Productising a Service Business (Part 1) | Hacker News Reader

Productising a Service Business (Part 1)

theprocedurepeople.com

48 pointsdools6 comments

Financial Services and Insurance Services sell actual products though. An option is a product, insurance policies are products.

Right, they are. But what makes them a product? Really, all they are is a contract, an agreement. A really really well defined agreement. There are also associated processes for executing that agreement.

How does that differ from, say, the person who "knows heaps about the web and will build you a website"? Well, their agreement (and processes, usually) aren't as well defined.

My point is that those financial/insurance companies are really service businesses, it's just that their services are so well defined they behave like products, and that you can do it too.

Anything can of course be bundled and productised, including insurance. Scale can only be achieved through self service for both customers and employees/contractors. If you can facilitate a trusted connection between these two parties, without intervention, you have reached the promised land. On the other side, you must provide your workers with all the resources necessary to execute without you. Self reliant people.

An options contract or an insurance policy can be re-sold to another party without anyone needing specialized "service-like" knowledge. Generally you can classify something as a product if it can be re-sold without a specialist being involved.

You can't really re-sell a web developer.

You can package web development into neat, resellable chunks, but however scalable it might ultimately be, selling scripts, templates and cookie-cutter CMS installations is a million miles from financial services and insurance: you're actually pitching at an audience who have lower budgets than you'd have for custom design and marketing projects, and facing plenty of competition.

People in finance and insurance are highly paid precisely because regulators (and demanding clients) are persuaded that a certain level of service is required which avoids the appearance of competition from low end commodity products, and because the problems they solve are much larger than "how should I skin the company blog?"

Yes! In fact my primary "content mission" is to promote good policies & procedures as a means of creating a sellable business, much in the same way that John Warrilow does.

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