A lot of bigger businesses, they don't want to use a Canva template.
They don't want a script.
They want a person.
That's what I hire for.
I don't buy templates and I don't really pay for coaching.
I pay for people because I don't have time.
This week I decided to take to Instagram to ask you a few questions about some of
the things that you were struggling with, some of your goals for 2022 and some other
things that you wish you would have known
before you started your online business and overwhelmingly, I got responses
about scaling about growing your business bigger than just yourself, about hiring
a team, knowing when it's time to do that and really crushing some of those
huge goals, revenue goals, or otherwise.
So today I want to talk about how to scale your business, whether that means a bigger
team, more revenue, or a diversified.
set of services or something else.
So I think the number one thing to enabling yourself to scale first
and foremost is to dream bigger.
This is something that I still find to be very challenging.
I put a lot of limiting beliefs on myself and on my business, and I
kind of allow myself to get stuck.
And I say it all the time.
There's nothing wrong with sort of being stuck where you are, if you're really
happy and that is truly your end goal, but sometimes we almost need somebody
else to help us realize what's possible.
I know whenever a friend or a business mentor or business contemporary,
if you will says something like, oh my gosh, you're going to hit
this number of subscribers soon.
Or you are probably going to do this much in revenue soon.
I actually start to believe it myself.
So that's something that has been really helpful for me is just being,
uh, part of this entrepreneurial community, asking for support, talking
to people, you know, friends loved ones, other business people, et cetera.
I'm a part of several different sort of networking groups, mastermind
communities, things like that.
And they really do help.
It also helps to see what other people are doing.
And I think by tuning into this podcast, that's a great step because sometimes we
do just need to see what other people are doing and see like, Hey, this is possible.
But yeah, you know, I think you have to dream bigger.
If you're going to scale your business to have team members or to have an
office or whatever the case may be, you have to start playing bigger.
This means that the types of clients are reaching out to if you've been getting
with just, you know, small mom and pop shops, you need to start thinking bigger.
You need to start looking for businesses that actually have a
decent marketing budget or whatever it is that you do to work with.
You need to start thinking bigger campaign ideas.
If you're just simply posting quotes and stock photos for clients, you
need to get out of that habit and start really creating campaigns and
creating content that are going to get.
Massive results for clients.
And it also means taking bigger risks.
And we'll talk a little bit about hiring throughout this episode, but at a certain
point, scaling and hiring anybody or investing in an office space or any
of the things that you might want to do, there is some level of risk to it.
There's certainly, there's certainly math, you can do.
There's certainly projections you can make, but like a lot of things
in business, you have to be okay with taking some calculated risks
that are probably going to be bigger than the ones that you've been
used to doing up until this point.
Now, when we talk about calculated risks, the first thing you need to do
is know your numbers.
You should be knowing your numbers at any point in business anyway, I talk about
this all the time, data and numbers.
It's so important.
It's so boring to a lot of people.
It was to me.
And now I'm such a numbers nerd, but you have to know how much money
you're making, but even beyond,
where your money is coming from.
Is there a certain service or product that's selling easier and that is
giving you a better ROI than others?
Meaning, yeah.
I can probably make a few thousand dollars pretty quickly if I sell a
full service package, but that takes a lot of my time away from doing
some of the other things that I do.
So you need to be able to like line those things up together and say, okay, This
one is taking not a lot of our time, it's making us a good amount of money and so
on so that you can really pull the lever on the things that are working, the things
that are profitable and just amplify that.
So you're not wasting your time doing things that aren't super profitable,
but you also need to know your numbers so that you know what you can afford,
again, whether this is office space and investment in, you know, some
other arm of your business that you want to open team members and so on.
You don't want to just take a complete risk and hire someone Willy
nilly and promise them, you know, a good salary without knowing for
sure that you can maintain that.
So to put it in perspective, what I did is I was operating at the level
that I needed to be, meaning I was making enough money for myself and
my full-time team members salary
for, I would say at least six to eight months before it actually hired them on.
