Ask Steph: Should I scale my existing offers or create something brand new?

Today I'm answering a question from one of my long-standing students who is torn between scaling her current offers or creating new offers to service her existing community. In this episode I answer this question by detailing some of the pros and cons around this important decision as well as offering a couple of alternatives…

– How scaling one product can minimise the risk and allow more time for focussing on the next thing.
– The challenges that present themselves whilst scaling up.
– Why creating a new offer and increasing the lifetime value of your existing customer is easier than trying to reach new people all the time.
– The strategy behind expanding your offers backwards, creating the simple win whilst nurturing your audience to your next offer

Have a question you’d like me to answer on the show? Write in with your question at https://stephtaylor.co/asksteph

 

Today I'm answering a listener question that was sent in. The question says:

“Hi, Steph! Congrats on the podcast. My question to you is this. I'm torn between scaling, what I've achieved with my current offers, or create a new offer to service my existing students and clients. They have been asking for a community, but I can't do both right now. What would you recommend that I do first? I also wanted to know if you think investing time in writing a book is worth it?”

I'm going to start by answering the second question first because I think that's probably the easiest answer for me. 

I found that it was worth it because even just this morning on one of my Launch Magic calls, one of my students said that she came across me through seeing my book on Amazon and that's how she came into my brand universe. 

So yes, absolutely. I thought I will be honest that writing my book probably wasn't as much effort as it would have been for a lot of people, because what I really did was I took a lot of content that I'd already shared elsewhere. And I fleshed it out. I turned it into longer essays. And rather than having to structure a book in chapters, I structured it in essays. 

 

How scaling one product can minimise the risk and allow more time for focusing on the next thing.

Torn between scaling what you've achieved with your current and creating a new offer? Now there are pros and cons to both approaches. And honestly, thinking about how you are designing your offers in your business as a whole is very important.

Now let's look at the first approach. Let's look at the pros and cons of the first approach – scaling what you have achieved with your current offers. The obvious pro here is that you don't need to spend any time creating new offers because you've already done that. The hard work is done. 

Now you can focus more time and energy on streamlining them because you already know how to deliver them. You likely already have processes in place. So you can possibly start to bring in a bigger team, a team that can help you to free up your time, which then might give you a bit of time that you can create that next offer when you have a bit more time available to do so. 

You already know your existing offers convert. So now it's less risky to look at other ways to scale them by looking at things like paid traffic, for example, Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads, because I know your audience is very active on LinkedIn, Renata. But on the flip side now, scaling what you've achieved with your current offers means that this becomes more of a numbers game. It becomes a matter of getting more people into your offers. 

Which means that you then need to reach more people. And that is a challenge for everybody right now. The online space is different from what it used to be and trying to reach more people organically is a lot harder than it was five years ago. Now, the more people you have in your business universe, you will probably also find that you have more customer support. So you will probably need to hire somebody at some stage to get that off of your plate, if you haven't already.

When you are relying on those current offers, then your income becomes a bit more tied to your audience growth. If you're not showing up so much on there, then your income might drop. 

And I guess the last con of scaling what you've achieved with your current offers is it doesn't help your existing students and clients. Now that might not be a problem. It doesn't necessarily need to be a problem. It really depends on what your bigger vision is for your business. Do you want to keep helping them? Do you want to keep helping your existing students and clients? 

Maybe helping them with new challenges or helping them in a deeper way than before. Conversely, are you happy with delivering the solution to specific challenges? The ones that you're already helping them to solve? And then letting them go, letting them go elsewhere to get that next step of support if they need it. So there are a few different pros and cons. And again, I'm going to say there's no better solution. It's what's going to work for you. 

Creating new offers to service your existing clients

Now, the second option was creating new offers to service your existing clients. So let's look at the pros for this. The big pro is that you get to help those who have already had a great experience with you. 

They want to work with you again, they are asking you for ways to work with you again. So it's an easier solution for you. It's an easy option for you than selling to somebody who doesn't know you that well yet. Increasing your lifetime value from each customer is so much easier than trying to constantly bring in new people all the time, especially in the current online environment where it's really hard to stand out and it can be really hard to reach new people. Ads are expensive. 

So selling to those existing customers becomes much and it also allows you to help them in a deeper way. It can, it means you can deliver a better overall client experience because now you are helping them to solve that next problem. You're helping them to achieve that next transformation. That next step. 

 

Why creating a new offer and increasing the lifetime value of your existing customer is easier than trying to reach new people all the time.

I want to highlight something that you said. They are literally asking you to create a community. That sounds like such a good opportunity. And I know that you are really limited on time and you can't do that and deliver your existing offers. But I wonder if maybe you could bring in a team member to run this for you. 

Could you hire a community manager for an hour a day, five hours a week? And make their sole responsibility running this community. I would encourage you to really investigate this idea a little bit more, really find out what they want. Like when they ask you for a community. What do they mean by that? What does that ideal community look like to them? What does the perfect solution look like. What problems do they now have that your community could solve for them? And if it's a recurring problem, maybe they need ongoing support. Then potentially that could be part of a membership. And the recurring income from the membership would then cover the costs of having someone manage the admin, having somebody manage the community and ultimately be profitable over and above those costs. Once you have created this new offer, then maybe your focus shifts to scaling your other offers. Because now, you know that there's a natural next step. But somebody who completes the first one knows that each time you launch that existing offer, that first offer you're going to be adding more people into the overall journey, the overall pipeline. Which means that their lifetime value is going to be higher. This means that you can spend more time and energy acquiring a new buyer for that offer. 

Your return on investment becomes a lot higher. Because the lifetime value is high. Now, obviously, the downside to this option is it does take a lot more time to create and deliver new offers than it does to simply launch an existing one over and over again. Once we've created an offer, we created all of the assets to promote it across the sales page, and we've got caught open emails. All at then, the comms is tweaking. The marketing, tweaking the messaging. Each time we launch but we're generally not having to reinvent the wheel. So it's not a whole lot at work. 

 

The strategy behind expanding your offers backward, creating the simple win whilst nurturing your audience to your next offer

There are another two options that you didn't include in your question, and you might've already discounted these options, so option three is to create a new offer that comes before your existing offer. So it doesn't need to be as big as a community or as big as a next step offer. But it could be something smaller, something that solves a problem. Somebody has before they can solve the problem that your existing offers solve. So they might have a problem that needs solving before they will even be in a head space to solve the next problem that your offers solve. 

It might be lower ticket, probably it would likely be a lower ticket, but the aim here isn't to generate a lot of cash. It's not to generate a lot of income. It's more there to give them a smaller win and nurture them into your next offer. And this could be really simple. It could be a live workshop. It could be a mini course. It could be anything as long as it's aligned with your strategy. It doesn't matter so much what the format is, it matters more what the outcome is and what the overall goal, the overall strategy is. 

And that's really why I created off a less. Sell more because it's not about just adding extra offers to your business. It's about intentionally designing. What do I want this to look like? What is that journey that I'm taking people on, where I can bring them back to buy from me again and again? 

Rather than just letting them pick and choose things. And then they go off on their merry way and I never see them ever again. So really thinking about what is that strategy. What is that journey going to look like? 

Option for the last one. I do not recommend it, but I'm putting it in here because it is still an option, even though it's not a decision. We are still doing this when we don't make a decision. And that is sitting in indecision between the options. So I just want to make that one very clear. I know it's very hard when you're like, oh, which is going to be the better? 

 

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