Six months before Marcos Rivera left Vista Equity Partners, he did something most founders never think to do.
He started saying hello.
Not pitching. Not asking for introductions. Not teasing his upcoming business. Just reaching out to old colleagues, former bosses, people he’d worked alongside and genuinely liked. He sent messages that basically said, “hey, what’s up?” And then he listened.
By the time he actually announced he was going independent as a pricing consultant, he wasn’t cold-launching into the void. He was announcing to a warm room of people who already had him on their radar and actually cared how he was doing.
I thought about that when he told me the story, because I did the opposite when I started my fractional practice. An accelerator coach told me to ‘reach out to my network’ and I did exactly that, to people I hadn’t talked to in two and a half years. You can guess how it went. They were polite. Nobody called back.
Marcos’s approach works because it’s not a strategy. It’s just how humans actually operate.
Warm the Network Before You Need It
Reconnect before you have anything to ask for. That’s the whole discipline.
Marcos spent that pre-launch window checking in with his network the way a decent human being does. No agenda. He wanted to know if people had changed jobs, had kids, moved on. And because he genuinely liked a lot of these people, it didn’t feel calculated. It just felt like catching up.
Then, when he announced he was going independent, he had four to six months of pipeline warmth already baked in. People reached out to him. Some offered referrals. A few became first clients.
Cold network outreach asks people to do you a favor before you’ve re-established any relationship capital. It works occasionally, but it feels bad for everyone involved. The warm-up approach inverts the dynamic entirely. You’re not asking. You’re already in a relationship.
If you’re thinking about going independent, or launching something new, or pivoting your practice: start the warm-up now, six months before you need anything.
Your First Clients Are Your Marketing Team
Marcos’s first clients came from Vista. Former colleagues, portfolio company contacts, people who knew his work and trusted his judgment. Standard enough.
What surprised him was what happened next.
Those clients presented his pricing work to their boards. And board members from other portfolio companies (people Marcos had never met) started reaching out directly: hey, who helped you with that? Can I get an intro?
He hadn’t planned for this. He’d just done excellent work and put it in front of people who sat on multiple boards.
Nail your first few clients. Put everything in. Don’t hold back. Not just because of goodwill, but because good work placed in front of the right people at the right moment becomes its own distribution channel.
For most specialist consultants, the referral engine doesn’t start with cold outreach or content or ads. It starts with one board member telling another.
Marcos eventually layered on more credibility signals like, the Vista name, a growing client logo list, and then a book. Each one compounded the authority from the last.
Ditch the Deck. Give Them the Playbook.
The big consulting firms deliver a 300-slide deck with six-point font, colorful charts, and a million-dollar invoice. Dense. Beautiful. Completely unactionable.
His deliverable is the playbook which includes what the pricing model is, what features belong in which plans, what’s an add-on, what the price points are, and exactly how to test and roll it out. Steps. Decisions. Specifics. Stuff you can actually execute the week after the engagement ends.
He adapted Google’s Sprint methodology into a cross-functional pricing workshop. Everyone relevant is in the room: finance, product, sales, engineering. The session is intense and collaborative. By the end, everyone knows what the pricing is and, critically, why.
When clients co-create the pricing with him, they walk into their next board meeting with high conviction that they can execute it. They’re not presenting something a consultant handed them. They’re presenting something they helped build.
The Mr. Miyagi Technique
A sales leader in one of his workshops pushed back on tiered packaging, insisting every customer should get every feature so they could just be successful. Marcos didn’t argue.
He asked, “why do you feel that way?”
He listened. He empathized with the intent (wanting customers to win). Then he asked a single question, “have you ever paid for something you never used?”
The leader said yes, he hated that. Marcos walked him through what happens when customers are paying for 11 features and only using 3: discount pressure, churn risk, renewal nightmares. The sales guy nodded. He got it. He became an advocate.
The secret move in the workshop is cross-examination between team members, not between Marcos and the team. He asks the group to comment on each other’s ideas before he weighs in. People listen differently to peers than to consultants. And while they’re challenging each other, Marcos is teaching them, almost invisibly, how to think about pricing.
That’s the Mr. Miyagi method. You’re guiding, not correcting.
Price Your Own Services Like a Founder, Not a Freelancer
Marcos made two decisions on his own pricing from day one: no hourly billing, fixed fee only.
Hourly billing breaks the incentive structure. You get paid more for working more hours, but the client just wants the problem solved. Fixed fee puts the risk on you. That’s exactly the point. It forces you to scope tightly, deliver efficiently, and stay disciplined about what’s in and out of the engagement.
His initial pricing audit offer, a two-week diagnostic to find what’s broken, flopped. People said they liked it. Nobody signed. When he dug in, he realized: clients don’t actually want to find their problems. They want them fixed.
So he pivoted. He kept the diagnostic but credited its cost back to the project if the client moved forward. Now the diagnostic isn’t a standalone offer. It’s an on-ramp. Conversion improved immediately.
Three words that now anchor his service delivery philosophy: simple, fixed, clear outcomes. No ambiguity about what gets built, when, or for how much.
Scale Without Disappearing
The hardest part of growing a specialist consulting firm isn’t finding clients or hiring talent. It’s solving the founder bottleneck where clients want you, not your team.
