You make that promise at 11pm with a shoebox of client receipts open on your desk. In the moment, you really do mean it. But by November the promise has quietly expired, so the engagement letters go out at last year’s number, and the whole thing repeats.

I broke that cycle in my tax resolution practice with something I called the personality surcharge. After every consultation, before I quoted a fee, I quietly added a surcharge for how difficult the client was going to be to work with. I colloquially referred to this as my “pain-in-the-ass fee”. The client who argued with every IRS letter paid more than the one who didn’t. At the top of the scale, the number was really a polite way of saying I’d rather not take the case. It never showed up as a line item. It just lived inside the fee.

It ran the other way exactly once. A client walked in with every document I needed, already in order, and I cut the fee and told them why.

That surcharge worked because I’d decided ahead of time that hassle has a price. Most tax pros never decide. So the hassle client pays what the tidy client pays, and the difference comes out of your evenings.

Last week was about why a price increase stalls. This week, it’s time to actually do it.

Here’s what last season looked like for many tax pros (maybe YOU don’t need this message, and for that, I applaud thee!).

Let’s see what the client has: Three K-1s, a rental property, numerous crypto transactions. You billed at the same fee as the W-2 couple with a mortgage.

Or consider the client who dropped off everything on April 12th, then paid what the February client paid. The corrected 1099-B that arrived in March and turned a finished return into an amended 1040, and you did the 1040-X for free.

Or how about the the “shoebox client” that you don’t charge extra for the bookkeeping. You know the one.

Every one of those was a pricing decision. You just made it by not making it.

Your fee for next season isn’t set in January. It’s set by whatever you don’t do in November.

January is too late. By then the organizers are out, the engagement letters are signed, and you’re not about to reprice a client in the middle of tax season. The only quiet window a tax practice gets is right now, and it closes in about five weeks.

Start with one number: Your fee structure from last April.

Pull the ten returns from last season that hurt the most. The ones you dreaded, redid, or chased documents for. For each one, divide the fee you collected by the hours you actually spent, including the phone calls, the missing-form emails, and the second look after the late K-1 comes in. Average the ten.

That’s your April number, the hourly rate your worst work really paid. If it’s within 20% of your standard rate, your pricing is mostly honest and the problem is logistics. If it’s half your standard rate or less, your fee schedule has been subsidizing your most difficult clients, and your easiest ones are paying for it.

Now answer these without looking anything up.

1. Can you state your base fee for an individual return, out loud, right now?

2. Have you raised that base fee in the last two seasons?

3. Is your fee schedule written in your engagement letter, or does it live in your head?

4. Do you charge more when documents arrive in the last two weeks?

5. Do you charge for an amended return caused by a client’s late or corrected form?

6. When a client asks “how much?”, do you say a number before you say “it depends”?

7. Have you repriced or let go of a client for being difficult in the last three years?

If you said no to three or more of these, you have your project for November.

That last one deserves a second look. If you’ve never lost a client over price or hassle, you aren’t charging for either.

I’m going to repeat that: If you’ve never had a client push back on your fees, you aren’t charging enough.

Call this the November fee reset. It takes an afternoon, and it’s built so you don’t have to win an argument with yourself about any of it. The procedure makes the decisions.

1. Set your floor. Pick the lowest hourly rate you’re willing to work for next season. Any return type whose April number sits below it gets repriced. No exceptions for regulars, and especially none for the regulars you dread.

2. Raise the base. Take your current base fee, run it and the year you set it through the BLS CPI Inflation Calculator (bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), and round the result up to the next $25. That’s the new base. Don’t try to rationalize it away.

3. Add three hassle fees. Write an amount next to each one today:

- A late drop-off fee, for documents that arrive after a date you choose.

- A rush fee, for anything a client needs faster than your normal turnaround.

- An amendment fee, for amended returns caused by a client’s late or corrected documents.

These aren’t punishments. They’re the price of the evenings those returns used to steal for free. A client who brings a tidy folder in February never pays any of them, and that’s the point.

4. Put it in writing. The full fee schedule goes into the engagement letter and the organizer cover sheet. A fee that isn’t written down doesn’t exist in April, because in April you won’t have the energy to invent it on the spot.

5. Use the script. When a client asks, say it like this:

“This season, your return starts at $[base fee]. If your documents come in after [date], there’s a $[late fee] late fee. Everything’s spelled out in your engagement letter.”

No apology. No paragraph about software costs. No “but for you….”

6. Say the number out loud ten times. Before your first January appointment, say your new base fee out loud, alone, ten times. It sounds silly. It’s the step that keeps your voice from catching when a real client asks, which is where most fee increases actually die.

7. Schedule the send. Put a date on your calendar, December 15th or sooner, for the engagement letters to go out with the new schedule. Then tell one person what the date is: a colleague, your partner, or me in the comments.

One afternoon, ten returns, three hassle fees, and a script. This is a November job wearing an April disguise.

Do the April number first. Once you see what your worst returns actually paid, the rest of the decisions make themselves.

Write the hassle fees down. Write the hassle fees down. Write the hassle fees down TODAY!

The Fee Reset Score is in the download: twelve statements that score where your pricing leaks, plus a one-page fee reset sheet to fill in with a pen.

Fee Reset Score

163KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

And if you’d like company for step 6, I run a free monthly Zoom called Behind the Books, for practitioners and business owners of all types. The next one is Tuesday, November 17th, 5 to 6:15 pm Pacific (8 to 9:15 Eastern), and this month’s topic is about your fee: The mental story behind the number, developing the wherewithal to charge what you’re worth, and saying it out loud until it stops catching in your throat. It’s free and it’s for any kind of practice. Get the Zoom link at financialhypnosis.com/biz.

This is the money psychology side of what I do now. If you have any sort of mental blocks around pricing or anything else in your business, join me for Behind the Books each month.

This isn’t a math problem. If it were, the spreadsheet would have solved it.

When I first started my tax practice, I set my fees artificially low because I just needed income coming in, and I assumed that the low fees would drive more business. But shortly after I started ratcheting up my pricing, and I noticed no drop in conversion rates. People with a tax problem that were willing to pay for professional assistance were willing pay, period. As I increased and increased those fees, I noticed very little price elasticity.

Here’s what it looks like in a practice.

The massage therapist still at $85 an hour, same rate since 2019, who doesn’t want to “price out the regulars.” The acupuncturist whose sliding scale started with three people who truly needed it and now covers anyone who asks. The coach who answers every tight month by adding sessions instead of raising the fee, and is now fully booked and somehow still broke.

None of them is missing information. Each one is running a money script.

Your price often isn’t really a number you chose. It’s a belief about money, printed on a rate card.

Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist, calls these beliefs money scripts. They’re picked up mostly in childhood, rarely examined, and partly true, which is exactly why they stick. His research sorted them into four families. Here’s what each one sounds like at your front desk.

Money avoidance says “I’m not in this for the money.” Money is a little dirty, and caring about it means caring less about your clients. In Klontz’s research, avoidance went with lower income and lower net worth, and mental health professionals were more likely to hold such scripts in their heads it than financial advisors were. Does a little bit of anxiety come up when somebody asks how much you charge? That’s the script running.

Money worship says “more clients will fix it.” The answer to every money problem is more: more volume, the next certification, one more package sold. In a practice it looks like discounting to fill the book and ending a fully scheduled month with nothing left over.

Money status says “who am I to charge that?” Your price becomes a ranking of your own worth. You can’t go above the colleague down the street who’s been at it longer, or you hold a premium rate with nothing behind it, because a lower one would say something about you.

Money vigilance says “what if they all leave?” It’s the careful, saving script, and the only one Klontz ties to better financial outcomes. In pricing it tips into fear. One lost client feels like a catastrophe, so you’ll hold a price for five years rather than lose anybody.

Every one of them is partly right, which is why you’ve never argued with the sentence. You’ve just obeyed it.

Let’s start with one number: years since your last price increase.

Write it down. Then open the BLS CPI Inflation Calculator (bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), enter your current price and the year you set it, and read what that price is worth today. The gap between the two is the discount you’ve been handing every client, unannounced, every year since. Under a year since your last raise, you’re fine. Two or more, and your price has been falling behind from inflation.

You can download the two-page exercise referenced in this post as a PDF below.

Price Script Module 8

163KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

In the exercise, you’ll find twelve statements to score for yourself. Sore these twelve statements from 1 (not true at all) to 5 (completely true). Don’t deliberate. The first number that shows up is the honest one.

After completing the assessment, add up the totals, and also circle your single highest scoring section. Scoring:

12 to 27: the scripts aren’t setting your price. If you haven’t raised it, the holdup is logistics, so skip straight to step 4.

