The reason the one-hour consulting format I've been running keeps working for people has nothing to do with the conversation itself. It's the deliverable, which is a document the client walks away with at the end of the hour. Most consulting arrangements I've seen end in a long meeting and some verbal recommendations, and the client walks away feeling like they got value until about three days later, when the specific advice has blurred into general impressions. The one-hour format produces a document at the end of the call, and that document is what you're actually buying.
I started calling it the playbook because that's how clients were describing it back to me. "The playbook you sent is what I used to run the all-hands this week." "I pulled the playbook back out when we were building the hiring plan." It became the shorthand for the deliverable, and the deliverable became the product.
What's in it
A playbook from one of these sessions runs three to five pages. It opens with a short restatement of the actual problem written clearly enough that somebody who wasn't on the call will understand it, moves into a ranked list of concrete next moves with a sentence or two of reasoning for each, and usually closes with a short section on the second-order consequences you'll want to be ready for.
The playbook is a working document, not a situation analysis. The whole thing is designed to be read in ten minutes and acted on in the next ten days, which is a very different product than the hundred-page market-context deliverables that come out of traditional engagements.
What people are doing with it
The use cases have been more varied than I expected when I started running these. Operators are using the playbook to prep for board meetings, founders have been pulling it out when they're trying to make a go/no-go decision on a strategic bet they've been circling for months, and a few department heads have used it to realign teams that had drifted off strategy. The document is portable, which means it keeps producing value weeks after the hour that generated it.
A few clients have told me they've used the playbook as the opening of their own internal planning document, which is a use I didn't anticipate but makes sense. The ranking and the reasoning do the hardest part of planning for them, which is deciding what matters most. Once that's on the page, the rest of a planning document mostly writes itself.
Why I think this format is going to spread
The economics work for a lot more people than full consulting engagements do. A thousand dollars for a trained outside brain, for an hour, with a written deliverable, is a line item almost any operator can get approved without going through a procurement cycle. The alternative that produces a comparable output is a traditional engagement starting at ten or twenty thousand dollars and taking weeks to deliver. When the real question is "what do we actually do about X," the twenty-thousand-dollar version is overkill, and the playbook is enough.
The other reason this is going to spread is that the playbook itself is doing most of the marketing work. Clients send them around internally, use them to justify a decision to a board or a partner, and sometimes forward them to peers in their network who are dealing with something similar. The deliverable gets passed around, and the next client books an hour because the previous client sent them the document.
If this fits your situation
If there's a specific decision you've been circling and more time hasn't been making it any clearer, that's exactly the shape of problem these sessions are built for. One hour, thousand dollars, playbook in your inbox the next day. Reach out through the contact section of this site and we'll get a time on the calendar.
