What Moved the Needle the Most in Our Service-Based Business
Episode 733: Show Notes
We have a list of goodies to share with you today of things we have learned over the last 18 months. We aren’t digging into the archives from years ago. These are definitely things we have learned and implemented more recently, and they are things we know you can benefit from. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, these are tips that you should pay attention to for yourself, and try to figure out how they can work for you!
We know that the last couple of years have been very strange and we started noticing things that we used to do consistently and used to get predictable results from not working at all anymore, and we even got negative results. This is not uncommon for service-based business owners to experience at all! We wanted to gather up the best things that moved the needle the most for our business, especially when things are confusing. You may be surprised at how foundational these steps actually are and we came up with these ideas as a sort of experiment.
In the last 18 months, our business has more than doubled. We went from a team of two to a team of seven full-time, we reduced our contractor load while still having subject matter experts, and our revenue is on a completely different playing field than it ever has been before. We have focused more on our values and taken these steps to move the needle substantially for our business. We want you to develop an experimental mindset and actually live in it, and here is how!
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Taking the Pressure Off of Marketing and Social Media
This one may not be surprising to you at all or, on the flip side, you may be completely shocked. We turned off our ads. Yes, you heard us correctly, our ads have been turned off for six months now! We moved away from spending money on advertising and we have been talking to our clients about how they can continue to be successful without relying on ads, trendy marketing tactics, and social media. We also cut all of our blog content in half and stopped focusing on creating a daily presence on Instagram!
The time we spent on these things became so exhausting and one day, we decided to just stop. We’ve noticed, as we have focused less on those areas that nothing bad actually happened! In fact, only positive things happened. We were terrified that this change would impact sales negatively but we actually haven’t seen any negative impact whatsoever. We want you to stay present on these platforms, but being present is different from feeling the pressure to show up all the time. Starting with this step gave us room to take the other steps we’re going to talk about today.
Shifting to a Premium Pricing Model
Most of our clients are in services and we are still educators at heart so having different pricing has always been a part of our business model. We actually decided to drop a lot of our lower-priced courses that were way too outdated. We’ve shifted into a premium pricing model that is more in alignment with the coaching and consulting services and we are feeling really good about this shift! We have said this (practically) since the beginning of time: creating a low-price and premium-price offer takes exactly the same amount of time and energy! So if you’re going to be exerting the same effort, you may as well be paid more for that effort right?
Working with the Same Client at Different Points in Their Journey
We learned a really big lesson that taught us to look at our ideal clients on a range of needs and at different stages of their business. We remember feeling like we had lost touch with our clients and didn’t even know who they were a few years ago when we were serving hundreds of thousands of clients. We didn’t have the capacity to know everyone’s business and we wanted to change that!
We want you to look at how you can serve your clients at the different stages they may be in. This informed some of the changes we made because going deeper and getting a better result in this one area has made a bigger impact on our clients’ businesses, and they are able to see results in a more tangible way! We can spend more one-on-one time with clients that fill our cups and help them progress the way they want to.
Seeing our clients graduate through our programs is wild to us because we can see how one program gets them primed and ready for the next stage. Not being ready is absolutely okay and it’s okay to pause and refine things in your business in order to get ready. That is exactly what we want to help you to do! You have to make some tangible decisions that will impact your business at the stage it is in on its journey. And when you make decisions, they don’t have to be concrete decisions! They can be flexible, experimental, and can be changed! There has to be some ability to move and go with the flow so that your business survives stormy weather.
The First Thing We Do When Something Goes Wrong
When you see things that aren’t working in your business, we often see clients shifting the blame. We think it’s important to pay attention to how the leaders can grow in the business. We like to look at how we can improve first before looking outside of ourselves when something goes wrong in our business. This will shift everything and make your team more loyal and more focused on success, because your expectations are clear!
It's also important to make sure you are clear on the difference between working with contractors and working with employees. We want you to understand those boundaries and how your expectations of employees and contractors need to differ so that you can get what you should be getting out of that relationship and not expect what you cannot (legally) expect. We want you to turn inward first instead of reacting in anger or frustration. Pause, take a beat, and look at the ways you can improve first!
