How SMB Advisors Deliver Scalable Growth and Trust

Discussion with Isaiha Fields

With a career that began in entertainment and media, Isaiha Fields has spent over a decade sharpening his expertise in strategic operations, project management, and campaign execution. Today, as Founder and Head of Strategy at Time Inc. Agency and Internal Foundations Consulting (IFC), he partners with small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) across behavioral health, media, and beyond to deliver scalable solutions that resolve complexity and unlock growth. In this article, Fields outlines how solo advisors and lean teams can evolve from bespoke service providers into strategic growth engines through frameworks, productized offerings, and trust-based engagement models.

Packaging Complexity into Clarity

For Fields, the path to scalable advisory excellence starts with pattern recognition: identifying those critical, recurring friction points that routinely disrupt growth for SMBs. "We look for recurring high impact pain points, right? These range between various different clients in the small business and midsize business sector", he explains. "Whether it's those operational inefficiencies, those growth obstacles that they have to overcome, or if there's strategic misalignment".

But recognition alone isn't enough. Fields emphasizes a disciplined filtering process: "If a service can be scoped, templated and delivered with consistent outcomes", he notes, then it can be elevated into a core strategic advisory offering. This is not about simplifying complexity, it's about capturing its essence in a repeatable, scalable format. IFC’s approach doesn’t dilute value, it enhances it by operationalizing clarity.

This methodology aligns with a powerful shift across the advisory world: the end of bespoke as default. Clients increasingly expect tailored outcomes with enterprise-level efficiency. By codifying solutions into modular, productized offerings, Fields is meeting the market's demand for impact that is both repeatable and results-driven.

Value-Based Pricing in a Retainer-Free Era

Retainers, once the default revenue model for advisory work, are losing relevance in today’s leaner, outcome-focused consulting environment. "Only 13% of consultants use monthly retainers today". The shift is not just stylistic, it reflects deeper changes in client expectations around value, transparency, and flexibility.

Rather than charge for time, IFC charges for tangible outcomes. "We include everything from a fixed-based fee to a project management fee with a percentage on for our project managers and a scope-based optional add-on", Fields explains. This value-aligned pricing architecture gives clients clarity, while ensuring IFC is compensated in a way that reflects the impact it delivers, not the hours it logs.

"Market research shows around 37% of consultants use project-based pricing while only 13% utilize retainers", Fields notes. But more than a statistic, this represents a strategic pivot: advisors are being asked to act more like product builders than service vendors. For Fields, this means designing pricing that reinforces confidence, invites shorter cycles of engagement, and positions each project as a building block toward larger transformation. 

Deliverables That Build Trust Without Dependency

Rather than locking clients into long-term engagements, IFC has designed its service architecture around fast, data-rich diagnostic tools that establish trust from day one. "Our most successful formats come from what we call snapshot reports", Fields shares. These reports assess everything from digital infrastructure to marketing performance, providing SMBs with an immediate, evidence-based understanding of their operational landscape.

What makes snapshot reports powerful isn’t just the data, it’s the strategic context they provide. By surfacing blind spots in SEO, paid media, backend workflows, or technology usage, they offer a concrete reason for change. This leads naturally into strategy sprints, IFC's intensive planning sessions that convert insights into structured, execution-ready deliverables. "These formats, they're structured, they're repeatable, and they produce clear deliverables right from the jump", Fields says.

This methodology flips the traditional advisory script: instead of asking for commitment upfront, IFC delivers so much value in the diagnostic phase that follow-on work becomes a logical next step. As Fields notes, "We come initially providing strong data-informed value that will allow you to make a decision right from the jump". 

Customization Within Repeatable Frameworks

Customization is still essential, but it's no longer about starting from scratch, it’s about intelligent layering atop proven systems. "Initially, we go framework first and then customization second", Fields explains. By leading with structured, templated formats, IFC ensures that advisory engagements are both scalable and grounded in strategy, not just intuition.

"This principle offers us to come with a templated structure but we also customize the diagnostic portion based on real client insights", he notes. In practice, that means the deep personalization comes not from rebuilding the process, but from integrating what matters most to the client: current pain points, operational constraints, and sector-specific nuances. Snapshot reports and interviews are not simply intake exercises, they're the engines of contextual relevance.

This methodology reflects a new kind of consulting mindset. Where empathy is engineered through systems. Clients don’t just feel heard; they see their realities embedded in the solution. 

Creating Entry Points That Spark Long-Term Engagement

One of IFC's most strategically designed tools is the success interview, a post-audit conversation that bridges the gap between diagnosis and trust-building. "It's not a pitch", Fields emphasizes. "This is for the business owner or the administrators of the business to share their story". Framed as a reflective narrative, this session allows advisors to tap into both the emotional origin and the operational evolution of a business, mapping not only what has worked, but what’s stalled.

What emerges from this storytelling format is far more valuable than anecdote: it reveals critical decision-making patterns, hidden frustrations, and the company’s true appetite for change. That context sets the stage for what Fields calls "low-risk, high-value offers". These are not just teaser engagements, they are deliberately scoped interventions crafted to solve specific constraints that hold SMBs back. "Especially with small businesses, they get stuck between that $1 million to $3 million range", he explains. These inflection points demand more than motivation—they require a strategic reorientation.

As IFC uncovers deeper misalignments, from disjointed leadership visions to execution bottlenecks—its value becomes self-evident. "Once we initially unlock the areas of decline or stagnation, we can resolve those issues and then that opens up the door for other issues that you may come about", Fields says. 

Tech-Enabled Delivery, Human-Centered Strategy

Automation and CRM tools are part of the backbone at IFC, allowing the team to deliver focused, reliable results as they scale. "We have actual integrated tools where there's customized workflows, there's conditional logic", Fields explains. These systems centralize communications, structure workflows, and allow clients to access key documents and updates through intuitive portals, significantly reducing back-and-forth while increasing transparency.

"This allows us to streamline the planning and execution logistics and allows us to focus our energy on delivering strategic insight", he adds. For Fields, automation isn’t about dehumanizing the client experience, it’s about removing the noise so that human insight can rise to the forefront. By taking administrative burdens off the table, advisors are free to focus on pattern recognition, decision framing, and strategic foresight, elements clients truly pay for.

Fields began constructing this digital backbone in 2019, but global disruptions accelerated its evolution. "There was so much more that we had to learn because there was the shift in artificial intelligence coming, the shift in augmented reality and things like that", he reflects. The result isn’t just a leaner system, it’s one that is resilient by design and capable of adapting in real time to changing business conditions. 

Productization, Trust, and the Future of Advisory

As solo advisors look to scale, Fields believes productization is the way forward. "Once you can productize your strategy services, you can have alignment with having engagement without the term commitments", he explains.

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Instead of focusing on retainers, the future lies in modular execution, automation, and scalable content. "You'll succeed by delivering tailored modules of what you can do at scale and not by locking in clients into end retainers that you don't necessarily see an end to".

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Fields leaves us with three essential lessons:

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1. Retainers are out: Only 13% of consultants still use them. Most models are shifting to project-based work.
2. Productize your services: Build structured, repeatable offerings that deliver consistent value while allowing room for tailored solutions.
3. Lead with trust: Use low-risk, insight-driven entry points to establish credibility early and create momentum for long-term partnerships.

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For those willing to rethink how value is delivered, the future is rich with opportunity. As Fields puts it, "Success leaves clues". Advisors who invest in repeatable frameworks, honest diagnostics, and well-timed strategic offers won’t just win the next engagement, they'll earn a seat at the table for the long run.

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