But I don't want to grow my business

“But I don't want to grow my business”. This is something I hear all the time!

I talk a lot about growing your business and scaling it and how to outsource but most people say to me “I don't want to grow my business” I just want it to be me.

I think that is absolutely fine, there's no problem with that if you don't want to grow your business. But part of growth is to stop exchanging time for money, this is something we all need to get away from so you can have a holiday, you can have time off, if you are ill, or you have an ill family member or even if you don't want to work five days a week, nine to five.

I want you to think about stopping exchanging time for money as way to grow, and being able to scale your business so that you can take time off so that you can enjoy your business a bit more.

When you're working time for money, there's a ceiling in your capacity and how many hours you work delivers how much revenue. If you're saying I will work 10 hours for this much money, you've got to work those 10 hours. Whereas if you can offer a service for a fixed price then maybe you can do the same work without working 10 hours every time. So if there's a ceiling in your capacity, it leads to burnout really quickly.

I feel at the moment that I'm working quite hard, and I am pretty much at capacity. I am tired and that's fine, I know it's because I took on a client on a short term project, which is quite a lot of work.

But I couldn't do this in the long term. Even though it's good for my bank account, and I'm making quite a lot of money out of it, actually, it's not great in terms of time that I am not working on my own business. You have to focus on the things only you can do and you need to price your services so that you can outsource all those other things.

 You might have a Virtual Assistant who posts for you, who does your email newsletter - you write it and then they send it all out. They write your emails, and they can do a whole load of other things. And you outsource all of that, because, somebody else can do that work. The writing of the blog posts and all of that sort of stuff can be outsourced to my Virtual Assistant, who does a great job and I don't need to be there for that bit. If I'm speaking in a group, I have to be there but actually making sure that I've got a good email funnel for the group members once I’ve finished speaking is really important but I don’t have to be there for that bit.

One of the easiest ways to stop exchanging time for money is to package up your services.

If you’re offering a fixed cost service, it might be that instead of saying 10 hours is £500, you flip it and say the cost of that service is £500, and you work out how to spend less time doing that thing. So over time, you either outsource some of it, or you make it easier and quicker and you systematise it and you make it a process yet still get paid £500. 

What I want you to think about is how to make yourself more standard. I know every client is slightly different, but I would argue that 80% to 90% of every client is the same so you can offer a standardised service. If all your clients are completely different, and you are charging £1000’s then you are offering a bespoke service and you don’t need to be thinking about a more standardised service.

You need to standardise your service and by-product as you get better at it. For example, I offer a Power Hour and at the beginning it took me three hours to deliver it and now I can do it in less than two. I think it's really important that you know that even though it’s an hour less, the price is still the same because I'm still delivering the same result every time.

If you want to know more, I offer a packages masterclass. It's £27 and it's my most popular masterclass all about stopping exchanging time for money.