If you are a business owner that sells a service, you probably have a process that you take your clients/patients/customers through. Hopefully, these same people love what you do for them. How can you expand on that and grow your business without growing the number of hours that it takes to do that?
For service businesses, it’s a struggle to get out of the “time for dollars trap”. The more people you see, the more hours it requires to see them. You can be more efficient, sure. In the end that only takes your business so far.
What you need is leverage.
The best place to start the process of leveraging your current service is to look at the service itself and look for ways to create value for potential clients where you aren’t involved in the process as intensely.
In the information product space, this is called a home study course.
Creating some sort of home study course is essential to leveraging your time and effort in your business. For some potential clients, they just simply aren’t ready to buy your full blown service. This could be for a couple of primary reasons. One of those reasons is money and the other is trust.
Having your primary service turned into product helps you to build trust with people who may not be ready to be $5,000 for your service but they may have seen enough to justify $297 to see if you can deliver the goods.
One of two positive outcomes are produced with a well designed home study course. The first outcome is that you don’t leave money on the table and you can create value for more people. The second is that you are able to bring certain buyers along more slowly and educate them on your philosophy which makes them better clients once you work with them in a more in depth manner in the future.
Even if you aren’t in a business where you can put together a home study course, say if you are a chiropractor or dentist for instance. What ultimate questions about your practice and philosophy can you put together in a product to build trust more quickly in your practice. You don’t have to charge for the product but the product would pay for itself in helping people make the proper care decisions with your practice and increase the chance for lifetime clients.
If you have a service business and you want to leverage your time more effectively to make more money and create more value, then a home study course that is based off of your main service is a great place to start because the content has already been created. Even a simple product that drives home your business philosophy is better than nothing and can pay dividends for your business.
What are other ways you have used product creation to leverage your business?
PS… If you go to My Business World and get our white paper on Designing Your Ideal Product you can see our home study course on Total Experience Design. Check it out and start creating the type of products that your clients want.