The Smart Way to Scale Your Business When You Can’t Work More Hours

Want to know the smart way to scale your business when you can’t work more hours? For many in-demand service providers there comes a point where the only way to increase revenue is by increasing prices or scaling their business. You might be in a situation where you know you need to scale your business, but your calendar is already full and you aren’t in a position to be able to work more hours in order to start scaling your business. If you find yourself in that position – where you want to scale, but you are restricted time-wise then you are in the right place. Keep on reading to find out the smart way to scale your business when you can’t work more hours.

 

 

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THE SMART WAY TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS WHEN YOU CAN’T WORK MORE HOURS

 

 

Step 1: Free up some time

The ultimate aim is to scale your business without working more hours. To get your scalable offer up and running you are going to need some time. In some cases people will decide to put in a block of extra time to make that happen. But in this instance I’m going to assume that isn’t possible. I’m assuming that however many hours you work right now is the limit and it can’t be exceeded even for a few weeks. So the first thing you need to do is free up some time. There are two main ways to look at achieving this.

 

1 – Work with less clients – The first thing you can do is decide to change your version of ‘fully booked’ and work with less clients. Depending on the way you provide a service, it might be that as people stop working with you, you don’t replace them. Or it might be if you have set hours for availability you reduce those. Either way, the aim is to have less hours dedicated on client work / delivery each week.

 

You might be thinking “if I take on less clients I’ll make less money and I can’t afford to do that?”. One option is to increase your prices. Especially when combined with decreasing availability you can find clients will pay the increased rate and you can make the same revenue from less clients. If you don’t want to increase your prices and you can’t take a temporary decrease in revenue or you can look at option 2 for freeing up time.

 

Please note if you decide to work with less clients and take a decrease in revenue for a while, this will only be temporary. Once your scaling offer is up and running, the aim is for you to leverage your time in a way that you can make more money per hour than you did whilst working with one-to-one clients. 

 

2 – Reduce or eliminate low ROI tasks – As a service provider, not all of your working hours are going to be client-focused. There will be hours spent on doing other activities for their business. This could be marketing, sales, finance, operations, admin etc. Some of these tasks can be eliminated or reduced. It might be there a tech solution that can do it for you, it might be you hire someone to help you, or you just decide it isn’t a necessity for a period of time.

 

Either way, whether you work with less clients and/or reduce or eliminate low ROI tasks you should be in a position where you are able to have a few hours per week to dedicate to your scalable offer.

 

Step 2: Choose the right type of scalable offer

At this point, you’ve made changes with how you are working to give you some time to be able to dedicate to creating, launching and running your scalable offer, but which scalable offer is best? There are various scalable offers you can add to your offer suite in order to scale your business. However, if you are limited on time and want to be scaling to increase revenue and profit, then some scalable offers will be better for you than others.

 

You’ll want to think about the time involved for creation, time required for ongoing delivery, time needed for marketing and sales, pricing and profit margins.

 

For example, if your business model was based on having long-term one-to-one clients (either with people who had a multiple month package or on retainer) and you’ve let go of one or two to free up to the time to make, sell and run your scalable offer then it might make the most sense to have an offer which has an ongoing monthly commitment, but one that feels doable based on the hours you just got back from reducing your clients. In this scenario it might be that running a membership or mastermind feels like a good option. The added benefit of this option is you’d also have a monthly recurring revenue stream, which would help with making the decision to invest in upgrading your tech or building your team.

 

You can find out more about how to choose the right scalable offer for your business here.

 

GET ADVICE ON THE RIGHT SCALABLE OFFER AND THE SUPPORT TO LAUNCH AND SUCCESSFULLY SELL  Choosing the right scalable offer is key when time is limited. You want to ensure you’ve considered all the ongoing realities, which is you are new to scaling you’ll be unaware of. That’s why I offer one-to-one mentoring will give you the strategic advice, as well as ongoing support and accountability so you create and launch your scalable offer, and go on to have a (multi) six figure year. I’ll be by your side every step of the way to help ensure you are thinking strategically, taking intentional action and analysing your business’ performance so it continues to get better and better. Your business can only grow as much as you do. With my by your side, both you and your business will grow. For all the information and to apply (I only take on a limited number of 1:1 clients at any time) please click here.

 

 

Step 3: Create Your Scalable Offer

Once you’ve chosen what scalable offer to go ahead with, it is time to get creating. Since time is tight, you’ll want to focus on making a minimum viable product in the first instance. You don’t want to spend months creating a course to put it on sale and then no one buys it. Think about what is essential to exist when people first buy and what can wait until later? Also, what do you nee to create and what can be outsourced?

