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Creating Leverage In
Your Freelance Couriers Business.
Article By: Andre
Hendricks
 today's
article is all about creating leverage around your
courier jobs. If you catch what I am about to
teach you in this article you will grow your business by
leaps and bounds while working less and less
guaranteed.
So exactly what do I mean by creating leverage? In a
previous article I have mentioned that business is a
team sport. Think about your business right now… Chances
are you are the receptionists, the driver, the admin
staff, the customer services representative, the sales
person, the marketing person, and everyone else -- all
by yourself.
Now I don't want you to get me
wrong here. I am not implying you should go and hire 10
staff members to help you in your business. I also
started out by doing everything myself, but then
leveraged my time by employing others to do the work for
me.
Time is the only real currency of the 21st century and
time also equals life. You cant's save time and use it
later. You need to know what your time is worth in order
for you to leverage your time and grow your business.
The purpose of creating leverage is
to eventually remove yourself from your business and
have others do what your companies courier jobs.
If you continue doing everything yourself you'll
probably work till you drop because you don't have
anyone else that can do it for you.
Like I have said before, I am not
implying you hire a lot of staff but I want you to
prepare to get help in once your business can afford the
extra help. So when do you hire someone and what will
they do? The answer to this question lies within what
activates you are currently doing that occupies your
time the most but that is not the most effective use of
your time.
For example once you grow your
business and have a few clients under your belt, your
main point of focus should be to grow your business by
acquiring more paying clients. If you are
answering your own telephones, doing the driving
yourself and everything else, you will not be in a
position to acquire more work for your business simply
because you will not have the time to do so.
That is why need to pay very
careful attention to what I am saying to you In order to
grow your business beyond £750 per week. If you can
generate £750 per week, what would your business be like
if you had 2 more people that generated the same amount
of money for your business? What would happen of you had
5 people generating that amount of money for you?
Now…what would have to change for
you to make that happen? First of all, you need to have
time to acquire more clients, and let's say you're not
really good at acquiring new clients, how can you change
that?
You could hire someone that is paid
based on performance for example, you only pay that
person when a prospective client actually becomes a
customer. Believe it or not there are people that earn a
living this way, that's much better at sales and
marketing then you are and more importantly that enjoys
doing it!
You see if you want to grow your
business you need to ask yourself " Who can I get to do
this for me, that can do it faster and better then I
can?" Once you start thinking like that, you will be in
a position to grow your business, have more time for
yourself and your family, and actually work less because
other people are taking care of the things that use to
take up your entire day.
Truth be said you should be able to go on vacation, and
when you come back your business should have grown and
have additional clients that puts money into your
pocket-- all in your absence.
This is leverage at it's best. Let
me give you a few simple examples base on my own
business. As you know we do not provide jobs we provide
the information on how to get started within the
freelance courier industry. We also provide one year
support to all our customers.
In the beginning we had a problem
with many people asking the exact same question: Do you
provide jobs?" And myself or my staff would email the
person back saying the exact same thing "No we don't
provide jobs, we provide information on getting started
within the freelance courier industry.
Now as you can imagine, it takes time reading the emails
and answering them. In total probably about 20 minutes
per email. If we had 6 emails for the day that is 2
hours of time just reading and sending emails with the
exact same question and answer. So If we loose 2 hours
per day, that's 10 hours per week.
Now let's assume you are making
£3000 per month, that means your weekly income is £750
per week right? That means you're making £125.00
per day -- working a six day week. If you work from 9 to
5 that means your hourly rate is £15.60. at 26p per
minute.
Now I want you to understand that is example is 100%
accurate and if you want to grow your business you need
to know what your time is worth. You need to measure
every activity in your business and break it down like I
am doing here so you can see where you are wasting time,
what it's costing you, and where you can create more
time, thus increasing your profits.
So by checking emails and replying
to the exact same questions, we were loosing more than
£30 per day just answering emails. That equates to
£187.20 per week and £748.80 per month. Now Let me ask
you this, what is your ideal monthly income?
In other words what would you like to be earning?. Let's
say you want to earn £10,000 per month how do you go
about increasing the value of your time in order to
achieve that?
First of all you wont be able to
jump from £3000 to £10.000 in one go so here's what you
do… Take 10% from what you want to earn and ad that to
your current earnings which in this example is £3000
plus £1000 = £4000 So you that means you want to earn an
additional £1000. Now that's not your ideal target yet,
but it's a much more achievable target to shoot for.
Now look at the activities that's
making you money in your business. For example, you
discovered that by getting more customers you can
increase your income right? So how do you go about
getting more customers if you are to occupied servicing
your existing customers?
Simple, start by automating as much of the mundane tasks
as you can and hire someone to take care of the time
consuming things like checking emails, answering phones,
dealing with customer queries, and a ton of other things
that use to take up your time.
Why do you need to this? You need
to do this so you can create more leverage or time for
yourself to market your business and get those 2 or 3
additional customers that will put that extra £1000 in
your pocket per month. We managed to save almost 2 hours
of our time every day by automating our customer
services process.
Here's how it works. We created a FAQ page for people,
so they can read what we are all about before emailing
us their questions. But as you know many people will not
bother reading the FAQ page so they'll email anyway.
Because of that , we created an email autoresponder that
emails the person back the moment they submit their
questions.
The email autoresponder then thanks
the person for contacting us and then lets them know
that their questions are more than likely already
answered in our FAQ Page which we have include in the
email. We then ask them to read through the FAQ page and
right at the bottom of the page, if they still can't
find a solution to their problem, we present them with a
second email address where they can reach our support
team for direct assistance.
This automated process freed up all
of our staff's time answering replica emails throughout
the day and we were able to get more productivity from
those previously wasted 2 hours. For example, I now had
2 extra hours to look at ways how I can make my business
more profitable, or create more products to further help
my customers in their businesses.
As a result we started making more money because we were
more productive and got more done. Another example is
this. I use to create websites for my clients
personally, and that used to consume most of my time. I
then outsourced the task to someone else that did it
faster and better then I could, yet costs me less than
what I was charging my customers.
The result, I can offer the service of building websites
for my customers without having to do it myself, thus
saving my time and even making a small profit in
process. Here's another example, We offer one year
support to our customers where we send you guys monthly
articles like this and video tips as well.
But in reality, and if I can let you in an a little
secret… I'm not actually doing these articles in real
time. I have pre-recorded all of these articles for the
entire year, and automated the process of sending them
out to you every month.
I could even be on holiday right
now, basking in the sun in the Bahamas! while you're
reading to me this very moment! How do you like that for
leverage? We have taken our entire support process and
automated it so we can free up our time and be busy with
more productive things.
What I'm trying to teach you here is that in order for
you to grow your business, you need to start thinking
about how you can get things done by actually not doing
it yourself, so you can concentrate on building your
business.
You already know what takes up most
of your time, and how to grow your business, the next
step is to identify how you can leverage your time and
outsource certain activities that is not productive and
that can be done by someone else.
As you free up more time, make more money and work less,
you can then hire people to grow your business for you,
so that the growth of your business is also an activity
that's being outsourced.
I sincerely hope you begin to see
what I mean by leveraging your time and why I said at
the beginning of this recording, if you understand this
concept you will grow your business by leaps and bounds.
Start by identifying where you are wasting too much time
and then find a way to have someone else do that
activity for you so you can leverage your time to be
more productive.
I'm afraid we're out of time but I
encourage you to read to this article again so you can
really grasp the concepts I have shared with you today.
Thanks for reading.
Until then I wish you much success
Andre
Hendricks
Courier Jobs - Earn Between £450 -
£850+ P/W Using Your Car!
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