Thesis · 7 min read
Every professional an owner engages opens the same way — a request list, and weeks of somebody searching. That search is billed at professional rates, it recurs with each counterparty, and the artefact it produces stays on the adviser's server rather than in the house.
Watch what happens when a new accountant, lawyer or notary is appointed.
The first meeting is about scope. The second produces a request list: entity documents, statements, deeds, trust instruments, insurance schedules, the prior adviser's working papers. Then weeks pass while somebody finds them, one at a time, in email threads and filing cabinets and the memory of a person who left.
That period is billed — not the searching, which is unpaid work done by the owner's own people, but the professional hours spent chasing, reconciling, discovering what is missing and asking again.
Next year it happens again, smaller. When the next professional arrives it happens completely, because the first one's picture of the affairs is not in a form the second can use and lives on a server the owner does not control.
The archaeology tax: the recurring cost of the record not existing — paid to professionals at professional rates, once per counterparty per engagement, indefinitely.
It is not a service anyone chose to buy. It is the price of reconstruction, charged again every time a new party has to reconstruct.
And it compounds in a way that is easy to miss: the artefact never accrues to the owner. Each adviser builds a partial, dated, private picture and keeps it. Three engagements, three incomplete copies that disagree with each other, none of them held by the person who paid for all three.
Administrative burden has three costs and only one appears on a bill: learning what is required, complying with it, and carrying the open obligation. The invoice captures the middle one. The household absorbs the first and third — usually through one person, the one who knows where things are and is described admiringly as very organised.
That person is not a filing system. They are the reason there isn't one.
The record stands rather than being assembled. A new adviser is granted a scope and reads themselves in, so the first meeting is a judgment conversation instead of a document conversation — which is the conversation the owner was trying to buy.
Their work then lands back in the house: the opinion, the filing, the deed, each filed against the thing it concerns. The next professional inherits it instead of rebuilding it, which is the moment the tax stops recurring.
Engage two professionals in the same year, the second after the record exists. If the second engagement costs materially less in reconstruction, the tax was real. If it does not, the cost was in the work itself and this argument does not apply.