Productizing Web Design Services: A Guide for Scaling Your Business

[00:00:02]welcome to the josh hall web design show web design show helping you build better websites and create a web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love hello friends welcome into the podcast this is episode 131 and you are in for a treat and this one my friends because in this episode we're going to talk about how to scale your business by productizing your services and this is what's so interesting about this episode is that when you think about digital products if you're like me you probably think about other than something you like physically buy that as a physical product you probably think about courses or training programs or consulting or something like that but what have i told you you can 100 productize your services whether it's web design or seo or maintenance or retainer of hours or copywriting whatever you're doing for all your clients in regards to web design you can actually productize those in a number of different ways and better yet you can actually prod you can use a like a hybrid approach to productize some services and then have more custom bespoke style custom services along with products for this talk i brought in somebody who is an absolute pro at this this is brad hussey who helps web designers do just that he well he helps freelancers in general but he has a lot of experience as you'll find out in web design but we talk all about that how you can productize your web design services and as we went through this conversation it dawned on me and i think i mentioned this later on it dawned on me that i had started productizing my web design services and i didn't even realize it and what's more i didn't even realize that the majority of my income and how i was able to close and sell better was buy my productized services i started packaging up my website packages and one thing i did when i started doing seo just as a quick example before we dive in is i was doing seo services you know kind of randomly and i didn't really sell that much of it because it was kind of confusing well i offered i kind of wrapped up this seo product called seo boost and i talk about this in my seo course for those of you who have been through that but i created this product and then all of a sudden i started getting a lot of clients buying that and i think it's because it was a product that was much more digestible because they understood okay here's exactly what's involved with that here's how it'll help and it kind of dawned on me that i started productizing my web design services and they sold the best and we talked all about how you can productize your services again whether on a huge you know macro type of level with all your services or if you just want to have like i did productize services that go along with your bigger web design services you are going to get so much value from this episode you're going to be able to scale a productized digital service there's so many benefits to it i'm so excited for you to go through this episode and to hear from brad on how you can customize and productize your services right now to help you boost your sales and scale your business so i'm super pumped for you and i do want to mention brad has an incredible resource we mentioned this later on but it's worthwhile talking about right now because i've never seen a guest create such a cool landing page for my listeners but if you want more after this episode about productizing your services brad did create a free little course for you it's at bradhusty.ca josh hall all one word it's a really great little graphic that he put together i was super impressed so i wanted to make sure i mentioned that for you because it is a great additional resource if you're ready to go to the next level after this and by the way i mentioned my seo course i tell you about how i productize my services if you are doing seo and you're interested in making some sort of digital product out of that in particular join my seo course today there's a link below for this post uh for that course on this post at joshua.com131 i would love to welcome you into my seo course and i will show you how you can productize your own seo plans and you can create and offer what i did which is called seo boost for your clients as well and without further ado here is brad again check out the resource mentioned at bradhussy.ca.slashjosh hall for more if you like this and you're ready for more but for right now here are the basics of productizing your web design services can't wait to hear how this one helps you out enjoy [Music] brad welcome on to the podcast man so great to have you on oh thanks josh i really appreciate it this is going to be exciting it is going to be exciting because we're going to talk about the wonderful world of productizing or productization i don't know what the correct word is there but it's so unstandardized that nobody knows and who knows if standardizes a word who knows so we're we're going to have some fun and this is obviously something that i'm super passionate about very near and dear to my heart with being a chorus creator now and while a lot of my audience are still web design freelancers there are many who are finding out they're quite entrepreneurial and inevitably we want to get out of the rat race and the hustle of new client new project new client new project and hourly work to be able to build something that you can scale and essentially sell while you're sleeping and that's what we're going to talk about here and i know you've got a lot of experience in this and you have an incredible audience that you helped do this so before we dive in and start having some fun man do you want to let everybody know first off where you're based out of and then if you could summarize what you do what would you say sure okay so i'm based out of southern alberta canada uh near the rocky mountains kind of we're in the prairies it's a beautiful countryside sort of area um many people might know it as kind of the general area of the calgary stampede we got a big stampede up there how's that how's the wi-fi out there you know what i got great wi-fi right here um we just uh we just went away to a cabin for a couple weeks and that was a little spottier satellite internet a little bit uh more shoddy but where i am it's a smaller city we we got some pretty good internet i think we're getting fiber optics set up and everything so beautiful i can i can whiz bang around everywhere it's pretty great um so yeah so that's kind of where i'm located um right north of montana you know for anyone who's in the states and you kind of want to get a gauge i could drive to montana in no time but i can't right now because we're not allowed to right right in a normal time yeah exactly um and kind of what i do is i help independent professionals usually independent creative or technical professionals designers developers writers who want to be able to work for themselves or are working for themselves and struggle to kind of break out of the feast or famine they keep going client to client i've been through that cycle and i've been working for myself as an independent professional for about 10 years now so i i know how that works and i've seen the other side of it and so i just i hate seeing uh you know independent professionals who are really entrepreneurial minded and they want to be able to provide for themselves or their families and and and take advantage of this really interesting economy that we're a part of now the creator economy and uh make a living for themselves but they don't know how to get to it they're just going client to client so essentially i help those people those struggling independent professionals whether you're starting or you're growing break out of their current stage and into something way bigger awesome awesome i do think it would be great to have a little bit of context and backstory on your experience brad so what was your experience doing service work and then when did productization come about was there like a wall that you hit or was there a come to jesus kind of moment where you're like all right i can't do this anymore like what did that look like yeah so i would say it was a multi-phase um journey of realizing it and um the resources and information that we have now is vastly different from when i started as a freelancer in 2000 and well i've been freelancing since 2009 but working for myself full time since 2012. so like the differences in like even the way that we google like the things that we type in google is vastly different than how i would have typed it in 2009 or 10.

[00:08:33]now we just say like how do i scale my creative business or you know the creator economy was not a phrase um and so i just came across opportunities and tried and experimented with different things so i was freelancing doing client work very much the feast or famine um charging less than i should have and so basically i when i went full time it was fine when i wasn't full-time because when you're not full-time and you're just side hustling again another new word in the last 10 years um that you're kind of pat it's a it's a pacifying stage like you're kind of protected from the real risk like you can you can side hustle all all the time like kind of on the side and never really feel any pressure just go oh i got a client that was nice so an extra thousand dollars that's nice but when you go full time and you realize like okay i got a full day i got a business to operate i got a family to feed or bills to pay whatever whatever your situation is and you need a minimum amount of money to make a living and you didn't get into business for yourself to like barely get by you did it so that you can have some semblance of of freedom and and growth and so when you get into that then you start to really see the gaping holes in what you're doing and your strategy or lack thereof so for me i had enough clients to go full time and to go i can i think i can do this um but as soon as i would finish a client project this very unusual thing for me would happen where there was no income happening and then i would have to go and scrounge up some more work and bug some past clients and try and network and try and get some more new clients i'd land somebody it'd be pretty good gig and i'd be busy working on it be busy busy busy i'd make a big paycheck from it and then i'd crash down to the ground again and have little to no income coming in for as long as it took me to get another gig and then i started to realize like that's not sustainable and that's not what i wanted to get into this for but i wasn't willing to give up on the freedom so i thought i got to figure out another way and for me you know i came across creating uh now this isn't necessarily the topic of productizing so i i want to tread carefully here but in my specific journey i just like was like i'm just going to find a way to teach people web design that's a skill that i'm good at and then i use every day i'm going to teach people that maybe i'll rent a room at the university or something like that but there's got to be a more you know scalable way of doing that so i ultimately created an online course and published it on udemy and um was able to you know fast forward that do pretty well with