Consulting is a Little Bit F'ed

"In this AI-soaked era, the primary thing we're buying — anytime we're buying anything — is thinking. Consultants, you need a way for people to test the quality of your thinking. Efficiently. With a low financial impact."

Nobody sat down and decided to build a consulting offer that was bad for them, bad for their clients, and bad for their industry. It happened anyway. And if you're in consulting, fractional work, agency work, or any kind of advisory role — you're probably working inside a system that came from one of two tainted pools: the agency model or the McKinsey model. Both are imploding in real time. Neither was built for the world we're in now.

In this episode of Damns Given, Nick Richtsmeier gets practical. He walks through exactly what goes wrong with the two dominant approaches to getting hired as a consultant — the scoping process that produces 97-bullet-point SOWs nobody reads, and the audit tool that clients pay $5,000 for only to receive a boilerplate proposal recommending they hire you for the work they wanted to hire you for in the first place. He names both for what they are and explains why they exist — and why they need to stop.

Then he gets to the fix. The entry level offering. Short. High impact. Structured around thinking with your client rather than selling at them. Priced low enough that nobody has to go through procurement. Valuable enough that the deliverable is worth more than what they paid. A way for people to test the quality of your thinking before anyone commits to a long engagement — which in an AI-soaked world where thinking is the primary thing anyone is buying, is the only sale that actually makes sense.

This one is for consultants, fractionals, coaches, and agencies who are tired of the broken cycle and want a way out of it. And it's for founders and leaders who are hiring these people and want to know how to structure the front end of those relationships so everyone ends up doing better work.

Trust Forge — Nick's four-week live workshop on offering design — is at trustmadegrowth.com/trustforge

