131. You Don't Need More Clients to Fix Your Unpredictable Income (You Need This)

Does your income feel unpredictable even when your work stays the same? If you are a VA, OBM, or done-for-you service provider stuck in the good month, slow month cycle, the problem is usually not your rates, your visibility, or your number of leads. So why does one month feel amazing and the next leave you anxious about what is coming? Why do retainer clients still keep you checking Stripe first thing in the morning? And why is the real fix so different from getting more clients? This episode gets into why income feels so unpredictable for so many service providers, and the one shift that finally makes it feel stable.

In this episode:

✨ Why unpredictable income is a structure problem, not a visibility problem

✨ What reactive income is and why it keeps you stuck

✨ Why more clients will not break the good month, slow month cycle

✨ The real reason retainer clients still leave you anxious

✨ The one question to ask about your last five clients

📩 I read every message, come find me on Instagram!

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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: Okay, so picture it. You have just had your best month ever, like your best, best, best. Highest income, you are so proud of yourself, and you're looking at your bank account, and for the first time in a while, you are relaxed. You can go out for dinner without doing the mental math that you've done before.

[00:00:43] Andrea Elibero: You're thinking like, "Ooh, I can actually book that trip I wanted to go on." And you're thinking that, "Okay, like I finally figured this out." And then the next month happens And it's not quite the same. You have the same clients, the same type of work, but [00:01:00] you're not earning the same amount.

[00:01:02] Andrea Elibero: Or maybe you're on total, you know, retainer clients, but one of them unexpectedly stops working with you. And the thing that really gets you is that it's not the slow month itself, it's that it's so hard to predict. You can't explain why it's happening. You can't point to anything specific that you have done differently.

[00:01:23] Andrea Elibero: You can't look at your business and know whether the next month is going to feel amazing or whether it's going to be really stressful. So if that is a cycle that sounds familiar to you, then I invite you to keep listening, because today I am going to talk about why income feels so unpredictable for so many VAs, OBMs, done-for-you service pros, and why the answer to fixing this is so different from what you think it is.

[00:01:49] Andrea Elibero: Okay, so before getting into the answer and the logistics and those things, let's talk about feelings for a minute. Because so many feelings happen when you're on this unpredictable [00:02:00] income rollercoaster. And again, the problem is not really that you had a low month, right? You can handle that. You've done it before.

[00:02:07] Andrea Elibero: The problem really is the not knowing. The problem is the uncertainty that lives in these income swings. And it's really interesting because I've had clients with similar income numbers, but they've had such different experiences in their own businesses. For instance, some clients know that, "Okay, for the next X number of months, my revenue is good," right?

[00:02:28] Andrea Elibero: Like, they can plan. And then I've had clients where they had no idea what was going to happen, uh, how they would replace the next client when they would stop working together, you know? And so on paper, they were making similar amounts of money, but those second group of clients, they're not relaxed, right?

[00:02:47] Andrea Elibero: Like, they're not supported. Their nervous system's not supported. So it's very different experiences, even though the income is the same. And so what happens when you have this income [00:03:00] unpredictability and that creates this stress, extra stress day to day. It's the constant wondering whether you should keep working on signing another client, even though you might be fully booked.

[00:03:11] Andrea Elibero: You might think about, like, "Oh, this person," like... Or you might come across, you know, somebody looking for help, and you're like, "Oh, I'm not really excited about that, but maybe I should, you know, apply just in case," things like that. About saying yes to work you don't really want because turning it down feels risky, working with unaligned clients, all of those things.

[00:03:30] Andrea Elibero: Not being able to hire, you know, not being able to plan a vacation, not being able to make a financial decision with confidence. You know, it's doing all the things that feel right, but you're still not able to relax. And that doesn't have anything to do with your income. It has to do with predictability.

[00:03:49] Andrea Elibero: And these are different solutions. And really it is the unpredictability that really creates so, so, so much stress. So what do we do? All right. When income feels unpredictable [00:04:00] in our business, a lot of times we think, "I need more clients," right? "I need more people in my pipeline. I need to post more. Maybe I need to start posting on a platform that I'm not really ever on.

