How to Hit Consistent 10k Months as a Solopreneur – FastForwardAmy Show Episode 28

You’ve probably seen online entrepreneurs talk about how they make consistent 10k months in their business. If you’re just starting out, or if you’ve plateaued at a monthly amount that’s far less than 10k, it might seem like this crazy, impossible thing… I’m here to let you in on all the secrets, and the reasons why you’re NOT making those 10k months, so you can turn that around and achieve the income you’ve always wanted.

If you want to be making 10,000 a month as a solopreneur CONSISTENTLY (whatever your currency, whether that’s Euros or Dollars), this article is for you.

Let’s get one thing clear. We’re talking about consistent 10k months – not doing one launch of 10k, and then having recurring 1k months. 

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If you’re freaking out about your finances, it’s time to put in place a structure that gets you 10k months – every month – so you have some consistency in your income.

I guarantee you, once you hit 10k months, you’ll become unstoppable. A bunch of opportunities will open up to help you get towards 20k, 30k or more! The difference between hitting 20k and 100k a month is not that great in terms of amount of work, let me tell you that… 

Hitting that 10k goal for starters is a really important starting point.

Coincidentally, this is also going to be the focus of my new coaching program, the Business Freedom Elevator that’s opening up this summer for the very first time. If you haven’t signed up for the waitlist, go and sign up! 

Now, let me walk you through some of the mistakes you might be making that are stopping you from hitting those consistent 10k months.

Maybe you're also interested in this: Create a Successful Business with my 15 FastForward Success Principles

Mistake #1: You have a bunch of offers

This is one I always start off with in my business courses – because after all, I’m a business coach. The key to scaling your business to hit 10k months consistently is to have one core offer. You might have a bunch of offers, and not one core offer. Way too many people have 10 things they’re selling, but they’re not actually selling a lot of one.

A general rule of thumb is that if you have 10 offers, there are probably 2 that are bringing in the most money. What you need to do is stop looking at all of the packages you’re creating, and figure out what is the one core offer that is the Golden Overlap between what your clients and customers want, and what YOU want to be offering and are good at. What is that overlap? The intersection of those two things is going to be your one offer.

I want you to look at the ONE thing that 80% of people are actually looking for. Is it a 2 day consulting offer? Is it a course that will help out 80% of your clients?

Mistake #2: You price your offer way too low

Okay, you’ve got your core offer. But the second mistake that people make is that they price that offer WAY too low. I’ve got a rule for you to follow. If you’re like me, you’re getting new ideas all the time. My new rule for ideas is: could this new idea bring in 100k in a year? For you, if you have a new idea for a new venture, ask yourself if it can bring in 10k a month. If it can’t do that, you’re probably pricing it wrong, and spending the wrong amount of time on it. If you’re like, “hey, I offer coaching days, and I offer coaching days for 200 euros”, you won’t be able to hit 10k on that, just because of the number of days in a month. You could hit a maximum of 4000 euros a month – so you’d be 6000 short.

Here in Europe, we work around 20 days a month. So you need to be able to bring in 10k on those 20 days. You might be saying “Hell no, Amy, I charge way more!”, or you might be saying “Well, Amy, I charge 200 euros for one afternoon”. The thing is, you need to drive there, and you waste time having a nice chat over coffee, so you don’t actually have time for another client. So your one core offer is priced wrong. If you want to work out your hourly rate, check out episode 5 of my podcast The FastForwardAmy Show that will walk you through this.

Mistake #3: You focus on pitching, not continuous lead generation

The third mistake you might be making is only focusing on pitching, not on continuous lead generation. Here’s an example. I release a podcast episode every Tuesday – and this has been the case since January 7. Some weeks, I get more downloads. Other weeks, I get less downloads. 

But here’s the thing: whether I’m launching or not launching, I’m generating leads. So by the time I launch something, I have a bunch of people who are warmed up to buying. I have a really cool lead magnet that you can download from this episode – my Business Bible. I show up on social media sharing value. 80% of the time, I’m actually not selling. 

What most people do is they have something they want to sell, and they post about it once, but the rest of the time, they’re not sharing value. If you do that, people will think, “why should I buy from you? I don’t even know you.” We need to turn the value into trust, so that when you have an offer, people want to buy from you. 

How to do that? Well, you could create a schedule for yourself to help with consistency. Let’s say every week at the same time, you go live and answer a FAQ from your customers. If you have a product-based business, you could go live and show your packaging, or behind the scenes of your day when you’re shopping for new inventory. Create a content plan that helps you stay consistent.

