The architect's incentive: Why construction models work and consulting models don't

Architects don't get paid more if your building takes longer to construct. Yet consultancies do.

Imagine if your architect profited from delays, change orders, and complexity. Imagine if they recommended the most expensive materials not because they're right for your building, but because they extend the timeline.

That's the model we've normalised in consulting.

The cost of this misalignment is staggering.

Enterprises routinely spend 2-5% of their total costs on consulting. Bloated teams stretch timelines, recommendations gather dust on shelves, and you're funding their learning curve rather than your transformation.

Fewer than half of projects start with clear success metrics, which means you're buying activity, not outcomes.

The billable hour rewards inefficiency: consultants stretched thin across mismatched projects, delivering mediocre work under pressure to hit utilisation targets that have nothing to do with your results.

This persists because the incentives are broken at a structural level. Utilisation targets demand that consultants bill hours, not deliver value. The longer projects take, the bigger the team they deploy, the more they profit.

Your success and theirs are fundamentally at odds. When you call out delays or bloat, you're fighting against their business model, not working with it.

So we ripped it up. Value-based pricing instead.

We charge when we deliver measurable impact, not when we log hours. This shared investment creates shared accountability: focused teams, clear outcomes, and zero incentive to drag projects out. Our fees are tied to your metrics, not our utilisation rates.

If we don't create value worth the investment, we don't get paid.

In practice, this means we move faster because speed benefits us too. We recommend what works, not what extends the contract. We design for your existing IT estate, not for the most complex solution that maximises our fees.

Our reputation depends entirely on your results, which forces a level of honesty that the traditional model simply can't sustain. When we say something won't work, you know it's because we've evaluated it against your success, not ours.

This isn't just fairer, it's better business.

As AI automates much of what consulting firms once sold as expertise, the industry is being forced to confront a simple truth: clients want partners who share their risk and their upside, not vendors who profit from confusion.

Real partnerships require structural alignment. Payment tied to outcomes.

That starts with transparency and proves itself through shared risk.