The clients who pay you least

Picture the client who queries every invoice. Who emails at eleven at night. Whose records are never ready, and who is somehow surprised by the same deadline every year.

Now check what they pay you.

It is rarely a coincidence that it is the same client. Most firm owners already know this. What they have usually not done is anything about it.

The eighty-twenty rule works on problems too

Most practices find that a small handful of their lowest-paying clients generate a wildly disproportionate share of their aggravation. The chasing. The out-of-hours contact. The write-offs nobody logs. The jobs that sit half-finished because the information never arrives.

There is a reason that pattern holds, and it is not that low-paying clients are worse people.

It is that a fee too low to include your attention still gets your attention. The client is not doing anything unreasonable. They have a question, so they ask it. What has gone wrong is on your side of the arrangement: you priced the work and then delivered the work plus a relationship.

A client paying you very little will still expect the earth, because nobody told them what their fee actually buys.

What a minimum fee actually does

A minimum monthly fee is a floor. No client, whatever their circumstances, goes below it.

It does two things, and only one of them is about money.

It filters. Somebody shopping purely on price finds out early that you are not the cheapest, and goes elsewhere before becoming your problem. That is a good outcome for both of you. You have not lost a client. You have avoided one.

It protects the clients you want. Every hour spent chasing a client who pays you almost nothing is an hour not spent on somebody who pays you properly and would happily pay for more of your attention. Your best clients are, quietly, subsidising your worst one. A floor stops that.

Pick a number that makes you slightly uncomfortable

This is the part people get wrong. They set a minimum at roughly what their cheapest current client pays, which changes nothing at all.

The number should be high enough that saying it out loud makes you pause. If it feels completely comfortable, it is not a floor, it is a description of where you already are.

Your price is usually a measure of your confidence rather than a measure of your work.

Which is worth knowing, because it means the number is allowed to move as you do. Mine started at £100 a month, back in 2013. I could not tell you today where the figure came from, and it does not matter, because the value of it was never the amount. It was having one at all.

Then clients paid it. So it went to £120, and clients paid that. Then £150, and £180, and onwards, each step taken shortly after the previous one had stopped feeling brave.

That is the whole method. You are not trying to find the correct number, because there is not one. You are setting a floor slightly above where you are comfortable, watching the world fail to end, and then doing it again.

And be clear with yourself about what it buys, because that is what makes it defensible. The minimum is not the price of a set of accounts. It is the price of having you: the questions answered, the being their agent with HMRC all year, the not having to wonder whether something needs doing.

That is the most valuable thing a firm sells, and it is the thing most firms give away.

The objection you are about to make

"My market will not stand it."

Possibly. But it is worth noticing that this is almost never tested. It is usually assumed, on the basis of a small number of price-sensitive conversations that stuck in the memory, and then applied to everybody.

There is no single market rate for accountancy in your town. There are firms charging four times what you charge, half a mile away, to businesses that look like your clients. What differs is not the work. It is what each firm has decided to be.

You are not discovering a price. You are choosing one, and then choosing which clients that price is for.

What to do about the clients already below it

You do not have to fix everybody at once, and you should not try.

Take the three clients furthest below your new floor. Not all of them, three. For each one, work out what they should be paying under your own system, and have the conversation at their renewal, in that order: what they get, then what it costs.

Some will move up. Some will grumble and move up. One might leave. If one leaves, look honestly at what they were paying and what they were taking, and ask whether you are worse off.

Then do the next three.

Not repricing is not the neutral option. It is a decision to keep working harder for less, taken quietly, every year.

Making it stick

The reason floors slip is that nobody is watching them at the moment a quote goes out. You set a minimum in January and by June you have quoted below it three times, because each one felt like a special case.

They always feel like a special case. That is what a special case is.

In Power Pricing the minimum is a setting rather than a memory. You put your floor in once, and any quote that comes out below it is lifted to it automatically, so you cannot accidentally undercut your own number in a meeting. It is a small thing that removes the one moment where the discipline usually fails.

But the discipline is the point, not the software. A minimum fee is not really about charging more. It is about deciding who you are willing to work with, and then having a number that enforces the decision when you are tired and it is Friday afternoon.