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Turn real client conversations into Linkedin content that builds authority and attracts the right clients.
Turn real client conversations into Linkedin content that builds authority and attracts the right clients.
Software companies figured out tiered access a long time ago. Free trial, starter plan, upgrade when you're ready. The idea was simple: let people get value at a smaller price before asking them to commit to the full thing. Harvard Business Review has been writing about why that model works since 2014.
Service firms never built that. You either sign the retainer or you don't. There's no rung below it.
That's a real structural problem, and I've started to see a few firms actually solve it.
One of our customers runs a full-service agency. Their retainer sits around $10k a month, which is right for the clients they work with. But every few weeks, a startup would reach out that genuinely wanted to work with them, liked what the agency was doing, and just couldn't justify the number.
The agency didn't want to drop their rates. And they didn't want to keep saying no to founders they liked.
So they built something different. A brain for each of those clients, trained on everything their team knows. Their frameworks, their process, the things they've figured out across years of real client work. A startup pays a fraction of the retainer, gets access to that thinking, and implements it themselves.
No extra hours from the agency team. The startup gets something genuinely useful. And when they grow into the budget for the full retainer, they already know exactly who to call.
The firm kept the relationship alive at a price that worked, without compromising their rates or their team's time.
There's an obvious objection here: this only works if your firm does something the client couldn't get anywhere else.
That's true. And if that's not the case, there's a bigger problem than pricing tiers.
But for most firms I talk to, the real IP is there. It's just locked up in the way things get done. The judgment calls. The frameworks. The way a specific problem gets diagnosed and approached. That's what the $10k retainer buys. It's been the product the whole time. It just came bundled with your hours.
What the client-specific brain does is unbundle it. The knowledge becomes accessible without the hours attached. MIT Sloan Management Review calls this productization: packaging part of a service into something repeatable that doesn't scale headcount with revenue.
Alex Hormozi did this at scale. He took thousands of his own sales calls and packaged that data into an AI that anyone can interact with. No general-purpose LLM has that data. Only he does. That's why it works. It's the same principle, applied to a different business model.
I had almost the exact same conversation with a coaching founder this week. She was thinking about a $250-$500 a month subscription tier for people who want what's in her head but can't afford one-on-one time.
Same idea, ten people instead of ten million.
The business model has been sitting there. The thing that was missing was a way to package and deliver the knowledge without creating more work in the process. That's the piece that's changed.
A fractional consultant I spoke with earlier this year was already thinking along these lines too. He built a diagnostic tool as a lower-cost entry point to his engagements. Clients get upfront value, he gets a foot in the door, and the tool creates a natural path toward a deeper working relationship.
The goal isn't to cheapen what you offer. The firms doing this well are pretty clear about that. The goal is to create a path in for people who aren't ready for the full thing yet.
A client who gets real value from a $400 a month subscription is a very warm prospect when they're ready to spend $4,000 or $10,000. They already trust the thinking. They've experienced it firsthand. The sale at that point is almost already done.
The firms that figure this out end up with something most agencies and consultancies don't have: a way to grow a relationship before the budget is there to support it.
Most firms are waiting for the client to be ready. A few are building the bridge that gets them there.
For a long time, the barrier was practical. You couldn't really package your firm's knowledge without either writing an enormous amount of content or hiring someone to do it. The ROI didn't make sense for most firms.
That's changed. The ability to take what your team knows, how you approach problems, what you've learned across dozens of engagements, and make it accessible in a useful form without generating more work, is genuinely new.
The question worth sitting with isn't whether this model could work for your firm. For most firms, it clearly could. The more interesting question is what the bottom rung of your firm actually looks like, and whether you've built it yet.
