Why Freelancers & Small Agencies Struggle to Scale to $10K+/mo Consistently?

If there were no obstacles preventing you from making $10K+/mo consistently, then you’d already be making that money. And without identifying what the obstacles are, you won’t be able to fix them and release your brakes so that you can reach those levels of income.

Some agencies and freelancers do have $10K+ months… but they’re one-off. They happen once, and then the feast & famine cycle starts again. So what is actually holding most people back and how can you remove those obstacles?

1. Return on Time Invested is Too Small

Everyone has the same amount of time. The reason why Elon Musk is worth $200+ billion dollars and you’re not even a millionaire is because he’s been getting a MUCH higher return on his time.

The truth is that most freelancers and small agencies are confused about how they should be investing their time to maximise returns. This leads to them working really hard and investing a lot of time, but then the returns simply aren’t great enough to allow them to scale.

Every business exists to provide value and solve problems for their target audience better, faster, and with less hassle than competitors. The better you can serve your target market, the easier it will be for you to stand out.

As a freelancer or small agency owner, all your time needs to be spent interacting with your customers, better understanding their problems, and figuring out solutions to better serve them. It’s very important that you treat this as a process – you cannot dream better solutions, you must get them by interacting with your market.

If most of your time isn’t spent doing sales & interacting with customers, then you’re losing out.

2. They Are Selling a Service Rather than Solving a Problem

If I asked you what do you do, would you answer by “copywriting”, “google ads”, “facebook ads”, “web design”, “web development”, “seo”, “marketing” or similar?

If so, then you’re like most people. You’re struggling to differentiate yourself from the competition, and you’re seen as one amongst many. This means that customers frequently haggle on price and shop around.

Instead of trying to niche down on a service, it’s much better to create a niche around a problem that you solve. If you’re a web designer for example, your niche could be construction companies, and the problem you solve for them could be helping them score bigger contracts through a website that adequately displays their credentials and credibility.

If you’re interested to find out about our NPOT Model and how you can use it to find the perfect niche & problem for you to solve, check out our free training which shows you how you can scale your business to $10K+/mo.

3. Time is Wasted on Non-Money Generating Activities

If you spend too much time getting a project done, reading, learning, studying, chasing shiny objects and so on, then you minimize the time you have to generate revenue.

If you’re still making under $10,000 per month, 80% of your time should be spent interacting with customers, doing marketing or sales. It is possible to perform the services and get the results you promised for clients with just 20% of your time invested, but you must be smart about it.

You have to systemtize your service delivery, and understand what actions are absolutely necessary, and what actions you can eliminate and still get the results. Being able to perform them quickly is also very important.

And finally, you need discipline. You need to understand that at this stage, sales & marketing is most important, and that’s where you need to focus on, while still ensuring the value gets delivered.

4. You Don’t Believe You Can Do It

If your mind isn’t in the right place, you’ll find ways to sabotage yourself. Always. You will also find that procrastination, anxiety, fear, and all these negative emotions overcome you.

And then you find it hard to get on sales calls and help others, which is the key to business success.

So if this is you, then the antitode is simple – you must change your negative habits into positive ones. Habits work in chains. You’ve got trigger events -> actions -> rewards and repeat.

Maybe opening LinkedIn to do some prospecting is the trigger. And the action is that you start feeling anxiety and procrastinate. The reward is that your anxiety diminishes.

To break the habit loop, all you have to do is reframe the reward – anxiety diminishing – into a negative consequence “I’ll never build my business this way”. Then couple that with changing the action, by for example opening Sales Navigator and searching for the right prospects. Consider the consequences of doing this – namely that it will help you build your business.

Do this repeatedly and replace your negative habits with positive ones, and soon self-belief will happen by itself as the result of taking action.

5. Value to Price Ratio is Too Low

If you’re trying to sell “Google ads” or another service for $5,000, and you can’t justify that through the value you deliver, then your value to price ratio is too low.

Ideally, you want this ratio to be around 10x. Meaning that you deliver 10 times the value that your customer pays for. Maybe you need to increase your value delivered, or you just need to choose better customers, who stand to benefit more from what you do.

If you’re selling some kind of marketing service, then you’ve got to think about delivering 10 times what they pay you every month. Suppose they pay you $2,000, then you deliver $20,000 in sales for them.

If your service is something like web design, then you need to find some way to convert the value you deliver into money. For example, if you’re building websites for construction businesses, you could say “we build websites that help our clients apply for larger jobs and win them by displaying their credibility and showcasing their team and capabilities”.