Most people think there is only ONE way to productize your services.
The most common is called “Unlimited” services pioneered by a company called WP Curve then followed up by ones like Design Pickle.
But that’s only one METHOD.
Now that we’ve helped about 300 agency owners productize their services and knowledge we’ve realized that there isn’t just ONE way to do it.
There are 6 different ways our clients have done it and there are even services we use and love that I’ll share today that have different ways of delivering their services more like products.
Watch now
Transcript / MP3
What’s good. Everybody. Greg Hickman here with all agency@allagency.com. And in this video, I’m going to break down the six ways to deliver your services like products. Now, if you’re new here on this channel, we talk about how you can grow your agency, scale your agency through systems automation, and diversifying your revenue streams beyond just selling your labor and actually getting paid for your thinking. So we release a new video every single Thursday. So go ahead and click that subscribe button. So you don’t miss another episode. Let’s get it going. …All right guys, like I said, I want to break down the six ways to deliver your services like products. And often at least in our business, we talk a lot about productizing your business, and that is a way to kind of transform your agency. A lot of the people that come to us, they’re more generalists. They serve a wide variety of businesses and they also sort of have a, you know, a large service menu and they’ll send proposals. And what they give one client is different from what they give another client. What we’ve found is by productizing, by selling your services more like products, you have the ability to get a lot of momentum in your sales and marketing to attract people, to have them coming to you instead of hunting them manually and also to deliver an experience that gets your clients pretty much the exact same result that you would get from doing your done for you, but in a more leveraged and scalable profitable way.So, uh, I want to share the six different ways that we’ve seen agencies actually productizing, because it seems like sometimes when I talk to folks that they think there’s really just one or two ways, but as you really start to break it down, there are a lot more. Now, if you stay till the end, I have a bonus method for you. And I also put together a worksheet that you can opt into, uh, where we’ll walk you through how to use this worksheet. We call it the productized service, a worksheet so that you can actually unpack your own process to map out a new streamlined way to deliver your service. So without further ado, let’s talk about these six ways, but we have to ask the question, well, what are productized services? We want to make sure we’re all on the same page here. So what is a productized service?A productized service to me is a service that’s sold and delivered with a fixed scope, a fixed price, and a fixed timeline. Now, why might you want to productize your service? The answer is fairly clear, but for a lot of reasons, the key ones to me are looking at one. You can run a business way more predictably from your marketing and your acquisition to your fulfillment. It runs more predictably because you’re going to build your fulfillment. You’re going to build your sales process and marketing systems around standard deliverables. Now this could be multiple packages. This could be one package. Uh, it doesn’t really matter, but we’re building the whole offering around these standardized deliverables and also standardized pricing. So instead of going back and forth, uh, with RFPs and, you know, slicing and dicing up your service menu line item, you’re basically going to say, Hey, I’m going to get you this result.And it’s going to take this amount of time and here’s how much it’s going to cost. So that’s a way to package up your services in a way where you’re selling a specific outcome, not your time and your labor. Now, most importantly, when it comes to all of this, we’re doing it because we’re designing with scalability in mind. If you were just looking to kind of get your clients more, more, and better results, you’re probably just going to raise your price and go all in on giving them everything and all the attention that they need, but like a traditional agency that can only scale so high without having to just continually hire more people, which creates more of a headache. And if you’re on this channel, that’s probably not the path that you want to take. You want to have a lean and mean team that can produce a lot of results, a lot of revenue, and you still have a life.At least that’s what I know my situation was. And hundreds of our clients feel the same way. So let’s break down the six options. The first and most obvious is the one off project. Now the one off project, an example of this is a company called scribe writing formally book in a box by Tucker max. And in four months you pay them I think, four K a month. And you have a bestselling book. Published, designed, looks beautiful. Um, and you go through their step by step process. Another one is great assistant. We use great assistant. You basically pay them a fee. They bring me three different candidates for an executive assistant. We interview them and we hire one. I don’t need that to be a recurring thing, unless I’m going to need to hire an executive assistant every month. This is more of a one off project.So do you have more of a one off offering? If so, are you selling it as a one off or are you really trying to span it out and collect revenue in a monthly recurring way when it’s completely unnecessary? If you’re doing so you’re actually hurting yourself. And if you click, uh, around here, there’s a video that I, where I talk about how most agencies get recurring revenue wrong. Now the second type of productizing is this notion of unlimited tasks. Now unlimited tasks is probably how productize came to be in the first place. Um, there are companies like WP curve, which was unlimited WordPress support or design, pickle, um, unlimited graphic design and, or a company that we use automation agency. And the unlimited is you get to have unlimited to requests for a particular type of deliverable each and every day, week and or month, depending upon the service.And they’ll knock one out at a time. They, most of them usually have some sort of caps and limits possibly through different pricing where you get more requests in a short amount of time with if you pay more. But all of the kind of notion of productize, at least in my experience has kind of spawned off of services like this that were the unlimited type of offering. Maybe you have that in your business. Um, one thing I have noticed about those sorts of businesses, and this is there’s obviously exceptions to the rule is that most of the companies that are super successful in doing this model have a lot of the fulfillment overseas. So they can have a really affordable price point, but still be profitable. Um, you know, using, uh, staff