that uh make a pretty good um like get pretty good success with that um so that helped me open my eyes is that like the first taste of that was like that you know that come to jesus moment you kind of mentioned there that was that oh like my time like it's not about my hourly billings it's not about the time that i that i i'm not selling time like i'm selling expertise i'm selling transformation i'm selling value i'm creating value and i really saw how i could create something whether that was a literal product like a course or a physical product or a service but i'm not that's that's the means to an end the end is the value and then if i can scale that value and because i have access to the internet and like almost everyone on the internet i just need to be able to create value for them at scale and i can like overnight so i mean overnight success is usually like 10 years in the making sort of thing but um you virtually create the massive amount of success or like a really good business that's not this traditional sell your your time for money and try and get client to client and never compound on that always start from zero every time you get a new client so that was that taste of like there's more to this and the internet is really is something magical and i'm a web designer but i'm not really seeing the real power of the internet here until i did this so um so what i did from there was i kind of straddled creating courses and managing that and doing client work service work raising my rates i had more confidence because i had more income coming in beautiful so i raised my rates i became more uh specific about what i did who i did it for so i just naturally started specializing and becoming more premium so when i get a client it'd be like a big paycheck and i wouldn't worry about the in between because i would bridge that through with some course sales gotcha you know now in terms of productizing which we can get into the definition after it is a hybrid between a product and a service to keep it really simple at this moment that's something that i only really started to realize in the last couple years um when i started to focus more on courses and uh and course-based um business e-learning type business my business model more shifted more to that and i didn't need to take on many clients i started to miss doing client work but i didn't miss the way i did it before where i was just like any client any price any project it was always about you know just that mr good clients yeah i missed the good clients and then i started to see a pattern in that was that there were certain types of clients there were certain outcomes that i enjoyed doing that i had fun doing and that i could charge a fixed price for at a fixed timeline with a fixed outcome and then i was like wait maybe i could only do one thing for one person at one price and then get better and better and keep raising that price and just scale that scale of service essentially and have it be really standardized then then i could do client work my way in like a really concise amount of time and make probably way more money doing client work like just in that way than i ever did when i really was full time with it so that's where productizing kind of opened my eyes um well and it's for me so a very similar path i definitely feel a kinship with you there because i don't know how much you know about my journey brad but i was very similar web design freelancer started scaling my business to a small team then started doing courses grew my business and scaled it while doing courses and then now full-time doing courses and this podcast and everything and i agree you definitely get to that point where it's like the light bulb turns on and you realize there's so so many more options than you ever thought possible and i do think it's really worthwhile diving into the point that productizing isn't just for course creators or authority builders there are a lot of ways to productize services and that's why i'm super excited to have your expertise in this talk particularly for my audience of web design mainly freelancers who are probably like okay you know if i build websites and do some seo and some design that sounds great but how can i make that a product and i think what's interesting too over the last probably five to ten years is the idea of a product has changed particularly when it's a digital product like ten years ago if you think about an online product it's something you would buy it's something on amazon or you know shaving gel or whatever it's something that you wouldn't buy and then that would be shipped to you but now the idea of a digital product is much more vague it could be in my case courses or a consulting program or in the case of web designer and i actually want to throw this question over to you what are some digital products that you've seen web designers in particular be able to offer that aren't just your trading time for money services yeah okay so that's great question and they would they would fall somewhere on the it's called the the uh service goods continuum that's it um that phrase keeps uh escaping me but i was able to remember at that time service goods continuum so basically it's one on one side it's service on the other side it's pure commodity so think like a window washer as the service and on the far end it would maybe say like like a window washing squeegee that's a you know that's a commodity you can purchase and anyone can make that any you know uh place that makes that can make it can make it for cheaper that's the point services are the far end it's not it's not commoditized problem is is uh freelancers now our freelance web designers specifically they commoditize themselves in a bad way where they just essentially the the dummy definition of a commodity is something that can be produced by anybody um for the as cheap as possible and that's kind of the point you don't want commodities to be like really super expensive when you're trying to purchase them and and produce them at scale like a template style site where you have it you just throw some text and images in there and get it up kind of thing yeah yeah and like if a lot of freelance web designers they just commoditize themselves so they just they're replaceable that's the real key word here is can i just look at what you're saying you give me a quote and i just go to somebody else maybe i'll take it to upwork and someone who's actually faster than you who is way more hungry than you can do it for 10 times less yeah i'm gonna do that guy so that's that's like what freelance web designers do all the time and so breaking out of that one of the ways for the sake of this conversation is productizing um there's other ways you know raising your rates specializing but that'll be a conversation for another time productizing is in my opinion one of the best ways to get out of that to break you out of that um rut yeah now some ideas or thoughts or examples that other i've seen other web designers do and create to come out of that would fall on that that spectrum that service goods continuum away from the pure service into something in the middle okay now that could be something like let's say for example um an obvious example at least for me would be okay i'm a web designer maybe i create a like a template like a wordpress template and i sell it on a marketplace that's like a really obvious example sell it for 19 bucks 29 bucks now you have an asset that can scale infinitely you know there's work to to sell it to market it and everything like that and to manage it that would be more product based that's more commodity based i could look at your template create a better version of it it's faster it's got cooler animations or whatever so that's a commodity now if we bring it closer to the center of that that continuum to more service based which is not as easily replaceable um especially if it's specialized we're getting to more of the productized service so it's essentially a productized service is something that you can that is um scalable that's like a product that it is the same outcome at a fixed price in a fixed timeline usually for the same type of client or the same client vertical or horizontal and so now this is where some cool ideas come out where you really could do some some magic so let's say you are a wordpress developer probably you have a lot of those people in your audience i know that a big part of my audience are wordpress developers um web designers who get into wordpress because it's more profitable to sell a skill with a cms so selling wordpress services is like anybody can do that it's very easy to figure that out it's very easy to get someone to do it for cheap it's actually not that valuable but let's say that you are actually quite good at um let's say webflow as well so you dig in and you go hmm i'm good at webflow webflow is kind of a hot new tool it's a little bit more popular wordpress is popular i'm good at both and let's say you find a pattern in your customers or you just realize you know what i prefer to to do webflow stuff but i'm really good at wordpress so an example and this is an actual example is instead of just selling webflow services or wordpress services there's a service out there called wordpress to webflow in more there's probably a few services but there's one that i'm thinking of in particular and what they do is in 48 hours we'll convert your wordpress website fully to webflow and so and you don't need to get a custom proposal you don't need to go back and forth on a sales call and a discovery call and a road mapping session and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and then send them a quote for them to shop around you read the sales page you understand the problem i'm a wordpress website owner i would rather have a webflow website because of xyz reasons which is being addressed on the sales page it's two thousand dollars and in 48 hours it's going to be on webflow ready for me to rock for next week i'm in so you click buy or you enter your credit card information you choose the day that's available and you click buy the person on the other end which very likely could be just one person with maybe an assistant developer to help fulfillment with fulfillment they get a notification cool i gotta i get a transition or a conversion whatever they want to call it uh next wednesday cool send them the prep work uh and we'll get it done by next wednesday and delivered by the following couple days oh and another one just came in okay now we're backed up now like now we're booked out for the full month or two months that's a productized service that is a really cool example of hundreds that i've seen where it's an ordinary unremarkable wordpress developer or webflow developer can create remarkable value and flexibility even wealth by just thinking totally differently than i'm really good at wordpress i should just sell my hourly rate for 50 an hour and then try and just get more clients it's it's an old way of thinking and it's a limited way of thinking that doesn't take advantage of the tool that's sitting right in front of your face this massive 20 to 30 inch screen that's screaming at you to do something more remarkable so it's it sounds like it's more of a mental shift from in that case you