by Karen Skidmore | 06,24 | Marketing Articles, Pillar Articles
The number of choices you have to make each and every day can add up to the thousands, from what clothes you put on in the morning and what you eat for lunch to which email to respond to next or what meeting to prepare for.
And if you also have a family household to manage, well … the number of decisions you have to make for others can rack up even quicker.
Some sources claim that we make up to 35,000 decisions every day (Sahakian & Labuzetta, 2013) and 226.7 decisions each day on just food alone (Wansink and Sobal, 2007).
It’s no surprise, then, that when it comes to making decisions about your business and marketing strategy, decision fatigue can become a real problem.
If you’re already facing a thousand or more decisions about day-to-day stuff, when you try to make decisions on the bigger business and marketing stuff, your brain can be running tired-and-wired.
Mental overload
I liken it to having too many tabs open on your browser or too many apps running in the background of your phone … because your brain is full of mundane thinking, it just doesn’t have the capacity to move up a gear to deal with the seemingly bigger or more important decisions about your business.
So if you feel you are struggling with motivation or you don’t think you are a good decision maker, it may be that you just don’t know what to do next because you are relying on your logic brain too much.
Decision making is one of the “secrets” to business success; you probably know that it’s action, rather than ideas, that grow your business and action can only happen once you’ve made a decision. So if you find it difficult to make decisions, which in turn means you aren’t taking action, it can really hold you back in your business growth journey.
The P Cycle
Many years ago, I came up with The P Cycle, the constant and exhausting swirl of perpetual learning, which leads to perfectionism, which leads to procrastination, which leads straight back to perpetual learning.
Because when you don’t know something (which is ALWAYS the case with most of your business and marketing decisions, yes?!), it feels that you ought to go out and learn more about whatever it is you are making a decision about first, before actually making a decision to take action on it.
However, this can mean you keep learning because you are striving to be perfect, which then leads to procrastination and back to perpetual learning again so you are forever seeking ideas and learning more about how to do something.
You never quite get out of The P Cycle to take actual action and move forward with your business idea or marketing initiative.
So is decision making a skill you can learn?
Yes, sure it is.
You can use tools such as the classic SWOT or cost-benefit analysis to help you weigh up the pros and cons. But for most of your decisions you have to make in your business, these decisions making tools have the danger of keeping you in the P Cycle.
These tools can keep you in your head, forcing you to seek information externally and you use logic to come to the ‘right’ decision which can delay the decision making process even further.
Is there another way of making a decision?
Yes, I’m glad you asked!
Because there is an important space within us that very few of us know how to access on a day-to-day basis.
You probably feel it from time to time and perhaps, like me, you know it’s there because so many people around you refer to it.
Some people call it a gut feeling.
Others may call it intuition.
It doesn’t really matter whether you may feel it or hear it in your gut, soul, heart or solar plexus, it’s the thoughts and feelings that come to you when you are in the shower, or out walking in nature, or when you are doing anything but trying to solve a problem and make a logical decision.
Having spent the first 25+ years of my adult life as a strong, independent woman (yup, I really was on track to burn out by the time I got to 42 – I was so in my head that I didn’t see the signs!), I really didn’t know how to access this intuitive way to help me make decisions.
Just like that browser with too many tabs open; at some point that spinning circle of doom comes on the screen and you realise the only thing you can do is shut down and re-boot your laptop.
In my 40s, when recovering from my burnout, I decided I needed to re-boot, slow down and explore different ways of growing and building my business, and this is why I’ve come to see that there is a simpler process to decision making when you learn how to get out of your head, and connect with your intuitive self.
What is intuition?
Everyone experiences intuition differently. For some, it comes as words or phrases. Others feel it as a gut feeling or a sixth sense. Some even experience it as a physical sensation.
The trick is to figure out how your intuition communicates with you. The more you get out of your head and pay attention to what’s going in your body, the more you’ll notice it. And when you start to honour your intuition and act on it, it becomes more noticeable, and your connection with it grows stronger.
Many people think they aren’t intuitive. I certainly didn’t think I was growing up in my 20s and 30s. But when I speak to my clients and ask them to recall a time they ‘just knew’ something wasn’t right—be it in business, finance, relationships, health, or anything else—everyone can remember an instance.
So if you’d like to find a way of accessing your intuition more to help you make decisions more easily – and thus take action on the stuff that’s going to grow your business – here’s what I love to invite you to do.
Learn to be a tracker of how your intuition shows up.
I’ve been on a huge journey over the last few years, re-connecting with myself and discovering how our energies work and flow.
I have had to learn how to slow down so that I may hear what my body, heart and soul is trying to tell me.
A couple of the regular practices I used to begin this journey was:
- Journalling – the simple practice of writing a few pages of my thoughts before I start my working day
- Using Angel Cards – picking a card before or during my journaling to help me bring awareness to what I could be paying attention to.
Both these practices allowed me to get out of my head and feel into different parts of my body and awareness. And, although it may sound a little woo-woo airy-fairy to be using things like Angel Cards, I have found them to be a practical way to give me another frame from which to see myself from. It’s like finding a four-leaved clover or shiny penny on the floor; these may be old wives’ tales to some but I dare you not to see either of these and NOT smile with the same child-like glee that you may have done when you were younger.
When we can pay attention to our own internal source of information, rather than the logical brain, it’s less exhausting and you will make better business decisions.
A final word about the stories we make up …
It is easy to confuse intuition with stories that we make up in our heads. If you find that you begin to explain why something feels a certain way and you tell yourself stories about it, it’s likely to be projection; you’ve interpreted something to mean something and this is when we start to second guess ourselves or make decisions that serve others, rather than ourselves.
Intuition just is; it doesn’t need to explain, rationalise, or justify.
If your sense or feeling comes with a lot of explanations or rationalisations, it probably isn’t intuition so when this happens, take some time to journal, walk out in nature or meditate to get past the stories. It can also be helpful to turn to a skilled coach or healer, such as myself, who can help you move out of the story in your head and into the wisdom of your body.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
by Karen Skidmore | 06,24 | Marketing Articles, Pillar Articles
No, it’s not a trick question nor am I about to launch into some passive-income, work-from-the-beach way of turning on the money tap whilst lounging back on a Caribbean sundeck.
