Service
Incentive & Contract Design
The fee structure is the strategy: a contract that pays anyone for the wrong thing will eventually purchase the wrong thing, professionally executed.
The work
What the work actually is.
Fee structures engineered so the firm is paid because you won — success, gainshare, equity, milestones.
Every contract is a forecast. Hourly billing forecasts nothing — it pays the same for a win, a loss, and an elegant explanation of the loss. Outcome structures force both parties to state what they believe: a firm that accepts a success fee is underwriting its own confidence; a client that grants one is conceding the result is worth a real share. The negotiation of the structure surfaces more truth than most diagnostics.
The structures themselves are a matter of matching, not preference. A discrete transaction takes a success fee — typically on a declining scale, with a tail so incentives survive the engagement’s end. Continuous, measurable value takes gainshare above a locked baseline, collared so the downside is bounded and capped so the number stays defensible in front of a board. Cash-poor, high-upside situations take equity or warrants with vesting; long arcs take milestones with accelerators above target. The firm’s public commitment is constant across all of them: fees weighted toward the outcome wherever it can be measured.
Every term sheet carries the same skeleton regardless of structure: the outcome defined in one sentence, the baseline locked, audit rights running in both directions, and an ethics clause — any member of the firm can halt the engagement, without penalty, and the clause has no exception for the fee at stake. The skeleton is short on purpose. A term sheet either side needs a translator for is hiding something.
Deliverables
What you keep.
- Term sheet
- Outcome, baseline, fee, accelerator, tail, audit rights, ethics clause — one page, every clause testable by either side.
- Fee architecture
- The structure matched to the outcome’s shape — success fee, gainshare with collars and caps, equity or warrants, milestones with accelerators.
- Collar & cap schedule
- The downside floored, the upside tiered, the maximum stated — numbers agreed while nobody knows whom they favor.
- Tail provisions
- What is owed when the outcome lands after the engagement ends — decided at signature, not litigated at closing.
Getting started
The proposed engagement, or the contract already signed, marked up against the outcome it claims to serve: every clause that pays someone for the wrong thing flagged, and a replacement term-sheet skeleton drafted alongside it.
The practice
The rest of Outcome Engineering.
- Outcome Engineering overview
- Outcome Underwriting The result priced before it is pursued: prize, baseline, attribution, and a written verdict.
- Instrumentation & Verification The measurement machinery an outcome fee stands on: locked baselines, verified value, audit rights.
- The Operating Cadence The weekly rhythm that keeps an outcome engagement on the rails — drift named early, exit designed from the start.
Get started