Why we don't jerk people around

There is a version of this business that runs almost entirely on small dishonesties, and none of them are illegal, and most people running them have stopped noticing they are doing it.

The price gets inflated so it can be discounted. The proposal quotes for things nobody needs so the number can come down in the meeting and feel like a favour. The retainer includes hours that were never going to be worked. The report leads with the metric that went up. None of that is fraud. All of it is designed so that you cannot tell what anything actually costs, which is the point.

I will not do it, and the reason is not that I am a better person. It is that every one of those moves has the same hidden price, and the person who pays it is me, later.

Take the fake discount, because it is the purest one. You mark something at ten and sell it at seven. The client is pleased. And you have just taught them, permanently, that your numbers are fiction. Every quote you send that person for the rest of your relationship now opens a negotiation instead of a decision, because they know the first number was never real. You did not win seven. You lost the ability to say a number and be believed.

Or the padded scope. You put things in the proposal you know they do not need, because a bigger document feels like more value and gives you something to concede. Then you have to either do the useless work, which wastes your life, or quietly not do it, which means you are now managing a lie for the length of the engagement.

The dishonesty is never the expensive part. The bookkeeping on the dishonesty is the expensive part.

So the promise is short, and it is on the bottom of every page of this site where anybody can hold me to it. I do not sell you things you do not need. I do not inflate a price so I can discount it. I do not make promises I cannot back up. I treat the people who work with me properly, and you receive the difference in the work whether or not you ever see the cause. And I keep up with the machines without joining the hype.

None of that makes me generous. It makes me easier to check, which is a different thing and a more useful one.

Here is the part that matters if you are choosing somebody. You cannot audit an agency's judgment before you hire them. You cannot verify their taste, their process, or whether the work is any good until it is too late to matter. What you can do is watch how they handle the small, boring, checkable things. The quote. The invoice. The thing they said they would send on Thursday.

How somebody does the small stuff is the only advance notice you get.