Rebecca is a talented interior designer, but lacks the time management tips and savvy to claim the success she deserves. She’s made a beautiful difference to many clients over the last decade. Her frustration is that her business growth seems to have plateaued and she’s stuck spinning her wheels and not moving forward. Her time management is a real challenge and productivity leads to profitability.
She keenly feels the trap of the revenue roller coaster, that uncomfortable endless loop caused by marketing to get business in the door, then stopping all marketing to deliver services to the clients you got. Then wrapping those agreements up and finding an empty pipeline and diving back into marketing to start the loop again. It’s incredibly common with interior designers and it is the fast path to burnout.
There are just 3 Secrets to implement that will put you into profitable and productive with a full pipeline and get you off the revenue roller coaster for good. These secrets and time management tips will help your reclaim time and enjoy greater success.
Problem #1 ~ Every clients needs a customized proposal and it takes you hours to create this every time so you stall and hot leads go warm, and warm leads to cold.
Solution #1 ~ Template Your Agreement ~ (Time Management Tip: The faster you get proposals out the door, the faster money comes in.)
I’ve always worked off a master agreement that has every imaginable clause in it. For every client I create a personalized letter, and then pick and choose which clauses to keep that apply to what we discussed. This can apply to scope of services too. You can have a bullet point or paragraph for each deliverable and keep what’s relevant and dump what isn’t. This will effectively reduce the time it takes to put together a proposal from hours to 30 minutes.
Yes, creating the master agreement the first time, may take you a couple of hours, the more thorough you are, the less time it will require on an ongoing basis. Rebecca is working toward this. When we spoke she had three clients all awaiting proposals and she’d been stalling. In her case, simply applying a deadline and accountability did the trick and within 36 hours, she had all three proposals out the door with 7 day deadlines so she’d either get the client’s approval or refusal and move forward.
Problem #2 ~ Every marketing effort requires creating new materials, presentations, and copy.
Solution #2 ~ Template Your Marketing ~ (Time Management Tip: Reinventing the wheel every time you market is exhausting and wastes a lot of time, create an engine that runs for you.)
Rebecca often gets her best clients when speaking at events, but she has to create a new presentation every time. That’s a lot of hard and unnecessary work. Instead, she’s now putting together just two signature talks, one with a title that delivers a reward (3 Simple Secrets . . .) and one with a title that promises to remove pain (3 Massive Mistakes . . . ) She’ll have a one sheet for each topic complete with a synopsis and bullet points ready to go at the push of an email button.
These will also already have any necessary powerpoint presentation complete, handouts ready to go, and she’ll know clearly the offer she’s making. So much simpler than having to go into creation mode for every opportunity.
Problem #3 ~ No Metrics in Place. You aren’t tracking anything except revenue numbers so you have no idea how you are doing at any given time.
Solution #3 ~ Measure Your Efforts ~ (Time Management Tip: You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly metrics ensure growth and show you stalls before they happen.)
Rebecca has no metrics in place. She isn’t keeping track of how many events she has lined up, how many connections she is making at each event, how many connections are moving to conversations, how many proposals she is generating, and how many new clients are coming on board.
Keeping track of these numbers and checking them daily will give her an instant snapshot (and you when you follow this discipline) of exactly where she is in generating revenue at any given moment. She’ll be able to see the slow downs before they become stalls and the gaps before they become gaping holes in her business generation.
BONUS! Accountability to hold your feet to the fire and get work out the door. (Time Management Tip: Accountability keeps you on track and saves you time in deadlines met and expectations exceeded.)
This is perhaps the greatest key for many service based small business owners and professionals. We often fail to meet our own deadlines but when faced with having to tell someone else that we didn’t get it done, we will develop the “get it done now” muscle. Rebecca got more done within 36 hours of our first coaching conversation than she had in the previous three weeks.
Knowing WHAT TO DO, knowing HOW TO DO IT, knowing the IMPACT IT WILL HAVE, and having a mentor HOLD YOU ACCOUNTABLE can take you from stuck and stalled to soaring in no time.
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COMMENTS WELCOME, will you apply the strategies here?
