Hi friends,
I get a lot of inbound requests for personal consulting which I've had to turn down the last couple years. My commercial projects often have me becoming effectively the right-hand man for a CEO of a growing company, and I haven't had the bandwidth to take on clients who don't need that level of intensity, or who are looking for something other than the type of commercial work I typically do.
One thing I wanted to start for 2016 is to start working with people at scale more.
Hence, I developed this new offering --
Productized Service: Get Your Next Project On Rails
A couple years ago, I hovered around a 40% success rate on new projects and initiatives. After many collaborations with Kai Zau and studying and training in operations, I've brought that up to high-80's / low-90's.
Kai, for his part, has a project success rate in the high 90% region, really probably close to 100%. I've never seen him fail at a major initiative or project he's taken on.
This offering looks to bring the most succinct of what I've learned by studying project success and in close collaborations with people excellent at operations like Kai.
The crux is going through four calls to help you get your next 4-6 week project or initiative running on rails, so things go smoothly and succeed.
Call #1: Inventory and Project Selection
Call #2: X-Examine and Simplify
Call #3: Check-in/Version/Iterate
Call #4: Closing and Harvesting
And we'll go through the following:
1. Getting the basics down
2. Get the people right
3. Breaking down to outcomes and core steps
4. Being practical about time and bandwidth
5. Checking all assumptions carefully through a Friendly Cross-Examination
6. Iterating and Versioning as things change
7. Closing the Project and Harvesting the Gains
We'll have some templates and guidelines for you between calls; you're going to wind up putting a project plan together and simplifying the work required to get the outcomes you want.
The benefits: increased adherence rate to doing the work you want to do, higher success rates in general, getting things done faster, being ready for things to go off track, some sanity-checking to make sure your plans are practical, and accountability to getting it done.
The cost is $200.
Limited email support between calls is included: you can send a short weekly update as you make progress and one of us will read/reply. Each call will be scheduled to be 30 minutes; we might be able to run longer but it's set like that so you're coming prepared and ready to go right out of the gate.
On the off chance your project is running longer than wanted or you need an extra check-in call, you can get additional check-in/version/iterate calls at $60 per half-hour. I hope that won't be necessary, but hey, sometimes things come up.
Some quick groundrules and expectations:
1. Your project or initiative should be something to be completed in 4-6 weeks at most. If you have a much longer project or initiative, we'll want to break it into a first phase that's completable on its own.
2. Ideally, you are somewhat flexible and can bring 3-5 potential projects or ways of doing the project/initiative you want to do, to explore and decide on final parameters in the first call.
3. You should already be having a decent baseline of success in your life. This is going to require decent basic working skills and achievement skills. This is emphatically not "Sebastian fixes your life for $200"; you should pick up new skills, get to your outcomes faster, and benefit from the added accountability -- but at the end of the day, you need to do it. Think more like personal training, not heart surgery.
4. The first wave of calls will likely be with myself; though depending on when you're seeing this and buying, you might work with someone skilled like Kai who I bring into the mix.
5. I'm still figuring out some of the logistics behind the scenes; bear with me on things like scheduling and coordinating with you. The methodology is sound and has been run, but this is the first time it's being offered it at scale. (That's the main reason for pricing at $200 for four calls plus additional support, which I think is a pretty darn good value.)
6. This can be a personal project/initiative -- health, fitness, building out your network more, doing more of the creative work you want to do, establishing more of a base in your home city or other city you visit, really any of the things covered in Gateless -- or it can be work-related. For work-related projects, it's only looping in with you and not other stakeholders. If you have something more complex and wanted to get other team members involved, email me -- or just buy and do a one-off project with us to see how you like it, and we can iterate from there.
7. Please only purchase if you intend to take the process seriously and march out a project or initiative. This isn't free-form consulting at a discount; it's trying to solve a particular need in a predictable way.
Ok, you want in?
[edit: thanks. we're having lots of fun with the first batch. I'll let you know if it becomes available again.]
Once you buy, you'll be redirected right away to a page with more instructions and a scheduling link.
Looking forward to working with you, regards,
Sebastian