Do you think it’s time you found new ways of Growing Business? The problem is “growing” means different things to different people. In the beginning, the challenge was to grow from “not making money” to “making money”. Moving forward to when you started making money, growing might have shifted to “becoming profitable”. I could go on and on incrementally moving along a growth scale, but that is not what I want to talk about. I am just not a fan of incremental growth. I want to talk about significant growth. You know, the type that is a game or life changer.
For many business owners, trying to figure how to increase their revenues 5% or 10% over the previous year becomes a mind numbing challenge. You pour over:
- Sales and financial data,
- Current product/services offerings,
- Customers
- Suppliers
- New products or services that you might offer, etc.
Eventually, you decide that you have looked at every possibility over and over and “settle” on some small percentage of growth. After all the work you did, “settle” sounds like a weak outcome. I believe that the path that one chooses in looking at business growth is the basis for the final result. Most people approach the problem looking at things incrementally, which usually limits the results.
As you move along considering all the business data that you have, your subconscious is also considering the personal effects of generating more incremental revenue. This is especially true for professional service providers whose business model is based on trading dollars for time. Professions like:
- Business consultants
- Business coaches
- Marketing consultants
- Personal or Life coaches
- Many other job titles in the Information Industry
These professionals mostly base their revenues on trading dollars for time.
2 Choices for New Ways to Grow Your Business
More importantly, if you trade dollars for time, then every time you think about growing your revenues you also think about how this impacts you personally.
It usually comes down to two choices:
- Work More Hours or
- Raise Your Rates (Although, you might be concerned that raising rates might mean losing some clients
Ok, so what is the answer? First, I want to preface this by saying that whatever solution you decide on, there will always be an element where you will be trading dollars for time. Where I believe significant growth opportunity lies is in combining elements of One-on-One activities with alternative One-to-Many programs.
For example, if you are charging $500 per hour for consulting, then when you meet for an hour, you bill $500. Clearly, your clients value the information you are providing and believe it is worth your fee. Now, suppose you take that same information and deliver it in another way where you are talking to a number of people at the same time? What might that look like? The basic premise is to use a process that allows you to talk to a larger number of people, who pay you for your information, that results in your working One-to-Many. But, you might not know how this might work, and you certainly don’t have the time to learn a whole lot of new things.
First, I am a big fan of Dan Sullivan, The Strategic Coach, and his 80/20 Rule around new projects. Dan believes that generally 80% of what you need to accomplish in a project is part of your Core; it is what you know and are probably good at. The remaining 20% is not in your Core, but where do a lot of people begin to focus? On the 20% since their belief is that this will be what hold the project up or will cause it to be unsuccessful. Now, if you think about that decision, it just does not make sense for a number of reasons. Even if you do learn it, at best, you are a trainee because training produces trainees. Would you look to hire a trainee to take on 20% of your project’s success? I wouldn’t. Also, it is highly unlikely that this would ever become part of their core. When people chose to take the 20% on, it consumes 80% of their time and usually ends up stopping the project. My suggestion is to find someone where your 20% is their 80%. Combining your 80% and their 80% of your 20% adds up to your covering about 94% of the project.
This solution includes a combination of:
- Creating a Facebook Business Page
- Using Facebook to build lists and place advertisements,
- Using Eventbrite to process orders, provide access to those who buy, collecting money and sending you a check
- Using YouTube Live to deliver your content
Clearly, I have no intention of trying to convince you to go out and learn all these things in order to start delivering your content in a One-to-Many format.
Delivering Your Content: One-to-Many
Using the 80/20 Rule, here is how I envision this would work.
- You engage someone to build a customer audience on Facebook
- Run a campaign to attract that audience with Facebook Ads
- Have a group like Eventbrite handle the reservations and access and collect the money
- You deliver your information using YouTube Live.
Starting to sound a little to techie for you or like it will cost a fortune? Or maybe this sounds like this will be too time consuming? Then keep reading because none of these are true.
There are lots of people around who understand Facebook and how to create customer or look-alike audiences. They can build you a Facebook Business page rather quickly that can be used to build your list of potential people who want what you know. This leaves you to focus on your 80%, creating and delivering content based on your expertise. Once you have this built, you can use it over and over again attracting more potential clients into your business.
Budgeting: New Ways to Grow Your Business
You can also get some help running Facebook Ads where you offer a one-hour Webinar using the same information that you use with your clients. If your clients are happy paying you $500 for this information, then how do you suppose people you are reaching out to would react to your asking $50 to get this information? I realize that this is 10% of your hourly rate, but what if 100 people decided to take you up on your offer? You would generate $5,000 for that hour!
You might be interested in my illustrating not just how much you could generate, but what type of expenses you might incur?
- Facebook work might cost around $400 to $500.
- Facebook Ads Budget of around $200
- Eventbrite to handle the reservations, pass out tokens to the people so that they can see the event, handle the money and send you a check will cost you a whole $300.
So, for $5,000, your costs would be around $1,000, which leaves you with $4,000 for that hour.
You might be asking yourself if I mistakenly left out the fees that YouTube will charge for using their facilities? I did not, there are no charges. More importantly, when your session ends, YouTube will send you a link to an MP4 (movie) of your session!
Think about what you can do with that MP4? You could run another campaign on Facebook advertising your event, get Eventbrite to do what they do, and when it comes time to start the event, instead of turning on your camera, you hit play and replay your event. Remember you already have the basic architecture for this in place.
Oh right, I just mentioned a couple of things that I haven’t mentioned. What type of equipment will you need on your end and what will that cost? Pretty simply, you probably have all the technology in your office already.
- Laptops and desktops all come with built in cameras and microphones
- Smartphones like the iPhone 6’s and 7’s have great cameras
- iPads also have great cameras you can use
You might need to purchase a tripod to put your phone or tablet on while doing your Webinar. These are very inexpensive costing about $20, and are available for either your desktop or floor models.
I think it is time to circle back to my main point. There are many ways to grow your business. However, you might want to consider re-thinking how you approach growth. I am a big believer in Using Technologies nor Learning Technologies. As I said earlier, I am a big fan of Dan Sullivan’s 80/20 rule. So make part of your planning to focus your efforts on the 80% you are good at and find someone, like me, who can take care of the other 20%.
I plan on continuing to talk about using technologies through a series of posts, and I also have videos on the subject on my YouTube Channel. So you should plan on checking in from time to time.
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