As a lifestyle entrepreneur, it's been my goal to help other professionals achieve the same level of financial and time freedom that my family has been enjoying for years. That's because when you run a lifestyle business, you optimize your life for comfort, fun, efficiency, and relationships. Sure, money will still play a significant role in your day-to-day, but it will just be a tool to fund your family's dream lifestyle and build generational wealth.

In this blog post, I will show you how you can turn your hard-earned professional degree or postgrad education into a profitable machine that will fuel your wildest dreams. So, if you are an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, a physiotherapist, or any other type of professional, keep reading and save this post!

But before we dive in, let me tell you who I am and why you should listen to me. My name is Deniero, and after working in corporate Canada for close to seven years, I decided to quit my job to focus on my mental health and follow my dreams. Since then, I have scaled an Amazon business, a digital marketing agency, a coaching program for professionals that want to build lifestyle businesses, a personal brand on Instagram, a podcast, and I wrote a book. If you want to know more about me, you can click here to tab the page out, but for now, let's get going!

There are quite a few differences between building a regular firm and a lifestyle one, so to make your life easier, I'm going to give you a step-by-step system, and then I'll break down each point for you.

Define a high-value audience that needs to solve a specific problem

This is the starting point for all professional firms that want to scale fast and enjoy a hassle-free business model. If you don't nail this first step, you may find yourself working for a niche that either can't afford your services or is not motivated enough to hire you in the first place.

When choosing your niche, keep in mind the following.

1. Ability to pay premium prices

2. Size of the addressable market

3. Willingness to solve the problem.

Now let's look at the first point, and to illustrate it better, let's pretend that you are an accountant. If you aim to charge $3,000 to $5,000 a month for fractional CFO services, you should not target new entrepreneurs or small businesses. Instead, you should identify those companies that are big enough to need such services but small enough not to need a full-time CFO. For example, my accounting students target companies with 1 to 5 million in revenue. These companies generally have 5 to 15 employees and can easily afford a $5k retainer.

But what if you sell B2C? For example, if you are a dietician, you could target middle-aged men or women since they are more likely to afford to pay an extra $500 to $1,000 a month to gain their health back.

And this takes me to the second part of this point.: solve a specific problem. See, most people don't wake up in the morning and think, "I want to hire a lawyer" or "I can't wait to spend $3k a month on an accountant."

Instead, people think about their problems:

• "I can't believe my dental practice spent $250k in taxes this year... I need to optimize my accounting asap so I can pass on the business to my kids when I retire."

• "Wow! I can't believe I gained another 15 pounds this winter... No wonder I can't even play at the park with my kids anymore... I have to do something about this"

• "I've been trying to open a second restaurant location in another state for a long time, but between all the paperwork and permits, I'm going crazy... And worst of all, I'm wasting so much time I can't even focus on my main restaurant."

So, before offering your services, package them in a way that they can solve a real issue for your audience.

Here's an example of how you'd design your offer based on the above problems.

• We minimize your taxes and implement business and accounting systems to help you create generational wealth with your dental practice.

• We help middle-aged parents regain strength and energy so they can spend quality time with their children and future grandchildren.

• We help restaurant owners navigate the legal aspects of opening other locations in other states or abroad, so they can focus on what they do best: sell great food.

Do you see how powerful these are compared to "tax accounting," "weight loss," or "legal services"? They are prepackaged solutions to common issues that your high-value prospects experience. As long as you do your research and you test a few offers, you will 

Focus on high-value services unless you're gathering social proof

Once you've dialed in your offer and messaging, it's time to get picky! I know how tempting it is to onboard new clients, even when they don't fit your ideal customer description. But working with the wrong clients, especially cheaper jobs, is like throwing a wrench in the works.

Often, these smaller clients will require you to do work that you won't have the margins to outsource. That means you will find yourself working double the time for a quarter of the pay.

I can't stress the importance of staying consistent with who you choose to onboard. There is only one exception to this rule: if you are trying to build your reputation online. 

