How to Build a Consulting Offer That Does the Convincing for You

If you're a consultant and you feel like you're constantly looking at your revenue, your leads, and you're chasing the next client, the problem probably isn't your marketing or your network, or your sales call or your funnel. I'd suggest that the problem is what's underneath all of that. It's the solution that you're selling.

Look, I know this because after a long career in consulting, I started my own solo consulting business. I wanted to be done with the politics and the drama of the big firms and have a business on my own terms. But when I started, I made the mistake that almost crushed me. I needed revenue, deal flow, and I thought the more I could do for my clients, the more successful I'd be. I'd earn more, I'd be more valuable for them. And so I'd hear about something that they were thinking of and I'd work on a pitch and then I'd convince the client that I could do the work, even when I knew I wasn't really great at it.

And then when I won the work, the revenue felt good, but I found myself doing work that I had a shallow understanding of, perhaps just a little bit more than the clients in some cases. Certainly not leading them the way a good consultant should. You see, what I'd done is I'd built a firm with an offer designed to win whatever work I came across. And so I found myself in situations where I was sometimes barely a step ahead of the client, figuring it out as I went along. That didn't feel great. I felt I'd compromised my own integrity and was constantly waiting for someone to call me out.

What I actually needed, and what my business needed, I needed to pitch the work and win the work and then do the work that I was actually the best at doing.

I've spent 95% of my career in consulting. I came up through Proudfoot, then Deloitte Consulting in New York, and I was President of Kotter International. Professionally, I think it's fair to say consulting is in my DNA. But even with that depth of experience, I had those moments of revenue strain and uncertainty. If you've had them too, you're in good company.

Today, my consulting business earns more than I earned at any of those firms. And the single biggest reason is that I stopped pitching anything and convincing clients that I was the one. I started building a solution, an offer that did the convincing for me.

I get asked this quite often, and so in the next few minutes I'm going to walk through exactly how to build your consulting offer, one that's so good you'll shake that uncertainty and shift from convincing clients to having a solution that accelerates your consulting business. I'll cover the five core components, the constraint that almost no one applies, and suggest what to look for in that moment when the whole dynamic flips from chasing clients to choosing which ones you actually want to work with.

So let's get started with what you're actually selling, because this is where the chasing comes from. If you came up through a firm, or if you were in industry and decided to build a consulting business, the way you got into it was probably something like this. You took the things you'd already done and you packaged them up and you went out and offered to do them again.

And what most people end up calling an offer is really just a list of services, a smart sounding description of what they're capable of. You'll see this on most solo consultants' websites. The list of capabilities like M&A advisory, or leadership development, operational strategy, organisational performance, transformation, change management. It's a page that effectively says, here are the things I'm willing to do for money.

And the moment your offer is shaped like that, you've put yourself in the position of being a solution looking for a problem. You're hoping a client sends you a message on LinkedIn with a need that maps to one of your capabilities. And then you'll scope something out around it. You find an old one and tweak it or change it up. You're bidding for things you're moderately good at instead of being asked to do the one thing that you're exceptional at.

That's the chasing. The chasing is the natural consequence of having an offer that's structured as a menu. You see, when your offer is a menu, the client's in charge. You become the responsive servant in the relationship. You end up doing what the client wants you to do instead of what the client actually needs to have done.

So if a list of services is what creates the chasing, what's the alternative? Well, it's an offer built on a defined outcome. I want to be specific about that word. An outcome is what happens to the client's business after you've left. A deliverable, that 30-page slide deck, or the report, that's just an artifact along the way. The outcome is the shift in the business itself.

So what does this mean for you and how you talk about what you do? Well, instead of saying you're a process consultant, you become the person known for finding the seven figures hiding in your client's operations and getting it back into the P&L within a quarter. Even though in terms of what you do, it might be the same experience underneath it all, there'll be a completely different offer on top. What the client should remember is not process consultant. The client should remember the person who improves my P&L.

Look, here's why this matters. Operationally, when the offer is a defined outcome, the buyer no longer has to interpret what you do. They look at your offer and they immediately know whether they need it or not. The qualifying is happening before the conversation even begins. So from this point on in the video, when I say offer, I mean a defined outcome with a real mechanism built behind it.

Let's walk through the five components that will build an offer like that. I'll tell you upfront though that the order matters more than most people think. Most offer design advice tells you to start with the buyer. Pick your ideal client and then everything around them. But I think that's the wrong starting point. The buyer follows from what you're sharp at, especially as a solo consultant or an adviser. So that's where we'll start.

