MoneyEngine · Growth consulting & coaching
How a solo consultant keeps thirteen client engagements in view
Impact
13 engagementsTracked from mail, none entered by hand143 repliesWent out that she did not have to write
310 contactsBuilt from mail she was already sending
“I think this is the first time in years that I, as a customer, have gotten a wow moment.”
Tash Jefferies · Founder, MoneyEngine
- Company
- MoneyEngine
- Work
- “I help early stage tech founders make money”
- Also
- Five-time founder, two-time TEDx speaker, mentor at 500 Global, Techstars and a16z
- Using Clarity since
- November 2025
A spreadsheet, and several hours a week of follow-ups
Tash consults and coaches early-stage founders on growth. A hired gun, in her own framing. Every engagement is a relationship rather than a ticket: a programme, a cohort, a founder she is walking through a raise. There is no account manager and no ops person. There is her.
She was tracking it in a manual spreadsheet: outreach, conversions, the KPIs that tell her whether the month is working. On top of that went several hours a week of writing follow-ups by hand.
And the failure mode is not a full inbox. It is an engagement that quietly stops moving while she is busy with another one, and nothing in email marks the difference between a client who is mid-programme and a client who has gone quiet.
Open an engagement from the mail, and keep it in view
Her board was built from her own mail rather than from anything she typed. 13 engagements, each opened from real threads, with 310 contacts and 64 milestones across them.
What the pass had to get right
- A coach she pays is not a client. A vendor is not a client. Those get flagged, not seeded as revenue.
- A CC'd assistant or a scheduling tool is not the client, even when they are the only name visible on the thread.
- An engagement is matched on a real identifier: a programme name, an invoice number, a contract reference. Never on a generated title that changes between passes.
Of the thirteen, twelve were confident enough to show. One stayed a candidate because the evidence genuinely was not there, which is the behaviour we want and the reason the other twelve can be trusted.
Replace the KPI spreadsheet with the pipeline itself
The dashboard shows the engagements by stage, new to in progress to closed won, with a value against each. That is what her spreadsheet was for. The difference is that the spreadsheet was true when she last updated it, and this is true when the mail last arrived.
She measured it against Streak, which is the honest comparison for a consultant running a pipeline out of Gmail. The argument for us was not features, it was that the tracking is a by-product of the mail rather than a second job.
Draft the follow-ups, trained on her own ICP
Over 295 days, 143 replies went out that she did not have to write.
They are not generic. She uploaded her own Ideal Customer Profile document into the platform as a snippet, so the drafts speak to the founders she actually wants rather than to whoever wrote in. That is the same mechanism as her voice. Give it what you already have written down, and it stops guessing.
Tell a client from a coach, a vendor and an assistant
A consultant’s mailbox is full of people who look like clients and are not. The person coaching her is not a client. The tool that emails her receipts is not a client. Neither is the assistant CC’d on a thread who happens to be the only name visible on it.
Getting that wrong does not produce a slightly untidy board. It produces a board that says she has more revenue relationships than she has, which is worse than no board.
What the pass had to hold
- The account’s own disqualifiers, so a vendor-coach relationship is flagged rather than seeded as revenue.
- Real identifiers over generated titles, because a project renamed between passes breaks any match on text.
- The literal reference searched across the whole mailbox, not only the threads already linked, so a real engagement hiding outside them still gets found.
Of the thirteen it opened, twelve were confident enough to show and one stayed a candidate because the evidence was genuinely thin. That last one is the reason to trust the other twelve.
The test she set for it
She set the bar herself, and it was not a feature list: if it closes one deal, it has paid for itself.
That is the right test for a solo consultant. One engagement is worth multiples of what any tool costs, so the question is never whether it is cheap. It is whether it moves one deal that would otherwise have gone quiet.