Why Agencies Must Shift to a Solution-Based Commercial Operating System
Most agency leaders already agree that hourly billing has run its course. Many have moved to fixed-fee or deliverable-based pricing, some layering in performance incentives. But even with these upgrades, most firms are still packaging and pricing the wrong thing. The mechanics may look modern, yet the unit of value remains the same: projects, deliverables, tasks, and access to talent. That’s the deeper issue.
If the goal is revenue stability, pricing power, and defensibility, agencies have to shift from selling what they do to selling what their expertise makes possible. That requires stepping back and asking hard questions: How do we define our expertise? Who values it most? What business problems do we reliably solve best? How do we outperform the alternatives? What outcomes do we consistently create? And are we framing that value in a way that shapes a buyer’s sense of worth?
When firms get clear about their expertise and the impact it produces, their ability to capture value changes dramatically.
The Case for a Solution-Based Commercial Operating System™ (OS)
In the revenue model transformations my colleague Tim Williams and I have led, we use the idea of a pricing stack—replacing the traditional rate card with a system designed to capture value, not cost. The stack spans dynamic pricing, two-part models, subscriptions, tiered structures, usage pricing, and more. It’s how firms design a pricing platform aligned with how clients perceive value—what we often call value engineering.
Over time, as agencies adopted the full stack, a clear pattern emerged: firms gravitated toward a solution-based structure as the foundation for their pricing strategy. Not because other models failed, but because solutions create the most stable environment for value-aligned pricing.
Why Agencies Gravitate Toward Solutions
Every pricing model trains clients to focus on a specific control mechanism:
Hourly billing shifts attention to time, cost control, and utilization.
Deliverable-based pricing emphasizes volume and progress markers.
Retainers highlight access, responsiveness, and availability.
Because these units of value are easily compared—even across differentiated firms—they reinforce commoditization.
AI accelerates this problem. Time and utilization no longer signal value when algorithmic tools can compress production to near-zero effort. Deliverables, once labor-intensive, can be generated rapidly by clients or competing agencies.
A Solution-Based Commercial OS™, breaks these patterns. It redirects attention to the business problem that needs solving, the outcomes that matter, and the impact your expertise creates. Here, value is defined not by output volume, but by the expertise required to diagnose the problem, the design of a repeatable method, and the reliability of results. This is what turns offerings into defensible, differentiated, high-value solutions—and ultimately increases pricing power.
Solutions Change the Commercial Relationship
Solutions create something agencies have long struggled to achieve: commercial continuity.
Once a firm defines a repeatable solution, the next logical areas of value become clear—diagnostics, pilots, enablement programs, optimization cycles. A sequence of connected, high-value solutions. Instead of relying on AOR agreements or reacting to project-based demand, agencies can design what comes next before the client identifies the need.
Clients benefit just as much. Buyers don’t purchase outputs; they purchase the promise of outcomes. A well-designed ecosystem of solutions makes the path to those outcomes visible and intuitive. That clarity itself becomes monetizable value.
What a Solution Actually Is
To understand what makes a real solution, it helps to begin with what it is not. A solution isn’t a bundle of existing services or a neatly scoped packet of deliverables. The solutions that command larger deal sizes and higher margins operate at the intersection of three factors: what the client urgently needs, what the agency is uniquely qualified to deliver, and where the client’s category is heading.
It’s where positioning, expertise, and relevance converge into a repeatable method for moving a client from a problematic current state to a more desirable future one. A true solution is a vehicle for transformation.
Because the term “solution” is used so broadly, it’s important to define it in this model. A true solution has three characteristics:
It is anchored in a clearly defined client problem with economic significance—a problem the firm understands deeply through experience and pattern recognition.
It is delivered through a codified method—the frameworks, models, workflows, and increasingly AI-enabled tools that ensure consistent delivery and reduce risk.
It is designed to influence a defined outcome, even when compensation is not performance-based. You don’t need to guarantee results, but the direction of impact must be obvious.
Most agencies assume their work must be custom because every client feels different. Scopes are rebuilt from scratch, estimates trigger internal debate, and pricing goes through multiple rounds of negotiation before anyone talks to the client. The work feels bespoke, so the business behaves as though it must be.
Yet when we map actual workflows, a different picture emerges: 60–85% of the work follows repeatable sequences, recurring decision paths, and predictable patterns of value creation. What feels custom is often unstructured repeatability.