And so there was that moment that there was that period of time where I
was hustling because I was maintaining those high revenues, but I also
hadn't brought anyone on full-time.
I wanted to be able to build up my cash reserves in my business
bank account to enable me to save
six months of my salary and my employee salary.
So during that in-between time, you can certainly hire contractors, freelancers
to help kind of lighten the load.
But that is my personal advice is save six months at least of operating
expenses, salaries so that if something happens like it did in 2020, and like
happens all the time and maybe you're not making money or you lose a big client,
you don't have to let go of your team.
That's not a good position to be in.
Knowing your revenue and where it's coming from.
And all of your numbers also helps you decide on salaries.
Right?
So my bookkeeper I've talked about them before.
They're called evolve to finance.
I'll leave their link down below, not sponsored.
They are fantastic.
And they recommend for me personally, in my business, again, everybody's
business might be different.
So I recommend talking to a bookkeeper and, or an accountant, but they recommend.
Spending no more than about 20% to 30% on team salaries and talking to
them let me just say was so helpful.
I'll tell you talking to a good bookkeeper will really feel like
the missing piece to your puzzle.
They will be able to help you understand and, you know, make
decisions on things like spending.
How much should I be spending on courses and coaches and how much should I be
spending on a team and Facebook ads?
Stuff.
So I highly recommend this team.
They're really fantastic.
Again, they don't know I'm making this, but I'll leave their link down below.
You can let them know that I did refer you.
If you want to reach out to them.
When I first signed up for their service, I had kind of a deep dive of my PNL or
my profit and loss statement, which is really where all of the key numbers are
going to be that you need to know to run a business, had a deep dive of that
with one of the owners of the company.
And it truly did more for my business than most business coaching
sessions I've ever paid for.
So highly recommend knowing your numbers.
Another thing that falls in line with that is knowing where your
time is going for a long time.
When I was first trying to scale, I would just hire somebody
because I just needed hands.
I just needed to duplicate myself.
I couldn't do all the things.
And a lot of people do that and then they end up disappointed and here's why
it's because they're not giving clear direction to their people and they might
not even really need another person.
It might just be, I needed to stop doing something, which was my case.
Honestly, I was doing all the things for my clients and I really
should have just simplified.
Productized my offer and not been doing all that stuff.
And I probably wouldn't have even needed somebody at that point.
So track your time, you can use, you know, an app or you can just
write it down old school or at the very least just use a calendar.
I use Google calendar and I would be lost without it.
I can go to any day of any week and know what I did.
Personal life, business life.
And so on.
Last thing I'll say about that is I recommend building an org chart for
yourself before you're even ready for it.
This kind of ties into the first point of dreaming bigger too, writing
those things down on paper and having a plan for your organization before
you're ready for it, helps you realize again, what might be possible or helps you
kind of work towards those goals when you have it visualized on paper, I have roles
on my dream org chart that are not filled yet, that I'm not ready to hire for yet.
We haven't hit the revenue goals that are required to hire that role.
I have promotions for my team that we just can't afford yet.
And.
You know, they need to work up their, their skills and their experience
for, I have all of that written down.
I have a master plan, you know, for how big I want my business
to be and what resources I want to hire for in the future.
Speaking of knowing your numbers, you also need to like stabilize those numbers
and you really need some financial stability before you start scaling.
Responsibly at least.
Let's just say that have an emergency fund.
I talked about that a little bit already, but have an emergency fund or
some cash reserves in your business.
I'm not an accountant or, you know, any type of expert reached out to yours,
ask them what they recommend, but I would not feel comfortable having any
less than six months operating expenses in the bank at any given time to
enable me to continue paying my team.
If something happens, if you get sick, if you need to be out of the office.
