3 min read · Written by Grant Rayner on 10 Jan 2024
Share by emailOver the past few weeks, I’ve focused on different types of products that you could incorporate into your portfolio of products and services as an independent consultant. I’ve discussed books, templates, subscription products, software, packaged service, and online training.
I’d like to wrap up this topic by focusing on several product strategies that you might find useful as you go about integrating products into your own business.
Don’t start your product journey by building a large product that takes months of your time to develop (effectively, tens of thousands of dollars). Large books and complex applications fall into this category.
Instead, start small by building a relatively simple product that requires minimal investment in terms of your time and money. In the process, you’ll learn how to market products and gain a better appreciation for what your customers may want.
If you plan to write books or develop applications, you can do this in the background while you continue working on other projects that will generate short-term revenue.
Digital products scale. Whether you’re offering books or training, digital products enable you to reach many thousands of customers. Scale not only enables you to sell more products but it enables more people to know of you and your work.
At the same time, I recommend that you still maintain ‘high-touch’ services, such as consulting and training. Doing so places you in the room with the client, rather than being a relatively unknown person that people have never met. In this industry, trust is fundamentally important, and trust is best built face to face.
One factor to consider with digital products is that you may find there isn’t a significant overlap with your normal corporate customers. From my own experience, the people that buy my books aren’t necessarily the same people that buy my services.
One approach you should consider is to promote products before you build them. The benefit of promoting before you build is that it will give you a sense of potential demand. You may also receive feedback that you can use to improve your product. More importantly, you’ll avoid wasting time building something that no one actually wants or is willing to pay for.
It’s easy to keep yourself busy by tinkering with potential products. I know quite a few people who have spent years working on products that have never been sold. Instead, build products in response to a defined client need. If you have spare time, you can spend this time engaging with clients, writing articles, or working on a book (yes, a book is a product, but it’s something that you can work on over time to complete).
Even better, build on work that’s already been completed as part of a client project.
Many of my best product ideas have come from designing a solution for one client, realising that solution has broader application, and then packaging the solution as a product for sale to multiple customers. I discussed this approach in detail in my earlier article on packaged services. The key advantage of this approach is that it reduces the up-front work relating to product development. As such, each time you make a sale, a significant percentage of each dollar you earn will be profit.
Stay attuned to events and be ready to build products that help clients navigate their way through those events.
Some of my best products have been driven by events. Recent examples were the terrorist attacks in Colombo, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the risks associated with China invading Taiwan.
This isn’t ambulance chasing. Rather, it’s designing something useful in response to an immediate demand. As an independent security professional, you can move faster than your larger competitors and get the product in the hands of your customers quicker. Your ability to move quickly is a major advantage and something that you should always seek to exploit.
Looking at the example of the work I did relating to Taiwan, I spent 10 days on the ground surveying routes and exploring the east coast. This was not part of a client project, and I had to pay the costs myself. However, I saw an opportunity to get on the ground and provide granular information that would determine whether specific routes are passable (some aren’t) and whether there’s sufficient infrastructure on the east coast to make it a viable destination. Other security consulting firms would only do such work if a client paid for it. If a different client asked them for the same type of service, they would go back again and repeat the same thing. I find this approach inefficient and have found success in packaging solutions in such a way that they are accessible to multiple clients.
One of the keys to your product strategy is to integrate each of your products with other related products and services. Your articles should reference your books. Your books and articles should reference your experience and your services. Your services should reference your products. And so on. By creating an ecosystem, you invite your clients and customers to buy from you. At the same time, this approach will help to diversify your revenue stream and make your business more resilient.
From next week, I’ll shift from product strategy to get into the basics of setting up a company from the perspective of an independent security professional.