As a service based business owner, your time is how you earn money. But what happens after you’ve maxed out your time? Because let’s be real, it happens. How can you bust through that earning cap? Here are a few helpful tips:
Find more Time
If you’re trading time for money, then increasing your time will obviously increase your income! But it’s not like time grows on trees so how can you make more time?
1. The obvious answer: give more time to your business. You can do this either by doing a time audit to track efficiency or by actually dedicating more time to your business. Often, this isn’t an option, and if it was, you’ve already done it. So unless you know how to clone yourself, we better look at other options…
2. Streamline your business. Create systems and processes that will allow work to be done without you. Think automated emails, a clean invoicing system, data collection, or scheduling. If you have employees, make sure they all know where to go for answers when you’re not available. The more you can take yourself out of repetitive, non-money-making tasks, the more time you can dedicate to your business growth and money-making tasks.
3. Hire it out. If you can hire an employee or contractor to take some of the administrative and/or recurring tasks off your plate, it will free up your time AND energy. That means more time to focus on your Zone of Genius (aka, the thing you do best), which means more income. So the rule of thumb here is to be smart. Smart with how much you pay someone else AND how smart you are with your newfound free time. As long as you’ve got those bases covered, you’ll see additional profits being added to your bottom line.
Increase prices
Have you heard of the term Supply and Demand? It’s an economic principle that looks at the amount of goods and services available to buy in comparison to the price consumers are willing to pay for them. Typically, the more rare a good or service is, the higher in price it becomes. That means if you are fully booked out or close to approaching that point, it’s time to raise your prices in response to demand. Of course, when you raise your prices the demand typically goes down, and in this case, that’s exactly what we want! You could serve 20 clients a month and make $10K or you could double your prices and in theory, serve 10 clients a month and still make $10K. Or maybe you still serve 20 clients a month but now you’re making $20K! See how that works?! Supply and demand is all about finding the sweet spot in your pricing and what your clients are willing to pay. It’s a game of trial and error. Don’t be afraid to play around with it and raise those prices already, will ya?!!
Cut Expenses
When was the last time you thoroughly reviewed your expenses? Yeah… that’s what we thought. It’s probably been a hot minute. Take a closer look at where your money is going and make sure you’re not spending money unnecessarily – especially on forgotten subscriptions. Anytime you cut expenses, you’re adding to your bottom line. Bravo!
Add another stream of income
Up-sell, cross-sell, bundle, promote affiliate links, but most of all, have a passive income stream! Passive income does not take time away from your business, it serves clients you are currently too busy to serve since you’re booked out, and it adds profits to your business. Win-win all around!
Now that you know how to bring in more profits, go do it! And if you’re interested in outsourcing as a means of doing that, reach out. We can help give you more time for business by taking care of the accounting, payroll, and tax side of things. Learn more about our accounting services by clicking below
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