*estimated, give or take eleventy billion
Everyone always wants to make more money. They spend a lot of time online discussing how to make more money and how to grow their businesses. But what if everything you need is already right in front of you?
No, seriously! And I’m going to tell you how to do it!
Let’s say you had a bunch of clients you worked with in 2014. Some were amazing, some were okay, some were the kind of people you’d never work with again. I want you to think about those amazing clients. Go through your entire PayPal and e-mail accounts for 2014 if you have to! Look at EVERY amazing client you worked with, and then answer these questions:
- Was this project profitable? Yes the person paid you money but did you end up working more hours than you thought or eating your shirt bringing someone else in? If it wasn’t profitable, perhaps you want to not include it in this list. I have plenty of people I like but I don’t like working with them because they always end up being unprofitable projects.
- Did you like doing the work on this project? If yes, great! If not … again, maybe not for this list.
- Is there some way for you to take the offer you gave to this person and package it to offer others? (If you don’t know what a package is, go read this.) I test out new offers by trying them with a few clients, deciding what the best package would be, and then offering it. I’d bet a bunch of your work could be packaged as well!
- Does this person have friends or colleagues? WHAT, YOU HAVEN’T ASKED? Well, maybe it’s time for you to send them an e-mail and ask if they know anyone who could use your particular services, because you super-duper loved working with them and think their friends are probably equally cool.
- Can you offer your favorite clients something else? If you have some truly awesome people around you, why not think of what they need? Go through your e-mails. Do they have some common themes or questions? Perhaps book a chat with your favorite past clients to ask them where they are in their business now, and what they need to get to the next level.
- Can you connect your favorite clients to someone else? When people need next-level projects, they often need more expertise than can be provided by one person. By joining forces with a provider you trust, you can give the client better service and more offerings.
- Can you stalk your client a bit? Okay I don’t mean the illegal kind, but the good kind that is considered "business research". Where does your awesome client hang out? Where did she go before she came to you? Can you find more like her that are going through the same channels and help them to find you easier?
- Are you leaving any money on the table? Sometimes I will go through past e-mails and realize that my clients were asking me for things, but I didn’t offer them. It wasn’t that I couldn’t offer them — it was just that I was too dense at the time to see what was being asked of me. So are you leaving money on the table with your clients or in your inbox? Time to go back and claim it, or add it to your packages moving forward.
And that is how you do it. If you can get your favorite clients to both sign on with you for another project, and to refer at least one other person, you’re pretty much guaranteed to at least do as well in 2015 as you did in 2014 — and probably a ton better, as you now have new services to offer and a loyal tribe of your favorite clients to offer them to!
I have been going through this entire process myself, and if you want to know what new free and paid offerings have come out of this process, make sure you sign up using the form at the top right. That way, you’ll be the first to know when they come out! I’ll be starting with my new (and free!) tech resources library in early January 2015, so you won’t want to miss that.
P.S. If you don’t have good systems in place for keeping track of clients, you should talk to Val. There is still time to get in her Systems Finishing School before it starts on January 12th. And then you can learn all sorts of things like how to track your finances and determine what sort of projects were awesome for you. <—— This is not even an affiliate link! I just think it’s a really good program that can help a lot of people.