If something happy comes up, like you have a baby or something, you know, that's
definitely something in my mind as I start entering different phases of life, like
I need to definitely have money in the business for any type of family changes,
marriage, unfortunately, you know, loss and bereavement and all of that stuff.
So save that money, honey.
Now, if you're having a hard time with that, you're you're
like, wait, how do I save money?
Because it can't take on the amount of clients I need because
I don't have enough hands.
There's two answers for this first thing is you can definitely look for grants.
Personally, for a service-based business
at least I don't recommend taking funding if you can help
it, but you can look for grants.
Tons out there for businesses, you know, a grant is something
that you don't have to pay back.
In most cases you can look for sort of fellowship type deals that might
offer you a good amount of funding that you don't have to pay back.
But you also, if you're, especially if you're gonna bootstrap, like I did,
and like, I, I have been doing, you probably need to raise your rates.
If you are in that high of demand, that you really feel like you could
take on more clients they're available for you, but you just can't do
it cause you don't have the hands
chances are, you can raise your rates.
It's really only when I feel really stuck in low paying offers or things that
just aren't serving me anymore is when I feel like I need somebody immediately.
And if you're trying to skill to an agency model or uh, business
model versus a freelance model, you should be charging more.
Anyway, listen, there was a reason that agencies charge more than freelancers.
In most cases, when I worked in corporate and I would see how much we're spending
on agencies compared to the same service that would be offered by a freelancer
or even what they were paying my salary.
It was always so shocking to me, but they're doing this for a reason.
They're doing this because they're highly skilled or at least they should be.
But also because you're getting access to.
It big team, right?
You're getting access to a lot of people who can help you.
You should be having better customer service because there's multiple people
who can take your call or take your email at any given time versus just Latasha
the freelancer, you know, scrambling to take care of all of her clients.
So you need to raise rates,plain and simple.
If you can't find clients that are willing to pay you, the
rates that you're looking for.
Nine times out of 10, what I find with my clients and people in my network is
they're looking in the wrong places.
They're tapping into a wrong niche, or they're looking, you know, in
the wrong places in general, you can check out my last podcast,
which is all about what I would do.
If I started an agency today, I talk a little bit about
where I would look for clients.
Some of the places that I found higher paying clients have been
on LinkedIn have been on sites like angel list and crunch base.
Has just been from building a personal brand, a strong personal
brand that spoke directly to my ideal client and not my peers.
Right.
So those are all things that you might want to investigate.
If you are looking for higher ticket clients, I'll also say that.
People will pay a premium for implementation.
They will pay a premium for something that they themselves cannot do.
I see a lot of people offering strategy and ideas and
templates and things like that.
And those things are usually great for solo preneurs or people who are
pretty comfortable with social media themselves, or maybe they do have like
a really, really shoestring budgets.
They can't pay for implementation.
But for me personally, and for a lot of big, big businesses, I'm still a very
small business in the grand scheme of things, but a lot of bigger businesses,
they don't want to use a Canva template.
They don't want a script.
They want a person.
That's what I hire for.
I don't buy templates and I don't really pay for coaching.
I pay for people because I don't have time to do it myself.
So this is something you can also think about doing is offering a
premium service, a done for you.
The full service that you offer at a premium, if you're looking to make more
money because people will pay for it.
And another thing that you can do, if you're looking to scale
is productized your services.
You can't multiply yourself, but you can multiply the number of
customers that you're selling to.
And you can do this by offering it in sort of a productized model.
Contrary to what I just said, you know, that would be a premium offer.
If you were to do a done for you full service.
But if you wanted to do a micro offer, that's a little bit more accessible
to some of those lower budget clients.
You can offer that at a fragment of that price and sell a hundred
of them versus selling one.
This can also be a good way to get repeat customers.
And what I mean by this, by the way, by productizing your offer
in my agency, we don't offer full service for any new clients.
We have, you know, the clients that we've worked with forever.
Go out and pitch or offer full service anymore, but we do offer strategies.
