Turnkey business systems are a critical piece of the puzzle for a leveraged business. For consultants, coaches and other solo practitioners, there are really only three systems you need to get into play to be on your way to achieving a six figure revenue in your business.
To earn a living, you need to figure out how to get clients. I use the Engage-Educate-Enrol pathway to help people see the three steps. And from there, you’ll see you really only need a solution – a system – for each step.
Some of you may start a business part-time while you built up to your previous salary. Others may quit the corporate life and feel under pressure to make money. Not just a few hundred every now and then or a couple of thousand here and there, but to achieve a six-figure revenue consistently.
And in this article, I’m sharing the only three turnkey business systems you really need to achieve that milestone.
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I know that talking about a six-figure business runs the risk of you thinking this is one of those get rich quick schemes – it’s NOT.
Let me be clear – this is about turnkey business systems that stop you getting overwhelmed with all the pieces you can build into your business operations.
Because I know that for consultants and coaches, especially starting out, being clear on the critical tasks is a really great way to focus the mind on the right things in your business.
Because there really are only THREE systems you need to start leveraging your most critical business processes that help you to get more clients, increase your revenue — and help a lot of the people you serve in the process.
Why 6 figures?
Well, for an independent service provider, six figures has always seemed the milestone to hit. Come find out why, and how to hit it …
Before we kick off with today’s topic, I just want to make sure you know about the Facebook group, because to be honest I haven’t really driven it too much and I think we’re missing a trick to take these topics deeper.
So if joining a group of like-minded people is appealing, championing the pursuit of true independence and freedom from your business, achieving life success on your own terms, then hop over to facebook groups and search for The Leveraged Living Club or just pop it in your browser.
Today, we’re talking about hitting that six-figure mark in your business and I’m answering a lot of the common questions I get from people about turnkey business systems.
Why is Achieving a Six Figure Revenue a Key Business Milestone?
So why 6 figures? Why does everyone talk about building a six-figure business?
For an independent service provider, six figures has always seemed the milestone to hit. $100k dollars is around £70k in pounds, which is about the salary of a consultant employed in a small consulting firm. Possibly coaches a little less.
When you build your own business and hit six figures it feels like you’ve hit independence when you can replace a corporate salary.
It’s a good milestone to reach.
Now if you’re starting from scratch, you may take a year or two to hit six figures. I mean we’re talking about consistently making an average monthly revenue of 7 to 10 thousand dollars.
Let’s do the maths, and for this purpose, it doesn’t matter if you want to count in dollars, pounds or euros or something else. If you’re charging around $5k a project, you only have to do 1-2 projects a month, and you’re going to hit that. Can you find 1-2 clients a month?
But here’s the thing. That first milestone is often reached by working one-to-one with each client. Then what? You hit an income ceiling and will need to do something differently to increase it.
So you look at pricing or scaling models – charge more, build a team, free up some time with outsourcing admin or tech tasks, create systems, use automation tools. Any or all of those changes will give you a little extra capacity to do the client work.
But still you’ll hit a ceiling at some point, because there’s only one of you!
So say you’re decide you want to work with clients in a group program model – and I talked a lot about group programs in earlier episodes – then you’d need to enrol 10 people who pay you $1k a month or 20 people at $500 a month, every month on average.
You might have a three-month program that you charge $500 a month for, so that would give you some retention, Still, there’s a cycle right, where you have to enrol a new group every quarter.
Do you have the marketing machine in place to roll in those numbers every month?
How Can I Avoid 60+-Hour Work Weeks?
To hear some people talk, achieving that mythical “6-figure business” level is an exercise in frustration and futility. Those are the folks who are working 60-hour weeks, or more, and struggling with less-than-ideal clients.
Without turnkey business systems in place, they quickly losing their motivation to keep on the treadmill.
Starting a business and getting that all important momentum going, acquiring clients, finding your process for working with them, it all does take time. That’s fair to say.
And it takes a bit of hustling. Now there’s two meanings of the word “hustle”. What I don’t mean is the slang term, the bad type, earning one’s living by illicit or unethical means.
