High-Quality Problem - Too Much Business

Today I want to talk about a high-quality problem that can actually drown your business: having too much business. This is a problem for three reasons:

1. It can cause unhappy customers if you don't handle it well
2. It often (though not always) means that you are saying yes to too many things
3. If you produce a product rather than a service - you could have supply issues and inventory management becomes a bear.

Scaling your business isn't something you can accomplish overnight, so starting to think about that early is best. Having a plan for how you intend to scale your business when you're a solopreneur can shorten the distance to grow dramatically when things start to take off.

The first thing to do is to look at what to say "no" to. As a coach, the first thing I did was stop taking one-time clients. These were my lowest grossing work and I just prefer to work with people on a longer-term basis. I am most effective and provide the best results this way.

But maybe you have a manufacturing business. In this case, the first thing to eliminate is the custom orders that take up a lot of time from your regular manufacturing. If you want to keep them, then raise your prices on this custom work to reflect the real amount of work it takes.

Identify economies of scale. Do you say the same things over and over to everyone you work with? Design an email or course that will cover this so you don't have to keep repeating yourself.

Look for the things you hate to do and eliminate them. If you've got too much business, then refine your market and say no to the people who don't appreciate you or make your life harder. If you have a mundane task you hate doing, outsource it and everything else mundane to a virtual assistant.

In fact, your highest-paid work is what you do for your customers. Anything that isn't that should be outsourced over time until you are only doing what makes you the most money (usually sales and expert consulting/coaching).

Raise your prices. If you have too much business and it's all good business, then gradually raise your prices with each new customer until the business slows.

And, get set up to scale. Hire on staff who can do what you do (or start training them). Don't forget to plan for communication and record-keeping. For every 4 people you add to your team, you'll have to double your communication efforts. So automate whenever possible rather than hiring.

Energetically, too much business means that you've aligned with the marketplace, but you haven't yet built a solid foundation for the business to operate from.

High-quality problems require effort to solve - and you need to solve them quickly before you lose the opportunities they provide, or before they do damage to your business because you haven't yet solved them.

If any of the solutions I mentioned above caused you fear, a gut wrench, or some other negative reaction, then in addition to the problem, you'll also need to address an inner belief structure/fear that will eventually sabotage your business. This is what I'm here for. Sign up for a Discovery Call to find out how you can work one-on-one with me to blow through those blocks because they do damage to your bottom line.