The Data Hustle Transcript

Scaling a Data Consultancy: Pricing, Branding & Clients — David Cohen

Episode 13 · Sep 25, 2026

Duration: 53:43

Source subtitle file: 2026-09-25__PfQ3Ao5oIU8__Scaling_a_Data_Consultancy_Pricing_Branding_Clients_13_David_Cohen.en.srt

Generated from exported YouTube subtitles. Speaker labels are approximate.

[0:01] Tony and Juan
We are listening to the Data Hustle podcast, where data is turned into business impact. Today, I'm joined by David Cohen, founder of Superposition. David spent over a decade in the consulting world, moving from a century into healthcare strategy analytics consulting, where he worked across data strategy, analytics delivery, digital transformation, storytelling, workshops, and practice building. At Accel Healthcare Advisors, he was part of the founding team for the Data Analytics Consulting Practice, helping build the team while leading the sale and delivery of over a million dollars in projects. Before that, at NTT Data and Accenture, he worked on everything from strategic roadmaps and C-suite workshop, to tableau assets, data maturity, analytics capability building, and large scale transformation work.

[0:52] Tony and Juan
Now, with Superposition, David has built what he calls the world's most meta-consultancy, a consultancy for data and AI consultancy founders. He helps boutique firms get unstuck on the things that often get ignored when you're busy serving clients. Positioning, pricing, go-to-market strategy, hiring models, workflows, discovery, scoping, and turning ambiguous client conversations into work people actually buy. So today, we'll go into all of that and what it takes to build out your consultancy. But before we get into all of that, David, I think you're the first meta-consultant I've ever met in the data world. So can you tell us a little bit about how you got to this?

[1:30] David Cohen
Yeah, it's a way better introduction than I could have ever given myself. So thank you for that. But yeah, so to give you a little bit of the background of why I do what I do now, as you kind of pointed out, the background for my career is that I have been in consulting for a bit, as most of your listeners will kind of figure out after listening to the background. And in the progression and kind of journey of my career, I burned out from doing consulting work hands-on myself. As you kind of expressed, I went in, you know, from very large consultancies to doing consulting at very boutique scale. And so I've experienced pretty much everything that there is to do in the consulting world, big and small.

[2:15] David Cohen
And in that journey, I got sort of jaded with the work, like, especially in the data world, many of you both and then the listeners will know that it sort of feels like we're stuck in Groundhog Day with the projects that we take on, like we take on the same sort of work, we like, it gets very frustrating over time. And for me, the way that that presented after many, many years, like over a decade of doing the work is in burnout. And so when I launched my own consultancy, I realized that the things that I had learned and the processes and frameworks and tools that I had kind of built along the way were useful for other folks like myself to help navigate the process of building a consultancy to begin with, and especially a small boutique shop.

[3:02] David Cohen
There were many things that I could help navigate or help those folks navigate as they were scaling their own consultancies as well. And so I decided to focus on becoming a consultant to other consultants like myself.

[3:13] Tony and Juan
I was going to say, I've worked in a lot of consultancies and they all in some sort of shape or form brought somebody to give them advice. But it was never from somebody that actually did consultancy. So it's a really interesting idea right there.

[3:28] David Cohen
Yeah, I think I came to the same conclusion myself, actually. So when I was starting my consultancy, like the superposition, I mean, I had a different vision for it. Like I was going to do very standard data work, consulting work on my own. And I had many people reach out to me to support my consultancy. And as you suggested, many of those people had never done consulting work. They didn't understand what it was and much less could help me effectively grow my consultancy because they, one, had never done it themselves, but two, never really understood what goes into it, especially from a data perspective or an AI perspective. There's so much from a technical perspective that goes into it.

[4:13] David Cohen
And there's so much nuance that goes into selling, delivering and growing a consultancy in such a technical space that most people that provide support services could never do. So I decided to focus on doing what I know and doing what I love.

[4:29] Tony and Juan
What do you think are the top requests that you get? What are the most common ways that you help consultancy companies?

[4:36] David Cohen
That's a good question. And so there's basically twofold or two types of requests. One is that consultancies typically come to me with what I would call like major scaling problems in the journey of growing the consultancy itself. Most of the founders that come to me, I would say, are relatively successful at what they do actually. They have essentially brute-forced their consultancy to the point of needing help to continue scaling, but they've figured out some degree of success in what they've already built. What happens is that in the journey of building a consultancy, you figure out your own stuff. You develop offerings. You start a certain amount of clients.

