Every time I brought up standardization or productization with a founder of a strategy firm, their expression changed.

Not anger. Not confusion. Something more visceral, like I'd just suggested they water down their life's work. It was almost involuntary. And it didn't make sense to me at first, because I wasn't recommending anything remotely close to what they were hearing.

It took me a while to realize what was happening. "Productized" had become a loaded word. In boutique consulting, it meant cookie-cutter. It meant stripping away the judgment, the nuance, the practitioner expertise that these founders had spent decades building. Of course they recoiled.

But here's what I also noticed: on the other side of that divide, the productization diehards — the agency coaches and consultants pushing "package everything" — were equally wrong. They were treating productization as the destination rather than a delivery decision that needed strategic context.

Both camps were fighting the wrong fight.

The Wrong Binary

This industry has been stuck in an either/or frame for years. You're either bespoke or you're productized. Pick a side.

The bespoke camp says:

• Custom means premium 
• Every situation is different, and we've seen them all 
• We don't want to be constrained
• This is how we've always done it

The productized camp says:

• It's the only way to cut costs and improve margins 
• It's the only way to operationalize the firm 
• It's the only way to decrease dependence on expensive senior resources

They're both right about certain mechanics, while missing the actual problem. Because I kept finding the same gap on both sides.

The bespoke firms that were thriving already had a methodology underneath the custom work, but just hadn't synthesized, named, or evangelized it yet. And the productized firms that were struggling had skipped the methodology entirely and gone straight to tactical packaging.

Same missing layer. Different symptoms.

Think about a jazz trio playing a standard.

A standard is a well-known tune like "Autumn Leaves," "Take the A Train." Every jazz musician on earth knows dozens of them. And every standard has two parts: the melody you recognize, and the chord changes underneath it. The changes are the harmonic structure.

The band plays the melody. Then each player takes a solo over the changes, inventing new melodies in real time, melodies that have never been played before and will never be played exactly that way again. Then they bring the melody back and close it out.

When a player solos, they're making it up as they go. But they're making it up inside the existing structure. The soloist can go anywhere, and the bass is still walking through the changes, the piano is still comping through the changes, everyone is still locked into the same structure.

That shared structure is what lets them fly. That structure is the methodology.

Improvisation it isn't the absence of structure. It's the highest expression of it. Those players can reinvent the tune night after night because they've internalized the changes so deeply they don't have to think about them. You can't improvise with someone who doesn't know the changes.

That's what the bespoke camp keeps forgetting. The custom work was never possible without the methodology underneath it. Standardizing the foundation doesn't kill the bespoke magic. It's the only thing that makes it repeatable.

The Methodology Infrastructure

Here's what sits underneath every firm that scales, regardless of where they land on the delivery spectrum.

A methodology is not a process document. It's a stack of interconnected components:

• Key Insight: A belief about the market you're in and how it operates, where it's going, or how it should operate. This is the foundation. Without it, you're just executing tasks.
• Core Principles: How things should work and why. These drive decision-making across the firm and are almost always connected to the founder's purpose and identity.
• Frameworks: Structured approaches to specific problems within the methodology. You might have one for segmentation, one for positioning, one for messaging. Multiple frameworks, one methodology.
• Processes: How you deliver on the methodology and the frameworks. How the frameworks connect. Your core delivery process lives here.
• Assets: Tools, proprietary data sets, data models, technology platforms. These are the enablers that make the methodology executable at scale.

Every successful boutique firm I've worked with has some of these components already in place. They're just scattered across the founder's head, old decks, client conversations, and institutional muscle memory. They were never synthesized and codified in a way that's actually useful from a scaling perspective.

That's the real work. Not "document your process." Codify your decision-making.

