Stop Trading Time for Money: Transform Your Business with Productized Services

In this episode of Big Deal Energy, host Laura Khalil tackles one of the biggest challenges facing consultants and service providers: escaping the limitations of hourly billing. Learn how to transform your business model from time-based pricing to value-based productized services that create predictable income and better results for your clients.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why hourly billing is holding back your consulting business
• The real problems with custom proposals and time-based pricing
• How productizing your services leads to predictable income
• Why working more efficiently shouldn't mean earning less
• Real-world success story of a consultant who transformed their business through productization

Ready to transform your consulting business? Laura is hosting an exclusive workshop on productizing your services in March 2025. Get early bird access and pricing by joining the email list at laura-khalil.com

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Solo service providers can be just as profitable as million dollar businesses. You don't need more staff, more products, or a bigger audience. Join 1000+ email subscribers who are learning how to sign bigger contracts every week --> https://laurakhalil.ck.page/

Transcript

Hey everyone. I want to welcome you to this episode of big deal energy. I am your host, Laura Khalil. And today we are going to tackle a big one.  How to break free from the time for money trap and finally build a consulting business that truly works for you. Not the other way around. Now, if you have been feeling stuck, or constantly crafting custom proposals, spending hours working on them, constantly reinventing the wheel with every client, and struggling to predict your income every month, I want you to listen up.

This episode is for you.  We want to start with the real problem, which is hourly billing. Now, I know that you probably got into business, Just like I did and started charging hourly because it seems like that's what we're supposed to do. Right.  And so it's normal to start that way. It's been very normalized as well.

I mean, in fact, this is really a relic of the industrial revolution and of how we actually value a person. , which I have all kinds of thoughts on, but let's get back to hourly billing, right? Because you are more than just an hourly number. When you charge by the hour, you're really not selling your expertise.

You're just selling your time. And in the information economy, that is truly a losing game.  There's a few reasons why the first is it creates an income ceiling. There are only so many hours in the day. So you're going to start by getting some clients trading time for money. And eventually you're going to run out of time.

Even if you charge a premium rate, you will hit a wall. Most consultants. 000 a year. Doing this. I have seen as high as around 150, 160, 000. And those people are typically incredibly overwhelmed, incredibly overworked and incredibly stressed out. And I have to ask you, you started a business to have more freedom, not less.

So why are we doing things? that are moving us further away from that goal. And unfortunately, hourly billing is one of those things. The second thing is it creates unpredictable income because every month is different. Every proposal is different. You might have a flood of work one month and then crickets the next.

And that feast or famine cycle is really, really exhausting. I alluded to it earlier, but the custom proposal hamster wheel is a major time suck. Every potential client needs a custom proposal, which means more unpaid work, more back and forth and more uncertainty. I am not a huge fan. Maybe in your business, there's times when you want to write a custom proposal, but I want to encourage you to think about things differently with what we're going to introduce to you today, because there are better ways to move forward, or at least begin to incorporate into your business right to incorporate more. 

The other thing is pricing dilemmas.  I hear probably once or twice a week. Well, what should I charge? You know, they're this, the company is like, we're basing our, what we're going to charge based on like what we think of the people we're working with, or like what we're trying to like, guess it's almost like we're like have a crystal ball trying to divine the answer to that.

You worry about your pricing being too high, losing the client, pricing too low, feeling undervalued. There's just a lot of problems with hourly billing. And let's not forget the efficiency penalty, which is the better you get at your work, the less you earn. This is very true. If you're charging by the hour, because you work slower, you have to work slower, or you have to pad your hours because you're doing it faster.

 That is just a trap and it's a very frustrating place to be. So if you're listening to this episode and your head is nodding, you're not alone. I'm going to talk to you about the good news because there's a way out of it and it is all about productizing your services. When you productize your services, you take what you do best, you package it into a repeatable offer and set clear outcome driven expectations around that.

So instead of selling hours, we're getting away from the hourly, goodbye, you are selling results. You're selling value. Instead of creating custom proposals, you have a go to offer that makes it easier for clients to say yes to. And here's really where some of the magic can happen with this. It creates predictable income.

So you know exactly what you're selling at what price and how many sales you need to hit your income goals. It,  dramatically improves your efficiency. So you're not reinventing the wheel every time. Instead, you refine and perfect your process, which actually leads to better. Client results, right? Cause I'm doing it.

I'm putting in the reps. I'm doing it more and more often. I'm getting better and better at doing it. And so you operate at a higher level. You produce higher level results than constantly having to figure it out again in this hourly proposal  world.  There is an increased value to this.  Because when you are delivering consistent, high quality experiences for your clients, your reputation grows.

And so does your ability to then charge more. So let me give you a real world example from one of my Elevate clients.  I have a client right now who I strongly encouraged to start productizing.

We actually worked on her productization  pathway, how to set up her services and what to charge for them. Prior to that, she was doing a lot of custom work. She was figuring out proposals, spending half days on proposals, and still she wasn't winning some deals. The productization actually made her look more professionalized and clear, like she actually understood what she was doing today.

After having put this in practice for three months, she currently has about 69, 000 of proposals out there that we're working on closing . Like, How amazing is that? And it's all about productizing. She said to me the other day, these proposals took me 10 minutes to update and write, not a day, not two days, not laboring over.

 it's so much easier. And the thing is. Business should feel easy. You should be well compensated for the things that are easy for you to do. So often I see consultants say to me, well, this thing is really easy for me to do. So I'm just like, not going to charge much for it.  We're thinking about this backwards folks.

What is easy for you is hard for others. And that is really where your zone of genius comes in. And what you deserve to be paid and compensated well for.

 So if this is lighting a fire under you and you're like, Oh my gosh, I want to learn more about how to productize.

What could that look like as a service provider? You're in luck because I am offering a workshop in March of 2025, all on productizing your services. And I would love to see you there. If you want to get. First dibs on tickets for that. And the early bird for that. I want you to go to my email list at laura-khalil.com

Check the show notes for that link. And we will make sure you get the early bird details first.  I would love to see you there and I would love to help you understand. What it takes to productize your offer and how to think about it.  It is the reason that I run a multi six figure business is I have learned how to productize.

I've gotten away from the hourly, and I would love to help you have that kind of success in your own business. Well,  until next time, giddy up.