Yes, giving too much value is possible and it’s not good for you, your business, and above all, your clients.
As service providers, we take pride in what we do. We feel that what we do is an art. An art that customers don’t really understand.
Nobody can do it as well as we can.
And when we do it, it’s inspiring. We get “in the zone” and magic just comes out.
That’s how we end up with things like the Art of Public Speaking, the Art of Copywriting, the Art of…
Amazing work everywhere!
But if we are trying to run a business, this will create a problem for us.
Because 99% of the time when we see this, the client got the value they wanted ages ago.
And that difference between the point where the client got value and where we end the service is holding our business back.
In other words, giving too much value is a bad thing.
This was a hard pill to swallow for me.
We are experts, we are in love with what we do.
But this is exactly the reason we can’t scale our business. The reason we struggle to find people to help us with it and the reason it’s so hard for us to get out of fulfillment.
Giving too much value to our clients stops our businesses from scaling. It makes it hard for us to hire people to help us, hard for us to get out of fulfillment, and can actually stop customers from buying from us. Click To TweetI know that because I was a victim of it myself.
For years, I thought I needed to inspire and educate the customer. That our service needed to have all these different features that I thought are crucial for the full success of the service.
When I see what we do today, is so much simpler than what we were delivering in the beginning.
It turns out, we didn’t need to do many things we thought were important. In the end, the clients will buy the things they think they need.
What Happened When We Stopped Giving Too Much Value?
Eliminating service features turned out to accelerate growth and satisfaction.
It allowed us to specialize in fewer things, and charge more while being more efficient. This made us profitable, giving us room to invest in the business.
Improving the customer experience even more. Now, we actually deliver the value the customer wants.
And with time, we understood that all those features made the clients feel we were trying to sell them things they didn’t really need.
So they didn’t fully trust us and made us lose deals.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t overdeliver or do our best work or do quality work.
On the contrary, we do need to overdeliver and do our best work.
But, the need to fulfill ourselves and not just the client’s needs is complicating our business.
Because:
- it creates unnecessary work for us (that takes away profit),
- Makes us feel stressed, underappreciated, and undervalued
- It complicates the processes of our business,
- and makes things more confusing for the clients.
- It makes it hard for prospects to trust us because they think we are trying to sell them things they don’t really need
So what can you do instead?
Narrow the scope of your service. Focus your work and canalize that passion.
What you will build will be infinitely better.
For example:
Let’s say you have a pizza restaurant.
You could make amazing pizza by doing your own dough, your own sauce, and your own cheese.
But if you make 30 different pizzas, make your own boxes, plates, fragrances, salt, pepper, etc.
Your business will get complicated very fast.
Now, compare that to making only tuna pizza. But strive to make the best tuna pizza the world has ever seen. This is a different story.
Now, you will obsess about the tuna, the spices, the method, etc.
There are many pizza restaurants.
But if somebody feels like tuna pizza, guess where they will go. Actually, they don’t even need to feel like tuna pizza to go to your restaurant.
They will go simply because they want to experience something they don’t have anywhere else.
Here in Vienna, there is a dönner restaurant that decided to sell only 1 product. Just dönners. No pizza, no sausages, nothing else. 1 focus. So they obsessed with it.
They decided that steak tastes better. And that cooking the meat with charcoal and fire give a better taste. And that making their own bread tastes better.
The result?
A 30-meter line with people waiting up 40 minutes in the cold.
Believe me, I’ve done the waiting. More than once.
Ok, Your Product Is Not Pizza
But Juan, my product is more complicated than making pizza.
It may seem like it, but the concept is the same.
Mine was professional production of virtual events for conferences, and we managed.
Now we have a productized service, delivered through a standardized method at scale.
At the end of the day, you get to decide what you include and what you don’t.
As long as the client’s needs are solved, and they get the results they want, that’s all they care about.
How you get them there, is not relevant.
I know is hard to put our passion in our pocket.
But the faster we do, the faster more money will come in.
Struggling To Scale Your Business?
Simplifying our service is hard. As experts, we know all these different features will help the client.
But the truth is that after a certain point, they actually take away value for your client, and for your business.
If you are looking to scale your business and transition out of delivery but, are afraid of quality going down…
Then I invite you to book a free Strategy Session.
In this 45 min call, we’ll look into your business to identify what’s holding you back. Then, we’ll develop a plan of action. And finally, if we see it makes sense, we’ll look into the possibility of working together.
Or at least point you in the right direction