You Built a Great Business. Here Are 9 Signs You Haven't Commercialized It Yet.
Being good at the work and being easy to buy from are two different skills.
By Lance Wagner · Published · Last Updated
What does it mean to commercialize a business?
Commercializing your business means turning what you're good at into something easier to understand, buy, sell and scale. Clear positioning, packaged offers, consistent pricing, a repeatable way to generate leads, a written sales process, and a business that doesn't depend on the founder being in the room.
Plenty of businesses do excellent work and still feel stuck. That's not a quality problem. It's a commercialization problem.
Nine signs, and what each one costs you.
1You can't say what you do in one line
If it takes you a paragraph, it takes your customer a decision they'd rather not make.
One sentence: what you do, who it's for, why you.
2Everything is custom
Custom work is hard to price, hard to sell and impossible to delegate.
Package the three jobs you do most. Keep custom for the ones worth it.
3Pricing changes by mood
Inconsistent pricing quietly eats margin and makes every sale a negotiation.
Set a price list. Hold it for a quarter. See what actually happens.
4You don't know who your best customers are
Not the friendliest ones. The most profitable ones.
Rank last year by profit. The top group is your growth plan.
5Leads come from luck
Referrals are wonderful and they are not a system. A slow quarter is just a quarter nobody happened to mention you.
Two channels, run consistently, changes this.
6There's no sales process
If the outcome depends on who picked up the phone, you don't have a process. You have personalities.
Write the five steps from inquiry to signed.
7No CRM
Leads in inboxes and notebooks are leads you'll lose.
One system. Everything in it. Even a simple one beats memory.
8Nobody measures anything monthly
Without a monthly review, problems get discovered a year late.
Thirty minutes a month is enough to catch most of it.
9The business stops when you leave
If two weeks away would break something, you own a job with employees.
Start with the one thing only you can do, and document the rest.
The short version
- Commercializing means easier to understand, buy, sell and scale.
- Packaging beats custom for anything you do more than twice a month.
- Pricing discipline is the fastest profit lever you have.
- Founder dependency is the ceiling on everything else.
Questions people ask
- What does commercializing a business mean?
- Turning what you're good at into something easier to understand, buy, sell and scale. Positioning, packaging, pricing, lead generation, sales process and delivery that doesn't depend on one person.
- When should a business focus on commercialization?
- When demand is fine but growth feels heavy, or when the founder is the bottleneck on everything. Usually somewhere between one and ten million in revenue.
Keep reading
Looking for industry and city specific advice? That lives in Two Cents.