28 to 43: one or two scripts are in the room. Your highest section is the voice that will talk you out of sending the email.

44 to 60: the scripts are setting your price. Run every step below, in order, and don’t skip the first three.

And if any single section adds up to 12 or more, that script is your project this week no matter what the total says.

Call this the script swap. You won’t win an argument with a belief you’ve held since you were nine, so don’t try. Write it down, give it its due, and let a procedure make the decision instead.

1. Write the sentence. Your highest section, in your own words: the exact thing the voice says when you think about raising your price. “They’ll think I’m greedy.” “I’ll lose the Tuesday regulars.” Write it the way it actually sounds.

2. Write what’s true about it. One line. You’re not arguing with it. It’s partly right, and saying so takes the air out of it.

3. Write the business answer. One sentence about behavior, not feelings.

- Avoidance: “Knowing my numbers is how I keep serving the people I care about.”

- Worship: “More clients at this price is more of the same problem.”

- Status: “My price is a business decision, not a ranking of me.”

- Vigilance: “I can lose one client and be fine. I can’t keep this price and be fine.”

4. Set the number without deciding it. You can create a baseline based on an analysis of your operating expenses and desired net income. Use the inflation-adjusted price from your baseline, rounded up to the next $5. That’s the new price. You’re not allowed to negotiate with it during this step.

5. Pick who and when, using these defaults. New clients pay the new price the day you send the notice. Existing clients get 60 days’ notice, never less than 30.

6. Write the notice now, from this:

“Starting [date], my rate for [service] will be $[new price]. Your current rate holds for every session booked before then. Thank you for trusting me with your [care / work / business]. I’m grateful to keep doing it. — [your name]”

No apology. No paragraph about rising costs. No “if this is a hardship, let me know.” If you want a hardship option, decide it privately and offer it one person at a time.

7. Schedule the send before you close this tab. Put the date on your calendar this week and tell one person what it is: a colleague, your partner, or me in the comments.

8. When the script talks, read your answer. Tape the step 3 sentence wherever you’ll see it the morning you hit send.

Go!

Twelve statements, one number, and an email you’ve already half written. This is a forty-minute job wearing a five-year disguise.

The Price Script Score is in the download: the twelve items, the scoring, and a one-page “price, decided” sheet with the notice template, built to fill in with a pen.

No, seriously. Here’s my registration with the state of Washington:

Yep. This is what I’ve been spending a lot of my time this year training for. If you’ve been reading my drivel since the tax resolution days, you may be wondering what a former EA is doing with a swinging pocket watch. (There is no pocket watch.)

Here’s the short version. For years years I sat across from people whose tax problems were rarely tax problems. The math was usually the easy part. The hard part was the shoebox of unopened letters from the IRS, excessive discretionary spending funded from the business tax account, the inability or unwillingness to get in the habit of making estimated tax payments..

I used to describe the tax resolution process as 50% tax work, and 50% unlicensed therapy.

Every ledger has a hidden column. These are the beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors around money and business. That’s the column I work on now.

With all that as a preamble, I’d like to give you the first look at what I’m offering in this new venture. The website is live at financialhypnosis.com, and it includes several free offerings:

• The Hidden Column. One 75-minute Zoom call a month on personal money. Three topics rotate: Settle, Water (reserves and rest) and Wood (direction). Each call stands on its own, so you can join any month, and each opens with the same short settling practice. First call: Nov 17th.

• Habit stacks. Short daily routines that attach one small money habit to something you already do, so the new habit has somewhere to live.

• The Reflections decks. Two digital card decks, one for money and one for business. Each card holds a single question worth sitting with. Pull one when you’re stuck, or before a conversation you’ve been avoiding.

• Heartfelt Finance. Mindful budgeting and goal tracking tool with personal reflection prompts. Also includes tools for financial coaches to manage clients, and will include a comprehensive financial literacy course later this year.

• Slack Tide (coming soon). A free library of hypnosis audio tracks, each one for a specific issue. There will be two program tracks, one for business matters and one for personal finance. This will be available by the end of this year.

1:1 Program for Business Owners

If you (or a client!) would like to work on overcoming limiting beliefs and changing behaviors that are holding you back in business, The Steady Ledger is for you. It’s six one-to-one sessions, 75 minutes each, focused entirely on business challenges. Each session starts from something owners actually say:

1. The numbers: “I’ve never been good at math.”

2. Worth and paying yourself: “What if they don’t think I’m worth it?”

3. The fee: “I feel uncomfortable raising my fees.”

4. Being seen: “Promoting myself feels like bragging.”

5. Invoices and collecting: “I don’t like telling people they owe me money.”

6. A one-page 90-day plan: “Business plans intimidate me.”

If you’ve ever put off raising your fees for one more season, session three was written with you in mind. Learn more here.

1:1 Personal Finance Program

Money Clarity is for individuals and couples to work through their personal financial challenges. It consists of fourteen weekly one-to-one sessions that combine financial coaching with hypnotherapy. The financial coaching is the part you’ll recognize: budgets, debt management, savings goals, etc. The hypnotherapy works on the habits around the plan, where willpower alone hasn’t succeeded . Between sessions, clients use the Heartfelt Finance coach workspace. Learn more here.

A word on what this isn’t. It isn’t stage hypnosis, and nobody clucks like a chicken. It’s focused, guided attention on the patterns that keep smart people stuck with their money, using evidence-based hypnotherapy.

Who is this for? You, of course, but also your clients.

You run a practice. The Steady Ledger is built for exactly the discomforts a solo professional carries into fee conversations and collections.

And you already know which clients I mean. The one who apologizes for the shoebox. The owner who undercharges their own work and wonders why there’s nothing left in April. The couple who can’t talk about money without arguing.

If you’re interested in discussing how any of these programs can be of help for you, book a free initial conversation. If you have clients that could use this kind of help, learn how referrals work.

Even though I’m going off in a very different direction than anything I ever expected, I’ll still continue writing here on this Substack occasionally. I’m sure part of that writing will be “build in public” stuff, where I talk about marketing and systems I’m developing for this business. Also expect stuff about personal development, business motivation, and maybe even occasional woo-woo stuff. Come on, I know you want a past-life regression! 🤪

Have a jolly Halloween!

~Jassen Bowman

Bizorca Press is for heart-led practitioners, helpers, and healers who are skilled at their craft but get stuck when it comes to money matters, making decisions, and overcoming self-doubt. Each week I take one decision you already know you should make, but haven’t: Raise your price, hire the seasonal help, let go of the client who costs more than they pay.

Every post is practical and actionable, focused on helping you overcome the obstacles that stand between you and a sustainable, efficient, and profitable practice. It identifies a common business or financial conundrum, and offers a diagnostic assessment for you to apply to your own business. Then we examine the belief, pattern, or habit that causes the stall, and provide a simple protocol you can use right away, so that the decision mostly makes itself. Each post also includes a free worksheet to help you put it to work.

What changed, and why. For many years, I’ve produced practice management checklists and marketing playbooks for practitioners to use in their own business, but consistently noticed those same practitioners not using these tools. In my tax resolution years, the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it was the whole job. Many clients still didn’t make their estimated tax payments, missed payments on IRS payment plans, didn’t implement the business turnaround plan we created.

The plan can be a perfectly good one, but something else was steering the behavior. So that’s what these posts go after now: The procedure, the reason you haven’t implemented it yet, and the path to getting around your own thoughts, beliefs, and habits.

The principles underneath are simple. Clear communication attracts the right clients. Clean operations reduce chaos. Consistent structure leads to sustainable revenue. The whimsical metaphors may swim through the Salish Sea, but the conclusions stay grounded.

Who writes it. I’m Jassen Bowman. I believe strongly in regulation before revenue and clarity before complexity. I’ve built three companies and sold two of them. During my years as a federally licensed tax professional (IRS Enrolled Agent, now in inactive retirement status), I represented small businesses with significant tax debts, structural challenges, and operational issues. Today, I’m a business and financial coach, but also a Washington registered hypnotherapist, working with business owners on the habits that a good plan hasn’t changed. Bizorca Press is where that work becomes something you can use this week.

If you want to go further. Once a month I host Behind the Books, a free Zoom for practitioners and business owners. Each session takes one money topic, from pricing and collections to paying yourself, and the story underneath the number. If you’d rather work on your own situation one-to-one, you can book a free 20-minute first conversation from the same page: financialhypnosis.com/biz

If you’re building a practice with heart and prefer systems over scramble, this is your harbor. And as always, take one slow breath before the next decision. A steady owner makes better calls than a rushed one.

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Work with me

But almost nobody does it because they get busy with life, with work, and they just forget to do it.

The marketing tactic that keeps you top of mind to existing clients isn’t the communication itself. It’s the lack of consistency in doing it — it’s the lack of a system.

