Productizing complex services

Lee:
Well, without further ado, then, I would like to introduce to you my brother from another mother is, Mr. Pete Everitt, who I’ve been on his podcasts more times than he has. So come, sir, and share with us How to productize complex services.

Pete:
Thank you very much, Lee. Well, good morning again, everyone. As Lee said, my name is Pete Everitt, and for anybody that doesn’t know me, I run two businesses. I run a digital agency here in the UK called So, and I also run a white label SEO service called SEO Hive. And Lee wanted me to talk to you today about how we have broken a process like SEO, which has so many moving parts down into a productize service.

So what we’re going to cover today is basically three things. Firstly, identifying an opportunity for a productize service and how do you validate that? Secondly, how actually to productize the service. And thirdly, I’m going to share a few mistakes that we’ve made along the way, basically, so you don’t have to. Right, so you want to productize a service.

Where do you begin? Firstly, whatever your solution is, whatever your product is going to be, it needs to solve a problem for somebody. And what I’ve done here is just taken some screenshots from some services that we’ll all know, hopefully some of them, and see their positioning. You can see that they do all solve a very clear problem for a very clear person. So if you’re going to start this, you need to be able to solve a problem for someone.

This isn’t the talk where I’m going to get into Niching or customer avatars or any we don’t have time for that. But you need to solve a clear problem for someone. As a quick show of hands, those four screenshots I’ve just been through, do people know of those companies that we’ve just seen? Yeah. Yeah, right, cool.

Hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly what we want. So what is the problem that SEO Hive solves? This is where we started. Well, we wanted to support agency owners in building their recurring revenue.

So actually, our positioning statement isn’t really about SEO. It’s about helping people like you with building your monthly recurring revenue. And the way we do that is by providing high quality SEO services. And these are just a few screenshots that we took back at the time when we were looking for some kind of social proof. That before we went any further, those ideas Lee was talking about, where you have this idea, you buy the domain name, you set up the landing page, and you’ve done all that in less than 24 hours.

This was what we did after that 24 hours to make sure that we were barking up the right tree. We deliver SEO services in a reliable and transparent way so that they don’t have to do all the hard work. I agency owners don’t have to do all the hard work or get it wrong, and they can build their monthly recurring revenue. That is what we do and how we solve that problem. And that translates to our website in the same way that it translated to all of those other screenshots that I showed you earlier.

So if you want to start a productize service, what problem are you going to solve and for whom? And I believe that’s the right English. I’m useless at this. My wife proofread this because she studied English at Cambridge, and I certainly didn’t, so and for whom? Before we go on to validating the idea, the bit of the story I need to tell you about SEO Hive was SEO Hive was born out of a few different sources.

One of them was ATL2019, and throughout the following year ATL19 was in spring of 2019 and throughout the following year, myself and my business partner, a guy called Jeff Patch, who lives in California, who unfortunately couldn’t be here today, we started putting the bones on this. And as it entered 2020, we started getting things out into the real world, started building an email list, started putting the landing page live that we built, started going through the processes and stuff that we’re going to talk about in a minute. And we were going to launch it at ATL2020. That was the idea. And Jeff was going to come, and we were going to have a sponsorship stand, and we were going to it was going to be part of the presentation on the screen and this that nature.

And then the world had a different idea, and we had COVID, and we had a lockdown. And I don’t need to tell you don’t need to talk about the rest of it. So in March 2020, Jeff and I had a conversation, and we said, look, we don’t want to be the people that tries to sell something new to agency owners, to anybody, really in a pandemic when finances are uncertain. We don’t want to be known as the douchebags that are launching a new service and trying to flog this thing. So we sent an email out to our email list.

It wasn’t a huge email list. It was around about the 200 figureish. But we sent an email out on the 21 March saying, thanks for all your support with SEO Hive. We’d committed to the idea, but with what’s going on in the world and the uncertainty but let’s face it, at that point, nobody knew what was going to happen. We don’t think it’s right for us to proceed with this right now.

