Every custom quote is a tax on your expertise. You spend two hours understanding a prospect’s situation, another hour building a proposal that you may or may not win, and another hour on the back-and-forth if they have questions. That’s four hours invested before a dollar changes hands, and it starts over with every new prospect.
A service catalog eliminates that tax. When someone tells you they have a website that isn’t converting, you don’t build a custom proposal, you recommend the Website Audit ($299) to diagnose, and explain that depending on the findings, the CRO Sprint ($3,800) or the Full Site Redesign ($9,500) is likely the next step. Thirty minutes, done.
The catalog doesn’t limit what you can do. It structures how you talk about it. Every engagement still gets executed at full quality, the catalog just means you’ve done the thinking about scope and pricing in advance rather than under pressure during a sales conversation.
The Five Core Offering Types
1. The Audit (Diagnostic)
Purpose: Identify the specific problem before committing to a solution.
Duration: 1-5 business days.
Price range: $300-$1,500.
Deliverable: A written report with specific findings, prioritized recommendations, and a recommended next step.
Who buys it: Clients who know something isn’t working but aren’t sure what, and clients who want to evaluate your thinking before committing to a larger engagement.
Design rule: The audit should be narrow enough to complete in under 10 hours of your time and broad enough to produce actionable findings. A website audit covers 5-8 dimensions (design, copy, UX, technical, conversion). A content audit covers 4-5 dimensions (volume, quality, SEO, distribution, conversion). Define the dimensions in your audit template before you sell the service.
2. The Sprint (Focused Implementation)
Purpose: Fix one or two specific problems identified in the audit or defined upfront.
Duration: 2-4 weeks.
Price range: $2,500-$7,000.
Deliverable: Specific implemented work (not a plan, the actual work done).
Who buys it: Clients who know their problem and want it fixed on a defined timeline. Often converts from audit clients.
Design rule: A sprint has a hard scope boundary. It solves specific problems. Anything outside the defined scope is handled as a new engagement or added via a formal scope change. “While we’re in there, can you also…” is always a scope discussion, not a courtesy.
3. The Project (Full Implementation)
Purpose: Address the full scope of a problem from diagnosis through implementation.
Duration: 4-12 weeks.
Price range: $7,000-$20,000.
Deliverable: Complete solution, strategy + implementation + documentation.
Who buys it: Clients with a well-defined problem and budget, who want the complete solution handled rather than phase-by-phase. Often comes from referrals or inbound from the pricing page.
Design rule: The project should have a clear, documented scope that distinguishes it from the sprint (broader problem) and from the retainer (fixed timeframe, not ongoing). If every project feels custom in scope, you haven’t productized the project offering yet, add more definition to the deliverable list.
4. The Retainer (Ongoing Service)
Purpose: Maintain and expand the work done in a sprint or project on an ongoing basis.
Duration: Month-to-month (minimum 3-month commitment recommended).
Price range: $1,500-$6,000/month.
Deliverable: Defined monthly scope (e.g., 4 articles + distribution, monthly reporting + optimization recommendations, weekly advisory call + strategic recommendations).
Who buys it: Clients who’ve completed a project or sprint and need ongoing maintenance, or clients who understand ongoing work is necessary (e.g., content strategy is never “done”).
Design rule: The retainer must have a defined monthly scope. Not “ongoing consulting”, “4 content pieces + distribution + monthly performance report + 2 strategy calls.” Undefined retainers lead to scope creep, client dissatisfaction, and difficult cancellation conversations.
5. The Advisory (Structured Access)
Purpose: Provide structured access to your expertise without project-based engagement.
Duration: Month-to-month.
Price range: $1,200-$4,000/month.
Deliverable: Defined monthly touchpoints (e.g., two 60-minute strategy calls + unlimited async Q&A + review of one deliverable/month).
Who buys it: Founders or executives who have an internal team doing the execution but need senior strategic guidance on an ongoing basis. Also used by consulting firms who want access to your expertise for their own client work.
Design rule: The advisory must be clearly different from the retainer. The retainer produces deliverables. The advisory produces guidance. The advisory client does the work; you steer. If you’re producing deliverables in an “advisory” engagement, you’ve sold a retainer at advisory pricing, which is a problem.
The retainer and advisory offerings are the economic engine of a productized catalog. They generate recurring revenue that you don’t have to re-sell every month. Design the catalog so that every sprint naturally leads to a retainer, and every project naturally leads to an advisory. The entry offerings (audit, sprint) exist to create retainer and advisory clients, not as standalone revenue strategies.
