The Consulting Growth Podcast
Joe O'Mahoney is Professor of Consulting at Cardiff University and a growth & exit advisor to boutique consultancies. Joe researches, teaches, publishes and consults about the consulting industry.
In the CONSULTING GROWTH PODCAST he interviews founders that have successfully grown or sold their firms, acquirers who have bought firms, and a host of growth experts to help you avoid the mistakes, and learn the insights of others who have been there and done that.
Find out more at www.joeomahoney.com
The Consulting Growth Podcast
Productize! Eisha Armstrong and Chris Dando discuss how to generate products from expert knowledge
Productization offers considerable opportunities to consultancies as the cost of development has collapsed. Eisha Armstong is the world's leading expert on how this is achieved in consultancies, co-founder of Vecteris and celebrated author. Chris Dando is a member of the Boutique Leaders Club and founder / CEO of Reinvigoration - an operations consultancy which has recent successfully productized some of its offerings.
Eisha, brings her expertise in helping service companies reinvent their business models to thrive in today's market. Meanwhile, Chris shares insider knowledge on developing a software spin-off aimed at facilitating operations transformation and building recurring revenue streams.
Transitioning from consultancy to software business can be riddled with pitfalls. Learn how to avoid common mistakes by ensuring you have the right people in strategic roles and conducting thorough market validation. Discover why a market-minded product leader can make all the difference in commercialization success. We also discuss how focusing on urgent and expensive problems can guide product development, along with the importance of co-designing with your target market segment for best results.
We explore actionable methods like the Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter and the 10x value rule, essential for aligning pricing with perceived value. Explore the future of productization, including how AI and automation are revolutionizing service delivery by enhancing standardization and efficiency. Join us as we provide a comprehensive framework for optimizing your consultancy’s offerings and staying competitive in a rapidly changing landscape. Don't miss out on these invaluable insights from Eisha and Chris!
You can download Productize free here: https://www.vecteris.com/complimentaryproductizebook
Prof. Joe O'Mahoney helps boutique consultancies scale and exit. Joe's research, writing, speaking and insights can be found at www.joeomahoney.com
Okay, welcome back to the Consultancy Growth Podcast.
Speaker 1:We're doing something slightly different this time, because I have the pleasure of having Aisha Armstrong, who I've wanted to get on the podcast for a long time, since reading her productized book, which is I mean, I don't know if you can see the amount of notes that I've written on this and the number of pages that are folded down, but I've read this book several times and it's been incredibly useful for me.
Speaker 1:But as well as that, we've got Chris Dando, who is the CEO of Reinvigoration, who is a member of the Boutique Leaders Club, so we've got two experts in the room, and I know Chris has done a lot of work on productization and servitization. Aisha not only wrote the book and has also written a couple of other books, one of which is coming out this year, but is also the co-founder of Vecteris, which is all about productization, and also has a lot of experience at that board level in terms of growing and helping other people grow their firm. So, first of all, thanks for coming on, both of you. Ayesha, I'll pass to you first of all to fill in the gaps of anything that I've missed out.
Speaker 2:No, it's great. It's such a pleasure to be here, joe. Thank you so much for having me and it's lovely to meet you, chris. Yeah, I co-founded Vectris in 2018. After my business partner and I saw more and more private equity money had was that they would help services companies productize. The issue was that services companies are services companies and they do services very well. So to start to productize services is usually not only a different skill set, it's a business model transformation and it's a cultural transformation. So we came into the space to offer our expertise. Both of us have over 20 years of experience developing and selling productized services, and that's what we've been doing now for the past six years.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. I'm really excited to talk to you about this, and I don't use those words likely or commonly, but I think, especially at the moment, there's so much opportunity to take advantage of this and I think there's a big knowledge gap that you can help fill there. Chris, do you want to give us a quick overview of yourself and reinvigoration?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great Thanks, joe. So my background is in operations, operations management. So I spent the first sort of decade in my career in various sort of hands-on operational roles and I got sort of exposed to sort of change and transformation as part of that and it kind of excited me. And I got to work as sort of an internal sort of SME, if you like, on a consulting project in the organization that I worked in at the time and I just loved the pace and the variety of the work and I thought, well, do you know what? I quite, quite fancy a crack at this consulting gig. Um, so, yeah, yeah, yeah, uh, so went off, did a bit of you know education and and whatnot and found sort of my particular niche linked to operations and, um, yeah, reinvigoration was born. I co-founded the business with, with Ryan, who I met on that journey, and we really wanted to set a business up that was different, that felt different and created a brilliant culture. So Reinvigoration is an operations transformation organization. That's what we do. We help businesses to improve and over the last sort of three years we've decided to set a software business up as a sort of a spinoff. So, you know, pretty exciting.
