Want to change niche, industry or services? Do this first
Are you feeling stuck in your business because you want to make a big change like changing your niche, changing industry or the services that you offer but don't know how to go about this?
Then you're not alone.
Some of the clients I have worked with wanted to make a huge change in their business like the ones I mentioned above but did not know how to.
As the result, I have often seen (and experienced this myself several times) that they get stuck in a circle of not taking action. When you no longer want to offer a certain service or work with a specific industry you stop promoting this. This usually means that you stop creating content, stop being visible and don't want to take on any clients from the service or industry you are so fed up with.
But because you either have not decided what this new service needs to look like or how to reach the niche/industry you want to work with, you also don't know yet what content to write.
So you do nothing but serve the clients you currently have.
You'll probably get increasingly frustrated by these clients because you really don't want to work with them anymore but are also not getting any new clients in. Or at least not those you dream of working with because they don't even know you're looking to serve them.
The thing is (and I learned this the hard way when I wanted to stop offering brand and website design and focus on brand strategy) that you can't just stop offering your services or not take on new clients from the niche or industry that your working with without having a plan in place.
A plan that will allow you to transition from one thing to the next, without your business and revenue coming to a standstill. A plan that will tell you exactly what you need to do and in which order to do this.
So let's look at; how to (and why you need to) create an action plan that will allow you to pivot your business when you want to change your niche, change industry or the services that you offer
In this blog, we'll get into:
How to (and why you need to) create an action plan that will allow you to pivot your business when you want to change your niche, change your industry or the services that you offer
Step 1: Know where your revenue came from so that you can set your future targets
Step 2: Evaluate your services and create a lead generation plan to reach your target revenue
Why you need to create an action plan.
You might be rolling your eyes at me here because if you knew what steps to take you would have done them right?
But I can't stress this step enough. Often when making big changes like this that should not only help you with getting your motivation back but also have a positive impact on your revenue, the first thing most business owners want to do is jump into marketing.
But what are you going to market? Who are you going to market to? Where are these new ideal clients hanging out? What type of services are these new ideal clients looking for? What is the pricing of your new service? What is included in these services? And how many of these do you actually need to sell?
I know these are a lot of questions. But no matter where you are in business, and whether you want to make a change or not, these are all things you need to know to build a sustainable and profitable design studio.
And it is not just about knowing what to work on but also in which order you need to do this. This order is very important as everything in your business is connected.
You can't, for example:
Look at pricing without knowing your revenue goals, how much time you are spending on your projects or what your hourly rate is.
Determine which social media channels to focus on if you don't know who your ideal client is and where they hang out.
Update your website if you don't know which services you should offer and who these services are for and aren't for.
So the best thing you can do is have a step-by-step action plan that you break down into daily action steps that can be built into a project management system like ClickUp. This will allow you to know exactly what to work on each day and will help you not to jump ahead.
And I know how tempting it is to want to jump ahead to the thing you feel is going to give you the quickest result, like marketing instead of doing the quiet, behind-the-scenes strategic work. And it might work temporarily.
But the key to building a business that is sustainable and profitable is to know your ideal clients, know which services they are looking for and are buying(not what you think they need) and have several strategies for how to reach them (which is about much more than just posting on social media or basing your design studio on referrals).
Ok, so let's dive into the action steps.
Step 1: Know where your revenue came from so that you can set your targets for the year.
I have written several articles about having a finance routine, the 4 key pieces your Design Studio needs and how to create a revenue budget as a design studio so I won't into too much detail here about why you need to have a revenue goal or how to set one and what to consider when you do.
But what you want to do first is have a clear overview of the revenue and profit from the past years. This is often found with some resistance because why would you look at where your revenue came from if you want to make a big change? Because going forward, this will look completely different.
And it will look different from where your revenue is coming from. But as mentioned before, you can't just stop offering your services or not take on new clients from the niche or industry that you're working with without having a plan in place. And part of that plan is knowing how much revenue you need to replace.
Therefore, with every client, I look at least at last year's revenue but preferably we'll look at a couple of years (and don't worry if you don't have these figures ready, with most clients we need to do a bit of digging to create this overview) and note:
How many times was each type of service sold? (And how did this compare to previous years?)
How much does each type of service contribute to the total revenue? (and how did this compare to previous years?)
What was the average value of each type of service? (and how did this compare to previous years?)
What this number looks like will depend on your personal situation and the change you want to make. You might need to replace (almost) all of your revenue if you change industries like one of my clients who is a photographer that also does some brand design and wants to fully focus on brand design. Or it might be 50% of your revenue when you are offering brand and website design and want to fully focus on website design. But after doing this exercise, you will know what it actually looks like for you.
You might be thinking, ok now I know what I need to replace, now what?
Now it is time to set your revenue targets. Especially when it is a very high percentage you need to replace (but I would advise this for everyone no matter the percentage) you will never be able to switch services or industries from one day to the other. So you need to take a phased approach to make it more likely that you will successfully make this change and not burn your business or motivation down while doing it.
In my article about taking a phased approach when you don't seem to be able to reach your goals, I go into more detail about how and why this approach works but in the context of this article, it would mean that you set sub-goals.
Here's an example. Let's say that you made £30.500 last year from offering brand (9 projects or £2000) and website design (5 projects of £2500) but you decided that you fully want to focus on website design.