No, there’s the original means of ‘hustle’ which is to proceed or work rapidly or energetically – the kind of ‘I better get a wiggle on’ meaning, I better hustle, I better push myself, be assertive.
OK, so let’s clear a few things up so what are the best things to hustle yourself over.
What Are the Right Things to Focus On?
To achieve six figures in revenue in your business, you want to make sure you’re not busying yourself on the things that don’t lead to income.
Part of the answer to this is mindset. You want to spend a little time focused on developing a results-driven mindset and create daily success habits for yourself.
For instance, we talked last week about empowerment for entrepreneurship, and touched on this. It’s not always about pushing or forcing things to happen, although I’ll come onto that in the minute.
It’s a lot about finding productivity techniques that work best for you and developing self-care habits that will make you feel unstoppable.
However, what I see a lot of entrepreneurs doing is “hustling” in a rather unproductive way, especially online.
You’ll often hear people exclaim they’re exhausted or overwhelmed or going round in circles. And I also pick out specific things they say like:
- “If only I could find the right clients…”
- “If only I could keep my clients for more than a month or two…”
- “If only I could find a way to stop trading hours for dollars …”
And the truth is, those “if onlys” would make all the difference in their business… if only they knew how to achieve them!
The fact is, though, you can find the right clients, keep them happily paying for months or years, and even dramatically reduce the number of hours you work – without lowering your revenue.
What’s needed is a simple, proven system that works to fill your pipeline – your sales funnel – and keep the leads, clients and money coming in, predictably, dependably and consistently.
Sound too easy? While it’s proven to work, and easy to set up, it can be confusing to make all the pieces fit together seamlessly. Let’s take a look at them one at a time.
What Turnkey Business Systems Do I Need to Get Clients and Earn Revenue?
I often talk about client flow as involving a kind of dating analogy – I call it client dating. It means woo-ing your prospective client, getting to know each other, building the connection before you ask them to take a more serious commitment together.
Ok, so you’re not going to propose marriage obviously, but you are going to ask them to work with you, to hire you, or to enrol on your program. And if your price point is at the high-end, that’s a big step for your prospect.
So you need a process by which they can get to know, like and trust you. I call this the success pathway of Engage-Educate-Enrol and they map beautifully onto our leveraged business flywheel, that’s on the front cover of my book – Leveraged Consulting in the Digital Age if you haven’t grabbed a copy yet, it’s on Amazon.
So here are the three steps you need to create a system to get a consistent flow of engaged prospects or leads and turn them into paying customers or clients.
#1 – Discover the Fit – ATTRACTION SYSTEM
Before your first client can pay you, they have to know who you are and what you do. They need to see you as the right fit for you them. What you’re all about, what you do, what you offer, it has to resonate with them, both personally and in terms of what they want to achieve.
In my book, I talk about becoming distinctive and slightly famous. And that’s a lot about letting your personality shine through your brand, your content, your communication with people.
I just commented on a post in LinkedIn where someone was saying the whole “unique value proposition” is unnecessary and people should not try to manufacture uniqueness.
I disagree that unique value isn’t important, but I had to agree with not forcing a distinctiveness for the sake of it.
Discovery can happen in a dozen different ways, so it’s just a matter of choosing the best medium and method for you and your ideal client. Let your uniqueness shine through by being purposeful and authentic in who you are and how you show up.
#2 – Nurture the Connection RELATIONSHIP SYSTEM
Once your perfect person has found you, they’re unlikely to hire you or sign up on first contact. That would be a bit like getting married on the first date. It’s possible, but it rarely goes well or lasts long.
To have a successful marriage, you first have to build a relationship. The same is true in business. It takes a bit of romancing and resonating.
And again, there are many ways you can nurture the relationship with your future client – but copywriting, storytelling and consistent effort are pretty key to all of them.
# 3 – Make the Offer – SALES SYSTEM
The final piece of the 6-figure puzzle is to make the offer and close the sale. As with the other two steps or systems, this can happen in a variety of ways.
