Productizing a Bespoke Service

Optimist was not built to scale.

In order for a service business to scale—and in order for the founder to move out of client delivery—there needs to be a level of productization.

If I’m being honest, I’ve always had a distaste for this concept.

I think of the millions of productized marketing agencies that are focused on building widgets—fixed-price deliverables churned out en masse for bargain prices and with little strategic thinking or creative rigor.

I think of content mills.

I think of service providers rather than strategic partners.

This is the antithesis of our business.

If we are to provide a truly specialized service that focuses on smart, strategic thinking and demonstrable business outcomes, then how can it possibly be productized?

But if my goal is to remove myself from some of the day-to-day work, then we need to address this scalability challenge. I had to grapple with this and define exactly what level of productization would be acceptable and what this transition would look like in practice.

For us, productization doesn’t mean that we start churning out cookie-cutter “strategies” or generic content.

But it does mean that we need to narrow and refine the content that we are creating. We need more clarity on what size and shape a particular content asset will take—and how much time and money it costs to make that thing.

Putting Productization in Context

“Productization” exists on a sliding scale.

It doesn’t mean boring, bland, or generic. It simply means that your business is built to foster a deep expertise for a certain and specific type of product or service. You focus on doing one thing in a specific way and/or for a specific set of customers.

I think of it like a restaurant.

Different restaurants specialize in certain products (dishes). But every successful restaurant has productized their particular specialty.

Of course there are fast-food joints that lean all the way into productization and mass production. McDonald’s a great place to get a cheap, fast hamburger without a lot of frills. People go there because that’s what they want. They don’t go there expecting a gourmet dining experience.

In our world, this is the equivalent of a content mill. They consistently churn out a high volume of content but without much strategy or an emphasis on quality. They’re the fast-food equivalent of content marketing. And certain companies want or need this kind of service.

Optimist is decidedly not on that end of the spectrum.

But even a 5-star restaurant achieves some level of “productization”:

• You still order from what’s on the menu
• They still make only certain dishes that they have planned and prepared in advance
• Everyone who orders the crab cakes gets basically the same thing

The menu is usually small. It’s a limited selection of highly-curated dishes that the chef and kitchen team have trained to make—and can deliver at a consistently high quality.

And, because of that, the kitchen is able to serve world-class food without complete chaos. (Yeah, I know—there’s still some chaos.)

Moreover, the diners who go there expect a world-class dining experience. And they don’t expect it to be fast or cheap. They don’t expect to be able to order things that aren’t on the menu or make ad hoc substitutions.

This is the world in which we want to operate. We don’t want to be an “everything” restaurant or one that’s known for being fast and cheap.

We want to be a 5-star steakhouse—a specialized, boutique content marketing agency.

We want everyone on our team to know what’s on the menu and how to prepare it.

We want our client strategy to be both bespoke and modular—comprising the items on our menu, but with enough flexibility that the approach can be customized to meet the needs of the client.

We want to be the best in the world at the work that we’re best at.

This means taking some things off the menu.

Over the years, we have acquiesced to many one-off client requests. We’ve agreed to do work that, while we were technically capable of delivering, we are not well-positioned to do at a high caliber. We’ve become a restaurant with a giant menu of stuff we can make rather than a tightly curated menu of the things we’re prepared to make at a world-class level.

At one point or another we’ve taken on work including:

1. Tactical how-to articles
2. “Viral” articles
3. Affiliate articles
4. Round-ups
5. Rankings
6. Awards and badges
7. Case studies
8. Ebooks
9. White papers
10. Templates
11. Calculators
12. SEO audits
13. On-page optimization projects
14. Original data analysis
15. Original surveys
16. Infographics
17. Data visualizations
18. Maps and geographic data projects
19. Landing page copywriting
20. Landing page design
21. Email newsletters
22. Email nurture campaigns
23. Organic social promotion
24. Paid social promotion
25. Social content
26. Social graphics
27. Tactical linkbuilding
28. Guest post linkbuilding
29. PR/media linkbuilding
30. Broken linkbuilding
31. Sales collateral
32. Slide decks
33. One-pagers
34. Product comparisons

As you can imagine, trying to do all of these things—and expecting our team to be capable of delivering all of these different types of content—was not ideal. And it is also a major barrier to achieving enough productization to allow us to grow without chaos.

We were doing too many things that we weren’t great at delivering.

We were serving frozen pizza at our 5-star steakhouse.

Moving forward, we’ll be focusing the work that we do best and is best suited for our team structure and workflow. As part of this transition, we’ve done some analysis as to where we’re best suited and where the team is most excited to focus.

I’ll be sharing more details on the specifics in my next post about shifting our positioning.

But for now just know that we’re cutting down our menu from 34 items to just 5 or 6 core services.

Anything outside of that, we’ll handle in one of three ways:

1. Spin it out — Creating a separate team and company for out-of-scope work that doesn’t fit under the Optimist umbrella
2. Refer it out — Send the work to a trusted partner or outside agency
3. Project work - On very few cases, our team has agreed that we will consider taking on one-off projects for well-established clients; these will be individually scoped and managed outside of our day-to-day workflow

Although I went into this process fearing that it would dilute what we offer, I’ve come out of it feeling quite the opposite. As I look at what we were trying to do and the direction that we’re heading, I see higher quality and less confusion—better outcomes for both our team and our clients.

It’s not dilution. It’s distillation.

Key takeaways here:

1. Productization is not a dirty word. We can standardize parts of our business without sacrificing the strategy and creativity that makes us special.
2. Productization requires specialization. We simply don’t have the resources to productize every one of the deliverables that we’ve had on our menu. We have a small kitchen and we need to work with the tools we have.
3. Specialization is differentiation. If you try to be everything to everyone, you’ll be nothing to anyone.

As we make this shift toward a narrower scope of work and a focus on productization, we’ll need to make some other changes to communicate that to the world.

For one, we have positioned ourselves as a full-service agency and advertised a pretty broad range of content types, services, and approaches.

We need to change the signage and reveal the new menu.