When You Want To Punch Through A Revenue Plateau

When you’re running an expertise business, there will come a time when your revenue plateaus, hovering around the same number year after year.

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 if you’re getting frustrated with a three, four or even seven year income plateau, you know it’s time to take some action.

The thing is, you might be thinking the only way to break through that plateau is to do something big: change your niche, 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, intentional 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 re-thinking your lower-end pricing.

Maintain your pricing on a low touch option (like products or low maintenance productized services) and invest some time building your pipeline 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?

p.s. If you want some focused 1-1 help punching through your revenue plateau, I have 3  2 QuickStart spots in March (you’ll find the details here). Think short engagement focused on fast, tangible revenue growth.