How to grow your revenue while staying small

Leah Neaderthal0:02

Because when you want to stay small pretty soon, you find that you hit a revenue ceiling and you can't break through it, or you don't even think about trying to break through it, because you're afraid that you'll have to either work way too much or hire a bunch of people and build an agency. But that's just not true. It's easy to think that's true, because you're trying to do it using the same skills that got you to that revenue ceiling in the first place, but the skills that got you to that revenue ceiling won't be the same skills that help you break through it. Welcome to the smart gets paid podcast with me. Leah niederthal, I help women land higher paying clients in their independent consulting businesses, but I've never been a salesperson. My background is in corporate marketing, and when I started my first consulting business, I learned pretty quickly that it's about 1000 times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell someone else's. So I taught myself how to do it, and I created the sales approach that I now share with my clients so they can feel more comfortable in the sales process, get more of the right clients and get paid way more for every client contract. So whether your client contracts are $5,000 $100,000 or more, if you want to work with more of the clients you love, do more of the work you love, and get paid more than you ever thought you could, then you're in the right place. Let's do it together. Thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to rate, review and share.

Leah Neaderthal1:28

Hey there. Leah here. Thanks for tuning in. I hope that wherever you're listening to this, wherever you are right now, you're having a great week, making some good progress on your business and taking some time for you. All right, so I've been noticing something that's starting to come up more often as I've been talking to women consultants, and I'm hearing it more and more frequently, so frequently, in fact, that I felt like I just, I wanted to come on and talk about it here. And the situation goes, it goes something like this. I mean, it's a little different every time, but generally follows this flow. I'll be talking to a woman about, you know, making more money in her consulting business, and right away she'll say, I mean, I don't want to build an agency or anything, which I think is kind of funny because, like, it hadn't come up, you know, building an agency. And I don't even focus on, you know, helping women build these big agencies. But what I'm curious about, you know, what I've been observing is this assumption that, if you want to grow your revenue and your income, you know, the assumption that you have to build an agency like it's this assumption that you can't make a lot more money in your consulting business and still stay small. And if you do do that, and you want to stay small, you're going to get way overworked, and those assumptions just aren't true. And like I said, it's coming up so often that I just wanted to address that here. And so in this episode, I'm going to share the four things to do if you want to increase your revenue, right? You want to make more money in your consulting business and still stay small. So first, who is this episode for? This is for women independent consultants, right? I work with women who are running independent consulting businesses, and we use consultants and consulting as an umbrella term for anyone who is offering their expertise, like what your clients are buying is your expertise. So in some cases it can be that you're a service provider, like you actually offer a service, and you're doing the work. In some cases, it can be more advisory, more consultative. There can be some coaching involved. And many of my clients actually do have coaching as part of their offering. And I mean, what consulting engagement like doesn't have some type of coaching as a part of it, either formally or informally, right? But this is for women doing consulting, because it takes your time to do the work. And I just want to make that distinction, because it's not for women who are selling like a low cost online course or online product or whatever, where if you sell 10 or if you sell 1000 really doesn't make a difference to how much of your time it takes to deliver it. But when you're doing consulting, it does take your time to deliver the work, right, whether that delivery is in the doing or in the offering, guidance, etc. So when it takes your time to deliver the work, then naturally, you know, when you think about taking on more work, then it's natural to be worried about how much time it'll take. And so when I talk to women consultants, I hear two things that are sort of similar. First is this fear that if I bring on all these people, I'm not going to be able to serve all of them. Or, I guess the second part of that is, or I'll end up having way too much work, and I'm going to be working all the time. I mean, I'm just curious check in with yourself. You know whether you've had either these thoughts too, feeling like you won't be able to serve all the clients you take on, or you'll have to work so hard to serve the clients that you'll be working all the time. And so when that happens, women hit a revenue ceiling that they just can't get past. Or they're afraid to try and get past and so if you're doing consulting, right? So it's you doing the work, and if you want to grow your revenue, you assume you only have two options, either take on more clients and have to be busy and working all the time, or hire a bunch of people and build an agency. And that's just not true. Those are not the only options. You absolutely can grow your revenue and still stay small, so you don't have to build an agency, and you don't have to work all the time, and that's what we're going to talk about here. So what do we mean by staying small? We mean staying such that you are the one whose expertise drives the business. Now I'm going to operate under the assumption that you're open to having at least one person helping you you know, run the day to day operations of the business, because we know we can't