Why We No Longer Do Free Consultations

I stumbled across an old email thread the other day that reminded me why we don’t do free consultations anymore.

Someone with an online business was complaining to a good friend of mine that his current CPA just didn’t seem to understand what all he had going on. As a favor to my friend, I did a call with the guy and looked over all of his stuff for free.

I found about $20,000 of deductions the other guy had missed. Not my biggest find, but not insignificant either. Instead of being ecstatic and hiring us immediately, he asked me this:

“So overall, based on the returns I gave you, about how much in taxes do you think you could get me down to for 2018? I understand it would be estimated. But It only makes sense to compare a general estimate to what my current CPA could do, then go from there!”

…what?

Tax programs will all generate roughly the same result. The guy could obviously point the list of missed deductions out to his accountant and the accountant could input them into the return and reduce the tax bill. That’s not going to change based on who is plugging in the numbers.

But the fact that the deductions got missed in the first place didn’t seem to faze him. The accountant’s lack of understanding in his business and other things that will likely be missed going forward? Not a problem at all.

Granted, we were about 3x as expensive as his current accountant (and with good reason!) but I guess he figured he could take our knowledge and splice it into the other guy’s work. It’s basically the same thing, right? ??