As a woman entrepreneur, growing your business is likely on your mind every day.
Do you wonder which growth strategies, tactics, and tools will work for you and your clients?
Does it feel time consuming and overwhelming to choose a business growth path?
You’re not alone. Not by a long shot.
After all, identifying and implementing growth tools is just one of the many hats you wear. You don’t want to be mired in trying to make the right choice, when there are hundreds of options, do you?
Especially as a business owner who provides content and services to your clients, you rely heavily on using a one-to-one approach to serve your clients. You just simply don’t have the time to weigh every option all the time, while also providing the kind of service your clients expect.
One thing that makes your revenue growth task harder year over year is the speed of change taking place among technologies available to support your business. Many of your competitors are actively using these technologies, which allows them to potentially grow faster. Add to that, the saturation of content in our always-on world, and it becomes impossible to keep up with by yourself..
The reality is, when you’re identifying prospects, reaching out to them, and creating and distributing your content, you need the right tools.
“You must be visible and consistently provide value to your current and future clients…
Why? Because your ideal clients are constantly looking for answers, help, and insights. You must be the expert resource to provide them with that information.
A significant percentage of life and business coaches, health practitioners, trainers, and expert consultants like you, are looking at business growth the way it was 10, 15, or 20 years ago.
Their focus is on incrementally growing as a percent of revenues. So they look at growing 10% or 20% or 30 % at the high end. Is this is how you’ve analyzed your growth options? If you have, you’re in good company. That’s the traditional way of assessing and calculating your options.
For example, if this was you and your last year’s sales totaled $200K, then you start looking at what would it take to grow it to 10% or $220K, 20% or $240K, or at most 30% or $260K. Right?
For starters, using this approach you would likely try to figure out how You can do more. Although, aren’t you already working pretty hard?
- Where would these additional hours come from?
- Consider the amount of effort you might spend for $20K, $40K at $60k of incremental (there’s that word again!) revenue?
Pinpoint Your Growth Rate
Remember, we said that the related industries are growing exponentially. What do you think happens when you grow incrementally while your industry grows exponentially? For one thing, the information and training industry constantly introduces new products and tools that make growing your business much easier.
You can address a wider audience, build a larger prospect/customer list faster than you could without these new programs and tools. However, you have to start thinking about your growth differently than you currently do.
If you’re tracking what’s going on in your industry or attending conferences where entrepreneurs discuss growth plans, you’ve probably heard your peers talking about having goals to triple their revenues in the next 12 months. You might even hear talk of 10X growth! You might think that those growth rates are unrealistic, impossible, or outright lies. If so, it’s probably because you have only heard the results that some people have achieved and not enough of the “this is how I did it”.
My intention is to post a series of articles that will provide you with insights on how the digital information product and content industry is evolving and what savvy entrepreneurs are doing to take full advantage of it. I’m also going to share what I’m doing with these technologies to grow my own business.
Let me give one example to show you how this can work for you. This is an example of how to expand a business that’s primarily providing services to clients using a one-to-one delivery process and adding a completely new one-to-many delivery program.
Analyze How You’re Growing Your Business
Let’s say your hourly consulting fee is $500, which means that you meet with your client either in person or online to teach and deliver your content. Now, your clients believe that you and your content is valuable and worth the $500 you charge them.
Suppose you take this content, repackage it a bit to deliver to a larger audience, and have 100 people get this information through an online webinar? Whats more, you charge each attendee $50. Total revenue for your hour is $5,000.
That’s a pretty profitable way of growing your business, right? And, what if you got a free video recording of your presentation? You could then schedule another presentation where you got another 100 other people to pay $50? That’s an additional $5,000 but this time it is very different. You have the participants login 15 minutes before the program begins and interact with them through a Chatroll. When the program starts, you hit PLAY and show the recording. Your time involved in delivering a second or subsequent programs is minutes not the hour plus a few minutes you were involved on the first one.
For the two programs, you generated $10,000 and spent about 90 minutes of your actual time! Let’s compare, in order to generate $10,000 with your current method of serving clients, you’d have to spend 20 hours. Consider this, every time you schedule a program using your recording, you could generate $5,000. What’s more, you’d only spend about 15 minutes interacting with your attendees who log into the program. Now, this is an example of how exponential thinking works.
Later, I’ll go into more detail about this in upcoming posts. For now, I’ve mentioned how technology is evolving exponentially.
The good news is, the capabilities and costs to create and deliver teaching programs online have become less expensive in the past four years. Once you change your revenue growth approach, you’ll deliver your same excellent services without leaving your desk.
The best part, you don’t need expensive cameras or recording equipment. In future posts, I’ll go over what equipment and tools you’ll need in greater detail.
Your Next Steps for Growing Your Business
Imagine how you’d feel if you had a new, tightly automated process to serve your clients?
How many more programs could you put into place?
How many more of your ideal clients could you serve?
Here’s what to do now:
- Make a list of each part of your client-servicing process and identify the parts you’d like to not do.
- Write down the additional programs you could implement.
- Calculate how many more clients you could bring in.
This list will be useful for you when you read my next post.
If you’d like to receive more ideas and strategies to help grow your business in your inbox, enter your name and email below. I’ll also send you a free chapter from my most recent #1 International Bestseller, Spin Your Content into Gold.
To your success,
Jim
Shirleen SUSAN says
hello there Jim ….
We met the other night at the WRS meeting. I was hoping to connect and do all the wonderful things to become a millionaire plus.
Can I purchase a book or can we meet? Lunch possibly…
Jim Butz says
Hi Susan,
I will be happy to talk with you although my preference, even with my current clients, is to use either a phone call or a Zoom video call. I have grown to dislike driving and I value my time too much to waste it driving.
I would not recommend purchasing my most recent book, which I published back in July 2017. So much has changed in the past two years both in terms of technologies and the ones I use. I plan on putting up two new blog posts a week over the next few months. I also plan to update my current book and title it “Spin Your Content Into Gold 2020”.
I have a lot of flexibility over the next week since I am actively redesigning and implementing changes to the various sites that I use and going through a few online training programs.
Regards,
Jim Butz