This is the 8th article in the series, we’ve covered information from planning to start your business and generating a simple business plan, to pricing your services and marketing. You’ve followed all the steps, created your portfolio of services, began getting clients and doing work. So what’s next?
Getting help
Once you’ve reached the point where you cant take on more work the next logical step is to take on your first employee to help spread the work and allow yourself time to take on more clients. Except its not quite that easy. Once you bring in an employee your costs are going to go up significantly. You need to consider it’s not just the cost of paying that employee, but you’ll also likely want to get someone to do payroll services, you’ll need to add the new employee to your insurance, and depending on your business and that person’s role you might find yourself paying for additional things like travel time or reimbursing them for gas or other expenses. So before we get there lets see if there are other options.
Outsource tasks
In most businesses there are tasks that you can outsource to other people or companies. Take a close look at your business processes and see what tasks take the longest to complete, then see if there are ways you can outsource them or make them easier to do. For example, if you are getting a lot of leads through a marketing campaign you do and it takes you a while to sort them out and call your leads to schedule work or a walk through so you can quote jobs, see if there is a way to automatically cut down that list before its even generated. I mentioned in another article including prices or pricing examples that people can use to see if they are a good fit for you and if you are outside of their price range they won’t bother reaching out. As I mentioned, you can also outsource this to a service provider that is familiar with your industry and can separate good leads from bad ones. Maybe you rather do that yourself and outsource something simpler like scheduling jobs or billing.
Raise prices
If you are inundated with work, there’s a possibility you aren’t charging enough. Even if you are, raising prices is a good way to raise your income without the need to take on more work. If some of your customers are scared off by the higher prices it won’t be a problem as loosing that work will be supplemented by making more money on your remaining clients and it opens up space to take on more clients at a higher price point. You just need to be careful not to raise your prices too much, normally a small increase in prices per year is normal as businesses need to keep up with inflation.
Hire someone
Finally, if there is no way to reduce time spent on tasks then you need to just go with it and hire an employee. Figure out what roles you want to keep doing and find someone to take the others off your hands. You are now entering entrepreneur stage of your business, you should be stepping into the role of managing and growing your business while others do the actual work.