An ideal sales system depends on what’s gone before – the engage, educate and enrol processes. So if you’re having trouble closing the sale or getting people to sign up, you should check back if each step is working harmoniously, synergistically and seamlessly to present the right offer to the right people at the right time.
How you seal the deal and close the sale – whether it’s with a buy now button on a sales page, after a webinar, on the phone – that really will depend on your offer, price point and the timeframe for nurturing.
How Do I Set Up the Right Sequence for Launching My Offer?
These three systems are all you need in place to attract visitors or traffic and turn them into good quality leads and clients, and to do that consistently. When you focus on getting good at converting traffic into leads and converting leads into clients, this becomes a turnkey system for your business.
And it’s related very closely to the sequence you need to launch an offer too. In fact, the first time you run a campaign through this three-system funnel, you’re essentially launching. You can generate a constant stream of prospects or you can create a launch style sequence – the steps are the same.
The difference with a big launch is there’s more buzz (and in some cases, more hype), and you may have a whole series of events and giveaways and prizes, you may have partners involved and have a big affiliate system that amplifies everything.
You’ll sometimes hear people say they did a six-figure launch, which means they set everything up and made over $100,000 in one go. So it’s a really different thing that more established businesses can do.
But starting out, it’s more a matter of getting the funnel, the sequence of pieces into play. And you’ll want to test it converts before you send too much traffic through it or use paid ads to drive it faster.
Anyway, the question of how do I set up the right sequence for launching my offer came up the other week. I was running a mini-mastermind and a lot of people in the group raised the question of the best sequence for getting clients. That it was all a bit confusing, overwhelming and daunting.
Well, if that’s you too, I totally hear you.
Because people get a tad overwhelmed by all the different pieces that marketers seem to be using across a sales funnel or the different options – how do I find the right people, what emails should I be sending, should I run a webinar, is a membership the right way to go?
Thinking about these three steps, and putting just three systems in place, is definitely the best way to solve the puzzle of sequencing.
What gets complicated is when you build out the funnel and start adding pieces to it.
How Do I Identify What Are The Best Systems For Me?
The way I address this question is to get my clients to think about each step in turn. The goal is that for each one, you first decide on the ONE thing you can put in place most easily and quickly to get something up and running.
Let me summarise here and then next week I’ll be going through a whole list of methods to give you some more detailed examples. But have a think for now.
So for an attraction system, you can ask yourself: What would be your best method to attract people to work with you? Pick one that plays to your strengths. Is that writing, teaching, speaking? Do you shine most on video, audio or written word? Do you prefer solo or group settings?
For the relationship system, it’s more about the platform – do you want to focus on a series of emails to nurture your connections or leads? Do you want to run webinars or start a YouTube channel, maybe a podcast or to start with podcast guesting?
Perhaps you can speak at key events where your audience is hanging out? Perhaps you need to try a few things first, but decide on one so you don’t spread yourself too thin.
And then for the sales system, that’s a little more nuanced, but think about what you’re selling. If it’s a low-end priced product or service, you could just have a sales page and buy now button.
If it’s higher priced, you will probably want to drive your prospects to an enrolment call, especially if you want to be selective who you work with and check it’s a fit on both sides.
A Deeper Dive on 3 System Methods
Ok, so hopefully that will start the ball rolling for your 3 systems and what might work best for you, remember to start with, pick just one thing and lean into that, do it consistently, showing up there regularly and tracking how it’s working.
Next week, I’ll go through the three systems again and talk through some of the methods that people are using successfully to give you some ideas.
Bear in mind, though as I said it’s important to choose a method that will really suit you personally in terms of your skills and personality as well as suit your intended target market. Because you’ll want to enjoy being in that space!
If you’d like to connect up with me if you have further questions. There’s a submit a question box on the podcast site at jayallyson.com/podcast. You can write it or speak it – go on, be courageous 🙂
Until next week, have a super day.
Jay xox
