The Consulting Shift I Am Making In Year Two

On April eighteenth I am thirteen days into year two and I can already feel the shape of my consulting practice shifting. Writing publicly every day for a year changed who shows up in my inbox. That change deserves a conscious response.

The business problem is matching how you sell to how you actually deliver. My delivery model has matured. My sales model had not. Year two is where they get aligned.

What year one taught me about the funnel

Most good leads came from articles, not from outbound. The articles that converted were the specific ones. A story about one engagement beat a general post on AI every time.

The shift

From long retainers to fixed scope outcome projects. Most clients do not want ongoing access. They want a specific problem solved in a two to six week window.

The new default engagement

• Week one: discovery and plan
• Week two to five: build
• Week six: ship, document, train

Flat fee. One invoice. No scope creep.

What I stopped doing

• Hourly billing. Every hour I saved with AI tooling was an hour I billed less. That is upside down.
• Monthly retainers without a specific deliverable. Ambiguity rots relationships.
• Proposals longer than three pages. Any proposal that needs more has not been scoped enough yet.

What I started doing

• Pricing by outcome, not effort.
• A short paid discovery engagement before any larger scope.
• Publishing case studies within two weeks of shipping, with the client's blessing.

The deeper change

My skill soup means I can deliver a whole engagement solo. Pricing by outcome captures the real value of that. Pricing by hours gives it all away to the client.

The year two goal

Fewer engagements. Higher value per engagement. More writing. The writing is not marketing. It is the product filter. Clients who read the articles arrive pre-qualified. The inbox gets lighter. The work gets better.

See Jonathan Stark on value pricing if you want the canonical version of this shift. Thirteen days into year two, I am running the same playbook. So far it fits.