It’s a serious question that all experts and service-based professionals need to answer at some point in their business.
Of course, the sum doesn’t have to be 6 figures. If you read my book, True Profit Business, you’ll discover that I am not a fan of pushing out the 6 figure business dream; it’s an ego-driven target because the reality is that most 6 figure businesses have an entirely different money-in-their-bank-account-sum when you take into account exactly what profit is made.
Too many people are working too hard to achieve the wrong goals.
If it is a genuine 6-figure sum you’re after, great, but the money sum could be that you simply want an extra £10,000 over the next few months.
For the sake of simplicity, the money sum I am going to use in this article is £100,000 because it’s as an easy number to work through.
First of all, why is this question important?
Knowing how you want to make your money from your business is important because it’s going to significantly impact your marketing strategy, positioning required, resources needed (advertising budget, hiring of team, cost of digital platform set up), skills to learn and how much time and effort you are required to get it all working.
Your business model – how you engage with your clients and deliver what you sell – is directly related to how well you can grow and potential scale your business. You have a choice in the way your design, set up and run your business.
But most people end up with a business model based on what everyone else in your profession is running, or a business model based on what you’ve been taught to be the most profitable or easiest to run.
In the first instance, you may have the same business model as everyone else in your profession not because of choice, but because you don’t know any better. What you don’t know, you don’t know and, as with most clients I work, I doubt you’ve gone to business school or have training in business processes and systems.
If this is the case, you may have spent a lot of time learning about marketing and how to get clients, but the topic of how to design, set up and run your business is something you’ve probably never given much thought to.
Doing what everyone else in your profession does has its upsides because you know what works already. However, there is a big problem with this. Just because most of your colleagues or competitors are running their business in a particular way, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are all doing it the right way for them.
80% of businesses are doing it wrong
If we take the Pareto Principle that statistically proves 80% of your outcome comes from 20% of your input, 80% of the success that happens in your profession comes from just 20% of the businesses.
Thus 80% of businesses in your profession are creating just 20% of the output.
Can you see why so many of your colleagues and competitors seem to be struggling when you get to see what’s really going on behind their marketing, promotional campaigns and brand presence?
You know if you are in the 80 percentile if you experience any of the following:
- You’re overwhelmed; you’re procrastinating over marketing initiatives and new product ideas because you simply don’t know what you “should” be doing to make your business work more effectively.
- You’re overworked; you are stuck in the day-to-day grind and feeling miserable that you can’t spend the time doing more of what you love
- You’re underpaid; you compete on price, charge by the hour or the time you spend with a client and often over-deliver so that you do far more than you originally promised thus dropping your value even further.
I know this paints a pretty depressing picture but there are plenty of you in this situation (you are part of the 80%!) and if you get a copy of my book, True Profit Business, you’ll discover the path out of this 80%.
What are the top 20% of your profession doing right?
There will be of course all sorts of reasons for their success but there is every chance that they are using technology to create huge growth advantage opportunities to allow them to stand out as a leading expert in your profession.
You’ve probably already seen colleagues and competitors create new ways of sharing their expertise. From expanding their offerings to serving groups of clients, large and small, through to creating digital content and artificial intelligence; the opportunities to do something “different” and grow the number of clients you work with are open to you if that’s what you want.
This leads me to the second instance where many of you may be.
Digital doesn’t necessarily mean better
The explosion in selling digital content since 2015 has led to thousands of marketing experts teaching digital ways of making money and growing a business from your laptop on the beach, particularly within the coaching, therapy and training professions. Because technology has been the reason for a lot of businesses’ success, it’s easy to get sucked into believing that digital is the only way to grow a business like yours. But that’s not simply the case.
Many marketplaces are now so flooded with digital offerings that it’s hard to break in and claim your space, especially when so much of the content can be of poor quality and your client base may have begun to distrust this form of learning or support.
Plus there are plenty of those 20% businesses in your profession who are running more traditional business models, but because you don’t get to see their marketing campaigns or brand presence on your Facebook or Instagram feed, you may not realise they exist.
And let’s get real about how it is to run a top 20% business. You may have a business that, on paper, is well within your profession’s top 20%, especially if you are measuring its success on traditional key performance indicators such as turnover. But the reality of running your business in the top 20% is that it may be burning you out.
You know if you are getting burnt out in the 20% if you experience any of the following:
- You’re overwhelmed; you’ve stepped up and created your expert status but you don’t like the visibility and constant pressure to perform.
- You’re overworked; you can’t seem to keep up what you’ve promised your clients and can’t come up for air long enough to hire the right people to help you grow.
- You’re underpaid; your turnover maybe 6 or 7 figures but there’s not much left for you once you’ve paid your team, advertising invoices and running costs.
Again, another pretty depressing picture.
But as before, you aren’t the only one to have created a business that is burning you out because this practice of growing a business based on following someone else’s formulas and business model is rife. This is why I want to open up your eyes and see the possibilities available to you on your path to creating a True Profit Business. My aim of my book is to help you to avoid following someone else’s proven business model and systems, just because they are telling you it works for them.
You have a choice
You have a choice on what business infrastructure, processes and team to have in place to give you the right business to help you achieve your creativity, purpose and money aspirations.
You can choose the design, set up, and how you run your business based on who you are and how you want to show up. It’s just the way you can decide on the right vehicle you want to drive day-to-day.
There are so many different types of vehicles on the road because each of us has a different reason for choosing our mode of transport, and at different stages of our lives. Starting out, you’ll drive any car you can afford; a small hatchback or perhaps stick to your bike, especially if you live in a city. Families may drive a big SUV. Some may like fast cars. Others choose their mode of transport based on environmental impact and may even decide they don’t want to own a vehicle but use uber or rental cars for longer journeys.
There’s no one vehicle that’s right for everyone or for a specific profession.
And so it is with your business model and revenue streams.
There are four critical decisions to make to help you decide which business model you want; your role in the business, the number of clients you want to serve and then consequently at what price point, how you deliver your service or products and which selling system you decide works best for you. In my book, True Profit Business, I take you through in detail all four of these decisions.