know converting a wordpress site into webflow normally somebody would probably just say well i think this might take me a certain amount of hours let me give you a custom proposal it's more of a this is it this is the package this is the product it might be a little more premium but you're going to get something that's proven that's going to be faster that we're equipped for it's what we specialize in that's kind of the the foundation of this idea right going from service to a hybrid type of model yup yup and so it's like productized services it dances with commoditization because let's say i see this service and i go i'm good at those things too i think i can create a better version of that or a different version of that maybe i want to change one of those factors like they do it for that market i'm going to do it for agencies because i know they got money i know they got a budget i know they like to move fast and maybe they don't like the clunky heavy bloated you know yeah and i'm not knocking wordpress i love wordpress but you know let's say that that's my audience i'll take the same thing and i can create that version so in a sense it is commoditized but there's so much market share available that you can capture a slice of that and create a successful business around one product i think we should make a big distinction between web designers who are client-side and working with clients who don't even know what wordpress is and they just want a website versus digital agencies they might partner with who they're doing more like white label type of work for i actually i think you could definitely productize services in both i think it might be even easier for white labels because you could essentially come up with your packages for the type of sites you want to design if you're doing those for agencies and then they're working with the client to figure out the scope of things that way it doesn't become a beast growing legs whereas the client side i'm sure and i've talked a lot about pricing and packages and how to you know put your offers together although i've also talked a lot about value-based pricing where you don't want to go too low and then have somebody who's willing to pay you a big 10 15 000 project and then have you know two thousand dollar packages so there's i think there's probably more strategies that are that need to be employed on that end of things but yeah i definitely want to make that distinction because yeah for everyone listening and then just for your reference brad my audience is 100 wordpress um most everyone are using divi and then i've got a lot of folks who use elementor and some other themes but it's mainly freelance web designers who are both client-facing and now they're doing white label work for agencies so i think that definitely makes sense for white label now for the client-facing side of things this is where productizing seems a little bit daunting and a little confusing because it's like how can i package up my web design services for clients when i don't want to limit myself but i also don't want to do hourly i don't want to get myself into trouble with some fixed prices um what are some tips on that because i know of of some different ways you can create packages and stuff but like i said i'm also a big fan of of that value based pricing um yeah for those bigger clients so yeah i've got some i've got some ideas but i'd love to hear your your yeah and i i want to hear your ideas too but i also want to make a distinction too so i'm also a big proponent or supporter of value pricing and specializing those like value pricing and specializing those are partnered together and are separate from productized services okay when when a productized service there might be some like exceptions but you don't really get to value price productive services right because they are dancing with commodity commodity means price is generally good to go lower it's more accessible people can reproduce that same thing it's just what you're doing is carving out the productized service is in my opinion it you could be successful with just a productized service you could probably scale it up to a million dollars or more a year there's people who are examples that i have written down that are doing very successful and they have no desire or need to then go to another step and be highly specialized high value high revenue like or high price because they're making six figures a month with a product one product i service yeah i'm just gonna keep it with that so you can just stay there but the point of a productive service is to get on and i'm gonna i use this term unremarkable freelancer an unremarkable unremarkable web designer or wordpress developer because i mean it because i mean what most wordpress developers are doing is so unremarkable and it's not meant to hurt feelings but it's also meant to light fire under their butt because it's so replaceable anybody can be you could take one of my wordpress courses on udemy be decent at wordpress and then now you've cr i've created more competitors for wordpress developers so don't be unremarkable find something unique and special that you can package into a productized service it's a nut it's a step out of that rut of just commodity services into something something more valuable i like that it's a good kind of harsh point it's like yeah don't be remarkable because if everything you're doing is something that somebody else could do you do have to find something that is your superpower like what makes you stand out from everybody else i know for me as a web designer i was fairly unremarkable in a lot of things but i was remarkable with particularly the the client side of things i like i can't tell you how many clients i said or i had that said i've worked with like you know a dozen agencies and you're the only one that i feel like actually cares about my business for me it was like the customer service and the actual care because i really gave a crap about my clients and that kind of made up for the other chops that i was learning along the way but it could be different for everybody i think that's a really good point and it's literally it's right in front of our faces or it's within rather is how do you be unremarkable and and another flip side to that question is how do you be irreplaceable or as how do you get away from being replaceable saying i'm a wordpress developer it's replaceable someone in 24 hours could learn enough about wordpress to take your clients so the more replaceable you are that means the lower your price has to be it's just naturally how it is the more replaceable what you're offering is the less valuable it is which means you now have to sell it at a lower price at a higher volume so that's a hard game to play the more specialized the more unique the more interesting the more irreplaceable you are the more remarkable you are or your offers that is harder to replace so when you said like this intangible of working with josh and josh's agency is like working with somebody who cares i can't just go well i'm going to just care more it's so inauthentic if that's not natural to me then i can't just replace that because you're you and i can't just like be you and better i can be a better wordpress developer but who cares because so many other people can do that but if you're a wordpress developer with a let's say a team so you got a bit more leverage and speed and skill on your bench and then you like really care you could like dial it up and then that's like puts you so far ahead that you can now charge higher and specialize and charge based on value and command those prices because where are you gonna go yeah yeah now that's a good point and i was thinking back to something you said a little bit ago with productizing being that it's something that can be scaled and even though like you said it kind of it borderlines commodity if you have something if it's in the case of web designers with a website package that you build that's you know maybe a few tiers and then you have some additional ancillary services that accompany that if you can package all that up the beauty about that is i think you said it brad you get to a point where you could potentially take higher projects and value-based stuff if you wanted to but you don't necessarily need to if you can scale it and if you create an sop a standard operating procedure and have some help with that for delivery and fulfillment it really is something that can be scaled and i think that's the beauty particularly about people who are early on would you say that productizing almost benefits people earlier on because i'll be honest when i got started the idea of charging 10 000 or more for a website i wasn't there yet my design chops weren't great i didn't know much about seo i was still learning wordpress like would you say for the folks who are earlier on in the journey if you can learn enough about wordpress and divi and package up some nice services is there almost more opportunity for that awesome question i think so uh absolutely because if you are more experienced and you are doing well i've talked to agency owners i have a few um colleagues in in my city and i've worked at agencies and like when i pitched the idea of productizing and i got feedback from like i get the idea but like i don't have uh i don't have a scale problem i have a small team we're really good at selling and we've got this unique selling factor we do pretty well there's probably some inefficiencies in fact there there would there are inefficiencies that could help them break out of it and agencies can productize and create a sub firm and like really dial in like a revenue uh stream to like feed the rest but that aside it's the beginners who are stuck in this unremarkable way of selling hours for dollars and just selling their time for money that productized services and the exercise of coming up with something is what breaks you out of that and into a more higher value form of selling a more entrepreneurial understanding of their business because most freelancers don't see themselves as businesses they see themselves or rather act as rogue employees so they're just running around looking for more bosses you know so where's the next client who could just boss me around and then i'll complain that i they didn't value my whatever and then i'd find another client and they're just looking for more bosses because they're kind of like uh like a a free agent it's kind of literally a freelancer someone who's free of some sort of organization and they're just looking for gigs in work and bosses to boss them around so i try and break them out of that and to see themselves as actual business owners so if you want to get into business freelancing is your transition into business then be a business owner and how you can do that is through productizing it's one of the ways that'll break you out of this old way of thinking yeah this employee way of thinking and into how can i create value how can i standardize and systemize and scale right well and i was just thinking sticking with the folks who are early on the journey the problem that i fell into and i know pretty much everyone does is you just end up doing whatever the client asks you and you do stuff that's way out of your expertise or skill set