Customize vs Standardize.
Does this scenario sound familiar?
You're all over the place making sure you customise your offering to your client.
The client walks in, they start to change everything about your delivery, they want to mix in their own methodologies, they ask you to create a proposal that is not the way you normally do it, they want things included at a different price, on different payment terms.?
There are so many different variables and now you have to manage all that.?
So now you have to manage different clients, with different requirements, proposals, projects, formats and standards.
It’s a nightmare.
There are parts of what you do, you probably know how to do really well by now.?
Ask yourself, what could you standardise about your service offering?
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Start thinking about what you do as a product.?
Whenever you create something, you really want to build a business asset. Something you can use over and over again. It’s not that one off proposal, one off project, its standardised.?Meaning there is a certain standard by which you do things. You could standardise the outcome, the price, the deliverables.?
When you do so, you create processes for delivering the outcome. It becomes the standard and becomes easier to replicate, repeat.
Another huge benefit if you’re the bottleneck of your business as the owner, is now you can make sure that others do the tasks that only you used to know how to do.?
You can delegate, outsource and automate because they are so simple.
The more you can standardise about your business the more you can have predictably and efficiency which is another word for profitability, really.?
When you can do things over and over, you can do them better, or cheaper.
Which doesn’t necessarily meant that clients pay any less for them.
Eenvoudzoeker ? Strategie als Therapie · Design als Medicijn
2 年Good read. Thanks Michelle. In addition to that: I found out that even when processes are standardized, the outcomes are always custom from a client perspective. So it doesn’t have to be a problem for the client, and so not for me either. It’s like buying a suit in standard M-size that fits perfectly to 99% M-wearing-ideal-clients. ??
Brand Strategist || I build simple, powerful brands that raise the valuation of entrepreneurial companies. Investors and M&A specialists call me their value enhancer.
2 年There is great comfort for my clients (and me) knowing that my contracts take them through processes I’ve honed with hundreds of reps. At the same time, I make it clear their case requires a few tweaks to get the perfect result for them. Standardization is great. Cookie cutter is bad.