Productized Services and Workshops
What the Experts on expertise say. And what I say about that.
People sometimes tell me that I talk too much about workshops for consultants.
I sometimes think that too.
So, to give everyone a breather, and show you I'm not insane, I'll talk about something else:
I might still end up mentioning workshops, who knows…
The deceiving difficulty of consulting
As a business model, consulting and advisory work can be very demanding:
You need a constant stream of work and new clients;
Before you close on an engagement, you'll probably need time to understand that specific situation, to create a proposal that can later be declined by that lead.
The value of much that you do is in its specificity for a concrete client. And that makes it hard to re-use.
And the worst:
None of your friends understand what you do.
From the outside, it can appear that consulting is easy to execute (“just give your opinion on stuff”). But if you actually do it, you realize that consulting work is very different from that.
Lots of very clever people like to think about the business of consulting. Reading their stuff is always fascinating to me.
There's a pattern, an idea going around that can't be missed.
You might have seen it too.
That idea is that Consulting and Advisory work can be packaged into something more tangible.
You see this referred to in slightly different ways:
“Consulting Frameworks” is something Sean Johnson mentions a lot;
You will see Luk Smeyers and Florian M. Heinrichs talk about “Signature Methodology”;
“Productized Offerings" is at the core of what Eisha Armstrong, founder of Vecteris1 specializes on.
Luk Smeyers gives us a short definition of "Signature Methodology":
A Signature Methodology is a unique and proprietary approach developed by a consultancy to solve specific problems or address particular challenges their clients face. This methodology encapsulates the consultancy's expertise, processes, and best practices distilled into a structured framework.
Luk Smeyers2
Sean Johnson makes the case for creating one's own Consulting Frameworks3:
(…)As your company gets more practice with the framework, you’ll discover modifications that make it more effective with your team. (…)
With sufficient modification, you can make it part of your own company’s way of doing things, the unique process that they start marketing to others.
(…)
If all goes well, everyone wins. Your company gets really good at something they used to have difficulty with. You learn a process you can leverage in future organizations. Your company develops a way of doing things that differentiates itself from competitors. And you get opportunities to advance your career while helping the company increase its profile and customer base.
Sean Johnson
The idea behind all of these, is that Consulting, being so dependent on constant effort, could be made easier if only we could do things faster, reuse more of them and make it simpler for people to buy them (shorter sales cycles, anyone?)
What I talk about when I talk about Workshops
See? I cannot be stopped
Despite all my talk of workshops I must admit something:
Workshops are not the silver bullet for turning expertise into products.
But they are the best first step towards that.
Converting knowledge and experience into products is not black and white thing. It happens on a gamut. This is best represented by the Product Innovation Ladder for Services Firms, from author Eisha Armstrong.
Everyone starts with Customized Services and as you eventually start to package, automate and bundle your offerings, you move up the the ladder.
The last step, the really enticing one is the Product-as-a-Service. This basically means software that people can signup, onboard and pay you for, without ever talking to you. 4
If you have a consulting business and want to transform it into one or several products, you should not jump into building bespoke software products. That's too big a leap to begin with.
But you can start with a proprietary workshop format.
You can start creating proprietary workshops today and have them in your offering in a couple of weeks. And do this in a sustainable way that does not require you to change your entire hiring and incentive structure (for example).
How you can help
As you know, I'm putting together an offer around this.
I've created countless workshops, customized frameworks and workshop activities. It is time that I create a Workshop for that.
If you are a Principal, Partner or Business Developer at a consulting firm that has between 5 to 20 employees, I want to chat with you for 30 minutes.
Not to sell you anything, but to show you what I've crafted.
I'm very excited for this.
And I want to share it with you.
And the poll returns:
All the best, João
I'm exaggerating a bit, but not too much.