Speaker 3:And you know, joe, you and I have had a few conversations about this and you know it's commercial. We're getting some traction and really the driver behind that there were kind of two things. The first one was, you know, we have a genuine desire to make operations transformation accessible to all. That's our vision, and there are hundreds of thousands of businesses out there that simply can't afford a consulting rate card. But actually our knowledge, experience and know-how will add enormous value to those businesses and, more importantly, the people that work within it. So that was the first piece that we were wrestling with. And then the second one was, of course, was strategically, how do we shift a portion of our revenue to recurring revenue as opposed to us continually hunting the next project to deliver? So those two sort of challenges combined led us to create a software product, and we've learned some lessons on the way and I'm really looking forward to learning a bit from you.
Speaker 1:From my perspective, I advise consulting firms on growth and I see some firms experiment with productization and it takes off and it goes. Some struggle and some completely mess it up. Not mess it up. Maybe they've just got the wrong thing, maybe it was not meant to work. You know, it's not their fault. Everything's easier in retrospect but it doesn't work and from my perspective, at the moment, most of those experiments where it doesn't work, what are you seeing out there? What's, what are the opportunities and what are the risks for professional service firms?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean there. There are some very significant opportunities. The first one is exactly what Chris was talking about, which is technology allows us to perhaps reach different market segments, or the same market segments but in a more efficient way, and the emergence of AI and the use of AI in professional services is also really starting to change that landscape. So there is an opportunity to use new technologies AI or not to reimagine how you create value for customers. Opportunity is that, as a professional services firm, you have a significant competitive advantage compared to like a tech startup, which is that you already have relationships, you already have knowledge of the market, so you should have a really good understanding of customer problems and how they're currently solving them and hopefully, you're profitable. Your services business is generating free cash flow that you could turn around and invest, if that's something that you want to do, and so you're not beholden to outside investors, at least not first when you're getting started with productization. So those are the opportunities that I see.
Speaker 1:And how about the risks? I mean, you must see this as often as I do. I mean because I'm not an expert in this space and, to be honest, there's a gap in the market in the UK, because there's lots of people that will say, oh, we'll build SaaS and they're a bunch of coders, great, but they have no idea how to turn consultancy know-how into products. What are the risks that you see, and how can a founder or an owner seek to minimize those risks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I alluded to them earlier. The first one is that, if you're using technology, this is a digital transformation. And digital transformations, regardless of what industry you're in, are very difficult. They take notoriously a long time and are not as effective as people think they are, and part of that is lack of skills, but part of it is also behavior change.
Speaker 2:And that leads me to the second risk, which is culture. So the cultural attributes that make you great as a services, professional, services provider can actually kill your ability to productize. So, for example, like always having to be the expert, right when you're productizing, you need to go out and test and learn and put on your curiosity hat and experiment, and that flies in the face of always being the expert. So it's a culture shift. And then that leads me to the third risk, which is it's a business model transformation. You're changing the way that you're pricing, that you're making money. You're changing how much your services, how much it costs for you to deliver value. With products, there's a huge upfront investment and then the gross margins are good on the backend. But with services, how much it costs for you to deliver value with products, there's a huge upfront investment and then the gross margins are good on the back end, but with services you're only investing as you get new clients. Typically.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic and I so appreciate that point about culture. It's a different type of business often. So, chris, have you got any questions? You know, either from a reinvigoration perspective or from a general perspective, about productization for Ayesha?