Looking at the above numbers you can see that brand design brought in more than half of your revenue. Going forward, you need to replace 60% of your total revenue, which means £18.000.
This will form the base of the next step.
Want an easy way to track your revenue? Have a look at this article where I dive into How to track your revenue in ClickUp as a designer
Step 2: Evaluate your services and create a lead generation plan to reach the target revenue for 2022
Because you did the exercise above, you know that on average your revenue per website design project is £2500. This then tells you that, to fully replace the revenue you used to get from brand design (60% of your total revenue), you need to sell an additional 7 (officially 7.2) website design projects.
On average a year looked something like this:
You sold 1 website design package every 2 months
You sold 2 brand design packages every quarter
For Q1 this would mean about £6500 in revenue. To fully replace your brand design revenue in Q1 you would need to sell £4000 more in website design projects. So this might not be achievable right off the bat. And this is where the phased approach comes in again, so let's continue with the same example.
Instead of focusing on replacing £4000, which can be completely overwhelming, if you have built your business based on referrals (like most creatives do) and don't know where this revenue should come from. So to ease yourself into this, let's focus on replacing £500.
Side note: when making big changes or when wanting to grow revenue substantially, I always suggest not putting too much pressure on the first quarter, to ease yourself in but also leave time to complete the adjustments that need to be made.
And yes, this would mean that you still need to take on branding projects for the time being. This might be really hard to do if you no longer want to. But please remember that it has probably taken you years to build up to where you are now and while you have a new direction you want to focus on, you don't want to burn your business down in the process. I have seen this happen and almost did this myself. So let's set you up with a step-by-step process to get you there.
The first step is to evaluate your services.
We did this for a past client who was a photographer. She was offering an unlimited number of photos in her packages, leading to countless hours of editing. So we decided to limit this, which increased the profit margin of her services as she would work fewer hours per project. But we also found that there was room in the market to increase her pricing. Past clients had even told her she should. So we did.
Based on this, we were able to:
Re-calculate how many times she needed to sell each of her services against the new pricing to replace the revenue from the service she stopped offering (which used to be 50% of her total revenue)
Understand what that would look like in terms of how many services she needed to offer per month to make sure she was not overcommitting (it's one thing to determine how many services you need to sell but if you don't actually have the time to deliver these services there is no way you will achieve your revenue goal)
For the example I have been using this could look something like this:
Increased price for the website design package. Going from £2500 to £3000
Increased price for the brand design package. Going from £2000 to £2500
There is a lot that comes with price increases and I am aware that they are often not as simple as just increasing the price on your website, which is how it might come across in this example. In my mentor program, this is something that is discussed in more detail and we often need to work on certain beliefs around price increases.
But for the sake of this example; with this price increase this is what you would need to sell for Q1;
You need to sell 1 website design package at £3000
You need to sell 1 custom brand design package at £2500
You need to sell 1 semi-custom or reduced package at £1000
This not only allows you to achieve your £500 replacement from brand design to website design ( already making you less dependent on brand design projects), but it also allows you to take on a smaller brand design project, leaving you with time to work on implementing the other steps of the action plan.
And just like we did for my client, the next step is to re-calculate how many times you need to sell each of your services (in this case you would need to sell 6 website design packages instead of 7 due to the new pricing), considering a progressive % of the revenue that you want to replace with website design projects.
This might all sound a bit overwhelming when you're not a fan of looking at the number side of your business. So I want to share the first reaction of the photography client I mentioned above when we had created her sales target overview; oh that actually looks doable.
So instead of feeling overwhelmed by the numbers side of her business, which she had in the past, these numbers actually gave her peace of mind. They made her feel confident she could do this.
The next step is to create a plan for the next quarters. Here are a couple of steps that I would suggest:
Work on your brand strategy: with this change in direction in your business you need to determine how you are going to position yourself and who your ideal client is so that you can work on creating a brand message that will help you reach them.
Make your changes public: if no one knows you are making a change, you won't sell your new services. So you will need to update your website, be vocal about the change you're making on your social media or newsletter, while in conversation with past clients or when talking to people in your network.
Review your client management processes: Improve the service you deliver by creating or updating your client workflows. Can you make your onboarding easier? Can you add more value by replacing your onboarding questionnaire with a strategy call? The happier your clients are with your services the more likely they will be to refer you.
Start working with a Client Management System like Dubsado.
Start working with a Project Management System and have a clear process of how to determine what you need to work on in your business to keep you moving forward
Create a monthly review process to help you evaluate the metrics and financial results from the past month and plan ahead for the new month
Work on your business model and product suite and determine which other services you could offer to increase your revenue. For this example, you could think of offering website reviews or website templates. And I mention this one with caution, as this could very easily turn into one of those tasks where you jump ahead without doing all of the steps I mention above because this is exciting. Should this be part of your action plan? Absolutely, but do this with caution, base new services on audience research not what you think your clients need and don't offer a new service because you're not able to sell the offers you already have. If this is the case, first focus on improving the conversion of the offers you have as a new service will not magically change everything.
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT
There you have it, how to (and why you need to) create an action plan that will allow you to pivot your business when you want to change your niche, change industry or the services that you offer
If you thought this post you might also like:
LOOKING FOR ANYTHING?
Popular items in the shop
FOLLOW ON INSTAGRAM
FAVOURITE RESOURCES
