More, Steady Clients Do NOT Equal a Successful Business

More clients and steady clients = a successful business. Right?

WRONG.

So, I’m going to get real with you here, and talk about something that’s probably going to disrupt what you thought you knew about having a profitable, successful business.

Ready?

Focusing on getting MORE clients and STEADY clients is NOT going to make you more profitable. In fact, it will keep you stuck.

Hear me out.

It’s a really common thing, and I fell into this trap on more than one occasion as I was building my agency.

If you’re anything like me, you probably thought “Well, I just want a certain amount of money each month, and I’ll be good.” 

After all, who doesn’t want steady, recurring income, right?

In fact, if you won that big ‘whale’ client, like, say, a $30k project, you maybe did what most business owners do, and got them to pay you over 6 months, because then you’ve got that money coming in every month.

But there’s one big problem. 

Living month-to-month like this is the employee mentality. 

And I get it. It’s hard to get away from that thinking.

But there can’t be this arbitrary ‘30 days’ when you have to make a certain amount of money.

Here’s why.

You’re not factoring in that business is inherently cyclical. 

And when you’re a 1-3 person business, there’s going to be an ebb and flow. And even though you could have packages and repeatable processes, no 2 client projects will be the same.

You’re not Walmart. You’re not predictably selling 1000s of low priced ‘widgets’ every month, where selling 100 more or less one month won’t hurt your bottom line.

If you’re selling $5k, $10k, $15k+ services, the difference between closing a $5k project and not closing that sale is significant. You’re not going to have that constant drip of sales as you would with a lower priced item.

Here’s another way of looking at it.

When you’re focusing on steady clients, you leave yourself open to taking on more clients at lower price points, just so you can avoid having a ‘bad month’. It’s unavoidable - remember, I’ve been there.

And those lower ticket clients don’t necessarily take less of your time, so that means you end up working longer hours for less and less.

All to hold on to that employee mentality.

Another downside? You get so busy serving your clients just to cover that monthly goal, and to make sure it’s a ‘good month’, that you completely take your foot off the gas when it comes to building your pipeline of new clients. 

You have no time to market your business, or follow up on those people who were a ‘not right now’, get yourself out there where your ideal clients hang out etc. So what inevitably happens is that you get to the end of the month, and you’re scrambling to find that next client. 

And then it starts all over again.

I think by now you get the picture. 

So, how do you get out of this trap, and actually scale up?

You start by giving yourself an annual goal, instead of a monthly goal. 

So, instead of saying ‘I want to make $10k/mo’, you could say ‘Over the course of the year, I want to make $150k’.

And then get to work on bringing that in, profitably.

And how do you do that? 

You make probably one of the biggest mindset shifts you need to make.

You’ll need to get that the only way to have real security, is to make your money in less time, so you don’t need it to be steady, and instead charge enough, and make enough profit, so that as long as you’re making enough money over the course of the year, you’re good.

Then, you free yourself up to bring in, say $30k one month, and then $0 the next month, and then alternate that. And if your goal is say $15k a month, I’d argue that this is a much ‘steadier’ way of doing that.

So you may only have to sell 5 x $30k packages in a year, and they can come at any time of the year, instead of having to hustle to find that $5k, $10k etc. every month.

When you space things out like this, you give yourself a ‘free’ month multiple times a year, when you have an uninterrupted chunk of time working on the business, building the pipeline, getting in front of your ideal clients etc.

And let’s face it, when you’re up against it to deliver on a client deadline month in, month out, that ain’t gonna happen.

Do you feel like the ONLY way to have a successful, growing business, is to get more and more clients, and make sure you have that steady, predictable monthly revenue?

It’s OK - I’ve felt like that too!

But staying there kept me stuck, and stopped my agency growing.