Meet Julia Chanteray from Adventures in Products

Hi Julia, can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

I’m Julia Chanteray. I’ve run many different companies and spent the last 20 odd years also coaching hundreds of small businesses. I don’t do much coaching nowadays because I’m concentrating on growing Adventures in Products.

Adventures in Products is for people who have had a business for a while and got stuck trading time for money. Their company is usually doing okay, and they’re making some money. But there’s no room for growth because of the limited number of hours they can work. I help people who have got stuck using my favourite business growth strategy. Instead of selling time, they create products instead.

You’ve been a member of the Chamber for a number of years (and you used to be our Chamber President!) how did you first get involved, and what’s a standout Chamber moment for you?

I first joined the Chamber in about 2001, when I moved to Brighton. It was very different in those days it was primarily, a small group of grumpy fellas meeting to complain about the Council. I discovered someone called it the “Chamber of Horrors”.

But there were a few great people I met there, and we gently took it over and made it into the magnificent organisation it became. I was Vice President and then President for about 10 years. It took over my life for a long time.

I remember two moments that were pretty small but led to big things. One day, I was in the Old Ship Hotel interviewing this woman for a new job. She was so impressive, with a bunch of Excel sheets she’d printed out and brought with her. I wanted her to start immediately. Her name was Sarah Springford.

And a couple of years later, I was chatting with Sarah and said – we should do a big event. Something more ambitious. A whole day summit conference with loads of workshops and quirky bits.

Sarah, of course, is now the Chamber CEO, and we hold Brighton Summit every year.

How has your own business evolved over this time?

I used to do a lot of local networking and aim for Brighton business owners. Nowadays, I’m talking to people all over the world every day. I’ve learnt a lot about running a business since 2001 – quite a lot of which I’ve learnt from asking questions of other Chamber members at events.

The next cohort of your Productise Your Expertise course launches soon – can you tell us a bit about the course, and how it came about?

Productise Your Expertise is my signature six-month programme. It takes business owners through creating an ecosystem of products and building an audience of people who want to buy them.

It’s a group programme with fortnightly modules, tons of support from me and a carefully engineered methodology for getting your products out there and selling them.

The other day, I emailed someone who had done the Productise Your Expertise course before. I got his out-of-office autoresponder thingy. “I’m away from 2nd August to the 9th of September.” I smiled and thought, “You wouldn’t have been on holiday for a month before you built products”. It was a lovely moment.

What is productising and how can it be used to scale and grow a business?

A product-based business is where instead of charging your clients by the day or for the assignments you do for them, you solve their problems through your products. You take all the expertise, knowledge and know-how you’ve built up over the years (I call this your magic) and put it into your products.

You might develop guides and templates, one-off taster products like feedback reports, discovery sessions and workshops, which bring in more clients of a higher value to you. And then there are group programmes, audits and dashboards…Plus, of course, online courses, widgets and tools.

Productising means that you can have multiple, sometimes hundreds, of customers at the same time. It means you remove the ceiling on how much you can earn. And it means you can scale without having to grow a big agency.

What’s the biggest challenge businesses have in productising?

To be honest, once someone goes through the methodology in Productise Your Expertise and gets support and guidance, they’re on a roll. It takes consistent effort, but they’re off.

The biggest challenge is changing your mindset and getting started. Many people say, “Oh, I’d love to do that, but I’m so busy with client work right now that I can’t do it.” Maybe you are, but productising is like exercise – if you don’t get started now, you might leave it too late.

You’ve guided lots of businesses through this process already, what’s the most surprising thing you’ve learnt working with different entrepreneurs?

The weird stuff people do. I help people to recognise their magic their superpowers and package this up into products. And some of this is, in fact, magic…they have to explain it to me.

And finally, because we love to get to know the people behind the business - what's a new skill or hobby you've learnt in the past year? 

I was always told as a kid that I couldn’t draw. And for some reason, my parents never gave me pens and paper to practice drawing. When I launched the new Adventures in Products brand, I decided to learn to draw to explain some of the concepts in productising. My diagrams and stick people are still terrible, but I enjoy them, and they help people understand the ideas.

Find out more about Julia Chanteray's Productise Your Business course, open now, here. 

With thanks to Julia for a brilliant interview, and to Vervate for photography. 

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk