Liftoff: Why We Turned Delivery Into a Methodology (and Put the Prices on the Website)

Most consulting engagements don't fail on the work. They fail on the ambiguity.

Nobody agreed on what "done" meant, so the project ran until everyone was exhausted. The price was a range that quietly became a ceiling and then quietly became a floor. The scope was whatever the loudest person in the last meeting said it was. And six weeks in, the customer and the vendor are both sure they're getting taken — which is usually a sign that neither of them wrote anything down.

I spent twenty years on the vendor side of that dynamic. I've decided I'm done with it. So we built a methodology, gave it a name, sized it like a t-shirt, and put the prices on the website. It's called Liftoff, and I want to walk you through exactly how it works — because the whole point is that there's nothing to hide.

The problem with "it depends"

When a small-business owner calls an AI consultant and asks "what will this cost," the honest-sounding answer is "it depends." And it does depend. But "it depends" is also where every bad engagement starts, because it keeps three things open that should be closed before anyone signs anything: what we're building, what it costs, and how we'll both know when it's finished.

Leave those open and here's what happens. The vendor bills hours because hours are the only thing that's certain. The customer can't tell the difference between real progress and someone learning on their dime. Scope creeps in one "quick addition" at a time. And the finish line moves every time somebody has a new idea. I've watched engagements that should have taken six weeks turn into six-month annuities, and I've watched customers pay for that and feel worse at the end than they did at the start.

You don't fix that with better intentions. You fix it with structure.

Three phases: Ignition, Ascent, Orbit

Every Liftoff engagement moves through the same three phases, in the same order, every time.

Ignition is a paid scoping sprint. The posture is: start fast, say no to the wrong things, and produce something you can actually touch. At the end of Ignition you don't get a proposal document — you get a working prototype running on one of your real workflows, with your real data, plus a fixed-price quote for everything after it. Then you make a go/no-go call. If you proceed, the Ignition fee credits forward into the rest of the engagement. If you don't, you keep the prototype and the workflow audit and you've spent a couple thousand dollars to find out something didn't fit. That's a good trade either direction.

Ascent is the build. Not a demo, not a proof-of-concept — the minimum system that moves real work through your business, deployed against real data, with a couple of your people using it in a controlled way. The scope we locked in Ignition gets delivered. By the end of Ascent there's a thing running, and your team has touched it.

Orbit is where the system becomes yours instead of ours. This is the phase everyone skips and it's the phase that decides whether the whole thing survives. Production rollout. SOPs and a runbook written for the person who'll actually operate it. Administrator training. A 30-day window where we monitor and tune while the system is live in your hands. Most consulting engagements fail at the handoff, not the build — the vendor packs up, and three months later the system nobody was trained to run has quietly rotted. Orbit exists specifically to prevent that.

At the end of each phase you hold something concrete: a prototype and a go/no-go after Ignition, a deployed MVP after Ascent, a production system plus the documentation to run it after Orbit. No phase ends with a slide deck.

T-shirt sizing, and why it matters

Before Ignition is even quoted, a free 60-minute call decides one thing: what size is this? We use four.

• XS — "automate this one thing." One workflow, one integration. ~3 weeks.
• S — "automate this department." One department's workflow set, two or three integrations. ~5 weeks.
• M — "transform a business function." Multi-workflow, new data pipelines, real rollout. ~9 weeks.
• L — "build a platform." Multi-department, custom data model, actual change management. ~4.5 months.

Sizing does something subtle and important: it forces the honest conversation up front. If your problem doesn't fit in a size, that's information. Maybe it's too small to justify the engagement. Maybe it's really three separate projects wearing a trench coat. Either way, we find out on a discovery call instead of three payments deep.

Putting the prices on the website

Here's the part that makes other consultants nervous. XS is $7,500. S is $19,000. M is $45,000. L is $110,000. Ignition is invoiced separately — $2,000 for XS and S, $3,000 for M and L — and it credits forward if you proceed. Payment on the engagement follows a 30/40/30 split tied to milestones: thirty percent when the build kicks off, forty when the MVP is deployed and accepted, thirty at handoff.

Those numbers are on the services page. Anyone can read them without talking to me.

I publish them for a simple reason. Hidden pricing is a tax on the buyer's time and a signal that the number depends on how much the vendor thinks you can pay. A small-business owner shouldn't have to sit through two discovery calls and a "let me put together a proposal" just to learn whether a project is a $10,000 conversation or a $100,000 one. Publishing the rates disqualifies the wrong-fit fast and builds trust with the right-fit faster. If the price scares you off, we both just saved a week.

And fixed price does something to the vendor, too. When the number is locked, slowness stops being profitable. I'm no longer incentivized to stretch the work — I'm incentivized to scope it honestly and ship it, because every extra week comes out of my margin, not your invoice. Scope changes still happen; they get repriced as a conversation, not slipped in as an invoice surprise.

The methodology is the product

The thing I most want a customer to understand is this: you're not buying my hours. You're buying the framework.

The three phases, the sizing, the fixed price, the handoff discipline, the 30-day tuning window — that structure is what actually protects you from the way these projects usually go sideways. The AI is almost the easy part now. The hard part has always been running a project so that a busy operator with no software team ends up owning a working system instead of a bill and a bad memory. Liftoff is the answer we ship every time, and it's the same answer every time, on purpose.

That repeatability is the whole point. Same methodology, same shape, same published rates — so there's nothing to negotiate except whether it's a fit.

If you've got a workflow that's bleeding time and you want to know what size it'd be, that's what the discovery call is for. Take a look at how the phases and pricing break down on the services page — it's all there in the open.