How do you scale a productized service business?

Long-time consultant here. Although it's not the only option, I've found a lot of success selling bolt-ons that have high perceived value but either don't take much time to implement or are never actually used by the client. Examples:

• If you have a limited engagement to do ghost tweeting, you add on a three-part training session at the end.

• If you're doing consulting where your deliverable is a plan or strategy, you add on a block of hours that they can tap into for talking through implementation issues throughout the year.

• If you're doing media training (or any training, really), you build in or bolt on individual on-call hours for the trainees with a six-month or 12-month expiration. Most people wont' call, and it's essentially free money.

It is a great idea to productize your services, rather than offering random services. I’ve been running an unlimited graphic design company since 2015, I’ve done it both ways, entirely on my own and hiring.

I would say its best to decide early if you want to hire and hire right from the start. Hiring and doing it alone have different challenges. So it depends on what kind of life you want to lead and where you want your business to go.

If you want to scale and remove yourself from writing and day to day tasks, hiring and/or automation is the way to go.

Otherwise, once you set your productized offers, you will start to create systems and processes. Even if you are doing it solo, you can also serve many clients. But of course there will be a limit at some point. Also you can’t have as much freedom as when you hire.

The hard experience for me is, it’s out of my comfort zone to remove myself from doing the design work and hiring, documenting the processes and delegating the work to others. The hard part may be different for you.

That said, no regrets productizing.

You don’t have to give up everything to do this. Go on with your usual freelance work, and pick a few clients to test your productized service. If it works fine, covering your income, then it’s a good sign you can go all the way with it.