Let me guess…you are a virtual assistant hitting consistent 5k, 7k, maybe even 9k months doing it all alone but you are feeling burned out, overwhelmed, and just about ready to throw in the towel all together? Many service-providers that have come before you have stood in your shoes…myself included. We get our freelancing businesses to a point where we are making a decent income, but we know we want more. We know we can be making a bigger impact, serving more clients, and earning more but the question is, HOW?? Today, I am sharing four main ways you can scale your freelancing business so you can start earning more, working less!
Create an Agency
Hiring a team or a mini team to help support you and your freelancing business is a great way to scale. With more help, you can serve more clients. But before going the agency route, make sure you have solid systems in place and that you are charging enough to hire help.
If your business is a mess and you can barely keep up, how can you expect someone to step in and help? The first step is to streamline everything you do. Create SOPs and document everything you do for each of your clients that way when you onboard a team member, they know exactly what to do. They will be able to easily follow through on all of the processes you have in place and you and your team will be able to tackle double the work.
As far as profit margins go, you want to make sure they are high enough before you start bringing on a team. The last thing you need is to go from pocketing 9k a month down to 5k simply because you are not charging your worth. Make sure you evaluate this before implementing an agency model.
Create a Course or Membership
This is the route I took. And I couldn’t be happier! I knew I wanted to make a bigger impact by meeting the needs of more women, so I went the course creator route. Whether you decide to create a course or create a membership, you have to consider the added work that comes with doing so.
As a course creator, I have learned the importance of visibility and the constant need to generate leads. When I was just doing freelancing this wasn’t as big of a focus considering the ways I was landing clients wasn’t dependent on standing out in a crowd. However, as a course creator, you have to keep in mind that in order to sell a lot of courses/memberships, you need to always have new students, new leads.
As a result, I now maintain an email list, TikTok, podcast, Instagram, and most recently, Pinterest. Marketing is a HUGE part of going this route so keep that in mind if this is the way you are leaning.
Create Digital Products
Creating a digital product suite will allow you to make some passive income while still offering your premium services, but just like I mentioned above, you have to consider the marketing piece. Nothing is truly passive.
Maybe you’re a social media manager so you create graphics or story templates. Or maybe you’re a Dubsado wizard so you create proposal templates or welcome templates. No matter what type of digital product you create, you are going to have to actively sell that product.
Offer VIP Days
VIP days are a great way to take your current services and offer them at an even higher price. Basically you are taking a service you already offer and cramming it into one day. For example, if you are a website designer, maybe you offer a 5 page website in a day. Or as a Pinterest manager, you offer to plan and schedule out an entire month’s worth of content in a day.
You take the back and forth out of your life because everything is done in a day. For just 5 hours of work, you can charge anywhere from 1k-5k if not more! People are willing to pay a premium because they want it done and out of the way.
So let’s say you offer a VIP day at a rate of 2k. You would only need to have 5 VIP days a month to reach 10k. Who wouldn’t want a 5 day work month? Of course there is marketing and selling involved along with prepping for VIP days but still it’s an amazing business model that allows you to scale quickly as a freelancer.
Which route do you want to take to scale your freelancing business?
