New Revenue: How Service Firms Build and Sell Products

For decades, service firms have grown by scaling their people and deepening client relationships. But today, headcount growth is increasingly constrained, margins are under pressure, and clients expect more solutions that reflect their experiences in day to day life. These shifts are prompting many firms to explore commercial product development as a tactic for growth, differentiation, and business valuation.

In our experience, firms tend to arrive at this crossroads from one of two starting points:

1. You have an internal tool or methodology that’s gained traction and are exploring whether to commercialise it - perhaps a scheduling platform, compliance engine, reporting tool, or diagnostic IP built to support client delivery. This path typically begins with something that’s been quietly adding value internally and starts generating external interest.

2. You’re earlier in the journey and motivated by market pressure, client demand, or the opportunity digital offers present. These firms often don’t have a product yet, but recognise the long-term value of recurring revenue and tech-enabled delivery.

Both are viable, both are ambitious, but they require different investments, expectations, and execution journeys. Because we’ve encountered with proprietary tools weighing up commercialising these or building a digital product from scratch, this guide addresses both tracks, highlighting strategies for each.

Step 1 Is Always: Understand Your Market

Regardless of starting point, the first job is not to build or sell - it’s to validate.

If you’re sitting on an internal tool, don’t confuse anecdotal usefulness with market demand. Just because it works well for your firm - or even a few clients - doesn’t mean there’s broad appetite or willingness to pay. Start by mapping the external problem space: Who else has this problem? Is it urgent? What are they using now? A narrowly successful internal tool might still face fierce competition or solve a problem that’s niche to your operating model.

If you’re earlier in the journey, this is your chance to explore the market from a clean slate. Conduct a proper market scan before getting wedded to a solution. Talk to clients about emerging pain points. Look for underserved workflows, points of inefficiency, or new regulatory pressures where software might provide an edge. Your goal isn’t to chase trends, but to spot patterns.

Either way, defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and building an honest Total Addressable Market (TAM) view is non-negotiable. And be wary of inflated business cases - especially when internal enthusiasm runs high.

Tip: Never forget, your biggest opportunity might not be your traditional service clients - it could be your suppliers or even your competition.

Emphasise Customer Feedback - But Don’t Don’t Forget To Follow Your Gut

For firms with existing tools, the temptation is to harden the product too soon - add features, improve the interface, and polish before putting it in the hands of users. But don’t mistake internal stability for product-market fit. Your internal use case likely benefited from cultural context, internal champions, and workarounds that won’t exist externally.

Instead, put the tool in the wild. Invite external users into a limited beta, and resist the urge to immediately “fix” or explain away their friction. Their struggle is your insight.

For earlier-stage explorers, feedback gathering needs to be structured, not speculative. Don’t pitch vaporware. Co-create with clients, observe their processes, and validate problem framing before landing on a solution. Here, your job is less about improving a thing and more about confirming the thing is worth building.

In both cases, feedback should drive iteration, and can be done cheaply and quickly with simple prototyping methods and experiments.

Strategic Financial Planning and Governance

If you’re commercialising a tool, chances are you’ve already absorbed the development costs and think of the product as “paid for.” That mindset can backfire. Commercialisation requires a separate investment - into packaging, support, marketing, and legal frameworks. If you don’t plan for these, you’ll underfund the product’s real potential.

For firms just getting started, the financial challenge is more fundamental: you’ll need to justify pre-revenue investment, build a long-term case for ROI, and manage leadership expectations around time-to-profit. Don’t starve the product by trying to fund it opportunistically from service overflow. Create a dedicated capital line, a clear governance model, and measurable investment milestones.

In both cases, you need senior-level sponsorship - someone with the authority to make decisions fast and protect the product from being deprioritised against immediate service revenue.

Harness Your Core Strengths While Filling the Gaps

If you’re sitting on a tool, your advantage is embedded IP: a solution born from real client work and refined in the field. But these tools are often clunky, coded by consultants or offshore developers, and tightly coupled to your delivery model. To succeed externally, they may need re-architecture - not just a prettier UI.

Early-stage builders, on the other hand, have the luxury of starting fresh. You can validate concepts without legacy baggage. But you may lack the clarity or specificity that comes from solving a known problem internally. Here, investing in cross-functional product thinking - bringing together delivery experts, technologists, and product talent is essential.