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely, thanks, joe. So firstly, just a reflection on sort of the last sort of bit of dialogue then. So, we've split this, our software product, out as a separate business as of this year. So it kind of ran as part of our core consulting business for 18 months as we were developing the product. We funded it from the balance sheet, which was your point, aisha.
Speaker 3:But yeah, it's a different business, right? So you know, we're really proud of our culture as a group. So the facets of the culture are the same, you know, in terms of how our people know treat each other. But of course, you know, um, you know, software engineers are different to consultants. So you know, you've got those nuances.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, that that's been a sort of a big turning point for us on on our journey. Um, so yeah, like first question really, isha, um, we've made quite a few mistakes on our journey thus far. Um, as you would expect, a bunch of consultants having an idea let's build a software business, you know, and one of the sort of the key mistakes really that I look back on is you're not having sort of the right people in the right seats at the right time, you know, and that kind of hurt us for a while in terms of progress, but we addressed that and the transformation has been unbelievable actually. So, on the theme of kind of things that go wrong on this journey, from all of your amazing experience, what are the kind of key things that you see with professional services firms, what they get wrong as they try to productize?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question and congratulations on your success and the decision to split the business, especially because it sounds like you're going after a different market segment, so a more price sensitive market segment that, as you said, couldn't afford the rate card for your services.
Speaker 2:So I think that was very, very important decision that you made. So we see a number of mistakes. Some of the top ones that we see are developing a product where there's really not an urgent and expensive customer problem to be solved. And usually that's because, like Joe was was talking about, the founder gets an idea in the bathtub and, um, there isn't, you know, time to market validate whether or not this is really a market need. Um, or you may have some of your core consulting clients bring something up as a problem, but then when you think about a productized solution to it versus a services solution, you haven't actually validated that the market segment that would want a productized solution feels the problem the same way, that it has the same amount of pain and urgency. So that you know we call it. Developing a product that nobody really wants is a problem that we see and unfortunately, a mistake that we see too many organizations make, easily solved with just a little bit of market testing, but sometimes, more often than we would like, that doesn't happen.
Speaker 2:So that's one. The other one is failing to co-design the product with your target market segment, and again I think this gets back to a cultural attribute that we have as professional services providers, which is everything needs to be perfect. We have to always be the expert. And to show customers something that's half-baked, or actually invite them into the innovation process, can feel very uncomfortable for some people. And so that's a new muscle.
Speaker 2:And if you bring in people who have kind of product development expertise into your team to help with that, they usually have that muscle already and are not afraid. But then you've got to figure out okay, how do I get access to the market that we're targeting to really bring them into the creation process? And then the last one is and this is where we're spending a lot of our time right now with the next book doing research is on the commercialization of the new product. So, like you talked about with yours, you're going after a different market segment, right? So that's going to require different in kind marketing and sales capabilities than you've had. Right, you've got to generate leads in a whole new market segment where perhaps your organization doesn't have strong brand equity. You may need to bring in and stand up a completely different sales channel or channel partners, or even e-commerce, depending on the type of product that you're selling.
Speaker 1:You know, I know a good CTO or two, I know product managers, but for people that are unfamiliar with those terms and those roles for example, people leading consultancies what advice would you give on the people? What advice would you give when it comes to the people and roles?
Speaker 2:So the number one piece of advice I give is find someone who thinks with a market mindset, who has strong commercialization skills and prioritize that over the technical skills, which is not where most people go they usually go with.
Speaker 2:I need a CTO, I need to spend a lot of money on the data, because those are skills you have, right, and it feels really scary. Those are things that you can outsource and a good product leader would know how to do that. But is this even an attractive market segment? How are we going to access this market segment? How do we price and package and structure the product in a way that makes it recurring and renewable? That is somebody that somebody with a market mindset, who's got real product commercialization experience, will be able to guide you through way, more so than anybody with technical expertise.
