💡 Business Tip - Sell Your Mind, Not Your Time (Issue #65)
Scaling your business as an experienced professional
First, I want to say Thank You to everyone who attended my Solopreneur Workshop yesterday! I enjoyed getting a chance to meet you and learn more about your business ideas. If you missed it, I will be hosting the next one in Aug, so stay tuned to this newsletter for that announcement.
One topic we discussed during the workshop was what to sell and how to price it. A very common model that people use to transition from employee to solopreneur is “copying and pasting” your job.
This is how I created my first solopreneur business way back in 1998. I was an employed designer and decided to create my own one-person design agency. The simplest way for me to get started was by tracking my billable hours and invoicing clients.
Guess what? That doesn’t scale very much. You can only work so many hours a week. You gotta eat, sleep, and live the rest of your life, too!
As you advance in your career or your business matures and you want to scale, you should move away from the model of hourly billing. You’ll also want to expand beyond projects and other types of work where you’re on the hook for deliverables (e.g., design assets, writing specifications, writing code, running studies).
You stop selling your time and start selling your mind.
Your wisdom and experience have value. Selling your advice and consulting is usually more lucrative and enjoyable than hands-on service production.
It scales better.
It pays better.
It gives you more freedom.
It’s more resistant to ageism.
I noticed people didn’t mind my gray hair as much when they hired me as a consultant and wanted the benefit of my wisdom and experience. They do seem to mind when you’re in your 40s-50s operating at the level of people in their 20s and 30s doing production work.
So, look for opportunities to capture your knowledge and turn it into a sellable asset.
Books
Guides
Workbooks
Courses
Templates
Systems
Documented processes
Talks
Workshops
Consulting calls
Start thinking of how you can capture what you know and create something once that you could sell millions of times forever (with the occasional update and refresh).
I’m Larry Cornett, a business coach who can work with you 1-on-1 to design, launch, and optimize your business. I live in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with my wife and Great Dane while running my businesses 100% remotely.
