Why Your Voice Should Not Cost a Fortune

My one ask: read this to the end.
There is an announcement at the bottom.

But first, the education, and Happy Super Bowl Sunday if you celebrate.

For the past eight years, I have been obsessed with a single question:

Why does marketing cost so much, and why does that price silence so many people who should have a voice?

Not bad ideas. Not weak thinking.
Just economics.

Where this question started

In 2017, I was brought in to help launch a book for an author who also happened to be a marketing technology CEO.

Behind the scenes, the operation looked like this:

• A writer

• A graphic designer

• A website developer

• A podcast team

• A videographer

• A performance ads specialist

And me, stringing it all together. Project managing. Driving speaking opportunities. Building partnerships. Mobilizing people around the launch.

When I stepped back and looked at the model, something felt off.

Not creatively.
Economically.

It looked something like this:

• Bryan (PR, outreach, speaking, project management, reporting): $4,500 / month

• Writer: $2,500/month

• Website: $15,000 (one-time)

• Podcast production: $2,500/month

• Ads budget: $10,000/month

• Book ghostwriting/editing: $20,000

• Videographer: $2,000/month

Does this look vaguely familiar?

Does it feel a little painful just reading it?

Yeah. Same.

The real problem was not the talent, it was the structure

What I saw firsthand was not waste. It was friction.

Friction to:

• Assemble the right talent

• Coordinate them

• Maintain consistency across creative and project management

• Keep everything running long enough to actually see ROI

My first instinct was simple, and naive:

That instinct turned into a service business.

And yes, every agency book, like Built To Sell, will tell you not to do this.

“You are doing too much.”
“This will not scale.”

They were right in the short term.

But I believed there was a better long-term model hiding underneath the mess, if we were willing to build through the inefficiency (and find it).

So we did.

Piece by piece.
Customer by customer.

Very similar to how Tesla did not start with a mass-market car. They started with the Roadster, built it for people who could afford it, learned everything the hard way, and used that knowledge to work backward.

To everyone who trusted us early, thank you.

Then I saw the same problem everywhere

Once you understand how individual brands are built, you start seeing the same economics (and dysfunction) repeat across industries:

• Publishing

• Speaking

• Public relations

Different labels.
Same issue.

These are cottage industries protecting their own, with price structures that quietly exclude about 95 percent of people who want to participate.

And here is the part most people miss:

To have a real brand, you must define it, then activate it, then maintain it over years.

This is not a 90-day experiment.
It is a long, deliberate compounding effort.

Which makes the cost structure even more brutal.

Let’s talk publishing . . .

Traditional publishing is often pitched as “making it.”

In reality, I would argue getting a bad publishing deal is worse than raising venture capital on terrible terms.

Typical economics:

Hardcover Royalties

• Author: about 10 to 15 percent

• Publisher: about 85 to 90 percent

Paperback Royalties

• Author: about 5 to 8 percent

• Publisher: about 92 to 95 percent

You wait one to two years (sometimes more).
You give up control.

And 95 percent of people never even get the deal, especially if they do not already have a platform.

So what do people do instead?

Hybrid publishing.

Remember, If you are already maintaining a brand today, you are likely spending $3 to $5k per month just to stay visible.

Now add:

• $20k or more for publishing

• $30k to $50k for ghostwriting and editing

You are easily $50k to $100k in just to ship a book that may or not do well.

And you are still on the timeline of the hybrid publisher.

This is the gross financial problem that keeps bothering me.

It is not that people do not have ideas.
It is that the system prices them out before they ever get momentum.

“Okay, but what about PR and speaking?”

Same pattern.

Podcast booking agencies: $1k to $3k per month
Traditional PR firms: $3k to $5k or more per month (minimum!)

So now you have:

• Built the platform with a team of specialists

• Published the book

• Hired PR help

• Burned six figures

And you are asking:

“When does this start paying me back?”

So you try speaking.

Speaking can pay well.

Three thousand dollars on the low end.
Twenty thousand dollars or more on the high end.

But it is:

• Inconsistent

• Competitive

• Lifestyle-heavy

• Not recurring

Only about 5 percent of people can sustain this full stack long term.

And yet we are entering an era where more people want independence, ownership, and a voice.

There is demand.

There just is not a sustainable cost structure.

The gap I could not unsee anymore

The market will pay for help.

But most of the market cannot afford to pay for it long enough to see returns on the J-Curve.

So they stop.

Their voice disappears, not because it was not valuable, but because it was not financially survivable.

That is the failure mode.

The shift, and the news

I believe this can change.

I believe you can have:

• Low-cost

• Premium-quality

• Long-horizon brand and voice activation

Without hiring an entire marketing team.
Without burning out your runway.

And after seven years of building every piece manually, learning every inch of this ecosystem, we are finally seeing how a better long term solution can exist.

Tentatively timeline, but towards the beginning of Q3, we are rolling out a new model more broadly for individuals called Arcbase.

It is designed to:

• Amortize our best services over a 24 month period at an accessible price point

• Focus on core brand definition and activation

• Support voices over years, not months

• Deliver ROI before budgets collapse

And if you eventually need more (write and publish the book, launch the podcast, short and long form videos, GTM support and do PR), you ideally will still have budget to pay for it. And that's not all, as there will be a software rollout before years end, that pairs well with our service model.

This is the first time I have felt like the original vision, the one that started this whole journey, is actually within reach.

Thanks for reading all the way through. I hope you resonated.

1. If you want to get on the Waitlist, reply to this email and let me know.
   Happy to talk in March.
   

2. Oh, and if you know anyone facing this conundrum, send this to them. I’d love for this piece to be shared with those who need it most (many do).