Don’t make the mistake of pitching and disappearing off the face of the earth. You’re not making 10k months because you’re not showing up consistently. 

80% of your content should be content where you’re NOT pitching. Jessica, my Alfavrouwen business partner, uses this analogy. If you’re only ever selling online, it would be like having a newspaper only full of ads, with no articles. No one would buy another newspaper! You want to be focusing on continuous lead generation. Do people want your free download? Or to sign up to your email list? Make sure you’re inviting people into the machine of your business so that by the time you pitch to them, they want to buy. Give people a REASON to buy from you.

Mistake #4: Not spending enough time on money-making activities

I know you’ll hate me for this one. Mistake 4 is not spending enough time on money-making activities. Money-making activities include working on marketing that will help you make sales – or actually making the sales themselves. Activities that are NOT money-making include getting stickers made for your car, doing random stuff on Instagram… There’s an 80/20 rule in that. 20% of the work you do leads to 80% of the outcome. You are actually making money from only 20% off the stuff you’re doing – so we want to focus on doing more of that. 

A good example is making invoices. That’s not a money-making activity for you, because you could have someone else do that. If you’re going for 10k months, it’s time to outsource or invest in a system that helps you. Spending an hour every few days on invoicing is NOT going to help you get there. You want to be focusing your time on money-making activity, and you should be asking yourself which activities YOU don’t actually need to do.

Mistake #5: You want to do everything yourself

You don’t need to do everything yourself. If you’re earning a couple of thousand euros a month, it’s fairly easy to hire someone to work for you for 600 euros a month. Or consider a trade with someone. Use each other – respectfully! Let’s say you need a logo. Why would you spend hours and hours creating it? You don’t need to do that yourself, because you’ll only use the skill once. Outsource it! 

You’re just postponing doing the thing that matters. As long as you don’t do sales calls, you can’t fail. As long as you procrastinate, you can’t fail. Let others do what they’re good at, so you can do what YOU’RE good at. Dare to ask for help. Maybe your mom can help hand out fliers. Maybe you can do a skill swap with someone. Maybe you can pay someone a reasonable fee to do it for you. Make sure you’re focusing on the key things like sales – because sales are the fuel for your business.     

Mistake #6: You’re pitching your hours, not your packages 

The first downside to this is that you’ve imposed a ceiling on yourself, and you’ll never be able to break through this ceiling. The second problem is that you’re only able to invoice your services afterwards. When you pitch packages, on the other hand, you can charge upfront. You can pitch the benefits, and ask for a package price instead of an hourly rate. The most important thing is that you can ask for at least some of the money upfront. It’s just smart to do! You don’t want to be hanging by a thread at the will of someone else.

Mistake #7: You don’t have a clear structure for sales calls 

The big one! If you are running a product based business, it probably means that you don’t have a clear sales flow and are losing a lot of people when they come to your shop. 

If you are running a service based business, it means that when you jump on a call with someone who contacted you to hear more about your business, you’re giving out advice. Newsflash: that is not how you run a sales call. 

What you’re doing is giving people a bit of advice, so that they think they don’t need you anymore and can go away and do things themselves. 

You don’t have a clear structure for intakes or sales calls and you’re just giving out advice. That is NOT the way to do it! An intake call should be what the name says it is: to see if people are a good fit for you and your services. 

Stop screwing yourself over by offering advice in an intake call. In an intake call, your client is not the boss. You are the boss. You need to take control and run the conversation.

I have a little training on that and you can find it in my shop. It’s very simple but it will change your life.

I just want to hammer this home: this is the biggest mistake people make and this is why you’re losing so many sales. And it means that you’re spending so much time, and effort, and money on your marketing and once you get people through the door, you’re not able to convert them to clients. That is an issue and you need to fix it.

Make sure you have a clear structure for your sales flow. For a service based business this means sales calls. By the way, if you’re afraid of them, learn how to love them. And if you have a product based business, make sure your sales flow in your business makes sense so that people don’t get distracted by the time they want to check out.

Always, always, always remember that your clients and customers need structure and they need to know you are in control. A lot of people are afraid to be in control but you are the boss, you’re providing the service, so you have to stop waiting for people to ask you what they need. 

Mistake #8: No one knows what you do and how they can get it

Make sure people know what you have to offer and how they can get it. For me that might be right now that people know that I’m not just going around offering 1:1 coaching, but they can sign up for my Business Freedom Elevator waitlist. When you sign up for the waitlist, you will get the next steps.

