Stop Selling Your Time, Sell Service Products Instead

Hi I’m Anton the founder of ManyHands. I’ve been running Urbian, a service based business that has been fortunate to have designed and built software for some of the largest companies in SA and globally for the last 20 years.

So believe me I know when I say making money from selling time is difficult. We found it to be just a really model for billing expertise. The more experience you get the more your hourly rate goes up, but the more you have to justify how much time something takes to do. And then if you’re good at your job and you can do things faster, you’re penalised in revenue because you now delivered in 2 hours and not 5.

Having two or three massive bluechip clients that make up more than 60% of your revenue is a very risky place to be. When one of those clients leave, it takes ages to recover from and make up that lost revenue.

Large clients are often the most demanding and make you work in their tools and processes. Working in 10 different tools and processes for 10 different clients is the stuff of project management nightmares making for unhappy staff and a generally terrible chaotic working life.

Doing free work is never a good idea. Clients asking for custom proposals, quotes and pitches to award work is a trade where you are always the looser.

Spreading your service offering thin in order to service more clients to increase your revenue most of the time leads to low quality work and lower profit margins due to increasing overheads.

So the answer to the above is the productised services movement, which in case you are not familiar is the approach of selling services like products. Moving away from treating each new client and project as something completely unique and bespoke and instead packaging up your services into a set of neat repeatable deliverables with a fixed price and fixed timeframe that doesn’t change from client to client.

Productised services or what’s coined as ‘Productising Yourself’ has been around for a few years, popularised by various people like the Naval Ravikant, Jonathan Stark, Chris Do and Jack Butcher from Visualise Value, to name a few. Loads of businesses have come out with the popularised ‘unlimited’ service subscription offerings for design, marketing and even coding. Where you browse their service packages and pay for it with a credit card like you would software.

So just to be clear, we are fully behind the productised service model and believe that in the future most services are gong to be bought this way. So whether you choose to go all in and only offer services on a productised model or you go hybrid where you sell productised services as well as custom projects, the point is this is proven to work for 90% of almost all kinds of service businesses.

But the real question is: how do we do this. Great question, so generally these are the options:

• You do it all yourself: You package up your services, you systematise your processes and deliverables, you setup your project management software of choice, you design and create the website and you integrate a payment gateway. Where this falls down is you will be surprised at how long it takes to setup (so much so that there are courses and agencies that you have to pay to help you do this) and once you’re set up you have to go out and tell the world that your productised services are for sale, unless you’re happy to grow is slowly over time.
  
  or
  
• You choose to upload your productised services to a freelance marketplace like Upwork or Fivver to get customers. The thing with that is, these freelance marketplaces were started as cheap services from freelancers. Most of the clients that buy on these marketplaces have been groomed to shop for price first and quality later. The whole aim of Productised Services is not about offering less quality, at a cheaper price, it’s about quality work from specialist’s in an easy to buy model. Competing with low priced freelancers doesn’t often end well. Then on top of that to take a 20% hit on commission fees, is tough to swallow.

So as we’ve spent time looking at this ourselves and talking to others, we see the following unmet needs:

• A credible platform where any service business (not only freelancers) can productise their services and keep all of their earnings. No commission.
• A way for service businesses to spend more time serving clients rather than trying to find new clients.
• Then a place where a service business can be assured that if clients buy from them that they never have to worry about being paid.
• Then a way for service businesses to spend as much of their time as possible delivery the service rather than spending time explaining things in meetings and unnecessary admin.

So we’ve been in closed beta for the last 2 years creating something that can fill the gaps we see. These gaps fall into 2 main buckets:

1. The first, is a set of tools that make it super easy to create productised services as well as managing all the clients that buy your productised services without your hair getting on fire.  
   and
2. Second, is a way to get clients. A system that can consistently bring you the right clients to your productised services who are ready to buy, instead of you solely having to go out and find clients yourself.

Let’s start with me briefly explaining how we’ve made it easy to start selling productised services in no time at all:

• Firstly, we’ve made it super simple for you to create as many Service Pack’s as you like which look gorgeous on desktop screens and even better on mobile.
• You can create Service Packs that are sold once-off or monthly. You set your fixed price and choose whether to offer more than one pricing option with different prices and different deliverables for each option.
• You set the terms of how your service works, and can choose to go super specialised by selling Service Packs that work with specific tools like Shopify, Xero or industry specialisation like Digital Marketing for Doctors or Legal Services for the Film Industry.
• All these service Packs are added to your company profile with links to your website, social channels and all your reviews.
• Clients can buy your services using over 10 payment methods, and we’re adding more all the time. Imagine how many more clients could afford your services if they could pay over time with Buy Now Pay Later.
• Clients have to pay upfront to buy your Service and if you accept, the full amount is deducted and held in escrow so there is never a scenario where you are chasing clients for payments after work had done.
• As soon as a service is bought deliverables are turned into a Task list. So when your client buys your Service Pack, they don’t need to chat to you about what it is you’re doing and when you’re doing it, they get notified every time you tick off a task. No chatting needed.
• Talking about no chatting, we created a ‘Weekly update’ feature with the sole purpose of reducing client communication and chatting that is mostly around updating the client on progress. Every week you submit a weekly update on anything important, the client get’s that and happiness. Turns a little pro-active communication goes a long way.
• Something we’ve also done is to give you even more time back by giving you your very own AI assistant to help you get your work done faster and at a higher quality built on the largest language model in the world ChatGPT 4.
• When all the tasks are done the client has 2 days to approve and you get paid out to the bank account of your choice. No invoicing, no chasing up payments.
• Also when we pay out from a Service Pack directly bought from you, we don’t take any commission. That’s right you keep all the money you make from selling a service.

Ok, now let’s talk about how we bring clients to you:

• Just something to mention, while we do allow freelancers to sell services on ManyHands we are not a freelance marketplace, actually over 80% of the service pro’s on ManyHands are companies.
• What we are strict on is quality. We only allow quality Service Packs delivered by experienced professionals. To use the App Store analogy, we’re more Apple app store than the anything goes Android Play Store.
• Vetted quality Service Packs is what we promise clients who buy from us and that’s why we are able to bring you clients by the truck load.
• So how do we get all these clients. That’s where our partner ecosystem comes in.
• We partner with companies who have large customer bases. These companies get a ‘white-labelled’ version of ManyHands in their brand and colours on their own URL. We share any revenue made from the sale of Service Packs sold to their customers. So in essence, when you create a Service Pack it’s not only going live on ManyHands it’s going live to our entire partner base of over 260k+ customers and growing.
• The quality of the services on offer and the low barrier to purchase we reckon is our secret sauce, loads of companies seem to agree. So much so that the likes of even Vodacom decided to partner with us to bring services to their SME customers.

We're currently in private beta, if you like this productised services language and are keen to find out more of what it's about. Send me an email at anton@manyhands.co.za and I'll get you onboarded to ManyHands to start productising some of your services.