Don’t Do Paid Discovery – It’s A Temporary Fix For Your Agency

So I'm going to be the one that has to say it. If you're an agency owner and you have been trying to productize your business so that you can grow and be more scalable and you've chosen to sell and package up your discovery sessions or an audit process, you're going to have to hear what I'm going to be saying here, ...So I'm going to be the one that has to say it. If you're an agency owner and you have been trying to productize your business so that you can grow and be more scalable and you've chosen to sell and package up your discovery sessions or an audit process, you're going to have to hear what I'm going to be saying here, because after talking to hundreds and hundreds of agency owners that are really looking to get more leverage in their business, they have been told, and I see it all around, that the solution is, well, why don't you just sell your discovery session? Get paid for your thinking. Is is really what the message is, and the reality is getting paid for your thinking is great and it's what you should do. But the concept of selling an audit or a discovery session just to get paid for the strategy isn't going to necessarily solve your problem because really what ends up happening is you have a capacity problem.

So if you're in this situation where you have been wanting to grow and you've been wanting to scale and you've been wanting to get more leverage in your agency, and you've either been told to package up and sell an audit or a discovery and it's not working, or it doesn't feel right to you, then private message me because I want to talk through how you can actually solve this process. And we can help you get clients in the next 90 days where this isn't even a problem. And I'm gonna explain how this works right now. But if you're feeling that right now or you felt that that's not the right path, then I'm on board with you, message me and we'll chat. So why is this a real problem? Like, yes, get paid for your thinking. That's a great step. But what I want to do is share a little, uh, kind of concept here.

So here's kind of the before situation. A client comes to you and right now you actually give away your strategy, your all, all of the stuff for free in order to get the client, which if you're doing this, then yeah, pain, getting paid for your strategy and getting paid for your discovery sessions is a huge improvement because you're collecting money, but it's still a bandaid for the real problem. So right now a lot of people actually just do the discovery, the audit, spend a lot of time trying to convince their client that they can help them then get paid for execution. And so this is no bueno because this is all lost revenue and lost time and then you're getting paid over here. All right. And so often what happens even over here is you know, you're kind of doing a bunch of different things.

The project starts from scratch, which is actually where the real problem is. So people are recommending for you to go and package up the audit as a, as a product, 1500 3000 I hear those things commonly. So that's the next, that's the next step. So it is sort of better, but it's not again, solving the real problem. So in this scenario, client comes in, you say, Hey, we can help you, but we do a, you know, a $1,500, or maybe it's a three K is again, what I see commonly for a discovery process that is going to really lay out a map, lay out a strategy, give you the executable blueprint, then we're going to resell you into execution. So yes, good, you've gotten paid for your thinking. It's a step in the right direction. But if you really think about how service businesses, agencies, freelancers scale, it's more on the capacity side.

And it's because most projects don't really follow the same process because you're solving unique problems. So while you get paid for this, and this is sort of becoming a product, right? So, Hey, one step better where we're getting paid here. When it comes to the execution, if one client needs solution, one, one client needs solution, two, three, four, you're always going to be starting from scratch. And the work is still going to be custom, which is where the problem really lies. You're never doing the same thing over and over again. So you're really just delaying when the custom work actually starts. You're just going to do a discovery, you're going to get more clear on it. But if on the other side of the discovery process, the execution looks different for every client, still you're still going to have the same problems that you were really experiencing up here as well.

You'll just have a little bit more money to show for it, but all of the work is likely still going to be custom. And now obviously there are some exceptions to the rule where you might already be serving one market with one solution. And that's what I really want to talk about here is what you're doing in discovery and the audit is really figuring out what the true problem is and where the where like what work you actually have to do to get them the answer and the results that they want. Right? We're trying to really define the problem and then show them what the solution is. AK defined the solution. Well, the path that I'm suggesting is actually solving a predefined problem. So the client comes to you and they already know that they have a specific problem and you've, they already know that you have the solution to that problem because of how you have packaged your services, how you show up in the marketplace as a leader.

So the client comes in, they pay you right out of the gate and you can package your solution, which in my opinion should have a little bit of strategy and a little bit of execution, limited execution, strategically designed, strategically choreographed to get them to a specific result. And that result might not need to be from a to Z. It might actually just be, you know, for the sake of Greg a to G and this way they actually get to see the results of the strategy that you've actually put in place. Oftentimes I see people get paid for the discovery and they hand over this PR, this kind of second proposal like, Hey, now that you here, here's the plan. In order for us to execute it, you're going to pay us again. And usually those are set up so that they're only gonna be able to ever get the results if they execute them with you.

The person who just gave them the blueprint. So it's sort of like sort of a, I don't know, it seems tricky and fishy to me because most of the clients aren't going to want to go try to implement that, implement that themselves. So in this scenario, if we already know what problem they have and we already have the solution, we can go right into solving that particular problem. And we're just looking for more people that have that problem versus having a unique solution every single time. So they'll get to see our strategy, like the result of it, because we're also including a little bit of execution. And so instead of going all over the place with different clients and different, you know, them looking for different things, starting from scratch, we're going to have every client kind of come through this one experience and we can get really good at delivering that experience over and over and over again.

And you're going to be able to serve more clients with less energy, uh, less overhead, less headache, because you're constantly solving the same problem for different people, not solving different problems for different people. So hopefully that makes sense. So a quick recap, if you've been trying to grow your agency and you wanted to, uh, productize, deliver and package your services more like a product and you've been either told and or have been trying to just package and sell paid discovery sessions, audits or like a strategic roadmap, and then the work becomes custom, you are, while you're getting paid for your thinking and it's one tiny step in the right direction, you're still just having a bandaid covering up the real problem. If all of the work in execution is going to be unique to each and every client, you're still going to have the capacity problem.

You're still going to have to go outsource different things to get the right talent in house to solve those unique problems. And each of those unique problems kind of ends up being its own business. So if you're looking to grow your business a whole lot faster, I can help you do this. Package up your expertise to solve a predefined problem with a predefined solution so that you have a predefined roadmap to demonstrate to your client that you can help them get these results really quickly. We can help you and we can help you dial this in in a matter of weeks and have paying clients shortly thereafter. So if that sounds interesting to you and you feel like that's more in line with what you want to do, private message me, I'd love to share some details with you about our process and our program foundations. Otherwise, hope you found this well. Leave a comment with your biggest takeaway and we'll talk soon.