You’ve probably heard an entrepreneur or business coach say something like, "To start a successful business, find a problem and solve it."
Well, that’s true – and the same is true if you want to boost your personal income from a business you own, freelance for, or are employed by.
"To boost your personal income, find a problem businesses have and solve it."
This week I’ll be writing about the skills you need to build to raise your personal profits – not just the revenue numbers of a business.
The best way to become more valuable to any company (including your own) is to build skills that solve the problems that make a business more money.
I’ll bullet that out:
- To become more valuable to a company (and hence, demand higher rates or rake in bigger personal profits)…
- You need to build the right money making skills.
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The right money making skills are the skills that help solve the biggest problems that businesses have related to making more money.
This is all pretty straight-forward thus far.
Where it obviously becomes tricky is identifying the best problems to solve. This is where everyone overcomplicates things.
And the point I’m trying to make is that when you don’t know what problems to solve, it then makes it extremely difficult to know what income-boosting skills to build.
The easiest way to figure out what money making problems you should be solving for businesses is to use legendary marketing consultant Jay Abraham’s timeless advice.
Jay said there are only 3 ways to grow a business:
- Increase the number of customers.
- Increase average transaction value.
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Increase the frequency of purchases.
As you can see each of these 3 growth levers provides challenging money-making problems that a business must overcome.
Let’s very quickly look at each.
Problems You Can Solve That Help Increase The Number of Customers
Let’s say an online business needs to increase the number of customers.
They probably have problems with lead generation (not enough leads or quality enough leads). They might have issues getting traffic. They might have trouble with their sales copy conversion rates. Their offers might not be good or the right fit for their audience.
There are several problems right there, that if you have the skills to solve, you’ll become instantly more valuable to a business.
Problems You Can Solve That Help Increase The Average Transaction Value
If you need to increase the average transaction value (sometimes called Average Order Value) you basically need to charge more or persuade customers to buy more products in order bumps or upsells.
That means that businesses might need better sales copy to help raise their price. The business might have a problem with their backend offerings – there’s no higher tier product customers can buy – and that’s a problem of needing new offers.
Problems You Can Solve That Help Increase The Frequency Of Purchases
This growth lever means that a business needs to get more repeat business.
Problems might be needing better products (that increase customer satisfaction), or more offers in the portfolio. They might need to send more emails to their customers too.
Okay, so the first step in boosting your income to new heights is to become a problem-solver… But not just any ole problem. You want to solve very specific types of money related problems for businesses.
Go through Jay’s 3 ways to grow a business, and look at the business you’re working with or on. What is that business lacking in the growth department? Those are generally the money making problems most worth solving.
There should be something obvious that stands out. The next step is to then start building the skill(s) that solve that problem.
Make sense?
So the "P" in my PSRB Method for boosting personal income is "Problem-Solving".
Again, when you know the common problems that businesses have making money… you’ll have a much better idea of the exact skills you’ll need to build to make yourself more valuable to a company.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about the "S", which are the specific Skills that I recommend you build.
Armed with the Problem-Solving info above, it’s probably not too hard to identify some of the skills I think you should build. However, some skills are much, much better to focus on than others.
We’ll talk about those tomorrow!
– Derek
P.S. Again, there’s nothing for sale in this series. I’m just real-time mapping out the times in my life that I’ve made significant leaps forward in personal income because it’s been on my mind recently.