Offering simplification and the principle of simplify to amplify aren’t just buzzwords; they’re the keys to unlocking greater profits and a less stressful business. In this episode, Tonya Kubo and business advisor Gwen Bortner dive deep into how to streamline your products and services. Gwen shares her expertise on why the common belief that “more choices are better” often leads to customer confusion and business overwhelm. They discuss how entrepreneurs often end up with a “library” of services disguised as a simple menu and the hidden costs of context switching between multiple offerings. If you’re struggling to explain your services clearly, feeling like your revenue is spread too thin, or sensing that your offerings are more complex than they need to be, this episode provides practical insights. Tune in to discover how simplifying your offerings can amplify your business’s success, making it easier for both you and your clients.
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Driving Business Revenue: Can Every Role Do It?
Intro: Untangling The Offering Web
The most successful businesses tend to be known for doing one thing extremely well. Meanwhile, we have a lot of struggling entrepreneurs frantically juggling dozens of products and services, hoping that something will finally take off. We’re going to be continuing our Simplify to Amplify series by tackling what I think is one of the most challenging areas to simplify for a business owner, which is products and services.
That’s mainly because many of us, especially those of us who started our own businesses based on what we’re good at or based on our skills, get a little emotionally connected to the products and services that we provide. I hope by the end of this episode, if you stick with us, you’ll see why having fewer, more focused offerings might be the secret to greater profits, happier clients, and a much less stressful business.
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Gwen, this is the second episode in the series. I thought it would be important to focus on products and services because I’ve seen when you are working with clients, they’ll come in thinking you’re going to talk to them about their pricing. Oftentimes, you say, “We might need to talk about pricing, but before we talk about pricing, let’s talk about what you have on offer.” Why don’t you get the ball rolling for us and help us understand why that’s oftentimes the first place to start when you’re trying to diagnose the problem in a business?
More Isn’t Always Merrier: The Choice Paradox
The root cause of this is that there is a very mistaken belief that more choices are better. It’s like, “I want to have all the choices. I want to be able to choose from all the things. Since we believe that to be true, we want to give that option to our clients as well. We’re like, “I want to have all the different ways that they could possibly work with me. I want to have all the different physical products that they could possibly want. I want every color that they could possibly need to be a choice.”
What ends up happening when we start doing that is we create a space where our brains can’t choose. Reality, testing, and all sorts of other things show that most of us can only choose between 2, possibly 3 things. When we start getting more than 2 or 3, we decide not to decide. That is what our choice is. Our choice is none.
There’s a part of us that thinks that if we have more products or if we have more offerings, we’re more likely to hit the mark for somebody. If those products and offerings are either too similar or too disparate, either is a problem, then what happens is we end up getting in this space of, “I don’t know. Should I choose A, B, C, D, or E? They’re so close. I can’t decide.” I end up deciding nothing. It could also be that A, B, C, D, and E are so completely different that it’s like, “I’m not even sure which is the thing I’m in need of at this point.” That becomes a problem as well.
The reason we get there is that we try to respond to our clients. We end up having a client, or we have a conversation with someone who’s potentially a client. They’re like, “That’s not quite what I need. What I need is fill in the blank,” and it’s like, “I can do that, too.” We create a new offer that we can do that, too, and then that becomes part of our offering.
A client says something else and it’s like, “That’s not what we’re doing, but I could do that, too,” so we create another offer. All of a sudden, we end up either with lots of offers that are close but not exactly, or we end up with lots of offers that are nothing alike and it’s like, “I’m not sure what to do,” because you’re doing all of these things and it doesn’t quite fall in.
The problem is that as soon as we get down either of those paths, we’re no longer focused. There are so many. It goes on and on. The whole idea of Simplify to Amplify is that simpler is always better. It makes it easy for you, and it makes it easier for your employees, your contractors, and your customers. It makes everything easier. It’s true when we’re talking about products and services as well.
Hidden Services: Are You Offering 15 or 3?
