The Bridges We Build

About 25 years ago, I founded and ran a photography business with a partner. We were doing good work, getting good bookings, charging good money. When a photographer I'd come to know, Simon Hoyle from Southlight Studio, said: "You're not charging nearly enough for your work. Think of the most you can charge, and then double it, and when that works, double it again."

We did. Not all at once, not without nerves about it, but we did. What surprised me wasn't what changed about the money. It was what changed about the work.

The higher price let us invest in every job. Better preparation. Better gear. More time with the bride and groom before the day. More care on the day itself. A different standard in the development of the photos afterwards. The price wasn't extracting from anyone. It was funding what the work needed to be in order to be worth what it cost.

The other thing that changed was who turned up. The clients who came in at the new price didn't argue with it. They were thoughtful about what they wanted from the experience. They expected more, and they were right to. They were investing in something that mattered to them, and they wanted the work to reflect that.

The same thing applies to advisory work, and most of us have been trained out of it.

Here's a definition that's helped us.

It gets more real with every step we take together. You can measure the distance closing – that's what makes it worth paying for, and worth more than the hours it took.

The substantive side of that is what every advisory conversation talks about – the visibility into the numbers, the recommendations, the work streams, the avoided mistake, the spotted opportunity. The emotional side, less often named, is what carrying that future actually feels like for the owner. Less guessing. Less alone with the hard decisions. Less ashamed about wanting what they want. Both sides matter at once. What the owner is paying for isn't a deliverable handed over at the end. It's the path getting clearer underneath them as we go, and the proof, step by step, that they're moving.

Once you have that definition in front of you, the pricing question changes shape.

We ran a bookkeeping firm for a couple of years and priced it fixed, by scope. The client didn't see hours. They saw a monthly fee for a defined piece of work. That model works for compliance, because the scope is genuinely knowable – the books need to be kept, the reconciliations need to be done, the reports need to come out. We priced it that way, and so did almost every CPA firm we've worked with. Nothing wrong with it. It's the right model for the work it's pricing.

The trap is what happens when that same calculation gets carried into advisory work. The client still sees a monthly fee. But the bookkeeper or fractional CFO is still working it out by estimating hours under the bonnet. I think this will take me about ten hours a month, my rate is roughly X, so I'll quote a fixed fee that lines up. It looks like value pricing from the client's side. It's compliance pricing wearing a different label.

Hours measure the wrong side of the transaction. Hours measure your effort. They don't measure what your effort produces for the owner. The same outcome can take many hours or few; either way the owner gets the same result. Pricing on hours tells the client you're charging for your time, which makes you a contractor – someone they can compare on rate against anyone else willing to do the same work.

What the owner actually gets – distance covered toward a future they couldn't have reached alone – is what the price is for. And it doesn't track with how long it took you.

If value is what makes the path real, then the discovery conversation isn't a sales meeting. It's the only way the price can be set honestly, because the price has to follow the distance you're covering, the distance has to follow the end state, and the end state has to come from the owner.

Most owners haven't articulated the end state in concrete terms. They have a felt version of it, and the specifics are deeply personal to them. One owner wants to play more golf. Another wants a Friday off that doesn't require a week of recovery. Another wants to be the chairman, not the operator. Another wants the business to be worth something they can sell in a few years. Another has hit a ceiling they can't push through and doesn't yet have language for what's on the other side of it.

The work of discovery is helping the owner hold those things up to the light long enough to name them as the destination. Twelve months. Two years. Five years. What does success actually look like, on each of those horizons? What does it feel like to get there? The answers aren't a template. They belong to that owner and no one else.

Pain, problems, purpose, and fit – both directions. We never push to close. We're committed to helping the prospect find the right answer, whether the right answer is us or not. That's not a posture; it's the only honest position when what's being priced is the path to their future. If we're not the right people to walk it with them, taking the engagement does damage to them and to us.

Once the engagement is underway, the work runs on rolling scope, not fixed scope.

