Make Money Online

You know, maybe I was a little too extreme in the last episode with the firing bit and the never speak to me again bit. I appreciate that. Yeah, so I think that what probably makes sense is to continue working.

And I don’t take Venmo, and I only take Stripe. And the minimum number of minutes is 382. So you’ll pay me either three hundred eighty two or more, I guess, if an episode goes above three hundred eighty two minutes in addition to the twenty six minutes, which would make it one four hundred and nine minutes. 408 minutes. I’m sorry. And for the privilege of my friendship, you will also pay me $3,000 a month, payable quarterly.

So early April I think would be a good time to begin kickoff. Like how about April 3rd or so? No, that’s fine. I mean, I really appreciate how you’ve broken down these options for me and really let me know what’s included and not included in terms of a podcast with you. And friendship. You get paid. And friendship. There’s value there. You’re also my friend. Yeah. True. True. But yes, anyway, I’m sorry. No, no. I guess I’m just looking for something that’s a little more accustomed to my needs. I guess one of my worries is. Like, this seems like, like you said, you have a predefined agreement, but how do I know this is really going to meet my needs in terms of podcasting and friendship? Well. I have a lot of other friends, and I’ve been on a lot of other podcasts, and I’ve developed these offerings based on the needs of my other friends and podcast hosts. I’ve really become an expert in the space of friendship and podcasting and believe it makes the most amount of sense for the most number of people. Now, there are some people out there who have particularly extreme needs. Like they’re they might want to talk to me more than three times a day about multiple topics. And so we have kind of add-ons that make more sense for that. I’m happy to open that conversation, but how about we just start with this right now and see how it goes. And if it’s not working for us, we can talk about making maybe more of an a la carte option where Occasionally, you fly in Chicago because I don’t really leave my city at all, but You fly into Chicago and we go to a meal at a preordained location that lasts for a specific amount of time. And you buy it for me. You know, that sort of thing, right? Like, we can definitely add on other things as needed, but I don’t know. You may, I don’t know, synthesize nutrients in some other way other than eating, and so might need something different as far as friendship is concerned. Maybe you. Maybe you spore something like that. I don’t know. Yeah, very frequently with the sporing. It’s what I really like how you’re laying this out. I think you’re right. Like this, this. this predefined scope for friendship and podcasting. Like it addresses a lot of my needs. It’s it’s easy for me to understand what I’m getting and what I’m paying and what the value is. My my one question is, we pay net thirty Will that be a problem? Yes. Why? Because I’m talking with eight other friends today and I want to be fair to everyone. There’s definitely a situation here where I understand that net 30 is a procedure that you might have in the organization.

I might be amenable to that. If you sign a contract that indicates you’ll pay by a specific date and then I can collect on it, or there’s penalties, or something like that.

That’s a It’s a thing some of my friends tend to do. I’m really disappointed that I bought that 8 foot by 4 foot portrait of you and have it hanging in the bedroom. Like a velvet Elvis or something. But it’s your head on a stake. Yes. In your front yard as a warning to others. Dripping blood and spores everywhere. I think this might take the cake for the most odd offbeat intro we’ve ever done. I think we’re past intro point. This is an actual episode that we’re doing. It’s an episode about productized consulting, which I still like. People think that I’m like the godfather of this thing. I ripped it off for 37 Signals in 2000. They made an offering called 37 Express. And this is actually how Basecamp came about. They had so many 37 Express engagements that they needed a way to project management them. And then so they built a tool called Basecamp, and then it became a thing, right? So 37 Express was basically like a heuristic evaluation and website teardown service for like $2,000, which was not bad money in the late 90s for a firm of like five or six people. And I remember looking at that then and being like, God, that’s brilliant. That is such genius. I was 17 when this thing came out, right? Like, I’m not. I did not have I was not business woke at the age of 17, but thinking like, that’s a really bold and confident way of approaching the practice of design, is saying, okay, I’m going to do these things, you’re going to get a teardown report, and you’re going to pay us for the privilege. And we’re going to offer I think they offered a redesigned like comp. They didn’t even offer a prototype. But it was just like, here’s all the things that we improved on