I had investors interested in a Midtown Phoenix building, and they wanted a full architectural set. I needed an architect who could actually move, not one who wanted to charge me a flat fee just to sit there and watch how my team trained AI on plan creation. He wasn't going to produce anything himself, just observe.
I turned that down. I went with the architect who actually stamps work fast and was willing to teach me the process directly, two weeks, intensive, side by side.
That first guy's fee was slowness dressed up as oversight, right? The second one actually produces stamped work fast, and if my team learns the plan creation process directly, that's capability I own forever instead of a bottleneck I keep paying someone else to sit in front of.
The two week push toward an appraisal ready set kept moving, and the investor interest, tied to a comparable building sale, stayed live because the set was actually getting produced instead of stalling behind somebody's slow review process.
Pay for actual output. Don't pay someone to stand over your shoulder while you build the thing they used to charge you for.
I picked the partner who'd teach me over the one who wanted to get paid to watch. Building real capability mattered more than protecting his fee structure.