[5:20] David Cohen
You start growing. And then you hit a ceiling because you typically don't have the perspective of knowing what comes next. Like going from a few clients to a lot of clients or going from just yourself to hiring the first few set of people. That journey is different for everybody. But in many cases, most people are able to scale to a point of needing to grow. And then when you get to that point, knowing how to get to what's next is where most people reach out to me with. What happens is that they come to me with an issue relative to something that they lack in their ability to grow their consultancy. So as Tonya was mentioning, that can be anything from how to hire the first couple people when it's not just yourself anymore, or how to price accordingly so that you can define a model that allows you to grow sustainably, or how to position or reposition your consultancy so that it targets the right people and that you're able to get the clients you want, or

[6:11] David Cohen
how to build go-to-market strategies to actually get attention. So obviously, the problems are extremely varied depending on what person's reaching out to me and what their biggest obstacles are. And those obstacles change from person to person, obviously. Another area, the second area where people reach out to me that Tonya was also mentioning is when they want to sell to their own clients. So when they want to expand existing relationships with clients, when they want to showcase to clients what's possible in the data world or in the AI world. They also call me to white label my workshop services to help generate more business for their own projects as well.

[6:50] David Cohen
So basically to create a collaborative setting in which they can create and define a roadmap to make data real or to make AI real for their clients.

[7:01] Tony and Juan
Yeah, I never thought that like it's always the blindfold of the founder, the thing that becomes an issue when you're scaling the consultancy.

[7:09] David Cohen
The process, as we all know here and everybody that will watch this can also relate to the process of growing any company is pretty lonely. And especially growing a consultancy, it's lonely in a different way in that like not only do we is it normally lonely like any growing any company is, but you're also in this process of like constantly churning both client attention, client projects and also delivering work and doing technical work all at the same time. And in that process, you can get very caught up like you as a founder can get very caught up in the process of growing to the point where you're neglected. You know, you always default to client work first and helping your clients first.

[7:53] David Cohen
And in that process, navigating your own growth is often a huge challenge for many of the founders I work with. And just having an outside perspective that understands the context of where they're coming from and where they're headed is hugely helpful to them.

[8:09] Tony and Juan
This is exactly something we see with a lot of consultants we speak to in this space. They are obviously very comfortable with doing technical work. And then as they progress to consulting and they find clients, a lot of the materials and their personal branding is still very technically focused, but it might lack some of the things they need to actually bring in a client from certain industries and domains. And to anyone that's going to look you up after his podcast, you have a lot of very creative ways to put your content out there. And you also mentioned your workshops as well, which I do want to zoom into a little bit a bit later. But before we get into all of that, what would you recommend to people they should change about their personal branding strategy if they really want to capture attention and actually convert that to clients?

[8:57] David Cohen
So the easiest one would be, I mean, I'm just going to say this right off the top, right? Be take more risks, be less boring. And I'm going to say that plainly so people get it right. But what I mean is, from a branding perspective, what most people don't get is we meaning collectively, like all consultants are in an attention game. And like we are in the same space as every other company in the world, especially in social media and otherwise, where we are competing for people's attention. And what happens from classically, a consulting perspective, and I know this deeply, you know, coming up in consultancies myself is that consultancies are really bad at marketing by and large, right?

[9:38] David Cohen
We expect that the offering itself will carry weight and that people will care about our expertise to a level that they just don't like, this is true of small consultancies. It's true of big ones. We as consultants expect that our expertise is what will sell the work and it never works that way. It's always relationship based. It's always based on opportunity. It's based on timing and it's based on attention. And at the end of the day, the larger consultancies can get away with that because they have brands where they have pre-existing power. They have pre-existing leverage, both from relationships that they built over time and also from from relationships that they built by even people that work for them now working for those companies and understanding what the value proposition is.

[10:24] David Cohen
For us boutique consultancies, it's it's a different game. We have to both make people aware of what we do, which, you know, not many people know what I do, so I have to educate them on what I do and how I do it. But also to make it seem that it's worthwhile to work with you in the first place, like you have to attract people and make them interested in what you do so that they can then buy what you do. You know, part of the job is education, part of the job is interest and part of the job is selling and obviously delivery. But the step number one is always getting people's attention and doing that requires going well beyond what your comfort zone is as far as, you know, what's acceptable to put out there marketing wise.

[11:05] Tony and Juan
That's funny in almost every consultancy I've worked for and even consultancies I haven't worked for, I constantly have this frustration of there are so many amazing people, so many interesting projects that we have built, like why are we not talking more often about this? So I can clearly recognize marketing as one of the weak spots in a lot of consultancies. I'm going to guess that another weak spot is going to be like everything financial like I haven't seen too many consultants that do the financial thing, right? Like how do you calculate a daily rate? Do you change something different per client? Can you walk us through some of the most common financial things that you help people with?

[11:49] David Cohen
Yeah, of course. So the as you said, financial models, especially for a consultancy and a small one are not magic. Like you don't just figure out how well you shouldn't just figure out how much you're charging a client just off the top of your head. The number that you're charging a client is very real and it comes directly from the amount of time it takes to do the work, the amount of time it actually takes to do that work in reality, as opposed to theory. And then what you want to make from the perspective of maintaining not only just you as as the leader of the consultancy, but everybody that works for you. So from the perspective of building a sustainable model, it's all centered around the value of your work.

