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Want to know how to work less hours and still make more money in your one-to-one service provider? As a one-to-one service provider there is a direct relationship between the amount of time you work and the money you make. That can make many one-to-one service providers feel as if the only way they can make more money is by working more hours. And if you want to make more money, but don’t want to work more hours that can be disheartening. But when you are smart there are some ways you can make more money without working more hours. Keep on reading to learn about the 6 ways you can work less hours and still make more money as a one-to-one service provider.
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6 WAYS TO WORK LESS HOURS AND MAKE MORE MONEY AS A ONE-TO-ONE SERVICE PROVIDER
1. Increase your prices
I’m going to start with the easy way to be able to work less hours and still make more money – and that is by increasing your prices.
Increasing your prices means if you carried on working the same amount of hours you’d make more money in your business. However, depending on the amount your increase your prices by you could end up in a situation where you can work less hours and still generating more revenue in your business than previously.
Web Designer Example
Imagine you are a web designer that charges £3,000 for a website and it takes you 20 hours to make a website. Imagine that over the past year you had 40 website clients. This would mean that you made £120,000 in revenue and worked 800 hours. But you decide you want to work less and you decide to only commit to 700 hours across the year. This could mean you can do 35 websites. If you increased your prices to £3,500 then you’d make £122,500. This is only a slight increase on the £120,000, but you’d have gained a whole 100 hours back. That could easily mean a few extra weeks off! And, of course, there is nothing stopping you from increasing your prices further.
Coach Example
Imagine you are a coach and you have a 3-month package that you charge £2,500 for. You provide email support between session so on average you spend 8 hours per month with a client. Over the last year you had 32 clients. This means you’d have spent 768 hours on client work and earnt £80,000. Now if you upped your prices to £3,000 (an increase of 20%) you could work with 28 clients, generate £84,000 and work 672 hours. By just working with 4 less clients across the year you’d save 96 hours. Again another for a few weeks of holiday, without lowering your potential revenue.
2. Spend less time on your marketing
In the example above the focus is on working less hours in relation to fulfilling the service, but the reality is as a small business owner your working hours aren’t limited to just the hours that are delivering a service. You will be spending time on admin, marketing, sales, finance and more. And this all adds up.
One area that many business owners spend a lot of time is marketing. As a small business owner, you’re likely to have a small marketing budget and instead focus more on time-intensive ways to market your business. So rather than running advertising you are likely to use social media, email and long-form content. And whilst all of these forms of marketing are great there is no denying they are time-intensive.
If you want to spend less time working it is a good idea to look at how to reduce the amount of time you are spending on your marketing. There are a number of ways you can do this.
Optimise long-form content for search (SEO marketing)
If you currently create long-form content then it is worth learning how to optimise your content for search. By doing this your content will have a longer shelf-life and the potential to market your business for months or years in the future.
Make the most out of automation
In order to spend less time on your marketing you need to focus on marketing that will run for months rather than days. Automation is a great way to do this. By using software like Kartra rather than delivering live masterclasses you can create an automated webinar that people can join whenever they want, sell in that webinar and then have automated email sequences that is sent afterwards.
Run social media adverts
Social media marketing is the most time-consuming marketing a small business owner can use. Given the short life-span a piece of content has on a social media platform it is easy to get caught on a content creation hamster wheel where you are spending hours every week creating. Instead of doing this you could reduce the frequency of your organic posting and supplement that with running paid adverts instead. With paid adverts you spend a fair amount of time setting the ads up but after than with a bit of monitoring they have the potential to run for months and months.
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| NEED A SMARTER MARKETING STRATEGY?
It’s so easy for marketing to take up a lot of you time – when it doesn’t need to. If you are ready to have a smarter marketing strategy that makes the most of tech and frees up your time then I’d love to help you. I’m a Chartered Marketer with a wealth of experience helping small businesses to make the most out of their marketing budgets and times. Whether you just want to get your strategy created in a day or you want a strategy and then ongoing support I can help. |
3. Grow your team
The right technology can do a great job in streamlining your operations and marketing so you can spend less time in those areas. But some work requires a person to do it. However, just because a person needs to do that work it doesn’t mean you have to be the person to do it.
Another way you can work less hours and still grow your business is by hiring other people to work in your business. This can be on a part-time or full-time basis. And it can be as a freelancer or an employee. There are so many options now that you can work out what makes the most sense for your business. It is common for small businesses to first start outsourcing by hiring someone to help with the financials (accountants, bookkeepers etc), the admin (virtual assistant) or the marketing (social media manager, marketing assistant etc).
