Fifteen years ago, the “fixer” was declared dead — the lone operator who got things done through connections belonged to another era. In a recent workshop with the management team of a Dutch consultancy firm, the fixer walked back in. Not as one person this time, but as a team: fifteen to twenty people sent into an acute, politically exposed crisis with one assignment — force a breakthrough, fast.
What the fixer actually sells
The surprising part is what these teams are not: deep content experts. A fixer does not need to know the subject better than the client. The assignment is different — take an urgent problem that must be solved within months, and pull it off the ground with a team. The example discussed in the workshop: a government that must become more decisive sounds like one organisation, but is in reality a field of departments, agencies and interests. Everyone already has an idea of the solution. Nobody can get the others to move.
“Problem-solving is actually not that hard. It is above all about getting all those people on one line.”
That sentence is the product. In a public sector that, in the team’s own words, “hops from crisis to crisis” where it once planned for the long term, what clients pay for is not analysis. It is the organised ability to align stakeholders under time pressure — stakeholder navigation, packaged as an offer.
Why now: the report stopped being the product
The timing is not an accident. The classic consulting product — expert analysis — is commoditising in front of the team’s eyes. Clients now run the firm’s reports through AI and come back with questions; the expectation in the room was blunt: soon everyone will have the facts in order, and the difference will be made by people who can steer what happens next. Their answer, visible across its proposition in the last two years, is to move from giving advice to realising the change — and the fixer is the sharpest version of that move. You cannot ask a chatbot to get seven departments on one line by March.
“Clients run our advice and reports through AI and tell us: nice advice — Copilot says this.”
The honest qualifier
Selling the fixer is unfinished business. Like most professional-services firms, this management consulting firm has advisers who must do everything, including acquisition — “we have no real sales.” The fixer offer asks for a different motion: spotting acute issues before they become tenders and moving a team toward them — selling on anticipated urgency rather than on long relationships and content depth. The firm has started building that motion, and management is openly unsure whether it will work. The workshop’s opening exercise said why this honesty matters: one wall full of notes on how the market is changing, and opposite it, an almost empty wall on how their own selling has changed.
The work
The fixer is the professional-services version of a pattern this research keeps meeting: when AI makes the analysis a commodity, the value moves to the capability — here, the ability to force a breakthrough among stakeholders who each hold a veto. The question for any supplier selling expertise: when your client can generate the report themselves, what is the breakthrough only you can deliver?
The five demands customers now make of suppliers — including “Involve everyone”: see the research at Current Trends. From the Future of Selling research programme — see the working paper Engineering Systemic Value in B2B.
About this article. This article is part of the Future of Selling research programme. It illustrates one pattern from our current finding, Systemic Value: B2B customers increasingly judge suppliers by the improvement they bring to the customer’s wider system, not by the product alone. Read the full analysis in the working paper Engineering Systemic Value in B2B, or get one research update a month.
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