So if somebody wants a well-researched social media strategy done for you by
people who have been doing this for a long time, get a lot of our great ideas
we offer that as sort of a package.
You can offer e-course you can offer a workshop.
That's something that I used to do a lot back in the before times
as I would go onsite and often.
Workshops because I could do one or two of those a month and make the
same amount that I would've made from 5, 6, 7 full service clients.
It helps with repeat customers because a lot of my clients would want that
as an add on, they would want a LinkedIn training for their sales team.
In addition to the full service work that I was doing on their
company accounts or a client.
might buy a set of templates or something that's customizable
in addition to your Facebook ads package or whatever the case may be.
So it can help you do more with less.
Now it takes time to develop those things, but once you do them, they're
pretty set and forget or templatized.
Like a strategy we have that down pat, we know our process, we know the
system for it, and we can do it pretty easily without having to completely
reinvent the wheel all the time.
The problem that I see with people opening up new revenue streams
is they often end up creating a lot more work for themselves.
So if you are a social media freelancer, and you're like, you know what, to reach
those higher ticket clients I really need to do Facebook ads in addition to
content creation and copywriting and all the things that you already do well,
you're just making more work for yourself, even though you might be able to get
some of those higher ticket clients, you now have to do a lot more work.
So if you can offer some type of productized version and or some type
of premium offer, that has a better chance of getting you where you need
to be revenue wise to actually scale.
Okay.
So that's kind of part one, I mean part two is going into actually hiring,
let me know in the comments or by leaving me a thumbs up on the YouTube
video, do you want a more in-depth episode or piece of content around
hiring, finding people, creating roles?
Let me know, let me know if you'd like to maybe have me try to get some of
my team on the podcast as well, but that's how you set yourself up at least
to start scaling your business and I'll leave you with that for today.
But before we go, I did want to let you know about something that's
coming up here on my YouTube channel.
I'm hoping we can, we can do it on my YouTube channel.
I'm trying to figure out the logistics of it as a part of my social media
management accelerator program.
It's a accelerator program program, it's an online course for social media manager.
It's going to be wrapping up soon and sort of the capstone to that course is doing
a pitch competition, which is really fun.
They get to share their strategies and ideas and kind of showcase what they've
learned over these past eight weeks.
So we're going to be doing a pitch competition on November 3rd.
I'm hoping that I can broadcast that live on this YouTube channel as well.
Cause I think it would be fun to give them additional visibility.
And just for anyone who's watching to kind of see what goes into a
good social media strategy, which is what they'll be pitching.
But I wanted to let you know about the sponsor of that pitch competition.
They're not sponsoring this podcast, but I wanted to give them a little shout out.
99 designs by Vista print is going to be offering the winner
of that pitch competition.
A real life, $500 prize, which is amazing.
99 designs by Vista print allows you to connect with designers and
to work with professional creative experts from around the globe.
I actually got a logo created.
By using 99 designs, I will link that to somewhere in this,
uh, piece of content as well.
I documented that process, but really, really professional folks.
I'm actually working on another logo for the new kind of brand
that I'm launching stay tuned.
So that'll be really fun.
But anyway, they're a really cool platform.
You can either run a contest so you can run a design contest
and have different designers.
Pitch their ideas for your design, or you can work directly with the designer,
which is what I'm doing this time around.
I'm actually working with the same designer who created my
first logo, which is really fun.
So we've been able to build up a good professional relationship and it's great
to keep bringing more work to somebody who I know already did a really great job.
I've also partnered with them to bring you something special,
you can get $20 off your first design contest by heading to my custom
link, which is 99designs.com/latasha.
James.
I'll leave it in the show notes if you do want to get started and that's
it for today, that's all I got.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Thanks as always for tuning in.
Be sure to subscribe on YouTube on the audio platforms and tweet me,
Instagram me, let me know what you thought of today's episode and if
it got the wheels turning for you.
All right, I'll talk to you next time.
Have a great day.
Bye.