To level up your consulting business, start with the menu

“I think a lot of people overlook the importance of the menu as a marketing tool and a way of communicating to the customer what the ambition of their restaurant is. Not only the typeface and the design, but what is it printed on? Is it cheap-looking? Is it the right kind of paper for that restaurant?”

— Joe Bastianich

Confession time: I’ve been watching a lot of MasterChef recently. Mostly I do it for Gordon Ramsey’s famously calm and comforting demeanor — I kid! — but there’s also Joe Bastianich, who has elevated “blank, emotionless death stare” to high art and takes just a little too much pleasure in torturing the contestants he’s judging.

I’ve got my issues with Joe, but he makes a great point about menus.

When I set out to revamp and rethink my agency’s services this year, redesigning the menu from the ground up was a core part of the conversation. I don’t necessarily mean “menu” in the literal, physical sense the way Joe does, but rather in the holistic, big picture sense: the harmony between the services on offer; ensuring that differentiation exists and is meaningful; that names and prices reflect the value and scale of each offering.

Early in my consulting days, my mind wasn’t on any of this. I simply charged an hourly rate to use my creative and strategic talents however my clients pleased.

But that wasn’t so great for me or my clients.

First of all, tracking hours undervalues the client-consultant relationship. There can be specific types of engagements where charging by the hour makes sense, but charging a flat rate gives consultants a more stable platform on which to set expectations. In other words, you’re charging for the deliverable, not your time, which eliminates any misunderstandings down the road about how much time (and money) a particular deliverable would take you to complete. Plus, let’s not lie, tracking time is just a pain.

Secondly, potential clients need help understanding where you fit in their world. Open-ended hourly engagements aren’t conducive to concrete results, especially if your consulting business focuses on big-picture work that can be challenging to define.

And let’s not forget a more practical matter: There are people in the world who want to work with you and could benefit from your expertise but simply can’t swing what you charge.

Crafting the menu

So I took all of this to the drawing board when it came time to rethink Cause:Effect Creative’s offerings (literally — I drafted my new menu of services in colorful markers on a big whiteboard on wheels). I realized that I had an opportunity to be dramatically more specific in what I offer to clients, from durations of engagement to deliverables. And I also realized that I had a way to create a full spectrum of well-defined offerings, from micro-consulting up to board memberships and everything in between. To put it in terms Joe might appreciate, I was just offering a single entree when I had the ingredients to make appetizers, mains, desserts, and cocktails that accommodate many tastes and budgets.

Taking the time to list out every kind of engagement a client could have with me brought clarity to my business and gave me a much greater appreciation for what it is that I actually do. I’m not just a free agent for hire; I can answer a burning question that’s on your mind for a flat fee, or I can host you at The Land of Make+Believe for a day of intense creative partnership, or I can deliver a keynote to your employees that will completely transform the energy of the room.

This was the result:

I developed the menu (which you can view in full here) across mutliple dimensions — price, audience, and goal — with the intention of meeting potential clients where they are and helping them get to where they want to go. I’ve also named each offering to create a common language we can use in sales consults, and I’ve grouped the offerings by category, since a seat in my Build-a-Bio course is a very different type of engagement than a keynote address.

All this was done with the goal of helping potential clients dream with me. There are some types of consulting where the nature of the work and the benefit is self-explanatory — if you need crisis comms, you hire a crisis comms consultant, for example. But I know I’m not the only thought partner out there who needs to do a little more to make their work real for their prospects.

Helping clients choose their own adventure

Now, taking the time to document and organize your menu is only half the work. With variety comes complexity and decision paralysis. Unless you and I had already chatted and you had a sense of what you needed, the diversity of work we could do together might still be overwhelming. And while sales consult calls are valuable — and I love talking to new people about how we might make magic together — they don’t necessarily scale.

To tackle this next problem, I created an interactive guide to my services using Typeform:

By asking a relatively small number of multiple-choice questions, I have a good sense of where your immediate needs might fit into my menu of services. The goal isn’t to railroad clients into just one option, but to give them some specific, actionable guidance and help their creative juices flow. With every recommendation the tool makes, there’s a link to my full menu — and I’m still mindful to offer those sales consults. But in many cases, clients may find they can self-serve and either book one of the micro-consulting offerings themselves or reach out to me with a very strong idea of how we might engage.

This all only took me a few days’ work, but the dividends will pay for years. The content I developed here forced me to think in new ways about what Cause:Effect Creative does and how we do it. But most importantly, I’m helping clients wrap their brains around my work before that first call or email.

Joe would be proud. Even though you probably wouldn’t be able to tell from his facial expression.

Anita Stubenrauch is an ex-Apple creative and the founder of Cause:Effect Creative, an agency that helps brands express visionary ideas with poetic power, and the host of the Hyperactive Imagination podcast, a high-voltage channel for creativity.