You’d Pay £1m for a Parachute

I did something recently that's been on my bucket list for years. I bought my first V8 engined car, and drove it down to France.

It seems silly to some, but it's something I've always wanted, and I'm a believer in setting a goal and then celebrating when you hit it.

Anyway. Back to work, and to a different kind of purchase.

Imagine you're falling out of a plane

Someone falls past you holding a parachute and offers to sell it to you for £1m.

You don't negotiate. You don't ask for a discount. You don't say "this looks great, can you send me a proposal and I'll come back to you Monday."

You buy the parachute.

Not because it's a good product. Not because the sales copy was clever. You buy it because the problem has a deadline and there is no alternative.

That's a parachute problem. And most businesses I look at aren't selling one.

Your clients don't have a problem. That's the problem.

They're selling a fluffy problem. Nice to fix. Should probably fix. Would be better if. Nobody is falling.

You'll recognise the symptoms:

• "This sounds great, send me over a proposal" and then nothing
• Prospects who compare you to three other people before deciding on none of you
• Having to explain why the problem matters before you can explain what you do
• Deals that don't die to a competitor. They die to nothing at all

Founders look at those symptoms and blame the sales call. Or the pricing. Or the content. Or the funnel. So they go and do more of all four.

But you can't add urgency in the copy. You can only find it in the client.

The uncomfortable part

Most people already sell to someone with a parachute problem. They just describe it from far too high up.

"I help coaches get more clients" is a fluffy problem.

"You've got six weeks of runway and the one referral source that fed you for three years has gone quiet" is a parachute.

Same person. Same service. Same price.

People only ever buy three things: health, wealth, or relationships. And they only buy urgently when one of the three is actively on fire.

Your homework

Get a pen and a piece of paper. Not a doc. Definitely not AI.

Write down 99 problems your ideal client has right now.

The first 20 or 30 will come easily, and they'll all be rubbish, because they're the ones you've read on LinkedIn a hundred times. Keep going. Somewhere around 40 you run out of borrowed answers and you start having to remember actual conversations with actual people.

That's where the parachute is. It has always been in the specifics.

One rule to sort your list at the end: if the problem doesn't have a deadline attached to it, it isn't one.

Do the 99. It takes an hour and it will change what you say on every call for the next year.

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If you would like to work on this with me 1:1, here is how that works.