127. The Income Model That Grows With You: Stop Trading Time for Money

If you are a VA or OBM who is busy, good at what you do, and still not seeing your income grow, this episode is for you. The problem is almost never effort or skill. It is the structure of your income model, and there is a straightforward fix for it.

In this episode, I walk through the two-bucket income model that my clients use to build stability and growth at the same time, without burning out or maxing out their calendar.

Key Points Covered:

✨ Why the hourly retainer model creates a ceiling no matter how good you are

✨ The invisible drain of scope creep, fires, and cognitive overload that comes with it

✨ The two-bucket model: foundational income and growth income

✨ What a core offer is, how it works, and why it is not based on hours

✨ A real client example: 8 clients, $4,800/month, 30 hours a week, and what changed

✨ Two questions to ask yourself to build the model that fits your life

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Podcast produced and edited with love by @FerAssists

Transcript

[00:00:00] Andrea Elibero: Hello, and welcome to Soulpreneur Scaling Stories. I'm Andrea, a certified OBM turned business coach helping VAs, OBMs, and done-for-you service pros turn their unstructured expertise into a signature method and a business that pays them for outcomes, not hours. So if you want a business that gives you freedom instead of taking it, you're in the right place. 

[00:00:23] Andrea Elibero: Welcome back. Let's start out today with a question. You know that I like to dig into those things, get deep on this podcast. Okay, so when is the last time that you finished your workday and you were so, so completely energized by everything that you were doing that you were like, "I can't believe that this is my life"?

[00:00:45] 

[00:00:45] Andrea Elibero: I've been digging into this in my free business audits. I do a few of those every month, and it's really cool. They're free. There's a link below if you want to have one. But when I ask this a lot, most people are like, "Oh yeah, like it's fine.

[00:00:58] Andrea Elibero: It's okay." I had [00:01:00] somebody recently who really fell out of love with her business, or people are like, "You know, I like it, but there's-- it's too much, you know? There's a lot going on." And so today we're going to talk about that and what to do about that, but in a way that's really interesting, in a way that is more about the structure of your business and your offers, and it's a way that you probably have not heard before.

[00:01:19] Andrea Elibero: Okay, and let's jump in. So what I often see is that you have been doing this for a little while, right? You are genuinely good at it. Your clients get results. They refer you clients. You have a reputation. You know, you have experience. But the thing that doesn't add up is that your income hasn't really grown so much, and you don't understand why, right?

[00:01:43] Andrea Elibero: Maybe you've tried things like raising your rates a bit, and there's-- obviously, there's a ceiling there. There's only so high that you can go. You've tried to be more strategic. Maybe you've tried to hire a little bit of help, or you've tightened up your systems, but nothing's really moving the needle that [00:02:00] much.

[00:02:00] Andrea Elibero: But the good news, and I really, really mean that, is that it has nothing to do with you. It's just structural, and there are structural solutions to this problem, and this is the easiest problem to solve, which is really cool. So what I see so, so often is that the model that you're running on is a hourly retainer model, where basically you're trading time for money.

[00:02:22] Andrea Elibero: And there's nothing wrong with this model. It's a good model, but up to a point. The problem comes in, in that there is a ceiling that gets created, and a lot of service providers, a lot of done-for-you service providers are so busy that they don't have the time or the space or that-- they don't realize that, "Wait, I'm hitting the ceiling where I can't actually work anymore, and I want to earn more money, but I don't really know how.

[00:02:50] Andrea Elibero: How do I do it?" And this happens because Right now, you're basically, you have an hourly rate, right? So basically there's only so many [00:03:00] hours you can work, there's only so much you can charge, and that's it. If you want to earn more, you can either charge more or work more. But if you are already at capacity, then what does that leave you with?

[00:03:11] Andrea Elibero: You could have an agency, but only if you really want one, right? Only if you now want to step into the role where now your focus is on client acquisition, you hand off all the work. If you love that, great, but if you don't love that, you don't have to do that. Like, there has to be another way to earn more money to grow your business aside from having an agency.

[00:03:31] Andrea Elibero: And then the other problem is that on top of this, where you're capped in hours with this model, you also have this invisible drain that happens. So many times there is scope creep, where clients are asking things that you didn't necessarily agree upon in the beginning, and now you're doing them. Or maybe you were hired as a VA and now they're asking you for more operations or OBM level things.

[00:03:53] Andrea Elibero: Or maybe they hire you as an OBM and the opposite happens and you're like, um, you know, "What's going on here?" [00:04:00] Or maybe now there's so many fires that have to be put out that take up all this time and interrupt you. you got questions later on in the day. Maybe you're working on something else and now you have to stop that, jump into this thing.

