Cortado Group got faster at delivery and refused to hand the savings back as a discount. Average deal size drifted down anyway. Total client spend did not.
Dan Bernoske runs Cortado Group, a growth strategy consulting firm working with private equity firms and their portfolio companies. The firm had a genuinely good quarter, and when asked what drove it, Bernoske was blunt that the new productized service the team had spent months building was not even switched on yet. The growth came from fundamentals.
One of those fundamentals was a packaging decision. Delivery had gotten quicker, which creates immediate pressure to reprice, because the client can see the timeline shrink and will ask. Cortado held rates and showed up with faster scopes instead of cheaper ones. What moved was the size of the individual purchase.
ASP is average selling price. Smaller chunks, more of them, same total. The firm did not defend its average deal size, it defended its rate, and let the buying unit get smaller so that saying yes got easier and more frequent.
Bernoske was also clear about the boundary of the play. Cortado has stayed out of the bigger ticket categories where this would not work, and the monthly in-person selling rhythm that generates the relationships has, in his words, nothing to do with technology.
Why it matters to you.
When delivery gets faster the reflex is to lower the price, partly out of fairness and partly because someone will eventually ask why a shorter project costs the same. Both instincts quietly transfer your entire efficiency gain to the client and leave your margin where it was. Shrinking the purchase instead of the rate does something different. A smaller scope clears approval faster, needs fewer signatures, and can be bought several times in a year rather than once. You end up with more transactions at a protected rate, a shorter path to the first yes with a new client, and more chances to prove value before the big decision. The wallet is the same size. What changes is how often you get to open it, and what you gave up to do so.
Your one thing.
Take your standard engagement and identify the smallest piece of it that would still be genuinely valuable on its own. Would a client approve that this month without a procurement cycle?
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