TOP 5 WAYS TO BUILD A FINANCIALLY STABLE BUSINESS

Financial stability is a fundamental business goal that should be top of the list when writing your Business Plan and setting out your strategies.

When your business is consistently meeting your financial targets, you can either enjoy and maintain the steady success, or start to focus on growth.

I’ve achieved financial consistency for probably around 5 of my 8 years as a business owner so far.

When I started out, it took me a while to realise that’s what I should aim for, but once I’d achieved it, everything got a lot easier.

Over the past 18 months I’ve pivoted my business, and at the same time developed a robust model to deliver exponential financial growth while retaining my solopreneur status.

This transition put me back into a period of financial instability, but sometimes you’ve got to take an up-front knock for greater long-term reward.

In this blog I’m going to share with you some of the key strategies I guide my coaching clients through to achieve a financially stable business.

If you’d like to chat about how these strategies could work for you, you’ll find a link to book a Marketing Brainstorm at the bottom of this page.

1. IDEAL CLIENT

If you want to build a financially secure business – get to know your client.

Doing this is the ONLY way you can create products and services that will sell.

Your ‘ideal client’ is the type of person you know you can serve most powerfully, ie the stuff you’re able to do will help solve their specific problems.

Remember – it may be that you offer different services that help different types of people, that’s fine – just make sure you build avatars for each of them.

Here are some questions you should be asking to build your ideal client avatar/s:

• Who is my ideal client?
• What do they really want and need?
• What keeps them up at night?
• What solutions do I offer that solve their problems?

Once you’ve got your answers, and know who your ideal client is on an intimate basis, you can package up your skills and expertise in a focussed and targeted way.

2. OFFER

Packaging your skills and expertise into specific offers is the best way to make it super clear to your ideal client what you can do for them and is a step towards building that consistent business.

Selling one-off, individual services is great, but the aim should be for your clients to buy-in longer-term solutions and/or purchase bundles of your services.

Think about the journey your client needs to go on to achieve their goal – where do each of your services fit within that journey?

Bundling your services together to lead your client seamlessly through the journey will compel them to buy, because you’ve made it easy for them.

If I can make one purchase to solve my entire problem, or try to piece together several services to solve each piece of my puzzle…it’s a no-brainer!

The way you communicate your offers should make it abundantly clear that they’ll deliver a proven and reliable solution to the problems and challenges faced by your ideal client.

3. DELIVERY

Building a financially secure business is so much easier if you can include a subscription / membership / retained service into your monetisation strategy.

If you don’t need to give everything all in one go, don’t.

Sell a one-off product or service and eat for a week.

Sell a retained service and eat for a lifetime.

Even if the bulk of your service deliver happens in one go, offer your client a monthly payment plan that includes ongoing support.

Think about how you can give them access to ongoing solutions for a monthly subscription.

There are several monetisation strategies for financial consistency, and I’ll cover them in more detail in a separate blog, but it all starts with really thinking about the solution you deliver and how you can deliver it in a long-term and consistent way.

4. LEAD GENERATION

Lead generation is essentially the stuff you do to attract your ideal clients and compel them to buy from you, including

• Newsletters
• Direct Marketing
• Networking
• Social Media
• Blogging
• Advertising

Each piece of lead generation you create should be designed to effectively communicate why they need what you can offer.

Knowing what type of lead generation works to attract your ideal client and compel action, and making sure it’s as effective as it can be, will save you time and money.

I went into detail about the 9 Step Formula each piece of lead generation should be funnelled through in order to be effective in my blog The Most Common Marketing Mistakes And How To Avoid Them.

5. CONVERSION

For your business to be financially consistent, your conversion strategies need to be on point.

Understanding how prospects become aware of you, and the journey they take to working with you, is the first step.

Understand this and you’ll know how to nurture prospects through your sales pipeline and achieve higher conversion rates.

To start mapping out the customer journey, here are some questions to ask…

• Where do my prospects first hear about me/my services?
• Where do they go to find out more?
• How do I know when they’ve taken time to find out more?
• How do they take the next step towards working with me?

The next phase is to focus on conversion tactics.

Once your prospect is close and ready to buy – how do you help them make that important decision.

This goes back to understanding your ideal client, and knowing the answers to some vital questions, such as:

• What will compel them into action?
• What’s the most powerful motivator for purchase?
• Where are they most likely to take the action?

Having a mapped out your customer journey and defined your conversion strategy, stick to a system that you can measure.

Monitor and measure everything in your business – clients, offers, lead generation, deliver, conversion….everything – doing this helps you stay proactive and nimble, which will also help you build a financially secure business.