Three decades. Several thousand phone calls. Not one invoice.
People have been ringing me for as long as I have been working, and they still do, most days. Not about one thing — about anything. A clause in a contract they have already signed. Whether a wall can come down. Which doctor to go to. Whether the price they were quoted is mad. Who to hire, who to sack, whether to sell.
I have never charged for any of it. What I have received, over thirty years, is a lot of drinks in a lot of bars, the occasional crate of something, and one washing machine.
This is not a story about how I should have been charging. That is the obvious ending and it is the wrong one.
What I noticed, slowly, over a very long time, is that the advice did not land in the same way as advice that had been paid for.
Same words. Same person saying them. Different weight entirely.
Someone would call, describe the situation, get an answer, agree with it enthusiastically, and then do the other thing. Eighteen months later the same person would tell me about a consultant who had told them exactly the same, and they would say it as news. Not to spite me. They genuinely did not connect the two. The advice they paid for had arrived as information. Mine had arrived as conversation.
I saw this often enough to stop taking it personally and start finding it interesting.
The clearest version: a man I have known for twenty years asked me whether he should take on a job that would double his turnover. I told him his margin would not survive it, and why, in about four minutes on a Sunday. He took the job. Two years later, deep in trouble, he hired someone to tell him what was wrong. They told him his margin had not survived doubling his turnover. He fixed it. He was very impressed with them.
He was right to be. They were right. So was I, on a Sunday, for free, in four minutes.
I think it comes down to this: most people cannot evaluate advice on its content, because if they could evaluate the content they would not have needed the advice.
So they evaluate everything else. How the person is dressed. How long the report is. Whether there was a meeting with an agenda. And above all, what it cost — because price is the one signal that seems to come from outside your own judgement.
It is not stupidity. It is a reasonable strategy in a world where you cannot check everything. If a stranger charges a great deal, other people must have paid it, and they cannot all have been fools.
But it produces something absurd: the same sentence is worth following on a Tuesday with an invoice attached, and worth nodding at on a Friday night in a bar.
And the friction is not really about money at all. It is about commitment. When you have paid, doing nothing means you wasted the money — so you act, to make the decision retrospectively correct. When it was free, doing nothing costs you nothing you can see. The cost is still there. It just arrives later and wearing a different coat.
I would love to end this by saying that I am above it. I am not.
I ignore free advice constantly. I have been told things by people who turned out to be entirely right, and I did nothing, because they told me in passing and there was no moment where I had to decide. I have paid for information I already had, and acted on it, and felt that I had learned something.
So this is not the sound of a clever man complaining about slow friends. It is a mechanism, and it runs in everybody, and knowing about it does not switch it off.
There is a second thing I have to be honest about, and it is the reason I never turned this into a business.
I have no niche. People do not ring me because I am the expert in one thing. They ring me because I have run enough different kinds of business, in enough different trades, that I have usually seen the shape of the problem before — in some other industry, wearing some other name. That is genuinely useful and it is almost impossible to sell. Nobody searches for a general. Everybody searches for a specialist.
Which means the most valuable thing I have is the thing hardest to put a price on. That is not a boast. It is a design flaw, and I have had thirty years to notice it.
Here is the part I have thought about most.
It is not that free advice is worth less. It is that free advice never makes you decide.
When you pay, there is a moment. You hand something over, and from that moment you are in it. Doing nothing afterwards means admitting you wasted the money, so you act — not because the advice got better, but because the alternative became uncomfortable.
Free advice has no such moment. It arrives in the middle of a conversation, between one thing and another, and nothing is required of you at the end of it. You agree, you mean it, and then the evening carries on. There was never a point where you had to choose.
And there is something else, less flattering to all of us. Taking free advice and acting on it means admitting, quite plainly, that somebody else saw the thing you did not. Paying converts that into a transaction — you bought a service, you are the client, you are still the one in charge. It is a small piece of dignity and it costs whatever the invoice says.
I understand it, because I do it. That is the whole of it.
If I had to reduce thirty years to one line for someone starting out, it would not be about pricing, or hiring, or when to expand.
It would be this: whatever you are doing, cover yourself.
Not the office version of that phrase — the one where people document everything so that when it goes wrong there is a name on it that is not theirs. That is not protection. That is a career strategy, and a poor one.
I mean the plain version. Nobody else carries your risk. The consultant is paid and leaves. The friend on the phone hangs up and goes back to his own week. The client who said don't worry, we'll sort it out at the end, will not be there at the end. Every one of them is sincere. Not one of them is exposed the way you are.
So take the deposit. Put the variation in writing before you start it. Read the clause. Keep the recording. Know what an hour of your own work actually costs before you name a price. Not because people are dishonest — mostly they are not — but because when it goes wrong, memory softens on their side and the bill lands on yours.
Advice, mine included, is worth exactly what you do with it. What you do with it is the only part that was ever yours.