this. Have fun Here’s Adobe Photoshop, you know, like there you go. And so I ripped it off from that. And then I made a thing called DraftRevise in 2013 where I run uh A B tests on a monthly basis. So um for the record um There are no new ideas, and I’m happy to see that productized consulting is kind of gaining currency among other people. What are the most important elements of productized consulting? There are kind of three. Fixed price. So you are usually publishing that price. Fixed scope, I do X for you, and fixed delivery. And that means that you get it every month, you get it on this date, so there’s certain deadlines expected, right? Now, those have associated outcomes, and hopefully you’ve thought through those because you’re not a slop artist. But yeah, I think that those are pretty much it. Even then, DraftRevise does not have a fixed price. I don’t publish the price because I do a value-based negotiation. But the scope is meaningfully the same Right. So I think that the price is kind of optional, but the vast majority of productized consulting offerings or fixed bid consulting engagements that kind of have They kind of have the same terminology there. So yeah. One question I run into a lot when talking about productized consulting with peers, with colleagues, with other consultants is Is this selling information products like e-books? Is this something else? I personally think the name productized consulting is really, really confusing. It came about because we’re selling a consulting service as if it was a product, as if it was a course or an e-book. You have a sales page, it describes what you get, it describes the price, it describes delivery. Okay, I’m going to get this thing in three weeks for $1,000. Perfect. I’m selling consulting services like a product. But we also have information and educational products in the mix. And so there’s a lot of overlap and I think confusion between: well, is productized consulting turning my consulting knowledge into a product, or is it Offering my consulting services for sale as if it was a product. And it’s very much the second one. We’ve taken the concept of selling a one-off consulting offering, writing a proposal, doing that whole song and dance, eliminating it by saying, This is the service you’re buying. This is what’s included. This is how much it costs. This is the delivery timeframe. You get A, B, and C, and we do a kickoff call. And we make it easier to buy by eliminating that proposal. And I think, really, at the heart of it, Productized consulting comes down to, in my mind at least, eliminating that proposal writing process from your consulting sales. Process. It’s not a panacea. It’s not going to get you more clients overnight. It’s not going to magically make money. It’s not going to eliminate the need to talk to prospective clients to learn about their needs and pains and present the solution. Over the last Three and a half years of selling productized consulting services, I have sold one service for $250 to a stranger who did not email me or request a chat beforehand. And I’ve sold multiple six figures of productized consulting services. So The idea that just by launching an offering, people are going to show up and buy it without you needing to do sales is erroneous and incorrect. The major benefit is you no longer are writing proposals. Somebody shows up and says, I want to pay you money, I want to work together. And you say, great, here are the three things I offer. Choose which one you want. And they say, But I want something custom. And you could say, Well, custom engagement starts at $20,000. Do you still want a custom engagement? And most likely they’ll say, No, I’ll take option two. It’s affordable and seems valuable. So productized consulting, I think, is. An odd name, but the concept is strong. We’re selling our consulting the same way we’d sell an e-book or a course. Here’s what you get. Here’s what it costs. Here’s how long it’ll take. Yeah. I think that to add another thing to this, There’s a tremendous benefit to not only not having to write proposals, but also having fixed scope. Because I tell you, man, I only barely have to think when onboarding a new client to DraftRevise. Like, it’s really a brainless, easy process for me right now. And normally when I onboard somebody, it’s like a significant amount of labor. Like it takes a week. And it takes like a whole kickoff meeting and stuff like this. And you never have to do that when you become seasoned enough with a specific productized consulting offering. So there’s definitely like a knockout effect to like ease of delivery that happens in a business. If you told me, Nick D, I want to be a draft revised client. Here’s a shitload of money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I’m like, great, wonderful. This is great. We have a good process for getting onboarded and You can be up and running with A-B tests within about a week at this point. And that’s not to sell me more, but just to rather say, like, I’ve been down this rodeo before. We don’t have to worry about it.

