The Thoughts And Ideas Of The Efficiency Coach

Ha, I bet that headline caught your eye… It’s what many scams, pyramid schemes and networking marketing schemes use to entice you to read their marketing materials. Some of you may remember that I’ve blogged before on the subject of get rich quick schemes. But, enough about scams et al, in today’s blog post, I wanted to talk about this magical six figure income – that is deemed to be a universally motivating salary. Like many people, I thought the ‘six figure income’ was a number quoted by (potentially slightly less than honest) internet marketing folk to entice people in, because it was a good solid round number.

Since being in business almost a year – our first birthday is on the 13^th March, I’ve discovered another reason for quoting the ‘six figure income’. As a small business owner, a personal salary of over six figures is very hard to achieve. Yes, a bit of a reality check for all those of you who think independent coaches, consultants or trainers earn massive amounts of money for what we do!

I’ll explain a little more… Many professionals who start up a professional practice use a solely time based business model. Whilst there is nothing wrong with this business model, the only way to earn more than a personal six figure income is to bolt on more fee earning members of staff. My reasoning? To earn top dollar, you must spend a considerable amount of effort on marketing your business. This time spent marketing in your business is non-chargeable… unless you have a service offering which lends itself to recurring annual work, such as accountancy, you are extremely limited in the amount of recurring work you will receive. If you do the maths, by the time you have completed all your marketing and networking to gain a 50+% utilisation rate, you don’t have enough time left to do the work.

So, if you don’t want to hire more staff, how do you as a small business person achieve the magical £100k+ annual salary?

The first solution is to value-price your work, so that you are billing proportionate to the value you bring. This, in itself, may be half the solution to raising your earning potential over the £100k mark.

The second solution is to add some products into your mix. If you are a training provider or a coach, think about offering some open programmes, teleseminars or on-line training programmes. If you are a consultant, think about offering some products in a box – for example, the start-up business guide to marketing. If you are a lawyer, how about some standard templates, e.g. terms and conditions?

What’s your personal solution to breaking the six figure salary barrier?

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