Hey there, Tom here.

I hope you’re all having an awesome Sunday so far 😎

I’m in Nepal right now for some trekking. I’m excited to share more about this trip and some upcoming travel/nomad plans very soon. But overall, Nepal is such a beautiful country with some incredibly kind people. Highly recommend visiting here at least once in your life.

NOW, today I want to share some actionable steps you can take to begin earning more income today.

Because here’s something crucial I realized a few years ago 👉 Most one-person businesses and freelancers don’t have an income problem.

Instead, they have a leakage problem.

Money leaks out through unclear systems, underpriced offers, missed payments, and unnecessary complexity.

Fix those mini leakages, and income often goes up without adding a single new customer.

These 10 ideas are honestly pretty boring. But they can help you increase your revenue, land more clients, and build more wealth overall starting immediately. Let’s take a look 👇

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1. Use AI to buy back your time

If you do a task repeatedly, you need to start using cool AI tools so you win back some of your time.

I use Otter (meeting notes), Gling (talking-head video edits), Opus Clips (long-form into shorts), and PopAI (decks and research).

Gling and Opus alone save me a thousand dollars a month in editing costs at least. I also keep custom GPTs for weekly jobs like YouTube scripts, competitor research, and email copy, so I’m not retyping the same prompt every week.

Spend 30 minutes each week playing around with AI and automations and you’ll get the hang of this SO fast.

2. Incorporate and lower your tax bill

Once revenue starts scaling, structure matters.

Incorporating can mean smarter deductions, more flexibility in how you pay yourself, and liability protection.

It’s a hassle and costs money upfront (I paid a Canadian lawyer to set up two of my businesses), but the savings were well worth it and have saved an unreal amount of money on my tax bill.

3. Make cash collection a priority

Too many solo operators let money slip through the cracks because of weak bookkeeping.

Open a separate business bank account (I use Wise, which is free and multi-currency). Then get basic accounting software.

I’ve used Wave for years for invoicing, payments, and expense tracking, and it has a free plan. Block out a weekly bookkeeping session, because your work isn’t finished until the money is in the bank.

4. Consider raising your prices

Ask yourself these questions immediately 👇

If you said yes to any of these, a small increase in price often changes nothing about demand but just boosts your bottom line.

I’ve also found that raising prices helps you attract better clients with fewer headaches. This is consistent across industries. Clients willing to spend money with you without nickel and diming you at every turn are the kinds of clients you want to land.

5. Document everything (SOPs)

Done a task more than twice? Write it down.

Once it lives outside your head, a VA, a contractor, or even an AI tool can take it over for a fraction of what your time is worth.

Outsourcing my blog writing, YouTube editing, and other areas of my content business is how I’ve bought my time back. I can now use this time for higher leverage income activities for my businesses.

6. Productize your service

Custom work can pay well, but it can also wreck your effective hourly rate.

Productized services have a fixed scope, fixed price, and clear outcome. That means less back-and-forth, faster delivery, and an easier sale. Plus if you’re outsourcing, your SOPs are waaaaay easier to create and implement.

7. Audit your subscriptions, mercilessly

Do this every 6 to 12 months.

Go through a year of card statements, cancel what you don’t use, downgrade where you’re overpaying, and replace outdated tools with AI. Then email your SaaS vendors and ask for discounts. Mentioning that you might cancel over pricing works well.

I recently cut a few hundred dollars a month with a handful of emails. $300 a month is $3,600 a year.

8. Cut purchase friction

How many clicks stand between a customer and your checkout?

Pitch your offers early in your content, not buried at the bottom. Turn your link-in-bio into a simple checkout page. Make your packages and pricing easy to find. Every extra hoop costs you sales.

9. Automate your upsells

This is one of my favorite tactics that makes me money every single day.

I run numerous email newsletters. Some of those are on platforms like Kit and Beehiiv.

With both of these platforms, I trigger follow-up emails based on what subscribers do: open a certain email, buy a digital product, click an affiliate link.

This is how my best content and offers get sent to the right people at the right times.

Learn more about how I do this 👉 These 4 automations make me money every month.

10. Just… do more

What would happen if you 2X’d, 5X’d, or 10X’d your marketing output?

Most solo operators are scared of marketing more, but your audience isn’t tired of you. If a few people tune out, the extra content will replace them many times over.

A good example is MarketBeat.

Founder Matt Paulson’s view is that his competitors treat this as a content and technology game when it’s really a distribution game: whoever builds the biggest audience wins.

MarketBeat emails its 5M+ subscribers aggressively with trigger-based sequences, and it did roughly $50M in revenue in 2025 with a relatively small team

Posting once a day? Someone out there is posting three times a day…

Over 90 days, they’ll run circles around you. So experiment. Send one email a week? Try one a day. Post a video every two weeks? What would it take to post every three days?

Where I’m at right now: Right now, I’m in a “do more of what works” phase, leaning harder into AI, automations, and better outsourcing.

Maybe you’re in the same boat, or maybe cutting costs and getting your books in order will make the biggest difference for you right now.

Either way, pick one thing from this list and do it this week.

Sometimes, a business or freelance operation isn’t suffering from one major problem. Rather, it’s death by a thousand cuts.

Analyze your business, look for these kinds of leaks or inefficient workflows, and start fixing them. You’ll see traffic, revenue, and profit improve as you patch things up 😎