[00:04:11] Andrea Elibero: I need to network more, get more eyes on me," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that can help, but in the moment, it's not a long-term fix because the cycle is going to start again. And for most of the VAs and OBMs that I work with, it's the inconsistent income. It's not coming from a visibility problem per se.

[00:04:30] Andrea Elibero: It's really coming from a structure problem, and it's really coming specifically from this reactive income problem that is... You're really at the mercy of what opportunities happen to show up instead of you building up income based on your deliberate structure of your business. And I'm going to explain this.

[00:04:52] Andrea Elibero: So little story. So I worked with a client, obviously excellent at what she does, because all of my clients are. You know, her clients loved her. She had [00:05:00] referrals. Things looked pretty good on paper. But she didn't have a floor to her income. And what I mean is that, you know, one month she would onboard this big retainer and feel amazing, like, "Okay, great, I cracked the code to this whole business."

[00:05:14] Andrea Elibero: And then maybe something would unexpectedly end, and then she'd find herself back in Facebook groups or on threads, you know, wondering if she should be pitching again because she didn't have a system to getting consistent revenue. Every month it felt like she started from zero even though she had these retainer clients.

[00:05:32] Andrea Elibero: You know, like maybe she would get a project here or there, referral when she was lucky, and then nothing in between. And so it started... You know, she started to have these thoughts in her head, and it felt very cyclical, like, "Oh, should I be worried? Do I need another client? Should I be posting more? What's wrong with my business?"

[00:05:50] Andrea Elibero: Et cetera, et cetera. She wasn't struggling per se, but she wasn't relaxed. She was in this in-between space, and [00:06:00] she was there for so long that she just figured, "Okay, like, that's how businesses like mine work." And it wasn't until we looked at her business structure together that she really started to realize that the issue wasn't her rates, it wasn't her visibility, and it wasn't that she needed more leads.

[00:06:20] Andrea Elibero: It was that her income was reactive because of how she designed her business. She built a business that responded to what the clients asked for, you know, rather than a business built around specific offers with specific outcomes and consistent pricing. So that means that she had no way to predict what income was coming in, and she didn't really have a strong way to influence her income either.

[00:06:47] Andrea Elibero: And so I see a lot of people get tripped up in this. So when I talk about offers and things like that, a lot of people think I mean to create more offers or charge more or niche down and turn everything else [00:07:00] away. Uh, that- that's not what I'm talking about at all. What I'm talking about is having clarity, is ha- being intentional.

[00:07:10] Andrea Elibero: So having a list of random services is not a structure to your business. It works at the beginning, but then it just stops working when you actually want to grow. Having offers, on the other hand, that are designed deliberately with specific outcomes, with a clear scope, with consistent pricing, built around you and your strengths and what you love doing, what you're amazing at, that is a structure, and that is where predictability comes from.

[00:07:39] Andrea Elibero: So when my client got into that place where she wasn't waiting to see what clients would bring to her, she knew what she was selling, she knew who it was for, she knew what the cost was. She had this pipeline. She could look at it, and she could... She was always confident where she could estimate what her next month would look like because the [00:08:00] work that she did didn't necessarily change, but she went from reactive work to an intentional offer, an intentional business structure, and that was the first step in her stopping this cycle of unpredictable income.

[00:08:14] Andrea Elibero: Because now she wasn't checking Stripe at 7:00 in the morning wondering, you know, what was going to happen the next month. She knew. And this is one of the very first things that we work together through inside of Expansion, which is my four-month one-on-one coaching program for VAs, OBMs, done-for-you service providers.

[00:08:31] Andrea Elibero: And, you know, before we get into messaging or marketing or anything else, we look at your foundation because you need a strong foundation in your business in order to have this sustainable business that you actually want to keep doing. So what are your offers? What are you selling? How does it fit together as an ecosystem?

