How to scale your service based business to $100k (6 figures)
Imagine what a world this would be. If everyone admitted, when someone is using a word that they don't understand. Or a concept that they don't understand. I want to tell you a little bit about my journey to owning a multiple six figure business and go back to the beginning. When there were lessons that I was learning.
Slow and steadily. I have watched people. Go. So much, further, so much faster than me. I feel like it was just a slog and a half to try and learn these lessons and Institute them, but everybody's got their own journey and maybe this episode will help you learn from mine.
I'll skip the origin story and go straight to the messy middle. So picture this. My boyfriend and I have an apartment together and he's got a fancy corporate job and every morning he gets up and he goes to his job. And I get up a couple hours later cause he got up at an ungodly time. No one, no one else in the world is getting up at that. And he must've had the streets to himself at that point.
So he gets up at his ungodly hour, a couple hours later. I crawl out of bed. I crawl down to my L-shaped desk in the window on queen street in Toronto. And sit down. I often don't brush my teeth. I make a million piles of coffee. I don't even get out of my pajamas because I always have so much work to do more work than a normal human could possibly. Humble brag on. Could possibly do. And then around like late afternoon, he would come in the door. And I would often still be sitting there. Sweaty hungry, still in sweatpants or PJ's just a disaster. And then he'd make me dinner. Drag me away from my desk. He'd call me like three times for dinner and then I'd go eat dinner. And then I would.
Go back to my desk. It was a real lovely existence. And not only that, but I was still bartending. So one of the reasons that I was like perpetually exhausted was because I was paring back my bartending shifts. And trying to do both things at once. I was also an actor at the time, but that wasn't taking up a ton of my time.
So I would first, I was like, oh, well I'll just work Wednesdays and the weekend. And then I was like, okay, well I'll just work the weekend. But then working the weekend and then trying to have a day job throughout the week was just absolutely exhausting. I couldn't do it. I was so tired all the time.
So that's kind of where my head was at. But I was plugging away and I was getting clients and I was also working for this American publicist doing. Uh, social media and PR for like indie films. And contracts were coming in and contracts were going and some were stable and some weren't and I had no systems and I was all on my own and I was just trying to manage all these social media accounts and keep my head above water.
From there, I started getting involved in some like community like networking groups and some groups that were run by this one particular business coach. And she said to me, well, like you need to scale. And you needed like a product that's scalable. And I was like, what does that mean? And I'd heard this word scale so many times and I truly didn't understand it.
And then at one point she's like, you need a program. I'm like, what are we literally talking about? I'm not naturally a techie person and I don't learn new softwares easily. I will cry. I'm getting I'm better at it now, but especially at the time.
My business was such a. Thrown together. Pile of me trying my best that literally my project management software was a whole bunch of little pieces of paper that had each of my client's names on them. At the time I had 10 clients whose social media I was managing. And I would put a little gem, a little crystal, a little rose quartz onto their name at the beginning of the day. And I would like take the crystals off as I completed all the work I had to do for them today, which often meant creating a post and posting it.
Now you would never see that in my business, we schedule all our content and in advance. Everything is ready, but when I was starting out, that's how I know that that system doesn't work. I would make a post that day and get it up that day. And then at the end of the day, I would just, you know, cross my fingers and pray that there had been enough hours in the day for me to remove all of those gems and that everybody's work was done for the day.
So when someone said make a program and scale, I was like, what, what is that? Black Onyx. Ocean Jasper, what crystal do I need?
Do that.
So here's what she meant. If you're sitting there and you're like, Jenna, I am that rose quartz person. I am that person who doesn't know what scale means. Please spell it out for me. Hello, old friend. I am you. Here's what it means. It means that when you are a service provider,
And you are providing your clients with some sort of offer some sort of service in exchange for their money. You need to create systems and structure in your business so that you can continue to add clients to that system without burning the F out. Like I was.