Once you get in the door, I get on a Skype call. We get to know each other. I ask you a bunch of questions about what the upside would be for your business. and why you’ve come to me right now. It’s very much Alan Weiss value-based fees conversation, which we’ve talked about extensively in other episodes. And then I give you a price You tell me yes or no. I give you terms and conditions page. By paying me, you have agreed to the terms and conditions. And that’s it. I write that in the invoice and I just forward you on that. And once you’ve paid me, we get started. That’s the process. This process exists as a great client qualification process. I’ve done this a lot, and I would recommend listening to the Make Money Online episode we have about this. It is also Something that makes clear sense for me. And it’s very, it fits the way draft operates very well because I’m one guy and I put up a few barriers to get access to me. And if you’re a good fit, then I try to be as warm and kind and understanding as possible. And I’m trying to smell out whether or not you’re the same. And so I’m kind of vetting your personality on that front a lot. And then go in if it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, makes sense to me. It’s very similar for me in my business where people show up, you go through an application process, and If you pass that application, if you pass that phone call, then you get offered the opportunity to purchase one of my services either one-off or on retainer. I found, and honestly, like I’ve said this multiple times, the major benefit to me has been eliminating proposals. I had a fuck this moment when it came to consulting and proposals in 2004. I think it was 2014 when I had written three extensive proposals in one week, shipped them off, and got noped on each one. And I was like. Fuck this bullshit. I spent like six hours on each proposal. Some preposterous amount. I was like, fuck this. I’m done. Everything is either a productized service now, so I never have to write a motherfucking proposal again, or. It starts at $20,000. And I have written, I think, four proposals since then. And it’s been very, very good for me. Allowed me to evaluate, it’s allowed me to have better focus. This is what I do. And the this is what I do has changed over time as my positioning has changed, but it’s given me clarity in terms of these are the services I offer. And it’s made it a lot easier to kill off services since Somebody might show up and be like, Oh, I want to buy this thing you used to offer. And I could say, Sure, sure, you could order from the secret menu if you want. But for a majority of people, and a majority of the time, it’s Hey, these are the services I offer that line up with my positioning, that line up with the outcomes I want to help you and your business achieve. Choose which one you want to buy. If you don’t feel any of these provide value to you, I encourage you to seek out another consultant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s kind of your fault if you don’t have something that fits what somebody’s looking for, right? Like that, that’s something that you need to be having as an objective as a business owner. So there’s a huge research process that goes into this as well. It’s not enough to just, I have a thing now. Like, no, you have to. I wrote a whole blog post about creating new consulting offerings called Following the Hunch that I would recommend taking a look at because it goes into a deep dive about this whole process. So, yeah. No, great blog post. Have to recommend it to everybody. I think that, at least when we look at my business, I started out with productized services after seeing you launch it. And saying that seems a lot easier than continually writing proposals. And it was right when I was starting to reposition my business. And so I did sort of like a backdoor hacky thing where I said, okay, I need to pick a target market. And as I look at these different target markets, let me see what they seem to be buying. I wanted to say, well, if 10 people are selling the service, the market can probably support an 11th person. I picked SEO and I picked e-commerce stores. And I launched a productized consulting offering doing an SEO audit of e-commerce stores. And it sold really, really well. It was very much a brute force attempt that played out well for me, but I think it played out well because I looked for a couple key things. I picked a target market that I knew was already spending money. E-commerce stores are actively spending money. And I picked a problem that I was able to validate they were experiencing both through conversations with e-commerce store owners and by searching around and saying, like, well, what are the service offerings that other consultants are offering for e-commerce stores? And I said, Hey, I’m going to launch a Me Too offering, and it worked really, really well. And over time, I identified the most valuable parts of those offerings and what could be split off, or what I wanted to double down on. My service offering podcast outreach could actually be directly traced back to that. I’ll audit your site for SEO offering because I went from there to, okay, the problem people have is they don’t have enough links. I need a way to get them links. Hey, I have a productized service around link building. Then I realized getting people on podcasts made a