The key to scaling your business with confidence

Want to know what the key to scaling your business with confidence is? Many online service providers dream of going from growing their business (by selling one-to-one services) to scaling their businesses (by selling one-to-many offers). Switching from growth mode to scaling mode can be daunting. It is unknown territory and that brings risks. However, I’m here to help. Keep on reading to find out what the key to scaling your business with confidence is.

 

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THE KEY TO SCALING YOUR BUSINESS WITH CONFIDENCE

 

Moving from growing your business to scaling your business

 

Before delving into the key to scaling with confidence it’s important to ensure we are on the same page about scaling your business and discuss some of the key differences between growing a business and scaling a business.

 

When you are growing your business the focus is on creating increased revenue in a linear manner. There is a direct correlation between the number of hours you work and the amount of revenue your business can generate. If you sign more clients and work more hours you’ll make more income. This model usually works fine for a while, but the fact is you are limited. If you don’t want to work more hours, but want to make more money you can up your prices, but other than that you are stuck.

 

That’s why many online service providers will get to a point where they decide to switch from growing their business to scaling their business. When scaling your business the focus is on creating increased revenue but in a non-linear way. You’ll need to focus on creating one-to-many offers, which will mean that you can either create drastically more income in the same amount of hours (as you are able to work with multiple people simultaneously) or you can create something once and then be paid for it over and over again without doing any more work.

 

For many reasons scaling a business is appealing to many online service providers, but transitioning from growing to scaling isn’t something all online service providers achieve. And that’s because there are a number of things in your business that need to change.

 

For example, you’ll need to :

1. Choose your new scalable offer – Even deciding what to sell can be overwhelming for some online service providers. There are so many options (such as membership, mastermind, digital course, group programme, live events) and knowing what is best for your business can be overwhelming. I’ve written more about how to create the right scalable offer for your business here.

 

2. Create your scalable offer – If to date you’ve only been offering one-to-one services it could be that you don’t have the knowledge on how to create your scalable offer. For many online service providers once they’ve chosen what they want to create the reality of creating something, and all the tech options, can be massively overwhelming.

 

3. To launch and continually sell your scalable offer – If you’ve been selling one-to-one services it might be that your marketing wasn’t actually generating sales. You could have been relying on recommendations and referrals. You could have been using marketing to generate leads but then actively been involved in selling whether that be in the DMs, via email or on a sales call. And as long as you are actively needed in the sales process you are going to be the bottleneck stopping your business from reaching it’s full potential.

 

As you can see there are number of changes that will need to happen in your business to order for you to successfully transition from growing to scaling. And make that transition the best thing you can do is get support.

 

The support that will help you to scale your business with confidence. 

 

A business mentor or coach

The first type of support that will help you to scale your business with confidence is a business mentor or coach. As the CEO of your business the weight is all on you and there will be a lot of decisions to be made, and actions to be taken, in order to successfully scale your business. Working with a business mentor or coach who has either scaled their business, or helped others to scale their business, is invaluable. That level of expert knowledge and support will help you to take the fastest, and most effective, route possible to scaling your business.

 

Every year I work with a very small number of business owners as a one-to-one business mentor. To find out more about my one-to-one business and marketing mentoring click here.

 

Administrative / Tech support

To successfully scale you will most likely need to make some administrative and technological changes in your business. One of the reasons why scaling your business is easier than every before is because of the technology. Technology will now do the heavy lifting. It will make it so you can deliver a live training to hundreds of people at the same time. It will make it so you can create a digital course than can be paid for and accessed instantly without you being involved. However, someone has to set those things up initially and that can mean that you need to get someone to help you from an administrative or tech perspective.

 

A community of business owners who are also focused on moving from growing mode to scaling mode

Being in a community of business owners who also ‘get it’ will make such a difference. Once you start focusing on scaling your business the questions you’ll need to ask yourself and the conversations you’ll want to be having will change. Very soon you realise you are on a different path. A path that most other online service providers won’t be and therefore it’s likely you’ll need to change the communities you are in.

 

 

LUMINARY is the ultimate hybrid mastermind experience, for the business owner who wants to build a global, online, empire. If will give you not one but two of the types of support you need with scaling. Firstly. you’ll have me as your business mentor and then secondly you’ll be in a community with other coaches and online service provider who are looking to shine brighter online, expand their influence and ultimately build a global, online, empire that enables their wildest dreams to come true. To find out more and apply for LUMINARY click here.

 

The main money metric you need to focus on to scale with confidence

Many will try to scale their business, but only a percentage will succeed. I’ve highlighted three areas (mentor/coach, tech/admin support and community) where investing will make a huge difference when scaling your business. But they are investments. They are going to involve time, and money, which is why the real key to scaling your business with confidence is increasing a certain money metric – and that is monthly recurring revenue.

