How Productized Services Can Change Your Life with Pia Silva
Moving from traditional custom projects to productized services can completely change how you run your business: think more revenue, more free time and more joy in your work and your life. No BS Agencies founder Pia Silva did it for her own branding agency and now teaches others to do the same.
We had a fascinatingly candid conversation about:
What happens when your business is successful financially, but not sustainable.
Why you want to evaluate both the revenue and profit of each service before deciding to launch—and how to build your confidence in making new offers.
The mindset and behavioral shifts required to shrink 3-6-12 month projects down to just a few days.
Your freedom calculator—Pia’s formula to design and price your work so that you have “enough” revenue, free time and flexibility for the life you want.
What it’s like to shift from serving clients to teaching and coaching other people like you (and why Pia went all in immediately).
LINKS
Pia Silva Website | Crash Course | LinkedIn | Instagram
Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram
GUEST BIO
Pia Silva is the founder of No BS Agency Mastery where she teaches 1-2 person branding agencies to scale to $30k months without employees. She’s also a TEDx speaker, a Forbes contributor, podcast host and the author of Badass Your Brand.
RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS
Join the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.
Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather and learn.
The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00 – 00:29
Pia Silva: That was the light bulb moment. It was, wow, I’m surrounded by people who will pay us $3, 000. And that is more profitable. And we had just let our employees go. And Steve and I said, let’s go all in. I’m not kidding when I say like overnight, we completely changed our website. And I called back, I had a bunch of outstanding proposals and I actually just called them all up and I said, hey, you know that big project that you’re still thinking on, consider that moot. We are no longer doing that, but I can do basically
00:29 – 00:39
Pia Silva: the same project for you for 3, 000 or if it was bigger, I said 2 days of 5000. I closed all of those on the spot and that was the beginning of it.
00:43 – 01:17
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I’m here with Pia Silva, whose work I’ve been following for a few years, much admired. Pia is the founder of NoBS Agency Mastery, where she teaches 1 to 2 person branding agencies to scale to 30K months without employees. And we love that here. She’s also a TEDx speaker, a Forbes contributor, podcast host, and the author of Badass Your Brand. Pia, welcome.
01:18 – 01:20
Pia Silva: Thank you so much, Rochelle. So happy to be here.
01:21 – 01:47
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. Well, 1 of the reasons that I’m excited to talk to you is that you’ve made productized services work so well in a niche that’s littered with people working lots of stressful hours and frankly not pulling in nearly as much as they could in revenue. So let’s start with what made you decide to first start your business, which if I understand correctly was initially a brand agency that you founded with your husband, is that right?
01:48 – 02:16
Pia Silva: Yes, I don’t even think I would call it starting a business. He was my fiance then, and he was a freelance graphic designer. And I was in the gig economy before we called it that. And at some point, it just became clear, hey, you’re really talented at this thing, maybe not as talented at finding the clients, managing the clients, invoicing all of that stuff. And while I have absolutely no experience in the design world, you know, I’m a fast learner. I can figure
02:16 – 02:16
Rochelle Moulton: this out. And I think I could
02:16 – 02:18
Pia Silva: do it better than you, no offense, because you’re
02:18 – 02:37
Rochelle Moulton: an artist and you should just do what you do best and let me figure this out and that’s actually how it started. Oh, I love that. I love that. So let’s talk revenue. So if you can think back to like your first couple of years, 1 of the things we love to ask people is how long did it take you to hit your first hundred thousand dollars? Do you remember?
02:37 – 02:59
Pia Silva: Absolutely, because we did it our first year. We did, but you have to remember we are 2 people who were working not just full-time, probably 7 days a week, living in the middle of New York City in 1 of the most expensive neighborhoods. So eking out $100K, I don’t know if we could have survived making less, frankly.
02:59 – 03:09
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. New York is a challenge. So how painful was it then? I mean, does do you remember that as being sort of a painful process to get that thing going?
03:09 – 03:39
Pia Silva: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I hadn’t, like I said before, I had no context or idea what I was doing. So the first month and a half, it was just Craigslist. It was literally just me refreshing Craigslist and applying to every gig I could find. 1 of the gigs I found, the woman that we did this job for invited me to her B&I group. I did not know this idea of networking even existed. She was like, oh, you should come to this thing I do. And I joined. I was like, this is the answer. And then I just
03:39 – 04:10
Pia Silva: networked my face off for about a year and a half. And I, when I tell you, like, I went all in on this. It was every day, all day, meetings, events. I joined other groups too and I built a network very quickly. So, you know, just between that, I mean, we were charging by the hour at that point. When we first started, we were charging $30 an hour. We charged her, I remember, I mean I love numbers so I remember every number, we charged her $40 an hour and she convinced us that we needed to start
04:10 – 04:13
Pia Silva: charging $65 an hour and we probably charged that for a while.
