If clients are capping day rates, stop selling days

You can’t control what a client pays for a day anymore.

For years you could get the fees you needed with a great consultant who had a strong CV. That era is closing. Now the largest buyer in the market is fixing day rates; regardless of the strength of the CV, it might be time to differentiate based on outcome.

Day rates are day rates, no matter how good your CV is

The largest buyer in the market is fixing day rates. Defence is the strongest signal, holding the line at $1,500 per day, including GST, on L3 roles. It no longer matters how strong the consultant's CV is for T&M work. The number is the number. The market is being repriced by its largest customer, and no CV lifts the cap.

And with the Big 4 on the nose, more of this work is within reach of smaller firms and independents than it has been in years. Good news, until you realise government clients have already decided what a day is worth, not matter how good the firm or its people are. A fantastic CV won't change their mind.

Competing on the day rate is a race to the bottom. Someone will always sell a day cheaper than you, and their CV will look just fine too.

So don’t sell a day

Here’s the thought I keep wrestling with, and I’d love to know whether you agree or whether the market is ready.

You can’t control the day rate. But you may be able to control what you sell.

So stop selling days. Sell a fixed-price outcome instead. Price the result, not the hours. A cap on a day rate is only a cap if a day is all you put on the table.

That doesn’t mean walking away from T&M altogether, although it probably does require a different operating model for capped day-rate services. It means moving from selling capacity to selling capability. From selling effort to selling certainty. From charging for time to charging for solving a problem. That's a fundamentally different consulting business, and increasingly, I think it's the one the market will reward.

The opportunity for outcomes based work

For consultants, this is an exciting opportunity to develop a whole new set of skills.
Delivering fixed-price work isn't just about changing how you price your services. It's about learning how to define scope, estimate effort, manage delivery risk, build repeatable methods, and continuously improve how you work. These are commercial skills that make you more valuable.

The first time you deliver a service, you'll likely build everything from scratch. The second time, you'll reuse parts of it. By the tenth engagement, you'll have refined your method, improved your templates, strengthened your checklists, developed AI prompts, captured lessons learned, and removed unnecessary effort. Your service becomes more mature with every delivery.

With this service, the value to the client stays the same, but your effort continues to reduce. Your efficiency improves, your confidence grows, and your margins increase. Instead of working harder to earn more, you're rewarded for becoming better.

As your method matures, it becomes easier to teach others. New consultants can learn your delivery approach, follow proven playbooks, and contribute sooner because they're building on a system rather than starting from a blank page. You've stopped selling your personal time and started building a consulting capability that can grow beyond you.

Where to start

Moving from selling days to selling outcomes sounds like a big leap. It needn't be.

The best fixed-price services rarely start as million dollar engagements. They usually begin by solving one clearly defined problem with a repeatable method. If you can consistently solve a problem better, faster or with greater confidence than others, you already have the foundations of a service.

Find the problem you're unusually good at solving, then ask yourself one simple question:

Could I package this into a small, fixed-price service that solves a client's problem?

Here are six ideas to get you started, including an LLM script to get you there.