What Does Leaving Look Like

There is one question that reveals the entire business model of anyone selling you help, and almost nobody asks it: what does leaving look like?

Ask it and listen carefully, because the answer arrives in one of two shapes. The first shape is a description of an ending: the engagement concludes, here is what you hold, here is how you carry on without us. The second shape is not an ending at all. It is another tier, another renewal, a community you must never leave, an alumni programme, a mastermind above the mastermind. If the answer is the second shape, then the product was never your capability. The product is your subscription, and everything else is packaging.

This is not an accusation of bad character; it is arithmetic about incentives. In a recurring-revenue model of help, a client who becomes independent is a client lost, which means independence is a cost, which means the model quietly ensures you never quite become one.

Nobody designs the dependence on a whiteboard. It emerges, the way water finds a slope: the content that answers this month's question but not the pattern behind it, the community that solves problems in a way that keeps the solving inside the walls, the drip of material that is always one module short of complete. Each piece is defensible alone. Together they produce customers who have paid for years and still cannot leave, and who read their own staying as loyalty rather than as the model working precisely as built.

Good mentoring runs the other way, and it should be structurally visible that it does. It should end with you needing less help, not more, and everything about how I have built this work follows from that single test. The workshop ends with a written plan you can act on with or without me; the exit is inside the deliverable, not on the far side of a cancellation flow. Anything longer, the six and twelve month private mentoring, is by application only, because ongoing work should be a deliberate choice made twice, once by each side, not a default renewal made once by a card on file. I measure engagements by what clients can do without me afterwards, and I say that in public so that clients can hold me to it.

Now the practical part, and it may pay for your week. Pull up everything you currently pay for by subscription in your business education: the memberships, the communities, the portals, the softwares of self-improvement. Against each one, write two things only. The date you last used it. And what changed because you did. Not what you learned, what changed: a decision made differently, a number that moved, a thing now done another way. The list is usually shorter than the direct debits, and the gap between the two columns is the price of never having asked the leaving question on the way in. Cancel accordingly, without guilt. Loyalty belongs to people, not to renewal dates.

And if what remains after the audit is a suspicion that the help you actually need is diagnostic rather than perpetual, the ten-minute place to start is the Entrepreneur Gap scan: eight roles, honestly mapped, free, built for businesses past £15k a month, and over the moment it is done, which is rather the point.

Continue reading: Five Questions →

Or check your business first: Take the free 10-minute Entrepreneur Gap scan →