How to Turn a Service into a Product with a Repeatable Workflow

Which would be more valuable to you as a buyer? 2 hours of time with a stranger or the perfect headshot for your LinkedIn account. So whenever you look at it, you think, yeah, that's me, rather than yeah, that's me. Which of those two realities feels a little bit more tempting if you were in the market for say, a headshot? For most people, that latter situation of knowing an outcome that is what you really want at the end of the day and the amount of time it takes to get that isn't something that is appealing to you or necessarily what you're even looking for. For many of us in this example, we don't know if two hours of photography means we're going to get a headshot, or if it just means we're going to get the lighting right or whether we're going to have a full feature film. We just don't know. So that latter situation of having a set outcome is pretty appealing. That difference though, between an outcome and an input is the difference between a service and a productized service. Productized service is a service that has product like qualities because we fix the process, we often fix the inputs, we fix the price. And by fixing all of these variables and making kind of set in stone, we can sell a service as if it were a product. By fixing, fixing all of these variables, we're essentially able to make a service feel and sell like it would a product and get us to that headshot scenario we talked about before where we have customers buying results and us selling certain results. Productizing a service is as much around operations as it is marketing. This is not just as simple as bundling time and saying, hey, I'm going to give you two hours of my time as a photographer. No, productizing in the pure sense means I'm going to give you the product of my work as a service provider, which in this case would be a headshot. Also, one thing I want to call out here, just at the beginning is that productized services are often confused with bundling or cookie cutter services. And it is neither of those things. Bundling your services means having a retainer prepaid or not prepaid, of basically picking a bundle of hours and saying, hey, pay in advance. That is just a payment method and has nothing to do with productizing your service. The second thing that is often confused with a productized service is a cookie cutter service or a service where it's wash, rinse, repeat the same every time. A productized service just means you have set steps you go through. In the example of that Photographer doing headshots in a productized way, you're selling the perfect headshot. Sure, that's the service. But. But when someone goes through the perfect headshot productized service, it's not like they get some kind of stock image of a headshot, right? No, they get their headshot. When you're productizing a service, you are setting your steps in motion. It's kind of a fixed journey. But the way people go through that journey and the things you might work on, all of those things are going to change. It is a custom service, even if it is productized. Just the way you are getting to that custom outcome is the part that is fixed. Okay, so that's productized services in a nutshell. Why should you care about this? Well, hopefully just because it's interesting, Is it something you should consider first? Do you have a clear avatar that you like to work with? And maybe some others that tend to come to you but you don't want to work with? Having a productized path will make your offer more narrow and will make sure you attract more of the people you like and fewer of the people that don't necessarily jive with your process. Number two, do you have a preferred process? Is there a way you like to work with people? If you are someone who frequently gets custom projects and you're like, I wish I didn't have to do this. I wish I could do this prep work before I did this thing, and that bothers you to have to work completely based on the order of the customer, you might find this to be helpful. Number three, do you have a customer avatar who just does not get how long your work takes, does not understand what's involved? If you give hourly quotes out to your clients and they're like, sure, what does that mean? Or maybe they just freak out about hourly pricing in general could be a good time to productize. Number four, do you have a hard time explaining the ROI or the return of your services? Maybe you are a home organizer and you work hourly and folks are like, okay, so like, what will you do in my house? And you fumble over your words trying to explain that productizing your service can help with that because you are creating a product and in so doing you're going to get clearer on what you can and cannot deliver in each of your products. Products, which are your services? If you're a business owner who said yes to any of these, you may want to consider a productized service as either your signature product or just another offer to try out. Adding in something like this isn't going to break your business. Well, I mean not, not a lawyer, not a business advisor, you know, disclaimers here, but these aren't things that are giant endeavors to build out a productized service. It's a great thing to try and see if it works for you. I know for me earlier on productizing, my tech and process work that I was doing was a huge help in getting my business kind of set up and making communic with prospects a whole lot easier. So for the rest of this video, I just want to talk to my past self here and go through the steps you would need to go through in order to productize. If you are someone who's considering this but not quite sure where to start. And just to make things a bit more real world for the purposes of today, let's pretend that I am a dog trainer, which I am definitely not, but pretend I'm a dog trainer. And I really like to work with animals that have had behavioral difficulties. I like to help them kind of get back to a normal quality of life and improve what they're able to do and help their families and all that stuff. That's me, Layla the dog trainer. Woohoo. And given that information, I'm gonna take my dog training business here through a productizing step to add a new productized offer into my dog training and boarding business that I already have in this imaginary world. All right, let's start with step one. This is basically the the scope of your productized service for processdriven here. Our scope is taking small teams that want to systemize their business. They have a proven offer, they've been doing it for a haven't quite got processes to stick. We help them build a foundation of process for their business so they can start systemizing and start scaling. That's