Why does each expert call cost you five hours of your own time?

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 question I get asked a lot on intro calls is some version of this:

"How are your clients running 30+ calls per quarter without burning out their analysts? Ours are spending half their week on call admin."

The honest answer is that we run a fundamentally different business model.

The traditional expert network sells you access to an expert. What it doesn't sell you — and what almost nobody calculates — is the four hours of your own time it costs to make that one-hour call useful. By the time the expert dials in, your analyst has already spent half a working day on the call. By the time the writeup is filed and the trading log is updated for compliance, they've spent the rest of it.

You are paying $1,500 for a one-hour call. You are paying yourself ~$500 of analyst time on top of it. The invoice only shows you half the bill.

Here's how the other half breaks down.

The five hours that don't appear on the invoice

A buy-side analyst running an expert call through a traditional network spends, on average, around five hours of their own time per call. The call itself is one of those hours. The other four are unpaid, untracked, and largely invisible to the people upstream from them.

Here's the breakdown:

45 minutes — Writing the brief. You can't ask the network for "an expert in semiconductors." You have to specify the role, the seniority, the geography, the relevant employer history, the specific operational angle, the time horizon of their experience. A vague brief gets you vague profiles. A precise brief takes 30-45 minutes of structured thinking before the associate even sees it.

45 minutes — Reviewing and vetting profiles. Three to six profiles arrive. Each one needs to be cross-checked against LinkedIn, against the brief, against your existing thesis. Two will be obviously wrong. One will look right but turn out to have left the relevant role too long ago. You'll push back, request more, repeat. AlphaSense's own analyst guide notes that experienced interviewers "conduct exhaustive preparation before and after a call" — and the profile vetting is where that preparation starts.

60 minutes — Building the discussion guide. This is where the call's value is actually determined. Industry best practice, per a recent consulting research breakdown, is to structure the hour into a 5-minute warmup with MNPI disclaimer, 40-45 minutes of targeted questions across 3-4 key themes, and a 5-minute wrap-up. Building those 3-4 themes — and the question sequences underneath them that probe rather than just survey — is an hour of focused work for any call worth taking.

60 minutes — The call itself. This is the part that appears on the invoice. The thing you actually paid for.

45 minutes — Notes, synthesis and writeup. Per the same consulting breakdown: "Notes are recorded in the note-taking instantly after the call. Insights are cross-referenced by other calls and research within the company." If the call went well, you have a draft thesis update, a list of follow-up questions, and three to five quotes that need to make it into the IC memo. None of that writes itself.

15 minutes — Compliance and trading log. This is the one most analysts forget about until they get an audit request. The SEC's April 2022 Risk Alert on Investment Adviser MNPI Compliance Issues was explicit: investment advisers must implement procedures to "track and log calls with expert consultants, review detailed notes of those calls, and review trading activity in securities of publicly traded companies in similar industries as those discussed during such calls." Every call you take generates a compliance artefact your firm is now required to maintain. That work falls on you.

That's 4 hours and 50 minutes of your time, plus 1 hour on the call. Five hours, give or take, for every expert call you book.

Why this matters more than the dollar cost

The traditional expert network industry has trained you to think about the per-call cost in dollars — $1,500, $2,000, $2,500. The dollar cost is real. But for a senior analyst at a multi-strat pod or a deal partner at a mid-market PE shop, the time cost is dramatically larger than the dollar cost.

A senior buy-side analyst's fully-loaded comp is typically $400k-$800k per year. Burned over a 60-hour working week, that's roughly $130-$260 per hour of analyst time. Five hours of that analyst's week per call works out to $650-$1,300 of internal cost — on top of the $1,500 invoice. The all-in cost of a single expert call is closer to $2,500-$2,800 once you include the analyst's time. The visible bill is somewhere between half and two-thirds of the real bill.

And unlike the dollar cost, the time cost is non-fungible. You can find another $1,500. You can't find another five hours in a week where your senior analyst is already working 60-90 hours and where the next earnings catalyst lands on Tuesday.

The five hours per call is the binding constraint on how much primary research a buy-side team can actually do.

What this does to a real workload

The constraint shows up the moment you try to run real volume.

