Day 2.1 Business Model Design (Scale It Up) 2016planathon.com

What's up everybody? Ash Ambrogee here with the Middle Finger Project. Yes, that is the name of the website. Yes, I own the trademark and yes, it is a place for business owners and creatives who want to make some neon hot money this year. Kind of like my lips, maybe a little more green, a little less red. Welcome to the plan A thon. I hope you're enjoying yourself so far. I'm delighted to be here today. From what I understand, I've been tasked with talking a little bit about money. We all like money, right? We like money. Especially as business owners, especially as new business owners who are often trying very, very hard to get an idea off the ground to make money, to support themselves, to have fun while they're doing it and not get caught up in that whole hamster wheel thing of oh my God, I can't take on one more client, but if I don't, I can't pay my bills and what am I going to do? So that's where I come in. Money. In addition to the Middle Finger Project blog, I am the CEO and founder of House of Moxie Inc. Writing Studio. I am a soon to be published author. I am absolutely thrilled about, represented by the number one literary agency in the world of my dreams and I have built an entire career writing from my MacBook. But let me tell you a little story. I didn't always have a million dollar brand in my laptop case. At one point I started off as a freelancer. Many years ago I had a different writing company. It was brilliantly called Ashley Ambergrey Copywriting back when I was still a babe and many years ago, I quickly figured out, as most of you probably have, there are only so many hours in a day. So much project work you can get done in a day. One of the bigger challenges for me always was not so much even the hours in the day, but the fact that my work is so creatively demanding that really, even if I had an eight hour time slot, I might only be able to do three or four hours of really good work. So that's another layer of issue on top of the already perplexing not enough hours in the day issue, right? So there I was. I made my first hundred thousand dollars in a year and I busted my buns for it. I absolutely did. It felt great. But at the same time, by the end of the year, I was exhausted. Let me say that again, I was exhausted. And right after that, not right after that, some time after that, I got hit with an unexpected bill. A big hairy unexpected bill. In order to pay that bill off, I was going to have to pay $8,000 every two weeks for years. $8,000 every two weeks. Whoa. So after crying into my beer, I sat down and I thought about ways I could scale my business. It's the only way. You've probably heard a lot about this idea of scaling and how important it can be. Now the idea of scale is really helping your business to function for you instead of always constantly requiring you to function it. I knew I needed to scale the business because no matter what kind of amazing project work I was doing, it didn't matter. I could score a fantastic contract, and still it wasn't going to pay the bills. And on top of that, at the time, my operating expenses were already about $20,000 a month. So now you've put me in the position to earn about $36,000 a month before profit. So that's a tall task. So I started creating workshops. I started giving a lot of workshops. I realized that I had done some workshops in the past, and they were always really profitable. But it wasn't something that I did regularly. It wasn't something I built into my schedule. And I looked back at some of the ways I had been able to help other people while still profiting well and doing it in a way that felt good. Not overwhelming, not stressful, joyful. In fact, those are the three criteria for me, even to this day. Something that helps other people, that helps me, and that also feels good to do. I revisited that model. I started creating several workshops. I gave several live workshops. I still give several live workshops later. I turned some of those into on demand workshops and programs. I've built courses and programs and written books. And ultimately I ended up building a business that supported me rather than me working so hard to support it with all of the sweat and like the muscle spasms in your neck. That was the end result. I came out far ahead of my goals that I needed. And ever since, my business has continued to scale and scale and scale and scale, which is a beautiful thing. Your business model is incredibly important for this reason. If you're just doing the one on one service, that's great. It's a great way to build experience. It's a great way to build a reputation meditation. It's a fantastic way to really get your hands dirty, figure out what you like. But I will tell you that I think that that's only the first step. That's a nice stepping stone, and I think it's a great exercise. And this is my challenge for you to think very hard what you would do if tomorrow someone told you you needed to come up with $8,000 every two weeks for the next five years. What would you do? How would you make that happen? The answer is not going to be more one on one. Raising your rates, hiring contractors to help you to a point that might be plausible. But if you really needed to challenge your business model to become more scalable and you really needed to hit that number, what would you do? I have a girlfriend right now, a very dear girlfriend of mine who started her own design agency several years ago and she now is going through this stage where she's burnt out. She is. She's been dealing with so many different clients, clients and scrambling to constantly stay ahead. But the problem is her business model does not support anything else at this point. So even just the other day we started having conversations about ways that even she could do it locally by giving some type of class or building something that helps the local community in a way that doesn't always require require her one on one effort. This is so important. One of my favorite tools for doing things like this is woocommerce. I love woocommerce. They have something called subscriptions and something called memberships. When you put those two things together, you can do beautiful things with your work, help others with your work and still scale. Keep it nimble. I think that's the key word here, nimble. I had a consult with a woman the other day who's looking to do some type of subscription. And this is exactly the software that I recommended for her. Said, look, you can go in, you can build out the subscription, it can actually be built out in advance if that's something you want to do. And that frees you up. It frees you up to live your life. It frees you up to be able to focus on making the business work for you instead of constantly working in your business. And these things are the ways that we grow now with the Internet it is easier than ever to make it happen and I highly, highly encourage you to do so. It's 2016. It's a brand new year. It's the perfect time for you to introduce something new into the market. So why not think about it? Take the $8,000 every two week challenge. Let me know. I'm sure you're gonna let Amber know and the rest of your plan A thoners if anyone is interested, please do hop on over to the TMF Facebook wall. Facebook.com tmfproject I would love to hear your response to that challenge. And in the meantime, I wish you the best of luck with making all of that neon hot money that feels good to make. Take care, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. Ash. Amberjay, the Middle Finger Project.