Why our fees are published

Most of the early back and forth in this market exists only to establish price, which usually means two calls to describe the work, a week to turn a proposal around and a third call to talk through it. If you already know that you need a quality of earnings report on a twelve million dollar business, you should be able to see the fee, read what actually gets delivered for it and decide inside five minutes whether this is worth continuing, and if it turns out not to be a fit then you have spent five minutes.

That cuts the same way for us, because the hours that go into engagements which were never going to happen are hours taken away from the ones that are.

Almost all of this work sits on somebody else's clock. An exclusivity period is already running, a credit committee has a date in the diary, a board meets on the same day every month, or a round has a close date that everyone has agreed to. The days spent working out what something costs come out of that window, and they come out of the front of it, which is the part where there is still time to act on whatever the work turns up.

Publishing the fee takes those days back, because you read the scope, you see the number, and the first conversation we have is about the work itself.

The method depends on it from end to end, since every adjustment in a databook ties back to the document that supports it, every assumption in a model carries the source it came from and the date it was set, every report states which procedures were performed and which were not, and every deliverable arrives with a list of what remains open and who is holding it. A firm that works that way should be able to tell you what something costs without being asked twice.

Published fees work where the deliverable is defined, and they stop working for an embedded mandate, for running a finance function through a transaction, or for a programme shaped around one particular business over eighteen months. That work gets scoped individually because its responsibilities and duration depend on the business.

A quality of earnings engagement on a single-entity business turning over two million and the same engagement on a four-entity, three-location business turning over thirty million share a name and very little else, since the second one brings more entities to consolidate, more eliminations to prove, more locations to present separately, more customers to analyze and considerably more support to chase down.

Fees are banded by enterprise value for deal work, facility size for lender work, assets under management for fund work, and combined revenue, annual revenue or funding stage depending on the service. Engagements above the top band are scoped and quoted individually, with deliverables agreed before work begins.

Diligence turns up things that nobody anticipated, whether that is a target keeping two sets of records, an entity that never came up in any conversation, or a revenue recognition policy that has to be rebuilt from source before anything else can be relied on. When that happens the extra work gets identified and quoted before it begins so that you can decide whether to add it, and the fee for the original scope holds either way.

Putting the number in public means the scope has to be right before the work starts and the delivery standard has to hold at every level, since the client paying eight thousand dollars is reading the same promise as the one paying forty. The standards that sit behind every schedule, model and memorandum we produce are set out in how a fixed-fee engagement runs.