63 percent of the consulting invoices I reviewed this quarter had no defined deliverable anywhere in the scope

The enforceability problem compounds this downstream in a way most capital allocators do not catch until they need it. If there is no defined deliverable, there is also no objective standard against which a performance cure trigger can fire, which means the engagement effectively runs until someone gets uncomfortable enough to terminate for convenience, and that almost always costs more than the retainer itself because the consultant can argue partial performance on every invoice. The two engagements you described as having clear deliverables are the only ones where you could actually withhold the final payment without a dispute, because you have a binary test: the thing either exists or it does not. What I would add to your seven ambiguous ones is that the risk is not symmetric. If the consultant underdelivers on proximity, you absorbed a soft cost. If the consultant underdelivers on a defined work product and you have the language, you have a real remedy. The question worth asking before the next engagement lands on your desk is whether the scope was written by someone who also drafts management agreements, because the people who write good management agreements tend to build in the cure language automatically, and the ones who write retainers from a consulting template usually leave it out entirely. Are the two clean ones from the same source, or is that just coincidence?

The pattern you're describing has a name in professional services: input billing dressed as outcome billing. The consultant invoices for presence and time, the client pays because the relationship feels valuable, and nobody ever writes down what done looks like. It survives because the buyer is often too close to the decision to want a hard deliverable test, and the seller has no incentive to create one.

The assumption doing the most work in those seven engagements is that the person in the room has made the decision better. That assumption is almost never tested, because the counterfactual is invisible. You do not know what the decision would have looked like without the consultant, so the value of proximity stays permanently unfalsifiable. That is structurally useful for the consultant and structurally bad for you.

The risk you did not name is that the two engagements with clear deliverables are also the ones most likely to get pushback when the deliverable is wrong. A memo with a recommendation is something you can argue with. A quarter of strategic guidance cannot be wrong in the same way, which means it also cannot be right in any way you can point to. The absence of a deliverable is also the absence of accountability, and that protects the consultant more than it protects you.

If you want a workable filter, the question at the term sheet stage is not "what will you do" but "what will I have when this is over and what does it say." A consultant who cannot answer that in one sentence is describing a relationship, and relationships have different pricing and different governance than engagements.

The two that had clear answers, were those scoped that way from the start, or did the deliverable show up later in the document as a secondary item?

@tomasz_wro is not addressing anyone above, so straight in.

The framing I would push back on is the 63 percent number being the problem. In my experience the vague scope is not an accident, it is the product. A consultant who writes a crisp deliverable into the contract is also writing a finish line into the contract, and a lot of them do not want a finish line. I had one engagement on my triplex refinance in 2022 where the scope said "support during the debt structuring process" and the invoice kept arriving for four months after we closed. When I asked what the current deliverable was I got a calendar invite. That is not incompetence, that is design.

What I actually do now is refuse to sign anything that does not have a termination condition that is not time-based. Not "three months" but "upon delivery of X." If the consultant cannot name X in the first conversation I take that as information about how the engagement will end. Two of my notes deals last year had third-party advisory attached and in both cases I rewrote the scope paragraph myself before countersigning. Neither consultant objected, which also told me something. The ones who push back on a defined deliverable are almost always the ones you will be chasing at month five.

The version that holds up is a deliverable defined as a condition of payment, not a description of effort. When the invoice trigger is "month elapsed" the scope language is irrelevant because nothing in the contract requires the work to exist before the check clears.

What jurisdiction governs most of these engagements, and are the consultants structured as individuals or entities? That changes how much friction there actually is if you push for output-tied milestones instead of calendar billing.