Episode Transcript:
Hey design starters. Today, I have a lesson on productizing or not to productize, so it depends on where you are at with your business right now. I would like to just say that if you want more of this productizing health and a community where you can bounce off ideas, build partnerships, learn from experts in this area, whether it’s a sales, systemizing processes and, uh, Getting leads, marketing just simply growing and scaling your business in this productizing way.
Then I have this membership where you can join. I partner with link daddy. She is the CEO and co-founder of outsourcing angel. It’s a global. Outsourcing company where they help you look for virtual assistants. So go to productize kit.com. That’s where you find the information on how to join and, um, yeah.
And you just have access to myself and then, and everybody else in the community. So this is growing because many people asking for this. So I would like to help as much as I can. And, um, with this one that you will get premium content, which we don’t reveal out out of it, because this one is a very kind of customized way when we work with you, uh, depending on your needs.
So that, that is productized kit.com will be great to see you there. So when it comes to productizing right now, back to this lesson, This term, isn’t a new thing. It’s another word to mean service product, where you sell a service, like as if it’s a product. So if you are not productizing your service, then.
I would like to just illustrate more on how you’re running your business right now, so that you can compare, right? Because you may be thinking, you know, what does that mean? Like I can also, you can, you are thinking you may be doing it already, but let’s, let’s just break it down a bit further on how you work.
If you are not productizing your service. So you are not. How it works is a prospect or client comes to you. What do you do next is you do a discovery session. It can be a call. It can be meeting up. It’s just a time where you want to find out what, what they do, where they need help and what they want. So why are you doing this is because you don’t know what they want.
Right. And in this case, you are assuming clients know what they need, but I can tell you that. Clients people in general, usually, um, they don’t really know what they need, right. Because what they need is not what they want. They may know what they want, but needing something to help with say, growing the business, they don’t know that there’s something that they need.
They just want, they just know what they want. For example, when it comes to building a business, they know what they want is. Say, for example, people to be aware of them, they want to build awareness, right? So that’s what they want. They know that’s what they want, but what they need now may not be awareness, what they need now, maybe sales, what they eat now may simply just be just generating income, awareness, branding, and getting people to know you does not mean incoming money.
All right. So these are two different things. What I’m trying to get here is what people want is not the same as what people need most of the time. And most times clients don’t really know what they need and you are here to show them what they need. Right? So if you are in a, you know, if you’re not productizing, you may come in, you may get to a point where you feel, you are thinking that.
I just want to hear what my clients say, because since they are there, they know what they want. They can tell me and I can give them what they want. All right. So if this finds, if you find this familiar, yeah. This is where you may be at. And right after that, what happens next is you find yourself creating bespoke or customized proposal for every client.
So let’s say. Let’s say this client meets you and say that, okay. Uh, you know, it looks like my branding is very blend and, uh, if have this website, but, you know, I would like my local to stand out and have this color, um, that kind of phone. Then then after that, you, you are, you are, you start to tell them that, Oh, I see.
So you want to, you want a logo and you want to go like this. So you started to come up with a proposal, right. To, to work on, to, to kind of give them the ideas of what you’re going to help them with their logo. And you put down things that they want, things that they tell you that they want this color.
They want a certain look. They want it big on their website. And you write that down in your proposal and tell them that this is what you’re going to give them, because that’s what they said. They want it. And then you put it on the price and you deliver that proposal to them and present to them. Then after that you realize another client comes to you and say, Hey, you know, I find them, my Luca is great now.
Uh, but the thing is, my letterhead doesn’t seem to be very easy to use. You know, I would like it to be in word document. Can you design the header and the footer? Can you design the background? And then you set off to, to put that down in the proposal and said, okay, you know, I can do this background for you.
This header for you, this is completely different from the proposal that you have done in the first one where you did the, you gave ideas on creating the logo for your client. So you start to do proposals like that. And then the third proposal is probably a website. The fourth proposal is probably.
Something else. So it’s completely bespoke because it’s not product ties. You see where I’m coming from. Right. Then you see yourself wearing hours, days to create these power proposals. You think they are so good in the ISS. So perfect. Because you are giving what the client wants and you look forward to showing your prospects and you look forward to starting work.
The thing is, you know, All of them have different budgets. All of them have different rates. You need to start taking your time to figure out, okay, how many men I wasn’t going to take? How much am I going to charge this for this, this world, this number of hours. And all the time has gone, right? For each proposal.
It’s not just one, but you may have 10 20 proposals to create. And. If one proposal takes one hour, that’s 20 hours of your time. Right. And that’s not the worst thing, right? When the time comes to present your proposals, guess what? The client probably has found someone, or they decided to call it off, or they don’t like your proposal ideas or they can’t afford your fees.
