Productized Services with Brian Casel

In this episode of Billable Hours, I talk to Brian Casel. Brian is the founder of ProcessKit, a software tool that helps agencies document their processes and also helps them actually follow those processes. He's also the creator of the Productized online course and he runs his own productized service AudienceOps. Listen to hear Brian's advice on how to move from billable hours and into the world of productizing.

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today on the show I'm excited to talk to Brian Casel, a true legend when it comes to productizing. Brian is the founder of quite a few different businesses and products, but two of them are especially relevant to you as a listener of this podcast. The first one is ProcessKit, a software as a service product that helps you document your processes and also helps you actually follow those processes.
The other one is Productized an online course and community that teaches you how to productize your client work. Brian is also the co-host of the BootstrappedWeb podcast, and you can find him on Twitter at CasJam. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast.
It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy. And fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines, it's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started.
So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments in your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. I start out this episode by asking Brian a pressing question, Brian, what's so bad about billable hours.
I love that first question. Billable hours is obviously charging money for your time. And you know, you're, you're calling out like the headline on my productize and scale website. And the thing is like, that's sort of just a way to speak to what most agencies end up running against it for a lot of freelancers and consultants as well.
Which is at a certain point, you know, you get to this point where it's like is my entire business reliant on me, sitting here at my computer, doing the work, delivering the services. And, and even if you start to, you know, hire people to do some of your tasks, if you're still billing by the hour, Still relies on you to be there and, and to drive every single project, you start to see the ceiling insight.
I mean, I definitely ran into that early in my career. I was a freelance web designer, web developer. I was doing a lot of work with WordPress and I didn't even bill by the hour, either as a freelancer, but I built by the project. So what would you say is the alternative to build by the hour? Is that value based pricing?
Yes. So like a lot of people say that the alternative is to do, do a project based. Some people call it value based pricing and that's one way to look at it. And I also went that way when I was a freelancer, I would just talk to a potential client, figure out what the project scope is, and then just give them a flat price.
And if there's scope creep, then we deal with that later. But I think that's a good start, but what I tried to get across when I talk about productized services, is that that too still doesn't solve all of your problems, all, all of your stresses as a freelancer or as an agency. Because what I ran into was, even though I was doing project based pricing, maybe value-based pricing still, every single project was completely different.
You know, I was, I was doing websites, but I was doing websites for universities and then websites for doctors and then websites for restaurants and websites for a blog. Like that's still a completely different project, but that's also a completely different customer each time when you're doing a project based.
Pricing strategy in the background is still based on the amount of hours that you expect to use on it. Like, is it still in theory, billable hours, but they just, basically, you try to guess how many hours that's going to be, and then you make an offer based on that. I know that a lot of agencies do it that way, but I never did.
I honestly, I just never really cared so much about, um, the hours that I spent. I only just sort of cared about like, does this project basically seem profitable to me? Yeah. When I was, uh, when I was a freelancer, it all that mattered. Was that I made X thousand of dollars a month. I'm doing my work to keep the bills paid, basically.
And you know, a lot of times, like as, as you grow as a freelancer or an agency, you start to raise your rates. So like the same project, the same scope, the same requirements that you might do in year one, you can start to charge five X for that. In year three. And that's also where you get into like the misaligned incentives of like billable hours.
Because as you get better at your job, your skill set, or as your team gets better and better, they become faster and more efficient. That doesn't mean that they should charge less and less really. They should be charging more and more, but that's the opposite of, you know, if you're, if you're charging by the billable hours, but even if you're billing by the project, you still run into the ceiling of like the number of simultaneous projects that you can take on.
But more importantly, If you're doing projects for anyone and everyone and all different types of projects, scopes. You're still in this treadmill of, Oh, we have to create a new custom proposal. We've got to do this whole discovery process. We've got a hope and rely on referrals. You know, we can't really do any sort of real marketing because we don't have a target customer.
We don't, we don't have one person that we're speaking to. And that's where I get it to productize services is because like, you know, eventually you want to figure out like how can this become a, an actual business and an actual brand. That I can go market actively.
Yeah. So, so let's talk about productized services because it sounds like that's basically the answer to all of these issues. Like basically with, you know, like traditional client work, it sounds like you started from scratch. Every time you start a project because you have to figure out everything and come up with everything or reinvent the wheel basically for this customer.
Um, but it sounds like part-time services is a very good answer to this. Um, so let's talk a bit about basically what a prioritize service is and, um, And how it solves some of these issues that you just mentioned. Yeah. So with productized services, you know, a lot of people like to sort of like compare it to freelancing and, or, you k...