3 Steps To Free Yourself From The Day-To-Day

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Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in the day-to-day of your business?

Like you’re always reacting to everything going on around you and there’s no time to do the fun stuff?

I was talking to a client the other day and we were reflecting on the work that she’s done with us in the Accelerator Program that we have.

When she came to us, she was stuck in the day-to-day and she couldn’t seem to lift herself out of it no matter what she tried.

Less than 6 months later, she’s taking regular work-free vacations, she’s cut her hours down by more than half, her revenue is up and her clients are getting better results than ever.

How did all of this happen?

There were really three things: Read more

Use the Impact Matrix To Scale Your High-Touch Work

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When I’m working with clients — whether I’m doing an intensive or having a jam session with one of our Accelerator clients — one of my favorite questions to tackle is this one:

How do I help clients create amazing results without working 1-on-1 with them personally?

When you offer high-value products and services, it can be challenging to figure out how to scale it up without losing the high-touch part of the work you love … or turning your business into one of those highly leveraged models that herd people into group programs.

Since it’s such a popular question, I decided to record this short video to answer it.

Inside, I share the 4 different models you can follow, and which ONE we’ve found to work best for scaling up a client-based business.

So let’s dive into this. Read more

Get Off the Revenue Rollercoaster

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Feast or famine.

Inconsistent income.

The revenue rollercoaster.

No matter what you call it, few things feel harder than not being able to predict how much money your business is going to make every month.

Today, I want to talk about how you can create more predictability, in terms of the revenue that your business brings in.

Because if there’s one thing I hear all the time, is how tired people are of being on the revenue roller coaster. Inconsistent income. Feast or famine.

Whatever you call it, let’s be honest: it sucks.

And it can be a real problem when you’re trying to figure out how to grow your business—how much you can spend on team, for example. It becomes really tough when you can’t predict how much you’ll bring in next month.

So in terms of how we tackle this, it’s part of what we do in our business every week and it’s also what we do with our Accelerator clients: we have a weekly scorecard.

But this scorecard isn’t about tracking everything and it’s not about tracking revenue, because revenue is the result of other actions we take.

And so we’ve got a method, it’s something I picked up from a bunch of places, from books like the 12 week year, various coaches and consultants we’ve worked with, some of this is from my friend Angela Lauria, from Tara Gentile …

Here’s how it goes.

1. Start by working backwards

How many leads will you need to get, for you not just to stay in business, but to grow?

This means knowing your conversion rate. If it’s sales calls, are you converting 25%? 50%? 80%?

And then, how many clients do you want. 10 clients? 50% conversion? You’ll need 20 sales calls.

2. Make a plan for what you’ll do if you aren’t getting them.

Tara Gentile calls this doing a pre-mortem.

  • What will you do if you aren’t at 25% of your calls in week 1?
  • 50% after week 2?
  • What are you going to do if you aren’t at 75% of the number after week 3?

Make a plan so that when things go off the rails, you can get them back on track.

3. Put your numbers into a scorecard.

Keep this simple; just a few numbers. For us, it’s number of leads, conversion rate, number of new clients.

So if you need 20 sales calls in a month, you need to be getting on 5 calls per week.

Track this week by week, so that every week you know if you’re on track. And if you’re not, you can implement the plans from step #2.

4. Lastly, assign it out.

Will you be doing the sales calls and lead gen?

If so, what do you need to remove from your plate to make it happen?

Or should someone else on your team be figuring out what the targets should be, figuring out how to reach them, making the contingency plans, and so on?

No matter who it ends up being, it needs to be assigned to someone as their responsibility.

So whether it’s you doing it, or someone else … those are the 4 things we’ve found to be super helpful:

  • We need to know our leading indicators
  • We need to know what you’ll do if you’re trending under where you should be
  • We need a system to monitor and adjust our progress
  • And we need to make sure that you, your team — that you have the capacity to make it all happen.

So which of these four things would help your business most right now? I’d love to hear from you.

And if you’re having a hard time figuring out what that would look like for you, feel free to reach out.

Send a message on Facebook, and I’ll see if and how I can help …

And we’ll talk again very, very soon.

Bust Through Your Revenue Ceiling

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Hitting a revenue ceiling sucks.

