When you are trying to make your business sustainable, it is often very helpful (and very smart) to look beyond your main offering and see if there are other things you can provide for your students or clients that will
1) Help to support them further in their vegan journey and
2) Create an additional revenue stream for you and your business.
As a cooking class instructor, vegan coach or other service-based business owner, it is likely that you have been developing recipes, writing blogs or creating videos full of useful information, or providing advice to your clients outside of your paid service. If that’s the case, how can you harness and repurpose those efforts in order to easily develop some supporting items that can be cultivated or expanded into something useful to you and your clients? Here are a few tips:
- Take a look at the blogs/articles you have written, videos you have created, tips you have collected, recipes, meal plans, encouraging/inspirational ideas you have put together in the past for your students/clients, and pull them all together in one place. You may be surprised at how much raw material you have that could easily be leveraged! Once you have it all collected, take a critical look and see if you can tweak any of it to develop one or more resources that could serve as an offering (remember, the idea is not to start making things from scratch, but to use existing content to easily create something that is marketable). Alternately, think about whether you can make something fresh and new from these materials (for example, maybe you can take one set of information from a blog and make it into a fun video clip, etc).
- Once you have established what you have, or what you could create with minimal effort, think about whether there are things you could bundle into a support package that would benefit people, and that they might be willing to pay for. For example, if you are a cooking instructor, perhaps you have a collection of recipes for busy people, a tip sheet with time-saving cooking tips, and a video on how to set your kitchen up to make it more efficient than you could bundle and offer to students who have taken your recent cooking class for busy people. Also, don’t forget that these offerings don’t necessarily have to be something physical — they could include paid access to a private, paid Facebook support group or access to a private recipe club.
- If you’re not sure how to go about this and you don’t think you have anything that could be useful in your back pocket, take a look at what other business owners in your field are offering their clients. What kind of extra support are they providing? Do any of their ideas inspire you to make something of your own? No matter where you are in this process, taking the time to do a bit of benchmarking and research into what other businesses like yours are doing is a great practice, and keep in mind you don’t necessarily have to stay in the vegan realm to do this kind of research — you will often glean very useful ideas from similar non-vegan business owners that can be tweaked for your vegan biz.
As business owners we often spend the majority of our marketing efforts trying to reach more people with our message and our offerings. But the ideas above are things you can do to help support the loyal following that you grow every time you do a consult, run a class or hold an event. The importance of supporting this group cannot be understated, and hopefully these ideas have inspired you to see the win-win in thinking past your keynote service.
Take Action
Take an inventory of the materials you have created in the past and find a way to repurpose at least one of them.