We had a cold walk-in contact from a sales person. She talked a good talk & we were interested but said wait until after the holiday rush specifically telling her to contact us after the new year.
For the next 10 days we received up to 5 calls a day trying to set up an appointment to do their analysis. Mistake #1 = If they had any real business sense & truly cared about helping us, why in the heck did they keep calling us, taking us away from our work during the busiest time of the year? They had a sales quota to make before the year ended perhaps.
We finally sat down with an analyst [partly based on the phone salesman's claim to cut my tax bill in half & to get them to stop calling] who spent about 8 hours with us over 2 days to tell us it is amazing we have grown to where we are today since we seemed to have no business sense at all & it was critical that we become financially literate immediately.
Then the final pitch - what's it gonna cost.
They would tell us how to legally restructure our tax situation in such a way that we could pay a substantially smaller tax. AND the cost to do this would be recovered by the tax savings within the next 12 months. Sounds like a no brainer, doesn't it? Except, the cost was 15K when our tax bill has only been 10K or less without their help. Mistake #2 = We KNOW the IRS is not going to pay us an extra 5K each year especially after we restructure to avoid paying even the 10K we paid in the past.
And there's more...
For the total consultation including the tax restructure, they wanted a little over 52K. When told our cash flow could not support that, the Senior Business Analyst said they could violate their own company policy & structure a payment plan. Mistake #3 = After telling us 5-6 times how important it is for a company to have systems in place that must be followed, the Senior Business Analyst was willing to throw out his own company policies to get their hands on our 52K.
Now I must add they would give us a Letter of Assurance on the first day of taking on our project.in this letter they would give their assurance just how much better our company could do if we followed their recommendations. We were told a return of $3 on every $1 we pay is minimal but we should see $3.20 - $3.50 at least based on how poorly we have been running our business to date. There was no guarantee we would do that well. Even if they gave us a guarantee, they always had the option to ignore the guarantee unless we followed their recommendations exactly or if there was a national down turn in business or whatever.
They did get to us for $400 for the survey - which was actually a sales pitch. I may stop payment on the check since when I made the appointment I was told I wouldn't have to pay it. Part of the appointment setting was that they already had an analyst in my area & they would waive that survey fee since they could save more than that amount in travel costs by not sending the guy out a second time. Mistake #4 = The analyst complained how he had to leave home on Christmas day so he could make it to our appointment on the 26th. He obviously was not in our area already.
Before I go, we are a small company but have seen a minimum growth over 10% every year we have been in business & doubled in growth several years. We have been recognized as Small Business of the Year, New Family Business of the Year, & in the top 25 manufacturing companies in our area. WITHOUT IPA.
FINALLY, we have had much better experience & gained more from MBA students working on their master's project than we got from IPA. All for free.
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