The WIG: Why We Now Define Every Engagement With One Number

Before we defined the WIG for the client engagement, the work felt productive. There were deliverables, and progress on various fronts: reports going out, systems getting built, research underway.

The problem was that “progress” and “the client’s actual problem” had quietly diverged, and nobody noticed until a week went by where every assigned task went undone because I’d been building something useful that nobody asked for.

That meeting, where I showed up with nothing on the list, is where the WIG came from.

What the WIG is

WIG stands for Wildly Important Goal. It’s a concept from execution methodology: one goal defined so specifically and measurably that every other decision gets filtered through it.

For this client, the WIG was: remove 20 hours per week from his workload.

Not “improve operations,” not “build better systems,” not “scale the business.” Twenty hours a week, off his calendar. That’s the number.

Twenty hours is specific enough to be testable. You can look at any proposed work and ask: does this actually reduce the client’s hours by some measurable amount? If the answer is yes, it’s a candidate. If the answer is no, or “maybe eventually,” it’s not the priority right now.

Why “improve operations” fails as a consulting goal

“Improve operations” as a brief produces a consultant who works on whatever is interesting, visible, and feels like progress, because “improve operations” is true of almost anything they might do. Building a new tracking spreadsheet improves operations. So does fixing a bottleneck, redesigning a workflow, or writing documentation, along with any number of things that are genuinely useful but don’t connect to what the client is actually constrained by.

The accountability failure in August 2025 happened precisely because there was no WIG. I knew the engagement involved operations improvement, so I improved an operation, just not the one that mattered most to the client at that moment.

Once the WIG was explicit, the question changed to this: of everything I could work on, what takes the most hours off the client’s plate? The email automation project cleared that bar easily (50 automations identified for inbox triage, an estimated 5 to 10 hours a week of the client’s time). So did the Asana escalation structure that pulls low-level admin decisions off his desk, and rebuilding the influencer program so his team could run it without him.

The beautiful spreadsheet I built the week I missed everything? It might have reduced some administrative burden eventually. But “eventually” isn’t the WIG, and “some” isn’t 20 hours.

How to find the right WIG for a given engagement

The WIG has to be defined in a unit the client can measure and feel. “Revenue generated” works. So does “hours saved,” or “inventory turns improved by X” for supply chain engagements, or “deals added to pipeline per week” for acquisition-focused clients.

What doesn’t work: “better,” “more efficient,” “improved visibility,” anything that requires the consultant to define whether it’s been achieved.

For operator-type clients, founders and CEOs who are personally the bottleneck in their business, hours saved is almost always the right framing. Their problem isn’t a lack of information or strategy. It’s that every decision still runs through them, and the business can’t scale past their personal capacity. The consulting value, then, is specifically removing decisions from their plate.

For the client, the follow-on questions from the WIG were: which of his current activities are the biggest consumers of his time? Which of those are candidates for automation (email triage, deal pipeline creation, routine notifications)? Which require a human but not necessarily the client (admin follow-up, content approval, certain supplier communications)? Which genuinely require the client and can’t be delegated or automated?

The 20-hour target made those questions concrete. Without it, you’re just describing the work abstractly. With it, you’re making a case that this specific automation or this specific escalation protocol takes X hours off the client’s calendar, and the sum of those claims is the engagement’s measurable output.

What changes when the WIG exists

The client stops wondering whether the engagement is valuable, because “valuable” has a definition. The consultant stops optimizing for looking productive, because productive and valuable are now the same thing. And the weekly check-in turns from a status update into a score: we removed this many hours this week, here’s how, here’s what’s next.

It also changes how you handle competing priorities. When something urgent comes up mid-engagement, and it always does, the question is whether it’s WIG-aligned. If it is, it moves to the front. If it isn’t, it gets scheduled or declined. The WIG is what keeps an engagement from becoming a general-purpose task queue for whatever the client wants done today.

Every engagement we run now starts with the same question: what’s the one number that makes this engagement unambiguously successful? That number is the WIG, and nothing else starts until we have it.