Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: There's something about the number a million dollars a year that really gets entrepreneurs, founders excited. I've been doing business now for longer than I like to admit, and I remember the first time that I ever did hit a million dollars a year, and I was floored by being able to do that. And today as we have conversations here around how to grow our business without hiring the million dollar number is a thing that I hear a lot of solopreneurs coaches, small agency founders talk about, but without having a lot of what I had when I did that.
[00:00:40] Ken: Well over a decade ago, and I get it to some extent. I really care ultimately more about what you take home. And in our last conversation, we talked about the difference there between just the number, the top line revenue number, and what you actually take home as an owner. So definitely double back to that one if you [00:01:00] haven't already.
[00:01:00] Ken: Because that to me is actually more important than even some companies that are doing a million or 2 million or what, whatever number they're doing. And you know, relative to some of the largest organizations and businesses in the world, that sounds small, but for people that are running these smaller businesses, that's significant,
[00:01:21] Ken: they ultimately are not taking home very much, or they're only growing when they add more bodies or people, and they have these legacy ways of building businesses. Not unlike the fact that corporate, especially corporate businesses, would lease hundreds of thousands of square feet to have these offices.
[00:01:42] Ken: When I suggested it wasn't important to do that, and now post 2020, a lot of them have these empty spaces where they've locked up leases for 30 years and they don't know what to do about it.
[00:01:52] Ken: All that being the case, I do think it's worth looking at some of the differences between, let's say a hundred thousand dollars [00:02:00] a year business
[00:02:01] Ken: and a million dollar a year business. And really, what are the differences between those and what do we need to do in order to get there? And I, look, I wanna be clear. I don't have a problem with having certain goals as a entrepreneur. So I'm not down on saying, oh, I want to get to the million dollars a year.
[00:02:20] Ken: I just wanna make sure that we're doing it the right way and not. And I got a little sidetracked when I was mentioning this a minute ago, that we're not just getting to those numbers and then having almost nothing on the bottom line or nothing that is actually available for us to take home.
[00:02:34] Ken: And clearly, again, this tied into the conversation around what are some key things to look at before we would make a quote unquote higher.
[00:02:42] Ken: And if you listen to that episode, you'll understand why it said higher in your business.
[00:02:46] Ken: So let's look at this idea that I want to make sure it is clear for you around what I'll call the a hundred K trap. And I understand that some of you would just love to be at the six figure mark, and I understand that [00:03:00] some of you may be at. 200 K or 300 k, but independent of the side where you are. When I talk about this, it's sort of a pattern for when you are dramatically below a million dollars a year.
[00:03:13] Ken: And as with a lot of these conversations, there is definitely an element here of mentality. I love one of the testimonials that I have that said, Ken gets things done. He's not just a business therapist, and there obviously are great therapists out there, independent of business, but there also are bad therapists.
[00:03:31] Ken: And I would just say this relative to being the business therapist, sometimes I wind up doing that, but not purposely or knowingly more because I just see these. Old ways of thinking, these old mindset, these legacy mindsets around taking on work that doesn't make sense and not being willing to say no.
[00:03:51] Ken: And that's the first part of this a hundred K trap is just you have what I call these legacy clients. Lot of legacy today, but there's a reason why I use the word legacy. This is [00:04:00] not the positive legacy, by the way. We'll probably talk about that at some point in the future. But this is the historical stuff that you did when you first started the business because you just needed to have a client because you were just happy to take on a client and they sort of look like this.
[00:04:15] Ken: Any client that you could get would be a good client as you grow the business though, and I just had a session yesterday with a bunch of people in my program where I was talking. About this exact issue. And someone even chimed in and said, yeah, you know, that really got me into trouble and they got a lot more success in the business.
[00:04:33] Ken: But then their calendar wound up driving the business. They had people that were, you know, irritated or difficult to work with. And if you keep doing that, you absolutely stay closer to that hundred k mark that hundred k trap. If you're not willing to say no and focus and target on these lighthouse clients that you've started to hear me talk about.
[00:04:51] Ken: And that also winds up looking like this, which again, I mentioned in other conversations that you don't have that repeatable, consistent [00:05:00] way to land new work.
[00:05:01] Ken: So you're out there desperately hunting for projects and that is part of what actually influences you. Taking on whatever work comes your way, or let's say you get a referral or word of mouth and there's a great way to do that, by the way, again, I have a certain kind of business now where referrals make a lot of sense 'cause I have more clients that I had when I was in an agency model and that's part of the business that I'm building today versus what I did before.
