Sell your sawdust Simple frameworks for creating profitable digital products

As they say, time is money, and every entrepreneur I've ever met is short on one or the other (and sometimes both).

The following framework is one that I used to take my agency from a strictly time and materials business to a service-based product business, gaining back valuable hours while being more profitable along the way.

What does it mean to sell your sawdust?

The term "selling your sawdust" comes from the lumber industry, which began selling their waste (sawdust, chips, shredded wood, etc.) to other companies for a hefty profit.

Today you can find the byproduct of their milling process in dozens of consumer products, including concrete, particle board, synthetic fireplace logs, pet bedding, and mulch.

Taking this model and applying it to your own business, do you notice any "waste?" Are there byproducts of your work that might be valuable to potential or existing clients?

In the following sections, I'll introduce easy-to-use frameworks to help you take the services you're already providing and turn them into stand-alone products you can sell on autopilot.

From problem to product

If you're an entrepreneur, you've probably experienced the transactional nature of client services or consulting. A client offers to give you something you want (e.g., money) to help them get something they want (e.g., a bigger social presence).

To the uninitiated, it might appear that the client is simply handing over money for a bunch of new followers. But that's not the whole story.

Whether expressed or not, the client has specific metrics in mind when evaluating the value of their purchase. They're paying for tangible outcomes such as increased awareness, better conversion, more engagement, or any number of additional KPIs outlined in their brief.

The client isn't paying you for a bigger social presence; they're paying you to solve their problems. Problems like how to turn an audience into a revenue stream, getting leads for a new business venture, etc.

Luckily, most problems you'll solve during the consultation aren't unique to that particular client. Hundreds of other clients will experience similar issues at some point (whether they know it yet or not).

For many digital entrepreneurs and consultants, regardless of size, solving client problems is usually straightforward—create a practical, repeatable process that you can implement over time.

Once you take that newly created process and wrap it around an existing service, you have yoruself a new product. And there's no better way to divorce time from money and scale your business than by selling clients products that solve their problems.

But I know some of you are saying, "How will I know what problems potential clients are facing?" The short answer is that you won't—unless you change how you position yourself and your services.

In the next section, I'll show you how to identify common, recurring problems many people face by becoming a trusted partner.

Be a partner, not a vendor

One of the best ways to understand people's problems and produce value for them is to dive deeply into their business and learn everything you can from the inside out.

When you take an interest in your client's business, you hone your communication skills and engage with them in a profound and meaningful way. They start to look at you as a partner, not just another vendor. And once you have a relationship based on trust, you can start to tease out answers to questions that might not come up otherwise.

As a consultant, I spent a lot of time identifying common client issues and then building service-based products to solve those problems. The following is a list of questions, answers, and, ultimately, products I created after learning what they needed:

These problems and solutions outlined above aren't new—and they're certainly not unique. But by becoming a trusted partner, I could pinpoint recurring client needs early in the vetting period and assemble solutions into neat, process-driven packages to sell to clients over and over again.

Creating demand for your service-based products

Now that we've identified ways to create products out of your daily routine, let's look at how you can generate demand for these products to sell more.

Offer your products to existing clients

The easiest and most obvious way to generate demand for your products is to offer them to your existing client base. If you have multiple clients (which you should), there's likely an opportunity to cross-sell your products to clients in different industries or backgrounds.

Add your products to the new client sales cycle

Another way to introduce your offering (and increase average order value) is to include your products a la cart for all incoming clients. These products already exist, so it's simply a matter of adapting them to specific client needs.

And even if they don't need your product now, there's still an opportunity to sell them later once you thoroughly break down project needs and goals.

Sell your products to strangers (not in a weird way)

If you have a marketing budget, it couldn't hurt to create a landing page for each of your unique product offerings and drive traffic there.

Position your product as the solution to your potential customer's problems, empathize with them, and offer something that will give them a quick win.

From there, the door will be open to upsell in the future—turning a small, lightweight sale into a more robust relationship in time.

Oh, and if you don't have a marketing budget, these pages are a great way to attract organic search traffic by adding choice keywords. With a little bit of work, these products can also become businesses of their own—but that's another article.

Make it once, sell it forever

By now, you should be able to see the value of turning repetitious, tedious parts of projects into one-off products that you can sell again and again.

I hope these ideas spark your curiosity and set you down a path to readjust your thinking around service-based products and frameworks—ultimately using them to sell more and work less.