4. Standardise your services
Standardising your services is a great way to be able to work less for a number of reasons. Firstly, standardised services will mean that you are doing the same thing over and over again. This will mean you will get more efficient with delivering the services.
Secondly, standardising your services will help reduce the time you spent on marketing and sales. If right now all of your services are bespoke not only does that make your marketing more complicated (and no doubt you spend more time than necessary on it), but it will also mean you have a lengthy sales process.
So many one-to-one service providers will have people get in touch with them, they’ll have a call, a proposal will be sent across, and then the potential client decides whether to work with them ot not. This can take hours! And they might not even become a client.
By standardising your services you are able to have clear offers that you can have on your website and promote in your marketing. Where suitable you can then have it that people buy instantly. Or if you still want to talk to people at least you can skip out the proposal stage.
5. Be super strict with your time
Have you ever come across the idea of Parkinson’s Law and that a task with take as long as the time allocated. It is so true! When I first started my business it was a side hustle. At one point I had a job as a Head of Marketing, was co-hosting a podcast, running PropelHer and my business. I had no choice but to be super efficient with my time. But after I went full-time in my business and stopped co-hosting my podcast I started to notice that as my plate thinned out my efficiency decreased.
I decided that even though I had more time if I wanted to be as productive as I used to be I needed to get strict about the time I set aside for the business and specific tasks. I started using Toggl to track my time, would plan at the beginning of the week when I was doing what and sure enough my efficiency increased.
So if right now you have a list for the week my recommendation is to start plotting when you will do each task and for how long. And if you really want to up the anti – time yourself. Not only will it help you to understand how long it takes you to complete specific tasks, which is good for future planning, but when you see how long specific tasks take you’ll start to speed up.
6. Design your working week up to work for you
Not all hours are created equal and one of the ways you can work less hours is by making sure you are maximising your productivity. Part of that is achieved by being super strict with your time, but you can also set up your working week so it works for you. What I mean by that is trying as much as possible to do work at the time when you do it the best.
There are two main ways to approach setting up your working week to work for you. One way is to look at how your day is set up and the other is to look at how your week is set up.
For example, if you know you work best in the morning block out the morning for work that needs your best energy. And then you can do other business activities after lunch.
The other approach is to look at what you do each day. By having dedicated days for certain activities you’ll be able to batch your tasks and save time. For example, in my business I use Mondays for CEO activities and content creation, and then Tuesday and Wednesday are client days. Creating my content on the same day maximising my productivity as I only have to get dressed up once per week and by making all of my content back-to-back it makes it a lot easier to repurpose across my marketing channels.
| BUILD YOUR BUSINESS TO WORK FOR YOU!
It can be hard when you’ve already get an established business to see how you can make the necessary changes so it works for you. I help one-to-one services providers, using my 5P framework to transform their business into one that they love and works for them. Whether that means more time off, more money, working with better clients – I can help that become a reality through my one-to-one mentoring.
Over 6 months I’ll help you to dig deep, acknowledge your true business desires, and then make the necessary changes in your business for that to be a reality. For more information about my one-to-one mentoring, and to apply, click here. |
* Bonus Way* – Add a scalable offer to your business
If you have exhausted the whole list and still want to make more money in your business then it’s time to switch from growing more to scaling mode. Rather than selling one-to-one services it’s time to add a scalable offer into your business.
Fortunately there are so many scalable offers you can add to your business. For example, you could add a membership, mastermind, group programme, course, digital product, events or trainings. Given that you already have a successful business the key is choosing a scalable offer that will compliment what you are already selling in your offer suite and that you can sell without negatively impacting your one-to-one sales.
I go into more detail about how to choose the right scalable offer for your business right here and I have a whole programme dedicated to helping to one-to-one service to sale. So if you are interested in this option check out Fully Booked and Scaling.
That’s it! You now know how to work less hours and still make more money as a one-to-one service provider.
As I said at the beginning there is no doubt as a one-to-one service provider that there is a relationship between the amount of hours you work and the money you are able to make. But that doesn’t mean you are doomed to having to work increasingly more hours to keep on making more money and continue to grow your business. When you act smart there are ways to make more money without working more hours – so you have the time to enjoy all that money you are making!
I hope you’ve found this blog post useful. Let me know in the comments what your biggest takeaway is.
If you are serious about working less hours whilst still making more money in your business then 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. |
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