RR#100 - Dear Ray… Is my business even scalable?

“Dear Agony Ray,

I want to stop trading my time for money. I’m selling coaching services to marketers for $2k a month, and have 5 clients (all I can handle).

I worry that if I’m not hands on with all my clients, I won’t be providing enough value. Is my service unscalable?

Cheers

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Coach-At-Full-Capacity”

Dear Coach-At-Full-Capacity,

Congrats on filling your month. It’s further than most coaches get.

But now you’ve hit a common obstacle. A ton of coaches get capped out when they ‘run out’ of time.

The good news is you’ve got a few options to consider.

To start: do you want to make more money, or create more capacity?

If you simply want to make more money, you just gotta know how much more.

Because if you’re at full capacity charging $2k/month, you could make 50% more money by simply charging $3k.

A lot of coaches have some insecurity around charging more - imposter syndrome is everywhere. But the easiest and fastest fix when you hit capacity? The majority of the time, it’s to increase your prices.

But let’s say you’re thinking bigger, and you want to figure out how to 10x the number of clients you can take on. That’s entirely totally doable.

But it does require rethinking what value means. And more to the point, what your clients are actually paying you for.

Because your current assumption seems to be that your clients are paying you to be hands on. But zoom out.

Are they paying you to be hands on? Or are they paying you for the results that being hands on helps them achieve?

The overwhelming majority of the time, it’s the latter.

I’ve noticed that being “hands on” is a tool coaches sometimes use to make themselves feel better about charging a lot of money.

But when you ask the clients what they care most about, it’s the transformation or results their coach helps them achieve.

So, the question is: how do you increase your capacity, while providing the same level of value?

The answer is to productize your service. In other words, create a system that allows you to recreate the results your current clients are getting, without having to be as hands on with each person individually

A lot of coaches are initially resistant to this. But after coaching 150+ founders of expertise-based businesses (coaches, consultants, service providers), I can tell you this is a marketplace issue 2% of the time, and a mindset issue with the founder 98% of the time.

You can make a decision on how productized your service becomes, but it’s the thing that unlocked both my coaching and consulting businesses.

And I’ve got a YouTube video to help you do that here.

P.S. - Wanna take it on the road? Tune in on Repeatable Revenue Podcast here.