lot of sense as a link building strategy. And so I said, Hey, I’ll get you on podcasts and we’ll promote your stuff and we’ll earn links through it. And it turned out that was a really valuable offering. It turned into a book. Has been my primary offering ever since, and people really enjoy that. But it was through this iterative process of saying, Well, What are the most valuable elements of what I’m offering? Why are people buying this service? What value are they receiving? That I realize I could double down in a new and interesting direction and have it affect both my positioning and my service offerings over time. Yeah. Yeah, you need to make sure you’re creating the right thing, right? Like it’s not enough to just say, okay, well, I do A B testing, I’ll run A B tests. Okay. Well, you have to be specific about it. and thinking it through, you’re creating both the scope and the outcome, right? That’s what should be on a marketing page So if I’d say, okay, well, you’re going to get three A B tests a month. Okay, great, wonderful. Why am I buying three A B tests a month? Why not 20? You know? Why did you settle on the number three? Why every month? Why not every week? And I have answers to all of those questions, right? So you’re thinking that through as well. One question I get from consultants often is: How do you eliminate or how do you handle scope creep when you have a productized consulting offering? And in my experience, it’s been very, very easy to handle scope creep because With a correct, with a you know, a proper productized consulting offering, you’ve said you’re going to get A, B, and C. You’re getting three AB tests a month, you’re going to get a report, and you’re getting a call each month. Okay, great. So the client says we want six AB tests each month. You could say, excellent. I’m happy to hear that. The service you purchased, Link, is three AB tests a month. If you would like something different, we could open that conversation as an extension of our agreement. But the thing you bought, it’s just what’s listed on the tin. So it’s like if you walk into a restaurant and you’re like, hi, I’d like the salad, but. I’d like additional things, please. They might say, and I see this often in restaurants these days, no substitutions, no modifications. It’s the same thing when it comes to a productized consulting engagement. You’ve defined what the outcomes are. You’ve defined what the deliverables are. If somebody comes in and says, Well, I want a slightly different outcome and different deliverables, you could easily point to the service that they’re either considering investing in or I’ve already purchased and say, I’m so happy to hear that. Unfortunately, the service you’ve purchased does not include those. Let’s talk about how we increase scope to include those. And If those are actually valuable decisions or valuable directions for you to head in your business, so I think scope creep is almost off the table if you’re following a pure productized consulting methodology. And, and this is a big and You’re comfortable saying no and pushing back to clients. If you aren’t comfortable saying no, productized consulting or not, you’re going to have a very hard time when it comes to scope creep. You really need to be confident in saying no. Saying no is not You know, rejecting the client or putting your entire project at risk. Maybe it is, but in that case, it’s probably not the best client to have. But you need to be comfortable saying no when somebody says, Hey, I bought, you know. This can of soup. I’m very angry that the can of soup does not have an entire cake inside of it, and you’re able to say, Well, you bought a can of soup. Next question, please. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you’re setting boundaries on the engagement. You’re continuing to do that. I mean, offer an alternative, like, do you want 35 AB tests a month? Okay. Well, first off, that’s a horrible idea for your business because you don’t get enough traffic for it. But if you do, Maybe that comes from a good place. Then we need to renegotiate the agreement, right? Maybe you have to pay me more money, right? And that’s what I mentioned at the beginning of this episode in that lengthy tortured metaphor that we did where You know, maybe this isn’t actually something that fulfills your needs, but we don’t know until we try, right? And you start asking for stuff. Well, the request itself is not unreasonable. Right? It is not something that you should just be noping because it doesn’t robotically fit the like parameters of the engagement. It is something that you need to take seriously So I would recommend doing that and trying to push back on it with an alternative that makes more sense. Yeah, I think it’s important to realize that any conversation where somebody is asking for something and you’re going for something different, it’s a negotiation. And it’s important to understand how to navigate. That sort of negotiation. We should get into negotiation in a future episode. One book that I’d recommend to listeners is Start With No. Very, very good book on negotiation. But when it comes to those scope-creepy type questions, well, There’s an opportunity to have a value-based conversation there and figure out what makes the most sense for them and negotiate something where you both gain value. Yeah. You’re pulling, I’m sorry? Oh, no, no, you, you. You’re