Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time. ~ Jim Rohn
Imagine if public school teachers only had one student in each class. In other words, we the taxpayers would have to pay for about thirty or forty times as many salaries as we currently do to educate your kids. The extra enormous cost would in no way justify the possible added educational benefits of that structure.
Now, take a national talk show host like Jimmy Fallon. Suppose he decided he’d get a whole lot more personal satisfaction out of doing his entire show to one person at a time, rather than to a huge studio audience, as well as all the millions watching at home on their TVs. It doesn’t make sense, right?
We could go on. Ministers who only preach to one person, newscasters who roam from home to home delivering the headlines of the day on an individual basis, NFL teams that spent all season playing in peoples’ backyards instead of giant stadiums… all seriously crazy scenarios.
What’s the point of all this conjecturing? Well, it’s pretty obvious what we’re doing – we’re taking traditional jobs that are usually done in front of big groups of people and turning them upside down. But it’s patently ridiculous to do so – because it either costs the people involved huge amounts of money, or stretches the amount of time they have to do those jobs to an impossible number of hours.
What’s not ridiculous, however, is the result you get from flipping the example, if you currently make a living providing a service one-on-one for your customers or clients. If you do, that’s what is called “trading hours for dollars” – and it’s a business model that both limits the amount of money you can make and the amount of people you can serve.
When you work at finding ways to go beyond that one-on-one interaction so that you can serve larger groups of people simultaneously, you also find the kind of business breakthrough that crashes through those hours-for-dollars limitations. It’s a surefire path to becoming a leader in your chosen field by scaling your business formula from one-to-one to one-to-many. You spend the same amount of time but make a multiple on each hour spent.
GOING BEYOND “HOURS FOR DOLLARS”
The term “scalability” in the computer and electronics industry means that a system or process has the built-in ability to handle growth, or increased usage by more people. If a design fails when quantity increases, it’s said, “not to scale.”
You may think there’s no possible way your business can scale, either. For example, if you’re a doctor or dentist, you assume that there’s no way to do what you do without attending to one patient at a time. That’s the way it has always been done.
Well, the truth is, there is always another way to do what you do for a larger group of people at one time. Yes, you too can scale!
And you should. Because, if you don’t, you’re going to find your growth potential hitting the wall at some point, if you haven’t already. When you’re selling hours for dollars, you…
- experience little to no growth; you can serve only so many on a one-to-one basis.
- have only one fee structure.
- are completely dependent on one person…you..
- have a diminishing inventory: you can only do what you do so many hours and so many years.
The good news is that there is a better way to run your business – actually a number of better ways.
MORE FOR YOUR CLIENTS, MORE FOR YOU
So – how do you expand your product or service so that you can sell it to more than one person at a time?
The beginning of that process should be for you to think of how to leverage the expertise, or knowledge bank, that’s behind your product or service. Your expertise and who you are is what makes what you sell attractive. To begin scaling what you do, it’s a matter of packaging that expertise in a different way that makes it available to more people at a time.
For instance, let’s say you’re a golf pro at a country club and your income is generated by giving one-on-one lessons to a fairly exclusive clientele. Now, you might say, you’re not going to get enough people at your $50 an hour rate to make the money you want. Well, this is a case where less magically becomes more. You cut your rate in half to $25 an hour to attract more people – and, maybe, you get 15 people to regularly show up for your “class.” Suddenly, you’re making $375 an hour – that’s over 7 times your normal rate.
For the same amount of work you were doing before you make more money and gain more clients who may do even more business with you and even refer others. This is the beginning of scaling your business. Your clients win also by getting your $50-an-hour services at half the price. Yes, they suffer slightly because they don’t have your undivided individual attention – but, again, they are getting half off!
Our personal experience bears out the added value you can give to your clients with this kind of approach to your business. Recently, we traveled to Washington D.C. with a group of our clients to produce a series of TV shows entitled Capitol Connection™ Live. We were able to do some beautiful on-location filming that showcased these business leaders in an incredible light.
Now, we could not have pulled off the high production values that our clients will benefit from if we tried to do the shows with only one client at a time on different shooting days. But because we had so many participate at once, they realized a higher value from this particular project than they would have otherwise doing it on their own and for a much cheaper price for each individual.
You make more and your customers get more than they ordinarily would have for the price.
And by the way, scalability is not just a concept for entrepreneurs, professionals and the self-employed. Big corporations do it too. Think about when Netflix moved beyond their initial business model of mailing individual DVDs to their customers – and now stream their rental product online.
Instead of customers only having access to a couple of DVDs at one time, they suddenly were able to pick from countless movies and TV shows – for one flat fee. Again, more value for them and zero delivery expenses for Netflix.
You might now be wondering, “How can I scale my business even further?” Here are some very specific ideas you can you can use to scale any business.
Boot Camps, Group Seminars and Speaking Engagements
Let’s say the golf pro we used as an example earlier is now ready to move on to a bigger group. He runs a Saturday morning boot camp for several hours, where he can host 30 or so people. He’s able to charge more per head and also make a lot more with the additional attendees he is training at the same time.
He takes it a step further and slaps a label on his expertise – he calls what he provides the “Ultimate Golf Secrets of Success,” and rents out hotel conference rooms where he can do group seminars for a hundred or more attendees. Now he’s charging $99 a head for three hours. More people at a higher price. That significantly increases his income.
By doing this, he’s also upped his profile from golf pro to noted “Golf Expert.” Having established himself this way, he can now also branch out into speaking engagements at conventions and other gatherings. Again, he can charge a premium price and reach more people at the same time.
Membership Websites
Now the golf pro decides he’s tired of traveling and talking so much. And he wants to set up a recurring income stream from his current customers, so he doesn’t have to generate new events every few weeks.
A great way to do that is to create a password-protected membership site. Members pay a monthly charge to get access to exclusive information. They might pay $20, $40 or $60 a month in order to be able to check out his exclusive golf videos. Not only that, but our golf pro can also establish a premium membership level on the website – for more money, members can have direct access to him and request advice for their specific golf difficulties.
Educational Products
The golf pro has now built himself a thriving membership site – and he’s also created a whole lot of great content for the site that can now be resold to both members as well as others outside the website.
For example, he can compile all his golf tip videos into a DVD that he can sell through Amazon. He can also take articles and blog postings that he’s done for the site and put them together into a book.
Coaching Others in Your Field
At this point, our golf pro is getting noticed by other golf pros. They want to learn how to make the same kind of money he does.
Well, guess what? Our golf pro now has a whole new area of expertise to sell – teaching other golf pros to start scaling and creating their own Million Dollar Formulas. This level of business value can also be increased for our golf pro by adding an area exclusive fee for the other golfers who want to teach like he does or even go into franchising the areas of the country where interest is strong enough. Ultimately the golf pro can sell the entire business for an even larger amount of money as his final exit plan.
As you can see from the example of our now-wealthy golf pro, there are a myriad of methods to fulfill your Million Dollar Formula. Isn’t it time to scale your business?
