Today, I’m going to teach you how to scale your service based business without burning yourself out.
Yes, it is possible. Watch the video or read on to learn more.
If you are a coach, consultant, professional of some sort, accountant, lawyer, financial advisor, something like that, or a freelancer or some other one-to-one service professional, chances are you want to scale your business.
And what most people do when they’re looking to scale their business is they think. Well, we can either charge more money or we can get more clients. Those are really your only two options.
But what both of those options do for you as a service professional is they really just cause you to end up burning out that much faster. I know this because I’ve been there.
When you charge more money, the client expects you to do more for them. And unless you have very clear boundaries in place, they’re going to demand more from you, they’re going to expect results faster, they’re going to want you to respond to every single email they send you very fast.
It becomes almost unruly. And conversely, when you go out and get more clients, you’re just creating more or work for yourself, especially if you are in a solo practice of some sort.
So what I’m going to do today is share with you exactly how I have found to scale my law practice without burning myself so that I could actually earn more money and work less.
I know that sounds really weird, doesn’t it? That’s sounds like … That’s not possible. How’s that possible? Well, I’m going to show you today in just a minute.
Now, there are really three steps to this process, and I’m going to take you through each one of them, one at a time.
- The first step is to automate your business.
- The second step is to start the process of productizing your business.
- And the third step is to start eliminating yourself from the equation, using systems and processes and strategic, intentional hiring of core roles that you need on your team.
Automate Your Business
So let’s go through the first one, that’s to automate your sales, your marketing, and the delivery of your services ultimately. There’s a lot of different tools out there for how you can do this, but this is one of the first things that I did with my law practice.
Now, mind you, I’m a techie, and so I’ve really relied on technology to basically streamline everything I do in my law practice. I was one of the first attorneys in my area to actually go paperless, which a lot of people are reluctant to do, but honestly, if you want to streamline your practice and you want to have some sort of independence in the way you work, going paperless is a great first step in that process.
I started using scheduling software in my business so that people could book their appointments on their own. They could book a time to talk with me without me being a part of that equation and without me having a receptionist being a part of that equation.
It was easier for my clients. It was easier for me. I started using a program called Zapier, which if you’re not familiar with it, is a lifesaver. It’ll do so much for you and it’ll save you so much time, but you start doing all these things where you’re going to really automate everything that happens in your business.
And that can happen at the sales side, the marketing side, and the delivery side. So that just makes it that much easier to work with your clients without you specifically having to work with each one of them and you specifically having to do a whole lot of administrative tasks for each specific file.
And that’s what really happens is when you’re building a service based business, it’s not necessarily the delivery of the service, the one-to-one time that you have with that client, that saps so much of your resources, it’s the administrative burden of managing multiple clients that really can cause a problem.
Related Resource: If you are a service professional looking to systematically scale your 1:1 client business so that you can earn more money while working less, click here.
So you need to start finding ways to automate a lot of the administrative things that have to happen in your business.
Productize Your Business
Now, the second thing you need to do is you need to do what I call productizing your business, and what do I mean by that?
When you’re productizing your business, you’re basically taking your knowledge that you normally would share with a client and you are putting it out there in a video form, in an audio form, through emails, different things like that, so that you can actually work with clients where they can get a lot of information from you without you actually sitting down and telling clients the same information over and over again.
Related Resource: Check out my new podcast here.
What I found in my legal practice is that clients were asking me the same questions over and over and over again. And this is even before they hired me to work with them.
So I found a system, I created a system to basically answer all those top questions my clients had and put them into a format where the clients could access them. And then you can actually give that to prospective clients. You could actually sell that to prospective clients, and sometimes they can use that in lieu of actually hiring you directly.
So that’s what I mean by I say you have to productize your business. You have to take your intellectual property, what you know, and you have to put it down into a tangible form so that your clients can consume that content without having to actually talk to you.
Eliminate Yourself from the Equation
And then the last step of the process is that you need to start eliminating yourself from the equation. And what do I mean by that?
I mean, you need to start developing systems and processes for your business. This is something that I’ve done strategically for many, many years now, so that anytime something happens in my business, there is a system for exactly how that needs to take place.
And once you start putting those systems down on paper or in a computer, or in some sort of system, then you can hand that off to a virtual assistant or a customer service person or someone like that who’s working for you, that they can handle those things without you actually getting involved in those day to day tasks.
Related Resource: To sign up with my favorite email service provider, click here (affiliate link).
Because you really shouldn’t be involved in those day to day tasks. What you should be doing is the higher level services that you need to be doing as a professional that’s going to be working with these clients.
And the visionary tasks, the things that the $250, $500, $1,000 dollars an hour, $10,000 an hour type of tasks, as the business owner those are the things that you should be doing. The $10, $15, $20 an hour tasks are not the things that you should be doing.
That’s the easiest way for what I see most solopreneurs who are working in a service based business, that’s what they do that’s really going to drag them down and really leads to a lot of burnout, stress, and where people just want to quit doing what they’re doing and going back to a regular nine to five job.
Now, you may be thinking, this all sounds well and great, Jim, this actually sounds wonderful. I would love to implement this into my business, but I don’t have any idea where to start.
Well, for those of you that have been following me for any length of time, you know that I’ve been teaching the legal stuff that you need to do to legally protect your business. But over the past several months, I’ve started the process of transitioning into more of a business coaching role while telling people the legal stuff they need to do in addition to that.
That’s provided more value to my coaching clients, and actually teaching the legal stuff to my clients is one of the ways that I have productized my business in a way that I could now step away and I don’t have to do as much of the day to day legal work for my clients in my business.
I’m really doing more of the coaching, mentorship, teaching people what they need to do legally to protect their business, but doing in a one to many format as opposed to a one to one format, the way most lawyers work.
So I’m currently exploring the possibility of launching a high ticket group coaching program that would work specifically for service professionals, like I said, freelancers, consultants, coaches, different people like that who work one to one with clients and are looking to break free of that business model into a one to many model, or actually just automating and systematizing their practice so that they can start to step away and have more time, freedom, while still earning the same amount or even more money than they are right now.
If this is something that you would like to learn more about, here is a link where I’m going to have an interest form. And if I get enough people that are interested in learning more about this, then I’m going to launch the program and I’d be happy to send you an application.
Make sure you check out this video on how to start an LLC.
