For many entrepreneurs, professionals and experts in service-based businesses, the path to success often starts with delivering personalised, one-on-one services. Whether you’re a consultant, coach, creative professional or any other expert, your services are your bread and butter. However, as your business grows, you may find yourself facing limitations in terms of time, resources, and the ability to scale.
That’s where productising your services comes in – a strategy that can revolutionise your business model, enhance profitability and unlock new levels of scalability.
What Does It Mean to Productise a Service?
Productising a service involves packaging your expertise into a standardised, repeatable offering that can be sold like a product. Instead of delivering customised services tailored to each client, you create a specific, streamlined solution that addresses a common problem for your target audience.
Examples of productised services include:
Online Courses: Instead of providing one-on-one coaching, as a business consultant you could create an online course that teaches business owners how to develop a strategic growth plan.
Membership Sites: As a marketing expert, you could offer a membership site with access to exclusive content, tools and resources for a monthly fee, rather than charging hourly for consultations.
Templates and Toolkits: As a graphic designer you could sell design templates or branding toolkits that businesses can use to create their own marketing materials.
Why Productising Your Services is Essential for Profitability
1. Increased Revenue Potential
Productising your services allows you to move from trading time for money to generating income that scales. When you offer a productised service, you can sell it to an unlimited number of customers without significantly increasing your workload. This shift enables you to serve more clients simultaneously, resulting in higher revenue without a proportional increase in effort.
For instance, if you charge £100 per hour for consulting and work 20 hours a week, your income is capped at £2000. But if you create an online program that sells for £100, you will only need to sell it to at least 20 clients without giving up too much of your time your time. Unlike consulting work, this earning is not capped, which means you can increase your earnings easily without being limited by your time.
2. Predictable Income Streams
One of the challenges with service-based businesses is the inconsistency in income. Productised services such as subscription-based offerings or evergreen online courses, provide a more predictable and stable income stream.
For example, as a social media strategist you could offer a monthly content calendar subscription service. Clients pay a recurring fee to access new content ideas and strategies every month, creating a steady flow of income for you.
3. Lower Operational Costs
Delivering customised services often requires significant resources, from extensive client onboarding to personalised project management. When you productise your services, you standardise the process, reducing the amount of time and resources needed to deliver the service.
For instance, as a copywriter, you could create a series of pre-written email sequences that can be customised by the buyer. Instead of writing each sequence from scratch, you can sell these templates repeatedly, minimising the time spent on each sale and maximising profitability.
Why Productising Your Services is Key for Scalability
1. Breaking the Time Barrier
The biggest limitation of a service-based business is that time is finite. There are only so many hours in a day, and when your revenue depends on those hours, your income potential is capped. Productising your services allows you to break through this barrier, enabling you to scale your business without being tied to the clock.
For a example a leadership coach who typically works one-on-one with clients could create a group coaching program or a self-paced leadership course, and can serve hundreds of clients simultaneously without needing to increase their hours worked.
2. Easier to Delegate and Automate
Productised services can be systematised, making them easier to delegate or automate. This allows you to focus on higher-level strategic tasks, rather than getting bogged down in day-to-day client work.
For example, a web developer who traditionally builds custom websites could develop a set of website templates for specific industries. Once the templates are created, the developer’s team can handle customisation and implementation, allowing the business owner to focus on marketing and growing the business.
3. Expanding Your Market Reach
When you productise your services, you can expand your reach beyond your local market or existing network. Digital products such as courses, templates or toolkits, can be sold globally, giving you access to a much larger audience.
For instance, a legal consultant who typically works with small businesses in their city could create a legal document library or compliance toolkit that’s relevant to small businesses worldwide. By shifting from a localised service to a global product, the consultant dramatically increases their potential customer base.
Conclusion
Productising your services is a game-changing strategy for entrepreneurs, professionals, and experts within service-based businesses. Not only does it open the door to greater profitability by breaking the time-for-money trade-off, but it also enables you to scale your business in ways that traditional service models simply can’t.
By packaging your expertise into standardised, repeatable offerings, you create opportunities for passive income, predictable revenue streams and the ability to serve more clients with less effort. Whether through online courses, membership sites or ready-to-use templates, productised services empower you to achieve the profitability and scalability that are essential for long-term success in today’s competitive market.
If you’re ready to take your service-based business to the next level or are considering productising your offerings, feel free to reach out and see how I can support you to achieve that. This might just be the key to unlocking your business’s full potential!
