When you purchase a new car, you’re buying a professionally assembled product, not a list of components. It would be senseless to attempt to deconstruct the entire cost of a car in order to judge its value.

Why, then, do agencies persist in selling components instead of finished products? Or worse yet, selling the hours required to build the components? When we price the building instead of the bricks, our clients are more likely to fully appreciate the value being delivered, which means we can more effectively capture the tremendous value we’re creating for our clients.

In this compelling online workshop, we show how the agency business can break through its broken belief system and start down the road to a completely new revenue model, including:

Package what you do as solution sets instead of services. To harness the power of GenAI –- and to more effectively capture the value you create for your clients -- serve up your firm’s competencies as programs and products instead of a list of widely available services.

Price the program, not the person. The way to command uncommon pricing is through uncommon offerings. Instead of trying to defend higher hourly rates (inputs), price the deliverables (outputs).

Create program roadmaps. For each of the programs you develop, create a roadmap outlining the what, who, where, where and how for each key element. This provides the information your project managers need for allocating resources and managing workflow.

Moving to a productized business model in no way diminishes your firm’s ability to deliver custom thinking. Products are simply frameworks for solving business problems. In this through-provoking workshop series, we’ll explore the many advantages of a product-based business model, including:

1. It allows the firm to increase its revenues without increasing its staff.

2. It significantly reduces the administrative costs in the agency-client relationship (estimating, tracking, reporting, and reconciling hours).

3. It provides reliable information for forecasting, allocating and managing internal resources.

4. It improves the firm’s ability to manage and prioritize workload and workflow.

5. It creates a shortcut to pricing.

6. It enables the monetization of the firm’s intellectual property.

7. It makes it harder for professional buyers to directly compare the firm’s offerings with competitors.

From a client perspective, programs present significant benefits. Compared with stand-alone services, programs significantly reduce the time and expense associated with integrating individual components and dealing with multiple providers.