Recapture & Reallocate: A 30-Minute Revenue Enhancer Exercise

If you’re a freelancer, coach, solopreneur, or creative experiencing a consistent monthly revenue shortfall, your instinct is probably to try to make more money.

In this article, I share a much more efficient path to more effortlessly increasing your bottom line in less time and with less risk.

How to Optimize These Insights

Be receptive. Take notes. Ask questions and share reflections in the comments. Check out the resources listed at the end of this article. But the most significant force multiplier that will get you closer to what you want is to apply these insights.

The Situation

When you feel pinched or lacking in your personal financial position, your instinct is to make more money by working more and harder.

As a business owner, when you’re in a revenue dip, you double down on your marketing efforts or start creating, marketing, and selling new offers. Both approaches take much more time, attention, money, and effort.

In either case, your ROI (return on investment) on doing more is far less than if you prune your expenses and optimize your revenue system’s reliability.

How to Recapture Revenue

Audit your personal expenses and activities. Prune unused or underused expenses, app subscriptions, streaming services, etc. 

Audit your business expenses and activities. Eliminate all unnecessary costs and activities and raise the floor on the essential elements of your business revenue systems. (This is detailed in The Coaching Business Prescription.)

Example of Recapture of Personal Revenue

Here’s what happened the first time my wife and I audited our basic personal expenses.

We discovered that we spent:

• $260/month on coffee ($10/day, six days/week)

• $260/month on dining out every month ($60/week)

• $100/month on wine

• $200/month on books and craft supplies

• $200/month on entertainment (streaming services, lifestyle apps, etc.). 

Total discretionary spending expenses: $1020/month.

Rather than go into full austerity mode, we reduced our spending on these expenditures by half.

Total recaptured: $510/month ($6120/year)

Results of Reallocation of Personal Revenue

Reducing our discretionary spending by half increased our bottom line and enhanced our experience. Coffee, dining out, and wine dates were more special, and shopping and entertainment were more intentional and enjoyable.

Our annual savings allowed us to fund our primary solvable problem™, something that we really wanted to get in life (see Dan’s book, Rigging the Game). The revenue we recaptured that year paid for a two-week beach vacation.

Example of Recapture of Business Revenue

The recapture of revenue in your business is amplified twice. First, you save a ton of time, attention, money, and effort that would have gone into trying harder to sell existing offers (or creating new ones). 

Second, if you have prospects that would genuinely benefit from your offer but can’t afford it, you can work through a recapture with them, and they can reallocate that revenue into enrolling in your program or product.

Here’s what happened the first time I applied the recapture process to my business.

• Revenue: $4K/month (gross)

• Hours spent: 80+/week

• Total expenses: $1800/month (software, services, subscriptions)

• Profit Margin: 55%

• Total expenses after recapture: $900/ month

• Amount recaptured: $900/month ($10,800/year)

Cool, huh? But then look at the additional savings in time, money, and effort

The Math

The additional sales necessary to increase my business revenue by the amount recaptured would be $1636/month (savings/margin).

That’s $19,636 annually.

An additional benefit is that pruning all the unnecessary and under-performing software, services, and subscriptions from my revenue-generating system increases that system’s reliability, which increases my revenue without any additional work.

Click here to learn more about system reliability.

Click here to grab my handbook that teaches the complete process for optimizing your business revenue-generating system so you not only increase revenue even more but also save time and effort and reduce risk.

1 Year After Recapture & Reallocation

Here are the numbers for my business one year after my initial recapture and reallocate.

• Revenue: $9K/month (gross)

• Hours spent: 20/week

• Total expenses: $1400/month (software, services, subscriptions)

• Profit Margin: 84%

When my business revenue reached $5K/month, I reallocated some of my savings into advertising, which catalyzed my revenue growth to $9K/month (a 700% ROI).

Additionally, I reduced the hours I worked in my business and increased my profit margin, significantly amplifying my revenue.

Go Further

What’s your biggest lesson or question from this training? Contribute to the conversation by leaving it in the comments.

I learned how to recapture and reallocate revenue to get closer to what I want in life in Dan Nicholson’s book, Rigging the Game. I learned additional force multipliers from Nic Peterson in his book, Bumpers, and in content that he shares in the Guardian Academy Substack.

You can grab Rigging the Game and Bumpers in the Creative on Purpose Bookstore. (You can also grab my book, The Coaching Business Prescription, for $1).

Get more insights that inspire intentional action and get you close to what you want in life by subscribing to my Substack publication.

If you’re ready to take a bolder step into possibility with your business, click here to complete a free audit of your offer, audience, and sales strategy.

I go through the recapture and reallocate process live and provide several bonus insights in the video above.

Or click here to tune in to this episode of the Creative on Purpose podcast.

Scott Perry, Chief Difference-Maker at Creative on Purpose.

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