While everyone else is freaking out about how the latest change to the Facebook algorithm is going to kill their lead gen …

There you sit.

A calendar chock-full of client work, no time to take on anything more, and still not enough money is coming in.

I remember when I first hit that point, I tried following all the advice about how to “scale quickly.”

I built group programs. I brought on contractors. I raised my prices. I switched to retainers and productized my services.

And I just ended up more stressed, more frustrated, and with less money and time to show for it.

Maybe you can relate.

So what do you do when you’re in that situation?

Here are three steps you can take if you want to be able to expand your business’ growth capacity and blow through that revenue ceiling.

Here they are.

1. Get the Cash Flowing

The first thing you need is to free up some cashflow.

That’s pretty obvious. If you don’t have cashflow, you can’t invest to grow your business.

Now, that might mean you need to raise your prices, it might mean that you need to reduce the amount of effort that goes into delivering your product, it might mean you need to do both.

But we need to free up your cashflow to a point where 15% of the money that comes in not being spent; staying in the business as profit.

Once you’ve got that in place and you got the cashflow sorted out, then you can go to step number two, which is to start to reallocate.

2. Reallocate

If you’ve been able to set aside 15% for profit, you can now temporarily reduce that to 10% and use the difference to fund your growth.

You can use that to hire someone. You can use that to reinvest in the growth of your business. You can use it in any number of ways.

But the key is that the investment that you make should see a return on that investment. If you hire someone, they should increase your business’ ability to generate more revenue.

That way, the costs remain the same, but your revenue increases.

Over time, your profit will also increase back up to 15%. It gets back up to 15%, you can start to reinvest again, drop it down to 10, allow that investment to achieve its return …

You get into this really nice cycle where you’re able to continue to grow your business without hitting a ceiling.

3. Don’t Save Time, Expand It

So once you’ve got the profit, How do you reinvest?

A lot of people think, “Oh, I should hire someone” and that can be a great answer.

But when you’re hiring, it’s really important to think about expanding time, not just saving time.

Because the truth is, there’s only so much time you can save. Hiring a VA may give you a few extra hours a week but what if you were to hire someone to do sales calls or to do your coaching calls?

Then you’re starting to create more time, more capacity, more ability to do amazing things in your business.

So, when you hire, think about how you can create time instead of just saving time.

Your Turn

That’s what I’ve got for you today; just three really quick things to look at if you feel like you’re in a situation where you’re at a revenue ceiling.

The question is, which of these three things is going to be the thing that’s going to make the biggest difference for you?

Is it freeing up cashflow, is it reallocating profit, or is it expanding your time through hiring instead of saving time?

Send me a message on Facebook; I’d love to hear which of these three things you’re going to prioritize … or if you don’t know we can chat about it, and find an answer together.

How to Beat the Short-Term, Long-Term Tug Of War

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The other day, I was chatting with a client and a few things came up that I wanted to share with you.

As a bit of background, this client has a really successful coaching business, and we’d spent quite a bit of time getting her foundation solid.

We killed off products that weren’t working, re-focused her on the clients that she gets the best results for, and started getting her profits in line.

And for what she needed at the time, it was the perfect medicine.

But she was feeling like her business was one big game of tug of war. Too many things pulling at her attention, too many possible priorities, too many things to work to.

So we sat down and talked it through.

One of the things we looked at was why she was getting so yanked around.

She asked me,

“How do you decide what to focus on? How do you balance the long terms with the short term, especially when you want to bring in some extra cash or hiring someone? How does one even go about that?”

Now, I don’t know if that’s something that you’ve ever experienced:

Where you are in a constant tug-of-war between the long-term and the short-term, with too many good options and no real clear idea of which one will actually get you where you want to go.

But just in case you are, here’s the process we take our clients through:

Read more

Why Selling More Hasn’t Helped, And 2 Things You Can Do About It Today

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Not too long ago, Jill and I were talking with one of our clients.

She gets AMAZING results for her customers, so it’s no surprise that she has a waiting list a mile long.

But the problem was …

No matter how much she would sell, she just couldn’t seem to get ahead.

And so I asked her, “How much does your BUSINESS make every time you make a sale?”

The answer: “What do you mean?” Read more