Balancing profit and lifestyle: Designing your business model (Part 1)

I see so many online business owners trying to build a business without taking the time to intentionally design their business model. This not only leads to burnout and overwhelm, but also creates a business that doesn't align with your goals, or your lifestyle. In today's episode, I'm sharing 4 essential components of a business model that balances sustainability, profit *and* lifestyle.

- The importance of intentionally designing a business model that aligns with your goals and vision.
- Why visioning is crucial for business model design and decision making.
- The 4 different types of online digital product offers and how these can be combined.
- Using your vision *and* your offers to create an offer suite that serves your ideal clients at different stages of their journey.
- Why pricing your offers correctly is so important, not just for profit, but also for avoiding burnout.
- 3 common pricing mistakes and how you can avoid them in your business.


SHOW LINKS:
- DM me “OLSM” on Instagram (@stephtaylor.co) to find out more about “Offer Less, Sell More” or visit https://stephtaylor.co/offer-less-sell-more
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's going to stop you from creating a business that
doesn't align with your goals, your vision, the kind of
lifestyle that you want. It's going to help you to
avoid burnout and overwhelm. It also ensures that you are
building towards your long term success, your long term vision,
rather than just chasing the short term goals. They are

(00:20):
kind of taking a month to months upon welcome to
a perfect action rather than thinking about, well how does
this play to downloaded the picture? How it does this
action that I'm taking now? But it was you start
taking year five year plan business had Instead it becomes oh,
how can I just bring in enough sales? Perfect action
is about doing things. It's the spore You're ready, prioritizing

(00:41):
consistent action over perfect action and moving forward even when
you're not sure you're doing it right. On this show,
you can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips and strategies
to build a business that brings you more profit, more freedom,
and even more joy. Do you want the list to
get my daily businesses? Every day, I'll send you a

(01:03):
bite sized prompt designed to help you grow your business
in a more intentional way. Sign up at Steph Taylor
dot co, forward slash DBB or at the link in
the show notes. Hey, we welcome back to In Perfect Action.
This is episode eight hundred and forty three. Today I'm
talking about business models. The key ingredient that I feel

(01:27):
is the one thing, the one thing you need to
get right if you want to have a good balance
of a business that generates profit and gives you the
kind of lifestyle and the kind of freedom that you want. Now,
most people go and they start their business, especially online
business owners, because it is pretty easy to start an

(01:48):
online business in that you don't have to go and
get a space, a physical space, you don't have to
order physical products like, it's a pretty low barrier to entry,
I guess. So most people start, they put up a website,
and they don't really think about the business model that
underpins everything that they are doing. And I'll talk about

(02:09):
business model over this episode and the next episode. Why
does it actually matter? Though, before we jump into the
elements that you need to get on top of. Why
does it matter? Firstly, it's going to stop you from
creating a business that doesn't align with your goals, your vision,
the kind of lifestyle that you want. It's going to
help you to avoid burnout and overwhelm. Take this from

(02:30):
somebody who has previously built a business that was not
aligned with what I wanted, and I will tell you
it was very, very, very difficult, and it took a
long time before I realized what actually needed to change
because I was feeling so overwhelmed with all of the

(02:50):
things I needed to do that I didn't have any
energy to actually sit down and figure out what are
my next steps. It also ensures that you are building
towards your long term success, your long term vision, rather
than just chasing the short term goals. I see this
happen a lot with especially newer online business owners, where

(03:10):
they are kind of taking a month to month's approach
to business rather than thinking about, well, how does this
play into the big picture? How does this action that
I'm taking now fit into the one year the five
year plan. Instead it becomes, oh, how can I just
bring in enough sales to survive another month in business? Okay?

(03:31):
So the very first part, the very first foundation of
all of this is your long term vision. Okay. This
is crucial for your business model design because it's going
to become your north star when you are making any
kind of business decision, whether to accept that client, whether
to invest in that software, whether to do this, to

(03:51):
do that, to launch a course, whatever it is. Okay,
it's going to be your north star that every decision
you make you can check whether it's moving you closer
to that long term vision or away from it. It's
going to help you to be able to prioritize your
actions and your investments. So if you're feeling like you
have so many different priorities and you're so overwhelmed with

(04:12):
all of the different things you could do, chances are
you are not clear enough on that long term vision
you are working towards. It also prevents you from chasing
shiny objects or looking sideways at what other people are doing,
what their business models look like, what offers they're selling,
that kind of thing, because you're so focused on your
own vision, your own business that you are trying to build. Okay,

(04:37):
So how you actually define this long term vision kind
of boils down to two components, your life outside of
work and your business. So I really want you to
think about, like, what does that ideal lifestyle look like
and what are those longer term business goals? Because yeah,
one person might want to build a twenty million dollar

