As a service provider, you have to solve all of your client’s problems.
If you’re having struggle scaling your service business you may have become a generalist.
When you’re a generalist you quickly fall into this trap of doing everything your client needs.
Your “service” is actually you saying the word “yes”.
Client: Can you also do our social media?
You: Yes.
Client: Can you build us a funnel?
You: Yes
And next thing you know you’re just a glorified freelancer and would probably be making more if you were employed full time by this client.
It’s a slippery slope that most service providers fall into.
The reality is that it’s usually cuz you:
1) Don’t know how to say “no”
2) You’re afraid that if you say “no” you’ll lose the client and you’re not really sure where the next dollar is coming from.
So, let’s solve this problem instead of making it worse by trying to solve all of our client’s problems.
Transcript / MP3
You ever find yourself saying yes to every single client request that comes in to the point where you actually are afraid that if you say no, you might lose your client’s business and that’s scary because you don’t know where your next client is coming from. I totally feel you, and this is actually a curse with most service providers. You get your client for the thing that you’re really good at and then they ask you if you can do one more thing and you say yes because you don’t know where the next client is coming from. You don’t have leads coming in outside of networking and referrals. So you say yes and then you say yes again and you say yes again and your siloed experience, the real power behind what you do, it gets diluted because now your product is just yes, not solving a specific problem and when your product is just yes, really what you’re doing is selling your time, I can come to you as this generalist service provider and I can ask you to do all of these things and then I can say, you know what?
Out of those five, I really only need those three. So can you lower your price and giving me those three just instead? And you say yes because again, you don’t know where your next client is coming from and it turns into this vicious cycle that has you doing tons of custom work and really just getting paid for your time to do all of these things. So I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to solve every single problem that your client has and as long as you do, you’re never going to be able to escape one-on-one custom projects and only ever working with a handful of clients. And at that point when you do the math, it probably just makes sense to start working in one of their businesses anyway. And if that’s for you, great. Now at least you know. But if your path was to build a business and build something bigger than you, you’re going to have to stop saying yes to every single request that comes your way.
You’re going to have to stop selling just your time and you’re going to have to stop sending out proposals with a list full of services and let your prospect to cherry pick what you do for them. You need to go to your ideal client and tell them the problem that you can solve, which means you need to know that which problem they have is that $100,000 problem that if you solved it, they’d be willing to pay you 10 2030 grand because the amount of revenue that they’ll get from you solving that problem is so real. When you get there, you can finally start to package up your experience in a way where they’re going to get so good at delivering it that you can remove yourself. You’re going to get so good at marketing it that you have clients coming to you instead of you chasing them.
If that’s what you want, we’d love to help you click the link below and join our free Facebook group called the scalable service provider. Each and every week we’re sharing frameworks and systems and strategies for you to package up your services and sell a specific outcome that delivers a specific result so that you can finally have all of the systems that allow your business to run as smoothly and streamlined as possible, letting you become the owner of your business instead of just the technician in your clients. If that sounds good, click the link below. Let’s hop into that Facebook group. We can’t wait to see you there. And if you know someone that is currently struggling in the one on one service game and wants to go from full service provider to in demand specialists, then share that link with them. We’d love to have them in the Facebook group as well, and we’ll see you there.