[00:04:11] Andrea Elibero: There's just a lot of chaos that happens, it's not just the time or the money, it also is so draining for you energetically, emotionally, and you really need to be able to take care of yourself to be able to perform at your best. And that leads into the third situation that happens oftentimes with these when you only work in hourly retainer models, is that the cognitive weight of holding all these different businesses in your head simultaneously can be a lot.

[00:04:41] Andrea Elibero: It's different clients, different systems, different business models, different communication styles, different platforms, different priorities, and it is so much to juggle. It's actually a thing that led to my burnout when my model was only having hourly retainer clients. And so this [00:05:00] plainly and simply is a structural problem.

[00:05:03] Andrea Elibero: And so if you are experiencing this, I want you to be excited because you can actually fix it and it's not that hard. And this is exactly what I do with my clients inside of Expansion, which is my four-month one-on-one coaching program for VAs and OBMs who are ready to move beyond this monthly hourly income so now they can grow with more premium clients where they're not maxing out their calendars or their nervous system.

[00:05:27] Andrea Elibero: But today, let's dive into what we can do about it right now because I think it's really gonna shift how you see your whole business. So what if instead of- Just the hourly retainer clients. We actually had two categories of clients. The first is your foundational income. This is your traditional retainer clients, but it's ones that you like, ones that respect you, ones that pay on time, ones that pay a good rate.

[00:05:56] Andrea Elibero: The job of this bucket, let's say, [00:06:00] of clients, is not to grow your business. It's the foundation. It's to protect your nervous system. It's to make sure that your bills can get paid so there's no financial pressure for you, that you know, "Okay, I have these couple of clients. I'm okay." And that really serves...

[00:06:19] Andrea Elibero: It really serves all of my clients. It's kind of cool that this is something that they all really gravitate towards because of the stability, and then they get to have more fun and more growth in the second category of clients, which are their growth clients. So this growth income comes from creating a core offer, and the core offer is something that is contained.

[00:06:44] Andrea Elibero: It's a project, and it can be a long project. It can be six months. It can be two weeks. It's whatever you want it to be that fits your life, that supports you the best. But it is a project that is based on outcome, on the transformation, not on the hours that [00:07:00] it takes. You are not selling your time. You are selling your expertise, your process, your framework, the results that you create.

[00:07:07] Andrea Elibero: This is the part of your business that has somewhere to go. You're able to grow it, and this is so cool, right? Because most done-for-you service providers are running their whole business with just this foundational clients, this bucket one, these ones where you're trading time for money. So that then creates this conflict, right?

[00:07:28] Andrea Elibero: When you want to grow because now it's, "How do I earn more? How do I grow while keeping stability?" Because you grow, grow, grow, grow to a certain point, then your capacity drops, and then something suffers, and now you're burnt out, and now you don't know what to do. But when you have both of these types of income, the foundation and the growth, now there's no conflict All right, so let's talk real numbers.

[00:07:51] Andrea Elibero: So let's say... And again, these numbers are gonna be so specific to you, so just take them with a grain of salt. So let's say you have two retainer clients, and that means [00:08:00] that they give you $3,000 a month. Great. Stable, your bills are covered, and you're like, "Okay, I can breathe. I feel okay. Maybe I'm only working, you know, 25 hours a month," you know, whatever, like, with these two clients.

[00:08:11] Andrea Elibero: But then you have your core offer, your contained project-based offer. And maybe for you, this is a three-month thing, and it's $3,000, whatever, based on what it delivers. And maybe in one month you have two of these people, and maybe in another month you have three, and maybe in the next month you have more, and now you've brought on somebody to help you deliver this.

[00:08:34] Andrea Elibero: And you have a process. It doesn't take you very long. You're in charge of it, right? It's just adding, adding, adding, but it's not costing you more because it's set up strategically, and it's built around your method, and it's streamlined more and more over time. It is not custom for every client. And so with support, with the streamline that you have with, you know, the strategy around it and delivering [00:09:00] it, you're not now charging based on hours, and you are able to create this core offer that you can deliver that's based on something you love doing, and that's now able to grow your business and do so peacefully.

[00:09:19] Andrea Elibero: This is the structure that I invite you to create in your own business because that's what I have found that supports done-for-you service providers the best. And if you're like, "Okay, I'm curious about these numbers and what I need to get to my income goal," I have a free calculator, you don't need to enter in any email or anything, um, that will calculate this for you.

[00:09:43] Andrea Elibero: So... And it's kind of interesting because it basically lets, lets you see, like, "Oh, in my current model, what I'm doing now, how much do I have to work in order to get to my income goal?" And it's really important to see those numbers because from there you can make a plan, right? You know what to do moving forward, and that really helps to give you really [00:10:00] good direction.

