The idea of a “service plan” is to offer a service or product that will result in recurring payments from customers for a set period of time.

The idea is to be able to generate reliable stable revenue from your customer base which puts you into a stable financial position as its now very easy to be able to forecast your revenue and thus create reliable future plans for your business and spend.

I don’t think I need to further emphasize the benefits of reliable monthly income, as I’m sure you can think of many right away.

The service plan or “maintenance contract” is usually something that is used in your more traditional service industry, such as IT for example. Whereby service companies sign contracts with customers at fixed monthly or yearly fees for X period of time.

With a little imagination however we can easily put this to use in any other business, I don’t really care what it is, there is always an opportunity to offer a recurring billing product.

Where possible, you should always offer something similar in your portfolio as its these recurring plans that offer you the peace of mind and reliable income in difficult times.

For example, a fitness or bodybuilding trainer can offer current customers a dietary program that monitors their measurements and weight and makes monthly adjustments to their diet plan based on their changing macronutrient requirements for R150 a month, or whatever it is worth to you.

Even though many customers could easily do this themselves, people are inherently lazy and would rather have somebody do this for them for a small fee, even if all they are really getting out of it I peace of mind.

With enough customers, these small monthly billings add up to good extra revenue.

Try to take advantages of opportunities for making your customers life easier by offering small additional services for a small fee. As an expert in your own business, I’m sure you can identify many opportunities for recurring services you can offer your customers for an additional fee.

Actions 1:

1. Investigate opportunities in your business where you can offer recurring monthly services to existing customers.
2. If you are considering offering your own service that takes up time: Calculate at what it price it would be worth it to you to offer these services, based on the time and admin it takes. Would you customers pay this price? If unsure, test it out on a few choice customers!

For example, if you are considering offering a certain service for a certain free, for a certain number of customers, and this would now take up 6 days of your time each month, will it pay you enough based on what your time is worth?

Lets say you used those 6 days to rather perform your core service, would you receive more revenue?

You need to calculate whether offering additional services is really worth your time or not, or you could be doing yourself a disservice.