Liberatory Business with Simone Seol

51. The 10-to-1 rule of profitability

• Simone Grace Seol • Episode 51

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What if you stopped obsessing over “Is this post going to get me a client?” and started asking, “How much real help am I offering my people?” In this episode, Simone introduces her 10-to-1 Rule of Profitability – the idea that when you consistently put out 10 “units” of true help into the world, about 1 “unit” comes back to you as profit… and how that changes the way you think about marketing, generosity, and boundaries.

This isn’t about being a martyr or giving yourself away for free. It’s about becoming deeply useful in ways that are sustainable for you.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

  • What the 10-to-1 Rule of Profitability actually is (and why the exact math doesn’t matter as much as the mindset)
  • The crucial difference between information and real value – with concrete examples for artists, nutritionists, and coaches
  • Why hoarding your “best stuff” in the name of protecting your paid offers often backfires
  • The shadow side of “giving value”: unpaid emotional labor, especially for women and women of color
  • How to tell whether you’re being genuinely generous or quietly abandoning yourself to earn worth or approval
  • Reflection questions to help you set loving boundaries that make generosity more possible, not less
  • How thinking in 10x value terms can soften your attachment to immediate results and help you play the long game in your business

If you’ve been feeling stuck between “I should give more” and “I am so tired of giving for free,” this episode will help you recalibrate how you think about service, profitability, and your own capacity.

Simone Seol:

Welcome to another episode of Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol, and thank you so much for listening.

Simone Seol:

I want to introduce you today to a concept that I came up with called The 10-to-One Rule of Profitability. So here's the idea: if you put out 10 units of helpfulness in your marketing, in your sales, in your business, you will get one unit — say 10% of that — back in the form of people actually paying you, in the form of profit.

Simone Seol:

Now, of course, how do you measure what a unit of helpfulness is, right? Like, what is one unit of service? Who knows? But if you just roughly think about it — if you help other people 10 times, you're going to profit one of those times. It's always going to come back to you. The more you serve, a tenth of the value you put out into the world, a tenth of the energy of effective help, of generous service, is going to come back to you in the form of profit.

Simone Seol:

Okay, I have a lot to explain — but let's start with this one. Why 10? Why not 8? Why not 15? How do you know it's not 20? Listen: I don’t. But 10 seemed like a nice number to illustrate the idea that if you want to make money with your business, you should always be focusing on helping other people, serving other people, being useful to the people who follow you, who are in your world, who are connected with you, as much as you possibly can.

Simone Seol:

With the caveat that this is not an exact science, I find that a lot of people — when they get into business, whether it's creative work or coaching or anything that happens online — have a fear of giving out free help. A fear of sharing too much of what they know. You know, hoarding all the good stuff and only sharing surface-level things as freebies or posts — not the really good stuff.

Simone Seol:

And I think this comes from a kind of scarcity thinking that goes, “If I give away all my good concepts, if I give away all the good things that I would give to my paying customers or clients, why would people pay me?” Right? So this is understandable — but actually a mistake.

Simone Seol:

Because if you were to share generously all of your best stuff, the things that you might want to reserve for the people who pay the most, and you actually start sharing that in a really powerful way, guess what's going to happen? People's lives will change. They're going to download or read or watch something of yours and go, “Oh my God. That’s a great idea. This is helping me right now. This is solving a problem I had. This gives me an insight into something I've been struggling with. Wow, wow, wow.”

Simone Seol:

And then they start implementing those changes, and their lives are better off because they interacted with your stuff. And the impression they're going to be left with is: This is someone who really gets it. This is somebody who can help me.

Simone Seol:

Now, let me be clear about what I mean by giving value, because I see a lot of people who think they're giving tons of value, but they're actually just giving information. They're just pouring stuff out, and that is not the same thing.

Simone Seol:

Information is like: “Here are 10 tips for X.” “Here's what I learned today.” “Did you know XYZ?” Information is the stuff you can Google. You can ask ChatGPT for information, advice, and tips. It doesn't require you to actually understand the person that you're talking to.

Simone Seol:

Value is: you understand that someone’s really struggling with something, and you give them a perspective shift, an insight, a reframe, a tool, a piece of guidance that actually helps them move forward.

Simone Seol:

Let me give you an example.

Simone Seol:

Let's say you're a textile artist. Just information dumping would be posting, “Here are five natural dye techniques you can try.” Value would be instead noticing that people in your world keep saying they want to try natural dyeing but feel intimidated because they think they need a full studio setup and expensive equipment. So you create something that shows people how to do beautiful natural dyeing in a tiny apartment kitchen with stuff from the grocery store — addressing the actual barrier keeping people stuck.

Simone Seol:

Or say you are a nutritionist. Information is: “Here's how to meal prep on Sundays to eat healthier all week.” Value is: you notice that a lot of the people who follow you are exhausted parents who barely have time to shower, let alone spend three hours chopping vegetables on Sunday. So instead, you share how to build actually nourishing meals from two ingredients: rotisserie chicken and pre-washed greens — meeting people where they actually are instead of where you think they “should” be.

