By Robert Streeter

The missing piece between packaging your expertise and scaling your consultancy 

If you run a consultancy, you’ve probably heard the advice a hundred times: productise your services. Package what you know. Create repeatable offerings. Stop selling time and start selling outcomes. 

It’s good advice. We’d even say it’s essential. But here’s the uncomfortable truth that most consultancy growth content won’t tell you: Productisation will help you today – and that’s great, but on its own it doesn’t solve the strategic problem consultancies must address in 2026. 

Productisation gives you structure, clarity, and something resembling a scalable offer. But the market is shifting fast, and Productisation is only the first step to protect your consultancy from what’s coming. 

First, let’s give productisation its due 

Productisation is a genuine step forward for most consultancies. When you move from bespoke, scope-it-every-time engagements to defined service packages with clear deliverables and pricing, several good things happen. 

Your sales cycle shortens because prospects can understand what they’re buying without three discovery calls. Your delivery becomes more consistent because your team isn’t reinventing the wheel on every engagement. And your efficiency improves dramatically because you’ve done the same type of project dozens of times before. You know what you’re looking for, you can assess data faster, and you’ve probably seen the solution before anyway. That means better margins per engagement, even if you’re billing the same rate. 

For a 10-to-100-person consultancy, this can be transformative. So yes, productise. Absolutely. But don’t stop there. 

Where productisation hits a ceiling 

The promise of productisation is repeatability and scale. But the consulting market is changing around you while you’re busy packaging your services. And two forces in particular are making productisation alone a dangerous place to stop. 

Your clients have more information than ever 

AI is giving your clients instant access to knowledge that used to be hard to find. Regulatory frameworks, technical standards, best practice guidance: the kind of information that clients previously relied on consultants to interpret and explain is now a prompt away. That doesn’t mean clients don’t need consultants. But it does mean the bar has moved. The old offering, where a consultant walks in with expertise the client couldn’t easily access on their own, is becoming less compelling. 

That doesn’t mean demand for consulting is disappearing. New challenges are emerging all the time, and with them, new consulting opportunities. But the shape of those opportunities is different. Clients don’t need someone to tell them what the rules are. They need someone to help them stay compliant, improve continuously, and prove it. The value is shifting from knowledge transfer to ongoing advisory that delivers measurable outcomes and ROI. 

Your competitors are getting faster too 

It’s not just clients gaining access to better tools. Consultancies across the industry are using AI to speed up their own delivery. A project that used to take four weeks now takes two. That sounds great until you realise what it actually means for your business: shorter projects, fewer billable hours, and downward pressure on pricing. If you’re charging for time, AI is actively compressing your revenue per engagement. And if your competitors are delivering the same outcome in half the time for a lower price, you’re in a race to the bottom. 

The result? Even well-productised consultancies are finding they need more and more clients just to stand still. The efficiency gains are real, but they’re being passed straight through to the client in the form of lower prices and shorter engagements. Productisation made your delivery repeatable. It didn’t make your revenue recurring. 

What’s actually needed: recurring business, not just repeatable delivery 

This is the shift that most productisation advice misses entirely. It focuses on the delivery side: how to package, how to price, how to scope. But the real problem facing consultancies today isn’t delivery efficiency. It’s client retention, Partner leverage, and revenue predictability. 

Think about the typical productised consultancy. You’ve defined your cyber security posture assessment. You’ve got a clear scope, a fixed price, and a proven methodology. A client hires you. You deliver the assessment. You hand over the report. And then... you’re done. You’re back to square one, looking for the next client. 

Now consider the alternative. Instead of selling a one-off security assessment, you sell the outcome: ongoing cyber security resilience, and ongoing access to specialist IP and advice. Not a project, but a subscription. Not a point-in-time assessment, but year-round monitoring, reassessment, and continuous improvement. The client doesn’t hire you once. They stay with you, because the value is evidenced and compounds over time. 

That’s the progression that productisation should lead to, but rarely does on its own: 

Step 1: Time-based projects. You sell hours. 

Step 2: Productised outcomes. You sell a defined deliverable at a fixed price. 

Step 3: Recurring outcomes. You sell ongoing, continuous value. Year-round compliance. Quarterly reassessments. Living dashboards. Monthly support. Systemised consultancy. 

Step 3 is where your revenue becomes predictable. It’s where your client relationships deepen rather than reset. And it’s where AI becomes your advantage rather than your threat, because you’re using it to deliver continuous systemised value instead of competing on who can finish a one-off project fastest. 

The infrastructure gap 

So why don’t more consultancies make this shift? Because moving to recurring outcomes requires infrastructure that most consultancies simply don’t have. 

To deliver ongoing value, you need shared outcome metrics with your clients. You need KPIs that both sides can see. You need clear ROI that justifies the ongoing subscription. And you need all of this in one place, updated automatically, so your consultants can focus on the high-value strategic work instead of wasting weeks chasing clients for data to prove the engagement is working. 

Without this infrastructure, the "subscription model" is just a retainer with extra steps. The consultancy still does periodic check-ins, still chases the client for updates, still scrambles to demonstrate value at renewal time. It’s not scalable. And it’s not what clients want either. 

This is what TheAX does 

TheAX is the platform that closes the infrastructure gap. 

We are building a Consultancy Operating System not only for today’s consultancy Productisation needs, but for the future needs for systemised outcome-based consultancy.  TheAX gives consultancies everything they need to move from one-off projects to recurring, outcome-driven client relationships. Imagine a future where you can deliver your assessments through a systemised platform that captures and enriches your IP, tracks outcomes and KPIs automatically, builds client intelligence. And, gives your clients a shared dashboard that shows exactly where they stand, what’s improved, and what needs attention next. That is what TheAX is delivering. 

Your consultants stop chasing spreadsheets and start doing what they’re actually good at: interpreting results, advising on strategy, and driving improvement. The platform handles the tracking, the visibility, and the proof of value that keeps clients engaged month after month. 

The result: predictable recurring revenue, deeper client relationships, enhanced Partner leverage, and a consultancy that scales without burning out your best people. 

The bottom line 

Productisation is necessary. It’s the foundation. It forces you to codify your expertise, define your value, and create something repeatable. Without it, you’re just a collection of talented individuals doing custom manually intensive work. 

But it’s not sufficient. In a market where AI is raising client expectations and compressing project timelines, productisation alone leaves you running faster just to stay in place. The consultancies that will thrive are the ones that go further: from repeatable delivery to recurring business. From one-off projects to ongoing outcomes. From selling your time to proving your value, continuously. 

That’s the shift. And it requires more than better packaging. It requires the right platform underneath. 

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Ready to move beyond productisation? 

If you run a consultancy and you’re feeling the squeeze of shorter projects, pricing pressure, and a constant hunt for new clients, we should talk. TheAX helps consultancies like yours build the infrastructure to turn expertise into recurring revenue. 

Book a call with me: calendly.com/robert-theax