The Efficiencer Model

There's a dirty secret at the heart of traditional consulting: the business model rewards failure. A consultant who solves your problem in a week earns less than one who takes six months. The entire industry has built itself around maximizing hours rather than outcomes. And everyone involved pretends this is normal.

We decided to stop pretending.

The Meter Is Running -- Against You

Traditional consulting runs on what we call the inefficiency engine: a business model where the cure for your problem is also the thing that kills the consultant's revenue. Think of it like a mechanic who gets paid by the hour. The one who fixes your car in thirty minutes earns a fraction of the one who takes all week. Same car, same problem, inverted reward.

A firm estimates a project at 1,000 hours. If a senior engineer finds a way to solve it in 200 using better architecture and automation, the firm loses 80% of its revenue. If a junior engineer takes 1,400 hours because they chose the wrong framework and had to rebuild twice, the firm earns 40% more. The smart solution is the unprofitable one. The expensive mistake is the revenue driver.

Now extend that logic across an entire engagement. Every efficiency gain threatens the consulting firm's revenue. Every shortcut that saves you money costs them money. Every tool or process that makes your team self-sufficient reduces their billable pipeline.

The consultants working inside these firms aren't bad people. Many are talented engineers who genuinely want to do good work. But they operate inside a system that punishes the behavior their clients most need. And systems, over time, always beat intentions.

What an Efficiencer Actually Does

An efficiencer is a technology leader who sells efficiency rather than time. The distinction sounds subtle, but it restructures every incentive in the relationship.

When we walk into an organization, we aren't looking for work to do. We're looking for work to eliminate. Every manual process is a candidate for automation. Every repeated decision is a candidate for a system. Every bottleneck where human effort substitutes for missing infrastructure is a place where investment creates leverage.

The goal is multiplication, not addition. Adding a consultant adds one person's output. Building a system that makes your existing team twice as effective doubles your entire engineering capacity. Nobody straps a horse to a Model T. You replace the horse.

In our experience, the highest-value work we do often looks like the least work from the outside. We've spent a single afternoon redesigning a deployment pipeline in a way that saved a team 15 hours per week. We've written a 200-line script that eliminated a role. We've recommended killing a project that was consuming 40% of engineering capacity for a feature that generated no measurable user value.

None of these required months of engagement. All of them required years of experience to recognize.

How Engagements Actually Work

We don't sell blocks of hours. We structure engagements around outcomes and the capacity levels that match your needs.

Every engagement starts with assessment: identifying where time, money, and talent are leaking. This isn't a checkbox audit. It's an experienced operator walking through your systems, your processes, and your team dynamics with fresh eyes and pattern recognition built across dozens of companies. From there, we design the systems, automations, and architectural changes that will multiply your team's effective output. This is where the real value lives -- not in writing code, but in deciding what code should exist and what shouldn't.

When it's time to build, the work is collaborative. Sometimes we build directly. More often, we guide your team in building, because the goal is capability transfer, not dependency. A system your team understands and owns is worth ten times more than one a consultant built and left behind. And the work doesn't stop at delivery. We measure results against the outcomes we committed to. When something isn't working, we change it. When something's working better than expected, we double down.

Our compensation reflects this structure. Effective rates may be higher per hour, but total engagement costs are typically lower because we're incentivized to solve problems quickly rather than stretch them out. When we find a way to deliver the same outcome in half the time, we both win.

Why This Requires a Different Kind of Consultant

Not everyone can operate this way. Selling efficiency requires a level of experience and confidence that hourly billing doesn't demand.

When you bill by the hour, you can afford to be uncertain. You can explore, experiment, go down wrong paths -- and the client pays for the journey. When you sell efficiency, you bear the cost of your own mistakes. If your recommendation is wrong, if the automation fails, if the architecture doesn't scale, you absorb the rework. Hourly billing is a safety net. The efficiencer model is a tightrope.

This is why it only works with operators who've built and scaled real systems at real companies. Pattern recognition is the engine. When you've seen the same infrastructure problem at five companies, you don't need three months to diagnose it. When you've hired and scaled three engineering teams, you don't need to experiment with your onboarding process.

Every engagement we take on draws from our collective experience as founding technology leaders at companies like GigSmart, ToolWatch (now AlignOps), and Oxen.ai. We've made the expensive mistakes ourselves. Our clients shouldn't have to make them again.

The Partnership, Not the Transaction

Traditional consultants are vendors. They respond to specifications, execute deliverables, and bill for time. The relationship is transactional by design.

We're partners. We challenge assumptions when they're wrong. We push back on feature requests that'll create more problems than they solve. We tell founders things they don't want to hear, because our success is measured by their company's outcomes, not by their satisfaction with our compliance.

This requires trust on both sides. The founder must trust that pushback comes from expertise, not arrogance. We must trust that the founder values honest counsel over comfortable agreement. When that trust exists, the work accelerates in ways that transactional relationships can't match.

The Outcome That Matters

At the end of every engagement, we ask one question: is this team measurably more capable than when we started?

Not "did we bill enough hours." Not "did we deliver the specification." Not "was the client happy with the process." Did the team ship faster? Did the systems scale? Did the organization build capabilities that persist after we leave?

If the answer is yes, the model worked. If the answer is no, nothing else matters.

We don't want to bill you for our time. We want to give you back yours.

If you're tired of paying consultants to be busy instead of paying them to make you better, let's talk. We'll be honest about whether we can help, what outcomes we can commit to, and how we'll measure success.