There is a version of your practice where that question becomes a $60,000 engagement instead of an awkward twenty minutes on a call. The Practice is how you get there — a licensed diagnostic, a room that helps you price it, and a reason to call every account you already have.
You have more than ten years of it. The problem is that expertise sold by the day has a ceiling, and the ceiling arrives faster than anyone tells you.
A client asks what AI means for their workforce. You give a thoughtful answer, for free, and it ends there — because you have no instrument that turns the question into scoped work.
The engagement ends well. Then months pass, because you have no legitimate reason to make contact that is not a check-in email nobody wants to receive.
You quote a day rate. They compare it to a contractor. You discount, because there is nothing in the room that makes the comparison obviously wrong.
Every firm that escaped the day-rate trap did the same thing: they built an instrument, and the instrument sold the engagement. You do not need to build one. You need to license one that already works.
“I can help with your workforce planning. My rate is $2,500 a day.”
“I run a Work Architecture Diagnostic. It shows you which of your 180 decision types have no owner, where 361,000 hours a year are going, and what it's costing the organization. It takes six weeks.”
The core membership. Everything you need to sell and deliver engagements above day rate.
Every two weeks, ninety minutes, ten people. Bring a live opportunity — leave with a scope, a price, and a positioning line. Not a mastermind. A working session on deals that are actually on your desk.
Every month, a client-ready point of view on what is happening to work and workforce in your top three accounts — their sector, not generic AI commentary. You send it under your own name. Twelve legitimate reasons a year to be in front of a client.
Once a quarter, we take a capability you already have and turn it into a named offer — scope, price, a one-page sales artifact, and the sequence to take it to clients you already hold.
Everything in The Practice, plus me in the room on your client calls.
As your named workforce-architecture specializt. You bring the relationship and the account knowledge. I bring the framework and the fact that I have sat on the enterprise side of this table. A one-person practice stops looking like a one-person practice.
Licensed separately. You do not need to be in The Practice to run it — though most people who run it end up wanting the room that helps them price it.
You send your client a structured intake workbook — designed to be completed in under ninety minutes, using data they already have. It comes back to the instrument. You receive a client-ready report in your own branding: work states, friction hours, decision ownership, and where human and AI boundaries actually sit.
You never build the analysis. You present it.
The $500 is a disbursement. Put it on the invoice as a line item — clients expect professional tooling to have a cost, and it signals you are running an instrument rather than improvising.
Independent HR, People and Talent advisors with at least one active client and a practice they intend to still be running in three years. Most members came out of senior in-house roles in the last two years.
You do not need to understand AI deeply. You need to be willing to walk into an account you already hold with a different kind of conversation.
The frameworks you would be licensing are the same ones used in enterprise engagements — which is the only reason they hold up in front of your client's executive team.
HR. REWRITTEN. and WORK. REWRITTEN. — the executive field guide and the book behind the Human + AI Workforce Architecture™, the Work Architecture Atlas™, and the Hybrid Role Canvas™.
T.R. Ellis Group — where the same diagnostic runs for CHROs, executive teams and PE operating partners at enterprise scale. You are licensing tested instruments, not theory.
Created by Trellis Usher — twenty-five years across enterprise HR and talent leadership, and years outside it as a fractional executive making these decisions the hard way. trellisusher.com →
I read every one. If it is not a fit I will tell you plainly and point you somewhere better.
No, but certified practitioners skip the application conversation. If you have not done the certification, the application just gives me what the cohort would have shown me anyway.
That is a legitimate path and plenty of people take it. $99 a month plus $500 per full diagnostic, no membership required. Apply above and select instrument only.
Yes. The client-facing report carries your branding. The instrument is attributed in the methodology note, in the same way a research firm's index would be.
I guarantee the artifact and the conversation — that within ninety days you will have a client-ready diagnostic on a named account and will have presented it. I do not guarantee revenue, because I cannot sit in your client's budget meeting. Anyone who promises you otherwise is selling something.
Yes, once, for up to two months — engagements get intense and I would rather you came back. Cancel any time with thirty days' notice.
A mastermind is people helping each other. This is an instrument you license, an analysis you did not have to build, and a room where the facilitator has run this work at enterprise scale. If nobody else showed up to the Deal Room, you would still get the briefs and the diagnostic.