Marcos hit this wall around five to six people. He was in every meeting, every sales call, every delivery session. When he started turning away business because his lead time was getting too long, he knew something had to change.
Before he hired anyone, he ran a Google Calendar time audit. He tagged every meeting and task and used the analytics feature to see exactly where his hours were going.
He was spending 18 to 20 hours a week doing Excel analysis for pricing work. That was his signal. Not ‘I’m busy.’ Specifically: here’s the low-leverage work I can hand off, and here’s the profile of person I need to find.
He started with contractors on Upwork and Fiverr, ran interviews, and hired the ones who could take that analysis block off his plate. Only later, once the right people proved themselves, did he bring them in as full-time employees.
The hard part isn’t hiring. It’s convincing clients who signed because of you to trust someone else.
Marcos did it gradually. In every engagement, he started working alongside his senior associates, present in the same sessions, giving them credibility by proximity. Then, methodically, he started stepping back.
Eight sessions became six became five became four. He didn’t disappear. He just stopped attending the ones his team could handle alone. Clients still saw him at the critical moments. They still felt the expertise. The handoff was invisible because it was gradual.
He told me he thought about a dentist he used to love who grew her practice too fast. One day he showed up and got a junior associate instead of her. It felt like a downgrade. That sensation is what he’s always worked to prevent.
Every Monday, Marcos meets with each of his six senior strategists to review active client work. Each strategist presents where a client’s pricing stands and where they’re taking it. Then the room picks it apart: why this structure? What’s the evidence for a price increase? Have you considered this instead?
Marcos stays sharp. The client gets the firm’s collective thinking, not just one person’s. And the strategists get better every week by watching each other get challenged. He’s never marketed this externally, but he should. His clients aren’t getting one expert. They’re getting six.
What AI Can (and Can’t) Do for Specialized Consultants
AI has made Pricing I/O faster. A lot faster. The firm has built dozens of custom GPTs for internal analytical workflows. Document consumption, interview summarization, pattern extraction, code optimization. Things that used to take hours now take minutes.
What it hasn’t replaced is the judgment call. When Marcos tested AI on real client pricing strategy, it gave competent generic advice. It couldn’t apply the firm’s proprietary frameworks to specific business contexts, or navigate the organizational dynamics that make a pricing rollout actually stick.
Where it gets interesting is in the middle ground. Marcos has been training AI on his pricing page breakdown framework, uploading pricing pages and videos of himself analyzing them, feeding the AI his annotation patterns until it started recognizing the same signals he does. It’s getting better with every upload.
His roadmap involves feeding all 400 engagements plus his full framework library into AI systems that can eventually replicate his analytical lens at scale. Phase one is faster analysis. Phase two is firm-specific decision support.
The nuanced take I’d add to this is – It only works because he already has everything documented. His frameworks are written down. His 400 engagements are organized. Most consultants I talk to are carrying their best knowledge entirely in their heads, which means AI can’t touch it.
What’s Next: Pricing Deserves a Home
Right now, for most companies, pricing lives in spreadsheets and old slide decks from projects that ended months ago. There’s no infrastructure for making ongoing pricing decisions, tracking whether the model is working, or knowing when it needs to change.
Marcos is building that infrastructure.
This summer, Pricing I/O is launching a software product layered with expert services: a permanent home for pricing decisions. Not just a SaaS tool. A system with expertise baked in so clients don’t just get software; they get validation, accountability, and guidance on what to do with what it shows them.
It’s the natural arc: one-time project, to retainer, to ongoing operating system.
The best consultants eventually productize their judgment. Marcos is doing that with 400 engagements and a decade of frameworks behind him.
Things Worth Stealing
Start the network warm-up six months before you need anything. No pitch, no agenda. Just genuine check-ins with people you actually like. When you eventually announce your move, you’re landing in a warm room, not a cold one.
Nail your first few clients completely. Make the work practical and executable, not impressive and dense. The board room is your distribution channel. Good work placed in front of the right people at the right moment creates referrals you can’t buy.
Workshop over deck. Co-creation over reveal. Fixed fee over hourly. Give clients the playbook, not the presentation. Define scope tightly, deliver clean outcomes, and make sure they leave knowing exactly what to do next.
Run a calendar audit before you hire. Find the low-leverage hours and build the job description around them. When you bring people in, work alongside them first, step back gradually, and never disappear entirely. Authority transfers through proximity, not announcement.
Use AI to move faster on analysis. Don’t expect it to replace judgment. And if you want AI to eventually think like you, start documenting your frameworks now. It can only learn what you’ve already written down.
You can find Marcos at pricingio.com or follow him on LinkedIn, where he posts pricing breakdowns, frameworks, and tactical content. His book, Street Pricing, is the no-BS practical guide to pricing he wished existed when he started.
If you’re working through GTM strategy, positioning, or content at a B2B SaaS or AI startup, I’d love to connect. Find me at data-mania.com or on LinkedIn.
P.S. After this conversation, I immediately started reconsidering my own delivery model and how I could improve it based on what I learned. It’s been less than a week, and I’ve already brought in a new client where I’ve transitioned my pre-strategy development check-in call to alignment call where I fully intend to co-create with the client and start building that buy-in from the very beginning.
