How To Punch Through An Income Plateau (And Still Sleep At Night)

It’s a New Year and you’ve got some goals.

If one of them is to punch through an income plateau, I’ve got you covered…

Let’s start with a definition: an income plateau is when your revenue has been hovering around the same number for at least a couple of years.

Now if that number makes you happy—because you’ve discovered the right balance between working in your genius zone and not working at all—good on you! No need to fix what isn’t broken.

But maybe you’re starting to get frustrated with a three, four or even seven year income plateau. It just might be time to take some action.

The thing is, most soloists think the only way to break through that plateau is to do something big: change your audience, overhaul your message, re-work your business model.

While those CAN change your business, many times you don’t need to do anything that drastic.

Instead, you can explore some “tweaks”—small moves that may feel hard but in the grand scheme of things are pretty simple:

Increase your prices/pricing structure for new clients (like the soloist who doubled their prices for a productized service and punched through a three-year plateau).

Offer a new productized service that serves as an entrée to your higher-end offerings (or as an ultimate destination to start shifting how you serve all clients).

Say no to any new client who isn’t directly in your sweet-spot (shutting out non-ideal clients shows you how great life can be working in your genius zone—motivating you to eventually drop existing bad fits).

Introduce a high-end offering whose price scares the stuffing out of you. It almost doesn’t matter if anyone buys it—the important thing is that by claiming an aggressive high end, you’ll start to re-think your lower-end options.

Maintain your pricing on a low touch option (like products or low maintenance productized services) and invest some time building your audience to increase sales.

“But none of these are rocket science”, you might be thinking.

Exactly: why make this any harder than it has to be?

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