Growing the Safety of Your Business
People love to overcomplicate building a business. At it’s core it’s a simple game.
- Acquire Attention – Get the eyeballs of your market
- Demonstrate Value – Show them that you’re worth continuing to pay attention to through providing consistent value
- Monetize – Convert that attention (over time) into money
Of course, something being “simple” doesn’t automatically make it “easy.”
Getting the attention of your market, especially if you’re in a crowded vertical, is becoming more difficult and costly. Retaining attention through excellent demonstration is more work that most people are willing to put in (excellent opportunity here if you’re ambitious)…
And, many entrepreneurs have absurdly high concentration risk around their Monetization model – i.e. – they rely almost exclusively on one single means of harvesting money for their expertise.
You are shooting yourself in the foot if you only have one way for your audience to give you money in exchange for the value you provide. It’s one of the more dangerous places to have unexamined risk in your business.
So, let’s talk about the 4 ways that we teach clients to turn attention into money.
Products
The first model we’ll talk about here are products. If you’ve ever purchased one of our courses, bundles, or books, then you’ve engaged with the product model.
Here are some basic criteria:
- Low to mid-ticket price point (under $100 for low ticket – typically over $1,000 for mid-ticket)
- Designed to be gone through by each individual person at their own pace (no group element)
- Zero customization – if you and a friend both purchase the same book from us, you’re not getting a personalized version… the words in each will be exactly the same
The benefit of using products as a monetization model is that they also produce “proof” and (to some degree) a little bit of free advertising. If someone gets a product from you and they love it, they usually wind up talking about it to others – and “word of mouth” is still the single strongest form of marketing on the planet.
Services
If you are a freelancer (or have been one previously), then you’re already familiar with services as a monetization model.
Put simply, “I do this for you, and you pay me X amount in return.”
Where products are education and training based, services are in the realm of labor.
A coaching or consulting business doesn’t typically leverage services as part of their model, but it can be used as a solid retention play. For example, inside of some of our higher level programs we offer a small number of done-for-you services performed by a team of virtual assistants for a small additional fee. The purpose is to remove obstacles for the client so that they can put the majority of their focus on implementing their big needle movers. This helps them get results faster (decreasing TTV, or Time to Value), and gives them a reason to stick around and continue paying you (useful if you’re running our Revolving Price Method in your business).
Programs
Now we are in the meat and potatoes of the consulting and expert training industry. Where a product teaches a customer a piece of your expertise that is “at their own pace,” a program allows you to directly transfer your knowledge to your client base.
This is also where we get into the realm of customization. You customize the application of your expertise to the unique needs of each client.
For a program, we usually recommend a low threshold of $5,000, but there really is no upper limit. It completely depends on the market and what the offer allows them to do. We’ve seen high-ticket programs with varying levels of proximity to the teacher (or guru) that are in the hundreds of the thousands (or even millions) of dollars range.
Partnerships
The last model that we teach is partnerships. This comes in many different forms, but the idea is that you work closely with another business owner or entity to monetize your audience (or borrow from their audience).
Paid sponsorships, affiliates, joint ventures (JVs), and white labeling, are all examples of the partnership model at play. Another great way to run a partnership model is through referral. If you and another owner have complementary offers, you can give them a special payout for sending clients your way, and vice versa. This can help lower your paid acquisition dependency, thus feeding the “Attention” piece of the flywheel.
But it doesn’t stop there. The highest level of partnerships is equity – where you give another business owner a piece of your company (and your profits) in exchange for a piece of their company.
Creating Balance
The goal for a scaling expert business should be to have 3 out of the 4 monetization models firing at any given time. Inside of the Wealthy Consultant, we actually have some version of all 4 running currently.
Why?
Because of what we talked about earlier – concentration risk. We do not want our ability to make money from our marketing and sales efforts to be hampered because of the failure of ONE model. You shouldn’t want that either.
What’s the best place to start? While this is dependent to some extent on your industry, we typically recommend that expert trainers begin with a program – a single, high-ticket offer that is capable of creating the top line revenue needed to feed expansion in the business quickly. If you have questions or want to talk to us about fleshing out your high ticket offer, or adding a new monetization model to your existing business, click here and schedule a time to talk to our team.
Master This and a Dozen Other Models
Access 15 models designed to help any expert business owner build a more sustainable, fruitful and enjoyable business by grabbing Taylor’s original book, “The Wealthy Consultant.” Inside, you’ll learn foundational principles that have fueled the success of Taylor’s multiple 7 and 8 figure businesses.
