February 21, 2021

$10,000 for a cake?

Offering a range of products and services is a great way to increase the odds of making a sale when a prospective client comes along.

BUT!

I am NOT suggesting you should become a generalist and offer a buffet of tangentially related products and services.

That would be bad.

When I say “offer a range of products and services” what I mean is that you should create a product ladder.

Ideally, each rung of your product ladder would be focused on the same domain of expertise, but with more or less of your involvement.

So it’s not a question of selling whatever random things you’re capable of, it’s a question of picking an area to focus on and packaging your expertise in a variety of delivery formats.

For example, let’s say you are a recognized expert at baking amazing wedding cakes.

If you wanted to package this expertise to sell at a range of prices, a good product ladder might look like this:

(By the way, if you think nobody would ever spend $10,000 on a wedding cake, you’re in for a surprise if you Google it.)

For comparison, a BAD product ladder for a wedding cake baker would look like this:

Could someone who knows how to make wedding cakes also bake pie and pizza and muffins?

Sure.

But the rungs of this bad product ladder don’t naturally align with each other.

There is no meaningful central theme. There’s no synergy, no positioning, no strategy.

It’s just someone throwing fudge against the wall to see what sticks.

Here’s the thing...

Packaging your expertise for sale at different price points is NOT the same thing as being a jack-of-all-trades generalist who sells whatever people ask for.

Creating a focused product ladder won’t guarantee that you will reach stratospheric levels of profitability, but I can promise you this...

A jack-of-all-trades baker is never going to get $10,000 for a wedding cake.

Yours,

—J

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