One of the things that you said is that it comes from a place of wanting to be responsive to customer or client demand. I feel like that’s a piece of it. I know that I see myself in that picture, too, where it’s like, “It’s a little bit more. It’s a little bit different,” or it doesn’t feel different because you’re adding it all to say one service item.
First of all, what I’d want to know is how do you know that’s what you’re doing, especially if publicly-facing, it still looks like, let’s say, 2 to 3 service offers? We’ll use services because I know product-based businesses run a little bit differently. We’ll use services as our example. Some people have a menu of 15 different services, but sometimes, it’s a menu of 15 different services disguised as 3. I want the reader, for whom this episode is meant, to be able to know that it’s meant for them. Can you explain the difference between those two, like how you might know if you’re the person with 15 different services, or if you’re the person who has 15 disguised as 3?
It’s pretty easy to know if you’ve got 15 different services because you look at your website and there are 15 different services. That’s fairly easy. The question is, are you doing the exact same thing for service A when you’ve got service A, B, and C? You’ve got 3 services, but it might be disguised as 15. Is it being the same thing? If it’s not, how complicated is it to explain the difference between A1 and A2, which are both A but they’re a little bit different?
I’ll use myself as an example. I work with clients on a private one-to-one basis. My primary service, one-to-one, is approximately once a week for an hour includes some of the other base services. I’m not going to get into all of that, but that’s what’s there, and that’s for a price. After I’ve worked with you for a while, you may say, “I’d like to move to twice a month.” That technically is a different service, but I keep it under the same service.
Part of the reason I say that I’m not doing what you’re talking about is because I don’t sell the second service. I only offer it to existing clients. I only sell one service. If you worked with me long enough and it makes sense, then we might offer the other service. That’s an adjustment to the service, but very easily, early on, I was selling the once a week, the twice a month, and the once a month, all as private one-on-one coaching.
That, to me, was where I was selling 3 services as 1 service because I was selling it all as private one-on-one coaching. Explaining how this one is a little bit different, why the pricing is different, and what’s included was not an easy description. That’s a pretty simplistic version of it. It is, “Do you offer the same thing or is there something different that happens for customer A versus customer B?” That’s when we’re disguising things.
Putting on my marketing hat, I know that the most customer-centric thing we can do as service providers is to make decision-making easy for the client. The no should be as easy as the yes. In the picture you painted, I wouldn’t have put that example in here, but I could see what you’ve done. You’ve put your client in the position of going, “Do I need once a month? Do I need once a week? Maybe once a week is too much. Maybe it’s twice a month. Maybe I need once a week now, and then next month, I’ll go down to once a month.”
There’s all this energy being put toward what’s the right offer when that energy could be put toward making progress on the problem that they’re hiring you to solve. That’s from the customer perspective. I like that we started there because most of our readers care way more about their customer than they care about themselves.
Unfortunately, that is a true statement.
We attract women who set themselves on fire to keep everybody around them warm. We know our type. I know my type because I see myself in the mirror every single day, so I can’t outrun myself. That’s where it’s not helpful to the client. There’s the flip side to my point of setting ourselves on fire to keep other people warm, where it gets unsustainable for us. What does that unsustainability look like in your mind?
One of the situations is when it’s just us, it’s pretty easy to keep all of this in our head because we understood how we got there. We saw the whole path. We were walking the path. It makes sense to us logically because if it didn’t make sense to us, we wouldn’t have done it. We can see how we got to these eighteen services because it makes perfect sense.
Simpler is always better. Share on XWhere it becomes problematic is when we start bringing other people into the organization because they can’t see how these things connect, how they’re related, and how to choose between choices A1, A2, and A3. When someone else is talking to them, or when they’re making choices about things that they’re doing related to those offers, they don’t understand how to make the choice themselves. That adds a whole level of confusion.
Every time that we add a level of complexity or confusion, we are greatly increasing the chance of a mistake, failure, issue, or whatever words you want to put around it. By having all of that complexity, how do you explain that to somebody else? What is the difference? A lot of folks are like, “Isn’t A and B mostly the exact same thing except we gave it a different word?” In your mind, it’s like, “No, A is completely different from B.”
