Standard consulting economics are simple, and a little uncomfortable once you sit with them for a moment. The invoice gets paid on delivery: the recommendation, the workshop, the strategy document. Whether the client actually implements it, whether it moves a single number on a revenue dashboard, becomes someone else's problem the day the engagement officially ends.
That model rewards the appearance of expertise more than the result of it. A consultant can run a technically excellent engagement, on time, on budget, everyone satisfied in the final meeting, and still leave behind a client who never adopts a word of it. Under the standard model, that isn't a failure. The invoice still clears either way.
It's why so many founders arrive at Growth Frontier already skeptical of consultants before we've said a word. Most of them have paid for a framework before, filed the deck on a shared drive, and watched nothing change six months later. They aren't wrong to be cautious. The economics of the industry taught them to be.
We built Growth Frontier around a different bet: that the only fee worth charging is one that depends, at least in part, on the work actually holding up.
What We Do Differently
Growth Frontier reinvests up to 20% of every engagement fee back into the client's business. It's a structural decision, not a marketing line: a portion of what we earn only becomes real value to us if the work we did actually holds up after we've handed it back.
It changes the math on our side of the table too. A portion of every fee only becomes real value to us if the sales strategy, CRM setup, or team structure we design is still running the way it should be well after the engagement wraps. If it isn't, we've effectively left money on the table that we could have kept under the standard model.
It also forces a different posture from us during the engagement itself. A consultant who is paid regardless of outcome has an incentive to keep things running smoothly on paper: hit the milestones, avoid friction, close the project cleanly. A partner with a stake in the outcome has an incentive to say the uncomfortable thing when a process isn't going to hold, a hire isn't right for the role, or a CRM rollout is heading for the same adoption failure as the last one.
None of this is about pretending an engagement can guarantee an outcome. Markets shift, deals fall through for reasons no consultant controls, and a founder still has to run the business day to day. What the reinvestment changes is narrower and more honest than a guarantee: it means our own economics are tied to the same reality the client is living in, not to a deliverable that gets marked complete regardless of what happens next.
Where the Standard Model Breaks Down
None of this is a criticism of any individual consultant. It's a description of what the fee structure itself rewards. When payment is tied to delivering a document rather than achieving an outcome, the rational response, for any firm, is to optimize for how the document reads rather than how the recommendation performs six months later. Capable people build careers doing exactly that, because the market keeps paying for it.
Growth-stage founders feel the mismatch acutely, because they're usually paying for advice inside a company that doesn't yet have the internal muscle to implement it without help. A strategy document handed to a five-person sales team with no CRM, no playbooks, and no manager to enforce anything isn't advice. It's homework nobody has time to do. The gap between "here's what you should do" and "here's what actually happened after we left" is exactly where most consulting fees quietly stop being accountable for anything.
This is also why the reinvestment model only makes sense for firms doing implementation work rather than pure advisory work. A strategist who never touches the CRM, never sits in on a sales call, and never trains a single rep has no real lever to pull if the recommendation doesn't land. Reinvesting a fee only means something when the same firm is also the one responsible for making the thing work.
What This Looks Like Inside an Engagement
In practice, having a stake in the outcome changes what gets prioritized during the work itself. Deliverables that look good in a final presentation but won't survive contact with a real sales team get cut, even when they'd be easier to hand over and move on from. Training and adoption get built into the timeline from the start, not treated as an optional add-on once the "real" work is done.
It also changes what happens after the formal engagement ends. Reinvesting part of the fee means we stay accountable to whether the system we built is still being used, not just whether it was delivered on the date in the contract. That's a different relationship than the one most consultants have with a client six months after the final invoice.
Questions to Ask Any Consultant You're Evaluating
Before signing with any implementation partner, it's worth asking a version of one question directly: what happens to your fee if this doesn't work?
A few follow-ups tend to reveal the honest answer. Does the engagement include a built-in check-in after go-live, or does it end the day the deliverable is handed over? Is anyone on the consulting side accountable for adoption, or only for the document itself? What does the firm actually lose if the recommendation gets shelved?
For most consultants, the honest answer to all three is that nothing changes for them either way. For us, the answer is that we've already put part of our own fee back into making sure it does.
What This Looks Like From Day One
The reinvestment model changes the shape of an engagement from the very first conversation, not just the way it ends. Scoping a project isn't only about what we'll deliver by a certain date. It includes an honest conversation about what has to be true internally, on the client's side, for that deliverable to actually stick: who owns it after we leave, what gets measured, and what would count as a warning sign in the first few months.
That conversation can be uncomfortable, because it sometimes surfaces things a founder would rather not confront before the project even starts. Maybe there's no one on the team positioned to own a new CRM after we hand it over. Maybe the sales team is being asked to adopt a new process while also being short-staffed. We would rather have that conversation in week one, when it can still shape the plan, than discover it in month four when the reinvestment is the only thing standing between a finished deliverable and a system that actually gets used.
It also means the engagement doesn't quietly end the day a system goes live. Part of what the reinvestment funds is exactly this stretch: the weeks after go-live when adoption either takes hold or quietly doesn't, and when most standard consulting relationships have already moved on to the next client.
“The only fee worth charging is one that depends, at least in part, on the work actually holding up.”
Where This Lands in a Six-Month Build
Across all six months of the project outline, after a month of analysis has decided it is worth doing.
Nothing described above gets proposed on day one. Every engagement opens with a month of analysis that scores ten areas of the organisation, followed by an evaluation and a custom scope priced against what it found. Only then does the build start, and the sequence it runs in is fixed: technology, then the sales organization, then marketing, then tracking, then handover.
The reinvestment is not a stage in the outline. It runs alongside the whole engagement, from the month of analysis through to handover, which is what makes it different from a discount applied at signature. Note that it is our own commitment rather than part of the standard process deck - it is how we chose to structure the relationship.
See the full six-month outline, or read what we build in this discipline.
Common Questions
How does the 20% reinvestment actually work?
The exact form depends on the engagement itself, since what a five-person startup needs to make a new process stick is different from what a fifty-person sales org needs. The principle is constant: a meaningful share of what we earn only becomes real value to us if what we built keeps working after we're gone.
Does this mean Growth Frontier's fees are lower?
No. It means a portion of a standard fee is directed back into the client's business instead of being pure margin. The total investment a client makes is transparent upfront, before any reinvestment is applied.
Is the reinvestment guaranteed regardless of results?
It's tied to engagements where we're implementing the system directly, not offering pure advisory input from the sidelines. It's a structural part of how we price hands-on implementation work, not a discretionary bonus.
Why up to 20%, specifically?
It's a meaningful enough share that it changes incentives during the engagement, without being so large that it undermines the sustainability of doing this work for other clients. It's a number we're comfortable being held to.
Does the reinvestment model apply to every service you offer?
It applies to hands-on implementation engagements, where we're building and installing the system directly rather than advising from the sidelines. That covers most of what we do, since Growth Frontier is built around implementation rather than pure strategy consulting.
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