The first component is about getting brutally clear on where you are uniquely good. That thing that you are genuinely sharp at. That thing where your knowledge is so deep that you don't have to spend time researching before you go into a client conversation.

And the way I think about it is this. In your career so far, you've built up a body of knowledge. That body of knowledge is from dozens of projects where you've likely solved variations of the same issue over and over. Some of those projects, you were genuinely the best person in the room. On others, you were probably dabbling a little bit or picking it up as you went. The job here is to separate between those two piles and then commit to the first one, where you're sharp.

You see, when you're talking about what you're good at, the market rewards clarity. You need it to be precise, specific, and clear. But the thing is, most consultants are petrified, terrified to be that specific because it feels like they're shrinking the market. And we'll come back to that in a minute, but it's the single biggest hedge in this whole conversation. For now, though, just sit with the question, what is the one thing you're sharp at? That thing where you don't have to research before you walk into a client meeting, because that's the thing your offer needs to be built around.

Let's now move on to the next piece. The second component is the outcome that you actually deliver. And here you have to be willing to talk about what changes for the client in terms that they would describe to their boss, not in words that you would use, in language they would use.

In my own work with leadership teams, I worked with a team in the insurance industry. When we started, they locked onto a target of hitting $5 billion within a couple of years. As we worked together, they ended up delivering just over $11 billion. Now, of course, a lot of their execution and operational decisions made that happen, but the team that walked in setting a $5 billion goal walked out hitting more than double. That's an outcome they can name and put on a piece of paper.

Generic outcomes sound like this. I help organisations improve performance. A specific outcome in my case sounds like, I help leadership teams get clear on their ambition and convert that into revenue within 12 to 18 months.

One of the truths I keep coming back to is this. AI and the tools that have come with AI produce artifacts very easily and very quickly. The 30-page slide deck no longer is the thing that justifies your fee. The result is what gets paid for. So if your offer is shaped around an artifact, you're going to lose. But if you shape it around the result you're going to achieve, you're going to be able to keep attracting clients and charging good fees for solving real problems.

The third component is the mechanism. This is the repeatable thing you do every time that produces the outcome. And the mechanism is what most consultants completely skip, because for most solo consultants, every engagement is different for them. So they tell themselves their work doesn't lend itself to being repeatable. But if you're doing the thing you're good at and you know how to do it and you know that it gets results, the work absolutely is repeatable. But most consultants just haven't done the diligence of codifying that sequence of what happens, what happens next and what happens after that.

So in my case, one of the things I do is I deliver a 3-day leadership reset. That's the mechanism. Now around those three days, I have everything engineered. What happens in the month leading up to it, the conversations I have with each participant before we meet, what happens on day one, day two, and day three, and then how I make sure the team doesn't regress in the weeks after. That's the mechanism defined and clear.

So we know where we are sharp. We have a defined outcome, and we have a clear mechanism. Now, if you want to actually build this kind of offer for your own business instead of just thinking about it once this video is done, once a month I run a five-day signature offer challenge for a couple of hours every day. We go through these five components in real time and you get to start shaping your signature offer. The next challenge is coming up. There's a link in the description to get on the wait list. I hope to see you there.

The fourth component is the buyer. And this is where I disagree with most offer design advice that's being put out there. The standard playbook says pick your buyer first and build everything around them. But I think that's backwards. The client follows from what you're sharp at, what you do, and the outcome you produce. Because once you're clear on the problem you solve, it's pretty easy to then identify who has that problem.

Look, consulting is inherently relationship based. And we can get so caught up in our own cleverness and talking about problems and solutions that we sometimes forget that problems don't buy solutions. People do. So the people we want to get in front of with our solution are simply the people who have the problem we solve. But you go from networking with anyone and sending messages to everyone on LinkedIn like let's catch up and hoping somebody out there has opportunity for you, and you move to saying quite confidently, if this is your problem I'm the person who can solve it.

It becomes fact-based. It works the way you choose a doctor. When you have a specific issue you find the specialist who treats that issue. You pay whatever the specialist asks because you want the person whose entire practice and reputation is built around solving exactly the problem you have. Your offer has to put you in that position so that you become the specialist they seek out by name when they have that problem that you solve.

The fifth and final component is the measurable result. The thing that actually proves the outcome has happened. Now, this one comes from my time at Proudfoot where I started my consulting career. On every single engagement, we tracked the impact. Every single one, we would look at the process improvement, anticipate the dollar value attached to it, and we would actually underwrite the engagement against that number. The improvement metric was the design of the engagement itself, written into the contract before we even began.