pulling them on your side of the table, right? It’s important to, when somebody has something that like you find disagreeable to feel cooperative with them. And I think that’s kind of what you’re getting at. Anyway, yeah. What do you recommend as that first step to getting started? Let’s say a listener is a consultant, has a consulting agency, they’ve been consulting for a few months or a few years now. They’ve had some clients, they have positioning figured out to some extent or not. How would you recommend they get started with productized consulting as the godfather of productized consulting? Read my blog post called Following the Hudge on 99U. com. I just laughed so hard my headphones fell off. Put them back on. I can’t hear you say that. But seriously, like it is a good blog post. I would recommend I mean, we’ve talked a lot about expensive problems in positioning. Those are foundational to a business. If you don’t have good positioning or an expensive problem worth solving, get them. If you do, think about what you can do in a way that is consistently repeatable, hopefully in a periodic way for clients. Engagements are either closed ended, like Revise Express, where you do it once and then you’re done. or they’re open-ended on a retainer basis where you do it continually, like with DraftRevise. Neither are bad, neither are good. Benefits and drawbacks to each of them. Figure out what the actual scope looks like. Start talking with other people and determine whether or not this would be something that they would pay for. Figure out pricing for it by asking other colleagues. Have a research process in place if other people are actually doing this. I can’t tell you how many like wannabe A-B testing services have come out in the wake of DraftRevise. Probably horrifying. Hundreds, literally hundreds. And they’re all very similar to what Draft Revise does. If I came in right now and tried to make DraftRevise or an equivalent, I’d be like, wow, that’s a crowded market. And it also is fraught with price races to the bottom, which is why DraftRevise has gone so hard on research lately, also because it makes you more money. But yeah, I would recommend doing that research process as a component of it. That seems like a good place to end on where to start. There are a lot of things. I got a couple of tips and tricks I could share. So when it comes to productized consulting, one tip I often offer to people is look at your most recent 12 proposals or projects you’ve done this year. And just like sort them into categories. Like, this was an SEO project. This was a design project. This was an A-B testing project. What are you selling the most of? Turn that into a productized consulting offering. And the trick I often tell people is: take the latest proposal you wrote and turn it into a page on your site, and now strip out all the confidential client information. And make it follow like what I think of as the canonical pain dream fix outline. Jonathan Stark of ExpensiveProblem. com has a wonderful sales page outline we’ll include in the show notes link. But taking that proposal and turning it into a public-facing sales page on your site can be a very effective first step. Since if you’ve sold a lot of this service in the past through proposals Well, chances are you’ll sell more of this service in the future. So let’s just cut the whole proposal song and dance out of it. And next time somebody’s like, Hey, can I hire you to do that thing you do? you could say yes, here’s the page that describes what I do and What the deliverables look like and the outcomes are for you. If you do that exercise and you’re like, guy, I got nothing. What do I do? What’s the backup plan? What I recommend doing is A roadmapping session, essentially a paid discovery session. And the value in that is you’re able to write better proposals if you’ve been compensated for doing the discovery work that goes into the proposal ahead of time. Sitting down with the client, talking through what they need, what outcomes they’re searching for, what problems they’re experiencing, what solutions they’ve already tried gives you a ton of information. And now you’re able to also ask value-based questions. What does the upside of this look like? What is the value to your firm? Why are you doing it now and not in six months or six months ago? All of that you’re able to bake into the proposal, but it comes from doing discovery, and I think it’s incredibly important to do paid discovery, not free discovery. And so, just by having a road mapping session, hey, it’s X hundred or X thousand dollars, and we meet. You answer these questions. I give you a report with my recommendations, and I give you my proposal. It’s wonderful for two reasons. Reason number one is it gives you the information you need to be able to write.

Honestly, it transformed the way I do business and the way I view service offerings. And I don’t see myself moving away from it. I only see myself Moving closer to it, implementing it in more places. I think it makes the most sense. I would not advise using the phrase productized consulting with a client. It’s very inside baseball-y. Oh, yeah, I don’t. Most bus consultants won’t even know what you’re talking about. Like if a client asks why you don’t do proposals, you could say, I found it works best if You know, I offer a fixed price or a base price or not.