04:15 – 04:23
Rochelle Moulton: It’s funny how hard it is psychologically sometimes to just make that shift when you’re in hourly or even a flat price and making it higher. It’s
04:23 – 04:23
Pia Silva: just some
04:24 – 04:26
Rochelle Moulton: kind of resistance around that, right?
04:26 – 04:34
Pia Silva: Rochelle, I remember when I told my dad, who’s an accountant, that we were making $65 an hour and I was so proud. I was like, we’re going
04:34 – 04:36
Rochelle Moulton: to be rich. He was like,
04:36 – 04:44
Pia Silva: that’s not a lot of money, Pia, $200 an hour, maybe. It’s like $200 an hour. Like that will never happen. Pretty amazing.
04:45 – 05:01
Rochelle Moulton: It is. I love the journey. So I remember either seeing or hearing about how the light bulb went off in your agency business that started you down the path of the product I service you’ve created, the no BS agency idea and model. I mean, can
05:01 – 05:37
Pia Silva: you tell us the story? Like, how did you get to that place? Yeah, so it was 2 moments. The first moment was in 2013 with a business coach, and I was pushing to get these $30, 000 clients. I had assessed our process and how much our overhead was and figured out that these projects we were doing needed to be charging about $30, 000 for us to eke out a living, honestly, because we had 2 employees at the time. I had this big network. People seemed to like me and trust me, but I could not get these
05:37 – 06:04
Pia Silva: to close. And so they were few and far between. And I said to this business coach, I’m talking to all these people who wanna work with us, but they just don’t have the budget at all. And he said, well, what budget do they have? I was like, I don’t know, $3, 000. And he said, well, what could you do for $3, 000? And I said, I mean, we could actually do a lot of stuff in a day. If they would just pay us for the day, I think Steve and I could act, Steve’s like we could
06:04 – 06:31
Pia Silva: build a web. This was right at the beginning of Squarespace and we were using it. We could probably build like a home page and maybe an interior page and a logo and a business card. And I could kind of consult on the branding. So we had this as a secret offer. I didn’t want anyone to know about it because I wanted to sell the big thing and we Sold that out of my back pocket for a year sporadically it didn’t sell that well at the time who was we weren’t really all in on it a Year
06:31 – 07:06
Pia Silva: later we find ourselves in $40, 000 of debt, which at the time was us completely maxed out, freaking out, had to let our employees go. And that’s when we kind of looked at this thing, this Brand up, we called it a brand up, this secret brand up, and we said, you know what? $3, 000 for this 1 day is so much more profitable than even the $30, 000 projects that we are closing sporadically. If I tally up all the energy and time that we spend doing that $30, 000 project, it takes way more than 10 full
07:06 – 07:39
Pia Silva: days of our time to execute. And if I just do the math, 1 day at $3, 000 is more profitable than probably 20 plus days for the $30, 000 project. And that was the lightbulb moment. It was, wow, I’m surrounded by people who will pay us $3, 000, and that is more profitable. And we had just let our employees go, and Steve and I said, let’s go all in. I’m not kidding when I say like overnight, we completely changed our website. And I called back, I had a bunch of outstanding proposals and I actually just called
07:39 – 07:57
Pia Silva: them all up. And I said, Hey, you know, that big project that you’re still thinking on, consider that moot. We are no longer doing that. But I can do basically the same project for you for 3, 000 or if it was bigger, I said 2 days of 5, 000. And I closed all of those on the spot. And that was the beginning of it.
07:58 – 08:27
Rochelle Moulton: Mic drop. Mic drop. So I want to pull out a couple of things you said here. I mean, the first thing is sort of the difference between revenue and profit, right? Cause it’s easy to like the 30, 000 feels like the big shiny thing that we should want to have. And I love that the $3, 000 thing was secret until you figured that out. And I hate to say it, but it’s almost like you had to have that pile of debt and the pressure of employees and having to let them go to be able to see
08:28 – 08:29
Rochelle Moulton: what was right there.
08:30 – 08:46
Pia Silva: A hundred percent. Yes. I would have just kept going because I had an unrealistic vision of what this was supposed to look like. And I didn’t connect the fact that those $30, 000 projects were actually unprofitable. I just didn’t get it until I was forced into a corner.
