These days the most common question I get asked is something along these lines:
“Hey, I like your stuff, but you’re always talking about product businesses – what about people like me with service businesses, how do we do it?”.
Typically these are people with businesses like:
- Law firms
- Accountancy practices
- Advertising agencies
…anything where you’re selling time rather than a “thing”.
Now, it is true, my explanations tend to favour product businesses. But this isn’t because they’re the only ones who can do great strategy – it’s simply because they’re more famous and so help me land my point easier.
Generally the answer I give to the above is something like this:
“There is no difference between any type of business. The game is always the same. Bring new value to your industry, connect it with what your customers want, and reap the rewards”.
…but I’ll admit this isn’t super helpful.
The fact is that true strategic differentiation is harder for service businesses, for the simple reason that they are chameleonic. They have to respond to customer briefs, which means they basically have to become a “different business” for every client depending on what’s been asked for.
In this situation it’s super hard to get tight and specific and be about “one thing” – because the business will always respond “OK… but what if someone comes and asks us for something else? We’re not gonna just turn it away, right?”.
This is why, as many have observed, branding agencies have shit branding. They just don’t want to be pinned down – when strategy is all about being pinned down!
But look, I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. After all, I have a service business. And there are some service businesses in the Inner Circle of the Strategy Shortcut System, so we’ve been digging into it.
And I’ve come up with a few techniques that I think make strategy easier for service businesses.
Check them out:
Niching
This is the obvious one that most service businesses try, and honestly I don’t like it. This is where you say something like “we’ll be web developers for dentists”, or something like that. It can work, but it’s unimaginative, it needlessly compresses your market, and often your target customer actually doesn’t want a specialist anyway. Proceed with caution.
Thingification
This is something I’ve done a lot in my career. You say you don’t have “products”? Well that’s easy to fix. Just look at things you’re doing already for customers, codify them, slap a name on them, and hey presto what was a “service” becomes a “product”. When something has a name and a systematised process it gives the appearance of a proprietary innovation – even if “under the hood” it’s kinda similar to what all your competitors are doing, but without labelling it.
Delivery medium
You’ve heard “the medium is the message” right? Well the same thing applies to service businesses. Just changing the medium by which you deliver your services will dramatically change the way it lands for the customer. This is what I’m doing with my product. There’s a course element, a tool element, a community element, and a group coaching element. However the actual “service” being rendered here is the same as the service I offer for $100,000 to an ordinary consulting client. It’s just the medium is different, unlocking a whole new form of value.
Trojan horse
One of the guys in the group coined this term – which in the past I’ve called “context shift”, but I like his version better. Here you take your service, but rather than selling it to people who are looking for that service (highly competitive), you instead enter another market where people are looking for something different, but where your service is still relevant. They think they’re buying X, but they’re actually buying Y. A basic example might be a sales consultant targeting people who are shopping for websites – knowing that their desire for a new website is really a desire for more sales. Thus you bring a new skill to that stale market.
Personal brand
OK this one is kinda cheating in a way, but it’s a huge lever for service businesses so we’ve gotta mention it. Quite simply if you (or someone in your team) is a bit of a “celebrity” in your field, things are going to come so much easier. (Take it from me!). I frankly don’t understand service businesses who don’t try and exploit this. If you’re a subject matter expert it’s not hard to create content about it, and there are fantastic support resources available for all the technical stuff. To produce a video like this only costs a couple of hundred bucks (if that) when you’ve set it all up. The trick or course is to ensure you have an original point of view.
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These are just off the top of my head, but hopefully you can see that even as a service business you have plenty of options to:
- Innovate
- Get specific
- And build meaningful differentiation
You just have to break out of the box in your head.
Now if you have a service business that is doing more than $1m in business a year I want to help you do this. Together we can create a vision beyond the grimy “billable hours” treadmill, and build something more scalable, impactful, and fun.
