Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: Over the last several years, there's been a myth that every entrepreneur running a service business keeps chasing. It's one where you are sleeping or sipping espresso as your business runs itself. The problem. It's a mirage. It's a mirage you never find while giving your business. Heat stroke
[00:00:24] Ken: Productizing is a myth and like many myths, it comes with a mirage, a beautiful oasis shimmering. Yet, just outta reach
[00:00:37] Ken: a perfect automated business running maybe today with ai, maybe with agents. But definitely with passive income and you having to do nothing. Of course, you have a incredible checkout page where people punch in their credit card and you profit while at the beach
[00:00:58] Ken: You think you're getting [00:01:00] closer. You're not having watched countless entrepreneurs over the last number of decades, but especially the last few years. Here's what I'm seeing. You're wandering the desert of client delivery, chasing a state of business nirvana that never arrives.
[00:01:19] Ken: So let's talk about what productizing quote unquote really means, because I get it.
[00:01:25] Ken: The idea behind it sounds like freedom.
[00:01:29] Ken: A business that needs less of you
[00:01:32] Ken: recurring revenue, fewer meetings, more leverage.
[00:01:37] Ken: But for 99.9% of those listening to this conversation, if you are a service business, that is the heat of the desert talking.
[00:01:49] Ken: Now, there's a lot of reasons why I am passionate about this topic. I've lived through countless times, and we've actually had other episodes where I've gone [00:02:00] into loaded terms. People exploiting words like solopreneurs or solo entrepreneurship to make themself wealthy, but I can promise you that this is not me today.
[00:02:11] Ken: I sounding like the old guy yelling, get off my lawn.
[00:02:15] Ken: I am someone who's actually built products, not just quote unquote service packages,
[00:02:20] Ken: but real software used by millions. I've built apps for Levi's, for Toyota. I've been featured for Apple and Google, so I'm talking about that kind of product. Someone who can go to a landing page, can go to an app store. Click or tap a button, use something without your intervention
[00:02:39] Ken: and maybe never even interact with you.
[00:02:42] Ken: So when I talk about products versus services, it's not theory. It's lived.
[00:02:47] Ken: When I see founders calling their notion Dashboard a product, or maybe they've even used something like Vibe coding, tools such as lovable, I have to just smile. [00:03:00] Because almost none of those things are ever gonna be sold in a professional services capacity. The way that people are thinking about the word productizing, they're simply just not the same.
[00:03:12] Ken: And I understand today that some of you are maybe a little bit lost. Maybe you even have to go Google or use perplexity or ask Chat GPT what the word productizing means. And if you are in that boat, please don't do it. Let my definition, let this. Philosophy around what we actually need to do in the business, be the thing that replaces, that.
[00:03:33] Ken: Productizing actually has a very strong corollary to it, which I had to address years ago before this. Which is running after passive income and just like that topic. The issue is that when you see an outlier, you see someone who is making so much money posting photos of themselves in lifestyle situations, profiting.
[00:03:56] Ken: They've got the look, they've got the revenue [00:04:00] snapshots. That's what you want as well. In the world of passive income, all of those people hardly have any passive income. They have super large audiences, which I understand they built, but they often have made their money talking about making money. And the same thing is true today with productizing.
[00:04:17] Ken: There have been an extreme few businesses that are quote unquote productized,
[00:04:23] Ken: and as a result, you have a lot of people chasing after. That same as I called it before business Nirvana or that oasis, that mirage of productization.
[00:04:36] Ken: Here's what most founders. And consultants miss.
[00:04:40] Ken: There's a massive difference between selling a 99 cent app and a 20,000 or $200,000 engagement.
[00:04:48] Ken: The app is a vending machine. You drop in a coin and something pops out. A 200 K engagement. Yeah, that's a custom home. And you're picking the quartz [00:05:00] slab and you're designing the fire pit.
[00:05:02] Ken: What founders want from a revenue standpoint is the custom house.
[00:05:07] Ken: What you want from a lifestyle standpoint is the vending machine.
