Are you at that point where you have exhausted the billable hours in your day?
When the product in your business is you it limits how far you can go, you cannot just sell more products. So how do you combat this and scale your business?
Here are some ways you can get out of the pay-per-hour cycle and scale your service business.
1. Find Your Right Hand
Imagine how effective you can be with 4 hands instead of 2. This can be a combination of an actual person/company and/or technology. Finding someone to offload some of your daily work to that is experienced in what they can help drive you forward. Also, consider using forms and chatbots that collect information from clients without you having to do anything or a scheduler where clients can book themselves.
2. Package Your Products
Instead of getting caught in the per-hour cycle, you should package your products. Charge either a monthly fee or a per-project fee. Offering services as products saves you time having to create specific proposals and take meetings that don’t ultimately result in new business. If you offer a set menu for your services, people are either interested or not. There’s no need for you to customize everything, so it saves you time. Having set easily repeatable products will free up your time to take on more clients.
3. Automate, Automate, Automate
Automation is key to saving you time so you can scale. With a service-based business, the main investment in human capital since it will be your team that will be providing the servicing. In order to scale, the team has to have streamlined processes so you can hire more people to scale the business. Processes like a client onboarding plan, standard operating procedures, and a well-trained team.
4. Find Your Profit.
Your most important step is to ensure that your margin on the services you provide is high enough to cover the labour expense of delivering your service. Invest in training so that you can hire entry-level team members so that you can get more efficient and thereby more profitable over time. create standard operating procedures to ensure consistency in how the service is delivered. Map out your step-by-step workflow, provide written or video instructions, and ensure your team is trained on the best practice so that your customers receive the same result each time.
5. Make Your Customer Experience Exceptional
The best way to set your brand apart from all the rest is by giving all your clients the best possible experience you can. This keeps them coming back and they will be your biggest driver for growth because they will tell everyone about this amazing experience. You will need to add people to your team who have exceptional customer relations skills and invest time and resources into training them. From the very first moment, whether it be through social media, your website, online chat, or in-store, you want every second to be a positive experience.
6. Take Back Your Time
The point of scaling your service business is to eventually grow and stop selling your time for money. To do this you will need to find highly skilled people to provide the service for you, and leverage your expert reputation to add new clients who those people can work with. Eventually, your client base grows large enough that you can gain significant growth.