Episode 026: Winter is Coming – Auditing Your Offer

You may be approaching a slower season in your business, which offers the perfect opportunity to do an audit in your business. Over the next three episodes, I’ll be diving into three different audits you can do in your business to ensure your business is still working for you and your clients! In part one of this series, we’re exploring your systems, what you need to audit in them, and how to make your clients the priority throughout these audits!

The Business-First Creatives Podcast is brought to you by CRM and Dubsado expert Colie James. Join Colie each week as she discuss how to build a business that brings you joy and a paycheck! From business advice with fellow entrepreneurs to sharing automation tips and tricks, Colie and her guests are sharing industry trends and resources, along with a little bit of sarcasm.

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This episode is part one of a three part series, Winter is Coming!

Here are the highlights…

[2:31] The Offer Audit

[3:31] Organize Your Data & Review Each Project

[5:26] Offer Audit Exercise
1. List everything you offered.
2. List everything you want to offer again.
3. List what you thought about offering but didn’t.

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Mentioned in This Episode

Episode 1

Review the Transcript:

Hey guys, welcome back. Just wanted to let you know in case you didn’t, Winter is Coming. Now, some of you might be thinking that, you know, actual winter is coming and that’s totally true, and if you happen to be a Game of Thrones fan, that sentence probably means something different to you. But overall, what I wanna talk about is what typically happens to small business owners and creatives in Q1 of a brand new year..

Let me just talk as a photographer, because as a photographer, fall is usually the busiest time of the year. It doesn’t actually matter what kind of photographs you take. If you’re a family photographer, if you’re a newborn photographer, if you’re a wedding photographer. By the time we get into November, we are all super exhausted from our busy season and just wanting to take a break.

And then what happens after the new year after, You know, we’ve looked at our yearly earnings after we have considered what we did last year. We are typically super motivated to basically change fucking everything. . I mean, if you have not experienced this, I would be surprised. People usually feel invigorated in Q1 to up their prices, change their website, update their systems, like basically overhaul your entire business.

Now, I would not be a good business strategist if I didn’t tell you, don’t do that. Please do not come into January and just start changing everything without some forethought into what changes you want to make and why you want to. So today’s episode, we are gonna talk about some of the things that I think you should put on your calendar for Q1 in order to improve your business when that motivation is running through your veins.

But I want you to do it strategically. So I’m gonna give a shout out to episode one of this podcast because if you joined. My listenership, when I first started the podcast, you probably listened to episode one, which was, you know, if you keep hearing No, listen to this. And basically the entire episode was talking about if you are getting no’s continuously on your offer, it’s probably not your price, it’s probably the offer.

The first kind of audit that I’m actually gonna suggest that you do is an offer audit. And while I could recap everything, all of the tips that I gave you in episode one, I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna focus on a very particular part for this episode, and that is, Analyzing what you did in the entire year.

Now, when I first gave the idea of an offer audit back in episode one, I was talking about making sure that your price is profitable, figuring out what brings you joy. But now that we’re at the end of a year, you can actually go a little bit more in depth with that. And this is what. Right now you are at the end of your financial year.

So you’ve probably serviced, I don’t know, 40, 50, 60, a hundred clients. Um, if you are not going back to do some analysis on those clients, you are really missing an opportunity. So for the offer audit, I want you to do a few things. I want you, first of all, if you are not really keeping track of all of your clients, how much they paid.

What offer they purchased from you? I highly recommend that you get all of your data organized before you start this process, because what I want you to be able to do when you go into Q1 is look at what offer every single client purchased from you, how much money they spent with you, how much you enjoyed.

Or maybe didn’t enjoy working with them, and then whether or not you would like to work with them again on the same offer. And that last part is really important because it could be that for that particular client, you might want to craft a new offer that will help them, you know, in this new year. I want you to write all those things down.

Spreadsheets are great, something like Google Sheet, but a good old fashioned piece of paper works just as well. After you have accumulated all these things, I do want you to go back and listen to episode one of this podcast. I want you to listen to how I told you, figure out whether or not the price that you are currently charging is profitable now, even if it is profitable.

Guys, I think everyone should change their prices. I usually don’t recommend that you increase them in q1. I know a lot of people do, but I don’t. I actually think that when you need to increase your prices is back in Q3 when you are booking the final sessions for the year. If you increase your prices when you’re almost fully booked, the last few people that you will book will be at that new price point, and then that price point will be established for you in the new year.

We’re in November . So if you didn’t do that and your season is ending, you missed that boat. So for q1, I do want you to figure out what your new prices are gonna be, but before we get to the prices, I want you to make three columns. First, I want you to list everything that you offered in 2022. So if you did new board sessions, if you did branding sessions, if you did senior sessions, whatever kind of sessions you did, I want you to list everyth.

In the second column, I want you to list the offers that you would be happy offering again in 2023. This is your wishlist, guys. So if you know, if you did some senior sessions in 2022 and you were like, Yeah, that’s really not the thing for me, do not list them in your 2023 column. So first column, again, everything you offered in 2022.

Second column, all of your current offers that you want to continue to offer in 2023. Now your third column is where you get to experiment. If there is anything that you thought about offering in 2022 and you didn’t have the bandwidth, or if there is something that you used to offer that for some reason you stopped offering and now you want to bring it back, this is what’s gonna go in that third.

After you’ve contemplated all of your offers and you’ve figured out new price points for all of them, you will be ready to do the second audit. Now guys, this is a lot for today, and so I’m intending these three episodes to be bite sized to where you can sit down and you can do the homework before you progress to the next one.

So if you’re interested in what the second audit is, I will see you in the next episode.