In both cases, service expertise is a strategic advantage, but not a complete product competency. You will likely need to upskill or augment with experienced product and engineering talent.

Value External Advice, Take It With a Grain Of Salt

If you’re commercialising a tool, you might already feel like you know the product better than anyone else. That’s partially true - but beware of confirmation bias. External advisors can help you see where the real competitive moat lies (or doesn’t), and whether your go-to-market model is fit for a product business, not just service cross-sell.

For those earlier in the journey, advisors can help sharpen focus: validating whether a problem is productisable, helping you avoid overbuilding, and setting realistic timelines and governance. The trick is to go broad and use advisors as filters and accelerators - people who’ve lived through the transition and can help compress the learning curve.

Synergies and Strategic Outcomes: Align to Firm Strategy

Many service-born products have synergies with the service firm. If your product began life as an internal tool, the most natural synergy is often delivery efficiency - saving time or cost on existing engagements. That’s valuable, but don’t confuse internal savings with commercial viability. The real upside comes when the product extends your firm’s reach: into new clients, new markets, or new revenue streams.

If you’re building from scratch, synergies may be more speculative - but potentially more transformative. A well-positioned product might reposition your brand, move you up the value chain, or help you win deals you’d otherwise lose. Just be clear on your definition of success: is it profit? Lead gen? Valuation uplift? Strategic narrative?

Aligning these objectives early will help avoid misalignment later.

Tip: Synergies can be highly valuable but must not distract from the commercial viability of the product. If you’re building a lead-generator then synergies are essential to realise its’ value. If you’re building stand-alone SaaS then forcing cohesion with the firm’s operating model can create huge opportunity cost.

Build a Fit-for-Purpose Go-To-Market Strategy

One of the most common missteps service firms make when bringing a product to market is assuming it can be sold through their existing services Go-to-Market. It can’t - and trying to force it through will almost always lead to muddled messaging, confused prospects, and sluggish growth.

Your service GTM is optimised for high-touch relationships, tailored solutions, and project-based delivery. Product GTM, on the other hand, must be designed for scale: crisp messaging, clear value props, self-serve or repeatable sales processes, and the infrastructure to support multiple concurrent customers without bespoke effort.

If you’re commercialising an internal tool, resist the urge to ‘tack it on’ to your existing offer suite or quietly introduce it to clients. These soft launches tend to fizzle - not because the product lacks merit, but because it was never given a real shot to stand on its own feet. Treat the product as its own line of business, with a distinct brand voice, dedicated sales motion, and separate success metrics.

If you’re earlier in the journey use the build phase to also develop your market motion: experiment with different channels, trial pricing models, build demand early, and validate not just the product, but how it gets into customers’ hands.

Yes, your services reputation might open doors - but don’t mistake familiarity for product-market fit. Ultimately, your product must justify its own existence in the market. That means building a GTM engine from the ground up that’s designed to scale, not just to sell.

Crafting a Competitive Pricing Strategy

Internal tools rarely have pricing models - so if you’re commercialising one, you’ll be starting from scratch. Don’t fall into cost-plus thinking. Instead, look at what value the product creates relative to external alternatives. This might mean charging per-seat, per-use, or bundling with services - but it must reflect the economics of SaaS or platform models, not consulting.

If you’re earlier in the journey, use pricing experiments as part of your discovery. What are clients willing to pay to eliminate a pain? What does budget ownership look like? Use this to shape your monetisation logic before you code.

Pricing should be reviewed quarterly in the early days before you scale. It’s not a one-time decision, it’s a opportunity to fine tune your revenue engine.

Conclusion

Whether you’re sitting on a promising internal tool or just beginning to explore the product opportunity, the journey ahead requires deliberate transformation - not just operationally, but culturally.

If you’re commercialising, think of yourself less as a services firm “with a product,” and more as a firm building a scalable, investable venture. That mindset will unlock better decisions around funding, governance, and growth.

If you’re starting from zero, take advantage of the blank slate. Don’t rush into building. Start by learning - and build conviction before code.

For both paths, success won’t come from treating productisation as a side project. It demands dedicated resources, clear leadership, and a tolerance for ambiguity. But done well, it can future-proof your firm, create new valuation upside, and open a new chapter in your growth story.