So for now, let me take you through a couple of examples.
The passive income dream
Someone I spoke to recently had recently spent a significant amount of her investment cash setting up a new membership website. She had read a lot about membership sites, had joined an online business mentoring programme to teach her the basics of setting up digital products and thought this would be a perfect revenue stream to have around being a mum at home with two young children. She wouldn’t have to travel anywhere and could do everything her business needed her to do from her kitchen table.
There was no questioning her passion for helping the audience she wanted to reach out; she knew they were desperate for clear signposting and easy to access advice. But 14 months in and her beautifully designed website was verging on a marketing disaster. Although visits to the site were climbing and she was good traction in the forums, database building was almost non-existent and her offer just wasn’t compelling enough.
She planned to start with the freemium model and then charge £27 monthly. She dreamed of having a 6-figure business, but to make £100,000 would mean 309 members, assuming that all 309 would stay a minimum of 12 months. That’s a whole lot of leads to get that many customers and a whole lot of customer retention strategy to keep them being members.
Of course, long term, this kind of membership model can work, but you need a big bucket of resources (advertising, customer support, time, energy and hours and hours of screen time) because your marketing strategy is focused on a high volume, low pricing model.
It’s highly unlikely that any decent profit will be made for at least a year or two (probably many more!) if you rely solely on this revenue model. And this person was burnt out after 14 months of struggling to build up her tribe on a bootstrap budget and a lack of skills in digital marketing and advertising.
Let’s go to the other end of the scale.
I recently worked with a client for many years in the publishing industry. I am sure you know the massive changes that have turned much of the publishing sector on its head. The problem was that she was still stuck in the traditional, old-school business model where very little revenue was created until a book was published and sold. For her business to make £100,000, it was all about book contracts, working hard upfront, and only seeing rewards when (and sometimes only if) the book was successful. Plus, it was a cost-heavy business, so profits were tight.
When we started diving into the process she went through with her author clients; it was apparent to me the value of what she did even before the content was written. Of course, being surrounded by the traditional – and very much outdated – publishing business model, it was a classic case of “what you don’t know, you don’t know.” But having talked through all her options and what role, client capacity and the delivery process would work for her, it was as if a searchlight was beaming through the fog, and a new path became clear.
Offering her services as a book coach and mentor at the start of the process was an obvious place to begin; charging for the 6 months run-up to get the book ready for editing was not only profitable for my client but incredibly powerful and instrumental for the success of her author clients. Again, it was not a holy grail solution to making 6-figures – there was still a lot of thinking and doing to be done around her positioning and marketing her new offerings – but she could see clearly that this additional revenue stream could be a far simpler way of growing her business revenue than sticking to what everyone else in her industry did.
And without distracting her from her core revenue base or burning herself in the process.
The price you decide to charge has much to do with your success.
Before I send you off to think about your potential revenue streams, let’s deal with the elephant in the room: the price you charge. When creating new revenue streams in your business, it’s often perceived as easier to start at the lower end of charge of the price scale. I’m sure you have seen, and perhaps even bought from, the classic product funnel that starts with a £10 introductory product, which leads into a £295 course and then takes you into a premium programme of £1,000 and more.
So what many do and are taught to do is start creating your £10 introductory offer because you believe you need to build your list. And a £10 product is so much easier and safer to create, is it not?
Coming back to the question on hand – how do you go about creating £100,000 … that’s a lot of £10 sales you need to make to build enough momentum to move people up to your next mid-level product. You’d probably need 500+ sales to get you the conversions to that £100,000. That’s exhausting (and I speak from experience!)
Again, this kind of product funnel works like the membership offer example above. There’s no doubt about it. But starting with the perceived easier end of the funnel is not always your most straightforward path to growing your business. A far quicker, simpler, and easier way to do this is to flip your funnel on its head and start at the top end of the scale. Even if you decide to start small and create a programme or service at around the £2,000 mark, it becomes obvious that you have to sell to far fewer people to get yourself to your £100,000 goal. Plus, you’ll gain valuable experience, build your credibility, and see better results for your clients at this level.
Now, of course, I’m starting to sound like the rainbow fairy.
“Just wave your wand, burn your candles and the unicorn will come and poop out those clients for you.”
You know clients aren’t going to magically appear with intention alone (don’t you?!). There is a need for focus for your overall strategy and positioning, a clear offer to be created, and an understanding of what your marketplace really wants. But I hope that you get the point I am making here and that you realise you have a choice about how you design, create and run your revenue streams in your business.
Think carefully about your pricing and offers as you grow your business.
You mustn’t just follow someone else’s system or stick to what your industry does because what works for others may not always be the case for you.
Always come back to where YOU want to go in your journey and what income and impact goals you want, and work backwards from there because that’s when you can build a business that will work for you sustainably.
by Karen Skidmore | 02,24 | Business Planning, Pillar Articles
As a woman of a certain age, I’ve grown wise to the fact that two things are most precious to us: time and energy
But we can often spend our whole lives giving them away without a moment’s thought.
When we feel we have lots of time and energy, we can take them for granted.
But when we don’t have much of either, we grind along, working to other people’s schedules and demands. They exist as a finite resource for everyone, no matter where you live, and yet we can’t make more of either of them when we run out.
They are the most valuable resources we have in our lives and businesses, and yet without some fundamental boundaries in place; we will under-value them and give them both away to anyone who demands them of us, without recognising the need to use them first on ourselves and what’s important to us.
In my 20s and 30s, I often felt I had boundless amounts of both. If I felt tired, I would grab another cup of coffee. If I were hungry and didn’t have the energy to cook a meal, I would throw a ready meal in the microwave or eat a sandwich on the run.
We could do that then, couldn’t we? Without much thought to the consequences or long-term impact.
But as I woke up to my 40s, kicking off the decade with a young family (2 kids just 22 months apart), reeling from losing my dad to cancer and a business to run, my time and energy resources were suddenly depleted.
That coffee fix or sandwich on the run didn’t quite do the job as it had in my 20s, and I spent most of that decade crawling my way through quite extreme peri-menopausal symptoms, over-worked adrenals and wearing my Superwoman cape to get by every day.
