Automate Your Agency

When should you ditch services and products that are not working?

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 25

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Are you holding onto services that no longer serve your business—or worse, are draining your time and profits? 

Many founders face this dilemma, unsure of when and how to pivot without losing clients or momentum.

In this week's episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson dive into the art of strategically evolving your offerings when it’s clear that something’s got to change.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • How to recognize when it’s time to pivot and phase out less profitable services
  • Strategies for smoothly transitioning clients when discontinuing or altering services
  • How to overcome emotional attachments to services that no longer serve the business
  • How to avoid scope creep and set clear boundaries with clients
  • And much more!

If you're ready to streamline your offerings and focus on what truly grows your business, this episode is packed with the guidance you need.

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0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. All right, Micah, so for this episode, I wanted to do a follow up to our last episode on selling before building. Because what can happen is, okay, I followed this methodology and I'm all in.

0:00:31 - (Alane): And then, oh, crap, I've got a bunch of stuff that I don't want to be servicing anymore, I don't want to be offering anymore. How do you unwind doing that?

0:00:40 - (Micah): Yeah, that's a really good point. And even if it's not a bunch of things, even if it's just one thing, and you realize, oh, the profit margin to this, what I thought was going to be great, is actually not great as a business. I can't keep offering this because I'm spending my whole time working on this instead of, you know, focusing on maybe more profitable solutions.

0:01:05 - (Alane): Yeah, and another thing that comes to mind too is pivoting in your business. You know, maybe that there's a different direction that you want to take and you no longer want to provide those services anymore.

0:01:16 - (Micah): Yeah, you know, we. We really struggled with this in our last business. We got in the automotive industry. And after too many years in that industry, I remember thinking, we have gotta get into other things because this is like, it's just too much of one thing for too long. And we.

0:01:38 - (Alane): Yeah, you were ready for something different.

0:01:40 - (Micah): Yeah, it was very difficult to make that pivot, to make that transition. We were so embedded in automotive.

0:01:48 - (Alane): Yeah. So we sold the company. That's how we pivoted. That's how we got out. But on a much smaller scale than selling your company. And we were just too invested in that as a whole, so we needed to sell it as a unit and we had that opportunity. But even on a smaller scale with this business, what we started off with as consulting and more of a fractional coo, and even just at an hourly rate versus now how we package our services, we've niched down into what we provide. We really focus on a project management system at a core and then building into automation past that.

0:02:27 - (Alane): But even that's evolved and we've sunset things. So I thought we could talk about, you know, even how we have been able to do that as a company and sunset some of the original things that we did early on.

0:02:38 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. You know, you bring up a really good point with what we've done with this business so far because even kicking this whole thing off, technology has changed so much that we've had to change our offerings just to keep up. And we've had to sunset things just to keep up.

0:02:57 - (Alane): Yeah, and sometimes you did it begrudgingly.

0:03:02 - (Micah): Very true. I do most things begrudgingly.

0:03:05 - (Alane): I think that's true. No, but technology did change and we did need to. We were already doing automation for companies. That's actually, you know, one of the things that I was really passionate about coming into this business because that's what I did early on in our previous company where I was writing our own automations and Zapier but where we've really had to switch gears and how did we do that? So I thought we could talk about, you know, what are some tips and guides on when you do sell first, build later and then you realize, okay, I did this and now I want to shift. What are some ways that you can do that?

0:03:42 - (Alane): And one of the first ways is probably the simplest is communicating with your customers that you're going to be changing and giving a timeline to that change.

0:03:52 - (Micah): Yeah, generally a good idea.

0:03:54 - (Alane): Yes. So, you know, coming up with why it benefits them for the change because they don't care about you as a business. You know, they're thinking about themselves. So you can't talk about why you're changing and, and the reasons that you need to make this change. You need to make it about them and why you're changing. And so I think one of my favorite ways that we did this Micah, recently is that we even recorded a video explaining to our customers that were on an older package with us or a service agreement with us why we were changing and how it was going to benefit them. And we just explained it and then it was a little bit more of a personal touch when we sent out the communication that things were changing.