So we don’t know why we said this next sentence, but the email ended by saying, so we will readdress it in the fall, in the autumn of 2020, we had a 70% reply rate to that email. Not just an open rate, not just a click through rate, but a reply rate. People hitting the reply button and saying, what the hell are you doing? I’ve been planning on using yourself. I’ve got clients lined up, the world’s uncertain, but I can’t pull the plug on them.

I’m banking on this for my business for the next few months. It’s the only certainty I’ve got. You can’t not do it. What you’re talking about? So, on the 23 March 2020, Jeff and I had another zoom call and said, Right, well, we got that a bit wrong, didn’t we?

So ATL, I think, was supposed to be in May. I don’t know whether we can remember exactly the dates it was supposed to be in May kind of time. So Jeff and I sat down and said, right, well, look, if people need this and they need it now, and they need it now more than they needed it now three or four weeks ago, because of what’s going on in the world, how can we expedite this process? So we broke our service down into the elements that you’re going to see in a few minutes, put our processes together, and on April the first, which we realised was April fool’s day, but on April the first, we then launched the service and the rest, I suppose you could say, is history. So I just wanted to tell you that story because some of the way we did things and some of the mistakes I’m going to get on to a bit later, were maybe due to things being a little bit rushed and maybe due to the things that were happening in the world at the time, but we certainly learnt a lot from them.

So validating the idea. Once you’ve got your idea and you know what it is, that who it is you’re trying to help and the problem that you’re trying to solve for them, the next thing you need to do is get somebody to pay for it. You see, Will Schroder wrote, an idea is just an idea until you have a paying customer attached to it. Anyone can discredit a simple idea, but no one can discredit paying customers. So can you get somebody to pay you for it?

Now, it’s easier to have the it to get somebody to pay you for it, I understand that, but somehow you need to validate that idea next, you need to see if there’s an opportunity. So getting one person to pay for something is well, it’s possible. You only need to find somebody once said, you only need to find one person daft enough to buy it. Finding one person is part of the challenge. Is there a market for it?

Is there a bigger audience? What is the size of that audience? Is there an opportunity for you to actually make some money out of this? Because whilst we all need bigger purposes in life, actually we do need to be able to make some money. We do need to be able to support ourselves we need to be able to support our families and our businesses need the stability of finance in them in order so that they can be around for years to come to support those customers that we are trying to serve.

So is there a market for it? And is that market cash rich enough? Is there the income within that market? Or how can you help generate the income? And that was the approach we took with SEO Hive, was actually to tie our service into other businesses recurring revenue.

So we can help you make money. And we will do that by delivering the work right. And then step four, do it. What’s it? Right.

We need to make a minimum viable product or an MVP. So in order to make this MVP, you need a few things. I’ve always found it’s easier to start the end and work backwards. Reverse engineer it. Reverse engineer everything.

Firstly, you need a defined output. So what are you going to deliver? What is the customer at the other end going to get for their money? You then need a defined input. What do you need to put in so that you can process for the customer to get what they’re paying for at the end of the process?

And then, of course, you need the process or the mechanism to get from A to B. Key thing with an MVP, start small. Always start small. Don’t muddy the waters by making something too complicated too quickly. If that’s I’m generating X pieces of content, or if that’s I’m I don’t know.

We’re processing artwork in this way for social media, graphics, whatever it might be, start small and grow from there. It really will help you as you move forward. Then you need to figure out the product engine. This is the mechanism that you’re going to deliver. Defining your output, the scope of work.

Can you answer the question for the client? You are going to receive X. You fill the blank in with what X is and it achieves an objective. So you get you have you move towards, et cetera, et cetera. What’s the context for the end client?

This is SEO Hives Outputs. So we have a content pathway. And you can choose whether you get 2468, however many pieces of content you want each month. It’s a defined output. You receive these many pieces of high quality optimised content.

We have an onpage pathway that is X many hours of on page work per month. So you know what you’re getting. We report back to you, you know what the tasks are, etc, etc, etc. And we have a link outreach pathway where we will reach out to 50 domains every month for you all with higher domain authority than the client website. And our reporting is those 50 domains and any opportunities that come off the back of them.

