Agency owners: Are you tired of the feast-or-famine cycle of agency life? Are you ready for more predictable business and more freedom? It’s time to explore how to turn your agency into a productized service. You’ve honed your skills and built a client list, but the time-for-money trade-off is getting old. The beauty of the productized service model is that it lets you package your agency’s expertise into a scalable offering.

If you’re currently pinballing between too much work and too little, I understand. My agency was either raking it in or cratering. Then, I shifted to a productized service model. We built websites for therapists, charged $59/month, and built the business into the mid-7 figures in revenue before an acquisition.

Productizing your agency is the best move you can make to build a digital agency that can scale and lead to a sky-high acquisition price.

Ready to learn how? Here’s the best guidebook written by someone who has been there and done that.

Why Consider Switching to a Productized Service Business?

The productized service model provides multiple benefits compared to a traditional service model. In short, you gain more time, money, and freedom.

Traditional agencies hit a growth ceiling tied to billable hours, but this isn’t an issue when you shift to products. With productized services, your pricing, deliverables, and processes become more standardized, and your revenue stream gets more predictable. A productized model simplifies many parts of an agency’s operations and allows your agency to scale more efficiently.

How do Productized Services Work?

Think of your favorite burger joint. They probably have a simple menu. You know what you’re getting, and it’s the same every time. That’s the beauty of a productized service. You take your agency’s expertise, like SEO or web design, and package it into a repeatable, easy-to-understand service.

Instead of custom proposals and endless client calls, you have a set price and process. This makes it easier to sell and deliver, giving you more time to focus on growing your business. It’s a win-win for both you and your clients.

Let’s say you’re an SEO agency. You could offer a productized service like “Monthly SEO Audits for E-commerce Websites.” You define exactly what the audit includes, set a fixed price, and create a streamlined process. Clients get clear value, and you get to scale your business efficiently.

Steps to Transition from an Agency to a Productized Service

I flew by the seat of my pants when making my transition. But it sure would have been easier if I had carefully planned the process before executing.

You want to package your expertise in a way that attracts the ideal customer. Consider these five key steps in transitioning your agency.

1. Identify Your Ideal Service

Review your agency’s offerings and customer data. What services are most in-demand, consistently profitable, and have the smoothest delivery processes? Consider your agency’s strengths. Do you have an exceptional track record with SEO? Do your branding projects always wow clients?

It’s essential to pick a service offering with a high perceived value that you can package and price effectively. What are some popular productized services?

• Website maintenance
• Website design
• Graphic design
• SEO audits
• Content writing
• Logo design

2. Standardize Your Offerings

Clear deliverables and pricing eliminate the back-and-forth often associated with traditional agencies. A good example is AudienceOps, a content creation agency offering fixed-priced content marketing packages that clients pay for annually. By setting these expectations upfront, you provide transparency, minimize scope creep, and make it easier for clients to see the value you deliver.

To further illustrate, take inspiration from companies like Brighter Vision (my old company) and Design Joy, which offer a productized service for a recurring fee. Standardized services work best because customers know exactly what they are going to get, how much it costs, and what they need to provide to get the service started. I always told my team to think of Starbucks. What’s great about Starbucks is that you could go to one in Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine… and the smells, experience, and tastes will be the same. That’s what you aspire to in a productized services model.

3. Develop Your Packages and Pricing

Create different tiers based on volume, features, or the level of support. Will you offer a single, comprehensive package or a tiered pricing system with options?

At my last company, we started by offering websites. It was simple and easy: $59 per month got you a website and ongoing design services. Over time, we added additional products and tools, which resulted in a more traditional, tiered pricing model.

Also, keep things simple. Don’t reinvent the wheel with your pricing. Charge monthly with an annual discount. Consumers are trained to purchase subscriptions online like this, so don’t make it harder for them.

How do you transition to a recurring pricing model for a productized service business?

Let’s talk about packaging your SEO and digital agency services. This is where you shift from one-off projects to a streamlined menu. Think of it like this: Would you rather order a custom burger or pick from a few delicious options on a menu? Most people like the simplicity of a menu.

Start by listing your most popular SEO services. Maybe it’s website audits, on-page optimization, or content marketing. Got it? Good. Now, bundle those services into clear packages.

For example, a “Bronze Package” could be a basic SEO audit. A “Silver Package” might include an audit plus on-page optimization.  Need something more robust? A “Gold Package” could offer everything in Silver, plus monthly content marketing. You get the idea.

4. Streamline Your Process

Streamlined workflows ensure efficiency. This involves creating standard operating procedures (SOPs), investing in onboarding & project management software, and developing templates that help standardize the way you deliver your product or service.

Remember, your processes and systems will evolve over time. Don’t try to get things perfect immediately. Make it work for you, and tweak it as you grow your team.

Looking for inspiration? Here are our top 5 strategies to onboard new web design clients.S

5. Difference Between a Productized Consulting Service vs a Productized Business

Think of productized consulting services like this: You’re still the expert, guiding clients toward success. But instead of reinventing the wheel every time, you’ve packaged your expertise into a specific service with clear deliverables and a fixed price.  Let’s say you’re an SEO agency. Instead of offering custom strategies, you could sell a “Website Audit and Action Plan” package. 

This is different from a fully productized business, where the goal is to minimize client interaction. Imagine you’ve built software that analyzes websites and spits out SEO reports automatically. That’s a product! You might still offer some support, but the product mostly runs itself.

Both models offer serious benefits for agencies tired of the feast-or-famine cycle. Productized consulting brings in recurring revenue and lets you scale faster. You spend less time chasing new clients and more time doing what you do best.

However, a productized business provides better scale, but requires more standardized processes to successfully get off the ground. As an agency looking to turn their business into a productized service, start with the easy transition. Once you better understand the business model, you can build a product later.

This is what we did at my company. We started off with websites-as-a-service and later added products that assisted with social media marketing, content writing, and other products for a higher monthly fee. This helped create even more predictable income, increasing the company’s value.

FAQs about how to transform an agency into a collection  of productized service offerings

How do you find a productized service idea?

The best place to find productized services for an agency to offer is to think about your existing agency. Think about the services you currently provide. What are clients asking for repeatedly? Are there any tasks you do that you are repeatable enough that you productize? (BTW – If the answer to the second one is No, then it’s a process thing you need to figure out).

It’s essential to find services in demand from clients so that when the transition is complete, they begin ordering immediately. Remember, too, the key is to identify something your agency excels at and offers to existing clients.

Is transitioning an agency to productized services difficult?

Turning an existing agency with an existing customer base into a productized service-based business does not happen overnight and has many moving parts.

Depending on your service, you might require several weeks of work to set up everything, plan a sales funnel, set up an email marketing automation system, and market your service or product effectively to hit the ground running.

Is productized service right for every agency?

There are advantages to a productized approach. In my opinion, having run both a productized agency and a standard service-based agency, productized provides more challenges up-front but results in a better lifestyle.

Conclusion

Turning your agency into a productized service is not about staying within your expertise. It’s about packaging it in a way that’s more sustainable, scalable, and beneficial for you and your clients. It might feel overwhelming to make this shift, but the potential benefits of both profitability and lifestyle are worth it.

I’d encourage you to embrace the productized model and unlock new levels of success. You’ve already done the hard part, which is building a successful business. You understand your clients’ needs. Now, standardize your offerings and SOPs and build a client-centric system that transforms your agency and unlocks recurring revenue.