Revenue is applause for work well done. Not a bet on a promised result.
Most consulting engagements put the financial risk on the client. You pay a retainer before the work starts. You buy a project at a fixed price based on a scope that was written before anyone fully understood the problem. You wire the invoice and then you find out whether it was worth it. The consultant carries the upside; the client carries the risk.
We do it differently for Discovery sessions and for speeches. The fee for the work itself is paid only after it is done — and you decide what it was worth.
**Expenses are not the gamble — only the fee is**
Expenses are separate, and they are always covered. The bare minimum — travel, accommodation, food — is invoiced regardless; it is not part of the value judgement, it is cost that exists either way, and I keep it as low as I honestly can. I hold a BahnCard 50 and a Deutschland-Ticket, so for most engagements you pay only a flexible (Flexpreis) train ticket, plus a taxi at the far end if there is no other way. A plane only when the destination genuinely cannot be reached by rail, or the distance plainly justifies it — and any flight is CO2-compensated. Flights longer than four hours are billed at premium economy rather than economy: if someone travels a long way to do good work, the travel should be as humane as possible. No hotel upgrades, no inflated per diem. What you owe for expenses is what the trip actually cost, and you can settle it on the spot.
**The fee is pay-what-you-want, paid after**
You have seen the session. You know whether it moved something. You decide what the work was worth, and you pay it once it is done — by card on a SumUp terminal, or via a Mollie QR link. Or, if you prefer the old-fashioned route, you sign the session or speech sheet with the amount you are willing to pay, and we invoice accordingly.
This is not a promotional trick or a loss leader. It is how I want revenue to work: as a signal. What it inverts is risk. In the standard model, the client bets on a promise. Here, Apuna bets on the work — I carry the risk of doing work good enough to be worth paying for. Revenue becomes feedback: applause for work well done, not an advance against a result that may or may not arrive.
**Why this works for these specific services**
It works for Discovery and for speeches because these are defined, contained encounters. A half-day session has a clear beginning and end. A speech happens and then it is over. The client can assess the value immediately and completely. That is not true of a six-month implementation project, where the judgment takes time and the work is genuinely interdependent — I am not claiming the model fits everything. It fits where the client can make an honest, informed assessment on the day.
The deeper reason is alignment. A speaker or discovery facilitator who knows they will only be paid what the session was worth has one very strong incentive: make it worth something — not appear to, actually do it. The accountability is immediate and unambiguous. That is the kind of work I want to do, and it is the kind of first step I want clients to be able to take without the usual threshold of commitment getting in the way.
Revenue is applause. You only earn it by doing something worth applauding. That is the discipline, and it is deliberate.