This is part 2 in my ongoing series about productized services. This series came out of a recent interview I had with Nathan Barry for his upcoming book: The Ladders of Wealth: How to Master the Skills of Making Money (sign up to learn more).

BTW: even if you don’t run a "productized service", these lessons still apply. They’re really about building systems, managing clients, and creating leverage — things that matter no matter what kind of business you’re running.

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A few weeks ago I shared the first lesson I learned from running a productized service: which is that you simply cannot set expectations with your clients once and think everything is going to be fine. If you missed that, go back and check it out because they saved us a lot of headaches down the road.

This week, let’s talk about another big mistake that almost tanked our margins early on: being too vague about scope and deliverables.

When I first started building out our offer at Paperboy, I began by listing out ALL the different things our clients would get as part of our service.

By the end of it, our sales documents and proposals were full of vague phrases like: “monthly strategy and support” or “ongoing optimization.”

It sounded great during sales calls, sure but when it came time to actually deliver?

Nobody knew what it meant.

Including me.

Clients didn’t know what to expect.

And my team didn’t know what to deliver or when the thing should be considered “done”.

Pretty quickly I realized that productized services leave no room for ambiguity. So we started getting clearer.

• Instead of “monthly strategy,” now we say: → One 30-minute call per month to review a performance report covering [specific metrics].
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• Instead of “ongoing optimization,” we now say:→ Two creative tests per month (new headline or image variant) with performance comparison data shared in the next report.
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• Instead of “weekly communication,” we say:→ Monday Slack update with last week’s results, this week’s priorities, and any action items needed from your team.

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That level of detail might sound like overkill, but in a productized model it’s essential.

This not only sets the right expectations with the client but it forces you to tighten the delivery process.

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The Bonus Benefit

But here’s the best part.

Once we got painfully specific about what was included (and what wasn’t), something interesting happened: our communication got cleaner — and our margins got better.

One of the biggest levers for profitability in a productized model is reducing unnecessary back-and-forth.

You want the service to feel personal, but run predictably — like clockwork.

And what’s wild is — when clients know exactly what to expect, they actually trust you more.

They stop trying to control the process. Operations get smoother.

So if you find yourself buried in constant pings, approvals, and quick calls… the issue probably isn’t your clients.

And it might be time to take a look at your offer and your scope.

Tighten the scope. Clarify the deliverables.

Every extra ounce of clarity you create can potentially buy back hours of your time.

Good luck! We'll see you next week-ish.

— Shane