So these are the things that. You realize may come up and that’s the worst things, right? And what’s, what’s next. You need to find another client and you repeat the same process. So what’s the worst, worst, worst case of all seven days have passed and you’ve got no case for the week. So this worst case is pretty bad.
Isn’t it? If you have done so much yet without pay, you know, So if you, but if you eventually get a client, that’s great. But when you start work, you realize you have to create a set of designs in a different way. From the previous clients, you, you know, different things. So you can use the same mode.
There’s no more when you can, just, when you repeat, you can just use that mode, but you need to recreate your processes. You need to recreate your systems. And it’s it’s on you every time a client comes in. If you have hundred clients have to do a hundred times, that’s, that’s, that’s totally crazy, right?
It’s a lot of time and I’ve done this for 10 years, myself. So right now I think is a mistake. It wasn’t a stick for me, but those days. You know, I, I, I didn’t think of this. So those 10 years I realize right now, it isn’t, it wasn’t a good idea at all. And, and for me, I’ve learned a lot even by doing all these bespoke customized proposals, but, but I’ve also threw away a lot of time.
I threw away after 10 years and I have use this time to, to build my own. Assets and systems to make processes more efficient. And that’s why I’m sharing this with you. And I hope that you can also come up with, um, this way of putting in the right time for the right things where you can repeat it without recreating it.
Yeah. So I would say great things will come from productizing and there’s no harm in that. You wouldn’t have to worry about quality because you have to build the system to repeat the same quality. And you, if you do that, your quality will match. There is no more haggling. There’s no more negotiation of a course.
You don’t spend time on that. Clients don’t spend time on that. You save your time. They, you save the us and clients know what they are getting. You do you, you do one thing, you show that thing and you’re saying, this is the thing that you get. There’s no need to ask them. What do they want? You know, that they don’t know what they need.
And they’re just going to ask, tell you what they want. And yet it doesn’t improve their business or their situation because you haven’t given them what they need. You’ve only given them what they want. So start giving them what they need. You can tell them what they want. You can say, you can give them what they want, but first.
You will have to build something that can give them what they truly truly need. You know, that that is the best value you can give to anyone and you can make your order self serve, right. Or the process instead of recreating a whole new proposal from scratch again and again, and then invoicing them. And when you invoice them, you may not get your income, your money back on time.
They may drag the invoice. And this is all time and money. It’s interesting over time. So you shouldn’t be giving them the invoice and waiting for all your money. You have already given the work for us. We charge and, and ask for the fee upfront because it’s under $500. If it’s under $1,000, you can ask them upfront.
It’s a commitment for them to be part of the world, right? So you have to charge upfront. And to touch up front, you can do a bespoke and charge up fun because when you don’t know what they want, and you are in this mindset where you should know what they want before you create. And then when you create, before you get your money, then you, you have to create, if you’re in this mindset, then it’s really a bespoke mindset where you will have to work first, then invoice.
And before you pay. So, what I’m saying is don’t get in there. So get into productizing. Then you can create the product first, a predefined set, fixed set of deliverables and items where you can pass it on to your client after, after you’re done with the work. So with this, you can charge upfront. It’s like a product, right?
You go and buy clothes, online shoes online. Well groceries online. They don’t give you an invoice after you’re done. And then that you owe them, you, you pay for us, then they deliver to you. Yeah. So you can also do the same with design services. Correct. So what you are doing is you build just one set of systems for all the clients.
So what you can do is with that, you can remove yourself from the, all the processes, because right now you can, everything’s the same. So if everything’s the same for every client, you can. Hire people, you can leverage automation and tools, and these can accomplish the tasks. They don’t need you to be there to use your brains every time a client changes.
So right now you can serve as many clients as you want. And remember this built ones sell too many. Okay. So what you’re doing is to be at once. And you can have this one thing sell to many, many people without redoing the same thing over and over. So there’s in turn helps you to earn a recurring income and well you’re on your way to becoming a wealthy designer and achieve financial freedom.
So become a wealthy designer, become, create a company that works without you being in debt so much. Right. So that’s, that’s where you want to go. You don’t want to be stuck in the day to day everyday. And when the time comes for you to relax, you may not even have time to realize, I would say those were the 10 years of my life.
Right. So I really got that. And, and you shouldn’t be in that position as well. Don’t get stuck at that. Um, There’s always work to be done right now. And you still can remove yourself, but look towards the time when you’re wealthy looks, look towards the time when you have financial freedom, right. And then, and set this up right now.
Uh, you, uh, putting in the time right now to do this, this is your asset. This is your company. So productize as much as you can now, and you can earn money and make an impact while you sleep. And do all this while making your clients happy. Okay. So yeah, that’s it for today. I hope you’ve learned something and see you tomorrow.
Bye.