08:46 – 09:23
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. Well, why would you? Right? I mean, you did what humans do. We look at, well, 30, 000 is better than 3000. Right. Right? Yeah. But yeah, every dollar is not equal. Nope. Right. So when you think about like the traditional agency model, especially with I think of graphic design where you’re dealing with websites and timelines and strict budgets. I mean, what challenges do you see people like graphic designers and brand strategists facing when they organize that way and more of an agency, traditional, either hourly rate or fee for service
09:23 – 09:59
Pia Silva: way. Well, how much time do we have, Rochelle? It’s every step of the process I see a problem in now, starting from the very beginning. My experience of all of those pitches, it was a very defense place to come from. It was you, the prospect, have all the cards, you have all the power, And I’m here tap dancing and trying to convince you that I’m worthy of you. I’m putting so much time and energy into talking to you and meeting with you and making decks and proposals and following up and all of this. And you just
09:59 – 10:36
Pia Silva: get to say yes or no, or nothing at all. I mean, you get ghosted, right? Even when we did close on those, I mean, I was starting to use some of the strategies I use now to build the authority within the relationship. But I do think the free pitch, it starts the relationship off on the wrong foot. You’ve just done a ton of free work. And so it’s an unequal relationship. Whereas now where we teach to actually pay for that first step, there’s immediate respect and value of your time and your expertise. So that would be
10:36 – 11:12
Pia Silva: the first part. And then I think probably overall there is this thing that I’ve noticed happens with creative projects that are stretched out over many months where there’s a lot of excitement and momentum in the beginning from both sides. And then it kind of dwindles and it kind of gets exhausting and the client has different ideas that pop up or somebody says something and there’s lots of wrenches being thrown in because it’s happening over time, and that makes it take even longer. And by the end, everyone just wants it to finish, and there’s punch lists, and
11:12 – 11:44
Pia Silva: all of these things are what make it exhausting. It loses the fun and excitement of it because your creative work is getting often watered down by that process, right? Either by the client or by the committee or by the client’s friends and family. But whatever it is, the thing that you’re doing this for, it doesn’t usually look exactly like that at the end. And sometimes it looks quite different. And it’s really upsetting when you do a project and you are so excited about it and you put all this energy into it and then it gets watered
11:44 – 11:52
Pia Silva: down by committee. And then the thing that goes out in the end, you’re not even that excited to show on your website. So those are just a couple off the top of my head.
11:55 – 12:13
Rochelle Moulton: Well I’m struck by the length of the project. I mean, I think that’s, I mean, we all know, right, the longer a project goes on, unless you’re doing certain kinds of change work, the longer a creative project goes on, the more voices will get in the mix. What is that? The camel is a horse designed by a committee?
12:14 – 12:15
Pia Silva: I’ve never heard that.
12:15 – 12:20
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So once you get the committee in there, it does not look like the horse you had intended
12:20 – 12:22
Pia Silva: from the beginning. Oh my God.
12:22 – 12:39
Rochelle Moulton: That’s funny. So obviously you have a solution to all this, Pia, but I’d like you to have you talk about how you advise these folks to get off that hamster wheel of attracting serving clients on projects that stretch out over months versus days?
12:40 – 13:18
Pia Silva: Well, I think there’s a lot of mindset shifts that have to happen in order to shrink a project. The way we position it is we shrink multi-month, 3, 6, 12-month projects down to a couple of day intensives. So right now, our company, most of our clients would be a two-day intensive for $40, 000. And a lot of people think the mindset is, well, I’m paying more for less, right? I actually heard that yesterday. Someone said, but why would they pay more for less? And I said, they’re not getting less, they’re getting more. What they’re getting is
13:18 – 13:49
Pia Silva: 6 months of their life back. What they’re getting is actually the version of the work that they need, not the version of the work that they watered down. What they’re getting is the ability to get that brand out there to sell at a higher price point, to position them as an expert, to show their authority. 6 months earlier, I mean, the longer it takes to do this kind of work, there’s such an opportunity cost in not doing that. And, you know, they’re getting their mental space back. I’ve hired a lot of service providers over the years
13:49 – 14:20
Pia Silva: too and when it goes on forever, it’s this thing that just takes up real estate in your brain, wondering how it’s going, I have to get on more meetings. You know, oh, now I gotta give feedback. It takes away from running your business. So I think 1 of the biggest mindset shifts is shrinking it down does not mean delivering less value. In fact, it can mean, and it should mean delivering more value. And just to be super clear, When I say $40, 000 for a two-day intensive, we are not doing the work in those 2 days.
14:20 – 14:42
Pia Silva: We are doing the work beforehand, completely actually. The 2 days is the time where we present it to the client. We take them through a process of getting feedback and making revisions in real time, such that at the end of the 2 days it’s launched. But we have as much time as we need to do the best job possible. And that is always the goal.
14:42 – 15:05
Rochelle Moulton: Couple things strike me there. 1 is the word that comes to mind is speed, right? Clients do pay for speed. And what you’re doing is, as you said, they get 6 months of their life back. And I would absolutely use that in my marketing if I were doing that. And I think then the other piece is that this $40, 000, this is what you used to do for 3 to $5, 000, correct?
