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Want to know how to break through a revenue plateau in your business? Have you been stuck bringing in the same amount of money month after month? Are you ready to see your revenue increase and have more money in your business account? If so, keep on reading to find out how to break through a revenue plateau in your business.
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Business growth looks different for every business. For some business revenue will continue to grow month on month. However, it is also very common to hit a revenue plateau and it can happen at any stage of business. So whether you are just starting your business and struggling to grow, or whether you’ve been growing your business well and for some reason have now hit a revenue plateau in your business I’m here to say it is normal and it can be overcome.
HOW TO BREAK THROUGH A REVENUE PLATEAU IN YOUR BUSINESS
1. Review the last few months of sales in further detail
The first thing you should do if you are stuck at a revenue plateau is take a closer look at the numbers. This is especially important if you offer more than one service at one price point. Is your monthly revenue made up of recurring payments from clients who signed up months ago? Or have you been signing new clients every single month? Have you been selling the same amount of a specific service month after month? Or have you been selling a variety of services each month and they just magically keep on resulting in the same monthly revenue.
Being able to breakdown your monthly revenue for the length of your plateau should help give you more insight into how the plateau is occurring, which will help you to be able to address it.
2. Do a resource audit
In some cases, a business plateau is because the business has hit its maximum is a key area. For example, if you are delivering a 1-to-1 service and currently only have space to take on 4 new clients a month then it wouldn’t be surprising if month after month you only sign 4 new clients. With service delivery it is usually a bit easier to spot when you’ve hit the max. However, it might come up in other places. For example, if you require your potential clients to attend a sales call then you can only sign as many clients per month as sales calls your business is able to handle.
3. Raise your prices
If after reviewing the resources available to your business, you realise that you have reached the maximum capacity for service delivery you have a few different ways of being able to break through a revenue plateau in your business. Firstly, you can increase the capacity of service delivery (this could be by growing your team or if you provide the service by outsourcing other activities that are currently taking up your time). Secondly, you can raise your prices. Raising your prices will allow you to generate more income from the same amount of work/clients and will help you to break through your current revenue plateau.
Further reading: Find out how to raise your prices as a coach or consultant here.
4. Tweak your marketing and sales activities
By this point you should have discovered whether your revenue plateau is the result of supply issues. If however, you are at a plateau but have the capacity to take on more clients it is time to look at the demand side of business coin.
Ask yourself honestly “Is the reason you aren’t growing because not enough people want to buy your services?”
Answering that question is tough, but if the answer is yes and you can admit that to yourself than you can start to solve that problem. If not enough people want to buy from you then you need to have a look at your sales and marketing strategy. Go through everything and try to work out where the problem is. Is the problem that not enough people are aware of you and therefore you need to focus on increasing your visibility? Is the problem you have a large audience with people eager to consume your content, but they aren’t taking the next step to enquire to work with you? Or do you have enquiries coming your way but proposals go unanswered and sales calls result in a no.
Now to be clear you could have all of these problems, but it is usually best to only tackle one thing at a time so try and go through the whole customer journey and work out where the biggest gap exists between what you want to happen and what is currently happening.
Then it is time to start experimenting. With marketing you don’t want to change everything in one go. It makes it super difficult to understand what is working and what isn’t. Instead by experiment and changing one thing for a period of time and reviewing the impact. If it works keep doing it and if it doesn’t chuck it out!
5. Add in an additional revenue stream
A great way to break through a revenue plateau in your business is to give the business more ways to make money (aka an additional revenue stream). During your reviewing process you might have realised that a specific service is bringing in a consistent level of revenue month after month and it might be that this level is the right thing for the business. You may believe you can’t sell more of the service or you might not want to deliver more of the service. If you are in that position, then looking at other revenue streams totally makes sense.
For an additional revenue stream, you might decide to offer a new service, an online course, a digital product, a physical product, an event or even consider becoming an affiliate for another business. To choose the right additional revenue stream you’ll need to think about the time and money you are willing to invest and what makes sense based on the brand of your business and the current audience.
6. Work on your money mindset
Sometimes you can make all of the sensible strategic changes in a business and still find yourself at a revenue plateau. When this happens it usually means that there is a mindset block that is keeping you at that level.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is there anything symbolic about the revenue level I’m currently at?
- Can you envision any negative connotations of making more money in your business? If so, list all of them.
- What changes do you think would need to happen if your business generated more revenue?
- What changes do you think would need to happen in your life if your business generated more revenue?
This is just a few questions to get you started. Essentially, you want to uncover the blocks you have around earning more money and then start reframing those blocks one by one.
There are lots of emotions connect to money and if you’ve got to a point where rationally there is no reason for the business to be stuck at a level it makes sense to start exploring the emotional reasons as well.
There you have it! You’ve now know how to break through a revenue plateau in your business.
As I said at the beginning business growth is very rarely linear. It is normal to have a mixture of growth and then plateau and then growth and then plateau. However, as a business owner you can take actions to help minimise the length of the plateau.
I hope you’ve enjoying reading about how to break through a revenue plateau in your business. In the comments I would love to hear about an action you are going to take as a result of reading this blog post.
WANT HELP TO BREAK THROUGH YOUR CURRENT REVENUE PLATEAU AND NEXT YOUR SERVICE-BASED BUSINESS TO THE NEXT LEVEL?
I work with solopreneurs and (super) small service-based business owners to get clear on their business goals and then implement the right growth, marketing and sales strategies to achieve build a thriving business that supports the lifestyle they want.
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