My firm Keenan Reid Strategies builds 9-figure business models and the financial engines behind them. We help enterprise B2B leaders:

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I listen to a lot of podcasts, but a recent one stuck with me: an interview with Jon McNeill, the former president of Tesla, on My First Million.

He was walking through the algorithm he used to scale Tesla as President of Global Sales and Service:

A few minutes in, I realized that I'd already been running a similar playbook for years, inside both Dell and Microsoft.

Then I decided I needed to run it for myself.

Keenan Reid Strategies used to be just me, working as an independent consultant. Now, it’s a network of consultants helping businesses grow into billions – not just by adding customers, but by changing entire business models. Changing how value is defined, delivered, and priced.

The results are incredible – once the model shifted, these businesses added up to 600% more customers without touching their margin.

That’s what got me thinking about something bigger than just “here’s a tactic that worked.”

Before we get into the how, let me tell you the two reasons why I’m doing this.

Reason one: the untapped value in this model. I think there’s still untapped value sitting inside this business model – for our clients and the people who do the work with us.

For clients, it’s the results: the problems we help them solve and the things we unlock for them that they couldn’t unlock on their own. We’ve even had some real magic moments, and I think there’s more of that we can offer.

For the consultants on our team, it’s the job itself: this is genuinely a great fit for someone who wants to make an impact but needs the flexibility that traditional firms can’t give.

Reason two: I love solving problems. I could run KRS to generate a few million a year for the next 20 years, but I’d be bored. Once I saw how this flywheel actually worked, I had to go see if I could solve the next puzzle.

Jon McNeill has five steps he talked about in The Algorithm.

I think he’s right on all five – and all those apply to my consulting business. But I thought there was a missing step that serves as the foundation before any other step works.

This is the one step I would add to McNeill’s framework, because I think this is the one thing everything else depends on.

You have to start with a business model that’s engineered to deliver disruptive value against a very specific, unsolved pain point your customer faces.

That means getting three things right:

We hacked this 10 years ago at Keenan Reid Strategies.

We took the MBB consulting model and rebuilt it: the highest-caliber strategic thinking, delivered at 25% of the cost.

It wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky academic strategy. Our consultants do hands-on commercialization work. They help products sell. We've been doing it for a decade, and good work has compounded into great work. We just didn’t go to Davos or have to share 30% back to the partners.

But then, the economy changed on me.

Even at 25% of the cost, our offering was challenged in client budgets. When companies tighten, growth spend goes first.

But sitting right next to us was a budget line nobody was touching: the operational vendors who sit between admin and strategy, the people who actually make things move inside large organizations.

That spend had historically been protected. Clients would pay top dollars for it because the quality mattered. Then that budget started tightening, too. Clients still needed those seats filled, but they needed them filled for less.

Same client. Shifted pain point. But we had an answer.

A deep talent pool of director-level individual contributors in Latin America, which meant we could place higher-caliber people into those roles at a lower cost than clients were used to paying – without sacrificing the quality they needed. That's the signal to pivot.

I built and piloted an offer to address it, with three elements:

Blu Dot used Roku Ads Manager to drive incredible results for its furniture sales event. Its strategy hinged on custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.

“Roku has been a top performer,” said Blu Dot’s Claire Folkestad. “We have seen…CPMs lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”

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I questioned every requirement of the traditional business model for consulting. The distinction is that I did it in service of the business model.

Questioning requirements in a vacuum produces random cost cuts that might bite you back in the future. But questioning them against a clear pain point produces a sharper offer.

Every requirement we challenged came back to one test: does this help us deliver disproportionate value to the client?

Take our consultant onboarding process. Some consulting firms run a multi-week intake before placing anyone. We thought it was a rigorous process, so we stripped it down, cut the timeline, and the quality of the placements didn’t drop.

Clients in a budget crunch need the right person in the seat fast, not just a process for its own sake.

How do we work this magic? By tapping directly into career services at big firms and local market exec recruiters.

This is where I made Sarah Olson our COO. Between us, we ask every single question about how we do things faster, better, more efficiently.