Here’s today’s quick assignment. Open your calendar, and create one monthly recurring appointment with yourself. Do it the same day every month. When that time comes, you send a short note to a batch of past clients. The goal is to show up consistently, and that starts with actually scheduling the time.

You don’t need to design the perfect postcard, write the perfect letter, or lay out the perfect email. You just need to start with setting aside the time. That way, the decision is already made for future-you, the time is already carved out.

So open your calendar. Set a repeating monthly appointment with yourself titled “Client Touch - Send something human.”

The reminder is the trigger. Everything else is just showing up when you say you will.

The most successful people, however, are actually selective sellers. They curate their clientele, are selective about who they take on, and that selectivity creates a club that everybody wants in to.

Instead of trying to close every prospect, change the game. Have people apply to be your client. Become a discerning practitioner, a business with a select client list.

Here’s what most practitioners do:

• Chase every prospective client, try to get every body in the door.

• Accept whatever clients come along that want to work with you.

• Operate from a place of scarcity, asking to be chosen.

Instead, do this:

• Set standards that people must meet in order to work with you.

• Say no to all opportunities — clients, joint ventures, referral partnerships — that are not in alignment.

• Let it be known far and wide that yours is an exclusive club.

Your homework: Write out your specific criteria for allowing people to become your client. What conditions must exist for you to be willing to say “yes”? Then, build these criteria into your consultation process, and be willing to walk away from a potential client that is a bad fit.

What are your client acceptance criteria? Sound off in the comments below and let’s discuss.

An offer ladder solves this challenge by giving people a series of rungs, each one a small, natural step up from the last, so that by the time they reach your actual service offering it feels like the obvious next move rather than a leap. Nobody starts at the top. They climb, and each rung earns their trust for the next — and service businesses like our are built on trust.

Trust and commitment compound. Someone who got real value from your free content will happily try your most affordable offering; someone thrilled with that will move up to your course or workshop; and a workshop graduate who got results is primed for your one-on-one services. Each satisfied rung makes the next rung an easy “yes”.

You’re not selling one big offer. You’re building a staircase of “of course I need this.”

The protocol, four rungs:

1. Free content. The bottom rung. Posts, videos, a guide, a newsletter. It attracts people, proves your value, and costs them nothing but attention. It also builds your email list, one of the most important assets in your business.

2. Low-cost entry offer. A small paid product — a book, a mini-course, a low-priced workshop. The first transaction turns a follower into a buyer, which is a bigger leap than any that follows.

3. Mid-tier course or program. A more substantial offer for people who got value from the entry product and want more depth. This could be a workshop or group program, or an in-depth online course.

4. Your full-service, 1:1 offering. The top rung. Therapy, massage, life coaching, tax resolution, business coaching — those who want true transformation and the deepest relationship with you.

Sketch your four rungs today. What’s your free content, your low-priced entry offer, your mid-tier, and your highest level service?

If you’re missing a rung, that’s your gap — people have nowhere to step next. Build the staircase so every yes leads naturally to the next.

In the comments below, tell me what you do and which rung you’re missing, and I’ll share my ideas for you if you’d like.

Trying to please everyone is how you reach nobody.

One of the most important marketing lessons I ever learned was to be polarizing. Emails, blog posts, social media posts, books, videos, podcast episodes — all of it should attract those whom you want and actively repel those you don’t want. In short, if you’re not repelling the wrong people, your content is too bland to move the right ones.

Here’s what most practitioners do:

• Water everything down to avoid offending anyone.

• Take no positions, name no enemies, hold no strong opinions.

• Blend into the background and get ignored.

What to do instead:

• Take a real stance and own it.

• Name what you’re against, and what you’re for.

• Accept the fact the repelling some people is the price of attracting others.

Write in a polarizing manner (hmmm, I’m probably doing that right now). Pick a belief that you actually hold that some people in your world would push back on — a common practice in your field that you think is wrong, a piece of conventional wisdom that outright reject.

The people that agree with you will feel found; the ones who leave were never going to become clients.

In my previous tax career, I did this often: Calling out the fly-by-night tax resolution firms, actively reminding unlicensed tax return preparers that they can’t legally do tax representation, vehemently positioning myself against the “pennies on the dollar” nonsense.

So say what you believe. Write your next blog post or video script with a specific strong stance, and own it.

What stand are you taking? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll respond personally.

What about the other 97%?

That’s where the long-term value of your business exists. The 3% will pay for an appointment today, but the other 97% are the future clients that will book an appointment in a month, six months, a year, two years — but they have to know that you’re still there to serve them.

The 3% just need an easy way to say “yes” to your offering. The 97% need long-term follow-up: A contact sequence, a newsletter, a reason to stay in your orbit and pay attention to you until such time as their need and willingness are aligned with your offering.

Action: Build just ONE lead nurture path for those not yet ready, so that you are seen as the obvious choice when they join the 3% that are ready at that time.

What’s your plan to nurture the 97% Tell me in the comments section, and I’ll respond personally.

Most practitioners write such emails like an apology. We tend to hedge why we’re reaching out, over-explain ourselves, offer a discount to actually make the ask for business. But remember, this isn’t a client that got angry, they got busy and just drifted away.

Instead, we send a warm check-in. We let them know they are seen, thought of, and that their absence was noticed.

Send three emails, spread over two weeks. The first acknowledges the time, acknowledges their needs, and makes one specific offer with a 14-day expiration. The second arrives seven days later with a testimonial and a reminder of the offer. The third arrives five days later, as a calm reminder. Each one is short enough to be readable with at most one swipe on their phone.

Don’t skip the testimonial in email number two. Specifically, it needs to be a testimonial from a client that had a similar gap in time between sessions with you. Ideally, a testimonial that acknowledges they drifted away, expresses how that absence made them feel, and expresses a sense of relief at how nice it was to come back to see you. This testimonial dissolves the resistance that other clients have about returning.

Don’t have such a testimonial? Go through your recently returned clients, and ask several of them for one. Clients are more willing to provide testimonials than you think; oftentimes we just fail to ask.

🎯 Go!

The three-touch sequence:

1. Reach out to a few returned clients to get that testimonial.

2. Write your day 0 email: “It’s been a while, so I’m reaching out to see how you’ve been.” Make an offer — temporary expanded hours to accommodate them, a one-time small group workshop, etc. A 14-day deadline.

3. Write your day 7 email: “Here’s what a recent returning client said:”. Include the testimonial, offer reminder, deadline.

4. Write your day 12 email: “Last one from me about this.” Offer reminder. Calm close, no pressure, best wishes.

5. Queue all three in your email marketing software to the sub-list you identified a couple days ago.

I’ve fallen into this thinking trap many, many times. I just assume that another practitioner undercut me on price, or the client no longer saw value in my offering.

So in many cases, we offer discounts to win back clients. But this devalues our services, and trains customers to wait for that discount.

The research on why customers stop doing business with us tells a very different story. Here are the actual reasons, ranked from most commonly cited reason to least:

1. They forgot.

2. They found somebody else (due to their marketing).

3. Bad product.

4. Bad service.

5. They moved away.

6. Price.

Huh, look at that. Price is dead last. In these studies, “they forgot” is #1, and usually by a significant margin.

Think about it. They know they need an oil change, but they also need to pull more overtime at work because life has gotten more expensive. They know they need a massage, but it’s soccer season for the kids. The pain relief they got from acupuncture was great, but a family member passed away and they’re lost in the bureaucracy of being an executor.

The reality is that everybody lives a busy life. Stuff creeps in. And the pain relief kinda slips away into a distant memory, and they just…. live with it.

Ground yourself in this reality: Of the six reasons surveyed, which one is within your control?

If they moved out of reasonable driving distance to your business, that’s beyond your control. Discounting is just a race to the bottom (and let’s face it, we have bills to pay, too!). They found another provider they really connected with — well, we can’t break real human connections.

But that whole getting busy and forgetting thing? Yeah, we can fix that.

One other thing worth mentioning before we get into the pragmatic to-do thing: A past client is the third easiest person to generate new business from. An active client is obviously first, and new referrals are second. But a past client that likes you and just sorta drifted away is third. It’s a waste of marketing dollars and time to chase random strangers before attempting lost client reactivation.

🎯 Go!s

Build your lost customer list today:

1. Pull everyone from your CRM, scheduling, or payment system who bought from you but hasn’t returned within their normal repurchase window. Don’t have a CRM system? I built Kokoro for you. It’s free. (Or TaxCRM for the majority of readers that are in the tax resolution space. No, I haven’t forgot where I come from.)

2. Normal window: 30 days (restaurant, private chef - hi, Elisa!), 90 days (auto repair/retail), 6–12 months (professional services - hi, tax pros! hi Jill!).