do everything right, and we shouldn't be the ones doing every single thing right. We're on the same page on that. Okay, good. So staying small means having some contractors to help you with running the business, and in some cases, maybe taking on some of the delivery, some of the client work, but essentially led by you with a couple of contractors and maybe one person who's maybe helping you do the work. Maybe that's down the road, but certainly not building a big team or a big agency. So why would you want to stay small? Well, there are a lot of reasons, and I'm not saying that you have to stay small. There are a lot of folks who, when they thought about what they wanted their business to look like, they pictured an agency, you know, a firm like a whole ass company with people and managers and stuff, and that's okay, but that's not how it has to be. And there are a lot of reasons why you wouldn't be interested in running a business that looks like that. So there are a lot of reasons why you'd want to stay small. One reason is that maybe in your career, you worked at a big company, and you don't want to replicate that. You know, a lot of us worked at agencies or large corporations or even, you know, mid sized companies with a couple 100 people. I mean, the first two companies I worked at were multinational advertising agencies that employed 1000s of people, and then the next two companies I worked at each had under 100 people, and actually for one of them, I was the 37th employee. And while I worked there, we hit 100 employees. So I've worked at companies with 1000s of employees, and I've worked at companies with under 100 employees, and I don't actually want either of those situations in my business. There's just a lot more complexity, a lot more infrastructure, a lot more processes, people, and a lot more management that comes along with that. And so if you've been part of that and you didn't love being a cog in a bigger machine, then you know it's understandable that you wouldn't want to replicate that in your business. Another reason you might want to stay small is that you want to be the one doing the work, because, well, first you enjoy it, and also it gives you a measure of control. Because when you're running a business where the product is your expertise, you know you want things done the way you would do them, and you actually like being the brain, you know, the one who's working with the clients. And frankly, you know, many of us, we like doing things ourselves. I mean, remember, I'm going on the assumption that you know you shouldn't be the one doing every single thing, but generally speaking, we like to do the things, and especially the things that involve helping our clients get the results. So you might, you know, down the road, maybe bring on one or two people to help you with delivery, but it's still very much your expertise. And listen, I'm not saying that if you have a bigger company, or if one has a bigger company, you can't have things done your way. It just takes a lot more in terms of hiring the right people and training them to do things your way. And another reason you might want to stay small is just that you're prioritizing other things in your life. You know, maybe when you were younger or at a different stage of life, you were okay working a lot like work was the biggest thing in your life, and you might have really liked that, or, you know, liked working a lot or working hard on something. And I mean, a lot of us, I'd say probably most of us, have already done that whole, you know, working all the time thing earlier in our careers, and we don't want to get back to that. I mean, when I was a junior person at the agency, oh my god, there were days and sometimes weeks when I wouldn't leave the office before 10, and I'm just not interested in that anymore. And when I started my business, it was before I had kids, and so I could work all the time if I wanted to. And I love to work. I mean, work is like my happy place, and so I kind of did work all the time, like I'd work at night, and, you know, I could spend the weekend jamming on some stuff, and that's so not my life anymore. You know, I have two small kids. I can't just work all weekend on my business. This jamming on stuff. And I mean, depending on when you started your consulting business, things could have changed for you since then, too. But I think for all of us, our priorities just change over time, especially in the post covid years. I think a lot of us have had this, I don't know, collective realization that there's just more to life than work. And so you might want to stay small in your business, because you have other priorities. Now. Maybe you have kids, or you have aging parents. Maybe you're super into a hobby, or you do a bunch of things. Maybe you want to travel or be the cool aunt, or focus on your health or your fitness, whatever it is you just don't want to spend all of your time working. We call that emotional profitability. So in our world, there are three types of profitability that every consulting business needs. You need financial profitability, right? Making great money so you can support your life. Professional profitability, doing the work you love with clients you enjoy, and emotional profitability, having time for the things you care about, and so maybe at one point you might have wanted to or had the space to really focus more of your effort on that financial profitability. But a lot of us find as we get older, that it's the emotional profitability that's the most important. So that's another reason you might want to stay small. So we talked about why you'd want to stay small, but what usually happens when you want to stay small? Because when you want to stay small, pretty soon, you find that you hit a revenue ceiling and you can't break through it, or you don't even think about trying to break through it, because you're afraid that you'll have to either work way too much or hire a bunch of people and build an agency. But that's just not true. It's easy to think that's true because you're trying to do it using the same skills that got you to that revenue ceiling in the first place, but the skills that