Professional services firms make up the majority of Small business university in usa Most never cross the seven-figure income mark or even see it on the radar. They tend to be dominated by a few loyal customers. Hard-working founders work 24/7 to get projects done and, if a client asks, they'll sell the few minutes they have free each week to catch their breath. They are highly dependent on the owner's time and talents and are extremely difficult to scale and monetize.

My partner and I eventually scaled our professional services firm to nearly eight figures when we finally realized that the biggest opportunities tended to go to the biggest businesses. We were good at selling and shipping to our customers. But only with the two of us playing all the roles in our business, we were overwhelmed – and the customers knew it. They saw us juggling multiple assignments and companies and got used to receiving emails at all hours of the night when we finally had free time to answer their questions. They often provided additional consulting engagements to other firms due to our limited bandwidth. We lost millions of dollars in opportunities when we thought small.

We broke through the million dollar mark and kept going when we started thinking like a bigger firm. We talked a bigger game early on and took on debt to hire consultants and vendors to get there. He was nervous and had several sleepless nights. But very quickly we started to see more opportunities in the pipeline, existing clients expanding their scope of services with us, and competitive opportunities we had never been involved in before.

Here are three iron rules that led to our success:

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1. Start selling your firm, stop selling yourself

Unless you can charge tens of thousands an hour or clone yourself multiple times, you will never make that much money selling your personal skills. You need people – or at least the illusion of more people (until you get the troops in place) to get real income. Our approach? We understood what customers liked best about us and rewrote our sales materials to include words like “our team” and “our approach.” Behind the scenes, we created a training guide and videos for new employees to learn our ways (and our whys) and then be able to sell them.

2. Resist the temptation to save on salary expenses by hiring less experienced consultants

Our success was ultimately tied to our willingness to hire far ahead and put the team of experts in place that our new sales materials promised. A big startup mistake we didn't make was hiring people part-time or with less experience than the business needed. Instead, we hired seasoned players who were bored in corporate America and looking for a new challenge.

We couldn't match their high salaries, but we made up for it flexibility and independence. In some cases, we have provided capital in exchange for quality work, attitude and sales. But we took most of the hit personally by staying on greatly reduced wages for nearly two years. It was a delay, but it allowed us to make some key hires that were critical to running the business and helping us hire more superstars.

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3. Don't skimp on sales

We fancied ourselves the best of our firm retailers. Unfortunately, we were also the head recruiter, editor-in-chief, chief administrative assistant and bookkeeper. We just didn't have enough time in the day to sell. But unless you're selling to a services firm, you're dead in the water. Our only other option was to invest (heavily) in the sales function.

We hired someone to discover and create opportunities, giving us more time to focus on closing bigger deals. Maintain risk-based vendor compensation. We used a compensation plan with highly motivating levels and built in huge bonuses to achieve high numbers. Our first seller doubled profits year over year when he finally crossed the $2 million mark. We made money, he was a happy employee and my partner and I forgot (almost) to give up a few months salary to bring him.

These days, it might make more sense to invest in a marketing platform like Hubspot, Salesforce or a host of other new competitors to do the heavy lifting. By the time we sold our firm, nearly 50% of the new opportunities for our consulting deals over $100,000 came through these means. Be sure to save some money in the budgets for marketing platform consultants. It took us some time to patch our system and stop nearly two-thirds of our emails from being blocked by spam filters.

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In general, the bigger your team, the more you can run without you, the higher your income and profitability. Put your time and talent into increasing your company's valuation—not being tied to it—and you'll be rewarded with historic sales and a payout that more than makes up for any sacrifices you make along the way.