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Does anyone end up taking on too many clients and feel overwhelmed sometimes?

Anything related to matters of the mind

Devilery

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This is usually accompanied by a never ending "to-do" list, and long nights thinking over the "What if's"

Oh, man! I can relate to this so much. Recently, my freelance business (if I can call it so) really got traction and I'm getting so many requests that I actually turn most of the down.

I work a lot. Always at least two projects at once, occasionaly up to five. I work all day, every day, but same as you, I feel as I can't hire anyone yet.

I'm sure we're both on the borderline of "too much for me alone, not enough to hire someone."

What I am going to do is - raise my prices. So, I work as much as I do now, but I have the financial ability to hire someone. I've thought about this for a while and see that as the fastest and most effiecient way to scale.

Of course, we might have a little different situation, but what I'm doing is preparing a website with my porftolio etc., positioning myself as an agency. I willraise my prices, hire someone who works on a comission only basis (e.g. 50% of the project), and keep hiring until the commision-only become a part-timer. Then, a full-timer. And slowly add more people where each goes from a commision-only to a part-timer to a full-timer.

Raise your prices! If you have too many clients, you're charging too low. I know it's a mental hurdle, but you need to overcome it!
 
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Andy Black

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Yep. It happened to me this summer.

Being overwhelmed is no joke. Make sure you get enough sleep and exercise. Go for a stroll every day and let your brain calm down.

What’s helped me is to mentally split my business into different parts:

1) Consulting
  • The consultancy is where people hire *me* specifically.
  • My team still helps me, but my skills and experience are needed to break the back of the project.
  • I’m not going to increase the number of consulting clients I have. 10 clients is ideal. 15 is ok. 20 is a stretch.
  • I will slowly increase prices (when a client churns I’ll replace them with a higher paying client).

2) Productised Service(s)
  • When I have a few clients in the same industry then I can train people up to go through the steps I figured out when I was consulting at the coal-face.
  • I’m even doing some of these for free to try and create the SOPs so we can scale to dozens and then hundreds of clients in the same industry.

3) SaaS / Platform Products
  • We keep solving the same problems and have naturally developed solutions that we now roll out to some clients as part of the onboarding.
  • Some people just want those solutions and not our main service. These customers are helping us to define our SaaS offering.

4) Courses & Other Info Products
  • There’s often a DIY market that doesn’t want the DFY service.
  • By doing the work I’m able to create courses and content to help others do the work.
  • I’m even considering moving our team’s SOPs into an area where other people can pay to access them - thus killing two birds with one stone (training my team and creating paid courses at the same time).

Further reading:
 

Aurelius

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All jokes aside, I have nearly no clients. Can’t relate. If someone’s hiring, I m here lol. Consulting, copywriting, whatever
 
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MattR82

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Learn to say no to a fair chunk of potential clients that aren't a great fit. Charge more. Hire a VA or two, project manager, from Philippines, outsource and find resource partners/white label agencies to help.
 

Stargazer

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What if that wasn't possible?

Any particular reason?

Because...

All jokes aside, I have nearly no clients. Can’t relate. If someone’s hiring, I m here lol. Consulting, copywriting, whatever

...this Forum is full of people who wish to do xyz and have no customers.

If you contact and chat with people such as the above (I don't know them) you may have aligned goals and standards and can come to an arrangement including virtual limited companies if that is what they are called. ie You both make sure you have exactly the same domain name but you .co.uk and both .com etc etc

Dan
 

minivanman

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What if that wasn't possible?

A. Find another business to be in.

B. Once you see this start happening you should raise your prices. Not just a little, raise them a lot. You can always lower them. That's the beauty of being small, you don't need to take it in front of anyone to get things approved.
 
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Andy Black

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Learn to say no to a fair chunk of potential clients that aren't a great fit. Charge more. Hire a VA or two, project manager, from Philippines, outsource and find resource partners/white label agencies to help.
I like the mentality of getting the clients to say No. Slap a price on it that you’d be delighted if they said Yes. (Beware getting sidetracked of course.)
 

DaRK9

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Get money up front, hire out. Mo money, less problems.
 

Imgal

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That @Andy Black will keep dropping in and saying all the wise things before me (and a hell of a lot better than I ever would).

This has been a problem I hit a LOT and still would refuse to learn from it. For me the issue really was pricing. I wasn't charging enough to be able to survive from the clients I'd have so need to take on more... despite the fact I was burning the candle at both ends just to keep up with the current ones.

It all comes down to charging more or doing less.

Now I don't do any day to day marketing work except with high level influencers which I don't actually charge for. I'm sure that sounds like utter madness but the truth is between commissions on brand deals I tie in and the power of the name drop in getting consulting clients, it's actually one of the most effective lead gen methods I've ever used! I'm also at the point that I could drop them completely and it wouldn't cause an issue with company growth, but I have to admit there's something very helpful about having big accounts to test things out on!
 

Tiago

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What’s the real challenge and opportunity here?

What if you created a product/service that costs more?

Why isn’t hiring possible?
 
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BizyDad

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I like the mentality of getting the clients to say No. Slap a price on it that you’d be delighted if they said Yes. (Beware getting sidetracked of course.)

Hahaha. I'm laughing because this was exactly my response earlier this year. I doubled my prices. People kept saying yes. So I doubled again. And then I could afford to hire...

I am delighted. And yet, I didn't get sidetracked...

I like to think I got "right tracked". Yea, I just made that phrase up.

Hiring brings up the whole added management responsibilities, and the training responsibilities, developing interviews skills, leadership skills, having to let people go when they aren't working out, etc etc. And if they are client facing, that's a whole other set of issues. People think it gets easier because you have help but not always. You are adding to your plate a bunch of responsibilities. Growing a business can be hard work y'all.

@Harry Waywell I'll tell you is this. You're right that never ending list will never end, BUT you will somehow learn that 80% of it isn't that important and 20% of it is what really drives your business forward. You go from being overwhelmed to being simply whelmed.

Don't sweat the small stuff. And while it is just you, now, focus as much as you can on documenting your process so you are better prepared than I was to hire helpers.

I humbly like to consider myself the king of "What Ifs", and as such, I'll tell you that also get better, gets easier, gets rewarding even.

Just be patient with yourself, it won't happen overnight. And forgive yourself if you forget to do something or something important slips through the cracks. Just be sure you are giving your best to your craft every single day.
 

Andy Black

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