Here's why you should spin up a mini offer
The spark to ignite your portfolio career.
I stared into the roaring flames as they licked the night sky and their heat rolled across the eerily orange lawn to warm the tips of my fingers. The bonfire cracked and spat as I breathed a mix of deliciously crisp mountain air and woody smoke deep into my lungs. For the first time in what felt like forever, I exhaled.
It was 2023 and after a few pandemic-induced shaky years of self employment, I’d landed a lucrative fractional gig with a startup that overnight had catapulted me into a new financial reality. As my nervous system started decompressing, finally safe enough to think beyond survival, I allowed questions that had been lurking on the periphery to take centre stage in my mind.
Now I’m anchored, how do I want to spend my free time and energy?
What do I want to create next?
How can I build something that lasts?
I didn’t know about portfolio careers back then but I did know that I wanted to expand my remit beyond fractional work, although I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be “known for” or how my offers would take shape (#thatgeneralistlife).
The perfectionist part of me was waiting for a stroke of genius to precede the creation of said flawless offering while the practical part said I should pick a starting point and get cracking. As I stood before the raging, crackling, blazing flames, I resolved to do the latter.
The next morning, fresh off the high of a newly cashed invoice, I chose an area of expertise to test - the prestige beauty scene. I’d spent 4 years working in-house at Australia’s biggest beauty retailer and knew I had valuable expertise so I spun up a one hour advisory call, crossed my fingers and took this first offer to market.
Little did I know but that one decision - to test a mini offer - would spark a new way of building income streams that I’d experimented with but never fully committed to. Create a mini-version, ship it, validate it, tweak it, grow it, repeat.
Introducing the mini offer
A mini offer is a small, paid service that solves one specific problem for one specific customer. I’m talking a one hour advisory call, a 90 minute workshop, an async audit, a coaching session or anything else that’s fast, simple and easy to execute. I like to think of it as the minimum viable service; an atomic expression of value wrapped up in a nice little bow.
Mini offers are a big deal because the barriers to entry are virtually zero. They don’t require an audience, a personal brand, a fancy website, a complex marketing funnel, or anything other than your willingness to pick a skill, package it up and tell someone about it (in other words there are no excuses).
The downside is small (worst case scenario is being rejected but I’m pretty sure we can handle that) and the upside is huge. You earn money, sure, but more importantly you flex your entrepreneurial muscle in a low stakes way. You learn what works. What doesn’t. You start seeing yourself not as someone with potential, but as someone who has proof of it. You become the kind of person who can make money off their own back.
For those with an established core income stream (eg. a full time job or a long term client/s) a mini offer is the perfect way to start diversifying. One of the first lines to cast in your ever-growing career web.
Spin it up
If you’re waiting for clarity on the perfect suite of offers - high ticket, mid tier, entry point, subscription based, limited time, one off, evergreen, seasonal, up-sell, down-sell, tripwire, bundled etc. etc. - then you’re waiting for a stroke of genius that may never arrive.
Want my advice?
Park the 70 page strategy doc (or is it 75?) and spin up a mini offer. Pick a skill. Package it up. Go to market. See what happens. Because when you put something into the world that wasn’t there before and get a positive signal, it sparks something. A smouldering confidence. A flicker of possibility. An ember of hope. And when that spark catches fire something wonderful happens.
It turns into a roar.
If you want to learn how to test a new income stream in under a day (ie. spin up a mini offer) without needing to quit your job or have a personal brand, I’ve created something for you! My new 7 step playbook is coming soon. Sign up to the waitlist.
Hear the outcome of two of my mini offer experiments:
🫶🏼 When you’re ready, here are three ways I can help:
Free Training: Stabilise, Systemise and Scale Your Portfolio Career: learn the inbound and outbound acquisition strategies to generate a consistent flow of leads and grow your income, and the workflows to that will help you increase capacity beyond your time.
The Portfolio Career Operating System: a fully fledged system for people who do multiple things and want to do them well. I’m talking Sales, Marketing, Content, Product, Clients, Ops, Finances and Admin.
Portfolio Career Mentoring: 1-1 sessions to help you get started and build a career that sits at the intersection of freedom, creative fulfilment, meaning and money.
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…to help you build a financially lucrative and creatively fulfilling portfolio career and life.
Anna, this is such excellent advice. I started reading this article thinking that this didn’t apply to me because, who would pay for an hour of my time? By the end I had a lightbulb moment. I know that in 60 minutes I can workshop an audience activation strategy for nearly any business. Now the question is, since I don’t yet have a presence for my consulting business, how do I promote my mini-offer?
Love this! My problem is that I have experience in so many different areas that it’s crushingly difficult to pick a niche. How do we choose what mini offer to start with when the options are so abundant? What’s a good way to reduce that list to unblock the spark to get started?