It is the question everyone has and almost nobody asks on a first call, because asking feels like admitting you don’t already know. You should not already know. The market has gone out of its way to make sure of that.
The range, in the UK, runs like this. An eCommerce consultant will quote you a day rate somewhere between £250 and £2,000. At the bottom you are buying a freelancer who will build the thing you have already decided to build. In the middle, roughly £600 to £1,000 a day, you are buying someone who has run a store or a channel and can tell you what is wrong with yours. At the top, £1,200 and up, you are buying someone who has sat on a board, carried a P&L through a bad quarter, and can argue with your CFO in the CFO’s own language. Agencies price differently again, as retainers from about £5,000 a month to well past £50,000, and the retainer buys hands rather than judgement, which is a different purchase and I have written about it elsewhere in this library.
The trouble with every one of those numbers is that it describes the input. It tells you what a day costs and nothing about what the day is for. A £1,500 day spent confirming a decision you had already made is expensive. A £1,500 day that stops a £300,000 replatform three weeks before the contract is signed is the cheapest money the business will spend that year, and the board will still remember the day rate rather than the saving. That is the shape of the problem, and it is why I stopped quoting day rates.
Why the prices are on the page
Fixed prices are an odd thing to publish in this trade. Nobody else at board level does it, which I checked before I did it, and the reasons they give are all variations on “every engagement is different”. They are. The questions are not. Whatever the brand, the work comes down to three of them, asked in order: what do we know, what is the pattern, what is the play. The engagements differ in how long each question takes to answer well, and twenty years of doing it means I have a decent idea of how long that is before I start. The prices on this site are the prices.
A Board Session is £3,500 for a day in your room on the one decision that has been pending too long. The Clarity Diagnostic is £15,000 for four to six weeks and ends with five moves for the next twelve months, ranked, costed and argued for. Advisory starts at £8,000 a month for the board shape, where I govern the work until the investment lands, and runs higher for fractional days inside the business. None of it is charged on the site; the bag books a thirty-minute call, and the fee is invoiced once we have both agreed it is the right thing.
What to compare it with
Whether that is good value depends on what you compare it with, so compare it with the real alternatives rather than with each other. A permanent eCommerce director at a £50M brand costs £150,000 to £200,000 a year once you add the employer’s costs, takes four to six months to hire and another six to be useful. An agency discovery phase at the same brand runs to six figures and tends to tell the board what the trading team already knew. A replatform that should not have happened costs whatever the replatform cost, plus the year nobody will get back.
I spent five years running an agency, so I will say the fair thing about the other side of this. A good agency on a well-written brief is worth every penny, and most of what goes wrong with agencies goes wrong in the brief. What an agency cannot be is independent of its own scope. The consultant’s whole value is that the advice does not get more expensive when it is followed.
There is a version of this article that ends by telling you to get in touch. The more useful ending is a question for the next person who quotes you a day rate. Ask them what the day is for, and what it would have to stop you doing to pay for itself. If they can answer in one sentence, the rate is probably fine.