So a year ago my business was doing great and I was working part-time but I felt it was time to up-level things again.
Do you ever get that feeling that the time has come to push for the next level of growth otherwise you’ll start to get bored?
Well I did!
At that point my diary was pretty full with private clients that I worked with face to face for two hours twice a month.
I was pretty fixed in my mind that I delivered great value because I was face to face with my clients and that was the best (in fact I felt it was the only) way to do it.
Because I was delivering face to face I could only work with clients within a 45min drive time of my house, and I could only work with 3 clients a day (six hours of client time and two, one hour gaps to allow me to drive between them).
So what was the problem?
I’m sure you’ve already spotted it, but I was wasting approximately three hours a day driving and that wasn’t a leveraged way of doing things!
And two hours per meeting? That’s a long time especially if I’m seeing them every two weeks.
The desire to change needs to be significant
I was pretty much at full client capacity delivering how I was so my desire to step things up had to be greater than my fear of change otherwise I wasn’t going to budge.
Thankfully I did have a bigger desire to change than the size of my fear.
Don’t get me wrong, I was very confident and comfortable delivering the way I was.
I was making good money so they was no major driver (like the pun ?) to do it but I sucked it up and got on with it.
What did I change?
All the new clients I recruited were only offered the option of two one hour Skype/phone calls with me.
And shockingly they were all happy with that.
As my existing clients came up for contract renewal I swapped them over.
Only one didn’t want to change, and that was fine so I left them as they were. Entertainingly they now work with me on Zoom ?
What did it mean?
Now even though I halved the amount of time I spent with each client I didn’t change my fees as I was convinced their results wouldn’t change; and I was right.
So my revenue didn’t drop.
And I freed up not only the three hours of driving but I also saved on delivery each day too.
Now I can do up to five client calls a day with a 30 min gap between each so I can gather my thoughts, grab something to eat and do some fluid rebalancing if you know what I mean ?
So all in all I saved 3.5 hours a day, petrol and sanity!!
Plus I generated the potential to earn an extra two clients/day of fees.
In all fairness I struggle if I do five clients calls a day as I’m wiped out by the end of the day but it’s created time for me to do marketing/biz dev/ create content etc which is hugely valuable.
It didn’t stop there
So I took it one step further and started working with clients in groups which is very leveraged.
It’s similar to running workshops except that I only have to sell once to each person and not repeatedly to numerous people for every workshop.
What I did isn’t inventive or novel, but I did it.
How could you be more leveraged with your delivery?