How I Earned More Money With Less Clients….and I Didn’t Raise My Prices Once
“You don’t need everyone to love you. Just a few good people.”
At one point in 2022 I was serving 14 clients.
14 clients that I was serving 1:1. I was spreading my time across 14 different businesses and I was at capacity so my earnings were now completely capped unless I increased my prices.
I loved the variety that having so many different clients gave me but I don’t know about you but keeping 14 plates spinning in the air is EXHAUSTING! On one hand I was impacting 14 businesses, 14 women and that felt amazing. But on the other hand, I was holding space for 14 businesses. That is a lot of energy and a lot of things to remember.
Now I want to stress that I didn’t make a change because I could do it.
I needed to make a change for my health, for the growth of my business and to achieve the lifestyle I had desired when I started my own business.
Because I was trading time for money, I found that I was giving more and more time to my business - time that I wanted to safeguard for my wellbeing or for my family. That was a big shift that needed to happen.
But what was the biggest challenge was that I was capped both in earning potentially and more importantly on the number of people I could help.
So how on earth did reducing my client roster help me earn more while also helping more people?
I turned to my trusty data. I needed to pull out my time reports to really understand what was going on. I was able to see that some of these clients were only engaging my services for, in some cases, 2 hours per month or 30 minutes a week. That is not a lot of time on client work but it was the same amount of mental space needed as a client I was supporting for 15 hours per month.
Also, the time and energy spent switching between client projects/tasks was a big chunk of my “budget” that I didn’t want to waste.
In essence, a 2 hour per month client was in reality more like a 4 hour a month client but I could only charge for half of the time and energy.
How I Earned More Money With Less Clients….and I Didn’t Raise My Prices Once
I am a huge believer that when one door closes, another opens but of course I still felt anxious at turning down guaranteed income.
What I found was that every time I let go of a small contract, something came my way. In most cases, this is existing clients wanting to increase their services with me. I was still earning the same amount of money but I had more time and energy in the bank.
During this time I was also developing my service offerings which involved a restructure of my fees. Now to be clear, my existing clients did not have a price increase but any newly onboarded clients went onto my new packages and prices.
Each time I let go of a mis-aligned client (as opposed to small contracts), a new more aligned client arrived on my roster.
I eventually whittled my client roster down to just 7 clients. I halved the number of clients that I was working with. This had massive impacts on my physical and mental health. Not only that but I then had the capacity to look at how I could then develop my business so that I can support more women, which was hugely important to me, without putting myself last.
I love that I was able to reduce my client list and still increase my income. My workload is manageable. My energy is the highest it has ever been. My mental health is the best it has been.
I now have the flexibility to work to my terms, the work with my energy flows and with the seasons. I am happy and therefore I am successful.
