How productisation can help your service-based business grow twice as fast.

Productisation is the process of turning a service into a standardised solution that you can market and sell like you would a physical product.

Productised services are easier to sell, market and fulfil at scale because they are tangible, easy to understand and follow a replicable process that you can train team members on.

Most small businesses have services they can productise, and if they did, they would grow twice as fast.

The reason why many service-based small businesses don’t productise their services is they believe customers are coming to them for a customised or personalised solution.

While customers do expect a more personalised approach from small businesses, it’s not the driving reason for doing business. Ultimately, customers are looking for a solution to their problem.

Explaining how a service can solve customers problems can be a little more difficult than a physical product, and that’s where productisation comes in…

Productisation makes it simpler and easier for customers to understand how your service will solve customers problem, and deliver the solution in a predictable, streamlined way.

Everything else, (the personal touch etc.) is icing on the cake to the customer.

At LeaderGuide, we’ve helped many small businesses productise their service offering and seen revenue double, even triple.

Here are 3 reasons to consider productising your services:

Easier to sell

Small businesses tend to offer dozens of services, but this can drain time and resources. When you simplify your services into a fixed menu of products, you can start dialling in your marketing message to focus on your ideal (and most profitable) customer.

You’ll also save time not reinventing the wheel with every sales call, quote or proposal.

A good example is Bob Jane T-Mart. Since the creation of their ‘Long Life Tyre Plan’, they’ve made it easy for customers to know when and why to check-in on schedule.

Productisation also gives you the opportunity to package multiple services together into simple packaged solutions that generate more value for customers and more revenue for your business in less transactions.

At Leader Guide, we helped an IT company package lots of different technical services and software into 4 packaged solutions that are easy to understand and say yes to. These solutions offer much more value to customers and has helped the business grow.

Easier to scale

Productising your services involves creating a standardised internal process for what’s included in each product and how product (as a service) is to be delivered.

This makes your operations much easier because you can have a predictable process to train your team on and to follow.

Working alongside creative agencies (who do a lot of custom project work), I noticed that productised agencies were the ones that completed projects fast, grew their team and revenue — without the business owner burning out.

Productisation doesn’t mean sacrificing creativity or customisation. It’s about the process and deliverables of each project becoming more standardised, and therefore easier to present, deliver and replicate.

Whether your doing small 1-hour jobs, or large projects, productisation will help you do more profitable work at scale.

Easier on cash flow

Productisation helps you set clear profit margins and scale with more predictable pricing. You can also move towards creating recurring revenue products.

E.g. A monthly recurring (fee-for-service) plans.

Large swings in revenue lead to cash flow crunches, especially for service-based businesses which typically have higher staff overheads. As you start to productise your service, you’ll find opportunities to create predictable, recurring revenue streams.

Then you can focus on growing your average monthly revenue to cover all your overheads, instead of worrying about cash flow crises!

A recent example of this was a production studio that started selling their own video and audio clips via online marketplaces. This now generates thousands in passive monthly revenue.

Written by Lachlan Nicolson

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