The fact that someone else is like, “I don’t get it,” means that your customers probably aren’t getting it either. That means that they may treat A like B, where you do expect them to be treated differently. A has a 30-minute turnaround time and B has a 24-hour turnaround time. If someone doesn’t get the difference and they swap them, then you’ve got problems. That’s a weird little example, but it’s a great example because it could easily be that someone is not doing what they need to do because they don’t understand the distinction and how to manage it.
I would love for you to give us a list of visible costs, the no-brainer costs, of having too many services, but I’m also interested in what some might be that are more hidden.
The obvious ones, we’ve already talked about. It’s preventing the customer from saying yes. One of the phrases that comes up at Genius Network, which I attend from time to time, is being the Sales Prevention Department. Too many offers are a version of the Sales Prevention Department. That’s a lot of very obvious costs. There’s also cost and confusion with your employees, contractors, and whoever’s helping you.
The subtler cost is what I was talking about. Every element we add to our business, regardless of whether it is a system, a process, a person, or any element that we add, none of them are perfect. Some systems and technologies can get pretty close to perfect, but with updates and all the rest of it, they’re still not perfect because somebody puts in an update that accidentally breaks something else. There is no 100% perfection. You like equations. I never give you an equation. I’m going to give you an equation.
I’m going to get a pen for the equation. I’m ready.
When you’re putting two elements together, they’re not added together. They’re multiplied when we’re trying to figure out efficiency. The thing is, if you’re not multiplying it by 100% efficiency, which pretty much nothing is, then everything you add reduces the effectiveness, efficiency, and likelihood that it’s going to come out better.
Even if it’s good or even if it’s 95%, it’s still going to reduce the overall total over time. Taking things out is a way to increase effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, and any of those words that you want to look at, because we are taking out something that’s less than 100%. By nature of our existence, everything is less than 100%.
We’re human, whether we like it or not.
Some people have a menu of 15 different services disguised as three. Share on XWe’re human doing human things. Human people are touching our non-human things, like our technology and all of the rest of it. That’s where having fewer offers allows us to increase our efficiency because we have fewer things for our people who are supporting us in those offers to know. That’s an element that’s coming out, which allows us to be better at the few things that we’re doing.
Ultimately, back to knowing our people, our people want to do good work. They want to deliver high-quality services. They want to deliver high-quality products. They want to deliver top. It often feels like more is better, but this is a case where most of the time, more is not better. More is worse. It may be only a tiny bit worse, but it’s still worse. If we can keep it simple, like, “This is what we offer. This is how we do it. This is the way we do it,” then it increases the chances that the people that are working with us are also able to be successful. If we have good people working for us, they also want to be successful.
Red Flags: Signs Your Offerings Are Overwhelming
When I’m thinking, “How do I know if my offerings are too complex?” based on what you’re saying or what you’ve said so far, one sign is if you can’t succinctly explain what you do. When somebody says, “What do you do?” and you tell them, and then they say, “Tell me more about that,” if they’re not catching on, chances are, it’s too complex. You pointed out that if you have a library of services versus a menu of services, that’s a sign that things are too complex.
A couple of things that you said made me also think of your revenues being spread too thin across your offerings. Generally speaking, everything has a different profit margin. It depends on some things you need more support with than others. All those offers take more administrative work. Whether you’re doing the administrative work or you have a team, you’re paying people to manage a bunch of choices versus paying people to deliver an effective level of service.
We already talked about customer confusion or client confusion, but one thing that keeps bubbling up for me, and I want to know what you have to say about this, is the cost of context switching. This is something I’ve discovered in and of myself. I’m a good soldier. I’ve had excellent mentorship. I had 3 offers, but 1 of my offers was a lot more strategy and advising, and then I had another offer that was a lot more execution. While both of those I could give my 100% best to, it was hard for me to juggle having clients taking advantage of both services at the same time.
