Most Advisers Aren’t Underpaid – They’re Under-Priced

Ask a room of five advisers in the same practice how they’d price a moderately complex estate planning engagement, and you’ll get five different numbers – not because anyone is doing anything wrong – but because the pricing logic lives in someone’s head; not on paper.

I’ve watched this exact scene play out in dozens of practices over thirty years, and it never reads as incompetence. It reads as instinct. Advisers are trained to read a room, price to the relationship, and adjust on the fly — and for a long time, that was arguably the job done well. The trouble is that the same instinct that makes someone a good adviser in the room makes their pricing impossible to defend outside it.

That’s not really a compliance footnote. Standard 7 of the Code of Ethics asks for exactly this — that a fee represents fair value for the advice and services given, and that an adviser can show their reasoning, not just assert it. Most practices could describe their pricing philosophy in a sentence. Far fewer could reconstruct, file by file, why one client paid what they paid.

The part nobody’s pricing for

…the bigger cost isn’t the regulatory exposure. It’s the scope that quietly grows for free

Here’s the opinion I’ll defend: the bigger cost isn’t the regulatory exposure. It’s the scope that quietly grows for free. The extra meeting a client needed after a life event. The additional complexity that crept into a file over three years of reviews. The service that used to be a nice-to-have and is now just expected. None of it gets re-priced, because re-pricing feels like an argument nobody wants to have — so the practice absorbs it, one client at a time, until the gap between effort and fee is large enough that a principal finally notices their margins have moved without an obvious cause.

The usual response is to treat this as a confidence problem — advisers just need to charge more, hold the line, stop discounting. I don’t think that’s it, or at least not the root of it. You can’t hold a line you haven’t drawn. Confidence follows documentation, not the other way around. An adviser who can point to a written methodology and say “here’s why this file costs what it costs” isn’t being braver than one who can’t — they’re just standing on something solid.

The counterargument, and why I don’t buy it

The pushback I hear most is that clients don’t want an itemised invoice — they want a relationship, and pricing that reads like a menu cheapens that. I take the concern seriously; nobody wants advice to feel transactional. But in practice, the opposite tends to be true. Clients who ask, “so what exactly am I paying for?” aren’t usually objecting to the number. They’re objecting to not knowing how it was reached. A documented methodology doesn’t have to be shown to the client as a menu — but the adviser needs to have one, whether it’s ever put in front of anyone.

Pricing that lives in a principal’s head is a ceiling on the practice itself…

There’s also a scale argument that gets less attention than the ethics one. Pricing that lives in a principal’s head is a ceiling on the practice itself — every fee decision routes back to one person’s judgement, which means the business can’t grow past what that person can personally oversee. That’s a strategic cost, not just a compliance one, and it’s usually the one principals feel first, long before a regulator ever asks a question.

None of this is necessarily an argument for charging more. It’s an argument for writing down what you already believe, so it can be checked, taught, and defended by someone other than you. We’ve spent the last few years building a documented pricing methodology of our own — not because it’s the only way to do this, but because writing it down forced us to answer questions we’d been avoiding for years. If you’re working through the same questions in your own practice, I’d genuinely like to compare notes.

General guidance only. This article does not constitute legal, taxation, compliance, or regulatory advice. Practices should seek professional advice appropriate to their circumstances before implementing any pricing strategies…