The course for a business that wants wealthier clients.
Upmarket Pro teaches a service professional how to find, win, and keep clients at the top of the market. The course is free.
Money is moving to the top
The top 10% of American earners now account for about half of all consumer spending. The top tenth of households hold about two thirds of household wealth, and the top 1% hold nearly a third.
A professional who serves only people like themselves is working in the part of the market that is shrinking. The clients with the most to spend are a small group. Most service professionals have never been taught how to reach them.
That is the gap this course fills. It covers the top 10%, the top 1%, and the 0.1%. It also tells you which of the three is the right first target for your business.
The client at the top is the easiest client to serve well
A wealthy client is short on time and has limited interest in collecting bids. When a task takes up room in their week, they would rather pay someone to take it off their plate. They want it done properly, and they will pay for it.
For a service professional, this is the best client. They decide quickly and pay without a negotiation. They stay happy as long as the work is done well.
What they will not do is hire someone who looks, writes, or prices like everyone else. The course shows you what they look for instead.
I built the map I needed
I started this research for my own business. I used to bring up price on the first call before anyone asked. I believed the price I offered was an important part of the equation for my clients. The wealthiest clients I met were weighing something else, and it took me a long time to understand what that was.
Once I understood how these clients make decisions, I went looking for a course that taught this to service professionals. There was no such course, so I created Upmarket Pro to help other business owners.
Who I am
I am Brett Wharton. I run NexusMKTG, a full-service marketing firm in Boston for ambitious business owners who are scaling toward a national presence. That work is where I learned what moves a client from interested to signed.
Upmarket Pro is the course I wished someone had handed me. The business owners who need it most are the least likely to pay for advice they have not yet seen work. With this in mind, I am giving away this course. I am confident that you will see what is possible for your business within the first few lessons.
What the course is built on
This course rests on decades of research and hundreds of firsthand accounts from service professionals. Five books explain how clients decide when money is not an issue. The accounts show what happens when those ideas are tested at a wedding, in a kitchen, or in a client's living room.
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Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Wealthy clients judge quickly and trust their first judgment. The course shows you what to put in the first minute of a call, so that judgment works in your favor.
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Influence, Robert Cialdini
Why do people say yes, and how do they defend themselves against pressure? The course uses Cialdini to show which of your habits feel like pressure to a wealthy client, and what to do instead.
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The Luxury Strategy, Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien
This book covers how the best luxury houses price, limit, and present what they sell. The course translates the rules that hold for a business of one.
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The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen
Some things are bought to be seen, and the purchase says something about the person who made it. The course uses Veblen to show which clients hire you for what the choice says about them. Then it shows you what to put in front of those clients.
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Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
The way a choice is presented decides it, long before anyone weighs the options. The course uses Thaler and Sunstein to show how to lay out your prices and your proposal. A client can then say yes without a comparison.
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Hundreds of firsthand accounts
Hundreds of professionals have written about moving upmarket, in blogs, interviews, forums, and trade press. Their accounts are the course’s most important source.
Books generalize. A florist in Calgary, a designer in Sag Harbor, and a photographer who stopped getting booked at his new price do not. So the course does not hand you one rule and tell you it works everywhere. Instead, it shows you what hundreds of professionals found in their own markets. When two accounts disagree, the course examines why, so that you can tell which principle is likely to work in your market.
What you leave with
By the end of the course, you will have made these decisions for your own business:
- Which clients you are going to serve: the top 10%, the top 1%, or the 0.1%.
- Your price, and the reason you can give for it out loud.
- Your limit, the number of clients you can serve well, and the reason behind it.
- What the first screen of your website says, so a wealthy client knows it was written for them.
- How you reply to an inquiry and what your proposal looks like.
- Which clients you name, and what you give them to say about you.
- Where your clients already gather, and who can introduce you there.
- How to tell why a client is hiring you, and what to say and not say when you know.
- How you bill and how you keep a client’s confidence, so the clients you win stay.
Each lesson ends with one decision for your business that you can enter in your Workbook. If you create a free account, the Workbook will save every decision you make. By the end of the course, you will have a plan you wrote for yourself. Then you can hand that plan to Claude or another AI tool and ask for a step-by-step roadmap.
Start with Module 1
Module 1 takes an hour and sets up everything that follows. Please begin here.
If you would rather work with someone
This course is complete on its own. If you would rather work with someone directly, the Upmarket Diagnostic gives you a written plan for your business within a week. You do not have to read a single lesson first.