Are you running an agency? Does it often become difficult for you to continue its’ service profitably? Lee Goff associated with us at Clientjoy Agency Summit and discussed how productizing your agency can help you out:  

What Is Productization?

According to Investopedia, Productization does not involve a tangible, physical good. It is an idea, a process or a skill that has been developed into a sellable product.

Why Productize Your Agency?

Productizing your agency will let you build your services once and sale them a thousand times!

When you are running a service-based business, you only have 2 levers that determine your revenue potential:

• Time lever- The hours you put in, delivering your services.
• Rates lever – The specified rates you charge for your services.

Now, let’s face it- No matter how many extra hours you put in, you are not going to spend your entire life doing the work.

Your rates are going to have a ceiling and many clients out there are fond of price comparisons and often end up resorting to cheaper alternatives.

You definitely need more leverage. Productizing your agency will help you gain more levers.
It helps you standardize the entire delivery process and allows you to have people at a cheaper cost to the specific part of the task.

In a nutshell, it just makes everything easier. You can proactively plan your service department, promotional schedule, run ads and manage cash flow.
Because you will know how long things are going to take, how much you are going to charge and what kind of profit you are going to make for every unit you said.

How To Productize Your Agency?

Get Things On A Rope:

Rope here refers to having a common thread for the start. In order to productize your agency, you need to figure out the steps of the process involved and get all of those on a single rope. Starting from, your lead conversion process, to your business proposals, the deliverables and your referrals. When you implement this, all of your services are going to be perfectly aligned.

Legos:

As you might have guessed from the name itself, we are talking about the building blocks of your services here. You can build custom services/ solutions for your clients. When you are building your services, you either focus on selling your services as individual blocks or create different offerings by combining a different set of services.
Tesla is a classic example of how customers select and build preferred products according to their own set of legos.

Service Framework:

When you wish to productize your agency, you must have a standardized framework that delivers predictable and reliable results for your clients. In order to deliver standardized results, you will need to follow a standard process. This will require you to get specific things in order such as your scope documents, the technical tasks, swipe copy templates, change-logs, legal agreements and everything else that is required to deliver your services.

Value-Based Pricing:

Value-based pricing helps in establishing a baseline for your custom services. When you have a static product line of your services with a value-based pricing model, your customers will automatically know and assume that they will have to pay a lot more for availing custom services.

Bespoke:

When you productize your agency, we are not necessarily looking at eliminating all the custom work. Instead, we can limit it to 15-20% of the work done by your agency which is actually a healthy practice. Customizing for each and every client is a very draining process and not a very profitable one. Productization will eliminate the custom work you don’t wanna do with turning a very profitable aspect of your agency while still feeding research and development.  

Existing Clients:

For your existing clients, don’t rush into introducing the new products to them. While you productize your agency, make slow and subtle attempts to speak about your new products. You can either put it in your newsletter or talk about it in your Facebook group. Let your existing clients see the value in your new products and come to you asking for the same.

About Lee Goff

Lee started his agency in his upstairs bedroom in 2003 (That he built into a multi-million dollar agency). While at the helm of that agency he won dozens of awards, to name a few; entrepreneur magazine top company culture, elite business of the year finalist in 2015 and partner of the year for several years.

After successfully exiting his agency in 2016, he took some time off to be with his family. He then Dove Headfirst into creating the World’s most comprehensive agency coaching program that focuses on the business side of the agency. In most cases, the technical and creative skills have a tendency to hold your growth back. With the right tools, tactics and strategic guidance, he has cut years, not just months off of a lot of agency’s success journey.

Check out the full session here: