Why I Publish My Consulting Prices (No One Else in Healthcare Ops Does)

Here is a small experiment. Go look at ten healthcare operations consultants and try to find what any of them charges. You will find case studies, testimonials, and a contact form. You will almost never find a price. That is not an oversight. It is a strategy, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The game hidden pricing plays

When a price is hidden, the number you eventually hear is not fixed. It is calibrated, to your practice size, to how urgent your problem sounds, to how much the seller thinks you will pay. The discovery call is often less about whether they can help and more about discovering your ceiling: how many providers you have, how badly you are hurting, whether you sound like someone who shops around. By the time you get a number, it has been shaped to you. Two practices with the same problem can be quoted very different prices, and neither knows it. I find that quietly disrespectful, so I do the opposite. Every price is published, the same number for everyone, before you ever talk to me.

Why sellers resist transparency, and why the reasons are thin

Sellers give three reasons for keeping prices off the page, and each has a rebuttal worth knowing as a buyer. "Our work is custom, so we cannot publish a price." Custom scope does not prevent publishing a starting price or a clear range; it just prevents publishing a single flat number for everything, which is a different thing. Nearly every genuinely custom business, from law firms to builders, can still tell you where pricing starts. "Publishing prices lets competitors undercut us." If your only advantage is a number a competitor cannot see, you do not have much of an advantage; value that survives being seen is the only durable kind. "We want to explain the value before the price." That is a preference for controlling the conversation, not a reason the buyer benefits. A confident seller can publish the price and explain the value; the two are not in tension. Strip the reasons down and most of them protect the seller's leverage, not the buyer's interest.

What transparent pricing actually requires

Publishing a number is necessary but not sufficient. A price with no context is only half the truth, and some sellers use a headline number to look transparent while the real cost hides in the terms. Real transparency states four things. What is included and, just as important, what is excluded, so the scope is not quietly narrower than it sounds. The payment terms, including whether paying over time costs more than paying in full, because financing markups are where quiet money is made. The guarantee and exactly what it covers, because a guarantee on something the seller does not control is theater. And the real deadline on any promotional price, if there is one, with no fake countdown clocks. When I publish a price, I publish all four alongside it, because a number without its terms is just a nicer-looking version of the same opacity.

How to evaluate any consultant's pricing

You do not have to take my word for any of this. You can hold every consultant you talk to, including me, to the same four questions, and how readily they answer tells you as much as the answers. One, what does this cost, as a number or a range, before we go further? Reluctance here is the first tell. Two, what is not included that I might assume is? This surfaces the scope gaps that turn a good price into a bad deal. Three, what exactly does your guarantee cover, and what does it not? A guarantee on delivery or adoption is real; a guarantee on your revenue or your rankings is a promise on things they do not control. Four, does paying in installments cost more than paying in full? If it does, that is a financing charge, and you deserve to see it named. A seller who answers all four plainly is one you can trust with the harder questions later. A seller who deflects is showing you how the rest of the relationship will go.

Why the rarity is a signal

If transparent pricing were bad for buyers, the transparent sellers would be the ones to avoid. It is the reverse. The seller willing to state the number, the terms, and the exclusions up front is the one confident enough in the value to let you judge it cold. So when you notice how rare published pricing is in this market, read it as a signal, and use the four questions to pull the same information out of the sellers who will not volunteer it. You can see exactly what I charge, with the terms and guarantees for each rung, on the published pricing page, and the same honesty runs through how I run US operations from 8,000 miles away.

Where to go next

• What Working With ClinicOps Costs: Every Price, Published live

  Every ClinicOps price, published in full: the free Leak Audit and Rescue Kit, the $749 Prior.

• How I Run US Practice Operations From 8,000 Miles Away live

  How a remote consultant runs US practice operations from overseas: owned systems not presence,.

Frequently asked questions