Strong CV.
Wrong deck. Wrong room.

The situation before

Jo Rice came to the Fractional Formula as someone who knew her subject deeply. An experienced organisational consultant with a background spanning senior corporate roles and independent advisory work, she was not short of perspective or expertise. What she was navigating was the shift from occasional consultant to someone who could go out and create clients deliberately.

Before joining the programme, she had taken a meeting with a prospective client - a real opportunity - and lost it. Not because her thinking was wrong. Because she had gone in with the wrong frame. The wrong deck. The wrong conversation for where the client actually was. She presented as though they were further along than they were, and the room did not follow her there.

It is one of the most common patterns in consulting. Capability is not the issue. The consultant walks in knowing what the client needs and starts pitching the solution before the client has had a chance to name the problem themselves. The result is a client who feels unheard rather than understood, and a consultant wondering why the obvious answer was not enough.

What the programme changed

The Fractional Formula worked on the fundamentals: ICP clarity, product structure, profile, and how to enter a client conversation in the right way. For Jo, the most significant shift was in how she thought about the early stages of a client relationship - particularly around discovery, diagnosis, and the difference between selling a solution and earning the right to propose one.

The work Dan did with her on approach and positioning directly influenced how she handled subsequent conversations. One session captured in January 2025 shows the texture of that work - Dan walking Jo through a live prospect situation, coaching her on how to run the opening calls with a fast-growing energy company, what questions to ask, how to avoid being farmed into the wrong engagement, and how to structure a discovery proposition rather than going straight to a retained brief. The advice was specific, commercially grounded, and built around her actual situation rather than a generic framework.

“It felt less like a course and more like having an experienced operator in the room, pressure-testing thinking and accelerating decision-making.”

By week five of the programme - while she was on holiday - Jo landed a contract with a client she had never met before. The programme had not finished. The work was already paying for itself.

“I have already won a contract from a complete stranger before even finishing the programme - and it will more than pay for the programme itself. I am so grateful for the kick-start this course has provided.”

The client she thought she had lost

Alongside the new contract, something else happened. Boodles - a client Jo had worked with previously, a relationship she was uncertain she had preserved - came back.

She had reached out to their MD a few weeks earlier. Not to pitch. Just to reconnect. They invited her to run a workshop for their sales team. Off the back of that, she was asked to pitch for a three-month follow-on project.

In a message to Dan after that sequence played out, she was direct about what had made the difference:

“Boodles are back in the frame. So relieved I didn’t burn my bridges. Your help with that and the course correction was invaluable. Onwards.”

The course correction she referred to was specific advice from the programme on how to handle that relationship - what to do, what not to do, how to stay in the frame without forcing a conversation that was not ready to happen. The result was a client who came back on their terms, through a workshop that let Jo demonstrate value before the pitch existed.

Where the journey went next

Jo went on to join the Table Group - a small, elite organisational health consultancy built around the work of Patrick Lencioni, with seven consultants and more client demand than they could handle. It was a consultancy she had admired from afar for years. Getting there was not a pivot. It was the destination the programme had been pointing toward.

In a message to Dan after joining, Jo made a connection that landed:

“One of their principles is Naked Consulting - about never selling but only consulting, which often leads to a sell. It is exactly as you describe. All that to say, thanks so much for your help in 2024. The Boodles contract came back my way in the end and kept me occupied, and your help and course correction was invaluable. Hope you are thriving - sounds like you are.”

The Naked Consulting principle she references - diagnosing before prescribing, never leading with a sale - is the same logic the Fractional Formula builds its entire approach around. For Jo, the confirmation that the world’s most respected practitioners in her field operated by the same rules was a full-circle moment.

Who this is for

Jo’s story is for the consultant who already has the expertise but has discovered that expertise alone does not get you the meeting, the contract, or the retained relationship. She came in knowing her subject. What she needed was the commercial layer - how to position it, how to enter a conversation correctly, how to structure an approach that clients could say yes to at the right pace.

The wrong deck in the wrong room is not a one-off mistake. It is what happens when a consultant leads with their answer before they have listened to the question. The programme fixes that. Not by teaching you to be more consultative in the abstract - but by giving you specific tools for specific moments: how to open, how to discover, how to position, how to protect relationships you have not yet earned and relationships you think you have already lost.