[00:05:24] Ken: It's why businesses like realtors. Or financial advisors can actually grow with a referral system because they have a much higher volume and a higher number of clients. But putting that aside, that is not, generally speaking, what works well for you as a consultant, for you as a founder, for you as an agency owner, for you as a coach, you tend to not have the same number of clients that a higher volume business does in most cases.
[00:05:53] Ken: So for you, you have to have a system. You have to have a way to get leads into your funnel, into your queue [00:06:00] without hunting for them or without them just dropping in your lap. And if you don't have that, you again fall into this a hundred k trap.
[00:06:06] Ken: The other thing that really is common is we're selling things based on a deliverable basis.
[00:06:12] Ken: We have milestone payments, we have things that. Are sort of marginally better ways of selling your time. And a lot of people today get, they say, oh yeah, I get it. Like I'm not gonna try to do hourly work. But then they think a day rate is better, or they think a VIP day is better. I don't even know what that was by the way.
[00:06:31] Ken: But apparently it's a thing or they think that projects are better or they even think that value pricing is better and value pricing. Is pretty confusing for prospects. They don't understand that process that well. It's a cool thing to say as a consultant or if you read it in a book, I want you to get paid for your expertise, but trying to make it hyper customized to every single client is not very scalable and definitely puts you into the a hundred K trap.
[00:06:58] Ken: And when all of these things kind of [00:07:00] get combined together, and then we're gonna get into what does it look like to move out of this a hundred K trap. You wind up getting stuck in the business, you wind up getting stuck, drowning in day to day delivery. Hell is what I call it, and delivery hell is often powered by some things seemingly working right.
[00:07:18] Ken: The key word there is seemingly, oh, well I am getting leads. Oh, I am closing deals. Are you closing the right leads? Are you closing? The right deals because once you do all those things, if you're stuck doing all the work, and let's say you're more of a solo founder or a solopreneur even, you have to do the work.
[00:07:36] Ken: You're actually putting your hands on the keyboard. In certain cases. If you're selling deliverables, for example, versus being paid as an expert or advisor, and guess what happens? You don't have time to fix the things that we've been talking about. You don't have time to build the system for business development.
[00:07:54] Ken: You don't have time to work on your newsletter. You don't have time to do business development and [00:08:00] marketing,
[00:08:00] Ken: and now you're on a vicious cycle that is almost impossible to get out of because you say, I have one or two or three clients that really push a decent amount of revenue, and if I stop. Serving those clients. I don't have money coming in, even if some of them are very difficult. They just had a client this week who offboarded their final, what we call legacy client, and they had decided once they began to build their more consistent marketing system.
[00:08:27] Ken: That they were okay walking away from clients who didn't really wanna work the way that they wanted to work. They didn't want to just do the hands on keyboard work anymore.
[00:08:34] Ken: So that is what I've seen over the last decade, really more than that. But I don't like to age myself too much, despite people telling me I have beautiful skim, which obviously you can't see here on the podcast, but you can see it if you go check me out on social if you haven't already done that. Just a little nod there, right.
[00:08:48] Ken: Let's talk about though this thing that everybody in the world wants, which is, how do I go to being the million dollar business? Now again, I understand that this happens more often than [00:09:00] not. I have people who follow me, who actually have employees who are already above. The million dollars who are multimillion dollar entrepreneurs, and they still listen and follow my stuff because they're stuck in that hungry dragon of more people, more clients, more people, more clients, more people, more clients.
[00:09:18] Ken: So again, you may be above that number or you may be close to that number. That's not the point. We're just using this for illustrative purposes on the spectrum of what does it look like to have that million dollar a year revenue in. What I call that remote solopreneur mentality, or in a business that is not only built around hiring.
[00:09:38] Ken: And when you hear me talk about some of this stuff, there are patterns, there is overlap across some of these different conversations. Because that is what works and because if you don't change the foundations of the business, you can't do what I'm suggesting here. Oh, well, I don't really want to spend time thinking through how to have a [00:10:00] marketing system because I just get people that show up on my doorstep sometimes.
[00:10:04] Ken: I was talking with someone this week and they basically said. Yeah, I've tried to do things like I post a social or have a newsletter, or I've go out and network and so forth, but that doesn't really get me any clients, so I don't really want to try to build something that's gonna do that.
[00:10:19] Ken: I just get referrals.
