The Prosperous Pyramid: How to Design Offerings to Skyrocket Your Business

Let's talk about your offerings and how your income-generation methods relate to each other. People just starting a business often struggle to identify an offering that's likely to be successful. They often also struggle to balance a day job or part-time work with their fledgling business. Later on in business, we might get stuck in an offer that we want to branch out from. Though others might find their offers have spiraled out and need to be condensed. Regardless of where you find yourself, all your income generation efforts relate to one another. You get to make structural decisions about how they relate. These decisions are full of questions like "Do I tell my day job about my side hustle? What about the reverse?" and "How do I tell people I do both A and B?".

Regardless of what you do, an ideal constellation of activities is perfectly suited to you. Your interests and endeavors are all part of a singular whole. (That whole is YOU!) There needs to be balance among those parts, for your health and the health of your business. Throughout the rest of this article, we're going to talk about two things. First generating ideas for offerings. Then the characteristics that allow you to prioritize those offering ideas.

Ideas for Offerings

I notice folks have one of two tendencies: some have a lot of irons on the fire and it's hard to keep up with them all. At the other extreme folks stagnate on a single offering or very few revenue sources that limits their ability to thrive. So when it comes to generating ideas for offerings, you might tend towards having too few ideas or too many.

For those that have singular or minimal business offerings, this is your opportunity to dream about some expansion! Diversifying offerings increases resilience. While you may have launched with one or two offerings, that might need to change. Brainstorm how to diversify your offerings and weave in passive income sources. Think about different levels of the thing you do. For example, a baker might bake and sell pastries to the masses. Or bake highly niche coveted items for select clients only. Or write a cookbook and sell that. Or teach cooking classes to home chefs. Or consult with professional chefs to refine their skills. Or consult with other teaching chefs to be better teachers. All of these leverage the baker's skills but are very different offerings.

Similarly, think about what your ideal client might want at different levels of readiness. Someone who might want your services one day, might be excited to follow you on social media. Someone who wants individualized attention might try a freebie before committing to a paid service. If someone has already bought a service from you, what else might they need? Could they go deeper if you offered what you do in a different format?

For those of you already with a billion ideas, I bet you just generated more over the last two paragraphs! Ideas are great, and you can't do all of them all at once from the beginning. Even more importantly, we need to identify which ideas appeal to a common Ideal Client. This means that the client who wants Offering A would likely also benefit from Offering B. For example, the person who purchases your cookbook would enjoy social media posts of single recipes. Or, members of your group training would also gain value from similar information delivered in a retreat format. Your marketing will be more streamlined if all the offerings appeal to essentially the same Ideal Client.

The reverse - a client who wants Offering B would also benefit from Offering A - might or might not be true. There maybe a developmental element where Offering A would be irrelevant to folks already partaking in Offering B. For example, a landscape designer may have two offerings: a design only or a design and install. Once the customer has a design and install for their yard, they're unlikely to need another design and install, much less just a design. We're less worried about if this is the case. We're trying to ensure your offerings all appeal to the same Ideal Client, even if their budget is different or they can only choose one offering.

To start we need to focus on a single idea, keeping in mind that there will always be room to expand. Even once we're expanding, we need to identify which one to do next. And once we've got a bunch of offerings, we need clarity on what to promote and when so that clients don't get overwhelmed with too many options.

Analyzing Your Offerings

You've got ideas for offerings, but how do you know what's a good one? Frankly, they're all probably good ideas. What you actually need to know is where to start or what offering to try next. Businesses are successful most quickly if they focus on an offering that balances four key factors: the owner/operator's time, the level of individualized attention, the price, and the number of clients served.

Your Time

A key factor of any offering is the amount of your time that goes into delivering the service. At one end of the spectrum are things like custom presentations. These take many hours to prepare and involve real-time interaction with a single client at a time. Less time intensive are direct services. Things like meeting one-on-one with a client that requires minimal preparation. Even less time-intensive are things that don't require your immediate participation or have an economy of scale. For example, synchronous group classes or asynchronous consultation via text or email. The epitome of minimal time is when you can develop something once, but it can be provided to infinite clients without your intervention. Asynchronous online classes are a great example of this.

Personalized

The second key factor in an offering is the level of personalization and individual attention a client receives. At the highest level of personalization, the client gets a lot of direct interaction and tailored customization. Other offerings provide only some personalization. The client would get a mix of pre-prepared materials and customized service. Still, other offerings might provide only minimal customization. This could be achieved with a larger portion of pre-existing materials. Alternatively, a service offered in a group setting limits the customization available to the participants. Finally, it's possible to have no customization at all. In this case, the client receives no personal attention at all. Their experience is self-guided. Their only connection to you is through pre-recorded videos or written content you created beforehand.