Why We Focus on Our Long-Term Vision
You would’ve heard us talking about shifting away from looking at goals and focusing on outcomes instead. Now we are focused on what we can do today to put us on course for what we want long-term. We are so excited about having this more long-term focus and while we know that this may feel like a major luxury and maybe you may not be able to focus on the vision just yet, this is a place we hope you can get to in your business.
Understandably, in the beginning, you may simply feel the pressure to build a business that is going to survive and that is absolutely okay! We are well aware of the luxury capital provides and how difficult things can be when you rely on your business to pay your bills. But when you get to the point where there is no doubt your business will stay around, focusing on the long-term is key!
The more we focus on the business through this lens, the less our self-worth is tied to the business and then we are able to make decisions brick by brick to carve the path we eventually want. Try to remember that your decisions are biased and third-party input can be so helpful. We have turned to other people countless times in order to avoid some of their mistakes when making these decisions. You don’t have to meet your vision in one click of a finger tomorrow but as long as you are making very smart decisions today that lead you to that goal, you are on the right track!
The Power of Reinventing Your Messaging and Meeting Your Clients Where They Are
When your capacity is low early on in business, putting time and energy into your messaging doesn’t really make a difference, believe it or not. But when your capacity is where ours is, messaging is so important. We even landed one of our biggest clients from our website alone! Not too long ago, we were due for a messaging change so we revealed a new brand, new colors, and new language on our website so that we can show up for our clients and really showcase what it is that we offer. We have gotten so specific about the services we offer and how we help and we are constantly shifting our messaging. These subtle changes make a huge difference in the conversations you are having behind the scenes.
So if your capacity is increasing, we suggest that you make messaging and web improvements, and our team can even help you. Just as your business goes through changes, so do your clients’ businesses! We do not approach every client with a cookie-cutter outlook. Everything we do is personalized and we make sure to meet our clients exactly where they are in their business. At first, we made the mistake of making our service offerings too broad but we have realized that clients mostly have the same type of issues, so narrowing the focus for you and being experts in those fields delivers better results! Now we are very clear about what we are and aren’t willing to do, and these things are in alignment with our culture and focus on our mission, vision, and values.
Defining Your Values
As we have defined our values as a company, we use them as a lens for every single thing we do going forward. We decided to create a value called lighthearted, and part of that means that we have no addiction to urgency, time, and results just for the sake of it. We want to start to do things with ease, slow down, and enjoy the journey. We use this value as a guiding principle for how to have an experimental mindset. Whenever we feel frustrated, we remind ourselves and our team to be lighthearted.
This has become huge for us and our goal is for you to run your business that is in alignment with how you want to be living your life and has the vision of being more future-focused! We make decisions in our business that some of our peers may think are strange but we remain focused because we know what our values are. We have started a new cohort for our Incubator and we want to encourage you to join us, so that we can help you have radical realizations and make changes that have a deep impact on how you show up as a human and in the online world!
Quote This
The amount of time that it takes you to create and market a premium-priced offer and a low-priced offer is the same!
Highlights
Taking the Pressure Off of Marketing and Social Media. [0:10:51]
Shifting to a Premium Pricing Model. [0:14:09]
Working with the Same Client at Different Points in Their Journey. [0:17:36]
The First Thing We Do When Something Goes Wrong. [0:25:54]
Why We Focus on Our Long-Term Vision. [0:30:26]
The Power of Reinventing Your Messaging. [0:37:53]
Meeting Your Ideal Client Where They Are Right Now. [0:42:28]
Defining Your Values. [0:46:19]
Today’s Guest:
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
The Strategy Hour Podcast is a twice weekly show hosted by Abagail Pumphrey and Emylee Williams, the founders of Boss Project. Join us for semi-ranty biz conversations for service providers looking to ethically grow their agency businesses. Episodes cover everything from lead generation to leadership mindset to team culture and beyond.
Key Topics:
Marketing, Social Media, Premium Pricing, Vision, Values, Messaging
