Speed Kills: Nobody Escapes The Impossible Triangle

Why fast work might be the worst work (and what to do about it)

A member of the Lighthouse told me recently she'd started positioning herself as the fast option - a full brand identity system delivered in a week, because that's what her market seemed to want.

I asked her one question before anything else: are you charging three or four times your normal rate for that?

She wasn't.

Here's the trap, and it catches capable people more often than careless ones: nobody escapes the impossible triangle. Good, cheap, quick -pick any two, because you cannot have all three.

If you're compressing weeks of strategic work into days, something has to give: charge substantially more for the compression, take on far fewer clients at a time, or quietly let the quality thin. Most people don't choose any of these on purpose. They just absorb the compression, project by project, until the business is running at a pace it was never actually priced for.

The deeper problem sits one layer under the pricing question, and it's a strange, almost backwards one: the better and faster you get at solving a problem, the less most clients think it's worth. We've enabled a mindset that pays for time rather than outcome, so the visible hours a project takes have become a stand-in for its value - a stand-in that punishes exactly the expertise that lets you go fast.

Thirty years of pattern recognition is what lets an experienced strategist see in an afternoon what would take someone else a month. Charge for the afternoon, priced like an afternoon, and you've just discounted the thirty years to nothing. Clients rarely do this out of malice. Nobody has made the case for what they're actually buying.

This is the argument for value-based pricing - a larger conversation than one edition can hold. But the smaller, immediate version is worth sitting with: know which two points of the triangle you're actually standing on, and stop pretending you can quietly hold all three.

If a client is asking for your fastest, cheapest, best work simultaneously, that's not a brief. That's a test of whether you know your own value.

Which point of the triangle have you been giving away?

Peter

P.S. - Pricing for outcome rather than time is one of the things we work through properly inside the Lighthouse Brand Builders community during bi-weekly LIVE cohort sessions