Replace Your Income with a Service Business, Step by Step (Greatest Hits)
May 2, 2024
auto_awesome
Abbey Ashley shares how she started a successful virtual assistant service business while pregnant and hating her job. She explains the minimal startup costs, networking for clients, scaling her business to $75 per hour. The podcast discusses strategies for starting a service business, finding clients, and transitioning from a traditional job to entrepreneurship.
Starting a service business offers a quick way to earn extra income with minimal costs and flexible hours.
Identifying marketable skills and meeting client needs can lead to scaling a service business through subcontracting.
Client connectivity is vital to growing a service business, which can evolve by targeting high-end clients and expanding offerings.
Deep dives
Leveraging Airbnb: Turn Your Space Into Profit
Using Airbnb as a host allows you to earn extra cash by sharing your space while you're away, making a guest's vacation more memorable. Your spare room or home could be an opportunity waiting to turn into a practical and profitable venture. Hosting on Airbnb provides a flexible income opportunity that could help support your travels.
Starting a Service Business: Freelancing for Quick Income
Starting a service business, like freelancing, offers one of the fastest ways to make extra money with minimal startup costs. It allows you to provide services based on current skills or learn new ones, fulfilling client needs and connecting with paying customers. Transitioning from hourly work to service packages and potentially scaling by hiring subcontractors can further enhance income potential.
Identifying Service Ideas and Skills
Service ideas are abundant and valuable skills are marketable. Identifying tasks that clients need help with is key to offering services, even if starting with simple tasks like social media management or appointment setting. Leveraging existing skills and exploring new interests can lead to discovering profitable service offerings.
Networking and Client Acquisition for Service Business
Clients are everywhere, and connecting with them through networking events, referrals, or online platforms is essential for growing a service business. Leveraging personal and professional networks for client referrals and offering value-first approaches, like customized solutions or specific services, can attract potential clients.
Growth Strategies in Remote Freelancing
Remote freelancing offers growth opportunities through expanding service offerings, raising rates, and transitioning to agency models. Going broad before niching down allows flexibility in serving client needs, while pursuing high-end client targeting and subcontracting can lead to scalable service businesses. Leveraging a mix of skills and interests can help evolve service offerings over time.
Starting a service business on the side is one of the fastest ways to build extra income. It's flexible, low-overhead, and you can probably start with skills you already have.
“I had a lot of drive underneath me," Abbey Ashley told me, about starting her service business back in 2013. "I was super pregnant and I hated my job so much,”
Abbey started offering her services as a virtual assistant, and connected with her first clients at local networking events in Washington, DC. My the time her maternity leave was up--just a few short months--Abbey had booked enough work to not have to go back to that job she hated.
On top of that, she only had to work 20 hours a week to do it, and could work from home.
There are almost no barriers to entry to starting a freelance service business, and the startup costs are minimal. (All Abbey did was make business cards for networking.)
In fact, it was a service business, a house painting business in my case, that was one of my first entrepreneurial adventures.
Over time, Abbey scaled her virtual assistant business from just herself at $20-30 an hour, to her own little virtual agency, to $75 an hour and up for some specialized work.