And then our final one, which isn’t really something you sign up to, but is our reporting. And this comes back to the communication side of things that we I’ll talk about in a moment, where you can never communicate too much with clients. So we needed to have a mechanism to deliver back to the client reports of, you’ve paid us this money, and this is the value that this has turned into for you and for your end client. So we have these inputs so that your client can make gains in the search engines, and you can build your monthly recurring revenue. Hopefully, that starts to make sense of putting together your outputs, defining your outputs.

You could have anything that your product does on the left hand side of the screen as you’re looking at it, but it needs to lead to so that a bigger purpose for what you’re trying to achieve, right? Defining your input. This is how we do it. In order to for our process to run smoothly, we need an order or payment. Now, we decided to hang our entire process off the order side of things.

To begin with, we started by trying to do it on dates. So invoices or payments were automated and tasks were automated, and in theory, that would work absolutely fine until you get to a month that only has 28, 29, or 30 days in it, and then you find out that all your payment dates move, but your task dates might move in a different way. So you end up having tasks created that people haven’t paid for, which was an interesting conversation to have at one point. So we hung everything off the order and the payment. However, before we can get on with anything, we need some keyword research.

We need some competitor details and analysis. We hang everything off an SEO check to make sure that with SEO, if your website isn’t healthy, it’s a bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall. So we need to make sure that your your website is operating properly. And of course, we need that reporting tool. Don’t forget, we need that setup as well.

So we put together an onboarding process for to gather this information. Now, back in 2020, if I rewind that clock back again, we made our onboarding process a month. And the reason we made it a month was because, as I said, we’d had this reply rate from this email, and we had no idea whether, when we said the site, the the service was going live, whether we’d get one sign up, ten sign ups, 100 sign ups, 200 signups, we had no idea. We actually ended up with 68 sign ups in the first 24 hours, which we thought was phenomenal that we were over the moon with it, but we had no idea that was coming. So we didn’t want to stitch ourselves up and say, hey, we’ll onboard everything in three days, and then find out that you’d have 200 websites to process.

And it was just never going to happen. So we made it a month. We very quickly shortened it, and we’ve shortened it again since then. But that’s just one example of starting small and refining as you go. No client is going to be unhappy with you if you deliver ahead of their expectation.

But if you miss their expectation, especially when they’re signing up to something new, when they’re trusting you for the very first time, if you stuff that up, you’ve probably lost the customer for life. So we were incessantly obsessed with making sure that we didn’t disappoint people immediately. So that’s our input. We have an onboarding process, then we get on to the process, and then we have our defined outputs, right? Defining your Process and Team one of the tools that I have is something called the Recurring Agency toolkit.

It’s currently being developed. You’ll see some information about it later on. I actually have a masterclass about creating processes, so I’m not going to go through this today because it would take up too much of my time, which I’m just checking. But if you want to see it, peteeveritt.com/processes, you can get access to the masterclass of the process of writing processes and it will walk you through it.

And it’s got templates for how to write SOPs and that kind of thing. If you’re doing a productize service, SOPs are a must, particularly as your team grows. So in overview, these are the processes that each of our pathways go through. They all start with the order, as I said, and they all end up with a deliverable reporting, then sort of sits underneath and catches everything and wraps it up for people in the end. So for content, we need topic ideas.

Somebody needs to write it, somebody needs to approve it, and then it needs to be published. I don’t need to read them out. Link outreach and on page work in that way. In order for that to happen, we needed a team. Because whilst SEO is I like doing SEO strategy, I’m a terrible copywriter.

I’ve already told you that. I got my wife to double cheque the presentation. I’m a terrible copywriter. So that’s not really my bag at all. So I need other people to help me with that.

So we needed to put a team together. We started off a bit slimmer than this, I’ll be honest. But this is where we are now. We have a content team, an on page team, and a link outreach team. We made the decision to manage things by pathway rather than by client.

There’s nothing saying, though, that you couldn’t do it the other way around. That was just our decision. So getting to that point then gives you your MVP. You know who’s delivering what, you know how they’re delivering it, you know what the outputs are. You can get it off to the client.

