How to Package What You Do (When You Can't Explain It to Anyone)

You know that moment when someone asks what you do and your answer changes every single time?

Sometimes you lead with "I'm a coach." Sometimes you say "I help people with their leadership" or "I work with businesses on their strategy" or you launch into a meandering story about how you used to be in corporate and then you made a change and now you do this thing that's hard to explain but basically you help people figure out their stuff.

And by the time you've finished answering, the person you're talking to is nodding politely but you can tell they've got absolutely no idea what you actually do, and honestly, you're not sure you've nailed it either.

I hear this constantly from solo business owners who come to me, and the frustrating thing is that they're usually extremely good at what they do. Their clients love them. They get incredible results. Referrals come in regularly because the work speaks for itself.

But when it comes to packaging that expertise into something someone could look at on a website and think "yes, that's exactly what I need, take my money," everything falls apart. Because how do you package coaching services when the thing you're brilliant at is different for every single client?

Why your expertise feels impossible to package

This comes up so often that I've started recognising it within the first five minutes of a conversation. Someone will describe the work they do and it's genuinely impressive, but when I ask them to show me their offers page or talk me through their pricing, the energy completely changes.

Suddenly they're apologetic, or vague, or they start explaining that they "need to sort it out" and they've been meaning to for months.

The reason packaging expertise feels so hard is because you're trying to take something that lives entirely in your head, something intuitive and nuanced and different every time, and turn it into a fixed thing with a name and a price and a description. And your brain goes "but I can't reduce what I do to a sentence, because what I do depends on the person sitting in front of me."

Which is true, by the way. What you do probably does depend on the person. But that's a delivery truth, and it's completely separate from how you sell it.

The difference between how you deliver and how you sell

This is the thing that trips up almost every service-based business owner I work with, and once you see it you can't unsee it.

Your delivery can absolutely stay flexible, intuitive, personalised, responsive to whatever the client needs, because that's your superpower and it should stay exactly as it is. Your sales message, though, needs to be clear and structured enough that someone who has never met you can read it and immediately understand whether it's for them and what they'll get. That's what packaging actually means.

I worked with a leadership coach who had been running her business for four years and was still sending bespoke proposals for every single enquiry. Each one took her about two hours to write, and she was customising her pricing every time because she didn't have a standard structure. She was exhausted and undercharging, and she was spending more time writing proposals than actually coaching.

When we sat down and pulled apart what she was actually delivering across all her clients, it turned out she was doing roughly the same thing every time, just describing it differently. There were two core offers hiding inside all that bespoke work, and once we named them, gave them a clear structure and price point, she went from dreading enquiries to sending a link and saying "here's what I do, here's what it costs, let me know."

Her revenue went up because she stopped underquoting, and her time went down because she stopped reinventing the wheel.

How to actually package your coaching or consulting services

Right, practical bit. Here's what I'd walk you through if you were sitting in front of me right now.

Start by listing what your last ten clients came to you for. Write down the actual problem they described in their first conversation with you. You'll start to see patterns, because even though every client felt unique at the time, the underlying problems tend to cluster into two or four categories (remember, not three).

Name those clusters. Give each one a working title that describes the outcome, not the process. Your client doesn't care that you use a "six-week reflective framework." They care that they'll finally have a clear strategy they can actually execute on. Name the thing they'll walk away with.

Decide what the container looks like for each one. How many sessions, over what timeframe, with what included? This is where it's helpful to look at what you've already been doing and just formalise it. If most of your clients naturally need about six sessions over two months, that's your container. You don't need to invent something new, you need to document what already works.

Price it based on the outcome, not the hours. If your six-session programme helps someone restructure their entire business and add £X to their revenue, charging £Y for it is completely reasonable regardless of how many hours are involved. Stop counting hours. Count what changes for the client.

Write one paragraph that explains who it's for and what they'll get. Not a manifesto. One paragraph. If you can't explain it in one paragraph, it's still too complicated and needs simplifying further.

What "but every client is different" actually means

If you're reading this thinking "yes but my work really is different every time, this doesn't apply to me," I'd gently push back on that because I hear it constantly and it's almost never true in the way people think.

What's usually different is the surface-level presenting problem. One client comes in worried about their pricing, another comes in worried about their pipeline, another comes in worried about their team structure. Those all sound completely different.

But underneath those presenting problems, you're probably doing roughly the same diagnostic work every single time. You're asking similar questions, spotting similar patterns, applying similar frameworks, guiding people through a similar process of getting clear on what's actually going on, and arriving at similar types of recommendations even though the specifics are different.

The presenting problem varies. Your methodology doesn't, at least not as much as you think it does.

And once you recognise that, packaging becomes much easier because you're packaging your methodology (which is consistent) and letting the client's specific situation be the variable that gets addressed inside the fixed container.

When packaging feels impossible, the problem might be underneath the offers

Sometimes the reason you can't package what you do is because the offers themselves aren't clear yet. You've been saying yes to everything, delivering something slightly different to every client, and you've never actually sat down and decided what your business sells.

That's a structural problem, and it's really common in businesses that have grown organically through referrals and word of mouth. You've been so busy doing the work that you've never built the architecture underneath it.

If that sounds familiar, it might be worth starting with a Detangle session where I can look at the whole picture and help you figure out what your actual offers are before you try to package them. Ninety minutes, £295, and you'll leave knowing exactly what you're selling and to whom.

If you already know what your offers are and you just need someone to help you build the packaging (the copy, the structure, the pricing, the delivery system), that's a Sprint. Three weeks, and you'll have a finished, sellable offer suite with everything documented.

One thing you can do right now

Open a blank document and write down what your last five clients actually said in their first conversation with you. The exact words they used to describe their problem.

You'll start to see the patterns. And those patterns are your offers, they just haven't been named yet.

Laura Cloherty is the founder of The Ops House, a strategic operations partnership for solo business owners who are brilliant at what they do but exhausted by running the business behind the business. Connect with her on LinkedIn Follow her on Instagram

If you're already running your own thing and the operations are doing your head in, let's talk.