A long/short hedge fund analyst covering ~40 tickers will, across a coverage cycle, want to do 20-30 expert calls per name. That's somewhere between 800 and 1,200 calls per analyst per year. At 5 hours per call, that's 4,000-6,000 hours of analyst time — and a working year is roughly 2,500 hours. The math is broken before you start. Nobody actually does this. What actually happens:

• The team triages. They run 200-300 calls per analyst per year instead of 800. They cover their highest-conviction names properly and do desk research on everything else.
• They cut corners. The brief gets written in 10 minutes instead of 45. The discussion guide is improvised on the call. The writeup is a Slack message to the PM instead of a structured note.
• They drop calls. The first three calls on a thesis get done properly. The next ten get done at 50% effort. The next twenty don't happen at all.

Each of those compromises degrades the quality of the diligence. None of them show up on the invoice. The cost is borne by the analyst, the thesis, and ultimately the returns.

PE deal teams have the same problem in a more compressed window. A 3-week commercial diligence sprint that "needs" 30 expert calls is, in reality, 150 hours of analyst time on top of the modelling, the management meetings, the IC prep, and the data room. The deal team does fewer calls. They take what the network sends. The diligence quality suffers in ways that don't show up until 18 months post-close.

Why smaller teams take the worst of this

A multi-billion-dollar fund with thirty sector analysts and a dedicated research operations team can absorb the five-hour-per-call burden because the work gets distributed. There's a junior who writes the brief. There's a research operations associate who vets the profiles. There's a notetaker on the call. There's a writeup template that gets filled out in 15 minutes instead of 45. The senior analyst's time is preserved for the work that actually requires their judgment.

A four-person hedge fund covering 40 tickers cannot do that. The senior analyst is the briefer, the profile reviewer, the question-builder, the note-taker, the synthesiser, and the compliance logger. Every minute of expert call admin is taken from the work that's actually compensable — the modelling, the position sizing, the IC pitch.

And it's worse for them on the cost side too, because the same expert network treats their account as low-priority and pitches them recycled experts at the same $1,500 invoice price as the multi-billion-dollar fund. The smaller team is paying more, getting less, and absorbing more of the operational cost on their own time.

The traditional model wasn't built for them. It was built for the buyer who has the team to absorb the friction.

How it got like this

The traditional expert network model is a self-serve model dressed up as a service model. The intermediary handles sourcing and compliance. Everything else — the brief, the profile vetting, the discussion guide, the call execution, the notes, the synthesis, the compliance log — is your problem.

This was a defensible split in 2008, when expert networks were a thin marketplace and primary research was a low-volume input into a buy-side process. It is a deeply weird split in 2026, when buy-side teams are running primary research at industrial scale and the "service" half of the workflow has expanded to consume more of the analyst's time than the call itself.

But the incumbent model can't fix it. Doing the brief, the discussion guide, the notes and the synthesis for the client would mean adding senior research staff to the network's payroll — analysts, not associates, at $200k+ per head. The economics break. The graduate-on-monthly-hurdle model only works if the actual research labour stays on the client side of the line. So the line stays where it is, and the five hours stay on you.

Why Woozle's model is fundamentally different

We don't sell access to experts. We deliver finished primary research. The brief, the sourcing, the screening, the discussion guide, the call moderation, the notes, the synthesis — all of it sits with us, on our team, in one workflow.

Your role is to tell us what decision the research is informing. Our role is to deliver the answer in a format you can drop straight into your IC memo, your model, or your thesis.

That changes the analyst time cost dramatically. Instead of five hours per call, your team is in for ~30 minutes of briefing and ~30 minutes of reading the output. Across a 30-call diligence sprint, that's the difference between 150 hours of analyst time burned on call admin and 30 hours spent reading finished research.

Same expert. Same compliance bar. Same diligence depth. Different workflow — and your analysts get most of their week back.

If you've ever spent a Friday afternoon writing a discussion guide for a Monday call you wished someone else could just run for you — and most of you reading this have — that is the workflow gap we built Woozle to close.

If you want to see how a done-for-you research workflow actually compresses the analyst time cost on a live diligence brief, get in touch. Happy to walk through a side-by-side with whatever your network is quoting you and whatever your team is currently spending on call admin.

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.