Sustainers vs. Sprinters - The Right Advisory Model for you
In this one, we’ll look at flavors of the Advisor model, specifically Sprinters vs. Sustainers.
In the Advisor model, you’re guiding clients toward a transformation rather than doing the work yourself. Think strategy, coaching, consulting, and other done-with-you services. Because delivery is lighter than in the Craftsman model, you’re usually carrying multiple clients at once.
The primary challenge with sprint-style Advisor models is the same as with intensives and short-term services work: you need very consistent lead flow, and/or a price high enough to give you the revenue you need per engagement, assuming you won’t be fully booked all of the time.
If you need to make $100,000 per year, and you sell a 3-month coaching package of $3,000—that doesn’t extend—you need 33 clients per year. That’s almost 3 clients per month, which is transparently so many new clients.
So, recurring revenue and never-ending client engagements—a Sustainer model—must be the answer, right?
Maybe.
But if you’re considering a Sustainer model, here are four things to think through.
Promise
Short-term offers usually have a concrete promise: negotiate your exit package, update your website in eight weeks, fix your offer in six weeks.
Longer transformations are harder to describe. Building confidence, changing habits, building a business, or implementing lasting change rarely happen on a fixed timeline. Maybe your work moves through interconnected layers that can only shift one at a time.
The promise becomes harder to make tangible. What will someone achieve in 6 months, 12 months, or 24 months? It can be squishier.
But we can learn from how the Sprinters market their work. We can provide a clear roadmap, even if that process isn’t exactly everyone’s path. We can outline short-term quick wins, and be specific about what someone will work on first. And—importantly for long-term retention—we can show the full lifecycle of how a client works and grows with us.
By having a methodology, you can show that people aren’t buying “coaching” or "consulting", but are buying a concrete path towards their destination, with clear steps along the way.
Taki Moore sells this exquisitely well. He sells you three pillars—Effortless Sales, Leads on Repeat, and A $10k offer—with the first phase: his $10k in 10-Minutes™ strategy to bring you leads, clients and cash first. He isn’t selling coaching. He’s selling three outcomes and a first phase designed to pay for itself.
In my own practice, I’ve been trying to make “build an expert business” more legible through a detailed assessment and naming the three areas we’re most likely to work on together in the sales process.
Pace
Short-term offers have the benefit of focus: for 6 weeks, or for 3 months, commit to this process. A distinct block of time, usually less than a season, where someone can make this a priority. They’re also linear—step-by-step toward a destination.
Six weeks is short enough that nothing has time to go sideways.
Longer engagements don’t have those benefits.
Over time, something always comes up that shifts the focus. A client gets sick, has a heavy workload, has an emerging issue in their personal life, or simply runs out of energy once the initial excitement wears off.
Progress also stops moving in a straight line. A client may feel stuck for months, unable to move forward on their next steps forward due to those circumstances or otherwise facing a block. Then one conversation changes something and whoosh, the floodgates open, creativity unlocks, and the client makes a huge leap.
And the work itself changes shape. With my 1:1 clients, it usually takes 4–5 months of focused work to build the foundations—authority system, offer design, operations foundations, sales and marketing strategy. But then they have to go implement it: publish the content, expand the network, actually use the CRM. We’re no longer in a building phase, we’re in a running phase, and the engagement looks different—price, logistics, even what we talk about on calls.
Are you able to hold space for that? Is the relationship normalized for the changes in pace?
And are you priced for a varying pace? Or do your clients feel pressured to ‘push forward every month’ to make the most of their investment?
Engagements designed for the long-term should look distinct from short-term offers: changing modes from one intensity to another, building in pauses or integration time, showing long-term progression, establishing re-engagement checkpoints. Look at the pace of your best clients. Where does it naturally shift, and how can you design for that on purpose?
Price
Over the years, I’ve paid for two $10K positioning and IP development sprints, each over about 3 months, with brilliant practitioners. That’s roughly $3.5K per month. It was a stretch—I pulled from my cash buffer and had to save up—but I could handle it.
Both of those providers offered ongoing packages at $1.5K per month.
