Solo Summit Recap: How to Scale Your Solo Business Beyond Billable Hours

As a solopreneur, you’re likely far too familiar with this common trap: If you’re not working, you’re not earning money. And while trading your time for dollars is a common model, it does limit your ability to scale your solo business. After all, there are only so many hours in the day. 

Fortunately, it’s more than possible to move away from the billable hours approach. “Building a better business is not about working harder,” explained Sam Lee, Founder of IndeCollective, during his “Breaking Free of the Time for Money Trap” session of Lettuce’s recent Solo Summit.

“It’s about working smarter and gradually translating your years or even decades of experience into a set of more strategic, scalable solutions,” he continued. 

Wondering how to do that? It’s all about productization. Sam has a three-part strategy you can use to embrace productization and build a scalable, sustainable solo business that doesn’t require endless hours.

What Exactly Is Productization?

The term “productization” might inspire visions of cranking out generic work like a factory, but that’s not the case. “Productization is about putting just enough structure around your brilliance so that you can consistently accomplish three things,” said Sam. These include:

• Consistently and confidently doing your best work for your clients.
• Consistently and confidently selling engagements that always optimize for income, impact, and freedom.
• Building processes, systems, and tools that take you out of the redundant aspects of your work and free you up for more strategic and creative thinking.

It’s not about stripping away creativity or fitting yourself into a mold. It’s about giving yourself the clarity and support you need to work more efficiently. As Sam shared, that not only scales your business, but also gives you “so much more time for people and passion projects that matter most to you. That is what productization is all about.”

3 Steps to Productize Your Solo Business

Particularly if you’ve built your business as a service provider, it can feel tough to switch into a productization mindset. Sam’s three-step process will get you started on the right track. 

Step #1: Define Your Best-Fit Clients

Your best-fit clients are the ones “for whom you can show up as an expert, create outsized value, and also really enjoy doing the work,” said Sam. These types of clients don’t want to work with generalists—they want to work with “experts like you, people who have been there and done that.” Here’s how to find them:

1. Look Back: Reflect on the work you’ve done for clients over the past year (or even several years). Put each client or engagement in its own row on a spreadsheet or piece of paper. Next, add three columns where you can rank your:

• Outcomes: Which of these clients and engagements drove the biggest outcomes for your client?
• Profitability: Which of these clients and engagements drove the biggest income and profitability for your solo business?
• Joy: Which of these clients and engagements gave you the most happiness and satisfaction?

Rank each client or project in each category using a scale of 0 to 5 (with 5 being the best). You’ll end up with something that looks like this:

3. Spot Patterns: Once you’ve ranked everything, Sam said it’s easy to total up each row “and see which of these clients and engagements rises to the top.” Here’s a look at our example:

Client B and C came out well ahead of Client A. So, why is that the case? “What made them the best fit?” Sam asked. “What are the common patterns?”

This exercise helps you drill down and gain a deeper understanding of what makes a client a great match for you and your business, so you know what to focus on as you pursue future work. As Sam explained, “When you get under the hood of the work you’ve done, there is gold in plain sight.”

3. Look Forward: Don’t stop there. Sam said it’s smart to dig a little deeper by setting up three to five user research interviews with people who look like your best-fit clients. These conversations will help you “confirm or invalidate whether or not this is the right type of client for you.” 

Step #2: Identify Their Painkiller Problems

Think of painkiller problems like the big, juicy issues your clients are most eager to address. If you’re the one who can solve them, Sam explained that your best-fit clients are “going to pick up the phone, answer the call, sign the contract, and pay for the value created when an expert like you comes to them with a proven approach.”

Of course, the challenging part is identifying these problems in the first place. Sam recommends thinking through four things:

1. Frequency: Is it a recurring painful nuisance or a one-time and nice-to-solve issue?
2. Cost: How much does this problem hurt? Is it costing them revenue? Reputation? Something else?
3. Urgency: Is this a must-solve-today problem, or is this better thought about next month, next quarter, or next year?
4. Visibility: Is the problem you’re trying to solve already understood and highly visible for that prospective client?

“If it’s highly visible, urgent, costly, and frequent, you’re going to have a lot of business,” Sam shared. “If not? You’re going to have a lot of education to do.”

Sam advises finding problems that meet at least three of the above criteria. If your problem falls short, head back to the drawing board, speak to more of your best-fit clients, and dig in to understand even more about their top one or two challenges.

Step #3: Design Strategic Solutions

You’ve laid the groundwork—and now you’re ready to productize. You don’t need to jump on the first idea that comes to you. Rather, Sam suggests following this process:

• Reflect: Look back at your clients and engagements that rose to the top in the first step. Ask yourself: Which aspects of that work could be more repeatable?
• Validate: Once you have an idea of something to productize, validate your strategic solution using the information you collected during your user research interviews. Sam also recommends you start pitching now “because the number one way to know if you are keying into a painful problem is whether or not someone is ready to close.”
• Scale: Productization doesn’t need to be an overnight overhaul. Sam said you can grow and implement your solution by “gradually building processes, systems, tools, and other artifacts like decks” to bring more systems to your work and avoid repetitive tasks.

You can repeat these same steps whenever you have a nugget of inspiration for something you could productize or systemize within your business.

Build Beyond Billable Hours

Productization isn’t about boxing yourself in—it’s about giving yourself the structure and clarity you need to work smarter, serve your clients better, and free up more time for the parts of your solo business you truly enjoy. As Sam put it, “If you walk this threefold path, you can unlock more income, impact, and creativity in your business and life.” 

Learn more about productization by watching Sam’s full session or check out the complete video library to get more insights from the other experts at Solo Summit.