15:06 – 15:38
Pia Silva: Technically, but I would say the project’s definitely got bigger, but the value also got higher because we got more strategic, right? So we’re better at it. I have more authority, so there’s a lot of trust there. And I find that in creative work, it’s not just doing good work. There’s a lot of people out there who do amazing work. There are students out there where if you look at their portfolio, it’s beautiful. It’s really not about the craft anymore. To me, it’s an assumption. I assume that your work is good. What we need to layer on
15:38 – 16:10
Pia Silva: top in order to get this higher price point and this higher value is your own confidence in the work and how it relates to the goals of the client and being able to communicate that in a process that is so seamless that the client can relax into it, completely trust what you’re saying and say yes. Because the whole intensive process is really reliant on the client trusting you implicitly and feeling really good about saying yes to the work. And I think also a lot of this, the stuff I was talking about earlier, where you kind of
16:10 – 16:34
Pia Silva: start in a defensive position or creatives get in this position all the time where it’s like whatever the client wants, oh, you want me to change it? Or you want to see this? You want to see that? All of a sudden, the client is running the show and the client doesn’t trust you because if the client says, can I see it in blue? Can I see it bigger? Can I see it this? And you just keep going and going and going. In their mind, they’re thinking, well, have I exhausted all my options yet? Right? Like, maybe
16:34 – 16:58
Pia Silva: there’s another version I need to see. And that to me is a representation of not believing that the person doing the work actually knows what’s best. And so we have to flip that relationship in order for the intensive to work. And I tell people in the sales process, if they ever question the, you know, the short, the short time and, oh, what if I don’t have time to think about it and all of this? I say, listen, people hire me because they want me to tell them what this is going to look like, what this should
16:58 – 17:19
Pia Silva: look like to get them to their goals, right? I’m not here to be the hands to create the thing that you’re imagining in your head. I’m here to hear what you want this to do and I’ll make that thing and it’ll be freaking awesome. And that either repels them or they’re like, yes, Thank you. That’s what I need. I don’t know what this should look like. And those are the clients that I want.
17:19 – 17:51
Rochelle Moulton: Yes. What struck me about that too is when I think about, let’s say, Fortune 500 companies, I can’t picture them saying yes to this only because there’s so many voices that want to get heard and they love to carry things out over months and months and months. But if there were some, wouldn’t that be awesome? Somebody could say, Oh, this would be amazing. I can just bring, you know, the people from these 3 units, like 3 other people into a room for 2 days plus whatever prep you have to do and we’re done. I mean, it
17:51 – 18:00
Rochelle Moulton: goes back to really knowing who your audience is and knowing the outcomes that you produce, the transformational outcomes and the value to your audience.
18:01 – 18:34
Pia Silva: Yes, that’s so well said. And I would say in this particular space, so if you’re doing like, we deliver entire brands, right? The website, the collateral, the brand, the messaging copy, all of it, that particular set of deliverables would be almost impossible to do in a corporate setting because there are so many people that need to sign off on it. However, I’ve been advising people on this concept for years even before I focused on the small agencies and you can still apply the concept to all sorts of consulting and I’ve had a lot of students do
18:34 – 19:01
Pia Silva: that very effectively. So it could just be, and we have heard this, going in and doing the brand strategy workshop where at the end of 2 days you have clarity of your mission and your messaging and all of that, or coming in with any sort of consulting, the intensive model will just get you there faster. And as long as all of the decision makers are in the room, I don’t think it should matter if it’s corporate. But the deliverables would be different, obviously.
19:02 – 19:27
Rochelle Moulton: And I think a lot of us, I mean, we want to do things fast. We don’t want, and I’m talking about the practitioner, we do not want this to go on forever and ever and ever. Mostly it doesn’t serve us either. Those of us who are doing these services, I mean, I think of projects that I used to do when I was doing brand strategy, and I could tell when the client was going to drag it out, and I didn’t want to work with those people. Because I could feel it was just going to take months
19:27 – 19:38
Rochelle Moulton: because they couldn’t make a decision. And I don’t work well with hand wringers. And I know that about myself. So it’s, it’s, yeah, I think there’s more of us that want things to get done quickly than not.
19:38 – 20:12
Pia Silva: I completely agree. And I also think that there’s a desire to work with people who are able to make those decisions. And it’s on us as the practitioners to create an environment where making those decisions feels comfortable. So it’s 2 things. You have to find the right person and you have to deliver that safety for them. I always think of it because I have a young child and I read a lot of parenting books and there’s a lot of similarities between parenting children and working with clients. And I don’t mean that any disrespect, but it’s the
20:12 – 20:26
Pia Silva: same kind of thing. You have to give the person guardrails so they can relax into it. There have to be boundaries. If you don’t give boundaries then they’re going to go all over the place and they’re going to feel very unsafe. And when you’re unsafe, it’s very hard to make clear decisions that you feel good about.
