A roadside mechanic never gives you a price upfront.
You describe the sound the car is making, he sucks his teeth and says, “Bring am, make I look am first.”
Two days later, the bill is whatever number he woke up feeling that morning.
That’s how most Nigerian service businesses sell.
Every client gets a custom quote, every project gets scoped from scratch. The price depends on a long conversation, the client’s mood and whether the founder had breakfast.
It feels flexible, but it costs you more than you think.
Every sale takes forever, because nothing moves until the founder sits down and thinks. Clients can’t compare you with anyone, so they hesitate. Your team reinvents the process on every job, so quality bounces like a danfo on Third Mainland Bridge. And the business can’t grow past one person, because nobody else knows how to price the work.
I spent over fifteen years in education, IT, real estate and hospitality before I started Solomon Snobs. Different industries, same habit.
Now walk into Balogun Market and price a shirt. You’ll haggle for twenty minutes and still leave feeling cheated. Walk into a mall and the same shirt has a tag on it. You read it, you pay it, you leave.
Same shirt. Different selling.
Productising takes your service out of the market stall and puts a tag on it. You end up with a defined offer, a fixed scope, a clear process, a set timeline and a price anyone can read.
Custom Work Is Not a Personality
You can keep doing custom work. Productising just means you stop pretending the job you do ten times a month is a fresh invention every time.
“We do websites, let’s discuss your needs” becomes “Five-page business website, live in four weeks, ₦850,000.” The scope is decided before the client calls. The price is on the page. The process is the same every time.
I know some founders love the custom quote. It feels like craftsmanship. Each client gets a bespoke proposal, a bespoke timeline and, three weeks in, a bespoke headache when the scope starts to creep.
Keep a custom option for the strange projects. But if custom work is most of what you sell, what you’ve built is a job with a CAC certificate.
The Agbada Test
Here’s a small task, I want you to answer these four questions:
Do you do roughly the same work over and over? If most clients need the same thing, package it.
Do clients struggle to understand what they’re buying? Confused people don’t buy. They say “let me think about it”, and you never hear from them again.
Does every sale drag? If each enquiry needs a custom proposal, you’re paying for it in hours you never bill.
Do you want the business to grow past you? Your staff can only sell what they can describe and price. Give them a package and they can close the sale while you’re stuck in traffic at Ojota.
If every project you take is unique, productising won’t fit. But be honest with yourself, most “unique” projects are the same job wearing a different agbada.
Dig Through Your Last 20 Jobs
Pull up your last 20 projects. Group them by what the client needed, and ignore whatever you wrote on the invoice. One need will keep showing up, like that one uncle at every family meeting. That’s your first package.
Before you commit, check two things.
Is it profitable? Package the work you deliver well and make money on. Leave out the headache job you secretly lose money on because you feel guilty charging properly. Scaling a job that already hurts only gives you more of the pain.
Is there demand? Look at what people ask you about and what they search for. The customer research guide and the Search Console guide show you how to check.
Write Down What You Won’t Do
Every package needs the same parts, written down where your whole team can see them.
- A name that says the outcome.
- Who it’s for and, just as important, who it’s not for.
- What the client has at the end.
- What’s included, item by item.
- What’s not included, spelled out so clearly a lawyer would get bored reading it.
- The steps, what the client must provide, and when it’s done.
- The price, the deposit and the payment schedule.
- How many rounds of revisions are included, and what happens after that.
The exclusions and the revision rules are where most people get lazy. Don’t. Most fights in service businesses start with an expectation nobody wrote down. Somebody assumed “website” included the logo. Somebody else assumed “two revisions” meant two per page. Write it down and the argument never happens.
Fixed Price, Fixed Risk
Price from the value of the outcome, and treat your costs as the floor.
Start with your real delivery cost. That means staff time at the rate you pay them, tools, subcontractors and overheads, including the diesel. Add the margin you need to run and grow the business. Then check that number against what the outcome is worth to the client and what their alternatives cost.
Then add a buffer, some projects always run long.
Understand the deal you’re making. A fixed price moves the risk to you. If the job overruns, you eat the cost. Loose scope plus a fixed price is a polite way of working for free, and no landlord I know accepts “polite” as rent.
The pricing strategy guide goes deeper on value-based pricing, and the pricing page guide shows how to present it.
Make It Run Without You
A package only works if it gets delivered the same way every time, including the week you’re at your cousin’s wedding in Owerri.
In The Founder, the McDonald brothers rehearse their kitchen on a tennis court with chalk lines until every burger comes out the same way, every time. That’s productising, done with chalk.
So write the process down. Give each stage a checklist, and keep templates for the documents and questionnaires you use. Build an onboarding form that collects everything on day one, so nobody is chasing the client for their logo in week three. Then put a quality check in front of anything that leaves the office.
For a lot of founders, this documentation is the real prize. It’s what lets someone who isn’t you deliver your work to your standard. It’s also how you finally take a holiday without your phone ringing on the beach.
How We Packaged Our Own Audit
I’d be a hypocrite if I preached this and then quoted from my gut.
Our marketing audit started life as a free marketing plan. When we turned it into a paid product, we wrote every part of it down. It’s now the Maze Map.
You get a full audit of your marketing and a 90-day plan, with a written goal behind every recommendation. It takes five business days from your kickoff call, followed by a 60-minute walkthrough. It costs ₦2,000,000 in one payment, VAT included. You can get a full refund any time before your kickoff call starts, and if you hire us within 30 days of the walkthrough, ₦500,000 comes off your first invoice.
Nobody waits for a proposal, and nobody guesses what they’re buying. The page answers the questions a sales call used to answer.
For an example outside marketing, say there’s a bookkeeping firm in Yaba, and most of its small-business clients need the same thing every month. So it sells “Monthly Books and Tax Readiness” for businesses under a set number of monthly transactions. The client uploads statements by the 5th. Clean books and a one-page summary arrive by the 20th, with a review call every quarter. There’s one fixed monthly fee, and a higher tier above the transaction limit. Payroll, audits and the tax filing itself are sold separately.
Every part is written down and priced. That’s the whole trick, and it’s embarrassing how few businesses do it.
Test It Before You Shout About It
Don’t throw a launch party on day one, instead, sell your package quietly to a few existing clients and fix whatever breaks.
Then give it its own page on your website, with the price on it. Train everyone who sells it to describe it the same way, word for word if necessary. Keep the custom option for the clients who don’t fit.
After the first ten deliveries, look at the real numbers. Check how long each job took, how happy the clients were and how much you made. Then adjust the scope or the price.
Start with your last 20 projects. Find the one you do most often and most profitably. Write down its outcome, what’s in and what’s out, the steps, the timeline and the price. Then sell it to three clients before you change anything. When you’re ready to make the offer harder to refuse, read the offer design guide.
Write It Down Before Monday
The roadside mechanic knows his engines. He just never wrote anything down, so every job is a guess and every price is a negotiation. Most marketing runs the same way.
If you want to know where your own guessing is costing you, the free 2-minute diagnostic scores your four walls (Measure, Convert, Retain and Attract) and points at the weakest one. The result lands on screen and in your inbox.
P.S. Businesses spending ₦1M or more a month on marketing also get a free Leak Check, a 30-minute call walking through three places the money is slipping out. No card, no obligation, and definitely no “bring am, make I look am first.”
The bookkeeping example is fictional. Fixed-price work shifts delivery risk to the provider, so define scope, responsibilities and change terms carefully, and take legal advice on client contracts. This is general business information.
This article covers one part of a bigger system. Our guide to digital marketing in Nigeria shows how the four walls fit together, and the order to build them in.