The Delivery Spectrum

Once the methodology is in place, you don't have to choose between custom and productized. There's a full spectrum with at least four distinct models:

• Custom/Bespoke: Fully tailored engagement. The methodology provides structure and consistency, but the scope, approach, and output are unique every time.
• Modularized: Standard pieces that can be assembled in different combinations. Think modular home building: same components, different configurations. Not everything is standard — you have custom elements woven in. But the modules give you leverage.
• Standardized: All the modules, in a set order. Step one, then two, then three. You might have customizable elements between steps, but the path is defined.
• Productized: Same scope, same process, same price, same delivery. No customization. Done the same way every time.

No matter which one you choose, the methodology infrastructure sits underneath it all. Whether you're delivering fully custom strategy work or a fixed-scope assessment, the key insight, the core principles, the frameworks, the processes, and the assets are the same foundation.

And your firm doesn't have to live in one place on this spectrum. Most successful firms operate across it. You need the core model (say custom), but it's completely kosher to have parts that are elswhere on the spectrum (say a productized entry point offering).

The Banking Consulting Case Study

I was working with a client running an innovation consulting firm in the banking sector. The moment I mentioned productizing something, I got that same visceral reaction.

We dug into it. His concern wasn't productization itself, it was that his key differentiator would become invisible. His consultants were all ex-banking executives. Every one of them had been practitioners. He was afraid that packaging anything into a repeatable format would hide the contextual understanding and nuance that made them different.

But here's what was interesting: even though there was no formal methodology written down, one clearly existed. He had a key insight into why innovation didn't happen well within banking. He had core principles for how innovation should be structured and how the banking business model should be optimized. He even had a clever analogy that tied the whole thing together.

All of it was already there. It had just never been codified.

Once we surfaced those components and gave them structure, the resistance dissolved. He actively collaborated on building a productized entry-level offer — an innovation sprint.

The sprint worked like this:

• The assessment phase was productized. Standard inputs, quantitative and qualitative, collected through a structured process with technology layered underneath to automate the data collection.
• The working session was productized structure with bespoke output. Same number of consultants, same type of client stakeholders, same facilitation format, same timeframe. But the output was completely custom because it depended on the client's unique inputs and context.
• The working session format put the practitioners in the room with the client. It didn't hide the differentiator. It put it on display.

After the sprint, engagement moved into modularized delivery. The sprint would surface the full innovation priority list — things the bank was already considering and things that weren't on the docket yet. Each priority could become a project. Some followed documented standard use cases (modularized), and everything else was fully custom.

Standard inputs. Standard process. Custom output. The infrastructure is productized. The judgment is bespoke.

What Happens When You Skip the Methodology

Now compare that to what I've seen with tactically productized firms. Having run an marketing agency before, I've seen it all in that sapce: social media agencies, LinkedIn ads shops, personal branding agencies, Google Ads firms, content agencies.

The majority were strictly tactical. They didn't lack expertise in the tactics, and were often very good at execution. But they had no key insight. No core principles. No point of view on where the market was going or why things needed to change.

They were good at executing with the way things were. That's it.

When AI hit, it wiped them out. Not because AI created a new problem — because AI removed the scarcity that was hiding an old one. Tactical execution used to be scarce enough to mask the gap. Once it wasn't scarce anymore, the gap was exposed.

The firms that survived (and thrived) took a different approach entirely. They took what I'd call a vertical problem-ownership view — owning a bigger part of a large problem and being accountable for a larger portion of the end economic result. Not just owning a tactic, but owning the problem space strategically.

On the content side: thought leadership consultancies that advise founders on developing their point of view, integrating PR, building the strategy; not just cranking out LinkedIn posts. On the staffing side: firms that didn't just own placement but owned delivery quality encompassing compliance, management, career development, skill development, and cultural integration.

The problem wasn't that these firms were delivering tactical vs strategic expertise. The problem was that they were treating the tactical expertise as the differentiator instead of the methodology (or lack there of) underneath it. And more importantly, is that methodology oriented around a tactic, or around core problem ownership?

AI Isn't the Cause. It's the Accelerant.

