A share of the result means doing work that cannot be shown

There is a kind of marketing work in which a successful campaign leaves no public trail, and the reason is written into the contract rather than into the temperament of the person who did the work. The result that generated the fee belongs to the client who paid for it, and a client result is not a credential the contractor is free to exhibit on a website, in a case study, or in any other form a stranger could inspect. Search a contractor’s name and you may find a company filing and a founder title, and nothing that would let you judge a single campaign.

Ilarion Kompantsev works as a performance marketer on a contract in which the reward is a share of the result rather than a monthly retainer, and he says he conducts those deals with startups directly. That arrangement follows from the contract. What it changes is the shape of the job itself: who gets chosen, which numbers are trusted, who carries the team, and what, if anything, a stranger can later inspect.

The three things that travel with the risk

When a specialist is paid every month, the client’s unsold product is an inconvenience, whereas when the same specialist is paid a share of what that product actually produces, the unsold product is a month without pay. Under that second contract part of the risk moves: the client still carries its own costs and its own unsold stock, while the specialist carries the risk of working a month for nothing. Three pieces of the job move with that shift.

The first is the right to refuse the client, because working on a product that does not sell is a cost the contractor can no longer recover from a retainer. The second is a measuring instrument the contractor owns, because the fee is calculated from a number, and a number that lives in somebody else’s dashboard is not a number the contractor will accept as the fee. The third is the team, held as a standing cost rather than as a line on a client’s monthly invoice.

A share of the result moves the risk onto the contractor. The proof of that result stays with the client.

None of this is a revolt. It is ordinary hygiene.

The client you cannot afford to keep

A monthly retainer lets a marketer keep working while a product is still looking for buyers. A share of the result does not allow that patience, because the months spent on a product that produces nothing to split are months without a fee from the client. Under a retainer, a weak month is a conversation about next month’s plan. Under a share of the result, a weak month is a conversation about whether the contractor can keep the people who were supposed to produce the share.

Kompantsev says he takes these deals with startups directly, which puts that filter on his own desk rather than on an account team sitting between him and the product. The first commercial question under this contract is not whether the client will pay a fee this month. It is whether there is a result worth sharing at all. That is the selection pressure, and it sits on the contractor before it sits on the client.

A number you will not take on trust

If the fee is a percentage of a measured result, the argument about what happened is an argument about whose instrument did the measuring. A client’s analytics account can be revised, filtered, or simply read differently after the fact, and a contractor who is paid from that reading has every reason to keep a parallel record of his own.

Kompantsev says he built his own Google Ads analytics panel with an AI consultant inside it, and that panel is the one working asset he points to in the account he supplied. Owning the meter still does not make the number public. It only means the contractor is unwilling to let the fee be calculated on a dashboard he does not control.

The team as a cost that does not wait

He says he assembled a team of about twenty people, among them marketers, data analysts, and product owners. He also says he moved that team from Ukraine to Poland before the full-scale war, without naming the month of the move or how many people went. Those two statements sit together as a picture of overhead rather than as a story of rescue: the people are his, the relocation was his, and the cost of keeping them does not wait for a client’s monthly invoice.

A retainer can park a team. A share of the result cannot, so the contractor holds the payroll through the months when a startup is still finding out whether there is anything to split.

The dated points a stranger can open

According to his account, he started in marketing as a hired SEO specialist in 2012. In 2014 he opened his own web studio in Kyiv, building sites, online stores, and landing pages. Those are two dated points he names, and they do not add up to a continuous history of the years between them, because nothing in the public record fills the gap.

The third date sits in a public register, and unlike the first two it can be opened by a stranger without taking his word for the year. K&K Advertising Ltd was registered in the United Kingdom on 7 November 2022, under company number 14465695. He is listed in the register as a person with significant control of that company, and on the company site knkads.com he appears as Ilarion Kompantsev, Founder. Anyone can open the filing in a minute.

Almost none of the campaign work can be checked from outside. The results belong to the clients, and they are not set out here.

Both sides of the trade

The contract buys the contractor a reason to be selective about the product, a reason to own the instruments that count the result, and a reason to carry a team as a fixed cost instead of as a cost parked against a client’s invoice, before any result exists to share. What a specialist may show about a campaign is set by the client agreement, not by the payment model, and in his case those agreements leave him with nothing public to point at. The filing in the British register and the founder line on his own site are the parts of the practice a stranger can inspect. Those campaigns are not.

Kompantsev traded a monthly retainer for a share of the result, but this choice left him with almost nothing a stranger can verify. His contract ensures payment for the achieved outcome, but the rights to display that outcome belong entirely to the client. Because he cannot share the details of these campaigns, this work will not give him a public case to win his next client.