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For years now, I keep thinking about the need to have recurring revenues in my business. As a service provider - a consultant - I can only make as much money as I have time to work. Unless I hire others to do additional work and increase their rates enough so that I can still make a profit, I’m totally limited by my own time and brainpower.

Recurring revenues can be fairly obtainable online. Here are some things that I’ve tried and other things that I am exploring to extend my offerings to make more “passive” income, that is, money that comes in without any bearing on my time or ongoing effort.

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Image by Choconancy1 via Flickr

I used to fear delegating tasks to others, even trusted staff. As a Type-A, over-achieving, perfectionist type, I just couldn’t imagine anyone else would care as much about a task, much less a job or client, as I did.

I made the terrible mistake of micromanaging - and even (GASP! HORRORS!) re-doing work that I had assigned to staff. I know I was a nightmare to work for back then.

These days, I’m absolutely desperate to delegate, however, now I just find it really difficult to take the knowledge and information that is packed tightly in my overfilled brain and actually impart it to someone else in a way that makes sense.

Here are some things I’ve learned - and am still learning - about the Fine Art of Delegating.

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Image by vistavision via Flickr

I’ve been thinking a lot about business models lately. Even as a company of one, I need several business models cobbled together - diversified revenue streams - to make ends meet.

Right now, my business models are:

1. Consulting Services. The meat and potatoes of what I make comes from offering high-level strategic consulting services to companies, nonprofit organizations and individuals. I am paid either by my hourly rate or per project. Most of my consultants come from word of mouth referral from my existing clients. Some come from Twitter, Facebook and Second Life. Very few come off my web site but hoping that will change as I pump up the “business” side of my site. This accounts for about 60% of my income.
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When you’ve got the right tools for your business, things just seem to run smoothly. Then you begin to take for granted all the great software programs and applications that you use on a daily basis to simply get the job done.

Let me take a moment to celebrate these tools - some of which I’ve praised on previous posts, some that I have yet to mention, but I think you should really know about them.

These products and applications help me accomplish tasks each day to be more professional, more efficient and more productive. And most of them are free or pretty darn affordable. So without any further ado…

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I haven’t participated in a lot of conference calls, mostly because I do a lot of my communications via email. Also, more recently, I use Skype to make free long distance calls and for conferencing people from California to Australia. But lately, I have been checking out a number of free conference call applications  on the Web (that do require calling a TOLL number) and thinking about how they might help me in my business. Those apps include FreeConference.com, Rondee, and I’m also going to check out Palbee and DimDim.

In the last few weeks, I’ve actually been putting one of the applications - Calliflower - to use. I’ve been corresponding with several other women and doing some brainstorming and mutual pep talks as each of us try to take our careers and businesses to the next level. We have a lot of ideas for ways we can help one another as well as work together.

Email was just not sufficient for our “talks.” So we’ve set up a regular weekly conference call with the four of us. And if one of us can’t make it? Calliflower lets us record the call and save it as an MP3 file that we can access later if we missed the call.

How else can you take advantage of the free conferencing apps out there? Let me count the ways…

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Guest Blogger: Alycia de Mesa, Brand Expert, Modern Metapreneur

Alycia is a Brand Consultant & Coach, Published Business Writer, Brand Author & Speaker, Harpist, Composer, Mom & Wife, Spiritual Student, Educator … and that’s just on Monday.

Here is her take on the basics of branding.

“As an entrepreneur, to market successfully you have to define the basics of your brand and really KNOW what makes up your brand positioning in order to market it on- or off-line. It’s surprising how many entrepreneurs gloss over this part, but skipping or skimping on the foundational basics will only lead to inefficient, ineffective marketing results.
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I’m all for anything that makes my life and work easier, and I still believe - after over 20 years online - that Internet access to information and applications truly provides convenience to help cut down on all that busy work, wasted time and superfluous spending.

Here are some online services that can help you perform business tasks more cheaply, more easily, or both.

Stamps.com - I did a review of Stamps.com on the CBS Morning Show in the 90s, and their service is still solid today. The Web-based service let’s you calculate and print postage directly from your computer and printer. Since they work in conjunctino with the Unites States Postal Service, the postage labels you print are official. For small businesses that need to track their expenditures, Stamps.com offers a detailed record down to client codes.
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Over the years, I seem to always be in the position of giving business advice, whether in my columns or to colleagues running their own companies. With a handful of companies under my belt, I have a lot of “life” experience with businesses. Also, I’m a proponent of being an open book so others can learn from both my successes and failures. In the same way I’m very self-revealing about my personal life in articles and blogs, I do the same on the entrepreneurship front.

So it was a major “aha” moment for me last week when I found myself turning to someone else for advice. Someone suggested that I might want to call my local Small Business Development Center (SBDC) office to get some financial advice for my corporation. SBDC’s are a program of the SBA to provide management assistant to aspiring and current entrepreneurs.

My dealings to date with the SBDC have been as a consultant or as a speaker or instructor, never as a business owner looking for help. But with some major corporate changes in the works for my company, I suddenly found myself in a deep ocean without a life vest. And of course my local SBDC was well-stocked with life preservers, life vests and even life rafts.

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