How to License Your Expertise When You Provide Bespoke Custom Services

Thinking about turning your expertise into a licensing program, but concerned that it isn’t a fit for your highly customized, non-recurring professional services that you are known for and that your clients demand? If so, you are correct.

You can use licensing to scale your business without compromising quality by maintaining WHAT YOU DO (high-value custom services) while changing HOW YOU SELL what you do, paving the way for new opportunities and revenue streams.

Game-Changing Examples

How can you apply the principles of licensing to your bespoke professional services?

Microsoft

Did you know that IBM hired –and paid--Microsoft to develop DOS? However, instead of following the typical services engagement where the client owns all of the deliverables, Microsoft licensed the rights in the system it created for IBM to IBM! Sweet.

Ownership vs. Access

Does the Microsoft example seem impossible?

Let’s consider the “access economy”, where we increasingly prefer access over ownership:

• Instead of owning servers, everyone is in the cloud.

• Even the largest companies are using SaaS solutions.

• Why buy the dress when you can Rent the Runway?

I know these examples aren’t bespoke professional services, so let’s look at two cases for applying this to your business.

SCENARIO ONE: License a custom solution instead of selling deliverables.

Your client wants their problem fixed; they don’t want a deliverable. As every coach worth her salt will tell you—sell the transformation.

To quote Alan Weiss in Value-Based Fees: “Self-interest is most affected by results, not tasks, by output, not input. That is why “deliverables” are only a commodity that will be comparison-shopped by most buyers. A report, a training session, or a coaching regimen are simply tasks performed. But improved morale, faster customer responsiveness and more effective leadership are highly valuable organizational outputs. Fees should be based on future improvement, not on past technique.”

Now look at your proposals--are you selling deliverables or are you selling outcomes?

Instead of selling deliverables, give your client a license to—not ownership of—the solution you create to provide the desired transformation.

In your value-based proposal, you present your client with options based on the actual value the client will receive. If there is no actual value in owning the solution, if the client gets the transformation by having a license to the solution, then you have a win-win:

✔️ The client pays only for the rights in the solution it needs.

✔️You build a valuable, scalable library of IP assets that you own and can leverage.

Everything else involving how you currently create results for you clients remains the same. The only difference – the intellectual property provision in the client agreement.

Obviously, this will not work for every service. If you provide a highly creative service, such as creating advertising campaigns, your client will insist on owning the 100% of the deliverables.

However, for most of us, it is the transformation our clients pay us for, not the deliverables.

SCENARIO TWO: License the non-proprietary part of the deliverables.

In this scenario specific deliverables are an essential part of the services and some of the deliverables will incorporate the client’s proprietary information.

Consider this example from a participant in one of my workshops: She is a futurist who provides sophisticated analyses of what the state of the world will be in 10 – 15 years to companies with very long R&D cycles. To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky, “the client wants to skate to where the puck is going."

She receives massively valuable confidential information from her clients so she can do her research. And of course, the client would never tolerate her owning or using any of that information for any purpose other than serving the client.

However, a lot of her research that is not proprietary to the client, such as the effects of climate change or future geopolitical forces and immigration patterns.

Even if the only reason she researched, say, the likelihood of a United Ireland at the client’s request, the resulting research contains no proprietary information of the client. Rather than assigning all rights in the United Ireland research to the client, that portion of the research can be licensed to the client.

She retains ownership of that research allowing her to create a library that could be licensed to other custom clients (at increased profit) or even to create a database that could be licensed by subscription to companies that can’t afford her 6 figure fees.

Practical Steps to Implement This Approach

Think expansively about scaling your businesses without compromising the quality or customization of your services. 40 years ago, Microsoft knew the power of retaining rights in custom commissioned deliverables.

• When your client has a problem and wants a solution, consider licensing the solution, even a custom solution, to your client.

• If there are parts of the deliverables that are not client specific, retain the rights to those elements and license them to the client instead.

IP is fuel! 🚀