April Dunford runs a one-person, 7-figure consulting business.
Aside from book sales and speaking fees, the majority of her revenue comes from the sale of her positioning workshop, priced at $80k to $100k.
She’s a big profile in tech with a large audience. most of whom don’t have the budget to spend money with her besides buying her book.
I put it to April, some people might think you’re leaving money on the table. Are you?
“Most of the people that say that have not really sat down and crunched the numbers, because if they did, they would understand that I’m very much not leaving money on the table.” - April Dunford
April made the point that a popular idea has emerged over recent years that a consultant should have multiple revenue streams. “Monetise the heck out of everything,” as she puts it.
"If you have a podcast and newsletter, sell sponsorship for each."
That type of thinking.
Many people kept asking April, "Why aren’t you offering a course that everyone can access?"
So she did. She ran two experiments – two courses.
Here’s what she discovered:
There’s a huge amount of work upfront to build the thing. Even though it’s your area of expertise, the delivery mechanism is different from consulting. Less contact, less done-with-you. It's not a two day, 1:1 workshop.
Then you’ve got to market the thing. Even for April, with a big audience and an email list, it doesn’t sell itself. You have to promote the course.
Then you’ve got to deliver the thing. She could have gone down the on-demand route, but there’s increasingly less appetite for that, and the price is significantly lower if there isn’t some form of live access to her.
So April trials two live cohorts in one year, which in turn reduces her capacity for $80-$100k workshops.
When she takes a step back to run the numbers, it’s clear that she’s making less money with the course than she would have done with the additional workshops she’s giving up.
Why would she do that?
“Now, if I was not very successful at consulting and not charging very much, then that may not be true, right?” - April Dunford
The same was true when she looked at sponsorship. Though you may think it's a form of passive revenue, it’s not. It would fragment her focus: require negotiations, additional editing, and ongoing management. The money on offer was a fraction of the fees she could get for consulting.
“Why wouldn’t I just be amazing at this one thing, and be so amazing at it that I could charge a lot more, and then just do that one thing?” - April Dunford
I’m not suggesting you should or shouldn’t run a course.
But I do wonder, rather than “productising the heck out of everything,” what if you built a business model that focused on delivering one or two things exceptionally well?