got you to that revenue ceiling won't be the same skills that help you break through it. So let's talk about how you can break through to the next revenue level and still stay small. There are really two directions you can go. You can make way more money for doing the same work or less, which makes the work more profitable or or really, I should say, and you can reduce the amount of work that you do in the business, which also makes the work more profitable. So you do it by how you structure and price the work, and then how you deliver the work. And I'm going to share four ways to do it. The first three are about how you structure and price the work, and the fourth is how you deliver the work. All right, so let's dive in. So to increase your revenue and still stay small number one, price your work and get paid based on the value you provide, because when you get paid based on the value you provide, you can make a lot more money for every single client engagement, and we do that using value based pricing. So many women consultants out there are pricing their work based on what I call the bad math of entrepreneurship. The bad math of entrepreneurship says that you take what you want to make in a year, you divide it by the number of hours, and then you have your hourly rate. The problem with that is that it leads to being overworked, and it severely limits your income, because when you're not working, you're not making money. So when you're with your family, or you're on vacation, or you're fill in the blank, not working, you're not making money. And then, usually after a time, you sort of realize that this sucks, and you start to do a package rate or a flat rate, but you find that you're still hitting a ceiling on your capacity and on your revenue. And I gotta say, if you're listening to this and you're like, Well, I don't do hourly pricing, but you have a flat rate that's loosely based on hours, or you have a day rate, I have bad news for you, that's still hourly pricing. So when you're charging hourly or you have a flat rate that's based on hours, no wonder you're afraid to make more money, because, of course, you'll have to work a lot more because the way you're structuring and pricing your services basically ensures it, and even if you raise your prices a little like a percentage here and there, you can't really make that much more. You're in a trap. So you have to get out of that trap. You have to stop getting paid on hours or deliverables or a flat rate. You essentially have to stop getting paid for your time and start getting paid for your value, because when you get paid for your value, you can charge and get paid a lot more for the same work as you're doing now. Now when I say get paid based on the value, I'm not saying get paid based on your value. I'm saying get paid based on the value you provide to the client, because in value based pricing, you don't charge based on your value. Air quotes your value, you charge based on the value to the client. So how do you start to get paid based on the value to the client? Well, so I do have a whole step by step methodology on value based scope and pricing, and it's way more. That I can talk about here, although there is one part of it I'm going to talk about in a second, but the way to start getting paid based on the value you provide is to first know what value your clients are truly looking for from the work. And the way to do that is to do great discovery and really uncover the value that your clients are looking for. And discovery happens by leading great sales conversations and asking the right questions, then you can structure your services and your pricing around that value that your work will deliver to the client. I always say, and I've said here before on the podcast, that pricing doesn't start with numbers. Pricing starts with discovery. It starts in the sales conversation. Again, I have a whole step by step methodology on value based scope and pricing. It's one of the first things we do in the academy is turn your services into value based scope and priced services, because it's that important to helping you make a lot more money and still stay small. So that's the first way to make more in your consulting business and still stay small price your work and get paid based on the value you provide. The second thing is, get paid for what you're already doing. So a while back, I was talking to one of my clients who does workforce consulting, and we were just sort of talking through the ways that she works with her clients like a typical client engagement, and she was telling me, you know, all the stuff that she does for them, and we were just making this list, just to really get a sense of how she helps her clients. And we got to the end of that list, and she said, Oh, my God, most of my clients have no idea I'm doing all of this. And we ended up using that list and taking it and creating a value based service out of what she was already doing, and then we priced it for that value, and the next client who signed up for it paid her about $7,500 more than what she was already getting for that service. And she had changed absolutely nothing. She had just started getting paid for the things that she was giving away for free. So many women consultants are giving away value for free and don't realize it, I'd say just about every consultant I talk to is giving away value for free, just because you don't stop to think about all the ways that the client is getting value, and you don't have a way to talk about it. So one part of value based scope and pricing that I did want to talk about here is to start to identify all the ways that you provide value to the client. You know, we think that the value is in the work that we produce, or in the meetings we attend or in the hours we spend, but there are so many other ways we provide value. For example, if you are, you know, generally working day to day with your senior clients, and you also do some coaching here and there for junior team members on how to use the things that you're implementing. That is value. If you're bringing the most current tools or techniques to bear so that the client's up to speed and