Hey,
this week I want to try something a little different with the pod: i’m adding an enhanced summary of the “main takeaway” of the episode for those of you who prefer to just get to the good stuff and skip the rest.
Of course I still think you should listen to the full episode to get the context, or at least put it on in the background while you scan through this. But whatever way you like to consume my content, enjoy!
So!
Here it is:
The problem I had
Most consultants sell exactly one thing, and it happens to be the most expensive, hardest-to-buy thing on the menu.
It’s the lowest leverage thing too, meaning you have to put in a lot of time to get paid to do this… which takes away from being able to actually run your business.
For me it was selling design work to clients. Meaning the more design work I did, the more I would get paid. It was a 1:1 relationship with time and money.
Around 6 years in to my design career I learned that there was a completely differently way to approach running an agency, a completely different set of business models that I had no idea about… and honestly I wish I had known about them from the start because GODDAMN they changed everything for me.
Let me show you the other things you could be selling.
The three rungs
Every consulting business can be split into three offers.
Done For You. You do the work. The client pays top dollar and gets your hands on their problem. This is where almost every consultant lives, and most of them never leave.
Done With You. You don’t do the work. You teach their team to do it. Workshops, training, group coaching. Cheaper for the client, way more leveraged for you.
Do It Yourself. Courses, books, content. The client never interacts with you at all. Cheapest rung, fully scalable.
When AJ&Smart was a UX agency, Done For You was us running design sprints for clients. Done With You was teaching their teams to run sprints themselves. Do It Yourself became the Design Sprint Masterclass.
The part nobody expects
Done With You ended up being the most lucrative tier for us.
Here’s why. You train ten people at a company. Another team hears about it and wants the same thing. Then another. The training spreads inside the company in a way a one-off project never does. And the rungs feed each other: trainings generate sprint requests, sprints generate training requests.
There’s also a second thing that happens once you have three rungs instead of one. On a huge number of our sales calls, when the price for the top tier is too high, we don’t lose the client. We move them down a rung. If you only sell Done For You, every call is all-or-nothing. With three rungs, “no” to one offer is “maybe” to another.
“But my work is too custom to teach”
I said this exact sentence for years. I was certain there was no Done With You version of UX design. Too subjective, too dependent on me being in the room.
I was wrong, and if you’re thinking it right now, so are you.
The goal is not to turn the client’s team into you. It’s to find one fragment of what you do that can be taught. Maybe it’s just how you run a kickoff. Maybe it’s one part of your process. That fragment is a product.
And if you’re experienced, there’s a move most consultants never consider. You don’t only have to sell to clients. You can sell to you, ten years ago. There are people who would do anything to be where you are now, and teaching them is a whole second business. That’s where Facilitator.com came from.
Stop selling your time
The last piece. Once you have your rungs, price them as packages, not hours. No day rates, no itemized lists of what’s included. The moment you itemize, you invite people to negotiate you down line by line.
A rule of thumb I picked up that’s stuck with me: one month in your group program should cost about the same as one hour alone with you. That gap is what makes the cheaper rungs feel like a deal and the expensive rung feel exclusive.
Do this this week
* Write your three rungs. One sentence each: what’s your Done For You, what could your Done With You be, what could your Do It Yourself be? Don’t build anything yet. Just name them.
* Find the teachable fragment. Ask yourself what you do that feels boringly easy to you but looks like magic to clients. That’s your Done With You seed.
* Add a down-sell to your next sales call. When someone balks at the price, instead of “no problem, bye,” try: “There’s another way to work with me. I can teach your team to do this themselves.”
* Price by the rung. Top expensive, bottom cheap, and stop itemizing.
You don’t have to build a course this month. You just have to stop being a business with one product, where that product is the single hardest thing on the menu to say yes to.
Cheers, Jonathan
P.S. The book that flipped this switch for me on packaging and pricing is Built to Sell by John Warrillow. It’s a short read. Worth doing this week.
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Ireland