It can be hard to scale a service business if time is your major commodity.

That’s where the concept of “productizing” a service business comes in. Productizing a service business means adapting your business model to present what you offer as a product instead of a customized service. Try the following tips to successfully productize your service business: 

1. Automate your delivery – If you find yourself doing a lot of one on one repetitive education or training for your customers, consider recording the sessions and then selling the recordings online. This can be done as a onetime fee or as a subscription fee to generate recurring revenue.
2. Think “what else” – Many service based companies can bundle products with their services to make additional revenue. If you own a cleaning service, for example, consider adding organizational tools or “between clean” packages that make maintaining a clean home easier for the home owner.
3. Publish a price list – Readily available pricing information can be crucial if you want to scale from a single sale into thousands of sales. Doing custom quotes can be time consuming and may keep the number of sales down. Create a list of your most popular services and put a price next to them.

Productizing a service business may not be for you, but it can solve a number of the issues that plague small businesses. Productizing can help solve the problem of inability to scale, stress of constantly acquiring new customers and projects, and limited profits.

Uh…no. Re-marketing is pretty cool. Re-marketing lets you show online ads to people who have visited your website or used your mobile app before. For example, you go online to look for a product—a pair of shoes, a new dishwasher, a car. The site you’re on (whether it’s Google or another search engine) puts a little line of code called a cookie on your computer, smartphone or tablet. When you visit another site, there are blank ad spaces just waiting to pick up that little line of code and show you an ad for the very same product you were searching for.

Re-marketing is one of the most cost-effective tools in the online sales arena, and for some products, it’s effective at converting shoppers to buyers. Re-marketing works because it creates multiple impressions. We’ve long known that the more impressions we have of a product, the more likely we are to recognize and buy that product.

If used too frequently or too long however, re-marketing may alienate some customers as it can be seen as an aggressive and pushy sales tactic.

If you’re looking for a short-term bump in sales for a seasonal product or a limited time offer, then re-marketing could be ideal. Try starting a campaign on a regional basis or for a single product to see if re-marketing is ideal for your product or service.