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Nothing until you win

My advisory contracts at Common Ground rest on an agreed result with no retainer, so my pay rides with the client's outcome.

Advisory in my category usually sells as a monthly retainer attached to loose deliverables: brand work, strategy decks, items that no client can link to a figure they would measure anyway. I wrote Common Ground's advisory contracts differently. Each starts from a result agreed in advance, a baseline, and a measuring rhythm. No retainer. I carry the risk and the upside, instead of billing for hours or documents.

My thinking: production is now close to free. Sites, decks, outreach and CRMs have all been commoditized by the AI tools everybody can use. The one thing left that deserves payment is a result pegged to a figure the client already tracks. Work that cannot be connected to such a number is something about to be commoditized.

The diagnostic itself became the contract. A free first conversation exposes the problem, and the engagement begins right there on an agreed metric. There is no paid diagnostic step and no proposal theater between. If you cannot name the number a client would already measure, you are not selling a result. You are selling something that is about to cost nothing.

I put my own compensation on the line next to the client's outcome, rather than asking the client to pay either way.

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