At that point, you’re ready to start and launch your service. It might not be sexy, it might not have all the bells and whistles on it, but it will work from end to end and you can launch a service but there’s a few things that you need to make sure that you know and the first one is your limits. We all have limits. Lee has just spent 25 to 30 minutes talking about his limit, which he found in a way and I know he shared that so that you don’t have to find out your limits in exactly the same way. We all have limits.

It doesn’t matter what somebody’s social media profile looks like, it doesn’t matter if they’re Gary V or if there’s some young upstart that you’ve never heard of before. We all have limits. There’s only so many hours in the day. And we do have other priorities other than work priorities that are bigger than our business priorities to do with our health and our life and our families. So know your limits but also know the limits of your team.

Because growing your MVP if you’re trying to grow your productize service as a reaction to too much work or as a reaction to something going wrong, then you can very easily make wrong decisions. You can very easily hire the wrong people in the wrong order. You can very easily lose clients and make mistakes that basically come down to you. So we set limits on the number of or the amount of work that each of our staff can handle and we track this every month and when any staff member gets to 80% capacity we then look starting for our next hire. So nobody is ever working at 100% capacity, working with people in a product if you’re running software I realise this is different but working with people in a productised service, people get sick, people want holidays, people want to all those things that you want outside of work they also want and they’re entitled to.

So you need to make sure that you’re managing that and that you have additional capacity in order to cover those things. I was talking to somebody earlier about they asked about how do we had any bumps in the road? We had to let one of our content managers go earlier this year. It was a challenge. He was being so ingrained in the process, too much hung on him really it was our fault we overworked him.

We didn’t give him the breathing space he needed. He felt like he was on a treadmill so much so he jumped off and found a job somewhere else. So this really drove home the fact to us that we need to create ownership in our products and in the processes that people work for. We also need to make sure that we’re not overworking people, which is really where the numbers started to come in on this slide. And as I say, when somebody gets to 80% capacity that’s when we look for our next hire in that particular area.

So once you’ve got your MVP and you know where your growth points are, you can then start adding the good stuff on the top. You can then start with the sexy little extras, the added value, the intro products, the marketing funnels. I would recommend, though, that as part of growing your MVP, you also include means for your current customers to become advocates for your product. So is there things you can add that will make your product easier for them to sell or more attractive for them to sell? Can you include referral opportunities?

Can you turn on that marketing machine again? Look, we’re a group of web agency owners. I’m not going to stand here and talk to you about marketing particularly, but can you turn on that marketing machine? Right, so what have we learned? What’s gone wrong?

I don’t know whether I should be showing this screen because some people in this room are my customers or have been my customers. I don’t know whether they should be seeing this, but they are the key thing that I struggled with. And this is where my business partner, Jeff, really shone in the setup of SEO Hive. He runs another service called Maintain Press. He’d done the productized thing before and it was at a far lower price point, but he’d been through that process, he was into that mentality and I really struggled with it because I’d been an agency owner for like 15 years.

I was all about the client is king and getting the best result for the client and being client led and going over and above and under promise and over deliver and all of that kind of stuff. Running a prototype service, though, is a little different. You’re not an agency at that point, you’re a service provider. And it sounds a lot more boring, I’ll be honest. But actually, if you want this thing to grow, if you want this thing to scale, then you need to have defined limits.

You are paid for something. That something is what you deliver. Any added value you can add over on top of that is great, but you need to be able to do that to every client. You can’t pick and choose your favourites like you potentially could in an agency. So it really is a key mind shift from thinking of yourself as an agency to a service provider.

As I said earlier, you can never communicate too much. We have fallen foul of assuming that people know how our system works, know how our process works, and actually, you know what, just because they get tagged in an email that comes from ClickUp or whatever it might be, that’s not good enough. Make sure that you have the right communication processes in place. Also, how do they communicate with you about something that’s outside of your scope? If they’ve got a billing inquiry or they have, I don’t know, something that they want to ask advice about.