or even if you're not a quote-unquote expert early on it's out of anything that's even in the realm of what you should do so like i was doing everything for every client that came to me and it was just it was a nightmare early on like i once i started refining what i did and i think this is where productizing could come into play even even if you're just early on and you can barely put together a website if your product is a simple divi wordpress website and lower end with some basic kind of functions that's your product so when your client asks you can you come to my office and take pictures of my staff no i i hire that out and that's what i would do i would literally do all that kind of stuff and one thing that's interesting brad is i as i'm look as i'm going through this conversation i'm thinking back to when i didn't even realize i started productizing but i did and that was when first thing my first product was my hosting and maintenance plan when i offered that i did not realize that was a product but that was a hundred percent a digital product for my clients for my service site so i was doing custom websites bill you know having a fixed custom proposal on those but then the product was the maintenance and security and hosting afterwards additional products i started to offer were seo packages so i had a couple different tiers of seo packages not knowing those were 100 products because they were like limited they were constrained to here's the basics there's like a fundamental option which i called seo boost and there was different versions of that and if they wanted to do a lot more content seo we could do that but that's where it would get more into the value based type of pricing so i do feel like there's a happy medium and i think i mean this is just something i thought of as you were talking that last segment i feel like productizing is definitely a way to kind of bridge the gap and get the conversation started and that can be almost a lead generator for the higher stuff right yeah exactly so that's like that's where the entrepreneurial thought process comes in once you start productizing and you start doing that exercise then you start to it it changes the way you think and i see this i've seen this a number of times when i've taught my students specifically how to productize and taken them through exercises and and challenged them on their selling time for money and and getting into productizing all of a sudden it's like you give them the key so when you when they learn an exercise they like unlock something in their thought process and just like what you said that thought process of i created a product so i had wordpress management and protection and you know insuring your wordpress site which i built for you for this price and so this ensures that everything's all good it protects your asset and you know we're on it 24 7 making sure everything's taken care of updated secure yada yada yada and it's this much per month okay so you've that's a product productized service if you if there's an element of you um involving your time now then you start to realize like when you create a productized service you start to realize that that is an entry point into the back end of your business now you can stop there if you're doing really well and you're like no i'm just going to stay here and just get the best at this great but a lot of the times it's an entryway into feeding the back end of your business which is really where you make your money so you validate a client they come in through a productized service let's say at fifteen hundred dollars one thousand five hundred dollars it's a low price for a very standardized thing that probably let's say you can turn around in one day and that satisfies a smaller tangible need and provides a tangible outcome for them they see the value they see your expertise and your competence and then they go you know what i actually what i really need is this yeah and you go okay well that is not you know i can't do that with a productive service this productive service is fixing your on uh on-site you know seo or your you know whatever like some small piece that let's have a value conversation about that and my company or my agency my firm or just yourself if you're a solo business can take care of that and so let's find out the value of the outcome and what we can do and then we price based on value so here's the big question with how the heck to productize web design services because as you know and as i well know and everyone listening knows every website is different there unless you're doing a like clone type of template style website if you're working with a client there's going to be different services different needs different amount of pages different functionality different everything there it's always going to fluctuate so i i will say i never 100 productize my web design services however i will share with you you asked me earlier what i did to kind of merge both and i'll share with you i've shared it publicly before i'll say it here what i essentially did was i created a funnel for what i dubbed a qualified lead or a questionable lead if a qualified lead came in and i felt like this company has a really good budget i know they do really well we're going to go the custom route i know right away this is going to be a high value client the other productized services that i offer like maintenance seo and stuff they're going to 100 go for that so let's focus on the high level stuff if it was a questionable lead and i thought they might not have much of a budget let's see where they're at i know their project's going to be different but i at least want to put them in the the buckets that i have set up what i did was i funneled them to what i dubbed my potential client page and here is where i had three tiers of websites and they were kind of like a mini package it was like and i always said started starting at this is the big thing pricing is starting out because i did not want somebody to buy the first package and then they actually need a lot more than that and then it's going to be a tricky upsell and they're going to be confused so i always said starting at you know here's our base price which at the tail end of running the agency the base price was 24.97 this was like your smaller brochure style sites with some basic seo the tier up from that was more of a medium style site 15 20 pages maybe a calendar some basic functions a blog stuff like that and then the top tier was more advanced sites and that's kind of how i funneled that way too if somebody was looking to pay 200 bucks they would see starting at 2500 and be like nope that's not going to be for me and i didn't even need to have that conversation so that's essentially how i kind of like had a hybrid approach between product you know almost almost productized web design services um but i wasn't even at that case i wasn't using like full templates or anything i think you could even take the productizing further from there to where it's like if you need this style site pick your template we'll build it out you could you could really productize that if you wanted to yeah yeah okay now that's that's brilliant and that's a if everyone listening right now who provides services and gets leads in their email or text or phone or facebook messenger or any of the ways that you get incoming leads if everybody right now in like did an exercise for one hour which is go and standardize your incoming lead generation so that you don't have to get on the phone or go back and forth on the email to try and qualify or screen a lead you'd you'd boost your business your efficiency and your productivity and your happiness dramatically guaranteed like do that right away standardize that inbound lead generation and screening because that i agree with you as soon as i started doing that i had a type form set up where if you wanted to get in touch with me instead of just emailing me before i just said everybody and anybody should email me because every lead is potential customer in every like i need to say yes to everything common like um scarcity-based approach that most freelancers do it's also a pride approach too it's like how many clients do you have here's here's the shocking news for everybody you don't want to win the amount of client award you want to win the best client award oh there's yeah you should have like a rule of thumb and i don't want to go too far off on this tangent because i want to come back to what you were saying there um if you could have 10 clients and that's it like 10 active clients a year maximum then that then that is what you should aim for and now some people want more if your productized services you know that's a lower price okay you can take on more clients if you're specializing in higher value 10 clients because then let's say your goal is like 500 000 a year and i know that that's like an outrageous sounding number to a lot of freelancers it's not something that's intangible um but let's just use that because it's an exciting number everybody here listening uh was able to generate that in their independent business you'd be laughing so let's do that divide that by 10 that's 50 000 per client so then let's say if that was your goal and you only wanted 10 clients a year that means that your budget for that client to spend in the year it doesn't have to be up front it could be throughout the year is fifty thousand dollars so if your client if you want only ten clients a year because that will maintain your pedigree and your focus and like your real dedication to that clients to get them the value that they're looking for if they're required to spend 50 000 a year with you then that's a good client if they're willing to if a client is only going to spend a thousand dollars a year with you in order for you to hit your 500 000 goal right right then you got to get a 500 clients a year you know how hard it is to get 500 clients and even like even practically like the 10 client thing if you got 10 clients that were paying you you know 10 000 bucks that's six that's six figures right there i mean that's not what you're taking home but that's technically a six-figure business so yeah i totally agree yeah i definitely didn't mean to derail us too far down that road but the idea yeah definitely i just i wanted to share my funnel because that's how i discovered like that was the game changer for me was how i funneled the leads yep yep that's right you funnel them and you standardize that entire process so that when you get on the phone with somebody you know that they're pre-qualified to purchase x or if they're not going to purchase x this high value project but they still are a valid client maybe they're valid for your productized service and you don't even need to talk to them or maybe it's just like a live chat window where you just like quickly answer a couple questions you know monday to friday you just are available to answer a few questions and then they make the purchase for fifteen hundred dollars without talking to you how do you feel i'm always fascinated by the how people feel about this particularly in web design which is when you have something on your your contact form or get a quote form about what's your budget how do you feel about that because i i got my own