How can a freelance consultant be time independent?

[rockcrunch]

@Andy Black Thank you for your detailed reply

I'm in a similar boat at the minute... I'm a consultant with clients. I don't even consider myself a very good consultant and could make a lot more money doing just that, but I've already decided to try and "switch lanes".

Below is something I posted into my INSIDERS progress thread.

I think consultants leave money on the table by not having the low touch revenue streams (I've bolded that part).

For me, the low touch product/service that I'm creating is a support forum, similar to TheFastLaneForum, but much smaller obviously. Clients can post questions that I'll answer, but it's in a forum environment so everyone else can get to see the answer. I'll also put in tutorials etc.

What I hope to gain from it, is a better insight into paying customers, even one's who'll only pay $49/month, and it's also the starting level where my other 1-2-1 clients might come from.

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I read "80/20 Sales and Marketing" by Perry Marshall last year and picked up this rule of thumb from Perry that:

"A fifth of your customers will pay 4 times as much"

So if I had 1,000 people on my list paying me $10 per month

Then 20% (200) will likely spend $40 per month.

And 20% of that 200 (40) will likely spend $160 per month.

And 8 will likely spend $640 per month.

And 2 will likely spend $2560 per month.

Mileage will vary obviously!


Here's what that would mean:

So if I didn't have higher price points, then I'd be leaving $18k on the table.

It works the other way too: if I only had the top price point of 2 clients paying me $2,560/month to work full-time for them, then I'd be making $5,120/month. If I didn't have the lower, less hands-on tiers, I'd be leaving even more on the table.

I've studied Nathan Barry's three tiered model in detail and here is what I have been thinking about it, how do you optimize the pricing for the lower tiers?

A giant sum of $14,400 comes from the first two tiers comprising of (800+160) = 960 customers. Now lets say bumping the price of $10 to $15 and $40 to $50 brings no change to the number of sales, then its possibly a profit of $20000 which is leaving around 5.5k on the table. So how you fine tune your pricing without A/B testing is what I am asking?

Obviously the sales are calculated for a thousand customers so it doesnt make a difference. But lets say we sell to 10,000 or 100,000 customers, it makes a huge huge difference.

 

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[rockcrunch]

@FionaS Thank you for your reply

What if you give your clients info products for the steps that seem pretty much the same around the board, and then go one-on-one with the more unique, hands on stuff?
Or you could take on a 'mentee' and teach them the basics, and have them help each customer up to a certain point, where you can step in as needed.

Yes I decided to create an infoproduct. Hope it works out well.

 

[Andy Black]

@Andy Black A giant sum of $14,400 comes from the first two tiers comprising of (800+160) = 960 customers. Now lets say bumping the price of $10 to $15 and $40 to $50 brings no change to the number of sales, then its possibly a profit of $20000 which is leaving around 5.5k on the table. So how you fine tune your pricing without A/B testing is what I am asking?

Obviously the sales are calculated for a thousand customers so it doesnt make a difference. But lets say we sell to 10,000 or 100,000 customers, it makes a huge huge difference.

Honestly, I've just picked $49 as my intro price because I want it low enough to be attainable for a solopreneur just starting out, but pricey enough to discount people who aren't motivated enough to join.

I'm in the process of building my funnel to send cold traffic to it. If I assume a 10% visitor-to-email-subscriber-rate, and a 10% email-subscriber-to-premium-member-rate, then I've a 1% visitor-to-premium-member-rate. If I pay $0.49 cost-per-click, then I'm breakeven on my front-end, and any additional months they stay a member are profit.

Given I'm creating a forum (of sorts), I want less members of higher quality.

The data that I buy when I start driving cold traffic into my funnel will give me a clue as to my next step. So there will be split-testing of price points, but also of the quality of members it drives.

 

[rockcrunch]

@arillera

I have been a freelance consultant for a little while now doing web design, and have done fairly well six figures a year consulting just by myself and a few outsourced team members, but have been implementing a fast lane business to eventually get out of trading my time for good. Unfortunately anything that relies on time is going to violate the commandment of time mentioned in TMF .
I have a few good friends/ mentors who earn as high as $500k a month consulting with no employees consistently BUT they 1. Have high pricing $25k-$50K plus per client 2. They do group programs to leverage their time and 3. invest that money into things like real estate that make them more money independent of their time.

