How to Grow Your Business After Hitting Maximum Capacity

Want to know how to grow your business after hitting maximum capacity? Whether you call it hitting maximum capacity, being sold out or being fully booked getting to the point where your books are full and you can’t take on any more client, at that precise time, is a landmark for for one-to-one service providers. It’s a landmark that many service providers never achieve so if you are there – congratulations! But if you find yourself asking yourself the questions ‘Now what?’ you are in the right place. Keep on reading to find out how to grow your business after hitting maximum capacity.

 

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HOW TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS AFTER HITTING MAXIMUM CAPACITY

 

Keep your business running at maximum capacity

 

Reaching maximum capacity once and continually being at that level are two very different things. So if right now you are in your first month of maximum capacity, before you get super excited about moving into scaling mode focus on having a number of months at maximum.

 

The feast and famine cycle is common in business and sadly for some businesses, the reality is that working at maximum capacity puts such a strain on the business that maintaining that level is impossible.

 

For example, when the maximum capacity limit has been set too high it can mean that a business is no longer able to keep up with it’s regular marketing. And without that marketing further sales don’t come into the business or at least not at the same volume, which means inevitably once the current clients stop working with the business they aren’t able to replace them.

 

The smaller window of time someone works with you the more important it is to ensure that you are constantly marketing your business and have a sales pipeline with potential clients who are ready to work with you as soon as a spot arrives.

 

And if you are worried about marketing your business when you are at maximum capacity because people can’t work with you right now don’t be. You can market your services and then have people sign up to a waitlist.

 

I write more about creating and managing a client waitlist here.

 

Ultimately, the aim is to set the maximum capacity limit for your business at a point where you are still able to successfully manage all aspects of your business (client delivery, sales, marketing, admin, finance etc) without making, and your team, having to put in extra hours or getting stressed out. When you find that optimal level you’ll be able to continue working at maximum capacity and put your business in a place to successfully scale.

 

Remind yourself of your goals (business and life)

It’s easy to get caught up thinking that you have to continually grow your business and as you look to scale your business you’ll have a whole range of choices, but keeping your ultimate business and life goals in mind is important.

 

It’s easy in business to get sidetracked and lose sight of what you wanted to achieve. Maybe you started your business to help you become financially independent and retire early, maybe you wanted to be location independent and travel the world, or maybe you had a deep desire to impacts thousands or even millions of people.

 

Reminding yourself of your ultimate goals for your business and life will be important for ensuring you make the right decisions for you as grow your business after hitting maximum capacity.

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FULLY BOOKED AND SCALING Fully Booked and Scaling is a one-to-one mentoring programme for online service providers who want to be fully booked in their one-to-one services and then successfully add a scalable offer to their business. Over 6 months I’ll help you to become fully booked with one-to-one clients, choose and introduce the right scalable offer for your business, and then have a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy so you can continue to successfully sell on both sides of your business. For more information, and to apply, click here.

 

 

Build a scalable offer suite that is right for you

To grow your business after hitting maximum capacity you have to increase your capacity. But before you think I’ve gone crazy and there is no way you can take on anything else hear me out. I’m not telling you to take on anymore one-to-one clients. Instead, you are going to need to introduce new offers to your business. The focus will switch from only offering one-to-one services (which aren’t scalable) to offering, at least one, one-to-many services (which are scalable).

 

There are a lot of scalable offers you could potentially sell and the reason why I mentioned remembering your ultimate goals is that they should be in mind when thinking about what option is best for you. Some of the most common scalable offers used are:

 

• Memberships
• Masterminds
• Self-study courses
• Live Events
• Digital products
• Group programmes

 

Every scalable offer has pros and cons. What is the right option for one business will not necessarily be right for the next business. That is why you shouldn’t just copy what your business icon or business bestie has. Instead you need to think about your personality, your favourite way to work and your ultimate goals (business and life). I have a whole blog post where I go into more detail about choosing the right scalable offer for your business – you can have a read here.

 

But here are some questions to ask yourself?