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Nick Richmeyer, and this is Dam's Given, a podcast where we explore how to free your venture from the extraction economy, realigning it to the timeless ways that humans build, collaborate, and buy. All right, gang, I'm just gonna jump right into it. Today, the way that consultants build offers is kind of effed. Like, I just like just want to start with the obvious that most agencies, consultancies, like just the entire offer structure is bad for the consultant, bad for the agency, bad for the client. And it's honestly incredibly irritating because no one intends for it to be this way. Like nobody's sitting at home going, how do I be really, really annoying and be hard to hire and set myself up to be underpaid and all of the things. And, you know, I obviously y'all know I talk a lot about trust made and solving for trust, all this kind of stuff. But what people really confuse is that they think like sort of trust trust is like nice, you know, like that we're solving for trust by being nice. I was on a call with a potential uh podcast, cool podcast I'm trying to get on out of the UK. And the guy was awesome. Um, and but he's talking about, hey, oh, you're gonna really love what weird we do because we have all these people who are into philanthropy and and all this kind of stuff. I'm like, yeah, like I love philanthropy and I come out of the nonprofit world and I care about us like fixing things, you know. But it was interesting because, again, in very much the same way that almost everybody misunderstands what I do, which of course is probably my fault, and that's a different episode for a different day. People think trust is this like squishy do-gooder thing. And obviously, it's sort of like a prerequisite for squishy do-gooder things, but it's not, it's not really what we're working on. What we're working on is bringing down the neurological resistance to healthy engagement. We're bringing down the nervous system energy and the nervous system and the and the personal resistance to engaging with each other in healthy ways that produces healthy outcomes. So essentially, we've gotten so sick culturally and socially and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the internet. You've watched all the other videos. Because of this, now our literal nervous systems, our brains, our patterns are resisting the good stuff. And so, what trust made is really about, and I'm getting back to consultants, just stay with me. What trust made is really about is how do we actually make little tiny decisions in sequence, in meaningful chunks, in strategic themes, to start to get back to saying yes to the good stuff. All right. So getting back to consultants, this is why offering design is so important. Because if your offering design is full of resistance, if your intention of your the creation for it is full of your fear of resistance, then guess what? We create what we fear. That is just normal human behavior. So a lot of people out there are going, well, I'm really afraid that some people won't hire me, or I if I really do what I want to do, then I won't make enough money or whatever. Well, guess what? Then everything you've built is imbued, is dripping with that fear. And let's get practical about that. What does that actually look like? So, what does a normal consulting style engagement look like? Well, most people come to consulting or really sort of third-party advisory work out of one of two big camps. They come out of it out of the agency model, and that can be design or marketing agency, but it's also like HR agencies or digital coding agencies, right? There's lots of different kinds of agencies, not just marketing, but the agency model, or they come out it out of the sort of like McKinsey Big Five sort of design model. Now, you may have never given two thoughts about Arthur Anderson in your life, but my guess is because you've read a lot of crap from Harvard MBAs, you have a lot of it in your bloodstream, right? So we come out of those two systems. What's important to understand is that both of those systems are actively imploding in on themselves as we speak. The McKinsey style model is trying to turn itself into AI vendors. Like they're basically trying to become software companies. Um, and there's all kinds of interesting evidence about that. They're partnerships with Open AI and all kinds of like so, so if they had real confidence that their way of solving for and getting paid and all of that was suitable for the modern world, they'd stick with it, right? They're not dumb. That's imploding in itself. And any of you that are anywhere near the agency world, the agency world is interrahable, right? Consolidation, price compression, AI threat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So all that means is if you are designing a way to work with you, a system of offerings, if you're doing that, you probably, your base concept comes from one of these two tainted pools. And so you're probably bringing ideas that are just not suitable for the world as we currently have it. So I'm not gonna do a whole episode today on offering design and how to do that and the systems for that. We have training for that. I have a really cool live, not recorded, hanging out with me. Four-week course I do on it called TrustForge. So this isn't gonna be like a deep dive for an hour and a half on offering design and how to do it and all the pieces of that puzzle. That is important work and uh we love to do it and we love to help people with it. I actually have a four-week course uh that we do on that called TrustForge. It's a live course with me workshop. We roll up our sleeves, we actually work through your particular offering for that time. Um, and you can find out more about that at trustmadegrowth.com slash trustforge, trustmadegrowth.com slash trustforge. That's not what we're doing today. What we're doing today is helping you get to the first giant hurdle between you and fixing your offering. And that is how you get hired. So if you're coming out of the agency model, you might have like an audit. Or you might have the other option is often some sort of really dull and extended like scoping process because people come to you with like, I need a website, or I need a hiring plan to fill this role, or I need you to audit my payroll, right? So they come to you with a really tactical need that you know is full of deep root problems. You know that you know that you know that you know is full of deep root problems. And again, got to pause here for a second. Some people listening to this are my founder, friends, who are part of our damns giving community, who are some of you who are our clients, past clients, future clients. You are coming to the table and you're going, hey, I need some help. I would like some help with this thing. We're not nobody's mad at you for having deep root problems. I'm not mad at you for having deep root problems. We love you, we appreciate you, you're lovely. Everybody has deep root problems. I what I just want those of you who are on the hiring side of this to think about is to just accept that even when you say, I need a website or I need to fill this role, can you help me fill this role? That smart people are going to want to understand at least what the deep root problems are that are the reason why you picked up the phone to ask for this service. Many of them will say, hey, we don't need to solve for all of that because some of that is like entrenched and it's not the right thing for right now, and we don't need to solve everything today. And good consulting people know how to go fast and slow at the same time. That is a fundamental skill of really good consultants, is they can solve for immediate need with an awareness of big problems and slowly chip away at the big problems at the same time. That's what good consultants do. So, again, if you're on the hiring side, just accept that if you're hiring good people, and actually, this is sort of a bell to ring if when you're screening, is if they're not asking you to think about root cause or at least have sort of a map of what are the causes driving this, they're probably not that good. So, back to consultants. You are going to be aware that they want this thing and it wants root cause. Well, the way the agencies solve for that, because the agencies really hated getting hired for stuff that that was too big and out of scope, and then it ends up blowing up and whatever. And I ran an agency for a while, so I understand how this is. Scope creep is real. And the way you solve for scope