One thing I have learned over many years in business is that the best results come when I narrow down to focus on my top core talents and simplify my business offerings.
I was teaching a marketing class recently to a group of coaches and consultants and said to the participants that you need to do just three things to grow your business: specialize, simplify and systematize. I call them the 3 Ss of success. It can be simple!
Here are my tips on these three steps that you can implement right away in your business to increase your profits while working fewer hours.
Step 1: Specialize
People look for the best in a field when they need advice and solutions. If you strive to be the best you can be in your area of specialty, so you’ll stand out as the top service provider in your marketplace.
Get clear on what your greatest passions, strengths and expertise are, and build your business around that. Know what makes you different from your competitors and leverage that uniqueness. Developing a specialty based on both your expertise and unique personality will give you a very distinctive professional brand.
Offer unique solutions to solve the problems and frustrations of a smaller section of your target audience so that you will be seen as a specialist and not a generalist. Go deep instead of broad. You’ll be easily referable and you’ll be able to charge much higher fees.
To build a highly successful, highly profitable business, you must be an expert at what you do. You need to choose one market, focus on it, and grow it as big as you can.
Step 2: Simplify
Too many women are overwhelmed with all the actions they are taking to grow their business. They are making it much more complicated than it needs to be because they aren’t following a simple model.
You need to simplify and streamline your business so you can work fewer hours, have more freedom, and make more money.
My motto is simplicity plus prosperity – I want them both.
Focus on those activities that will produce profit to grow your business and income. The most important activities in your business are marketing, sales, client service delivery, and new program and service development. Simplify your actions so that you’re devoting most of your time to attracting new business and delivering your specialized services, and delegate the rest.
Step 3: Systematize
When you’re just starting out and you have only a few clients, running your business is easy. Once you reach expert status though and have a full slate of clients, live events, information products and joint ventures, you get too busy to handle it all.
This is when you need to automate and systematize many of your business functions so that you are able to focus on your core strength. Lead generation, follow-up, content delivery, registration and payment can be entirely automated, freeing you up to do more high level work.
You can develop simple systems for everything in your business – email communication, client support, publishing ezines, articles and blog posts, posting to social media sites, managing your schedule, and processing payments to name a few.
Creating systems and automating will help you simplify and streamline your business so you can work fewer hours and make more money. Systematizing your business will give you much more income, freedom and fulfillment.
Take action on any one of these ideas on specializing, simplifying and systematizing and I can guarantee that your income and feeling of fulfillment in your business will increase dramatically.
I invite your comments below.
Wishing you much success!
~ Jan Marie
6 Steps to Get Fully Booked With Coaching Clients + tips & training FREE!
This is my first actual quiet time in three weeks which meant a chance to indulge in reading the blogs that had accumulated in my e-mail. Thank you Jan Marie, for this “simple” reminder about the importance of creating and then putting into practice an automated system. I have been a paper and pencil person with many little bits of paper; a system I understood until I physically moved locations and discovered the limitations of an organizational system on “scraps”. Unpacking a box filled with notes on everything from tissue to the top of a cereal box made me realize that “simple” is found in order, and the relief and comfort I have tonight is the result of two weeks of steadily creating a digital unit. Wow. And your blog arrived in time for me to feel I could say “YES”.
Alison (Alitutor)
mytutoringspace@live.ca
I would love to hear more about tools and references for streamlining and automating! 😉
Hi Alison,
It sounds like the changes you are making have been very positive. Order and simplicity do lead to peace and freedom. Our lives have become too complicated!
Jan
Hi Jan Marie
I found your three nuggets of information invaluable and very helpful. I regularly get your notices about your teleclasses but living in the UK makes it sometimes difficult to join in with the time difference. It’s great to have a niche to develop and I know my skills but how do you decide on that niche – go see another coach to mentor me?
Keep up the nuggets of advice.
Kind regards
Lynne Pinto
Hi Lynne,
To decide on your niche, you can start with either your specialty (based on your strengths, expertise, passion) or the target audience you would like to reach (your ideal clients). When you combine them, you have a true niche. A great way to decide is to write a blog/articles and get out speaking. That will give you much more clarity too.
Best regards,
Jan
PS – I’ll be sure to do some of my teoleclasses at UK friendly times. We always send out the audio replay if you can’t make it.
Jan, fabulous advice! As I know you’re aware as I am that many of the info marketing gurus stress systematization; “the riches are in the niches,” and do your best and delegate the rest, but, as for me, I’ve never seen this triumvirate so cogently, succinctly stated as you have here. A work of powerful simplicity in and of itself. Thank you for your invaluable advice.
Hi Sandie – yes – the 3 Ss of success. It can be that simple!