3. That list is your highest-ROI marketing project this month.

4. Didn’t catch that? This list is your highest-ROI marketing project this month.

5. Read it again: That list is your highest-ROI marketing project this month. !!!.

6. Don’t fold them into a general newsletter. They need their own sequence.

Seriously. Go. Do the thing. Mosey along, now. Pull that list. Yes, I’m serious, go do the thing. Need help? Need clarification? Post a comment, I’ll respond personally.

Dude. Stop reading. Go make that list. Go!

Congratulations! Take a breather, you earned it.

But… Now, the hard work begins.

Today, or maybe tomorrow, you have a series of choices to make.

You will take stock of the lessons learned from this filing season. You will contemplate what went well, what frustrated you. And you will choose to either make improvements, or you won’t.

You’ll also contemplate revenue generation for the rest of the year. The kind of clients you want to keep working with, the services you’ll offer them; the services you won’t.

You’ll dream about making your own life easier, and you’ll either choose to take action on that dreaming, or you won’t.

Wanna talk about it? Let’s chat.

Then I remembered: Oh, right, I still know a few things about tax planning.

Last February, I purchased a new rental property, upon which I’m currently building a tiny house village to provide affordable housing to friends.

Normally, the IRS allows real estate investors to deduct a portion of the purchase price each year, called depreciation. Normal residential rental property is depreciated over the course of 27.5 years. So, you take your purchase price, divide it by 27.5, and you get a deduction of that amount each year.

But that’s the default.

The tax code is incredibly complex, and it includes a lot of nuance. Some people like to call these nuances loopholes.

Here’s the loophole on that 27.5 year thing: Not everything in a rental property is a building.

See, the rental house itself needs to be depreciated over 27.5 years. But many other things on a property — the carpet, appliances, light fixtures, etc. — are understood to have a working lifespan of only 5 years, or 7 years, or 15 years. Then they theoretically need to be replaced.

Therefore, these other items are allowed to be deducted faster.

Oh, and it gets better (or worse, depending on your perspective, but that’s a conversation for a different venue). Occasionally through history, Congress passes a law that allows people to gather up all that 5 year, 7 year, etc. depreciation and deduct some larger percentage of it in year 1. It’s called bonus depreciation.

Such a law was passed in 2025, and it’s a doozy. That law allows every dollar of that shorter timeframe depreciation to be deducted in year 1.

In short, the new law allows up to 20 years of depreciation to be deducted in 1 year.

I’m pretty sure that some high falutin’ lobbyists were popping champagne corks after that law passed.

And yes, this absolutely is a tax break for the wealthy. There’s no getting around that. But at the same time, the tax code applies equally to everybody, so at least in theory, anybody and everybody can benefit from this tax law gift — all the way down to the accidental landlord that begrudgingly inherits a headache property in another state.

Here’s the real challenge with taking advantage of tax code changes like this, though: There are hoops to jump through, and those hoops cost money.

In this case, the acrobatic feat in question is called a cost segregation study. In order to take advantage of this 100% bonus depreciation, you need proof breaking down the dollar values of just the carpet, just the light fixtures, just the furnace, and this price breakdown needs to be performed by somebody that the IRS deems qualified to do so.

And guess what? Those experts are expensive.

That’s why tax loopholes like this are often considered only a gift to the wealthy, because they can afford to hire the engineers and accountants required to do this kind of work. A typical cost segregation study will run between $5,000 and $15,000 if performed by an engineering firm.

On a large, commercial project, that cost is negligible. For a small-time real estate investor (like me), it’s cost prohibitive.

Yes, of course, there are some “questionable” ways to generate these kind of reports so you can then claim the deduction. But, good luck when you get audited.

There are also a handful of DIY online software tools that will prepare this cost segregation study for you. I closely examined five of them on the market. In my professional opinion as a licensed tax professional, I don’t believe that 3 of the 5 would stand up at all in an audit. One of them was decent and would likely survive scrutiny, but it also produces pretty conservative numbers. One of them was what I would personally consider “solid” — but it was also the most expensive.

So I built a better one.

Enter: SegDesk.app

I needed a legit, audit-proof cost segregation study for my own property. This will literally save me tens of thousands of dollars in taxes for 2025. I built this to solve my own problem, and because I’d rather spend that money building another tiny house instead of gifting it to my Uncle Sam.

It just happens that I have the proverbial “unique set of skills” to make something like this. I have several years of construction experience, used to be an electrician, have held a real estate license, have invested in residential rentals for over a decade, and have nearly 18 years of tax experience. I also have the skills to build data models and use modern coding tools to actually build the software.

SegDesk was built from the get-go to precisely follow the guidelines for an audit-proof cost segregation study as outlined in the IRS manual for auditors looking at such studies. It uses a component-level engineering cost approach, using highly-regarded construction industry data from Craftsman. Instead of using standardized percentages (which are not accurate), users enter actual measurements to create accurate engineering take-offs. Reports are generated in the proper format that the IRS demands, with full citations and the mark-up they want to see.

There’s a lot to this software. It was a complicated project, but also incredibly fun. Yeah, I’m a nerd.

If you’re a real estate investor and want to save on your taxes, check it out at https://SegDesk.app.

If you’re a tax professional preparing returns with rental properties on them, this could save your client thousands and thousands of dollars. If you have a client with multiple rentals, or have multiple clients with rentals, reach out to me directly to discuss volume pricing on cost segregation reports.

OK, time for me to grab a tape measure and go measure all the hog panels and countertops.

Gee, I wonder what software I’ll build this week? If you have an idea for a web app you’d like built, let’s schedule a chat.

That’s not cynicism — that’s the process. And the uncomfortable truth is that most people who hire a financial advisor at $200–$300 per hour don’t need an advisor. They need a system. There’s a difference.

I’m not saying advisors are useless. A good CFP earning her fee is worth every penny when you’ve got a complex estate situation, a pension decision to make, or a tax problem that requires genuine expertise. I’m talking about the other 80% — the people who walk into an advisor’s office carrying $14,000 in credit card debt and a vague sense that they should probably be saving more. Those people don’t need a fiduciary. They need a budget and a debt payoff sequence, and they can build both themselves for exactly zero dollars.

Here’s the plan.

Step one: Every dollar gets a job

Zero-based budgeting is the foundation, and the concept is simple. Your income minus your expenses equals zero — not because you’ve spent everything, but because every dollar has been assigned somewhere intentional. Savings is an expense. Debt payoff is an expense. Entertainment is an expense. The point is that nothing goes “wherever” at the end of the month, because “wherever” is the enemy.

I use a Kakeibo-inspired four-pillar structure — Needs, Wants, Culture, and Unexpected — because it forces you to categorize spending by purpose rather than by vendor. Knowing that you spent $287 at restaurants is useful data. Knowing that $287 went toward Want-category spending when your budget was $250 tells you something you can actually act on.

Step two: Know where you stand

Before you can build the plan, you need the numbers. Monthly take-home income, a list of every debt (balance, APR, minimum payment), and a rough tally of what you spend each month by category. That’s it. You don’t need a net worth statement on day one. You don’t need projected returns on a portfolio you haven’t built yet.

The thing most people skip is writing it down. Actually putting the numbers somewhere forces you to confront them. I’ve watched people’s jaws drop when they first do a budget and realize their minimum payments alone are eating 22% of their take-home pay. The advisor doesn’t do that to you — the numbers do.

Step three: Build the payoff sequence

Two methods. Avalanche: pay the highest APR debt first, throw every extra dollar at it until it’s gone, then roll that payment to the next highest. This minimizes total interest paid. Snowball: pay the smallest balance first, regardless of APR, to get quick psychological wins. The math favors avalanche; the psychology sometimes favors snowball. Pick the one you’ll actually stick to.

The key mechanic — the one that makes this work — is the roll. When debt #1 is gone, you don’t pocket that minimum payment. You add it to the extra you’re already throwing at debt #2. Freed minimums cascade. A $200 extra payment that clears a $4,200 credit card in 16 months becomes a $484 payment on the car loan the next day. That’s how you go from staring down $14,000 in debt to being debt-free in 29 months instead of seven years.

“But what about my 401k? My taxes? My investment strategy?”

I know what you’re thinking. “This is fine for people with simple situations, but I have real complexity.” Maybe you do. But I’d bet the that most of the people asking that question don’t have complexity — they have anxiety. There’s a difference.

Here’s a simple sequencing rule that covers 90% of situations: (1) contribute to your 401k up to the employer match — that’s an instant 50–100% return, take it; (2) pay off any debt above 7–8% APR aggressively; (3) max your Roth IRA; (4) invest the rest in low-cost index funds. No advisor required. John C. Bogle (the founder of Vanguard) said this forty years ago and the basic advice changed.

