Client Magnets Official Blog

Are you familiar with the song, “Too Much Time on My Hands”? If you are a solo professional, running your own business, that song probably makes you laugh.

For you, there is no such thing as too much time. Because your time is actually the commodity you are selling. And there are a few problems with that.

1. As long as you’re selling your time, you’re basically manual labor. There are only so many hours in a day. Once they’re gone, you can’t create any more.
2. This makes you vulnerable. If a client cancels, and you don’t have a cancellation policy in place, that means lost revenue for you. The hours that you’d booked for that client are now wasted time – time when you are not earning any income.
3. If your business model is based on trading your time for money, it requires you to be constantly working to meet your target.
4. If you’re constantly working on trading time for money, you are going to get tired. And when you become tired and uninspired, your clients start to lose out because the passion goes out of your selling.

You started your business because you really love doing it. If it’s now become a chore, and you feel as if you are on a treadmill, you need to change your business model.

1. Look for ways to leverage your time. Get paid for your expertise rather than your time. Find a way to help people that doesn’t require your physical presence to do the work with them all the time.
2. Recognize that you are trading your time for money, but don’t make a snap decision to create quick income streams. Be careful about rushing out and creating an e-book to see if that brings in any money.  Instead, plan out your strategy – there are quick ways you can bring in cash but you need to have a strategy that works.
3. Productize. Package your expertise in the form of products or programs. Your first reaction might be that this can’t be done in your business. That’s what I thought too, working as a sales trainer. I saw that the results I helped people achieve were based on their interaction with me. They talked to me about the challenges they were facing and I helped them by offering solutions. I couldn’t conceive of any way in which I could put this in a box and productize it.   The fact is, I found out that there were lots of ways that I could actually serve clients better, rather than just working with them individually all the time.
4. In order to really benefit from making the switch to a better business model, you need to reconsider your whole strategy. You can’t do it just by bolting on one product at a time.

If you’re serious about moving to a business model that will generate more income through products and programs versus selling your time, then you need to look at your business in its entirety.

The products that you offer will have an impact on the demand for your time as an individual. And they are going to be compared with how much you charge for your time as an individual.

So when you look at the big picture, you’ll see that bolting on a £37 e-book really isn’t going to be enough. Because if you’re charging £500 a day or even £1,500 a day, you’re going to have to sell a lot of e-books to make up for that one day’s pay.

This type of approach won’t give you the momentum you need to really make a difference. So don’t do this piecemeal. Don’t do it as a sideline.

Think about your whole business. You need to think about a whole suite of products and programs, logically thought out at different price points, that work together to bring you an income that you desire.

If you approach this productizing in the right way, you will be more committed to getting this side of your business off the ground. And you will no longer be stuck in a vicious cycle of trading your time for money.

By analyzing your business model as a whole, you can work fewer hours and triple your income.

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