Price

The third key factor is how much the client pays for a given offering. At the highest end is a big-ticket item that not everyone can afford or will decide to invest in. This is your most wildly priced offering! Just below that are robustly priced services; those that are still substantial but possibly more accessible. Think of a high-end product: quality, but not affordable to everyone.

You'll also want at least one moderately priced offering. Something more affordable and accessible to a wider audience. It shouldn't be "dirt cheap" but it's an attainable price for the average potential client. Having a minimally priced offering means there's an option for folks who aren't ready for anything more than a low-risk investment. A minimally priced offering is NOT your "discount" version of another offering! It's something that delivers a commensurate amount of value, but if they don't like what they receive they'll be unlikely to be angry.

Don't overlook the "price" of an email address or social media follower. At this price level, the client pays nothing monetarily but provides an avenue for ongoing communication. You can even include truly free things in your understanding of your offerings. A truly free offering allows the client to access your awesomeness without anything in exchange. These are things like public blog articles or social media posts that reach out beyond followers.

Client Capacity

This final factor asks you to consider how many clients can take part in an offering at the same time. This isn't how many you actually have enrolled. Rather, it's how many you could (or would want to) have enrolled at the same time. Consider the offering of an intensive year-long program where you hold the clients' hands every step of the way. You can't take on more than a few clients for that offering. But that might be too intense for some. You could diversify into an offering that shines best with a few dozen clients involved at any one time.

You can further diversify by looking at bulk or systematized offerings. These would allow us to take on many more clients at the same time. We still need to understand the limiting factors. For example, group coaching serves more than one client per hour. But the service delivered to a group of 100 people or a group of 12 people is likely to be very different. You might also have preferences in how you spend your time. For a coach who prefers providing one-on-one coaching over group coaching. They'll be most happy and productive if they limit the number of clients who can avail themselves of the group coaching offering.

Truly bulk offerings are not dependent on your time and really can serve an unlimited number of clients. This typically means the offering runs through an automated digital system. Things like asynchronous online courses.

Pyramid of Offerings

Translate those four factors into a numerical score. Then put them in order based on that score. This would be a stellar guide! Both for where to start your business as well as goals for where to go from there. Wish that existed? I got you boo! I've made a free little quiz thing that scores and ranks your offerings.

A brand new business starts at an offering in the mid-range. As the business evolves, it expands to higher-scoring offerings. The ones that are minimally time-intensive and able to serve many people. These are the offerings that introduce people to your business and open the door for them to participate in your other offerings. Once there's capacity, the business can open up offerings that are the lowest scoring. These are more time-intensive, limited access, and are highly customized. These are ways to go deeper with existing clients or invitations to participate in new ways.

I love a good visual, so I think of these scores as organized into a pyramid. The ground your business stands on is your free content on social media, newsletters, freebies, etc. From there your offerings stack. At the top of the pyramid, are your exclusive and highly customized offerings. In fact, I made a free download of a pyramid graphic just for this!

This takes the shape of a pyramid because the long-term goal is to have the number of people involved match the pyramid shape. E.g. the most number of people are involved at the bottom, and the number decreases at each level until there are the fewest at the top. That being said, most business success is found by starting at the middle level and gaining the most people there before expanding to other offerings. Once your participant count is shaped like a pyramid, your revenue will be doing the opposite. Your revenue from each level forms an upside-down pyramid. The top level brings in the most money and the bottom level brings in the least.

The levels of the pyramid offer a guide for how the offerings relate to one another. Not just what offering to expand to, but how do we streamline the offerings we're presenting to our followers and existing clients? If you focus on offering the members of one pyramid level only the next level higher, then this invites them to connect with you further while not overwhelming them with too many options. In fact, the public may not be aware of every level!

We design for this upward flow in how the levels relate to one another, but individuals can become clients by engaging in any level of the pyramid. This doesn't limit your earning potential. Rather, you can engineer consistency in your business by gaining participants towards the bottom of the pyramid. These are folks who might get more involved later on.

Design Your Offerings

I hope this has helped you understand your offering(s) in a new way. Take this information and design your offerings to have a strong and healthy relationship with each other. Remember, there's no such thing as a bad offering, it's just a matter of where to start and how you pitch it!

Don’t forget to download my free PDF and Spreadsheet that helps you organize your offerings into a pyramid!