If you genuinely have a complex tax situation — multiple business entities, stock options, real estate, an inheritance — yes, hire someone. But be honest with yourself about whether the complexity is real or manufactured. The financial services industry profits from making normal money management seem complicated. It isn’t.

The $0 part

Heartfelt Finance is free. Zero-based budgeting, the four-pillar Kakeibo structure, savings goals, debt payoff simulation (avalanche and snowball), spending reports, values alignment — all of it is free. You don’t need a spreadsheet wizard, you don’t need a $15/month app subscription, and you definitely don’t need to hand $300 to someone to ask you what you earn.

If you are a financial consultant, coach, planner, advisor, or therapist, Heartfelt Finance has something for you, too. Head over to https://HeartfeltFinance.com/coaches to see how this tool can enhance your current practice.

The problem isn’t the categories themselves. Categories are fine for tracking where money went. The problem is that categories don’t tell you why you’re spending it, and they definitely don’t tell you whether your spending reflects the life you’re actually trying to build.

That’s where Kakeibo comes in. And that’s why Heartfelt Finance doesn’t organize your budget by category (I mean, yeah, it does, but at a micro level). At a macro level, it organizes by pillar.

What Kakeibo Got Right in 1904

Kakeibo is a Japanese budgeting method that dates back to 1904, invented by Hani Motoko, Japan’s first female journalist. The core idea is disarmingly simple: instead of tracking fifty spending categories, you sort your money into four buckets based on the role it plays in your life.

Needs. What sustains you. Shelter, food, health, transportation, insurance. The non-negotiables that keep your life functioning. You don’t feel guilty about Needs. You honor them, because knowing your true baseline cost of living is the foundation of every other financial decision you’ll ever make.

Wants. What delights you. The streaming subscription, dinner with friends, the new shoes you’ve been eyeing. Wants aren’t the enemy. They’re the whole reason you work. The practice isn’t to eliminate them; it’s to choose them deliberately instead of accumulating them on autopilot.

Culture. What enriches you. Books, courses, museum memberships, music lessons, charitable giving, the yoga workshop, the conference ticket. This is where it gets interesting, because almost no Western budgeting system has a category for “things that make you a more complete human being.” They lump it all into “entertainment” or “miscellaneous” — as if a $15 book on stoic philosophy and a $15 impulse buy at Target are the same kind of spending. They’re not.

Unexpected. What prepares you. The car repair, the medical copay, the appliance that dies three months after the warranty expires. Every budget has an emergency fund line item. Almost no budget has a philosophy about the unexpected. Kakeibo does: life will surprise you. Build the buffer that lets you meet surprise with calm instead of panic.

The Two Pillars Nobody Talks About

Here’s what I noticed after years of using traditional budgets: I could account for every dollar and still feel like something was off. My spreadsheet said I was doing fine. My gut said I was treading water.

The missing piece was Culture and Unexpected.

In a traditional budget, my $145 vocal lessons go under “Entertainment.” My $165 in books and courses went under “Education” or, more likely, “Miscellaneous.” My charitable giving went under... honestly, it went wherever I remembered to put it that month. All of that enrichment spending — over a thousand dollars a month that was actively making my life better — was scattered across half a dozen categories, invisible in the aggregate.

Meanwhile, my emergency fund contribution sat in “Savings” right next to my vacation fund and my house down payment, as if preparing for a blown transmission and planning a trip to Japan serve the same emotional function. They don’t. One is defense. The other is aspiration. Treating them identically means you never see how well you’re actually prepared for the curveballs.

When I reorganized everything into four pillars, two things jumped out immediately. First, I was spending more on Culture than I realized — and that was good. That spending was intentional, enriching, and aligned with who I want to become. Second, I was spending almost nothing on Unexpected, which meant every actual emergency sent me scrambling.

The four-pillar view didn’t change how much money I had. It changed what I could see.

What the Pillar Pulse Reveals

Heartfelt Finance shows your four-pillar distribution as a horizontal bar called the Pillar Pulse. It appears on your dashboard and your budget plan page. Four colors, one bar. Your entire financial month compressed into a single visual.

There’s no “right” ratio. A grad student’s Pillar Pulse will look nothing like a mid-career professional’s, and both can be perfectly healthy. The point isn’t to hit some magic percentage. The point is to see the balance — or imbalance — clearly enough to make a conscious decision about it.

When Wants starts creeping up to 35% and Culture drops to 5%, that’s a signal.

Not a moral failing. A signal.

It means your money is flowing toward consumption and away from growth. Maybe that’s fine for a month or two. Maybe it’s a pattern worth examining. The Pillar Pulse makes the pattern visible so you can decide for yourself.

Budget Plan: Categories Inside Pillars

This is where Heartfelt Finance diverges from every budgeting app I’ve used. Instead of showing you a flat list of fifty categories, the budget plan groups your categories under their pillar. Needs at the top, then Wants, then Culture, then Unexpected. Each pillar shows its total allocation and spending, and each category within it shows its own progress bar.

The visual hierarchy matters more than you’d think. When your categories live inside pillars, you stop seeing “Groceries: $480” in isolation and start seeing “Groceries: $480, which is part of Needs, which is 48% of my total budget.” Context changes everything. That $480 grocery bill feels different when you can see it’s a fraction of a well-structured foundation versus half your entire budget.

Every category gets assigned to exactly one pillar. You make that decision once — when you create the category — and then every transaction that lands in that category automatically feeds the right pillar. No extra tagging, no extra clicks. The structure does the work for you.

The Spending Report: Four Cards, One Story

At the end of the month, the Reports page shows you a spending-by-pillar breakdown. Four cards, each tinted with the pillar’s color, each showing exactly how much you spent, how many categories contributed, and how it compared to what you budgeted.

Below the cards, comparison bars show allocated versus actual for each pillar. Green when you’re under budget, amber when you’re close, red when you’ve blown past it.

The four-card layout forces a different kind of analysis than a category pie chart. Instead of asking “did I spend too much on dining out?” you ask “is the balance between what sustains me, what delights me, what enriches me, and what prepares me roughly where I want it to be?” That’s a fundamentally better question. It’s a question about your life, not your line items.

Why This Works

I’ve tried every budgeting methodology that exists. Envelope system, zero-based, percentage-based, the 50/30/20 rule, YNAB’s “give every dollar a job” approach. They all work mechanically. You can follow any of them and end up with a functional budget.

The four-pillar system works *psychologically*. It doesn’t just tell you where your money went. It tells you what your money did. Did it sustain you? Did it delight you? Did it enrich you? Did it prepare you? Four questions, four honest answers, and suddenly you understand your financial life at a level that no category breakdown can reach.

Hani Motoko figured this out in 1904. It took American personal finance about 120 years to catch up. Heartfelt Finance is my attempt to close that gap with software instead of a paper ledger, but the insight is the same one she had: your budget is a portrait of your priorities. Make sure it’s painting the picture you actually want.

Set up your four pillars. Assign your categories. Spend one month watching the Pillar Pulse. I guarantee your money will tell you something about your life that fifty categories never could.

Heartfelt Finance is free for individual users. It’s a budgeting tool, spending tracker, goal planner, credit score education tool, and the like — but built around money mindfulness. Check it out at https://HeartfeltFinance.com.

Cool. Thanks. That and a dollar will get you a candy bar at the gas station (or maybe it’s two dollars, with inflation and all).

What no budgeting app will tell you is why you spent $47.99 at Amazon last Tuesday. Were you replacing a broken kitchen tool? Were you buying a birthday gift you’d been planning for weeks? Or were you doom-scrolling at 11pm after a brutal day at work and clicked “Buy Now” on something you can’t even remember ordering?

Those are three fundamentally different financial events. Your bank statement treats them identically. Your budget app categorizes them all as “Shopping.” And then everyone wonders why tracking expenses doesn’t actually change spending behavior.

That’s the gap I built the Mindful Tags feature inside the Heartfelt Finance app to close.

## Survival, Comfort, Escape

Heartfelt Finance asks you to tag every expense with one of three labels: Survival, Comfort, or Escape.

Survival is the stuff that keeps your life functioning. Rent, groceries, utilities, gas, insurance. You need these. They’re non-negotiable. The goal isn’t to feel guilty about them; it’s to honor them clearly so you know exactly what your baseline cost of living really is.

Comfort is the stuff that makes life enjoyable. Netflix, the yoga studio membership, a nice dinner out with friends, the Spotify subscription. Comfort spending isn’t bad. It’s the whole reason you work in the first place. The practice here is choosing it consciously rather than accumulating it unconsciously.

Escape is where it gets interesting.

