What Makes a Great Client? (From an Expert’s Perspective)
If you need our services, we want to help you! But there are some ways clients can help make their hired expert’s job easier. Great clients lead to great results. Read on for a list of six attributes we believe make for a great client, from a financial forensics expert’s perspective:
1) Timely
In many cases, time is of the essence. The sooner we get the engagement letter signed, receive requested documents, and gather initial information from you, the sooner we can get started on your project, whether it be a business valuation or litigation work involving forensic accounting. As soon as we receive the requested documents, we can get started.
2) Organized
We often require many different types of documents to get started on a case. These documents are fairly similar across business valuations, so we can provide a detailed list of what we need. For cases involving forensic accounting review, our requests may be more open ended. A great client is one who provides the documents on our list in an organized way, with clear, descriptive titles with relevant dates. This could include the request number in the file name or including notes on the request list, helping guide us to the right documents.
Additionally, receiving files in a usable form will save us time (and save you money!) when entering data. Do you have a file in both Excel and PDF form? Send us both! Has someone in your company already summarized relevant data from a large group of files? Send us that as well! Anything you can do on your end to provide us with complete, usable data will allow us to spend more time on valuing your business or performing forensic analysis, instead of on data entry.
3) Communicative
We rely on our clients to provide us with not only documents, but also answers to our questions about the business or case. Some clients are more communicative than others. The easiest clients to work with provide detailed answers to our questions and take the time to meet with us in person, over the phone, or on Zoom, to help give us the clearest picture possible of what we are reviewing. Not answering emails, phone calls, or giving vague answers will make our job harder and cause the project to take longer. This works both ways, however, so we will be sure to remain open and communicative with you, our client, as well!
4) Forthcoming
In addition to providing timely communications, we need to know many details about the case we’re working on. The more information we have, the better. In a business valuation, for example, it’s extremely important that we are aware of any major upcoming or recent changes to the business that would impact operations or profitability. Finding out after our project is complete could mean we need to redo our work and delay your timeline.
5) Proactive
Is there something you think would be helpful to our work? Please let us know! Providing information that will better inform our analysis makes for a great client. Since we don’t know your business like you do, we rely on business owners to provide us with useful information, even if the specific question hasn’t been asked.
6) Understanding
We must be impartial in our work; great clients understand that. Our job is to listen to the facts, review the documents and relevant data, make reliable assumptions, perform an analysis, and make an assessment based on what we find. Understanding our process and our role in the case (as business valuation expert or forensic accountant) makes for a better experience for everyone involved.
If you are an individual or attorney in need of a forensic accounting or business valuation expert in Seattle, Bellevue, or elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, call 4 Corners Financial Forensics at 425.800.4896 or schedule a video call here; we’ll listen to your situation and help you scope your project. We’d love to help you.