The Hidden Drain: Cost Of Context Switching
Context switching is one of those things that’s so hard to track in any way. The cost of it, the effort, the energy, and the time. There was a study done a long time ago at Standard Oil, which is very different than our environment. It was estimated that an average worker on any given day was losing something 3 hours out of an 8-hour day in context switching. I don’t know exactly how they tracked it, and I have no idea how accurate it is, but I also could believe that’s true. We think we’re jumping from here to here, but there is a process of finding the paper, opening up the document, and getting our brain to remember where we were the last time. All of those pieces play into the context switching.
Particularly, if we’re doing what you described as what I’m going to call different levels of work, there’s answering emails kind of work where something comes up and I’m responding. Not that it’s bad work, lower-level work, or any of the rest of it, but it’s very different from doing deep thought work. Occasionally, an email comes through that requires deep thought work. If you’ve had that happen, you can feel your whole momentum go crazy. I’m getting through the emails, and then I’m like, “Stop. I can’t get through the emails,” because I have to put some deep thought into this email.
That’s a great example of context switching. You haven’t stopped doing what you were doing, but the context of what you were doing is completely different. Instead of quick responses and easy answers, you’re having to do deep thought. What you are talking about with the strategy versus more of the tactics, that’s huge context.
If you can block it into giant chunks, like, “I do all my strategy work on Monday and Tuesday, and I do all my tactical work on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday,” as an example, then it is probably not as big of an issue. Rarely can we organize our lives that well when we’re working with clients. Not to say that we can’t, because I know people who do, but rarely does that work in the real world.
That is also another cost. It’s also not a cost just for you as the provider, but that is also the kind of cost that we have with those who are supporting us. We have three primary products, and then our entry-level products. We’ve got the insight to impact, which is our least hands-on product. It doesn’t take a whole lot of onboarding. There’s not a whole lot of effort that we have to put into that.
Sometimes the highest revenue offerings aren't always the ones that should stay. Share on XBeyond that, part of what we spend a lot of time on is white glove service. We’re spending a lot of client interaction with our clients. Weekly Course of Action, which is our next-level product, has an in-person onboarding process. It has elements that both you and Sophia do. There is quite a bit that goes on there. We have our Velocity Generator product, which includes the Weekly Course of Action. We have all of that, and we add more things to it.
We have our one-on-one Private Consulting product, which is a little different than Velocity. It still has all the Weekly Course of Action stuff. Being able to say which of these things I’m doing when I think about Sophia doing onboarding or you doing onboarding is also a context-switching situation. If I had seven more of these, there would be that much more time to say, “Which one are we doing? What are the details in it?”
I’m not talking about hours of time because you guys are both extremely competent and super smart, but it’s the little bits of time that are adding up. That’s where the problem is. It’s these little tiny bits of time, and they start adding up over time. The context switching is huge. It can be huge for you as the provider, using your example, but it also can be huge for folks that may be supporting you because they’re having to jump across a fence that’s a fairly big fence, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first moment of it.
I’m thinking of the Pareto principle because I have yet to encounter much in life where the 80/20 principle does not play in.
It does. It’s one of those that you don’t want it to be true, but yet it is.
Do you think it’s true here that 20% of your offerings probably generate 80% of your revenue?
At least 80% of your profit? Probably.
Another question I have is, I think, but I don’t know, that sometimes the highest revenue offerings aren’t always the ones that should stay if you’re doing an objective audit of your offerings. What do you think?
That’s one that could go either way on any given day.
Do you think it comes down to factoring and profitability?
We don't have to serve everybody. Sometimes, we get stuck thinking we have to do things how we've always done them because we started doing them that way. Share on XIt is. To me, it is about looking at the data. You know how I feel about data. I have warm feelings about it.
You cuddle up with the data.
The data is the data. It doesn’t have emotions associated with it. I did an analysis of our three offers, and depending on the level of capacity where we are in our capacity, they all hit pretty close to the same level of profitability as a percentage of dollars.
