar process to what other people are doing.

And so this, there are so many benefits.

It makes your work great client work, client work with clients easier because they know the process they're going to go through before they even sign up to work with you.

That's actually what they're buying into.

And it also becomes a huge marketing asset where it's attractive to people.

It can be packaged in so many different ways.

and you can do lead magnets, podcasts, all kinds of things that spin off of that as well as low ticket products and whatnot.

So sharpen the positioning point of view, package that into your IP or framework.

Then we look at the offer and the sales process.

And so this is another thing that I've started working in the past like three months or so with more people is like really kind of pressure testing and refining the offer and making it.

This is, was the, the whole thing that unlocked my upward swing in my trajectory for my business was looking at how my offer, it was actually designing a new offer.

I used to have the PMA membership and then I rolled out the whole coaching program on top of it.

And that's just been this thing that sold way more.

It's my most expensive offer is the thing that sells the highest.

And so this year I'm rolling out even higher ticket offers as well.

but it was repackaging the offer.

It was like the offer that I'd been working on for five years, four years, something like that was just never going to, it wasn't good enough, it wasn't sharp enough.

The messaging, the structure, everything was kind of just like hard to sell and hard to, not hard to deliver on, but it was, it was more hard to sell and hard for people to buy into.

And so reformatting basically the same offer, adding a layer of coaching and a different framing around it has now unlocked one way more.

It's way easier to sell.

It's, it takes more work for me to deliver, but it's actually way more fun and it actually creates this flywheel where the work one on one with clients leads into all my content and everything else.

And so for a lot of people the biggest problem is that they just, they, they're actually probably like 80% there on their offer.

Like my coaching, one on one coaching now is basically just a collection of stuff I was already doing ad hoc in different capacities.

Like they were all existing offers I had.

I didn't create anything new, I just brought them together in a structure and created a kind of narrative frame around it of like, oh, here is a process.

All these things fit together in this way to achieve this result.

And it became very logical.

instead of saying, oh, do you want this one thing over here?

And then maybe this thing over here, it was like painting the picture of how each of these things helps come together to help the client get the result and kind of also wrapping that then in my IP and framework.

So that's something that we need to do.

So positioning IP develop or positioning a point of view, develop the ip, work those into the offer and sales process.

I'll say the sales process is the other thing that there's generally, creative business owners we need to do a lot of work on and it turns out to be way less scary than we think it is.

And really this comes down the sales process.

It kind of takes care of itself in many ways.

When we have an offer that is logic, it's logic based.

And so we talk somebody through the offer and they clearly see, oh, yeah, that seems like that's inevitable, that that will work.

And we don't need to do any hard selling because the offer is structured in a way it structurally communicates to people that it will achieve the result.

And when we pair that with the ip, then we're just like, really in a position of strength.

So once we have those things, that's kind of the foundation of the business.

Now we need to get out in front of people and we need to get people into our content ecosystem and then we need to nurture them to get into the sales process.

And so this is where really, where, the focus that I'm really going all in on with people who are expertise based business owners is developing a podcast that irrefutably demonstrates their expertise.

And so when we're thinking about like, my new show killer concept, that the whole point of that show is to demonstrate my expertise around concept development.

And so every episode I'm going to develop a new concept from scratch and pointing out how people make boring shows based on the same idea throughout the episode and saying, here's what we do instead to make it fascinating and actually work for your business.

roast my podcast, another example of a show that puts my thinking on display by every episode, helping people see, oh, Jeremy can just pull up a show and see what's wrong with it and what they should do instead.

and I do a lot of other types of this stuff in my marketing and it sells better than, than anything else.

And so this is where, this is kind of the Infinity Loop style podcast model that I've been talking about for more than a year now.

Lots of people are already in the community working through this and developing these kinds of shows and they very, very quickly get results once you get them out there.

And so why this works is again it's kind of like that logic based offer and the, the framework where when somebody sees you do the process, they can observe you do the thing that you would help them do for somebody else or either for a hypothetical scenario, you, you become seen as this just like zero risk, high reward expert because they already know you can do it.

And if they've seen you do it a lot of times it increases their confidence that you can do it for them and they can see the value.

Part of your marketing is demonstrating the value that this process will have.

And this makes you worth paying a premium for, which is one of those things.

We are looking to unlock premium pricing.

And so then once we have this then we just kind of connect the dots between the offer, and your front end marketing, whether that's podcast, if you're on social media and then email marketing is really that glue in between those, that ties everything together.

And so we build up that product marketing back end to reduce friction in the sales process.

So these things right here, this is really where my focus is in 2026.

these are all things that, you know, they're all, all of this is basically in the PMA curriculum already.

and so I'm really doubling down on the framing of this in my marketing and for new people coming into the program.

Like hey, if we are looking to achieve this high margin in profit time and creativity, we need to be able to do these things.

We need to unlock an abundance of opportunities, become the go to expert for solving a particular high value problem which will unlock premium pricing and then we can increase our margin.

And the way we do that is by doing these things.

So that is what I'm focused on for 2026.

If this is something that is interesting to you, you're already in the right place and I would welcome you to bring any of these things up that are interesting to you, in the comments of this post.

Just like share where you're kind of at, what's interesting, to this about you, what's exciting, where do you feel you're kind of weak right now and want some focus, and some help on that.

there are a few of these things that we're going to be new trainings around and so there's a bunch of content already.

For example on the, let's see, what color do we want to go with here?

on the podcast concept development side of things.

But we're going to be doing a new course in the next two months that's like a updated, revised, much more streamlined process for going through the concept development process.

there's also going to be.

On the offer side of things, we've got a lot of content there, but I'm going to be doing a new version of it.

a lot of people have already gone through this and it works really well.

But I'm going to be repackaging that, revising it, updating it later this year, with a, a bit of a new frame around that.

I'm thinking of these as logic based offers where again you go through these like, you just talk through it and people are like, oh, I get it, I'm in.

You don't need.

There's no like high pressure selling or anything like that.

No convincing, no persuading.

It's just like the offer should sell itself by talking through it because it has been designed in a way that addresses all the objections and all the, the questions that somebody might have.

And and then the, the third one we've already got like, we've got like, it's not even V ones, it's like V1s or twos, of a lot of this stuff with the product marketing back end in terms of this is the kind of conversion, conduit I call it.

Right now I'm going to be repackaging some of that stuff and making it a little bit more cohesive as right now it's a bit more of a collection of like three or four different resources kind of pulled together.

We're going to do a new version of that as well later in the year.

But if you're curious about any of this, a lot of it, pretty much all of this already exists, actually all of it does exist in some way in the community already.

And this year I'm going to be repackaging and really building a much more streamlined set of paths to do each one of these things in the most efficient way possible.

So we'd love to hear your thoughts where you're at if this aligns with where you're, you're looking to go with your business where you feel like the, current roadblock or bottleneck is in that process.

And, together we're going to work on building all those out, over the next year and perhaps beyond.

However long it takes.

Maybe less.

All right.

Talk to you more soon.

Bye.