Before I dig into this question, I just wanted to share that your services will evolve over time and that’s totally okay! You always have the right to change your mind and your services. I want to share that especially for my high achievers and perfectionists out there who often feel they need to have the answer right away and stick with it until the grave. You ain’t got to do that. I’m giving you permission right now to give yourself permission to experiment and pivot when necessary for you. 

Now, when it comes to choosing your service, especially during the early stages of your business, you should be thinking about what you can do in the next 30 days to generate revenue. I don’t want you to get stuck trying to find the “perfect” service model. The service that you’ve determined will bring in revenue within the next 30-days does not have to be your signature service. This can be a stepping stone on the way to get you to the service you truly want to offer, but if you’ve got big plans, you should start by backwards mapping from your ideal signature service to services that will allow you to bring in revenue while you develop that signature service. 

Let me give you an example. Say your ideal service is an online course, creating, marketing, and onboarding clients into an online course is definitely going to take longer than 30-days. So there are plenty of other services you can offer while you build that course that will allow you to bring in revenue, grow your audience and, and this is cri-TEE-cal, gather more data on your target client. Yep. 

Here are a few examples of services you can offer in the interim:

• Virtual Workshops: You can actually use a virtual workshop to test out material for your online course. This is a great way to experiment and figure out what kind of information your target clients will need while working with you, and it will help you gauge where your target clients actually are within their journey.

Doing this is a form of beta testing your curriculum, which you’ll need to do anyways before you launch your course and again, that takes time. By beta testing through workshops, you’re gathering valuable data and saving a bit of time while honing your course offerings. And, if your workshop goes really well, you can save that recording and share it as an exclusive replay with those who enroll in your course. 😉

• Virtual Coaching & Strategy Sessions: This is great if you have a limited capacity because you can schedule these sessions at a time that works for you. This is also a great way to do some market research. You should always send a pre and post consultation survey to your clients so you can begin gathering data on your target clients and start determining what kind of clients you don’t want to work with. 

I get a lot of questions around what people’s signature service should be, but that’s something you need to ask your target client. You need to meet with them and speak with them about their challenges and goals to determine the right services to offer them, and a virtual coaching session is the perfect way to dig deeper and get to know your ideal client intimately. 

Another thing to consider when determining what services you can offer that will bring in revenue in the next 30 days, is your capacity. When I started my education consulting business, I was working full time. My capacity didn't allow me to deliver services during traditional work hours, so most of my work and client delivery had to be on the weekends or after hours. 

That's why professional development became one of my core service offerings, because I had the capacity to deliver PD on the weekend and in the small instances where it was during the work day, I could take it a full day or a half day, deliver the PD.

So those are a few things for you to think about when determining your service offerings. The biggest things to remember are to:

• Start with a service that will bring in revenue in the next 30 days

• Backwards plan from your ideal service model, using revenue building services as stepping stones

• Use your service models to learn more about your target clients and develop your service model

• Consider your capacity

I hope this was helpful and I’d love to hear about your service model ideas in the comments. 

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