[00:10:20] Ken: Okay, well that's why you're gonna be stuck under 20 KA month. Because you just wait for that prospect to show up.
[00:10:26] Ken: So the first thing you have to do. Is become much more biased around who it is that you wanna work with. I call this the Lighthouse client, and you've heard me talk about it, and I probably need to do a conversation around this sooner rather than later, but the simplest way to use it for today's conversation is a lighthouse client is someone that pays you more, that pays you for expertise, not for the things that you do.
[00:10:51] Ken: That actually wants an advisor and A partner, and that will replicate your best client of all time. If you've heard the term ICP, there [00:11:00] is a lot of different ways that I construct a lighthouse client that's different than that. But again, for the sake of moving the conversation along, consider it to be your best ICP of all time, of all the clients you've ever worked with.
[00:11:13] Ken: If I could only have these two clients and I can have them at scale, let's use that for the way that we talk about the Lighthouse client. But you gotta know them better than they know themselves. And that is why I say that the very high level title, headcount revenue is not enough. We have to go deeper.
[00:11:30] Ken: We have to look across five different characteristics to find this lighthouse client. And I understand some of you are saying, Hey, well, I'm in a job still, so I haven't actually had a client, or I don't have a lot of clients because I'm newer. I just shared this week about a client who is newer, but they're doing really well.
[00:11:49] Ken: They're newer entrepreneur as a whole, but they came in a corporate and they've been crushing it and they already are well past the a hundred K mark, but they may not also have a hundred data points [00:12:00] to quote unquote find that lighthouse client. But I'm not asking you to have a hundred. I'm not even asking you to have five.
[00:12:05] Ken: And if you don't have any, I usually talk about it this way. Go look at even an old boss or go look at an old team member that you worked with. You said, Hey, I would love to work with people like that. They were cool. They felt like a peer.
[00:12:17] Ken: When we are looking at this lighthouse client and we go deeper and we decide to disqualify so many more.
[00:12:26] Ken: And I mean so many more potential, quote unquote prospects. This is your key to scalability and replicating your marketing system into your sales system, into your client delivery system. I call these the three big systems, and I don't care what business you are in the world and the size of your business, you need to have those three functioning really well.
[00:12:48] Ken: They become much more complex. Obviously, if you're a billion dollar business. But if you're someone that's even under 5 million, and I know, 'cause I was there and I got to the 5 million and then I was in a $20 million business as a partner [00:13:00] with two other folks, wasn't there very long, but learned and saw how their business operated relative to mine and transparently.
[00:13:07] Ken: The marketing wasn't even as good as what I was doing, but they were really good at a few other things. Allowed them to grow more. But the point is, it doesn't matter if you're at one five 20 million a year, having the ability to say no much more and focus in on a kind of client that is easy to target.
[00:13:26] Ken: And that's actually a really important point. Oh, well, I really wanna work with someone who has this issue in their psychology. For example, I've talked about mentality here today. You can't necessarily target that and scale that by putting it into a list building tool. Now, I don't say that we should ignore the psychographic element, but you might have to do much more of a marketing like I've done over the last few years, which is to build category and positioning leadership around something that's gonna attract those people and kind of smoke them out.
[00:13:55] Ken: But it's just an example to say. To go from a hundred K to [00:14:00] 500 K to a million, we'd have to be able to find these people that want to pay us more at scale and then convert them consistently into our sales. We'll talk about this a little bit more today and, and eventually into our client delivery.
[00:14:13] Ken: So let's kind of turn the corner a little bit on that being the foundation. And I have a whole. Much deeper training. Obviously I love doing these conversations here, but I work with people who are trying to solve these problems, and I have a large number of training workshops around this exact topic. So the thing from there that we say, we have that lighthouse client and they're the reason we can build a business in a leaner way.
[00:14:39] Ken: I have. Probably five x number of clients in this business that I had in an agency and still able to know who they are, what their challenges are, and so forth. But we then need to move away from everything in the business. as being hyper customized, hyper, let me write a [00:15:00] proposal.
[00:15:00] Ken: Hyper. Let's drop everything because this is a really cool logo or brand to get and we wanna land it.
[00:15:07] Ken: Just for a point of reference, because I know that you kind of get interested in these conversations, you might look me up, okay, yeah, this guy's cool. He is got 30 K followers on LinkedIn. He's got a bunch of people on X. He's got these newsletters, he's got all these things going, so it's really easy for him to talk about.
[00:15:24] Ken: Packaging expertise. It's really easy for him to talk about a way to scale and grow without hiring.
