There are many different ways to scale—even without hiring employees—but there is one that tends to be undervalued: getting better clients.
Getting better clients works in the early days of your business as you learn who you work best with and who happily pays your fees.
And it works just as well once you’ve established yourself and built some authority in your niche—even if your circle is still quite small.
In fact, I’ve had clients 2X and 3X their already six-figure revenue just from a focused client upgrade.
Say you’re earning in the $150k range with a handful of clients and you’re working pretty much at capacity.
If you could charge each client twice as much, you could double your income or halve your working hours.
How would THAT change your day-to-day life?
The thing is, it can be challenging—and sometimes downright impossible—to change how you price your work for existing clients.
But new clients are wide open territory.
They’ve come to you because they were referred to you from someone they trust or they stumbled upon your website or heard you on a podcast.
You’re free to experiment, one engagement at a time.
Let’s say you offer a productized service. Just try upping the ante every time you get a yes: when client X pays $10,000 easily, bump it up to $15,000 or $20,000 for the next one.
You’ll find the upper limit fairly quickly this way and your bonus for experimenting is extra revenue that goes straight to your bottom line (like the client I’ve mentioned before whose assessment product is now at $50k from a starting point of $10k).
And if you don’t publish your prices, it’s even easier to play with price tags on specific engagements.
All you have to do is start.
Like “Jeff”, who recognized his ideal buyer amongst his existing client base and committed to replicating that person in any new relationships.
That buyer had a firmly strategic outlook and was willing to pay top dollar for Jeff’s expertise, while the others were more focused on tactical outcomes.
After a few sales conversations, it became a no-brainer to recognize those better clients—and to charge them significantly more for their high-end outcomes.
No change to his business model, a few messaging tweaks and he’s currently at 2X his old income and counting…
Related: 3 Signals It’s Time To Break Out From Expert To Trusted Authority