Repeatability doesn’t mean templated work; it means codifying the frameworks, methods, and decision models that can be modularized and assembled in different ways. These become the “products” of the firm’s value. This repeatability is what makes solutions teachable, scalable, and AI-ready. Consistency strengthens proof-of-value, and that consistency also opens the door to outcome-based pricing by reducing risk for the firm and increasing confidence for the client.
Productization as a Repeatable Value Engine
In a Solution-Based Commercial OS™, agencies productize their value, not their services. They intentionally design a repeatable value engine.
Here, Seth Godin’s guidance applies: don’t find customers for your products; find products for your customers. But we argue that it’s your ideal customers we need to design products for.
For agencies, that means designing offerings for your best-fit clients—the ones who already value your core strengths. Done well, productization becomes a discipline of designing backward from high-value client problems rather than forward from your existing service list.
This often requires deprioritizing low-value, price-sensitive work and elevating capabilities that consistently create meaningful impact. It also requires surfacing the intellectual property—methods, templates, patterns, and frameworks—that teams rely on every day but rarely articulate. When that value goes undefined, it goes unmonetized. Productizing value makes these hidden assets visible and usable. They become the building blocks of productized solutions.
The Value You Haven’t Charged For
Designing productized solutions exposes where agencies are missing opportunities to capture more value.
Many early engagement steps—scoping, kickoff meetings, discovery—were originally created to help the agency get organized, gather inputs, and reduce risk. But when these steps are redesigned to create explicit client-side value, everything changes.
A traditional kickoff, for instance, clarifies roles, timelines, and expectations. Those benefits accrue mainly to the agency. In our work, we teach firms to flip that logic. A kickoff becomes a Success Workshop—a session that aligns client teams, clarifies measurement, mitigates risk, prepares stakeholders, enables scenario planning, and allows for rapid AI-assisted prototyping. The agency still gets everything it needs operationally, but now the client experiences tangible value up front.
The same dynamic applies to discovery. Traditional discovery helps the agency get its bearings. But when you reshape it around client value—into something like a strategic diagnostic—the dynamic flips. A diagnostic, by contrast, helps the client make decisions. It clarifies what’s working, what’s at risk, what choices must be made, and the consequences of inaction. Clients perceive this as value. “Discovery” feels like paying the agency to learn their business.
A recent example illustrates the point. A PR firm spent significant time coaching clients on becoming more “talk-worthy” before any paid execution work began. They saw this as preparatory work for the retainer. But this was strategic advisory—high-value work clients needed to succeed. Once formalized as its own productized solution, clients recognized its value and willingly paid for it.
This is value blindness—agencies sitting on value they cannot see.
How to Quantify a Solution’s Value
Under a Solution-Based Commercial OS™, price is anchored in four factors that mirror how executives evaluate strategic investments. These factors create a structured way to assess value before any pricing model is applied.
1. Distinct expertise and unique qualifications
The markets or audiences the firm understands most deeply.
The high-value problems it reliably solves.
The IP, frameworks, and proprietary insights that shape its approach.
In practice, the question is simple: Does this assignment require specialized expertise your firm is uniquely qualified to provide, or could it be delivered just as easily by another firm? The more singular the expertise, the greater the pricing leverage.
2. Proven effectiveness
Measurable outcomes, case studies, benchmarks, testimonials, and patterns of success – evidence that the solution works predictably and repeatedly.
Clients pay for confidence as much as capability. Here, we consider whether the assignment has the potential to create meaningful financial impact, whether through incremental revenue, reduced operating costs, or mitigation of a significant risk.
3. Strategic importance and intended impact
The business outcome the solution is designed to influence, expressed clearly but without overpromising. This includes both leading and lagging indicators of transformation.
The central question becomes: How important is the assignment to the client’s strategic agenda? Work tied to long-term value creation, business model evolution, or mission-critical initiatives carries significantly more economic weight than tactical or short-term tasks.
4. Client context
Urgency, visibility, competitive pressure, internal dynamics, cost of inaction, risk tolerance, and perceived differentiation – factors that materially shift perceived value.
Context amplifies or subtracts value. The same solution can be worth 3–5x more depending on what is at stake and how important the problem is at the moment it needs solving.