It also means. That when you're a service provider and you are working one to one with people, you and them. That eventually you will run out of time. And need to adjust in order to continue to grow your business. So if you only have time to have five clients, and you want to grow your business, you need to adjust that you need to either create new systems so that you can have 6, 7, 8 clients. You need to raise your prices.
Or you need to create an offer that instead of being one to one is one to many. So enter my group program. So now my business is structured in, well, it's essentially two businesses. I've got a social media management agency where we have very clean systems so that we can continue to add new clients until we hit our max.
And then I have a group program where I can serve many, many people all without adding any hours to my life.
A scalable offer is an offer that is designed to grow the offer and your marketing for it and your sales of it and your delivery of it is designed so that you can continue to grow your business and you can scale up.
Sometimes when I'm recording these episodes. I hop into Google and I'll just pause for a second and I'll just Google something and I'll, and I'll kind of fact check myself or like play something back and make sure it's clear. So I just had a perfect example of why I didn't know what the heck I was doing when someone said this to me, because I just Googled.
What does it mean to scale your business? And the first answer that comes up is so unhelpful to me. It's Tony robbins.com and like no shade, but it's like, you know, Google sort of summarized what is written on the page. And it's like, invest in technology. Expand your team. According to the market's needs, get external help. Create a plan around realistic goals.
I can't express enough. I was using crystals as my project management tool. Like those types of words were not going to help me.
Here's what did help me though. I started working with a business coach who absolutely changed my life. And one of the very first things that I had to begrudgingly do was create a ton of systems behind the scenes, in my business and start delivering the same thing to everybody. So what I was doing before was everyone kind of had a slightly different package that I was providing them.
So my clients, one might get five posts a week. One might get seven. One might also have me running paid ads on another one. I might be doing their graphic design. Like we were all over the place and everybody was getting a different thing. Cause I was sort of catering to the needs that people came to meet with.
But one of the things about scaling is that you need to be delivering essentially the same thing to everyone the reason for that is because as you start to grow your team and also manage your time effectively and spend the same amount of time on everybody, you need to have streamlined workflows and streamlined systems. And another thing you need is consistent marketing. So one of the big mistakes that service providers make is, and this is whether you have scaled up yet, or you haven't scaled up yet, you know, whichever way.
Is your roster fills up say, you can only work with three people at a time. So you get your three people and you start working on all of your deliverables and you start serving those three people, and then you spend all your time focused on them because of course they matter, like, of course you have to hit your deadlines and you have to get your work done, but then you start to forget to market yourself because you're swimming in dough.
Right? You've got your clients, you've got everything you need. Which means when people turn back to their marketing, back to their social media, back to creating content. It's been dormant or it hasn't been the focus of your attention. So every time you need a new client, you have to start from scratch again.
You have to start working and nurturing and growing and selling from the very beginning. And then furthermore, if you're desperate for a client and if you know, you're not going to hit the benchmarks, you know, and make the money you wanted to make this month, then all of your sales content is going to have this sort of air of desperation.
And that's really hard to avoid. And even for myself, If I go into creating a post from this like energy of, I want to sell this, but I also have everything that I need. The content is so much better. And the, like the impression people get from the content is so much better. If I write a post with shit, I need money right now ASAP. Then the post it's gonna, it's gonna be embedded into it. I don't know if it's like an energetic thing or it's the word choice or whatever, but.
Creating content from a place of abundance, if you will. Is going to be so much more valuable.
So part of scaling your business to whatever your next benchmark is, maybe you're trying to hit two K months, five K months, or, you know, that ever sought after hundred K year. Having systems so that you always have marketing rolling. You always have posts going out and you're doing that in like a really efficient way. So it doesn't take you all damn day, which is like one of the big things that I teach in social media marketing and Instagram marketing is like, how do we do this quickly?
That's so important in order to scale up the business. So you're constantly growing and getting new eyeballs on you. So that moment when you go, okay, it's time to sell it's time to have another client come in the door so that I can fill my roster. You just like. I picture it like pressing go, you press go. And in, they come.
