I’ve written before about how you can create a new business and make a living by creating and selling passive income products. This can be a very powerful way to build a business by taking advantage of your professional and life experience.

Did you know that creating and selling passive income products is also an excellent way to leverage everything you’ve put into developing your coaching or consulting business? In fact, adding passive income products to your portfolio is the simplest way to transform your income (and by this, I mean increase it dramatically). You don’t have to start a new business, re-invent your current business or push it to the sidelines. You can go bigger with your message, serve more people and serve them more effectively. Win-win-win.

If you’ve ever read the book Think and Grow Rich (and if you haven’t, you should add it to your reading list!), you’ll know that the key to building a sustainable business that doesn’t burn you out lies in your ability to leverage your time by creating passive, recurring income. In fact, the book also outlines the importance of having multiple streams of income – and passive products are the perfect way to add income streams to an existing business.

 Now, building on your current business doesn’t mean you don’t have to work. In fact, building up that stream of passive income will take work. But once you create the systems, you can leverage them over and over and over again to create a steady cash flow that no longer depends solely on you and the number of hours in your day.

 Just imagine the flexibility that would bring to your business and to your personal life.

 So how do you take a business, such as a consulting business or a coaching business and add passive products? Surely the 1-1 time you spend with your clients can’t be translated into products. Or can it?

scale what you have

You’ve spent years following your passion, studying your chosen field, working with clients, and showcasing your genius. You can expand your circle of influence by creating products – based on that genius and experience – which you can sell over and over to a larger audience. If you imagine what you can accomplish by serving a single client, try thinking about how impactful it can be to multiply that result by tens or hundreds or more. That is precisely the power of products which can be delivered and consumed without your presence (all the time).

Now don’t worry, adding these products and upscaling to the next level doesn’t necessarily result from spending a ton of money on your business either. In fact, sometimes, it means spending less. And I’m also not talking about spending six months in training, endless courses in building your confidence, or taking a multi-thousand-dollar Law of Attraction course.

Here is the really good news: upscaling your business with passive income products is that it follows a simple, five-step roadmap that any coach, consultant or entrepreneur can put in place. Seriously, there are basically no areas of expertise which don’t have some opportunities for passive income products. When I talk to friends and clients, I see endless opportunities for books, courses and more regardless of whether the original business is life coaching, selling flowers or coaching basketball!

If you take the time to walk through these five steps, you can take care of any confidence issues as you see the results and bask in the knowledge that you already know how to serve your customers well. And you’ll find that people will be attracted to your impressive powerhouse of a business.

STEP ONE: WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

What problem does your ideal client struggle with the most? Does she lack confidence, and suffer from mindset issues? Does she want/need to write a book but just can’t seem to get started? Does she need help setting up the accounting for her business?

While this may seem like a very obvious question for someone already running a business, it’s really important to re-ground yourself on the problems you are really helping people with. Consider:

1. What are the most common questions your clients ask you to help them with? 
2. What are your signature systems and processes?
3. When people refer you to others, how do they explain what you do and how you have helped them?

Grab a piece of paper or your favorite note-taking app and start writing or dictating. Capture the first ideas that come to mind. No judgement, just write the list. Write until you run out of ideas. Put it down and pick it up a little later and see if you can add to the list.

STEP TWO: WHO CAN YOU SERVE?

This one may surprise you a little bit since I’m not going to talk only about individual client profiles. Go back and look at the list you just wrote. You may have looked at it from the perspective of individual clients. But passive income products are not only helpful for individuals. They can also be massively leveraged for small businesses and corporations.

Companies are always looking for great ways to train their employees in a cost effective way. And if you think about it, a company can achieve a lot of savings by purchasing a training rather than developing it themselves. No matter what type of client you currently serve, you can almost certainly develop products to scale that knowledge.

Take some time to brainstorm about who you can serve. And once you have identified your “ideal client”, think about it from the angle of a company as well. How could your knowledge and expertise be leveraged in a corporate context?

To note, “corporate” is a very broad context. I’m not only talking about Fortune 500 entities. I’ve worked with non-profits, schools, government entities and more. Large and small businesses and entities all need expertise from external suppliers, so really give some thought to how your expertise and know-how can benefit them. Look at things going on in your community and think about how your key skills can help.

STEP THREE – WHAT CAN YOU REPURPOSE?

What resources do you have that you can repurpose? You may not realize it, but your files and your computer are a virtual goldmine of materials you can use.

You very likely have short reports, frameworks, trainings, presentations and other material you can quickly pull together to create a complete training. Or you may have blog posts, speeches and articles you can combine into a fantastic book. In many cases, the material needs only light edits in order to transform it into a sellable product.

One way to approach this is to think through how you work with your customers in person. This will almost always give you a great starting framework. Then go step by step through how you’d work with the client to solve a problem and you’ll automatically have an outline for your product.

There is very little of your material that you should skip over in this step. Cataloging it will take a little effort, but don’t disregard anything at this stage. You may be surprised later how a seemingly insignificant piece of material can be transformed into a valuable product.

With your inventory done, you can proceed to:

STEP FOUR: HOW CAN YOU SHARE THE MATERIAL?

Now that you have an overview of the material you have already available, brainstorm different ways of sharing that material. You can, for example, consider writing a book or creating a course your customers can follow. Create a group program based on the one-on-one coaching programs you currently offer. If your business isn’t yet online, do some research to see what other people are offering in your particular area of expertise. You might see some opportunities you haven’t even considered yet.

And, going back to your audience, think about how you could sell these products to an entirely different audience – like a corporate audience if you currently sell to individuals. Or selling to individuals if you are currently working with companies.

Let me give you an example of this. My first passive income product was a book. It was a book for volunteers, helping people plan a volunteer trip. I re-imagined the idea (and even a lot of pages of the content) to create bespoke books for schools and travel companies. I reapply the basic concept to a huge number of different circumstances and that gives me an endless supply of opportunities to develop new products.

My first book isn’t something that earns me a lot of money on its own, but I make a nice income selling the new books – all inspired by that first one – by the hundreds.

STEP FIVE: CREATE THE PRODUCT

Whatever the trouble spot is that you’ve identified, a small training product or course will no-doubt help. Remember, you don’t have to solve all your client’s problems, just start with one. 

Using the materials you curated from your files and your experience, you can put together a book, a video, a training series, or other product you can then start to sell. And once you’ve created one, go back and repeat the cycle and create another and another.

JUST GET STARTED

Expanding your business can be scary, but adding passive income products to your portfolio is quite low-risk since they can be developed without huge investment of time and money, particularly if you are using materials you already have. 

By using the steps outlined, you’ll find that adding passive income to your existing business is not only do-able, but necessary, if you want to lift your business impact and income.