Within our standard terms and conditions, you’ll recall that we mention an annual review of our hourly rates on the 1^st April.

In February 2020 we warned clients that we’d need to increase our fees slightly from 1^st April 2020, despite avoiding doing so the year before. But then Covid hit, and we delayed that increase until November 2021, some 19 months later.

It seemed the right thing to do at the time, and formed part of our contribution to supporting our clients through such a difficult time.

Looking at the current landscape:

• Inflation is now reported to be over 5%, the highest level for more than a decade, and looks likely to continue upwards.
• In a recent survey by the British Chambers of Commerce, 58% of businesses planned to increase their prices in the next three months.
• The economic recovery has stalled in recent months and confidence is decreasing within the business community.

Given the above, we’ve decided to take the long view this year. 

We know many of you are still finding things hard since the pandemic, and Brexit. There will therefore be no general increase in our fees on the 1^st April 2022. Instead, we will continue to absorb the increases in prices and costs that we’re facing.

We hope this will help as the Omicron restrictions lift, and easier times are hopefully ahead.

Can you help us in return?

We’re going to have some additional capacity from Quarter 2 of 2022.

As we enjoy working with the clients that we already in place, our ideal clients can be categorised as ‘more of the same’. So, it seems sensible to ask you the following questions:

• Who do you know who’s running a similar business to your own, who might like to have a chat about how we can help them?
• Which of your contacts perhaps didn’t get the support that might have been helpful during the pandemic?
• Who might find our Regular Round-ups of interest?

If you could pass the word out to your contacts that we’ll have some capacity becoming free, we’d be very grateful!

There’s no rush or pressure for anyone to sign up, and we’re very happy to have initial conversations without any obligation, but I’d hope you know us well enough to know that!

Advanced warning!

Finally, we can’t credibly advise you to increase your prices, and ensure you look after your own profits, and continually avoid doing so ourselves!

We might be an intentionally small firm, but we are still a business, so please be warned that from 1^st April 2023 we will be implementing an annual inflationary increase. This will take place on 1^st April each year, in keeping with our existing terms.

To continue to offer innovative advice and keep ourselves up to date, we need to invest in our business. We repeatedly counsel clients to do so and need to practice what we preach!

We hope you’ll appreciate our decision not to increase prices this year, and that it will be helpful, but if you have any questions or concerns please come back to one of us. As ever, we’re very happy to chat, about this or anything else.