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.
- It depends on several factors:
- 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
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