That’s good to know.
Higher-level offers create more income. Part of my higher level offers leverage my lower level offers. There’s no reason not to do the lower level offer because I’m still going to be doing that as part of the higher level offer. That’s an okay thing. It’s an interesting thing to look at. Some people say, “Get rid of your lowest level offers.” Sometimes, they create more money, even if they’re not more profitable, but maybe they’re easier to sell.
What about joy? That’s one of the things we talk about here on the show all the time. A part of sustainable success is how much fun or enjoyment you get from the work you do. Where I’d like to take us before we end this episode is I’d like to help our listeners audit their offerings to see if they need to simplify.
Based on what you’ve talked about so far, I’m hearing you’ve got to look at your revenue that comes from the offers, but you cannot isolate the revenue from the profitability. You’ve got to be looking at what the true profitability is of each offer. We also want to look at how aligned those offers are with what brings you joy and what the business is supposed to be about. What other steps should they take to audit their offers?
Profit & Passion: Auditing Your Offerings
I want to go back to the first one about income versus profitability because there are about three layers in there that we want to look at. Income is important. That’s an important number. We do want to say, “How much does it cost to deliver that?” It’s not net profit. It’s gross profit. What are our costs associated with that? We also want to look at whether there are other costs that are not officially directly associated with it. If we didn’t do it, we would eliminate.
I’m going to make up an example that isn’t quite true for us, but it could be true. We offer the Savvy Syndicate as a bonus to our private clients, but we also put it out to the rest of the world as well. We could say, “That has a good gross profit number,” but what we might not be paying attention to is that we also have a person on staff who helps manage the travel and the organization. We don’t have someone on staff. That would be me.
That’s a cost, too, having you do it.
There's also cost in confusion. Share on XIt’s not necessarily a direct cost. We wouldn’t necessarily put it quite in the direct cost, but it’s related to that to say, “This person who’s doing my executive assistant work is also spending X amount of time.” I’m not going to put her in as a direct cost to that, but I can look at it and say, “That would take out ten hours a month. That’s another big chunk of change.” All of a sudden, as you start doing these things and going up, it’s like, “This is a bigger cost than I think it is.” It is looking at not only the income and the gross profit, but also saying, “what pieces of the other expenses get allocated toward it to some degree? What are we looking at for profit?”
Our effort, energy, joy, definition of success, those things that we talk about are super important. Often, I have folks who very helpfully tell me that I could make so much more money if I had giant group programs. I don’t want big giant group programs. That doesn’t make me happy. I like meeting one-on-one with my clients.
Part of what I consider my value is meeting one-on-one with my clients. Could I make more money? Probably, but that’s also not going to bring me joy, so why should I do that? I’m not doing this business to make money and be miserable. That is a big piece. The other thing that you want to be looking at as you’re doing the analysis is, quite honestly, the ease of the sale.
Say more about that.
When I say easy sell, I mean that either conversion rates are high or you get lots of good leads. There are lots of things that can mean an easy sell, and I’m not going to define the specific. If it is something that I have to work hard at and it generally takes two years before I get a sale, you have to put that into this equation as well, combined with the lifetime value of that sale.
I had a client a while back that changed her early entry membership offer from a more appropriate level, which was quite a bit higher by multiples, like 10X or 20X multiples, to a cheap offer, which made it very easy to sell, but no one was staying in. The lifetime value wasn’t there. It was like, “It’s super easy to sell,” but you’re having to constantly sell it forever.
Sometimes, the easy sell may take a year, but once you have them, you’ve got them for five years. That’s a pretty easy sell as opposed to it only taking me two days to make the sale, but I’ve got to be making those sales constantly forever, and they don’t stay in for more than a month or two. That’s a different version of easy sell. It’s what feels easy.