Escape spending is the money you spend to avoid feeling something. The Amazon order after a fight with your partner. The DoorDash because cooking feels overwhelming tonight. The Target run where you walked in for paper towels and walked out with $67 worth of stuff you didn’t need and won’t remember buying by Friday.

Escape spending isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a data category. And until you can see it clearly, separated from the rest, you can’t make a decision about it.

The Three-Minute Tag

When you log an expense in Heartfelt Finance, three buttons appear below the amount: Survival, Comfort, Escape. One tap. That’s it. Takes about two seconds per transaction.

Over the course of a month, those two-second taps build a dataset that no other budgeting tool collects. Not “how much did you spend on groceries” — the answer to a fundamentally different question: *what was the emotional purpose of this money?*

Most people already know the answer in the moment. You know when you’re stress-buying. You know when you’re treating yourself intentionally versus numbing yourself reflexively. The tag just makes you say it out loud. Or, more precisely, it makes you tap a button that says it for you.

The act of categorizing is the intervention. Not the report you’ll look at later. Not the pie chart. The moment of honest classification, transaction by transaction, is where the behavior change happens. By the time you see the monthly breakdown, you’ve already been paying attention for 30 days.

What the Donut Chart Reveals

At the end of the month, the Mindful Tags report shows you a donut chart. Three colors. Your entire month of spending, sorted not by category but by emotional intent.

Here’s what a real month might look like: 52% Survival, 18% Comfort, 24% Escape. That Escape number is the one that stops people cold. Twenty-four percent of discretionary spending going toward emotional regulation disguised as commerce. That’s over a thousand dollars a month for someone spending $4,200. Twelve thousand a year. The down payment on a house, evaporating into Amazon boxes and delivery fees.

Nobody set out to spend $12,000 a year on emotional avoidance. But without the tag, that number hides inside “Shopping” and “Food & Dining” and “Miscellaneous” — categories that tell you nothing about intent.

The transaction list makes it even more visceral. You scroll through your month and the little colored badges tell the story. Green, green, blue, green, red, red, red. Three Escape purchases in a row on a Wednesday evening. You don’t need a financial advisor to tell you what happened that Wednesday. You already know.

This Isn’t About Elimination

I want to be clear about something, because I’ve seen this misread: the goal is not to eliminate Escape spending. The goal is to see it.

Some Escape spending is fine. You had a terrible day and a $6 coffee made you feel human again. That’s a reasonable exchange. The problem isn’t any individual purchase; it’s the pattern you can’t see without the data. When Escape spending creeps from 10% to 15% to 24% over a few months, that’s a signal worth noticing. Not because you’re bad with money, but because something in your life is generating stress that you’re paying Amazon, Starbucks, etc. to absorb.

The Mindful Tags report doesn’t prescribe. It describes. “This is what happened. This is how your money moved. Here’s the emotional texture of those movements.” What you do with that information is up to you.

The insight card at the bottom is where it lands. Plain language, no judgment, specific numbers. Your top Escape categories, the dollar amounts, the percentage. Data you can act on or data you can sit with. Either way, you’re no longer unconscious about it.

Why This Matters for Financial Literacy

Financial literacy programs love to teach people about compound interest and index funds and the time value of money. That’s fine. Those concepts matter. Heck, they’re some of my favorite subjects to teach about. But they’re downstream of a more fundamental problem: most people don’t understand their own spending patterns well enough to have money left over to invest in the first place.

Survival/Comfort/Escape is a framework that meets people where they actually are. Not “here’s how a 401k works” but “here’s what’s happening with the money you already spend every day.” That’s the starting line. Everything else — budgeting, saving, investing, debt payoff — comes after you can see clearly where your money goes and why it goes there.

I need to say something about shame cycles here, too. Shame is a significant presence in my own life. Shame creeps up for me around unfinished projects, the untidy workbench in the garage, when I have to say “no” to somebody when they ask for my help. I’m currently stuck in two overlapping shame cycles in regards to some interpersonal conflict with friends.

I’m no therapist or psychologist, but I know that for myself, the most important part of breaking my shame cycles is to first recognize the pattern. I know that I develop shame around those unfinished projects because I simply take on too many projects, which later leads me to having to say “no” when the next person needs my help because I’m so backlogged and lacking capacity.

In order to regulate my nervous system and avoid this shame cycle, I actually need to say “no” more often, so that I don’t get backlogged, bogged down, and energetically shut down and socially isolate. The “no” needs to precede the start of the shame cycle, so that I can protect my energy and have the capacity for a “yes” when the request is in alignment with the work I want to be doing and the people I want to serve.

I think it’s similar with money. It’s hard to look at our spending patterns in the way described above, and for some people it might trigger a shame cycle. I’m sure an expert will correct me in the comments if I’m wrong, but I believe that in order to prevent future shame cycles, we need to see the pattern that triggers them in the first place.

Awareness and recognition then generates the plan for regulation. We can’t discuss our disregulated spending with our financial coach or therapist if we’re not aware of the pattern. Without knowing there’s a pattern, and the exact extent of it in real dollar terms, we can’t take action to course correct. As famed management analyst Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” This is the measurement.

So it is my hope that this unique feature in Heartfelt Finance will be the start of pattern recognition and regulation for you, if it’s something you’re in need of on the financial front.

So there you have it. The three-button tag takes two seconds. The monthly donut chart takes thirty seconds to read. And the pattern it reveals is worth more than any financial literacy course I’ve ever seen, because it’s built from your actual life, not a textbook scenario.

Tag your spending for one month. Just one. Then look at the donut chart. I promise you’ll see something you didn’t expect.

Heartfelt Finance is free for individual users. It’s a budgeting tool, spending tracker, goal planner, investment tracker, credit score education tool, and the like — but built around money mindfulness. Check it out at https://HeartfeltFinance.com.

Here’s a question that sounds simple but will rearrange your entire relationship with money: Why did you buy that? Not what you bought. Not how much it cost. Why. The answer almost always falls into one of three categories — and once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it.

I call it the Survival/Comfort/Escape Matrix. Every single transaction in your bank account and credit cards fits into one of these three channels. Understanding which channel is pulling the most current changes everything about how you navigate your finances, and getting control over your finances involves aligning your values with how you spend.

The Three Channels

Survival is the non-negotiable infrastructure. Rent, electricity, insurance, groceries, medication. These are the costs of keeping the lights on — the lighthouse, if you will. You don’t choose them so much as you honor them. They represent the baseline cost of existing and having a functional life. In Japanese kakeibo budgeting parlance, these are your Needs (more on kakeibo in a moment).

Comfort is the intentional upgrade. The slightly nicer coffee beans. The gym membership you actually use. A meal out with someone you love. Comfort spending is conscious. You know you’re doing it, you’ve decided it’s worth it, and it genuinely improves the texture of your day-to-day life. There’s no guilt here because the decision was made from a grounded place. In relation to kakeibo budgeting, these fall into Wants and Culture.

Escape is the tricky one. Escape spending happens when your nervous system is looking for an exit. It’s the $47 Amazon order you placed at 11 PM because the day was brutal. It’s the subscription you forgot you had because you signed up during a rough week and never circled back. Escape spending doesn’t solve the problem it’s responding to. It just delays the feeling for a few hours. In kakeibo structure, I would put these under the Unexpected category.

The difference between Comfort and Escape isn’t the item. It’s the state you were in when you bought it. A $6 latte purchased on a calm Saturday morning while reading a book is Comfort. The same $6 latte purchased in a fog between back-to-back client calls because you needed *something* to feel like a human being — that’s Escape. Same drink. Completely different current.

The Scramble vs. The System

Most financial advice skips this entirely. The conventional approach treats every dollar the same: income minus expenses equals savings, and if the number is negative, you need a budget. Cut here. Trim there. Use a spreadsheet. Try harder.

That’s the scramble. It assumes you’re a calculator with legs — that the problem is math and the solution is discipline. It works for about two weeks, until a hard day hits and the escape spending kicks back in. Then comes the shame spiral, which makes the next escape purchase even more likely.

The system looks different. Instead of auditing what you spent, you audit why you spent it. You pull up last month’s transactions and sort every single line item into one of three columns: Survival, Comfort, or Escape. No judgment. Just sorting.

What you’ll find is revealing. Most people discover that their Survival costs are relatively fixed — there’s not much to cut without genuinely destabilizing their life. Their Comfort spending is usually reasonable and intentional. And their Escape spending is where the current has been quietly pulling them out to sea.

How to Run Your Own Matrix

Pull up the last 30 days of transactions. Every single one. Then go line by line and label each transaction S, C, or E. An easy way to do this is to perform a CSV export from your online banking and credit card sites, and import those CSV files into an Excel or Google Sheet.