creep is by doing these big, long, drawn-out scoping discussions. And then you build a scope of work that has 97 bullet points in it, and no one remembers what the 97 bullet points are in there. At least seven of the 97 are very significant threats. You're like, if you do this, I will come to your house and murder you because someone has done that to you before. Like, it's very messy. It's very messy. And the whole time your client's like, I just want to do the thing. I want to do the working and the solving and the getting things done. And you're not doing it, right? It's not happening. So the other way is that agency starting to catch on to this, is like, oh, people want to get to work. So then they build an audit tool. I like an audit tool. That's a different conversation for a different day. Most audit tools have become a really ugly thing, which is you're basically asking your client to pay you to scope the work. So it's really about what the deliverable of the audit is. One of the ways to build in a trustmade way, and if you get nothing else out of this, this is a, I think, a tool you can consistently use. One of the ways to build in a trustmade way is that every time you sell something, that the end deliverable of that thing is worth more than what they paid for it. A lot of people are selling stuff that the deliverable actually isn't that good. They're just going to catch up on the next thing. And that's what audit tools often are like the results of the audit are well, we recommend that you hire us and you hire us to do the thing that you actually wanted to hire us for in the beginning. And we recommend that we do it over 12 weeks and we do it with this budget, right? And all of a sudden, your client paid $5,000 for you to write up a boilerplate offer. And that's a really shitty thing to do, to be honest. And all y'all out there who have done it and are doing it right now, stop it. Stop doing it. It's shitty and it breaks the reputation of whole industries. Stop doing it. But it's there for a reason because it solved for this thing of like, well, then how do we scope and how do we whatever? Okay, pause there. Now we've established the problem there. If you're coming from the kind of McKinsey consulting side, then you're coming with, we are the smartest people in the room. Aren't we brilliant? Here's our track record, here's all our logos, here's all the people that we've helped. And you're just gonna sell the big engagement. And I know a lot of people doing this, that the out-of-the-gate, they're trying to sell a six-month retainer or a nine-month retainer or even a year retainer. A lot of people in the fractional space are doing this where it's like, yep, I'm a fractional. So if you want me, here's my base, year, year retainer. You want to do that? Yeah, yeah, everybody good? Want to do that, right? That is just not how the world is in a large scale. Now, I'm not saying that this isn't happening. Obviously, some of these people are getting hired in these grand schemes, but there is, by some statistics, 6500%, 6,500 more people claiming to be fractionals on LinkedIn than there was five years ago. 6,500%. So that means that you can't just like wing it. The competition is at a completely different playing field. And so this, like, hey, I know what I'm doing, I'm X whatever, ex Facebook, X Google, X whatever, just hire me. It's not working. And also, even if you do get hired under those constraints, you're gonna probably spend six months being really irritated with them, and they're gonna be really irritated with you because the scope of work probably wasn't right, the structure wasn't right, all of it becomes very problematic. And then you're having to use the last six months of your retainer to salvage it and go, okay, now we're actually gonna get enough stuff done so that we feel good about it. That's not a trust-making way to work. That doesn't bring down everybody's resistance, that doesn't make people feel like they're doing the things that get them toward the things that matter. So, okay, Nick, great. You spent 45 minutes telling us what's wrong. What do we actually do? What I want you to do is I want you to build an entry-level product, an entry-level offering that allows you to constructively think with your client and produce high speed outcomes for that thinking. Now, I have a way I do that that takes three weeks. Three, maybe four weeks if they're slow. It's very structured. It is high delivery. We basically give them what we honestly what I used to do in 90 days, and we give it to them in three weeks because I built a system to do it and it's entirely custom. The advice is entirely custom. It's literally, and it's all because I demand an enormous amount of disclosure through the process. We can talk about that tool in a different conversation because I think it's important to think about if you want to do high-level delivery, you've got to get high-level disclosure. But even if you don't want to go to that level that I do it at and how we train our strategists to do it, you need a structure of a short-term engagement that's high impact that allows you to think with your client. They pay you money for that thinking, and you deliver thinking that moves them down the field, whatever that is. So if they are thinking about a brand redesign, it's 30 days or two months or two weeks of thinking hard about what their brand actually needs to do, a clear deliverable about what you think needs to happen. They get to see you think, they get your ideas, they get your way of viewing of the world, they get a feel for talking to you and what talking to you does. And do they actually feel smarter and better as they're doing it? And you get paid for it. And the thing is, when you're out there scoping in the world and you're business building and you're and you're trying to build your network for new opportunities, it shortens that time frame substantially because when people are like, hey, this sounds kind of good, might want to work with you. What do we do next? But great, I've got a three-week thing. I'm gonna do this three-week thing, two-week thing, whatever your scale of it is. It's XYZ price for everybody, and this is what you get. And it's low risk for them. Nobody has to go through procurement to get approval. It's within their budget constraints. Most of the time when you're being hired as a consultant, you're not in budget. Let's just be honest. Nobody likes to put in the budget. Yeah, we want to spend half a million dollars on consulting this year. You are above and beyond the itemized budget. So entering into their PL in a way that you have minimal impact on the budget, but high impact on their thinking is magic. Okay. So, consultants, fractionals, team, let's do better. All right, let's work on this. It's a project we're working on inside the guild. We're doing some coaching around it, we're helping people think through it. The links for that are all, as always, in the show notes. Or you can just go straight to trustmadegrowth.com if you're listening on the audio only. And buyers, founders, leaders of companies, I would strongly encourage you to draw this out of the people you hire and say, hey, can we put together an arrangement where we work together on this for 30 days? And we both get smarter and we agree on what that would look like and minimal financial impact, but we see if we're the right fit. Before you go and spend 90 days sending them all aflutter through your organization and auditing this and auditing that, and trying to move things around, and all of a sudden you're frustrated because not only did you potentially hire for the wrong problem, now you hired the wrong person because they can't think well about what you need them to think well about. And we all know in this AI-soaked era that the primary thing we're buying anytime we're buying, the primary thing we're buying is thinking. So, consultants, you need a way for people to test the quality of your thinking and to do it efficiently and to do it with a low financial impact. So, just some stuff today on buying and selling. Uh, here in today's TAM's given, we cover the gamut here on this show. Sometimes we talk about deep systemic, socioeconomic things, and sometimes we talk about how to sell shit. And the reason for that is because trust is under assault everywhere. And as we learn to start to call it out and lean into it and face our own resistance to it, we start to build the groundswell of a better way of doing community, society, and economy. And I hope you join us on this way. So we'll see you next time.