But what has all this got to do with business?
There’s a magic word that I want to share with you that has become one of the most essential strategies to my business growth and comes up repeatedly in our coaching conversations with our clients.
Boundaries
Without boundaries to protect and fuel your time and energy resources, you will often end up working like a ‘busy fool’, as one of my clients called herself before we began working together. You may be making money, but the amount of hours you put in and the money you pay yourself at the end of each month doesn’t feel worth it.
In this article, I’d like to share the top 4 work boundaries I’d recommend you have in place to increase your profitability and avoid burnout.
1. Hours Worked
What hours are you prepared to work?
Very few clients I have worked with have ever stopped to think about how their ideal week could look; they have allowed their weekly routine to be shaped by what their business gives them.
When you started your business, your work diary probably looked very empty. It’s not until you begin marketing, start working with clients and become able to attend various events or conferences that you find your diary getting booked up. Meetings are being scheduled to suit other people. You don’t consider the preparation or rest time you need between appointments. Your once-open diary is now pulling you apart; you’re wearing your busy badge of honour, and you don’t have the time to focus on projects that could grow your business.
The irony of time management is that you can’t manage time; you can only manage yourself.
To stop this, I’d recommend you take a breath and work out your ideal week. If a week feels too routine for you and you imagine different things happening at other times of your working month, change the time frame to an ideal month.
Here is a list of questions to help you define your ideal week.
- My ideal working week starts on …
- What would I do on my first working day to set the right tone for my week?
- How would I spend the other days? (For example, are certain mornings or afternoons important to keep clear for certain activities?)
- My favourite day of the week is … and this is the reason why …
- The days and hours I want to work with my clients are …
- I am most in flow during this time …
- What I love to be spending most of my time doing is …
- Who I want to be spending more of my time with is …
- When I am not working, I want to be … (This question is crucial for those of you who don’t have other commitments, such as family members to look after, to pre-determine your working hours. It can be far harder to switch off from work when you only have yourself to be committed to, so decide what you want to do when you are not working.)
- How I want to feel at the end of my ideal week is …
- What do I want to do or achieve daily?
- What do I want to do or achieve weekly?
- What do I want to do or achieve monthly?
- What are you not prepared to sacrifice? (Are your Fridays sacred? Do you have to pick up children every day at 3.30 pm? Are you happy to work during the weekends but you have to have two days off during the week? Decide what time you aren’t prepared to give away so you can set those boundaries in place now and avoid frustration or resentment at a later date.)
Once you have answered these questions, could you decide what changes you can make to your scheduling and working hours? Do you need to block out certain mornings or afternoons for routine activities, such as content creation or team meetings?
If you cannot make any immediate changes, at what point can you introduce this new schedule? Can you add this to your diary right now?
You control who and what takes your attention during your working week. Some may not feel this is the case, especially if you are fully booked with clients for the next weeks or months. But when you decide what’s important to you in spending your time, you set the necessary boundaries to create the space to grow. You will realise that the right clients will want to work with you when you are available rather than you being dictated by their schedules.
2. Capacity Available
What is your capacity and availability for taking on new clients?
I often hear business owners asking for more clients, but they haven’t stopped to consider how many clients would give them a ‘full’ business. Think of your business like a hotel booking sheet. A hotel will have a finite number of rooms to sell for every day of the week. No matter what you sell, you will find an optimum level of clients, products, or programs you can sell while maintaining the service level you want to give.
If you choose to maximise your sales and compete on price (AKA always sell at lower prices because you feel it’s easier for you to sell), you are going to find this a challenging marketing strategy; competition is going to be tight, and you have to ensure you have the distribution channels or delivery systems in place to keep up with the demand.
For most of you reading this, you will have better success in optimising your sales and deciding how many clients or customers you can serve in any one week or month. By doing your sales numbers this way, you can work your charge rates back from here once you’ve decided how much you want to earn and thus set your boundaries on how many clients you can effectively onboard each week, month or quarter. This simple exercise can radically change your profitability overnight, and if you need help working this through, get in touch.
Please email me at karen@karenskidmore.com, and I’ll happily arrange for one of our coaches to talk you through the process and help assess your profitability options.
3. Communication Channels
Technology is a double-edged sword; it’s made communicating and corresponding with clients and prospects more accessible than ever … but that’s also meant that you are in danger of managing multiple platforms, never being able to follow a message trail, and constantly switching on.
The first rule of communication is that you DON’T have to be everywhere or have every messaging app switched on at all times.
Yes, your clients may have their preferences, but if you allow them to communicate with you on their messaging channel of choice, you will let your precious time and energy run out each day. You decide which communication channel(s) you want to use and set your working hours.
For example, you may want to only use email for all communications on the projects you are working on, and you promise to respond within one working day or the same day if you get their email before 2 pm. And for all quick messages or check-ins before meetings, you keep your WhatsApp between 9 am and 5 pm, Monday through Thursday.
Over the years, I have had many clients complain of having to answer WhatsApp messages on Sunday mornings or late at night. But the truth is that they have allowed that relationship to happen because they didn’t have clear communication channel boundaries set up at the start of their relationship.
If these boundaries slip as the relationship goes on (as often is the case if a client forgets or gets comfortable with working with you and treats you as they would any other team member), you can remind them of the original agreement and reset the boundary again.
For those of you who run a business that serves hundreds of customers online, the same principle applies to customer support and help desks. Could you clarify what support your business offers and when so your customers know what is expected? Lousy customer support happens when there are no clear communication boundaries set up, and the customer will ALWAYS have higher expectations of response than you can give them. So, avoid this from happening by setting clear expectations upfront.
4. Holidays & Time Off
Last but not least is the need for holiday boundaries. I see only a few self-employed business owners rarely plan their holiday times.
If employed, you would automatically get 20+ days of holiday a year. And yet, when most people want to work for themselves because of the freedom of choice, they rarely take holidays. The irony!
For many, holidays and time off are forced upon you, either by kids’ school holidays or you end up booking a week off just as you reach breaking point and the holiday becomes a necessity before you keel over in exhaustion.