This isn't a new problem. Firms have always stalled when they didn't have methodology infrastructure. You can get to $1 million, maybe $2 million without it. But competition increases as more firms enter your space, and it gets harder and harder to answer the "why you, why now" question when all you have is a tactical, reactive business model.

AI didn't create this problem. It accelerated speed at which you reach it.

It's not too different from what happened during COVID from a culture perspective. COVID didn't create the culture gaps in organizations. It exposed them. The moment everyone went remote, it became obvious which firms lacked trust, which had weak processes, which maybe weren't hiring the right people.

Same dynamic here. AI became powerful enough to be a competitor rather than just an enabler... and suddenly every structural gap has become visible.

Where AI Actually Fits

AI is the enabling layer underneath the methodology infrastructure. Here's how you can, and probably should, use it:

• Codify the methodology: package the key insight, core principles, and frameworks so they're accessible for onboarding, content, and client conversations.
• Execute within the frameworks: build agents that handle specific parts of the framework and process execution.
• Build the assets: data models, analytical tools, proprietary platforms.
• Orchestrate the operating model: serve as the coordination layer across delivery.

None of this removes the bespoke elements. None of it prevents a senior consultant from reviewing AI-generated recommendations and saying, "None of this is right, try again." None of it replaces the ability to contextualize a problem, navigate internal politics, or manage the change management that every client engagement requires.

What it does, is make things productizable that weren't before. You can now create a contained scope and delivery model with elements of custom output because generative AI can handle the variability that used to require a senior practitioner for every step.

AI handles the repeatable infrastructure so your judgment can be applied where it actually matters.

The Positioning Connection

This entire model connects directly back to Positioning Clarity. It maps to all three anchor points:

• Owner's Intent: The founder almost always discovers the key insight. It comes from their purpose, their experience, their identity. The core principles connect to how they believe the work should be done. The real question is whether they can build the methodology while staying true to their intent and capacity.
• Positioning Intent: The methodology is a core component of how the market sees and experiences the firm. It's not just an internal operating decision. It's an external one. Your methodology is a big part of your market position.
• Positioning Reality: This is where you validate the model, discover incremental insights, and find the right language for presenting the methodology to the market.

Positioning determines where you sit on the delivery spectrum. And the methodology is part of the positioning itself. It's both.

The Conventional Advice Is Wrong

Here's my problem with the vast majority of existing advice on scaling a services firm: it's woefully incomplete and devoid of context.

"Document your process." No. Codify your decision-making.

"Productize what you can." No. Decide what you should productize vs. what you shouldn't, based on your positioning, not convenience.

The missing context is the Positioning Clarity methodology. Without it, productization decisions are tactical, not strategic. You end up packaging things because they're easy to package, not because they prove and show your chosen position in the market.

This is what I started unpacking in The Work on the Business Trap. The "work on the business" advice isn't wrong, it's just dangerously incomplete when it's disconnected from positioning.

The Service Offering Audit

If this clicked for you, here's what to do next. Go through every service your firm currently offers and answer two questions:

1. Does this service, in its current state, firmly support and drive home our chosen market position? Why or why not?

2. Was this service designed reactively or strategically? If reactively, what would you change?

The first question tests positioning alignment — does the service prove who you say you are? The second tests design intent — did you build this deliberately or did it just emerge because a client asked for it?

Many founders find that at least half their services fail one or both questions. 

This is Bespoke at Scale

A methodology infrastructure that sits underneath your entire delivery model, whether that model is custom, modularized, standardized, productized, or some mix of all four. The methodology doesn't change based on the delivery model. The delivery model is a strategic decision that the methodology makes possible.

AI is the enablement layer that makes the whole thing executable at a level that wasn't possible three years ago. But none of it works without Positioning Clarity first. The methodology has to be oriented around owning a problem, not executing a tactic. And the founder has to build it in a way that's true to their purpose, identity, and capacity.

If you ran the audit and want to talk through what you found, or if you're staring at a methodology where the parts are clearly there but haven't been synthesized, reply to this email. That's exactly the kind of conversation I have with founders every week.