Discover the key to scaling your business without overworking
Leverage.
It’s what we dive into massively inside the Refine and Scale sections of Life-First Business and it’s something we’re always talking about inside our alumni membership, Traction.
In fact, many of them have been amplifying their sales this summer while pulling back on their workload simply by learning how to leverage their existing assets and sell them through one or more of the funnel structures that I break down inside the program.
Here’s the thing: I want to work smarter; not harder – and that’s why so much of Life-First Business is about breaking down what that actually looks like in practice.
Because in the context of productivity, leverage is less about the volume of your output and more about the quality of what you choose to take on and its ability to serve you now and later.
Leverage amplifies your choices and the actions you take; and the right kind allows you to make the kind of small, intentional moves that pay off in perpetuity – and with far less heavy lifting.
In one of my favorite books, Naval Ravikant breaks down four different kinds of leverage:
Labor: Making decisions and having a human workforce that executes for you.
Capital: Investing money to make you more.
Code: Using technology versus humans to perform what you want it to.
Media: Content and the Internet.
Want to hear a fun fact?
In past generations, the majority of wealth was made with capital and labor leverage (think Henry Ford and the Warren Buffetts of the world); compared to today, where more has been created through code or media.
He used Joe Rogan as a great example of someone making 8-9 figures a year from a podcast alone and of course, all the Silicon Valley tech giants.
But when I was reading, the first thing that I thought of was the opportunity we have in the online education industry.
There has honestly never been a better time for more of us to scale with relatively low overhead and high margin potential by turning our methods and frameworks into a clear and powerful pathway for people to move through independently.
My intention with this conversation isn’t just to talk about online courses, but more so, to give you invitations to reflect on how you can shift your thinking from micro to macro – and really take advantage of leverage.
I’ve noticed two things that block most online businesses, coaches and experts from scaling with more leverage.
- Service providers who think that lead generation is their biggest issue when it’s actually a boundaries/leadership issue
This often looks like this:
They’re creating packages but dishonoring their boundaries, leaking energy and driving their bottom line down by working outside of scope.
They’re taking on non-ideal clients that require extra handholding, which reduces their capacity to serve more people; or accepting clients with problems outside of their usual remit, which prevents them from being able to lean on automations and systems.
They’re at capacity because their prices are low but deliverables are high so while they have clients, they’re not actually feeling it financially.
Oftentimes, they have a faulty belief that high ticket offers are the problem, when it’s actually their lack of leadership and boundaries that are making those offers unsustainable energetically and financially.
More sales could actually break a business like this.
- Online businesses that are built on constantly launching or creating new stuff
Many people block their ability to scale because they haven’t figured out how to sell their core offer to more people, so instead of dealing with the real bottleneck, they exhaust themselves by coming up with new things to sell to the people who are already there.
Don’t get me wrong, increasing the lifetime value of a customer is important, but it’s the baseline and will lead to an income ceiling and lots of one-off experiences that you can’t do anything with afterwards.
And because things are constantly changing, it robs you from building old solid, repeatable sales and marketing systems – the kind that actually allow you to claw more of your time and capacity back.
The commonality between both scenarios is that it creates zero capacity to actually grow and scale in a sustainable way.
In the first example, their capacity is capped due to being bottlenecked in client delivery; in the latter, creating and producing more keeps you overworked and underpaid. It’s temporary, it’s short-term and, on the whole, unsustainable.
So I want you to think about how leveraged your business model is.
We want to be paid for creating frameworks and pathways that get our clients results; not for our time.
Our time is finite; whereas you can support an unlimited number of people when you’ve transferred your process into a course or program.
This shows up in so many other spaces.
When a musician writes and records a song, for example, they create it once and they’re (hopefully) paid in perpetuity.
It’s the reason we’ve seen artists like Justin Timberlake leveraging their music by selling their catalogs for hundreds of millions of dollars.
When you start selling your IP, you get to shift your focus on scaling your traffic and conversion, while the systems deliver that IP with limited overhead and without your involvement, which allows you to generate income independent of time without compromising on the customer experience.
So as entrepreneurs, one of the most powerful things we can do is be more discerning around the offers that we’re choosing to put time and effort into creating and marketing.
That’s why I look for 3 things:
- High margins: I want my offers to produce enough surplus cash flow for me to reinvest back into my students, my business and to support me building wealth.
- Infinite scalability potential: I want growth to be completely independent on my time.
- Impact: I want to help more people, not less; and I can only do those with offers that allow people to sign up 24/7, when they’re ready and on their own time.
This is truly the key to scaling and serving more people in a way that serves you, too.
So reflect:
- How much time are you devoting to building a brand, independent of your offers and what you’re currently selling and do you have the capacity to make it a priority?
- Is your business model congruent with the lifestyle you desire and the ease with which you want to scale?
- It’s easy to unknowingly focus on things that don’t drive revenue but require a significant amount of time and require a lot of energy. Identify those places. What are some pivots you can make?