thoughts on that um but i've seen agencies i still see agencies that will have a contact form and they ask what's what's your budget and i know that's their funnel that's where they're like okay if this person's under 2000 they're here i understand that methodology but my take is i also don't want to limit i don't want somebody to think they should be in that 2 000 bucket when maybe they should be in the 10 000 bucket what are your thoughts on that yeah okay so that question that scenario of posting your price or or hinting at your price or your minimum budget becomes less of a relevant question the more you either productize or specialize so if you're if you're highly specialized and you only work with one type of client and you deliver this one really valuable you know outcome the more specific you are about what you do who it's for the outcome you get the more you could say the more you can confidently just say you need a 25 000 budget to even like for us to consider it's not worth it for us if we're on the call for an hour and we really dig in and we say okay so we require a ten thousand dollar deposit and it's five grand a month uh for 12 months in order to get that and someone literally vomits at the hearing that that's a waste of your hour it could have been with somebody who really really needed you so in that case you just post your price and you say this is what it is like we're not hiding anything we only work with these people now that's if you're highly specialized um productization you post your price you just you so if you use your price as an example there's no everybody pays the same price for the same outcome because it's the same person every single time so the more you're productized or specialized which is a separate conversation the more posting your price or telling you the fee is is actually um a good thing yeah and almost required that's what i had with that whole potential client page type funnel that i had because that was a hidden page so you wouldn't find that on my menu or anything and that was what i sent to people so they would know these are the buckets you're going to fall into whereas yeah the high the higher end clients i knew that required much more of a custom approach and that's where like on that call i would say well typically these projects are 5 10 15 000 and then yeah if somebody throws up you know sorry i don't think we're the great fit but if somebody's like oh okay all right and then i was like oh okay we got one this this is awesome yeah this is somebody yes so now the more general you are the more that you're trying to figure out who they are you're temperature testing you're trying to screen you're trying to figure out so the more and that is a that would be a um indicator the more you are wondering if you should show your price or if you should have a minimum budget is in my opinion the more of an indicator of how generalized you are versus specialized um that would be my thought on that i've posted i've done that before in my type forms where you have you say like choose your budget range uh to spend with us over the year what's your budget you know i've i've also uh positioned it as how much do you invest in marketing services per year in your organization okay two thousand dollars a year ten thousand dollars a year and so that's like kind of my way of less being like how much can i you know that's what the client how much are you willing to just just put it out there just throw it out there put it on there let's say so i could charge you that number but what i really want to know is like how much are you how serious are you in investing in your business per year now that might not be the price that we charge but it's more so if someone's like yeah i don't spend i diy everything i don't spend anything on marketing then you're like oh okay well maybe you should subscribe to my blog and kind of learn some basics and then eventually when you're at a different level sure that so i've done that before um and so i guess my opinion to be if you the more generalized you are you kind of have to do that in my opinion to try and get a gauge because you might have a big client you might have a small client is but you don't know whereas if you are specific and you say i my service let's use an example of a of a productized service is let's say you are um a restaurant looking for like a wordpress restaurant site and you only work with restaurants or at least your productized service offering is restaurant sites um restaurant wordpress sites so it's the restaurant tour it's the it's the restaurant owner who probably a little bit smaller needs a wordpress website they can update their menu people can reserve on opentable nowadays with curbside delivery and all this new tech that's kind of emerged and needs based on no contact delivery and everything like that you know okay now the site needs to be able to do online ordering delivery talking to skip the dishes white label or or uber eats or whatever the you know tools you're using so you can bake that in and say you know uh we build wordpress websites for restaurant owners and our package is two thousand five hundred dollars right right you know then you can just be specific because it's not going to be a chiropractor who goes you know what i saw that you do wordpress websites i know you mentioned restaurant owners but i kind of need a wordpress website what's your feed you'll be like you're not our customer go talk to a wordpress developer or something else so from a web designer perspective we've talked about some potential services we could productize being custom website design which i think you could start potentially like at you know starting points but then inevitably you're probably going to get a little more custom from there and ideally higher end if you specialize uh we talked definitely about you know the templatized approach for for website type of products which are are great to go particularly starting out talked about some seo type services you could productize maintenance and hosting i'd love to hear your thoughts on consulting and strategy for web designers i've got more and more students who are offering more strategy because what i think what i realized very late in my web design career is that a part of what designing a website for somebody is getting to understand their business getting to know their customer and you don't even realize it but you are a consultant for them you are a a strategy partner for them and this is something you should be billing for or if you're going to do that have it as a line item or a product what are your thoughts on that like do you think that's worthwhile for most all web designers these days and could that be something that really separates them from i'm just your wordpress developer if you're actually like a partner with them in their business and they could you know buy that product for a few months or something like that yeah awesome question and that if we kind of go back to the beginning of the conversation what separates you from everybody else what makes you less unremarkable what makes you less replaceable and if you tell me that you're a wordpress developer i could literally google wordpress developer and i'd have i don't know how many hundreds of thousands of listings show up on upwork fiverr guru whatever marketplaces are available there's probably wordpress developer marketplaces standalone i have a wordpress course on udemy that teaches people to be wordpress developers and i have uh hundreds of thousands of students in that course so that's like if that's any indication yeah it's like so that's unremarkable but it's a tool like you need to know how to do it but what can make you more remarkable so to come back to the consulting if you can bake that into and into your thought process because what is a consultant it's someone who has uh who will consult with the client who will look at the bigger picture to guide them to a more valuable outcome so if you're just hiring me to build your wordpress website you could stop the conversation let's say that you go through that funnel you go through that vetting pre-screening process you get someone on the call and it seems like there could be a decent client you know minimum budget of about five thousand dollars so you're like oh this is good they could ask you and most of them are going to say like okay and you say well what do you need from us well we know we need to do a wordpress website we need to manage the site ourselves most people are gonna most wordpress developers freelancers are gonna stop there and go i can do that i can build your wordpress website and i can you can manage it yourself what else do you need and you're like uh and it needs to have a calendar and an events page and it also needs to be able to have a contact form with this many drop down menus and and this and this and this and this and this many admin users so that our account manager team can do this and do this and go i could do all those features and all those features and all those features and then they say well what's the price i'm like what's going to be i'll get back to you with a quote you can't you'd spend a lot of time produce a quote let's say it's like two thousand seven hundred and forty dollars and then they shop around a bit maybe they choose you great and then you go and overwork yourself a lot of out of scope stuff and you realize what a waste of time that was just for 2 400 bucks so that's what most people do i did it a lot i see it a lot so what as a consultant if you see yourself as that first who just so happens to to be in the wordpress world and that's like kind of where your tool belt is so you're not your tool belt don't be your tool belt because you could buy a tool belt anywhere else for cheaper yeah okay so as a consultant you have the tool belt and you get to pick which tools for the job that's good that's nice that's a nice analogy take that out as a sound bite um so think about that so when you're talking to someone and they go i need a wordpress site great um why do you need a wordpress website well because uh i want to be able to manage my content myself like that's nice yeah wordpress is great for being able to manage your own content why does that matter to you um because it's i don't have to go back and forth to within my developer to to update content like okay well it sounds like updating content is valuable to you and you don't want any friction so why does that matter why does creating content a frictionless experience matter to you so well because my content is actually where my i kind of shine i'm really good at developing content and i don't want to have anything in the way well so tell me more about why this content is so valuable it's like because it's my content that gets me um my best leads and it's through my content that i've had the most opportunities and you're like so tell me about these opportunities what kind of opportunities does your content get yeah and then so this conversation this why why why why gets them really down to what they're actually looking to you for so they have a problem and they tell you that they need a wordpress website as the solution but it's not they might not even realize what the solution is so you simply asking why why that