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Why I Don't Do Timed Contracts

Jeffrey Summers Jeffrey Summers
The Practice
August 27, 2026

I do not bill by the hour. I do not bill by the day. I do not sell retainers. And I do not promise outcomes on a timeline.

That is four refusals, and operators tend to hear them as pricing preferences. They are not preferences. They are the same structural read applied twice — once to what the fee is priced against, and once to what a consultant is entitled to claim. I have said for years that speed is the operator’s scarcest asset. I refuse timed contracts because working on time is amateurish, and because the structure that pays for time is probably immoral. I am going to earn that second word rather than leave it hanging as an insult.

What A Timed Contract Actually Prices

In my framework, [Contract] is the constraint category in which the capped resource is the form of agreement in force — what each party has actually been offered and actually accepted, as against what either party believes he is entitled to draw. The category runs on four surfaces in the operation and the lowest form found on any of them sets the ceiling for all of them. It is a ceiling, not an average. Strength on three surfaces does not compensate for a spot form on the fourth.

Every form is one of two. A spot form prices the transaction in front of it and carries nothing across the boundary of that transaction. A relational form carries obligation, discretion, and standard across transactions in exchange for something named. The words the parties use do not establish the form. The terms do. Family language over a shift-by-shift schedule is a spot contract with a relational speech on top of it, and everyone on the receiving end has already read the terms correctly.

An hourly agreement, a day rate, and a monthly retainer are all spot forms. They settle at the unit — the hour, the day, the month — and carry no obligation across it. What they price is elapsed time in the presence of the operator’s problem. Not the read. Not the sequence. Not the change. Presence.

This is what makes the structure amateurish before it is anything else. The unit of sale does not correspond to the thing being bought. The operator is not buying my attendance. He is buying an accurate read of what is currently capping his operation and a sequenced plan that lifts it. Those are the product. Time is the input I spend producing them, and no operator in this industry prices his own product off his input clock. He would be out of business inside two periods.

The Incentive Runs Backwards

Now put the two parties side by side and read the incentive.

Under a timed structure, the longer the engagement runs, the more the consultant earns. Under any structure priced against the change, the sooner the change closes, the sooner the consultant is done and paid. Those are opposite gradients on the same axis. One of them rewards slow.

[Incentive Recursion] is the physics by which every incentive structure is itself the output of an incentive structure operating one layer up. Incentives do not sit still in the layer where they were installed. They cascade. A consultant on a clock is not consciously stalling — that is not the claim and it is not what makes the structure indefensible. The claim is smaller and worse. Under a timed form, every judgment call in the engagement has a thumb on one side of it. Scope wider rather than narrower. Add the discovery week. Run the second round of interviews. Read the extra system. Every one of those decisions is defensible on its own, and every one of them is being made by a party who gets paid more for choosing the longer branch. The structure does not need bad faith to produce the outcome. It only needs a normal person making a hundred close calls with the gradient tilted.

[The Summers Principle] holds that every outcome in the operating domain traces to design or default. There is no third cause. A fee structure is a designed thing — somebody wrote it — but almost nobody who bills by the hour has ever read the incentive it installs. That is the design-or-default fork on the advisory surface. The consultant who has read it and kept it is one thing. The consultant who has never read it is running a defaulted structure and calling it standard practice, which is how most of this industry prices itself.

Earning “Probably Immoral”

Here is the argument I will not soften.

Transactional Arbitrage is the structure in which any actor creating business success captures the gap between what gets sold and what is needed. It requires three elements: a gap the actor did not create, a capture move that harvests the upside of that gap, and an exit risk that closes the gap on some timeline. It is domain-agnostic. It runs on the advisory line exactly as it runs on the labor line and the delivery-platform line.

Run the timed consulting agreement through it.

The gap is the operator’s binding constraint. The consultant did not create it. He found it, or more often he was handed a description of it in a discovery call. The capture move is the clock: the constraint is converted into billable duration, and duration is the thing being sold. The exit risk is the operator finally seeing the substitution — realizing he purchased months of presence where he needed one accurate read and a sequence.

That is the full architecture, satisfied on all three elements. And the second mechanism is the one that decides the moral question. Consent Arbitrage names the gap between the consent that was given and the consent that currently exists, exploited for value. The operator consented to a fee against a problem. He did not consent to a structure in which the persistence of that problem is the seller’s revenue base. He would not consent to it if it were named at the table, which is precisely why it is never named at the table.

Now add the condition every operator in this industry is currently operating under. Margin is compressed. Labor is repriced. The cost of goods moves monthly. The operator buying counsel is not a party negotiating from strength — he is a party whose ability to refuse has been degraded by the very constraint he is buying help with. A structure that pays more for taking longer, sold to that party, extracts from the client’s constraint. Not from the client’s budget. From the constraint itself. The worse his position, the longer he will tolerate the engagement, and the more the structure yields.

