You know this moment. You're on your fourth call of the month walking a client through the same steps you've walked dozens of clients through before. You’re not billing for it.
You’re telling yourself it's part of the service, good client relationships, or whatever excuse you’re using.
I promise you this… You're sitting on at least $100,000 in untapped profit if you stopped calling it the cost of doing business.
We Were Busy Being Unprofitable
In the early days of my ad agency, we built websites and provided ongoing webmaster services: maintaining sites, making updates, keeping things running. This service sucked. It sucked up tons of time from my team and kept them off more profitable projects.
Part of our website work was training clients to manage their own sites. Every client needed it and we did it for every client one-on-one. We hated doing it and our clients treated it as a necessary evil. They had to schedule time off for their people to attend the training, who had to try to remember everything they were taught.
A friend of mine got into selling digital infoproducts and I was like, "Yeah, buddy! This could get rid of this problem for me."
But before I get to my genius idea, let me tell you about a client who was running a web design agency. He had the classic problem of getting content from clients...
All Experts Have The Same Problem
My client served influencers, coaches, and public speakers. Almost everything they produced required professional photos of the client, from the website to the marketing materials.
Getting those photos was a recurring nightmare. Clients sent selfies, event photos from years earlier, weirdly cropped, lo-res images and never in the style needed for the site. Oh, and that's if they got around to sending any images at all.
A redesign that should have taken four weeks was routinely dragging into 2 or 3 months.
The photography bottleneck was adding weeks of work-in-progress to every project. His team was always hassling clients to send the pics. It wasted everyone's time and the clients were annoyed with his service.
Revenue was delayed and referrals were nearly non-existent.
Your Knowledge Is Already a Product
What I want you to understand is you can and should stop treating friction as a necessary evil of client work. Treat it as a problem worth solving, and worth charging for when you do fix it.
Every agency accumulates tons of knowledge: systems and frameworks built through years of trial and error. They just don't realize how valuable what they know is.
That knowledge, when packaged properly, is attractive to clients who don't need you to deliver it for them. It can be sold in a stand-alone format like my webmaster training program.
The best part is products scale.
And they build your authority. More on this in a bit...
Here’s the Exact Six-Step Process
Step 1: Identify the services you're under-charging for
Look for work that never makes it onto an invoice. Not just the obvious stuff like client-facing work. It could be the training and onboarding you give your new team members. It could be a "strategy" session you did with client that solved a problem more of your clients have, but you never shared it.
A clue is that it feels either too minor to charge for or something that you believe has to be included in your service.
For my client, the answer was in his work-in-progress... weeks of unbilled photography guidance on every single project.
Step 2: Document the process
Write down every step involved in delivering the service with enough detail that a client could follow it without you.
For my agency, that meant documenting everything involved in website maintenance and client training. I cranked this out in a weekend.
I had my client create a photography guide specifying exactly how many images were needed: outfit changes, close-up shots, three-quarter shots, full-body and wide-angle shots. Then personalize it to each client's brand with art direction on choosing locations and scenes that matched their visual identity.
Step 3: Package it so it's easy to buy and consume
Documentation by itself isn't a product. To turn the guide into a product, it has to be packaged into an accessible format that makes sense. My first version was a hand-coded portal that started as screenshots and text and then got turned into a video course.
My client started with a PDF with example photos, but then expanded it into a branded resource the client could give to any photographer. He then created a service addon where he would hire a local professional photographer who scouted the location, coordinated the shoot, and arranged hair and makeup. The client just had to show up and look pretty.
Step 4: Call every client
Your existing clients are your hottest leads. They trust you and they've already experienced the pain your product solves.
I immediately called a bunch of my clients and pitched them my licensing offering. Instead of 1-on-1 sessions that cost everyone time, I offered a resource they could access any time their team members needed to know how to do something in their website.
It would eliminate scheduling and pulling employees off their work for hours. Once I showed them the math on what staff training days actually cost them, my annual licensing fee looked cheap.
My client's clients loved the idea. It took away so much stress. If they didn't have the budget for the professional shoot, they could still follow the photography guide and get their site done fast.
Frame your pitch around the client's problem. Show them how this improves their lives and gets the most out of working with you.
Step 5: Make it standard in every new contract
Once validated, make the product a mandatory purchase. If you're worried about selling it as a line item on your invoice, increase your price by the amount you would charge for it.
I prefer making it a line item as it shows the client that what they are buying has value. If your product is something your clients team will access frequently then using a per-seat licensing model makes the most sense. It provides predictable recurring revenue that scales as you add accounts.
Step 6: Don't stop at one product
My client started photography guide which gave the client the whole visual asset system.
I told them to run paid ads to it, with a specific goal: use course revenue to cover the cost of advertising the agency itself. The goal wasn't to make a profit, but to give them a self-liquidating offer that covered ad spend immediately, and the course buyers became a warm audience for their core services.
They then launched workshops they put on in a few cities around the US where participants could learn to design their brand identity and get some of their photography done by a professional photographer. This gave them a room full of ideal clients that got pitched a complete website rebranding.
Build Your Authority By Selling Your Thinking
Clients get a knowledge resource that solves an annoying problem without waiting on your team. You convert a cost center into a profit center with near-zero delivery cost.
Products don't require more people to scale. And when you get this working, the product funds the promotion of your company. More people see your name over and over. That repetition builds your brand and authority.
When done right, it can be like EOS from Gino Wickman. Clients and customers start sharing your knowledge and turn you into the go-to guy in your industry.
The Opportunity Is Already Inside Your Business
I've put the full process into a worksheet you can work through in under an hour. It walks you from identifying the hidden cost in your business to scoring your best opportunity to writing a one-sentence pitch you could send this week. The download link is in the P.S.
I started with a service that was painful for my clients and for my team. Getting rid of that pain was a huge win. But getting paid to eliminate the hassle was a bonus.
My client was able to get most of his projects done in a month and then created a new revenue stream.
Your business has the same opportunity sitting in it right now. The question is which painful, unpaid process are you going to productize first?
Start selling your thinking,
Tim Conley
PS. Download the Process To Product Worksheet
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