Through the process of writing his latest book, Blair's thinking has evolved on whether or not firms should resist the urge to productize their services as they work to creatively meet the unique needs of each client.

 



















































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Transcript

David C. Baker: All right, Blair, it's been, uff, months since we've actually recorded an episode because we've both been doing things. You were traveling. Now we're recording again. I had to go look for my mic, dust it off, and all this stuff, but I like the way 2025 is starting because this is a mea culpa where you've just made this long list of places you've been wrong. We're just going to work through them,-

Blair: The list of one.

David: -hopefully we'll get through them in this year.

[laughter]

Blair Enns: We'll devote the year 2025 to fixing Blair's mistakes.

David: Yes. The topic, I guess we'll just call this, "To standardize or customize." In the past, you've been a proponent of customizing wherever possible. You've rethought that just a little bit. Tell us more about this.

Blair: Yes.

David: Ignore all of my unnecessary context setting right there.

Blair: [laughs] I always do, but thank you for the invitation to do that. I'm going to frame this through my thought processes or what I saw as true while I was writing different books. While I was writing the recent book The Four Conversations: A New Model for Expertise, I knew I had to revisit this topic that I addressed in my previous book from 2018, which was Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour. In Pricing Creativity, I was pretty adamant that as a creative firm, your services or your delivery model should be customized.

What I mean by that is, when you look at your client situations, you should see every client as unique, therefore every proposal should be unique. You didn't see yourself as doing the same things to different clients. You would harness your creative superpower, and again, creativity, as I see it, and this comes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, creativity is the ability to see, the ability to bring a novel perspective to a problem. I believe that the superpower of a creative person and a creative firm is the ability to think about the problem differently. I still believe this, I'm just less rigid.

I thought, as a creative firm, you should resist the urge to productize your services for that reason that you shouldn't impair that superpower, which is your ability to think differently about the problem. You and I both know Jack Skeels, and I've referenced his thinking on this before on multiple episodes. I've said I was really struck by the first time or one of the first times I heard him speak.

He was talking about the differences between agencies and consulting firms, and he pointed out that consulting firms have this convergent thinking model where they converge on the single solution for whatever the common problem is, and then they apply that single solution, obviously with some variation, across all of their clients in a sector. They converge on the solution, whereas creative firms are really businesses of divergent thinking, of you get different thoughts, different thinking styles, different ways of viewing and thinking about the problem, and you recognize the uniqueness in every situation.

I've always been a fan of the customization of your services where you see every client is a blank slate. You bring that superpower to bear. My experience when I saw my clients first start to productize was that they made similar mistakes on the pricing dimension. They would start to price the product, not the client, which led them away from value-based pricing. When I wrote Pricing Creativity, and I was all in on value-based pricing, and I still feel very high on it, but I would say short of all in on it. It was my point of view that all creative firms should be fully customized in the way they deliver their solutions and the way they price those solutions.

David: Yes, and that was sort of the larger context, right? Because the reason it came up so logically when you're thinking about pricing is because if you productize something, there's the potential that, one, maybe you're not listening carefully in those conversations, which is also something you talk about, if you just automatically jump to the same solution every time. You also are potentially leaving money on the table because you're not delivering what this particular client needs. I've noticed something when I talk with my clients or I'm at an event or something, and this topic of productization comes up, the objections to productizing services often come from kind of two areas, sometimes both or just one or the other.

One is they don't understand how that would even be possible because they're thinking of it from the perspective of an undifferentiated firm. In those cases, every one of the situations is different because the clients that they're faced with are different every time, and so it's hard for them to picture that. Then the other is that they're sort of in the mindset of not so much leading the client.

A client of mine wrote a book about account management called Tell Your Clients Where to Go! I thought that was just such a great topic. They're more in the order-taking mode. In that mode, you can't, you know, you're not imposing a productized service because you're simply doing whatever the client wants. This is one of those topics that just keeps coming up over the last few decades. I always enjoy thinking about it. Maybe to make this a little bit easier, can you walk us through this two-by-two model of this? We'll put this in the show notes as well.

Blair: Sure. I think, of all the sections I wrote in the book, the largest piece that was left on the cutting room floor that didn't make the book was this big, long diatribe on customization versus standardization. In the end, I think I looked at it, I thought, "Oh, this whole section has to go." It was pages and pages because it was me thinking through the problem. We've talked about this before. I think through my fingers. I have to write to fully understand and arrive at some sort of cohesive point of view on it. In the end, I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote around in circles. Then what made it to the book is a simple two by two with only a couple of pages of explanation.

The two by two is customization or standardization on one axis, and delivery model and pricing model on the other axis. Making the point that you simply have to make the decision, "Are you going to customize or standardize your delivery model?" We'll get into this, and "Are you going to customize or standardize your pricing?" Basically, these are the four options. There are four quadrants in a two by two, and those are really only your four options. I look at the four options and I could make a case for being in any of those quadrants.

I never studied economics in depth, but I feel like I turned into more of an economist as I get older where what I mean by that is I just see less right and wrong and more trade-offs. It's just trade-offs. What are their trade-offs of customizing your delivery model, how you deliver your services versus standardizing your delivery model? It's really as simple as that. There are trade-offs, and everybody would kind of prioritize their trade-offs and is going to do what they feel is best for them and their business. What's best for them and their business is often very much kind of a personal story of what makes the most sense for them as a person.

David: Yes.

Blair: Do you want me to walk through the model?

David: Yes, walk through the model for us.

Blair: Okay. I've got customized and standardized on the vertical axis, and delivery and pricing on the horizontal axis. If we start with delivery models, customized delivery model means that you sell an infinite number of bespoke solutions. Like I said earlier, my previous firmly held point of view that all creative firms should think about it this way is that every client is a unique slate of possibility, therefore every solution, every proposal should be unique. I won't talk about pricing here, but everything is a blank slate.

When you first fall in love with value-based pricing and the value conversation, you realize the value conversation, client comes to you self-diagnosed, self-prescribed, and they're just looking for sometimes a highly specified solution. Then you have a value conversation with them and you essentially transcend if not the problem as they've defined it, certainly the solution as they've def