0:04:35 - (Alane): And of course, you know, we, we did it on calls and let them know, hey, these things are going to be coming out. But we needed something concrete because if they weren't the decision maker, they needed to go and get approval or something like that. They had something tangible that they could send to the final decision maker on approving moving to a new package with us.

0:04:53 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. And we should probably add, don't do this the day before you're making the change. There needs to be some buildup, there needs to be some time, there needs to be some awareness.

0:05:05 - (Alane): Yes. And you know, I really like like a 60 day timeframe because you don't want to give it such a short period. Of time. If it is a service that they are invested in that is meaningful to their business, and they need to have a backup plan. They need time to plan whether that is financially shifting to a different package offering or finding a different company to fulfill that. If you're completely sunsetting that offering and no longer going to be fulfilling it at all within your company, you need to give them that time because you don't want to burn a bridge. You want to have a second option for them or the time to find a second option.

0:05:42 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. And I would say with this, as we're talking through this, Alane, I'm realizing how hard this actually, like, this is a very difficult decision to be made. I know you were joking about me being doing this begrudgingly, but it's because it's very difficult to make this decision. You can look at something and go, well, if we get more scale, then it'll fix it. Then it'll be better. Or if we get the right person, and then maybe this offering will work better, and you might have one or two clients that really love it, but then everybody else is kind of like, nah, I don't know.

0:06:25 - (Micah): It sounds cool, but do you want to let those one or two clients down? And so you really do go through this mental anguish of, is this the right move? Ultimately, you've got to make that for your decision, for yourself as a leader, as your business, of your business. But the reality is, if it's not working, like, we look at things and say, all right, how hard is this to actually operate? How hard is this to run? What are the profit margins?

0:06:52 - (Micah): Can it scale? And sometimes you just need to validate stuff, and other times you got to look at it and go, this is not working whatsoever.

0:07:00 - (Alane): Yeah. And there's. I can't remember the book that I was reading, it was super recent. It might have been a centralism, but maybe not. But they talk about this invested time into an idea, and the more time that you've invested into. Into it, and the more money you've invested, the harder it is for you to let go and change. And the example of this is the. That extremely flask fast flight that they used to have from the US to, like, the UK or something. I can't remember what it was called.

0:07:30 - (Micah): The Concorde.

0:07:31 - (Alane): The Concorde, Okay, I was going to say Concordia. So the Concorde. And it lost millions and millions and millions every year. But they kept thinking, oh, you know, we've learned a lot. It's going to get better. And they held onto it for Way longer than they should have because it never was profitable. It lost so much money. But there was that time and money investment. Well, I don't want to lose what I've already put into this and to say, no, I'm done.

0:07:58 - (Alane): There's going to be better uses of my time and my money and to grow other areas of the business. It can be really hard. But if you can do that and start putting time and money into the services that are profitable do bring you even purpose and happiness into what you're doing. There's services that we could sell and that we could provide, but we truly find no joy in doing it. And one of them, Micah, even whenever we started running our previous company together, you were doing websites and you did not enjoy that at all?

0:08:30 - (Micah): No, not at all. Not at all. Hated it. If I heard a client ask me one more time to make the logo bigger, that was like the end of the whole company.

0:08:44 - (Alane): That's so funny, because that really does happen.

0:08:47 - (Micah): Yeah. But honestly, Alane, I think that's a really good point. I started that last company doing websites, and then it got to the point where I realized, I don't want to do this anymore. And so I had to make the. All my clients were website clients. Like, I saw the writing on the wall with where social media was going. It wasn't even called social media at the time, so I could see that, but I didn't know how to get there yet. So to make money in the meantime, I was selling website design and development to pay the bills. Fortunately, we were able to make that transition together to go from websites to social media management, which led us into the automotive industry. But there's just these sequence of events that happen within a business. And sometimes it sounds really fresh and fun, like, oh, websites are gonna pay the bills. And then you do 20 websites in a row, you're like, I would rather be broke than make more websites.