[00:08:50] Andrea Elibero: Is your income being generated intentionally or reactively? And we put together all the things that you need in your foundation and build your [00:09:00] business on top of that. And by the way, how do I know that this works is because I lived this cycle also. I was an OBM, and I built my business on retainer clients, and it felt stable until it didn't.

[00:09:16] Andrea Elibero: Because what I didn't realize at the time was that my, quote-unquote, "stability" was just hoping that none of my clients left me, you know? Because as an OBM, when you're working with only hourly retainer clients, you can only work with a handful of clients at a time. So if one- you lost one, that's a third of your income, right?

[00:09:39] Andrea Elibero: If you only work with, like, three clients, let's say. So every time- You know, something would happen in terms of, oh, a client's budget shifted, their launch didn't go as well as they wanted it to, or a client was just quiet for a few days. I would start thinking, I would feel that. You know, I had this anxiety that was [00:10:00] asking like, "Oh my gosh, like, what if they leave?"

[00:10:02] Andrea Elibero: Like, "What if, you know, what if something happens, they can't afford me anymore?" Like, "How will I... If they decide to restructure their business, like how fast can I replace that income?" You know, like I was like one email away from scrambling at any given time in my business at that time, and I normalized that because I thought, "Well, that's just what an OBM business is.

[00:10:21] Andrea Elibero: That's just how it works." And what I didn't understand then that I really wish that I did was that the retainers themselves are not the problem, right? The retainers are fine. Like, they're great for foundation, they're great for stability. The problem was that my income was built only on those retainers and dependent upon those specific relationships continuing, and not on offers that I had any control over.

[00:10:47] Andrea Elibero: So if a client stayed, I was fine, but if they didn't, I was... It felt like I was starting all over again. And so the shift I realized was not just about getting more clients or charging differently. It was about building something alongside [00:11:00] my retainers that I was in charge of, that I led. A clear offer with clear outcomes, a clear scope, clear pricing, something that I knew that I could sell deliberately and I could grow.

[00:11:12] Andrea Elibero: I could also make it scalable, intentionally scalable, so I could grow my business without having to work a crazy amount of hours, and I could do this deliberately. And instead of just hoping that my current retainer clients would sustain me. And that was when my anxiety stopped because I was now in control.

[00:11:33] Andrea Elibero: I had a plan, and I knew how my business was going to be stable. So if you are in that cycle of good month, slow month, et cetera, et cetera, "Oh, no, a client h- w- had to stop working with me. What do I do now?" This is what I would, I would invite you to look at, and I would be interested in you sharing with me.

[00:11:51] Andrea Elibero: So if you look at your last five clients or maybe your last projects, ask yourself, did those come from a deliberate offer, or did it come [00:12:00] from, you know, your clients just being like, "Do X, Y, Z" and it was a bit random, and they asked for help, and then you figured out, you know, the pricing, and maybe it's hourly or y- what did that look like?

[00:12:11] Andrea Elibero: Because if, uh, most of them are from the second one, that's really great information for you because it means that your business is operating reactively, and that's something, too, I invite you really to sit with. Because if your goal is consistency, is nervous system safety, is growing sustainably, then getting more clients in that way is not going to fix it, right?

[00:12:38] Andrea Elibero: It's... Your... What... It will be fixed when you have an intentional offer that you are building upon. So if anything in this episode gave you a bit of a light bulb moment and you want another set of eyes to look at your business structure, really specifically what your offers are, what your clients look like, what opportunities you have [00:13:00] to make your income more predictable, I can do this for you.

[00:13:04] Andrea Elibero: I have a limited number of free business audits that I do every month. We spend 45 minutes together, and I give you this very, very specific feedback. And so you can grab your spot at dancingleafsolutions.com/business-audit. And that is all that I have for you today. I really hope this gave you something to think about, to sit with, and I will see you on the next one. 

[00:13:25] 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, "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.

[00:13:47] Andrea Elibero: There's a link in the show notes to grab your spot, and I will see you in the next episode.