If you are a freelancer or a service business owner and want to break free from billing by the hour, you are in the right place. This post will explain how you can productize your service to scale your business and get your time back.
Selling services can stop you from leveling up and growing because your billable hours are limited. Your business isn’t scalable if you’re constrained by how much you can work.
How To Productive A Service
Think of a productized service as a pre-packaged consulting solution that solves one particular problem. When you productize a service, you’re practically moving from freelancing or billing by the hour to selling a service package, i.e., a product. This allows you to scale your business and claim your life back. Regarding products, especially the ones with no inventory, you can sell as many as you want without working more.
But, when you offer services, you need to put in the time to make money. On the other hand, when you’re focused on selling products, your income is not tied to your time.
So, how do you go about productizing your services? How do you transition from a service-based business model into a productized service company that allows you to automate and scale?
The process
Step one of productizing a service is to identify the part of your service that is predictable, packable, and scalable. Let us give you an example.
Let’s say you offer consulting services. So, each time you have a prospect, you will start with a phone call, then move on to one or more long-drawn meetings with them, discuss their requirements and the scope of the project, go back to the office, and work with your team to create a customized proposal, then go back to the client and present the proposal, make any adjustments and negotiate, and ultimately win a percentage of the contracts because not all clients will sign the contract.
See what happens here? You invest a significant portion of your time every time to customize and improve your service offering for each new client, only to discover that only some prospects will ultimately become clients.
Every new client feels like starting over. During discovery and negotiation, you drain your energy, spend resources, and give up know-how in your proposal and during client meetings.
It is essential to realize that the project-based approach cannot be 100% standardized and scaled because it’s limited by your time and resources. Also, it doesn’t produce predictable results because each client case is different, and your service needs to be adapted each time.
Eliminating uncertainty
So, what if you could remove the process’s discovery and negotiation stages? What if you could present a standardized service to all prospective clients without creating a proposal every time?
This is precisely what happens when figuring out how to productize your service.
To productize your service, you create one or more packages for the part of the service that is identical across all projects. In other words, you sell an intangible product, including details of the service that are repeated in nearly every project.
Some consultants, coaches, and agencies productize their services by creating training courses. Others make two or three plans for smaller or bigger bundles of services. For example, if you are a web design agency, you know what is involved in creating a new website. So, you can narrow down to two types of products:
- Web design and development for service businesses and
- Web design and development for eCommerce stores.
That’s it. Clients will know that these two products are what you’re selling and can see what’s included in each one.
Now, will these products be the right fit for everyone? No, of course not. But your service wouldn’t be the right fit for everyone either. Only now can you save time discovering client needs and negotiating?
If productizing your service seems confusing, consider the 80/20 rule; find out what 80% of your clients need and decide to let the remaining 20% go. You can’t please everyone! Create your productized service, pack it with value, and put your offer out there.
Amazing benefits
If the implementation phase of your projects is predictable, you’ll be able to streamline your work process and deliver more excellent value with even lower costs. This is key to scaling your business and transitioning from being a freelance service provider to becoming a business owner.
Remember that digital products are infinitely scalable. It requires the same effort to sell the same product to ten or 100 people. You could even market to 100,000 people with more action and promotion.
Because your pricing and the deliverables are stated upfront, you will automatically filter out clients who can’t afford your service. Also, you won’t waste any time dealing with tire kickers. This helps minimize the resources spent on the sales process. The sales cycle will be shorter, and your cash flow will become somewhat predictable.
In figuring out how to productize your service, reducing sales costs allows you to allocate more resources to positioning, branding, and promoting your product.
Your productized service can be sold to the whole world, not just businesses in your locale.
What’s next
If you have an established service-based business but feel stuck on a plateau, then productizing your service is the way to move forward and scale. Our team at DoneForYou.com has helped dozens of service businesses create excellent online products, position themselves in the market, and sell their products through automated sales funnels.
If creating a digital product sounds like a good strategy for growth, feel free to schedule a call with us to discuss how you can transition from being a service provider into an online business owner.
