What’s up guys? Today I want us to have a cozy little chat about your business and where exactly its ceiling is. So the most successful business owners are always aware of their capacity to take on new clients and are challenging themselves to raise that ceiling. If you’re a solo service provider who can physically see 20 clients a week, this is your ceiling. If you’re a company of 100 employees and you can see 600 clients a week, that is your ceiling.

So no matter where you are in your business owning, you must consider your ceiling and know when and how exactly to raise it so that you can watch revenue increase and your time spent working decrease. This is the beauty of entrepreneurial life and the reason that you became a business owner.

Today I’m going to give you four ways to increase your ceiling and a hell of a lot of things to consider. This is episode 24 of The Hell Yes Entrepreneur. I am your host Becca Pike, and it is time for your weekly dose of Hell Yes Coaching. Let’s go.

Hey, guys. I’m Becca Pike and welcome to The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast, the number one show for entrepreneurs looking to create their first six-figure year. If you’ve got the drive and you know how to hustle but you’re not sure where to channel your energy, we’ve got the answers. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Hey guys. What’s up? So I’m going to be honest. I just got done crying on my 30 More Mastermind call out of happiness. It would be a disservice not to tell you what just happened. By the way, I’m crying a lot more lately. Is this like midlife female? Am I premenopausal? What’s happening? I think I’m just becoming more in touch with my emotions.

I had a lot of baggage, a lot of trauma in my life, and I think that I locked up my emotions. I’ve been working for the last year and a half or so to kind of unwind that and get back in touch with just who I am. I might have overshot because I just cry all the time now.

I remind me of my mom. I remember getting mad at my mom because she would cry all the time. She would cry at movies. She would cry at my basketball games. She would cry if I told her I loved her. She just cried all the time. Now that I’m looking back at it, I think she was probably just premenopausal. Anyway whatever it is, I’m starting to do it.

Today was a really good cry. Like I said, it would be a disservice not to tell you what happened. So a woman called me about a year ago wanting to leave her employer. So she hired me to coach her. We spent weeks talking about what it would look like to open her business. Like most people who come to me, she felt like she didn’t know enough about business to start her own. She wanted to own a brick and mortar med spa, but she had never done that, right?

So we spent weeks implementing plans and protocols and then getting a loan to support her dream. Then she wanted to buy the building that she was going to be working out of. So she did that. For months watching her make her business come to fruition. Then we weathered a pandemic together.

You guys, the coach to client relationship is a deep one. So like all the while she’s doing this, we’re riding the rollercoaster together of the ups and downs and the successes and the failures, the whole entrepreneur experience. A lot of times there’s a misconception that when people are this driven and this willing to go out and make their dreams come true that they aren’t scared or wavering in their decision. Or as if they’re not wondering the whole time if they’ve made the wrong decision, right?

So she is so brave, and she was so brave during all of this and so driven, but she’s also a human, you know. She had down days and she had days where she wondered what the hell she just did. She quit her job and she took out a loan to buy a building and start her business. I got to see her ride that rollercoaster of emotion. That rollercoaster that I know so well.

One of the reasons that I love this woman’s success story so much is because I got to see her being a human. It’s one of the best parts of my job, to be honest. Just watching people triumph what they didn’t know was possible and just living in awe of themselves.

So now she’s in 30 More, the mastermind that I host. We are finishing up our fourth month together. This is a six month mastermind. We’re finishing up our fourth month together. On our call today, she told me her numbers. So it’s six months into her first year of business owning. So she opened her doors about exactly six months ago. She has already hit $100,000 in revenue in six months. She’s looking at like a $250,000 year her first year. This month alone she brought in $20,000.

Not only to highlight the money. She also talked so deeply and passionately about how much more she loved her life and how that has affected her marriage and her relationship with her kids and with herself and with her family. She told us how desperate she felt when she was waking up and she was driving to work every day to a pretty toxic environment, where her voice and her needs weren’t really heard.

And how she doesn’t feel like she works now. She just pops out of bed in the morning. She’s excited to go to her studio because she feels like just chats with people all day. She’s like building and creating what she believes to be the best med spa she knows how to make.

Guys, I’m just so fucking proud of her and so thankful that I get to watch this, and I got to watch her journey. Guys, I love my job. I love getting to know people on such a deep level and watching them just completely blow their dreams out of the water. It fills me up with just the deepest and the best emotions available. To me, that is the human experience. Feeling is the human experience.

So while I build businesses and I talk to you guys about sales and growth, my favorite part of all is what I get to experience through your all’s journey too. I get to ride your rollercoaster with you. I get to cry. I get to laugh. I get to pop champagne bottles. Every single one of my students who triumphs, I get to do this with all of you guys. I hold a deep gratitude to my students who allow me in, allow me to be with them and hang with them while they’re doing really big things.