0:09:39 - (Micah): So, yeah, but so that. That one man. I haven't thought about that in a long time, Alane. And I think with that one was really interesting because that's such a perfect example. I had to let the clients know I'm no longer doing websites. Once I now, I will say before I even did that, I followed what we talked about in our previous episodes, which was, I'm going to sell it first. So I figured out how to sell social media marketing and had a path and validated that before I stopped doing websites. But once I could see that's going to work, then we implemented our strategies that we're talking about now, let's notify the client, let's give them some time, let's tell them it's ending.

0:10:19 - (Micah): In this case, I had some other people lined up that could help. There was no other offering that I was going to do that was going to help websites.

0:10:27 - (Alane): Yeah, and another one came to mind too, while you were talking about that. As we got into social media, and really right back then it was Facebook and Twitter were really the two core. And this was so early in where Facebook had just launched the ability to have a business page. So we were just right on the cutting edge of everything. But then social media sites exploded and there were more coming in.

0:10:53 - (Alane): You know, the clients would ask, hey, you know, what about Foursquare? And I'm like, yeah, we can manage Foursquare. And we started doing it. And what happened is. And I remember this because you were like, elaine, you have got to stop adding to what we're providing without adding more cost to the client for this. Like, we can't just keep adding and doing scope. Creepy. Which can happen in any project.

0:11:14 - (Alane): And so I was like, yeah, I get what you're saying. So I had to go back and say, no, you can't do this for free. Doesn't get just. You can't just add it because it's another social media site, but if you want to pay for it, you're happy to. And where we had to evolve and why. What I think this is important is we stopped selling a specific site and said, you get to pick three.

0:11:36 - (Micah): Yeah.

0:11:36 - (Alane): And what are three that are important to you? Because we were in an uphill battle because there were just so many sites. And eventually there were some core sites that we offered because you needed to be on Facebook, you need to be on Twitter. And then Instagram got huge. And so, you know, those were the three main ones. But when somebody's super, you know, thinks that this one's really important and this one's really important, it wasn't worth fighting with them on, trying to educate all the time, because they for sure had a younger person on their team that said, this is going to get us a bunch of sales. We're going to focus on this site.

0:12:09 - (Alane): Great. You can pick the ones you want. You get three, you can upgrade and do five. So that it wasn't us saying, yes, we can do this and we sell that specific site. It was more, you pick what's important to you from the offering that we wanted and we'll fulfill that. And that really helped us keep to a certain amount of sites. Like we just said, these are the sites we're going to fulfill. You don't get to do. I remember vine was getting really popular.

0:12:35 - (Alane): I think that's what it was with the videos on Twitter. And we're like, no, we're not doing vine like that. That's way, like, just, why don't you just get good at doing Facebook and sending content in for that versus just trying to keep saturating yourself in 40 different social media sites.

0:12:51 - (Micah): Yeah. And I think one of the things that you brought up a little bit earlier in this discussion is really important to think about too, and it's the opportunity cost of your own time or your team's time. Right. If you're spending all your time on this service that you, A, don't like doing and maybe B, and comb like has low profit margins, but you keep pushing it, what could you be doing with your time if you weren't doing that?

0:13:15 - (Micah): You could be working on other offerings that were more scalable, that had higher profit margins, that were more in demand, that might be more cutting edge. Whatever it might be, there's an opportunity cost to keep trying to push the same thing over and over.

0:13:31 - (Alane): And I think the last piece of this, that if it is going to be a service or our product, you know, whatever it is that you are no longer going to offer at all, and you're telling your client, you know, 60 days, I'm no longer offering this, Peace out. I would recommend having an option, a referral partner or something in there to say, hey, you know, I'm no longer going to be providing this, but I have a great partner that does provide this.

0:13:58 - (Alane): And here is their contact information. I'd be happy to set up an intro then. That really helps ease that transition for your client. They don't have to go with that referral partner, but at least gives them an option than starting from scratch.

0:14:12 - (Micah): Yeah, and that really helps. Not burning bridges keeps that relationship going. Because after doing several businesses now, Alane, I mean, I think you can attest to this as well. There's clients that maybe they won't be a client for your next business, but that's part of your personal network and they might know somebody who would be a client for your next business. So don't burn that bridge. Keep that relationship solid, because you just never know when they're going to refer somebody else to something else you're doing or a new offering that you haven't sunsetted.