using the most effective techniques for today's environment, that is value. If you answer questions from the client over email in between the times that you're meeting together, that is value. If you'll review their existing stuff and provide tips or suggestions on how to make it better, that is value. In the module on value based scope and pricing, we have a list of 50 ways that you are probably providing value beyond what you're thinking about. And these are things that you're doing because you know it will help the client get better results. These are the things that you know are necessary to solve the problem, and the client has no idea that they're getting this until they start to work with you. But if they only know it when they start to work with you, then they definitely aren't paying you for that value. So if you want to increase your revenue and still stay small, the mindset I want you to adopt here is that from here on out, no one gets anything they're not aware they're getting, which is to say, uncover all the ways you provide value, you know, all the ways you're actually already solving the problem and make them aware of it. And when you can do that, you demonstrate the real value of your services, because it's not your hours or your deliverables or the number of calls or your presence, that's the only value you provide. And when you can do that, you can dramatically increase the price of your work and not really change anything at all. Again, I have a whole methodology on this that it's too much to go into here, but if you think you would benefit from it, email us at team at Smart gets paid with pricing in the subject line, if you'd like my help to implement it in your business. Now, at this point, when I start to talk about, you know, raising your prices and charging for value. A lot of women start to say, Well, my clients can't pay more, or my clients won't pay more, or, you know, maybe they'll pay a little bit more, but not dramatically more. And that leads me to the number three, way to increase your revenue and still stay small. Number three, attract the clients. Who see your value, because to even start to do value based pricing, you have to work with clients who see your value, who understand your value and who want that value for their business or their organization. Because only if they see the value, understand the value and want the value, will they pay for the value. Now I didn't say you have to work with bigger clients or bigger companies or bigger organizations. I said clients who see your value. So one client of mine is a fantastic, strategic, very forward thinking copywriter for mid sized companies in a specific niche, and many of her clients brought her on to create some, you know, marketing pieces for them, and they loved her work so much that they kept working with her, in some cases, for years. And she recently told me, she goes, I like working with them, but they see me as a copywriter, and I can do so much more for them. She was saying that last year we did this project where it was really strategic, and my work helped the salespeople. It helped them convert way more customers, and I want to do more projects like that, but they really see me as a copywriter. She said, I think I'm realizing that they just don't see my value. And she's not alone. A lot of women running consulting businesses are working with clients who think their work is great and they love working with them, but the clients don't see the real value that they provide, and that's actually not the client's fault, because how the client thinks about us starts with us and how we position our work. And unfortunately, a lot of women consultants are positioning their work in terms of what they do instead of the value, and then wondering why clients don't see their value or treat them as a strategic partner. So if you've ever been in a conversation with a potential client, or actually, if you've been working with a client and you felt like you're continually trying to convince them of the value, or you have to continually show them the value, then you know how uncomfortable it is, and that's a battle that you can't win if they think about you for what you do, like the services or the tactics you do, and not the value. It's really hard to convince them otherwise. I mean, it's not unlike being a junior employee somewhere, you know, and then after several years, you get promoted a few levels, and then even when you're a lot more senior, people still kind of think of you as that junior level person, right? It's very difficult, but say, when you come in at the senior level, people automatically treat you like you're at the senior level. And that's what we want it to feel like, that you're seen as an expert, that you're a trusted advisor, that clients see your value from day one. And similarly, if you're positioning your work on what you do, like the services, and you have clients coming to you for what you do, then not only will it be hard for them to see the value, it'll be really hard for them to say yes to a price based on the value, which is why, if you want to get paid on value, you have to start at the level of value. So how do you do that? In our world, we do that by positioning you as a painkiller, positioning you as the solution to your client's number one problem, that's opposed to a vitamin, which is a nice to have. And positioning your work as a painkiller means that you start to attract clients who see your value right away, before they even reach out, before they even get on a call with you. And if clients see the value that you provide, they understand the value, they come to you for that value, then you'll be able to charge and get paid based on that value, and when you can get paid based on the value, you can get paid way more for doing the same work. And this shift is happening with a lot of my clients. I had a client who was really well known in her industry for doing implementations of a very popular software, but she didn't want to be known as the implementation person. She really wanted to be seen as doing more and solving a bigger problem than just the tech part. And frankly, she was so tired of