our journey. For me as the imaginary dog walker here, my ideal journey here is taking a dog that has had behavioral issues in the past and giving them a clear training plan for how they can change that behavior in the future. And by them I mean their owners, the dog can't read the plan. I do know that much about dog training. So this hypothetical dog trainer, Layla really likes the auditing part of getting to know a new dog, assessing their behaviors. And so I want to make a productized service around that journey. That's step one, deciding your journey. Now once you've got that down, step two is mapping out your journey. In this step, all you really need to do is list out the main steps that you would have to take a example client through if they wanted to go through the journey you outlined in step one. For my dog training business here, I'd probably want to go through first a home visit of some kind for some observation. I'd probably want to have the dog boarded with me for a little bit so I could observe, maybe for a long weekend. I'd want to write up some kind of plan of tracking what I was able to discover and then I'd probably want to bring the dog back to the owners and have some kind of discussion where I talk through the training plan and just kind of assess how the owners feel about the findings that I've had so far. That would be kind of my A to Z of this dog training audit thing. Think about for your business how you would do that transformation for yourself. If you are planning out a signature service like the process driven example I said before, this is going to probably take you a little while, but if you're doing a more small offer like the one that dog trainer is doing here, this should be pretty quick. Just pretend you have a custom client coming at you, asking you how would you do it. Try to respond with a quick bulleted list of what steps you would walk through, numbered 1 through 10, however many steps you have, and view that as draft one. Your goal here is to not have it be perfect, but to make sure that you're outlining enough complexity so you can make sure that you get that given client a result, but not too much that it's becoming unnecessarily complicated. Okay. We basically want just enough. Enough that they get the result, not too much, that they get overwhelmed or it becomes really expensive to deliver. If you struggle with this part or maybe you just want to go further into the weeds. I definitely suggest watching this video on process mapping up ahead where we talk about systemizing the unknown or a service you haven't yet delivered. Kind of taps right into this kind of mindset and it'll help you along journey. All right, now that you have your scope and you have your path to get from point A to point B, let's talk about positioning a little bit. What I mean by positioning is just how you're going to, well, position, put this thing, this product you're creating out into the world. It is going to be very tempting at this phase, particularly for new business owners to get really excited about positioning and think branding and colors and stop. We really only need four things. First thing, a name. We need some kind of placeholder name that accurately describes the results. Someone is going to get it does not need to be sexy. It does not need to be a forever name. It just needs to be a name so we can talk about this in conversation. Okay? Preferably something easy to say. The second thing is we need to have a price. Are we going to charge $10,000 or $10? That kind of matters. You can back into that price by looking at the step you did above and think, hmm, how much would I charge a customer for that? How much does that cost me? That kind of stuff. Pricing should be pretty easy. If you're not sure of how to price your service, aim for about the average of what you think the range could be. You can always increase the price later. In fact, you definitely should, but it's hard to decrease the price later. The third thing you need to define are your deliverables. So going back to step two, look at all the stuff that you think needs to be part of this process and basically bullet point it out as if it was on an invoice. On an invoice you might say you're buying the signature gold package and that includes boom, boom, boom, boom. We do not want to be very detailed here, but we just want to make sure we have enough that we can then take this stuff, put it in a contract and make sure our ass is covered. Like, we don't want to be selling only value based services where the scope is so unclear that the project never ends. We don't want that. But in the case of the dog trainer, we might want to say, you know, it includes two days of boarding, it includes one in home consultation and includes you getting your audit plan done. We just want to make sure we have a few bullet points that we can drag into our contract later. Last thing in step three is a one sentence pitch. This is not required, but I think it's so helpful that it's worth taking the time to do it. Basically all we need to do is create one sentence that describes the journey or the appeal of this offer. For example, my dog training business service thing could have a one line explanation, such as uncover a tailored training plan to help improve the quality of life of your behaviorally challenged pup. Something like that. I mean, maybe less wordy than that. It's just a one line explanation that explains the reason why someone should buy this. For another example, go back to my headshot example from earlier in this video. You know, get a headshot that makes you say ooh and not oo. That's a fine explanation. All we need here is a one sentence pitch. For lack of a better word. For our offer and we'll be good to go. For my dog training company, I already talked about my deliverables and my one sentence pitch. I think I'm going to aim for the price point of about 500. So really on the lower end there. And I'm going to call this service. What do I have on here? Oh, Paulsona. Paulsona. Training assessment. That's what it is. They're getting a training assessment. Short enough, clear enough, tells you what you want and I can always change it later. Those are my four factors for positioning. I want you to fill out yours and then we're ready for step four. That's a lot of fours. All right, step four, sell it. That's it. We're already there. Your offer is made. As far as I'm concerned, you are ready to start bringing it out into the marketplace. Now, some of you, and including myself, if I would have told this advice to me, will immediately start balking at the idea of selling it. In step four. You're going to say, but I have not created the train. Yeah, don't know when I'm going to book it. It doesn't matter. Layla