In this solo podcast episode, Ian Peterman, CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, argues that service‑based companies should develop their own products—digital (e.g., courses) and physical—to strengthen their business. He outlines four core advantages: (1) improving customer experience and retention by offering complementary products that address pain points and deepen brand interaction; (2) increasing profitability through evergreen products that generate revenue without the time‑for‑money constraints of services; (3) attracting new customers and entering adjacent markets by providing lower‑cost, high‑value offerings that serve audiences beyond the traditional service scope; and (4) expanding brand visibility by tapping product‑focused marketing channels such as magazines, product lists, and e‑commerce platforms. Peterman emphasizes that integrating services, digital courses, and physical goods creates multiple lead‑generation pathways, allowing each asset to promote the others. He concludes with a call to action for listeners to subscribe, like, and visit petermanfirm.com for more information.
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Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and on today's episode about launching a product, I want to talk about why your service-based company should have a product. I've talked about service companies getting products, adding products a few times before, but I really want to dive into why I think it's important for you to add a product if you don't have a product already as a service company. And it can be a digital product, but you also should be thinking about physical products to accompany your services. So I'm going to talk about improving your customer experience, improving profitability, gaining new customers and new ways for people to find out about your brand. Now, as far as improving customer experience and retention, it's always a great way to be able to increase the amount of products you sell, amount of services, because it allows your customers to be interacting with your brand more, and it allows you to improve the actual experience of with your, your company, with your brand. So if you have a service and you're sitting there and you want to add a product, you know, one of the things a lot of people think of is, oh, we'll create a course. And that's a great option. You should definitely think about courses as a product, but also be looking at, you know, how else can you improve your customer experience? What are, you know, pain points in what they do? If you offer a service and there's products that they need but none of them out there really fit what actually needs to be done, then you want to look at, well, how can you create a product to fill that need? Because if you make it so that when somebody engages with you and you're working through whatever your services are, then— and you can improve it by adding additional product. Whether it is a course, whether it's a physical product, whatever that is, you're going to increase the overall customer experience and improve it. And by doing that, you're gonna retain your customers better. It's gonna mean that it's gonna make sense for them to stay with you more. It's going to just help them to have a better experience overall. And with that, you also wanna be thinking about You know, what is your current experience? And it doesn't have to be bad. Your experience with your current customers, they may have a fantastic experience. Your service could be the best in the world, but maybe there's other areas that are related to you that are tangential to your service that aren't really service-based but are still impacted. You know, it could be a service and you're helping people overcome things that maybe some other product could help overcome as well and make that process even easier when they work with you. So improving your customer's experience and retention is definitely a reason why I talk to service-based companies and, and part of the process of working with them to launch a new product. And that's one of the reasons why it, I think, is a great addition to a service-based company. Second thing to talk about is improve profitability. So The great thing about doing products that are evergreen— if you're a service-based company, you're often exchanging time for money or value for money, but it still requires time and effort put in for the service. Whereas products, whether it's a course or a physical product, digital product, doesn't really matter. If you build it as evergreen, it's a product that exists that you can just pull off the shelf and ship to them, ship from a warehouse, let them have a digital download or access a course, it will improve your profitability because those are low, typically lower overhead products than your services. So it's a great way to help improve profitability, give something that really benefits people and allows you to improve profitability without having to go get new customers or change your service pricing, which can sometimes be a little bit touchy depending on what services you're providing. And there's also a certain cap on what your services are valued at based on your current customer base. So it's an easy way to kinda sidestep any limitations that your services have in profitability and add these products that you can sell easily. Third thing is gaining new customers. your services are going to be targeted towards a certain group of people. Depending on the pricing, it may leave out certain groups of people. And so that's where things like online courses and, you know, small books, things like that, creating a product is how service-based companies and businesses end up getting new customers is being able to offer something that is a lower cost because it has so much less overhead. It doesn't require your personal time. You know, if you're a consultant, and you're selling based on time you spend with a client, then you're gonna be limited. So you may charge a certain dollar amount and you may need, you know, a certain amount in order to work with you. And there's a smaller group of people that need to be stepped up. You can reach those people, you can gain new customers earlier by offering something that's for those people. You can also gain customers if your service is great and it works really well in an area, but there's these tangential areas where another product, not a service, is a really good fit, then it allows you to start gaining customers in these different areas that may, after they learn about you, right, because they're not looking for your service, they're in a related field, but they're not looking for your service, but they are looking for that product, they are looking for a solution that that product provides, that allows you to start entering into different markets and being able to help people that that you would not have necessarily been exposed to, at least not directly, without having a product inside of their field. And it allows you to do that without adding additional service or adding more people to your team to provide a specific service and move out in that way. It allows you to have products that are attached at least loosely to your service and be able to get new customers through your products as a lead generation. Of course, courses— people that do courses and services, you know, they do consulting and they also have a course— have really done this. But this model expands well beyond just courses. Courses are a great thing, and people do that because they're usually pretty cheap to make. You can film yourself and you can, you can pretty low cost put something out. But there's additional opportunities out there with physical products with other more in-depth products that take a lot more time and money, but they can offer greater returns. Fourth thing is new ways to find out about your brand. And I touched on this with gaining customers a little bit, but it's really— if you're able to create a product out there, you can apply different marketing because some people won't be looking for a service, they'll be looking for a product. And by doing that, you're gonna be able to get your brand out there in different ways, in different areas. So if you have a physical product, you're gonna be able to get listed in different magazines and different news articles on different platforms that aren't built for a service. So one of the benefits of entering into the physical product world while you offer a service, in addition, go digital courses as well, but If you're touching all 3 of those areas, you have a service, you have a digital product, and you have a physical product, that means there's entire areas of marketing and different places that they're only focused on one of those that you can't enter. If you're a service-based company, you're not gonna get into a top 10 product list. No one's gonna put you there because you're a service. Same with courses, you're gonna be in an education, you'll be in courses, you'll be mentioned in different things, But again, you're not going to be in a top 10 products of 2021 or whatever year you're coming into. It doesn't really matter because they're product-focused, they're physical product-focused. They're not gonna look at services or digital courses. So by entering each one of those areas, it'll actually— will open up not only your marketing, but in new ways that people can find out about your brand. And the more people find out about your brand and see what you do, those can all point to each other. And in a smart strategy— and I talked about this in another video— of, you know, blending them all together— oh, we have a product and we have a digital thing and we have service— all tie into each other, then each one becomes lead generation for the other, and you have more entry points and more contact points with people, which means more people will find out about you, what you do, how you help people, and people that may never have found you before will be able to find you. So these are, these are 4 things that I talk with about to service-based companies when they're looking at, hey, should we add a new product? We're rebranding, we're looking at our marketing strategies, and these are the topics that I bring up with them of of why it could be a benefit to actually have that product, especially if it's, you know, a physical, digital product. Either way, getting into new markets and getting new ways for people to find out about the company, improving profitability, and improving your customer experience as a whole, and allowing you to capture more of what's related to your service. It really, to me, it has a lot of benefit, and that's why many companies have services and digital products and physical products because it allows them to help more people, provide more value, and therefore become more valuable to their customers. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you.
