RR#119 - What got you here won’t get you there (but this will)

In business, a certain set of beliefs, actions, and skills will be sufficient to get you to a certain level.

But the very same beliefs, actions, and skills that got you there may prevent you from getting to the next level.

For example:

• When you’re getting started, you publish daily content on LinkedIn and engage for hours to get seen. But then you get the clients you wanted to all for that activity and no longer have time to do that.
  

• You reach out to new prospects in DMs for hours each day until you land a few sales and no longer have the capacity to do that. So you stop.
  

• Or you leverage your network for referrals and land a few high-paying clients that want your time, which you sell even though you know it’ll keep you too busy to build something scalable.

I’ve absolutely been there. And I’ve seen it among many of our community members and coaching clients.

At each level, we need to upgrade our beliefs, actions, and skills or we’ll remain flat and never get the full benefit of entrepreneurship.

I've found there to be 3 upgrades that contributed most to my growth from $200k per year in sales to $200k per quarter.

Here they are, along with a free resource to help you implement each:

1. Selling Solutions, Not Time

The single most important thing you can do to unlock sales in your business is to stop selling time and start selling solutions to a problem people will pay to get solved.

You already know that time is your most valuable asset. But it also happens to be the least valuable asset to your clients.

Don’t believe me?

Ask your client how they’d feel 6 months into a $15k per month retainer where you delivered a ton of your time, but nothing else to show for it.

It’s a misalignment at its core. Clients don’t actually want your time. They want the outcomes your time is supposed to deliver.

But if you don’t give clients something else to buy, they’ll default to buying your time.

Migrating from selling my time to selling productized services and solutions was an evolution for me that required:

• Clearly defining a target market I wanted to sell to

• Identifying a high-value, urgent problem to solve for them

• Creating a process that consistently solved that problem

• Then packaging, marketing, and selling that solution to that market

Productizing my services literally 10x’d the return on revenue to my time because I kept getting better at delivering the service.

The better I got, the more valuable the service became and the more efficient I became at delivering it. So prices increased while time invested decreased.

Bonus: it set up the opportunity for me to hire someone to help me deliver the service.

Here’s a step-by-step process for productizing if you’re interested.

2. Creating Content Systems

Content is the cornerstone of my marketing.

As I alluded to earlier, it was easy to create content and engage for hours a day because I didn’t have a full book of clients.

But the dog caught the car and before I knew it, I simply didn’t have time to keep doing what I’d been doing.

The only way to keep marketing my business while delivering work for clients was to build systems that would help me create and publish high-quality content.

Here’s how I’d build a content system from scratch knowing what I know now:

1. Write down exactly what needs to be created and done each month.

2. Break it down into categories (LinkedIn posts, newsletter, scheduling content, etc.).

3. Estimate how much time it’ll take to do each category.

4. Block that time in advance for the upcoming 3 months.

5. Stick to those time blocks.

6. Find opportunities to automate or delegate as you execute.

We’ve helped a lot of people create content systems and the hardest part for most people?

Number 5: sticking to the time blocks.

But here’s the thing: in order to reach high 6- and 7-figures in your service business without chaos, you have to develop the discipline of building and using good systems.

Without that discipline, your business will get stuck. There is simply no way around that.

But I promise you that the pain of using the system is less than the pain of having a business that feels like things are always on fire. Or the pain of feeling like you can’t afford to lose a client because you have no marketing happening in the background.

Bonus: systems like this make the likelihood of success with hiring a VA dramatically higher.

Here’s a breakdown of how I think about systematizing using content as an example.

3. Building a Funnel

When I started building online, I conceptually understood funnels. But it wasn’t until I reached capacity with clients that I truly appreciated the role they played and how valuable they were, especially to a very small business that required my time to support clients.

When you get the funnel dynamics in your business dialed in, you will have the ability to market and sell 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

I eventually learned that getting the funnel dialed in came down to 3 things:

1. A lead magnet (or collection of lead magnets) that “sold” a product in exchange for their email, becomes an immensely valuable list.

2. A long-form piece of content I could regularly share with that list to add more value, build trust and credibility, and stay top of mind.

3. Some strategically placed content is set up to be delivered when people book a sales call that helps educate them and warm them up before we talk.

Sure, they take some time to build and create. But after they’re set up they work for you on autopilot capturing leads, nurturing them into prospects, and pre-selling them before you talk.

It’s hard to beat that ROI.

Bonus: a funnel can be optimized over time because you start getting crucial, real-world data on what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s a video to help you build your funnel.

These are a few systems I found that helped me bust through the $10-30k per month plateaus.

I will no doubt find more as we grow because what got us here, won’t get us there.

I’ll share those with you as I learn them.

Hope this helps you start plotting your path through the next growth phase.