Can you imagine the day in your business when you have time, time to enjoy being a business owner? Not because you’ve decided to take a day off; but because you’ve created a systematic approach, hired an amazing team, found a way to scale your offerings. Yup, you guessed it, I’m talking about leverage.
Leverage. Every entrepreneur wants it but there are far too many entrepreneurs who don’t understand that leverage in business is a stage of your development. What I mean is you have to get to that stage. While there is no specific time wait to make leverage a possibility for your business, there are a few things that come before leverage. The right way will give you the financial and time freedom that you craved when you embarked on your entrepreneurial journey.
I remember when I first started in my business; I thought I could start out at the leverage stage. I really did. I’m no fool. I know that the best thing to do is to offer your products and services to as many people as you can at one time. I mean straight out of the gate I launched a group program. The number of people who enrolled….three.
Why you asked? Not because it wasn’t any good, but because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
I could tell when I saw Kathleen’s question that she’s in the same place I once was:
“Hi Darnyelle. I have a confession to make. I am a relatively new life coach but I don’t want to coach clients one on one. Is that a bad thing? I want to offer group coaching programs but for some reason I can’t seem to get more than one or two people to enroll at a time. What am I doing wrong? I keep hearing all this talk about leverage yet when I try to leverage I fall flat on my face. Help!”
Feeling a little like Kathleen? Check out my response to her in this week’s episode of Incredible Factor TV.
The thing about leverage is that in order to do it correctly, there is a progression that must occur. If you ask me, before you can get leverage in your business, there are five things you must do:
1. Get your message tight. By getting crystal clear about who you are, what you do and how you do it differently than others. The clearer your message, the more people will listen. It’s about taking the time to create a “dog whistle” effect with your marketing message.
2. Get your market precise. Know who you serve is key to being able to introduce leverage. From speaking at events (a great leverage move by the way) you have to be speaking to the right audiences to get the results you crave.
3. Develop your system. You have to be doing something that will yield results for other people and you have to prove that each step can be done for one as easily as it can for 10 or 10,000. This phase of development can take long, but it will be worth it once you have a “kick-butt” system in place that accounts for every nuance in the process of solving your ideal client’s problem. This system to solving your customer’s problem is regardless of the kind of work you do and who you serve. The fastest way to stand out from the crowd is to create your own signature proprietary system.
4. Validate the results. It’s not enough to build a system. Gone are the days of “if you build it, they will come.” You have to build it, then you have to get people to try it and get results. While people just like Kathleen buck at the thought of working with clients one on one, working with private clients is how you validate and tweak your system to ensure that it works. It’s also the fastest way to gain profit in your business. Profit, by the way, will help you progress to the point of leverage a little bit faster. Like I told Kathleen, take private clients until you can’t anymore. Once your client roster is full, you can begin to find ways to introduce leverage to continue to serve people.
5. Get social proof. You know, testimonials, case studies and client success stories. It’s not enough to know that the system works, you’ve got to capture them saying that it worked and you also want to display the tangible results they received from following your system. People are looking for a place to belong. If they can go somewhere and read how people just like them got results from working with you, they will want to work with you too.
(Pay attention, the 5 stages of entrepreneurship are in bold and in order :-)) Now, before you get to the leverage stage of business development, you spend time in the start up and practice stages of development. In both, you are finding your way and building a business around clients, you set up introductory operational systems and clarifying the space you want to hold in your market. Once you’ve exceeded your capacity privately, you allow leverage to enter your business model and start hiring a team and working one to many. The next stage is about learning how to make an impact and then ultimately creating your own entrepreneurial empire.
So, what say you? What’s your two cents? What about getting to the point of leverage frustrates you? What have you tried that worked or didn’t work? Are you clear about which stage of development your business is in? I can’t wait to hear from you so please leave us a comment below sharing how this episode has helped you in your business.
Until next week, Be Incredible!
©2013 by Darnyelle A. Jervey. All Rights Reserved. Darnyelle A. Jervey, MBA, The Incredible Factor Speaker, Business Coach and Marketing Mentor, is the founder of Incredible One Enterprises.com, Incredible Factor University® the Leverage Your Incredible Factor System® a proven step-by-step program for more clients, more income and more leverage in your business. For more information and a FREE audio CD “7 Critical Mistakes Entrepreneurs Must Avoid When Unleashing Your Incredible Factor So You Attract More Clients, Make More Money and Gain More Leverage” just fill out the form below.