For you that could be that you work with intake calls and that you will repeat that weekly. You can book an intake call with me and we can see if you’re a good fit and then you can book my social media coaching package. Make it super clear.

I did one round of a coaching program, where I forgot to tell people in my pitch that it was business coaching. So people were like ‘This looks nice, Amy, and super convincing but what is it that she does?’. Now I’m making a post about what it is that business coaches do because I didn’t know that a few years ago and you probably don’t know it either.

By now you might have gotten an idea because you listened to my podcast but not everyone in my target audience does. So I need to make it super clear what I do and how people can get it.

Have you done that recently? 

Have you recently told people what it is that you do, how they can benefit from it and how they can get it from you? 

I’ve had people in the past who wanted to start my coaching that have said to me “Well, I don’t really like selling and I don’t want to put it out there. People will come to me when they need me.”

No, no, no. Because there are a million other people doing what you do. So you need to make it the easiest to get it from you.

You owe it to tell people. No one knows what you do because everyone is self-obsessed. Everyone is focused on themselves.

So if you want to get up in that space and you want to make sure people think about you when they need your service or your product, you need to tell them and you need to tell them exactly how. they. can. get. it.

Mistake #9: You experience coffeechatitis

That is a word I made up. It means you’re going for coffee chats and you’re open for talking, and this and that. And you are spending whole days on other people and chatting, and probably solving their issues and helping them out with their products and packages and stuff like that. And you’re actually not getting anything out of it.

You’re spending a lot of time in traffic. A lot of time paying for other people’s coffees. Or getting reimbursed for your time with a coffee that costs like 3 euros and that is just the worst. 

If you want to take your business seriously, and I’m getting super fired up now, for the love of god, stop going for coffee. If people want your service, take control and be like: here’s my calendar, book in a call. Or is it okay for you if I call you at that time on Thursday at 3pm? That’s how you do it. That’s how you sell.

If you hear ‘hey I want to pick your brain on something?’ You could ask “do you want to hear about my services or do you want free advice?” That’s literally a question you could be asking. If it’s clear that they want your advice, you can tell them, okay my advice costs this much. We can have an intake call so we can see what’s the best fit for you. 

Maybe don’t be as brutal as what I just said but be very clear that you’re not a free puppet. 

You’re not going to get to 10k months if you keep building other people’s businesses and lives, and not focusing on your own. Your time is worth something. Otherwise people wouldn’t want to be talking to you.

If people ask you to go for coffee or you want to go for coffee with people, what I tend to do is ask them what they want to discuss first – my team actually asks them. I get a lot of proposals in my team inbox because I don’t give out my email anymore.

What happens is, people are like ‘Can we chat for a bit?’. It is my opinion, which is very brutal and I know that, that if people want to chat with me, it’s because they want to use me for something. Or they want me to fix their shit… 

So the way I fix that is by asking for a proposal first: what do you want to talk about, what’s in it for me, what’s your budget, stuff like that. If people are like ‘But I just really want to chat with you on the phone, I don’t want to put it in an email’ then to me that says they don’t know what they are offering me and there’s no benefit in it for me. So if people are trying to use you, make sure they write up a proposal beforehand. 

Of course, this is different if you’re the asking party. Then also use what I just said as really good information on how to do this for people. If you have a proposal for someone and you want to go for a coffee with them, be super respectful of their time and their energy. And be like ‘this is my proposal for you, this is what you’ll get out of it as benefit, la la la’ and write that up for them or send it through to their assistant. But I get so many proposals from people and they’re not even aware that the only benefit in there is for them and there’s no benefit in there for me.

And I just don’t have time for that. It sounds super rude that I’m saying it like this but you have no idea how many people try to take advantage of you. So I’ve tried to stop that.

For example, if I would ever want to invite someone on my podcast – there’s a really cool episode coming up soon with someone you’ll love. She’s not easy to get on the podcast and I invited her by stating what her benefits would be for getting on the podcast: like I have a top business podcast in Belgium on iTunes and Spotify. You’ll attract a new audience by doing that. It’s in English, bla bla bla.

Make sure people know the benefits and make sure you know the benefits when people ask you for coffee. And when they ask you for a coffee and you want to take it as an intake call, or you want to use it as a sales call/conversation, make sure they know. Make sure they know you’re not just there to give free advice. 

Be the boss of the conversation and let them know upfront so that they don’t walk away feeling forced into something. And the way to do that is to say ‘a one hour call with me is usually this amount. Are you looking for one-off advice or are you looking for more? Do you want to see if we’re a good fit to work together?’

