How To Know You're Ready To Productize Your Consulting Business

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Today we’re going to share a recording from our YouTube channel. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the Consulting Success channel on YouTube. I’ll now turn it over to Michael, and he’ll be talking about how to know when is the right time to productize your consulting services.

Productization is a hot topic. Many consultants want to prioritize their consulting services, but here’s one important distinction or at least consideration for you and that is – Sorry I’m in LA right now at a hotel doing a mastermind with clients and there’s police helicopters going off above so hopefully, you can still hear me. The distinction with productization is that it’s really hard to do. And I would say not the right approach if you are early stage in your consulting business.

The reason for that is that in order to effectively productize, you need to make decisions, you need to really have enough data behind you to know what the market wants. You need to know what you are better at typically delivering. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it, just means that it’s more challenging. So when I look across hundreds of consultants we personally help to productize their consulting services, the most successful ones are those who have already been consulting for a period of time. And you know, that can be even a year, it doesn’t have to be long.

But the process for effectively productizing your consultant services comes down to again understanding what are you best at delivering? Were you able to create the highest and most valuable result for a client? Where can you achieve the quickest results? What is most profitable for you to deliver? What is least profitable for you to deliver? What clients do you really enjoy working most with, and which ones don’t you enjoy working with most?

What kind of model do you want to have? What kind offerings or services or focus do you want to have? And so, when you take into consideration all of those different components, you’re able to say, yeah, you know, I’ve typically maybe gone through, let’s say, five different phases or stages to deliver my typical consulting engagement. What I’ve realized is that, that stage two and three is where I’m actually able to deliver the greatest value. It’s where clients have the greatest demand where the need is most acute. And where I can also, because I can create the highest value, I can also charge the most for it.

And so if you understand all those different components and if you can also see that there’s a way to scale that, a way to productize that, and build some processes and systems around it so that you can deliver with greater leverage. Or you can even train others to to deliver that for you.

Maybe you have a team or maybe you don’t. That’s where you can see the greatest results. Whereas if you don’t have, or you can’t answer those questions well right now, then your attempts at productization are probably not going to be as effective as you want. Again, I’m not saying you can’t do it, you certainly can.

But what I would encourage most consultants to do is get out there, right. Start making your offerings. Try different things. Get a bit of data behind you to know what is most profitable. What do you enjoy delivering the most? Where can you create the greatest value?

What do you see clients or prospective clients want the most, that they’re asking the most questions about, right? And what’s having the biggest impact on their organizations? And then when you can analyze some of that data, then you’re in a really great place to be very strategic about making those decisions around how to effectively productize.

We’ve done a lot of work with clients in that area. And so, if you’re looking to productize your consulting services in the most effective and efficient way to really scale and grow your consulting business to the next level, just reach out, get in touch through consultingsuccess.com. We’d love to hear from you and talk to you about how you can best do that.

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