Most consultancies will not publish a price. The reasoning is that every engagement is different, which is true, and that discussing money early loses deals, which is also true but is a reason about them rather than about you.
We publish ours. The smallest is AI Pulse at £600 per month, which buys one consulting day per quarter. This article is about what happens on that day, because "one day per quarter" is a unit of measurement, not a description of value.
The arithmetic, stated plainly
£600 per month is £1,800 per quarter for one day, or £7,200 a year for four days. At face value that is a £1,800 day rate, which is a real day rate for senior UK advisory work and slightly more than some.
Two things sit inside it that a bare day rate does not include: the preparation before each day, and email access between them. The prep is not trivial (going through your numbers, reading what changed since last quarter, and arriving with a hypothesis rather than a blank page.
If you want the cheaper-per-day version, it exists: the larger tiers run down to about £1,440 per day equivalent at AI Transform. Volume buys a lower rate, as it does everywhere.
What the first day is actually spent on
Not a workshop. Not a slide deck. The first day is an audit, and it is mostly asking questions and looking at real data.
Morning: how work actually moves. We follow a single enquiry end to end. Where it arrives, who sees it, what they do, which systems it touches, what gets typed twice, where it waits. Not the process as documented) the process as performed, which is always different and is where the losses are.
Middle of the day: the numbers. Missed calls by hour. Time to first response, plotted as a distribution rather than an average. Enquiries by source. Conversion by source. Most businesses have never pulled these, and the phone system and CRM already hold them.
Afternoon: the constraint. Out of everything found, which single thing is costing the most, and what would it take to close it. This is the part clients tend to disagree with, and the disagreement is useful (it usually surfaces a constraint we could not see, like a supplier contract or a person who is not going to change how they work.
Written up within a few days: what was found, what it appears to cost, what to do first, and what to deliberately ignore. Jargon-free, because a document only the consultant can read is not a deliverable.
What the other three days do
Quarter two is the roadmap. Not a wish list) a sequence, with the reasoning for the order written down, because the order is the valuable part and it is what gets forgotten first.
Quarters three and four are review and refresh. What moved. What did not. What changed in the business, because something always does (a hire, a new service line, a supplier switch. The roadmap gets edited rather than admired.
That quarterly rhythm is the actual product. A one-off audit produces a document. What kills projects is month three, when the enthusiasm has worn off and nobody has looked at the number that was supposed to move. Turning up on a schedule is how that gets caught.
What it does not buy
Being explicit about this saves everybody time.
It does not buy build work. No agents, no integrations, no automations. When the roadmap identifies something worth building, it is scoped and quoted as a separate fixed-price project. That separation is deliberate: it keeps the retainer advisory, and it stops consulting days quietly becoming development hours at a consultant's rate.
It does not buy unlimited access. Email between sessions, yes. A named consultant on call, no) that is what the larger tiers are for, with monthly or fortnightly check-ins.
It does not buy a second opinion on every tool you see. One day a quarter cannot cover a running commentary on the market. It can tell you whether a specific tool addresses your actual constraint, which is the question worth asking anyway.
Who it suits
- Sole traders and micro-businesses who want a senior view without a retainer that dominates the overheads.
- Businesses that have been sold something and are not sure. A day spent working out whether the thing you are about to buy addresses your real constraint is cheap relative to the thing.
- Firms with one obvious problem. If you already know the bottleneck, a day to check that instinct and sequence the fix is often all you need.
Who it does not suit
- Anyone with several initiatives running at once. One day a quarter cannot hold three projects honest. That is AI Momentum and above.
- Anyone who wants something built next month. Buy the build. You do not need a retainer to commission a fixed-price project, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a tier you do not need.
- Anyone hoping the consultant will drive the change. One day a quarter is advisory. Somebody inside the business still has to own the work between visits. If nobody will, no tier fixes that.
When to skip it entirely
If your constraint is genuinely obvious (you are losing evening calls, you know it, you have counted them) then skip the retainer and buy the build. Trial Echo One as a product, or commission the integration. Consulting exists to decide what to do when that is unclear. Where it is clear, paying to have it confirmed is a slow way to spend money.
We say this to people who ring up ready to sign, and it costs us revenue, which is roughly the point. A consultant whose advice is always "buy more consulting" is not giving advice.
The starting point costs nothing
Every engagement, at every tier, starts with a free AI Opportunity Assessment. It is a short conversation about where enquiries, hours and revenue leak today. You do not have to pick a tier to have it, and quite often it ends with us saying the honest thing about which of the three paths above you are actually on.
If that sounds useful, book one. If you would rather read the full tier comparison first, it is on the packages page with every price published.