How the engagement works
My consulting engagements start the same way. Every business problem I've been handed in 8+ years carried this distinction: what leadership is treating and what’s constraining revenue are two different things. This work is primarily focused on finding the constraint first.
Overview
Diagnose → Architect → Operate
The business diagnostic identifies & names the root constraint. Architecture build addresses the constraint that we are solving. The operating layer keeps the build aligned as your business continues to evolve, and each phase exists because the one before it produced the scope of work.
That sequence is the methodology.
You can stop after any phase, but you can't skip one.
Most consulting engagements start with the fix and work backward to justify it. That's how businesses end up solving the same symptoms repeatedly for years. The Business diagnostic runs first, so that the build addresses the Root constraint.
Phase 1 — Diagnose
Fixed fee · 2-3 weeks · Entry point for every engagement
Two layers run at once. The first is a 20-question pre-work assessment for you to complete on your own time, capturing how you believe the business finds, converts, and keeps customers — plus a guided 90-minute working session built on what you submit. The second layer is mine, done independently: buyer experience simulation, competitive positioning audit, ICP gap analysis, revenue model stress testing.
The diagnostic insight lives in what surfaces between those two layers. What you said versus what the evidence shows. Every business has an intelligence gap, but most have never seen theirs explicitly measured.
You leave Phase 1 with a Strategic Findings Report:
Your primary constraint identified: demand, conversion, retention, capacity, or positioning
The distinction between that constraint and the symptoms you've been treating
Gap between your stated reality vs. what external evidence shows
Highest-leverage interventions available to you
Recommended scope for Phase 2 (if the SFR warrants one)
Phase 2 — Architect
Scope defined by the diagnostic · 60-90 days
Phase 2 builds the infrastructure that closes the constraint that Phase 1 identified. Phase 2 scope comes from the strategic findings report, which means no two Phase 2 engagements look exactly alike. It also means nothing gets built on an untested assumption.
What the business diagnostic can scope:
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The infrastructure that shows what's actually driving revenue, connecting spend to closed business rather than to leads. A full-funnel attribution rebuild for a legal services client attributed $420K in annual revenue by channel and let the firm stop optimizing for lead volume.
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Maps where revenue leaks between awareness and close, and traces each leak to its root rather than its symptom. A high bounce rate is a symptom. Wrong audience, mismatched messaging, and broken conversion architecture are causes. The audit tells you which one you have.
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The buyer journey is mapped as a closed-loop system before anyone touches a CMS. The architecture does conversion work, so the copy doesn't have to do it alone. Designed as the corrected container ahead of a client's website rebuild — blueprint before build.
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Campaign architecture matched to the business model, conversion events tied to revenue, audiences defined by ICP rather than platform defaults. One account autopsy found every variable misconfigured at once — producing a result that told the owner paid search didn't work, when it told him nothing at all.
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How work actually moves through the organization, and where handoffs break. Most workflow problems present as personnel problems. Nearly all of them are structural: no defined handoff, no clear owner at the transition point.
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The measurement layer that makes everything else legible — marketing activity, pipeline, and revenue in one source of truth. Without it, attribution is guesswork and reporting is backward-looking vanity metrics.
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You get the systems and the reasoning behind every architectural decision — the why, documented, so the infrastructure keeps working after I'm gone. I've watched what happens to businesses when the logic leaves with the person who held it. The transfer is designed so it can't.
Phase 3 — Operate
Ongoing retainer · Requires Phase 1 and 2 completion
The strategic layer, retained: monthly constraint review, quarterly strategic assessment, on-call decision support for significant choices, and continuous monitoring of whether the build is producing what it was designed to produce. Businesses evolve. Constraints move. A strategic retainer is the function that catches the next one before it accumulates further complexity.
Start with clarity alone
Phase 1 is available as a standalone engagement: the Clarity Package. Fixed fee, runs 2-3 weeks, ends with the Strategic Findings Report in your hands and no further obligation. If you continue into Phase 2, the project fee is credited toward the full engagement.
The report is yours either way. Clients have changed trajectory on the findings alone, before anything was built — new language for the business, a constraint finally named, a plan re-sequenced. Some engagements should end there. The report will tell you if yours is one of them.
Decision advisory
Standalone services separate from the 3-phase engagement.
Choose this if there's a specific business decision on the table and the cost of getting it wrong is high.
Not for you if the problem is broader than one decision and the root constraint hasn't been named. That's what the business diagnostic is for, and it's a better use of the same money.
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How a decision in front of you affects your path dependency, including trajectories at 3/6/12 months, weighted by likelihood, with scored reversibility assessed for each path.
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Retrospective instrument that traces which past decisions, made when, have led into the current situation you're in. The next decision chain starts from a named root rather than repeating a pattern.
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The evaluation framework itself: how this decision should be sequenced, what criteria govern it, and what the go/no-go structure looks like before the pressure zone.
Not sure WHICH IS RIGHT FOR you?
That's normal, and it's usually diagnostic information in itself. The first conversation runs 30 minutes and is treated like a first pass of the diagnostic rather than a sales call: you'll leave with at least one constraint named.