Why you should consider productizing your services with Philip Wallage

Lex:
What if you could deliver your service as if it was a product? No more custom scoping, less pricing questions, more time back in your schedule.

This is the promise of the productized service. A trend we've been seeing take creative services by storm these past few years with firms like Designjoy and Two-step social that offer a pre-packaged service that operates a lot like a product from their clear upfront offers to their automated onboarding. These services feel predictable and repeatable in ways the custom scope projects do not, and that goes for both the service provider and the client.

Whether you're thinking of productizing your service or you just want to know what all the fuss is about, you're going to love today's guest Philip Wallage.

Philip is on a mission to end feast or famine freelancing, and the way that he does that is by empowering creatives to package their service. So it is a predictable, repeatable, scalable offer. Philip and I spoke about what it means to productize your service, what types of services it's good for, how to price your offer, and how to get started testing the waters. It's a thought provoking conversation for both new and experienced creatives. I'm Lex Roman. I help creatives make smarter marketing betts, and you're tuned in to the Low energy leads show.

Lex:
Philip, great to have you on the show. I'm so excited for our conversation.

Philip:
Likewise, it's been on my agenda for a while and yeah, definitely looking forward to it. I'm sure we'll have some fun.

Lex:
Yeah, absolutely. Philip and I have been talking behind the scenes for months because productizing services has come up with growth trackers with clients of mine, and I think it's a really cool emergent space. So today we're going to get into what does that mean and how do you do it? But before we talk about that, I want to talk about your experience working for yourself. You've done a lot of freelancing. When did you start working for yourself?

Philip:
So I actually started freelancing or trying to build my own business when I was 17, 18, and I was still studying. I ran a web design company for about seven years, which filled miserably when I really got into freelancing and went doing all my own thing. So my first switch from trying to lend website projects to real UX freelancing was when I started reaching out to large Dutch digital agencies. So instead of trying to lend customers or clients directly, I first looked for partnerships at agencies because one of the benefits, of course, when you do get a nice partnership with an agency, you get more work than from a single customer. I did that for a couple of years, worked out really well. I got to work on projects for Lego Adidas, and that opened up a lot of doors for me. And after that I've been freelancing for I think 12 years in and around Amsterdam. Worked for a couple of really big names, which I'm really proud of.

Lex:
Yeah, that's amazing. It's quite a journey. Journey. You've been a very successful freelancer and agency owner. So what are some of the things that you've seen in all those years of client work that made you go, you said something to me that was like, freelancing isn't a healthy business. What did you mean by that and what are some of the things that made you go, I'd like to work differently than this?

Philip:
I think that remark relates to a few points, but to begin with, when I started with building websites, I was really targeting small businesses because those were easy to reach. The truth is they didn't have much buying power, but also a website for them wasn't that important at the time. So whenever I would dive into questions such as what value do you offer? How do you stand out from your competitors? The reply was always Stop asking me these difficult questions, I just need a website. So I think the first part of that is to make sure that you're actually solving a valuable problem and that you're also finding the clients who are willing to pay for that. So I think that's the first part of that. But the other part, what relates to the unhealthy side of freelancing is actually the hourly billing or having an hourly rate or working on an hourly rate because if things go well, you're able to work faster.

Maybe you're building up some sort of design component library either in Figma or Webflow or whatever your poison is, and because of that, you're able to work faster and your hourly rate will cap somewhere, but now that you're able to work faster, does that mean you should earn less? And I think that's somewhere a point where at least the hourly rate model breaks. So there's definitely nothing wrong with freelancing. I absolutely love it and it's not for everyone, truth be told, but if it's your thing, it's absolutely amazing. But it's very important to be able to build your business in a way that works for you. And working on an hourly rate is definitely one of the challenges. And it also messes with your consistency. So one of the things we talked about earlier was that feast and famine cycle, and I think that's one that a lot of freelancers can relate to. And when you don't have a lot of work, you do a lot of sales and hopefully you get a lot of work because of that, but then all of a sudden you are overbooked and you're working day and night, and the first thing that you do is that you stop doing your sales and your outreach. So when your projects ends, then all of a sudden it's a little bit too quiet once again.

Lex:
Yeah, super common to be heads down in client work and then take your foot off the gas in terms of marketing and sales. And I think your highlight of capacity is also omnipresent for freelancers. It's like how much is my capacity? So if I take on a project that's like let's say 20 hours a week, do I really have 20 other hours or is that really more like five to 10 because 20 billable hours is different than 20 lived hours, for example.

