I remember the first Outwork ad that stopped my scroll. It was about 2 years ago, long before Jake Thompson sat down with me on the Exit Ready podcast, and long before most people in Northern Ireland had heard of them. By the time he came on the show, I did not want to talk about the camera work. I wanted the business behind it, and one decision in particular: the one that took Outwork from a freelancer with a good showreel to an agency people actually know.
That decision was a productised offer. Thirty pieces of video content from a single shoot day. One clear thing, sold the same way every time. But the more useful part of the conversation was what the offer could not do on its own, because a productised offer has a trap built into it.
A defined offer beats “I do whatever you need”
For nine years Jake was a videographer. Talented, busy when the referrals came, and back to zero whenever they dried up. He had moved country four or five times, and each time he landed home with no clients and the same realisation.
“I can’t just be ‘I am a videographer, what do you need’.”
So he built an offer. Not a service menu, an offer. Thirty pieces of video creative, produced in a day.
A defined offer does three things a general service list never will. It is easy to buy, because the client knows exactly what they get. It is easy to market, because you can say one thing over and over until people associate it with you. And it is easy to deliver, because you build a repeatable process around a fixed output instead of reinventing every project. That is why the thirty-video offer, in Jake’s words, put Outwork on the map.
The trap inside a productised offer
A productised offer gets you known and gets you sold. What it does not do on its own is make your revenue predictable.
Jake hit the wall that catches most project-based agencies, and he was honest about it on the show.
“The 30 video thing being very linear, it was a lot of one-off projects. If I wasn’t selling, or if the market didn’t want to buy because it was December, the cashflow stuff was really quite scary, especially with a couple of guys and all the overheads.”
I know that feeling from the inside. When you add two people to a team, the profit you were sitting on dwindles, and every new hire raises the floor you have to clear just to break even. A linear, project-based offer means you start each month at zero and sell your way back up. That is a treadmill, and it runs faster the bigger your team gets.
Laddering the offer into recurring revenue
The fix was not a better offer. It was a second layer on top of the first. Outwork wrapped paid media and back-end management around the core video product. Same clients, deeper relationship, and a monthly engagement instead of a one-off.
“The ad stuff and all the backend management lends itself more to higher LTV and longer-term relationships. The more embedded you get in somebody’s business, the better the relationship gets, and the more relaxed I can be not having to be in sales mode all the time.”
That last line is the prize. When recurring revenue covers your costs, you stop living in sales mode. I put it to Jake as the gold-medal position for any agency: get to the point where all of your costs are covered by your retainer business, and then you can scale as quickly or as slowly as getting the right team around you will allow. Once your fixed costs are covered before the month even starts, every new project is profit instead of survival.
The order matters: offer first, then recurring
Notice the sequence. Jake did not start with a retainer. He started with a sharp, productised offer the market actually wanted, got known for it, then added the recurring layer once clients trusted the work.
That order is the right one. A retainer you pitch cold, before you have proven anything, is a hard sell. A retainer you offer a client who has already seen the results of your core work is the easiest yes in the business. So you productise first to get found and prove the work, then ladder the recurring revenue on top to get stable.
The book Jake credits for the whole pivot is Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers, and the principle underneath it is simple. Figure out what the market actually needs, then mould your skill set into that solution. People buy solutions, not services.
I did a version of this myself
When we started Kaizen in 2009, it was a print company with very good designers. For about six years that is all it was. Then I noticed our own trusted clients were going elsewhere for their brand and branding work, the higher-value projects, while keeping us for print.
So we pivoted. We became a branding agency first, then a digital agency, with the print company running alongside. That was the point we matured as a business. We kept clients across more of their work, we went to market for the higher-value projects, and full-service relationships replaced one-off jobs. It was a big catalyst in why we were able to exit the business successfully years later.
Same pattern as Outwork, a decade apart. Start with the thing you are great at, productise it, then build the layers that keep clients with you and keep the revenue arriving whether or not you are selling this month.
What to do with this
If you run a project-based agency and the cashflow swings keep you up at night, the move is in two parts.
First, sharpen the offer. If you currently sell “we do these six things”, pick the one the market wants most and turn it into a defined, repeatable product with a clear deliverable and a clear price. That is your front door, and the full method is in productised services for agencies.
Second, ladder recurring revenue on top. Look at what your project clients need after the project ends, and build the ongoing engagement that serves it. That is how you turn one-off projects into a retainer base, and it is the single biggest driver of both your sanity and your agency’s recurring revenue.
A productised offer gets you found. The recurring layer on top is what finally lets you breathe.
Go deeper: Hear the full conversation with Jake on Exit Ready episode 009, then read the agency recurring revenue guide and how to get more clients on a monthly retainer.