A few ground rules:

1. Be honest, but don’t be cruel. This isn’t a punishment exercise. It’s a diagnostic.

2. If you’re not sure whether something is Comfort or Escape, ask yourself: *Was I regulated when I made this decision?* Did I feel calm, or was I reaching for relief?

3. Don’t try to fix anything yet. Sorting is the whole exercise. Fixing comes later, and it comes naturally once you can see the pattern.

When you’re done, add up the totals for each column. That ratio — the percentage split between Survival, Comfort, and Escape — is your financial vital sign. It tells you more about your actual relationship with money than any net worth calculation ever will.

There’s no “correct” ratio. Someone spending 70% on Survival, 20% on Comfort, and 10% on Escape is in a fundamentally different position than someone at 40/20/40, and they need fundamentally different interventions. The person drowning in Survival costs doesn’t need a budget app; they need more income or a structural change. The person hemorrhaging Escape spending doesn’t need a lecture about lattes; they need regulation.

If you’d like to use a financial health tool to keep track of this for you, head on over to Heartfelt Finance and create an account. This is a free financial mindfulness app that I’m building as part of my mission to grow financial literacy and wellness.

Your One Simple Move This Week

If you’re not ready to do the above audit for an entire month, or to start tracking all your spending in an app, do this one simple thing: Pick one day’s worth of transactions — just one day — and label each one S, C, or E. Don’t change anything. Don’t cancel any subscriptions. Don’t shame yourself for what you find. Just notice.

The ship’s rigging doesn’t get organized in a storm. It gets organized on a calm morning, with clear eyes, one rope at a time.

Most business advice focuses on the ceiling: How high can you scale? How much revenue can you capture? How big can your empire get?

But in a solo practice, the ceiling doesn’t kill you. The floor does. Or rather, the lack of one.

If you feel constantly anxious, reactive, or like you are one bad client email away from spiraling, you don’t have a revenue problem. You have a stability problem. You are operating without a Capacity Floor.

Context

In the Bizorca philosophy, we prioritize energy over time. Your energy is your most finite asset.

When a solo practitioner is in “The Scramble”—that frantic state of chasing payments, answering texts at 9 PM, and reinventing the wheel for every new project—they are leaking capacity. Their nervous system is stuck in sympathetic activation (fight, flight, freeze, fawn).

Biologically, you cannot think strategically when you are in fight or flight mode. You can only react. You become a technician of your own misery, putting out fires that you started yourself because you didn’t have a floor to stand on.

Contrast

The “Revenue First” Approach:

• Goal: Maximize income immediately.

• Method: Say “yes” to everything. Squeeze calls into lunch breaks. Invoice whenever you remember.

• Result: High revenue variance, high cortisol, emotional burnout. You are rich in cash (sometimes) but bankrupt in energy.

The “Capacity First” Approach:

• Goal: Protect the owner’s ability to perform.

• Method: Establish non-negotiable minimums for money, time, and administration.

• Result: Predictable cash flow, calm energy, and the mental space to actually enjoy the work you do.

Clarify

So, what is a Capacity Floor?

It is the minimum set of operational and financial standards required to keep your business functioning without your constant, high-intensity intervention. It is the solid ground that prevents you from falling into the basement of burnout.

A strong Capacity Floor has three planks:

1. Financial Capacity (The “Sleep at Night” Number) This is not your goal revenue. This is your survival revenue plus a safety margin, such as 10%. It is the amount of money you need to cover your business overhead, your personal mortgage/rent, and your grocery bill.

• The System: You must have a “Buffer Account” with exactly one month of this floor saved. If that account dips, you stop “building” and start “selling” until it’s full.

2. Energy Capacity (The “No-Touch” Zone) These are the boundaries that protect your focus.

• The System: No client communication outside of your designated portal or email. No meetings on Mondays (your deep work/admin day). A strict “lights out” time for your business email.

3. Mental Capacity (The “Clear Deck” Policy) The boring stuff that prevents cognitive drag.

• The System: A recurring calendar appointment on Friday at 2:00 PM called “The Weekly Close.” You check bank balances, send invoices, and clear your physical desk. You never enter the weekend with a messy ledger. You put all the business stuff that’s bouncing around your brain on to paper or into an app, to “close the tab” in your brain.

The First Plank

We are going to lay the first plank today.

Your Action Step: Identify your Financial Capacity Floor.

1. Add up your fixed business expenses (software, insurance, licenses, rent, etc).

2. Add up your minimum viable personal draw (mortgage/rent, food, utilities—no luxuries).

3. Add 10% for error.

Write this number on a sticky note and put it on your monitor. Write it on your mirror. Write it on your whiteboard. Tape it to the fridge. This is not your target. This is your floor. As long as you are above this number, you are safe. This is the number you manage to first. Here, you can breathe.

Capacity before complexity. Always.

If you’re ready to further explore the concept of regulation before revenue, check out the Bizorca Business Clarity Framework course inside the Bizorca Pod community.

Your calendar is a map of where you can go; your capacity is the fuel in the tank.

Most business owners treat a blank calendar as an invitation. If there is a white box at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday, they assume they are “free.”

They look at the open ocean and see only the horizon, forgetting that the depth of the dive matters just as much as the distance traveled. Think of it like this: you are confusing availability with capacity.

One is about time; the other is about regulation.

The Binary vs. The Volume

To build a business that is emotionally sustainable, you must learn to protect your internal currents from external demands.

• Availability is binary. It is the literal presence or absence of a commitment. If you aren’t in a meeting, you are “open.” It is a shallow, surface-level metric.

• Capacity is a ceiling. It is the total volume of work—cognitive, emotional, and physical—that you can process before the quality of your output begins to degrade. It is your high-water mark.

Availability creates options. Capacity creates calm.

The Sprint and the Stall

Imagine an orca. An orca is technically “available” to swim at maximum speed at any hour of the day. But its capacity for that exertion is limited. If it attempts to sprint for twenty-four hours straight simply because the sea is “open,” it will eventually beach itself.

I’ve seen too many practitioners do exactly this. They fill every “white box” with a client project or a discovery call. By Wednesday, their availability is gone, but their capacity was breached by Tuesday afternoon.

Design effort; don’t exhaust yourself. When you sell your availability without respecting your capacity, you are borrowing against your future stability.

Regulate the Intake

Here is what you can do to find your steady current again:

1. Calculate Your Baseline Load: Before selling an hour, account for the “tax” of running the business—admin, learning, and rest.

2. The Buffer is the System: In a well-designed business, the “gap” between availability and capacity isn’t wasted time. It is the water that allows the system to breathe.

3. Signal Your Boundaries: Practice the declarative “No.” It sounds like: “I have the time, but I do not have the capacity.”

Clear currents carry farther than frantic flails. If you sell all your availability, you will eventually have no capacity left to lead the pod.

To help you determine your capacity, I’ve created the Bizorca Capacity Audit worksheet to help. Take 15 minutes to complete this audit in order to help determine your actual capacity for client work, while maintaining your sanity for all other aspects of your business and regulating your nervous system at the same time. This is a free PDF download for all subscribers.

Businesscapacityaudit

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If you want a steady stream of new clients coming in to your local practice, the single best marketing strategy — even in the digital age — is to put butts in seats and educate your audience.

I have never found a simpler, more consistent growth strategy for any sort of professional practice to drive growth than by presenting small workshops to people already interested in your particular topic. Seminars and workshops are interactive, engaging, and build trust and authority faster than any other marketing tactic I’ve ever seen.

When you are the person at the front of the room, you have instant authority and credibility, which in a trust-based business, is utterly invaluable. On top of that, giving freely of your time in this way clearly demonstrates how much you care about what you do and the people you serve. Offering free workshops is an extremely tangible way of showing that you are a heart-led practitioner.

In this marketing deep dive, you’ll learn exactly how to conduct such events, attract attendees, and invite them to work with you further if there is alignment.

Three Different Companies, Same Strategy

If I had known about this strategy earlier in my business career, I firmly believe that I wouldn’t have struggled as much as I did earlier in life. But fortunately, I did find this strategy in my 30s, and it helped drive the growth of three different businesses that I owned.

When I ran my own tax firm, representing small business owners with state and IRS tax debts, one of my marketing strategies was to host live, 1-hour webinars educating people about their options for addressing the tax debt. Basically, most people aren’t aware of the government programs that are available to help them. I found attendees for these webinars by sending direct mail postcards and letters to publicly available lists of tax liens. Then, at the end of each webinar, I would make an offer to book a private consultation with me.

