Where does $1,500 of an expert call actually go?

The following is an opinion piece written by Mark Pacitti, CFA - Founder & Managing Director of Woozle Research, a done-for-you primary research platform for investment professionals.

A version of the same question comes up on almost every intro call we run.

"How are you delivering this so much faster and cheaper than GLG or Third Bridge? Where's the catch?"

It's a fair question. And the honest answer is that there isn't a catch - it's a fundamentally different business model.

Most investment professionals I speak with, even very experienced ones, have never stopped to look at the unit economics of an expert call. They approve the invoice because the call is small relative to the position, the deal, the recommendation it's informing. The price tag is trivial. Click, approve, move on.

That reflex — the decision matters, the invoice doesn't — is exactly the reflex this industry has built its economics around. It's not an accusation. It's just how the middleman model works. And once you actually map where the money goes, the answer to "how can Woozle deliver this for less" becomes obvious. We're not running the same business with a discount applied. We're running a fundamentally different business model.

So this piece is the long version of the answer I give on those intro calls.

"Where does $1,500 of an expert call actually go?"

A quick note on sourcing before we go in.

The figures in this piece come from GLG's S-1, filed with the SEC in October 2021 ahead of a planned IPO and withdrawn five months later. I'm using GLG's numbers because they're the only ones that have ever been audited and made public — Third Bridge, AlphaSights, Guidepoint, Coleman and the rest of the category have never disclosed at this level.

None of this is specific to GLG. The unit economics described below apply to any expert network operating as a middleman broker between an expert and a client. The model is the model. GLG just happens to be the one that opened the books.

Splitting the bill

Here is where every dollar of a $1,500 expert call actually goes. The breakdown is based on GLG's S-1 filing but generally this applies to almost any traditional expert network that operates a middleman/broker business model.

$300 to the expert — 20% of the fee.

The person who answered your question gets about a fifth of what you paid, often less than that. Thinking about the last expert call you did, it's very likely that the actual expert only received around $200 and $300 for doing a 1-hour call with you — regardless of what you actually paid the expert network.

$310 to the graduate associate who picked the expert for you — 21% of the fee.

The 23-year-old fresh grad in Midtown searching the database, sending you three CVs, scheduling the call. They cost more than the expert because they need a salary, a hurdle bonus, a desk and a manager — every month, whether you call or not.

Their KPI is calls booked per month and profit per call. Their bonus formula rewards picking the cheapest expert available, not the most relevant one. That's not me being cynical — it's exactly how the comp plan is written. An industry insider on Inex One's open forum described the mechanic almost word-for-word:

"Most expert network associates have profit margin as one of their top KPIs. Clients are generally paying the same price whether an expert charges $250 or $500 per call, so lower priced consultants result in higher profits for the project."

Your price is fixed. Their margin grows when the expert's rate shrinks. The most senior, most relevant operator for your question is, by the firm's own internal incentives, the expert the associate is rewarded for not pitching you. More on that later.

$540 to the corporate machine — 36% of the fee.

Sales teams. Executives. Stock-based comp. Offices in Manhattan, the City of London, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Lawyers. Auditors. D&O insurance. Bad debt provisions.

This is the single biggest line in the P&L — bigger than the expert and the associate combined. You are paying for a global corporate apparatus that exists to wrap a phone call.

$350 to profit, debt service and the private equity sponsor — 23% of the fee.

This is the line nobody talks about. GLG carries close to a billion dollars of debt, drawn in part to pay dividends to its private equity sponsor. The interest on that debt, plus the dividends and recapitalisations distributed to the sponsor, plus the modest tech platform that runs the database, all come out of this slice.

In the ten months before its planned IPO, GLG distributed over $450 million to its private equity owner. Per call, that's roughly $210 leaving as dividends and recap — about two-thirds of what the expert herself receives.

And this isn't a GLG quirk. Most of the big expert networks are PE-backed today — Third Bridge sits inside an Astorg and IK Partners vehicle, AlphaSights took $400 million from Carlyle and TA Associates in September 2024 at a $4.2 billion valuation, Guidepoint and Coleman have cycled through their own sponsors. Every one of them has an IRR to deliver, and every one of them funds it from the same place: the gap between what you pay and what the expert receives.

You are paying the sponsor and the expert nearly the same amount. Only one of them actually adds value to your investment thesis.

The expert is the pretext. The machine is the product.

What this forces the associate to do

Your expert wrangler, often a junior associate straight out of uni - has to book about seven calls a week, every week, fifty weeks a year, just to cover their share of the cost base. There is no other way for the math to work.

Once you understand that, every behaviour you've experienced as a client becomes obvious.

They reuse the same experts. A re-pitched expert books in four hours. A net-new expert takes thirty. The hurdle is weekly. The choice writes itself. A former associate on Wall Street Oasis put it bluntly:

"It was always funny seeing 3-4 clients on our book chasing the same deal. We would offer the same experts whenever a new process kicked off on the same company."

