Most consulting sells you time and hopes you never do the math on what it bought. You pay for hours, decks, and the comfort of a familiar logo on the invoice. Gainshare inverts that. We get paid more only when you realize more. If nothing changes, we earn a floor and not a cent above it.

The whole model rests on one honest number: the counterfactual. What would have happened without us? That baseline is the reference point everything else is measured against. Get the baseline wrong and gainshare becomes a story dressed up as an outcome, which is exactly the disease it is supposed to cure.

The mechanism

• Normalized baseline: the counterfactual, adjusted only by pre-agreed rules (seasonality, price changes, volume shifts), never by whoever is holding the pen at true-up.
• Attribution review: separate our impact from the client’s own moves and from external luck. A rising market is not our invoice line.
• Verified incremental value: actual results minus the adjusted baseline. The delta, not the total, is what gets shared.
• Contract guardrails: objective data sources, floors, tiers, and caps; audit and dispute rights; regular true-ups so nobody is surprised at settlement.

The guardrails are the part people skip, and they are the part that matters. A cap protects the client from paying us a fortune on a windfall we barely touched. A floor keeps us in the room long enough to do the work. Audit and dispute rights mean the number is negotiated once, in daylight, instead of relitigated every quarter in the dark.

Here is the honest caveat: gainshare only works when value is measurable, attributable, and governable. If you cannot see the outcome, cannot separate our hand from yours, or cannot agree on the data source in advance, then hourly is more honest and you should pay it. Do not let anyone, including us, put a share agreement on a number nobody can defend.

A fee tied to hours rewards motion. A fee tied to the verified delta rewards the only thing you were ever buying: the change.

Shailin Dhar