3 Reasons You’re Not Making Consistent Money in Your Business

Does your business have more peaks and troughs than a rollercoaster? Just when you think you’re hitting your stride, you plummet into another dry month.

Not know how much money is coming in each month is really stressful.

Will you be able to afford a holiday this year? Maybe things are bad enough that you worry about making your mortgage payments.

Do you wish you were making more consistent money in your business?

Here are the 3 main reasons your earnings may be inconsistent:

1.      You’re not talking to your next customer

I know what it’s like – some months you’re so busy delivering that you don’t have time to do any marketing. All your good intentions of reaching out to your customers are drowned in a sea of work. But then, when you have a chance to catch your breath, you find that there’s no more work coming down the pipeline.

Consistency is key.

So, why not book slots in your diary each week specifically for working on your pipeline. Let people know that you’re ‘now booking for September onwards’ and encourage them to get in touch.

If you do this consistently each month, not only will you be better able to predict your income, you won’t be tempted to overbook yourself this month in case nothing turns up next month.

2.      things take longer than you expect

We all tend to underestimate how long things will take, but do you know how much? One of my Business Strategy Pitstop clients sold her time in packages of 10 hours, but when she analysed her time she realised that she was often taking 15-20 hours to do the work.

So, do yourself a favour and record your time. All of it. There are some great tools out there that make it easy (try something like Toggl). Then after a few weeks, look back and see – are you being realistic about how long things take you? If not, you won’t be charging properly for your time. Which brings us onto…

3.      You don’t know where you earn the most money

You don’t want to find that all your hard work is resulting in a really low £ per hour. It’s pretty disheartening.

So, you need to know how much money you earn from each of your products or services, per hour that you spend on them. This can take a bit of time to work out, but it’s absolutely vital to know.

Step 1 –

Work out how much you make from each service that you offer.

Step 2 –

Track how much time you really spend delivering that service, including preparation and follow-up.

Step 3 –

Once you’re really clear on how much you earn per hour for each service, make some decisions:

• • • • • Focus your marketing on the services that earn you the most £ per hour
        • Consider putting up your prices, where the £ per hour makes your heart sink
        • Stop doing some things
        • Think about ways you could tweak your services so that they take less time. Putting new systems in place can be a real winner here eg an automated onboarding email sequence, rather than you sending individual emails each time. Or, recording a video explainer to send to clients rather than explaining the same thing 1:1 to each person.
        • Develop some new services that earn you a better return for your time. Could you adapt any of your offerings to be evergreen, for example?

Free resources to help

If this is something that would benefit your business, I have a free Quiz that you can take. Your results are followed up with emails detailing how to do this, step-by-step.

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