I get to philosophize about the biz once in a while here.
It was first brought to my attention years ago by boat guru Richard Elder that some of our customers are leaders in their fields. And by extension, they often believed that they could innately do multihull design as well as any unfamous designer. It went something like, after getting the lines, why bother to pay for what they could do as well or better just by who they were. A winner is a winner. When epoxy or the ocean proved them wrong, the bigger the ego, the happier they were to spend 10 times the amount of the skipped design fee to fix it with a sawsall. That does not happen as much anymore for a few reasons.
But a new, different and related phenomenon has begun happening more often. Several times this year already. Customers have chosen to skip paying a full design fee by hiring a kid with AutoCAD to finish the work. In every case I have seen, the results are luscious, but of course much of the work is wrong and won’t function properly. But it looks good!  Still, more often than not I end up with the shovel following the parade, cleaning up the mess.
Its not like my fees are excessive. Compared to a standard monohull design fee, or the multihull rock stars, they are low. Maybe it’s something to do with trying to help builders save money. I keep forgetting that means my design fee too? It’s a new paradigm that I have to sort out.