Speaker 1:Okay, and if I'm doing a search for somebody like that, if I'm putting out a job ad, am I talking about a product manager? Product management role.
Speaker 2:Yeah, product management, product leader role, and ideally somebody who has has some services background so that they've got internal credibility. Yeah, but they you know, especially if it's a product that's going to be sold alongside your services. If it's one that's a spinoff, like with Chris's organization, the services experience is less important. But if you're trying to sell the product alongside your services or bundled with your services, you want a product leader who's had some experience in a services organization.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you, Chris. What did you do in that space? So who have you got on board in terms of the product technical side of things?
Speaker 3:on board in terms of the the whole product technical side of things. Yeah, so, um, it's been fully outsourced to date, um, but we, we have a transition plan in flight actually. So, you know, our development team have been fantastic, you know, taking us on this, on this journey. Um, we actually, about 18 months ago, thought that we needed our own sort of you know, um engineer and, and started the process and we realized that, you know, we didn't know what good of you know engineer and started the process and we realized that you know we didn't know what good looks like.
Speaker 3:You know we were getting all these applications. I said, hang on a sec. You know we're going to hire the wrong person here, because I've got a clue right what we're really looking for. So we continued with our partners Since bringing a new head of this business in, who's obviously a product product guy that's helped to shape the roadmap right, um, and obviously our sort of capability is is a key part of that. So we've started to bring certain things in. So we've got a fractional cto. You know light touch, you know they've, they've looked under the hood, they've spotted you a few things for us. We've started to bring all of the, the support and infrastructure into our own environment. So that's like happening as as we speak. So we're kind of on that journey and I think probably later this year some of those roles become a bit more substantive. But you know we're just being. We're being sort of you know, kind of pragmatic with it really. You know we're sort of pivoting when we need to and not before we need to.
Speaker 1:Great, thank you. So, in terms of managing that cash flow and the practical things potentially getting loans or private equity involved, aisha, what have you seen on that journey? What are the things to look out for, what are the risks? I guess yeah.
Speaker 2:So nothing breaks my heart more when someone comes to me and they've spent, you know, high, six, seven figures building something that nobody wants and is not selling, and that unfortunately happens a fair amount.
Speaker 2:What we really try to do is work with companies and again, this is a cultural shift to teach them how to de-risk investment decisions, decisions, and to do that by adopting more of kind of a lean product test and learn design thinking set of skills where you're putting out things as quickly as possible to get market feedback. So, whether it's just a couple slides in a slide deck, or it's some wireframes or it's a clickable prototype, but but how can you really break down the design and development of the product into short, tiny little pieces where you're testing your hypotheses about both what the product should look like and the market appetite for it in a way that de-risks your investment, so that you're spending the bare amount possible, the smallest amount possible, in order to get market feedback before you then decide to invest a little bit more? So going from slides to wireframes, to clickable prototype to MVP, that can be a journey where you're releasing more investment dollars the more you validate your hypotheses. But again, this is not a muscle that most professional services firms have.
