Scaling: case studies and build-and-release

Apply ../00-lead-generation-guardrails/SKILL.md first. Every step this skill defines must still resolve channel, relationship, and jurisdiction against that skill's compliance matrix before touching a real recipient, list, or send. This skill also inherits 00's results/case-study honesty gate and pricing/guarantee honesty gate directly — the sections below carry those gates' operative tests forward into this skill's two specific uses (case studies, build-and-release pricing), plus the deltas each use actually requires, the same way skill 07 carries the same gates forward for its own context with its own named deltas rather than an unchanged copy. If 00's gates are revised, reconcile this skill's sections against the revision rather than letting the two drift.

What this skill covers

Two separate unlocks, once skills 01 through 09 have produced at least one real, completed or in-flight engagement: using case studies built from that engagement's actual results to grow outbound pipeline, and offering a build-and-release consulting model to scale delivery capacity past what one agency's own headcount can fulfill one retainer at a time. This is a business-model/consulting skill: it declares no capability abstraction and has no external tool or provider dependency. Out of scope: the sales frameworks that produce the results being cited in a case study, and the discovery/proposal call mechanics themselves — both are skill 07's job, not this one's. This skill starts once a result exists to report on, and ends at the two go-to-market decisions named above.

Case studies as the outbound-growth unlock

A substantiated case study is the strongest cold-outreach and proposal asset this pack produces, because it replaces an unproven cold claim with a specific, checkable result — it is what turns skill 05's cold-email proof line and skill 07's proposal-call ROI walkthrough from assertion into evidence. That is exactly why 00's results/case-study honesty gate exists, and why it governs every word of this section.

Sourcing a case study. Build it only from data this pack's own chain already produced for a real, completed or in-flight engagement: the qualified-lead definition agreed on skill 07's proposal call, the actual numbers from skill 09's delivery reporting, and the client's own stated pain and goal from skill 07's discovery call, in the client's own words. Never author a number for a case study that skill 09's reporting cannot currently reproduce on request — a case study is a republished report, not a new claim invented at publish time.

Two allowed forms, no third.

• Real, substantiated, permissioned. Every quantitative or outcome claim traces to a specific, retrievable, client-permissioned data point exactly as 00's gate requires, and the client has separately agreed the number can be shared publicly — accuracy and permission are independent checks and both must clear before publication.
• Explicitly labeled illustrative, anonymized-composite, or practitioner-estimate — and only with a stated real basis. Where no single client's number can be shared, the copy names one of 00's three labels in the same sentence the number appears in, and states what the number is actually based on: a real completed or in-flight engagement that cannot be attributed to a named client ("a practitioner estimate based on a completed engagement we can't name"), a blend of more than one real engagement ("a composite drawn from three completed engagements"), or a cited third-party benchmark. Never describe the basis as "typical" or "typical results," and never claim typicality any other way — 00 forbids extrapolating a single best week or client into a "typical" claim, and asserting typicality needs the same substantiated sample size a real number would. A label with no stated basis does not qualify as this form; it is the disallowed third form below wearing a label.
• There is no third form. A number with no real basis at all — not a named client's result, not an unattributed real engagement, not a cited benchmark — must not be published under any label, hedge, or qualifier. 00's gate treats an unsubstantiated claim as unsubstantiated regardless of how conservative or well-labeled it sounds: a hedge in the copy does not fix a claim with no underlying data.