A consulting fee begins with your business,
not a rate card.
What actually shapes a consulting fee — and how we come to yours. If you’d like a real sense of what our work will cost before you reach out, this page is for you.
You came here for a number.
Most people on this page want one thing — a rough sense of what our work costs. Fair question.
We won’t give you a number here. Not because we’re hiding one — because we don’t have one to give yet. We haven’t met you. We haven’t looked at your business.
What we can give you: an honest picture of how our fees actually work.
A consulting fee is not a price tag.
A price tag sits on something that already exists. The thing is made. The price makes sense. A consulting engagement is different — it doesn’t exist yet.
What we’ll do, how long it takes, how deep we go, what we’ll build with you — none of it is set until we understand your business. So our fee isn’t a rate. It’s a shape — and the shape only comes into view once we’ve understood what you’re building.
Putting a rate card on that is like a doctor quoting surgery before knowing what’s wrong.
What actually shapes a consulting fee.
Six things. Every one of them changes the number. Set them the way your business actually looks — the shape on the right moves with you.
A single product is easier to think through than a business with three revenue streams and a warehouse behind it.
A local brand, a national one, and a business expanding across countries need very different depth of thinking.
A quick decision on one question is different work from designing a whole new business from the ground up.
Commerce systems, AI, integrations, custom builds — technology changes both the thinking and the build.
Six weeks of advice is a different engagement from eighteen months of thinking and building alongside you.
We do both. Advice only costs less than advice plus execution.
None of these are boxes on a form. They’re inputs. Together they shape what the work actually is — and what it should honestly cost.
How we come to the number.
Beneath those six categories sit more than forty specific factors — the real sub-questions we walk through to shape a quote. Your sector and its depth. The stage your business is at, and the team you already have. The scale you’re building. The geography you’re building in or expanding into. The technology in play. The seniority of the consultants the work will need. Each factor is a real input. Together they answer one question: what does this engagement actually take?
The way we walk through them, structurally and honestly, is a Viability Assessment. It ends with three answers — and one of two outcomes.
The Viability Assessment has its own modest fee, stated clearly up front. It gives you a clear-eyed view of what you’re getting into — and gives us the ground to quote the real work honestly.
What honest fees look like here.
Our fee is a premium fee, honestly earned. We are not the cheapest consultant you’ll find, and we’re not trying to be. We charge what the work is worth — enough to do it properly, enough to bring our best thinking to your business, enough that we’re glad to be doing it.
Once you see the depth of the work — 18 years of it, across three continents and the sectors either side of a re-platform — the fee reads differently. You are not buying hours. You are buying judgement that has already been wrong somewhere else and learned from it. That is where a premium fee becomes the best value on the table.
If our fee doesn’t feel right for what you’re building, we’ll say so. If your budget doesn’t match what the work needs, we’ll tell you plainly — and sometimes suggest a smaller starting piece instead.
We don’t want engagements we can’t do well.
And you don’t want a consultant who took the job just to take it.
Asked before,
answered plainly.
There’s no single number. A consulting fee is shaped by six main categories — how complex your business is, how big you’re trying to become, how deep the decision goes, what technology is involved, how long the work runs, and whether you want thinking only or thinking and building — and beneath them, more than forty specific factors we walk through in a Viability Assessment. That’s how we arrive at an honest quote for what your business actually needs.
Because a rate card is a promise about work that doesn’t exist yet. Every real consulting engagement is shaped by the client’s business. We’d rather understand your business first and quote you honestly than publish a number that fits nobody’s situation.
A small, disciplined piece of work we run before any real engagement. We look at your business, your idea, your market — and come back with a clear view of whether it should be built, what the real work would look like, and what our fee would be.
Often, yes. If the budget doesn’t match what the full work needs, we’ll say so and suggest a smaller first piece that still moves you forward — a single decision, one market, one system.
The way to get there is a Viability Assessment.
We look at your business, your idea, your market — and come back with the shape of the work and what it costs. One modest fee, stated up front.
