The Work That Creates the Deal Is Often the Hardest Work to Charge For

Originally published on Substack.

There is a category of work in business that is surprisingly difficult to price.

A client needs a supplier. You find one.

A company has a product idea but does not know who can build it. You identify the right engineering teams, evaluate their capabilities, clarify the technical boundaries, and bring the parties together.

Two companies that would otherwise never have met are introduced. You help them understand each other, work through technical questions, compare proposals, resolve misunderstandings, and keep the conversation moving until, eventually, an order is signed.

Sometimes the assignment is even less defined.

A client simply says:

“We want to build this product. Can you help us make it happen?”

What follows may involve mechanical engineering, electronics, software, industrial design, supply-chain sourcing, AI integration, vendor qualification, cost estimates, feasibility reviews, and endless coordination between people who speak completely different professional languages.

None of this is abstract.

It takes time.

It consumes attention.

It draws on relationships, reputation, accumulated judgment, and years of experience.

Yet this kind of work is often among the hardest professional work to charge for properly.

That is the paradox.

A company may readily approve $500,000 for a machine, but hesitate over $30,000 for the person who helps prevent it from buying the wrong one.

1. Companies Know How to Price Things. They Struggle to Price Reduced Uncertainty.

Imagine a manufacturer planning to purchase a robotic automation system.

The equipment costs $1 million.

There will be specifications, procurement procedures, quotations, negotiations, purchase orders, milestone payments, and acceptance criteria.

The asset is tangible. Everyone understands that it has a price.

Now imagine someone says:

“I will spend the next two months clarifying your requirements, identifying twenty potential suppliers, filtering them down to three credible candidates, reviewing their technical proposals, helping you understand the trade-offs, and making sure you select the right partner.”

A $100,000 consulting fee may suddenly feel expensive.

Why?

Because businesses are generally very good at assigning prices to things.

They are much worse at assigning prices to uncertainty removed.

A machine is visible.

Software can be demonstrated.

Components can be counted and placed in inventory.

But the value of knowing which supplier is unreliable, which technical architecture is unlikely to scale, or which decision will cause a six-month delay often remains invisible precisely because the problem was prevented.

Economics has a useful language for this: transaction costs.

Ronald Coase’s work on the nature of firms emphasized that markets do not operate frictionlessly. Finding counterparties, gathering information, negotiating agreements, coordinating activity, and enforcing arrangements all consume resources.

In other words:

Finding the right party, evaluating them, negotiating with them, and getting both sides to execution are not peripheral activities around a transaction. They are part of the cost of making the transaction possible.

The problem is that these costs are often hidden.

And invisible costs are notoriously difficult to price.

2. The Best Consultants Do Not Sell Advice. They Sell Fewer Wrong Turns.

Consulting is often described as a simple exchange:

“I know something you do not know, so you pay me for the answer.”

That description misses most of the real value.

In complex industries, the consultant is often selling something much more important:

a reduction in uncertainty.

Suppose a company wants to enter humanoid robotics.

Finding suppliers is not particularly difficult.

Google can find them.

LinkedIn can find them.

Trade shows can find them.

Industry directories can produce dozens of names.

The real questions are harder:

Did this company actually build the system shown in its demo?

Can its mechanical design survive production, or was it optimized for a prototype?

Are its actuators dependable at volume?

Who owns and maintains the software stack?

Can the system operate for an eight-hour shift, or only for a controlled demonstration?

Will the engineering team still exist twelve months from now?

Is a bid that is 20% cheaper today likely to create 50% more integration cost later?

A spreadsheet of supplier names cannot answer these questions.

Experience can.

A strong operator carries an enormous filtering system inside their head.

They may look at a proposal for ten minutes and immediately recognize a problem.

But those ten minutes are not worth ten minutes.

They may represent fifteen years of failed commissioning cycles, customer acceptance tests, supplier disputes, field repairs, production problems, and product launches.

