Today’s post is all about how to remove the income ceiling from your business!
I met with a lady recently, who earns $3,000 a month from her home-based, coaching business. She wanted me to help her increase her income to $7,500 a month. As her business model is to sell her time for an hourly fee, I started by asking her how many “spare” hours she had available.
All things being equal, to increase her income by more than 100%, she would need more than 100% extra time each week. She explained she was already working flat-out, 9 hours a day, 6 days a week. In other words, with her current business model, her business had already reached it’s income ceiling. This is what’s commonly known as a scaling problem. Her current business model doesn’t scale to allow her to reach her income target.
Here’s the thing: There are only so many working days in a year and your marketplace will only be prepared to pay a certain fee for your time. Once these two have been maxed-out, you hit a scaling issue.
Here’s how you can remove the income ceiling from your business and how I helped that coach make her business infinitely scalable!
Scaling your services
You may decide to hire people and train them to do what you do (if you can), but many small business owners prefer not to; especially those who work from home. If they decide to employ more people, they need to consider investing in commercial premises and stocking those premises; which is expensive and a risk, as they have no idea if the new business model will work. Equally, if they elect to hire people to work from home, there are issues regarding quality monitoring. Both those models can work, and for many they do work (extremely well), but it’s not for everyone.
In my opinion, it’s also an outdated model for most small business service providers, who want to have a great income and a great lifestyle too!
In the example of the coach I mentioned earlier, the route was to stop her exchanging her time for money. We looked at her developing a very interesting 12 part course, which is delivered over a 12 month period to clients who pay her an annual fee. The course consists of workbooks, videos and a members only website, packed with useful information. If the marketplace decides this digital product is great value, once it’s developed it can be scaled indefinitely. There’s no income ceiling. With the right marketing and a strong product, this coach can achieve a 6 figure (or 7 figure) income goal with no scaling issues.
Here’s a suggestion!
If you are a service provider, you have specialist knowledge, which you can develop into a high value product or program. Make your product or program something that can be downloaded, like the coach I mentioned earlier, and you eliminate the need for; stock, storage, distribution and suppliers. People like myself, with large, targeted readerships can sell your product and collectively get it in front of millions of people each year.
If you know what you are doing, the potential is huge.
Today is a great time for you to start thinking about the scalability of your current business model. It’s not just a case of deciding what you want to earn, looking at your hourly rate and then figuring how many hours you have available to sell. You also need to consider what your quality of life will be, if you do manage to maximize all your chargeable hours. For example, I know “successful” accountants and lawyers, who have to work 14/16 hour days, following a day’s illness or even an IT issue.
A great free resource
If you want to know more about the best way to market a product or program online, I have some great news for you! I have a new free site, which shows you how to harness Internet marketing and content marketing to develop your own massively valuable online marketing channel. It will give you lots of ideas on how you can develop a more scalable, profitable (and fun) business model! It’s packed with free information with more being added all the time, so if this sounds interesting, check it out and remember to subscribe.
IMPORTANT: If you want to make more sales, boost your profits and grow an amazing business, this will help you!