(04:57):
a year empire, and another person might not want that,
and that both of those are completely valid. But if
you're not completely clear on what your vision is, then
you're going to listen to a podcast with somebody who
builds a twenty million dollar empire, and then you're going
to feel like, oh, maybe I need to be doing
that because you're not that grounded in your own vision.
So consider those kinds of things. Consider how many hours

(05:20):
you work, what days you work, where do you work,
what do you do like, what does your daily routine
and your business look like? How much money does your
business make and how much money do you personally make?
What kind of an impact do you have? So think
about what that success looks like for you personally. And
a great exercise to go through is to visualize your

(05:42):
ideal day five years from now or even one year
from now, because things don't have to take five years.
Things can happen a lot quicker than you think they can.
So thinking about, like, what does that day look like,
what time do you wake up? Where are you? Are
you exactly the same place you are now? Are you
living somewhere else? What time do you wake up? What
do you do when you wake up. What's the first

(06:03):
task that you do when you sit down at your
desk to work? What tasks are you working on? Do
you have a team or is it just you like
thinking about all of those different things. What does that
look like? Because once you're clear on that, then you
can start to make other decisions that are going to
move you closer to that. Then the second step, or
the second I guess foundation, is to map out your

(06:26):
different offers. If you were just starting out, you might
only have one offer and that is okay, but at
some point you're probably going to want to offer more
than just one thing, so that you know, if I
think about some of the most common offers that online
business owners, solo experts, you know, coaches, those kinds of people,

(06:47):
because I know most of you who listen to the
show are in one of those categories. The most common
offers that you that I see these kinds of people
selling are one on one coaching or consulting, which is
great if you want to do the high touch. It
can be quite high profit, but it is a lot
less scalable. Okay, you kind of hit that one point

(07:07):
where you can't take on any more clients, and you
can't earn anymore unless you put your prices up. It
is great for deeper client relationships. It's great for if
you want to actually see the tangible effect of your work,
but it can also lead to burnout if you don't
manage it properly. The next most common one is group programs.

(07:29):
There's a great balance of personalization and like that human touch,
but it is a bit more scalable than one on one.
It does allow for community building, It allows for peer support,
so everybody in the program can support each other, and
it can be more profitable than one on one if
you structure it well. Online courses are another really common one.

(07:50):
I love them. Most of my business has been built
around online courses. They are highly scalable. They are not
totally passive, but you know, i'd say, like you can
build them up to be about ninety percent passive income,
or actually a better way to describe it as leveraged
income where you are still having to do work. It's
not like you just put a course on your website
and it sells and that's your passive income. Like that

(08:12):
is a huge miss. And if that's why you're thinking
of creating a course, I would urge you to think again,
but it's a leveraged income where if you sell ten
or if you sell one hundred, it's the same amount
of work. Okay, with courses, yes, there is generally going
to be a bit of an upfront investment of time
to create it, but you can also sell it first,
or launch it first and then create it afterwards, or

(08:34):
create it with your students. That is possible as well.
It's a great way for reaching a wider audience. It's
a great way to serve people who maybe can't afford
to work with you in a one on one or
a small group format. And then we also have memberships,
which up until recently I didn't love them very much.
I've recently, only a couple of months ago, launched my
membership conversion campaigns and it has been a huge learning curve.

(08:59):
This is not even the first time I've had a membership.
I had one back in twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen
around then, and every time both times now that I've
had a membership, I'm like, oh, there is a lot
of work that goes into it, but it is great
for building a community and it can be great for

(09:19):
providing a much more stable, predictable cash flow than if
you are selling one off offers or standalone offers like
coaching or courses. It does require ongoing work, you know,
it depends obviously on your type of membership. There are
different types. There can be memberships with content in them.
They can be memberships where it's purely just they're paying

(09:42):
for access to you once a month, whatever that is.
So it does require a bit of ongoing work, and
it does require a little bit of community management to
ensure that everybody is engaged and on board. And of
course you can you don't have to build your business
around just one of these offers. You can combine them,
or you can pick and choose aspects of each of
these offers to build some kind of hybrid offer. But

(10:04):
you could also build out your entire office suite, which
I'll talk about in a minute. But you can build
out your entire office suite so that it's got a
little combination, a little blend of these different things. So maybe,
for example, your main offer is a course where you've
got some group calls or Q and A calls, and
you've got a little community, and then once they finish
that course, they've got a membership that they can graduate into.

