How to avoid feast & famine in your business. In its most simplistic format entrepreneurial businesses start with the passion and expertise of the person launching the business.
- They love what they do or a product they want to create.
- They have experience in what they do
- And they take their expertise or interest and turn it into their own business.
However, many starting these types of businesses are used to being in Jobs. Where there are teams around them, marketing departments, admin staff, hr and much more.
Suddenly as an entrepreneur you are wearing many different hats!
- You have to do your own selling
- You have to do your own admin (well at least for a while)
- You have to attract clients usually by creating content and resources.
- And the list goes on.
So often entrepreneurs and business owners tend to get into what I call a “feast and famine” cycle.
Where you spend time marketing and selling and then you get a new client (eg. a marketing company might win a big branding contract). You are then delivering the work for that new client and suddenly …
You haven’t done any marketing or sales calls for a week, two or even three! Or the other end of the spectrum where you get so visible, and clients are interested in you, that your calendar fills up with discovery calls. You are so busy doing calls, that you get little or no actual work done. You let things slip in your workload.
- And you are too busy servicing all the new clients that you are client projects get behind or worse still they feel neglected!
Then the cycle starts all over again. Never quite knowing where your next client is coming from. With your bank account being cleared out again and this continual …
Feast and famine cycle seems to never end.
Too many entrepreneurs and business owners are trapped in a literal up-and-down pattern of success and struggle.
This feast and famine can also be caused by:
- Lack of focus on income producing activities – you are being busy for the sake of being busy.
- Not charging enough for your services so to hit your income goals therefore you are having to service too many clients.
- Your business model is too complicated and you are trying to provide way too many different services, making it hard to systemise processes and allow for scalability.
- You are just totally trading time for money with no leveraged products or services.
Now that you are aware of this cycle, how do we start to change this:
Step 1:
Get some accountability and support – ideally you want to have a coach, or mentor that starts to hold you accountable for keeping you focused and on track. This will help you to start working more “on” your business rather than just working “in” your business. You start to see the helicopter view of your future plans, look at resources, plan our systems and much more. You create a detailed plan that gets you results.
The famous African proverb states “‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Step 2.
Re-assess your existing products and services – do you have a complicated business model that is trying to serve too many people! The goal is to have 1-3 core services that you can scale, systemise and become the expert in.
Many successful entrepreneurs have scaled just one product or service:
- Marie Forleo – B-school – sold millions of dollars of one core online program
- Harriet Inglis – founder of – Spacemasks.com – has created a 7 f+igure business selling one core product
- Crox – the kind of ugly, but super comfy foam clogs have been a huge hit and sold over 720 million pairs as of 2002 … and continues to grow (source: investopedia)
- Spanx by Sara Blakely is no doubt one of the most respected names in the pantyhose space … offering just the bare essentials to women (and men) around the world.
If you are a coach or consultant – get known for solving one core problem in your marketplace and create your own methodology to solve this. Like me, I’m an online launch specialist. I simply help coaches or service based business owners take their existing knowledge and skills to create, launch and scale an online program so they have more income and time freedom. I do this with 2 core offers that I can sell and scale.
The other element to this re-assessment should also be to look at whether you have a “leveraged” product or service that brings you recurring revenue. Is there a monthly payment plan, retainer, or a subscription based offering. Can you service 1 client, 10 clients, 100 clients or 1,000’s of clients at once?
Step 3.
Continually build your list and community – there is no way to hide simply behind your “desk” or “business brand” anymore. Even big industry leaders like Elon Musk and many others are building their own personal profiles.
To have clients coming to you, you need to position yourself and the leading expert in your industry, build your personal brand and continually build out your community.
The focus again for this should be on becoming the expert for solving 1-2 core problems in your niche. This will help you stand out from the crowd, build a strong following and allow you to continually evolve.
Through building your email list and regularly communicating with those on the list, you are always building the know, like and trust factor with your audience, providing them with value and staying at the fore-front of their mind. You are also able to immediately access them to share a new product or service, offer a discount or even host a sale.
For example for a coaching business, research from Campaign Monitor shows email campaigns increased their revenues by 760% and conversions by 49%.
This process of list and community building means you have a steady flow of growing clients interested in what you do and the services you offer.
Step 4
Systemise and Automate – there comes a time in your business (when you are ready to scale), that you need to take a step back to go forward. We often start our businesses growing from one client to another, without thinking too much about the systems and processes in place.
However, with good systems and processes, you are able to build your business so that it may run independently of you and generate the income you need, without you working every hour.
Here are five areas to start working on:
- Identify your key service delivery processes – look at the aspects that you often repeat, this could be client onboarding, project management, templates and structure of your services.
- Document current process – create your standard operating procedures (SOPs), or checklists that outline each step involved in delivering the service. Include relevant information such as who is responsible for each step, required resources, and any dependencies.
- Evaluate and refine processes – review the documented processes and identify areas for improvement. Look for bottlenecks, redundancies, or inefficiencies that can be streamlined or eliminated. Consider automation or technology solutions that can simplify or speed up certain steps. Aim to create lean, optimised processes that maximise efficiency and quality.
- Develop training materials and resources – as you refine your processes, create training materials and resources to ensure consistency and enable scalability.
- Track and measure KPI’s – understand your metrics and track effectiveness of your service delivery processes, marketing and revenue generation.
The biggest element that most entrepreneurs overlook is focusing on becoming the industry leader or expert in one core area to start with. So many I work with try and help everyone with “everything” – they are scared to get laser focused!
So ask yourself the simple question – what problem do I solve and who do I solve it for?
This focus allows you to reverse engineer the success of your business.
- How much do you want to earn?
- What products do you need to sell to earn that and …
- Which activities do you need to do to sell those products or services?
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