So she doesn’t like to be the center of attention. She has a problem with being seen as such a hero. So I’m not going to say her name, but she really is a hero. It takes a hero to be this brave, and to be relentless and trusting in themselves like this, you know. She is now an example of what is possible just because she was willing to put herself out there.

So thank you to you for being a hero. I deeply love you. I just want to say thank you for letting me in on this journey with you and trusting my advice all along the way. Even when it was horribly uncomfortable for you and sometimes me. I just want to make a public announcement that you’re doing it. You’re killing it. I love you.

All right guys. So let’s transition. Today I want to talk to you all about plotting your ability to scale. So I know I have a lot of different levels of entrepreneurs listening to this podcast, and this topic is going to span easily to every level.

So some of you may be solo entrepreneurs. Like you have a service and it’s just you providing that service. Maybe you’re a coach or a dogwalker or a hairstylist. You’re solo, you’re on your own, you have no staff members, okay. Some of you may have three or five staff members at this point. No matter where you are, you have what we call a ceiling. This is the point in which you can’t take any more clients than what you have due to a lack of time or equipment or resources, okay.

If you’re a massage therapist, you can probably do five or six massages in a day. That is hella physical. You may be loving the money from that, but there is a ceiling. You can’t do more than six or so massages a day physically. So aside from a small amount of increases you may see in your tips, your pay can’t really go higher than six massages in a day. If it’s even that. For some people it’s four, for some people it’s there in a day.

So you find yourself just kind of stuck. This goes for every solo entrepreneur in every industry. If you have staff members, they have ceilings too which is now your ceiling, right.

So guys when you hit your ceiling, you are playing with fire. You are playing with burnout. That is why it’s important to think about scalability way before you get close to hitting your ceiling. Because I promise you guys. The worst time to try to raise your ceiling, aka hire people, train people, buy more equipment. The worst time to raise your ceiling is when you’re exhausted because you’re at your own ceiling. Don’t do this.

I teach my clients to begin onboarding ceiling increasing assets, whether that’s staff or equipment or whatever, when you’re about 50% to 60% at your own ceiling. If your books are 60% full, it’s already time to begin choosing your path to raising the bar. Because you will use that 40% brain power and time to properly hire and train your next employee or contractor or assistant.

I would love to sit here and spend time and tell you how many times I’ve failed to bring on help at the right time, but I won’t do that to you. So I would let myself get to 100% ceiling max, and then I would try to hire help. It was like torture. It was like, “Hey, let’s wait until I’m dying and drowning and then someone throw on a part-time job. That would be great.” That’s what it felt like every single time. So I’m going to tell you a few different ways to raise your ceiling, because it’s not always just hiring more people. But I will touch on that first, okay.

So a couple things to think about. Number one, hire other service providers. So if you provide a service, you probably have hours in which you do this. Let’s say you’re a dog walker and you walk dogs from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. A fantastic way to drastically increase your ceiling is to hire someone to walk dogs after 5:00 p.m. Guys, listen. If you’re like, “Well, I haven’t even booked out my day yet. I can’t imagine hiring someone for the evening and having enough work to provide to them.”

I want you to remember this. I hear this all the time. If you have a service business and you’re only working during the day, you’re leaving hella money on the table. Massages, dog walkers, med spas, hairstylists. All service providers listen up. Your clientele works day jobs. If you provide services to them during the day only, you’re only seeing the people who are willing and able to take off work to come see you. This is the hardest way to grow a business.

I think about it at Massage Strong, at my business. We see like 70% of our clientele after 5:00 p.m. and on the weekends. If we tried to be open just during the day, we would have gone under a long time ago. So if you think that you’re not booked out enough during the day to have a service provider at night, this is a thought error. Of course you’re not. There’s not a ton of people willing to come to you during the day.

You aren’t taking into consideration how many people want your service but also don’t want to piss off their boss. Or how you’re completely missing the evening clientele because they are a totally different audience than the daytime clientele. Hire another service provider, but don’t put them on the same schedule as you. They need an opposite schedule so that you can see a bigger group of audience. If you work 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. then they work 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Right? You get what I’m laying down?

Unless your daytime is more than 60% booked. Then you may consider having a second daytime service provider. So this is all stuff that I teach in depth. So this goes into my second way of increasing your ceiling, which is pretty closely related to number one.

Number two is increase the amount of hours your service is open. If you’re a solo entrepreneur, this isn’t an invitation to just work more and more and more. This is, again, saying you can hire someone to man those hours. But increasing your storefront hours and availability as well as bringing in a service provider are both ways to increase your ceiling.

