From $300/Hour Consulting to $49/Month Platform: Our 25-Year Journey

The Early Days: Questions as a Service

When Ivanka Menken and Gerard Blokdijk moved from the Netherlands to Brisbane in 2000, they brought a simple but powerful idea: the best consultancy is built on asking the right questions. After years of management consulting across Europe, North America, and Australasia, they noticed that the organisations that improved fastest weren't the ones with the most expensive advisors:they were the ones that asked themselves the hardest questions.

The Art of Service started as an ITIL training and consultancy firm. Ivanka delivered courses and organisational change management. Gerard built the question databases. Together, they served clients in government, telecommunications, healthcare, and financial services.

Going Digital: 2009

By 2009, the shift was clear: digital delivery could reach more people at lower cost than in-person consulting. The company went fully online, transforming classroom-based ITIL courses into digital certification programmes with lifetime access.

This wasn't just a change in delivery:it was a change in philosophy. Instead of teaching 20 people in a room, they could serve 20,000 people across 100+ countries. The question-based methodology that made their consulting effective translated directly into self-assessment toolkits that any team could use independently.

The Publishing Years: 2010-2023

What started as a handful of ITIL toolkits grew into one of the world's largest compliance and operational excellence libraries. Gerard authored over 1,500 titles across every major compliance framework, from NIST Cybersecurity to ISO 27001 to AS9100. Ivanka published 186+ works and built the accredited certification programme.

The catalogue eventually spanned 190,000+ products across the store, the academy (with 15,000+ courses), and artofservice.com.au.

The Platform Era: 2024-2025

In 2024, we began transforming 25 years of accumulated knowledge into something fundamentally different: an AI-powered compliance intelligence platform. Gerard architected a knowledge graph with 2.1 million nodes and 3.2 million relationships, covering 692 compliance frameworks with 819,000+ cross-framework control mappings.

The platform at compliance.theartofservice.com launched in 2025. It offers AI-powered framework recommendations, cross-framework comparison, gap analysis, and compliance pathway planning. What once required weeks of consultant time now takes minutes.

The $300 to $49 Equation

Compliance consultancy still costs $200-$500 per hour. A typical engagement runs tens of thousands of dollars. We built the platform at $49/month because we believe every organisation:not just those with six-figure consulting budgets:deserves access to world-class compliance intelligence.