Bianca Robinson - Written by: Neal Taparia, Entrepreneurs Contributor, Forbes, Jan 25, 2021, 01:32pm EST
Bianca Robinson was born to be an entrepreneur. At an early age, seeing opportunities in her community, she started her own dog walking business. Little did she know, this would be the start of her entrepreneurial journey where she would eventually help thousands of people improve their businesses and create digital income streams.
Small steps
Robinson started with small steps but high ambitions. After finishing her business degree, she worked for an engineering firm as a project manager, but it wasn’t long before she felt the itch to be her own boss.
She started a bookkeeping company, and in her free time, she also invested in herself by getting her MBA and a master’s in logistics and supply chain management.
Armed with her MBA and management insights, as she built strong relationships with her clients with her bookkeeping business, Robinson began upselling her new skills to existing clients. She was growing, and her clients were growing with her.
Robinson tells the story of one client who had been working in retail for 10 years and came to her to better manage her store. Over time, Robinson empowered the client to run her own successful retail business.
After three years of running her bookkeeping company in Illinois, Robinson changed her business name from Cayden Cay Financials to Cayden Cay Consulting to reflect her growing services.
Trading time for money
Business boomed at first, but then Robinson hit a wall. Everything depended on her. Her calendar was full. She had no more time or energy to take on extra clients and her work-life balance was non-existent. Robinson explains, “I was just trading time for money.”
As she employed staff to expand her company's ability to take on more, it increased her stress. Employees brought team meetings, management, and personnel issues to deal with. Despite her efforts to scale though, she was still a bottleneck, as her clients still wanted to talk to her.
More than a consulting company
Robinson realized that her company needed to evolve. She needed to be able to generate revenue without having to put in extra time.
She had an epiphany. Rather than provide more services, she needed to sell more digital products. “Instead of being a service provider that also had digital products, I flipped my business model to being an online digital creator that just so happens to do services as well,” says Robinson.
Robinson transitioned from being a consultant to a digital entrepreneur. She digitized all her training material and began to sell her knowledge rather than her time. Using new technology and apps like Teachable and Gumroad, she digitized all her training material and began to sell her knowledge rather than her time. She used vcita’s payment, CRM and email marketing tools to further nurture and upsell to her digital products.
Now, her clients can access Bianca’s insights through online blueprints, guides, and courses. She still leads courses directly and offers custom managed services but only selectively.
Revenue began to accelerate again and the marginal effort decreased. She was earning more and doing less.
The secret to her strategy comes down to digital content. Bianca calls it her “education collateral” because it acts as a pledge of what she can provide to potential clients. Free content allows clients to see what you can do for them before they commit to a purchase, and premium content allows you to monetize and scale.
Digitalization as diversification
Her new digital strategy also diversified her sources of revenue and created a more attractive business. As a consulting company, she could be at risk if she lost a major client.
Additionally, growing means hiring more employees and more management overhead. In contrast, when you sell digital goods, the number of potential clients skyrocket with less headcount and you are less dependent on any one client.
Cayden Cay Consulting is now 80% digital content sales and 20% services, and is on track to be 90% digital.
Digital transformation as a service
Robinson has not stopped there. She is now sharing the lessons she has learned on digital transformation and entrepreneurship with other professionals. She is not just selling digital content, she is selling the process of digitization itself. This has widened her audience, which now includes service professionals like real estate agents, lawyers, dentists, and even other consultants. Per Robinson,“I’m helping service-based businesses to add a digital stream of income to their business model.”
Especially during the pandemic where service businesses have been impacted, Robinson serves as a model on how service professionals can offer premium digitized services.
In 2020, her clients were able to generate an extra $2.1M in revenue. One client made $35,000 with a five-day launch while another client made an extra $650,000 in six weeks.
Continuing to expand
With a growing brand and a track record of success, Bianca has started to sell additional products to help her clients become successful.
Having used vcita to grow her own business, she’s become a reseller, using the software’s “xperts” program to empower her customers to replicate the way she herself uses CRM segmenting and email sequences. Robinson says, “I can basically give my clients my business in a box.”
Bianca has also set up a membership program for her clients by engaging them more regularly, creating recurring revenue streams for her business
Dreams realized
Bianca is living her dream. Not only is she helping thousands of business owners and entrepreneurs digitally transform their business, but she’s also achieved financial success without spreading herself thin.
Neal Taparia writes about entrepreneurship and hard lessons that drive success. He is cofounder of SOTA Partners, where they invest in companies changing the future of work and food. They also rapidly experiment and incubate new business ideas. Previously, with a friend, he built an education software business without investment called Imagine Easy Solutions that reached 30M users yearly. He sold the business to a NYSE public company called Chegg, where he was in a leadership role for three years. From being a scrappy entrepreneur to an executive within a public company, He's had his share of failures and wins that has given him insight into what it takes to drive a business forward.
LPF's Takeaway
This is the second article I've curated from Neal Taparia. He has been hitting the nail on the head when it comes to rising stars in the world of entrepreneurs. I love how he is focusing on real people, with real successes we can all learn from.
I think it's great that Bianca has created a business model where she is able to make her "services" a digital offering. However, not everyone has the goal of digitalizing their content.
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