Are you selling a lot to a few?
Did you ever feel that the only way you could grow your business would be by selling more and more different products or services to the clients you have on board?
I’m Linda Feinholz. I work with business owners who want to get more control, more value and more freedom in their business.
One of the main mistakes I see owners make is in going wide, spending way too much time and putting way too many resources into adding more and more offerings to a short list of clients.
At the core is the need to make a wholesale shift, in terms of the way most owners start out in business, which is selling lots of things to a few customers.
Where we want to get to over time is selling just a few things to lots of customers. Now, that may sound like a just a turn of a phrase, but in fact, it’s a wholesale change in the way you think about and take action in your business.
WHY is selling many things to a few customers a problem? Well, think of it in terms of growth potential and what makes a company scalable. Scalability makes a company more stable and more valuable.
There are 3 key factors to scalability.
Number one, the activities of your business have got to be teachable to employees.
Number two, your products or services have got to be valuable, meaning they’re not a commodity.
And number three, they’re repeatable, meaning customers purchase them on some sort of regular cadence.
All of this is so that you get to a place where your business is not personally dependent on you.
When my client Jack made this scalability shift with his company, and shared the information with his bank – it became less risky in their eyes so they lent him 4x more money at lower rates which changed the cost structure of his company. Which in turn financed his business expansion.
What’s an example of this? Let’s imagine a photography businesses have a set number of services. A wedding photographer. And now let’s run an exercise.
Let’s rate wedding photographs as a product or service and the degree to which it meets those 3 factors.
How teachable, How valuable and how renewable are wedding photographs?
Well, they’re pretty teachable. They’re very valuable to the bride and groom, yet they’re not repeatable because you only ever get married once.
How about kids baseball teams photographs? Very teachable. It’s pretty simple. Short kids in the front, tall kids to the back. But, you know, not VERY valuable. There’s a lot of folks who sell baseball photography.
Now imagine focusing on school photographs. You could teach a formula to your staff that get the kids in and out of the classroom quickly. AND they need photos again next year, and the next and so on!
Now, as you go through this exercise with your own business it can get pretty frustrating!
What you might find is that your most valuable products and services are also the least teachable and the most teachable things to your employees are the least valuable to your customers. And so you can get frustrated with this kind of tension between what is valuable to your customers and what is teachable to employees.
So here’s a final element to this exercise: Can you productize your services, and add services to your products.
Your teachable products and services that are even maybe individually commodities, yet as a bundle itself becomes a more valuable product or service.
As an accountant providing financial services, you can assemble all those products or services that are teachable to employees into a service bundle. The bundle itself actually can become a very valuable because what it means for your clients is they didn’t have to hire a back office person in their company.
In fact, they could completely outsource that entire function. Now YOU can get out of some of the other activities that are just less scalable products or services.
I’d love to show you how my clients and I do it for their businesses and find similar solutions for you. You’ll find a checklist and guide and additional information at OnDay91.com/focus
Talk to you soon.
.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready… here are 4 ways we can help you stabilize and grow your business:
1. Grab a free copy of our Guide and Checklist
It’s the roadmap to creating a stable, scalable, valuable business that is so healthy you could be absent for ninety days and it would continue to thrive. — Click Here
2. Join the On Day 91 group and connect with business owners who are resetting and scaling too
It’s our new Facebook community where smart business owners learn to get more control of their business, value for their company, and freedom in how they use their time. — Click Here
3. Join our Momentum Program and be a Case Study
We’re putting together a new case study group at On Day 91 this month… stay tuned for details. If you’d like to work with Linda on your business-pivoting and growth plans… just send her a message with the words “Case Study”. — Click Here
4. Work with Linda and her team privately
If you’d like to work directly with Linda and the On Day 91 team to take you and your business to it’s next level… just send Linda a message and with the word “Private”… tell her a little about your business and what you’d like to work on together, and we’ll get you all the details! — Click Here
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