The Cake is a Lie

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For many years, the word services was almost a dirty one when it came to building a consultancy. Not scalable, too slow, not big enough.

These days, as AI tools have removed a small amount of the friction inherent in scaling a consulting business, we’re seeing a resurgence in interest in focusing exclusively on service (rather than product) work.

But old habits die hard.

One of the most common ideas I keep hearing from consultants I talk to is that they want to productize their shops’ services. And from one perspective, that seems really attractive!

After all, why wouldn’t you want to retain the ability to deliver project-based work for your clients while making some recurring money off a product you sell based on what you learn from those frameworks?

The problem is that when it comes to building offerings that make sense, you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too.

We’ve seen this time and time again from consultancies much larger and much more long-standing than ours (* cough * IBM & Watson * cough *), but trying to simultaneously convince your clients to buy both services and products from you leads to a very obvious outcome:

You sell neither effectively.

The reason for this is actually pretty intuitive if you think about how this all plays out: When you sell a service, you’re selling an outcome to a problem. You either solve that problem, or you don’t (and often get paid accordingly).

When you’re selling a product, you’re trying to sell usage (and retention). Whether or not the users use the platform properly is secondary, as long as they use it.

In that weird dynamic, what happens is that if you do both, whichever you give more priority to will always win from both a sales and a relationship management perspective.

Think about it: you would never go to a client and inundate them with offerings to buy everything from your consultancy. You’re gonna pick the most effective one, and try like hell to sell them on it.

In that world, the cake is a lie (whether you realize it or not).

Because, unfortunately for us consultants, our biggest enemy is also the most inescapable one: time.

Every consultant you know trying to grow their own shop is constantly trying to fight a battle of effectively serving their clients and having enough time to even get a regular 6-8 hours of sleep on an ongoing basis.

That’s where the drive to productize comes from.

What you need to know is that productizing isn’t something that should be off-limits, but rather something that you build as you see opportunities for those offerings to have a real impact on your clients.

A well-scoped project that actually solves a problem for a client and is delivered properly is a million times more valuable to everyone involved than one where you tried to push a half-baked product that does nothing for anyone.

Similarly, a client who wants to buy a platform you built that you’re suddenly requiring a full-on implementation attached to it for no good reason is also going to be pissed.

So as you think about building your offerings, my ask to you is that you think long and hard before jumping straight into the productizing pool:

and if any of these are true, is it worth the money, effort and growing pains that it’s going to take to effectively deploy both these types of offerings at the same time?

That’s the question you really have to answer.

Every consultant you know falls into one two camps:

Especially when we go out and build our own consultancies, this plays out in two really funny ways:

For the Brains (i.e. the assholes who won’t stop tinkering with literally everything), it means having a world domination plan for literally everything. Offerings, sales processes, delivery, automation. Everything must be meticulously planned for.

and then in their obsession, they end up missing the most stupidly obvious things: the simple cues their clients and prospects give them, the warning from their team members to be less annoying.

The classics.

For the Pinkys (i.e. the ones that are here for a good time, not a long time), it means just going with the flow in a very hakuna matata sort of way, if you’ll excuse the multiple references.

The problem for them is that firing from the hip on everything means that you miss opportunities, especially when you don’t take your processes and ideas seriously enough to understand when, how, and why they sometimes don’t work.

To be more effective, you have to find a balance between being either of these.

But if you’re trying to bring other people into your team, you need to find the Pinkys to your Brain, and vice versa.

Trust me, it’ll make your life about 10000000x easier.

Probably my favorite part of running Superposition is getting to do a bunch of insane projects to talk more about the work I do for other Data & AI consultancies.

The most insane of those is my game show (shown above).

The reason I even wanted to have a game show to begin with is that most consultancies are really bad at showcasing their work in a way that’s really interesting to others.

So when I was thinking about types of content that would make talking about discovery workshops interesting, I thought “well dummy, why not just put your guests through the same frameworks you use for your clients, but in a ridiculous way?”

and so the show was born.

In every episode, I invite 3 or 4 experts relevant to other consultants in the world of Data & AI and have them play three games to tell you all about their career paths, interests and passions, all while I score them in increasingly non-sensical ways.

All for the honor of winning absoutely nothing (other than a fancy postcard for me and an uninterrupted time at the end of the show to plug whatever they want)!

Later this summer, I’ll be relaunching the show for season 2 - so stay tuned as I always need fresh meat new contestants, and sign up here if you’d like to participate when the show relaunches!

Three months ago, I asked my followers on Linkedin to help me name a series where I interviewed other consultants about their biggest career disasters.

Everyone went crazy for the idea, but one name stood out above them all: This is Fine.

And later this week, we’re making it official and releasing the first episode of the show!

In the show, we’ll be talking about the real big fuck-ups of so many cool consultants’ careers, highlighting not only the stories behind what happened to them, but also what they learned, how they apply those lessons on a daily basis today, and what you can learn from them if you were in their shoes.

So get excited, because next week I’ll be featuring the first episode here in my newsletter before it goes live anywhere else!

Given that it’s a holiday week here in the United States, I figured I’d share an abbreviated version of the newsletter!

Expect a return to our regular programming and structure next week, including the new show (as I mentioned above), but also a fun new framework to use when doing discovery with your clients, as well as a fresh new meme straight from the meme factory!

If you’ve brute-forced your boutique Data & AI consultancy and feel like you need an external perspective to get unstuck, I’m here to help!

Get in touch to learn more about how I enable Data & AI consultancies to sell, deliver and scale more effectively through my workshops. If you haven’t already, visit my:

and let’s chat more about where you’re struggling with your consultancy!

Otherwise, thank you so much for reading, and see you next week!

P.S.: A reminder that if you enjoyed this newsletter, you should click this ad so my cats will stop yelling at me about how I need to increase Superposition’s treat budget 🤣

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