Services Firms and IP: What Has It Changed About Revenue?

• Sahil Harwani
• October 15, 2026
• Blog
• 0 Comments

Almost every services or engineering company we evaluate has a slide called something like:

Products. Accelerators. IP.

Sometimes it’s a very impressive slide. Twenty products. Fifteen accelerators. A long list of proprietary frameworks and platforms.

After looking at enough of them, I’ve stopped reading the list.

I read what comes after it.

Who is actually using it?
How many customers? Is anyone paying for it separately, or is it buried inside a services engagement?

How much delivery does it replace?
Does the sales team lead with it? Can another team deploy it without the people who built it?

Does it get better with every customer, or does every customer create another version?

A product can be real and still have no product business around it.

An accelerator can be enormously valuable without ever becoming a standalone product.

And a brilliant piece of IP can sit unused because nobody figured out where it fits in the market.

The contrast is easy to spot once you look for it.

In one company, the IP shows up in pricing, in margins, and in renewals. Deals are shorter, delivery needs fewer people, and customers pay for it even when the project ends.

In another, it shows up only on the slide. Billing is still time and material, and the team is still the same size.

Both built something. Only one changed the business.

So the question we ask isn’t “What have you built?”

It’s:

“What has this changed about the way you make money?”