[12:31] David Cohen
And one of the biggest things that people struggle with when they start and build consultancies is that we don't bill what the clients will pay. We bill what we want or what we need to charge so that the company will sustain. And that's a really hard distinction to navigate, especially because when building pricing models, most people tend to default to hourly pricing models. I like you charge the work that you worked. And that is conceptually easy, but scalability wise, very hard to navigate. And so part of my work is to help them navigate and think through other models beyond that. How do we charge fixed prices? Right. That's what large consultancies do.

[13:11] David Cohen
Charging what our work is worth so that we can grow sustainably and manage a project beyond just the hour or number or the number of hours worked. What happens is that in that process of navigating from hourly pricing to fixed pricing, you can also expand into other pricing models as well. There's retainer based pricing, which makes sense in some cases. And then there's the holy grail of consulting pricing, which is value based pricing, which obviously we can spend a whole hour talking about alone. So I won't get too much into that. But a large part of my work is in helping under helping the consultancy understand what pricing model works for them in their specific scenario.

[13:52] David Cohen
And most importantly, helping them build a model or models that help them kind of map out what exactly they should be paying or what they should be charging their client, not from perspective, as I said earlier, of what their client wants to pay, but rather what they need to charge so that they can sustain and grow and hire more people and sustain the people that they did hire.

[14:11] Tony and Juan
When it comes to what you charge, I noticed that there are like three forces that grow in different directions. The first one is the salary that a consultant asks for, which maybe is different now, but in a few years when it was a very competitive market, I think it was very common to be very aggressive with salary to retain talent. Or to hire people for very high salary. So that part kept on growing. What I noticed is that a lot of clients were constantly looking at other sites, other regions in the world and noticing, hey, you charge, I don't know, let's keep it simple, a thousand a day. But there are these people in another country that charge 500.

[14:52] Tony and Juan
And as a consultancy, I noticed constantly the whole balancing act that was very difficult to manage. What do you tell people that are in that situation?

[15:03] David Cohen
Well, I think that there's a couple approaches to it. Right. I'm actually a big advocate of the work cost, what it costs no matter where it comes from, so that people should be properly compensated for the value of the work, no matter what location in the world they're in. Like, I don't think that, you know, presuming that they are of equal skill, that we should take advantage of people living in, say, like, you know, Europe or Asia or something or Africa or wherever, because they live in those places and not in the US. And so from that perspective, that's why I'm a big advocate of charging what the work costs to deliver and not what the, you know, the the just so like whatever location you're in requires from a pricing perspective.

[15:44] David Cohen
Obviously, that that philosophy is not is not applicable to every situation. And it depends on what the consultancy is navigating and what their client needs. Different clients in different locations have different pressures to price, obviously, like pricing here in the US is significantly more, significantly more, there's significantly more growth potential, I should say, than in other locations, there's just more money. And so what it is is that the appetite to take on cost changes depending on both the size of the client and also their their appetite for different people in different locations as well. And that that is a very complex web of things to navigate.

[16:27] David Cohen
And part of my job is to help people navigate that web to begin with.

[16:32] Tony and Juan
So I guess the answer a little bit there is going to be like, if you keep that's why you mentioned that hourly doesn't scale too well, because if you're going for hourly, then you're going to be bound to have this conflict of location, people's salaries increasing. But if you go through another type of model, then you can focus more on what the whatever it's worth to do the job and then all of the other variables become a little bit irrelevant.

[16:59] David Cohen
Correct. And so the way I think about it from a pricing perspective is that what the conversation that we are really having when we talk about pricing is a conversation about margin. Like how do you control margin effectively? Right? When you charge hourly, you don't control margin at all, you just charge what you charge and then the hours that you worked and the margin is controlled via the difference between what you're charging per hour versus what it actually costs to deliver that service under a fixed price model, or under a variable value based model or retainer model, you have significantly more flexibility to manage how many or how much margin how much more you're making that what it costs to deliver the service.

[17:40] Tony and Juan
It feels like with a bit of planning, you can really be rewarded then.

[17:44] David Cohen
100%. I mean, the the ability for for consultancies to grow is pretty directly tied to their ability to have, you know, funds to invest back into the company. And that requires planning ahead from the very moment that we price the work pricing, as I said earlier, is not magic for a reason, like it requires thinking ahead so that you can manage not only the capital that you need to grow your consultancy, but also so that you can manage projects accordingly, right? What we do from switching or part of the reason I advise people to switch from hourly models, despite the fact that I occasionally charge hourly myself, is that the the ability to manage a project and the delivery of a project falls squarely on your hands and your skill. If you work under a fixed price model, rather than others in that, like, you know, from a retainer perspective, from a fixed price perspective, and especially from a value based perspective, what you want to lean on is your

[18:42] David Cohen
ability to deliver the project in the time that you scoped. And that is a hard conversation to have with people because many consultants, especially when they're earlier in their journey, don't realize how long it takes to deliver a project. And most importantly, whether they have the skills to deliver that project in the time they said they did.

