Productised services are a trap for partner-led businesses.
Why turning your best work into a fixed package usually attracts the wrong customers.
For a long time I thought the goal was productised services. Define the offer, fix the price, run it on rails. Cleaner sales conversations, predictable margin, easier to scale.
I tried it. Multiple times, multiple shapes. Each one worked on paper. None of them worked in practice, at least not for the kind of work that depends on judgment.
Here's what I noticed. The people who wanted the productised version were rarely the people I wanted to work with. They wanted certainty about scope, deliverables, and price before the diagnosis. Which is reasonable for buying a website or a logo. But for figuring out what's actually wrong in a business? It selects for the wrong customer, the one who already thinks they know the answer and just wants execution.
Meanwhile, the people I most wanted to work with, founders mid-pivot, operators wrestling with something genuinely unclear, were repelled by the package. The shape didn't fit their situation. They wanted a partner who would sit with the problem, not a vendor with a menu.
So I stopped trying to productise it. Now the offer is the partnership itself. The shape gets defined after a clarity call, not before. It's harder to market. The conversion path is longer. But the work that comes through is the work worth doing, and the people who arrive are the people who actually want to move forward, not the people shopping for a deliverable.
If your business runs on judgment, productisation isn't a step forward. It's a different business. Worth knowing which one you're actually in.