20:26 – 20:30
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. And it reverts the practitioner into being essentially an order taker.
20:31 – 20:31
Pia Silva: Yes.
20:31 – 21:00
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, you want this? So you want that? It’s very, very different. But I didn’t want to lose sight of this idea that you started out with this idea of 3000 or 5000 for 2 days. And now when you do it, it’s at 40, 000. Can you just talk a little bit about like, how did you have the confidence at various stages to go, oh, this is worth more than $5, 000 now. What should we price it at? Like how did you get from 3 or 5 up to 40 or maybe more?
21:00 – 21:27
Pia Silva: Yeah, well, I didn’t realize that I could increase the price for at least 6 months. So that’s the first thing. I just left it at those prices. It was going so well, and we were doing so many of them. I was just, and I had been, you know, I had PTSD from being in debt. So I was so happy to have cash in the bank and not be in debt. I just took everything, right? But about 6 months later, we went on our first real vacation in such a long time. We went to Maui for 3
21:27 – 21:55
Pia Silva: weeks over Christmas and we read a lot of books and 1 of the books that I read was Rich Dad Poor Dad. Have you ever read Rich Dad Poor Dad? Yes, yeah I’ve read it. I love it. Yeah, it’s like 1 of my cornerstone books just because it made the light bulb go off about a lot of things, a lot of income producing assets. But 1 of the things for some reason that it made me realize was that I needed to figure out how much money we needed to make. And then I needed to figure out
21:55 – 22:26
Pia Silva: how much I needed to charge for these to make that money. And that I wanted to have more time available to build my business and my authority. And I wasn’t gonna have that time if I didn’t actually intentionally put it in my calendar. So that was in December and I calculated it. I said, if we bring in $20, 000 a month, then we, and we do that, we do 2 brand ups, They’re each $10, 000. We do those in 2 weeks. We will have 2 weeks a month to work on other stuff and not have to
22:26 – 22:56
Pia Silva: hustle all the time. And so I then began the process of just increasing the price. I basically just, I advise my students to do this too, sell and raise, sell, sell, raise. I mean, I had to build up my confidence in my own price. So I think it was worth that a lot earlier, but it’s only worth it if someone will pay for it. And somewhat, it’s going to be hard to charge something that you don’t feel confident in. But I had charged, I had been paid the 5, 000 for 2 days for so, for 6
22:56 – 23:26
Pia Silva: months, many, many times. So when it was $6, 000, that, you know, that wasn’t that scared of that. So then I made it 7, 000 and then I made it 75 and within 6 months it was 10 and I just kept doing that. I literally just kept doing that the whole way. At a certain point I raised it 5, 000 at a time. I think I published my book and like the next day I just added 5, 000 to the page. Because you’re an authority now. Exactly. And I would do it sometimes on a whim because
23:26 – 23:38
Pia Silva: I have access to our website. I would just change the price. And I remember 1 person hired us once because he goes, every time I look at your website, your price is higher. If I don’t hire you now, I’m not going to be able to afford you. I said, good, you should pay me right now. And he did.
23:39 – 23:58
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, my goodness. I love that. I love that. So did that keep working that way where you had like kind of 2 weeks on 2 weeks off, were you able to build that in? And are you still doing it that way? Or I know you’re also teaching. So you’ve got these 2 streams of revenue. So how do you make it work?
23:58 – 24:29
Pia Silva: Yeah. So what I got to, So as you raise your price, or this was my experience, at least, as I raised my price, we had fewer clients. And that was by design, right? So we weren’t necessarily looking to ever make more money than we planned. I teach this whole thing called the freedom calculator. It was always about, well, how much does our lifestyle cost? How much does our business cost? How much would our taxes be? And then I just work my way backwards from that number to figure out how much we need to generate in revenue.
