The default everyone else picks
The consulting industry runs on six-month engagements for a reason. They're easier to staff, easier to forecast revenue against, and they give a comfortable buffer for the inevitable scope drift. They're also where most consulting projects go to die. Three months in, the client's priorities have shifted, the original brief no longer matches the business, and the last three months are spent rationalizing the work backwards into a deliverable nobody asked for.
Our default is six weeks. Here's what that changes.
What gets cut
The six-month engagement has a lot of connective tissue that doesn't survive compression:
- Discovery phases that last weeks. Replaced by a two-day intensive at the start, with a written scoping doc by end of day two.
- Steering committee theater. No monthly slide decks. We share Loom updates twice a week and a written status note on Fridays.
- Multiple parallel workstreams. A six-week engagement does one thing well. If the client wants three things, that's three sequential engagements.
- Deliverable inflation. No 80-slide final report. The deliverable is the working system, plus a 10-page handoff doc.
The thing that's surprising is how little anyone misses any of that.
What gets sharper
Compression forces three changes that turn out to be the actual value:
Scope honesty. Six months hides indecision. Six weeks does not. By end of week one we know exactly what we're shipping, what we're explicitly not shipping, and what's a "next engagement" item. The client signs that doc. There is no scope creep because there is no slack for scope creep to live in.
Decision velocity. In a six-month engagement, a question gets answered "let's discuss in next week's steering committee." In a six-week engagement, every open question is a blocker, and we surface them daily. The client's executive sponsor knows from day one that they'll need to make 8–12 fast decisions, and they show up ready for it.
Accountability symmetry. Most consulting engagements pretend the client and the consultant share accountability for outcomes. They don't. The consultant ships a report; the client owns the result. In six weeks there's no time for that fiction — we ship a working system, the client puts it in front of users, and both sides see the outcome together.
When six weeks doesn't fit
We're honest about this. Some engagements genuinely need longer:
- Regulated rollouts with audit and procurement cycles that take longer than the engagement itself
- Enterprise integration spanning more than two upstream systems
- Multi-region launches that require legal review per jurisdiction
For those we extend to eight or twelve weeks — but we still chunk the work into six-week phases with hard deliverables at each boundary. The phase boundary is where the client gets to fire us if we're not delivering.
What this means for pricing
A six-week engagement is priced fixed-fee, scoped tightly, and paid 50% on signature / 50% on delivery. Hourly billing rewards the consultant for being slow; fixed fee on a tight scope rewards us for being correct. We won't take open-ended hourly engagements as the default model.
Takeaway
Six weeks isn't a marketing gimmick. It's a structural constraint that strips out the parts of consulting nobody benefits from — the discovery theater, the steering committee slide decks, the deliverable inflation — and leaves the parts the client actually paid for: a working thing, a clear handoff, and a relationship where accountability runs in both directions.