How I transitioned from 1:1 clients to a digital product business

How I transitioned from one on one client work to pretty much a solely digital product-based business. Now, it's funny because everyone has this big expectation that what will happen on your transition from client work through to a digital product-based business is that you'll have this one big launch, make enough money to fire all of your clients, and then never work with a client again.

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How to go from client work to selling digital products

The reality is generally going to be somewhat different. Now, it might be that you let go of one client so that you have enough time to prepare for your launch. Then you freak out about whether you have enough money to last you, to feed you. Then you'll question whether you made the right decision. You'll launch once, you'll let go of a few more clients, you'll launch again, let go of a few more, eventually have no clients left, and you'll be solely digital product income. And then you might be like me and realize that you missed that client interaction and decide to take some clients back on.

 

The path isn't going to be linear. That path to building that online business isn't going to be straight. It's going to look different for everybody. Launching is a pretty major project in your business and creating a digital product is also a major project, two completely separate major projects. If you're trying to launch while you're creating your digital product, it's a lot of work and something's going to have to give. If you're launching first and then creating it, that's less work at the same time. And you can use it almost to create a deadline to kick your butt into gear, because if you tell your clients that you are finishing up with them on a certain date, then you are going to get that launch done by that certain date. Or maybe you'll say, “I'm going to stop taking new client projects from this particular date.” That deadline, you're going to work really hard to get it all done by that deadline.

 

The thing with letting go of clients and transitioning into one-on-one work is that it is a transition. It's not an overnight thing. It's not that you suddenly fire all of your clients. It's not that you suddenly have the big launch that enables you to fire all of those clients. It's that process of iteration. It's slowly having bigger launches that allow you to potentially let go of more and more clients if you don't want to keep working with clients. I personally started letting go of retainer clients in 2018. Before that, I was doing Instagram marketing. I was managing Facebook ads. I was the general social media marketing chick. And by the end of 2019, I had let go of all of my clients. I had no clients. That felt pretty good. It was pretty nice to have that freedom, but the income wasn't so great at the time.

 

So then, at the start of 2020, I started taking on a few one-on-one clients again for done for you launch strategy. But then what happened was, early in 2020, so around March, right when the pandemic hit, my business exploded. I was selling so many courses that I felt like this scattered mess and I didn't really have any time to work with my clients because suddenly I had to implement systems and processes into my business that I hadn't had before just to be able to keep up with the growth that we'd had so quickly. So then I ended up with no clients. By the end of 2020, I had no clients. 2021, I had no clients. 2022, coming into this year, so the end of 2021 and coming into the start of this year, I realized I really missed those client interactions.

 

I love showing up for my students, I love teaching the live Q&A's in Launch Magic twice a week, but I really missed diving deep into somebody else's launch that wasn't my own. So I decided to then start doing VIP days, where once a month I have one client where I'll spend six hours, an entire day, with my head down working on whatever they need in their launch. And I have so much fun with it. Sometimes it's brainstorming all of the content topics, their webinar outline, their lead magnet topics, the emails that they're going to send out during their launch. Whatever parts of their launch they need help with, I get to work on that, and it's really fun and I find it a lot easier than working on my own launch because I'm not as close to it as I am with my own launches.

 

The point that I'm trying to make here is that the goal isn't always to reach zero clients. The goal is to reach a business that feels really good to you and that might be one major client that you work with ongoing and then the rest of your income comes from a group program, potentially. Or it might be that 90% of your income comes from your clients but you have an ebook there to supplement that income. It might be that you work with one client project a month and you have an online course that you launch a few times a year. There's no perfect solution and the goal, the dream, isn't always zero clients. It's what lights you up, it's what makes you happy, and it's how you get to have the biggest impact.

 

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