Speaker 1:No, no, and I've often said with a lot of consultants and especially consultancy founders you're often not the shy and retiring type. You've made a bet on yourself, so it often attracts people that are quite confident and will bet on themselves. And I put myself in that category and I routinely my wife would say make decisions to build things that I think are going to be wonderful and they might well be if I had time to dedicate to it. But I think this is another, you know, consequence of what you're saying who's going to sell this stuff and who's going to manage it, who's going to improve it, who's going to run with it? And I don't know if you agree, but I think sometimes consultancies will do this as a side project and they'll get a few people on the bench to work on it. You know, or James, you know, can you take that over or whatever? And if it's going to work, you've got to run it like like another startup in some ways. That's my take on it. I don't know what, what your take is.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. First of all, there at least has to be somebody dedicated to it. This can't be an off the side of the desk or it will not be prioritized over client work. It just is not. And then, second, that person, as I said before, has to have a market mindset. So professional services are all about one-to-one right. I know what Chris needs. I design an engagement for Chris. I meet his very specific needs. But this is like you have to think about what does a market segment need and develop something that meets 80% of the market segment. That's a very different way of thinking. You may not have that person internally who thinks that way. Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep, and just to add a bit to this. So again, we've kind of been there right. So I remember when we first showed our product, which called an mvp, to the now head of this business and after an hour of us showing it, he said this is the best mvp I've ever experienced in my life. Because you know, joe, exactly what you've said. You know our mentality is to deliver. You know exceptional outcomes and the attention to detail, and this you know, and we did that right. And now, god, if I, if I look back on the sort of the journey to date, I I reckon we probably wasted. We spent a considerable amount, but we probably wasted a third of that cash. I would imagine you know only a third like that's.
Speaker 3:That's low, chris, you did really well yeah, so so I I don't actually have the date in the back what I just set up I've got field says probably a third. And now this product isn't about sort of features that we want, it's about what clients are using it, they're asking for. So we've completely switched the model. So again, yeah, we'd love to go back in time, sort of two and a half years.
Speaker 1:I was very involved in the start of the mobile phone industry sorry, smartphone industry and I remember taking a prototype of a mobile phone showing videos of football players to a test audience, asking them what they paid for it, and they were all like this is incredible, you know, we pay anything. You know, 10 pounds a goal for that. Incredible, We'd pay anything, 10 pounds a goal for that. And of course, now it's free to stream and we made a lot of bad pricing decisions off the basis of very excited people or people that didn't want to be rude to us.
Speaker 2:I guess we see that far too often, which is why we always suggest trying to do a paid beta as opposed to a free beta.
Speaker 1:That's a good idea, yeah.
Speaker 2:So when you're concept testing, asking in the concept test conversations, would you like to be a beta customer? And here's what we're thinking standard pricing will look like. And then here's the discount we're giving because it's going to be beta. And then there's some kind of incentive that then they lock in the pricing for, like an extra year after that. Or you know, if they decide not to continue after beta, they're released from the contract. Maybe there's a small cancellation fee or something like that. But that will give you. If people are willing to pay for your beta, then you know you've got a good idea. If they're not willing to pay for your beta, I don't know Right.
Speaker 2:Maybe, they're just being nice to you, like you said, yeah yeah, good point, chris, given where you are in the journey.
Speaker 1:I know you're already selling. You know and actually you've had, you've had some prior experience talking about your you know. I know you've got um some good online training material that also, you know, has been packaged up as a product. Talking about where you are in the life cycle with your latest product. Do you have any questions about where you go from here for Ayesha?
Speaker 3:So I think. So we're still on sort of if we're honest a product market fit journey. So we've set ourselves, you know, some numbers in terms of clients and types of clients to get us there. But we know there's a massive amount of interest because we've got people paying for it and have been so. But we're trying to just be realistic, um and you know, uh, and make sure that you know we've got, we've harnessed that feedback before we kind of go big bang on it. So we're sort of early in the journey.
Speaker 3:But pricing's an interesting one. So it's kind of like, where do you start with it? We've had so many discussions around because it's quite a unique product. Yes, there are parts of it are out there in other ways. But like, where do you start with pricing? You know, and you know, being honest, we've just kind of come up with numbers and floated them out there in the market and then changed and you know some clients have gone, some have gone no, and so what's your sort of advice in terms of pricing mechanisms? What's the starting point? Any science behind that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So the starting point and then I'll get to kind of where you are is in your concept testing. You're asking what would you expect to pay for a solution like this, or what have you paid in the past to solve this problem? And then you see what they say and half the time you'll actually get an answer, which is a great starting point. Then you can show them sample pricing and get feedback on that. And then you can even from there, once you've refined it, go to larger sample size and do pricing surveys.
