For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.

The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

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Most service businesses are one slow month away from starting over.

Not because they're bad at what they do. They're usually excellent. But because everything they know lives inside their head, gets rebuilt from scratch with every new client, and only scales as far as their available hours allow.

I've watched incredibly talented people grind for years without getting ahead. Not from a lack of clients. Not from a lack of skill. From a lack of a packaged, repeatable way to deliver what they're good at.

That's a productization problem. And it's completely fixable — once you know where you are.

Most service businesses move through four distinct stages, from pure custom work to something that can run — and grow — without them. Very few make it all the way to Stage 4. Most stall at Stage 1 or 2, not because they can't move forward, but because they don't realize where they are or what moving forward actually requires.

Here's the map.

This is where almost every service business begins. Each client gets a bespoke engagement. You scope from scratch. You price from gut. You deliver differently every time. The work is interesting. The relationships are real. The problem is that nothing compounds.

The upside: Maximum flexibility and high perceived value. Premium clients often expect this level of attention.

The downside: You're rebuilding the wheel with every engagement. Your learning doesn't accumulate into anything transferable. There's no way to quote fast, hand off work, or grow without hiring a clone of yourself.

To win here: Start paying attention to what you do the same way every time. That's your raw material. The patterns in your custom work are the seed of your process.

At Stage 2, you've figured out the shape of your work. You have a process — even if it only lives in your head. You know roughly what questions to ask, what the milestones look like, and how long each phase takes. You're not starting from zero anymore.

The upside: You can scope faster, set expectations more clearly, and hand off pieces of the work to a capable assistant.

The downside: It's still locked in your skull. You can't hire someone and point them at a document. You can't explain your process in a sales conversation without rambling. You're faster, but you're not transferable.

To win here: Document what you do. Not a textbook — a working process doc. The goal isn't perfection. It's getting your method out of your head and onto paper so someone else could follow it.

This is the first real leap — and it's where the business starts to feel different.

You've taken your process and wrapped it in a defined deliverable: a fixed scope, a fixed price, a named outcome, and a clear timeline. The client knows exactly what they're buying before they sign. You know exactly what you're delivering before you start.

The upside: You can sell with confidence. No more waffling on price. No more surprise scope creep. No more painful renegotiations mid-project. You can also delegate the execution to someone you've trained because the process is defined and documented.

The downside: You're still trading deliverables for dollars. You can sell more of these, and deliver them faster, but your revenue is still tied to how many engagements you can run at once.

To win here: Charge for the outcome, not the hours. If clients push back on the price, you're either attracting the wrong clients or underselling what the result is actually worth. Don't cave on the price — fix the positioning.

Stage 4 is where the economics finally change. You've taken your packaged offer and unlocked one of three scale mechanisms: group delivery (you serve multiple clients at the same time), self-serve (clients complete the process using your framework without you), or licensing (others deliver your method on your behalf).

The upside: Revenue can grow without adding proportional hours. You've built something that outlasts any single client relationship.

The downside: Stage 4 is hard to build while you're still doing Stage 3 work full-time. Most people can't carve out the time to build it while also serving clients at capacity. And some businesses — especially premium, high-trust services — genuinely shouldn't go there. Not every expertise is meant to become a course or a community.

To win here: Be honest about your motivation. Stage 4 solves a revenue ceiling. It doesn't solve burnout. If you're exhausted, the answer is usually better pricing and boundaries at Stage 3 — not a pivot to an entirely new delivery model.

Most service business owners treat productization as a future goal. Something to build "after I get more clients" or "when things slow down." That instinct is backward.

Productization is how you get more clients. When your offer is clearly defined and your delivery is repeatable, your sales conversations get shorter, your referrals get more specific, and your pricing gets easier to defend. The vagueness in your business isn't just an operations problem. It's a marketing problem.

Before you add another lead source, hire another salesperson, or invest in another tool, ask yourself three questions:

If any of those answers is "no" or "not yet," that's your next priority. Not more marketing. Not better systems. A clearer, tighter, more deliverable offer.

Until next time,

Steven

P.S. Which stage are you in right now? Hit reply — I'd love to know what's keeping you from climbing to the next one.

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