How Much Money Can I Make As A Soloist?

When speaking about positioning at a conference for creative business owners, a soloist approached me. After pivoting from a multi-employee business during the pandemic, she was pleasantly surprised at how much more she was earning solo.

Our conversation inspired me to record this episode to share what is possible for soloists—and we’re not talking unicorns:

The journey from something that looks suspiciously like freelancing to employing leverage in your business.

The three types of leverage most soloists use to evolve their business.

The pros and cons of using different types of leverage in a soloist business model.

Why you want to be delivering high value transformations to maximize your earnings without working more hours.

LINKS

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLE

RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS

10 Ways To Grow Revenue As A Soloist (Without Working More Hours): most of us have been conditioned to work more when we want to grow revenue—but what if we just worked differently?

The Soloist Women community: a place to connect with like-minded women (and join a channel dedicated to your revenue level).

The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:44

Rochelle Moulton: If you are setting, say, a 2 times rate on your contractor, so they charge you $25, 000, you bill them out to the client at $50, 000, then you're making 100% gross markup. Now I know that sounds like a lot, but remember, you're typically paying them some upfront before your client pays, so you have cash flow risk. You also have to spend coordination time and you're still doing all the usual client-facing activities including billing and collections And you're on the hook in every way, including legally, for the satisfactory performance of the work. Hello, hello. Welcome to

00:44 - 01:21

Rochelle Moulton: Soloist Women, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm sharing a short solo episode on a topic near and dear to many of us. How much money can you actually make as a soloist? Now, I recently spoke about positioning at David C. Baker's MYOB conference for creative business owners, where a soloist approached me when I finished. And it turns out she'd had a multi-employee business for many years, but the pandemic brought their client work to a halt. So she pivoted to a soloist model and now brings in

01:21 - 01:59

Rochelle Moulton: contract help only when she needs it. And she said something like, I've never had more money in my bank account or felt freer in my life. And I was thinking, amen sister, the soloist way. She seemed pleasantly surprised that such a simple pivot could bring more money, more free time, and more joy, which is why I wanted to record this episode on a related question I get asked a lot. How much money should I be making and how much money can I make with my expertise? Let's agree to just tossed should off the table. I don't

01:59 - 02:38

Rochelle Moulton: believe in shoulds, But I would like you to know what's possible. Not unicorns, but the kind of business models that actually exist out in the real world. Most of us start with something that looks suspiciously like freelancing, right? You start out charging an hourly, daily, weekly, or even fractional rate. And if you do well, you eventually hit against a revenue ceiling, often somewhere between about $100, 000 up to roughly $250, 000, depending on how expensive a problem you're solving. And you suddenly realize that the only way to make more money under your current business model is

02:38 - 03:19

Rochelle Moulton: to work more hours. And you just can't, or you don't want to. And that's when the great experiment begins. You start to explore how to use leverage. Your central question becomes, how can I earn more without working more hours? Well, here's 1 way to think about it. You can create a soloist business with any combination of 3 kinds of leverage, pricing, people, and product. Pricing leverage is when you set your prices so they are unlinked to your time. They'll usually be based at least partly on value, but not always, And this allows you to charge way

03:19 - 03:58

Rochelle Moulton: more than a set rate for your time. People leverage is when you hire people on a contract basis, assuming you're a soloist, to do client work. You make money on the spread between what you pay them and what you charge the client. And product leverage is when you develop products like books, courses, and even memberships that allow you to charge flat fees for a concentrated investment of your time and then you make money on Volume I think most people assume that you have to have people or product leverage to break the upper revenue Echelons. Well, I'm

03:58 - 04:39

Rochelle Moulton: here to tell you that you don't right? I've worked with soloist clients whose only leverage was pricing. They solve big, expensive problems for a very specific client niche, and they passed a million dollars in revenue. Soloist business. No employees, no products, but an outsized reputation in a very slim but rich niche. And as you know, if you're already a soloist, you take home a huge chunk of your top line revenue when you're not paying employees and maintaining a product structure. Now, if you add just a book, an authority book, to that mix, it gets even better.

04:39 - 05:19

Rochelle Moulton: Your book can act as a moneymaker on its own. I've worked with a handful of clients who managed out-sized book profits. But more often, it's a driver of revenue rather than a producer of it. So you publish a book, a tightly branded 100% on point book sharing your expertise. You promote it to your list on social media, you pitch yourself on podcasts, and word grows. Maybe you speak at conferences, word spreads still more, and that book becomes an entrée, sometimes the entrée, to your pipeline. Maybe you make a few thousand a year on the book, but

05:19 - 05:59

Rochelle Moulton: it drives hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue. 1 client writes a book about every 5 years, and while they sell anywhere from 50, 000 to 150, 000 copies over those 5 years, which by the way, is still a nice chunk of change. The real money is in their high-end consulting gigs, about $500, 000 a year, and speaking fees, 250, 000 or more in non-pandemic years. Now, before we talk about other types of leverage, I do want to point out something about only using pricing leverage. This model is still dependent on your producing value directly for

