Fullstride charges a fixed fee, stays small on purpose, and expects clients to outgrow it. Those are odd choices for a consulting firm, and they're all reactions to specific things I watched happen at the last two I worked in.
Nate Shutes had me on the Bootstrapper's Guide to Logistics in May 2025 to talk about building a business rather than about warehouses. What follows is the part of that conversation that explains how this one is set up, which is the part worth having on a company's own website.
Every quote block below is me, on the episode, condensed for reading.
The Firm Outgrows the Clients Who Built It
When you're time and materials and project-based, the ones that get you going early on and feed you eventually are the ones that get the scraps, or don't even get any attention, because you're chasing ever bigger paydays.
At the first firm that meant starting on five and six-figure implementations and ending on high six and low seven. Nobody decided to abandon the smaller clients. The economics did it quietly, one staffing decision at a time, and the same pattern repeated at the firm I joined afterward.
A consulting firm billing by the hour has to grow its headcount to grow its revenue, and every hire raises the smallest engagement it can afford to care about.
Built So You Outgrow Us
The pitch that started the current version of this business was six or seven lines of email to a vendor's CEO:
What if I built a consulting firm that was made for your size of clients? That way we don't outgrow each other. And if the client does get really big, we can celebrate that, because now they can move on to a bigger consulting company that focuses on them.
Designing an engagement to end is the only version of this that stays honest, because a firm that needs you next quarter has a reason to leave something unfinished this quarter.
It's the same logic that keeps us out of implementation. An assessment is worth something precisely because nobody involved is bidding on the work it recommends.
Why Not Hourly
Most consulting firms are built around the hourly rate, which means we want more people on there and more hours. Then you have the clients who want fewer hours and fewer people, but they want this result. So there's this big alignment issue.
Hourly billing puts the buyer and the seller on opposite sides of the same number, and it does it at the exact moment the buyer knows least about how much work there is. A fixed fee moves the estimating risk onto the party who has done this before, which is the party who should be carrying it.
An hourly engagement asks a first-time buyer to police a scope they have no way to size, and calls the resulting overruns their problem.
It also means the price is published rather than quoted, which removes the other thing I disliked: a buyer discovering what they were going to be charged only after describing their situation in detail.
Get the Agreement While Everyone Is Happy
The most useful thing I did at the first business was insisted on by my father-in-law before we had any reason to think we'd need it:
Getting a really good operating agreement in place with buy-sell language in there, to make sure that when everything is going well, you guys can agree on terms, potentially how things dissolve, all the things that can get hairy later on.
Years later, when the three of us wanted different futures, that language was what made the exit a negotiation rather than a fight. Specifically, it let each side commission its own valuation. Those came back a long way apart, and the process for resolving that had been agreed years earlier by people who weren't yet on opposite sides of it.
Terms written while everyone is aligned are the ones both parties still consider fair once they aren't. The same argument applies to a WMS contract's exit language.
That last point is not a stretch. The 3PLs I've watched get trapped in ironclad multi-year contracts, paying for shelfware they stopped using, signed those terms during the optimistic part, and nobody was reading for the unhappy ending.
Where That Leaves the Practice
Small, deliberately. Fixed fee, published scope, no implementation revenue, and an engagement designed to hand you something you can execute without me. It's slower to build than a staffing model and it doesn't compound the same way, which is a trade I've now made twice with my eyes open.
Every structural choice here is a reaction to watching the alternative work exactly as designed. The hourly, growth-by-headcount model isn't broken. What it optimizes for just isn't what a first-time buyer needs.
