Do This First When Moving to 1:1 Services
There are a lot of established business owners who are, to say the least, freaking out with the current marketing and lead generation climate. A lot of you are taking clients under the table or starting to offer agency or 1:1 services even though you’ve been building a 1:many business the last few years. While we don’t think this is a bad strategy at all (we actually love it and think you should continue doing it), there are some things to consider first.
More often than not, you’ve gotten used to the digital marketing world where quantity is better than quality; where going viral and getting all the leads, likes, follows, and shares is what’s going to help you get more eyeballs. In a not-so-distant past, that was true. Now, though, there are some mindset shifts that should happen.
And the reason we’re bringing this up now is because we’ve also seen a lot of established business owners (some 7-figure!) that are closing up shop because this is the part where ish gets hard.
Have you considered pivoting or adding on 1:1 services to your existing business?
An Audience Doesn’t Equal More Clients
We’ve been there, done that with the serotonin boost that comes from having an audience. When you have thousands of followers, sure you may have more leads, but you’ll inevitably waste more of your time sorting through them to find the ones that are even a tiny bit qualified. To be frank, we believe that marketing is a distraction for service-based business owners (and that’s coming from two people with backgrounds in marketing.)
Vanity metrics aren’t going to help you grow. Will they make you feel good about yourself? Sure, but ultimately is the sacrifice of your mental health worth it when seeing others with higher follower counts and “more success” makes you feel discouraged? Now, this isn’t to say that you can’t post a few times a month to make sure potential clients know your business is still active, but you shouldn’t be putting all of your eggs in the social media basket.
“I built my whole business (thus far) on serving/working with clients, without social media.”
Traditional Marketing Doesn’t Work the Same for Services
Take a step back and think of how you’ve been running your business so far where you’ve likely been selling digital products or low-priced offers. The price point on those is immensely lower than you should be selling you services for. The truth is, while traditional marketing tactics, like social media and email marketing, have worked in the past, it’s just simply not the same for services and shouldn’t be approached the same way.
If you’ve built up a following and experienced lots of sales for your digital product, you can’t expect the clout to carry over to your services because it’s not the same audience. An audience that will happily spend something like $27 on a low-priced offer or even just a couple hundred bucks on a digital product will not be as ready to spend $5,000+ on services (or even $35k+ like most of our Incubator clients). So what are you to do instead?
And chances are you’ve been building an audience where you’re teaching them how to do the thing that your service offers. If that’s the case, you’re going to need to find clients somewhere else.
Relationships Over Marketing
Utilize the connections and referral system you already have, especially the people you already know in your circle, to land your first handful of clients if not all of them. Most of our Incubator clients have built their entire business around referrals. They barely have to spend any time marketing because their existing and past clients are doing that work for them.
It takes 5 minutes to email a few of your connections and ask for an introduction or for them to share your business with at least 5 people. Word-of-mouth is the most effective tactic marketing there is with referral leads being 4 times more likely to buy (source). B2B companies with referrals experience a 70% higher conversion rate, making referral systems a no-brainer.
“(Sending out emails asking for referrals) … I already got one introduction email in the first 60 minutes. This is way better than posting on LinkedIn.”
The Quickest Way to Burn Out Your Team
Chances are you have a team, and if you don’t transition them properly to take on this new level of work, you could potentially burn them out quickly. You have to be sure you’re setting healthy expectations, communicating, and charging your clients appropriately. The rate you can charge as a solo business owner is absolutely not the same rate you should charge with a team.
Are you actually doing the math on how much it’s going to cost your team to take on clients? You should be clear on hours of availability, utilization percentages between you versus your team, the services included in your packages and how much time they take up, etc. if you want to make sure you’re running a sustainable, profitable, ethical business.
It’s probably been a while since you’ve worked with clients, so we’ll also happily remind you to have a contract in place, be super clear on the scope, make sure you’re getting paid on time and aren’t working without payment, and set boundaries and communication expectations.
Thinking of Going Back to Services?
It doesn’t matter if you’re a successful multi-6 or 7-figure business owner. If you’re entertaining the idea of going back to services or agency, we want to talk to you! This is our bread and butter, and we’ll help you refine your service-based business so it’s not taking up all of your time.
We don’t want you to accidentally wake up and realize that you’ve been working 80 hours a week because you’ve built two separate businesses. We can absolutely help you intertwine the two in a way that feels better. We’d love to have a conversation with you first to make sure you’re setting yourself up for success even if you aren’t thinking of offering services long-term or you just need a quick cash injection.
All you have to do is take less than 10 minutes to fill out this quick application, and then DM us on Instagram @bossproject letting us know you applied so we can get the conversation started!
