Turning A Service Into A Product

Right the five steps of turning service into a product. Now ironically the very thing that makes architectural services great value for your clients, which is things like the flexibility, the personal touch, customized experience. Also makes them very complex and difficult to understand by clients, and frankly difficult to sell. Now this is not the kind of challenge one wants to face when growing profits and revenues in an architecture practice. We want to make selling easier, so one way to make your services easier to sell and easier for your clients to understand is to productize your service. We're talking specifically about the old CC or the needs and option review.

So here's an example of turning a service into a product from another ...

So this is Zurchal.com, Zurchal's a company that offers virtual assistance services to small business owners. On a side note this may be a good option for the architecture firm that don't have or don't want dedicated admin. This service offering can be hard to explain to potential clients, and yet what Zurchal does, like a lot of other IT companies, they've productized the service. So look at how they've given it a ... Look at what they've done here, name, price and for different price points you can have different services. As you can see they've got an executive plan and a VIP plan. The features and the benefits on each are pretty easy to understand.

So let me go through the five steps that anyone needs to turn a service into a product. First thing, you need a name. You need a name for your product or your service, or your ... Let's call it a product, you need a name for your product. Number two, you need to explain the problem that your product solves, otherwise there's no context for it. Number three, you need to create a compelling promise, here's what you get. So you need to list the features of what they get and it's a good idea to talk about the benefits, how that changes and impacts their lives. Number four, you need to design a process ideally that can't be compared, it's different from what everyone else is offering. Number five, you need to set a price, because professionals charge.

Now here's lessons from the airline industry, they've productized a service. What have they productized? Well pretty much everything, but let's have a look at business class. Business class, what is it? It's got a name, business class, the problem is its hard to sleep, there's jet lag you get tired for business meetings. The promise is you get higher quality, more comfort, more flexibility in your travel. The process, faster check in, better food, better seats and generally all over treated better, finally the price is often two times more or even more than two times more. So a good example from the airline, well done, of course there's first class as well, which is even a different promise and a different process, and a different price.

Okay lets have a look at an architecture example, well obviously this is what I've done, I've productized this concept of having a pre designed meeting. Doing the same thing, so what's the name? Well I call it the design and options review, you could call it something different. It could be the initial meeting, could be the options review. Initial meetings not very creative as you can imagine, could call it one play [inaudible 00:03:46] plan, or site visit. Feasibility study, discovery process. A lot of architects have called this meeting different things. The problem, what's the problem? The problem you can explain is the danger of being overtime and over budget and receiving an inferior design if you don't go through and do the options review thoroughly.

So what's the problem? Well the problem could easily be explained as a risk for the client of going over time and over budget on their project. Or receiving an inferior design, maybe the third best design because the architect doesn't take the time to go through and do an options review properly. That's why we designed the service. The promise, what are the promises? What are the benefits? Well lower risk, better options, clarity of process, you get a ballpark budget so that you can estimate. You get a feasibility report, you get better more tightly designed brief, so that when we go into the design phase we know exactly what we're building.

Now here's an example of going through some of the features at least that once again an IT company uses, this is lead pages. You'll see this quite commonly for software, now there's no reason we can't take something, what these software companies are doing is they're turning something, which is complex software product into standardized products. All of a sudden when it's laid out like this it's very easy to understand. Now there's no reason we can't copy this type of approach, there's no reason we can't say, well here's the free option. If you're going to get a free architect to come around and do some free analysis for you, you might get these things, but you're not going to get all these things. But that can be the most expensive, because these are the areas where projects can go wrong and you can go overtime and over budget.

We might offer a needs and options review, okay now obviously you're not going to do all these IT things but just get the idea with the ticks and the crosses. Here's a needs and options review, this is the best value, we don't do absolutely everything but we do a lot more things and we're going to reduce your risk and improve your chances of getting a better design. Or we could have the needs and options review plus where we do basically everything. This is the lowest risk because we will cover every single angle, and reduce all assumptions down to almost nothing. So it would be a very smart thing, once you've worked out exactly what you want to have in your options review, to lay it out like this.

Alright the process, we need to explain the process, so where do we explain the process? Well we're going to explain the process in the form or the documents that we give them. We can give them graphic flow charts, we have an incoming call script, which explains the process. Your process gets best results remember, so failure to follow increases the risk or decreases the options that the client has. The price is the price, it's up to you to chose. I mean I've said it before, but people have gone anywhere from $750 up to $10,000 for this pre design advice, research, analysis, whatever it is you're going to do. There is no price, there is no standard price for this thing, you can set it at whatever you can justify. So as long as you can explain the value and you're speaking to the right people, there's every chance you will get paid that.

So when we're writing our documents and our articles we need to make sure we have those five components in, the name, the promise, the problem, the price and the process. If only the first word started with a P, we could call it the five P system. Unfortunately it's the name, I couldn't think of anything that to explain the title of your service that started with P. So if you can help me out let me know, and we'll be able to P it. Alright, so remember the resources you have, you have the incoming call script. So whatever process you design in the end needs to be incorporated into the incoming call script. The options review video, if you're going to change it significantly from the version we've done, then you'll want to adapt the video script and the video itself. Written proposals obviously, it needs to be incorporated in those and your email.