How to scale your business as a solopreneur

 

Want to know how to scale your business as a solopreneur? Scaling your business is a bit of a buzzword in the online business space. Everywhere you look there will be a business expert telling you that you need to scale your business. The fact is you don’t have to scale your business. But if you do want to scale your business, as you are specifically a solo coach, consultant or online service provider then I am here to help you. Keep on reading to find out how to scale your business as a solopreneur.

 

This page may include affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I may earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. 

Please note this blog post is specifically for solopreneurs who are providing an online service, rather than a solopreneur who has a product-based business or is providing a service in person.

 

HOW TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS AS A SOLOPRENEUR

 

Create a scalable offer

If you want to scale your business as a solopreneur the most important decision you need to make is what your scalable service, product or offer is going to be. To be clear, the difference between growing your business and scaling your business is to do with the relationship between inputs and outputs. In a growing situation you have a business where the more you work (the more hours you put in) the more money you can make. In a scaling situation, you are able to make more money without necessarily working more hours. Rather than one hour of work equals one unit of payment you might find yourself where one hour of work equals 10, 20 or even 50 units of payment.

You can find out more about the differences between growing a business and scaling a business here.

 

In order to scale it is essential that a scalable service, product or offer. So rather than having a service that you offer on a one-to-one basis, you’ll have something that you are able to offer on a one-to-many business. There are a number of options such as membership, mastermind, online course, group programme, digital products and even physical products if you use drop shipping.

 

What is right for your business will depend on what you current offer, what your current audience and client base is, and you. I go into more depth about the 6 ways you can scale your business here.

 

Make the most of technology

Most conversations about scaling focus on growing your team. However, since this blog post is focusing on how to scale your business as a solopreneur rather than increasing the working potential of the business by employing people you should look at investing in the right technology. One of the reasons why it is easier to scale your business as a solopreneur now rather than in the past is because of technology. As a solopreneur, you will be the bottleneck that is stopping your business to grow. That is why most business experts will tell you to start hiring. However, an alternative is to ensure you are using technology to the maximum. There are a number of ways where technology can help increase the capacity in your business.

 

Payment

Are you physically involved in the payment process at the moment? Are you sending out invoices or taking payment over the phone? If so, it is worth looking into having an online payment system that will enable you to remove yourself from the payment part of your business. You can have a sales page or an automated/templated email that gets sent out and people are able to pay without any more involvement from you.

 

Marketing

Have you got a marketing strategy that involves a lot of your time? Is the majority of your marketing something that you create and then live for a short time such as organic social media posts and email newsletters? If so, it is worth looking into a different strategy that will give you more return for your physical investment. This could mean investing in digital ads that can be set up once and then run for weeks or months with little involvement. This could mean creating long-form content and then using a social media scheduler that recycles posts so that you can easily drive people to your older content. This could mean using Repurpose.io to automatically take your short-form videos from one social media platform and then repurpose them onto others. This could mean taking the time to create an automated email sequence that can run for months or even years.

 

With the right technology, there are ways that you can maximise the physical effort you put into your marketing. This will either help you gain greater visibility from the same input or will enable you to reduce the amount of time you are spending on your marketing so that it can be used in other ways.

 

WANT A MARKETING STRATEGY THAT REALLY MAKES THE MOST OF YOUR TIME, ENERGY AND MONEY? Not all marketing strategies are created the same. As a solopreneur your marketing strategy needs to maximise all of your precious time and energy, so you can spend less time on marketing and more time on the other parts of your business that you enjoy much more (such as working with your clients).   I’m a Chartered Marketer and a solopreneur that specialises in creating marketing strategies for one person to deliver. If you want a marketing strategy that is based on your strengths and designed to fit around everything else you do in your business get in touch.   You can drop me a message via my contact form or you can book a free introduction call.

 

Delivery

Another reason why it is easier now than ever before to scale your business as a solopreneur is that technology has now made it easier than ever to deliver something to a client or customer without being involved. If you decided for your scalable offer to offer digital products, a course or a membership then technology can mean that someone can pay and get what they paid for without you being involved in any way shape or form. You could have a digital product where an automated email is sent out after purchase with a link to the download. You could have a course or membership where upon paying the buyer is sent an email with the login information and they can log into the course or membership areas within minutes of paying, and best of all you haven’t been involved in any way.

 

There are a number of different technology options for hosting physical products, memberships and courses, but as a solopreneur keeping things as streamlined and as simply as possible is key, which is why I recommend Kartra. Not only will Kartra enable you to have mobile-optimised sales pages, easily accept online payment and host your membership or course. But it can also be your email marketing software, calendar, quiz software and so much more. It is a one-stop shop for running your online business with ease. You can start a 14-day trial with Kartra for just $1 here. 

 

I go into greater detail about how Kartra allows you to scale your business with ease here.

 

Hire for specific purposes

As I mentioned earlier whenever the topic of scaling a business is mentioned there will be conversations about growing a team and the importance of hiring. In the first instance, you should definitely ensure that you are using technology to the maximum, but even after doing that, it may be that you need some extra people power in your business.

 

Now before you run away because you don’t want to manage a team I want to make clear there are ways to increase your people power without growing a permanent team. There are so many different ways to work with people. Depending on the support you need you could hire a freelancer on a project basis or you could look at outsourcing something to a company that offers a very specific service to lots of similar businesses. For example, you might decide you want to run ads and hire a freelancer who specialises in ads to run your ads.

 

The aim here isn’t to get someone who is permanently on your payroll but to get specific support, sometimes for a limited amount of time, but knowing they’ll help you to scale. This means there is a clear return on investment rather than them becoming a fixed expense that you struggle to see the financial value in.

 

Use your marketing to create more demand

To be able to technically scale your business as a solopreneur you just need to have a scalable offer, but your business is only going to actually scale if you create demand for that scalable offer and that is why you need to be focusing on your marketing.

 

The likelihood is that your scalable offer will mean your business will be able to work with more clients or customers than ever before. For example, you could currently be a coach that works one-to-one with clients and has a maximum of 10 clients at one time. If your package is 3 months long that means you will work with a maximum of 40 clients per year. But now you want to add a course to your business and your aim is to sell over 100 per year. That could mean for the next year rather than getting 40 people to buy from your busines  now want to get 140 people to buy from your business. That is a considerable leap. And this is the biggest mistake I see when solopreneurs are trying to scale is that they want to drastically increase the number of customers or clients they work with, but they haven’t properly thought about how they are going to generate that increase in demand.

 

You need a marketing strategy that will not only enable you to generate enough demand for your scalable offer, but you want to ensure that whilst marketing the new scalable offer you aren’t having a negative impact on the sales of your existing services.

 

That’s it! You now know how to scale your business as a solopreneur.

As a one-to-one service provider, the thought of scaling your business right now might feel like a fantasy, but with the right approach, it is absolutely possible. The key is ensuring you choose the right scalable offer, get the right support (technology and people) and then market your business like a pro.

 

If you’re a solopreneur that would like to start scaling your business within then check out my one-to-one programme Fully Booked and Scaling below

 

INTRODUCING 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.