Everything here has a scope, a price, and an end date.
Five ways in, arranged so you can step onto the first at no risk and step up only when the one before it has proved itself. Nothing on this page is sold by the hour, and nothing is sold without a date it finishes.
Diagnosis
The services conversation
Structured, not a discovery call. Five minutes on your situation, fifteen minutes of the highest-signal questions from the diagnostic question bank, and ten minutes of what those answers actually said. It ends with two or three specific observations you hadn't been given before — not "you should improve utilization," but the particular reason your numbers say two things that can't both be true.
You get a short written summary within forty-eight hours whether or not there is anything further. That summary is yours.
The services snapshot
The same method at a third of the scope, for organizations where the full diagnostic is more machinery than the problem needs. Three interviews, a short data request, and scoring across four dimensions — offer and pricing, utilization and capacity, delivery discipline, and services financial management.
You get a findings memo with a scored summary, the three highest-dollar gaps quantified in your own numbers, and a ninety-day action list. It's also the cheapest way to test the working relationship before committing to anything larger.
The services performance diagnostic
Six to ten stakeholder interviews across services leadership, delivery, sales, customer success and finance. A defined data request. Scoring one to five across nine operational dimensions against a defined maturity ladder, with every finding traceable to evidence rather than to opinion.
You get a scorecard, a findings report, a twelve-month roadmap ranked by dollar impact over effort, an executive readout, and a value model built on your own headcount, rates and services revenue. The calendar is part of the product: it ends when it says it will.
Selling a fix before a diagnosis is how a practice ends up owning somebody else's problem.
Remediation is always optional, and always separately priced.
Remediation
Packaged modules, sold after a diagnostic and never before.
Each one is a defined workstream with a fixed scope, a fixed fee, and a date it finishes. You take the ones the findings justify and none of the ones they don't.
- Margin recovery. Utilization definition and measurement, time-entry discipline, revenue leakage, discount governance, and the denominator question. Usually the fastest money.
- Offer portfolio build. Turning bespoke work into packaged offerings with scope, price and a margin model — plus the three-option proposal structure and the enablement to sell them.
- Delivery methodology build. A documented methodology, milestone structure, template set, project operations cadence, and an escalation playbook. For organizations where every project runs differently depending on who is running it.
- Partner delivery program. Certification structure, subcontractor economics, virtual bench design, flow-through model, and escalation governance.
- Post-acquisition services integration. Two methodologies, two rate cards, two utilization models and two sets of templates, reconciled into one. Sold to acquirers and to the operating partners running add-ons.
Partner programs
Partner and channel program design.
This is the one engagement that doesn't start with a diagnostic, because the buyer is usually a software vendor rather than a services organization — or a firm that has already been hired to build the program and needs the vendor-side experience it doesn't have in-house.
The credential that matters here is having owned both halves: the partner program and the services P&L it was supposed to relieve. Most people who design these have done one or the other.
What's in scope
- Program architecture and tiering. What a partner does to reach each tier, what they get for it, and whether the thresholds survive the first large partner arguing with them.
- Partner economics. "What's in it for me," answered in billable utilization, services attach per deployment, and the advisory work a partner can sell on top of configuration.
- Enablement and certification. Designed backwards from time-to-first-successful-deployment, which is the number that actually predicts whether a partner sticks.
- Delivery capacity. Hours moved off your own bench and onto partners' — the number that justifies the program to a CFO.
- Escalation governance. The stakeholder map across partner, customer success, services, engineering and product, built before anything goes wrong. Escalations get resolved by relationships that already exist, or they don't get resolved.
What isn't
Recruiting named partners. Sitting in your staff meetings. Owning a partner number. Carrying an escalation pager. Any one of those turns an engagement into a job with a vendor badge on it, which is a different arrangement and should be named as one.
Not on offer
The things this practice deliberately doesn't sell.
Saying no to these is what keeps the rest of it honest. They're listed because they're the four things a services advisor is most often asked for.
- Interim or fractional services leadership. The most obvious adjacent revenue there is, and a job with a different name.
- Recruiting or placement. Different business, different liability.
- Implementation staffing. It converts an advisory practice into a services firm with all the problems it diagnoses.
- Anything priced hourly. Hourly pricing caps the value of getting faster, which is the entire point of having a method.
Start here
Thirty minutes, and you keep whatever comes out of it.
The first conversation is free and deliberately structured. If there's no fit, you'll know inside the half hour — and you'll be told plainly.
What you'll be asked before we meet
- Roughly how large is the services organization, and what does it own?
- What made you start looking at this now?
- Who would need to agree before anything changed?