If they’re like yes I’m looking for that second part and in their head they’re actually thinking ‘I just want to pick your brain’, you can be like an intake call usually costs this amount but for you we’ll do it for free. Just know that I need you to fill out a few questions beforehand.

Something like that. Don’t be rude, because a lot of people are. I don’t want you to be rude. But I do want you to state your value respectfully and take control. If it is an intake conversation then for the love of god ask people questions beforehand so you can prepare and they know that you’re a professional and you cannot be used. 

This is about the time when people are like ‘Amy you and your podcast, I’m never going to listen again’ or you’ll be like ‘I’m going to sign up to your Business Freedom Elevator’… 

Mistake #10: you are screwing yourself over by not being your authentic self

This is something that wasn’t in the list and not something necessarily about 10k months. Or maybe it is. If you want to be happy in your business, that means you want to work with clients or customers – I work with clients for service based businesses, and customers for product based businesses – that you like and that give you energy. 

So with my clients who follow my coaching programs, I make them a deal: I give you energy, if you give me energy back. This is a trade and this has to be in balance. And so, when you want to hit those 10k months consistently, one of the mistakes you might be making is that you’re not yourself. 

I’m being very much myself in this episode, I’m swearing and being brutal, just the way my team knows me, my friends know me and my clients know me. And I want to be able to be myself in my business. It’s all about authenticity.

That’s also very important. Don’t hide yourself away in order to get clients that aren’t a good fit for you because I guarantee you that you'll get into trouble working with those people down the line. They’ll not be a good fit, you’ll get unhappy and it is so important that you feel good in your business. 

Because that is why you started running your business. That’s why you’re an entrepreneur. Don’t screw yourself over by pretending to be someone you’re not.

My mistake would be screwing yourself over by being someone you’re not and the solution is be yourself in your business because it is your fucking business. Yes I said it. It’s your fucking business.  

Mistake #11: You fuck up pitching in emails

You are screwing yourself over in your communication. I’m really fired up about this! How are you fucking up your communication?

Chances are, people are filling out the contact form on your website, or sending you an email, and you’re sending them back a whole heap of info and prices. What happens is that people receive all that info, they get overwhelmed, they close the email, and then they totally forget about it. They’ll never contact you again! This is a possible scenario. 

How do you fix this?

When someone sends you an email saying, “hey, I’m looking for help”, you ask them a few short but important questions.

You ask questions like:

• What do you do?
• What have you tried in the past?
• What didn’t go well?

Make it very clear that you’re looking to help them, but that you need some more info. Keep the questions easy. Make sure that when you get the replies, you’re able to say, “Okay, you’re looking for this, and you struggle with that.”

Make people want to book a call, and don’t overwhelm them with a whole bunch of info and prices – because that never works. 

Spending money hurts. If you send an email saying “this is how much you need to pay,” then what will happen? People will walk away and decide they’re better off doing it themselves… I’m a super outsourcer, but when that happens, I also think I’ll just do it myself. 

You want people to feel like you UNDERSTAND them and their challenges. Enter a conversation, rather than just punching people in the face with your prices. Make people feel like you’re helping them. 

Mistake #12: You’re hiding in your business

This is my final reason why you’re not making 10k months. You’re hiding in your business, and you haven’t set up a consistent sales process. You have no consistent lead generation. You might have made a lead magnet in the past, but you’ve never pitched it again. Maybe you never post on social media. 

Whatever you’re doing, you’re NOT selling your magic. Don’t be afraid to sell your magic. You need to be totally obsessed with everything you’re doing. I’ve got the Business Freedom Elevator coming up soon, and me and my team are so excited and fired up for it. We KNOW it’s going to be amazing. I love it, and I’m going to do everything in my power to convince everyone I know of that fact. 

You’re probably making the mistake of doing everything other than selling. That’s a BIG mistake! The solution is to focus on sales first. With money, you can figure out a whole lot of other stuff. Believe me, money will not make you happy, but having too little money can make you UNhappy. Spend some damn time on selling, and creating structures in your business so that sales happen. 

Phew. If you loved these tips and want more, check out my Business Bible for FREE at fastforwardamy.com/businessbible.

Or sign up for my free (Dutch) “10 Hacks om je Omzet te Verdubbelen” webinar! In this webinar, I share 10 hacks that you can apply to your business TODAY and will help you make more money, without working harder. Sign up here: https://fastforwardamy.com/10omzethacks.

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