How I Used My Profit Strategy to Blast Past $10K Months in My Business

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I think it’s easier to run my business now, doing $30K+ months, than it was at $10K months.

I think we'd all agree that a $10K/month or $100K/year revenue goal is pretty ubiquitous, as if it's some magical number. Today, I'm questioning if that goal is right for you. (Hint: It wasn’t right for me.)

I've seen enough businesses to know that you can be stressed and burned out at any stage, but I've noticed it happening at a fairly high rate with business owners in the $8-$10K/month revenue range. I definitely felt it too when I was there, and I personally feel a lot better now that I've gotten to the next stage of my business.

Is your goal to make it to $10K/month or $100K/year in sales? Have you gotten to the $8-10K/month revenue range but you still feel like you're hustling all the time? Or maybe you've started to get a little past this stage but are still feeling burned out?

When I was in the midst of major burnout in Winter/Spring 2021, I had to zoom out and come up with a whole new profit strategy for my business. This week's edition walks you through how I did it!

First - here's why it isn't always sunshine and rainbows when you get to $10K months.

You're probably hustling to deliver for your customers and continue filling your sales pipeline, but you don't have enough money to pay yourself a lot and also hire good help. If you stop working, the money stops coming in. It's a tricky in-between stage. Do you have time left over to be the CEO of your business?

Compare that to my experience as I shifted from $10K to $20K and now $30K+ months:

I can afford a team

I generally keep the rest of my overhead under control, so now I can afford to have multiple part-timers and a full-time employee on my team! That has in turn enabled me to grow my business even more.

My sales and marketing game is solid

In order to grow beyond $10K months, I had to dive in and figure out my sales and marketing processes. After putting a lot of work in (with help), I'm now confident I can fill my pipeline. This has enabled me to continue to grow and to work with more aligned clients, which makes me happier, my clients happier, and my employees happier.

I have space to come up with new ideas and take care of myself

At $10K, I was working all the time, because I didn't have enough of a team to be able to outsource more of the day-to-day work. Now, because I'm not solely responsible for executing all the work, I have time and space to come up with new ideas, to improve our processes and systems, to take care of clients better, and take care of myself.

I can pay myself more

Personally, I have ambitious wealth goals, so what I was paying myself at $10K was not enough to cover our bills, pay for childcare so I can work, have spending money, and put money into our investments. (Childcare is expensive!!)

Here's How I Grew My Business to $20K and Beyond

I Took a Pause and Shifted My Strategy

What would happen if you turned up your sales game and more customers showed up at your door tomorrow? Would your business break or would it run like a well-oiled machine? Would you actually have the capacity to do the work or would you stop sleeping, eating, and exercising in favor of staring at your computer all day, every day?

Sometimes that means you actually have to pull back for a while before you grow! When I needed to make a change in my business, I stopped taking on new clients for three months. You don’t have to go to that extreme, but I needed the space to fix things and then grow.

During that time, I changed my entire business model from high volume, low ticket to fewer clients at a higher price point to create more profit per client. This model was more aligned with how I wanted to work with clients, and because I needed fewer clients, I created a ton of breathing room and more stability in my business.

I Increased My Prices

With this shift in my business model, I increased my prices, in some cases by 3x-5x what I used to charge! I justified this by providing a high-touch service that adds loads of value to my clients.?

When I first started my business, I was trying to provide a high-value service at super low prices because I was trying to get and keep clients, and was competing with all the other CPAs out there. But it became impossible for me keep doing that. I had two choices - keep my pricing low and scale back on deliverables, or drastically increase my prices and change the way I worked with clients. The first option is low margin and high volume, the second option is high margin and low volume.

I chose the latter because that offering (my Virtual CFO monthly service) is one that I am actually pumped about providing! But there are plenty of other people who make the first option work. You do you.

I Got My Processes Tight

Make your processes repeatable and scalable. Don't offer something custom to every client, and don't make exceptions for every client. Standardize what you do and how you execute it.

Why? Because then you can outsource to a team member and they'll be successful because they'll know exactly what to do and how to do it.

I Built My Sales and Marketing Engine

Ultimately, I figured out my magical sales formula (with help!) - If I do {these activities} then I get {this result}.

I'm certainly not a sales or marketing coach (I definitely know some good ones!) but I can say that knowing your numbers will help you do this for yourself.

? How many packages/items do you have to sell to meet your revenue goal?

? What's your conversion rate? (How many sales you make divided by the number of sales calls you have or how many people come to your website/store to buy.)

? Based on this, how many sales calls do you need, or how many eyeballs do you need on your online store??

? How are you going to book that many calls or get the eyeballs??

I Hired Team Members

Once your processes are tight and you're confident in your sales and marketing machine, it's time to hire team members. I started by outsourcing the day-to-day tasks that were easier for someone else to take over (for me that's bookkeeping, sales tax filing, and payroll) which freed up a ton of my time.

Time that I then used to bring on more clients, using the sales and marketing machine I had created and that I am completely confident in.

Eventually, I was able to hire someone to fully manage the execution of client work, from onboarding to monthly reporting. I can now focus on being the CFO for my clients because my team handles all the rest!

That’s a really quick synopsis of how I strategically shifted my business and my profit strategy to grow from burned out $10K months to now $30K-40K months!?

In Episode 3 of? the Profit + Prosper podcast, I’m spilling the tea on how I used my profit strategy to grow my business well beyond $10K months, and ultimately made things so much easier on myself!

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why I think the ubiquitous $10K/month goal isn’t all sunshine and rainbows
• When I realized that running my business at $20K was way easier than it was at $10K
• The things that changed for me as I grew my business
• The steps I went through to restructure my business and make more money
• Why your profit strategy all comes down to implementing your vision for your life

?? Click here to listen to the full episode - 03: How I used my Profit Strategy to Blast Way Past 10K Months

Let me know in the comments - do you agree or disagree that $20K+ is easier than $10K?

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