tell me more about that oh it sounds like that frustrates you tell me why gets to the real core of the problem and then they'll tell you i'm i'm contacting you because my business has been on a steady decline since covid for the last eight months and i'm worried that if four months goes by with this same thing happening i'm out i can't have that happen because i've got this much money and time invested in it i know i could do better and and contacting you is my my hope was that you could help me get out of that and you go okay well it's not a wordpress website that you need that's part of the game here sure but what i can help you do is turn that those revenue numbers that's going down and down and down let's turn that the other way and get that going up and how we're going to do that is going to be vastly different than just giving you a plug-in that allows you to just take blog posts and even even like i i primarily still built websites that was my main thing but there was still a lot of strategy that was left on the table that i found and i think even this conversation the way you're kind of phrasing that is beautiful because if you're on a call with a potential client instead of just asking about website features and colors if you start talking about their business and here's a revelation we had recently so i have a private community a web design club with some of my top students and we talked about this recently and it's kind of a challenge we're doing right now where everyone's doing this is when you get on a call instead of you know going into your normal spiel or just asking about website stuff ask tell me about your business and naturally that's going to just open the floodgates and then from there you can decide okay what services do they need if you're a web designer who is not yet doing email marketing and social media and a lot of other marketing even if you're still just primarily doing website stuff you can still talk high level strategy with that website like maybe instead of a five-page website that they thought they need maybe you actually figured out that they've got like three different main customers and we need to create a really nice journey for each one of these customers on the site now suddenly you've got a 20-page website that's going to have a lot more functions you also went from a two thousand dollar project to a ten thousand dollar project so i think it's just a practical example of how you could just with that mental shift that you just talked about brad from going from you know here's what i do here's the specifics to just tell me about your business and then let's talk high level strategy and then nail down and then you can then you can offer your product high services or more higher level custom stuff if you have it exactly maybe you have that on the shelf that you can go i can solve that problem because that's a problem i'm very good at solving we solve it every single week with this this is what it is here here's the the checkout link choose your day choose your time pay the fee and we're ready to go and exactly the more you think about the strategy and the why behind the project the more you can actually prescribe a solution and so that's what you really want to be able to do and having the productized service is that gateway i'll use a personal example and i will spare details for confidentiality and such for clients but i have a productized service i call it done in one day and so i practice what i preach so i do my product business or my course business my coaching and training and consulting for my my students and my student base that i've built over the years um but like i said like i kind of want to be able to work with clients but not in the old way of just like doing being a go-to kind of hired gun you do it my way for this price which steadily increases which excludes lots and lots and lots of people because i don't really want lots and lots of clients i just want to work with like one or two really good clients who are willing to pay big bucks um so i can like get them the outcome they're more fun to work with it's just all around great so done in one day um i started out generalized just saying like book my day it's a pretty common thing i wanted to experiment with this new model or i just i just had uh somebody on sarah massey who uh have you are you familiar with her with day rate mastery yeah so she was just on recently yeah and we had a whole talk about day rates which was fascinating yeah so day rates not new it's just one of many pricing models for freelancers you charge hourly you charge weekly you charge daily you charge monthly you charge flat fee fixed fee like it's just one of the pricing models but what's really cool about what sarah did was that she created like a productized service around a day ring yeah about just like charging for your day and then you could jam pack whatever you want in that day or you could fix it you could play with it you could you know so i was like um i saw lots of people doing this and i was like i want to see how valid this is um so i just experimented and created a sim my own version of the day rate sort of um positioning and um so book the day what are my skills and expertise what are the things i can offer in a day realistically and so there was a handful of things you know setting up a squarespace site uh refreshing your your sales page for your course um you know email marketing and convertkit there's a handful of other things and so i just like cast a wide net and i started to see patterns where my clients specifically where i enjoyed the work and where my clients typically booked me was through a convertkit marketing machine i call it so the end-to-end complete ecosystem for your funnel for your for your business usually creators selling courses and coaching and so i thought i'm only going to focus on that i don't want to just get a squarespace project and then this and then an on-page seo and then this and this and i don't want to do any of that stuff it's it's not exciting for me um i'm just going to repackage this entire done in one day for a done in one day uh coaching funnel in convertkit or course funnel um end to end everything's all done packaged up now granted it's not just done in one day the implementation is done in one day it's very consultative and i do strategy prior to i give them lots of homework um and then there's there's a there's a call before and after and there's very strategy based so it's not like you book my day and do whatever you want it's very specific um consultative strategy based and i charge way more than you know typically these day rate people who charge day rates they usually charge 800 to 1500. i just charged 2 500 and i'm going to raise that even more so and it's just as easy to sell as when i tried it at 7 700 800 oh interesting i just get clients who are um at a different stage yeah yeah who who who really value the outcome and they generally have got more momentum in their business so when i make a small change boom results happen and they're very excited um so to get to my uh point that was my kind of roundabout way to get to the point was i have this producti service and so i was on a call with a past client from this productized service and he um he wanted to he's launching a product i'm going to try and spare as many details as possible just for confidentiality but he's launching a product and wanted help with that kind of marketing strategy and initially thought let's book another done in one day and you could just do a whole bunch of stuff for me so i was like let's get on a call got on the call and really asked these questions like i said why do you want that why does that matter why do you think that that matters why do you want a wordpress site for that why do you want this why do you want this and got to the point where i found out truly what they really wanted and it wasn't just book the day and then build this little funnel and set up this landing page on wordpress it was i want to be able to make x amount per month in this arm of my business so that i could fund the bigger consultative part of my business it was like and so i really found out what they really really wanted it wanted so i said okay there's two stages to this stage one is me doing this first part you know there's these things that you need done setting up the funnel on the machine and all the tech consolidating it saving you some cashier we can do this but the bigger part of this is getting you to x amount per month in sales on that product i can help you do that yeah i'll show you but first we're going to start here and so instead of just saying book my day for 2500 i charged i i quoted for double that still it's gonna be a one-day turnaround because it's more value based so it's not the productized service it's not the convertkit funnel thing it's something else but it's very concise quick turnaround and this is where it got really fun for me so a lot of freelancers will just say yes to everything you'll be the yes guy or the yes gal you know i need this and i need this and and then all of a sudden you start to be kind of like the task rabbit and they just you just do whatever they say because you don't want to lose the job i got a email back saying like okay i'll agree to this price if this and this and this and this and this and this all these things that they wanted to clarify mainly because they wanted to trust that they were making a good choice i clarified some of those points saying oh yeah as a part of the service this will happen you know and that is will happen but there were a number of things where i said no i'm not doing that no that's not part of the service no that's not happening you can do this yourself you can hire somebody for really cheap on upwork to do that and no we're not doing that gotcha it was like a whole bunch of no not happening that's not what i do like are you hiring me as a hired gun to just like fiddle around in your code base or do you want to get to x amount per month so then they like immediately were like yeah whoa yeah i don't want you to be like i want you to be that partner to get me to that goal if i'm burying you with like stuff that is eight bucks an hour on upwork then i'm actually harming my own business yeah yeah and then it was like okay yeah cool i'm in so i get to do less busy work and more value-based strategic work for a bigger price because i said no a lot yeah and i do i see that in the value of productizing i i i mean honestly after this conversation there's so there's so much value in it i think i think clients like it too because if you put yourself in the shoes of a business owner if you just say like they have no idea where their website is going to land price point wise it can be a little overwhelming and they don't know exactly what you do and then they're like they're stressed about what they should do they're like do what what do i need with a website what's involved with that do i need social media what's i don't even know what email marketing is if there's all these other things it can be really daunting for clients whereas if they you know if you have a consult with them and they see some starting packages or some template options for productizing and then some other product type services like maintenance