I have also seen another good friend start his SaaS business a year ago and go from 0 customers to 15,000 paying $37 a month. That's $555k a month with a potential for much more. He also got venture funding for $5 million recently. Now he has a few dozen employees but his business doesn't 100% need him to be there.

Just my 2 cents may not be worth much but hope it helps

Wow that seems amazing. Thanks for sharing that! And wow the subscription model is so powerful isnt it? I know its explained in the book too but wow. And in the subscription model, its not just customers but repeat customers!! sell an infoproduct for an X amount and thats it you are done. Unless you keep upselling them which is difficult. But every customer in subscription model is a repeat customer. A repeat customer will pay X amount month after month after month unless he unsubscribes. It's obviously more difficult to get customers for subscription basis(or maybe it isnt, idk) but is sufficient to make me day dream about recurring wealth

 

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[rockcrunch]

@ΕΝΔΕΚΑ Thank you for your reply

What you should do is try to focus on anything and everything that can scale back your time spent to make the same money. Price bump is the obvious one, but are there ways you can streamline or partially automate your service, so you make in 30 hours what you used to make in 40? Doctors are the principle badasses at this semi-fastlaning in our society. What happens today when you go to see "the doctor?" You go, and a billing tech who makes $10/hr checks you in and checks you out. You get diagnosed by an LPN who makes $18/hr using a rubric. A nurse who makes $26/hr comes in to do the messy stuff, and then the doctor shows up for 90 seconds of your hour visit to check some boxes, shake your hand, collects the lions share of the $150 bill for your 1 hour visit, and goes home in his 911 Turbo S. Can you make your consultancy "yours" while simultaneously farming out most of the grunt work to lower-level employees (whose work need not be known by the buyer)? That'd be a great way to fastlane something like this.

I have decided to proceed with an inforproduct at the moment and raise prices on my consultation. Hopefully it will help me scale.

 

[rockcrunch]

@Jkeenum @Lauryn Thanks for your reply

Could you not do a book? Then put a higher price on your consultation.

Product creation.
Create a basic set of products for your services.
And then let the high level programs filter clients who want more interaction at a higher price

Yes that is exactly what I decided to do

 

[rockcrunch]

@arillera Cannot thank you enough for that article you linked! It is what finally helped me decide as to for sure what I wanted to do. Instead of building businesses and products for others, its time I built my own business! Let me re-read that article again though

 

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[nbe]

I've been thinking about this subject for some time how to change consulting / contracting into sometime fastlane.
Best thing I came up with is a subscription site.
For example I'm doing Microsoft contracting work. I client will hire me to implement a microsoft product.

They either hire me because they don't have the manpower or the expertise.
In the latter case you can provide the customer a infoproduct containing the exact steps to implement the product.

The advantage for the customer.
When they implement the product themselves they have a better understanding of the product which will save them costs on support and maintaince fee's.

If it takes 5 days to implement SharePoint. The fee will be €5000. If you document every step and procedure and put it in infoproduct form. I think a reasonable price would be €500.

You will compete with industry provided training like global knowledge. In my opinion these forms of training are overpriced and do not deliver the value to implement products in the best possible way.

Need
I think this fills the need of company's seeking the expertise but are not interested in expensive consulting fee's.

Entry
I think the entry is the weakest point. Someone could easily build a similar site but the content is what matters. Building a reliable brand is key.

Control
You are in control of the site.

Scale
National / global whatever.

Time
At first you will need to spend huge amounts of time to create the product but you could do this during your day job. After you can provide a reliable source of income the content part can be outsourced and you can focus on the site.

Any comments would be welcome. I'm looking for ways to validate this without spending to much time.

 

[Leo Hendrix]

This might not lead you to be time independent but hopefully it can help, similar to what @Andy Black posted before.

http://kopywritingkourse.com/consul...e8481ce8812da1cd47340ccba5e058a0bed7bcb0b10#2

I also do consulting but on the side, as an information and connection broker.