How Are You Planning to Scale Your Business?

Once you get to a certain point in running a service based business you will probably want to see it grow. Maybe it has been growing gradually over time, maybe you have had a growth plan from the start and now you have hit the point where you need to start making some decisions because your business can’t grow any more with the model and current staffing numbers that you have, which might be only you. So, how are you planning to scale your business?

There are a few options out there…

Scale Your Business by Growing the Team

You could continue to do what you do, delivering the same service, but bring in more people to help you do it, so you can do it more and earn more money. These people could do what you do so you can essentially be doubling or tripling the amount you can do as you take on another one or two people. Or you could take on someone or a team to do all the bits you have to do that you can’t charge for such as admin, finance, marketing. But you need to consider that in this situation your output will increase, but you will have to be paying these people and all the other things you have to pay that surround employing people, so that will affect profits.

Scale Your Business by Having a Product to Sell

Selling a product is a great way to gain another income stream and grow your business. This could be a physical or digital product that supports what you already offer as a service. We think having a digital product works especially well because you will have minimal outlay and once it’s all set up and selling it really does become a very passive income. So, this could be an e-book or an online course.

Scale Your Business by Starting a Membership

Starting a membership is another fantastic way to grow a business. It’s a way of bringing the service you give to your current clients to a lot of people at once and a great way to generate a recurring income. We personally really like the membership model and it is also a way of attracting more people to your service to work with you in a one to one capacity as well when they see how amazing you are at what you do through the membership. Not everyone should rush into creating a membership though. There are some things you should consider first.

A membership isn’t a passive income model, like a digital product. You need to create valuable content on an ongoing basis. This can be done in batches, so you work hard for a few days and then your content is sorted for the next few months, so it is semi-passive, but you must commit to creating that quality content. Also, you need to be there for your members. The most successful memberships that we have seen are the ones where the membership owner is present, whether that’s in a community, via monthly group calls or even through offering short one to one calls. You can’t be completely hands off, these people are paying for your expertise so they want to feel like they are getting it from you.

A membership is a business growth model, a way of scaling your business and not something to jump into straight away. Again, the most successful memberships are run by people who have a lot of experience and expertise in their field. When you are running a membership you are hoping to reach a lot of members, they will all bring different questions or problems that they want solved and you will do this most successfully if you have the answer straight away because you have already seen similar in your business journey and you can draw on that. That level of confidence in approaching your members will show through and make them confident in what you offer and get them telling other people about you.

A membership owner who doesn’t have that grounding won’t present a confident approach, may flounder over questions and their inexperience will show through which means the membership wont be as successful as it could have been if you had waited until you were really ready.

Continuing on from that theme, you also need to have people to sell a membership to. This will also come with having some time in business behind you. Whether you have a good social media following or an email list of engaged people or you are an active member of a community where your ideal future members engage with you. Whatever it is, you need those people to already know who you are and respect what you do so that you have some potential buyers when you launch your membership. It takes quite a lot of work to set one up so you don’t want to release it and nobody joins. The adage, “If you build it, they will come,” (which is actually misquoted I realised when writing this) doesn’t apply here.

If the membership model is the way you think you will scale your business, then we recommend you take the time to properly plan it and choose the right platform to create your membership site on before you jump into it. We ran a really successful challenge last year to help people do this and we are running it again soon. So, if you are thinking of creating a membership site and want to ensure you do the best job possible to give your members a fantastic experience, then you can sign up for the next challenge here.