Below are the show notes/summary for this episode. Please listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for the full show! Xo, Alex

 

We are going to talk about how to scale your business. I have scaled my business from under 100K to what’s projected to be about $750,000 within a year. So, I know a few things about this topic. I’m not trying to say that to flex. I’m trying to say it so that you can trust me when I tell you these are ways; I scaled my business that quickly to those heights.

Create New Offerings for Your Current Customers

So, I like to approach Highmoon Studio as a “there’s something for everybody” kind of approach. So always offering free value & small ticket items that anybody could purchase, even if they are just starting their business, don’t have a business yet, or don’t have much money.

And then obviously up to very high-ticket brand consulting and stuff like that. So, if somebody came to my website, there is something for them, whether it’s free or whether they’re willing and ready to invest in a super high ticket offer and take their business to the complete next level.

You have to have your target market. I just find there are so many different target markets attracted to Highmoon Studio, and we can help so many different people. So why not create offers for them? And this isn’t necessarily like, Ooh, let me devalue my services or make things cheaper.

I have like a middle offer. This is your offer that most people purchase. And it’s really good at what it’s priced at. And I feel I’m getting my money’s worth. I’m not going to resent the client or the project. But then create offers below it where you’re doing less work. So that it’s a less investment, but you’re not getting paid less.

And then create offers above it where you have more work, and then it’s more of an investment for the client.

Sell Current Offerings to New Customers

You can tap into a more luxury market and say, okay, so I have my current offerings. I want to raise my prices. What do I need to do to get to a place where I’m grabbing these new customers? Or maybe let’s say you’re a brand and website designer. And right now, you’re targeting photographers, or maybe prior, you were targeting photographers, and you realized, Oop COVID. None of them have money anymore because none of them can shoot. So, I’m going to have to tap into a new target audience.

When you do something like this, and you kind of pivot your business, you typically have to rework your branding, rework your website, rework your messaging to attract these new people.

I just finished up creating this free five-day masterclass on leveling up to luxury. It goes through how to level up your brand, your website, your marketing, your social presence, and then your customer experience completely free. You can find it on our website. That will help you if you’re trying to sell to new customers and level up.

When you’re trying to sell the new customers, you’re not trying to get cheaper customers. You’re trying to get customers that are willing to invest a little bit more. So, then you have to level your up if you’re looking to get higher-level clients. So, go and watch that master class.

Create New Offerings For Different Customers

So, you can completely pivot into new territory. And when you get to this place, basically what you want to do is you want to see where there’s a gap in the market. whatever industry that you’re in, where is a gap, and how can I fill it

Optimize What You Have

You have some great products and some great services, but your sales pages aren’t optimized. Or maybe your website doesn’t have a good flow. So, you want to level up your brand. There are so many people out there who have great products, great services, but nobody knows about them. And if nobody knows about them, how in the hell are you going to sell them? You really need to optimize what you have before you start, like diving deeper into these higher-level things.

So just overall, in general, make sure your foundation is perfection. You better have a good brand. I better see a bomb website. And hire somebody to do it. If you can’t do it yourself, having a foundation is where you can scale and grow your business. If your foundation is shit, your house is going to fall, and you don’t want your house, AKA your business, to fall while you’re investing all of this money into scaling. So, make sure your foundation is on point.

Expand Your Product Suite

Maybe you’re like, okay, I have some great stuff, but let’s expand this slightly. Getting into what I was talking about before and this “something for everybody” approach.

So, do you have upsells and down sells to your specific services or products? Maybe you’re a brand-new website designer. You complete the branding and the website for the client, and you think to yourself, how can I do something that’s subscription-based? We know that I am obsessed with subscription-based stuff. We’re living in a subscription-based society right now. Think about Netflix, all of those things.

You can still add that to your services, even if you aren’t a product-based business, right? Maybe you say, okay, so I have my clients, and they have this beautiful new brand and this beautiful new website, but they’re still not designers. Just because they have this stuff doesn’t mean they will be able to execute beautiful graphics or their social media every month. Maybe I come out with some packages that state that you can pay X amount of dollars every month, and every month we will create 10 new graphics for your social media.

And then down-sells are for those more higher-level ticket type of services or products that somebody comes to, and they’re really interested in, but, oh man, I just can’t afford it right now. How can you still sell them and say, Hey, just because you can’t afford this doesn’t mean that we can’t work together. Maybe you can afford this. And it gives you a little touch on what I can offer. And maybe it can give you some information and some things that you can do within your business that you can implement that will help you make more money to move on and advance and invest in that one bigger ticket thing that you were hoping for.

So always pay attention to that. Just adding passive income products to support your larger offerings is super, super important. So, I have my huge designer training. But I also have mini masterclasses that go more in-depth into topics than I do in the designer training. Maybe somebody in the designer training and they’re like, well, okay, So she showed me how to design this one type of gif, but I’m looking to figure out how to design a different type of gif. And she has a gif training. So, I only need to pay $50 for it. And that’s completely passive income for me. You just have to always think about how you can help your customers.

Restructure Your Current Packages

I used to do what I call a la cart style packages. I always use this as an example: you can go to whole foods and buy a pre-made salad for $8. Right? You can grab it from the shelf, go check out. or you can go to whole foods, and you can go to the salad bar.

And when you’re at the salad bar, you’re like, Hmm, I’m going to add some avocado in here. Let me add some extra of this, extra of that. And then, all of a sudden, you go to checkout, and your salad is like $20. And you’re like, what the F did I do? But I chose it, So I’m really excited to eat it. And I’m just fine with the price because I chose those things.