[00:15:31] Ken: Here's what I had before in my highly customized software agency. We were one of the first companies to build apps. There were no cookie cutter apps. It was custom software development, custom design, but I still was able to systematize my marketing and my sales.
[00:15:49] Ken: And on the backend with the client delivery systems, I began to pattern match and create a bunch of systems there to say, Hey, this is the kind of thing that we do for startups that want to have a social [00:16:00] element, or here's the kind of thing we do for nonprofits, or Here's the kind of thing that we do for enterprise clients.
[00:16:05] Ken: So I don't. Allow you to make excuses or objections to say that you cannot somehow figure out how to package, and I don't like the word productize. We'll talk about that separately, but I call it operationalize your marketing and sales through scalable offers. I call it scalable service offers. It's a very foundational part of what I do with clients.
[00:16:26] Ken: We always start with the offer. Because the offer is a link to two key parts of your business. And again, we'll have a conversation on that at some other point as well. So moving away from saying, I am a content marketing agency that does long form content to, I am a content marketing agency that works with Series A startups that writes this kind of content that does this kind of thing for you.
[00:16:49] Ken: Series A founder. We really are good at driving awareness or we're really good at booking demos with this content, or we're really good at [00:17:00] whatever is the thing that is your thing in the market that they want to buy as a transformation and as an outcome as opposed to an output. We'll do 20 blog posts a month versus when people work with us, we typically book.
[00:17:14] Ken: On average, 30% more demos within 90 days of this going into the market. I don't always love to tie it to a timeline, and I don't recommend you put that into your LinkedIn headline as an example, just giving you a flavor of the difference between these two of actually selling expert based transformations.
[00:17:33] Ken: As opposed to widgets, as opposed to more things. Or I am a fractional, or I am a financial accountant, or I'm a developer and I get paid for how much code I push, which now in the world of AI is kind of crazy the way we're reversing actually the developers in some ways becoming the co-pilot, not the ai.
[00:17:52] Ken: And that's actually especially good and relevant here to say. I will ensure that the code that's pushed out [00:18:00] from Claude or from GitHub, copilot or whatever does actually integrate into these other places. I am almost like the conductor. I am the composer as opposed to the musician.
[00:18:14] Ken: So that is the next part of how we get to the million, is we have the leverage that even people on your team, again, if you're like, well, this is all great and good, but I actually have some people on my team. Okay. How do they get positioned as the experts as well, not just you As the founder and I mentored a bunch of people before I actually mentored entrepreneurs today in the way that I do, I essentially mentored people on my team to become elite product minds before.
[00:18:41] Ken: Product leadership really had caught in hold in the market. So you might have to do that if you have a team to allow yourself to move out of. Okay, cool. I'm just gonna hire another person to take on more projects and they're gonna be doers as well. We need to be able to set them up in a way so that they also can be [00:19:00] seen as experts.
[00:19:00] Ken: So number one, our lighthouse client. Number two, our scalable offers. And number three, to help us go from a ability to consistently bring in high paying clients that was our lighthouse client, to then convert them consistently through our scalable offers where we get paid more, not just because we do more things, now we need to get into the systems that multiply your time as.
[00:19:23] Ken: A founder as a solopreneur, as whatever thing you are, but as essentially the business owner or a person that has significant ownership into the business.
[00:19:32] Ken: So what does that look like? It can look like any number of things. Again, we talked about before that we don't have to jump straight to ai. When I talk about systems, I'm not saying go set up a bunch of AI agents tomorrow, and I still believe. That systems are just repeatable ways to get results that eliminate errors and give you confidence to find what is or is not working, as opposed to it being anything about technology.
[00:19:59] Ken: It [00:20:00] can include technology and obviously at certain points you can automate your system and do it at scale, but that's not where we start. I have this concept again. I've talked about different concepts over time, and I'll refer back to them. But the idea is, especially in the business I have today, I'm not looking to go build a big agency, at least as it stands today.
[00:20:19] Ken: And I've been able to get to a spot that I really didn't believe that I would get to. And I'm taking home more than I really did as an agency owner that had 20 plus people and that was doing $5 million a year. And this came down to changing. And I, I didn't do bad at this before, but it came down to really even changing it further around systems that multiply my time through a fleet of me.
[00:20:44] Ken: So I alluded to this saying, yeah, I'll put myself up against even a small team of five people because I've replicated myself into parts of my business.
