You want to create continuous growth for your business, but you also want to scale back your time required to do so. You want a thriving company, but you also want a beautiful life. You want an abundant business, but you also want freedom.
Why? Because we see countless entrepreneurs make this a reality every single day. In fact, this is the reason most of our clients come to us in the first place. Sure, they want more money (and hey, we’re all for that), but they also want freedom, fulfillment, and sustainability. Money without that means nothing.
And if you’ve landed here today, I’m willing to bet you’re craving the same thing. Let me be the first to tell you that it’s possible. You don’t have to create a business that feels more like a prison than the version of freedom you envisioned. You don’t have to give into soul-sucking growth tactics that keep you glued to your laptop 24/7. You don’t have to stay on the hamster wheel of hustle for the sake of “keeping up.”
You have to pause long enough to clarify what you do and do not want out of your business. There will always be more you can add to your plate, more ways to grow, more tactics to integrate. But the question is: What is right for you? The only way to answer that is to know what you want out of your business.
Do you want to run your business like a side hustle so you have more time to be a mother? Do you want to be a nomadic entrepreneur with the freedom to work wherever, whenever? Do you want to build several multi-million dollar companies from the ground up? Each of those visions will require a different path. What is right for one won’t be right for another. The point:
Ask yourself:
The Path to More Freedom
No matter what your vision may be, you’re here because you want freedom to be at the center in some form or fashion. To make that happen, we’ll want to consider how to do two things:
Diversified revenue will allow you to make more while working less. With various income sources requiring different levels of energetic input, we can create a business that is set up to scale without your constant one-on-one attention needed.
Along with diversifying, we’ll want to find ways to optimize your business model so you can take back your time. Creating more freedom in your business is often a balancing act between integrating new structures to promote sustainability and removing things from the picture. It’s a pushing forward and a scaling back all in one.
Today, I’ll walk you through the process we take many of our clients through in order to increase their revenue while scaling back their time.
Before we get into any diversification, we're going to anchor your revenue.
It’s easy to want to fast-track the process and start hitting $100k months from passive income sources alone each month. But that’s simply not how it works. There's a specific and gradual process that must take place in order to create that level of growth, brand, and overall revenue.
Part of that process is anchoring your revenue with a high-ticket service, experience, or product.
So our initial goal is to lock in a healthy level of recurring revenue that causes your business to thrive and frees up your mental energy.
Say you need $8k per month to feel secure and support ongoing operations in the business. Offering a low-ticket course at $100 means you will need 80 brand new sales every single month (960 across the full year) in order to make that goal possible. This means you need a larger, dedicated audience and a very solid marketing and sales process.
Alternatively, let’s say you offer a high-ticket package that spans across 6 months and costs $2k per month. This means you only need 4 clients per month and 8 clients the entire year to make that goal possible.
Note: You just went from needing 960 annual sales to only 8 in order to generate $96,000 in revenue.
The takeaway? Both paths are possible, but path #2 is going to be much more sustainable and accessible.
Once you’ve built a solid base of clients that allow you to anchor your revenue, consider introducing some secret menu items.
Why? This will allow you to increase your scope of work with your clients and boost revenue without necessarily needing to acquire brand new clients. It’s important to note that it’s always going to cost less to retain and resell to an existing client than it is to acquire a brand new client. So if you’re looking for a quick and accessible way to unlock more cash flow, look to your existing client base first.
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Once you've anchored your revenue and unlocked additional earning potential with secret menu items, it'll be important to make sure you integrate a project management system to streamline operations.
We want to structure your business up until this point to be a well-oiled-machine before you try to get to the fancier work of diversification. This means your processes for things like onboarding, offboarding, client communication, service delivery, etc need to exist as workflows and be organized in one place.
Optimize the inner workings of your business as you go instead of waiting until you have to react to a problem or something slipping through the cracks. It will save you a lot of headache in the future!
If you want to create growth for your business without needing a large team to facilitate on high-end services, you'll want to create a strategic set of offers.
A few things:
The easiest way to think about this is to envision low, mid, and high ticket offers. Consider what you want to teach your customers or what support you want to provide them with from start to finish. Your offers should be crafted accordingly.
Ready to grow sustainably? Read The Peaceful Path to Profit: How Our Client Hit $400k Without Burning Out
We hear this all.the.time. Although you should always be selling, you shouldn't have to rely on new sales each month to keep the business afloat. That's exhausting and stressful.
Instead, you want to optimize your business from the inside out so that every single sale is meaningful. How? By focusing on enhancing your retention.
Let’s imagine that your goal is to acquire 10 new sales every month. In order to acquire a new sale, you have to go through quite a few phases to make that happen. You have to ensure they discover you (either passively or through a proactive outbound strategy), take the necessary steps to capture their attention, build trust with them, ensure your marketing is hitting all the angles to warm them up, initiate your sales process, handle objections - truly the list could go on and on.
Now let’s imagine that you have 10 solid client accounts (truth be told: you don’t necessarily need 10 depending on your pricing structure). Instead of burning and churning through those accounts - constantly focusing on hustling to acquire new leads - you focus on retaining those clients over a long period of time. All this really comes down to? Making sure your clients are happy and they see the value-add you’re bringing.
The level of effort it would take to retain those 10 clients is drastically less than the effort it would take to acquire 10 new accounts every single month. Either is possible. The question is: Where do you want to put your energy?
Although the first step is retaining your clients in those anchor, high-ticket offers, that's truly just scratching the surface. Remember that strategic set of offers we discussed earlier? We’re going to focus on retaining your customers 1) within each of those offers (as applicable) and 2) across the entirety of your offer suite.
This means instead of serving your clients in one container, you may be able to serve them across 3-5+. This is what leads to increasing your customer lifetime value with a whole lot less effort than before.
To see this in action, watch this video where we break down how we acquired close to $100,000 from just one client.
Many think that diversifying your revenue and scaling back your time begins by adding a whole lot of new things into the picture. But often, that simply creates distraction and causes you to scatter your energy far too quickly to see meaningful results.
After working with hundreds of entrepreneurs across the world since 2019, we’ve seen the greatest growth and results come from optimizing one layer of the business at a time - building strong foundation after strong foundation - so once we get to the fancier elements of team development, passive income integration, funnels, etc, the business already rests upon a firm foundation.
You’ll be surprised by how much sustainable growth you can create with just 1-2 offers in the mix. Remember: Less working well in your business will always be more meaningful than more working poorly in your business.
Ready to grow your revenue in a sustainable, energizing, and fulfilling way? Apply to work with us at The Awakening! We love combining business strategy and marketing to help you increase overall profitability (without sacrificing your fulfillment).
Ashton Smith is the CEO and founder of The Awakening, a platform dedicated to helping women in business build intentionally so they can leave a powerful legacy behind. She helps early-stage all the way to established entrepreneurs own their power as CEO, deeply connect with their vision, & sustainably scale their businesses.
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