[00:05:12] Ken: You can't have both.
[00:05:14] Ken: When I look at the people who are talking about productizing your business
[00:05:19] Ken: to start, they a hundred percent are using it as a way to try to sell on their system, on their model.
[00:05:27] Ken: But like those in the passive income circuit, there are dynamics. In their business and skills that you don't realize that make what they're doing dramatically different from what you are trying to do.
[00:05:40] Ken: I once had a conversation with someone in an agency setting and they compared what I sold to high-end sports cars and what they were saying is that I just wanna sell a whole bunch of pickup trucks.
[00:05:53] Ken: Those going after that version of productizing have some skills that you don't realize to [00:06:00] sell All of those quote unquote pickup trucks,
[00:06:02] Ken: for example, they are definitively landing page experts. They are funnel builders.
[00:06:08] Ken: They are traffic experts.
[00:06:10] Ken: No wonder why they're telling you to go build a productized business. I,
[00:06:15] Ken: but here's the thing about that. And I've actually looked at the numbers behind these businesses. I'll share more on that in a minute. They are charging premium rates. They either had first mover advantages or, or they are people with massive personal brands. And millions of followers, which is actually why there's an intersection between this passive income crowd and the quote unquote productizing.
[00:06:39] Ken: But I did get to attend an event where someone who has a bunch of these little quote unquote productized agencies, which essentially just means they have a big following and a bunch of different portfolio companies, which they literally are just putting bets on. And based on the numbers, a lot of these companies are [00:07:00] churning a dramatic number of customers and barely hitting a million dollars a year in revenue.
[00:07:06] Ken: And you know, from other conversations that I've had that I was able to get to a million dollars relatively easily before AI without having any people on payroll.
[00:07:17] Ken: So I know you're waiting in this conversation like, yo, Ken, this has been a cool convo. What's the alternative? What should I be doing if I shouldn't be trying to prioritize? Okay, let's talk about that for a minute.Because productized service businesses, again, if you even wanna call them that, they look just like SaaS tools, easy to swap out and easy to forget.
[00:07:40] Ken: So this is what you mean when you say productize. What you really mean is, I want out of delivery. Hell, I've used the term before, but essentially the short version is it's the situation where you close a deal. And you might even close two or three or four, and then you say, oh my gosh, I've gotta go deliver all this [00:08:00] work while maintaining my other clients, while continuing to do bd, while continuing to have sales and offers in the market.
[00:08:08] Ken: So yes, I want you to build a business without endless customizations. Constant meetings or living precisely in delivery hell. That's right. That's the right instinct.
[00:08:19] Ken: But as I talked about in episode five, the a hundred K trap, I don't like this work productize, especially with my history of building real products. But I do want you to operationalize the business.
[00:08:32] Ken: And yes, when I was doing the 200 K deals, I was still able to have my marketing and my sales a hundred percent systematized. I didn't have to do hyper customized proposals. That took me endless hour, a upon hour. In fact, I was just having a conversation with a new client who has gone through my sales training more recently, and they have paid someone in the [00:09:00] past, by the way. To learn about marketing and sales, and there was some fencing going on along the way like, Hey, do I really need to change my sales process?
[00:09:09] Ken: It's working. It's not like I'm doing zero revenue. In fact, they were definitely getting to a spot where they were doing anywhere between, you know, 15 to 20 KA month, which is not bad considering how long they've been running the business.
[00:09:21] Ken: But having worked with lots of people like them and looking at what they were doing, I kept saying, we need to operationalize this. There's no reason to be doing the level of customization that you are in your proposals, and frankly, even in terms of your client delivery, there's a way to meet what your clients are asking for without constantly having to Change what you're doing on the backend once they sign off on the deal
[00:09:45] Ken: and I took a look at it because I got this message from them. Last week and it was an amazing message 'cause they've been working with me now for under a month.
