Principles and concepts to optimize your service business

By Garrett, 21 Aug 2025

One of the greatest challenges in starting and owning a service business is the shift from doing the work to building the business that does the work, and then optimizing that business to be better than everyone else doing similar work.

In December of last year I sold the web development business that I started in 2014. I started it because I was good at building websites, and over that ten-year period I had a crash course in what it actually takes to optimize a service business to be successful, scalable and sellable.

I learned to delegate effectively and build predictable processes and systems to minimize issues. I automated time-consuming tasks while preserving the human touch, and found ways to differentiate our work and positioning that attracted higher-quality clients, projects and employees.

Ten years in, I was sitting on a seven-figure business with above-industry-average profitability and retention rates, working with clients like Tito’s, PBS, Caesar’s Entertainment, and 100+ other businesses—all while requiring just 5-10 hours of my time per week. The complete opposite of where I’d started as a solo freelancer working 60+ hour weeks!

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Here, in no specific order, are the principles, tools and concepts that made this transformation possible.

Profit levers

First and foremost, focusing on profit levers not only increases your overall profitability, but provides by-products like a calmer business, scalability, sellability, happier clients, better pipeline, ability to work on the business rather than in it, etc.

Here’s a pretty standard and simple profitability formula. Everything to the right of the equals sign is a profit lever.

Profit = (Leads x Conversion Rate x Average Transaction Value) x Margin - Operating Expenses.

In it’s most basic sense, if you have more of anything (well, except expenses) then profit goes up. Everything else in the list below ties back to one or more of these levers.

Find your niche within a niche and fly the flag

Find your niche by starting broad and gradually narrowing your focus into the work that’s working. There’s a difference between being a web development company and being the go-to choice for medium to large businesses on a specific platform that need a reliable, long-term web development partner that excels at communication and project delivery. Once you’re there, join the communities, write the articles, become the expert.

Action: Rewrite the description of what you do so that it uniquely serves your ideal client. When done right, this makes the path forward bigger and clearer rather than holding you back.

Stay out of the commodity trap

It doesn’t matter what service you’re in, there’s the primary supply curve which is highly commoditized and there’s all the other specialized supply curves that aren’t. Be in a specialized one (or better yet, make one yourself).

This is a process that continues forever. Each curve gets flooded over time (because it’s working!) and you have to uniquely innovate your way into a new one.

Remember: commodities are bought, solutions are sold.

Action: What unique problems do you solve that your customers need you for? How can you become more consultative and customized rather than transactional?

Cut out the noise

If you look around to see what everyone else is doing then you’re more likely to fall into the commodity trap than not. Build your own path, follow your own intuition, and use your broader raw materials—experiences, perspective, way of thinking, things you’ve seen, books you’ve read—to decide how you do what you do and present what you do.

Action: The next time you want to look to your competitors to help make a decision, don’t!

Vision with checkpoints

A long term direction is good, but not necessarily a long term detailed plan. Especially in service. Visualize a near distant future, create a strategy to do the stuff it takes to get there, do it, and repeat. Committing to an idea and doing it is better than thinking about an idea and not doing it.

Action: How can you make a simpler version of a long term idea for your business and do it now?

Winner takes all

In business there is no first, second and third place. You either get the business or you do not get the business. Commit to getting better across the board, make better and more consistent micro-decisions than your competition, and you will continue to maintain a first place advantage over the alternatives.

Action: Identify one small thing in your business that’s causing trouble or could be cleaned up, and make it better. Commit to doing this weekly.

Competitive advantage mix

All service businesses are not created equal, but there are a few things that they should all be good at. My favorites are:

• Quality and expertise
• Customer experience
• Speed and convenience
• Trust and reliability
• Innovation and differentiation

You should have a pulse on all of these, and do everything you can to improve them.

Action: Commit to one or two items to be great at, and be better than good at the others.

Human to robot scale

Choose where your business should live on the human to robot scale. Fully robotic is efficient and forgettable. Fully human is charming and chaotic. Some industries should be more robotic, while others should be more human. Figure out where you need to land and use it to inform your process, positioning and customer interactions.

Action: Choose where your business should live on the human to robot scale.

Just enough process (without killing creativity)

Based on where you land on the human to robot scale, create just enough process around your business to make you efficient, but still human with room to be creative.

Action: Start with the simplest form of process, i.e. lead comes in, sales cycle, onboarding, do the work, delivery and aftercare. Fill in the blanks somewhere!

Systematize your business from start to finish

Take what you’ve done above and get granular with the steps it takes to go through each category and get to the next category. At my last business, our first version of process was a 40-page Google Doc that I made just before hiring my first project manager, and it became a living breathing thing that we optimized from that point forward.

Action: Set aside a few hours to document your business from start to finish, then commit to ‘building out’ each peice over time.

