Scaling Productized Consulting Services?

When I had this experience in my consulting business I had these considerations:

• increase my prices (maybe even double them)
• say no to the low-margin work
• increase my use of tech to optimize my use of time
• hire people and become an agency
• productize my services (courses, e-books, etc)
• build apps to replace myself

I opted for the last one and it did work out in the short-term, until my partners left me and my startup melted down LOL.

I'm debating over moonlighting consulting by developing API integrations. I found myself thinking about the same question today, how to scale... I'm not a consulting expert but I do work in risk and compliance, so here's my 2 cents.

Media and software are great forms of leverage. On the security consultant side you could offer a newsletter where you take the anonymized learnings from your previous projects and create content for other security experts to learn from. A format like marketingexamples.com comes to mind but via email. Market insights could follow a similiar model. I know at my org, one issue my manager expressed was keeping up with latest tech and if we should be implementing other cloud software.

You know companies are very concerned with security threats. Mostly after hearing about a large scale attack. If you could analyze security levels of the most common enterprise cloud softwares and create a library of summarized assessments I wonder if that would be of interest to your clients. I'm thinking capterra.com but with an emphasis on security. I think the value prop here is to aid security officers in preventing a threat.

So I'd say a newsletter of case studies to learn from and modern security best practices.

Another consideration I was thinking of - an "eat what you kill" model for other people who want to get into consulting, but don't want to stand up their own business and want a bit of structure to launch from. If they make the sale, then they would keep most of the revenue minus some overhead for insurance and tech stuff.

A few people I've mentioned this to offline really like the idea, but I can't tell if this is a good idea or a bad one waiting to happen. Looking for some counterarguments on this.

Adding onto this thread, some additional offline feedback I got from a friend who has had two successful consulting companies:

• When you get $50k-$100k saved up in your bank account, make your first hire so you can scale
• Work your way down the value chain by getting as close as possible to the implementation work. Everyone wants to do higher level strategy work, but those are harder to get if you don’t have a track record of executing. The better you get at this, the more you can charge and the better money-for-hours ratio you can get