If you’re thinking of selling your business at some point, you may attract a lot more buyers if you can define your business as delivering a series or products, instead of services.

At which point, you’re probably staring at your monitor and going whaaaa?? But it actually makes a lot of sense. The American Express OPEN Forum explains why and touches on five steps you’ll need to take to turn your services into marketable, and valuable, products, including the first step:

1. Identify something you can replicate repeatedly – The idea behind a product is that you want to be able to get paid for selling a “thing” and not selling your time.  Also, you want to sell the “same” thing over and over if you are to achieve operational efficiencies and decent profits. Look around at what you do.  Chances are, if you’ve been in business for a while, you have developed a process you follow closely for at least one service.  You may not even realize you have a distinct process until you set out to identify it – but you have something.  If that something is in reasonable demand, you have the start of a “product.”

Source: American Express OPEN Forum