[19:00] Tony and Juan
I'm gonna guess that when you shift the model from hourly to something else, you're also putting it on the client to plan ahead also a lot more. Because if you're going to hire somebody to be an interim date engineer, whatever we pick by the hour, we'll figure out what exactly you're good for, what are you going to fit, what test we give you. But if you go for this other model, then the client should know super well what you need to do starting from day one. Is that

[19:29] David Cohen
assumption correct? Correct. I mean, 100%. So right, because the as I said earlier, the the the ability to scope a project to understand how long a project is going to take to understand what the unique capabilities or the unique situation of a client is going to mean in terms of our ability to deliver a project. That is consulting skill. That's the be that the part that most people underestimate about doing consulting work is that they think that you just go show up to a client, you magically deliver something and then it happens as if by like, you know, coincidence. But there's significant planning that goes into that. And for most mature consultancies, right, both in terms of how many people it's going to take, how much time is going to take those people, what tools are going to need, what it's going to cost to make that into reality. And that's all skill that's not that's built over time. That's, you know, practiced, it's based on evidence, it's not

[20:26] David Cohen
just based on pure conjecture. The reality of it is that building that skill requires one understanding that it is a skill, two thinking about it critically, and as you said, building the tools to manage it over time so that you are able to scope a project. Yeah,

[20:44] Tony and Juan
they see. Yeah, because for most consultants, like not being let's say great at gathering requirement means find people will check your dashboards a lot less than what you think they will check it or they will not check it at all. But if your whole pricing model is built around you being really good at gathering requirements, then you really need to step up the level in which you do it, the clarity, the amount of documentation. So, and again, the

[21:10] David Cohen
real question that we're always answering when it comes to this topic in particular is who bears the risk of your work? In the ideal scenario, we want to not bear any risk of our work, right? But the reality is that that's not how client relationships work at any level. In large consultancies, we have to take on a fair bit of risk. In some cases, there's agreements like gain sharing or profit sharing that are often done with clients, there's value based agreements with clients, there's fixed price agreements, and in any of those scenarios, the consultancy themselves have to bear some degree of risk in order to build a larger and more profitable relationship for a client. And especially as the consulting model is evolving and changing with the AI and with the way the industry is evolving, we have to take on more risk as consultants. And taking on that risk doesn't have to be purely risk, that can be a calculated risk to some degree.

[22:08] Tony and Juan
Sorry, David, what do you mean exactly by risk?

[22:12] David Cohen
So risk, what I mean is that when we deliver a project as consultants, there are things that happen in the process of delivering that project that are outside of our control. There are things that happen from a client perspective, from a time perspective, from a tool perspective, all of which get in the way of us delivering our work to a client, you know, things happen. So what I mean by risk is that controlling that and having being the one that pays the monetary value of that happening, so to speak, is risk is things that you take on. And we have to take on some of that risk where traditionally, under, especially on our hourly model, it's the client that bears that weight. And we want to take some of that away from them, so that they will be more likely to work with us on larger projects.

[22:59] Tony and Juan
Yeah, because I was thinking one time I was in a client, and we were stuck for three weeks with something because the Terraform admin was out and nobody else had admin privileges.

[23:10] David Cohen
And yeah, well, that's a very classic scenario is like, you know, you scope a project for, let's say, six months. And then the first three weeks of the project, you don't have access to a database, or you don't have access to a dashboard, or you don't have access to people, because they're just not available. That happens all the time. So that needs to be accounted for in your pricing model, so that from that perspective, you can bear the cost of extending your team for three weeks if needed. Right? That is, as I said earlier, that is a skill that is not magic, and that is not handled by by coincidence, like understanding that those things happen, and that you have to be able to manage that.

[23:53] Tony and Juan
This is something I always tell consultants as well. And I'm actually writing about this in a chapter in our book currently, you always have to scope the risk when it comes to sort of unforeseen time losses. In this specific case, you might say, well, I mean, I know it takes me three months, but I'll calculate in 30% extra buffer time. So actually, I should aim to finish it in two months. And if I do, that's great. I've over delivered on my promises. If I don't, I can still stick to it, even if there's some unforeseen things that I didn't count for. It's something I'm reflecting about. Having this conversation is when I speak to many consultants, what I'm seeing is something along these lines, they'll be very comfortable doing technical work, they say, I'm going to go out on my own, be a consultant, and then they'll through their network, maybe scrap with scrap by like 123 contracts, right, but they'll stay very close to hourly because this is what they're

[24:53] Tony and Juan
used to, they're still going to define their work as the technical work, like I'm doing data engineering consulting or analytics engineering consulting, and they sort of get stuck in a place where basically not have just made themselves an employee at five companies, instead of running a business. And one of the things that you mentioned is sort of that reduction in risk. And what I'm seeing is a lot of people approach this from the perspective of relationships, right? Like if I know somebody personally, that's a huge risk reduction, right? Because if I know that David is very good at consulting, I might not be as critical when I'm evaluating his proposal. Whereas if it's somebody that I don't know, I might not do this. I think people are sort of leaning too much on this, what I'm seeing when it comes to a lot of conversations about creating inbound more sustainably for your company. Almost everybody I speak to sort of gets back to this engine because

[25:56] Tony and Juan
it feels trusted and safe. But could you give us some other ways in how people could expand on that?