We are customer zero for AI and automation in our own operation. We took out cost. What was human, we have pushed and continued to push toward automation.

With one exception that matters: it's not every possible step. The ones that are human-to-human and matter, those are the ones we will always keep human.

The client conversations. The consultant matching. The trust-building moments.

Those stay human forever.

Most consulting businesses try to grow by adding more: more services, more channels, more complexity. I went the other direction. I boiled our entire growth strategy down to two jobs and made sure everything we do maps back to one of them.

This involves getting our name in front of the right people, like executives and general managers at technology, manufacturing, and private equity-backed companies who are sitting on a problem we know how to solve. Instead of a generic messaging we tell everyone, we choose to be deliberate about who we reach and how.

We built this business to exceed $3 million on my old-school referral list, which had about 20 evangelists and 100 contacts in an excel sheet. Smaller than most networks, but powerful enough to move the needle.

Today we have a vetted lead list of 2,000 people who fit our ideal client profile. To get to $10M, I need that at 10x. I need 20,000 people on my list. Job one is how we get there.

This is referrals and reputation, made more systematic. We already do great work, but that stays invisible if the people who've seen it don't have a natural reason to share it.

Job two is about giving them that reason: making it easy to refer us and investing in the relationships we’re at. This is the important part.

(If you received a book in the mail from me in the last year and a half, you’ll know I really value our relationship.)

Together, these two jobs are where a huge amount of my time goes right now.

Growth at this stage doesn't come from adding more services or hiring more consultants. It comes from more of the right people hearing about us and trusting what they hear.

In optimizing around job one, I became the CRO, the CMO, and the chief salesperson of this business.

Then I brought in Rebecca McDowell, founder of meego, who relieved me on the front line as a go-to-market leader for KRS.

She built an outreach system that is amplifying our ability to job one by 50x. We're in the pilot phase for automating it, with a big human layer on top while we figure out which parts have to stay human. Sarah is also building the same kind of system for our recruitment of consultants and director-level ICs.

Our team at Keenan Reid Strategies is very small, so we have to operate at our best capabilities. That also means putting highly capable people who were different from me.

Rebecca is a very intelligent and talented young woman with an entrepreneurial background – but she wasn’t trained by the book.

What’s great about her is that she gets out, gets things done, and figures things out on her own. However, the process rigor and analytics focus you absorb inside a large organization are things we had to teach her.

To get to a point where I can see a single-page weekly view of our pipeline data, I had to be really hands-on in teaching her how to do it. Once she got it, it was an unlock.

We even found her doing pipeline math by hand instead of in Excel, let alone in a reporting system. When we discovered it, we pitched in and fixed it together.

Then, we have Sarah – our Johnny-on-the-spot.

Nobody gets things done in a faster and more efficient way than Sarah. When something needs to happen, she makes it happen.

Sarah came from investment banking. That background matters more than it might sound, because investment banking also trains you to work at a pace and precision level that most environments never demand.

She learned to build models that are airtight, to automate the repetitive before it buries anyone, and to treat deadlines as a hard constraint – and we put all those skills directly to work.

In an independent consulting practice where everyone is stretched, having someone who can identify what's broken and fix it is not just a nice-to-have. It's how you scale without falling apart.

All of us play a role in the system. All of us treat each other with mutual respect because we’re all genuinely invested in what we’re developing.

That's what building a small business actually looks like.

Because we work in technology, we run automation like a production line:

That's how we stay lean. Our business model depends on it.

We pay top-tier consultants top-tier rates while passing disruptive value back to the client, and both of those things at once are only possible if we refuse to become a bloated operation.

Automation here is a continuous discipline, never a one-time project.

Everybody reaches one step and says "that's enough."

If I'd known I was going to get here, I would have said that's enough too. Now that I'm here, there's another puzzle to solve.

So my answer is, who knows what will happen. I’m not trying to figure that out yet.

If you take one thing from our playbook, take this: engineer the business model first. Then run Jon McNeill’s framework.

The five steps are powerful, and they only compound when the model underneath them is built to deliver disruptive value to a real, specific pain your customer feels right now.