24:29 – 24:58
Pia Silva: And so as we raise our prices, like let’s say, we got to 20, 000, 25, 000, then I was just trying to get 12 clients a year. And sometimes we would do 3 in a row and then we would go away for a month or 2, or we would just work on other things. I mean, that’s how I wrote my book. I took off 3 months to write my book. And what I did was I just would schedule the clients later. So there was 1 time in particular, this was actually very soon after that when, when
24:58 – 25:24
Pia Silva: we were charging about 10, 15, 000 each, I booked 5 in a row. No, it must’ve been charging 20. Okay. I booked 5 in a row. No, it must have been charging 20. Okay. I booked 5 in a row. It was a hustle. I’m not going to lie. We did 5 in a row over 5 weeks. We made a hundred thousand dollars and then we went to Europe for 2 months and we came home and didn’t work for another month. And the whole time we were there, I was just booking clients into like after those 3
25:24 – 25:52
Pia Silva: months and I didn’t even tell them we were away. I just said, that’s our next opening, which, you know, made it look even sexier. Like, I don’t have an availability until September. So, and they booked so that I knew I was on vacation and I knew I was coming back to that work. But I will tell you, it took, it wasn’t overnight. It took a lot of discipline to do that because you have to get rid of that initial scarcity mindset of, oh, well, a client needs it and they want it right now, so maybe I
25:52 – 26:05
Pia Silva: should just take it. What if another 1 doesn’t come? So it was a process and there were definitely times early on where we would block out the weeks because my husband’s an artist and we were looking for time for him to paint too. And we
26:05 – 26:06
Rochelle Moulton: would block out the weeks and
26:06 – 26:18
Pia Silva: then somebody would tell us that they wanted 1 and they’re in a rush and I would be like, come on, Steve, what are we going to say no to this? And sometimes we would say yes and sometimes we would say no. And it was tough for me because I
26:18 – 26:51
Rochelle Moulton: was like, well, we could push things around, right? So it was a process. Yeah. Well, I’m really intrigued by the freedom calculator because what that sounds like to me is it circles around this concept of enough that I’ve been thinking about and talking about for years, which is like, what’s kind of like, what’s your number? Like, what’s enough? And it’s not a number that keeps increasing. Right. It’s you figure out what enough is. And that’s what it sounds like. This is like, what you need to have freedom in your design of freedom, your definition of freedom.
26:52 – 27:20
Pia Silva: Yes, exactly. So what I do to kind of standardize it for people is I have this formula I wrote about in my book called the 50-25-25 rule. And it kind of came from that story about $20, 000 a month, 2 weeks, okay, and then I’ll have a week to work on the business and I’ll have a free week. And I can work on the business, you know, I can write a book or something during that, or I can do nothing. But that way I have that flexibility. And so that’s where this idea of 50, 25, 25,
27:20 – 27:49
Pia Silva: 50% of your time, you need to make all the revenue you need working with clients 50% of your time. So if you can calculate exactly how much revenue you need, So you cover taxes, so you cover your lifestyle and your business, and then you calculate 50% of your time and you figure out how long your projects generally take. I know that’s a sticky point, that’s a whole other conversation, but if you generally have an idea of how long projects can take, It’s easier in the intensive model, by the way, because, you know, I think in days,
27:49 – 28:20
Pia Silva: not over time, spread out. So that’s also why I made this whole thing easier. But if you have those couple of numbers, the answer is simple. Like this is this is how much you need to charge. And you need to get that many clients. Okay, so I just need, like I said, 12 clients at $20, 000 each. At that point, it was even less than 50% of my time. And, you know, I always encourage people to have a good, better, best number. So what’s the good number? That’s just everything’s fine, right? And I always wanna know
28:20 – 28:49
Pia Silva: that number because we all have money mindset issues. Like if you’re freaking out, you wanna know, wait, am I covered? Okay, we’re covered. And then better is, okay, we’re covered, but we’re living the life that we want. And then best is the stretch. And I find that it really has more to do with can you command the certain price points at those 3 levels and still get the number of clients that you need. And at that point, you can make the decision As I continue to increase my prices, do I keep working with the same number
28:49 – 29:19
Pia Silva: of clients or do I work with fewer because I value time and freedom? And so that’s how I’m getting paid. I’m getting paid an extra time. And actually there’s a part in the freedom calculator that’s called profit in hours. So it calculates automatically how much time you’ve generated because of how profitable you are above and beyond the 50% of your time that’s available. I’m starting to get very numbery so sorry. The point is like you can work even less and you know you made more money it’s just in hours.
29:20 – 29:51
Rochelle Moulton: Well and that’s what you can do when you figure out how to package and or price your services right. I mean it’s packaging it in a way that your audience sees it as valuable relative to the transformations you’re creating for them. So it’s kind of like you’re doing both. Like you’re figuring out, all right, what’s my number? How much time do I have? And if you do that and you’re looking at the business that you have and you’re not there yet, That’s when you know you have to tighten up something or provide more value or maybe
29:51 – 29:56
Rochelle Moulton: you’re doing the value, but your authority just isn’t high enough. People aren’t trusting you yet.
29:56 – 30:22
Pia Silva: Yes, right. Exactly. You can troubleshoot it because you now see what it how far you are from where you need to be to have this life. And there’s so many places you can, like threads you can pull on. You just named a whole bunch of them. You can also look at your lifestyle and say, maybe I don’t need that thing, right? I mean, there’s so many ways to play with it. And that’s what I like. I like a nice puzzle. So to me, I think that’s why I gravitated to this. It’s just numbers and you can
30:22 – 30:39
Pia Silva: kind of move them around to make it work. But now you have control over it. Whereas before I kind of realized all of this, It was just like, how much can I charge? I need as many clients as I can. Like, how do I do this? Right? Like, just, just always in scarcity because it was never enough.
