PRODUCTIZING THE SERVICE

I found that selling services to SMEs may be difficult if they are open-ended. When you put them in priced-bundles, they seem quicker and easier to sell off.

A few examples:

Monthly bookkeeping bundle — x naira
Annual tax filing bundle — y naira

Photography Service Example

A friend of mine is an amateur photographer. We were talking about how hard it was for her to make decent revenues. So, I suggested the ‘productizing’ the service option. We created a birthday bundle for schools where kids get 20 photo shots + a box of sweets + 20 sachets of popcorn + a simple 3k cake on their birthday. She sold massively and is still selling and creating more bundles.

Mobile, Pop-Up Creche Example

A popular creche in Lagos recently created a bundle where a pop-up creche can be set up at any venue and mothers can drop off their kids and pay a token. So, a mother gets to the cinema, pays 1k to drop your child in the pop-up creche, watches her movie for 2hrs, picks up her child and heads home. She said she’s made more revenues from the pop-up than from the regular creche she had been running. She sets up pop-ups at weddings and other public places.

PR Example

Someone from Silicon Africa (Secret Facebook group), reached out to me to handle some PR for my startup. I asked for the fee and he said, “it depends”. Again, it was rather vague for me so I couldn’t proceed. Along comes another PR guy who says, “pay 100k, I’ll give you a one-minute documentary, a publication on Bella Naija and two newspaper publications. It kinda seemed easier to go with the second guy.

What are your thoughts?

Has anyone had a good or bad experience with “productizing” a service? Please share so we learn.

Chioma Eze is the founder of AccountingHub — Professional Accounting Support for Small Business Owners