How I'm Paid

No premium for nights, weekends, or the closing scramble. Diligence weeks aren't nine-to-five and I don't bill them as though they're worth more.

The percentage exists only as a ceiling. Your sale price can move my fee in exactly one direction: down.

A price-based fee rises with what your business sells for. Mine is computed from time worked. Price enters the calculation once, as a cap.

A price-based fee grows as your sale price grows and has no ceiling. That can happen whether or not the terms underneath the price are any good.

The cap here runs the other way. It's a ceiling, not a target. You never pay for hours that didn't serve you, and you never pay more than a set share of what you actually walked away with.

On the capped sale-process path, the cap is a share of the cash you actually receive at closing — before your transaction expenses, taxes, and debt payoff, and not counting escrow holdbacks, earnouts, seller notes, or equity you roll into the buyer's company. It's measured once, on closing day, and fixed there. Nothing about my fee changes later based on whether an earnout hits or an escrow releases clean. I have no stake in either.

Most owners about to sell have nearly everything they own sitting inside the business. Asking them to write checks during the tightest stretch of their financial life is backwards. So the money can wait.

What's owed doesn't change.

The work still gets billed. The cap governs what's payable at closing; it isn't a condition on whether fees are owed. What I'll do is put it on an interest-free installment schedule, because a process that doesn't close is already expensive enough. You'll hear this from me in the first conversation, not for the first time in an invoice.

The accrued fees are owed in full. The cap applies only to amounts payable at closing. A fee that disappears when the deal disappears is a fee that needs your deal to close. Mine doesn't.

What's owed is payable in 12 equal monthly installments, interest-free, beginning 60 days after the engagement ends.

Coaching and operational consulting are hourly or monthly retainer. Neither is capped, because there's no closing event to cap against and no reason a standing relationship should carry a ceiling tied to a transaction that may never happen.

The capped arrangement applies to sale-process engagements only, and only once that process begins under its own engagement letter. Fees already paid for coaching or consulting are separate. They aren't credited against the cap and they aren't part of the calculation.

The rate is the same across all of it.

Expenses are billed at cost.

The rate is held for the duration of any engagement in progress; reviewed annually otherwise.