Service Arbitrage Case Study: How I Made $1,000/Month With No Experience

A Little Background Story

A few years ago, both my husband and I just lost our jobs unexpectedly. The company that we both worked for suddenly closed down.

So, we needed to make some money quickly to help pay the bills.

After some research, we know that the fastest way to make money is to sell services.

But, there was one problem – no sell-able skills.

Then, an idea struck us.

Why not we sell other people’s skills?

Look around us, a lot of businesses actually operate in this way.

Hospitals sell the skills of their doctors.

Hair salons sell the skills of their hair stylists.

Creative agencies sell the skills of their designers.

Then, I noticed that there are literally hundreds of thousands of freelancers selling their skills on the freelance websites such as Fiverr & Upwork.

And, a lot of them are always looking for more freelance work.

So, why not get clients for the service they offer and outsource the work to them?

And we call this side business Service Arbitrage.

Here’s how it works.

First, you find in-demand services that freelancers are already offering at a super low price on freelancing websites. Then, you market their services to businesses that need it. Once you get a sale, you hire the freelancers to deliver the work for you.

How you make money is that you quote a higher price to your clients than what your freelancers quote you to pocket the price difference as your profit.

This can be considered another variant of freelancing.

The only difference is that you are outsourcing the work to other freelancers instead of doing the work yourself.

Who It Is Suitable For

Service arbitrage business is suitable for people who

• Have no sell-able or marketable skills
• Have sell-able skills but want to outsource all the work to freelancers instead of doing it themselves
• Feel not confident about their skills to offer the service by themselves
• Have little time for side business

How You Can Get Started 

Now, I am going to walk you through a simple but proven 5-step system which I have used myself to earn extra cash from my service arbitrage business. And I hope that you will find it helpful.

Step 1: Find a profitable service to offer

Many people seem to think that if you want to succeed in your business, you need to come up with a business idea that no one has ever thought of before. But, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Actually, the key to starting a successful service arbitrage business is to identify a service niche that is already in demand.

Then, you might be thinking that if there are already people offering the same service, why would anyone want to buy from me?

I had the same doubts before. But, isn’t this EXACTLY what is stopping so many people from taking action to start their own business.

They’ve killed their idea even before testing and validating it. If the founder of Shake Shacks or Five Guys had thought of the same way, we would never have Shake Shacks or Five Guys today.

So, it is really up to you. You either talk yourself out of doing anything out of your comfort zone and stay stuck at where you are right now. Or you can start taking small steps and at least give yourself the chance to get to where you want to be.

Step 2: Find Clients

Once you have decided what service you want to offer for your service arbitrage business, it’s time to get clients!

There are two ways of finding clients:

• Free leads
• Paid leads

Here, we’re only going to talk about how to get free leads for your business because it is an entirely different game for paid leads.

To master paid leads, you need to learn how to do it correctly first, then you need to spend money to test different ads and find out which ads works and which doesn’t. Finally, you need to know your numbers. That means you need to have a positive return on your ads spend. Only then it will make sense to spend money to buy leads.

For now, we will just stick to free methods to get leads when you are just getting started.

So, if you are just starting out, the very first thing you should do is to let everyone in your network know what service you are offering for your new business.

The purpose of doing this is that they can help you spread the word and refer clients to you.

Also, you should find out where your potential clients usually hang out online and then go where they are and put your offer in front of them.

Better still, you can directly reach out to them by email and pitch your offer. Don’t waste time posting on Twitter or Facebook because your post will only get buried among hundreds of other posts and NO POTENTIAL CLIENT IS GOING TO SEE IT.

Step 3: Close the sale

Now, how do we close the sale?

This is something that a lot of people struggle with.

Why?

Not everyone is a natural salesperson.

Not everyone has sales experience or training.

For me, I had no sales experience prior to starting this business. To be honest, I even felt guilty about asking for the sale.

Maybe you feel the same way.

But, I was able to overcome my fear and learnt the art of selling from my experience of growing this business. And I want to share with you what I have learnt.

So, what is it that I do that allows me to be my natural self and not feeling bad about asking for the sale?

A mindset shift.

Yes, all you need is to change your mindset from selling to genuinely helping and serving.

This way, you stay true to who you really are.

Also, it takes away the pressure on you and your client.

When you are genuinely trying to help your clients regardless whether they will hire your service in the end, they can tell that you care and not just go after the money.

If you want to be good at selling, you need to understand two things:

• We only buy from people whom we believe can solve our problem and get us the results we desire
• We only buy from people whom we trust and like

Once you can internalize these two points, you will find it is not so hard to close a sale.

Step 4: Find Outsourced Worker To Deliver The Work

Getting a good and reliable outsourced worker to do work for you is vitally important. You don’t want to end up with one who is unreliable.

Here are actually MANY SIGNS that you can look out for to help you filter the good ones from the bad ones.

For example, you should always look at the reviews that the past clients have given them. Are they good reviews? Or most of the reviews are bad?

A second sign is their response time. Do they respond very quickly to any enquiry? Or do they take very long to reply?

Inside my FREE Service Arbitrage Email Course, you can get access to the complete list of warning signs you should look out for when you are selecting which freelancer to outsource the work to.

Step 5: Hand Over The Completed Work 

So, we have come to the final step of this five-step system for starting your own service arbitrage business.

This step should be the easiest of all.

After your freelancer has completed the work and your client is happy with the result, it’s time to collect the remainder of the full payment from your client before you hand over all the deliverable.

If possible, always ask your client for a testimonial and referrals at the end of the project. If you have done a good job, your client should be okay to do this favor for you.

To get the detailed step-by-step guide on how to start your service arbitrage business, simply click and download the FREE Service Arbitrage Email Course below and follow the action plan outlined inside the email course.