SERVICE OVERVIEW

VETTING, VALUING, MARKETING AND SELLING NEW SERVICES

What Is This Service?

Our New Service Roll Out program prepares a new service to realize brisk uptake and maximum perceived value by ideal clients. This service is the ultimate entrepreneurial act, calling into existence that which does not exist. A successful new service adds meaningful revenue and profits that positively impact EBITDA and valuation for mid-size service firms. Our New Service Roll Out program also reduces the risks associated with a new service by defining crystal clear kill-or-keep criteria.

Most successful mid-size service firms offer a core stable of services. The revenue from these services provides the financial foundation of the firm. Yet, firm leaders often have hunches, ideas and even educated guesses about other services they could add. Some of these new services could simply produce incremental value to clients and incremental margin to their firm. Other new services might one day rise to the level of the core service offerings.

An organized and methodical new service development process is the key to staying on the cutting edge of innovation and beating the competition. This is also key to delivering client delight. We believe the right process is to vet, value, market and then sell new services with some very specific metrics in place to monitor outcomes. We also believe that milestones with timelines are critical and should be paired with kill-or-keep decision moments to protect your brand and financial strength.

At The Shattuck Group, we have seen some new services for our clients generate a trickle of revenue, then a stream, then a river and then a flood. Other new services do little more than break even financially. Still others are losers and end up costing money rather than making money. What’s the difference the big winners and the losers?

First, and most importantly, we do not have a crystal ball. We can not look into the future and see which new services will be winners or losers. But we can make some very educated and well-informed guesses. We can also test the market and get feedback that will be essential to defining how much money and effort you should put into promoting and new service and how much you should charge for it.

When mid-size service firms want to roll out a new service, they are usually pondering these questions:

• Who is the ideal client for this service?
• What are the features and benefits of the service?
• How do we package the service with the right deliverables?
• What do we think ideal clients will find valuable about this service?
• How much should we charge for this service?
• How much revenue do we think this service could generate in 1 year, 3 years, 5 years or longer?
• How do we market the service?
• Who should sell the service and how long do we think the average sales cycle would be?
• Does this service require a complex sale or a simple sale?
• Who are the competitors for this service and how is our offering different or better?
• What are the barriers to entry for this service?
• How much will it cost us to get the service off the ground?
• What are our minimum success criteria to keep the service offering alive?
• What are our metrics for success in terms of client uptake, engagements, revenue, profit and contribution to EBITDA?
• What are the milestones and timeframes we need to set to determine if we should kill the service or keep it going?

Many entrepreneurially minded service firm leaders will simply dive right into marketing a new service, especially if they perceive the barriers to entry to be low and the likelihood of success to be high. In our experience, over-confidence in the early stages of forming a new service will only lead to heartache and financial losses down the road.

Sometimes those losses come from investing in a service for too long, well after the market has disavowed interest. Other times the losses are opportunity losses, where a firm could have spent their time, energy and money on other initiatives that would have provided better returns. Still other times the losses come from not charging enough for services, and missing out on valuable profits, because they didn’t do enough research and understand the perceived value of the service.

There are very few people with the Midas touch in the world. Most of us live in a world where the risks are very real and so are our blind spots. This means that most service firm leaders will need a disciplined approach to vetting, valuing, marketing and selling a new service. Our New Service Roll Out program delivers that disciplined approach.

Who Needs This Service?

Professional service firms who:

• Want to test the waters with a new service, but also want to reduce the risks associated with the roll out.
• Want to develop a disciplined approach for launching the new service.
• Want to set specific metrics and timelines for success for the new service.
• Want to develop crystal clear keep-or-kill criteria.
• Desire to accelerate the success of the new service by filling a pipeline right away with prospective ideal clients.
• Have tried to offer other new services but did not achieve their desired outcomes.

To learn more about how we deliver this service, please click on Our Approach above.

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