Part of it is that the messaging is clear enough that people are able to say yes to it. That’s another factor in how simple it is. Is the selling process easy in relation to all of the other pieces? You may realize, “I’ve got these 5 offers, but this 1 always feels like pulling teeth to try and sell it,” or, “I’m putting lots of energy into it and it isn’t creating that much revenue.” The list can go on and on. That’s also part of what you want to be looking at that we haven’t talked about, which is how easy it is to sell it. It does go back to how easy it is to message it.
Unfortunately, dear reader, we are not giving you this handy-dandy easy formula of how to figure out what makes sense for you and your business, but we’ve given you some things to think about in terms of determining whether your offers are as comparable as you think they are. Are they easy for you to understand? Are they easy for your client to understand? Are they easy for the team to deliver?
Once you make that decision, you’ll probably see fairly clearly what makes sense to keep and what might need to be retired. Do you have a recommendation when it comes to a transition plan if you choose to eliminate offers? Is it slash and burn, “Effective today, we no longer do that.” Do you need to sunset things over time? Are there factors that maybe I’m not thinking about?
Offerings Exit Strategy: Slash, Burn, Or Sunset?
Both can work, and it depends on what the current customer involvement in them is. If you’ve got something that’s out there that, for the most part, no one is doing, then you can drop it and don’t ever have to say a word about it. No one will notice. That’s often a sign. If you drop something and no one says, “I was thinking about doing that,” that was not necessary for a real offer.
It also, to me, is how many people are in it? I have a client who has gone with me for eight years, which is since the beginning that I started this particular business. She started completely differently from what we offer now. For her, I offered her specifically a transition plan, and I knew that she might not take it. She did. I did a transition plan for her over time because I wanted to honor her early on commitment in what we were doing. She was the only one who was still on that plan. I did it for her and moved her into what I am doing. That becomes an option.
In some cases, if it’s not profitable or it’s not something you want to keep, it’s okay to say, “As of whenever.” If you’ve got contracts, agreements, and things like that, you’ll have to adjust for that. We’ll talk more about that when we talk about commitments. Once you’re done, you don’t have to keep doing it. There’s nothing that says you have to keep doing it, even if it is profitable. It’s like, “I don’t love it anymore.” Sometimes, it’s like, “Honestly, I don’t love the people that are still in this because the people that I wanted have gone to the other thing.” You don’t have to serve everybody. That’s not the way our world works.
That right there is what we all have to remember. We don’t have to serve everybody. It’s perfectly okay for us to say, “It made sense to serve this person for this period of time, but that time is now over. I want to direct my time, energy, and resources into offering services to a different population or a different type of service to the same population.” Sometimes, we get stuck thinking we have to do things how we’ve always done them because we started doing them that way.
It’s very easy for us to get caught in our own history. I don’t think that’s useful because if you are growing and changing, shouldn’t your business and offers be growing and changing?
One would hope.
We would hope. Sometimes, the thing that we’ve been doing for ten years is still working and we love it, so we keep doing it. That’s okay, too. It’s not an absolute. There is no right answer to this. There are lots of right answers.
We’re going to leave it there. There are lots of right answers. If nothing else, what I hope anybody reading takes away from this is that simplifying your offers does not necessarily limit your business. What it does is focus it for greater impact. When you eliminate the products and services that are draining your resources, especially if they’re not delivering significant returns, you free up time, energy, and creativity to make your core offerings truly exceptional. This is going to lead to happier customers, easier marketing, and easier sales conversations. Ultimately, the end result is a business that is likely more profitable and more sustainable.
If you are ready to focus on which offerings you should keep and which you should eliminate to achieve greater success with less stress, you are more than welcome to reach out to us. I know Gwen would love to help you. If you want to dip your toes into the water of what accountability looks like, we have our Insight to Impact accountability subscription. It could be your perfect next step.
Every Friday, you would receive a thought-provoking question. When you respond, you get personal feedback from Gwen on your specific situation, which could help you determine what you want to simplify moving forward. This ongoing support can make the difference between endless deliberation, that cycle inside your head, and taking confident action. Head over to EverydayEffectiveness.com/impact to learn more.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