 

• How many clients or customers do I ultimately want to work with every year?
• How much money would you love to make each year?
• How much time do you want to work in your business?
• Do you want to make a specific type of revenue or income? For example, passive income or monthly recurring revenue.
• Which option excites me?
• What suits my personality?
• What would work well alongside the other services you have in your business?

 

Create clear sales journeys for each offer

For each new offer you’ll need to know how you are going to sell it. You need to have a clear plan for how you are going to sell every single offer you have in your offer suite. As you have more offers you have to get more intentional about how you are selling. Otherwise it is easy for offers to be avaialble, but never bought. You have to make sure you are marketing all of your offers.

 

For each offer you’ll want to have mapped out some of the potential buyer journeys. In some cases this will be really obvious and in some cases it may be that people come in various ways.

 

For example, you might have a membership that you only open at specific times of a year and you’ll only sell via a masterclass and a follow up email sequence. In this instance the sales journey is very clear you’ll be driving traffic to your masterclass and then make sales either from the masterclass or the follow up email sequence.

 

However, it might be that you have an evergreen group programme that people can join at any time and so you create YouTube videos about it, you mention it when a guest on podcasts, you include it in social media posts and your newsletter will often encourage people to sign up. In this case there are multiple ways that someone could end up on the sales page of your evergreen group programme

 

In the two examples above I had one offer that is always open for people to join (evergreen) and one offer that people can only join at certain times of the year. Knowing whether something is evergreen or not is key when planning your marketing. This will impact not only what marketing channels and platforms make the most sense, but it will also impact your messagings (including call-to-actions).

 

FULLY BOOKED AND SCALING Fully Booked and Scaling is a one-to-one mentoring programme for online service providers who want to be fully booked in their one-to-one services and then successfully add a scalable offer to their business. Over 6 months I’ll help you to become fully booked with one-to-one clients, choose and introduce the right scalable offer for your business, and then have a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy so you can continue to successfully sell on both sides of your business. For more information, and to apply, click here.

 

Increase the visibility of your business 

Adding scalable offers to your business will mean your business is no longer at maximum capacity, and depending on what scalable offer you decide to add into your business it might be that there is no longer a maximum capacity in your business.

 

Regardless of the scalable offer(s) you’ve chosen you are going to have the ability to take on more clients or customers, and that means your marketing will need to go to the next level. To increase sales you are going to need to increase awareness, increase conversion or ideally both.

 

It might have been that previously you would have only needed 25 clients per year and now you could have 50 people buy your course or join your membership each month. That is a massive difference.

 

Previously you might have got away with doing no marketing for your busiuness and relying solely on referrals and recommendations. Or you might have done some marketing, but because you were trying to generate a large number of clients it is was pretty minimal.

 

That’s fine when you are only selling one-to-one services, but if you want to make the most of your increased opportunity to work with more people and make more revenue then you’ll need to get serious about raising the visibility of your business and actively growing an online audience.

 

At this stage the focus is the beginning part of the buyer journey – awareness. Now you are clear on your sales journeys so now you want to do specific marketing activites to make new people aware of you. The key here is new people. Some example of awareness and audience growth marketing activities are:

 

• Be a guest on a podcast
• Run paid advertising
• Create long-form content that is optimised for search engines
• Use hashtags on social media posts
• Do a joint live on a social media platform

 

That’s it! You now know how to grow your business after hitting maximum capacity.

As I said in the beginning hitting maximum capacity in your business is a massive achievement, but if you want to continue to grow there are so many options available to you. Moving from one-to-one to one-to-many brings so much opportunity – the opportunity to help more people, to make a bigger impact and make more money.

 

So if you are serious about successfully scaling your business then I’d love to help you and Fully Booked and Scaling would be perfect for you.

FULLY BOOKED AND SCALING Fully Booked and Scaling is a one-to-one mentoring programme for online service providers who want to be fully booked in their one-to-one services and then successfully add a scalable offer to their business. Over 6 months I’ll help you to become fully booked with one-to-one clients, choose and introduce the right scalable offer for your business, and then have a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy so you can continue to successfully sell on both sides of your business. For more information, and to apply, click here.