(10:27):
For example, Okay, number three, aligning your offers with your vision.
So your office suite is such is such an important
part of your business model, and it's the most overlooked part,
I think. So what we really want to aim to
do is create an office suite that can serve your
ideal client at different stages, so that you've got the

(10:49):
same person coming back to work with you again and again,
rather than constantly having to try and find lots of
different people because each of your offers is for a
different ideal client. Okay, so the goal is we think about, like,
we'll pick that one ideal client and then where are
the different what are the different pain points that they
might have over the broader transformation that you are taking

(11:11):
them through. So, for example, the broader transformation I take
my ideal client through is I help them to build
an online business that's profitable when they're offline, and part
of that involves designing their office suite. So that's where
my first offer comes in, offer less sell More, which
is only a three hour course. Then once they finished
off a less sell more, well, they probably want to

(11:32):
think about selling their offers. So that's where launch Magic
comes in. Right. Once they've done launch Magic, once they've
launched once, now they're like, okay, great, I need to
grow my audience so I can launch more and make
more sales in my next launch. That's where Booster Brands
Superfans comes in, right. So each of the different offers,
and then I've got Freedom fast Track, which is getting
those systems and that structure and the foundations in place

(11:54):
so that they can start to free up their time
and remove themselves from their business. And converging campaigns is
monthly cash injections so that you can actually start to
reinvest in your business, whether that's into software, into hiring
a VA, so you can free up your time. And
it's a really easy way to generate more sales so
that you can invest in those things. So see how

(12:15):
all of my different offers are serving the same ideal client,
but just at different stages in their business. Rather than
having one offer for let's say, people who sell one
on one coaching, and then one offer for people who
are course creators, and then one offer for membership creators,
like those would be three different people and it would
just be a much more broad scattered approach. Okay, so

(12:37):
you can think about different ways. There's so many different
ways to structure your office suite. So I won't go
into huge detail here, but I would be thinking about, like,
what are your first what's the first step that somebody
is taking with you. It's probably going to be a
slightly lower risk way for them to work with you.
You know. For example, like conversion campaigns is fifty dollars

(12:57):
a month, offer less sell more as two hundred versus
say Launch Magic, which is two and a half thousand dollars.
But yet most of the people who have come into
Launch Magic, especially in the last couple of launches, have
already worked with me in some other format because they've
built that trust. They've worked with me once they're like, okay, great,
I want to work with you again. Then you can

(13:19):
also think about your core offers. So if you do
one on one coaching, this is probably going to be
your core offer. It might be a signature program or
a signature course that you have. It's the thing that's
going to be the twenty percent that generates the eighty
percent of your revenue. Really like for us that's Launch Magic.
This is probably going to be something that's very closely

(13:39):
aligned with your expertise and your passion, Like it's the
one thing that if you weren't going to sell anything
else in your business, this would be the one thing
you would keep. And then think about your ascension offers.
So these might be higher ticket offers or ways that
clients can work more deeply with you or they can
get more access to you. These are probably going to

(13:59):
be your highest profit margin offers, and they're probably going
to be your highest price point offers, and we really
want to balance. We want to create a bit of
a balance between high touch and low touch offers. So
high touch offers are the ones where they're getting more
access to you. But as a result, you want to
make sure these are priced accordingly because they are getting

(14:23):
more of your time and that is costing you your freedom, okay,
And if you are under charging for it, it just
means that you are putting a lower price on your freedom. Essentially,
lower touch offers are going to be a lot more
scalable and they're typically going to be lower price, but
that doesn't mean that they are low tickets. So for example,
launch Magic is fairly low touch for me in that

(14:44):
I'm on the calls once a week, and I'm in
the Facebook group replying to questions as they come in, right,
and my team actually manages the group and then they
just pop the questions over to me for the ones
that they can't answer. So it's pretty low touch for me,
and it's quite scalable, and that gives me a lot
more freedom than if I were coaching, say ten people

(15:07):
through their individual launches. Yes, I might be able to
charge more for the ten people individually, but that would
be a huge sacrifice of my time. So when you
think about that longer term growth in your business, you
do need to think about how are your offers going
to scale? They need to be somewhat scalable because when
you have scalable offers, then you can increase your revenue

(15:30):
without also proportionally increasing the time that goes into it.
And that you know that is a huge takeaway for you,
because if you're working one on one, there's only one
way to scale, and that's with your time. And at
some point you hit a limit. There's only so many
hours in the week, so you need to think about

(15:51):
how else are you going to scale. Then the force
foundation is you're pricing pricing that you know that's going
to affect profitability. It's gonna affect your perceived value. It's
gonna affect how much freedom you create in your business,
because when you are underpricing your offers, that leads to overworking,

(16:13):
it leads to resentment towards your business, potentially towards your clients,
because you know that what you're doing, what you're delivering,
is worth so much more than what they are paying.
And if you have the right pricing, then you can
deliver a really good quality service without burning out. You know,
if you have to work with, say ten clients at

