What it costs

Three engagements, three different things being sold, three price shapes. A seat is time, so it is priced as time. A program is an outcome, so it is priced per phase and committed a phase at a time. An audit is a fixed object with a fixed end date, so it is priced fixed and quoted before it begins.

What none of them is: an estimate that grows. The scope carries the number, the number is written down before anything starts, and if the scope changes then that is a conversation on the day rather than a line on an invoice at the end of the month.

What actually moves a price

• The size of the marketing organisation. On the audit this is the only variable there is — the count of teams to interview and score.
• Days per week. The seat is bought in days, and how many is settled with you before anything starts. The rate is reviewed each quarter rather than fixed for a year.
• Which phase you are buying. A program is quoted a phase at a time, so the number in front of you is always for work that has already been looked at.
• The state of the data underneath. If customer history is not queryable, sorting that out becomes the first phase and is priced as one — said during diagnosis rather than after.

A retained day rate, reviewed quarterly. You buy a set number of days a week, agreed before anything starts, and the notice period is one month in both directions, which means the largest commitment on this page is also the easiest one to stop.

A day is a day of the seat rather than a day of production: the roadmap and its trade-offs, the team and what is blocking them, the vendor calls, and the retention number as a target I am measured on. That is what the rate is for. What you are buying is the leadership half of the job without the other half — if you also need hands, hire them, and I will help you write the brief.

Reviewed quarterly rather than locked for a year, in both directions. If the seat has grown into something bigger, that should be said out loud; if it has shrunk to the point where you no longer need it, that should be said out loud too, and a month’s notice is what makes saying it cheap.

Scoped and quoted one phase at a time. The first phase is Diagnose: two weeks in your data. It is deliberately the smallest thing on this page, because it is the phase that decides whether the rest is worth buying, and it is allowed to end in a recommendation that you do not need the rest.

Diagnose produces a scope with a number on it for the phase after it. Design, Build and Prove it are quoted the same way, each at the end of the phase before, so you are never committing to a figure for work nobody has looked at yet. The total is not knowable in advance and any consultant who gives you one before the two weeks is quoting a guess with confidence.

What moves it: which of the four pieces — contact strategy, LTV tiering, churn prediction, orchestration — is actually the constraint, and the state of the data underneath. Engineering time during Build is sized in the scope before you sign it rather than discovered during it.

Three weeks, fixed scope, fixed price. The number of teams is the only variable.

An audit billed by the day has an incentive to find more audit. A fixed price removes it, and the only thing left to optimise is whether the recommendations are any good. It also means the end date is a fact rather than a forecast, which matters when the thing being audited is a quarter that still has to run while you audit it.

To get the number, one line is enough: how many teams sit inside the marketing organisation. The quote comes back with the scope attached, so what you are comparing is a price against a defined object rather than a price against a promise.