[00:20:54] Ken: So the fleet of me and the systems that multiply your time. Need to function at [00:21:00] different levels, some on the marketing, some on the sales, some on the client delivery to allow you to get time to actually go back to work on the business.
[00:21:09] Ken: I know some of this might be getting lost, like, oh yeah, well this sounds all great, but how does this functionally help me go from the a hundred K to the 500 K to the million?
[00:21:19] Ken: Here's how it does. You stop getting stuck in your delivery, hell, you stop having to spend all your time creating deliverables. You stop having to hunt for the next project. You stop having to deal with people who are sending you nasty grams or who are draining your ever loving life force.
[00:21:37] Ken: One of my advantages that I have that you don't have a lot of you don't have that are listening to this, is that I can spend a lot of time doing marketing and sales.
[00:21:46] Ken: I'm doing a great job for my clients. I know because I have phenomenally above industry rates for lifetime value compared to other people that are quote unquote doing what I'm doing. A lot of those people charge way less than I charge. They also [00:22:00] don't get the same results. They don't have 114 video testimonials.
[00:22:04] Ken: And they definitely don't retain people and don't have people stick with them For years. I kind of said it this way, I have clients with me and this new business is new. I've had people from the beginning still with me. A lot of those people can't maintain someone for more than two weeks or two months.
[00:22:18] Ken: So I have the data to back up that side of it. So I, I have the delivery systems, I'm really good at that. But because of those fleets of me. And the delivery systems and replicating myself, which I also used to do with my team. I wrote so much documentation and had so many SOPs and had so much clarity for them.
[00:22:38] Ken: They didn't have to ask me a question all the time. They just got to do what they're really good at. Now today, I do that to ensure my clients can get answers to a lot of stuff without having to ping me all the time. And I've set up, leverage there so that I can actually record this podcast today and so that I can actually show up on social networks and I can write a newsletter [00:23:00] where I can record a bunch of videos.
[00:23:02] Ken: So if you're running from thing to thing to thing, or you're managing all your team and you're having to get them up to speed because you don't actually have any of that. Then you don't have the way to get past a certain revenue level 'cause you're not putting yourself out into the marketplace and establishing yourself as the go-to option.
[00:23:21] Ken: When I first began this business, no one knew me for what I am doing right now, period. I was a person who was an app expert and I did fine in terms of establishing myself there. I had a lot of good marketing out there, but it wasn't the kind of market where even the top person was going to automatically get a hundred leads a day.
[00:23:41] Ken: That's just not the case for selling six and seven figure software development projects. So if you are someone who's a. Consultant, a founder, and you have an industry where they're out building their audiences. On places like LinkedIn. They have a YouTube channel, they have a [00:24:00] newsletter.
[00:24:00] Ken: They're getting invited to do all the talks at the industry events, and you are focusing on. Taking the work that's coming into your queue, hunting for the next project, selling time consuming deliverables, arguing with people about payments, drowning in that delivery hell, who's going to grow the revenue.
[00:24:19] Ken: So that's the real difference between a hundred k and a million dollars a year. When you have that higher paying lighthouse client who wants to have you more as that advisor, doesn't mean there's never outputs. I just described it this way. They are paying you for outcomes even if there are some outputs and you have a way to consistently close them and packaging your expertise into those transformations, into the scalable offer, the scalable service offer, and then you have that way to build systems to multiply your time.
[00:24:47] Ken: And to give you discretionary time. By the way, it doesn't have to be just working on marketing or sales. You may come up with something that gives you even more leverage on the delivery side. I absolutely work on my delivery systems, but I need to make sure that I have [00:25:00] leads coming into the queue. So that's why I talk about that first.
[00:25:03] Ken: But if you have that fleet of me, you have built that into your business. This is what gets you out of the a hundred K revenue trap.
[00:25:11] Ken: So we'll end it there
[00:25:12] Ken: how can you break revenue levels? Without just adding bodies, how can you break significant revenue levels? A lot of it is, I hate saying it this way because it's kind of a cliche now, but it is giving you that opportunity to stop being in the business and start working on it. So that'll be where we end today.
[00:25:32] Ken: Love these conversations. As usual, if you're getting value here, if you learned a thing today, would love to hear from you. Send me a note. You can also leave a rating or review because that tells me that I'm doing a good job and inspires me to keep having these conversations with you.
[00:25:48] Ken: But keep putting in the work, put in the foundations over fads. Don't go for the gimmicks, and this ultimately is what allows us to grow without hiring.