What a consulting client costs to win, in days and in pounds

A consultant who charges £1,200 a day will usually tell you, to the hour, what an engagement is worth. Ask what it cost to win and the answer is a shrug, because the cost was paid in evenings and quiet weeks and never appeared on an invoice.

Here it is, costed three ways in your own day rate. Then the two multiplications that turn a cost per meeting into a cost per client.

Your day rate is the unit

Leadership Services' 2026 UK benchmark puts the median fractional CFO rate at £1,200 a day; fractional CMO rates cluster around £1,000 to £1,700. Use yours. Everything below is in that unit, because the real cost of winning work as an independent is almost always your own time.

Option one: do it yourself

The plan that works is about ninety minutes a day: rebuild the list weekly, thirty requests a day, a message to each acceptance, follow-ups to email and text, ring the replies. The plan in detail.

Ninety minutes at a £1,200 day is about £225 a day, or roughly £4,500 a month, in time that could have been billed. If it produces 15 qualified meetings a month that is £300 a meeting, which is respectable. It almost never produces 15, because the ninety minutes is the first thing to go when the client calls, and a plan run three weeks in five produces a fraction of the result.

Option two: paid ads

Consulting and advisory terms are expensive in Google Ads because every firm bids on them. WordStream's 2025 benchmarks for business services put a form fill at £100 to £150 at the upper end. Most form fills for consulting are students, suppliers and people pricing you against a freelancer site.

At 10 to 20% of leads becoming a real conversation, plus a management fee, a meeting with a decision-maker costs £500 to £1,200. The day you pause the budget, the phone stops.

Option three: outreach run for you, in your voice

The list rebuilt weekly from companies showing a signal. Messages on your profile in your voice. Follow-ups by email and text. A British caller who rings every interested reply within 24 hours and books the meeting into your diary with notes. Modelled on one LinkedIn seat at three to five qualified meetings a month, that is £98 to £197 a qualified meeting. A model, not a promise; your sector and your message decide the result.

For consultants we size the campaign down, because two new clients a quarter is a different job from twenty. The cost per meeting holds; the number of meetings is set to what you can take.

The two multiplications

Meetings to client. For most consultants it is three to six first meetings per engagement won. At five, a £150 meeting is a £750 client and a £1,200 meeting is a £6,000 client.

Engagement value. Two days a week for six months at £1,200 is roughly £62,000. Against that, the difference between the options is not the money. It is whether the meetings happen at all in the quarter you are busy.

The number for your spreadsheet

Take the last two clients you won. Count the days you spent on outreach, pitches and proposals to win them, honestly, including evenings. Multiply by your day rate. Divide by two. That is your acquisition cost today. Most consultants who do this for the first time find it is a four-figure number per client and that most of it was spent in the famine, at a discount, in a hurry.

Then compare it with a pipeline that runs every week regardless. Lead generation for consultants is that pipeline on one page. Book a 1-to-1 and bring your day rate and your last two wins; we run the numbers live.

Sources

Day rates: Leadership Services, UK Fractional Director Rate Report 2026, 200 respondents, May 2026; CMO range from UK provider estimates. Ads: WordStream Google Ads benchmarks 2025, business services, at 10 to 20% lead to meeting plus a management fee. Ours: modelled on one LinkedIn seat at three to five qualified meetings a month, read November 2026. Worked examples are arithmetic on those figures.