What’s on the menu?

How does your menu of services look at the moment?

I can’t blame you if you don’t do this, but… if you spent 10 minutes listing every service you’d offer if someone asked you, how long would that list be?

Five things? Ten? More?

If it’s more, my guess is you’ve felt some of these:

• Marketing is tricky
• Hard to describe what you do when someone asks
• Weeks feel scattered
• Projects overlap
• Deadlines often collide on the same day… (How!? Why!?)

I won’t lie and say these things go away completely when you create fixed-price products, but a lot of it gets a lot easier.

A few years back, a friend opened a Vietnamese restaurant in London – it became popular quickly, and we hiked out there a lot to support him (we genuinely craved his dishes).

The menu changed occasionally, but it only ever listed five or six meals to choose from.

It was always hard to choose, because choosing meant missing out on everything else.

…but it was far easier than dining at the club, where the menu is six fold-out A4 pages with seafood, salads, burgers, pizzas, pastas, curries, mezzes, wraps, and whatever else I’m forgetting.

Aside from the paradox of choice for diners, that’s a lot of ingredients and processes for a kitchen to hold and expect to run efficiently.

If you’re working solo, trying to maintain a high standard for the dozens of services you offer – even if you’re really super good at processes and systems and organisation – you have to expect things to fall through the cracks.

Fixed-price offers don’t solve all of the problems, but they can fix a lot of them.