High volume versus high touch business—design yours
I worked with a coach this past year who has done a great job building a seven-figure business. Here’s their formula:
Be good at what you do, have an approach or program that is proven to be successful for your clients.
Create a valuable, in-demand product. This particular coach and their team are helping other coaches and similar service-based business owners, mainly solopreneurs, create and sell high-ticket programs. There are a lot of solos who certainly want to increase their prices and learn how to sell them more easily, so there is a market present to sell to.
Create a free Facebook group specific to the topic and invite new members through paid Facebook ads. Use the FB group to host launches that enroll people into a paid program (their starter program was $22K for 12 months of training and support) as well as a ton of valuable, free content demonstrating expertise.
Help enrolled clients achieve success and then enroll them into more costly programs, typically an elite group program like a paid mastermind or one-on-one coaching.
Rinse and repeat.
There are currently 76 people in the $22K/year program, with about 8-10 of those people that are on their team, but that’s still over $1.5MM based on enrollment. That’s a lotta dough! And that’s not nearly what they are bringing in with their more costly programs. Total all of that up and you’ve got a big fat cash cow.
Anything is possible when you have the right attitude, strategy and willingness to invest in building something substantial like they have.
What’s your game?
The game a lot of people having been pitching on social media is how to scale your one-person business. This is what I’ve learned and why I choose to do my business the way I have.
There are many shysters out there, let’s just make that clear. The digital world enables anyone to sell anything that delivers low to no results. Lord knows I’ve fallen victim to disreputable people to the tune of about $80K over the years. I hear on a regular basis stories about how people have bought programs for five figures and received little or no success from their investment. You likely have too. That’s the risk we take in business, and when we market and swim in a sea of sameness, we’re always looking for the easy button that will help us increase our revenue and client base.
For me, I always thought that my selling skills were poor, and that’s why I struggled getting new clients. I learned through this high ticket sales coaching program that it was not the case. In fact, the biggest value I got through the program was the realization that sales was NOT my problem. My problem was I was trying to be something that wasn’t really me.
Since 2006, I have had my own business and love it. However, being in the digital marketing space, I sold myself on the idea that I needed to scale. With scale comes revenue, right? You’d think. But what also comes with scale is people management, expense, overhead, complexity and turnover. Suddenly you have a big business that is unwieldy and requires a lot of people and money to keep the big machine running. Pivoting and adapting to market changes is harder and costlier. Managing your brand is more important than ever (I recently learned of a very successful marketing coach who fell from grace when they shifted all of their programs around and burned a lot of their longstanding clients, which totally killed their brand).
What I’ve embraced, however, is that I’m not a scale girl. I’m an intimate, high-touch service provider who delivers an experience people hunger for. So instead of going for the scale, I went for the quality. The high touch. The high impact. The personal, intimate and caring support and guidance people need. Does that limit my income? Maybe. Does it light me up and give me my highest joy to serve people that way? ABSOLUTELY.
Why not do both?
My intention with this post is to inspire you to look at how you serve your clients and align with what works best. What works best for you, to promote your 1000%, is something you need to discover. If you are fueled like me by long-lasting relationships with clients you can work with over time, then create programs and products that support that. If you want to create systems and processes that are mainly automated and only require maintenance to run like an ecommerce platform or online courses that’s self-service, go for it.
But what if you did both? What if you were able to create an elite high-touch program where you work one-on-one or even intimate groups with clients to help them achieve their goals and also had additional programs, products, courses or memberships that could serve a multitude of people at a lower cost?
In today’s world, you can do so much in your business. What has worked best for me is to really know who I am, what I love to do, where I bring the highest value, and what I am most confident in delivering. All of those elements, when they come together, make for a wonderful lifestyle business.
In my KISS Marketing Map, my strategic product, I create a model of several products my clients can offer creating this staircase of revenue and engagement so they have more than one source of income. It’s a way to extend their value without overextending their time investment in running their business. It helps them sustain a one-person operation (with some contract or VA help, if needed) and enjoy a lifestyle of being 1000% authentic.
For you:
Look at your products, your business model and what brings in revenue. Are all of your sources of income, your products, your programs, fulfilling? Are they relatively easy to sell? Are they enjoyable to deliver? Look at ways you can either simplify your products/programs or stair-step them to create are more logical sequence of products/programs you can offer that diversify your client’s experience as well as give you more variety in your business and create scale where it makes sense.
