If you're still charging a slice of the savings, look at your last few engagements. Count how long each client waited between paying you and seeing a result. That wait is probably what's costing you deals.

I found Ray half a million dollars in potential tax savings and quoted him $50,000 to implement it.

Ray owned a company that handled drainage and large-scale plumbing work for cities and municipalities. When we met him, he was paying a little over $1.5 million a year in taxes. He was a high-income earner who was already buying real estate as an investment. He just didn’t know how much tax savings that real estate could create.

His wife didn’t work in his business. She managed the real estate which meant she could claim real estate professional status on their return by meeting the material participation tests. Then we ran a cost segregation study on the properties he already owned to accelerate the depreciation. We put it into action and turned it into $500,000 in savings.

That’s 10 percent of the number. At the time, I thought that was the obvious way to charge. It’s the model a lot of firms are taught the moment they start doing planning work: find the savings, take a slice.

Ray had never worked with someone like me. Beyond filing and maybe some bookkeeping, he’d never paid a fee for tax work. When I shared mine, his reaction was, “Man, that’s huge.”

When he finally did, he said, “David, my bill is going to be bigger, and I need to figure out what I want to do now.” He knew he’d be happy to pay once he saw the savings. But he wouldn’t see them until his return was filed. That was about 13 months away.

His biggest question was how to work with someone like me when he’d never done it before. So we walked him through our process, our system, and the opportunities we saw. Once we did that, everything changed for him. We settled on a fee in the five figures, based on the scope of that first engagement, and he’s renewed four years in a row.

He saved the money, bought more real estate, and retired a few years early.

Percentage-of-savings pricing looks logical on paper. Client saves money, so the fee is tied to the money saved, and the advisor is rewarded for finding more.