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Why to Productize Your Consulting with Brian Casel

Why to Productize Your Consulting with Brian Casel – 040

April 7, 2015 by Kirk Bowman Leave a Comment

Brian Casel specializes in launching and bootstrapping businesses. He is the author of Productize, a course to help freelancers turn their custom services into products. He also runs Restaurant Engine, a combination of SaaS and productized service for the restaurant industry.

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What Is Productized Consulting?

  • What is the most important thing you can share about pricing?
    • Pricing is more art than science.
    • How does the customer view pricing in terms of the value received?
    • Do customer support as often as possible to understand your customers better.
    • What is the return on investment?
    • How will this service make the customer more money or save time?
    • Set the price as a fraction of the return.
  • What is productized consulting?
    • From the customer perspective, it is a specialized done-for-you solution that is packaged at a set scope and price.
    • From the professional perspective, it runs systematically and can grow without your involvement.
  • What is the difference between custom work and productized consulting?
    • Custom work starts with a discovery meeting and then a proposal with detailed specs, timing, and price.
    • Every time you meet with a new custom customer, you have to redefine your value proposition.
    • With productized consulting, you offer the same outcome to everyone and find customers that fit your model.
    • Productized consulting can be used as an anchor point to customize add-ons.
    • You can offer a productized service to go with your product.
    • Depending on your end goal, you can decide how much you want to be involved with productized consulting.
    • A freelancer sells time for money; an owner creates an asset that grows in value over time.
  • What is the difference between productized consulting and a SaaS application?
    • SaaS is typically software – an application to which you subscribe.
    • Productized consulting scales up by having personal done-for-you services.
    • The services are highly standardized.
    • Through processes and systems, anyone can work in your business and replicate the steps.

Leveraging Processes and Systems

  • What was the epiphany you had regarding processes and systems?
    • Brian wrote a post on the mistakes he made building Restaurant Engine: Lessons Learned Building a Productized Service.
    • All mistakes shared the same theme of “do it yourself” with easy sign-up and no customer support.
    • Once he discovered that customers were not staying due to startup issues, he included setup with the product.
    • He embraced the idea of writing procedures, bringing in a team and refining the procedures over time.
  • How do you create processes and systems effectively?
    • It will take more time to document the process, but you need to invest the time in order to delegate: How to Delegate When You're Creative.
    • If you delegate the processes, you are freeing yourself to work on the big picture ideas and strategies.
  • What is the first step to create a productized consulting offering?
    • Recognize the way you do things.
    • Try to identify patterns to make the work more predictable.
    • Determine what the framework is, your way of doing it, and then streamline into a process.
    • As a freelancer, what is the one problem/solution that you can solve in a meaningful way?
    • Focus on that one problem/one solution to identify your ideal customer.
    • Focusing on a niche industry is not necessary; you can focus on a niche problem or solution instead.

Lessons from Restaurant Engine

  • Where did you get the inspiration to start Restaurant Engine?
    • Restaurants are known for having bad websites with a poor user experience.
    • The real inspiration came from the idea of building a hosted WordPress solution.
    • Consulting fees are often too expensive for small restaurants to afford.
    • He niched down to an industry like restaurants where everyone has the same set of requirements.
    • He focused on the niche that best fit the business model and type of website needed.
    • He took what he learned and applied it to an industry that was underserved.
  • What is the most important lesson you have learned from Restaurant Engine?
    • Be open to embracing change and modifying things to make it work.
    • Expect to do a lot of things wrong.
    • Do a couple of things that you know you can knock out of the park and adapt the others.
    • You need to take the skills you learn from your research and modify them to your situation.
  • How can someone price a productized consulting offering?
    • It depends on several factors:
      • The product
      • The customer
      • The value proposition
    • Price the offering as a small percentage of the ROI.
    • The closer you get to impacting the revenue of the customer, the better.
  • What is the best value you have ever created for a customer?
    • In his weekly newsletter, he asks customers where they want to be in 12 months and what is their biggest challenge?
    • The responses he gets are inspirational.

About Brian Casel

  • Author of Productize consulting course
  • Creator of Restaurant Engine SaaS application
  • Co-host of the Bootstrapped Web Podcast
  • Website: CasJam.com
  • Twitter: @CasJam

Filed Under: Episodes, Software, WordPress Tagged With: Software development, Startup, Web development

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