doing those implementations. But that's what people knew her for, and that's what people came to her for. And through doing this work, starting with her painkiller, she's made this shift. The projects she's working on now are solving a much bigger, much more strategic problem. She's working with clients who don't just see her as the tech implementation woman, and she's charging and getting paid a lot more for her work, and she'll never have to do one of those software implementations again. And it started with positioning her work around the value that it delivers to the client, really positioning her work as a painkiller. So we've talked about how to increase your revenue without increasing your time so that every client engagement is more profitable. And now let's talk about the fourth one, reduce the amount that you do in your business. So I mentioned earlier that even though you want to stay small and you don't want to build a big. Agency, we're assuming that you know you can't do everything yourself, right? Like you shouldn't be doing everything yourself. So I'm going to assume that you're okay bringing on contractors, or, you know, one to two people to help you run the business. Because what we're talking about is taking things off your plate that aren't core to you doing the work so that you can spend time working with clients in your zone of genius, which is also your most profitable work. So how to do that and who to bring on and what to have them do, is what we're talking about here. And I like to think about it like an artichoke. So side note, I was remembering this as I was writing this episode when I was growing up, we ate, like, a lot of artichokes. And it's not like we lived in, you know, California, or wherever grows artichokes. We lived in Nashville, Tennessee, and I don't know if this was a thing in the 80s and 90s, but, like, I feel like we just were eating a lot of artichokes at dinner, like, steamed artichokes. Like, this was a very common thing. And what's funny is, like, now I never eat artichokes, like we just never make them. So I don't know, maybe it was an 80s and 90s thing, but suffice it to say, I've eaten a lot of artichokes in my early years. I don't know. Maybe this was the root of this analogy for me. But anyway, an artichoke, you know, has these tough leaves, right? And you peel the leaves, and you eat the, you know, the parts you eat. And then you get to the inner part, the artichoke heart, right? And this is how I think about bringing on support in the business, your expertise, that thing you do, you know, your unique perspective, your way of doing things, that's the heart. And so just like an artichoke, you peel away leaf by leaf, layer by layer, taking things off your plate so that you can spend more time doing the things that only you can do, like working with clients in an artichoke the heart is the last thing you get to, and you get to it only after everything else has been removed. And when you're running a consulting business, and you want to stay small, it's the same. You take things off your plate, one by one, and your unique work with clients that stays with you. I mean, even in my business now, this is how I think about it, and this is how I do it. I have a small team of really amazing people who support me in my business, and that's allowed me to take things off my plate, so I can spend time doing what I love the most, which is working with my clients in the academy and a couple of one on one clients each year. So like, right now, you know, you might have heard this. It's really trendy to quote, scale yourself out of your business, right? I've actually done the opposite. I've scaled myself into my business by taking things off my plate that allow me to work with my clients more, not less. So as you think about increasing your revenue and increasing your profitability in your business, which, remember, isn't just about money, but it's also about your time. The fourth way is to spend your time doing your highest value work and reduce the amount of time you spend on anything that's not that so those are the four ways to increase your revenue when you want to stay small. Number one, get paid based on the value you provide. Number two, get paid for what you're already doing. Number three, attract the clients who see your value. And number four, reduce the amount that you do in your business by bringing on people to take things off your plate so that you can spend time in your most profitable work. So take a moment to think about, you know, which of these would make the most meaningful impact for you. First getting paid more for the work you're doing, working with the clients who see your value or reducing the amount that you do. Think about that and then ask yourself, what can you do today to get you on the path to that goal? Because with these four things, you can increase your revenue and still stay small, so that you can have more money to live the life you want and more room for the people and the things that matter.

Leah Neaderthal29:06

Hey, everything we're talking about in this episode is part of the system. Women like you are learning in the academy. In the Academy, we help women consultants install the two systems every B to B consultant needs a marketing system to consistently attract the right clients and a sales system to lead a sales process to a yes and get paid more for every contract. So even if you've only gotten clients through referrals or word of mouth in the academy, you'll learn how to attract and sign clients outside your network, how to lead a sales process with confidence and how to get paid for your value, not your time. And There's no cold calling or cold emailing involved, no changing your services or making a course, and you won't use any pushy sales tactics. That's just not our vibe. So if you like what you've heard here, the academy may be your right next step to learn how you can get these two systems in your consulting business and make progress faster and with fewer roadblocks. Head to smart gets paid. Dot com slash Academy and apply and we can chat about next steps. All right, see you over there. Transcribed by https://otter.ai