Don't Care To Hustle? Create A Coast Business
Don't Care To Hustle? Create A Coast Business
Just because you’re an entrepreneur, it doesn’t mean you have to build an empire.
Photo by Stephen Murphy
There are two types of businesses that entrepreneurs can pursue when opening up shop: a hustle or coast business.
Pursuing the entrepreneurial route doesn’t always mean you need to go hard at building an empire that makes you a budding millionaire.
You can build a business that you only need to work on 10-20 hours a week that covers the bills, or a business that’s easy to maintain while you’re working on other pursuits.
This is what I call a coast business. A business that has a formula nailed down that can be repeated with ease quarter after quarter to bring in the intended revenue.
A coast business is different from a hustle business in that you are not interested in growing the business by an exponential amount every year. You are more interested in consistency — and although yearly growth would be nice, it’s not a deal-breaker.
There are a lot of pointers out there on how to build a hustle business, but not so much on the various types of business models you can choose from to build a coast business. It’s pretty difficult to turn most businesses into a coast business — most models aren’t built for it.
If you’re a seeker of a coast business, here are the different models you can build off of that don’t require a ton of weekly investment once you get it up and running.
Coaching or consulting
Coaching and consulting businesses are a pretty great model for coast businesses.
You provide intellectual and analytical guidance on a topic or industry you highly specialize in and charge an hourly rate that represents the value of your knowledge (not your time). A higher hourly rate compacts and reduces the number of hours you have to work in order to hit your revenue goals.
There’s a lot of leeway when it comes to figuring out your hourly rate for your services. I’ve seen consultants and coaches charge anywhere from $100, $500, to $1,000 an hour. There are really no set norms based on industry and your rates are highly dependent on your expertise and the value of the guidance you have to offer.
High-ticket items
This is an obvious one, but it’s worth mentioning. If you sell a high-ticket product that’s about $2,000 and up, you only have to sell a few products per month to meet your revenue goals.
You can sell high ticket items for products and services of every kind, but in order for it to become a coast business, you need this item to be pretty low maintenance. Sales-heavy pursuits where the product is already made and all you have to do is sell the product is a good high-ticket gateway — think luxury item resellers, real estate agents for high-value homes, coaching packages, and more.
Micro-niche product or service
Micro-niching works really well in service industries like coaching or digital education. A micro-niche within these industries looks like coaching/educating your audience on one very specific topic and dominating that space.
A micro-niche may look like selling a course on how to build your first outdoor garden or coaching entrepreneurs in the jewelry industry. If you’re selling a physical product, a micro-niche can look like selling body appropriate clothing for bulldogs.
Whatever your micro-niche product is, it has to be a product that is manageable in its needed maintenance and is pretty hands-off for the business once the product is delivered to the customer. (Therefore most SaaS products wouldn’t fit in this category because of the continuous maintenance and customer service support needed.)
When you focus on a micro-niche, you reduce the amount of work on your plate considerably because you’re only focused on mastering one product. You have fewer product and information considerations to make and sort through, which in turn results with less maintenance for you to continuously spend time on.
Once you’ve refined your micro-niche product to a competitive state, you basically can coast without much work to do other than pushing for sales.
Your focus in this business is to get a micro-niche product up and running, mastering it, coasting with the master version, and then continuously upgrading it now and then to stay competitive. During your downtimes, you’re focused on building a large audience and selling as much of your product as possible to as many people as possible.
Businesses that nail down the initial product can extend their moneymaking potential by repurposing their proven concept and spinning it into different product classes (for example: a coach with a successful coaching curriculum can spin that information into a digital course, or a business with a successful physical product can create a spinoff item.)
Do you have a healthy business or does it need a tune-up? Grab my free checklist to find out.