I don't want to sound , um, You know, braggy. But I assume you're here because you trust me and you trust that. I know my shit. So, let me tell you that the agency side of my business for the last few years, we've been pretty much at capacity and like almost all the time or what we decided our capacity was where it was like a comfortable number of clients.
And so because of that, I'm mostly focusing on growing my program, magic marketing machine, where I teach service-based business owners, how to run their Instagram and get clients themselves and coach you on how to do it yourself. So you don't need to outsource. So, I ended up having. Room to add more agency clients.
I had one spot to fill. And then I said, you know, what guys, can we add another person to this too? Like, I feel like we can add two people to the roster right now. And we can manage that with like all the systems that we have in place. And so I posted. I think I made like one email and then posted to my Instagram stories that I had two vacancies and they were gone within an hour. And it's because I use the system. Like I had two high paying people that paid me, to run their social media. And I had that within a couple of hours because of this system, because I'm always growing and I'm always marketing.
Even when my business one side of my business is at capacity.
If this is you. If this resonates, if you're like I'm either ready to scale, or I see myself in say the next year, If in a year from now, you want to be ready to scale up and grow the business and add more clients and add more revenue. Then I want to give you four action steps that are hugely actionable, that are the first steps that you need to take in order to grow exponentially.
So, firstly, I want you to clarify right now what your clients are getting from you. It's okay. If everybody's getting a different thing right now, you gotta be honest with yourself for this to work. So just write out what exactly do all of your clients get from you when they sign up to work with you?
And then I want you to move in your brain over to you delivering that product, or that offer that service. And I want you to map that out. What does that look like? When do I get these things done? How do I get them done? And what we're looking for here are bottlenecks. What holds you up? What takes the most time? What bits.
Have weird deadlines where maybe you need to outsource a piece of it and there are deadlines involved. So I want you to start looking for bottlenecks. Because the more you can spot those bottlenecks that would keep you from. Adding another client or adding another client in and providing your service quickly.
You can start to fix them, but you gotta find them first. And you got to not be mean to yourself when you do find them. This is a fact finding mission. Next step. I want you to figure out your maximum number of clients that you could have right now. How many people could you have on your roster right now, before you, you know, max out or before you burn out or before you get tired?
Because you need to know how many people is your maximum. If you want to increase that maximum. And the next thing is you need to go, just start marketing yourself. Even if you can't add clients till next year, you need to start marketing yourself right now, you need to start posting on social media. You need to show up in front of people and start this process because there might be hot leads following you right now.
There probably are. And if you made a post, you could probably land a client right now, if you really pushed for it and ask for it. But I also want you to think about those future clients. I want you to think about attracting. Today someone who's going to buy from you. A few months down the road. If you've watched the free training that I have linked in the show notes that I always give away "how to get clients from Instagram without wasting hours glued to your phone". And you're familiar with the strategy I teach. If this is the position that you're in, I want you to focus on growth and nurture posts, post to get new eyeballs on you.
And post to make those eyeballs fall in love with you. Don't worry about sales just yet. Cause that's not what this is about. First, we're going to identify everything that's going on, set this goal to grow, and then you can worry about sales later. And that's actually what goes on inside my program as well. We don't start with sales. It's not the right place to start. We got to start with 📍 getting the new eyeballs.
And making them fall in love with you.
And Hey, if you're going to try that. If you're going to do any of those four awesome action steps. As a, uh, you know, to reciprocate, could you give me five stars? I'm still not feeling super comfortable asking for these, but I do love when I see five star ratings and reviews coming in on all of these podcasting platforms. It's so exciting to know that I'm like creating content that you want and that you're going to use.
And if you want to tell me more about like what you like in these shows, I can give you more of it. This is for you, this, this whole thing. Is for you. Friend. Hey. You look great today, by the way. Anyway, that's all from me. I'll see you in the next one.