That is a mechanism for converting another operator’s distress into duration. I do not need to establish anyone’s intent to call it what it is. The structure is immoral. “Probably” is the only hedge I will offer, and it does not attach to the structure — it attaches to the practitioner, because a large share of the people running this model have genuinely never read their own incentive. They inherited the billing form from the firm that trained them and never asked what it pays them for. That is culpable ignorance rather than malice. It is still culpable.

And the operator has his own exposure in this, which he will not enjoy hearing. He runs ROI math on equipment, on marketing, on cast development, on every meaningful line in his operation. He does not run it on consulting, because hourly pricing refuses the math by construction — an input cannot be evaluated against a return. So he switches to cost math instead, which asks only whether the rate is competitive. That is how the cheapest hour in the market beats the correct read, and how this industry ended up buying its most consequential advice on the one basis that cannot tell good from bad.

Why Speed Is A Physics Requirement, Not A Service Promise

[No Static Achievement] holds that nothing accumulated in an operation can be held without continuing to earn it. Standing still is not neutral — it is loss. There is no third state between compounding and contracting. Every asset the operation carries is being extended or spent right now: positioning, Guest relationships, cast loyalty, vendor standing, operational discipline.

Apply that to engagement duration and the arithmetic is unpleasant. While the engagement runs, the constraint is still binding. The operation is still contracting on the assets the constraint touches. The GX Horizon Gap — the distance between the speed at which the Guest decides and the speed at which the operator can move — is still open, and Guests are still resolving it in a competitor’s building. Speed of Knowledge is the infrastructure that routes signal to the operator while it still matters. Speed of Your Decisions is the discipline of acting at the point of opportunity rather than the point of convenience. Neither one tolerates an engagement calendar built around a billing period.

Which means the duration of the engagement is a cost, and it is carried entirely on the operator’s side of the table. A timed structure charges him for the cost he is already absorbing. Read plainly: he pays the consultant for the period during which he is also paying the constraint. That is the same money leaving twice.

Fast Is Not Rushed

Operators hear “fast” and reach for the wrong picture, so let me draw the right one.

Everything Feeds The Read holds that a read is built from the totality of input available, not from a finite or predefined input set. The diagnostic line in that term is the one that governs how I work: a reader sourcing his read from a checklist is not running a read, he is running an evaluation. Evaluations have boundaries. Reads do not.

So the read is exhaustive. I read every unit. I do not sample locations, I do not sample dayparts, and I do not extrapolate one building’s numbers across a group because the sample was statistically adequate. Adequate for a report is not adequate for a decision that reprices someone’s labor model. That part of the work is not compressible and I do not compress it.

What gets compressed is everything that was never the work. The relationship-building phase that exists to justify the fee. The interim deck. The status call whose only content is that the engagement is continuing. The discovery that repeats what the first read already surfaced. Strip those and the timeline collapses without a single judgment being rushed.

The change is sequenced, not dumped. Constraint Architecture returns which constraint is currently setting output and which response is the only one that lifts it. Sequence follows from that: the binding constraint first, then the one that becomes binding once the first is relieved. Core Constraint — a constraint binding in three or more domains at once — takes longer to read and longer to confirm relief on, because relief arrives distributed across five small movements in five places rather than as one number moving that night. I say so at scoping, and the read window gets set to what the outcome requires. That is sequencing to the operation’s physics. It is not the same act as stretching work to fill a billing period, and the difference is legible in whether the calendar was built from the constraint or from the invoice.

None of this is a shortcut. [Case Study Reduction] is what a shortcut looks like — taking a documented outcome from someone else’s operation and running it forward as an executable path, which flattens both the read that produced the moves and the conditions the reader is actually operating inside. Speed obtained by importing somebody else’s answer is not speed. It is a deferred failure with a faster start date.

And I Don’t Promise Outcomes On A Timeline Either

The refusal cuts both ways, which is the part that separates my position from the value-based-pricing pitch the counsel class has started running.

I will not tell an operator that his labor variance closes in ninety days. The read and the action plan are mine to deliver. The outcome closes on his side, through his execution, inside his building, against conditions neither of us controls. A consultant who dates that outcome is making a claim the buyer cannot check — which is Apparatus Absence at the advisory layer: a claim made to a party who has to act on it, with none of the apparatus that would let that party check it against independent reality. The confident date is not evidence. It is a letter from a merchant with no price current behind it.