Philip:
Yeah, definitely.

Lex:
I think freelancers often start in this place as maybe you did when you were 17 of here's the kind of thing I do come to me and we'll create a project together. But you recently have made this shift towards something called productized services. What is a productized service?

Philip:
To me, productization is really figuring out what is actually the problem that you're solving and how can you solve that problem with a guided process. So how do you get from A to Z and how do you get there as effective and efficient as possible? So for example, I've been a UX designer and specialized in design thinking, and these types of projects are very often bespoke projects. They're always one of a kind. Sometimes you do more user research or less research, maybe you do some more user testing or prototype testing. So it's really hard to say this project, it's almost like a box of cereal that you can grab off the shelf in the supermarket if all your projects are always different each time, it's very hard to become effective and that relates directly of course to the hourly rate part. So to be a productized service is really saying, well, hey, you have this problem and I'm able to solve it going from step one to step five, and whenever you find another client maybe in the same industry or at least someone with the same problem, you're able to solve that with your productized service with the same product and you don't have to reinvent the wheel once again.

Lex:
Yeah, I love it. It sounds so compelling, doesn't it? A question I have about productized services is what do you see the difference between the idea of packages and productized services? What's the main difference there to you?

Philip:
I would say that with packages, well, packages are essentially still a productized service, but I think you can always upsell. So if I would give an example to that, you can say, for example, maybe you have some sort of a kickoff version of your product project or a sprint zero or a way that you start your project. Let's say for example, you can apply automation towards that. So you can say, well, hey, we're doing this project, it's really awesome. I have this template email that I can send out, and it asks a couple of questions. So who will be involved in the project and what is their role? What is their contact information? Once you have that, you might automatically send out another email with announcing like, Hey everyone, welcome to the project. I have this intake form, which can be type form or whatever form tool you use to already collect information.

And by doing that, you already have a lot of information. Once you have that, you can actually, with Calendly set up the appointment and you completely got rid of the kickoff moment that first session. So with that, you're already a lot of time working more effective. So when you think about packages, you can think about what type of service is it or what type of product I service, is it a done for you service, which I'm doing all the work, or are we doing it together or are you doing most of the work or maybe do it yourself? And I think when you talk about packages, and of course that also affects price by quite a lot, you can also say, well, if you do it yourself, it's a little bit cheaper. If we do it together, it's a medium price and if you want me to do it, it'll be a lot more expensive because you kind of already know that it'll take up more time. But the question is also will it be better? So at the end of the day, even if you have different packages, I would always say, does it offer more value? Does it add more value?

Lex:
I also think there's the mindset of creating a package is almost solving for what you said earlier about hourly rate, where it's like the mindset of a package is more like the custom scoping work of like, let's figure out what this project size is is a lot of free labor that freelancers and service providers are giving to the client before they get paid. And so packages I think solve for that. When you talk about product type services, you're talking about Calendly and the onboarding and things like that, removing the kickoff call, what I hear is that there's more process that you're solving. So not just upfront what's the project going to cost and be, but also how do we work together in a way that is streamlined and predictable and repeatable?

Philip:
Yeah, I think it's really important for people to understand that it's not only, of course, you do want to be able to wrap it all in a package and say, Hey, you can buy this and you know what you will get. But then at the same time when I talk about productized services, I think it's really important that you also take the time to figure out how can I do this as effective as possible? Because when we think about scaling a company, quite often people think about hiring people because then my company grows, I'm getting bigger. But at the same time, you could say that your business is growing when you're increasing your capacity. So instead of hiring people, what could you do? Could you maybe reduce the amount of time or effort a project or a product takes for you to deliver by 50%? Well, that means in a way that you've grown.

Lex:
I love it. I love it. And now you've shifted from doing the work for all of these incredible brands to now helping people productize their own services. Can you tell our listener what you're doing now?

Philip:
Yeah, so I've noticed that I am staying in my field. So I've been looking for creative freelancers who are either struggling with the consistency in their business saying, well, they experienced that feast and famine challenge. They have a hard time either communicating, Hey, this is exactly what I do, not knowing how to sell, not knowing who to reach out to. So I've been putting together a three month program, as you would call it, called the productize program, in which I help create freelancers to really figure out, Hey, who are you as a person?

So there's personality tests as well, understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, things that you would find challenging. We cover what types of industries you would find interesting or maybe have experience in, of course, also, what is your absolute allergy?

What is the stuff that you really don't want to do?

