Lots of entrepreneurs are dead focused on getting more and more clients. But what happens when you get all the clients and then are maxed out trying to serve them?
To continue to provide excellent service, you’ll get to a point where you have to stop taking additional clients – or you’ll have to find ways to serve them more efficiently to allow space for more.
This tipping point serves as an important mark where you’ll have to decide how to proceed. In my work with clients, I’ve found there are many ways to approach this decision point. Today, I’m covering two of my favorites – creating leveraged materials to work with your clients and cloning yourself. Both of these are part of a streamlining process that’s necessary when you hit client overload.
CREATING LEVERAGED MATERIALS
Creating leveraged materials that supports your one-on-one work with clients is a key way to reduce the face-time you need to get the same results. These materials could include trainings you create that walk them through the prep phases. Or it could be worksheets you create that allow you to gather the necessary info to complete the work without asking for it manually each time you need it.
Many service providers resist creating this type of material because they fear it will devalue their services. But the reality is these types of materials generally enhance what you provide by standardizing your process and ensuring every client gets the very best of you.
They also allow you to remove some of the simpler or mundane steps off of your list of responsibilities as service provider, which will allow you to serve even more people without necessarily increasing your overall workload.
To start creating these, consider what prep stages go into working with clients. Are there steps you could easily record a lesson or training on that would allow the client to complete them on her own? Are their details you usually collect on a call that could just as easily be gathered in a worksheet? The prep phase is often the easiest to start with because it lends itself to self-directed work that you guide and support.
Once you’ve leveraged what you can in the prep phase, move onto other phases since they also often have parts that can be leveraged.
CLONING YOURSELF
Cloning yourself isn’t necessarily possible in the scientific sense but there are a variety of ways you can bring in a team to provide service for clients in exactly the same way you would.
One of the easiest ways to start this is to start outsourcing your lead follow up and client onboarding. While you may be the only person who can do a strategy call, you don’t need to be the only person following up with a prospect or getting a new client signed on.
By creating a specific process with documented resources and instructions, an assistant can easily follow up with prospects and answer basic questions about your services. They can also get a new client set up with the necessary contracts, invoices, and intake materials. This frees up your time to both serve more clients and generate new ones.
Similarly, an assistant can follow-up with current clients on scheduling, outstanding deliverables, and basic admin questions so you don’t have to.
This clones you in a sense because your assistant is working in your stead, following your direction and guidance!
There may also come a time when you consider licensing your process, methodologies or other secret sauce. Many coaches have used this as a way to grow their reach and revenue without directly seeing more clients themselves. This method of “cloning” yourself provides another way to reach more clients than you could on your own.
This often requires more experience and a larger presence in the marketplace than a beginner has, but it’s always something to consider as your business grows. It is also a more passive way to grow your income and capitalize on your expertise.
So there you have two ways you can reach more people – one that’s more of a beginner method and one that’s more advanced. Regardless of where you are in your business, there are sure to be ways you can reach more people and increase revenue without resorting to killing yourself by adding more and more hours.