RR#115 - The roadmap to repeatable revenue
A few weeks ago, I shared how I'd get from $0 to $30k a month if I had to start from scratch and had just 180 days to do it.
Many of you said you got a ton of value from that email and would love to see it laid out for someone with a different skillset for context.
So, this week, I'm going to lay out the full process for creating a high 6- or 7-figure business, regardless of what you are selling.
It's what I call the Roadmap to Repeatable Revenue.
Let's dive in.
The Roadmap Overview
The Roadmap to Repeatable Revenue is the process I go through for spinning up new offers and businesses. And it's the process I've used to coach 200+ founders these past couple of years.
High level, it consists of 8 core elements:
Establishing Vision Founder Fit
Nailing Down Your Niche
Standing Out From the Sea of Sameness
Creating Messaging That Actually Sells
Productizing Your Knowledge
Building a Full Cycle Funnel
Driving Targeted Traffic
Selling Without Feeling Salesy
Each piece plays a critical role in designing a business that maximizes your time, energy, and effort.
When you implement each of them the right way, you've got the foundation for a lucrative, sustainable, and enjoyable business.
When you don't, you've got a business that:
Caps out trading time for money
Has on-again, off-again marketing
Is unpredictable and insecure in cash flow
Struggles to attract the right clients consistently
Feels reactive and busy, without seeing much progress
Below is a breakdown of each step, and why it matters.
Establish Vision Founder Fit
Your business should serve you, not the other way around.
The problem is, most people get so caught up finding and servicing clients that they never take the time to design a business that is going to deliver everything they really want it to beyond cash.
What do you want your business to deliver for you—beyond the money?
Less time on Zoom?
Location independence?
More time with the family?
Chance to be more creative?
The only wrong answer here is not having one.
Because if you're clear on what you truly want from the business, you can design it accordingly. If not, there's a good chance you'll build a business that ends up feeling like a prison.
Establishing clarity on what you want from the business and creating boundaries and constraints to ensure you get it is a process I call establishing Vision Founder Fit.
It includes gaining clarity on your personal vision and determining what needs to be true of the business to make that happen.
You can read more about Vision Founder Fit here.
Nail Your Niche
I know it's cliché at this point, but the riches are truly in the niches.
That's because specializing makes it easier to market services, build expertise, establish credibility, and charge premiums.
But a highly profitable niche consists of two steps:
Defining the target market you'll serve.
Clarifying the problem you'll help them solve.
And most people only do one or the other, which makes it half as effective.
Nailing down both the market to serve and problem to solve lays the foundation for everything else here—differentiating yourself, productizing your knowledge, and creating content that sells your stuff like hotcakes.
Stand Out From the Sea of Sameness
The great news for digital entrepreneurs today is that it’s getting easier and easier to build a business online.
That's also bad news. Because it means the market gets more crowded every day. And blending in with a crowded market is a recipe for commodity rates.
Just imagine sitting in a room with 4-5 of your competitors—other consultants, coaches, or service providers—and your perfect client walking through the door.
How will your ideal client know beyond a shred of doubt that you're the best person to help them get results?
You've got to develop a strong unique selling proposition (USP) for your brand or your offer.
And here’s the bad news for many of you who think you already have one:
It's not 10 years of experience in the industry
It's not how much you care about your clients
And it's not your MBA, credentials, or certifications
Because those are things other people can claim. A strong USP is something:
Your competitors can't even claim
You can back up with verifiable evidence
You can prove before they buy your services
Here's a video sharing how to create a competition-killing USP in 10 minutes.
Create Messaging That Actually Sells
It's one thing to Nail Your Niche and understand who your target market is and what problem you help them solve. It's quite another to create messaging that actually converts into cashflow.
Why?
Because you have to understand where your target market is in the process of discovery with that problem.
Are they even aware they have a problem?
Do they want to solve that problem at the moment?
Do they want to try and solve that problem on their own?
Are they actively looking for a solution to the problem?
Are they aware that your service exists as a solution?
Or are they red hot, in the market, looking for your solution?
Most people spend too much time creating content that "adds value." But what does that even mean? And how much "value" should you add?
If you want to maximize your time with content creation, you need to target your niche audience at specific points in the journey. Otherwise, you'll invest months educating them, while someone swoops in at the end and gets them to buy.
Use this guide to identify the stages of the buying cycle.
