I considered going online with my services for many years before I finally did. After much planning and studying in advance, when I finally made the move to build out my online business I learned that there were so many misconceptions I had before I got started.
Things I completely misunderstood when it comes to what’s involved (and what’s not involved) when offering your expertise online to build a healthy, sustainable business.
Things I learned like:
I'll unpack all of these myths and misconceptions in more detail in future articles, but for now I share these with you because I want you to know that if you are a small business owner or a service provider that has monetized your skills, it's very likely that you already ⭐ have everything ⭐ you need to be successful in this space.
Not only do you have what you need, but I'm here to tell you 3 key reasons why it's very worth your while to pursue in your small business.
The opportunity has so much potential to be life changing, and if anyone should experience these life changing results—it’s small business owners.
Why?
Because small business owners are the lifeblood of our economy. They’re consistently the most passionate and committed people you’ll meet - yet most small businesses survive on paper thin profit margins.
You deserve to earn revenue that reflects the impact you have on the world. 🌎
Typical service-based business models aren’t designed for profit maximization. The limits of the design are built in, and a traditional service-based business model is not designed to scale - meaning that they will always require more overhead, team members and expenses to grow.
In that same effort to grow, the things that most service-based businesses do to be “competitive” (like competing on price or investing time and resources into social media trends) is the opposite of what they need to grow.
With that in mind, let’s talk about 3 reasons you need to seriously consider incorporating digital assets in your service-based small business.
1. Freedom of Time
Aside from your health, your most valuable assets in business (and life) are your time, creativity and attention. No matter how you view it, in order for you to maximize your revenue and your time here on earth you need to fiercely guard and prioritize these. You need to spend them wisely.
When people decide to become an entrepreneur and business owner, most do because it comes with this image and idea that freedom of time will be on the other side. The way that hustle culture paints the picture, we're told that if you just invest and sacrifice now, in a few short years you'll be living the entrepreneurial dream with freedom of time, full control over your outcomes, enjoying independence and being your own boss.
But…
The truth when you look at the data, is that instead of working towards a life of freedom the vast majority of brick and mortar small business owners buy themselves a a very intensive and demanding job. One that is not nearly as glamourous as "entrepreneur" sounds. 😲
“An entrepreneur is someone who will work 80 hour weeks to avoid working 40.”
This quote beautifully glamorizes hustle-culture. This idea that the only thing holding you back is not working hard enough upfront. That if you *just* put in those hours now you’ll build your business and life on your own terms.
But this catchy quote leaves out the very important fact that the majority of small business owners never get out of those 80 hour weeks. On average, small business owners work double the hours of their employees (but with the added bonus of carrying the high levels of responsibility and financial risk involved for the business).
1 in 4 small business owners work over 60 hours per week even after operating for 10 years
and less than 30% have time and resources to strategically grow their businesses
When calculating the effective hourly rate of small business owners, the hourly rate is often less than their employees when you factor in the long hours and investment required.
Yes, *some* entrepreneurs reach that big payoff where the hard work pays off. But the majority do not. Whether it’s due to depleted time or resources, it’s safe to say there is something missing in the system.
The traditional service-based business model is limited by design because it always involves exchanging time and resources for revenue. Whether that's your own time, or someone you compensate - the limits of the design remain in place.
Now, enter digital assets…
What if you could hire an employee to your team that could work 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and serve a limitless volume of people.
What would happen in your business (or life) if you could hire someone to work 400 hours per week entirely on automation to generate revenue. How many people could you help? How many people would hear your core message and mission?
...now, what if there could be 10 employees, working without limits all at once?
This sounds like a fantasy but this is what’s happening when you are effectively leveraging digital assets. Digital assets are the only thing that have these unique capabilities when it comes to volume and automation.
They are the only channel that allows you to productize your highest-impact work, and offer it in a highly-automated system to multiply the reach, speed and efficiency with which you can share it.
Sound worth your while to incorporate?
Now, onto the 2nd reason your small business needs digital assets...
