Now, are you ready to get to work making more money? I expect you are!

So here goes…you may not make money this year the same way you made it last year. In fact, if you want to make more money this year than you did last year, you are likely going to have to do it a lot differently. Said a different way, you can’t keep doing the same thing, and expect different results. 

As business owners we are so close to our businesses. We have our nose to the grindstone and it’s hard to pull back the lens to see different ways of doing things. So I brainstormed a big list of the most effective ways that I’ve seen business owners increase their income (in no particular order).

19 Ways to Make More Money

1. Raise prices.
2. Extend the life of existing client relationships.
3. Close a higher percentage of the deals you pitch on.
4. Market to clients who can pay more, who have scarier, more valuable problems or more significant opportunities that they don’t want to miss.
5. Value price your services instead of charging hourly.
6. Add on an ancillary service offering (“Do you want fries with that?”).
7. Productize the most consistent, repetitive pieces of your service so that you can sell them on your website with no sales interaction.
8. Develop strategic partners who sell to the same client as you do. 
9. Outsource more of your job (to a VA, or assistant, or your team — get it off of your plate!).
10. Outsource more of your team’s jobs (have a more flexible cost structure).
11. Buy a building to house your offices (or go virtual and eliminate your office costs).
12. List your clients from the highest customer lifetime value to the lowest customer lifetime value and fire the bottom 1/3. Only take on new clients in the top 10% or customers like them.
13. Develop unique intellectual property (do original research, write a book, etc.) that sets you apart from competitors and substitutes.
14. Create systems to automate repetitive work for you and your team members.
15. Build an audience (email list, podcast/youtube subscribers, etc.) that is similar to your ideal client. Sell them on your unique intellectual property.
16. Co-create content with another business or individual who’s audience is similar to yours.
17. Hire better people onto your team who can take on more with less supervision. Bonus: They will make you even more money if they know things that you don’t!
18. Create intellectual property off your expertise that you can sell as a product (book, course, seminar, etc.). 
19. Work to become a better manager so that you can get more out of the team you have.

Note that none of these were similar to “reduce costs.” Yes, you can reduce costs, but it’s not going to have that big a return on investment. If you develop a strategic partnership to grow your business 5% each year for the next five years, that’s going to be worth 10X what you could save by switching credit card processors. 

What did I miss? What can you think of that’s not on the list?

Your Assignment

Remember how I got you all fired up and gained clarity on your goal to make more money? We want to continue that type of clarity around the how. Do not run off and try 15 of the things on the list. Instead, stop and decide which 1 – 3 of those ideas are particularly attractive to you. Hit reply and let me know which ones you are thinking about and I’ll dive more deeply into the most popular ones over the next couple of weeks.

Remember, you have limits, and your business can only absorb so much change at once. What are the 1 – 3 of these things (or something else not listed here) that you want to do to make more money in 2019?