Working through an intermediary means somebody else owns the client

What an intermediary actually sells you

The thing being provided is not access to a customer. It is the removal of everything that normally precedes a customer: the finding, the credibility, the negotiation and often the collection of the money. For a business without an established reputation, that is genuinely valuable and it’s a reasonable thing to pay for.

It is worth being clear that this is what the fee buys, because it explains both why the share is large and why it does not fall over time. You are not paying for an introduction that has already happened. You are paying for the ongoing supply of introductions, and the moment you stop paying, the supply stops.

The share they take is rarely the main cost

People focus on the percentage, and the percentage is usually the least interesting part of the arrangement. The larger costs are structural: you generally cannot contact the client directly, can’t build a relationship they can act on, and cannot convert a satisfied customer into repeat work that belongs to you.

That means the ordinary compounding of a small business does not happen. Normally each good job makes the next one cheaper to obtain, through recommendation and return custom. Through an intermediary, each job is a transaction that ends, and the cost of acquiring the next customer is exactly the same as it was for the first. A business can work through one for years and finish with no more of its own audience than it started with.

Establish who your client actually is

The arrangements differ. In some, you contract with the intermediary and they contract with the end customer, which means your right to be paid is against the intermediary rather than the person the work was for. In others you contract directly and they simply take a fee for the introduction.

The distinction decides who you pursue if payment doesn’t arrive, whose terms govern the work, and who is answerable if something goes wrong. It is worth establishing before the first job rather than during a dispute, and where the sums are significant it is a reasonable thing to ask a qualified adviser to look at, since the answer depends on the documents and on the rules where you are.

The dependency builds without a decision

This is a concentration risk, and it is not the familiar one. A business can have thirty different end customers through a single channel and be entirely dependent on that channel, which looks nothing like dependence on a single client and behaves exactly like it.

The channel can change its terms, alter how work is allocated, raise its share, or remove you for reasons that may have nothing to do with your performance. Because the relationship with the end customers is not yours, none of them can follow you out. That is the specific danger, and the proportion of income arriving through any single intermediary is a number worth knowing.

You are working under rules you did not negotiate

Intermediaries set the terms, and they set them for their own operation rather than for yours. That can include how you communicate, what you may charge, how disputes are resolved, what happens to a cancellation, and sometimes whether you may work with a customer directly afterwards.

None of that’s unreasonable from their side. It is simply worth reading before agreeing, and worth re-reading occasionally, because terms change and the change is usually communicated in a way designed not to be noticed. In particular, any restriction on dealing with customers you met through them has consequences that outlast the arrangement itself.

Use it deliberately, and build something alongside

The sensible position is not refusal. An intermediary that supplies steady work while you are unknown is doing something genuinely difficult, and taking that deal in the early years is often the right call.

What matters is treating it as a stage rather than a destination. Take the work, learn what the customers actually want, and spend some of the capacity it buys on building a route to clients that belongs to you. The businesses that get hurt are the ones that let the channel become the whole business, and then discover that ten years of good work produced no asset they own.

There is one thing that transfers regardless, which is what you learn. The intermediary owns the customer relationship; it does not own your knowledge of what those customers wanted, what they objected to, what they paid and which parts of the job they valued. Recording that as you go is entirely legitimate and it is the part of the arrangement that stays with you when the channel does not.