To pay or not to pay

An IFA friend of mine has been here in the office this morning and we have been sharing a “best practice” meeting looking at all aspects of our client proposition and pricing.

She told me a story about how a prospective client asked her for investment fund advice in respect of the portfolio he has on a well known and indeed successful platform. I won’t say who it is but I think you may already know.

She told the client she would be happy to recommend suitable investment funds to him and quoted her hourly fee rate for doing so.

He expressed surprise and told her that he had not expected her to charge him for this service. “How would you have dealt with this”?, she asked.

I said I would have told him the following story.

Imagine I pop up the road from my office to M&S and buy a bottle of wine. They have a very nice 2008 St Emilion at a very reasonable price.

I then pop across the road to the local department store (it’s called Manns of Cranleigh) where I know they sell both corkscrews and some nice wine glasses.

I then say to the lady behind the counter “Can I borrow your cork screw and a wine glass to open my bottle of red and drink a few glasses from it?”

The answer I would expect to get would be “no” (or possibly a less polite version of that answer).

And of course that is exactly the answer that she should give to the chap who asked for her expertise, her intellectual property, her service and didn’t want to pay for it.