Trust and delegate

Hire smart people who fit your culture, trust them to do their job, and be okay with a screw up or two. When there’s a screw up, figure out what is broken with your process and come up with a solution to fix it. When they have questions, either point them to the right place in your documentation, or, if it’s not already there, figure out the best way to add it.

Action: Document something that regularly falls on your plate, quickly teach it to someone else on your team, and make it their responsibility moving forward.

Simple, consistent marketing plan

Establish a consistent marketing presence with valuable content creation. It doesn’t have to be heavy, or complex, but you need to regularly feed the beast. This will improve SEO, grow your email list, enhanced brand awareness and create deal flow. Over time, the results are compounding and you’ll be positioned as an expert in your field.

Here’s an example of a simple plan:

• One newsletter per month
• Two strategic blog posts per month (feeds the newsletter and social media, and your team can share them)
• One or two social media posts per week

Action: If you’re not collecting emails through a newsletter sign-up, set it up today.

Visually stand out

Anywhere that your customers and potential customers can see you or read about you needs to be intentional and stand out from the crowd. You need to be one in one-thousand, not one of one-thousand. Yes, this means your website, but it’s also your marketing materials, and the page people are redirected to after filling out your contact form or signing up for your newsletter, and all the other tertiary touch points across digital and physical space that represent your brand.

Action: Make an inventory of every touchpoint where prospects and clients encounter your brand and create a plan to make them better.

And an even simpler sales plan

One year my business grew 40%, exactly as planned.

This started as an exercise of going through my invoice/project history to find more granular ways of splitting up my services. Previously, we just “did custom work”. But after digging around, we had four unique types of work that we did on a regular basis.

I calculated the average cost per item of each of these services, both one-off services and recurring. I did the math of what happens if we sell X of these and Y of those, and created a 12-month plan to do it. The plan also included when and who we’d need to hire if we stuck to the plan.

It looked something like this:

• Sell one of this thing per month
• Sell two of that thing per quarter
• Sell one of this other thing per quarter
• Keep a spreadsheet up-to-date that we meet on weekly.

Vualà. It happened.

And a by-product of this exercise is that we got better at communicating each service in a more granular way and were able to create unique delivery processes around each of them.

Action: Try going through a similar exercise for your business.

Reporting and check-ins

Everything important needs to be broken down into a simple report or math formula to track progress and hold the team accountable. Things that you can and should report on:

This stuff all lives somewhere but can be extremely valuable when looked at together in any given timespan:

• Leads, wins, loses, conversion rate
• New v.s. recurring projects
• Team size in any given timeframe
• Revenue, profitability
• Marketing out the door by category

You’ll typically find insights while interacting with data in this way that you would not otherwise find.

Action: Make a simple spreadsheet that you’ll update on a monthly basis with key information to inform your future decisions.

Lego block everything

Here’s an example. You don’t like writing the monthly newsletter because it’s too time consuming and it takes you two days to write. But then you have an idea. What if I build my newsletter in a way that it’s mostly content that I already have?

• Introduction paragraph
• Latest blog posts (you already write two per month)
• Featured case study (you already have 50, roll the dice)
• Employee spotlight (again, roll the dice)
• Relevant industry articles (you could have a Slack channel where your team adds links of what they’re reading)

So now, in order to create your monthly newsletter you write an introduction paragraph and compile the rest.

Efficiencies can be found by making little lego blocks that work together to complete the whole across all aspects of your business: accounting, delivery, sales, marketing, admin, etc.

Action: Audit one item in your business (a task, a service, etc.) and break it down into component pieces that either already exist elsewhere in your business or could serve multiple purposes once created.

Overly optimized onboarding

Back in 2015 I learned one of my favorite things from a client, and it was called the “Master Queue”. For them, it was an email that got sent out to their project management team when a job was won. For me, it became the central point of start-to-finish process that everything flows out of. It kick starts all sorts of activities across the business and is the hard transition point from prospect work to client project.

Those days, most of that was manual work, but today it’s almost all automated.

A contract gets signed, which marks a deal as won in a CRM system, which sends a notification to a group of people, and sends the relevant data to your accounting system, project management system, and whatever other tools you use to do your job.

If you find yourself high on the robot side of the robot to human scale, you can automate the client kick-off emails off of this flow as well.

The “Master Queue” is my favorite place to start optimizing process work because so many things flow off of it.

Action: Create a form that your team fills out when a job is won that gets sent to a shared email address, and create a step by step process for what needs to happen when that email comes in.

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Some of these items came early on, some came later, some I was not as consistent with as I should have been. But intentionality, even with imperfect implementation, still brings outsized results.

Today, I help transform chaotic service businesses into high-performing operations through strategic design, technology and process innovation. Are you ready to bring order to your service business? Shoot me a DM. I’d love to chat.