How one client happily paid £5500 for £500 of time cost

On 2 July practitioner Paul Meades sent me the following story in an email (which he has kindly agreed I can share with you):

“…I just wanted to say thanks for earning me £5000 this week. Let me explain. A few weeks ago I noticed an opportunity to potentially save a client around £53000 in VAT for about half a day’s work. When I offered him the chance for us to utilise the opportunity, rather than charge for the hours at about £500 all in, I charged him 10% of whatever we could achieve in a refund (Remembering what you keep telling me and the lessons from the Masterclass). Last week he received a cheque for £53k plus £2k interest so we billed him accordingly and he happily paid us the full fee as previously agreed, we even earned a cut of the interest!”

The morals of the story are clear… when we systematically and proactively invest our own time looking for ways to save clients money then:

(A) We provide all of our clients with excellent service, and

(B) The clients who act on our advice will happily share the benefits by paying us value-based fees that recoup the speculative time cost we invest in providing this kind of proactivity to all our other clients.

So everybody wins.

steve@avn.co.uk

PS If you want some detailed practical suggestions for the kind of proactive advice that can add serious amounts of money to your clients’ bank accounts please contact me on steve@avn.co.uk and I will gladly email you back with my key thoughts