Now, that experience was so core to me that it shaped how I think about the consulting value equation. I've never been comfortable handing a client a report that may or may not get read just based on things that we've done. We must go beyond insights to action, because action leads to the real measurable shift in the business and solving the problem they hired you to solve.

So look, when you build your offer, the question to ask and answer is this. What does success look like in numbers? It can be a revenue number, a process metric, an improvement metric. But the only thing that matters here is that it is specific. The kind of result your buyer would talk about in their next management meeting. If they can't talk about the result and demonstrate it, you're on shaky ground.

Now, I want to be honest with you about why most people, even after they understand these five components, still don't build an offer like this. The constraint is almost always the fear of being so specific with your offer that you won't have enough business. Consultants are terrified to be genuinely narrow in picking one thing they're sharp at and then refusing to be hired for anything other than that. In practice, it feels like the moment you commit, you've shrunk your market, like you've just walked away from all the other work you could have done and that all the conversations are going to dry up.

And so most consultants hedge. They keep the broad capabilities up on their website and tell themselves that they'll get specific later when they have enough work. And the hedge, well, that's the thing that keeps the chasing alive.

I know this because I've lived through the version of myself that hedged, two engagements specifically. The first one, a client asked me if I'd be able to take on some new work adjacent to the work I was already doing, but not my core strength. Well, I said yes. Why? Well, I wanted the revenue. It was kind of close to what I did, and I didn't want to say no. I didn't want to disappoint the client. But I knew that I actually had a shallow understanding of the subject. Look, I did the work. The client probably never noticed, but I did. I know that a real expert would have been better.

In the second case, a different client wanted me to use a tool that I'd never used. Sure, I thought I could learn it, watch a couple of videos and podcasts. But here's the thing. When a client is paying good fees, they're paying for deep insight. And deep insight does not come from a couple of videos or podcasts or even a few conversations with your favourite AI tool. I love Claude, but even Claude can't give me the deep insights that I need to own from my own experience.

In both of those cases, I was doing work I should not have been doing, and I knew it. The only reason I did it was that I'd hedged on being specific. I kept the lane wide, but it turned out to be the source of the problem. When I realised this, I vowed never to do it again. I told myself I'd only take the work I'm exceptional at and let the rest go. From that point on, I doubled down on being the very best at solving the problem I solve.

For instance, my leadership resets went from charging around $30,000 for an engagement to charging more than double for what is essentially some pre-work and three days of work with the client. And I'm busier than I've ever been because my referrals are moving. You see, the fee moved because the offer narrowed, the work got better, and the client results were a lot stronger and easier to point at.

When all five components are in place, and you've held the line on being specific about what you do, the relationship between you and the market flips. What this looks like operationally in my own business is this. The inbound work has become so much easier because the work is referral-driven and referrals are mapped to the problem I solve. People say, Russell did this for me, he can do it for you. So the problem and solution fit is already established before the client even begins. And that anxiety about deal flow and pipeline, it's significantly diminished.

On the calls themselves, I'm still asking a lot of questions. Maybe 70% of a first call with the prospect is still fact finding. But here's what's different. I know what I do, and I don't want there to be any drift away from that. So my questions are all about trying to confirm whether the work they need is the work I do, not whether I can wedge my way into it, because that way I can tell the client on that call whether I'm the right person or not.

When we get to pricing, it's a very different conversation. I am 100% confident about what I do, the impact and the results it delivers, and I have a strong pipeline. So I'm not desperate. Instead, I anchor the client on what the problem is costing them. Did they lose a customer? Did they miss a milestone or quarterly result? What is the problem costing them today? And what would it be worth to them to have it solved? The fee follows on from that and the buyer can then understand what it would take to solve it and what it would cost them if they did nothing about it.

That's the dynamic flip. The buyer is qualifying themselves in instead of being pushed in. The inbound and the referral, well, they're doing the filtering work for me. And because a lot of that filtering is happening upstream of the call, I never have to convince anyone in a call. The offer is doing the convincing. I'm just confirming if they're the right fit. And hopefully they're confirming that I'm the right fit for them.

The reason I think about offers this way is because of where I learned about what it is to be a good consultant. So click on this video, because I walk through everything I learned from over 30 years inside firms like Proudfoot and Deloitte and others, the parts of the consulting model almost no one outside these firms ever sees, and the lessons that made everything I'm doing now possible. It would be great to see you there.