Kyle Barichello, VP of Operations at Xtrata, ran a three project trial on our takeoff work, and speed was part of what he was scoring. We delivered same day on all three, one job in under an hour, backed by a blind adversarial second pass that caught real errors before anything went out the door.
I didn't want to treat the free trial as a one time favor. We drafted a pitch to turn Kyle into a standing paid relationship, structured as a hybrid: a modest monthly retainer covering a block of takeoffs on a fast turnaround, plus a performance piece tied to whether the projects we quoted actually closed and got built.
Xtrata's real bottleneck was never the product, it was quoting speed. A builder waiting one to two weeks for a number drifts back to conventional framing. Reframe the offer as an outsourced pre construction arm and we go from a cost line to a revenue lever for them. Putting a success fee on the table puts the risk back on our own confidence in the work, instead of asking Kyle to buy on faith. And against the AI only takeoff tools out there, our differentiator is a human expert takeoff with an adversarial quality check on top, not raw output the client still has to fully re-check.
The operations lead's own verdict on the trial, in his words: pretty damn close, I am sold. As of now the paid pitch is still just a draft. Nothing goes to Kyle without my exact wording signed off first, same as always.
The way to turn a favor into a real relationship is to put your own money where your mouth is, not just ask the other person to trust you.
The success fee is there so Kyle doesn't have to take our quality on faith. The incentive does that work instead.