How To Experiment With Your Service And Product Mix

As a soloist, your first task is to make your authority business sustainable.

(I tend to define sustainability as consistently earning over $100k, but feel free to use your own metric).

Once you’ve got that worry off your plate, you’re ready to begin what will likely be a series of experiments with your services and/or products.

Because as you serve new clients and buyers, you learn what works and you recalibrate.

You might shift how you want to work, which work you most want to do, how much you work or who you want to do it with.

Which means experimenting with the best ways to package (and price) your expertise.

Let’s say you’ve been spending 80% of your time on executing for clients, where they are paying you to implement a specific thing.

But the other 20% has been on strategy for that thing.

And it turns out strategy is your happy place—you’d joyfully swap a chunk (or all) of those implementation assignments for more strategy work.

I’m gonna hazard a guess that your services are heavily weighted toward implementation—you might even have given away the strategy piece for free (or dramatically underpriced it) to win the implementation work.

In this case, it’s time to rethink how you’re presenting your options.

Experiment #1: Pull out the strategy piece and position it as a stand-alone offer.

That could look like a multi-day all-hands strategy workshop or a short, concise session (where you’ve done the heavy lifting in advance). In either case, you’re positioning this as vastly pricier than any strategy work you’ve done before.

Experiment #2: With a subset of your ideal client in mind, create a strategy offer tightly designed just for them.

Maybe you’ve been doing branding work for hospitality companies but found that new boutique hotels have a highly pivotal need for a strategist at the outset. (Hint: they might just pay more for that than clients in #1).

Experiment #3: Create an advisory retainer where you provide advice and counsel on implementation (without doing it yourself).

Yes, you’ll make less per engagement, but you’ll have more time while enjoying the heck out of your work. And, if you price it right, you will ratchet up your revenue to time worked ratio as you source new advisory clients. 😉

TL;DR Keep experimenting until you discover your optimal service/product mix.

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