Many of the people I work with and publish for are working diligently toward building a sustainable business as a coach, a consultant or a therapist.
They are offering (or planning to offer) 1:1 services for an hourly rate, which is a good honest business model that provides income for lots of people across the country.
The problem is that…if they are sick, or if their family needs them, or they aren’t able to generate and convert enough leads for their business, they don’t get paid, and their vision starts to become unstuck really fast.
What I see happening then is that they start working even harder, putting in more hours, pushing their business out on more platforms more often, and showing up at more networking events. Instead of generating more business, though, they exhaust themselves and burn out.
Today I was inspired to talk about the importance of having a simple business model and focusing on mastering one thing at a time as a strategy for building that sustainable business that we are all ultimately aiming to build.
I actually hold the belief that if we are doing it right, business should not be that hard. We either have a product/service that people want, or we don’t.
One thing I know about small businesspeople is that they are not afraid of hard work or long hours. It certainly shouldn’t be a massive struggle to get clients. But, if the business isn’t working in its current state, doing the same thing harder and longer isn’t going to change anything. It’s just going to make us miserable or worse, kill us.
If it’s not working, we have to do something different. Maybe we have to change a number of things. And we can stumble around in the dark for something to change or we can gravitate toward every new shiny thing that comes along and try that in our business.
Or we can use a tried-and-true business model and work on one thing at a time until the business is working for us the way we want it to.
The particular business model I obviously promote is one where you write a book and use that as a foundation for growing a business rather than having your business be about your book.
That business model looks like this:
1. Write a book and use it as a lead magnet
2. Invite people to work with you through your book
3. Automate the process so you don’t’ have to keep showing up everywhere all the time.
How can that work for you?
Writing a book sets you up as an author-ity on what you do. It is a top-quality lead magnet that literally gives you credibility.
The two biggest benefits of writing a book around your experience and expertise is:
· Writing your book is the best exercise that will help you get clear on your target audience and your marketing message, as well as demonstrate how you solve your market’s problems. It’s a powerful confidence booster for that reason alone.
· It also gives your target market the opportunity to see for themselves that you know what you are talking about and that you have what it takes to help them.
Other benefits include the fact that:
· You can use your new author-ity status to set yourself apart from your competition.
· You will look and act more professional
· You will be able to articulate and demonstrate how what you do is different to what everyone else is doing
· Use your book to attract speaking opportunities and podcast interviews for new audiences so you are constantly growing your database
· You will be more appealing and more interesting to other influencers who already have an audience who want to hear your message
· Use your book to the build know, like and trust factor with your target audience and attract new clients into your business
Of course, not everyone you connect with is going to engage you or work with you but a percentage of them will and it’s all about the maths.
The number of leads you attract x your conversion rate = your number of customers.
So the more leads you attract and the better you get at converting them, the more customers you are going to have.
A quality lead magnet – your book – shared to a broad audience of your target market is going to help you get the business you want easier and faster.
But you have to work on just one thing at a time.
Write the book first and don’t let yourself get distracted.
Make sure you have all the right links and calls to action in the right places within the book.
And finally, you have to automate your marketing so that you have a constant drip feed into your business.
I hope this inspires you to do something different.
If this makes sense to you and you would like to explore the option of writing a good quality book that will help you grow your business, reach out to us today.
We have a fill-in-the-blanks business book template that will take the hard work out of the process for you, and we’d love to share it with you.
Just click on the link below and we’ll email you with all the details of how to access that.
That’s it from me for today. I’m heading into nature to go camping, but I’ll be back next week, hopefully with a few less stress lines.
Please click here to find out more about the business book template.