Adam Radly
Founder
Founder of IIMAGINE.
More than $100M raised.
TEDx Talk about passion > 1 Million views. Founder of World Reconciliation Day with Nelson Mandela. Founder of One Direct Democracy.
Download Our Free ‘Start A Business’ Guide
Use our “Impact Entrepreneurship” checklist to start your business and make the world better.
Service Business Ideas: Is Your Idea A Good Idea?
Let’s talk about your service business ideas and how to decide which services to offer in your business.
How do you decide which services to offer and how to price them?
You can start by doing a quick review of the services that you are thinking about offering by answering the 5 questions below:
-
Is there enough demand to justify offering the service?
-
Do you have a deep understanding of what the customer “really wants and values”?
-
Can you access the target market with your available resources, skills, and budget?
-
Can you differentiate yourself from the competition?
-
Can you (or someone in your org organization) deliver a high-quality service?
If you feel like you have satisfactory answers to all of these questions, then you can move on to the next article/video in the series.
If you have concerns about one or more of them you should work through the steps below to identify the weaknesses in your plan and fix them.
Service Business Ideas: Generalist Or Specialist
The first decision you need to make is whether you want to be a specialist or a generalist.
It makes sense to be a specialist if you have advanced skills and experience in a particular service.
The trade-off that you’re making as a specialist is that you will reduce the size of your addressable market by only offering one service but you will increase the chances of winning new business by making it obvious to clients that you are a specialist and have an advanced skill set in the service that they are looking for.
When you decide to become a generalist, you’re maximizing the size of your addressable market and you are looking for customers that don’t have any advanced requirements or customers that value the idea of getting multiple services from one place.
There’s one important point you need to keep in mind. It takes a lot of time and effort to get a paying customer and it’s much easier to sell services to existing customers than selling to new prospective customers. One way to increase the average revenue per customer is to offer related services.
Service Business Ideas: Who Will Deliver The Service?
After deciding whether you want to be a generalist or a specialist, the next step is to decide who will deliver the service.
If you have the skills required to deliver the service yourself, you enjoy doing this work and you’re happy to just create a business that can pay you a reasonable salary then it makes sense to do the work yourself.
On the other hand, if you don’t have the skills, don’t enjoy doing the work or you have big plans for expanding your business then it makes sense to pay other people to do the work so that you can focus on other things in the business.
Make a decision about which one or more services you will provide, set your pricing and decide who will deliver the service.
The services and pricing that you just selected in this step are not set in stone yet. This is just a starting point. You’ll make a final decision after completing some of the next steps.
Download Our Free ‘Start A Business’ Guide
Use our “Impact Entrepreneurship” checklist to start your business and make the world better.
Service Business Ideas: Customer Research
After deciding on the services that you will offer, it’s important to make sure that customers really do want those services.
The simplest way to research what customers are thinking and what customers really want is to go to groups on social media relating to your service or to go to industry-specific forums.
The question you’re trying to answer is this – is there an unsatisfied demand for the service that you want to offer?
If the answer is yes, you’re good to go.
If the answer is no, then you need to spend time looking for an unsatisfied demand that you’re capable of addressing.
Based on this research, adjust or refine your service and or price accordingly.
Service Business Ideas: Competitor Research
The simplest way to do a competitor research is to look at the website, social presence and reviews of your competitors.
Try to figure out what they’re doing well and not so well.
Look at their website to figure out which services they’re offering and look at the reviews.
Then figure out how you compare to your competitors. If you compare well, you’re good to go.
If you don’t, you need to figure out what your competitors are not offering, or services that they are offering but not doing a good job.
Based on this research, adjust or refine your service and or price accordingly.
Okay now we’re still not done with finalising the service.
Unique Selling Proposition
Before finalizing the services you’re going to offer you need to get very clear about your unique selling proposition.
The one question that you will need to answer every time you talk to a potential customer is, why should I choose you?
I don’t how you can reasonably expect to succeed if you don’t have a good answer to that question.
Your answer to this question could be the difference between the success and failure of your entire business.
I’m pretty sure that you all have a selling proposition but I’m also pretty sure that 99% of you don’t have a “unique” selling proposition. So how do you go about developing one?
The summary is that you need to research your potential customers to find out what is most important to them and you need to research your potential competitors to find out how you compare to them.
Then you need to make an adjustment to your services that relates to something that matters to your customers AND also differentiates you from your competitors.
If you don’t have a strong USP check out my article/video the video in this series about how to develop a unique selling proposition.
Again, based on this research, adjust or refine your Service and or price accordingly.
The most important thing you need to understand here is that this is an iterative process.
Every time you make an adjustment to your services or your pricing or your USP you might end up triggering a new problem that needs to be solved.
It’s like solving a Rubik’s cube. When you put one color into place, it pushes another one out of place.
So you need to keep going around and around until you have everything right. This process is also known as finding ‘product-market fit”.
This is an ongoing process. The steps above are required to get started.
You will refine your services even further after getting feedback from clients about what they like, don’t like, value, and don’t value as well as reviewing your own ability to deliver the service.
How To Sell Services And Optimize Results
Check our guide about how to deliver your services, how to create a brand and how to create a website for your business.
After attracting your target market to your website you will need to make sure that you have created an effective funnel and addressed all of the website trust required to maximize conversions.
Harvard Business Review also recommends adjusting the way you deliver service by finding ways to “have the customer do the work”.
Download Our Free ‘Start A Business’ Guide
Use our “Impact Entrepreneurship” checklist to start your business and make the world better.