2. Lean into scalability
In a traditional service-based business model, growing your business and revenue requires adding resources. In other words, if you want your revenue to grow, your expenses need to grow as well. 📈📈
In my brick and mortar business for example (which is a typical service-based model) in order for us to welcome more clients, we have to bring on more team members, more space and equipment to support providing their services. We need to increase staff to support the experience of our customers and team, which means we need to increase training and development for all of them as well.
No matter how smart you are with your offers and systems, no matter how you grow revenue and limit expenses—as your revenue grows, the expenses and time ⏰ required grows along with it.
This is how most service-based small businesses grow their businesses. Adding locations, offering more services and growing their team. The numbers increase, but the profit margin relatively stays the same.
Digital assets allow you to lean into scalability.
Scaling your business is when you can increase your revenue but without matching that increased revenue in expenses and resources invested. For example, if I build out a high-value self-study digital asset to share with the world, I do invest resources and time into creating and developing it. (There’s no such thing as making money for free, be wary of anyone who tells you otherwise.)
But once I have built out this program, and the systems to effectively deliver it as part of my business, it will continue to generate revenue while the time and resources and expenses don’t grow. Whether I have 10 people who join or 1000 - my expenses and time invested stay relatively the same. I might add some support staff as things grow further, but at a fraction of the rate that it grows.
I have many digital assets and programs that I produced for my brick and mortar business years ago that are still running and generating revenue years later without needing further investment. With every month and year that those continue to grow in lifetime revenue, aside from if I decide to run ad campaigns my expenses and the resources invested stay relatively the same.
Experiencing this scalability has been one of the most rewarding and exciting things about adding a digital arm to my local business. The rapid growth in revenue without the associated expenses has provided support and security for all areas of my entire business, the ways I can support my team, plan for further growth.
This perspective shift has created one of the most empowering seasons for me as a business owner - one that I hope all small business owners can lean into to see what's possible.
...Now, ready for reason number 3?
3. Future reality for small business
Small business owners are deeply passionate and committed to what they do. 🔥 I get it. I am with you. High-quality is everything, it’s what you've built your reputation on and this is your life’s work.
When offering digital assets in your business, it does not mean that you have to lower this quality.
Yes, there will be things that change in aspects of your delivery. There will be things that you offer in-person that you’ll never offer online.
But there are many things that you can leverage digitally if you are a local service-based business.
Just like each small business is unique, there’s no one way to leverage digital assets. It’s entirely customizable to what feels right to you, and your business. Your digital business will be as unique as your local brick and mortar or service based business is.
What I find can make digital business overwhelming for some brick and mortar business owners, is all of the platforms, tech and automations.
But with all of these new elements - don’t forget that this is a channel that will still serve human beings, just like those you already do. The medium might influence the method or the delivery - but the message and service at its core will stay the same.
🤔 You may also think that you want to offer only in-person because you want your customers to have a great experience and are worried that digital systems will limit how well you can serve your people.
When your customers reach out to you for help and services, how helpful is it to them if they can receive your help and guidance almost instantly? There are many situations when consumers prefer digital offerings to in-person as they offer a high-quality and convenient experience. This instant service helps them to gain valuable support from you, and can be designed in a way that offers further opportunity for them to book that personal live service with you in the future.
⚡️Think of how quickly we've all grown accustomed to receiving customer care, online orders, and answers to our questions?
The reality is that this is not only what people accept as a new norm, but in many cases how people prefer being served...
When the norm was to travel using horse and cart instead of car, the famous Henry Ford quote (there's much dispute whether or not he said it, but much that says he agrees with it) says, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
As service-based small business owners we invest so much time and energy to developing efficient and healthy businesses. All of our hard work is in an effort to improve...but what if our perspective is limited by design?
If we are busy working hard to develop "faster horses" we may be missing an entirely new realm of possibilities that are available to us.
To clearly see all of the possibilities in doing something in an entirely different way.
Offering digital assets through automation is not about removing the humans from your business, it’s about amplifying them.
Incorporating digital assets into your business is about finding the high-impact, high-leverage work that you can share in this way that will deliver an outstanding experience for your customers and huge results for you. Results that allow you to further serve and impact more people on a larger scale.
There are 4 strategic categories of digital assets you can leverage in your small business today. Get the detailed summary inside the free Go Global Starter Guide below:
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