How do they do that? You need to make sure you always have communication mechanisms in place. Help your clients, help you sort of covered that if something goes wrong, and sometimes it will. Now, we do have Vito is in the room, and Vito runs Atarim, which is software. So Vito, I’m presuming that things also go wrong when you’re running software as well as when you’re running a service.

Yeah. Okay, perfect. He’s nodding his head.

So sometimes things go wrong, and I’m hoping for you to continue nodding his head when it does say so. Don’t try and cover it up, because it’s not going to help. You just holding your hands. Hold your hands up and say, look, appreciate this. We’ll work to fix it.

Whatever steps need to happen will need to happen. Hire fast, fire fast. That’s something I’ve learned. We’ve put together a hiring process. It starts right from some instructions to do with applications.

We ask for people to submit a GIF. That’s one of the things we do. If somebody doesn’t submit a GIF, it means they haven’t read the instructions. If they can’t read the instructions, they’re not going to read my process. If they can’t read my process, they’re not going to deliver what I want for the client.

So I don’t really want to hire them anyway. So something as simple as that, we put that in our application process. We then give people test accounts before we allow them to work on live accounts. If they don’t pass those tests, then we let them go. So really, before they start working on an actual client for actual deliverables, that’s going to go on an actual website somewhere.

They’ve maybe done half a dozen iterations of the process on stuff that we could use somewhere else that haven’t gone live. For copywriters, for example, we get them to write blogs for us. We may use them, we may not use them, but at least they’ve been through the process. Agency owners. How many people in this room have sold something that you don’t know how to do and thought, you will figure this out later?

100% of all agency owners based on this survey, have sold something that they don’t know how to do and figure out later? Yeah, you can’t do that with the productize service. It will crash and burn. We tried to put together a different product for our very first Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale. We hadn’t done it before.

We hadn’t tested it properly. In theory, it should have worked. It didn’t. Crashed and burned. A lot of refunds happened.

That Black Friday brings me on to the next thing. Black Friday and Cyber Monday is not a growth strategy. Please don’t base your business over the fact that you can do x many thousands of sales in four days. It is not a growth strategy. It’s a lovely cherry on the cake to have but it is not a growth strategy.

So please don’t think that that’s a measure of your success. Productize is something you love. You will be doing a lot of it. My relationship with SEO has changed significantly over the last two and a half, three years. And that’s because, whereas before I could cherry pick my clients, it was the agency model.

If something seemed a bit boring, I could pass on it. Yeah, I can’t do that with a productized service. I’m not in control of what’s signed up to us within reasons, and therefore I end up doing a lot of SEO on sites I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen. Making sure the strategy is right, making sure that all those processes that you saw work faultlessly from start to finish. Looking into specifics, it’s not necessarily what I would have chosen to do all the time.

But I do love doing SEO. I love when I started being a developer. I became a developer because I loved taking a pretty picture that artworkers would take, artworkers would make and making them happen. This was before we had page builders and design in the browser, where you actually designed it, a PDF. And then when I started growing through into bigger agencies, I realised that actually where the value was, was not in taking that picture and making it work online, but taking that thing that had been built online and making it work for a business, making it make money for somebody else.

So, yeah, that was why I sort of got into SEO in the first place. It was that next piece of the jigsaw. But whatever it is that you decide to do, make sure that you’re doing something you love, because you will be doing a lot of it. Always watch your profit. Always watch your profit.

Productizing, anything you can in certain markets, enter a race to the bottom and that’s not a good place to be. So always watch your profit. And as I’ve sort of mentioned before, it’s your job to guide your clients through your process. It’s not their job to figure it out. So make sure it’s clear, make sure that communication is in place.

Make sure you’ve got video walkthroughs or FAQ docs or a wiki or whatever they need. But equip them to go through your process. Don’t expect them to know it off the bat. You need to take ownership of it. Lastly, I do have a few resources that might help you with this.

These are resources that will be part of the toolkit, but they are freely available. I developed a recurring service planner and a base price calculator to help with exactly developing your MVP and pricing your products. You can get those at peteeveritt.com/rsp. As I mentioned, there’s the processes masterclass as well, which is at peteeveritt.com/processes.

So I hope you found that valuable. Thank you.