Happy Tuesday, Reader!

Last week, I talked about the $250K glass ceiling that has existed for women in this country for over a decade. Today, I’m sharing two things you can do about it.

Breaking Through Tip #1: Bigger Dollars, Fewer Clients

The top sectors for women-led start-ups still include retail, health, beauty, food, and support services. These industries often share a common problem: small margins and/or a need for scale to be viable income earners.

The way to combat this issue (in the earlier stages of a company under the $250k mark) is to aim for sustainability through higher-ticket, healthy-margin services until the smaller things achieve viable scale. In other words, focus on selling a few expensive services that make good profit, rather than trying to sell lots of small-ticket items right away.

This solution could look like:

• A hair salon offering workshops on doing your own hair and makeup, or training industry professionals on specialty services that allow for a larger ticket sale a few times per month
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• A restaurant or caterer offering cooking classes or dining experiences to augment the difficult margins with a more curated, higher-margin experience
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• Gyms, personal trainers, yoga studios, etc. seeking corporate partnerships to offset the scalability problem of a membership model

Breaking Through Tip #2: Curate recurring revenue over investing in one-off sales.

The one-sale-at-a-time model is almost impossible to scale, especially in micro-companies where one or two people typically do all the jobs. For many small companies, the key to breaking up with one-offs is focusing on packages, subscriptions, and solutions-based offerings.

This solution could look like:

• Consultants moving at least some of their work away from project-based work to retainer-based contracts (P.S.—That’s how we finally broke through the $250k barrier in 2016 after nearly 10 years of struggling to figure this out).
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• Healers (such as massage therapists, etc.) curating a journey for the clients rather than one-off appointments (For more on how to do this, see my friend Joanna Sapir’s work).
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• Home services companies creating maintenance packages so customers coming back to keep their homes in the healthiest place/shape possible.

As your smaller-ticket products or services start to generate reliable profit, you can choose to streamline by removing some of your high-ticket offerings. But in the early stages, these higher-priced items can help you fill the revenue gap.

Addressing your core business model's realities is essential for breaking through the $250K mark, especially when scalability and funding are in their fragile early stages. This week, take some time to brainstorm how you could apply these strategies to your business. What unique high-ticket offerings or recurring revenue streams could you develop that align with your expertise and customers' needs?

Until next time,
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Renia C.

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