Holidays and days off need to be planned.
Without this, you will keep working and working and working. Set the boundaries now, and look ahead over the next 12+ months and decide which days you want to set clear for holidays.
You don’t have to book anywhere, nor do you need to decide what you want to do with that time off. But without blocking these days out in your diary, you will automatically fill up the space with more work and more work. I have to do this myself every 3 or 4 months, on top of our family holiday time. If I didn’t block out chunks of 2 or 3 days around the flow of our business, I would keep on trucking, which I know is not suitable for me over a long period.
What Now?
These four boundaries may be just the foundation for you to work on more, depending on your business model and how you work with your clients. But if you have found yourself working like a ‘busy fool’, starting with these will hugely help shift your patterns of work and help reclaim your time, energy, and precious resources.
Now that you’ve read through this, I recommend you schedule the time to work through each. You will need time and energy to do this, a clear space to think and reflect on what’s important to you. Some of you will think you won’t have the time, but this will be because you need to have the proper boundaries for yourself and your business. You need to take this critical time out to avoid keeping those wheels spinning.
If you are super busy, start with a small slot of just 20 minutes – just the right amount of time to sit down with a cuppa – and work through the first one, Hours Worked. This is the most doable one to put into place, especially if you start to change your schedule two months hence. This may not make an immediate difference, but if you do, you will thank yourself for your forward thinking in just two months!
by Karen Skidmore | 11,21 | Business Planning, Pillar Articles
Have you wondered why you are not making the progress that you thought you ought to be making by now? It doesn’t matter how much harder your work, how many more hours you put in or what money you throw at your marketing, there comes a point where your growth gets stuck.
It happens to every business; it’s not just you!
There is a misconception that business growth has two stages; launch and grow. You successfully launch a new business or product, and then set on growing your business by finding more clients to increase your revenue.
But over time, the growth phase slows down; you start to plateau.
For some, you may have two or three high revenue months. But the months between aren’t and this is where the infamous feast and famine roller coaster starts to kick in, and you don’t seem to manage to get the growth that you had in previous years.
It doesn’t matter what you do or what new marketing initiative you put into place, when you look back on your financial accounts over the past few years, your business has bumped along at the same revenue.
Why?
When you are selling your time and/or expertise, you will eventually run out of capacity or energy. Or worse, you run out of both at the same time and you get on the fast track to burn out as you can’t keep up the delivery of what you are selling.
The Shirlaws Group carried out some fascinating research several years ago. They interviewed more than 700 businesses to discover that there are predictable ‘black holes’; key turnover figures where businesses get stuck because they don’t see where they have to shift strategies to get through them.
When I started to apply this ‘black hole’ research to the businesses that I’ve been working with over the past years, I began to see the same patterns at lower turnover figures.
You get stuck because you aren’t switching up your strategy to reflect the next level of growth.
Essentially, what got you here, won’t get you there.
Here are the three ceiling incomes your business will predictably get stuck at, and what you can do to shift your thinking and strategy to move through each one.
The Freelancer Ceiling – £45K
At around £4K monthly sales, there’s a very good chance you get stuck under The Freelancer Ceiling. You are selling your time either by the hour or have created a number of low priced courses or programmes.
Even though you may be getting recommendations through word of mouth, you haven’t worked out your marketing well enough to have a consistent flow of new clients, and you start each month wondering where your money is going to come from. Although you are working hard to keep your spirits up, you are running out of marketing ideas and energy.
To move beyond the Freelancer Ceiling you have to shift out of Freelancer Mindset, and start adopting a Business Owner Mindset. It’s time to change up your thinking, strategy and evaluate how good your services and products are, how well you are communicating that to your potential audience, and shift your client working relationship to be one of partnership.
You have to start outsourcing the stuff that is frankly below your pay grade; it’s time to release tasks such as diary management, proposal writing, invoicing and client onboarding. So if you haven’t hired your first admin support or virtual assistant, now is the time to do so.
It’s also time to evaluate the boundaries you’ve set with your clients to ensure you aren’t over-delivering or under-charging (often both!).
And finally, you want to be able to free up some of your time to develop your intellectual capital, such as your process and framework of working with clients, marketing collateral, such as brochures and videos, and credibility proof, such as case studies and keynote speaking.
This may sound like a lot, but over a course of a year, you will surprise yourself how much you can get done with the right plan in place. And all this will give you the strong foundations for your next growth phase, and help you get off the busy, always-be-marketing hamster wheel.
The VAT Ceiling – £80K
The next plateau happens at around £80K; the revenue that all businesses need to register for VAT. If you’ve already registered your business for VAT when you first started, then you may not get stuck here for long. But for those of you who have waited to register your business until now, then I’m afraid the mental block can hit you hard.
On one hand, this is simple compliance. Your business has been deemed to be contributing to the economy so it’s time to charge Value Added Tax; a phase that ought to be celebrated by all.
However, the emotional head games begin and you start to worry about having to increase your prices by 20%, especially if you are selling to consumers rather than other VAT registered businesses. I got myself stuck under this ceiling for more than three years before I finally took the plunge and got registered for VAT. A painless process in the end and funnily enough my business revenue went happily up once I had removed the self-imposed ceiling to my business growth.
But moving past this ceiling is much more than just registering yourself for VAT. If you’ve done the work as above to establish yourself in the marketplace, you’ve hopefully created a good suite of offers that sell well, your marketing is working and you are starting to have regular periods of £10K months.
To increase your revenue further into a 6 figure business, your Business Owner Mindset needs to shift into CEO Mindset; it’s not just about marketing yourself harder but developing a longer term game plan and being more strategic about what you want out of your business.
If you don’t realise this, you become the bottleneck. This phase of your business growth needs you to shift your focus from marketing, selling and delivering, to putting in the right process, systems and people in place to support your growth.
It’s time to start putting your energy into HOW your business is run; what and who is needed to support your growth. You need to ask yourself whether you’ve got the right business model in place to scale up and whether your branding – your positioning, website and social profiles – are reflecting the business you are becoming. And you have to be sure you are working with the right partners and hiring the right people for your future success, rather than what you need help with today.
