Productizing Your Services

Last week, I was forced to take an impromptu vacation.

With Hurricane Florence barreling toward the east coast of the United States, I was persuaded to flee north by a combination of The Weather Channel, scaremongering Facebook posts, and calls from my parents.

The result? A few days in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and zero work accomplished, despite having my laptop in tow.

(I don’t know about you, but I always overestimate my ability to get anything done when on the road.)

For my area at least, it was a bit of a non-issue. I think a few trash bins blew over, but weather is unpredictable – and evacuating was the right thing to do.

But guess what?

Even though I took the entire week off, my finances were unaffected. People, presumably those who weren’t in the path of a hurricane, still bought from me last week.

It was a good week.

Many of us pursue freelancing for the freedom.

We want to be able to evacuate our homes, either for hurricanes or for getaways to the Caribbean, and have as little impact as possible on cash flow.

Creating stuff is hard.

After all, why create when consuming is so much easier?

Distractions are everywhere.

On a daily basis, I’m told about another 9-season series I need to binge on Netflix.

Twitter and Facebook want any excuse to ding my phone.

I could sit in front of my computer and write something like what I’m doing now… or I could do something else. And, more often than I’d like to admit, something else wins.

But creating is also scary.

(This is a guest post by Brian Casel, a speaker at the upcoming Double Your Freelancing Conference. Don’t have your ticket yet? Buy your ticket while they’re still available and join Brian and 13 other speakers in Norfolk, Virginia, this September 16th – 18th)

In 2011 I made my fulltime living from billing clients for my time. Financially, that was a pretty good year for me.

But was I happy?  Did I see a bright future ahead of me?  Not really. I knew I needed a change.

So in 2012, I made it my mission to transition from being a freelance web designer to being an owner of a product business. A product business could scale and grow over time. That idea excited me. That’s where I wanted my career to go.

I thought it would take about year to get there.

It took three.

It turns out, launching a product business, and growing it to a point where it can fully replace a comfortable freelance income is a lot harder than it seems!

Last weekend, I spent most of the weekend scrutizining what was shaping up to be the biggest update in two years to Planscope, my software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup.

And as I was working on the pricing grid and trying to come up with how I could incorporate many of the new features and services I’m working on into the plans, it hit me…

Once again, I failed to take my own pricing advice.

Since the beginning, I’ve priced Planscope based on the number of team members your account had. As your team grew, you’d pay more… but the monthly cost per team member would decrease.

So I’m winding down a consulting engagement this morning in Philadelphia, and across my Twitter feed comes one of the best examples of productized consulting I’ve seen in a while — it’s a service called Kudu, and they manage your AdWords account so you don’t have to.

If you’ve been getting my newsletter for a while or have read DYFR, you know all about my love for productized consulting. It’s a fantastic way to package your time into what looks and acts like an off-the-shelf product, and — done right — it can be huge for both the long term stability of your business (by creating recurring revenue) and as a low touch method for getting new clients.