Element A: PROJECT ACQUISITION & SCALE. It's not true that, by running a "make customers contact you" strategy, your acquisition costs are zero, quite the cont

Element A: PROJECT ACQUISITION & SCALE. It's not true that, by running a "make customers contact you" strategy, your acquisition costs are zero, quite the contrary. In order to make customers contact you, you need to take a lot of risky bets on the acquisition-side of things. Things you might do to build a strong brand, like writing books and having a presence at events come with a likelihood that they won't be effective. By sinking time into those things, they present a risk of derailing work that actually pays. Doing a lot of PR & media work is a double-edged sword from the pov of clients who see the work you do as a trade secret. They want people on the job who know how to keep their mouths shut. And the stream of project opportunities you get from that kind of project-acquisition is highly volatile and unpredictable. Chances are, when an opportunity comes in, you will be engaged in another project, and when a project ends, you won't have an opportunity waiting for you at that moment. This only works, if you can scale it up enough so that the central limits theorem starts working in your favour and presents you with a constant stream of opportunities. But as a solo-consultant you wouldn't actually have the capacity to do anything with them, other than turn 99% of those opportunities down. At which point the relationship between the costs behind those acquisition effforts, and the rate at which you monetize them make the whole economics of the strategy break down. So you need to scale up your capacity and become a big agency, instead of a solo consultant, to make it work. Element B: BARGAINING POWER The other thing: Value-based fee sounds great, but what do you do in a situation where other people who get paid by the hour compete for the work you want to charge a value-based fee on? It's a race to the bottom, and can only work in areas that are so niche and highly-specialized that you are basically without competition, or where it would be prohibitively expensive for your prospective customers to line up alternative offers to compete with yours. CONCLUSION But then, the requirement to have scale, and the requirement to serve highly specialized areas so that you can have a lot of bargaining power are difficult to reconcile. ...so, all of this is just not as easy as the author of this article is making it out to be. If it were, everybody would be doing it, and nobody would allow themselves to get paid by the hour and do project acquisition by contacting the client rather than having the client contact them.