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.