Offers For Clients
Alright, that last chapter may take you a few days to reorganize your system and connect the dots, all the way up to a few months to build out the other tiers of your product ecosystem.
Once you have it all built out, the last piece is to think about your clients. Once you have a customer buy one of your DIY, DWY, or DFY offers, you want to make sure you have a way for them to buy from you again in an ongoing fashion.
The SAAS - software as a service - industry has figured this one out. These are companies that bill on a monthly basis, so everything from Netflix to Dropbox to ConvertKit counts as a SAAS product. We’re going to steal a few principles from them to create our offers for clients.
Principle 1: create a recurring payment offer
Principle 2: make it easy for customers to become clients
DIY Client Offers
Since your DIY offer is typically a low-cost digital product, the idea here is to expand it to a monthly offer. Think about subscriptions that you already pay for - Apple Music or Spotify, Streaming video, Canva, Adobe Creative Suite, Google Workspace, etc.
If you sell something once, and there are other options, could you put people on a monthly subscription to get access to future versions? Think about Patreon, the business that makes it easy for fans to become Patrons and support your work on an ongoing basis. They pay you a small monthly fee - say $5-25 - and in exchange they get regular content from you over time. You could even expand this to your DWY offer and include higher tiers that give your fans access to you with monthly livestreams or Q&A sessions.
Another option is to add a paid tier to your existing free content. If you have a YouTube channel, a Podcast, or a Blog, you could create a paid tier that charges your customers a monthly fee to access exclusive content or to get your content in a greater frequency (weekly vs monthly, or daily vs weekly). You can look at businesses like Cinema Therapy, one of the fastest growing YouTube channels who added a Patreon for their fans and became one of the fastest growing Patreon accounts. They now regularly speak at events at Patreon HQ to show other creators their model.
Andrew Huberman is a prime example of someone who built up a massive podcast business using the free + paid strategy. At the time of this writing he has over 4 million YouTube subscribers, has a top-5 podcast globally, and an estimated 200,000 paid subscribers at $10/month. If you assume he makes between $300-500k/year from YouTube Adsense, plus over $20m per year from his paid subscribers, you can see how lucrative adding a way to turn customers into clients can be.
Ask yourself with your current DIY offer if there is a way to apply the two principles. How can you turn your one-time offer into a recurring offer for your super fans (i.e. clients), and how can you make it easy for a fan to become a customer, and a customer to become a client?
DWY Client Offers
Done-with-you offers require some of your time to work with the customer to achieve the outcome you promised. If your DWY offer is coaching, you could turn it into a recurring monthly subscription for ongoing coaching, which is pretty typical in that industry. You could add monthly group calls and create a community of people.
Carl Richards created The Society of Advice, a monthly interview series that costs $147/month for access to a private conversation between Carl and a guest. Past guests include NYT Best Sellers like Ramit Sethi, Morgan Housel, and more. With 350 members at $147/month, that’s over $50k per year for - not to minimize this - having a zoom call with someone.
Carl has taken his brand and his network and connects people in these monthly calls and inspires them to take action in different areas of his life. That one DWY offer for clients generates mid-six figures for his business, Behavior Gap.
Another option is to start a community. Jay Clouse is the best example I’ve seen on this approach, and even created a course on how to Create A Beloved Membership if you want to replicate this for your business.
Jay teaches people how to become professional creators, and his Lab membership is an annual subscription to a community of 200 other creators. Jay’s community is currently oversubscribed, so there’s a waitlist to sign up. The membership costs $2,000 per year, so with 200 members inside that’s a $400,000 per year community for Jay’s business, Creator Science.
Both Carl and Jay’s approach takes some of (or most of) their time each month, so it’s not a DIY offer. The more they scale - either the number of members or the cost of the community - the more impact it has on their business.
What is a recurring offer you can make to your current DWY customers? How can you make it easy for them to pay you monthly or annually and become clients?
DFY Client Offers
As we learned in the last chapter, the DFY offer is typically your core offer, and the most profitable. You should make at least $2,000 in profit every time a customer says “yes” to this offer.
To help your DFY customers become clients, we add a recurring element to the offer. For this tier, it can either be the same offer just repeated, or a separate offer that works more like an add-on to the offer they already bought from you.
Let’s take a video production company as an example. The first option is to make it recurring, so instead of selling a customer on one video campaign, you create a client relationship and charge $10,000/month or $100,000 per year for ongoing video production services - one campaign every quarter, 4 smaller videos a month, etc.
The second option is to add on additional services. So if they purchase a campaign from you for $25,000, you could add on additional edits and videos for 3 or 6 months for $1,000 to $5,000 per month. These aren’t new videos, they’re just new edits from the original “hero” video campaign. The only expense to you is the strategic planning and the editing and delivery, so it’s a high profit-margin offer.
If you’re a consultant or agency, you could look at adding on additional services for a monthly fee to your existing clients. If they hired you to help implement systems that will grow their business, you could charge $1,000/month to do the teaching and analytics for them, and/or include monthly consulting calls. You’re combining a DFY offer with a DWY offer to make it a recurring offer for clients.
Looking at your current DFY offer, what else do your clients need? What can you offer as a retainer or add-on for a monthly subscription? Remember, these typically are in the $1,000-10,000 or more range, where the recurring DWY offer is more of a $50-500/month range.
How can you make it easy for your new and existing DFY customers to become clients?
Doing this work will create more profit for your business because you’ll increase the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer. Rather than someone buying from you once for $25,000, they now additionally pay you another $1,000/month, a nearly 50% increase in LTV in the first year alone.
Increasing LTV allows you to spend more to acquire new customers and clients, as well as makes your business more profitable over the long term.
TAKE ACTION
Spend time looking at each of your product tiers and create recurring offers to create clients out of your new and existing customers. Pitch these options along with your core offers so that new customers are aware of them when they are choosing to do business with you.
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