Pricing, therefore, becomes equal parts structure and judgment—what Tim Williams often refers to as “magic and logic.” The logic is the model. The magic is the experienced, contextual evaluation of what the expertise is worth in this specific situation, for this specific buyer, at this specific moment.
Value must be defined before it can be captured. Just as we said agencies must ask hard questions to define their expertise, they must ask deeper pricing questions to capture maximum value:
What is our expertise worth to this buyer?
Which pricing approach aligns with the impact we create?
What revenue model best fits this type of work?
How should the offering be structured so the value is unmistakable?
And how do we frame that value so the buyer fully understands what they are investing in—and why?
A Solution-Based Commercial OS™ prices the designed solution itself—anchored in expertise, effectiveness, intended impact, and client context. Everything else is downstream of that clarity.
How a Solution-Based Commercial OS™ Works With the Pricing Stack
After an agency defines its unique value and designs it into a structured solution, replacing the traditional rate card with a pricing stack—a layered system designed to capture value rather than cost—becomes both practical and necessary.
A pricing stack gives agencies three strategic layers for shaping commercial terms:
How the price is determined
How revenue is billed
How upside is monetized
The goal is not simply to change the invoice. It is to redesign the commercial system so it reflects the value of the value of the solution.
1. How the Price is Determined
Any of these mechanisms can be used to define what the client is paying for—and why.
Outputs - price tied to defined deliverables.
Commission - a percentage of spend or transaction value.
Points / Sprints - pricing based on units of work.
Outcomes - tied to achieving a result or metric.
Estimated Value-Based - pricing based on the agency’s independent estimate of the economic value of solving the client’s problem.
Co-Defined Value-Based - pricing based on a jointly defined agency/client view of the economic value of solving the client’s problem.
Percentage of Value - pricing as a percentage of value created.
Assessed Value - “pay what you believe this is worth,” used sparingly in strategic work.
Each of these can be used to shift the conversation away from hours and inputs and toward the impact, significance, and business value from the problem being solved, not the effort required to solve it.
2. How Revenue is Billed
These models shape the commercial rhythm of the relationship and determine its predictability, cash flow profile, and client-side flexibility.
Usage-Based - billed according to actual use or consumption.
Two-Part Models - a base fee plus a supplemental performance or usage component.
Subscription - recurring billing for ongoing access, enablement, or management of a problem or need.
Phased Billing - tied to milestones or stages of transformation.
Bundled Services - unified pricing for a consolidated offering.
Prepaid / Deferred Use - pay now, consume later.
Add-On Components - modular elements billed as the client expands the solution.
The models give agencies the ability to match the tempo of their solution to the tempo of the client’s needs—something hourly billing cannot support.
3. How Upside is Monetized
These structures allow agencies to participate in the broader impact their solutions create without relying on labor or production volume.
Equity in the client company.
Licensing of proprietary IP, technology, or frameworks.
Royalties tied to usage or downstream economic value.
Performance Pools tied to jointly defined success metrics.
Each structure expands the agency’s ability to capture upside when it drives meaningful business outcomes or builds assets clients depend on. As solutions mature, these mechanisms become increasingly attractive, to buyers and to the firm.
Bringing the Stack Together
When the three layers of the pricing stack are built on top of a clearly defined solution, the stack becomes a true commercial operating system. One that:
Decouples price from effort
Aligns economics with outcomes
Strengthens pricing power
Creates predictability without sacrificing margin
Scales without relying on headcount growth
This is why agencies that adopt a Solution-Based Commercial OS™ find it so transformative. Once value is codified, the pricing stack provides the mechanisms to capture that value consistently, across clients, across teams, and across markets.
The Commercial Engine Behind the Value Model
A Solution-Based Commercial OS™ is the commercial expression of the Agency Value Model. The Value Model is the architecture that determines how value flows through the firm—how it’s defined through your value proposition, designed as productized solutions, delivered through people trained to speak to and sell value, and proven through a value narrative—the commercial OS ensures that value is recognized, priced, and captured.
When these two models are aligned, an agency stops selling effort and starts selling outcomes. It stops competing on deliverables and starts competing on impact. It moves from comparison to differentiation, from negotiation to pricing power, from labor-based growth to scalable value creation.
Because ultimately, selling effort hands power to the buyer. Selling solutions takes it back.
