We’re all talking about scaling our businesses, adding revenue streams, and even adding passive income to our service-based businesses. The main reason for this is that, generally speaking, service businesses are not designed to be scalable business models. However, we all want to maximize our revenue potential, working less hours and making more money – and being paid for our services isn’t always the best way to achieve that.
While service businesses may not be scalable on their own, you can certainly add scalability to them simply by adding product-oriented revenue streams. Luckily, there are several ways to do this. The key is to discover how to convert what you do best (your service) into a product you can sell, that your target audience will also be interested in buying from you.
Questions To Ask Yourself Before Choosing To Scale
The type of product you choose to sell will be dependent on the type of service you provide. Ask yourself two questions:
1) What service do I provide that gives my clients the most value?
2) If I provide this service in a one-to-many platform, will it still be effective?
Keep in mind that adding a scalable revenue stream doesn’t necessarily mean you will stop providing services, it just means that you can have an additional income stream that isn’t dependent on your time. You may even use this income stream as a way to move product clients into your higher-priced individual services.
What Scaling Can Look Like
For example, suppose you are a marketing consultant and you work with clients each month to both strategize and manage their marketing tasks. Your clients need you to be creative, knowledgeable, experienced, and effective at getting them results. With this specialty, you could launch an event for business owners looking to improve their marketing efforts, where you are either the teacher, one of many teachers, the host, or the facilitator. You could collaborate with other marketing experts for this event, which would help you tap into a larger market. Either way, this could be an additional stream of revenue that once created, could be replicated many times. Additionally, it might be a great way to get more clients.
There are several popular methods of adding scalable revenue streams, especially for online service providers such as:
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Membership programs
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Mastermind programs
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Group Coaching
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Online Courses – Evergreen or live
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Books
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Hosting events/conferences
Choose one or several of these as additional income streams for your business, depending on what will best showcase your expertise, and be most effective with your audience. It’s worth noting that you’ll maximize your profit potential with any of these options by building your audience and your network. Remember, the idea of scalability is based on increasing the number of customers, so to be effective at scaling requires you to focus more energy on both marketing and building meaningful, online connections. However, you don’t necessarily need to have a large audience, you just need to connect with those who want to do business with you, and enough of them to meet your revenue goals.
