How to Scale from Selling Services to Building a Brand

This post provides a high-level overview of the journey from Service Street to Brand Boulevard. In the coming weeks, I’ll dive deeper into each stage and share detailed guides on strategies and tactics to help you succeed at every step.

With the destination in mind, let’s start with the first step in our journey.

Welcome to Service Street

Starting Out

Many years ago, I started on Service Street. This is the place where everyone can offer a valuable skill. Rather than your neighborhood, this is a global marketplace with no entry barriers.

The offers here include freelancing, consulting, coaching, and services, although some overlap exists.

But they rest on the assumption that you have a skill that others are willing to pay for. If you do, you must package that skill for the right clients.

Leveraging Platforms for Distribution

For general offers, the best places to start are Fiverr or Upwork. There may also be platforms for specific niches, but I would start where most clients hang out.

These platforms solve a particular issue that will stay with us the entire time: distribution. You can have the best offer in the world, but you will starve if no one knows about you.

One way is to piggyback on these platforms' already broad reach. The other option is to reach out to potential clients at scale.

Scaling Up

Once you have established a solid baseline, we can scale things up on Service Street. There is a hard cap on how much you can do as an individual when you sell your time because we only have 24 hours in a day.

This is the point where we need to scale beyond our own time. The greatest leverage comes from empowering others to amplify your impact. This is where the agency model comes in. Though often underestimated, it’s one of the best business models available.

But you have to be careful. When I built my first agency many years ago, I wasn’t intentional about it, and it quickly became a trap. I was given a job, and there is a huge difference between working in the business and working on the business (we want the latter!).

The good news is that you can learn these lessons without wasting time in a dark alley on Service Street.

After scaling up on Service Street, you’re ready to leverage your experience and resources to establish a strong presence on Brand Boulevard.

Claim Your Spot on Brand Boulevard

Once we have earned our stripes on Service Street, it is time to start looking for Brand Boulevard, which is known for concepts such as personal brand, audience, and community.

Why Move to Brand Boulevard?

Brand Boulevard is where your personal brand can grow without limits. Instead of trading time for money, a personal brand builds an audience that amplifies your reach.

However, most of your audience will remain passive. That's why building a community matters. An audience gives you visibility, but a community fosters deep connections, exchange, and growth. This is where engagement turns into revenue—through paid courses, memberships, or events.

And here's the key: people follow people, not companies. When you're known for your ideas and insights, you build a following that you can leverage across any venture. This influence opens doors, creates opportunities, and builds trust beyond any business.

Why Not Start Here?

I know what you are thinking. Let me immediately skip Service Street and try my luck at Brand Boulevard. This seems to be the common advice, and I would have probably done the same. But let’s discuss why the odds are not in your favor.

First, if you make it through Service Street, you will have good insights, failures, and stories to share with the world. This will provide you with a never-ending stream of content, which can be exchanged for attention—the currency on Brand Boulevard.

Second, you might fail if you start building a personal brand with the pressure to make money fast. You have to show up consistently every day to establish your brand. If you are looking for a quick buck, selling to your audience from day one, people might reject you.

Third, with a solid standing from Service Street, you should have some excess cash you can invest. You can make these investments to accelerate your growth.

This is why we start on Service Street and work our way up.

The Road Ahead

Let me share my venture portfolio with you here. I’ve been playing on Service Street for over a decade and have started shopping around on Brand Boulevard. This newsletter is at the heart of my brand-building efforts, where I share insights from my ongoing journey (yes, it’s a bit meta!).

So expect insights from years of making countless mistakes and occasionally a good story. I continue to evolve and scale my service businesses while sharing real-time insights into building and growing an audience.

Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. While we all want to find shortcuts, sometimes there’s no substitute for time and disciplined effort.

In the upcoming weeks, we will dive deeper into the details of getting started on Service Street:

• Where and how to offer your services

• How to find and win the right clients

• How to build out a team to scale beyond your capabilities

• How to use automation to run your businesses on autopilot

We will discuss proven strategies and tactics you can apply no matter how far in your journey, along with in-depth numbers for the most relevant metrics.

How to Scale from Selling Services to Building a Brand