Blockhouse Services Group

The Spark

Trevis Gardner wasn’t looking at child care as a policy problem. He was looking at it as a talent problem. Two of his affiliate consultants that he was trying to recruit were pregnant, due weeks apart. Both were exactly the kind of skilled, experienced professionals he needed—and both were entering a season of life where traditional employment would push them out of the workforce entirely. At the same time, two of his senior associates were grandfathers whose availability revolved around grandchild care days. Gardner saw the same pattern from opposite ends of the career arc: talented people whose schedules didn’t fit a standard mold, and a labor market where every other employer was competing for the shrinking pool of people in the middle.

The Solution

Rather than find employees who fit his business, Gardner is designing his business to fit his staff and partners. He calls it a “flexible work contribution model.” Instead of hiring one full-time consultant to carry a client workload, he staffs that same workload across two or three part-time contributors who job-share—each working the hours that fit their child care (or grandchild care) reality.

Making it work required three structural changes. First, Gardner invested in collaboration tools—Microsoft 365 licenses and a project management platform—so multiple consultants can hand off client work seamlessly. Second, he restructured client agreements to allow multiple faces on a single engagement, so clients expect and accept the team model. Third, he made scheduling employee-driven: his grandfather consultants pick their own training delivery dates around grandchild care days, and his younger associates can build their hours around nap schedules and provider availability.

The model is already in motion. When associate consultant Brandy entered her third trimester, Gardner tapered her client contracts rather than losing her. He’s holding off on marketing her service lines until fall 2026—giving her six months postpartum to settle into the new rhythm. She knows the work will be waiting when she’s ready, shaped around her schedule. Meanwhile, Brandy’s husband left his own W-2 job to become a finance broker specifically so the family would have two flexible careers instead of one rigid one plus one flexible one—a decision Gardner sees playing out across his talent pool.

Gardner didn’t discover this approach in a case study. He borrowed the principle from another business he manages—a marina where he replaced three full-time young dockworkers with nine part-time retirees. The retirees had better people skills, lower turnover, and no interest in leaving for more hours somewhere else. The consulting version applies the same logic to the opposite end of the career arc: new parents who want meaningful work but need control over their hours.

The Results

The model is still early—Gardner is candid that it’s not yet mature enough to measure financial return. But the early signals are clear. Brandy’s response to the arrangement has been, in Gardner’s word, “wonderful.” We continue to look for engagements to fit her family priorities. And Gardner expects the biggest payoff to come from a channel most employers never think about: word-of-mouth recruiting.

“If I do it right, I won’t have to put any energy or resources into recruiting,” he says. “The moms and grandparents will do it themselves by word of mouth.” In a professional services market where finding skilled consultants is expensive and slow, eliminating recruiting friction is itself an ROI.

Gardner frames the strategic logic simply: “If you’re right in the middle, doing the same thing every other business is doing, you have to compete with every other business. But if you look at the sunrise of a career—when families are having kids—and the sunset, when folks are retired, you can shape your business to take advantage of that. There’s less competition and more talent.”