Why our sprints are fixed-length, and end in a plan.

The industry is changing, and that favours smaller firms

Pretty PowerPoints are now generated in seconds. Anyone can produce a polished-looking strategy deck. What clients actually need, and what a slide cannot give them, is experience — proof that what is being proposed has already worked somewhere real.

Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, described a moment that captures exactly the shift happening across the whole consulting industry — a moment worth quoting because it explains our model better than we could summarise it:

I recently had the CEO of a company say — we were doing a workshop, and normally the leadership team on my account didn't meet with the CEO, and he asked me to come in and do a three-hour workshop. And I started the workshop by saying everything we talk about is going to be about real reinvention. So everything we share, we've actually done. And then we dazzled them with really significant impact that we've done across companies. At the end he said to me — normally I would go and I would spend, you know, I'd pay for a twelve-week sprint with one of my strategy houses, and at the end of the twelve weeks they would tell me "go faster." He's like, now I get your business model, because we had pitched actually an eight-week sprint — he said, at the end of eight weeks you'll give me a plan.

The lesson we take from this, at our scale: a client should never pay us to be told what they already suspected. A client pays us to walk away with a plan that is already partly executed, built on things we have actually done — not a diagnosis that restates the problem more elegantly.

Relevance and results, not advice

We deliberately push back on the word "consultant" when it implies someone who only talks. Sweet put the distinction plainly when asked why the label itself has become so diluted:

David, I think that we actually defy the label consultant, because sometimes consultant seems to imply that we only give advice. And when you look at what Accenture does, we're really different than the traditional version of a consultant. Our clients look to us for two things. Relevance — you know how to help them be relevant today and tomorrow... And then the other thing they look for is results. Right? So not just advice, but actually how do things change, and how do you execute.

At our size, that means the person who scopes an engagement is the person accountable for its outcome — not a partner who hands it to a team of juniors after the pitch.

How a sprint actually runs

• Fixed-length sprints, not open-ended retainers. We agree the sprint length before day one, and it does not extend itself.
• Founder in the room. For a company our size, the person who scopes the engagement is the person who is accountable for it — usually Yassine El Moumen directly, backed by the core team and, when the mission needs specialised depth, a vetted freelancer or external consultant.
• A plan at the end, not a request for more time. If eight weeks is the sprint, week eight produces a plan you can act on — not a recommendation to commission another sprint.

Why this matters more for a small firm, not less

A large firm can absorb an open-ended engagement across its bench — the twelve weeks that end in "go faster" are a rounding error against the size of the account. We cannot, and would not want to: every sprint we run has a name attached to it, and every sprint that ends without a usable plan is a reputation cost we feel directly. Fixed length is not a marketing constraint — it is what keeps the incentive aligned with your outcome instead of our billable hours.

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