Team building as a revenue growth strategy

When you deliver services, there will come a time when you have to decide to transition from solopreneur to CEO. Building a team is crucial if you want to continue to grow your revenue. Here’s why…

You can, of course, increase revenue when you’re at capacity by raising prices. But, at a certain point, you’ll reach a price ceiling for your market. So, to continue increasing revenue (if that’s your goal) you have to find ways to serve more people – and whether you add team members you directly manage, or start subcontracting in other ways – a team helps you do just that.

Depending on the type of services you deliver, you may find hiring someone to subcontract the actual client work is possible. If you offer services like copywriting, design, administrative support or web development, for instance, you could likely find someone to help execute actual client tasks under your direction.

However, if you offer services that require licensed or highly specialized training to execute, you may find it more effective to hire support to help run the business and complete daily operation tasks rather than actual client work. For example, lawyers or tax accountants have special designations required to deliver services so it may make more sense to build a support team rather than hire another licensed professional.

Even if you opt not to hire someone to execute actual client work based on preferences or other requirements, a team can still help you deliver and serve more people. By adding team members to provide operations support, you free yourself up to focus more of your time on the work only you execute.

Regardless of the type of support you add, there are some key things to keep your eye on during the process.

Step into your role as CEO

As you build a team, you’ll also find your role needs to shift more towards leadership and farther away from just being a service provider. This is not to discount the role of the service provider or solopreneur in any way. But, leading a team requires different skills and considerations than managing only yourself.

An important consideration here is to ensure that you are setting your team up for success. From communication to expectations, to fostering strong team relationships, your role as the leader will be essential. For more on setting your team up for success, check out this post.

You’ll also likely need to focus more on delegation as your CEO duties increase. This starts by distinguishing between the tasks that truly need your attention and those that don’t. It will also mean structuring your time to ensure you have the hours for all these new duties.

As your role shifts, you’ll also likely deal with some needed mindset shifts. Running a team and creating the vision for a business that supports an entire team is very different than simply delivering services. This isn’t impossible but can take some focused effort on your part. For more on three mindset shifts to go from solo to CEO, go here.

Rinse and Repeat

As you master adding subcontractors to help execute client work, or adding operations support, you’ll have to rinse and repeat every time you opt to increase revenue again. Going back to basics when this happens will help you strategically manage your workload and your team’s workload effectively. You get to control how often and how frequently you expand your business. Depending on what you want and works for you, this may happen many times!

You are in charge of the type of business you want to create to make sure that it serves you as well as it serves your clients.