Prose as Collateral: The Case for Writing Your Way Into Higher Fees

When a company engages an advisor, it is buying a prediction: that this person will think clearly about a problem the client cannot yet define. The client cannot audit your reasoning in advance. They can, however, read three hundred words you published last spring—and whether they admit it or not, they will.

I have come to believe that the public body of work a consultant builds is the single most underpriced asset in the profession. Not the credentials. Not the logo slide. The writing.

The Reading Test Happens Before the Sales Call

Consider how the buying process actually unfolds in the American market. A chief of staff is asked to shortlist three advisory firms. She has forty minutes. She visits websites, skims bios, and looks for evidence that the person behind the brand can think. A consultant who publishes essays gives her something no testimonial can: a transcript of the mind she is about to rent.

This is why vague, hedged, committee-voiced marketing copy actively costs money. It forces the prospective client to do the work of imagining whether you think well. Prose that is direct, specific, and willing to take a position does that imagining for them. The reader concludes, reasonably, that someone who writes clearly probably diagnoses clearly.

Why Decision-Makers Trust Writers

Executives are drowning in compressed communication—summaries of summaries. What they quietly crave is someone who can slow a problem down and render it in full sentences. An essay demonstrates the entire value chain of advisory work in miniature: you took something tangled, imposed a structure on it, and made a claim you were willing to defend in public.

There is also a signaling effect that is easy to underestimate. Publishing an argument invites disagreement. A professional who does it anyway is telling the market that their views survive contact with scrutiny. In a field where confidence is cheap, that durability is scarce—and scarce things command premiums.

Building a Body of Ideas Without Becoming a Content Machine

The objection I hear most often is time, followed closely by a fear of giving away the store. Both rest on a misunderstanding of what essays are for. You are not publishing your methodology; you are publishing your judgment. The client who reads your thinking on organizational design is not thereby equipped to do the engagement. They are equipped to hire you for it.

A workable discipline for a busy practitioner:

• Write from engagements, not around them. Strip out the client, keep the pattern. The best material is always the thing you just learned.
• Favor depth over cadence. One essay a quarter that people forward beats weekly posts that nobody remembers.
• Take positions. An essay that could have been written by anyone in your field is a brochure, not a body of work.
• Let the archive compound. A decade of thoughtful pieces is a moat no competitor can copy by Friday.

This site's own practice—essays on business and culture, published under a name rather than a brand—exists partly as a demonstration of the argument. The writing is the résumé.

The Fee Conversation

Here is the mechanism, stated plainly. Fees in advisory work are set by perceived risk. The client is asking: what happens if this goes wrong? A consultant with a visible record of clear, accountable thinking reduces that perceived risk, and reduced risk is priced at a premium. The essay is, in effect, collateral—something the client can hold against the possibility of being wrong about you.

None of this requires literary ambition. It requires only the willingness to write as carefully as you advise, and to let the market read it. In a profession where everyone claims to think for a living, the ones who show their thinking are the ones who get believed—and believed is what gets paid.