What I commit to instead is on the record on The Operator’s Contract, and it is deliberately harder than a date. I engage only against outcomes that can carry at least ten times the fee in the operation. The metric, the system of record, the baseline window, and the read window are named in writing before any work begins. The number is pulled by the operator from the system he already runs that decision on — I do not supply it and I do not hold the instrument. And I keep working until the outcome closes rather than until the hours run out. If the read named the wrong constraint, the rescope is mine and it is free.

That is an accountability the operator can audit. A timeline is a claim he can only believe. Value Is Outcome Not Strategy holds that value is what results from execution under a chosen contract form, not a statement layered on top of it. A dated promise is the statement. The verified ratio is the outcome of the form.

Read against Two Roads, the whole thing resolves cleanly. A timed contract is the advisory surface running Road 1 — the relationship treated as the instrument of the transaction, priced per unit of contact, settled at the unit, carrying nothing across it. A fee priced against the change is the same surface running Road 2 — the transaction as instrument of a covenant that outlives the invoice. The pricing model is not downstream of the road. It is where the road becomes visible.

The Diagnostic — Four Tests On Any Proposal In Front Of You

Run these against the last engagement letter you signed, or the one currently on your desk.

Test One — The unit test. Find the unit the fee is multiplied by. Is it a unit of time, or a unit of change? Read: if the multiplier is hours, days, or months, you are on a spot form and the ceiling on that surface is set by elapsed time.

Test Two — The gradient test. Ask what happens to the fee if the work closes in half the projected duration. Does the consultant earn the same, or less? Read: if he earns less, his incentive and yours point in opposite directions, and every close call in the engagement will be decided on the long branch.

Test Three — The unbillable-question test. Ask whether you can call him on a Tuesday with a question that takes four minutes, without it appearing on an invoice. Read: if it appears, you will stop calling, and the read you paid for will decay on schedule.

Test Four — The ratio test. Ask what outcome the engagement is priced against, in what metric, pulled from which of your systems, measured against what baseline. Read: if he cannot answer all four before the work starts, there is no ratio, there is only a rate.

Sort the score. Four noes: you are buying presence and calling it counsel. Two or three noes: you have a relational speech sitting on top of a spot form, which is the most common shape in this industry and the hardest one to see, because the relationship is real and the terms still are not. Zero noes: the structure is priced against your operation’s change, and you can now spend your attention on the only remaining question, which is whether the read is any good.

What You Do Monday Morning

Pull the most recent consulting, coaching, or advisory agreement your operation has signed — active or closed — and find the multiplier. One line, one number, one unit. Write down what that unit is.

Then, on the same page, write the outcome that agreement should have been priced against: the metric, the system of record it lives in, the baseline period, and the value to your operation of moving it. If you cannot write those four things, that is not an argument for hourly pricing. It is the read you have not run yet, and it is the reason the next proposal that lands on your desk will get evaluated on rate.

The Closer

Forty-five years in this industry, starting April 4, 1982, and the pricing model on the counsel side has barely moved: buy time, hope for change, evaluate on rate because return cannot be evaluated at all. I am not refusing timed contracts to be difficult about invoicing. I refuse them because the unit is wrong, because the gradient runs against the operator, and because a structure that pays more for taking longer — sold to an operator whose margin is already under pressure — extracts from the very constraint he hired someone to lift. Speed is not a courtesy I extend. It is what happens automatically once the fee is priced against the change, because from that moment the clock is running on my side of the table instead of yours.

Digging Deeper

Positions on the record

  1. The Operator’s Contract — https://jeffreysummers.com/the-operators-contract/
  2. Consulting — https://jeffreysummers.com/consulting/
  3. The Read — https://jeffreysummers.com/the-read/
  4. The One Hour Read — https://jeffreysummers.com/the-one-hour-read/
  5. The Diagnostic — https://jeffreysummers.com/the-diagnostic/
  6. Case Study Reduction — https://jeffreysummers.com/case-study-reduction/
  7. Results By The Numbers — https://jeffreysummers.com/results-by-the-numbers/
  8. Two Roads — https://jeffreysummers.com/two-roads/
  9. What Is “The Framework”? — https://jeffreysummers.com/what-is-the-framework/
  10. Coaching — https://jeffreysummers.com/coaching/
  11. The PeriodReview — https://jeffreysummers.com/the-periodreview/
  12. Fractional Operations Leadership — https://jeffreysummers.com/fractional-operations-leadership/
  13. Let’s Talk — https://jeffreysummers.com/lets-talk/

Term definitions from the Knowledge Base

Constraint Architecture engagement design incentives pricing speed The Operator's Contract value-based fees
Jeffrey Summers
Jeffrey Summers
 jeffreysummers.com

I have spent 45 years in restaurant operations. I work with operators on the one thing nobody taught them — how to grow — and I publish the whole framework in the open rather than holding it behind an engagement.

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