The Catalog Design Rules
Rule 1: No price overlap between offering types.
If your sprint runs $3,000-$5,000 and your project starts at $4,000, there’s a zone where a prospect doesn’t know which to choose. Clear price brackets eliminate this ambiguity:
| Offering | Price range |
|---|---|
| Audit | $299-$1,500 |
| Sprint | $2,500-$6,000 |
| Project | $7,500-$20,000 |
| Retainer | $1,500-$5,000/month |
| Advisory | $1,000-$3,500/month |
Rule 2: Each offering solves a distinct problem scope.
The question to ask for each offering: “What problem does this solve that the others don’t?” If two offerings solve the same problem at different price points, merge them into a tiered offering or differentiate by client type (e.g., “Sprint for companies under 20 people, Project for companies 20-100”).
Rule 3: There’s a natural progression path.
Audit → Sprint → Retainer is the primary path. Project → Advisory is the secondary path. A catalog without a progression path is a menu of disconnected products, it doesn’t build client relationships, it just closes one-time sales.
Rule 4: Not all five offerings need to be live simultaneously.
Start with three: one entry offering, one mid-tier implementation offering, and one recurring offering. Add the others as demand reveals the need. An advisory offering that nobody asks for is noise. A sprint you’re inundated with demand for is a signal to build the project offering above it.
The 1-Page Catalog Format
The catalog page (on your website, or as a PDF you send to prospects) has the same structure for every offering:
[OFFERING NAME]
[One-sentence outcome statement]
Includes:
• [Deliverable 1]
• [Deliverable 2]
• [Deliverable 3]
• [Deliverable 4]
• [Deliverable 5]
Timeline: [Duration]
Best for: [1-2 sentences on ideal client]
Price: [Price]
[CTA button or link]Total for a 5-offering catalog: one page, legible in under 3 minutes. The catalog page is not a sales document, it’s a reference document. Prospects use it to figure out which offering fits their situation. Your job in the sales conversation is to guide them to the right one.
How the Catalog Changes Sales Conversations
Without a catalog:
Prospect: “I need help with my content strategy.”
Consultant: “Tell me more about your situation.” (15-minute intake)
Prospect: “We have a blog that’s not driving traffic. We have a small team.”
Consultant: “I can put together a proposal for you.” (3-4 hours)
[Proposal sent, 2 days later]
Prospect: “This is more than we expected. Can we talk about the scope?”
[Another call, revised proposal, another day]
Time to close: 2-3 weeks, 6-8 hours invested.
With a catalog:
Prospect: “I need help with my content strategy.”
Consultant: “Two options depending on where you are. The Content Audit ($499) is the diagnostic, it tells you exactly what’s wrong and what to fix. If you already know the problem, the Content Sprint ($3,800) is the 4-week implementation. Which is closer to where you are?”
Prospect: “We know the problem, our SEO is weak but we don’t know what content to create.”
Consultant: “Then the Sprint is probably right. Let me send you the one-pager.”
Time to close: 1 week, 1-2 hours invested.
The catalog gives you a vocabulary. Instead of “let me think about what this would involve,” you say “here’s the offering that fits your situation.” Instead of custom proposals, you send a one-pager. Instead of scope negotiations, you describe what’s inside a defined offering and let the prospect decide.
Building the Catalog From What You Already Sell
You likely already sell two or three of these offerings under different names. Building the catalog is less about creating new services and more about naming, structuring, and systematizing what you already do.
The audit you’ve been calling a “complimentary strategy session” is a service with a price ($499) and a deliverable (written findings document). The ongoing “project help” you’ve been providing at $200/hour is a retainer with a defined monthly scope and a flat monthly price.
The three-step catalog build:
-
List every type of engagement you’ve run in the past 12 months. Group them by duration and scope: short diagnostics, medium implementation sprints, longer full projects, ongoing relationships.
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Define the deliverable set for each group. What does a client get from each engagement type? What’s always included? What’s sometimes included?
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Set a flat price for each offering type. Use your median actual hours from past engagements × your target hourly rate, then round to a clean number. If past audits took 6-9 hours and your rate is $150/hour, set the audit price at $1,000-$1,200.
The catalog is now real. Name each offering. Write the one-pager. Build the pricing page. Launch.
The catalog makes you feel more specialized and more expert, not less flexible. Prospects don’t think “this consultant only does four things.” They think “this consultant has done this exact type of work so many times that they’ve systematized it.” Systematized expertise is more credible than bespoke improvisation, it signals scale, experience, and confidence in the outcome.
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