The Capacity Ceiling – £200K
As you sell more and your revenue creeps up to the £200K mark, there comes a point that whatever it is you are selling, you’re running out of capacity; time and energy.
Trainers, coaches and consultants can comfortably sell £150K to £250K worth of services and programmes with a small support team. But the bigger the contracts or the more programmes you sell, the less of you there is to go round your clients. The dynamics of your working relationship starts to change and there’s every chance you are feeling stretched, and your clients don’t feel they are getting the value that they may once had when you were a smaller business.
Your business starts to feel like project management hell, you begin to drop some balls and you don’t get the chance to catch your breath or take the time out to work on your own development.
You start forgetting about the importance of your CEO Mindset and spending time working on the projects to support your business structure and processes, and you become a busy freelancer again, simply at a higher revenue.
If you want to grow beyond this point, then this is the phase where you stop treating your business as something you do, and start getting clear about who you want to become; the role you want to play, the impact you want to make and your bigger vision.
Do you want to keep things simple and decide that you like what you do but you want to work less hours and reduce your stress; increase your profitability and still have Fridays off and longer holidays?
Do you have ambitions to grow a team so that you pull back on the actual delivery to either outsource the work or recruit associates; to run an agency or consultancy that you may want to sell one day?
This is the time for you to switch your business model to a well-oiled exclusive boutique business with a waiting list, a scalable digital or training model, or create a team of mini-mes; associates, licenced practitioners, franchisers or employed consultants.
It’s worth bearing in mind that a good business growth strategy doesn’t come in one size fits all, hence why you have to adopt a CEO Mindset and start spending time working on yourself, not just on the business. It’s important to dig deep into what it is you REALLY want out of your business and life, make decisions on where to focus your time and energy, and re-evaluate who you hang out with as you move up a league in your development.
So, it’s really not your fault that your business may be plateauing; you couldn’t be working harder than you are already. But hopefully now you may see what shifts in your thinking and strategy need to take place at different revenues.
If you want to dive deeper into this, then I highly recommend you join me for my next Ignite event where we spend the day together working on where you are in your growth journey and what shifts you need to take to make your onward journey a success.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.

by Karen Skidmore | 09,21 | Ebb & Flow, Pillar Articles
There’s absolutely no doubt, that what you do on a Monday morning sets the tone for the rest of the week. And often the weeks proceeding.
I’ve learned the hard way.
If I start my week faffing about and scrolling through social feeds, the rest of my week will follow in a similar pattern. I end up drifting from one thing to another, reacting to what comes in to my inbox and I start to lose any clarity that I may have had about where it was I was headed.
At the other extreme, I have at times when I started my week with a blaze of energy, jumping into multiple projects and taking action. This may sound great but starting my week like this, I was always in danger of pinging from one thing to the next over the following days, working faster and faster until I hit Friday like a brick wall.
Over the years I have tried out different Monday morning routines, and have worked out what I need to do to keep myself on track each and every week, without over stretching myself yet still achieving what’s important to me and my business goals.
So I thought I would share these with you today to help inspire you into reviewing how you start your week and decide on the two or three key things that have to happen to ensure you remain focused and on track, without drifting through your week or hitting that Friday brick wall.
1) Check in where I am in my energy cycles
Having gone through some pretty horrid years of recovering from burn out and dealing with menopausal symptoms (still ongoing!), I now make sure I track my energy ebbs and flows. I have had to redefine my workflow and understand the patterns that I naturally go through during my menstrual cycle, as well as how I am affected by the seasonal changes, weather patterns, daylight hours and moon phases.
Some parts of my energy cycle I feel clear headed and naturally in flow. In other parts, my body feels stiff, my brain is foggier than usual and I feel myself retreating. I call these our natural Ebb & Flow energy cycles and once you start to become body conscious of them, they are incredibly powerful to help you do your best work.
So at the start of the week, I remind myself where I may be in my menstrual cycle (which has become far more erratic as I approach my menopause), where we are in the moon phase (I have a clock on the wall that tracks this for me and helps me see quickly at a glance) and what the weather may be doing in the week ahead.
If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you get a copy of my Energy Tracker which will help you embody this work. I liken it to checking your weather app on your phone and if it says there’s 60% of rain, you’d probably take an umbrella with you if you are going out. You aren’t trying to predict how you are going to feel energetically, but preparing yourself for whether you are more like to experience ebb energy or flow energy.
And if you are interested in how your menstrual cycle in particular affects your productivity, check out this article here: Marketing with your menstrual cycle
2) Overview of my business objectives and intentions for the week ahead
Next I give myself an overview of what is happening short and medium term in my business. I have a Big Vision and a strategy for the year ahead, but for my Monday mornings, I focus on what is due to happen over the next 4 to 6 weeks. I review what I have planned and have scheduled in my diary and then I drill down what needs to happen on one piece of paper.
This “one piece of paper” concept is important. I don’t have running to-do lists that go from week to week (these can distract and overwhelm you if you never seem to get the bottom. Read more about how to-do lists distract you here.) and I actually don’t use any fancy online scheduling tools because of the time it used to take me to maintain all the notifications, priority colour changes, etc. I’ve tried various ones but this way just doesn’t work for me.
My intentions for the week get put down on to one A4 sheet of paper, and that sheet remains on my desk until the end of the week or I have completed them all, whichever happens first. I then decide who needs to do each task or short project on that sheet of paper so I either put my initials next to or the initials of somebody else that it needs to be delegated to. So quite often a lot of the things that go down there have the letter A to it, which stands for Alexia, who is my VA and looks after my client and diary management.
This is often a fairly quick exercise taking no more than half an hour or so, as long as I do this every week. If I’ve been away or haven’t done this for the past few Mondays, it can longer. Sometimes I need a bit warming up, a coffee, sometimes a walk, depending on where I am in my energy flow.
3) Money Management
The next thing I do every Monday morning, is my money management. Often it takes me just 10 or 15 minutes to dive in and get this done. I go into my Xero online bookkeeping system, where I have all my bank account reconciliations to check to see what money is coming in and what money is flowing out. I check what I need to still pay for, and what invoices of mine maybe still outstanding. And I also review my revenue spreadsheet so I know how balanced I am moving towards my financial targets for the year.
