Russell Raath on which Hormozi advice works for consultants

Key ideas

• A senior client hiring a consultant hands over a consequential problem and takes personal and political risk on the decision, so trust comes before speed, price or demand.
• Most consultants who think they have a marketing problem have an offer problem: they sell a category, not a reason to buy.
• Know your real cost of delivery, but explain your price through the share of value your work can credibly influence, not the client's whole upside.
• High-touch work needs clients with a proven model, real stakes and the authority to act, and a niche is where you've earned the right to speak.
• Discuss a consequential proposal live, and guarantee only what you control: your preparation, your process and what you personally deliver.
• Content earns trust when it shows how you think, and every early project is a vote for the kind of practice you're becoming.

Russell Raath’s take on Alex Hormozi’s service-business advice is that the principles carry over to consulting but the tactics need translating, because a senior client isn’t just buying a service. They’re handing you a consequential problem and taking personal and political risk on the decision to hire you. These are my notes on his 16-minute talk, which works through six Hormozi clips in order: fix the offer, price from cost and value, pick your end of the market, sell live, give away the thinking, and choose what each project teaches the market.

Consulting is a trust and risk business

Raath says he’s spent more than three decades in and around consulting: Deloitte Consulting, Bank of America, then running Kotter International, and now his own advisory practice. His frame is that an executive who hires you is putting a problem that matters in your hands and staking their own credibility on it. Speed, price, the offer and demand all matter, but none of them hold up for long until the client trusts your judgment.

He applies one test to every clip: does this advice bring you closer to the client’s live business problem, or does it only help you look more like a consultant?

Fix the offer first

Hormozi’s order is offer, then price, then the sales process, then demand. Raath agrees completely. Consultants often think they need more visibility or a funnel when what they actually lack is an offer. “Strategy”, “transformation” and “leadership” are categories, not reasons to buy, and more traffic only exposes that vagueness faster.

A serious offer lets a buyer recognize the moment your judgment becomes useful. It names the problem or decision, says what movement you can credibly help create, and is concrete enough for the buyer to defend internally. His illustration: a 12-week strategic transformation package gives a category and a length. A stronger version helps an executive team work out, in six weeks, whether its performance problem is mainly strategy, operations or leadership alignment, and leaves them with the decisions, priorities and next steps. The difference is that the second one is attached to a live decision.

The check he suggests before spending anything on demand: can a serious buyer tell when to call you?

Price from cost, explain from value

Hormozi’s rule is to work out your true cost of delivery and multiply it by five to ten. Raath keeps the discipline and changes the explanation. New consultants, he says, usually price by turning their old salary into a day rate and adding a margin for risk and tax, which has nothing to do with the client’s problem. Knowing your real cost tells you whether the work can pay for proper preparation, senior attention, follow-through and a healthy business.

To explain the price, he separates three kinds of value: potential, attributable and realizable (defined below). His example is early work on a growth initiative for a business going from roughly $3 billion to about $6 billion in revenue, as he tells it. That didn’t make his contribution worth $3 billion, since most of the result depended on the leadership team and the organization. It did mean the problem deserved a different level of preparation and care. Charge enough to do the work at the level the problem needs, and enough that the client takes the decision seriously.

Choose your end of the market

Hormozi tells agency owners to go cheap and automated or high-touch for businesses that already know their numbers, because the middle is where they die. Raath reads it for consultants: if you sell high-touch judgment, pick clients with a proven model, meaningful stakes, decision-making authority and the ability to act, not ones expecting you to invent their strategy and guarantee the revenue.

On niching, he says broad transformation consulting looked like a niche to him and wasn’t. His territory became clear through the work itself: the moment at the start of a transformation when a leadership team needs to state a bolder ambition, get honest about what’s in the way, and set up the conditions to move. That’s where clients told him the work mattered and where results and referrals built up. His advice is to start where you’ve earned the strongest right to speak: the situations you’ve been close to, the problems clients already trust you with, the proof you have, and whether you can reach the people who buy or refer that work. You can standardize the method and sharpen the diagnostic, but you can’t automate away the judgment the client is paying for.

Sell live, guarantee what you control

Hormozi says never send an invoice by email, because the buyer will have questions and you want to be the one answering them. Raath agrees and goes further: a proposal can’t hear hesitation, notice that the scope no longer fits, or tell whether the worry is the fee, the politics, the implementation load or the buyer’s own credibility. Walk through the recommendation and the investment live, and let the buyer ask hard questions.

He’s more careful about Hormozi’s guarantees. Advisory results depend on much more than the advisor: a leadership team can refuse to decide, implementation can stall, and politics can water down clarity over the following months. So he guarantees what he controls: how well he prepares, the quality of the process, what he delivers personally, and the decisions the work is designed to support. He spells out what happens if his part falls short, and lowers the buyer’s risk with proof, a bounded scope and clear responsibilities. The senior buyer is also asking whether they can justify hiring you if someone challenges it later, and good risk reversal answers that without claiming you control their organization.

Give away the thinking

Hormozi’s point is that most of an audience isn’t ready to buy yet, so you have to educate further up the funnel, and a hands-on provider can give away all the secrets because buyers will still pay someone to do it. Raath sees two opposite mistakes among consultants: hiding everything useful, or publishing vague thought leadership that helps no one decide anything. A buyer doesn’t hire you because the information is hard to find. They hire you because applying it to their own complicated situation takes judgment.

So show the thinking. His examples: how you tell a strategy problem from an operating problem, the questions that expose false alignment in a leadership team, why transformations stall before they start. He admits he resisted content for a long time because he associated it with self-promotion and ghostwritten LinkedIn messages, and says that dislike shouldn’t have excused him from getting good at marketing. Good content lets buyers meet your judgment before the first conversation and gives referrers better language for what you do.

He also changes what gets counted. Instead of messages sent or posts published, he’d measure meaningful trust-building interactions. One thoughtful recommendation from someone who knows your work may beat a hundred generic messages.

Choose what each project teaches the market

Hormozi’s last principle is to take action, and Raath agrees that waiting for the perfect offer or client is avoidance. But action without selection can lock you into the wrong market, at the wrong fee, doing work you don’t want to be known for. The question isn’t only whether a project pays, but what it makes possible: proof in the market you want, access to a sponsor or referrer, a repeatable method, or the language buyers use for their problems. A cash-flow project can be perfectly rational, as long as you’re honest that it is one.

His own example: he took on work that was adjacent to his core but not his strength, and did it well but not to his own standard. The client did refer him, for the original work, not the adjacent kind.

To apply the talk to a practice of your own, his summary works as a checklist:

• Build the offer around a live problem a buyer can recognize.
• Price your real contribution, not your old salary or the client’s whole upside.
• Choose clients who can use high-touch judgment.
• Handle consequential decisions in conversation, not in an inbox.
• Make your thinking visible enough for the market to trust it.

Key terms

Trust and risk transfer business

His description of consulting: the client hands you a problem that matters and carries the risk if hiring you goes badly.

Authority offer

An offer built on judgment you've accumulated, tied to a specific consequential moment rather than a list of deliverables.

Potential value

The total upside if the client's problem is solved.

Attributable value

The part of that upside your work can credibly influence.

Realizable value

What the client is likely to capture once its leadership, politics, capital, technology and market have had their say.

Reputational debt

What high-volume, low-trust outreach builds up instead of demand.

Quotes from the talk