This is one of the central economics of professional expertise:

You are rarely paying for how long the answer took. You are paying for how long it took someone to become capable of giving the answer.

3. Expertise Creates an Awkward Pricing Paradox

The better someone becomes at solving a problem, the less time they may need to solve it.

That creates a strange contradiction.

An inexperienced consultant may spend two weeks conducting research and deliver an eighty-page presentation.

The visible effort looks substantial.

An experienced operator may look at the same situation and say, within an afternoon:

“Do not pursue this project.”

Or:

“Of these three suppliers, only the second one is worth taking to the next stage.”

Or perhaps they simply make one introduction:

“I know this team. You should talk to them.”

That single call may save three months.

If professional services are priced entirely by time, expertise is penalized.

The client asks:

How many hours did this take?

The more useful question is:

How much time, risk, and misallocated capital did your intervention eliminate?

Those are fundamentally different ways of understanding value.

This is why hourly billing works poorly for some forms of high-trust advisory work.

Once the core value comes from judgment rather than labor volume, other models—fixed project fees, retainers, milestone-based fees, or value-linked compensation—often make more economic sense.

4. The Hardest Value to Charge For Is Value That Exists Before the Outcome

There is, however, a problem with pure value-based pricing.

The consultant rarely controls the final result.

I can introduce a company to a customer.

But I cannot control whether the customer ultimately purchases the product.

That depends on pricing, product quality, budget cycles, sales execution, internal politics, timing, and dozens of other variables.

I can identify the right supplier.

But I cannot guarantee that both organizations will execute perfectly.

I can help define a product.

But whether that product succeeds also depends on engineering, manufacturing, distribution, financing, and market demand.

This is why making all compensation dependent on a success fee is often equally flawed.

The advisor performs the work upfront while assuming risks created by decisions they do not control.

That is not an alignment mechanism.

It is simply a transfer of risk.

A more robust structure in many cases is:

base fee + success fee.

The base fee compensates for real professional work:

• diagnosis,

• research,

• technical judgment,

• sourcing,

• introductions,

• coordination,

• meetings,

• evaluation,

• project management.

The success component rewards the creation of exceptional downstream value.

This distinction matters.

Professional labor has value even when the final transaction depends on other parties.

And exceptional outcomes can still justify upside sharing.

That is a healthier model than:

“Help us first. If something happens, we’ll take care of you later.”

In business, “later” is not a compensation structure.

It is an ambiguity.

5. “Can You Just Take a Quick Look?” Is One of the Most Expensive Sentences in Professional Services

Many advisory relationships begin innocently.

“Can you just take a quick look?”

First, you review a proposal.

Then you introduce two potential suppliers.

Then you join a technical call.

Then someone asks you to comment on the quotations.

A week later, the client tells the supplier:

“Please coordinate the technical details with him.”

At some point, something subtle has happened.

You are no longer offering informal advice.

You have become part of the project.

But there is no scope.

No contract.

No deliverable.

No commercial boundary.

And usually no agreed fee.

That creates a predictable outcome.

If the project fails:

“Nothing really came out of it.”

If the project succeeds:

“Our team did most of the work anyway.”

The problem is not necessarily that anyone is acting in bad faith.

The problem is structural.

When professional work is not defined as a product before it begins, it is easily reclassified as a favor afterward.

Once that happens, discussing money becomes uncomfortable for everyone.

6. The Real Product Is Not Expertise. It Is a Defined Way of Engaging.

A mature professional-services business does not simply charge a higher day rate.

It turns ambiguous involvement into a clearly defined product.

Suppose a company wants help developing a new technical product.

The work could be structured like this.

Phase 1: Diagnosis

Clarify the requirement.

Assess technical feasibility.

Map the supply chain.

Estimate cost ranges.

Identify major technical and commercial risks.

This is a paid deliverable.

Phase 2: Solution and Partner Selection

Identify suppliers.

Evaluate capabilities.

Compare architectures.

Run RFI or RFQ processes.