And then figure out together what problems are within that industry that would suit your skillset and your personality to really build a product I surface around. And the next steps of course involve building some sort of a one-pager and validating that offer because I'm still throwing in my design thinking knowledge on that part as well. And then figure out, well, okay, do we have something here? Are we now able to reach out to people?

And for example, say, Hey, I've been speaking to people in your industry. I know that these are the problems they're dealing with, and you might be as well. I've been able to help them. Would you like to hear how I've been helping your competitors? And it, it's more of a getting comfortable with reaching out to people and telling the story and asking questions and getting into calls with people without trying to, well, what some people think sales is like jamming something down their throat, really figuring out what problems do they have and how can you as a freelancer help them solve that problem.

Lex:
People really struggle with the idea of niching into something. And I find that when I work with a service provider who feels like they're too broad, they're serving too many people, they'll just sort of choose an industry out of a hat sometimes and they'll be like, I'm working with mechanics now. And it's like, okay, where sort of where's that coming from in the realm of who you are and who you serve best? And I think your strategy about the personality test and sort of the industries that you have experience in those things can make sense. I also think the type of problem you solve can span industries. We think about niching, people often go to industries, but I think the type of problem that you solve, accessibility is a great example of something that spans industries. Your expertise doesn't have to sit in an industry category.

Philip:
And one of the things that I was like some sort of an aha moment for me was also, for example, when I helped web designer earlier on, it was also really into accessibility. He said, well, I really want to build these websites. But the thing that really got things rolling for him was some sort of an accessibility audit because there are a lot of government and public sector websites who need to abide to those rules.

If they receive some sort of funding, then one of the requirements is actually that they are really accessible. So having such a tool, which really isn't such a crazy idea, was such a strong lead generator that it would actually help him to do what he really loves. So even if you are doing what you love, it's really important to think about what problem does it solve and how does that help me get my food in the door?

Lex:
And the buyer mindset there, the accessibility audit maps so closely into the buyer's mindset of I'm a government agency and we're being told that we could get fined if we don't fix our accessibility. So I need someone to tell me how bad we are on this. Score us on this, right? So that lead generator is a natural fit for what the buyer is actively looking for, which then just opens the door to our service. That's a beautiful example. We love that.

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Lex:
So for our listener, I've got folks who listen to this podcast who are designers for sure, but then I have people in other spaces, copywriting, photography, audio engineering. Do you think there's certain businesses that are more prime for productizing services than others? What would go into your business might be good for this?

Philip:
It's a good question. I think the people who would benefit most from it or the companies who would benefit most from it are the ones who are service providers who are working on an hourly rate, which would give them the difficulty to scale. I see for example, a lot of digital agencies or marketing agencies or full service agencies who are growing the traditional way, meaning hiring more people and then for example, they run into the problem of we have certain specialists, but they work in their own way. And when we have to involve a specialist for a proposal, if we would ask both of them, they would both give us a different answer. So also within those types of companies, even with multiple employees, it would be beneficial because you actually have these packages to sell.

You don't have to reinvent every proposal once again. So to answer your question short, I would say service providers who are working on an hourly rate, and I think they would benefit most from it because once you have a productized service, you always calculate how much time would it take me? What would be the normal rate? Can I do that times two, times five times 10, and how can I make it more effective? And I think that's a really good starting point.

Lex:
Pricing is such a huge pain point to your point about like, oh, if I ask the team and I'm trying to get the sense of hours and the rates and it's all different, pricing is really challenging. It's really logical for a lot of us to price off of time what goes into pricing, a productized service. How do you do that? As you get more effective, you get punished if you're charging off of time. So how do you price off of value in a productized service?

Philip:
Yeah, pricing definitely is a topic that we could spend a lot of time on. I think, to be honest, there are just a few famous quotes also from Dan Kennedy, I believe, who said, George, as much as you can without smiling. And I think that's a really good quote to be honest, because at the end of the day, it's solving a problem. And if you take a look at your competitors and you're always, because that's how a lot of people try to market it.

They look at what is the average price? I'll make it a little bit cheaper and I'll try to add a little bit more value, but at the end of the day, you really want to say, well, I'm going to deliver so much more value than any of my competitors and it'll cost so much more that the people that I'm talking to won't even think about comparing it to my competitors because offering so much more value, it's also a lot more expensive.

But that's the important part because once you get to that point, it's really a few things happen. People also have some sort of relationship with value and price because if something is more expensive, it's perceived as more valuable, but people also take it more seriously. For example, if I would give a presentation somewhere and I would say, I'll do it for free, or I do it for 800, 1200 euros, nobody would really have certain feelings about it.