[26:04] David Cohen
And then you mean in like creating inbound interest or like

[26:06] Tony and Juan
managing? So both risk reduction and creating inbound through other ways than just pure direct

[26:15] David Cohen
relationships. Well, to go back to the like your original, very, very original question about personal branding, right? Risk reduction and getting somebody to agree to work with you, especially when they don't know you, it's all about them thinking they know you better than they do. So like essentially percent, that's what personal branding is at the end of the day is like, you know, presenting your brand as bigger than it is so that people feel comfortable working with it when they don't know about it. That's why people feel comfortable working with large consultancies when they don't know anybody there is that like, there is something there that you can trust that you can lean on from a risk perspective.

[26:54] David Cohen
And that's what Greece's deals is that you are able to bridge the gap between what you're saying something will cost and what the perceived value of that same work is when a deal falls through and it doesn't sell is because the value that the person on the other side sees is not matched with whatever you're saying it's going to cost and that happens all the time. But sales, right? Part of our job as consultancy founders and especially as early boutique consultancy founders in our space is that that value is hard to quantify. And so from a from a de-risking perspective, that's what when a company and this is like switching gears a little bit, when I talk about content, when I talk about positioning, when I talk about go to market strategy with my clients, a lot of it is focused on how do you present your work as valuable? How do you present your perspective as valuable your experience? And how do you kind of package that into something that makes sense for one very

[27:53] David Cohen
specific type of person rather than an infinite number of people, which is something that we are really, really prone to doing and the analytics space and in the AI spaces, we are building generic tools for everybody. And that takes too broad of an approach, right? It's like everybody is a potential client. So effectively, nobody is a potential client because our work is for no one in particular. One very, very, very early lesson that I try to teach all my clients and that I try to instill on them is that as a consultancy, especially a small one, you can't just be somebody that's building actionable insights or that's building AI solutions, right? That anybody can and in fact, these days, most people, there are many people that say they can do that and probably can't. So from the perspective of what works for consultancies and building that trust and de-risking that relationship with clients, what works for many that are able to scale is being

[28:52] David Cohen
the one source of truth for that client in one area, right? Like being the company that a company we need help with this problem, we know that you can solve it because we've seen you do it with other people. We've seen you talk about it. We know you either second hand or third hand or even first hand and we know that you can solve this problem for us. And so that's the relationship that we're trying to build. It sort of

[29:18] Tony and Juan
reminds me of a thing that people do when they're first striking out to find a job or they're like writing their C fee in a way that it could apply to like five, 10, 20 different positions. I sort of feel like what you're describing is something very similar people do when they strike out at a consulting saying they're kind of afraid to commit to like one area of expertise and one customer persona. So they sort of create this generic message and they try to spread it out to all kinds of different people and by doing that, they miss the mark. That's what you're saying, right? Correct. And

[29:54] David Cohen
I think you'd find that if you asked your average boutique consultancy founder what their ICP is, their ideal customer profile, that they would give you an answer that's far too broad than most marketers would like, at least. So in that sense, understanding, as you said, the buyer personas is very critical, but most importantly, understanding why those people buy those personas, why they're buying in the first place is more critical. Like what is the pain that we are solving in reality for these people that we're trying to target? And so everything is downstream from there. Like you can't create content and you can't grab the attention of somebody who you don't understand and you can't understand somebody that you don't define. So that's why defining who exactly you're trying to reach from a persona perspective, from an ICP perspective, is step number one to everything else. If you don't know what target you're trying to hit, you'll never hit

[30:50] Tony and Juan
it. Do you have an example of a persona so that we can more or less know what too broad or not broad enough means?

[30:58] David Cohen
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you a concrete example for myself. Like my ICP specifically is boutique consultancies anywhere from, let's call it, one to 50 people in the data or AI world that have already achieved some sort of results. So they're either like a couple hundred thousand in revenue in all the way up to a couple million in revenue. So that's a broad statement that defines my ideal customer. They have to be somewhere in there. What happens from a persona perspective is that you can then segment that ICP into bits. So there's like the, let's call it, the founder of an early stage, like more in the lower end of that range, consultancy that is struggling with like a definitional like go to market strategy problem. That is one persona.

[31:53] David Cohen
But then there's another persona that might buy my work that is the CEO of a more mature consultancy in the upper end of that range that does not need internal help. He just needs a workshop built for him so that he can sell to his clients directly. Right. That's another type of persona. So when I persona is what I mean is like the generic version of what it will have somebody that's buying from you within your ICP and it's many different versions so that you can understand how your offerings tied to those people and why they're buying from you. Like the reason an early or a growth stage founder of a consultancy buys from me specifically is very different to the reason why the founder, the CEO of a grown mature consultancy that is already making money and are like significant amounts of money and has clients and wants to build a workshop to generate new business is very different to why a consultancy that is growing is hiring for the first time,

[32:53] David Cohen
for example, and wants to figure out how to hire those people. The reasons why they're buying from me are very different. So you would not want to market to them the same way. You would not want to reach them the same way. And from a sales perspective, you certainly wouldn't want to manage the sale process the same way because they're not buying the same things.

