Why worse writers, speakers, and coaches out-earn you — and how to climb into the top 1% of your field.
Let me be blunt. Your branding sucks. In fact, looking at the branding of some of you has me seriously questioning if you might be in the witness protection program. And if you are in the witness protection program, you probably shouldn’t be in such a public-facing business. 😬
Now if you’re not in the protection program, you need to stop making your business so invisible. Seriously.
If you’re an author and you’re not making a million a year, it’s not because you have a writing problem. If you’re a speaker stuck below seven figures, it’s not a speaking problem. Coach? Not a coaching problem. Consultant, influencer, expert of any kind — the thing keeping you small is not a talent problem.
You already know this. Because you know people in your field who are worse than you — clumsier writers, more boring speakers, shallower coaches — and they’re clearing a million a year while you grind. In fact, there are people all over your profession raking in serious money for work that’s mediocre at worst and average at best. You feel it in every fiber of your being.
So why are they raking in so much more dosh than you are?
Here’s the real reason:
- You don’t know how to articulate the problem you solve.
- Or you’re solving a problem that not enough people find valuable.
That’s it. There is no option C.
Everything else — your logo, your website, your credentials, your color palette, the followers you bought — is noise distracting you from the one thing standing between you and breaking out. You can be the most talented person in your category on Earth. But if you’re not sending a clear signal about what problem you solve, and how you solve it differently than anyone else, you’ll stay lost in a sea of commoditized, average, anonymous souls.
Which brings me to the framework I want to give you: the four levels of brand signal. Almost everyone reading this is trapped in the bottom two. Let me walk you through all four — so you can see exactly where you are, and where the money actually is.
Level one: aesthetics.
This is the person who thinks their brand is a font, a color palette, and a logo — or that they’re “branded” because they always wear a Panama hat, a Hawaiian shirt, or pink sneakers. It’s decoration. It’s the costume, not the character. And it’s the last place you want to be.
Level two: being known.
This is the person who confuses fame with brand. But being known is not the same as being branded. If notoriety were branding, then Jack the Ripper, Bernie Madoff, and Sam Bankman-Fried would have some of the strongest brands in history. (Same with the looksmaxxing streamers who are famous for being famous.) Only dimwits desire to be known in this way.
Here’s what levels one and two have in common: they’re entirely brand- and feature-centric. It’s all about you — your logo, your products, your awards, your services, your company — and nothing about the client. A full 99 percent of authors, speakers, coaches, consultants, and influencers are stuck right here. The other one percent? Those are the millionaires. Watch what they do differently.
Level three: problem-centric.
Here’s where it turns. You stop broadcasting who you are and start owning the specific problem you solve — with a point of view nobody else has. The market stops seeing a vendor and starts seeing the answer to something that keeps them up at night.
Level four: a category of one.
The top. You don’t compete in your category — you create a new one and own it outright. This is where Market Gravity lives: where the right clients come to you, pre-sold, because there’s no one else to compare you to. No price shopping. No pitching. Just gravity.
The most powerful thing your business can be…is different.
So how do you climb out of the bottom two levels and into the top two — and reset a million dollars a year as your floor instead of your ceiling? Here are the first ten moves:
- Build a list (mail, text, email) on a platform you own and control.
- Cultivate a tribe by delivering real value to that list.
- Know the exact problem people hire you to solve.
- Articulate why and how you solve it differently than anyone else in the space.
- Stop trying to be better than others in your category.
- Create a new category you can own.
- Develop the language and IP around that category.
- Build signal that creates Market Gravity — not around your brand, but around the problem you solve and your POV on it.
- Create assets (especially digital) that generate residual income from your IP.
- Make all your marketing and publishing two-track: one channel for humans, another for machines (AI discoverability).
Follow that list and you’ll stop chasing vanity metrics and outside validation. Please believe me when I tell you that absolutely nobody gives a fuck where you got your MBA. They care about one thing — the problems you solve for them.
Let me give you a personal example. Two universities have offered me honorary degrees. I was honored and graciously declined both. My Market Gravity doesn’t come from a diploma. It comes from being a high school dropout who advises CEOs, founders, and builders. The credential was never the degree. It’s the outcomes.
And before you tell yourself “easy for Gage to say, he’s in the Speaker Hall of Fame, he’s a New York Times bestseller” — I’ve got news for you. I was doing more than a million a year in my speaking business seven years before I was ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. I self-published my first book, sold more than a million copies, and had it translated into 18 languages a full decade before I ever hit a bestseller list. None of it came from credentials. It came from owning a problem and a point of view.
As you apply this information, two considerations to keep in mind…
One: this is about leveraging your IP and your talent to escape the trading-hours-for-money trap. Don’t build digital materials just to sell your old analog offerings. That’s like buying a Bentley Continental GT and using it to tow around your old VW microbus. Why give away a free eBook hoping to sell two $15,000 speeches, when you could sell 10,000 eBooks at $27 each — and sleep in your own bed all week?
Two: the hardest part of breaking out isn’t the stuff you start doing — it’s the stuff you need to stop doing. You must create a vacuum. That means letting go of some things: cheap clients, bottleneck pricing models, and limiting beliefs. Only argue for the limitations you want to keep.
I don’t teach anything I read in a trade journal, heard in a motivational speech, or saw on TikTok. I’m a builder — in the trenches growing and scaling my own companies every single day. This framework is my own IP and my own business model, and I’m practicing exactly what I preach: I’m building all of it into digital assets right now.
Which is where you might come in…
I’m putting together a small Branding & Market Gravity Incubator — a founding cohort of builders who fit the profile I described at the top of this post. Over a full year, we go step by step: your ideal client avatar, the unique problem you solve, your list-building platform, your IP, the language and Market Gravity around it, income-producing assets, and making you iconic in real life and discoverable by AI online. It’s a fraction of what I’d normally charge for this kind of access, because I’m refining the materials and building the first case studies. If the right people raise their hands, I’ll run it. If not, I won’t.
If that’s the kind of company you want to keep, get on the waiting list. Email samuel (at) randygage.com. Tell Sam who you are, what you do, and ask to be included. When the cohort fills, the door closes.
Stop trying to be better. Start being different. That’s the whole game.
Peace,
— RG
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