Number three. Hire front desk staff of virtual assistants to increase your ceiling. Let me paint a picture for you. This analogy is going to be for brick and mortar, but I will also loop it into why it’s exactly the same for online businesses as well. Hiring an assistant or a front desk staff will allow you to drastically increase your ceiling.

If you own a storefront, I want you to think about how much time you do anything that is not providing the actual service. Answering the phone, checking the email, cleaning the bathroom, checking clients in, taking credit card payments, answering questions at the front desk. If you’re providing a service that is worth $80 an hour and spend half your day doing front desk work, you’re diluting your ability to make money. You’re stopping your $80 an hour work to go into $15 an hour work. Front desk work.

If you didn’t have to do all the things I listed above, you could increase the amount of people that you see for $80 an hour. You could increase them by what, a third? Double. I had a brick and mortar company that I coached that literally doubled their ability to see clients day to day when they hired their first front desk assistant. It doubled overnight.

After their assistant was trained and came onboard, first day they went from being able to see 15 people a day to having the ability to see 40 people in a day. Just because they weren’t doing all the checking in, checking out, and taking credit card payments and all that stuff. They were just providing the service.

This goes for online too. If you’re a coach or an online service provider of some sort and you’re anywhere near 60% booked and yet you’re still doing all your social media, all your scheduling, all your email answering then you’re wasting your expensive hours on $15 an hour work. This makes no sense guys.

I want everyone listening to know that at your level, your brain is worth more than what your service is worth. If you provide a service that is $100 an hour, do not do anything that’s not worth $100 an hour. That is to be hired out. Even then we have to consider how to raise the bar from there.

So when I built Massage Strong, I hired assistants so I could only do $80 an hour massages, right. I didn’t want to use my brain for anything else. Just massaging. Then as I was massaging, I realized that every hour that I spent in that massage room making $80 an hour had a ceiling. Every hour that I spent outside the massage room training and hiring more massage therapists equaled, in the long run, to be like thousands of dollars per hour.

For every business, scaling looks different. I scaled Massage Strong by first hiring more service providers to cover the hours that I wasn’t there. I remembered it very specifically. I had kids, and I could only work a certain amount of hours because my husband was at work. We did this whole high five at the door thing where we never saw each other because he was working, or I was working one. So I would be there, and I would be there for a certain amount of time, but I started hiring people to be there when I couldn’t be there. When I had to be at home with the kids, right.

Then I started hiring assistants to make everything super streamlined. So while I was there and while my staff was there, we didn’t have to change the sheets on the massage table. We didn’t have to wash the sheets. We didn’t have to clean the office. We didn’t have to check anyone in or out. So it allowed us to see even more people in a smaller amount of time. It was more efficient.

Then eventually I removed myself from the massaging so that my sole job was to hire and manage and build the team even bigger, which drastically increased my ceiling when I wasn’t locked in the massage room all day. Does that make sense?

Same thing with my online company Hell Yes Coaching. We have been hella scaling for the last two years. So it used to be that I only coached people one on one. That, of course, had a ceiling. There’s only so many hours in the day. So this leads me to number four.

Turning your business into a group or an asset. If you coach people one-on-one, you will triple your ceiling by saying you only coach people in groups of three. Same with personal training. Same with tutoring. Same with lots of industries. Or you can turn your service into an asset.

So right now Three More. A lot of you guys are members of Three More, right. It was built and created with great care. It’s like all of my knowledge on how to gain more clients in a series of videos that lives on a website with a Facebook community and a live coaching weekly. So it has no ceiling.

If I woke up tomorrow and had 600 new people sign up overnight, nothing changes on my end. I’m not scrambling to have more service providers. I’m not scrambling to have more equipment. I don’t need any more hours in the day. Nothing happens because it’s an asset. Except money in the bank builds, right, and more people are learning how to make more money. That’s the only thing that changes. Because I took my knowledge and I turned it into a tangible thing that can be purchased.

It’s basically like taking your service and turning it into a product is the way that I see it. You can do this with any knowledge based service. If you’re a dog trainer and you think you have to train dogs one on one, think again. You could also put every dog training piece of knowledge into a series of videos or blogs. Then it is either purchased by other dog trainers or dog owners to do it themselves, right. This is turning your service into an asset. If you’re a personal trainer, you can start taking clients only in groups of two or three, okay.

So turning your service into a group service or an asset is a phenomenal way to drastically increase your ceiling. I see a lot of the same problem with people who do this at first. A lot of times entrepreneurs will turn their nose up at putting their clients into groups or turning their knowledge into an asset because they haven’t yet sold themselves on why it’s better for their client.

