Today we are going to look at one way that you can make more money from your business. A lot of the time business owners focus solely on attracting new clients and customers. Also a lot of the time they only offer one service. Whilst this is good intially from the point of being able to clearly explain what you do and to focus, it does limit the amount of money you can earn from each of your clients.

An example of this would be the company that does the bookkeeping for my Irish business they have been doing my books month in, month out for over two years now. They charge €50 per month which is very cost effective and saves me a lot of hassle. But I think they are missing out. You see I am pleased with the service they provide, and we have built up a good working realtionship. Yet they have never once offered me any additional services and I’m willing to bet that it is the same for each of their other clients too.

What they need to do is to identify a back end product that they can provide and offer to their existing customers. To do this they could put together a questionnaire and ask me what other similar services I might be looking for that they could then provide. For example I might be interested in payroll services or more in depth financial forecasting assistance. If they didn’t feel comfortable providing any additional services themselves then they could approach a 3rd party company and offer to pass on new customers to them for a % of the ongoing residual business.

So in this example say that my bookkeeper has 100 clients and she is currently getting €50 per month from each one. This means her turnover is €5000 per month. What if she was to offer all of her customers a more detailed financial forcasting service which she charged say an additional €50 per month?

Say only 20% of her clients decided to take her up on her offer, that would represent €1000 per month additional turnover, or a 20% growth in her business. All without finding any new customers but by finding out the needs of her existing customers and meeting them.

Based on this example what other products or services could you offer your customers?

If they have purchased from you before then they already know you and must have liked or trusted you enough to do business in the past. Don’t make the mistake of not going back to them and finding out if there is anything else that you might be able to do for them.