That is what I did with my packages for the branding and website design services. I like to do base packages and then have add-ons. So, what is the minimum that somebody needs to purchase to make the project worth it? And then how can you add all these add-ons that they can select themselves to almost like custom create a package of their dreams, right? And they’re the ones sitting in picking and choosing.

And then, all of a sudden, they see the number at the bottom of that proposal, and they’re like, that was a lot more than I thought it was, but Alex is doing payment plans, and I just want all of it. So, let’s just do it. If I’m going to do it, let’s do it. So, you end up making more money solely because you allowed your customers to shop instead of choosing the packages.

Use Your Customer Complaints or Problems to Your Advantage

So that can be something that’s free that turns into something that’s paid. So, when the pandemic hit, everybody just became super, super uncertain. And I was noticing this in my clients that I had never noticed before. Everybody was just having such a hard time deciding on the direction they wanted to move with their branding.

And I think it was just solely of like, where the is the world going to go? And how do I want to position my business? So, I decided to come out with this brand strategy master class. It was free, but it led to other paying things. So, it’s little things like that where you can use your customer complaints or problems to your advantage and create things to fix those problems.

So, as I am moving into next year, 2021, we’re restructuring our services, all of our packages, and all of our pricing. And I’m going to expand the customer experience because I know that Highmoon Studios is leveling up and I’m no longer playing with people in the mid-range. we’re going to be playing with the luxury range here. I want our clients to be million-dollar clients.

Million-dollar clients deserve a level of experience that non-million-dollar clients deserve. Not saying that people below deserve less of an experience, but as your prices get higher, you need to up-level your client experience. So that’s what we’re doing. And I’m going to pay attention when I’m doing that to all the little pain points that were happening throughout our client process in the past or areas that I know we can make more fun and exciting. I want to blow their socks off. I don’t want it to just be like a regular old experience. I want them to come out of it and be like, that was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was so much fun. The work is phenomenal. Alex’s changed my life.

To get there, I have to up-level the experience. But to up-level the experience, I need to pay attention to my previous customers and look at where can I make them go, Wow.

Put A Lot of Emphasis on Your Free Offerings

If you’re not giving anything out for free and showing that you are an authority in your field, you’re doing things wrong. You have to think ahead of yourself.

For instance, I created that five-day master class before black Friday, which led to other offers. So, there’s always a point behind everything. Every free thing you give out shouldn’t just be to give something out for free. It should always have a purpose to lead to something bigger and lead to something where you can make more money. So, get don’t do something everybody else has done. I preach innovation. So, you really need to sit down with yourself and say, what is my expertise, or what am I selling, and how can I sell a little bitty part of that?

Give people a taste of something great So that they come back for more and they’re like, give me more and more and more, and I’ll pay for it. I don’t care how much it is. That’s exactly what you want. So really, with giving out free stuff, you’re focusing on building these funnels. So you’re saying, what is my customer journey? What do they go through an order to pay me for X, Y, Z?

And obviously, that’s going to look different for every single product or service that you offer. And you really need to sit down and map it out. Get a big whiteboard, get some pieces of paper, whatever you need to do, and go through the process of what happens.

If you’re actually creating good stuff, then you got them in, and they’re going to realize that whatever you just created for them, they’re going to put it into practice, and it’s going to make them more money. So, then they’re like, oh my God, I love Alex because she makes me money. And gosh, what a great girl. I’m going to share about her with everybody because I just want to scream her name off the rooftops because of how she’s changed my life. And now I’m going to keep signing up for whatever she puts out. It doesn’t even matter what it is now I’m hooked. I don’t even have to know what it’s about. I will buy it.

Affiliate Marketing.

So, who can you partner with? for me, I share my Flo Desk. I use Flo Desk for email marketing. I share with all of my students my 50% off link so they can get Flo Desk for 50% off. Every time they purchase Flo Desk, at 50% off, I get $20 from Flo Desk. So, I have created a completely passive income revenue source just by giving people my Flo Desk link.

And it’s a win-win situation because I’m giving them a great deal, and they’re giving me $20 in return. That’s not even coming out of their pocket. It’s coming out of Flo Desk’s pocket. So those are the instances that you want to create. So, is that something with like another program you can do that it’s almost like influencer marketing, right?

For instance, we just set up our Amazon shop. We get a little kickback for that. It’s not much because I’m not pushing it. I am not an influencer, but there are little things like that, that you can implement in your business to push you to scale.

If you are still like reaching, reaching, reaching, wanting to get more clients, wanting to be booked out ahead of time, partner with somebody. For instance, if you are a brand-new website designer, maybe you partner with a coach, and you say, Hey, I know that you’re helping people start their businesses. And a huge part of the business is branding and website design. Especially if you have a good one, right? That will make you so much money If you have a good one. So, Hey, would you be willing to partner up with me? Any client you send me in books will give you 5% of that service, or I’ll give you $150 or whatever it might be, right?

So you partner with people so that you have clients consistently coming your way. And when you’re getting clients from somebody who is recommending you. These people who are coming to you as clients have somebody that they look up to who’s recommending your services. There is nothing better than that. That is one of the strongest ways to get clients because people, especially women, are so influenced by each other. And all we want is to hear how great of an experience somebody had. And it’s so easy then to be like, okay, I’ll book them too, because I trust you. And if you’re telling me that they were great, I don’t have any questions.

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