When I started Tax Resolution Academy, I had three core marketing methods to attract clients. What really made the business grow from a side project to a larger business was a 42-city tour of the US that I offered in 2014. In each city, I hosted a three hour live workshop that included one hour of business development education, and two hours of ethics continuing education. Since tax professionals are required to complete annual ethics education to keep their license, offering this for free was the perfect way to attract attendees, whom I invited to the event via email, collecting emails from a publicly available list of such tax professionals.

To a lesser degree, but still pivotal to early traction, the software company I started in 2015 was also fueled by events. Hosting lunch and learns for training coordinators and managing partners of Seattle area CPA firms, invited directly by phone, email, and LinkedIn direct messages, gave us validation around product-market fit and some of our earliest pilot customers.

Prominent Examples

Perhaps the most widely known application of this event marketing strategy comes from the financial services industry. Ever since the 1950s, the “free dinner seminar” has probably sold more annuities and other investment products than any other strategy.

In fact, this marketing method is so prominent for annuity sales in particular that entire marketing agencies exist that do nothing but help financial advisors to reserve private dining rooms in restaurants, send out postcards and letters to high income and high net worth individuals, and process registrations and reminders for the dinner. The prominence of this marketing strategy in the financial planning world is so prevalent that it’s basically a meme in personal finance circles.

Another prominent example of the use of this strategy comes from the network marketing (e.g., multi-level marketing or MLM) industry. Free dinners, free education nights, and free workshops are taught by the company to their representatives as a way to sell product and recruit new downline.

Within the real estate investor coaching industry, the common tactic is to use free half-day or even full day workshops to introduce concepts such as wholesaling, flipping, private lending, and other real estate strategies. A free brown bag lunch is often included. Attendees are then upsold on coaching programs that costs thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars (but you can save that money and check out the extensive free resources offered by my good friend James Orr at RealEstateFinancialPlanner.com instead. You’re welcome.)

These prominent examples may sound scammy or slimey to some readers, and yes, they often are. But the fact that they still exist, even in the modern Internet age, and drive billions of dollars in revenue, serve to demonstrate that the marketing strategy itself works very well.

Using this strategy for your own service business boils down to three steps: Crafting your workshop curriculum, attracting the right attendees, and then making an offer to work with you further.

Your Free Introductory Workshop

Your opening offer is a free one to two hour webinar, class, or workshop. It should be something small enough to provide solid value within that timeframe, meaning it should have substance, not fluff.

Requirements:

• Solve a specific, meaningful pain point.

• Reveal your larger method.

• Make the next step clear for attendees.

Here are some real-world examples based on local business owners that I consult with:

• A private chef could offer a free workshop on meal planning.

• A therapist could offer a free workshop on setting boundaries.

• A nutritionist could educate attendees about metabolic syndrome.

• An accountant could walk new business owners through setting up their record keeping system.

• An herbalist could demonstrate how to harvest specific herbs and compound three commonly used formulations.

• A massage therapist could teach a couples workshop on providing neck and shoulder massages for your partner at home.

Brainstorm a few ideas of what you could demonstrate inside of one hour, and share it with your fellow readers in the comments section.

Filling the Room

For many readers, this might be the most challenging step. But it doesn’t need to be difficult or complicated. The key is to attract the right attendees, not just any attendees. Let’s cover three distinct methods for putting butts in seats for your live workshop.

Cross-Promotion Partnerships

This one is the low-hanging fruit. Basically, you approach complimentary businesses, trade associations, training companies, and the like that already work with your ideal client. Your ideal client could be receiving education from this promotional partner, maybe they’re a customer of this other business, or are a member of a club or association related to your offering.

Here are some examples from the same professions mentioned earlier:

• A private chef could partner with health food stores and kitchen gadget stores to promote the meal planning workshop to their customers (and perhaps even host the event inside that store).

• A therapist could partner with other therapists, behavioral health agencies, and victim advocate services to promote the workshop to their clients.

• A nutritionist could work with health food stores, herbalists, and concierge physicians to promote their workshop to clients of those businesses.

• An accountant might partner with their local Chamber of Commerce, Economic Development Council, Small Business Development Center, and co-working space.

• An herbalist could present a workshop to their local Master Gardener foundation, and work with nurseries and health food stores to promote the event to their customer lists.

• A massage therapist could partner with relationship therapists and sexual wellness stores to offer the couples massage workshop.

In short, find the other businesses that serve the exact same type of customer that you want. Pick up the phone and call the owner, take them out to lunch, discuss how the workshop will be of benefit to their customers as a value-added service.

If you’d like help in identifying specific organizations and companies to partner with for promotion of your workshop, book a call with me.

Lists from Data Brokers

We all know that exhaustive amounts of data are collected by companies about all of us, and that data is sold and rented by companies all the time. While I personally despise the practice from a personal privacy perspective, I’ve also used it extensively as a business owner.

There are numerous data brokers out there, and for a fairly small amount of money, you can buy a list of names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers for just about any client profile.

Take the time to brainstorm the demographic profile of your ideal client, along with specific consumer actions they have likely taken.

For example, the private chef might want a list of local residents with incomes over $250,000 per year that have purchased high-end kitchen appliances. That list can be purchased or rented.

The therapist running the trauma workshop can likely obtain a list of people that have bought books on dealing with trauma, or that have indications of specific mental health conditions (yes, despite privacy laws).

The massage therapist leading the couples workshop can definitely obtain a list of couples that have purchased…ummm… “intimacy products” from online retailers.

Nearly every state, either through their Department of Revenue or Secretary of State, offers lists of new business entity formations for sale. Your local county or city may also offer a list of new business licensees for sale. The accountant offering the business record keeping workshop will want that list.

What are some of the purchase behaviors of your own ideal client?

What other products and services, related to yours, have they purchased?

Where did they purchase them?

Also consider what organizations they belong to, because you can likely buy or rent the membership list. Think about civic, political, and trade organizations they might be members of, or magazines they subscribe to. A private chef might be highly interested in obtaining the subscriber list for the local foodie magazine, an accountant might want to acquire the subscriber list of the local business publication, etc.

Event Discovery Platforms

This one is a bit more non-specific, but still of value in promoting your event.

Think Meetup.com, Events.com, MyCityScene.com, Eventbrite.com, local newspaper community event calendars, event announcements by local radio stations, coworking spaces, Chamber of Commerce event calendar, etc.

In my local area, paper flyers on posted on about 40 local bulletin boards are a surprisingly effective way to get people to attend local events. While most of the examples above are digital, don’t neglect local preferences. You can design really nice flyers using tools like Canva, or with AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

Your Ongoing Support Offer

This is likely the easiest step in this entire process, as you likely already have this set up.

During your free workshop, you walk people through achieving one specific process or demonstrate a specific skill that they can take home with them. But also, you’re gently talking about your broader framework or process. You’re demonstrating competence, and then all you need to do is offer them the opportunity to go deeper with you.

Here’s a short, simple, non-salesy example script for you to start with:

“Today, you’ve learned how to ________. If you’d like to [go deeper, work with me one-on-one, develop this skill further], then I invite you to [a retreat, a private consultation, your 10-week program, etc.].”

I highly encourage having a paper signup form, a QR code or simple domain name pointing to your calendar, or some other very simple way for them to take the next step. For example, instead of having a long website URL with hyphens and slashes that people have to write down, pay the $10 to register a specific short domain name that then forwards to your calendar booking page or your retreat registration page.

Post-Workshop Follow-Up

If you present a good workshop, you’ll might be surprised at the number of people that take you up on your next step offer. But for the attendees that don’t, it’s a good idea to have a system set up in advance to follow up with everybody.

A simple structure might look like this:

• Same-day thank-you

• 48-hour recap with a recording or handout

• 72-hour call to action for the original deeper offer

• 7-day client case study example

• 14-day second invitation to your core offer

Do this via email, phone, social media, or even…gasp!…snail mail. All are effective for follow up to increase conversions.

Consistency Creates Steady Revenue

Events like this are not just “one and done”. The most effective way to do this is to repeat your event on a regular schedule. In other words, make it a normal part of your business routine.

Depending on the nature of your business and the geographic scope of your practice, you might find that a weekly, monthly, or quarterly cadence works best. Repeating the event leverages the work you already put into creating the workshop in the first place, and gives people that couldn’t attend due to scheduling conflicts the opportunity to attend later.

This is a marketing strategy, not a one-and-done tactic that you then put on the shelf after the first time. You’ll improve your presentation over time, find new promotional partners, and find new places to go to in order to present this workshop. The more you do it, the more impact you will have, the better it will be, and the more people you will ultimately serve.

If you’re interested going deeper on planning your own workshops and attracting the right attendees, I invite you to join the Bizorca Pod online community or book a call with me.

In the comments section below, please share your own brainstorms. What kind of workshop will you present? Who are your ideal event promotion partners?