How Much Do You Want to Make?
Author: Nicky J. Davies |
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Categories: Business Fast Track
I’ve just completed session 1 of a Strategy Day with a client and he is thrilled.
Prior to our session, he had designed a 4-week programme that delivers tangible business results for corporates. But he was struggling with:
- Pricing
- Business Model
- Initial Offering
- Marketing & Sales Strategy
He reached out to me as I had coached him in the past, and he knew my 16yrs business experience selling and delivering to corporates would give him some answers to his many questions.
We decided to split the Strategy Day into two sessions with the first session focused on:
- Business Model
- Initial Offering
- Pricing
The second will focus on marketing and sales strategy.
My client is a senior leader within a corporate organisation. He is well used to leading teams, strategizing and implementing operationally through his team.
Where he struggles is what this looks like when setting up his own business. He had many questions around how to price his services, what would work in terms of an initial offering, what the business model could look like, how to model it financially, what a typical week could / should look like operationally… so many questions!
You see, if you are currently working in the corporate world, there are so many business decisions that have been taken care of for you. You probably operate within well-defined boundaries, and have specialised in a particular area of the business. What this means is that when you start your own business, suddenly you are staring at a blank sheet of paper and the number of decisions that need to be made can send your head into a spin.
Business owners wear all the hats associated with running a business. There are no defined boundaries – you get to choose what you want them to be for your business.
All decisions that need to be made, are yours to make. And this can be overwhelming.
You may feel you lack the experience in key functional areas such as marketing and sales, or finance, or strategy. And it is very different selling your personal professional services compared to selling for a well-known company with a history behind it.
This is where I can really help, because I’ve been there and am now into my sixteenth year of operation as a business owner.
Not wanting to stall right at the beginning of getting his business up and running, my client reached out to me for help and we booked in some strategy sessions.
One of my first questions to him was “how much to do you want to make?”.
After a lot of ‘erms’ and ‘hmms’ he spluttered out “500k in revenue per year to start with”.
So many people take a backward approach to working out revenue and start with what they think people will be willing to pay and how many days they can deliver, arriving at a total revenue for the year from this place. But why would you limit yourself in this way?
It all comes down to value, a sense of how much this is worth to the client, which is different to price.
Once you know how much revenue you want to generate, and what your initial offering is, you can start to build an offering with added value of around 3-5 times what you are asking for in terms of a price, without taking up more of your time. This gives a clear sense of value to your client, AND means you are on-track for the revenue you truly want in your business.
This is just one example of the many aha’s my clients have on our Strategy Days.
If you think this could be useful for you, let’s talk. Click on this link to book a call that fits with both our diaries.