Why the Porsche Beats the Pagani

Feels good, doesn't it?

The client is special. The problem unique. The stakeholders need finesse. So you spend three weeks scoping, drafting, consulting, revising. You build something bespoke — just for this client. You deliver. It works.

Two months later, the next client shows up. With 80% of the same problem. And you start from zero again.

That's not craft. That's an expensive habit.

Pagani builds about 40 cars a year. Each a hand-assembled work of art. Sticker price: €3M+. Owners adore them.

Porsche has built more than one million 911s — across the model's history. Each a touch refined over the last. And on any given track day, a €200,000 Porsche GT3 will dismantle a €3M hand-built supercar — reliably, repeatably, without drama.

Why? Because standardisation compounds.

Every generation 911 inherits fifty years of learning. Every flaw is a data point. Every improvement is encoded into the next unit. The hand-built exotic, for all its beauty, has none of that. It starts from zero every time.

Your consulting business is either a Porsche — or it's a Pagani trying to sell itself as a Porsche.

The numbers are brutal. Consultancies and agencies that productise their work see 2–3× faster revenue growth, 2–3× higher gross margins, 30–50% fewer burnout triggers, and 6–8× valuation multiples compared to classic hourly models.

And the operational upside is real:

- Predictable delivery. Same playbook. Same outcomes. Same timelines. - Faster selling. You don't scope every time. You quote. - Better onboarding. Junior team members can run a standardised method that would take years to build as "bespoke expertise." - Clean positioning. Clients can explain what you do in one sentence — which means they can refer you in one sentence.

Bespoke is not premium. Productised-with-depth is premium. That's a difference.

"But Daniel, my clients are all so different."

No. They aren't.

80% of your clients are solving the same five problems in variants you can name off the top of your head. Culture drift. Leadership bottleneck. Digital adoption stall. A sales system that won't scale. A transformation losing energy in month nine.

You don't need a new method for each of them. You need one method that works for all — with parameters that bend.

The other 20%? Yes, those are genuinely novel. Price them accordingly — premium custom, not default. And watch how fast the 80% finances the freedom to do the 20% really well.

Three reasons. All emotional:

1. It flatters us. Starting from a blank page feels like real consulting. Reusing a framework feels like cheating. (It isn't. It's compounding.)

2. It flatters the client. "We built this just for you" lands well — for about a week. Then the project gets slow and expensive, and they ask why simple things take so long.

3. We haven't done the hard work of standardising. Productising is actually harder than bespoke work. It forces you to name what you do, what you don't do, and why. Most consultants never do the work.

Here's what almost nobody tells you:

The more standardised your method, the more original your insight can be.

Because you've encoded the repeatable 80%, your creative energy is free for the 20% that makes the difference. You stop wasting brainpower on scope. You start using it on the work that matters.

Standardisation doesn't make you generic. It makes you relentlessly precise.

1. Look at your last 10 client engagements. What's the same in 80% of them? That's your product.

2. Give the method a name. A crisp name. A visual framework. Something clients and referrers can reference.

3. Fix the scope. Clear deliverables. Clear timelines. Clear price.

4. Publish it. On your website. In the pitch. In the proposal template. Make it impossible to misunderstand what you're selling.

5. Keep refining. Every engagement should make the next one better. Version 14 beats version 1. That's the point.

> Are you building a Pagani every Monday — or shipping the next Porsche?

Stop designing from zero. Start refining what already works. Standardisation isn't the death of craft. It is craft — at scale.