30:39 – 31:06
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. And I just love the story about taking off to Europe for a while and telling people, you know, you’ll be available in a few months. I mean, I want people to think about that. If you’re not where you’re at right now, think about that as not just the dream, but the achievable dream that you could get to. So Pia, now you’ve done that in your business. At what point did you say, I wanna teach other people like me to do what we’ve done? When did that happen?
31:07 – 31:38
Pia Silva: Yeah. Well, I think it was partially sparked also by that Rich Dad Poor Dad book because he talks about real estate, but it was really the idea of an income producing asset. And we went all around thinking about what this product was going to be. And then it kind of came back to the some sort of course. So I’ve done every sort of iteration of a course at this point, I made 1 so we could have it on the side. And of course it like took over after years because I didn’t realize until a good year
31:38 – 32:09
Pia Silva: into it that I had started a new business with this course. Surprise. Yeah, surprise. I thought it was just, oh, this is just the lower tier of what we’re selling because for people who can’t afford us, they can buy this course. Like that’s not how it works. PSA to everyone. That’s not how it works at all. But that was the impetus. And then after I wrote my book, I mean, it’s called Badass Your Brand. It was supposed to be to get me clients from our agency, and it did. And anyone who read my book and called
32:09 – 32:39
Pia Silva: me up interested in hiring us, hired us. Like there was no sales process. If you read my book and you wanted to hire us, I didn’t have to do anything for that, which was amazing. But the other thing that happened that was interesting that I was not expecting was how many small agencies, just like ours, read the book and said, okay, but how do you do that? How do you do this intensive? Like, because I don’t cover it that much. I kind of breeze by it because that’s not really what I was focusing on. And I
32:39 – 33:10
Pia Silva: got that message loud and clear in 2018 when I actually spoke at somebody else’s conference in front of a bunch of agency owners. And a bunch of people were like, when are you going to teach that? And it took me almost 2 and a half years to realize, it was actually, you know, during COVID, it was about like 9 months into COVID. It was like, what is the thing that I have that nobody else has? And it all kind of came together. And I mean, I deleted 10, 000 people off my list. I like went all
33:10 – 33:40
Pia Silva: in on this brand and it was a big bet. I just realized, listen, there are enough people out there and I think this would really help them. And it’s something that I, it’s like in my bones, like I’ve done it. I feel, you know, I know how to do this thing and I feel like nobody else has it. Not that nobody else has, of course, like productizing your services or selling strategy, but kind of just our whole model. I feel like I really made something and because I made it, obviously pulling from lessons and books and
33:40 – 34:16
Pia Silva: I mean, tons of coaches and consultants, all the little pieces, but I felt like I made it myself. I didn’t like do it from someone else. So it felt like something that I had to create to teach other people. And it’s been not just really fun to work with so many people, but it’s been a really personal satisfying journey having to explain all the details of this process because when you do something well, you’re not necessarily conscious of all the things, but when you’re teaching it you have to really articulate what’s going on and why. And
34:16 – 34:47
Pia Silva: so then I’ve just learned all these other things that I didn’t really realize about, like human psychology and leadership and confidence and how to lead someone to a decision, a meaningful decision that’s gonna benefit them in a graceful way, but still boundary. Like so many things. I had to just, I learned so much by that. I mean, I can’t wait to someday write a book about that. But it’s been really fun personally to just like learn all of these things and kind of develop new philosophies and theories on it. So,
34:47 – 35:22
Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, it’s like you’re translating your genius because you do things you don’t even think about because they’re instinctive in how you deliver. Right. And then you have to figure out a way to explain that to somebody who doesn’t have that particular innate genius. I mean, the translation is the piece. But I have to go back to what you said that you deleted 10, 000 people off your mailing list. I felt like I heard a collective gasp to anybody who was listening to this. And I just, I love that. I mean, that’s staking a claim, right?
35:22 – 35:30
Rochelle Moulton: To where you want to go to the revolution that you’ve created on this no BS agency model. I mean, you were all in.
