“Don’t you make the most money from working with clients?”
That was the question, Nina, my head of operations, and recent addition to my team asked. She’d noticed my hourly rate and assumed that with the $$$ amount that I charge for coaching that was where the profits were in my business.
As I explained to her, while I continue to work with a few select clients, one-on-one, I’ve been cutting back on this source of income.
Why? Am I nuts or what?
In any business, anything you do directly with clients uses your time and even if you’re the top expert in the world, you can only in good conscience, charge so much. And ultimately working with clients limits your income and your flexibility.
After all there are only so many hours you can work each week and my goal isn’t to work more but to have time to hit the ski slopes in the winter and get out on my bike and boat in the summer.
So what’s the alternative to working for an hourly wage?
It’s going to depend on the service you provide but the concept is simple.
Growing your business is about leverage – leveraging your time, and leveraging your expertise. In my case I’ve written marketing manuals, and put together telesummits, and then I sell these on my site.
Once I have the product completed it generates income whether I’m in the office or up in Vermont on vacation, as I was two weeks ago. Which is great, but the real money, the big source of profits comes from scaling the business.
What do I mean by scaling your business?
The idea is simple. Create a service or a product and leverage it.
Here’s what the owners of the bagel shop in my town did. They opened their doors and ran the business. After a few months, or it may have been a year of working the kinks out they hired on more staff and taught others to do the day-to-day work, so they could open clones of the first business in other nearby towns.
Think about it. Once the bagel shop had attracted all the people who like fresh bagels in my small town, they’d maxed out their business and profits. Sure they could have added in weekly specials, and social media marketing and seen their profits grow by another 15-20% but that would be it.
By leveraging the exact same system they’re using in the store around the corner from my office, in two additional locations, they tripled their profits.
Isn’t that what you want to do – triple your profits this year?
In my case, I don’t have a store front to manage or need to worry about having a staff to make bagels at 4 in the morning. To scale my business, I just need to keep adding marketing partners – a strategy that can work for any business.
Which do you want to do – grow your business incrementally or scale it, and double or triple your profits?
Either way, the first step is to put a marketing system in place you can leverage to keep growing your business. Here’s the system I use which has worked for thousands of others too. It’s called Attracting More And Better Clients.
Discover how much more you could be making >>
– Charlie
P.S. Being an expert in your field is the first step. Leveraging your expertise is the key to making real money and having the freedom you want. Find out how >>