(16:34):
one thousand dollars a month, or five clients at two
thousand dollars a month, those five clients who are paying
two thousand dollars a month would receive a much much
better experience than the ten who are paying a thousand,
because you are not spread as thinly and you are
not as likely to burn out. So there are a
couple of little strategies for pricing your offers. I mean,
I really struggle with pricing as well. And this is

(16:56):
one of the most common questions that comes up in
any of my programs in the Q and AS is
how much should I price this at? And I always say, look,
it's as long as a piece of string, really, right,
But there are a couple of strategies you can look at.
The first one is value based pricing. This is most common,
This is how I've most commonly priced my offers, where

(17:18):
the pricing is based on the transformation that it provides
rather than the amount of time or the amount of
content within the course. Okay, so I think about what
is the longer term value to the person who is
buying this, rather than how many lessons and modules are
there or how long did it take me to create
this thing. Then there's also tiered pricing, so maybe you've

(17:43):
got one offer, but you want to be able to
offer it at different levels of access or at different
levels of support. So that allows clients then to choose
whether they want to say do it themselves or whether
they want you to support them through the DIY process.
And then you've also got premium pricing, which is where
you are positioning yourself as the high end expert. This

(18:06):
one requires quite a bit of confidence and it requires
a good track record of results, and there are a
lot of people, especially in the online business space, who
are charging premium pricing when they have no results to
actually back it up, and it's a little bit ikey.
It feels really ikey when you are charging premium pricing.
The big benefit here is that you still can work

(18:27):
one on one if you want to, or you can
do it in a group format, whatever you want to
structure it as. But it means that you are working
with fewer people who are probably going to be a
higher quality. They're probably going to be more committed, they're
going to take action, they're going to get results, and
you can give them a lot more attention and a
lot more personalization and a lot more support because you

(18:48):
are working with fewer clients. Okay, now those are a
couple of the pricing models. But where are where are
the biggest mistakes that I see with pricing the mistakes
that completely wreck your business model? Firstly, underpricing, Okay, underpricing
because you are lacking confidence is probably the biggest one.
I work with a lot of women, and I don't

(19:11):
want to generalize, but typically the women I work with
have a little bit less confidence in how much they
want to price themselves at compared with the men that
I have worked with. Okay, and that's fine, it's you know,
it's years and years of conditioning and all of that.
But the thing that the solution to that is, I

(19:31):
really would encourage you to focus on the value you provide,
not on how you perceive your worth as a person,
or how you perceive your knowledge or your expertise, or
how you look at everybody else around you in your
industry and you're like, oh, well, I can't charge more
than them. That none of those things factor into your price, right.

(19:54):
The value that you can provide is what is in
the price, and value is not in the amount of content.
It's not in the amount of things that you know.
It's not the amount of information you can give them.
It's how you can help them to get that result
that they are paying you for. Another big pricing mistake
is not factoring in all of the costs, including your time.
So you know, if it's just you and you don't

(20:16):
have a team, the costs to deliver an offer might
be pretty much just your time. But if you have
a team and it's taking your team x hours per
week to manage the Facebook group or do whatever tasks
are involved in it, you need to factor that into
the price. So make sure that you are breaking that down.
You're creating a bit of a breakdown with taking team

(20:37):
member a five hours to do this each week. So
include all of those in. Include any overheads if you
have them. I mean, the great thing about online business
is we have pretty low overheads. It's usually going to
be like your software and that's it. But include them
if you have them. And include your time. So give
yourself an hourly rate. Work out how much time it

(20:59):
takes you and break that down into your pricing. The
third big mistake is failing to increase your prices as
you become more experienced or as you start getting better
or more proven results. So make sure you are once
every six or twelve months, you are reviewing the results
that you've got, and you're reviewing your prices, and you're asking,

(21:20):
is this still reflective of the value that I offer?
Do I need to put this up? Okay? So those
are a couple of things, the first couple of things
so far, and in the next episode, I'm going to
look at systems, delegation and evolving your business model. So
the other important side to your business model that is
going to create a lot more freedom in your business,

(21:43):
that is coming up in two days time. So subscribe
to the show if you're not already subscribed, But in
the meantime, I would really encourage you to have us
think about your current offers and your current pricing. What
kind of business are they serving. Are they serving the
business that you want to have, or are they serving
the kind of business that you currently have. And if

(22:04):
you want to build out your office suite in a
way that's really intentional and aligned with this business that's
going to create freedom, head on over to Steftaylor dot co,
slash o l SM or send me a DM on Instagram.
I'm it's Defftaylor dot co. Send me O LSM and
I'll send you the link and you can go over
there and it's a three hour course. You'll design your

(22:24):
office suite from scratch so that you're making more sales
at it more consistently as well in a way that's
aligned with the kind of business you want to build.
All Right, that is it for two days episode. Thanks
so much for listening. Catch you next time.