35:30 – 36:03
Pia Silva: I was all in. I had a vision and I just felt like I cannot dip my toe in this. I need to go, go big or go home. And this is something that I have advised so many people on. And I just felt like this is not going to get where I want it to go as quickly I’m ever the impatient entrepreneur. I want this to go. It’s never fast enough, right? So it’s definitely not going to go as fast as I want if I’m, you know, towing the line and the messaging is confusing and I’m
36:03 – 36:34
Pia Silva: not being super specific. It’s just gonna take so much longer and it’s gonna be so much harder. And so yeah, I had to make that decision and it was scary. But like Very soon after when I made the offer and launched it, it was clear because every decision I made after that messaging, emails, all my posts and social media and all the things, it was so easy because it was just so clear who I was talking to and it was so clear what I was telling them and I didn’t have to mince words and I didn’t
36:34 – 36:48
Pia Silva: have to, you know, be worried about saying something so specific that I would turn somebody off. It was like, no, be specific. And I immediately got the feedback like, whoa, it’s like you’re reading my mind. So yeah, it was really powerful. Scary, but it was powerful.
36:49 – 36:56
Rochelle Moulton: Well, so now are you still doing the other work or has your business really totally morphed into this teaching coaching?
36:57 – 37:28
Pia Silva: Yeah, so I have taken a select group of clients over the years since I started this, but it’s not my focus and I don’t market it anymore. So it’s really people who just have, you know, referrals that have come to me or once in a while somebody that reads our book, but I actually don’t, I try not to do, I do like 1 or 2 a year to stay fresh. But I generally don’t want to because this community and this program, like I give it my all and even like I just said, you know, all of
37:28 – 37:56
Pia Silva: this exploration of how all of this works and explaining it. I’m going through now already, it’s only been 3 years. The second iteration of that were now that I’ve made all these lessons, I actually brought a learning designer on to dissect the whole thing and cut it up and put it back together and re-film things so that it’s even tighter and like even clearer like the second round time around. So, you know, just a lot of it’s there’s always there’s always things to do to make it better. And that’s got to be my focus.
37:57 – 38:07
Rochelle Moulton: I love the focus though. I see it. I see it in your website. I see it on your podcast, the names of the episodes, the way you describe it. It’s very clear who your audience is and what your voice is.
38:07 – 38:08
Pia Silva: Thank you.
38:08 – 38:26
Rochelle Moulton: So I love that. And if anybody’s looking for some of this information, you’re going to want to listen to her podcast, among other things. So just 1 last question, Pia, If you could go back to who you were when you started your business, even though you weren’t sure you were starting your business, what’s the 1 thing that you would advise her to do?
38:28 – 38:59
Pia Silva: Oh man, I wish I’d gotten a business coach immediately. I just, I also didn’t even know if that was a, I didn’t know that was a thing then. I didn’t know networking was a thing. I didn’t know business coaches were a thing. I was really in the dark here. Absolutely. Like I failed my way into so many things and I could have gotten so much farther, so much faster. If I think back, I probably got my first business coach like maybe a year and a half, 2 years in. The seeds that were planted with those people
38:59 – 39:17
Pia Silva: are still, I still feel the repercussions of them today. So, you know, I could have saved myself some time if I had done it a lot earlier. And frankly, if I had known, I don’t know if I, I don’t know if I, I mean, I must have encountered business coaches, but I don’t know if it even occurred to me at the time.
39:17 – 39:25
Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, and a lot of people go, oh, I don’t know, I only have so much money to spend on things. Do I really want to spend it on a business coach? But sometimes it can be the right expense.
39:26 – 39:30
Pia Silva: I will say it is not any business coach, right?
39:30 – 39:31
Rochelle Moulton: True, true,
39:31 – 40:00
Pia Silva: very true. Careful, And that’s a challenge when you’re first starting because it’s hard. You don’t know what you don’t know. So you don’t know how to be discerning about who you should work with. And maybe actually at the time, there really weren’t. I don’t think there were really online courses. I probably would have taken online courses. I would have been very self-study motivated because that’s a very cost-effective way to do it. In fact, my little cousin wanted to go into social media marketing and I just sent her all the social media marketing influencers on Instagram. I
40:00 – 40:10
Pia Silva: was like, go buy all their courses and just do everything they say as quickly as possible. You need to just absorb all of this information. So yeah, that’s that would be my advice to my younger self.
40:11 – 40:21
Rochelle Moulton: Love it. Love it. Well, we’re going to be putting all sorts of links to the content that we’ve talked about in the show notes, but where’s the best place for people to learn more about you and what you do?
40:22 – 40:33
Pia Silva: Probably the best places, Instagram. I’m at Pia loves your biz. That’s BIZ because I truly do. And yeah, or no BS agencies.com.
40:35 – 40:53
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. Pia, thank you so much, not just for your energy and enthusiasm about all this, but telling us some of the story behind what looks So easy now. Right. But you know, you had your challenges getting there. And I really appreciate your transparency about that.
40:53 – 40:56
Pia Silva: Oh, thank you so much, Rochelle. It’s been my pleasure.
40:57 – 41:01
Rochelle Moulton: OK, so that’s it for this episode. I hope you’ll Join us next time for Soloist Women.
