Why it is fixed rather than scoped
Diligence work is normally quoted, and quoting it creates a problem the buyer pays for. A scoped fee has to be estimated before anyone has seen the systems, which means it is padded for the case where the systems are a mess. Then the scope moves, because it always does, and the conversation shifts from what was found to what was billed.
A fixed fee removes that entirely. The number is agreed before work begins and does not move once access is granted. The cost of a messy estate lands on the firm rather than on the client, which is the correct place for it: the firm is the party that can judge, from a thousand prior engagements, how messy an estate of a given shape usually is.
It also means the commercial conversation happens once, at the start, and never again during delivery. For a two-week engagement that matters more than it sounds.
What the fee actually buys
- A written report. The substance of the engagement. Every leak quantified as an annual figure, with the system it was measured in and the period it covers named beside it, ranked by recoverable dollars against the effort to recover them — so the order to work in is the order it is written in.
- A ninety-minute live readout, with whoever you want in the room. The findings get walked and the argument gets taken. If a number does not survive your scrutiny it comes out of the report.
- A sequenced build plan, with a cost and a timeline against each phase, written so that another firm could execute it without us.
That third item is the one worth pausing on, because it is where most diagnostic products quietly fail. A roadmap that only its author can execute is not a roadmap, it is a dependency. The test is whether a competent third party could pick it up cold and price it — and if they could, you have retained the option to shop the build, which is the whole reason the report is worth paying for separately.
The credit, and what it does to the incentives
The $5,000 is credited in full against the first phase of implementation. It is worth being clear-eyed about what that does and does not mean.
What it does: it removes the objection that a diagnostic is a paid sales call. If the firm builds, it has earned nothing from the report itself. What it also does, honestly, is create an incentive to find something worth building. The counterweight has to be structural rather than a promise, which is why the term that matters most is the other one — if the leakage is immaterial, the report says so in its first paragraph and the firm tells you not to hire it. A firm that will not put that in writing has a credit with no counterweight.
The second structural counterweight is that implementation is priced per phase, before each phase begins, with no commitment to a total. A firm that wanted to inflate findings would want a large committed total, not a phase-by-phase approval it has to re-earn.
What implementation costs, since the credit is meaningless without it
$15,000 to $75,000 across all phases is the typical range. Publishing that range matters more than protecting it: "credited against implementation" is an empty promise to somebody who cannot tell whether implementation is $40,000 or $400,000, and the uncertainty lands on the diagnostic rather than on the build. A $5,000 report is only worth commissioning if the follow-on is viable.
The number of phases is never stated in advance, and that is not evasion. Nobody knows it before the diagnostic. What is fixed is the mechanism: each phase is priced before it begins, you approve one at a time, and you are never asked to commit beyond the phase in front of you.
The comparison that actually decides it
Cost is the wrong first question, and asking it first is how companies buy the cheapest option and then abandon it. The right first question is what the leakage is worth, because that sets the ceiling on what finding it can rationally be worth.
Run the comparison on your own figures before you speak to anyone. Take last quarter’s inbound enquiries, split them by whether they received a genuine human response inside an hour, and compare conversion between the two groups. Multiply the difference by your own average first-year value and annualise it. You now have a rough order of magnitude, built from your own data, and you can decide whether a $5,000 fixed fee to have it measured properly is a serious decision or an obvious one.
What to ask before commissioning any diagnostic
- Does every figure in the report name the system it was measured in and the period it covers? If not, you are buying interview notes with numbers attached.
- What happens if you find nothing material? Get the answer in writing. It is the single best predictor of whether the findings will be honest.
- Can another firm execute your roadmap? If not, the fee is higher than quoted, because it includes a lock-in you were not told about.
- Who is actually in our systems, by name and role? A diagnostic sold by a principal and delivered by a junior team is a different product.
- What access do you need, what will you be able to write to, and what happens to the credentials afterwards? Any firm that has not thought this through has not done many of these.
- Is the fee credited, and against what exactly? "Credited against future work" is not the same as credited in full against the first phase.