But if I would charge 20,000 euros and people would say, okay, someone is coming, we paid a shit ton of money for it, you guys better attend. This is really important. And it sounds kind of silly, but in a way, of course that does hold true to a certain point. But in all honesty, you should be realistic with your pricing. I mean, you do need to know your market.
You do need to know your audience. And for example, if you're saying, Hey, I'm going to help people find a job, so I'm going to focus on unemployed specialist, how to make the perfect portfolio, exactly the type of things that I'm talking about, you can't charge a premium price for it because there are people who are unemployed, so their buying power is pretty much under pressure. So no matter how much value you generate, if they can't afford it, they can't afford it. So there should always be a bit of ethical, realistic pricing. I would say,

Lex:
Philip, when somebody is looking at productizing their service with you, what are some of the things that are involved in that process?

Philip:
So if you're looking to productize your service, I would first really be clear on what it is that you're doing and what really excites you. Because at the end of the day, the most important thing is that you do something that you really enjoy and really love and don't try to force yourself into something that doesn't make you happy. And I would say look for a specific industry or a specific type of company that you would say, I have a network with them. I know a bunch of these people, I understand it. I understand what challenges they face, and really dive into that.

And if you are currently serving different types of clients from all different industries, take a moment to sit down and think about what projects did I do that worked really well and which products were a bit meh or they weren't that great?

So which clients were you really able to make super happy, and why was that? So what is your magic between what you do and that industry or that type of client or maybe the type of project? And then really try to research that a bit further, try to talk to other people in that industry, try to see if more people are experiencing that problem, but for them, it's also important and urgent to solve. And we already covered that buying power part, so I'll leave that out. But that's the first thing you want to do. And I think it's more important to really find a problem that you're passionate about solving than the way you solve it. Because at the end of the day, a client or customer doesn't really care about your product or that's super cool, happy, fancy things you do. They just want their problem solved. So I guess a lot of people also don't want to do the same thing for 10 years, but if you do become the expert on that topic in that industry and you become known for that, you can always change your product.

Lex:
I love that framing of you're really focused on the problem area and your expertise and not as much on the product or the way that you're packaging it, because that can get stale for you after you've done it. So maybe you switch, you're doing accessibility consulting work and maybe you change that into a different package, but you're using the same expertise. I think that's a really strong framing. It can get really tiring to solve the same problem, frankly, over and over again.

Philip:
And who hasn't had that thought? Am I going to do this for 10 years? There's no need to think about, are you doing it for 10 years? If it's something that sparks excitement in you right now, just do it. Try to capitalize on it. And I don't mean that by try to make as much money off that, but try to use or leverage that momentum to really go in on that part.

Lex:
I'm curious for enterprise clients as a service provider, if you're working with enterprise clients, like big brands or big companies, have you seen pushback about productized services? They tend to be the most precious about, oh no, we're a special flower and we need our own scope and everything. Have you seen pushback or what's that like?

Philip:
Yeah, that's a tough one. I must say that from the productization part, the closest thing would resemble, for example, a design sprint. And for those who maybe are familiar with AJ Smart, I think that's a really good example of a product I service because you're actually saying, well, hey, if you have a problem with a product or maybe an onboarding or something isn't working in your app, or you maybe need some new feature to compete with your competitors, whatever, then a design sprint is a productized service that you're able to offer.

And then the question becomes, well, what does a design sprint cost? And you can say, well, a design sprint takes four days, the 2.0 version, if you want to do the original, it's five days, whatever. We also do an iteration. So it's eight days. Is it the equivalent of eight days in hours?

Well, we also do it with three people. So okay, but then you always keep hanging on that hourly rate. And if you say, well, you have this problem, we're able to solve it. We can do a design sprint from beginning to end in a month, including preparation and all the reporting and the outcome, and this is what it costs. And then you have your price.

And of course there will always be companies who say, well, how many hours will it take? And then you can say, we don't even have an hourly rate. This is what we charge for a design sprint. And you'll always find organizations and people who would say, well, we can't work this way. And that's unfortunate. But if you are able to communicate that you can solve the problem that they're having at the end of the day, it's always the price is what it costs, and the value is what you get. So if you're able to communicate the value that they will get from it, the cost is just a cost.

Lex:
Amen. Print out on the mug. If you can communicate your value, the cost is just a cost. I love that. So good. We're going to be using your pricing quotes next time.