 

Step 4: Marketing and Sales

One area where service providers often don’t set aside enough time is marketing and sales. That’s why there are scalable offers sitting on websites that no one is buying. You can’t expect to just create the thing and sales to roll in. You are going to need to do sales and marketing activities.

 

Given that your time is limited, you’ll really want to think about how the marketing and sales work alongside everything else in your business. This is where having a scalable offer, which is a natural lead on from another offer, can make a huge difference. For example, it might be your scalable offer is a downsell option for another offer, or it could be you offer it to people who have already bought X, Y or Z.

 

Regardless of whether your scalable offer will naturally fit alongside something else in your offer suite or not, you’ll want to map out the entire buyer journey. Ideally you want as much of the buyer journey to happen without you. You want to create sales-generating marketing where people complete the whole buyer journey and purchase without ever having any interaction from you. Now this isn’t always possible. For a mastermind or a group programme, people might have questions and want to talk to you. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but you’ll have to be realistic about how much time you can devote to sales each week and based on your conversion what you can then expect to make in terms of sales each week.

 

Knowing you are going to need to do sales calls and you aren’t able to work more hours might make you decide to go down the route of selling something evergreen (where people can join at any time), rather than using a launch method as you know you can’t dedicate enough time during a launch window to close enough sales for your sales target.

 

PERSONALISED MENTORSHIP TO ENSURE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT MARKETING TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS  A scalable offer without scalable marketing is pointless. With over 15 years in marketing my one-to-one mentoring will ensure you don’t just choose the right scalable offer, but you are able to successfully sell it, alongside everything else. Doing this all by yourself, with no strategic support, is difficult. That’s why I offer one-to-one mentoring that will give you the strategic advice, as well as ongoing support and accountability so you create and launch your scalable offer, and go on to have a (multi) six figure year. I’ll be by your side every step of the way to help ensure you are thinking strategically, taking intentional action and analysing your business’ performance so it continues to get better and better. Your business can only grow as much as you do. With my by your side, both you and your business will grow. For all the information and to apply (I only take on a limited number of 1:1 clients at any time) please click here.

 

Step 5: Grow your team  

You’ve got a scalable offer, it’s up and running, sales are coming in and it’s proven to work. I already mentioned how you could free up time right at the beginning by hiring, but you might not have felt in a position to do so, especially if you were reducing one-to-one clients at that point. But now with the scalable offer up and running, you’ll have more money in the business and you might feel more confident to invest a proportion of that revenue into hiring someone – whether it be a VA, OBM, community manager, marketing assistant or someone else. The point of the hire is to deal with work you don’t have to do. This can be directly attributed to the scalable offer, so you can check that even with that hire you’ve got a profit margin you are happy with.

 

That’s it. You now know the smart way to scale your business when you can’t work more hours.

 

Don’t let not being able to work more hours stop you from fulfilling your desire to scale your business. As you’ve seen, when you are smart about scaling your business, it can happen without you working more. Without being able to invest extra time to get your scalable offer up and running, it might be that you have to temporarily reduce your income or invest some extra money. Regardless, with the right scalable offer, you’ll be able to replace the lost income from reducing one-to-one clients, make enough money to cover the extra tech and team, and then some.

 

I hope you’ve found reading this blog post useful.

 

One scalable offer can change your business forever. If you  are one-to-one service provider who is looking to add in a one-to-many scalable offer so you can leverage your time to make more money without working more hours then my 1:1 mentoring would be perfect for you. My 1:1 business and marketing mentoring provides strategic advice, support and accountability to help ensure you grow your business on your terms.

To find out more about my 1:1 mentoring click here.

 

GET THE BUSINESS MENTORSHIP TO SUCCESSFULLY SCALE YOUR BUSINESS. There is a consider when scaling your business, especially when you are short of time. You don’t have the time to spend hours googling what to do, or wasting time with trial and error. That’s why I offer one-to-one mentoring that will give you the strategic advice, as well as ongoing support and accountability so you create and launch your scalable offer, and go on to have a (multi) six figure year. I’ll be by your side every step of the way to help ensure you are thinking strategically, taking intentional action and analysing your business’ performance so it continues to get better and better. Your business can only grow as much as you do. With my by your side, both you and your business will grow. For all the information and to apply (I only take on a limited number of 1:1 clients at any time) please click here.