[33:08] Tony and Juan
I guess some people like some markets better, some markets are more profitable, some markets are objectively bigger. But it's yeah.

[33:22] David Cohen
And what happens when we define personas, right, is that we can then abstract each of those people into groups. So like ideally, if you think about it like a pyramid like this, you want to have your like ICP at the top. And then from a from a breakdown perspective, you want to have different personas in the ICP so that you can tie in your offerings to each of those people. So like, there's not just one type of person that buys your service as a consultant, there are several different types, but they should all fit into one category at the top. And they should all be related to, to whatever you want to offer, obviously.

[33:57] Tony and Juan
That kind of blends to a very nice topic that I wanted to ask as well, which is saying no to a client. I guess if they deviate a little bit from what you want, you might as well say, okay, it's a slow month, let's go. But can you walk us through what are the things that you tell people when it comes to saying no to clients? I

[34:17] David Cohen
think it's a good question. And I'm going to split it into two parts. Well, you know, how to why and how to say no to a prospective client, meaning before they become an official client when they're a lead or when you're going through sales. And then what happens when they are a client, and it's time to say no to them, right, like when they're already paying you. In the former, when you're selling to them, I think what we're really talking about there is qualifying whether a client is the right type of client, there is a lot of pressure when you're running a consultancy to just generate as many clients as possible to just take on any client that comes by and basically, you know, say yes to everybody, everybody's a potential client, what happens is that a client doesn't become a problem until you make them one. And so the real skill when it comes to sales is identifying which clients are going to become a problem, either because they're not a fit, because

[35:16] David Cohen
they're going to take up too much of your time, because they are not actually interested in your services, or because you're not qualified or ready to provide services that they need. So when it comes to saying no, it's also some degree of introspection that is required on yourself of like, look, we are just not ready to take on this client, because we either don't have the team, we don't have the skill set, we don't have the time, we don't have the money, we don't have the scale, or this class does not a fit, like they're not, they're not the right type of client we want, they are an abusive client, even we don't we get bad, a bad vibe from the sales with them, all of that matters, like all of that plays into whether or not you say yes to building a relationship with a client. And, and the one thing that I would say a lot of consultants miss is that the relationship with client is or what clients is, is a two way street. Like we think that it's our relationship with the

[36:12] David Cohen
client only, but it's also the client's relationship with us. And like we are people just as much as the clients are. And part of the process of selling is not the client evaluating us, but us evaluating the client as well, and whether they're worthwhile taking on. So that's all prior. And then what happens after, right, is that from a, you know, actually managing the project perspective, learning how to direct a client and manage up into the area that we need them to go is a skill as well. Like learning how to be an actual advisor to a client is learning how to tell them when something is wrong, not when something is right. Anybody can tell a client when something's right, and it's going well.

[36:55] David Cohen
The real skill of being a consultant is being able to tell a client when something is not going in the right direction, and most importantly, proactively suggesting a solution to that problem, ideally through the services that we provide. The reality of what we do is that we often have to deliver bad news, we have to deliver problems, we have to deliver like challenges to how we deliver work to clients. Being able to manage those situations is pretty critical to the skill of what we do in delivery. And being able to manage what, you know, our client comes up with on their side is also a skill. Like not every client is equally easy. Some clients are difficult, some clients are hard to navigate, and managing that process is just as important as our ability to do the work itself.

[37:43] David Cohen
And everything that means saying no to them, which is hard.

[37:48] Tony and Juan
You know, when I was a consultant, I always looked at every client in a two-axis scale. On the one hand, there is like how fun versus how awful the experience is. Another one is how much I learn versus how comfortable chill I can be here. And I personally, and I know it's different, I didn't mind too much the ones that were whatever, let's call them toxic, but that I felt that I learned a lot. But I did have a couple that were just like awful and I didn't learn much. And those ones like, I really felt like, oh my god, I wish I was a freelancer to tell them no immediately and not waste anybody's time.

[38:27] David Cohen
Well, like I want to say something that is going to sound a little sacrilegious as a consultant, but it is okay to fire a client. Like, and it is okay to let a client go. That is not a fit for what we want. And as founders, like we are the ones that set the tone for what our consultancy is. And if somebody is not a fit for you, either during the sales process or after the sales process, you are better off unless like this is truly like a foundational relationship or client for your business. And like, it's going to go under if you let go of it. You know, the juice is not worth the squeeze for most of these clients, right? And there's always more clients to more fish in the sea, so to speak.

[39:11] David Cohen
And more often than not, like I said, unless this is truly like a foundational relationship and amount of money and business that you're bringing in, which happens, like, you know, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and take one for the team and take a client that's kind of bad and like it happens. But you should not defer every single bad relationship that you have with a client to the fact that they're giving you money.

