How To Scale Your Business Like Chipotle: Freelance or Business

I want to make this article short and sweet. Straight to the point without the fluff. Because fluff will not help you scale your hustle and your business.

Warning: Taking action and implementing this will increase your revenue, scale your business and make your life less stressful. Implement at your own risk.

I have seen many businesses and freelancers very successful and are doing pretty well, even with all the custom-tailored projects. But there comes the point where you can only do so much with a given time-frame and resources at your disposal.

Chances are, at this stage, you're going through this business process that looks something like this:

1. You run ad campaigns and attract your clients to your website or funnel.
2. Either two things happen at this point. The consumer or potential clients opt-in to your offer for a strategy call/inquiry, or they don’t.
3. Let’s say they do opt-in, and now you proceed to do a discovery call and see if they are qualified for your services.
4. Great! Say they are,, and you managed to sell them on your services that will help solve their problem.
5. You continue through the discovery and discuss what that custom-tailored project looks like for them. Your team finds their pain points, their needs and discuss solutions that will best suit them.
6. Now the project has started. Phase 1 of many is done. Oops, the client wants more revisions on Phase 1. The timeline is shifted to the right.
7. While your team is working on this project, you continue to sift through your leads and figure you can add 2 more projects before your team will be worn out.

If your sales and fulfillment cycle looks like this, you’re missing out on a lot of money that your agency could make at half the stress and time spent. Instead of doing JUST custom work for clients, I recommend a different solution.

I present to you the “Chipotle” business model.

The idea looks somewhat like this:

If you go to Chipotle and look at the menu, you can get Tacos, Burritos, Bowls, and Salads. But while they may be different food items, they all share the same ingredients. The consumer walks in, says they want a burrito; the line chef then proceeds through the process:

Courtesy of Kris B./Yelp

This simple approach of providing the consumer 4 main entree options laid out speeds up the decision process on the consumer end aswell on the production side. For one, it diminishes chances of confusion about what really goes into the final delivery. The workers follow a laid out system that is simple and fast to create. This results in more consumers going through the line which equates to more profit.

Say you have a creative agency that does custom work for its clients. Instead of doing EVERYTHING under the sun for them, think about creating different packages with services that you do well over and over. Remember, think Chipotle system.

Instead of doing all this custom work that is eating up your time and resources, look at past clients and the MOST common things they needed.

If you happen to just be starting out, take this route:

Identify your ideal client(s) you want to serve. Who are they? What problems do they tend to have? How are you going to fix that problem and do it better than the company next door? How fast can you deliver said solution. Speed is of the essence.

Once you identify their pain points and possible solutions, look at the services you provide. Take the guess work out and see how you can inter mix them across the board. Maybe you do branding work for Hospitality Industries and E-commerce. If you know that both need Print Design work, that’s one area you can add to both packages off the bat. Brand Identity? Boom! Goes to both of them.

Keep following this system and fine tune it as you go.

Conclusion

Learning to follow the KISS (keep it super simple) method will allow you to leverage what you and your team are good at to scale your business and take on more clients than you could possible imagine.