Personal testimony: I had Roz look over a short story that I had written years ago, and I knew needed work. She advised me that I had done nothing, as the author, to make the reader like the two main characters. Which made me realize that I did not care at all about the main characters! I just used them for a story with a plot twist that just wasn't clever enough. So I dumped the story.

Not wasting time on a dead end story was well worth the paid consultation!

And since then I've only spent time on characters I care about.