of the past and it doesn't matter you to my friends today. You think it does, but it doesn't. Before we spend hours and hours building a beautiful landing page or a product logo or a booking system or building automations to automatically remind customers of blah, blah, blah. What's more important than any of that is confirming that what we've created is actually appealing to people. Yeah, we don't know that yet. We just have this idea of a training audit based on our own interests and our knowledge of our audience. But what if we spend all that time and nobody wants it? No one wants a training assessment. They want something else. No better way to find that out than to try to sell what we've created. Now, I do not like the philosophy of sell everything, like selling a course before you built it. I think that's kind of. I don't know, it just feels gross to me and I don't want you to get into that situation. So when we're in step four here, what I mean by sell it is to get commitments, get bookings, get deposits in for your projects. So in my example of being a dog boarder, I probably know dogs who are exactly who I think would be perfect for this program. So what I'm going to do is send a personal email or text message or phone call to the owners of those dogs and let them know I'm starting this new thing that I would love to have them be one of our first clients in this new program, help build it with me, let them know that it's the introductory price of $500, tell them my one sentence explanation, pitch and say, hey, would you like to know more? That's it. If they say yes, I would arrange a way to collect an initial deposit on those services, making sure it's refundable in case something were to come up. And then I even go a step further and manually book those first training dates. But because I'm someone who is a little cautious, I would book those dates at least three weeks out. I want to make sure I have ample time to get the service ready, make sure it's excellent, and ensure that I'm not rushing and scrambling and giving their dogs a subpar service. I'm going to give myself a little bit of buffer time between yes and actually delivering it to make sure I can make all that stuff happen. I'm going to keep doing this process of trying to sell what I've built until I feel confident that yes, there is demand for this. For some offers, that might mean you need to sell it 50 times. For others, you sell it once and you're like, I'm convinced it's all going to depend on the cost and the price point and so on. But for this dog training example, I'd say probably once I have one booking, understanding this imaginary dog trainer already has an audience. If I have one booking, I'm going to say, all right, I'm good, and move on. So that brings us to number five, which is the build phase. What we're doing at this point is basically planning at least two steps ahead of where we are. Go back to step two, where you mapped out your whole delivery process, give it a once over and basically do the first two steps. Build your booking system, build your reminder system, build those two things, have a client go through them, and once the client is experiencing step two, you build out step three and four. Always just be at least two steps ahead of wherever your first client is. But you want to take some time here to build out. What are you doing in the in home visit? What do you do at boarding? What do you do at, you know, preparing basically for each step of the process before it actually comes to life. When we're doing this building, we do want to make sure we're moving efficiently and remember that our goal is to deliver an amazing service to, in this case, these dogs or to your customer. But we cannot aim for Perfection, because we will not achieve perfection this first time around. The beauty of a productized service is you're relying really heavily on process. So the first time you do it, it's going to be the worst time you ever do it. There's going to be issues, but the next time you do it, you build on what worked and you change what didn't work. Then the third time and the fourth time and the fifth time, by time 100, you're going to have a stellar service, probably three times the price, if not 10 times the price of where you started. And you can feel really confident in what you've created. Understanding that's built around the feedback and experience of actual clients who have gone through it. That's one reason why I suggested when you're pricing, you aim for the middle of the market or about middle of the value, because you can always raise it from there. And when you raise it based on confidence that you earn from experience, you will be able to raise that price and say it with confidence to the next customer that you would not be able to do if you just arbitrarily said, yep, it's, you know, high ticket, it's $5,000 for this dog training boarding weekend and then feel super uncertain as to whether you can deliver that value. I'd rather earn my confidence than just steal it from some high ticket sales coach who says everything needs to be high ticket because high ticket is high ticket and so you should ticket highly. I just don't get it. I think we should feel really confident in our pricing, feel confident that we can deliver that much value and there's no better way in my experience to, to know that than to have a price, see people get amazing results and be so happy and then raise it, and then see people be so happy at that result and then I'd rather let it go organically. So, soapbox aside, those are the five steps to build out your productized service. And Layla of the past, who is probably feeling all sorts of resistance around this, thinking that needs to be super prepped and super ready. It doesn't just take a few steps forward. Go through this, you could be done by the end of this afternoon and start trying to sell it out to the marketplace, see how it goes and if you don't quite like it, change it, go back to this, redo it, alter the price, the deliverables, the whatever next time around and just keep making it better. But just don't let the fear of not having the perfect product service prevent you from ever trying to build a productized service because it's really only the trying that's going to get you into the game at all. Anywho, thanks so much for watching guys. I hope this was an interesting video. If you have any questions around productized services, drop them in the comments. And if you are committed to taking action on this and you want to avoid procrastinating like I probably did for far too long, go ahead and drop in the comments your one line explanation of what your productized service is. Thanks so much for watching guys, and until next time, enjoy the process.