134 Productizing Your Consulting Business with Alex McClafferty
“For me, the holy grail of running a business or company is having a team that’s better than you in their own respective areas. You expand your impact that way.”
In 2013, Alex McClafferty co-founded WP Curve, when it was doing less than $500 per month in revenue. By 2015, Alex and his team had grown the business to a 7-figure run rate. In 2016, Alex ran the sell-side of their acquisition to GoDaddy. Finally, Alex left GoDaddy to pursue his passion as a CEO Coach in 2018.
In this episode, we talk about:
Productizing your services
Opportunities as a consultant/coach
Current market value of consultants/coaches
The importance of a sales process
Putting a structure to your sales conversations
Alex’s coaching services
To learn more, listen to the full episode!
The Importance of a Sales Process
For a sale to be successful, you need a process and a structure to make it work. If you are winging it, you’re going to have a hard time.
To give you an example of that, I would get folks in who wanted my coaching services, and I could really quickly diagnose what they needed and what was wrong with the business. So I would immediately give them a quote for my coaching services without building rapport with them. And it was way too much too soon for a lot of the people that I engage with. And then I realized that I didn’t actually have a sales process.
Saturation in the Consulting Market
I just came from the Conscious Capitalism Conference, and one of the speakers asked if there were any coaches in the room, and half of the attendees put their hand up, and I just started laughing. Because I was thinking, either everyone is an expert or a coach right now or there are enough problems to solve to support this market.
And so when I think about this, what I really get clear on for myself is I believe there are enough problems to solve to support a huge community of coaches and experts, but the gap is going to be whether you have actually done what you’re helping people to accomplish.
When It’s Time to Productize Your Services
If you are in a service-based business, you should really think about the following things.
If I get sick or take a holiday, will my business be able to run without me?
If I want to sell my business, what is the market value of my business today?
Do I need to hire more people for my business, or do I only need a better system or structure?
If those questions really hit you or gave an epiphany, then it’s worth thinking about productizing your services.