This simple process gives me a real grounding about where I am financially in my business. It’s what keeps my eye on my profitability. It makes sure I don’t get carried away with all the dozens of ideas that I’m always coming up with it, to ensure they financially benchmark against where I’m going from the money side of my business.
When I don’t do this, I could go weeks before realising that maybe my cashflow was about to dry up or I was overspending. I would often bury my head in the sand, especially when sales weren’t what they could have been, which meant I didn’t have the right energy when I showed up for my sales conversations. So now this money focus happens every single Monday morning.
4) Weekly team meeting
The fourth thing that I do is I have a zoom conference call with my team, Alexia my Operations Manager, and Melina, my Senior Coach. I didn’t really do this for the first eight or nine years of my business. It didn’t seem necessary when it was just myself and Alexia, who was more of a virtual assistant back then. But this weekly 45 minute call has made a huge difference to how we work together.
If you know me personally, or you have worked with me, you know my brain can work incredibly fast. I’m full of ideas; I’m a very creative and innovative person. And the danger of being this way is that I am always racing ahead and Alexia’s trying to keep up; trying to work out where I’m going, and what’s the latest thing I’m doing.
Our team meeting now grounds our week, gets us all focused on what is happening in our client programme, Momentum, which of our clients may need extra support, as well as what tasks are needed for events or campaigns coming up.
These are the four things I do every Monday. I’d love to know what you do each Monday morning to start your week.
Do you do the same things or do you do things differently?
Or perhaps this has inspired you to put some regular tasks or appointments in your diary every Monday morning.
What’s important is that you have a regular focus to your Monday morning (or it could be Sunday evening if you prefer – whatever works best for you) so that you don’t have to rethink Monday morning every week, and it gets you working on what and where it is you need to focus your time and energy on, rather then just jumping straight into your to-do list and reacting to the week.
Having this approach will give you that focus; reviewing, and possibly resetting your focus to ensure that you know where are in your journey and bigger plans.
If you don’t have this weekly grounding of planning, scheduling, tasking, working out where the money is, and who in your team needs to do what, it’s really easy to go adrift. It’s really easy to get carried away with ideas or get lost in the confusion and drown under information and feel you have too much to do.
So what can you do every Monday morning to start your week?
Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.

by Karen Skidmore | 07,21 | Pillar Articles, True Profit
The problem with selling services, such as coaching, advice and consulting time, is that it’s very easy to get caught up with how much you ought to be charging. Emotional stories such as “I’m not that worth that much” or “There’s no way my clients will pay that” whip you up into a storm at times, and you can spend days, if not weeks, agonising over the price of your next proposal or new programme.
When you’re selling your time and expertise, you have a low cost of sales, which means you don’t have to spend that much each month to be able to do what it is you that you do. So your prices are often based on how much you feel you can charge.
Although I am a big fan of trusting your intuition in business, emotional feelings are not good commercial indicators, especially if you are working hard to find enough clients each month and you may be coming from a place of worry or anxiety over where your next piece of business is coming from.
What if you could have a simple pricing formula to ensure the prices you charge, give you the income that you want at the end of each month?
There are a number of ways of calculating prices.
Cost based pricing; good for physical products, but not so good for services because of the very low costs involved, particularly if you work virtually and don’t have any office or clinic space.
Value based pricing; typically used for services, but because of the emotional stories, very few service professionals allow them to charge enough and so end up using the next method.
Market based pricing; set your prices based on what everyone else in your market place is doing. The problem with this method is that the only way to ‘win’ at this one is to be the cheapest. Customers will typically use price as the deciding factor when choosing you and you get trapped into having to work harder by having to work with more clients. It’s like putting your next proposal or new programme on Amazon marketplace and just hoping you come out on top of the searches.
There’s a fourth method and that is income based pricing; charge the price that gives you the income you want. And this is what I wanted to demonstrate in this article.
Before I dive in, I have a few caveats.
1) I’m over-simplifying the figures in this article to make it easy for me to share examples. Do you own finance work and costings to make sure it stacks up for your own business.
2) The kinds of businesses that this can work for are usually service providers, such as consultants, coaches, accountants and therapists, because operating costs are usually very low for these kinds of businesses, particularly if you are working virtually and have no office or clinic space.
3) What I am sharing here is not professional accountancy or finance advice. I am not a qualified finance advisor so do seek proper tax and accountancy advice from your own accountant.
4) In my working examples below, I write about monthly revenue. For most businesses, your revenue ebbs and flows. Sometimes people refer to this feast and famine, but in my experience, there is always a natural cycle of a few months of harvest and a month here and there of letting your fields go fallow. So don’t get hung up on the fact that a monthly income needs to be consistent to be successful, because consistent income is one of those holy grails that marketers sell you, but isn’t always easily achievable! It’s how you manage your manage your money during the harvest months that allow you enjoy the fallow months that matters.
How you may be using your income reports right now
For most people, you hire an accountant or bookkeeper to keep track of your finances, and at the end of each year, your accountant hands you your end of year accounts. This is when you find out exactly how profitable you were over the last year, how much tax you now need to pay and how much you’ve actually earned.
There are two problems to this approach. One, you may end up being very disappointed by the final figures, wondering where all your money went after working hard all year. If you’ve not been on top of your finances during the year, this is also where you may find that you’ve not put aside enough tax. This happened to me in my early years; it’s not a nice feeling!
Two, your tax returns and company accounts aren’t really designed for your business use. Tax returns and statutory accounts are legal requirements to let the Inland Revenue know how much tax you have to pay. As day-to-day tools to help you manage your business, they are pretty useless. Some business owners will have accountants who help them with management accounts each month, but for most, they are still too clunky to be use them to help decide on what their pricing ought to be.
You need a simple pricing formula that you can use to quickly and easily price up proposals and programmes.
The Profitability Sweet Spot
If you are like most service based business owners, there’s every chance that you allow yourself to think that whatever you charge your clients, is what you get as income, minus a few expenses and a little bit of tax.

