INTRODUCING THE 3 STAGES OF BUSINESS

I have been working with HR Professionals since 2013 to help them to

~ Start their businesses

~ Find their first clients

~ Create offers that sell

~ Introduce recurring income streams

~ Design successful sales and marketing strategies

~ Find ways to scale their businesses when they hit their growth capacity.

Over that time I have seen the same three stages repeated over and over again – no matter what experience someone has or what sector they have previously worked in or what kind of business they want to build.

STAGE 1 – STARTING YOUR BUSINESS

Broadly speaking you are in this stage from the day you start your business until approximately the end of the first year. A lot of Businesses never make it out of this stage – either they never launch at all or they wither on the vine of ‘this was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be’ muttered on the dash back to the jobs boards.

This stage is messy, scary, full of new challenges that make the thought of ever getting back to your comfort zone feel like a crazy dream.  You find resources and inner resilience that you never realised you had.  You say yes to clients and projects you know you should run a mile from but you do it anyway.  You work more hours than you would ever have agreed to in your (already too busy) Corporate role and get paid amounts that would have made you weep or laugh hysterically if your employer had suggested them.

You make mistakes, you feel despair, you wonder why you ever though this was a good idea – you think about giving up at least twice a week…

BUT….

You want it.  You can see the possibilities, you know that if you can just figure it out then the rewards will be incredible, you are so proud of the progress you have made, you want to make a difference, you can’t bear the idea of going back to the Corporate chokehold you have just managed to escape from.  You love HR, you have enjoyed your career so far but you don’t want the next 15 – 20 years to be the same as the last 15 or 20 years. You want to build something and make it great.  You want to make a real difference to your clients.

And if you are up for it – we can help you to do it!

15 TINY TASKS TO START YOUR HR CONSULTANCY BUSINESS (A free email mini course)

FIND YOUR FIRST CLIENT BEFORE YOU START YOUR BUSINESS (A 90 minute 1 to 1 Strategic Planning Session)

You did it!  You made it through that first year in Business when so many Businesses fall by the wayside – but not yours.  You have clients, you have worked on projects, you have gotten to grips with marketing and learned to hate sales a bit less than you used to. You have made money – not enough – but you have proved to yourself that people will actually pay you for the information in your head. You have learned a tonne of new skills, failed to learn another tonne of them, made mistakes and got past it, survived countless crisis of confidence, tried loads of things that didn’t work and some that did, become part of new communities, made friends for life among the business communities that this time last year you didn’t even know existed.

But goodness – it has been an exhausting process and you really need things to stabilse a bit.  After all – you can only live on your last nerve for so long!

Now you are at the stage where you want more financial stability, you want to work less hours but bring in more income.  You are less excited by the variety of lots of short term projects and more interested in finding ways to build longer term ongoing relationships with clients.  You are definitely not going to continue to take on low end, low income projects that take up your time but prevent you from bringing in the income you know you can achieve. You have learned what clients you do and don’t want to work with and the type of work you do and don’t want to do and you are much more confident about saying no to things that are wrong for you.

This year you want to reclaim your time, get some of that flexibility that was such a big part of your initial reason for starting a business in the first place, make more money and establish recurring income streams so that you are not continually worrying about where the next client is coming from.

And we can help you to do that!

FINDING HR RETAINER CLIENTS (a 90 minute 1 to 1 Strategic Planning Session)

People can find themselves here at any point but it is usually a stage you get to between 2 and 5 years after starting your business. You are established, you have clients you have worked with on an ongoing basis, you are making good money, you are fully booked and you are confident that even if some of your clients decided to stop working with you that you would be able to find new ones.  You have achieved and even exceeded your initial goals for your business – if you could go back in time to the Stage 1 version of you and show them what you have accomplished then they would be totally blown away by it.

BUT…

You are totally maxed out.  You have no more capacity to deliver and you are having to turn away projects and opportunities that you would love to take on because you know that you can’t do them justice.  You are still undercharging even though you have put up your rates a lot in the past few years. You are still providing services that bore you to tears (even though it makes you feel incredibly guilty to feel that way about them).

You have built a business that is totally reliant on you being able to deliver the services and you know that is a risky business proposition.  But your clients have signed on because of their relationship with you.  Because they trust you, because you made promises to them.

You need help but you have huge amounts of resistance to the idea of employing people (the vast majority of HR people I work with want nothing to do with employing people which is hilarious when you think about it!).  You want to continue to grow and develop your business but you are worried about over extending yourself and putting all of your achievements at risk,

You need a new plan

And we can help you with that!