0:14:43 - (Alane): Yeah, that's one thing I've had to learn in life because I can be A bit aggressive and abrasive in my personality. And, you know, the world is small. You're going to run into people when they transition jobs. They're going to buy from you in a different, you know, business or service or products. So you don't want to burn bridges. You do want to stay in a really professional, respectful transition. When you're going through something that way, whether they buy from you or not, you never know. They could refer you to somebody in the future.

0:15:16 - (Alane): And so really keeping that good rapport between you and the clients that you're no longer going to be providing that for.

0:15:22 - (Micah): Yeah, I mean, I've got to kind of just illustrate this story. I was 19. It was my very first client from my very first business. I showed up an hour late because I somehow got lost and went to the wrong address. And anyway, it was a mess, but we ended up doing business together, and him and I have now stayed in touch for almost 25 years. He's been a client of multiple businesses. He's referred people.

0:15:50 - (Micah): We actually have done some real estate investments together. And more than anything, he's just somebody that I can trust. And, Alane, you've got to know him over the years as well. So somebody that we can trust to bounce ideas off of, to get another perspective, to get other feedback. It's just hard to find good, you know, calling people up out of the blue. Sure, you're going to get some sort of feedback, but to know that, hey, I know this person, I know their personality. I know how they, you know, they're going to shoot straight. That kind of stuff makes a big difference.

0:16:20 - (Alane): Yeah, for sure. Nick, we love you. And also say, Micah, that was before Google Maps was on our phone. That got us right to where we needed to go. You know, not saying that you're elderly or old or anything, but that the technology was not there when you were 19. So we'll give you some grace. All right, Jess?

0:16:40 - (Micah): I was also the idiot in a full suit in the middle of summer walking because I didn't want to repark my car. So I showed up very sweaty as well. It was terrible.

0:16:50 - (Alane): You are crushing it. Hey, kudos to you though, Micah, you were 19, starting out your first business. Like, that's some balls and some courage.

0:16:59 - (Micah): You know what else? I just realized this whole story. So when I pitched Nick, or what I pitched him, he had zero interest in.

0:17:06 - (Alane): I do remember that.

0:17:08 - (Micah): But on the back of the printed leaf behind, I spiral bound this and everything. And on the back of it, I had some other services that I Could do. And he actually called me back, not on what I originally pitched him on, but some of the services that I mentioned on the back of this leaf behind.

0:17:24 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:17:24 - (Micah): And that's how we ended up doing our first deal together.

0:17:27 - (Alane): That is so sweet. He's like, gosh, I gotta find something to buy from this kid. He's out here in a suit, sweating, coming into this professional business meeting. Just let me buy something from this guy.

0:17:41 - (Micah): For all I know, that could absolutely be the case.

0:17:46 - (Alane): That's the story I'm telling myself now, at least. All right, so let's sum this up, Micah, because, you know, we talked about a lot of things, so I think. I think the three tips that I would give is, one, talk about the benefits of, you know, why you're making this transition in the perspective for the client. You know, why it's important to them. Number two, give them time to make a change. If they need to go somewhere else or they need to make a financial investment, that's different than what they're doing now. And three, if you're completely sunsetting it, no longer offering it is finding a referral source to send them so that they don't have to start from scratch.

0:18:20 - (Micah): And maybe my action item from this for everybody who's listening, is to start really looking at what your offerings are. And can you whittle it down? Can you narrow it down? At least question it? Because that's going to do a lot more things than just letting it run and absorbing time. Can you get more focused?

0:18:37 - (Alane): All right, that's it, everybody. I feel much better for talking through this and not just leaving you abandoned after our previous episode. And if you happen to listen to this one first, be sure to listen to the one that we recorded before this that talks about selling before building and why we think that is so important. Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level.

0:19:01 - (Alane): We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.

0:19:07 - (Micah): And join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:19:11 - (Alane): Bye for now.

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Alane Boyd

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Micah Johnson

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