Taste, Overhead, and Plumbing

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The last three issues covered finance, operations, and HR. In each case the difficulty was the same: the work was hard to see. Finance produces artifacts, which helps. Operations produces measurable outcomes, which helps less than you would think. HR produces an absence, which helps not at all.

Marketing, legal operations, and IT have the opposite problem. Everyone can see the work. That is exactly why it gets underpriced.

Olivier S. is a Legal Operations Director. He spent the first several weeks of thinking about outside work stuck on a sentence he had absorbed from a decade of budget meetings without ever agreeing to it: that his function was a cost.

Nobody had been unkind about it. It is simply where legal operations sits on a spreadsheet. But he had heard it often enough that when he tried to describe what a company outside his own might pay him for, the description came out apologetic.

Visible work gets judged by what it looks like from outside, and all three of these functions look like something they are not.

Marketing looks like taste. A campaign, a headline, a positioning line. Anyone can read the output, and reading it takes four seconds, so it feels like a four-second decision. The twenty years of watching which claims land with which buyer are invisible inside the finished sentence.

Legal operations looks like overhead. Contracts, process, risk. It appears on the cost side of every budget, and functions on the cost side get described by what they consume rather than by what they prevent or accelerate.

IT looks like plumbing. It is noticed when it breaks and forgotten when it works, which is the same asymmetry HR lives with, except that in IT the infrastructure is at least visible. People can see the system. They just cannot see the judgment that chose it.

Three different frames, one shared consequence. Each makes deep expertise look like execution.

The translation out of each frame is specific, and it is not the same move in all three cases.

1. Marketing, out of taste and into judgment under uncertainty. The client is not buying a headline. They are buying someone who has watched forty campaigns and can say, before the money is spent, which of these three directions is going to fail and why. How you know it is you: you have talked a team out of something expensive and been right.

2. Legal operations, out of overhead and into speed. The client is not buying contract review. They are buying deals closing materially faster, because someone finally looked at where the paper stops moving. How you know it is you: you can name the exact stage where agreements sit, and roughly how long they sit there.

3. IT, out of plumbing and into decision cost. The client is not buying a system. They are buying not making a six-figure infrastructure decision badly, which small companies do routinely because nobody in the room has made it before. How you know it is you: you have been the only person in a meeting who knew what the vendor was not saying.

The common move is the same one from every function week: stop describing the category, start describing the consequence.

Here is the shape of a sentence that gets out of the overhead frame. This is an illustration rather than a transcript:

"Contracts sit at the same three stages for weeks, nobody owns the handoff between sales and legal, and it costs you deals you have already won."

Your version, using whichever of the three you recognized above:

"[Specific thing that is visible] is not the skill. [Specific expensive judgment behind it] is, and it is the reason [specific consequence] keeps happening to companies that do not have it."

The structure matters more than the wording. Name the visible thing, name the invisible judgment, name what it costs to be without it. That sequence gets a client past the frame in one sentence, which is roughly the amount of attention you get.

Olivier's first engagement was a contract process audit. Small, bounded, unglamorous, and exactly the kind of work that gets dismissed as administrative by the person best qualified to do it.

What made it work was not the audit. It was that the audit produced a map of where agreements stopped moving, and the map made the second conversation inevitable. A company that has just been shown where its own deals stall does not want a report. It wants somebody to keep watching.

That is how the engagement became a quarterly retainer. Not through a pitch for ongoing work, which he had not planned and would have been uncomfortable making. Through a finding that made ongoing work the obvious next thing.

Pick which of the three frames you are inside. Then write one sentence that does not use the word for your function anywhere in it. No "marketing," no "legal," no "IT." If you cannot describe the value without naming the department, the frame is still doing the talking.

Write it three times. The first will contain the department name anyway. That is normal, and it is the point of writing it three times.

One contract process audit, and then a quarterly retainer. Among the professionals I have worked with directly, the audit-shaped first project converts to ongoing work more often than any other shape, because it ends with a finding rather than a deliverable. That is a pattern from my own client work, not a market statistic.

A book arguing that the goal was never to scale, and that staying deliberately small and profitable is a strategy rather than a consolation prize. It earns its place in this issue because of the audit: a first engagement that worked precisely because it was modest and recurring rather than impressive and finished. Worth reading if the plan in your head still involves eventually building something bigger, because the case made here is that three or four good clients is not the stepping stone to a business, it is the business.

A referral called me once and asked, in the first two minutes, what my success rate was.

I did not have an answer ready. I had outcomes, I had people I could point to, and I had nothing that would survive being called a rate. What I said instead was some version of "it depends," which is true and sounds exactly like what someone says when they are hiding something.

He did not hire me. I have thought about that call more than most of the ones that went well, because the question was reasonable and my discomfort with it was the actual problem. It is the reason I started keeping records of what happened to people, which is where most of what you read here comes from.

P.S. If you are in marketing, legal operations, or IT and have ever described your own work as "just" something, hit reply and tell me what the "just" is hiding. That word is usually sitting directly on top of the offer.

A few things I've built, if any of them are useful this week.

No pressure on any of it. Take what's useful, skip the rest.

Scott Fulbright

This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Any figures, projections, or outcomes mentioned are examples based on individual circumstances, not guarantees, your results will vary. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making retirement or income decisions.

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