One of my tasks today is to mark up a purchase agreement, a routine part of my work. I have already skimmed it and know what is ahead of me. Actually, I didn’t even need to skim it to know what I’ll face. It will be a document designed to achieve three purposes: to catch out the unwary; to anchor to aggressive positions; and to increase legal bills. Never mind that time kills deals and the attorneys on both sides know the final terms will not resemble those presented in the initial draft, going through the back-and-forth of sending redline after redline is the process of “negotiating” a contract. An entire economic model has been constructed around this process, the almighty billable hour.

Our value proposition is different. We charge our clients to deliver positive outcomes no matter how much of our time it takes. We also offer pricing certainty. Those are the things clients care about and why our model will prevail. It is the difference between delivering a process and delivering an outcome. I came across a blog post this week that presented a story illustrating this. I’ll reproduce part of the post here:

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young boy. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom. Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars. “What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!” So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer………………….. $ 2.00

Knowing where to tap…………………….. $ 9,998.00

That story is apocryphal. Nonetheless, it really was the man’s knowledge that constituted all of his value, not his time. We take more time on our projects than did the old man in the story, but we too are in the outcomes business. And even though we have lost the business of potential clients who would prefer to pay for a process, the outcomes business is where we will stay.