Most consulting arrangements overshoot the actual problem. You call about one specific question, and three weeks later you've got a proposal for a six-month engagement that comes with a kickoff deck, a stakeholder map, and a quarterly review cadence. By the time any of it starts, the question you were trying to answer has already moved on you. Something I've been doing differently with a lot of clients this year is a sixty-minute format that produces a usable document at the end of the hour, for a thousand dollars.
The format started as an accommodation. A few founders I know wanted my read on something specific without the overhead of a full engagement, so I ran a couple of these for free as favors, noticed the output was often more useful than the full-engagement equivalent, and started formalizing it. It's now one of the things I'm busiest doing.
What actually happens in the hour
The hour is structured. You bring the problem, I bring a set of questions I've been iterating on across every one of these I've run, and we spend about forty minutes mapping what's actually going on, which almost always surfaces something you weren't paying attention to going in. The last twenty minutes are where we draft the playbook, which is a document you can take back to your team.
The playbook runs three to five pages. It's concrete next moves written in your voice, built around the specific problem you brought in, designed to be short enough that you'll actually read it twice.
Why the deliverable matters more than the conversation
Most consulting ends in a conversation and some vague next steps. You feel like you got value in the moment, but three weeks later you can't actually remember what was said, let alone act on it. The playbook forces the thinking into writing, which means you can hand it to somebody who wasn't on the call and they'll understand it immediately.
The document is also what makes the hour itself feel different in the moment. The whole conversation is tilted toward "what are we going to write down" instead of "what are we talking about," which keeps us honest about whether the thing we're saying is actually true or just plausible.
Who's been booking these
The people booking these aren't my historical client profile. They're founders of ops-heavy businesses, directors of program management at mid-sized organizations, operators of specialty service companies in construction, logistics, and finance-adjacent spaces. The common thread is that they're trying to make a specific decision with real business consequences, and they want a trained outside brain on it for an hour, with a document at the end.
A lot of them are also people I would never have met if I were only doing brand and design work. The format opens the door to problems that are nowhere near the historical lanes I've worked in, which has turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of this year.
How to book one
If this format fits a decision you're trying to make, you can book an hour through the contact section of this site. The rate is a thousand dollars, the deliverable lands in your inbox within twenty-four hours of the call, and you'll have something written and specific to work from before the end of the week.