If your goal is to gather 5-star Google reviews and video testimonials, then your best bet is to get as many small jobs as possible and ask for a review and a testimonial in exchange. To set the right expectations, you can say, "Mrs. White, I generally don't onboard clients for services under $3,000 a month, but since I enjoyed our call today, I'd like to make you a special offer. For the next three months, I will do your bookkeeping and payroll for only $500, and I will also include a free 1-1 tax consultation call at the end of every month valued at $400. All I ask in exchange is that you leave me a Google review and shoot a 30-second video with your phone to share your experience working with me. Does that sound fair?"

Once you have collected enough reviews and testimonials, you have no reason to onboard small clients. If you have too much free time, spend that time looking for bigger clients! Focus on prospecting better leads. Set aside a couple of hours a day to reach out to 30 new clients, and soon you won't have to worry about idle time in your calendar.

Come up with one or more passive complimentary services.

In the past seven years, I have coached business owners in virtually all niches and from very diverse backgrounds. But one thing most of them have in common is that they can't see themselves offering any service other than the ones they are already offering. That shows how decades of conditioning will put blinders on almost anyone.

It doesn't matter if you are a litigator or a dentist. Sure, you need to be with your clients to fulfill your core services, but what about the complimentary services you could offer remotely?

To show you what I mean, let's pretend that you are a pediatric dentist. Up to this point, you have been focusing on seeing patients five days a week. But what if you put together a consulting program for dental practices that want to start focusing on family dentistry. You could create a 90-day program that can teach other practitioners how to set up their studios to visit more kids. You can also consult them on how to hire the right dentists for the job and market all the new services in conjunction with the others. You can even offer a soft-skill training program to teach dentists how to interact with kids and get them to cooperate during the visit.

Once you have your curriculum ready, you can record your content, promote it on Youtube and send the video viewers to a booking page where they can schedule a call with a commission-based salesperson.

This additional stream of income will a) differentiate your offering making your business even more stable than it was before, and b) will give you the freedom to choose when and how much you get to work in person.

I can't stress enough how important this step is to build your lifestyle business, especially if your current job requires you to meet your clients face-to-face.

Build your brand within your target niche

Now that you defined your audience and the services you're providing. It's time to increase your brand recognition. That's because when you or your team gets on the phone with a prospect, you want to focus on selling your services, not on convincing them that you are a trustworthy business.

To understand this concept better, let's pretend that you are an accountant and offer high-value CFO services to 7-figure manufacturing businesses. When your team books a sales call, your lead will likely Google you and your company. After all, who doesn't do basic online research before spending thousands of dollars? So if you have a poor online presence, your prospect will be wondering if it even makes to get on a call with you. But if you spent time getting interviewed and getting press in your target niche, your prospect will feel much more confident about the upcoming conversation.

Taking the time to work on your brand presence ahead is the difference between closing one deal every ten calls and closing three every ten calls. You can turn an entire business around by simply taking care of your online presence before committing to your sales efforts!

Hire a team to take care of operations, marketing, and customer service

The last step to building a lifestyle business is delegating most of your day-to-day work. But since not all work is created equal, let's break down the first things you need to take off your plate.

As a rule of thumb, start with systematizing all your mundane tasks. For example, you can turn your lead generation messages into a scripted step-by-step process. You can also create email templates for customer service inquiries. And for your social media, you can create Canva templates for infographics, so all you need to do in the future is come up with the content. 

Once the systems are in place, get a team member to follow them. And best of all, if you're starting and don't have a big budget, you can delegate all these basic tasks to one person.

Next, you'll delegate your sales. Once leads start coming in and you have a strong offer, you can onboard a commission-only salesperson that will deal with all your calls. Depending on how many leads you are getting, this could save you up to 20 hours a week (Nothing beats the feeling of getting a Stripe payment notification on your phone and knowing that your team just onboarded a new client!)

And as the last step, you can hire an operations manager that will take care of all the moving parts in your business and ensure everyone is working in sync with each other. Of course, you still want to hold daily meetings with your team at this stage, but your job is to motivate, support, and give general directions. Then your operations manager will take it from there and set up due dates for projects while holding everyone accountable.

At voilà! You now have a fully functioning lifestyle practice that a) is more profitable than your average brick-and-mortar business, b) takes less time to manage, and c) offers a laser-focused solution to a high-value problem that your niche has been trying to solve. 

If you want to know more about our coaching program, click here to contact me and either myself or my team, and I will get in touch with you and give you a hands-on strategy you can use right now to start from scratch or pivot.

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