Simone Seol:

One more example. Let's say you're a marketing coach. Information dumping might be: “Here’s why you need to use storytelling in your marketing.” Value is: “I see you have incredible stories, but you dismiss them as not that interesting because you're comparing yourself to people with dramatic lives. Here’s why your specific quiet stories about your creative process actually matter more than you think — and here's how to tell that story in a way that connects.”

Simone Seol:

You see the difference? Information is generic. It’s not speaking to anyone’s specific context. Value comes from understanding what's actually happening in someone’s life and offering something that helps with their specific reality.

Simone Seol:

And every time I talk about generosity, I have to talk about the issue of unpaid labor — especially for women, especially women of color — because the expectation that you’re going to educate people for free, do emotional labor and intellectual labor endlessly — it’s real and it’s exhausting.

Simone Seol:

But there’s a difference between generosity that comes from genuine kindness, and “giving” that comes from fear or obligation or trying to prove your worth.

Simone Seol:

Genuine kindness looks like: somebody asks you a question in your DMs and you genuinely want to help them, so you answer. You have the capacity. You’re not resentful. You’re not keeping score. You’re not thinking, “Maybe this will turn into a client.” You’re just being a helpful person.

Simone Seol:

Depletion looks like: you’re answering DMs, hopping on calls, doing unpaid consulting because you feel like you have to in order to grow your business. You’re afraid people will see you as unhelpful. Or you’re thinking, “If I’m just helpful enough, someone will finally value me.”

Simone Seol:

That’s not generosity. That’s trying to earn your worth. That’s trying to earn other peoples’ good opinion.

Simone Seol:

So the question isn’t, “Should I answer all the DMs and comments?” It's not, “Should I help people for free?” The question is: Whatever I do, am I doing it from genuine desire to be helpful — or am I doing it because I’m scared of what will happen if I don’t?

Simone Seol:

If it’s the second, that’s not smart business strategy. It’s self-abandonment. And people can feel that energy, I promise you — and that energy is very hard to value.

Simone Seol:

This is why boundaries matter so much. Not punitive boundaries. Not walls. But boundaries that feel loving to yourself. Boundaries that allow you to do your best work and show up as your most capacious self again and again.

Simone Seol:

Real generosity requires that you be resourced. It requires that you have something to give from. That means protecting your energy, protecting your time, protecting your capacity to do actual work.

Simone Seol:

Here are some questions to help you figure out what your boundaries might be:

Simone Seol:

When someone asks for your help, what’s your first feeling? Is it excitement? A genuine desire to help? Or is it annoyance, dread, obligation? Your body is going to know the difference before your brain does.

Simone Seol:

After you’ve helped someone, how do you feel? Energized and good? Or drained and resentful?

Simone Seol:

And here’s a big one: If this person never hired you, never referred you, never gave you anything back — would you still feel good about having helped them? If the answer is no, then don’t do it. Because that’s not generosity — that’s a covert transaction you’re trying to make happen.

Simone Seol:

When you have wise boundaries and are giving from a capacious place, there’s a really cool pattern I’ve observed: the good you put out there comes back to you in ways you could not have imagined.

Simone Seol:

I’ll be nice to someone I met one time — give them a compliment I genuinely meant — and they’re so touched they keep up with my work. They tell a friend about me. A year later, that friend buys one of my courses and I make $500. You have to be unattached to how the goodness comes back to you — but have faith that it accumulates. And keep showing up.

Simone Seol:

Not in big, grandiose ways. Even the smallest ways count.

Simone Seol:

So here’s the rough math I like to think about: if you want to make $1,000, you should be creating value that feels equivalent to about $10,000 worth of help. You want to make a million dollars? Amazing. What would it be like for you to give out $10M worth of service into the world?

Simone Seol:

Let me be clear: this is arbitrary and subjective. It’s hard to calculate the exact dollar value of creative work. But I still find it helpful to think in these terms, because in my experience, it takes the pressure off needing immediate returns and brings the focus back to being useful.

Simone Seol:

When you think, “If I want to receive, I need to first give 10 times that,” you stop obsessing over whether your next post is going to get you a client. You stop performing. You stop calculating every single thing you do.

Simone Seol:

And when your work is more intangible — emotional, spiritual, intellectual labor — try this: pretend, just for the sake of the game, that you could put a dollar value on what you’re giving. What would it be? Think about the last time someone helped you with something that mattered to you — even if it was intangible. A perspective shift, a piece of writing, a song, a framework that fundamentally shifted something for you. If you had to put a dollar value on that — not what you paid, but what it was worth — what would it be?

Simone Seol:

That’s the kind of value I’m talking about.

Simone Seol:

I think the people who are the most miserable, who complain the most, who say they hate social media the most, tend to be the people who are always thinking, “What am I getting out of it? I did a lot of social media and didn’t get many clients. Why aren’t people engaging with me?” It’s all me, me, me. It makes people unhappy, and it doesn’t make them money either.

Simone Seol:

Alright, my friend. The 10-to-one rule is not about keeping score or being transactional. It’s about remembering that building a business is fundamentally about being useful to people. When you focus on that, the money tends to follow.

Simone Seol:

Okay, so I hope you have a wonderful day of serving more and earning more, and I’ll talk to you next time. Bye.