A Sellable Service Business in Four Moves

Most service businesses don’t fail because the work is poor. They fail (or stall) because the business is built around the founder.

If clients are buying you, you don’t own an asset. You own a demanding job with good cashflow and limited optionality.

I came across a story of a freelancer who was pulling in serious money as “the Facebook ads guy”. Lucrative, low overhead, and completely unsellable; because the product was him. The rebuild that followed is a useful blueprint, but I want to take it one step further and map it to what we see in real owner-led firms: build value, build traction, and build on financial discipline. That’s the Trinity.

Move 1: De-risk the founder brand

A personal brand can be powerful. It can also be a valuation killer.

If the website, messaging, and delivery are essentially “Alasdair does X”, a buyer can’t acquire that. They can only rent it. That shows up as lower multiples, longer earn-outs, and heavier founder tie-ins.

The first move is a clean break: a brand that can stand on its own. Not a name tweak. A distinct identity, tone, and promise.

BTM take: brand isn’t aesthetics; it’s transferability. If you want a business that attracts the right clients and the right partners, your proposition needs to be bigger than the founder.

Move 2: Build a sales edge that isn’t dependent on you 

Founder-led sales is common. It’s also a bottleneck.

The pivotal shift in the story was moving sales off the founder’s desk. Commission-only, category-experienced, high incentive, low fixed risk. Hard to find, but the principle matters even if the structure changes: sales must become a system, not a personality.

Here’s where most firms go wrong: they sell features (“we do bookkeeping / accounts / ads / ops”). Buyers don’t buy features. Owners buy relief.

So the sales edge is built on pain points:

• “I’m working harder but profits aren’t improving.”
• “Cash is lumpy and I’m always braced for a bad month.”
• “I can’t take time off without things breaking.”
• “I don’t trust the numbers, so I don’t make decisions fast enough.”
• “I’m the hub of every decision and it’s exhausting.”

BTM take: when you lead with the owner’s lived pain, you build trust faster. And when you document that sales conversation (questions, diagnosis, next steps) you create a repeatable process that someone else can run.

Move 3: Make delivery owner-light

The next move is getting off the tools without spooking clients.

The smart part in the story wasn’t hiring an account manager—it was staging the transition. Clients didn’t wake up to a new face overnight. The founder eased the team member in over months: cc’ing emails, letting them run calls, gradually shifting ownership until trust transferred.

BTM take: this is “right people, right seats” in practice. It’s also how you reduce concentration risk while protecting retention—one of the biggest drivers of enterprise value in a service firm.

Move 4: Productise the journey

This is the glue.

A sellable service business feels less like a bespoke agency and more like a product company: named stages, clear timelines, checklists, and “here’s what happens next.”

That does three things:

• Improves client confidence (less uncertainty, fewer “why isn’t this done yet?” moments)
• Improves delivery quality (less tribal knowledge, fewer heroics)
• Improves margin (less rework, clearer scope, easier delegation)

And this is where I’ll bring in the Profit First lens. Productisation isn’t just operational neatness—it’s what makes profit repeatable. When delivery is predictable, you can set targets, protect margin, and stop profit being whatever is left at the end of the month.

Call it a profit burst: not a one-off “great month”, but a structural shift where cashflow and margin stop being accidental.

The multiplier most owners miss: referral partners

If you want to build trust at scale, referral partners are an unfair advantage.  Treat them like a channel, not a hope.

The businesses that become truly attractive (to clients and buyers) tend to have a few reliable partner lanes:

• lawyers and fiduciaries
• wealth managers and mortgage advisers
• corporate service providers
• specialist consultants and fractional leaders

But partners don’t refer because you’re “good”. They refer because you make them look good.

BTM take: productising your offer and clarifying pain-point messaging makes it easier for a partner to introduce you confidently:

• who you help
• what problem you solve
• what the first step is
• what a good-fit client looks like

That’s how you turn referrals into a predictable pipeline instead of sporadic luck.

A simple self-check

If you want to pressure-test how sellable your service business is, ask:

• Value: if I disappeared for 90 days, would revenue hold up?
• Traction: could someone else run our sales conversations and close deals?
• Profit: do we know our margin by service line—and do we protect it by design?
• Partners: could a referral partner explain our offer in one sentence without me in the room?

If any of those feel uncomfortable, that’s not a problem it’s a map of the path to follow.