Stop Trading Hours for Dollars: Create Your Ideal Signature Program
A key lever for growth in your Thought Leadership Business is to stop trading hours for dollars. I know, I know, you’ve heard this and know this already. The concept is not new to the coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs I work with. Here is the theme that I see with my audience though… you know this in theory and strive for it eventually but haven’t completely gone “all in” on the concept YET.
The unique perspective that I see in this topic is that your intuition knows the ideal signature program that you want to offer. In addition, I teach people how to step into these signature programs and transition from hourly to program pricing.
As soon as I describe my “someday when” project concept to an entrepreneur, they typically feel inspired to share what they long to launch in their business. They say things like:
“Someday, when I have more time, I want to offer online courses”
“Someday, when I have a team, I’ll launch a membership community”
“Someday, when my kids are grown, I will move into group coaching to scale”
The common themes; passive income, moving from 1-to-1 into 1-to-many and packaged pricing vs. hour for dollar. So, what is stopping them? The day-to-day demands of today’s business.
Often times these successful entrepreneurs have thriving businesses trading hours for dollars. That business is coming in like clockwork and they don’t want to slow that down in order to build tomorrow’s business vision. I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to. Here is how step into your signature offering while still running today’s business:
1) Listen to that voice in the back of your head whispering your “someday when” goals similar to the ones above. YOU and only you know what you were put on this earth to do, allow your desires and soul whispers to lead you. This can simply start with stating it out loud to a trusted friend or writing it in a journal. There is power in expressing this.
2) Create a mind-map of what that signature offering or line of business with a program price would include. Start with your ideal client’s pain point, the transformation you would take them through, how and what program inclusions you’d offer, then paint the picture of their end result.
3) Now that you have a vision for this new offering, you can start to play with numbers to begin to craft pricing for your new offer that is VALUE BASED. What is the value to your target market of that end result?
4) Draft up a quick fact sheet (done is better than perfect here, I see people get stuck on this stuff). Then do some target market research. Talk to your ideal clients or previous clients, share your early thinking, get input, tweak as needed and finalize the offer FOR NOW. Again, perfectionism can stop us on this step so ask yourself what “good enough” looks like?
5) Begin to offer this program on the side as a new line of business to all or some of your new prospects. You can keep your hourly clients as is while you test this out. Tell yourself it is a pilot to overcome any perfectionist tendencies have. Know that you will refine the signature program over time and that it will evolve. It might feel messy but messy action toward your future vision is better than waiting! Play with it as a beta program, introductory offer or use a founder’s rate if that helps. Better yet just launch it with the pricing you came up with and you can always make changes and learn as you go.
The bottom line is this: start small and start now! You can begin to step into this vision of your future business slowly. Large changes don’t happen overnight anyway so why wait?
You might need to hire a Virtual Assistant or Project Manager to help you out with some of the running of today’s business as this takes off and this will pay off tenfold in the end. Once you aren’t trading hours for dollars, you can scale with ease.
Stop telling yourself that it is hard and difficult and will take all of your time. If you tell yourself this, it will become true. If you tell yourself, this is easy, I can do this incrementally, perfect clients are coming to me, opportunities are opening up, they will!
Sometimes it helps to see how a transition month to month will play out financially as you offer multiple lines of business and shift into program vs. hourly rate work.
Want my Ideal Revenue Mix spreadsheet? DM me, it’s free. You can plug in your current line of business offerings in addition to your new signature program offer to show you the revenue increases over time. This will calculate the number of clients you need for each offer to meet your goals. This is not an exact science but what it does is opens your mind up to the possibilities and revenue potential of scaling.
