Just finished a great book – Built to Sell by John Warrilow. It’s about getting professional services businesses into a position where they can be sold.
Don’t let the title fool you: it’s actually full of useful tips and insights for anyone. If you run an un-sellable busines (like me, with my one employee, who is also me), or even if you work for someone else, it’s still useful.
The most valuable bit is around turning services into products. Rather than create a custom service for every single potential client that gets in touch, the book advises people to look at what they do really well, then turn that into pre-priced, prepackaged products.
(Much like landing page reviews).
This is just as useful for me as it is for someone in an in-house marketing team. When I was in teams like that, we spent a lot of time doing everything from scratch. Thinking about things as products rather than services helps to reduce – but probably not eliminate – a lot of the high fixed costs of briefing, scoping and arm wrestling that don’t really add any value.
This is what I’m going to work on over the next 12 months or so – identifying the projects that I’ve enjoyed the most and that have been the most profitable, then turning them into packaged services. That’ll (hopefully) give me a much more systemised business than I have at the moment. Not going to lie to you: right now, it’s less chaotic than it used to be, but it’s still a lot more chaotic than I’d like.
Anyway, it’s a great book. Super-easy read, written in this fictionalised style that’s very easy to engage with. If you run a business, particularly a professional services business, you should definitely pick up a copy.