The Three Components of a Successful Service Business

I believe that successful service businesses have three core components:

• Strong branding
• Relentless execution
• Aligned incentives

Let's dive in. 🤿

Strong branding.

A brand becomes strong when other people say about it what you say about it. I'll take my recruiting studio Generalyst as example.

For example, when we say, “we have the best candidates for early-stage startups”, but you say, “Generalyst has terrible candidates for early-stage candidates”, the brand suffers.

What we say and what the customer says isn't aligned.

But when the customer says, “man, Generalyst has fantastic candidates for early-stage startups”, the brand becomes attractive for other early-stage startups. 

Every external statement that's aligned with your internal statement makes the brand stronger.

So new companies reach out with high expectations. They will be disappointed when they don’t see fantastic candidates. 

This gives Generalyst a huge incentive to deliver every single time. Because when these customers see fantastic candidates and talk about it, they make the brand stronger.

Recruiting the best talent is literally a life-or-death endeavour for this company. Good motivation to keep the quality bar high. 

The same goes for any other service business: underpromise and overdeliver → strengthen your brand.

Relentless execution.

The best way to achieve high quality is to execute relentlessly.

Every product and service moves along the triangle of “faster, cheaper, better”.

Hiring with Generalyst won’t be cheaper than hiring your candidate internally.

But it will be better and/or faster.

In order to maintain quality and speed, the execution needs to be dialed in. Anyone can make claims; few can actually deliver on it.

You achieve extraordinary results by doing ordinary things for an extraordinary amount of time.

We’re not reinventing the wheel here. The field of recruiting has been around for hundreds of years. Lots of companies do it.

We just have strong beliefs and execute on them on a daily basis. That’s all.

Another good example is my first startup, Linguedo. We brought unemployed nurses from Italy to Germany and taught them German.

Today, we work with Germany's most prestigious hospitals, charging prices that most other agencies dream of.

Why? Because we do our language course in-house. Our candidates have a reputation for speaking German fluently (not just carrying a language certificate), and everytime you speak to a Linguedo candidate, this assumption is confirmed.

But we also just went above and beyond what's necessary. That shows.

Aligned incentives.

Value creation in recruiting happens when a candidate signs with a company and continues to work there.

Value capture should happen where value is created.

Generalyst’s business model is simple: we charge a %-of-first-year-salary fee when a candidate signs a contract with a company.

And we never charge candidates anything to be part of the program.

This creates the right incentives for everyone involved:

• Candidates have no obstacle to applying but a ton of upside when they do, which in turn attracts the best candidates.
• We work hard to find the right candidate for your company, at high speed – the longer it takes, the higher the opportunity cost of not having a hire.
• We coach candidates through the interview process.
• We're even incentivized to find the sweet spot for the offer the candidate receives: by charging a % fee of the first-year-salary, we have incentive to get the maximum possible salary while still making a deal.

Because ultimately, we only make money if a candidate finds a job and a company makes a hire via Generalyst.

For Generalyst to make money, it absolutely, positively has to create the best experience for all parties involved.

Who wouldn’t want to work with a business like that?

That's it. Building a profitable business isn't an art; it's a craft.

You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to identify what you're good at, do that for a long period of time, do the basics better than most others, and tell people about it.

Easy money.

LinkedIn | Threads | X | Bluesky | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube

Whenever you're ready, there are four ways I can help you:

[1] Reclaim up to 4 hours per day and find time to do the things you've always wanted to do by enrolling into Personal Productivity OS.

[2] Hire your next Founder's Associate or other business generalist position with my startup, Generalyst Recruiting.

[3] You could also find your next startup job in Europe by simply applying as a candidate.

[4] Learn how you can build your career as a generalist by subscribing to this newsletter. ⬇️