 

Monthly recurring revenue is a financial metrics that calculates the amount of money that is expected in future months based on ‘subscriptions’. This is money that the business can expect to receive in the forthcoming months without making any more sales.

 

Monitoring and growing your monthly recurring revenue is the key to scaling your business with confidence. As you’ve seen you need to be investing in your business to get the necessary support to scale. Building out your team, hiring a business mentor or coach, and joining a high-level business community aren’t cheap purchases and often they are ongoing. And whilst there are some business owners who are confident to invest thousands or ten of thousands without knowing how they’ll make that money not everyone is that way. And if you aren’t the focus needs to be going growing your monthly recurring revenue.

 

When you grow your monthly recurring revenue there is a level of predictability around not just the revenue you’ll be making in your business, but cash flow. And cash flow is so important. You want to be making sure that the money you are receiving each month is exceeding what is going out each other. That’s why monthly recurring revenue is so important as that gives you some confidence over what will be coming in. Your financial forecasting is no longer based purely on past data and predictions. Instead, there is a level of certainty (not complete because people do default) over what is expected in the incoming months as a baseline.

 

When you know you have thousands of pounds or dollars [insert whatever currency you use] expected to come into your business next month, and the month after that, even if you don’t make any more sales then you can have confidence in making the investments that will support your business in successfully scaling. And obviously, you are going to make more sales, but at least you know you don’t need to cover your bills.

 

Increasing monthly recurring revenue

Now that you know that monthly recurring revenue is something to increase you might be thinking “How do I do that Charelle?”. It could be right now that you don’t have any monthly recurring revenue in your business or you only have a small amount.

 

Here are the two things you need to ask yourself

 

1. For anything that you deliver that takes over a monthly could I introduce a pay monthly option? 

It might be right now that everything you offer you take an upfront payment. To be clear this isn’t bad, and actually given how many online service providers I see complaining about invoices not being paid there are many advantages to taking your whole payment upfront. But if you do want to look at creating monthly recurring revenue then you might want to change that now and offer a pay monthly option and a pay upfront or pay in full option.

 

2. How can I make the pay monthly option more appealing?

It might be that already you have pay monthly options but no one (or very few) people are choosing that option. The way you price your pay monthly versus your pay upfront does matter.

 

For example, imagine if someone was offering one-to-one coaching that is £1,000 per month for 3 months or £3,000. There is no difference in the total price so the majority of people would go for the £1,000 per month option.

 

Now imagine the 3 months upfront is lowered to £2,500. A saving of £500 or 16.67% would entice some people to go for the pay upfront option instead.

 

Now imagine the 3 months upfront is lowered even further to £2,000. Now you are saving £1,000, 33.34% or essentially getting a month for free. In that instance even more people would pay for the upfront option as that becomes the no brainer unless you don’t access to £2,000.

 

Hopefully you can see how by adjusting your pay upfront it will change the percentage of people who go for that option. Therefore, if you want more people to go for your pay monthly so that you are increasing your monthly recurring revenue you’ll want to make the pay upfront option mean people don’t save a lot or get a whole load of added bonus.

 

 

LUMINARY is the ultimate hybrid mastermind experience, for the business owner who wants to build a global, online, empire. If you want to successful scale your business then look no further. To find out more and apply for LUMINARY click here.    And on the topic of added bonuses… if you join Luminary for the year and pay upfront not only will you get two months free (saving you £2,000), but I’ll upgrade your onboarding strategy session to a whole strategy day (usual cost £2,000).

 

That’s it.  You now know the key to scaling your business with confidence.

 

Scaling your business might be simple but it isn’t easy. Otherwise everyone would be scaling their business (rather than just dreaming about it). The reality is to scale your business with confidence you are going to need to make some changes in your business. Changes to your offer suite, your marketing and your operations. To make those changes successfully, and in the fastest way possible, you are going to need invest in support. Support that will enable you to scale your business with confidence, but support means committing to investing (and for a continued period of time). That’s why it makes sense to focus on increasing your monthly recurring revenue so you have predictable income that will help with your cash flow, and help you to invest with confidence so you can scale with confidence.

 

Let me know in the comments what your biggest takeaway has been. 

 

To successful scale your business you’ll need to look at your business growth strategy, offer suite, pricing and marketing. All are covered in side of LUMINARY.    And you’ll get 1:1 strategic support, as well as be in a community with other business owners who are scaling.  To find out more and apply for LUMINARY click here.

 

Prefer 1:1 support? You can check out my 1:1 Business and Marketing Mentoring here.