Marketing VFP Consulting
This post expands on a conversation from VFP Consulting CEO Stephanie Taylor’s recent appearance on We Built It Because We Had To, hosted by Jonathan W. Buckley.
A version of “consulting” has been quietly hollowed out over the last decade, and most companies don’t notice until a project stalls. On a recent podcast appearance, VFP Consulting CEO Stephanie Taylor put a name to it: the rise of SaaS didn’t just change how software gets implemented — it changed what companies think they’re buying when they hire a consultant.
The Order-Taker Problem
The pitch used to be that a consultant brought outside judgment: someone who’d ask hard questions about how your business actually works before touching a configuration screen. As SaaS matured, product specialists diluted that role. Companies believed they were hiring strategic partners. What they often got were order takers: people who could configure a tool quickly, but weren’t equipped (or asked) to challenge whether the underlying process deserved to be automated in the first place.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Configuring a well-built system on top of a broken process doesn’t fix the process; it just digitizes the problem, making it faster to run into the same wall. Stephanie’s read, after founding VFP in 2015 specifically to bring management-consulting discipline back into Salesforce and Certinia implementations, is that the questions worth asking are rarely about the product. They’re about process, change, and the people who have to live inside the new system every day. A technically “done” implementation and a “ready to go live” business are two different milestones, and conflating them is where many projects quietly go wrong.
It’s also why VFP has kept headcount flat for four to five years by choice. Being selective about which clients the team takes on directly hedges against becoming an order-taking shop at scale.
What AI Actually Commoditizes and VFP’s Answer
The second thread worth pulling on is where AI fits into all of this, because Stephanie doesn’t hedge on it. Hands-on-keyboard configuration the part of the job that’s easiest to describe and easiest to automate is commoditizing. By her estimate, that work already makes up 30–40% of VFP’s implementation engagements today. Rather than treat that as a threat to wait out, VFP built it directly into its offering.
The result is Campfire, a requirements and lifecycle management product VFP spun out of its own delivery process and now sells on the Salesforce AppExchange. The logic tracks with the order-taker argument: if configuration work is going to keep getting faster and cheaper, the value a consulting firm offers has to concentrate somewhere AI genuinely struggles: reading a room, navigating change resistance, translating a vague executive ask into a requirement that will actually hold up six months into an implementation. AI will keep winning at the keyboard. It’s a much harder case to win at judgment.
The Throughline
Both points land on the same idea: the parts of consulting that are easiest to systematize are also the parts most exposed to commoditization, whether that pressure comes from SaaS vendors, AI, or both at once. The firms that hold up are the ones that were never selling the keyboard work to begin with.
Want the rest of the conversation, including the story behind VFP’s first seven-figure project and what changed after a 2019 co-founder split?