Each monthly conversation generates work streams. Some are the fundamentals that hold year in and year out – the financial close, the patterns we're watching. Others are projects that surface as we go: a pricing review, a hiring decision, a cash flow concern, a tax planning move. Most of them sit in a queue and get prioritized against what's most important for moving toward the aim, and what's most urgent given what the business is dealing with that month.

Things get set down and picked back up. When something more urgent comes up, we'll set the original thing to one side and come back to it later when capacity allows. The aim doesn't change. The path to it flexes.

We deliver this with the client, not to them. We can stack twelve worthwhile work streams and they'll get to three. They have a business to run. The owner's calendar, focus, and willingness are inputs to what actually moves. Pricing on hours pretends that isn't true; rolling scope acknowledges it.

Every quarter we step back and revisit the aim. Is the destination still where they want to be heading? Has anything changed about the path? Most of the time the aim is steady but the route has shifted. Sometimes the aim itself has matured – the business has become more enjoyable than they expected and the urgency to step back has softened, or the opposite has happened and the timeline has accelerated. The quarterly check is how the engagement stays honest.

When you price for the distance covered instead of for the hours, two things change.

You can afford to invest in every engagement properly. The preparation before the monthly conversation. The thinking between sessions. The willingness to sit with a difficult question rather than rush past it. The presence in the relationship that the owner actually feels and can't quite name when they're explaining to someone else why they pay you. Cheap pricing forces cheap delivery, and cheap delivery means you're never quite there. Higher pricing funds being there. Most of what makes advisory worth what it costs is presence, and presence isn't free.

The price also changes who you end up working with. Owners who want to invest in their business at the level the engagement represents are different conversation partners from owners squeezing every dollar. Not better people. Different fit. The ones we work best with treat the engagement as something to use, not something to ration. The work gets used, the results show, and the engagement gets better over time on both sides.

If you're reading this with a book of clients who came in on hourly or compliance pricing, the next quarterly review is the natural conversation – and it isn't a repricing. It's an aim check. What are you trying to get to in the next year, two years, five years? What's changed since we started working together? Is what we're doing actually helping you get there? The price follows the answer. The point of the review isn't the price. The point is whether the path is still real.

For years we were a Microsoft shop. Word, Excel, Power BI. It worked, but it kept the work on our side of the wall. Moving to Google Workspace opened up something we didn't have before: genuine collaboration with clients, where moving data into, out of, and between Drive, Sheets, and Data Studio (the tool many of us still call Looker Studio) is easy and shared securely. That changed the experience on both sides of the engagement. Not to mention the ease of adding automations via App Scripts.

The near-native integration with Claude has changed how we work again. The aim document gets surfaced when I'm preparing for a session. The running notes get pulled into context when I'm working on something and want to remember what we said three months ago. The plumbing is quiet, and the work is faster, because the information that should be in front of me when I'm doing the work actually is.

No referral code for this one. Just new thinking.

A client can feel, without ever being able to name it, whether they're being billed for our time or invested in for their future. It shapes how they show up. Billed by the hour, they ration us, they hesitate before they call, they wait until the problem is expensive before they raise it. Priced on where they're trying to get to, they use us, and the work compounds because they're not counting the meter while they do.

Knowing the value is real lets us hold the line on priorities, so we're not unintentionally creeping the scope or cheapening the experience. It was about what we value, as much as what our clients do.

So the pricing model was never only about what we earn. It quietly decides what the relationship is allowed to become.

When we were moving into advisory, we didn't rewire everything at once. We didn't have the nerve to, and we didn't need to. The courage came one conversation at a time. We'd take the next client whose aim we actually understood, and have the conversation about where they were trying to get to before we had any conversation about price. Each one taught us something the last one hadn't, and the confidence built on the back of that, slowly, the way it's supposed to. The number could always follow once we'd seen what we were really being asked to build.

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Know someone navigating the compliance-to-advisory transition? Forward this email — or better yet, send them to baifokal.beehiiv.com to subscribe.get "good meeting, thanks" as they walk out the door, that one's for you. Hit reply and tell me about it — I'm genuinely curious how many of us have had that exact experience.