A quote heard all too often from small business owners who can no longer afford to pay you your high-ticket recurring fee for digital marketing services.
It’s never fun to hear those words coming out of your client’s mouth...
And if you’ve been a Small Business Consultant or Digital Marketing Agency Owner for any length of time, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
The last time I heard that it was a Tuesday afternoon on a sunny spring day back in 2016 at around 3pm when I got the call.
My heart sank as panic was about to set in.
It felt like I had just been kicked in the stomach.
It’s probably just about the worst feeling in the world.
See it was only my fourth client that was paying me $1500 or more per month to provide digital marketing services for them.
And it just so happened that this particular client out of the four was paying me the most at $3500 per month!
It’s an extremely hard pill to swallow when you’re “fired” as you feel like you’re a complete and utter failure. and that perhaps you don’t know what you’re doing...
In fact, it makes you question whether or not you know what you’re doing or if it would just be easier to quit all this nonsense and “get a real job.”
But most importantly when you lose 25% of your monthly income (or in this case was more like 40%) it can really take a toll on your livelihood and your relationship with your significant other.
I can tell you from my own personal experience that there’s nothing worse than going from hero to zero from a single phone call like the one I mentioned earlier.
From being able to comfortably pay all of your bills to struggling to make ends meet.
It’s a roller coaster lifestyle I wish upon no one!
And unfortunately, finances are the number one cause for all divorces...
In fact, it nearly cost me my own marriage.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve had to endure hearing those exact words coming from various clients over the years.
And no matter how hard I worked or how much I tried, it didn’t matter because these types of clients were typically in over their heads with what they could actually afford to pay someone or some company to help them with their digital marketing needs.
Maybe you can relate???
See a lot of the times small businesses are desperate and as a last ditch effort to save their businesses from going belly up they’re willing to invest the last of their money hoping, praying, that you’ll save their business.
But it’s not your fault...
The reality is that you (or I for that matter) were set up to fail from the beginning!
No matter what you did (outside of divine intervention from you know who), there was no saving their business.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have a solid game plan from the get go and as the saying goes, “failing to plan is planning to fail.”
It wasn’t until I came to the realization that since I’m the only one in my business it makes it nearly impossible to handle more than a couple clients at a time anyway...
Especially when I was offering the farm as far as services were concerned (i.e. website design, sales funnels, paid advertising, SEO, etc.).
I mean how can I compete with the likes of digital marketing agencies that have teams of employees who work on each of the aforementioned digital marketing services?!?
That’s when it dawned on me that I needed to stop the madness of offering so many “results based” services that are not only difficult to deliver, but also are a huge time suck!
So I set out to see what else I could do...
I always knew I needed to be offering digital marketing services that were ongoing where I could collect payments month-after-month so I didn’t have to constantly acquire new clients each month like I did when I was just starting out and ONLY doing websites for small businesses.
Then one day I was on Facebook looking for an Accountant near me and while I was perusing various Facebook business pages and I realized that most were a complete ghost town - they hadn’t been posting to their pages on a regular basis... and some hadn’t seen a new post for years!
So I dug a little deeper and came to the conclusion that there were a ton of businesses neglecting their Facebook business pages.
That’s when I knew there was a huge opportunity to help small businesses with just their social media content or what I refer to as “social posting.”
Now mind you, I’m not talking about social media management... No siree Bob!
Social media management in the traditional sense of the phrase means that you manage their social media.
That's a huge undertaking and more importantly once again a huge time suck!
However, there was just one problem...
How could I provide just this one service in a way that didn’t require me to:
A) Manually post all the content each and every day...
and...
B) Create new content for each client I had...
I knew I could gather the content I needed and/or possibly outsource it to a virtual assistant or graphic designer.
But what about posting the content daily?
After doing some research and from trial and error I discovered a specific service that offered a special feature that most services didn’t have.
This feature by itself allows me to be 100% hands off after initial set up which usually only takes an hour or so per client.
And that’s the key to being able to scale this service to as many clients as you want to have without increasing your workload.
See when you incorporate systems and services in your business it allows you to “productize” your digital marketing services and turn clients into customers.
So rather than having to worry about receiving that dreaded phone call because you just have a handful of clients paying you a high-ticket recurring monthly fee to provide results based services...
I kicked that business model to the curb and now only provide “activity based” services such as social posting.
So although I may only get paid $100-$200 per client per month, I can take on as many clients as I well please...
