Apply WISP business growth tactics that are inspired by the Only 3 Ways to Grow.
If you’re like most small business owners, you watch your revenue like a hawk. It’s the grease that lubes your business machine and keeps your enterprise healthy and growing.
Even owners of long-established businesses watch the bottom line. It’s an on-going balancing act to keep revenue higher than costs so there’s a profit at the end of the day.
During tough times, a WISP operator may find that revenue is too low to keep the business in the black. Loans may be necessary or creditors and vendors go unpaid.
And, if the situation doesn’t get better, it becomes something no business owner wants to face. On-going revenue problems could mean that loyal employees are laid off, a credit score is demolished or worse – a business folds.
With pre-planning, WISPs can remain stable during lean and boom times. A key factor to consider in planning is the business growth principle, The 3 Ways to Grow.
In last week’s article, we discussed how to add subscribers to maintain the balance between costs and revenue; this article shares ideas on how to increase your revenue per customer to remain profitable.
Offer High-dollar Packages and Services
Skyrocket revenue with WISP business growth strategies.Do you have gamers or streamers among your subscribers? Of course, the answer is, “Yes!” Most will pay more for low latency, high priority and faster speed internet.
If you can support gamers and streamers, create a package that’s just for them at a higher monthly fee than average subscribers. And, upselling is easy with the right resources…
Make your subscriber’s bandwidth usage report available online and on their invoice. These reports are perfect for assisting an upsell to higher bandwidth packages and faster speeds that give your WISP more margin.
How many of your subscribers have a small business or a serious hobby that requires a website? There may be quite a few and this opens up another opportunity for recurring revenue, which is web hosting.
You can do the same with VoIP and open another income stream that adds to your bottom line.
Offer Complementary Products for Sale or Lease
Subscribers must have devices at their home or office to connect to internet or VoIP services, so why not sell or rent them?
If you want routers to be a one-time transaction, they can be offered when you’re scheduling new subscribers’ installations. This way, you collect the cost of the router up front along with the new install fee.
Make it a practice for techs to carry a couple of mid-priced routers with them to every install and service call. If the service call uncovers a problem with the router, your technician will have one that your subscriber can purchase so they don’t miss a moment of their favorite HBO programs.
If you’d prefer recurring revenue growth, you can lease managed modems to your subscribers.
It’s okay to offer subscribers discounts to be a “nice guy,” just make sure that there’s enough of a cushion so your cash flow receives a positive impact.
Offer HotSpot Services
If you’re lucky enough to be in the area with popular parks, concert venues, campgrounds or marinas, you can make good bucks offering hotspot services.
There are a couple of things that you’ll want – an agreement with the park, venue or marina to offer the services and your network to cover the area you want to serve, then you’re golden and will be in the money in no time.
Not sure how to put together effective hotspot deployment? Visp.net makes it easy by developing your branded portal page that’s presented to hotspot users to pay for access to your network. Visp.net’s Success Team will assist you in the deployment to ensure authentication works, your signup pages appear and you get paid.
Our next issue of the WISP Success Blog will take you on a deeper dive into MikroTik routers with Joshaven Potter (if you missed Joshaven’s overview of MikroTik, you can catch up here). Then, we’ll conclude the exploration into the 3 Ways to Grow with tips on keeping your subscribers longer.
