For a successful product business, growth often follows a familiar pattern. Develop better products, find more customers and sell more of what you make.

It's a perfectly sensible approach. Until the business begins to recognise that some of its most valuable assets aren't products at all.

They're the knowledge, experience and expertise accumulated through years of helping customers solve problems.

An established product company saw an opportunity to build a different kind of business around those strengths.

Rather than being valued primarily for what it supplied, it wanted to become a business that clients would turn to for advice and expertise. Consulting would become an important part of its future, rather than simply something that supported product sales.

The opportunity was attractive, but making the transition required some careful choices.

What expertise would clients genuinely pay for? Where could the business establish credibility as an adviser? How should consulting relate to its existing products? And how could it develop a proposition that stood on its own merits?

We created the consulting strategy, defining where the business could compete, what it could offer and how it should position itself in the market.

The important distinction was between adding consulting services to an existing portfolio and building a business that clients would choose for its expertise.

Those are not the same thing.

One extends the existing model. The other creates the possibility of a different relationship with customers, a different competitive position and a different basis for growth.