Thus if you charge a client £1000, you may think in your head that your income is about £900, give or take. If you have been trading for several years, this may be why you feel deflated at the end of each year when your accountant hands you your tax returns, and you realise you ended up making very little money. This can often trigger those thoughts that you aren’t working hard enough and thus you keep on the crazy ‘work harder’ hamster wheel.
Here’s how I look at a business’ finances, and how I use them to help them with my pricing.
There are four main areas that your revenue needs to go towards, apart from your personal income; tax, running costs, business growth and personal development.

Let’s go through each one.
- 20% Tax. You only pay tax on your profits, rather than revenue, and there are different tax rates depending on your overall income, including personal tax and corporation tax, if you are a limited company. This is why I make the caveat above about over-simplifying. I am not a tax accountant and nor do I want to be working out my own tax each year. But I do want to include a percentage of tax in my pricing to ensure I am being paid the money I want in my personal bank account. 20% is often slightly higher than it needs to be, but I always work to have more money in my tax account rather than risk having a short fall and not being able to pay my tax on time. Anything extra left in my tax account after I’ve paid my taxes I see as a great way of saving, so it’s a win win in my opinion.
- 10% running costs. Of course, this is going to vary depending on your business, which is why you have to get clear on exactly what you spend each month. But over the years of working with many consultants and service businesses, this figure is a good average to work from to get started. This percentage needs to cover everything from internet services and website hosting, to admin support and insurance.
- 5% business growth. Your business needs income, too. You may need ad hoc technical support, or need to invest in a new website, images or brochure design. Having this percentage ensures you have the cash to build up a buffer to pay for what you need, when you need it. Too often small businesses like yours struggle to invest, particularly as they start to scale up and grow, because they are trying to pay for things like new websites or branding out of cash that month, and that’s never easy to do.
- 5% personal development. Investing in yourself is critical as a business owner. Yes, this may cover the obvious such as coaching or mentoring, but you may also want to invest in CPD training or keep yourself up to date with the latest industry trends or attend a conference. Again, like business growth, people often try to pay for these things out of cash that month and if you struggle to have enough money, you forgo what is needed to develop yourself, both personally and professionally.
So the profitability sweet spot becomes 60%, which means for every £600 you want to earn, you need to sell £1000 to get that income.
Or let’s put it another way, for every £1,000 you sell, your true income is just £600. How does this make you think about your prices?
Now that you know you need 40% of everything you sell to go towards tax, running costs, business growth and personal development, can see why you have to charge better than most of your competitors.
Let me give you some working examples.
Example #1 Freelancer wants an income of £2,000 a month so needs to sell £40,000 of services a year
20% Tax: £8,000
10% Running Costs: £4,000
5% Business Growth: £2,000
5% Personal Development: £2,000
60% Personal Income (Profitability): £24,000
To sell £40,000 of services in the year, your monthly revenue needs to be £3,300. And if you work with five clients during the month, they each need to be spending £660 with you each month. Thus, £40,000 divided by 12 months = £3,300 divided by 5 clients = £660
Example #2 Consultant wants an income of £6,000 a month so needs to sell £120,000 of services a year
20% Tax: £24,000
10% Running Costs: £12,000
5% Business Growth: £6,000
5% Personal Development: £6,000
60% Personal Income (Profitability): £72,000
To sell £120,000 of services in the year, your monthly revenue needs to be £10,000. How this breaks down per client will depend on your business model but if you are predominately working with as a consultant, then this may look like five clients a month need to spend £2,000 a month with you.
If you sell group programmes, then maybe you need to be selling ten places at £1,000 a month. Or if you sell longer term contracts, such as training or consulting, then that may be ten clients over the year that all need to spend a minimum of £12,000 each.
What will typically happen with a business this size is that you will have a few different revenue streams, and your revenue will often ebb and flow over the year, as highlighted above in my caveats. But it never needs to be complicated.
If you struggle working this through with a business this size, then reach out to me. I do this work with my clients all the time so it’s easy for me to show you what your revenue model could look like with the right prices in place.
What if you are running at a higher profitability than 60%
What if you are genuinely paying yourself far more than 60% of your revenue each year? If it’s working for you, then great. You don’t have to be putting aside 5% for business growth and 5% for personal development, for example. And you may find your running costs are less than 5% over the year.
But there are two profitability danger spots you need to look out for.

Swinging into 80% or more
If you are swinging towards 80% profitability and above, and earning £800 for every £1,000 you sell, then there is a danger of your business being under-invested and under-resourced.
In the short-term, this may work. Enjoy the fruits of your labour!
But long-term, you may find yourself burning out, particularly if you are in the higher revenue bracket as seen in example #2. If you run a business with a revenue of £100,000 and more, then there is every chance you need a good operations person, and perhaps even start looking at hiring associates if you are in high growth phase, so it may mean you aren’t spending enough to give you the team, processes and systems to support you in your work.
You are working hard at doing everything yourself, and although this can work in the short term, over many months and years, your health and wellbeing is going to suffer trying to keep up with delivery work, as well as what it takes to sell and support you and your clients.
Swinging into 40% or less
If you are swinging towards the 40% profitability and lower, and earning less than £400 for every £1,000 you sell, then there is a danger of your business being over-invested and under-resourced.
In the short-term, this may be necessary; you may be going through an intense period of growth and hiring new members of your team whilst the revenues go up. Hang in there if this is the case, and stay strong with your vision.
But long-term, you may find yourself over-spending and if there is one guaranteed way of a business going under is a lack of cash.
One area I often see being over-spent is personal development; high priced coaching programmes and getting sucked into big marketing programmes can often put a business owner into a cash flow crisis, especially if you are using a credit card to finance.
The other area is hiring too many people, especially if you have decided to run a big launch or you are developing the digital marketing side of your business. You want to have a tight rein on your finances and ensure that whoever you are hiring have clear ROI targets and know what is expected of them.
So watch out for these two swings in both directions. Over the many years of working with consultants, agencies and service professionals, the sweet spot for your personal income happens around 60%, whilst ensuring 40% of whatever you sell goes into your tax, running costs, business growth and personal development pots.
How does this help with your pricing decisions? Let me know what you put into place and how this impacts your business.
Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
