5 min read · Written by Grant Rayner on 12 Jul 2023
Share by emailRecent articles have focused on business design. This and the next few articles will shift to focus on designing products and services.
As you set up shop as an independent security professional, one of your first priorities will be to determine what products and services you intend to sell.
How you approach the development of your products and services will be a major factor in your eventual success. Of course, how you promote and sell your products and services will also be a huge factor, but we’ll get to that in future articles.
In this article, I’m going to provide a brief introduction to services. I’ll start with a simple definition of services, share some thoughts on why clients need services, create a simple taxonomy of services. I’ll wrap up with some initial thoughts on the limitations of services.
Let’s start with a simple definition of services.
In the context of a services business, a ‘service’ is a specific offering or solution that the business provides to its clients. Services can include consulting, training, assessments, or other specialised services that are tailored to meet the needs of your clients.
You might think your biggest competitor is one of the global security companies. In fact, as an independent security profession, your biggest competitor is your client. More specifically, your client doing the work with their own internal resources rather than using your services. Why would they hire you to deliver a service that they can do themselves? Also, how do they justify to management that they need to allocate budget to pay someone else to do something when they could just do it themselves?
It’s interesting and instructive to explore why clients might need (or want) to pay for services. As you start the process of determining what services you want to offer your clients, it’s useful to consider the types of services they might actually be looking for and why.
A client may require services for a range of reasons, including the following:
In addition to these factors, there’s a few additional factors that should drive clients to use external services:
Clients may not necessarily consider these additional factors when they make their decision. As you build your services, you should integrate these factors into your value proposition. When you write proposals, you should certainly stress speed and efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, where appropriate.
There’s one additional factor, which I’d term ‘entertainment and variation’. A client might bring you in to provide training or a briefing that they could easily do themselves, but believe that bringing someone else in will be more interesting for their team. I’ve been involved with multiple engagements of this nature. Some paid and some pro bono, but always interesting.
In the security industry, there are a host of potential services you could potentially offer as an independent security professional. Here’s a simple taxonomy:
This is obviously not an exhaustive list, and some services may overlap with others.
There’s quite a bit to choose from here, and there’s an art and science to determining which services you should incorporate into your business. Some services are also complementary. For example, if you were running emergency response training, it would also make sense to offer planning and on-site response support.
As we’re focused on independent security professionals—one-person operations—you’ll need to consider, out of these services, which can be delivered by an individual. As I’ll cover in a later article, response can be difficult service for an individual to offer, because you can’t always guarantee your availability at short notice.
Let’s wrap up this article by focusing on some of the challenges and limitations of services. How you manage these challenges and limitations will be key to your overall success.
You’ll face three main challenges and limitations when incorporating services into your business:
I’ll focus on one of these challenges here: the upper limits on revenue from services. I’ll cover the other challenges in detail in later articles.
The fact that there are upper limits on revenue from services is one of the most important things you need to understand as you design services, and it’s something you’ll need to take conscious action to mitigate.
What drives the upper limits on revenue? Time and rate.
As you’ll learn in later articles, you won’t have that much flexibility to increase your day rate. You’re also limited in the number of hours you can work in a day, and the number of days you can work in a year.
Let’s explore the upper end of the upper limit of revenue. Let’s say you can charge $2,500 a day and you’re capable of working 5 day weeks for 48 weeks of the year. Your business will earn $600,000. That’s a healthy revenue for a one-person services business, assuming you’re able to survive the year. However, unless you’re able to innovate, based on these parameters, your revenue potential is capped at $600,000 a year.
Of course, the reality is that it’s unlikely you’ll get 240 days of work a year. It’s also unlikely that you’ll be able to invoice $2,500 a day for every project. So, the reality is that your upper limit on revenue will be considerably less than $600,000.
A more realistic upper limit would be based on $1,500 a day for 3 days a week, working 48 weeks a year. In this scenario, your annual revenue would be $216,000 a year. That’s nowhere near as good as $600,000 and considerably less than your earning potential. But at least you won’t kill yourself getting there.
I’ll explore how to break through these revenue limits in future articles.