Think of the best business plan.
When you start out, your online business plan needs to be aimed at the long-term vision of you working on your business, not in it. That means freeing yourself up to guide the future direction of the business rather than looking after the day-to-day running and simple delivery of products.
How Did Melbourne SEO Services Do This?
The way that Melbourne SEO Services structured its business plan outline was to create the initial cash-flow – the lifeblood of any business – by delivering SEO services; then using this to steer the company towards information products that could be delivered once but pay many times over.
This worked remarkably well. As the cash-flow grew we could start thinning out our clients taking SEO services, retaining only the higher-paying clients and upping the price for new clients so that we were left with only the “cream” of the high-end clients.
In truth this helped our health as well as our profits – we found higher end clients were easier to deal with and created less stress! They were very serious about SEO and willing to pay for it.
We used the cash generated from selling our SEO services to create new information products based around outsourcing, web video and small business products.
The key players in Melbourne SEO Services could deliver one-off workshops, film them, then use the content to create DVDs, articles and other content, while enhancing their credibility using press releases and the media to position ourselves as experts in the field. Again this sent our value and potential prices we could charge up.
The Future Picture Always Changes
We are almost at the point where the info-product side of the business is looking after itself, so we are freed up to look at the ever-changing picture of the future again.
The main players of the company have been driving the company into new areas. Recently we have been interested in acquiring a portfolio of assets for the company – targeting other websites that are playing in the SEO/outsourcing/ web video/small business arena, as well as buying up domains to sell to industry “verticals”.
Typical domains we have been looking at have been ones that follow this structure <suburb><industry>.com e.g. melbournefuneralservices.com.au and melbournedayspa.net.au
We get these dummy sites ranking at Number 1 in Google and then approach all local companies who may be interested in possessing that site with the fantastic selling point that they already have guaranteed traffic by ranking at Number 1!
Do you see how we have freed ourselves from simply putting out fires and delivering services; we are involved in creating the future direction of the company and delving into new waters that will help the company grow. That’s truly working ON your business, not IN it.
As you create your online business plan, consider where you ultimately want to be and engineer things to eventually free up your time – use cash-flow generation, outsourcing and development/marketing of products to get you to where you are not constantly needed IN the business.
More great tips like this can be found in the free-to-watch Competition Crusher Workshop. Just click here to learn more about it.