I said no to both.
Less than half the monthly rate, for people whose work I’d just paid a premium for and valued enormously. But I literally couldn’t swing it. At the time I was loaded up with recurring expenses—my team, my YouTube editor, my illustrator—and adding another monthly line item meant I couldn’t pay me my salary, no matter how good they were.
It wasn’t the rate. It was the rate every month.
In MBA jargon: a short-term project is a capital expenditure (CapEx). A one-time expenditure, fixed cost, short window to pay for it. You can save up for it. Even big numbers seem less big when they’re one-off.
Long-term engagements are operating expenses (OpEx)—ongoing expenses supported by ongoing cash flow, re-evaluated against everything else pulling at that cash, every single month.
Which means pricing for long-term engagements is designing for lifetime value, not the maximum monthly rate. I’ve had at least three clients stay with me for over three years. Over the lifetime of those relationships, I’ve earned more from a single client than I paid for either sprint. And the rate fit their budgets every month.
Are you optimizing for the maximum over a bounded engagement, or a lower rate that can be absorbed over months or years?
Presence
The final consideration is presence: your presence, specifically.
In short-term engagements, you’re maintaining the context of your active clients. But, clients roll on and then roll off, and your proverbial mental RAM gets reset.
But long-term clients? Three things happen:
The context per client grows longer. You hold the trajectory of where they’ve been over years, and a vision for them for the years to come.
You often have more clients to hold the context of, especially if people move in and out of your engagements in seasons.
You ultimately see how the transformation you facilitate, the fruits of your labor, actually manifests over time. Do people get—and maintain—their results and growth over time? If not, why not?
It’s a lot of responsibility to carry. And it’s very hard to carry without systems.
With my 1:1 clients, we complete a Five Foundations assessment every 6 months, so we can both track progress and have a record of what we’ve accomplished.
With my Membership and Cohort participants, they fill out a monthly form that lets me know what they’ve accomplished, what they’re working on next, and anything they want me to know.
And honestly? I take this responsibility seriously. It’s why I cap my 1:1 clients to 10, my cohort to 20, and the Membership at 200. While my brain can freakishly hold a whole lot of information about everyone, I refuse to have a business where I don’t know the stories of the people who engage with my work. I never want anyone to feel faceless or lost in the crowd. I have never felt more alive than seeing how people evolve and celebrating their wins, even if they are only paying me $30 per month.
But this is a real tradeoff of long-term engagement models. Not every provider wants to retain that amount of context or be responsible for people’s results over time. You love to get in, provide an immediate result, and move on.
So before you think, “Clients stay with me forever,” decide… do you want clients for a season or a lifetime?
Neither model is inherently better. They’re simply designed for different kinds of work—and different kinds of practitioners.
Here are the Five Foundations designed for the Sustainer model.
Business Design:
Design for modes, not a fixed profile. The engagement won’t look the same in month three as in month eighteen—building gives way to running, intensity gives way to maintenance, and the price, cadence, and content of the work all shift with it. Build the mode changes into the offer instead of improvising them.
Relationship Rhythms:
Sell renewals and re-engagements like you sold the first yes. Build the rhythms that surface them: the check-in far before the arc ends, the conversation about what's next, the invitation back after a pause. When you're replacing three clients a year instead of thirty, the renewal conversation is your pipeline.
Building Blocks:
Build systems that hold context for you. Assessments, check-in forms, progress records—the mechanisms that let you pick up a client’s trajectory without keeping years of it resident in your head. The load in a long engagement isn’t the calls, it’s carrying everything that came before them, and that only scales with structure.
Authority Loop:
Make entry clear and progression legible. You compete on the roadmap, not the sprint—named phases, mode changes, checkpoints that let a client see where they are in a process that has no fixed end. The methodology is what makes “long-term transformation” purchasable.
Root by Root Planning:
Forecast the roll-off. Recurring revenue looks stable until three clients complete their arc in the same quarter. Track not only who’s with you but how long they’re likely to stay and when they’ll naturally finish—and cushion the gaps between someone rolling off and the next one ramping on.