Set Up to Scale: How to Grow Consulting like a Product

Freelancers and consultants understand this: you can't scale the expertise.

What we forget, though, is that you can scale everything else.

Here's a blueprint for how to turn your consultancy, freelance, or even agency business into a scalable, productized service offering... without diminishing your quality.

The problem

Traditional agency and freelance models involve lots of extra "stuff" that's outside of the actual work. Things like email and/or phone communication to initiate a new project or task; the estimate and scoping period; proposals; all the back and forth refinement throughout the whole process... none of it is the actual work.

The key to scaling a consultancy or freelance business is to wrangle all of that everything-else inefficiency and take control of the entire process. Put another way, turn it into a SaaS product.

Oh, the unlimited subscription design model...

Yes.

But I didn't describe it like that right away because the real reason for the subscription part is around making client billing more efficient... not around the fad of it.

If you take a step back from the subscription part itself, you've got two things: the actual work and everything else. The goal is to make "everything else" as efficient/automated/autopilot as possible, so you can focus on the actual work. In that context, subscription-based billing is a no-brainer. There's a reason all software is subscription now.

"The goal is to make everything else as efficient/automated/autopilot as possible, so you can focus on the actual work"

Similarly, cleaning up the beginning of the process is a no-brainer as well. There should be no proposals or scopes or quotes or tracked and approved hours. In a perfect world, the client fills out a form (or sends a video) with what they want done, and in a few days, they get a notification that it's done. Async and everyone keeps moving.

In practice

In practice, this is achieved by giving each client access to a shared "dashboard" that allows them to request work and see the status of already requested work.

And then only accepting requests this way.

The dashboard can be Trello or any number of off-the-shelf SaaS. Or, it can be custom software, which can help dictate your specific process and further emphasize it as the only way to request work.

👆 That's what I just did, more below...

Scaling

By dictating how your clients request work and when they pay you, you can literally free up half or more of the time you currently spend on client work overall. That time can go towards the actual work, or it can go towards more clients.

After a while, you'll have a defined, teachable, and repeatable process with organized inputs and outputs. You'll be able find an expert at the actual work and drop them into your system, allowing them to focus on just the work but deliver the exact experience that your clients (and you) expect... because software is automating the client experience.

Proof?

I haven't actually scaled my consulting business in this way yet 😂, but I took the first step and am betting the farm on it. In the past, I've scaled an agency in a traditional way, so this is in stark contrast. I've gone first principles and I feel genuinely excited to take control of the process, which should improve my quality of life and increase value for my clients at the same time.

I launched Based UX, an unlimited subscription-based UX service, last week.

I focused on the ideal user experience from a client and a service provider's point of view and ended up with a simple system of requests with comments. Requests are "queued," "next," "in progress," or "completed," and comments have lots of formatting options and file attachments.

It all feels like a SaaS product, and it's ultimately a custom dashboard with a request form and a kanban-style list of requests that track and update in real time.

This streamlines 90% of the communication and creates a single source of truth for history and deliverables.

I also built in four distinct types of requests. Using examples in the request form, the client is guided towards a specific type of request that I know is both appropriate for 1 - 5 day sprints and is effective in adding value to what they're building. This type of guidance is where my 20 years of client experience comes in. By making this automatic, I'm saving cognitive and organizational overhead for both the client and myself.

All of these updates are geared towards one goal... to eliminate the "everything else" involved in a client-services business. I love the work. I want to focus on the work. And I want to create a machine where others who feel the same way can step in, only focus on the work, and create value for everyone on day one.

Consider this my public announcement, and follow my progress. Currently, the service has zero clients. First goal is a "got my first client" update. I'll keep you posted. 🤝