and seo it generally it tends to be a lot more uh welcoming and i think it kind of leads the client into just feeling more comfortable with moving forward with you and i found that when i started offering my seo boost service because i did custom seo services not that many people went for it but oddly enough as i think about it now when i offered my little seo boost for 4.99 which was just to do some seo work on the front page and the main services page is basically i had a ton of people go for that like almost everyone went for seo boost and it was a great foundation it was like another taste of product you know a product yeah type service so yeah i think that i think this like that's awesome and i think that this maybe dovetails into we should like come up with some examples of productized services and the varying kinds so that you know because we talked a lot about i mean kind of straddling a little bit like value based and specialization it's all in the same field it's getting you out of that rut of selling time for money at really low replaceable unremarkable um ways that's what most freelancers are doing it's very unremarkable and you're very replaceable and it's the reason why so many freelancers are so um up in arms or grumpy about fiverr and off work and like oh you're selling logos services for five bucks you can't get logo service for five bucks yeah you can it's right there and i can do it and it's actually pretty good but it's a different client it serves a different market it serves a different need it's creating value and solutions for that market who needs commodity based outcomes or services they just need something quick and easy dirty cheap low budget you know we're pre-revenue startup we don't want a fancy strategy for 50 grand we just want 100 logo we can slap on our instagram page and we can just start experimenting with this idea so get yourself out of that and so we've been talking about this a lot and breaking you into more productizing and and value based on thinking so i think we should kind of jam on some examples so that people can see okay well how can i fit my business or my personality my you know clients into one of these models and one of these ideas so that people could start walking away with ideas so go ahead oh i was just gonna say yeah i mean i i kind of thought of the majority that i was thinking about as far as uh you know the website stuff seo maintenance consulting strategy yeah and these are like yeah and these are all they fall in so they fall under a handful of categories so there are models for productized services so um generally i think there's about five and there could be more as people get creative and thinking but generally you have one-off projects so that's like you get a client you do it and it's done so that would be like that done in one day service that i mentioned that i do um or the day rates it's generally one-off it's like i'll do this thing for you for this price in this timeline and it's done like there's no back end to it in order to get another client you got to either repeat that client or get another one so that's a one-off project it could be something like a sales page refresh let's say you're a web designer and you're particularly good you have an audience or uh an interest or skill in a field so one of my clients in um my productized class is a ux designer but she's also an event planner and really interested in airbnb and so i was like what if we combine those things and so she created a service that she never would have thought of otherwise or i wouldn't have but we jammed on this and what she created was um an airbnb kind of conversion so if you have you're an airbnb host well she'll totally refactor your airbnb listing set up a squarespace site for it as well for additional info but refactor the listing get you boosted on the listings get you more books seriously specifically the outcome was you're an airbnb host let's get you fully booked and here's how we do that so she created with her event planning experience so how do you create an experience out of you know and she's a user experience designer as well so she combined those to say like with her interest in airbnb said like i can help airbnb hosts like rise to the top so we helped her come up with the productized service so that's kind of like a one-off you pay for the package she goes in does her work and she's out and then you got like you got your outfit right so that's a one-off project wordpress to webflow is a one-off project um a done-for-you facebook ad let's say uh a sales page refresh a you know like a brochure website for a flat fee for a certain type of person a restaurant a wordpress website you book your restaurant site it's two grand it'll be done by next monday it's always a five day turnaround it's a website in a week it's whatever so it's one off subscription offer is another model so that would be like the maintenance plan or maintenance plans uh wordpress security um let's say here's some other examples would be something like an online business manager so this would be less about the web designer but um somebody who manages online businesses here's my fee per month and the outcome you get is x so it's not you're paying hourly and then you just give me tasks yeah it's you pay me 500 bucks a month your inbox every week will always be at zero everything will be delegated um your your calendar will always be clean and managed and xyz outcomes if that takes that person one hour a week or ten hours a week it doesn't matter because you're buying the outcome so it's a subscription-based offer for an outcome um malware removal services um you know wordpress management wordpress updates like like hands off wordpress services like i'm trying to give examples for wordpress ideas here um group coaching and done with you services so a done with you model is also another consultative approach you have value and expertise maybe you're not maybe there's something in your business where you're not just selling to your end customer but you're selling to people who are like you now you can do group coaching for your customers like let's say you create you you do a one-off wordpress website or sorry wordpress website for restaurant tours and you have a back-end kind of group coaching where every week you teach them how to manage that site how to come up with interesting offers how to repackage their menu items how to you know strategies for so if you're an expert in the restaurant business specifically with marketing and in your field and the product you offered was a wordpress website you can then offer your insights and value in that weekly group coaching and you can sell that as a back-end offer to your current clients or it could be a front-end offer i like that they can learn from each other too which is really cool particularly the same niche yeah yep and then they learn from each other you become the expert you're the authority and then you be that becomes a referral source hey you should contact uh check out josh's site here he has a group coaching program for restaurant owners and every week it's like we do a call on zoom and i learn insights and strategies that i never would have other real otherwise realized check it out someone gets in there they pay your 100 bucks a month thousand bucks a month 20 bucks a month whatever your price range is for this and then they go i actually want to hire this person like they're really good i'm going to book a call with them they're in your ecosystem they trust you they know you're the expert so then from there it's a lot easier to sell than something else that can help them that's great i'm taking notes on these by the way this is a great way to put a cap on this conversation with these different examples yeah i kind of thought you know we need to give some examples here because we could talk about productizing and specializing all day long but i want to make sure people know like what does that look like especially for me as a wordpress developer designer things like this um other group like your copywriter you could do group copywriting classes group copywriting coaching um you know maybe you teach other people like you so it doesn't have to just be your end customer so my end customer for my you know um done in like my own customer generally is like business owners who run uh businesses and need marketing done built into their convertkit account so they can sell their stuff on autopilot so i could do a group class on convertkit for business owners for for six figure creators and instead of selling them a 2 500 plus service maybe they're more technically inclined and they can handle themselves so how do i capture that market well i go for 500 bucks a month we have like a like a weekly like insight session where i teach you the latest uh we dig into your funnels we we we tweak them you know so i'm selling to people who wouldn't buy that one service but buy something else in that ecosystem yeah so that would be group coaching done with you services coaching them consulting them you know to a specific outcome now another model would be unlimited services this one gets people a little bit queasy because like why would i want to give my clients unlimited access to me yeah that sounds like a nightmare so this one's a little bit this one is like treading on thin ice unless you do it right and i've seen a couple examples of it being done right so it rarely means unlimited it like it's unlimited in some way and it can never be um you can never reach an unlimited amount let's say for example like i have unlimited data on my internet plan but i'm not going to use a million gigabytes a month because i can i still only use like x amount i could probably have a cap on it and i'd never reach it but the fact that it's unlimited makes me feel like oh you know what i just downloaded this movie in ultra hd yeah it's fine but i'll never reach the unlimited anyway um so so unlimited would be something like um there's a really interesting example called design pickle there was on i can't remember which website it was but they did like a case study on design pickle the owner of design pickle an introverted designer who's like says he's uncomfortable with selling he feels like insecure about his work he's a kind of a standard you know creative person who's like i don't know i'm maybe not that good but like i don't really want to like i like doing what i'm doing but i don't really like what i'm doing because i'm i'm always critiquing my work and i wish i was better like this person so a lot of us can resonate with this person but he has a service called design pickle and it's an unlimited design service i think i've seen an ad for that it's like unlimited graphic design for what 2.99 a month or something like that yeah it's a flat it's a subscription fee and there's there's a tier-based system um and i think it's generally for like pre-revenue startups startup founders people who are like creating software creating startups and smaller companies and don't want to go the high risk upwork route where you have to like find somebody and then try them out and try them out and try them out until they finally land on somebody but then maybe they drop off the face of the planet because they changed their their business or they