Fees
We appreciate that fees are an important aspect when choosing an accountant, especially in difficult economic times. Our attitude to this is straightforward and borne of 30 years experience.
In the early days we attended a course about practice development when it was suggested that a good firm of accountants should lose 10% of its clients each year on fee disputes. This would suggest that they were charging as close as possible to the highest fees that the market would bear, and would also ensure that their marketing was strong as they needed to replace those clients each year.
To our certain knowledge we have never lost a client on a fee dispute. If the advice in the early days was correct then it would appear we have missed a trick and by definition are not a good firm of accountants, but that is not our view.
We would rather have a range of clients that are content with the fees they pay, happy to pick up the phone to us without fear that there will be an invoice in the post from us the next day, and hopefully are more willing to recommend us to others.
This might suggest that either we are lazy marketeers or too shy to go and meet strangers. More importantly it means that we do not have to spend vast amounts of time and money trying to work out an effective way of marketing our services.