My name is Sean Boyce and I offer product strategy consulting services through my company NxtStep. I can help make your B2B (Business to Business), SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company successful. Email me to learn more at sean@nxtstep.io.

You’re holding it wrong

Back in 2010 when the iPhone 4 was released users were reporting problems maintaining strong reception.  As it turned out, there was a design flaw that caused an unfortunate short which severely weaken the strength of the phone’s antenna which was causing the problem. So how did Apple and Steve Jobs respond? They basically claimed…

Accelerate through the turn

Years ago there was a great commercial of a little boy at the dinner table playing with his mash potatoes.  He was pretending like he was driving a race car complete with racing noises and using the utensils like a shifter. As the boy is ‘racing’ with his dinner, the boy’s father chimes in to…

Are your service options flexibile?

As your company grows, you will likely develop different services to offer your clients.  As these become more specialized you should be managing these independently as separate service lines. Let’s see what happens if you don’t.  I’ll use a CPA firm as an example. Accounting firms may offer services to their clients related to bookkeeping,…

Niches and riches

My favorite description of this concept is as follows… If you try to be everything to everyone, you’ll be nothing to anyone. To grow, you need to get laser focused on your target market.  Generally speaking, you can’t really go too narrow. Let’s use my podcasting as a service company Podcast Chef as an example.…

Growth is about process, not people

In grad school I studied the case of Home Depot under then CEO Robert (Bob) Nardelli.  This made big waves at the time because Bob made big promises to supercharge growth. Long-story short, that didn’t happen. The company got bigger, but profit didn’t budge, why? Well Bob just grew Home Depot to be bigger NOT…

Don’t fight technology

Technology can evolve rather rapidly at times, but how you respond to these changes really matters. Some of the biggest and most successful companies in the world have failed because they fought technology instead of embracing it.  When’s the last time you were in a BlockBuster or used a BlackBerry Phone? In a recent conversation about a MedTech…

Stop overthinking your solutions

People overthink solutions all the time.  Here’s one that still drives me crazy… I live in Pennsylvania and in PA we need to get our cars inspected each year.  We also have a separate process for managing vehicle registration with the state which also includes paying fees. The ‘drove me nuts’ part was that my…

What’s the bottleneck?

I’m big on process.  I’m big on it because it’s a great way to make improvements quickly. Introducing software is a real commitment in time and money.  This can slow everything down. So if you’re interested in making a small change that can make a BIG impact then I want you to find the bottleneck in…

Scaling services starts with the bottleneck

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make processes work faster.  Along the way, I’ve helped countless businesses streamline operations with my ability to find the best way to do this to help them scale. In this article, I’m going to talk about the key to scaling…