Coordinate technical discussions.

Shortlist credible partners.

This is another paid engagement.

Phase 3: Execution Support

Participate in design reviews.

Resolve cross-company issues.

Review quotations and schedules.

Track critical milestones.

Support negotiation and technical decision-making.

This can operate under a monthly retainer or project fee.

Phase 4: Outcome-Based Compensation

If the work generates a significant contract, financing event, licensing deal, or other measurable commercial outcome, an additional success fee can be triggered.

Suddenly, a vague request—

“Can you help us get this done?”

—becomes a sequence of professional services that can be budgeted, purchased, reviewed, extended, or stopped.

This matters because companies are not inherently unwilling to pay consultants.

What they dislike is paying for something they cannot clearly define.

The first job of a consultant, therefore, is often not to prove how smart they are.

It is to make the service legible.

7. The Best Advisors Absorb Complexity

I increasingly think one of the most useful ways to understand this kind of work is through the phrase:

complexity absorption.

The customer sees one supplier.

The advisor may have filtered twenty.

The customer attends one meeting.

The advisor may have spent days making sure both sides understand what the meeting actually needs to accomplish.

The customer sees a contract.

Behind it may sit dozens of calls, technical judgments, expectation resets, introductions, follow-ups, negotiations, and quiet interventions that prevented the process from collapsing.

A strong intermediary absorbs this complexity.

And then something ironic happens.

Because the complexity has been absorbed successfully, the client thinks:

“That seemed straightforward.”

This is the curse of excellent professional services.

When the work is performed badly, everyone sees the difficulty.

When it is performed well, much of the difficulty disappears.

The better the advisor, the more invisible the work can become.

8. There Is a Legitimate Reason Clients Distrust Consultants

It is too easy to turn this argument into a complaint that companies do not respect expertise.

That would be incomplete.

Clients have good reasons to be skeptical.

Some advisors sell access they do not really possess.

Some package internet research as proprietary insight.

Some produce expensive presentations but disappear when execution begins.

Some claim credit when a project succeeds while assuming no responsibility when it fails.

So the question is not:

Should consultants be paid?

The useful question is:

What exactly should they be paid for, and how should that value be measured?

A mature professional relationship makes several things explicit before work begins:

What problem are we trying to solve?

What does the advisor control?

What does the client control?

What is the scope?

What counts as completion?

Which outcomes depend on third parties?

What is the fixed professional fee?

What milestones trigger additional compensation?

If exceptional economic value is created, how will that value be shared?

Then both sides sign an agreement.

And the work begins.

This is far healthier than pretending the relationship is informal until money becomes important.

The Invisible Infrastructure Behind Business

Some forms of value are easy to price.

A servo motor costs something.

A robot costs something.

A software license costs something.

A factory costs something.

Other forms of value are much harder to see.

Someone tells you which road not to take.

Someone recognizes that a supplier will fail before the failure happens.

Someone introduces two people who would otherwise never have met.

Someone identifies a technical flaw six months before it becomes an expensive field problem.

Someone uses fifteen years of accumulated experience to turn a three-month investigation into a three-day decision.

None of these things can be placed in inventory.

They have no serial number.

But they are not free.

Markets do not organize themselves.

Deals do not close themselves.

Products do not assemble their own supply chains.

Someone has to search, filter, interpret, persuade, coordinate, negotiate, and absorb uncertainty.

Historically, much of this work has been hidden inside organizations, relationships, personal favors, and informal networks.

But as technology becomes more specialized, supply chains more fragmented, and products more interdisciplinary, this invisible layer of professional work becomes increasingly important.

The lesson is not that consultants should simply charge more.

It is that both sides need a better definition of what is being purchased.

Because a good advisor is rarely selling a few hours of time.

They are selling the accumulated cost of all the mistakes, projects, relationships, and decisions that made those few hours useful.

And sometimes the most valuable thing a company can buy is not another asset.

It is the ability to avoid buying the wrong one.