Your Kill Line

In gaming there’s a concept called the kill line.It’s the threshold where your character’s health is so low that a single hit finishes you. You’re technically alive - still moving, still fighting - but one wrong step and it’s over.

Chinese social media just made the term go viral as a way to describe economic fragility in the US. They are convinced that the US is at the Kill Line and it’s got a huge homelessness problem. And this is something that’s actually being pushed a little bit by the Chinese government as well.

Whether that’s true or not, I think there’s a really interesting comparison for coaches - A lot of coaches are living on their own kill line. They’re not financially ruined, but operationally, one bad month away from panic, one moment where three or four clients leave at the same time away from feeling they’re really struggling.

So even when they are doing well, it feels like they are absorbed in client work and they’ve got no time to write, no space to think about their positioning, no capacity to build the thing that makes next year different from this one, no room to experiment with an idea that may or may not pay off in six months’ time.

And lots and lots of coaches are surviving. Not that many are building and moving away from the place that they’re at. Then clients leave, a launch doesn’t perform, you get ill for a couple of weeks and the whole thing wobbles a little bit. And suddenly you’re not able to think about your brand or your intellectual property or your content systems.

This is where I think business advice goes a bit wrong because it tells you to get more clients. It focuses solely on how do we increase revenue month‑on‑month with short‑term things that will increase revenue every single month. Nobody tells you that your full diary or your capacity with no margin might be just a more comfortable version of a fragile business.

In my experience, the coaches who break this cycle don’t do it by finding loads more clients every single month. They create a distance from their kill line. Enough margin that one hit doesn’t send them into survival mode, that they’ve got enough breathing room where they can start to do relationship building, brand building. Six months of work that doesn’t pay immediately but might pay in the next 12 to 24 months.

That distance to me is the whole game of business.
And it’s not about your capacity and whether you are at capacity.
It is whether you can build anything meaningful while you are there.