Speaker 2:And there are different techniques Van Westendorp is one that we use a lot to start to get to a good price range for different packages. So there are kind of sophisticated ways to do this that don't take a lot of time or effort. That should be part of the upfront initial market research prior to development. Then, once you're in the market, then you start to get really testing your market segments. So I imagine within your target market segment of more price-sensitive customers who can't afford your consulting, there are different segmentations within that and then you think about what are the packages of features that align to the needs of those different segments and then the pricing becomes a function of not only what the features are in the packages, the differentiated packages, but also ties to some measure of value.
Speaker 2:So, for example, ties to some measure of value. So, for example, in training, you usually price based on number of employees who are trained right, because that's a clear indicator of value. Or if you're in, let's say, the energy efficiency space, you may price based on amount of energy consumed. Or, you know, if you know like HubSpot, you know based on number of contacts in the database. So it's some kind of measure of value that ties to the actual price point. Competitors are also a good place to look for pricing if there are competitive proxies in the marketplace, because that will give you a sense of what pricing has already been validated or what people might expect to pay. And then another thing to think about is pricing should be at least one-tenth of the value that you are saying your product creates. So if you can say, look, our price is X, but we create 10X the value, then it starts to become easy math for the buyer.
Speaker 3:What we do creates value right on the bottom line because we go into businesses, we help them change and transform, we release capacity which saves money. So what the product does is delivers all of that know-how that our consultants have proven across the world. So it's really easy for us to tag a business case. But we've not looked at it in that kind of 10x value pricing way. That's really interesting actually.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good kind of rule of thumb to start with and then start to test around it and, depending on how you are selling the product, you could also like if you're selling it online. You could do a lot of different A B testing on pricing. It's a little bit harder if you're selling through people, but you get to salespeople. You could start to run some more disciplined experiments with that.
Speaker 1:I'm writing a book at the moment about AI in professional service firms and I'm getting a lot of people saying, ok, what can AI do for our firm? And my starting point is always well, you don't start from AI. Start from your firm and the business need and what your clients need and what your employees need. And then you know very often AI isn't part of the solution. Very often AI isn't part of the solution. It might be automation, it might be some sort of a visual basic lookup in Excel or whatever, but there's no, or maybe there is some denying.
Speaker 1:But from my perspective, there's a very good case for arguing that things are changing significantly in this space. Things are changing significantly in this space not just with the advent of AI that is pretty good now but also with the cost of automation, with SaaS offerings, with the collapse in price of a lot of tech and coding as well. How are you seeing the productization space change in that area? Or are you not, if this is AI and automation, simply another sort of feather to the bow, that's the wrong metaphor. But whatever the right metaphor is, is it just another tool in the box?
Speaker 2:Great question and it's one I've been also getting a lot of questions about recently, as I'm sure you can imagine. So I talk about the AI opportunity in three different categories. So the first one is standardization and efficiency, which is a form of productization. So most firms, when they start on a productization journey, start by just standardizing and automating the way they're delivering services to clients, and the client experience is still the same. So they're still purchasing services, but the services are just more scalable on the back end because of standardization and automation. Yep. And certainly AI is now introducing a whole new way to automate knowledge work that, frankly, they couldn't do 24 months ago, yep. So if an organization is not actively pursuing at least productization of its services, standardization and automation using AI as part of it, then they are behind, flat out behind, and I actually don't think the best way is kind of top down. I think it has to be, with this type of tech, technology bottoms up and that you've got all of your professionals experimenting with how to use it to improve your already delivered clients. So that's the first category.
