Income First Glossary

Adjacent industries: Two businesses that serve the same customer at different moments, through different offers. Adjacency is defined by the customer, not the category.
Authority dynamic: Whether you sell as the provider, the coach, or the expert — the hands, the guide, or the brain.
Bricks: Everything you already have to build with: skills, professional experience, personal traits, interests, network, cultural and language advantages, life experience, education, and values.
Company Dashboard: A running record of the business: date, accomplishment, evidence. A spreadsheet is more than enough.
Condition: The chronic state the trigger exposed.
Consequence: What happens to them if nothing changes.
Cost of revenue: Anything you would not spend if you did not make the sale.
Costs: What it takes to produce the sale. Moved by automating, delegating, and standardising delivery.
Dataroom: The folder holding the evidence behind every line of the Company Dashboard.
Delivery model: Done-for-you, done-with-you, or do-it-yourself. Who is actually responsible for producing the outcome.
Divergent thinking: Generating many offers from the same seed before choosing one, instead of defaulting to the first decent answer.
Duration ladder: Offers from the same seed that differ by how long the relationship lasts: a one-time fix, a time-bound project, an ongoing retainer.
Efficiency target: The income and effort scores you are deliberately building toward, so you notice when you drift away from them.
Effort: How much of you the business eats. The vital nobody tracks, and the one that decides your quality of life.
Entry offer: The low-price, high-volume, easy-to-deliver offer that opens the door. It needs no education, no reputation, and no big marketing push.
Execution system: The structure that produces consistent effort whether or not you feel like it. Consistency is an output, not a character trait.
Go-to-market: How a business reaches its market — a how, never a when. You do not go to a market; you live in one.
Gross margin: What is left after cost of revenue. Below roughly 40% there is no room to reinvest, no room to pay anyone, and no room to be wrong.
ICP: Ideal Client Profile. In this method, ICP = Persona + Situation.
Income: Money you take home and spend on your actual life — not revenue, not a number on a dashboard.
Income First™: A way of building a business where income is the top priority — not the first thing you do, but the thing every decision answers to.
Income target: The real money you want this business to bring home in a year, decided on purpose and written down.
Initiative: The answer to "How will I…?" Keep asking it until the answer is a task.
Key Result: Measurable, dated proof you got there. If you could fake it with effort, it is not a key result.
Market value: What someone values enough to pay for. The value is not in the thing — it is in the paying.
Message: What you say to them: the emotion around the pain, the situation they are in, and the outcome they get. Not your features.
Objective: Where you are going, anchored to your income target. One, not five.
Offer: What you sell, made concrete: a specific scope, a clear audience, a clear outcome, and a price stated out loud.
Offer combination: Designing the mix of what you sell so one of the four vitals moves on purpose, without adding new clients.
Offer Levers: The roughly fifteen settings that decide how an outcome gets delivered. Move one and you get a different offer from the same seed.
OPEX: Anything you would still spend with zero sales.
Outcome: The change in their life, said in their words. Not your skill, not your process, not the problem you solve.
Participation format: 1:1, 1:group, 1:community, or 1:n. How many people benefit from one unit of your effort.
Passive asset: A business that keeps paying you without needing you in it day to day. The eventual destination of every Income First business.
Persona: Who they are: role, identity, goals, and what they already believe.
Personal Resource Inventory: The exercise of writing your bricks down, category by category, before you go looking for an idea.
Profit: What is actually left. Moved by raising prices, adding upsells, and shifting toward high-margin work.
Revenue: Is money actually coming in? Moved by more customers, higher prices, repeat purchases and better retention.
Routine: Recurring work on the calendar. Routines are the engine — appointments you do not skip.
Sales channel: A reliable, repeatable way to get in front of new prospects every day — and have the conversation.
Scope ladder: Offers from the same seed that differ by how much of the journey you take on.
Seed Offer: The smallest shape a business can take and still be alive: "I help [audience] achieve [outcome]." Two moving parts, no product, no pricing tiers, no website.
Situation: The moment they are in — and why now, not someday. An audience is not a category; it is a person in a situation you can describe.
Source of value: Human, system, or asset. What the client is really paying for — you, your process, or something you own.
Task: One-time work.
The Business Emotions Loop: The shape every business takes: start, build, crash, learn, repeat. It does not end when you make it — it is the work.
The eight pillars: The beliefs the method rests on — execution is 99%, income comes first on purpose, watch the four vitals, engineer consistency with systems, every idea can work, every valid path still has to be built, entrepreneurship is emotional, and a business should become an asset.
The Four Vitals: The only four numbers an Income First business steers by: revenue, costs, profit and effort. Every move should serve at least one of them.
The Income/Effort Formula: Income ÷ Effort = Efficiency. Score each from 0 to 10, divide, and you learn whether the business is making your life better or quietly eating it.
The Offer Generator: The console you run the levers on. Same inputs, different fader positions, a family of offers out the other end.
The plant analogy: A business is a plant, not a machine. It grows in the market, for the market, and because of the market.
Touch intensity: How much direct human attention each client gets.
Trigger: What set the situation off.
Upsell: The second thing you sell to a customer you already have. The cheapest sale in the business.
Value-based pricing: Pricing the change in their life rather than the hours it took you to produce it.