[00:09:52] Ken: And like that person who's searching for the myth of productizing or trying to attain something in the business, [00:10:00] especially if you're putting in all that work, they simply didn't feel like they were doing that. And this is what they wrote back to me. OMG. I told my husband, I feel like I've already gotten my money's worth working with you because you opened my eyes to exactly why my last sales call didn't go well, and it's seeing what you've been pushing me to do.
[00:10:21] Ken: I spent two hours last night on something that could have easily been standardized and ditto the night before. How am I gonna ever scale if I'm doing that? Thanks for opening my eyes.
[00:10:30] Ken: When I've built 20 KA month retainers for fractional executives or six figure a month engagements for agency teams. I promise you this. Now one of them needed to become a zero touch, quote unquote productized service.
[00:10:47] Ken: We were able to package their expertise without them becoming a vending machine.
[00:10:53] Ken: And multiple clients quit chasing these productized barrages. And hit 50 K months with [00:11:00] half the calls.
[00:11:01] Ken: Part of, again, the buildup of the conversation today is that I want you to understand. That if you try to turn your service business into that vending machine, as I've mentioned a few times, your clients will treat you like that. Do you think for a service where they click a button and start a subscription, that they won't also click a button to stop that subscription?
[00:11:20] Ken: They can swap you out for any other machine. No loyalty, no retention, and no premium pricing.
[00:11:27] Ken: And that is why I have talked about three pillars around being able to grow without hiring. Hence the name of this entire podcast to help you operationalize. I'm gonna cover it right now, but also the answer is in the 20 plus episodes I've already done for you. Because in order to operationalize, and this is the same thing that I did to build true products that actually scaled without today, trying to make you into an app or a website, you have to have these three [00:12:00] pillars.
[00:12:00] Ken: You have to go deeper into what I call that lighthouse client.And again, I mentioned this before, but one of my most important trainings is why a lighthouse client is key to scale your business.
[00:12:12] Ken: Being able to build that scalable service offer, an outcome-based offer that delivers consistently excellent results, not endless activity where you do, I get paid more to do more things and then mastering async client delivery. Which are frameworks and systems and playbooks that can replicate your expertise and get value delivered without stacking your calendar.
[00:12:37] Ken: And I promise you that almost every single episode actually touches on some of these things. So if you're coming straight into this one, I already mentioned episode five, but most of the answers are gonna be going back through and now you can listen to those conversations. Through a different lens after hearing about this myth of productization,
[00:12:57] Ken: and again, I get it. I'm not faulting [00:13:00] you for wanting to get to this level of quote unquote freedom, but now I'm equipping you to understand why what has been discussed out there is not for you. I've seen founders chase this oasis spending years wandering that client delivery desert until they realized finally that it was never actually real.
[00:13:22] Ken: I don't want you to bake in the sun chasing myths. I do want you to step into the real oasis. A business that's operationalized, leveraged, and still this human, no myths, no mirage, just growing without hiring.
[00:13:38] Ken: I promise you that this is what I have done in this business for the last three years, but it's what I've done my entire career in building true systems. I'm just applying it specifically. What I did in my business for 10 plus years as an agency owner previously building other services businesses, and now I'm just bringing it to you without using fancy terms like [00:14:00] productizing.
[00:14:01] Ken: So that's gonna be where we end it today. I didn't just leave it philosophical for you. I gave you some tactical steps and there's a homework assignment if you want it, which is to go back through the other episodes. And to listen to the answers to what you need to do to operationalize, not productize your business.
[00:14:19] Ken: If this was helpful today, if you got a nugget, would appreciate a rating or review, it lets me know I'm doing my job. If you want to connect and go deeper, you simply send me a note, a DM or a connection request On LinkedIn and do something fun, put in the note myth, and it lets me know that you're listening to the podcast, you're getting value from it. There's also a link down in the show notes for my weekly briefing where I go into another level in a different format relative to the podcast.
[00:14:48] Ken: I know you're busy, so I appreciate you taking a couple minutes to spend with me. I love these conversations and I can't wait to talk to you again about how to grow without hiring. [00:15:00]