How to Scale a Service Based Business to Freedom in 2023

Wondering exactly how to scale a service based business? Whether you’re in marketing, social media management, a virtual assistant or OBM, scaling a service based business gets to be simple when you have the right strategies up your sleeve. 

As a business coach and marketing strategist, I love helping service providers like you not just to grow but also to scale your online businesses so you can create the life you’ve been dreaming about. 

If you’re a coach who’s stumbled across this blog post, check out this article on how to scale your coaching business to financial freedom, too. 

But service providers, here are 5 of the best ways you can scale your online business to six and multiple six figures in 2023. 

1. 1:many Group Programmes 

There’s a big misconception in the online space that you can only start a group programme if you become a business coach. 

That’s simply not true and I see a lot of service providers stunting their growth because of this mindset block. 

I had a service provider client in my 1:1 programme who was tapping out at £3k months and we boosted her earnings to £7k per month in just one month by mapping out and launching a group programme for her. 

I’m also busting the myth that you have to be fully booked with Done for You before you offer group programmes, or implement any of these scaling strategies I’m sharing today. If you want to know when to scale your business, there’s never a perfect time, but if you’re starting to feel like you’re trading more time for money than you care to, NOW could be the right moment. 

Procrastination because of perfection won’t do you any favours in reaching your goals and   can actually hold you back from impacting more people. Plus, when all you do is fill up 100% of your time with done for you clients, it takes away ALL your time that you need to develop these new group and passive offers. 

2. Agency Model

A really popular option for scaling up a service business is to build an agency. 

There are lots of agency models that you can approach depending on how much you want to be “in” your business, but in short, there are three main approaches online service providers take. 

A fully passive approach, where you hire everyone down to the CEO of the company, and you just take the profits. You can consider yourself a bit of a silent partner here who gets to reap the rewards and just check in every now and then to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Next, there’s a more hybrid approach where you’re still the CEO and the visionary of the company but tend to have less 1 to 1 client contact. In this type of agency set up you’ll likely have account managers alongside done for you service providers who work on the implementation. 

And the third most popular agency model is one where you’re still heavily involved in the client deliverables. This may involve you being the strategist, and maybe taking on roles that you enjoy a lot in your business and then hiring team members to support you with the rest. 

You might find that if you’re looking to scale a service business using the agency model that you can start with the latter of the above models and progress with time and experience.

3. Passive Offer Suite 

One of my favourite ways of  how to scale a service business is by building out a passive product suite. 

This is exactly why I launched Freedom Course Creator, to help service providers like you to create and launch a profitable online course that you can market passively. 

But you don’t have to start by jumping in at the deep end if you’re not quite ready to become a course creator yet. 

A great way to get started is to make sure you record any guest expert sessions, or free masterclasses you host and turn those into a paid for passive offer.

Some service-based agencies also create a totally passive business model that someone else runs and is filled with digital products and courses. This is perfect if you’re an online business owner who really values time and financial freedom.

4. Consultancy 

Consultancy is similar to offering VIP days but is usually offered as an ongoing option for businesses who aren’t in a position to hire a full time high-level staff member just yet.

It’s also a HUGE industry, worth over $1.3billion meaning there’s a LOT of demand for it. 

 It’s almost like a Done with You Service and comes with a higher price tag for your time. You can also negotiate longer term contracts for consultancy to help predict your income better. 

Consultancy can be as flexible as you wish and can be done virtually as well as in-person. 

If you’re a social media manager, you may offer social media consulting to startups where you come in once a quarter and help them map out their strategy and then have someone in their company implement your suggestions. 

The level of additional support with consultancy support is completely up to you depending on how you want to scale your business. For example, access to email support or 1:1 calls may vary depending on their consultancy package.

5. VIP Days 

Last but not least are VIP Days. 

One thing we can all feel we’re short on as business owners is time, and as a service provider you might see a sense of urgency to get things done for your clients. 

The truth is, a lot of people wait longer than they probably should to outsource in services meaning they really want to hit the ground running when they finally do invest. 

This is where VIP days can help to not only boost your bottom line, but get deliverables over to your client far quicker than they would if they were on a monthly retainer or choosing a one-off service that takes a month to set up, for example. 

VIP days are perfect for scaling because even though they do take up your time, you can charge a premium for it and the sky’s the limit depending on how in-demand your time is. 

As a minimum, you can charge 4-figures for a VIP day and can charge as much as 5-figures. Remember the trick is here that you’re selling the transformation that they get from the day, the value, the strategy. Not the time they’ve spent with you. 

I hope this week’s post helped you come up with some scaling strategies that will work for you, but also gave you an insight into exactly what is a scalable business model and how scaling your service based business doesn’t need to be overwhelming and overcomplicated. 

Let me know in the comments which of these you’re going to try, it’s great to hear how you’ll be making moves in your online business. 

Claudia xx