Greetings from rainy Portland. We’ve had approximately 1.5 days of sun over the past 3 months. That might be a slight exaggeration but that’s the way it feels to me right now.
As promised, this email includes the three things you must focus your time, energy, and attention on if you want to maximize the growth of your impact, income and influence.
One of the biggest challenges of having a high-touch service business (I’m talking to you coaches, consultants, speakers, influencers and creative professionals), specifically one where you are your business, is what to focus on.
Why?
Because let’s just call it like it is. There are only 24 hours in a day and there are 7 million things we could be doing. Some things are obvious distractions like endlessly scrolling through Facebook or engaging in political arguments online. Others are less obvious. Meaning the latest, greatest marketing hack or sales funnel strategy or whatever shiny object of the day everyone is talking about. And there are so many things to do…what do you focus on and where do you put your precious time and energy?
I’m going to share with you the only 3 areas you need to focus on to scale up your impact, income and influence as a service entrepreneur.
Here are the three:
- Narrow your focus and craft your brilliance into a proven framework
- Simplify your business model so that your ability to generate income does not depend entirely on you
- Amplify your impact so that you can easily reach more people with your thoughts and ideas
Yup. That’s it.
Period!
That’s EVERYTHING you need to do to go from struggling and hustling all the time to having an actual business that allows you to increase your impact, your income and your influence while working less and increasing the value of your offering.
I don’t care what anyone tells you, these are the focus areas that are required for you to move the needle when it comes to scaling up a service business. You must start thinking like an entrepreneur instead of thinking like a self-employed service professional.
I’ve coached and talked with a multitude of service professionals that have all taken their businesses to the $1M+ mark and ALL OF THEM share these 3 focus areas as key elements that have allowed them to move from a self-employed service professionals to having a business that allows them to enjoy more freedom, meaning and operating in their zone of brilliance.
As a service entrepreneur, you will essentially stay stuck in place or move forward.
It’s as simple as that. Staying stuck means continuing to do the things that got you where you already are. Things like hustling, trying to do all the work, never creating real leverage in your business and remaining the best kept secret in your industry.
Moving a service business forward means turning resources, knowledge, ideas and relationships into something of greater value by creating unique solutions that solve problems and fulfill unmet needs.
Your intended audience is willing to pay and support you because of this.
The more you are able to invest your time and energy into operating like an entrepreneur and influencer, the more your impact, income and influence will grow.
In your day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month, your focus and planning must shift to these three activities.
- Narrowing your focus and crafting a framework around it
- Simplifying your business model
- Amplifying your impact
The more you get pulled away from focusing time in these areas…
The more you lose the value you could have otherwise created (impact) and captured (income) with that time and energy – even if that time and energy are spent on other areas of your business.
This leads me to an important point…
Everything in your business is part of a system with one sole purpose: to support you in being a needs-fulfilling, problem-solving machine that creates, relates and evaluates in a way that only you can because of who you are, how you think, and how you show up in the world.
In other words, your business exists to maximize your unique value and highlight your zone of brilliance.
This is how visionary entrepreneurs and influencers operate.
They become world-class by designing their business with that sole purpose in mind.
If you’re feeling like there’s something bigger for you and your business…
This is how you make that leap.
Doing this requires understanding exactly what narrowing your focus, simplifying your business model and amplifying your impact, look like in action.
(I talked about this more in my recent master class.)
Then you have to identify what aspects of your work truly requires your focus and which you can get rid of completely or hand off to others.
(BTW, I see most service entrepreneurs being held back from realizing their full potential because they think they have the right focus when really they’re still mucking around with things that fall completely outside of their zone of brilliance.)
To increase your income, impact and influence, you must make key changes over time to your mindset, business model, and the way you deliver your work to the world.
The problem is that so often we get pulled into adding tactics, team members, systems and other pieces to our business that don’t increase our ability to operate in our zone of brilliance.
In fact, what typically happens is our ability to operate in our zone of brilliance goes DOWN as time goes on. For a time our business grows.
But inevitably we hit the bottleneck.
As a result, we hit a plateau, burn out, lose site of our vision, stagnate, and never make the leap from a self-employed service professional to a business that fuels our big vision and legacy.
If you want to learn more about scaling up your impact, income and influence, then check out my recent master class, Why Scaling Your Business Might Be A Bad Idea, where I go through all of this in more detail and show you how to create more impact, influence and income in your business.
Live bravely,
Michael
Hear what Council member, Kate Sanderson-Holly, had to say about the community, support and accountability she received from the Council of Visionary Business Builders.