Productize Your Knowledge
When you started working for yourself, you probably focused on finding clients. But then the 'dog caught the car' and you had a new (but better) problem: you were capped out on service delivery.
There wasn't enough time in the day to:
Deliver good work
Keep marketing going
Keep working ON the business
So you were constantly juggling priorities and, potentially, burning out in the process.
The answer? Productizing your service.
Productizing is the process of systematizing how you help clients get results. And there are varying degrees of productization.
You can standardize certain aspects of your business—proposals, slide decks, templates in your onboarding, etc.
You can convert a 1-on-1 coaching service into a group coaching service that allows you to increase capacity by 5-10x.
Or you can fully automate your service delivery through delegation and automation.
As I write about here, productization exists on a spectrum. On one extreme, you have fully digital and do-it-yourself products. On the other, you add some structure to an otherwise custom offer.
Where you choose to sit on that spectrum is up to you, but you will eventually need to find repeatable processes to get clients results or risk burning out as a service provider.
You can get started with a step-by-step process to productize here.
Build a Full Cycle Funnel
A well-designed marketing funnel is like having a sales and marketing team working for you 24/7, ensuring you can focus on delivering great work for your clients.
The purpose of a funnel is to guide prospects through the buying cycle I shared above, from just becoming aware of who you are to becoming a high-intent buyer ready to hop on a sales call.
And a well-designed funnel does three things:
Attracts new leads into your marketing ecosystem to build your marketing list.
Nurtures that list of prospects with intentional and meaningful content.
Qualifies and warms up prospects who express interest in services.
These make up the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel. And they work together to help you market automatically, asynchronously, and at scale.
Check out this podcast where I break down the critical ingredients for a high-performing sales & marketing funnel.
Drive Targeted Traffic
Your funnel won't work very well if you aren't filling it with qualified leads.
This is easier said than done, but if you've done the legwork up to this point, it'll be a hell of a lot easier because:
You know who you’re talking to
You know what problem you help them solve
You know how to differentiate yourself in the market
You're creating content that's designed to convert
You have a system that captures & nurtures prospects
So, you simply need to determine where your audience is and how you're going to start conversations with them.
If your inbound traffic is sufficient to hit your goals, keep cranking out intentional content. If not, consider firing up some outbound prospecting on LinkedIn or another platform.
You've got an infinite number of ways to get traffic to your funnel. Here are 17 you can implement—right now.
(And here's why you should think twice about hiring a lead generation agency to solve this problem for you.)
Sell Without Feeling Salesy
Selling professional services can sometimes feel like walking a tightrope.
You want to close the deal without coming off as pushy or salesy. This is especially true when you are selling your own services because you want to maintain your positioning as a trusted advisor and authority.
That's where having a structured sales call process comes in handy.
At a high level, that means:
Taking control of the call and setting the agenda right out of the gates.
Investing the time to properly diagnose the problem before offering a prescription.
Tying your "prescription" back to the specific pain points you heard in the "diagnosis."
Closing with strategic questions, not pushy tactics that lower your status.
Handling objections respectfully, but directly before you get off the call.
I have an entire playbook you can have and implement on your calls immediately here.
And, if you're interested, I have an objection handling playbook I haven't published yet. If you'd like it, just reply to this email with "Objections" and I'll send it to you.
Order of Operations
My email to you a few weeks ago sharing how I'd get from $0 to $30k generally follows this same process.
There are some minor differences because I prioritize immediate cashflow in one and long-term sustainability in the other.
But you'll see the same pattern in both:
Vision first
Strategy second
Tactics & execution third
And that's something many people get entirely backwards.
They start creating content without a clear market to speak to and wonder why they aren't getting sales.
They agonize over their LinkedIn headline without knowing what problem they're solving for clients.
Or rewrite their About page on their website without knowing what differentiates them in the market.
Success is in the sequence.
Like baking a chocolate cake, you need the right ingredients and you need to use them in the right order. Get either one wrong, you get a very different outcome.
Putting This Into Practice
Hopefully, this blueprint helps you clarify what you need to work on—right now.
If you’re just getting started with your online service business, check out my free course here. It’s 4 hours of targeted lessons that follow this same general process + a playbook to put it into practice.
If you’re looking to scale out of the low six-figure grind with repeatable marketing & fulfillment systems, consider joining our mastermind and coaching community, Repeatable Revenue (risk-free, 7-day trial).
(100% risk-free - 7 days free trial)