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I’ve made a lot of money as a consultant across decades, and the pattern that keeps clients happy, brings in referrals, and turns “one-off projects” into multi-year relationships is surprisingly simple. It comes down to six questions you ask and answer on every engagement. Do these, and you’ll deliver clear wins, capture proof, and create easy follow-on work—without begging for it.

1) What exact problem are you here to solve?

“Improve productivity” isn’t a problem. It’s a wish. Narrow it until it’s concrete:

• Which team, process, tool, region, or metric is failing?
• Where is the friction actually showing up (tickets, delays, rework, error rates)?
• What’s the baseline today?

Often the “reported problem” isn’t the real one. Support backlogs might look like a customer service issue but actually be SOP chaos, bad handoffs, or missing automation. Get inside the system and find the true bottleneck first. Don’t accept a fuzzy target and then wonder why you missed.

2) What client condition(s) are you here to improve?

Credit to Alan Weiss for the framing: consultants improve conditions. Sometimes that’s fixing a burning issue; sometimes it’s elevating performance where nothing is “on fire.” Define the condition or set of conditions in plain language:

• “Warehouse pick accuracy from 93% → 98%”
• “Lead-to-opportunity conversion from 7% → 12%”
• “Time-to-resolution on P1 tickets from 9h → 3h”

If you’ll bring in subcontractors or specialists (great move), this clarity aligns everyone and keeps scope clean while you orchestrate.

3) What does success look like—numerically?

If you can’t measure it, you can’t defend it later. Bake success criteria into your proposal and kickoff:

• The metric(s) you will move
• The target (floor, goal, and “home run”)
• The timeframe and measurement method

Examples: “Reduce monthly IT tickets 50% within 90 days,” “Lift NPS from 41 to 55 by end of Q2,” “Cut picking time/order from 11:40 to under 8:00.” Qualitative work can still be quantified via surveys, SLAs, or before/after sampling. Corporations run on numbers—so should your engagements.

4) Who is the key person—and what’s their top priority?

You sell to a company, but you serve a human. There’s usually one liaison you’ll work with day to day (CFO, ops lead, head of marketing, GM—depends on the gig). Figure out what that person values most:

• Hitting a KPI?
• Looking good to the CEO/board?
• Calming a rattled team?
• De-risking an audit?

If you’re not sure, ask once there’s rapport: “Off the record—what’s the most important outcome for you personally on this project?” Then shut up and listen. Deliver the engagement goals and help that person win. That’s how you get brought back, pushed up, and referred sideways.

5) How much money will this result make or save?

Put a dollar sign on your work. Even a thoughtful estimate is miles better than hand-waving. Work with finance or your sponsor to model the impact once targets are hit:

• Increased revenue (conversion lifts, capacity unlocked)
• Cost reduction (labor hours reclaimed, vendor waste cut)
• Risk avoidance (penalties, churn, outage costs)

Then memorialize it. “We invested $27,000; annualized savings: ~$800,000.” Ask for a brief letter on company letterhead with those numbers and a signature. That single paragraph will close more future business than a dozen glossy case studies.

6) How else can you help—legitimately?

While you’re inside the system, you’ll see adjacent problems. Capture them. Midway through or at wrap-up, present a short add-on scope:

“As we mapped your returns process, we found three failure points inflating RMA costs. If you want, I can stay an extra 30 days to implement A/B/C and target a 35% reduction.”

Don’t invent work; reveal it. If you do this on every project, a meaningful percentage will convert into immediate extensions. The rest become future pipeline—and you didn’t cold-call a single person.

 

AI did NOT write this article. The article comes 100% from me and is 100% my content. However, AI was used to transcribe this content from some of my other social media which is why the voice is a little different. It’s still 100% my content and not written by AI. AI will never “write” my content!  Remember that you can always go to calebjonesblog.com and subscribe to my Substack if you want articles physically written by me with no AI involvement whatsoever.

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