[39:38] Tony and Juan
Yeah, that's completely true. I personally mean that a client where like, well, six of us ended up quitting like well being there because it was so awful. And we felt the consultancy company was not willing to break it. So I

[39:55] David Cohen
get it. Well, and one thing that I want to point out to the audience, and again, this is more more from me, like, caring about the people that do this job is your people often think that as a consultancy founder, your number one priority is to the client. Like, that's why people default to doing client work first and doing everything relative to the client, because obviously, they're the ones that bring in the money that allows us to continue doing what we do. My perspective is that your number one responsibility is to your team and to the people within it. So that requires maintaining our relationship with your clients that will allow the team to deliver the work successfully. That's often not the case. In many scenarios, we default to letting the client be as toxic as they possibly can and you know, not managing that relationship properly, and often burning out our team as somebody that have been burnt out from the work before I can tell you that

[40:50] David Cohen
that's not given the amount of attention that I think it should be given in the consulting world at large. And my perspective on it is that our number one responsibility is not to the client, is to the people in our team so that we can deliver it to the client in the first place. Yeah, I've

[41:09] Tony and Juan
been in a consultancy company where for the first years, they have this policy that you could like exit any client, like no questions asked, no nothing, and it's not that the people did it too much, but I did see like maybe two examples of people doing it and to me just the fact that it was like a not a big deal at all, like okay, it's not a fit perfect, we'll see what we can do about it, that make the working environment so much nicer. Because on the other hand, I also know what it's like to feel, I don't know, break an area inside of a client. So this resonates a lot with me and I hope with a lot of people listening. What I'm really hearing here is you really need to care about your community of people, whether that is your community at the company that you're building, making sure that they're happy, making sure that your client community of clients is happy. And I guess another thing that we talked about is you have to pick an area and

[42:10] Tony and Juan
just shoot. Now, when it comes to delivering value to a community of, let's say in your case, David, consultants of consultants, or somebody may focus on marketing companies or healthcare, how do you, beside building your personal brand, actually contribute meaningfully to community and how important are communities actually when you're building out your consultancy? I mean,

[42:36] David Cohen
they're critical, right? Like, especially when you realize that consulting work is people work at the end of the day, like we are hired because we are experts at something, we are hired because we have a relationship with somebody that thinks we are an expert at something, whether we are or otherwise. But the growth of our consultancy internally and with clients is pretty dependent on our community, like the community around us, like you need other consultants or other potential ones to grow and expand your company, you need them to be able to deliver specific services to a client when you don't have those skills, you need them to gain more clients because they either, you know, people either refer you to folks or because they connect you with the right the right spaces to find clients or because they like and support your work and then generate more business that way.

[43:24] David Cohen
Community is the basis of all consulting work at the end of the day, whether that's how we find work to how we sell it to how we staff it to how we deliver it and how we grow as a company. Being part of the right communities as a consultant to find the right opportunities, whether that's the right candidates for our jobs, the right people to join our teams, the right clients, it's all pretty simple. Yeah. Yeah, so what happens from from the perspective of delivering a project in the data space or in AI space is that everything that we're talking about is fairly technical work, right? Most people, normal people, let's call them, don't really care about that level of detail in the work that we're doing. And then from a delivery perspective, many of us in the in the consulting sphere tend to go far too much into detail when it comes to actually understanding what our clients need from a business perspective. At the end of the day, people hire us to solve a business

[44:42] David Cohen
problem from a data lens or from an AI lens. Like we are hired to build a system or build a tool or fix a system or tool that is broken and doesn't achieve something from a business standpoint, like allows or keeps the business from doing something or to create something new that will enable them to generate a new outcome or to make more money or to save or to reduce cost or whatever. What happens is that in that setting, you know, what we call discovery in that discovery setting, or as we scope work, as we IDA work with clients, there's a lot that gets missed in that process, right? Discovery is hard. It takes a lot to get answers from clients that are honest, that are centered around what we actually need, and that knowing what questions to ask when it comes to getting requirements from clients is a skill just as much as anything else that I was talking about earlier. And for me, the process of discovery as a consultant that has delivered many

[45:39] David Cohen
projects is also pretty dry, right? Like it's boring. It doesn't actually get the answers that you need. It takes too long. And it's not very collaborative. So as your reader or your listener may know, and as you both know, getting or doing discovery with a client takes forever. You often don't ask the right questions and your clients give you wrong answers because they don't know what they don't know. So for me, when I say gamifying the process of discovery, what I like about the workshop aspect of it, or the workshop approach is that when I say gamifying, I mean making that process structured, but also intrinsically collaborative, fun, engaging, so that from a client perspective, we can bring clients into one setting, one room, for instance, or one meeting room just like this and navigate the question of like, what business problem are we solving for you through data work or through AI work? And how are we going to do that in a way that's

