This is a cautionary tail of ‘expertise’ vs. expertise and something I see a lot of in my own business as I pitch against other companies who do what I do.

As you may know, I am a Director of The Escape. We turnover about £1.2m and had an appropriate accounting firm for our needs. They got bought last year so we became a smaller fish in a bigger pond.

We felt we weren’t getting value for money and the meetings that we had to pay for by the hour consisted of someone having a general chat. An hour and £500 later we realised that it was time for the change.

So, we approached a guy that we had dealings with a couple of years ago. At that time he had pointed out something in a deal we were doing, something that our accountant back then had missed.

So we started 2008 with a new firm and already our new accountant in Basingstoke has found a glaring hole in our VAT returns to the tune of nearly £40k, which we can now claim back.

Value is always great when you can clearly measure it. I guess that’s why I love online marketing so much.

And, as a bonus, offering value creates a happy customer and word of mouth, arguably the best form of marketing… hence my little Blog post.