The Wrong Thing to Give Away

A fee survey of 331 lower middle market M&A advisors, fielded in the second quarter of this year, found that nearly a third now charge no upfront work fee at all, up from 19% two years ago. That shift is happening even as the same survey reports deals taking longer, demanding more hands-on management, and falling apart more often. A growing share of advisors have agreed to carry the entire cost of an engagement until the wire clears, and what they are giving away is the most expensive and least scalable asset in the practice: execution. The instinct behind it is generous. The economics are not. Waiving a fee is not generosity; it is a discount with better manners. The Brownie Strategy draws a line between two kinds of giving that behave nothing alike. The first costs you every single time and never travels, a waived retainer, a weekend of free modeling, diligence run on spec. It buys exactly one relationship at full price, and giving it to a second prospect means paying for it all over again. The second costs you once and then circulates without you: a benchmark, a teardown of a deal that broke, a one-page checklist a seller can hand to their accountant, a written answer to the question asked in every first meeting. Only the second kind compounds. This distinction has become more urgent, not less, because sellers now arrive at first meetings holding AI-generated valuations. Credibility used to be built inside the room; it now has to be carried into the room already built. The advisor who published a defensible view on valuation in their sector three months ago walks in with the argument already won. The one who did not spends the first forty minutes proving they are not the weaker of two opinions. The prescribed exercise is a two-column audit: list every unpaid thing you did for someone in the last ninety days, then sort it into what cost you once and travels freely versus what costs you again every time you offer it. For most practitioners nearly everything lands in the second column, the hours go there, while the returns come from the first. The corrective is threefold: give judgment rather than labor, since labor is what you should be paid for and judgment is what you should be publishing; aim the gift at referral sources rather than prospects, because a prospect who takes your free work can send one deal while a trusted lawyer, lender or accountant can send ten for years; and convert one second-column item into a first-column asset this month, turning a model into a benchmark and a late-night call into a written answer. The strategy takes its name from a story my friend tells about a gift that cost under twenty dollars and outperformed Super Bowl tickets and Michelin dinners, not because it was cheaper, but because it said the thing he actually meant. A favor runs out the moment you give it. A recipe keeps getting passed around.