Women Consultants - Are You Doing The Opposite of What Will Actually Help You Grow Your Consulting Business?

Welcome to the latest edition of the Seven Figure Consultant LinkedIn Newsletter for Women in Consulting. Don't forget that you can get daily updates from Jessica in your LinkedIn news feed by accessing her LinkedIn profile and hitting Follow. She will be sharing insights and discussions through the week that she would love to hear your views on.

What do you imagine the relationship between your income and your effort looks like - if you had to draw it on a graph?

We start off with fixed ideas about how business works and what we’re capable of, and how far we think we can go in the world. And the process of growing a business is very much one of challenging those fixed ideas and beliefs.

One of the key beliefs we need to challenge is the idea that you earn more by working more.

In the beginning, if you were to draw it on a graph, you might see in the very early stages of your consulting business that there’s a diagonal line going up showing that the more you work, the more you earn. 

But this relationship between how hard you work and how much you earn only stays proportional for a very short time in the life of your business.

Very quickly, and this is what many of you will have already experienced, we start to see a scenario where working harder doesn’t yield much more income, and then eventually it becomes impossible - because you are already booked up to the hilt. 

And this is true for many of the consultant women I speak to. You’re in demand, you’re able to fill all of your working days with contracts and projects that are billable to the client.

But everything is going at 100 miles an hour all the time.

It’s overwhelming.

What we actually see in the life of a consulting business is that once you reach full capacity and you are fully booked with client work, you actually start losing out if you don’t change the way you do business.

The only way you can make more money from this income stream is to raise your prices.

And this is when a second money belief starts showing up - that earning money has to be hard.

No pain no gain.

If you’re a type A personality, and you were a high achiever at school, uni, and in the workplace - we are often the ones who struggle most with the idea that earning money can be easy.

After all, your top exam grades weren’t easy to come by. That first class degree with honours didn’t happen by itself.  

We put our blood, sweat and tears into our academic and professional lives, so it’s easy to bring that into your business.

I’ll do whatever it takes! I’m not afraid of hard work! I don’t need to take a holiday! Friends are overrated!

All these things we can end up telling ourselves because we are so focused on the belief that hard work equals high earnings.

But when it comes to your consulting business, it’s time to unlearn the idea that the only way to make more money is to work more, because it can actually STOP YOU from moving past the low 6 figures in your business.

You need to find the right income streams that enable your business to grow whilst allowing you to reduce your working hours.

Leadership is the main role you need to have in your business, and you can’t focus on steering the ship if you’re constantly putting out fires behind the scenes.

In order to earn more from your business you need to WORK LESS.

That’s what high-achieving looks like in a business. It’s not the daily scramble. It’s not doing 50 things at once all day every day.

It’s setting everything up in your business so that you get the optimal revenue at a pace that is sustainable.

It’s counterintuitive to a lot of the things we’re conditioned to believe in our early years.

But if you’re stuck in the hamster wheel in your business, it’s time to discover what the next chapter of your business needs to involve.

As women, we can be so used to being busy ‘doing’ all the time, and balancing lots of competing responsibilities, that we forget that one of the biggest benefits of owning your own business is freedom.

I know in my own business I’ve had seasons where I’ve rediscovered that freedom and just felt like, why didn’t I make these changes 6 months ago??

It’s part of the cycle of continuous improvement in a business, I do this in my own business but I also ingrain it into my clients – every 6 months ask yourself, do I have the balance right. Could I be working less and earning more?

If that’s you, and you’re ready for a coach like me to help you navigate through the next 6 months of your business with real, tangible results, I’d love to hear from you.

At the time of writing this, I have a small number of openings for new coaching clients, so you might need to register your interest and then wait for my next available start date, but I consider every application on its own merit and if we’re a good fit I would love to help you transition into this next phase of your business. Send me a message to find out more.

And tell us in the comments, have you started down the road of working less and earning more - or are you still pushing yourself to work harder to earn more?

Free Report - The Six Elements of a Seven Figure Consulting Business

I've created a free PDF report called The Six Elements of a Seven Figure Business. It’s my most popular free resource and in it I outline the 6 areas of unscaled businesses that need to change in order to move past being ‘booked up and burned out’ and shifting into that higher gear that gets you cruising again.

It’s the framework that helps consultant women like you find their feet and get back to leading the business, rather than being buried in client work and back-end business operations.

Sign up here for your PDF report, and I'll show you the six elements your consultancy needs to make the shift from a nice little 6-figure lifestyle business to a serious 7-figure enterprise.

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To find out more about the work I do, visit jessicafearnley.com or message me here on LinkedIn if you'd like to hear more about private coaching and how I can help you transition from booked up and burned out to THRIVING as the CEO of your 7 figure consulting business.