For instance, I used to think one-on-one was the only way to get great coaching because I just hadn’t sold myself yet on why group is actually better. It wasn’t until I was a member in a group coaching that I realized how powerful group was. Instead of just having my coach’s brain, I had 20 other brains looking at my business. It was way better than one brain. Group coaching has a vibe, right. It’s a community. Guess how people get best results? When they’re surrounded by a community.

So I just hadn’t sold myself on that for a long time. So I had a lot of resistance going from one on one to group. It wasn’t until I bought a coaching portal, like an asset, from a coach that was self-paced, and I paced my way through the videos. I drastically increased my ceiling through her packaged knowledge that she had sold me, right.

So I had to buy these things and go through them myself and sell myself on why these can be extremely successful for my client and beneficial for my client before I was able to really sell it. So if you haven’t sold yourself on why group or assets are better than one on one then it will be super hard to transition. I highly consider doing both. These are all things that I coach deeply on. Much more deep than this podcast episode.

So listen guys. Just to recap, there’s several ways you can increase your ceiling. Let’s take a second and remember why we would even do that or why it’s important. We got into business for time freedom and money freedom. Yet so many entrepreneurs work themselves to the ultimate max, they’re at 100% ceiling, unable to relinquish control, and allow others to help assist them. So they started a business for time freedom and yet have found themselves enslaved to this company that now owns every hour of their day. Don’t be that person.

Don’t be that person. Entrepreneurship is a beautiful thing. If you properly delegate and understand how to raise your ceiling so that you can actually make as much money as you want and have time freedom to spend with your loved ones, your world will open up. You don’t have to be a workhorse. If you are being a workhorse, you’re choosing that. Choose differently.

I believe in lifestyle entrepreneurship. That means a career or a business that provides for your lifestyle. You’re not living to work. You’re working in a way that allows you to really, really live. Okay? That is my philosophy.

In my mastermind that I host, 30 More, I teach you how to scale your specific business while working less. So this is a six month mastermind. It costs $12,000. Every one of my students this past round made their money back in the first 60 days of the mastermind and went on to have their biggest sales months ever after that. You can only come into this group if your business is your full time job, not your side hustle, if you’re made at least $25,000 gross in the last 12 months, and if you make it through our application process.

If you’re interested in joining this group, you must first join Three More to learn my more beginner level business concepts and my philosophies so that you can advance smoothly into 30 More. You can purchase Three More anytime before you apply. Even our Three More Newbies can apply for 30 More if they meet the above criteria.

Our class starts in January, but we are doing applications in November for five days only. You will have five days to get in your deposit and your video, and the window is closing after that. If you want in, come to the Three More community where we give out all the details at www.threemoreclients.com. If you’re unsure if 30 More is for you, we are doing 30 minute free consultations. So visit our website and book one today.

All right guys. Much love. I will see you here next week. Bye.

Hey entrepreneurs. If you are ready to create your first six figure year, your next business investment is our course Three More. When you sign up, you will get instant access to our video vault. In these videos, I teach you exactly what I did to create a highly successful brick and mortar company as well as a booming online company. Both successful in their first year. It was not luck guys. It was a process. I am now offering that process to you.

In this class, you will become a master at organically attracting clients. Three at a time to be exact. #ThreeMore. You will know what to say during a consult or a conversation about your business so that people want what you’re selling when you speak to them.

You will know what to do when your client feels timid to invest in your service. They might want what you’re selling, but they feel on the fence about investing. This is normal. To become successful, you must know how to gently and confidently navigate these situations without being pushy but with their best interest at heart.

In Three More, you will learn new ways to think about money and sales and growing your audience, so they are lining up to buy from you. This is not gross and sleazy sales tactics. This is learning to inspire through quality service.

Best of all, you will have a community of other Three More members all reaching out for the same business growth where you can ask questions, make friends, and lean on each other. Our members say that the community is the best part.

If the community and the video vault doesn’t already make you feel like you won the business coaching lottery, we also have weekly live coaching calls. Every Tuesday at 1:30 Eastern Standard Time, you will receive live coaching in our community via Zoom so that you always stay in line with your goals. You can begin coming to these calls as soon as you sign up.

Guys between the video vault and the community and the live coaching, the program is fail proof. We are so confident that you will love three more that we have a risk-free guarantee. If it doesn’t work for you, we will send your money back no questions asked. There hasn’t been a single person that has wanted their money back. In fact, the reviews for this course are all five stars.

Do not wait. Go to www.threemoreclients.com right now, right this moment. Make the decision right now that our business will inevitably be successful. I can’t wait to see you in there.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to today’s episode. If you’re looking to get more clarity and momentum for your business, visit hellyescoachingonline.com. See you next week here on The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast.