A Q&A on turning expertise into a product, published by 1000Startups.com. If you have ever wondered why some consultants get hired on reputation while others get haggled over like a used car, this is the whole answer.

Q: Why do unnamed consulting processes always end up competing on price?

Because an unnamed process looks like labor, and labor gets priced by the hour. When a service has no name, no fixed sequence and no stated output, the buyer’s only real question is “what does this cost compared to the next person?” The instant a service becomes a named method with a beginning, middle and end, the comparison shifts from “who is cheaper” to “what is this thing and do I need it.” That is a different conversation, and the person who named the method is the only one in the room who can have it.

Source: This is the core argument behind 1000Startups.com’s ongoing coverage of how founders and consultants package expertise into repeatable, brandable offerings rather than open-ended hours.

Q: Is there real-world proof that naming an idea changes its fate, rather than the idea itself?

Yes, and one of the cleanest examples is fifty years old. In 1970, Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group sketched a simple two-by-two chart plotting market growth against market share, and labeled the quadrants stars, cash cows, dogs and question marks. The underlying math was not new. The naming and the shape were. The growth-share matrix is still taught in business schools today, and BCG became, and remains, the consulting firm most associated with strategic frameworks as a category.

Source: Boston Consulting Group, corporate history and public materials on the growth-share matrix, first introduced by Bruce Henderson in 1970; widely documented in business-strategy textbooks and BCG’s own retrospectives on the tool.

Q: Did a single named question really become a multi-billion-dollar consulting practice?

It did. Fred Reichheld, working with Bain & Company, distilled customer loyalty down to one survey question and a scoring method, and called it the Net Promoter Score. The measurement technique behind it was not radically new. What Reichheld and Bain added was a name, a formula and a discipline around applying it consistently. Net Promoter Score is now trademarked, debated in nearly every customer-experience meeting held anywhere, and in active use at a large share of major companies worldwide. Nobody asks what the “hourly rate” for a satisfaction survey is. They ask for their NPS.

Source: Fred Reichheld, “The One Number You Need to Grow,” Harvard Business Review, 2003; Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, and NPS are registered trademarks jointly held by Bain & Company, Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix.

Q: What actually has to be true before a process deserves a name?

Four things, and none of them are optional. First, a fixed sequence you genuinely follow every time, not a rough vibe. Second, a stated input the client provides before you start. Third, a stated output they walk away with. Fourth, and this is the one people skip, a name a stranger can repeat correctly after hearing it exactly once. Skip the fourth requirement and the first three never leave the room they were discussed in, because nobody can refer a name they cannot recall.

Q: Should the name describe the benefit of the method, or the method itself?

The method itself, always. “Rapid Growth Framework” is a slogan; it could be the name of almost anything, and it evaporates the moment the meeting ends. “The Twenty-Room Teardown” is a specific, mildly strange, entirely memorable thing. Concrete names get repeated in hallway conversations and email chains you will never see. Aspirational names get forgotten before the elevator arrives, and every sale you are not personally in the room for is being carried, or not carried, by whether the name survives being repeated secondhand.

Q: If I publish and name my method, doesn’t that just hand it to competitors for free?

Competitors can copy the steps on a page. They cannot copy having actually run the method two hundred times, refined the judgment calls, and built the pattern-recognition that only comes from repetition. Publishing the method is, counterintuitively, what makes the two-hundred-times claim credible in the first place, because a vague “trust me, I have a process” is unverifiable, while a named, described, versioned method invites exactly the scrutiny that experienced practitioners win and inexperienced copycats lose.

Q: Does naming a method actually change what a consultant can charge?

It changes what the price gets compared to. A named method with a defined, stated output can be sold as a fixed fee, because the client is buying an outcome, not a block of time. Hourly pricing invites a direct comparison to any other contractor charging by the hour. A fixed-fee, named-output offering invites comparison to nothing, because there is no line item labeled “Twenty-Room Teardown” anywhere else for the client to check against.

Q: Is it worth releasing new “versions” of a consulting method, the way software does?

Yes, and for a reason that has nothing to do with software conventions. A second edition or third edition signals three things simultaneously: that the method is actively maintained, that the practitioner has learned something since the last client, and that the person who bought version one purchased a real, evolving asset rather than a one-time mood or gut feeling. Versioning is what separates a method from a personality quirk.

Q: I have a consistent way I work, but I have never named it. Does that count?

It counts, and it is the most common missed opportunity in independent consulting. Most experienced practitioners already have a proprietary method and describe it, self-effacingly, as “how I work.” That is not modesty. It is leaving the single most valuable, most transferable, most referable asset in the entire business permanently unbranded, sitting in a drawer labeled personality instead of on a shelf labeled product.

Q: What is the one-sentence takeaway?

DuPont did not invent a new fiber the day it invented the name Kevlar. The polymer, poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide, had already been synthesized; what changed its commercial fate was that DuPont stopped asking customers to pronounce it. Name the thing you do, and you will likely discover you have been quietly running a product line all along, and simply calling it a personality.

Source: DuPont de Nemours, Inc., corporate history of Kevlar® aramid fiber, developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont in 1965 and commercially branded as Kevlar in 1971; chemical name poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide.

This Q&A was prepared by 1000Startups.com for founders, consultants and independent practitioners who are ready to stop pricing themselves like a rental and start pricing themselves like a firm.