I was watching a video that Presentation Zen was highlighting. It was David Heinemeier Hansson who was presenting on how to make money online. I found the video is worth watching, simply because what he’s saying is so obvious, and he’s being a bit rude and tongue-in-cheek about it, in a nice way.
I’ve had many clients come to me over the years, and all they want, they tell me, is to get to $1500 or $2500/month in client fees.
Now, I’m not knocking those as goals- they are very worthy goals. You can eat and pay rent making that much. No caviar, and no big Hawai’ian vacations on that amount, but you can make it.
Don’t blink, ’cause you’re going to $4000.
Most of the folks I’ve worked with who put the various structures, strategies in place, with heart and sincerity, go right past that number. In fact, I’ve seen many people blink twice, and suddenly they’re at $4000/month, or more.
For some, that seems like a lot of money to bring in, and it’s not just a hill o’beans. And yet, let’s think about it.
What does your average service provider charge? Let’s not even get into products, or group rates, or packaging your services. Just good ol’ fashioned price-per-session.
$70? $90? Something in that range?
Now, let’s say you have 10 clients/week. That’s two days of seeing three clients, and one day of seeing four clients, with two days to do marketing and business, and you still get the weekends off.
Well, 10 clients x $70= $700. $700 x 4= $2800. Voilá! There you go.
But you don’t even need 40 clients.
10 x 4 = 40 clients. However, if you’re really honest with your heart, and with your clients, you’ll realize that most people really do need to see you more than once a month, if they are going to make real progress in the way that you help them.
Let’s say they see you twice a month. So instead of needing 40 clients, you need 20, that see you twice a month. And let’s say an average client sticks around for three months, although truth be told, it’s probably longer than that.
20 clients every three months= 80 clients per year.
Okay, now, let’s say you live in a semi-urban area, with an average population of 50,000 people. Do you think you can find 80 people a year out of those 50,000 people? Or how about if you live in a small city, where there’s 100,000, or 250,000?
It’s not like falling off a log, but it’s not so hard, really.
It’s not hard- unless.
The numbers work out. Our clients tend to get there.
But what does make it so hard? What do you think? Why are so many people struggling to have enough clients? I’ve got my thoughts, but I’d like to hear from you.
2 Responses
If I had the courage to actually ask the people I know who are struggling to get clients what their “secret” is, I’d probably have a more accurate answer for you. But from what I can see, they have 3 main problems. The good news is this is all stuff they could fix if they would just do the work. But a lot of people don’t want to do the work. Especially if they’ve been in business for a while and have never had to do the work before. Things change and they don’t want to do anything differently. Problem 1: They will work with anybody who pays them. The problem with this is, they aren’t willing to commit to declaring the particular problem they help solve. So, they end up sounding generic in all their marketing materials, and prospects tend to see them as commodities. “Oh, there are 100 other marketing consultants, and I found one who is cheaper than you are. See ya!” Plus, because they work with anybody, they tend to get overwhelmed and stressed out, because they’re not working with the right-fitting clients. Problem 2: They are asking for business too soon & aren’t leading up to that by providing information for free so clients come to them already recognizing they’re the expert. Problem 3: I think people get burnt out. They set limits on what they think they can do and just stop wanting to go past that. And then they say they struggle to get clients because of the economy, or some other external factor. I don’t believe any single person can really be stopped by something as vast and complex as The United States Economy. I pay attention, but I act as if there’s always a way around it. That’s the clients want us to approach their problems. So why not extend ourselves the same courtesy?
Kelly- I so agree with you and the three reasons you named. From what I’ve seen the reasons why people don’t get to those three reasons can be relatively complex, and sometimes people need some deep healing to move forward, but I’ve definitely seen the same issues surface again and again.
You do copywriting in a quite spectacular way, Ms. Copylicious- what do you do to help your clients, for whom I presume you’re writing marketing materials, get past the stuck places?