Before we defined the WIG for the Drups Ventures engagement, the work felt productive. There were deliverables. Progress was being made on various fronts. Reports were going out, systems were being built, research was happening.
The problem was that “progress” and “the client’s actual problem” had quietly diverged from each other, and nobody had 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 it functions as a filter for every other decision.
For Joseph at Drups Ventures, the WIG was: remove 20 hours per week from his workload.
Not “improve operations.” Not “build better systems.” Not “scale the business.” Twenty hours. Per 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 Joseph’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 what’s interesting, what’s visible, and what feels like progress. Because “improve operations” is true of almost any work they might do. Building a new tracking spreadsheet improves operations. So does fixing a bottleneck. So does redesigning a workflow. So does writing documentation. So does 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 Joseph at that moment.
Once the WIG was explicit, the question changed. The question became: of everything I could work on, what directly reduces Joseph’s hours by the most? The email automation project (50 automations identified for inbox triage, estimated to be consuming 5 to 10 hours per week of Joseph’s time) is a clear WIG move. The Asana escalation structure that removes low-level admin decisions from Joseph’s desk: WIG move. Rebuilding the influencer program so that Joseph’s team handles it without his involvement: WIG move.
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 that the client can measure and feel. “Revenue generated” works. “Hours saved” works. “Inventory turns improved by X” works for supply chain engagements. “Deals added to pipeline per week” works 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 that they don’t have enough information or enough strategy. Their problem is 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 Joseph, 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 Joseph (admin follow-up, content approval, certain supplier communications)? Which genuinely require Joseph 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 Joseph’s calendar, and the sum of those claims is the engagement’s measurable output.
What changes when the WIG exists
The client stops wondering if the engagement is valuable, because “valuable” has a definition. The consultant stops optimizing for looking productive, because productive and valuable are the same thing. The weekly check-in stops being a status update and starts being a score: we removed this many hours this week, here’s how we got there, 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 this question: what’s the one number that makes this engagement unambiguously successful? The answer to that question is the WIG, and nothing starts until we have it.
