I have lots of services and few clients: should I add another one?

Sunday afternoon, kitchen table. Your laptop is open and you're writing the page for a new service. It's the ninth. You like the name, you like the description, and you feel more productive than you have in weeks. On Monday you publish it. On Tuesday nothing happens, same as with the other eight.

The trouble is that Sunday felt like work. And it was, you were just working in the wrong direction.

Does offering more services get you more clients?

Stand on the other side of the counter for a moment. Someone has a specific problem, lands on your website and finds nine well-written offers. Any of them might do. None of them says «this one is for you». They close the tab and promise themselves they'll think about it, which usually means never.

There's a famous study, the jam one: faced with twenty-four flavours, people bought far less than when they saw six. I mention it with caution, because later studies don't all agree and on average the effect is small. What holds up is more interesting than the headline. People freeze when they have no way to decide. The number matters less than the clarity.

And here's the paradox. You add services to reach more people. Every extra service makes it harder for each of those people to see that you're the right choice.

Is having too many offers a way of avoiding a decision?

Writing a new service page is pleasant. Blank page, fresh idea, no client has said no to it yet. Refining the service you already have is a different story. You have to look at what didn't work, ask the people who bought it, change the price, rewrite the promise. It forces you to decide.

A menu that keeps growing is the most elegant disguise inertia has. It keeps you busy and spares you the choice. As long as you have nine services, none of the nine has to work, because there's always the next one.

I'm telling you this as someone who's been there. I spent months doing a bit of everything, with no clear product and no idea who I was talking to, and those months only took me further from results. I felt full of work. I was standing still.

How do I choose which service to focus on?

Take a sheet of paper and write down every problem you know how to solve. Ten, fifteen, that's fine. You're good and you can do a lot of things, nobody is questioning that.

Next to each line, add two marks. The first says whether it's something you do better than almost everyone else. The second says whether someone has already asked you for it without you offering it. A line with both marks is where you start.

If no line gets both, don't decide alone at your desk. Ask three people who might buy from you which problem keeps them up at night. The market chooses better than you do when you're in love with all your ideas. If you have too many and can't tell where to begin, there's an exercise made for exactly that: Too many ideas? The free exercise.

Once you've chosen, you don't throw the other fourteen lines away. You put them in a drawer with a date written on it. In ninety days you look at them again.

Then rewrite the circled line the way a client would describe it to a friend on the phone. Who it's for, what problem it solves, what's different at the end. If you need more than two sentences, it isn't precise enough yet. If your neighbour gets it first time, you're ready.

From that day, for three months, everything you post, tell or propose is about that one thing. Your other skills don't disappear, they go into the service as ingredients. The client isn't buying the fifteen things you can do. They're buying the dish that comes out of them.

What happens when you deliver the same service for the tenth time?

You get better at it, and not by a little. By the tenth time you already know where the client gets stuck, what question they'll ask in week two, which sentence reassures them and which one scares them off. The service stops being a page on your website and becomes a path you know by heart.

Something slower happens too. People start saying your name together with that thing. «For that problem, go and see her.» That sentence is worth more than any advert, and it only comes from people who connect you with one thing.

Think of the café you've been going to for years. It probably does sandwiches and fresh juice as well, but you go for the cappuccino, and when a friend asks where to get a good one you say the name without thinking. The café never had to convince you of anything. It made the same good cappuccino for a thousand mornings.

Buyers don't have time to understand everything you can do. They want to know if you can do their thing. The more recognisable your thing is, the less you need to explain yourself, and the less you need to drop your price to persuade anyone.

Refining is more tiring than inventing, I know. Every time you have to look at the part that isn't working instead of running towards something new. But that's where your skill stops being an opinion and becomes proof. If you want to get clear on what to say and to whom before you add anything else, start with The 3 Ps of Positioning: Person, Problem, Period.

If you look at your service list tonight and can't tell which line to keep, that's a conversation that fits into half an hour over a coffee. Bring the list, we look at it together, and you leave with one line circled.

The rest can wait.

Frequently asked questions

How many services should a freelancer offer?

There's no right number, but when you're starting out or clients aren't coming, it pays to have one main service that is very clear, plus a couple of variations at most. The main service should say straight away who it's for and what problem it solves. Others can exist, but they shouldn't compete with it for the reader's attention.

Won't specialising mean losing clients?

It feels that way at first, because you're saying no to something. In practice the opposite happens: people with that specific problem recognise you straight away and choose you with fewer doubts. Clients outside your main offer will still come through word of mouth, and you can decide case by case whether to take them or refer them to someone else.

How do I know which of my services works best?

Look at two things. Which service people asked you for without you offering it, and which one brings clients back or makes them send others your way. If you don't have enough clients yet to see it, ask three people in your audience which problem they'd want solved first. Their words tell you more than your own preferences.

What do I do with the services I take off my list?

You don't delete them. You set them aside with a date to review them, for example in three months. You can keep delivering them to clients who ask, without promoting them. Often, once the main service is working, you'll find some of the old ones naturally become the next step for people who've already worked with you.