Don’t hustle hard. Hustle smart.
Especially in this radically evolving Post-Covid business world. After all, for how long would you keep trading your hours for dollars and depend on the next conversion to make a living?
If you are a small or mid-sized agency with a team of 3-5 members, you might take a few years to expand if you go the timeworn way of client acquisition, depending on project-to-project revenue, hiring more resources, working 24*7 and leading an exhaustive life.
So, how can you scale your business without having to hire new resources, while optimizing your existing ones?
Perhaps, for freelancers and consultants as well, scaling up is one of the biggest challenges. It’s tough to get qualified leads, offer high ticket services, learn new skills and educate your target audience – all at the same time.
Can you afford to acquire new skills at the cost of non-billable work hours? But if you don’t, how would you grow? This brings us a growth hack, used to multiply your revenue and streamline your billable hours effectively.
Outsourcing some of your work to a productized service is one of the most seamless ways to scale and grow your business.
What is a productized service?
In simple terms, productized services are a set of services bundled together and sold in a packaged form. In a productized service business model, a service like content/copy, design, website maintenance, accounting, etc. is packaged and sold like a product.
Let’s understand this business model from both the perspective – yours (agencies, freelancers, and consultants) and the ones offering or planning to start the productized service.
Basically, for all the agencies, freelancers, and consultants, using the productized services is like that secret growth formula that will allow you to get more work done and make more revenue streaming in while reducing the time you put in achieving the two.
And how does that exactly happen? How is productized service going to help scale your current business position?
Let’s comprehend.
Effective ways to harness the power of productized services.
2. No Need to Hire
The fundamental benefit and reason to choose productized service are to leverage the beauty of automation. As freelancers and consultants, aren’t you tired of haggling rates and justifying the number of hours and efforts put into each project?
For how long would you keep doing everything by yourself – manually and repeatedly?
To grow, you need to outsource and automate.
Despite being a bespoke solution, productized services is a one-size-fits-all growth strategy.
How?
By solving client problems in a more automated and hence, faster way.
When your offerings and pricing are clearly defined, the entire workflow, payment processing and everything in between can function easily with minimal human interaction and coordination. Once you have understood your client’s problems, their requirements and analyzed the repetitive pattern in the client servicing process, automating it will only make your life simpler.
Buying services from a productized service firm is like shopping from an online website. You add your ‘services’ to the cart, pay in advance, and Voila! Services arrived. You’d categorically be assigned a dedicated resource (similar to a relationship manager assigned by your bank) who will be your go-to support personnel and point of contact.
Moral: Automation saves time. The more time saved, the more the business, the more revenue earned.
2. No Need to Hire
Which agency, freelancer, and consultant wouldn’t want to increase their clientele? But more client means more work, requiring more resources to be hired. And hiring comes with a cost, affecting your net revenue flowing in.
You can avoid all this drama by simply outsourcing your requirements to a productized service agency. This also saves you from the extensive interview processes, contractual complications, and time-consuming training.
It’s like optimizing minimum resources for maximum projects.
For instance, at Ahamagic, you can just pay $499/month and get as many designs and revisions as you/your client wants. If you/your clients are not satisfied, you can cancel the services at any given moment.
You’ve got nothing to lose. But a lot to save. Because, you pay only a fixed price, no matter what you make.
Moral: No hiring means no investment in a new or fixed resource. No pressure to pay salaries in times of crisis. Invest the saved money to generate more leads = More business
3. More Focus on Client Acquisition
Preparing custom proposals, negotiating rates, collaborating with other freelancers and consultants are all long-drawn-out. And hence, focusing on client-acquisition strategies, filtering qualified leads and marketing takes a back seat.
When you have outsourced some of your functions to a productized service provider, you no longer have to worry about trading your hours for money. Because now it’s more about the bigger picture.
When you know what you are selling and to whom, it accelerates your growth journey. You have complete clarity of what exactly the productized service offering is, and that helps you define your offerings better to your clients.
No Negotiations. No Contracts. No Proposals. You focus on acquiring more clients and delivering. While execution happens, even when you’re asleep
Moral: Better the reach, higher the traffic, better the (chances of) conversion.
