The talent at large consulting firms is strong, and the people in those organizations have the capacity to design engagements around capability transfer and structure sessions where the client’s team does the work. Business model design is what distinguishes firms.
Our Model Is Built Around Client Self-Sufficiency
We built our model around a specific belief: the engagement succeeds when the client can run the program without us. That belief shapes every design decision. Sessions are designed so the client’s team does the work, and artifacts are structured so they can maintain them. The operating rhythm is installed during the engagement so the team has practiced it before handoff. This is the operator’s consultant model, built to serve the people who will own the work after the engagement ends. Our twelve-week engagement is a design parameter: enough time to build a comprehensive program plan and transfer the capability to run it independently. The business model and the methodology point in the same direction, and the nine-step methodology encodes that alignment into a repeatable process. The real measure is what stays after you leave.
Building Deliverables With Clients Instead of For Them
Building with the client means designing exercises where the client’s team generates 70% of the substance. The consulting team brings structure and facilitation skill; the room brings the content. This requires more facilitation design time per session and facilitators skilled enough to run a room of senior leaders without controlling the outcome. Building for the client is faster; a team of four consultants can produce a program roadmap in three weeks, but it produces artifacts that do not survive contact with the organization. Building with the client takes longer because the process depends on the client’s team showing up and doing the work. The client’s team builds the roadmap, so they know how to update it; they design the governance framework, so they feel accountable to it. We also design the emotional arc of our engagements as a tracked variable. Our methodology is built around the W-curve: two peaks and two valleys. The dips are anticipated and named for the client before they arrive, and the emotional experience becomes something we actively design for. This is what it means to treat the experience as the product: every session and every artifact is designed with the client’s experience in mind.