and things like that in the Philippines. So not again, that’s not how it always is, but definitely common in my experience.Now, the next option is a recurring productized service or a subscription, as you might call it. An examples of this would be a company like vid shops or a content cucumber Vich hops is a company that we’ve used in the past. Um, for a fixed dollar amount, they will edit four videos a month. For me, those were my YouTube videos. If you check out the earlier videos on this channel, you’ll see some of the videos that were edited by them. Uh, and for X dollars a month, I get X videos a month. They don’t roll over or anything like that. Content cucumber is another example, um, X number of blog posts and, or, um, emails, things like that, that you can get per month from a content creation team, but you’re paying for the X number of deliverables each and every month. So maybe that’s what your service might look like or could look like if there is an ongoing need for deliverables for your client. Now, the next one is software with a service you’ve heard of software as a service SAS. Well, this is SLAs and sweats are companies like Splasheo Splasheo we use for those, um, kind of micro content graphics that have the headers and the transcription, and they use a combination of their own technology and a team, a bench, for example, bench, for example, is a company that does bookkeeping. Um, they have, you have a bookkeeper, but they also use their own proprietary software. And systemly, which was my former agency is another example where we piggyback an existing software. It doesn’t have to be a proprietary software and our service compliments that software. This is the great thing about software, the service. If you’re someone who, you know, your clientele use the same software, like an active campaign, or in my case at the time it was an infusion soft or a HubSpot. You can piggyback HubSpot users and then add a different service component to it. Maybe you onboard people into that software, maybe everyone that uses that software needs, you know, the three GoTo campaigns. I see a huge opportunity for a lot of people. I’m in a lot of markets when it comes to software with a service, combining your skills with an existing software and, or potentially even your own proprietary software. Number five is group coaching and consulting, probably the one that needs the least amount of explanation. But, um, this is how I look at this as done with you and one to many and all agency. My own business is a form of that. And one of my former mentors, Dan Martell, who runs a company called SAS Academy. He coaches SAS founders. Now for group coaching group consulting, it’s sort of a hybrid, there’s a combination of training.Usually there is a combination of live calls and support communities, and sometimes even in person events and you kind of combine those together to guide your clients to achieve a specific result. Now, I know a lot of you watching this channel, or at least if you’ve spoken to us, that’s something that is of interest to you. So I put a training linked up below in the comment section where I walk you through the three steps that we took to kind of transform our agency into a group coaching and consulting business. Now the sixth option of, or six method or style of productizing, your service is just productized, coaching and consulting. Now how I look at this different from the group model is that it’s really one to one, and this is where you can still do done for you. It can still be a one on one experience. An example of this is a company called UI breakfast. They were one of the first people that I saw doing it. They work with companies to help kind of guide them through their process, to optimizing their user interfaces for, for, you know, ease of use conversion, things like that. So you might be really good at something and used to do it with, do it for your client. Well, you could consult them in a one-on-one capacity and walk them through how you do it. So essentially teach them while doing it could be an example of that consulting or just consulting them all the way through that journey. So there you have it, the six different options, the one off the unlimited, the productized consulting, the recurring service, the group coaching and consulting the software with a service. Now, what I love about this is that you can actually combine all of these together and make a unique blend that fits you and your needs, your desires, your lifestyle choices, your business growth choices, all of those things, you can meld these things together into a little bit of a hybrid. And that creates a really interesting opportunity. And an opportunity is really this bonus method is connecting the complimentary methods together. So what does that mean? Exactly? Well, you could take a one off service and upsell people into a recurring service or into a group coaching and consulting program, or even into a software with a service. Conversely, uh, another way to look at this is you could have a group coaching and consulting experience that focuses on getting people from a to B and then knowing that they’re going to need you to go from B to Z, you can just keep going in a more in depth coaching agreement. So maybe you have a coaching program that is 60 to 90 days, and then you upsell them into a deeper engagement that takes them further on their goals. That is 12 months. Maybe you have a software as a service and you help them get set up on a software or install, you know, the first five campaigns. And then you roll them into a productized consulting agreement or same thing, software, the service and group coaching and consulting. There’s really so many different ways you can slice and dice and connect these six different styles of delivery so that it’s unique to you and benefits and capitalizes on your unique skill sets, your existing team members and really what your ideal prospect needs and wants and the results that they’re looking to achieve. So it’s not black and white. It’s not like there’s one option. There are a variety of ways. You can start to package up your expertise in a way that will give you more of that predictability and scalability. Now, like I said, I had a little treat for you. If you click the link below, there is an opt in to download our productized service worksheet. It is a worksheet that will come along with a step by step walkthrough video showing you one of the key steps of our process that helps you start to unpack and organize your expertise, your skills, your knowledge into a step by step process that can be productized, whether it’s coaching or any one of these other six models or methods of delivery, you can get started by downloading that worksheet right now. So I hope you enjoyed this in the comment section below. I want to hear which one of these options is going to be the option, your focusing on next, when it comes to making your agency more scalable and more predictable until then catching the next episode.
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