He repriced a client from £100 to £290. The client had expected £500

The firm: Ameer Javed, AJ Accounts, Bradford. A small practice he runs with his wife, niched into children's care homes.

The client had been paying £100 a month. That covered the year end, the VAT, and everything else.

Ameer priced the same client through a proper system and it came out at £290. Nearly three times the fee, for exactly the work he was already doing, and he had to go and say the number out loud to somebody he had a long relationship with.

The client's answer, in Ameer's retelling:

"I was expecting like £500 a month. From how you described it, I was expecting something like that."

Ameer's reply, as a joke: there is a bit of a glitch in the system, it should be showing £450.

It was a joke. It is also the entire lesson, delivered in one sentence, which is why it is worth stopping on.

The number he should have been comparing against

His minimum monthly fee is £120.

So that client, on a full compliance package, had been paying less than the floor Ameer had set for the very smallest engagement he would take on. Not because anybody made a bad decision. Because nobody made a decision at all after the first one.

That is how legacy fees work everywhere. You price a client once, at the moment you know least about them, and that number then follows them for years. The business grows. The transactions multiply. VAT gets added, then payroll. Nothing in the process ever stops and asks whether the fee still matches, because nothing is designed to. The client is not going to raise it.

Ameer named this himself when he was filmed:

"I've got a lot of legacy clients where we priced them at a certain point, and later realised it was a lot less than what it should have been."

Every firm has these. What most firms do not have is the number.

Ten clients, £9,700

He ran ten of them through the pricing system and compared the output against what each was actually paying.

The gap came to £9,700 a year. Ten clients. No new work, no new service, nothing to sell. Purely the difference between what the work was worth and what was on the direct debit.

That figure is worth sitting with, because of what it is not. It is not a growth target or a forecast. It is money the firm had already earned and was not invoicing for, and it had been leaking at that rate for as long as those fees had been unreviewed.

The exercise itself takes an afternoon and needs nothing you do not already have. Ten of your longest-standing clients, priced as though each walked in this morning, against what they are paying now. Most firms are surprised, and almost nobody is surprised downwards.

The other half, which is about his wife

There is a second thing in Ameer's story, and in a two-person firm it sounds like the smaller one. It is not.

"Before, it was just me doing the pricing, because it was all in my head. Now, if I did the pricing or she did the pricing, we'd come up with the same price, because we're using one tool. Consistency."

Two people. It would be easy to file that as tidiness rather than money.

But it doubles the number of people in the firm who can hold a pricing conversation, which in a practice of two is the difference between a prospect getting an answer on Tuesday and getting a callback. And it removes something worse than slowness, which is a fee that depends on which of them happened to pick up the phone. Two similar clients on two different numbers is not just untidy. It is indefensible the moment either of them notices, and in a niche as small as children's care homes, they know each other.

The same point at a different scale is in the case study on a fourteen-person firm whose team now does the pricing. Two people or fourteen, it is the same fix, and the reason is the same: a price that lives in one person's head cannot be checked by anybody, including the person carrying it.

What is worth taking from this

The fear before a reprice is always the same one. The number will be too high, the client will balk, you will lose them, and you will have done it to yourself for the sake of a few hundred pounds a month.

Sometimes that happens. But look at what actually happened here. Ameer nearly tripled a fee, on a long-standing relationship, on work that had not changed, and the client's honest reaction was that he had been braced for more. The client had already valued the work in his own head, and his number was well above the accountant's.

That is not a fluke and it is not a good-client story. It is what usually turns up when the fee has been frozen for years while the service quietly grew: the client has been watching that happen, and has quietly repriced you already. You are the only one who has not.

The useful move is not to go and reprice somebody this afternoon. It is to find out what your number is first. Take your ten longest-standing clients, price each one from scratch as if they were an enquiry that came in today, and total the difference. Contact nobody. Just get to the total, because until the total exists it is an uncomfortable subject, and once it exists it is a decision.