Speaker 2:Second one is then. It now should allow you to do things you couldn't do before. So it democratizes information, it puts information in the hands of people who didn't have it before, which can free you up to do higher value things, or give you more data and information to do better analysis, run more accurate forecasts, so on and so on. So it's an opportunity to take your service delivery to the next level, which should not only change the value improve the value that you're delivering to clients but it's also going to change your cost structure, because you need to make sure that the clients are paying for the cost of the AI. So that's the second thing, and then the third is it opens up new problems that you can solve, and you may be solving those through a technology solution, like Chris is doing with his organization, or you may still be solving them with a more productized services approach. But that's really what excites us and what we like to play with is what are the new customer problems that you can solve now that you couldn't solve before?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. In fact, Chris and I are having a conversation about that this week, aren't we, Chris? I mean, I'm a big fan of these new GBTs and their capability and the Claude equivalents that I think offer so much opportunity there. Chris, have you got any? I know you've got to jump off to get to an important client call. Have you got any final questions that you wanted to ask or any comments that you wanted to make before you disappeared?
Speaker 3:No more questions, just um thanks for for the invite today and, aisha, fantastic to meet you and um, you learn from some of your experiences. And, uh, I don't have your book, but it's on my list of things to order later, so yeah, your decision to invest in bringing in a product leader versus and keeping technology outsourced is so so important.
Speaker 1:Aisha, I'm interested in the common use cases you see. So you know professional. There are differences, obviously, in professional service firms but in effect we're solving client problems. We have a leverage model. We put people in to help solve those problems. Typically we'll do a bit of research and we'll um, we'll perhaps write some reports. Sometimes we might even get our hands dirty and actually remodel some things or build something for them. Are you seeing, or have you seen over the last, you know, many years, common use cases that are successful coming out that most consultancies could do well to consider?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think one is the use case that Chris identified, which is we can take our process and codify it in software so that it can either replace some of what we're doing, which is scary right, because you?
Speaker 2:could be selling in his existing market segment or it could reach a more price sensitive market segment. That is a very, very common productization use case. Another one, and one that I actually like a little bit better, is the data, and especially because of AI. So we are sitting on some data that either we're actively using right now in client engagements that if we were to structure and perhaps augment and then introduce AI so that it gets the recommendations get better and better based on the data, could create a real useful tool, a data as a service tool for our clients or for a different market segment who perhaps have analysts in-house. They just don't have the data to make the smart decisions. Yeah, so that's another great one.
Speaker 2:Ones that I like less are the kind of the content and the training. Just because you don't get the same because of the price point, you don't get the same like revenue impact that perhaps you would with a data as a service or a software as a service product, and then, as I mentioned before, just productizing the delivery of your services, but the client experience stays the same should be the first starting point. It shouldn't be let's go launch a software business. It might be, but that's a pretty big commitment. Sure, yeah Right. Totally different business model, huge upfront investment versus what can we do right now, just to standardize and automate what we're already doing for clients.
Speaker 1:And sometimes there's an intermediary step isn't there where you, you know, perhaps you haven't even servitized, servicized is that a word For a professor? I'm remarkably daft sometimes. But you haven't servicized that piece. You know everything's personalized, it's all run off people. And then you think, well, actually, you know, let's do this in seven steps, let's standardize it, let's capture the same data from the client and all the rest of it.
Speaker 2:And sometimes you almost need to do that before you can take it to the software side of things. Totally absolutely yeah. And you know, is there a way to get away from time and materials pricing to value-based pricing? That is a good early first step as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant. I did my top 10 professional service books a few weeks ago and Product Eyes was up there in the top five. I think it's a fantastic book. It's full of really practical insights to help people on that journey. You've also got Fearless, which is another great book, and you've got a new one coming out this year. Tell us a little bit about that, please.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Commercial Eyes, we can hit. Product Eyes, We'll have Commercial Eyes. It's all about the go-to-market. So how do you choose your target market segments, do your pricing, your packaging, your messaging and then make your decisions around sales channels?
Speaker 1:How long is a piece of string? September, yeah, oh, wonderful, good, I'm going to get in the queue for that because, again, you'll be seeing it a lot. I'm seeing a lot. More and more of my clients are saying how do I do this? What should I charge? You know, and that hybrid business is becoming more and more popular. Aisha, thank you so much for your time, really appreciate it and I hope to have you back on the show after after the new book is written.
Speaker 2:Oh, that would be wonderful. It was such a pleasure, Joe. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you, bye-bye.