stopped yeah so they want but they don't have the cash to hire say a high-end designer to take care of their design collateral so what this person did was create an unlimited monthly monthly fee for unlimited design services and they will be turned around within two days okay and it's for these pre-revenue startups generally so this person knows who he's working with and it's generally logos icons so there's there's some constraints there's constraints yeah so if like you come in as somebody who's outside of that scope i might not even want to buy it because his marketing is tailored towards somebody who's like starting up a new software and yeah has shoestring budget right but wants high quality assets so what you do is the way that the service is constrained is that you submit a task so let's say i'm his target audience i'm paying 200 bucks a month and i get access to the trello board and i go um i'm launching a course or i'm launching a product or a promo for my my software and i need a logo i need like a an asset i need a facebook ad and i need a couple icons they're like kind of quirky and silly um so i have five tasks those tasks when you put them on it's a two-day turnaround time per task based on when you kind of put it so you can't just give them a hundred tasks and say get all these done in two days it's this task is going to be two days this task will be two days after that two days after that so it sets expectations um in terms of turnaround time gotcha but it's but it's still fast and you know someone's going to take care of it and it'll be ready soon enough um so and then unlimited revisions which is another thing that's terrifying that scares the hell to me and then so that's where i read this interview with him it's basically because it's the same type of business owner because he always can expect the same type of client the same type of assets it's very repetitive and he's okay with that because he probably knows what to expect as far as what kind of revisions what yeah yeah and generally the person doesn't want unlimited revisions they just need like two or three like you know what i don't like that can you make this more rounded sure done it'll be two days from that update so it's always like okay now it's two days from that you want another revision okay two more days from that and because it's so standardized he just needs to follow the process gotcha and i think he's making 60 grand a month on on the server standard standardized and constraints sound like two big words in that one yeah exactly so that's one example of unlimited services you could do things like video editing for youtubers yeah where youtubers are creating content creators who create video content course creators and it can be unlimited video editing in the same process hey i got a video here it is i need it edited in a basic way oh i need this revision okay it'll be two days from then it'll be two days from then and maybe that's a higher priced service because it's more tedious yeah and so that would be an example there um blog content writing graphic design on demand seo you know unlimited seo services but you put constraints and it's a monthly fee and and then you can also um bring on a team member to handle fulfillment yeah right when it's straight when it's systemized it's always the same thing you know so get someone who can help you with that now the final model would be um service on software or um there's another word for it um service service uh you know how there's like software as a service there's software with the service i like calling it service on software um because software with a service implies that you're providing a software and then a service with it what you're really providing is a service on top of somebody else's software okay it could be your own but it's generally somebody else's so you can piggyback off of the success of a software the software actually wants you to do that generally because now you're just getting more people to come to their their their software and you're making them happier and getting more value out of it so you're if you're really good at a specific software for a specific type of client then you can offer a service so that would be like maybe you're really good at convertkit and you're really familiar with funnels and how to get people in with email marketing that might be something you could add on to a sales page wordpress site type of thing yep yep so that's like that's precisely my one productized service that i have that i have on the side which is i call it done in one day but it might as well it might as well be called something convertkit-based yeah but it but what it is is it's um a complete um end-to-end sales system baked into your convertkit account with documentation training on how it works so that you can sell more of your courses and your coaching um on autopilot while you sleep so it's on top of convertkit i'm a convertkit power user i routinely break it by experimenting with different things and that's not where my clients in that uh in that offer which are creators they're generally pretty busy they're doing lots of stuff themselves i say just give me the keys to your convertkit account and like one day of time minus like the strategy and stuff and i'll hand you back something that turns out sales on autopilot does that sound good and they go yes okay here's my fee uh we're booked out until next month if you can wait that long sure yeah book it out so that's service on a software it's productized if you're good at google adsense if you're good at uh facebook ads if you're good at like teachable kajabi mailchimp there's a ton of popular tools out there that you might even use one of my students is good at calendly which just seems kind of unusual i just need help setting that up though yeah yeah set up the full automation the full booking all the events train them on how it works heck you can create a group coaching program on managing your automated uh calendar booking with calendar yeah that's great with calendly get get on their work get on their blog get on their video get on their podcast and you're the kindly expert yeah no that's great man this is awesome what a perfect cap on this because yeah that's a great practical example so just a quick recap and then i've got one final question here before we head off here brad so number one one-off type services number two subscription offers that are more outcome based three done with you type coaching consultant often like group coaching for unlimited services that might be on demand with more limitations or constraints or standards standardized type stuff within that and then service on a software that you're familiar with or you know really well i think that's great man great great practical road map listen dude you've been an awesome wealth of knowledge in this area i've really really enjoyed talking with you i think you know i know the power of productization i'm super pumped about i think everyone listening hopefully gets a lot of ideas i'm sure there's tons of ideas flooding trying to figure out okay what can i productize how do i want to do this where would you like my audience to go to maybe connect with you and potentially find out more about you know your services for for help and figuring out productization awesome yeah uh bradhusty.ca josh hall i'm going to page set up there for you with um where you can get in touch with me uh but specifically kind of a roundup to what we talked about how do you productize i got a free kind of guide kind of with some uh practical tips to help you go through these exercises and productize and come up with a productized service and then from there if you're in that ecosystem and you realize you know what you just want my help with that then i'm also in the position to coach you through that through uh one of a few different ways but perfect house dot ca josh hall awesome and we'll link that in the show notes so everyone can check that out my final question for you brad of these five that you just listed out what is your favorite um i personally like one off project okay because i thought you were gonna say number five i thought you were gonna do like the uh service on the software you know what i i should say that because that's my in a sense this this service i do a one-off project combined with the service on software so so maybe my answer would be you take one and you combine it with the other so one-off projects but in context of this service on software um because you could do a subscription-based service on software you can do group coaching service on software for me it's combining the one-off with service on software because i don't like having a long-term like if i have a client who's like i'm on retainer with then i become less and less valuable i kind of just become a go-to person you kind of you eventually kind of slide down into more of a commodity in-house person and they don't really see your value i like the phrase this comes from david c baker he has a great book called the business of expertise if i'm not mistaken david c baker is is his name he says i like being more of a liberating force rather than an occupying force so you go in you transform the business and you get out of there whereas an occupying force is not really people don't like occupying forces in there and you stick around you know so i don't want to stick around you don't want to overstay your welcome and um yeah yeah especially if it's high intensive right so i get to get in create massive transformation that's so good that they go whoa what just happened can we call that guy back in and i come in and i do it again and i get out of there and i like that because it's like i can wipe my hands clean i could do a good job in a short amount of time book me again if you want yeah well that's the difference with like a maintenance plan because hosting and maintenance as much as i love that it's never done uh whereas if you do a one-off it's like ah you can celebrate you can you can get a glass of wine or pop some bubbles whatever it's done so i like that man every every person listening might look at these different models and go i like this model better and that's more in line with my personality and my goals and my business yeah well brad thanks so much for your time man i know we had a nice long in-depth chat on this so i'm super pumped excited to hear about what everyone takes away from this again bradhusty.ca josh hall we've got some resources for you there so man thanks so much for coming on and i'm excited to again see how this helps some people out man thank you josh really appreciate it thanks fred hey guys and gals just wanted to pop in with a couple things before you head out if you enjoyed this episode please consider leaving a review on itunes or wherever you listen to this podcast i would love to hear your feedback and it will also help other web designers find the show be sure to check out the show notes for this episode just go to joshua.com click on podcasts and search this episode number and you'll find all the links descriptions and resources we talked about and if you haven't already make sure you subscribe and you'll be notified when the next episode is live thanks again for tuning in and i'll catch you guys on the next episode