The fund down the street, the bidder across from you in the auction, the consultancy pitching your client — they're often talking to the same person you just paid $1,500 to speak with.

They pitch the cheap expert, not the right one. Same logic as above. Margin is a KPI. Cheaper expert means bigger margin. You pay the same regardless.

They prioritise your competitor's brief over yours — if your competitor is bigger. Top-10 accounts get the associate's best hour. Everyone else gets the database residue and a ten-minute search. The smaller you are, the worse the experts you're shown — at the same $1,500 price.

You are paying premium for a process designed to extract margin from you, in roughly that order.

Why this hits smaller clients hardest

The maths above is the same for every client. The way it gets applied is not.

Simply put: if you're a smaller client, you're getting the worst experts on the database, delivered slower, and at the same price the biggest funds pay for the best ones.

Here's why.

A multi-billion-dollar fund running 1,000+ calls a year on a top-tier subscription is the kind of account an associate fights to be staffed on. They're worth real hurdle points. They get the associate's best hour, the most senior experts in the database, and — when the brief warrants it — genuine net-new sourcing (albeit this only happens after they've already pitched the low-hanging fruit in the database).

A mid-sized fund running 30+ calls a year, paying upfront on a smaller annual contract, is the kind of account where custom recruiting simply doesn't make economic sense for the grad associate. Custom sourcing takes longer and wastes valuable hours they could be billing from their database.

The associate has seven calls a week to hit and a smaller account can't move their hurdle the way a top-10 client can. So smaller clients get the database. They don't get someone going out and finding the right person for their question — they get whoever was already in the system from the last brief on the same topic.

The expert-quality consequences of that are a blog post of their own — and I'll probably write about that in the future. But needless to say: if your account isn't large enough to justify the associate spending real hours on it, you're not getting custom-recruited experts. You're getting recycled ones, picked fast and cheap, at the same $1,500 invoice price as the fund that does get custom-recruited.

The invoice doesn't differentiate. The information you act on does.

When two funds take opposite sides of the same trade and one is acting on a sharper expert input than the other — at identical cost — the gap shows up in returns, not on the bill.

That is the most expensive feature of the traditional model, and almost nobody is pricing it in.

How it got like this — and why it can't fix itself

It wasn't always this. GLG was founded in 1998 as a genuine marketplace — asset-light, two-sided, the Airbnb of expertise. Silver Lake invested $200 million in 2007 on exactly that thesis.

Two things broke the marketplace.

The 2010–2014 insider-trading prosecutions — Primary Global Research, Galleon, Martoma/SAC — forced the entire category to build heavy, manual compliance on top of what had been intended as self-service. Manual process means people.

Then buyers demanded white-glove service: sub-24-hour turnaround, hand-curated candidates, a named account manager to escalate to. That demand was met the obvious way — by hiring graduates, in volume, in the most expensive cities in the world.

Once you're running a staffing firm inside a marketplace's clothing, the economics follow. Headcount is the binding constraint. Margins have to be wide enough to cover headcount, rent, compliance and sponsor IRR. Lower the price and the whole thing breaks.

The $1,500 invoice is load-bearing. It's holding up a cost structure that was built for a different era and a different product. You are paying to maintain it.

Why Woozle's model is fundamentally different

This is the question I started with.

How are you delivering this so much faster and cheaper than the incumbents?

The answer is that we're not running the same business. The traditional model is a staffing firm wrapped in a compliance layer wrapped in a sales organisation, sitting on top of a private equity capital structure. The cost base is people, offices and debt service — and it has to be funded by holding the client price at $1,500–$2,500 per call.

Woozle is a done-for-you primary research platform built on a different starting point. We run the calls. We run the surveys. We handle scoping, sourcing, compliance, scheduling and delivery as a single workflow — not as a relay race across ten people, four systems and a monthly hurdle bonus. The whole design starts from the thing that matters to you (the decision) rather than the thing that matters to the industry (its own P&L).

We deliver expert calls at a fraction of the traditional price without cutting what reaches the expert. The expert keeps their fee. The savings come from the middle of the stack — the corporate apparatus you've been funding without realising it.

Same call. Different unit economics. The math runs the other way around.

If you've ever clicked "approve" on a $1,500 invoice without asking where the money was going — and most of us have — it's worth knowing. Most of it isn't going to the expert. Most of it isn't going to the answer. Most of it is funding the machine that wraps the call.

If you want to see what an expert call actually looks like when the machine isn't taking the spread — get in touch and we'll run a brief side-by-side with whatever your network is quoting you.

Woozle Research, a done-for-you primary research platform used by hedge funds, private equity funds, and capital markets professionals. Get in touch to learn more.