Philip:
I'll set up a T-shirt. Please

Lex:
Do print on the man. I'm curious, on a lighter note, are there any tools you find yourself recommending a lot for sort of the backend processes of a productized service?

Philip:
Yeah, I would highly recommend Zapier or something similar. Being able to tie your different tools together is an absolute must. And ACRM in my opinion is an absolute must have. Quite recently, I've fallen in love with Adio, which is A-T-T-I-O, and the cool thing about it is that it's ACRM, just like any other CRM think HubSpot, Salesforce or whatever. But it's really minimalistic, it's really clean. You can very easily configure any additional fields that you would like and it automatically syncs with your Google accounts.

So if you use Gmail and Google Calendar for example, what it'll do is that it'll link all the emails to your context, but also the appointments. So you can actually sort your context in your CRM with when was the last time I had a meeting with someone or email conversation with someone. And it saves up a lot of manual labor to get everything in the CRM currently for appointments, if you want to use some sort of community or courses, there's of course circle or as a competitor, podia or Kajabi.

But to be honest, I would really start as simple as possible. And I do think things like Typeform are often overlooked, like having a good form. I think that's an absolute time saver. So if you think about the tools that we have available to us right now, so think about an intake form in Typeform, but combine it with some AI summary from chat GPT, that's for all of the sudden a really good lifesaver.

Lex:
We love saving time. Philip, if you could give one tip to our listener about getting started with productized services, what would that be?

Philip:
Don't spend too much time building the product. Just write a one pager, just save it as APDF or make some sort of presentation, like no more than six to eight slides and start talking to people. Just dip your toe in the water. Don't waste your time recording video courses before you even know if there's potential. I made that mistake far too often and start talking to people about your idea of solving one of their problems.

And if people say, this sounds really interesting, when are you launching? Or Can I sign up? That's when you know have something and find a couple of people before you build your product and don't overthink it. Quite often we think that we need to have this full fancy four K shiny solution for it, but if you take a look at some of the current people who are killing it online, like Justin Welsh for example, it's just a PDF with a Loom video. It's nothing crazy. But yeah, I would really recommend start with that.

Lex:
So true. It's a common mistake we overbuild and then we fail to get in front of the market. We're like, oh, they're going to love this. And then we talk to 'em. It's like, oh, actually we sort of built it all up in our head.

Philip:
Yeah, exactly. Or build it as you go. One of the things that scares the living crap out of me is sell first, solve later. I think that's also a really fun idea. But yeah, I truly believe that finding that problem and building that perfect solution, that perfect offer attached to it, that's a lot more difficult than actually building the solution. So start with that, spend more time on that, and don't build anything crazy before you are certain that you have something.

Lex:
Is there anything that you're doing that you want to share if folks want to work with you or keep in touch with you?

Philip:
So the community that I'm building with all the courses, workshops, programs, recordings of everything that I teach, I'm currently still building that. And for that I have an offer of 700, 7 97, so just under 800 Euros. And with that, you get full access to a community with all those resources. But since I'm still building that up, I'm actually throwing people in a monthly group where they can ask me anything as long as it's prepared ahead of time. And then on a monthly session, I will try to answer all your freelance related questions, challenges you run into.

And if I'm not able to answer it in that monthly session, you have my word that I will create a video or a resource that will be in that community. So you can now actually benefit for a limited time from my 12 month guidance for the price that you normally just get the Without Philip product for. So that's up right now, and you can of course visit my website, philip valla.com. If your Dutch isn't like mine, that's perfectly fine. You can also go to Philip nl and you will be forwarded, and of course, reach out to me on LinkedIn and X and hugs and kisses and confetti, Canon champagne, everything

Lex:
You can find that link in the show notes in case you can't spell it. I love it. It's great to hear the pronunciation. Philip, thank you for encouraging us to work smarter, not harder. Thank you for being on the show today.

Philip:
It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Lex:
Philip has a whole system for how he turns custom scope services into productized offers. He has a crash course available right now that you can take to find out if productization is right for your business. Find that link in the show notes and connect with Philip to learn more.

Coming up on November 9th, I'm doing a free training with web designer Christie Price on how to crack the formula for finding your buyers. This is my most popular training for creatives Scaling Up, and if you haven't joined us before, register at the link below. If you liked this episode, you might also like the interview I did with Systems strategist Devin Lee. Devin and I talked about how to choose systems as your business grows, what to automate, how to pick tools, and we looked specifically at some of her amazing relationship trackers. Go check that episode out if you haven't seen it before. Until next time, keep your energy low until the value will be high.