3 Ways To Tweak Your Soloist Expertise Business To Produce More Revenue

You’re not unhappy with your soloist expertise business—but you sure would be thrilled to produce more revenue without working more hours.

Even if you’re simmering on a pivot (exploring a tighter niche or moving up the food chain) or a complete business model overhaul (transitioning from consulting to writing/teaching), you can experiment to see what’s possible without blowing up the box.

If you’re primarily selling services, you have three ways to tweak your revenue.

Bump up your fees.

Hear me out before you write this off as impossible. Even if you’re not as booked as you’d like, you’ve got opportunities to increase your fees.

If you’re charging project fees, start experimenting with new clients. Bump that $10,000 project to $12,000 or $15,000—if you get no pushback, just steadily increase it until you start hitting no’s on a regular basis.

Ditto retainers—new clients pay more.

But let’s not ignore existing clients: they are experiencing your results regularly and if they are your ideal profile, will be willing to pay more to retain you. Increase that ongoing fee at least annually and regularly revisit the terms of your engagements.

Reconfigure how you charge.

You could opt for a slightly higher difficulty factor…

Maybe you shift from project fees to retainer work. Or you add a retainer option after they’ve finished your best-selling type of project ($50,000 for the project and $2,500/month for support afterwards).

You might even remake your service-based retainer into an advisory role for future clients (since this is harder to pull off with existing ones). Instead of say a $3,000/month retainer for performing services, you swap it out for $3,000/month to be available for guidance.

Same fee, much more free time 😉.

Develop a productized service from work you’re already doing.

Here you are productizing a high-value service that you’ve already proven gets exceptional results for your ideal clients.

For example, you could strip off the strategy piece of your work.

You define the parameters of the work, the transformational outcomes, who it’s for and slap on a price that—from your ideal client’s perspective—clearly pays for itself several times over.

FWIW: that doesn’t mean you can’t add on higher end options (see project fees and retainers above)—to further monetize your expertise after the strategy phase.

Just try one of these three tweaks for a small, low-risk experiment with a potentially game-changing pay-off.