05:59 - 06:38

Rochelle Moulton: your clients. It typically doesn't produce a business that you can sell and should you get sick or want to retire permanently from it, the spigot shuts off. So you want to have solid and expensive, unfortunately, disability insurance and sock away a good chunk of your profit every year. And by the way, Sallowis have lots of options for tax advantage savings. So you want to sock away a good chunk to preserve your options. Now people leverage can also be profound, although not without its challenges. In fact, my very first business leveraged people, employees and contractors, and I

06:38 - 07:21

Rochelle Moulton: was able to sell it to Arthur Andersen for a very nice premium that more than made up for the occasional lean year. Now, as a soloist, you can hire contractors as versions of yourself, mini-mes, right, to complete client work or you can hire people with related skill sets so that you can complete more complex work that you could not do by yourself. So this requires comfort with selling, with pricing work that other people will deliver, and leading your team. You will sometimes have to have difficult conversations and find yourself either thrilled or horrified with the actions

07:21 - 07:56

Rochelle Moulton: of your people. But if you choose your talent well, you have a consistent selling machine and a process to get the work done well, you can do quite well financially. So let me give you an example. If you are setting, say, a 2 times rate on your contractor, so they charge you $25, 000, you bill them out to the client at $50, 000, then you're making 100% gross markup. Now I know that sounds like a lot, but remember you're typically paying them some upfront before your client pays, so you have cash flow risk. You also have

07:56 - 08:36

Rochelle Moulton: to spend coordination time and you're still doing all the usual client-facing activities including billing and collections, and you're on the hook in every way, including legally, for the satisfactory performance of the work. If they quit midstream, guess whose problem that is. When I owned a boutique firm, I marked up rates 2 to 3 times what I paid the consultant depending on my prior experience with them, the specific skill set they had, the rarity or lack thereof, and the personality of the lead client. So more recently, 1 of my clients, he does a little bit of what

08:36 - 09:13

Rochelle Moulton: I think of as reverse engineering. He sells the project himself. He has a very high end reputation with his ideal clients. He scopes it out and he negotiates a usually value-based price tag. So he then takes that scoped project to a member of his extensive team of contractors, and he asks them their price to do the work as its outline. And inevitably, I know this won't surprise you, there was a significant difference between those 2, between the price he got with the client and the price that the consultant delivered. The contractor would often base their price

09:13 - 09:49

Rochelle Moulton: on their expected hours for the project, and they'd come in sometimes even comically low. I mean, sometimes the client had them redo their bid to be more generous to the contractor and the client would then mark up their price by a factor of 4 or 5, sometimes even more. I'm guessing it won't surprise you that this consultant's gross after paying his contractors was well in excess of a million dollars a million dollars a year. It came with some risk, I mean certainly more than a solo practice, but it was a fairly low and pretty manageable risk,

09:49 - 10:33

Rochelle Moulton: especially since he had a slew of pre-qualified contractors ready to step in if somebody dropped out. Now product leverage is another area that some soloists consider the holy grail. And it can be, although you usually will need a pretty significant audience size, an email list, to make significant revenue from products. The exception, productized services where you're selling some sort of assessment or strategy session to deep-pocketed buyers. Those can be a six-figure-plus revenue stream just by themselves, even with a small list. And when I say a small list, like under $500. So products can be books, courses,

10:33 - 11:17

Rochelle Moulton: memberships, anything you essentially create and then, at least in theory, put on autopilot. So selling $39 ebooks is a very slow roll. But selling, say, $7, 500 memberships can move your revenue line north pretty quickly if you've identified the right niche, offer, price, and compelling branding and messaging. How much can you gross? A lot. You just have to work through the challenges of scaling and you might wind up wanting an employee or 2. I've seen gross revenues as high as 6000000 to just under 10 million, but each of those had significant contractor and technology expenses, not

11:17 - 12:02

Rochelle Moulton: to mention running a constantly moving business. They were working serious entrepreneur hours. What I see more often in my practice is soloists adding a product or 2 in experimental mode, small at first and then expanding as their audience grows if they find they're suited to it because not everybody is and Some wind up splitting the difference between products and services to build productized services selling them to high-end corporate or business organizations So all of this is a detailed way to say this. With the right niche, making high value transformations and a working authority machine, you can

12:02 - 12:45

Rochelle Moulton: make mid 6 figures, 500 to 600 thousand dollars, pretty consistently without working a traditional full-time schedule. And you have the opportunity to make far more if you're motivated to do that. Not everyone is. So if you're still working on your business model and you know let's face it aren't we all, take heart. All right there is a way for you to build a joyful, sustainably, highly profitable, soloist business with your expertise. You just have to keep experimenting to find your sweet spot. Okay, so that's it for this episode. I hope you'll join us next time for

12:45 - 12:46

Rochelle Moulton: soloist women. Bye bye.