The Leaky Bucket

• Milind Soni
• May 5, 2026
• Blog
• #ITServices, #ProductLedGrowth, #productstrategy, #RecurringRevenue, #servicestoproduct
• 0 Comments

Services revenue leaks.

Project ends. Client pauses. Budget gets cut. Stakeholder changes. You’re back to hunting the next SOW.

You’re not building a business. You’re bailing with a bucket.

Here’s what that looks like at scale:

Every April, you start at zero. Again. Every quarter, pipeline anxiety. Again. Every year, growth means more people, more proposals, more delivery risk. Again.

The math never changes. Only the headcount does.

Product revenue works differently.

A customer renews. Then expands. Then refers. Annual Recurring Revenue compounds. Net Revenue Retention climbs. The baseline never resets.

You’re not starting from zero in April. You’re starting from everything you built last year, plus.

The difference isn’t just financial. It’s psychological.

One model has your best people spending 40% of their time on proposals, pitches, and procurement processes energy that produces nothing until a contract is signed.

The other has your best people making the product better and learning how to sell better.
Every day. For every customer. Simultaneously.

Same domain expertise going in.

Completely different businesses coming out.

The services firms that survive the next decade won’t be the ones that got bigger.

They’ll be the ones that got smarter about what they were actually selling and stopped letting their most valuable asset leak out through every completed project.

One model builds while you sleep. The other needs you to be awake at all hours to grow.

Which one are you running?