Transcript of the above video:

These are videos I don't really love making but I get to the point where I get so much correspondence and quite honestly it gets pretty vitriolic and I do end up sort of seeing it, there is kind of a hodgepodge of things that goes on when initial inquiries come in. We have an information desk; the gals that man that are able to deal with a lot of things just on their own honestly, like more routine things they are able to explain and deal with or refer off to me pretty much immediately. Then some things come along, look and we do free consultations, the reason for this video is people send me emails that say "well I expect this that and the other thing as part of my free consultation!" 

Free consultation is contacting us and asking us if we can do something and us telling you whether or not we can. The "who", "what", "where", "when", "why", "how" of doing that, completing that task or even understanding the subject matter more deeply as it applies in your particular situation and then rendering opinions as to how best to proceed, that falls under the rubric of Advisory Services or rendering opinions. That's not part of the free consultation process. The other one I see a fair bit, again my staff I think they almost have some kind of sadistic pleasure in sending these on to me, send me these emails or somebody will say, I saw one recently, "well back in the UK, I can get on the phone to somebody and talk to them about this, that and the other thing before we even get going." 

Look, we don't do that. That's not how it works.

Again there's a free consultation associated with whether or not we can do it. Again who, what, where, when, why and how, we don't have the time to be talking to everybody all the time about all of that stuff without being paid for it. Quite honestly, it would be wrong to our paying clients that we would do it like that; we just don't have the ability to do it like that; I don't really have the inclination candidly to do long doctoral dissertations on the situation and then the person decides if they want to proceed or how they want to do that. I don't have the inclination to really do that. Again, the Consultation is ‘send us a message, we will tell you if we can or cannot do it’. We spend a lot of time here saying "NO". I spend more time personally because usually my staff will then grab ahold of me here in the office and say "hey we need to hash this out, this is a really anomalous request, anomalous inquiry. Can we assist with this?" We will kind of rack our brains trying to find a way that we can assist and it will turn out that No, we can't assist under those circumstances. And then sometimes we just know out of hand, oh we can't deal with anything like that. A perfect example of things like are Schengen Visas, Visas to Europe, this kind of thing, we don't handle those Visas. Very rarely do we get an inquiry for that but when we do we just shoot back an email that says "no we don't assist, you are going to have to seek assistance elsewhere." 

So again, the point of this video is I am going to continue putting up "free consultation"; I understand everybody apparently has their own definition of what that means. What it means for us is look contact us; tell us what your situation is; we will tell you if we can assist. Again, at the point at which we are getting into the details of it, that's the point at which we are going to have to start charging and we make specific accommodation as best we can to make our fees as reasonable as possible and to also advise especially at the beginning in such a way that it mitigates cost as much as we can, but at the end of the day Advisory Services is our business and we can't do everything for free.