Success in Your Service Based Business: This is the Key Factor You Must Get Right
There is, without a doubt, one thing that can make or break your service-based business: capacity. This is something that has dramatic effects when not practiced carefully or correctly, and the people who are doing it wrong are often those who are overworked and underpaid. By not understanding your capacity in an in-depth and intimate way, you’re constantly sacrificing your mental health and wellbeing, you probably feel like everything is working against you, and you may not be making the progress you’d like to see in your goals.
In this post, we hope to leave you with tons more clarity on how capacity works, its cause-and-effect nature, and how to finally leave the path of burnout.
Understanding the Cause and Effect of Your Capacity
The biggest issue with capacity that we see in our clients and in the entrepreneurial space is that not many people seem to actually understand how it works. Everything that you do impacts your capacity, so we want you to have a fluid relationship with it. If you raise or lower your capacity, everything else in your business is adjusted as well. One of the most harmful mindsets you can have in your business is the idea that everything exists independently of each other, but the only thing that leads to is being unsure of what your next steps should be to reach your goals.
The conversation of capacity takes every single category of your business into consideration– from the balance of sales and marketing to having enough discovery calls, to closing enough clients, to also delivering work. It doesn't matter if you offer one-time projects, retainer projects, or at what price point; you're still going to hit a capacity ceiling.
Systemizing Your Offer When Capacity isn’t Price Dependent
It doesn't matter if you charge on the lower end for your services, mid tier, or high level– every business owner and every type of price point can reach a capacity. Just raising your prices isn't the only thing that's going to help you get out of capacity. There are many different factors involved, like where else you're spending your time as the CEO, how much your team impacts your ability to work with more clients, and your fluctuated schedule of refilling your pipeline.
THE IMPORTANCE OF STREAMLINING YOUR DELIVERABLES
Raising your prices and optimizing your systems and deliverables are such an underrated double whammy. We want you to focus on systemizing your deliverables in a way that makes the delivery a sort of machine because it’s so streamlined, seamless, and hands-off. You accomplish this by taking the time (like actually physically blocking it in your calendar) to walk through your client process and translate all of those manual steps into an automated process with a CRM. This includes checkpoints, scheduling appointments, follow-ups, getting approvals, sending final deliverables, etc. We talk more about how you can do that with our favorite CRM, Dubsado, in this blog post.
Productizing Your Service & Understanding Your Business’ Levers
Essentially, productizing your service means that you have pretty clear and set pricing and parameters for your service that is easily duplicatable and trainable for someone else to take over. Whenever we think of productized services, we imagine nice clean boxes that each client is picking up. Instead of having to customize each item that goes into the box or having tons of different shapes and styles, you just have one standard box that each client gets (for one service, at least). Sure, you may tweak the price or deliverables a bit for a client’s particular needs, but there are only small modifications so that the service itself is predictable for each client. The best part is that if you do it correctly, you don’t have to be the one delivering the box each time.
Productizing your offer will allow you to delegate and deliver amazing results every single time through structure and systemization even in your absence. If, eventually, you want to move into a different part of the business, retire, or even sell, you can plan for that. It won’t happen overnight, but if you find you can take a vacation for a month and your business is still thriving, you’ve successfully productized your offer.
PRODUCTIZING YOUR CLIENT EXPERIENCE
We like to take it a step further and encourage our clients to productize every single phase of their client experience, including leads, prospect journey, selling journey, onboarding, delivery, and ultimately offboarding. We believe that if you productize your client experience, you're going to be able to very clearly see your business in an “if-then” light.
An example would be if you’re at this capacity or if you raise your prices, then you’ll be able to let go of X amount of clients. Therefore, you’ll be able to get yourself back to a healthy working area or amount of hours. If you don't want to get rid of some clients but you want to raise your prices and still get some of your time back, then you’ll need some support. But are you actually hiring for the right role?
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF HIRING
We have a whole blog post about hiring over here, but for this specific issue in your business, the question you should be asking yourself is: Is the person helping you complete client deliverables or remove/cut back some of the time you’re spending in various areas in the client process, so you can actually work with more people? If not, you may want to revisit the job description. Also be mindful that you aren’t trying to hire “another you”, which is extremely easy to do when looking for someone to take over client work. That “other you” that you want to hire doesn’t have the same stake in your business, so you’re essentially giving them all of the responsibilities of an owner without any of the risk. This leads to entitlement, resentment, and unmet expectations because they’ll never understand what you’re going through as the CEO.
The Value of an Unbiased Third Opinion
When you’re so up close and personal to the options and opportunities in your business, it can be difficult to clearly see which changes you should make. It takes a third, unbiased opinion to help you make these decisions, no matter how intelligent or good at running your business you are. We help our clients navigate decision-making in a way that’s respectful of the kind of life they want, what their goals are, and whether or not they really want to increase their capacity. Again, capacity affects all of these aspects of business, which can cause things to get messy. We’d love to help you figure the mess out by having to fill out a quick form and book a time to chat with us!