[00:10:01] Andrea Elibero: And so I want to give you a real-life example. So I have a current client who was in the middle of this, and so I can't give you final numbers, but I can tell you what's happening now. When we started together, she had eight clients, a mix of VA and OBM. She was working a ton, 30 hours a week on client-facing work, bringing in about 4,800 a month.

[00:10:20] Andrea Elibero: And so of course this is, on paper it's functioning, but in practice, as you can imagine, she was really exhausted, and she knew that if she kept doing this, she was going to burn out. And so she wanted to take action to continue to grow her business without this burnout so she can breathe, so she can enjoy it.

[00:10:37] Andrea Elibero: You know? So she did have- Included in all of the different work that she did, she had work that she loved doing, which specifically for her was operations. And so she loved going into a chaotic business and doing all the things and then having it run smoothly in a short period of time. And the clients were so happy when she did this for [00:11:00] them.

[00:11:00] Andrea Elibero: But she never packaged it up. It was just something she did amongst everything else that she was offering. And she didn't do this because one, she wasn't quite sure how. She was afraid that she would lose her income if she didn't do all the things for her clients. And what would she, you know, what would happen if she just stopped being available to take on all the things that her clients needed?

[00:11:23] Andrea Elibero: So what we did was that we kept her two strongest retainer clients. So now for her, what she wanted to earn as her foundational base was $2,000 a month. So this was predictable for her, stable. She was happy with it. And then we built her core offer just around the operational work that she loves doing.

[00:11:42] Andrea Elibero: So now it is this contained offer where she gets to go in, assess it, fix it all up, hand it back all documented and fully running. That is priced on the outcome, not the hours. And so this is a premium offer and she's able to charge much more actually than if she were charging [00:12:00] hourly. Now, again, we are in the middle of this transition.

[00:12:02] Andrea Elibero: So right now what she has been able to do is raise rates for her retainer clients because she was undercharging them, the ones that left. We off-boarded all of her clients that were just strictly VA clients. So now she is functioning at an OBM level. She no longer takes on VA clients. And it's so, so cool to see this.

[00:12:23] Andrea Elibero: And she's going to be soon releasing her core offer. So I'm really excited for when that happens. But something she said to me was really cool is that she says, "I feel like my business is starting to work for me instead of the other way around." That's the feeling that I want you to have. So how do you get to a place where you can create your core offer to support you on top of your foundational retainer clients?

[00:12:50] Andrea Elibero: So there are two questions you can ask yourself. The first is What is my unique magic? So your unique magic is something that you are amazing at, that you love doing, that your [00:13:00] clients will pay you well for. And when you do this type of work, you could do this all day long and be excited with it. That's the thing that we are creating your core offer around because it is so easy for you to do, you are amazing at it, and it energizes you, and that's how you want to feel in your business.

[00:13:18] Andrea Elibero: And then the second question is, what's my dream life vision? Both in a bigger way, like what do I want my life to look like? And what's my ideal Tuesday? What time am I starting? What time am I finishing? How do I like to work? Do I want to be involved in meetings? Do I like to do more of this, uh, of strategy?

[00:13:37] Andrea Elibero: Do I want to work in the background and not talk to anybody? Do I want to split it up? Do I want to go to yoga in the morning? Do I want to have a painting class? Do I want to whatever. You specifically, do I want to move abroad like I did? What is your dream life vision, and how can your business now support that?

[00:13:56] Andrea Elibero: And I am asking you these two questions because when you [00:14:00] base your business on this, now your business is supporting your energy, and it's supporting the life that you want to build. So now you have this two bucket model that's not just a revenue strategy, it's also something that is supporting the life that you want to live.

[00:14:16] Andrea Elibero: You have your foundation income that creates the stability and your growth income that creates the momentum. And slowly now your business is serving you instead of the other way around. And if today's episode got you thinking, I would love to show up in your inbox as well. Twice a week, I write honest emails about building a VA or OBM business that does not require you to sacrifice yourself to run it.

[00:14:39] Andrea Elibero: I share real stories. I share patterns that come up. I share my takes, my tips, like we go deep in that as well. And so the link is in the show notes for that. And with that, I will see you guys on the next one. 

[00:14:52] Andrea Elibero: That's a wrap on today's episode, and thank you so much for listening. If anything we talked about today made you think, [00:15:00] "Okay, but what does this actually look like in my business?" That's exactly what a free business audit is for. In just 45 minutes, I'll help you identify your unstructured expertise, pinpoint what's keeping you capped, and map out what your signature method could look like.

[00:15:14] Andrea Elibero: There's a link in the show notes to grab your spot, and I will see you in the next episode.