[46:43] David Cohen
bounded by these rules that I create as part of the design of the activity, right? So when I say a workshop or a gamified activity, it's the series of guided kind of perspectives and activities that I make the clients do so that they can tell us what they need. What happens in that setting is that instead of us asking the questions, it's our clients telling us directly what they need so that we don't have to ask nearly as many questions. We ask follow-up, we ask clarification, but the clients are the ones that tell us rather than us telling the clients what they should be defining. So what I do is I take, you know, I work with the consultancies directly to define what we are building a workshop, a white labeled workshop for like what outcome are we trying to achieve out of a workshop setting from a discovery perspective? What are we trying to understand from the client? As we define that, we then go to the client and we say, we are going to build this

[47:41] David Cohen
workshop with you to do X, this is what the activities are going to be, this is what you can expect, and most importantly, this is what you should be thinking about. We then define an audience for that workshop. So we say these decision makers, and that's important, that last word is very critical, is decision makers need to be in this room so that we can decide this bit of work that's going to be done by this team is obviously going to be within the framework of data work or AI work or whatever. And we are going to achieve this outcome by doing these 10 things over the next four hours, or these four hours over the next week or so. We find a time, we actually run the activity, and this is where I come in, is I design the activities, I facilitate the session itself for the consultancy and for the client.

[48:25] David Cohen
And then I take whatever comes out of that session to build something actionable for the consultancy to take and build. So the gamification aspect of it obviously is in the activities themselves, but also in my ability to conduct the session as a series of games so that the process can be engaging and fun. Are we

[48:48] Tony and Juan
saying very jealous because when you look at for example Chrome or your design or some of these things, it's very easy to find literature with like actual scripts of how to conduct these workshops. And I've been trying to look out a lot in the world of data for like, what are the scripts for workshops when it comes to things like data modeling or getting requirements, I think it will be super nice to have these things more on paper and that we as an industry will think more tangibly about these meetings.

[49:19] David Cohen
Yeah, and obviously the reality is that my workshops are based on the same many of the same principles that the areas that you're describing are based on, right? Like I use design thinking methodology, I use human centered design methodology, I use agile methodologies and delivery to define effectively the outputs of the sessions, but the sessions themselves are pretty flexible in that the quote unquote games, the activities can be designed whatever is keeping the client from giving you the right answers. If what they need is to bring them all together, like all the clients, stakeholders together into one room and just fight it out to see who like actually has the right answers, then we know I created a game that is centered around doing that like forcing everybody to voice their opinions and having an honest conversation about what they need to build data wise or what they need to build AI wise, or if it's more ideation around that or if they need to assess

[50:17] David Cohen
where they are, then it's more on that lens. So while the frameworks and the basics of how these workshops get built are very similar to what you're describing, they are obviously significantly more flexible and being able to manage the engagement part of it for data work and for AI work more

[50:39] Tony and Juan
generally. You hit a spot that I'm very curious about it, which one time I was in one of these workshops and long story short, two of the people were disagreeing and they were never able to find a compromise and I think part of one of the things that kind of ruined that project was that they were always like to external forces that wouldn't like compromise that they wanted something that is contrarian. How much should you as a data person be there to mediate? Do you just tell them like, "No, I'm here to technical side, you guys get a psychologist" or do you actually actively take the leadership role

[51:19] David Cohen
there? Well my selfish answer is that if you run into that situation, you should call me because that's what I do obviously through my work, but the real answer is that you should 100% get very involved in that process. That is the reason that projects fail. Like the reason that you are not able to deliver a project that successfully does what your client needs is because of reasons like that and part of the process of discovery, part of the process of scoping, of understanding what you're actually going to deliver to a client and why is finding problems like that and solving them. That's why when I design a workshop, it's all focused around running into the problem rather than running away from it. The reality is that those points of friction between client stakeholders have to be figured out and if you don't figure them out, they're going to become a problem later whether you want them to or not. So you can either figure them out now and find a solution

[52:12] David Cohen
to them or you can just not figure them out and wait for them to explode and then explode your project along with it. That's a good

[52:19] Tony and Juan
answer. So if you're now willing to mediate a discussion and be there more from a leadership perspective, then you really need to become better at scoping these things before you even suggest to a client.

[52:31] David Cohen
Correct. So there's a few places. One is I'm most active on LinkedIn. So for one, if you want to reach out and find out more about my work, I am very, very active there. I post and share a lot about my work every day. So please reach out on there. I also have a website. It's superposition strap.com and I can send you it later so you can edit it on the screen if you'd like. I also have a newsletter which I will also send you a link for where I share a lot more about my work and frameworks and everything that goes into it, both from the perspective of client work like the white labeled workshops and then internal growth for work for consultancies. And I have a YouTube channel. So I have all different ways of reaching out primarily, as I said, either my website or my LinkedIn page would be the easiest ways to find me if you want to learn more about my work. And always, always happy to chat more about any of the topics that I covered in the session today. I

[53:28] David Cohen
talked about a lot of things, so happy to chat more with folks if they have any specific questions about any of those. Of course, happy to be here.