What if you could walk into virtually any business, offer them a large chunk of money with no strings attached, and walk out with a sizable commission check? Better yet, what if you could do this with very little expertise and a minimal amount of work? This is the Bottom Line Employee Retention Credit (ERC) referral partner opportunity in a nutshell.
The ERC is a refundable tax credit of up to $26,000 per employee that most organizations with five or more W-2 employees are eligible for. Businesses and nonprofits can qualify if they experienced an operational disruption because of a government order limiting commerce due to Covid, or if they saw a quarter-over-quarter revenue decrease of at least 50% between 2019 and 2021.
There is some urgency to help organizations recover their credit because the IRS only allows a limited amount of time to file amended refunds. Under the current rules, the ERC expires in August of 2024. This gives us about a year and a half to two years to help as many businesses and nonprofits as possible to recover the funds that they are owed.
There is no limit on the amount an organization can recover by obtaining an ERC refund, and there are no restrictions on how the money has to be used. However, the credit is only available to organizations with between five and 500 full-time W-2 employees.
Although they can receive up to $26,000 per employee, organizations will more likely receive around $10,000 per employee if they took out a PPP loan (which many of them did).
For example, a restaurant with 50 employees could receive an ERC refund of around $500,000. This is a significant amount of money for most small businesses, so you are going to find them very receptive and even appreciative for letting them know that this credit is available.
The ERC program was originally authorized under the CARES Act in 2020, but the program has undergone several rule changes since then. This has caused a lot of confusion because in at first, businesses had to choose between the PPP loan and filing for an ERC refund, and since obtaining a PPP loan was much easier, this is what most of them opted for.
In early 2021, the rules were changed to allow businesses and nonprofits to claim an ERC refund even if they had already received a PPP loan. But the challenge is that very few organizations realize that they are eligible for the credit. And to add to the confusion, a lot of accounting professionals are still under the impression that the old rules are in effect.
Claiming an ERC refund is a very complicated process that involves filing amended tax returns for the years 2020 and 2021, and there are a number of complex calculations that must be made with precision in order to ensure that the paperwork is filed accurately. This makes the ERC a program that even a lot of accountants do not want to get into because of the complexities and nuances involved with filing these types of claims.
You could compare this situation to a general practice doctor versus a specialist. The Internal Revenue Code includes tens of thousands of pages of rules and regulations, and the ERC alone contains several hundred pages. Just as doctors do not seek to become specialists in every area of medicine, most CPAs are not experts in every area of tax law. This is why it is best to leave ERC filings to firms like Bottom Line that specialize in this area.
Bottom Line Concepts is one of the largest expense reduction firms in the country. We have been around for 15 years, and we have worked with some of the best-known names across a wide range of industries, such as CBS, McDonald’s, Uber, and the New York Yankees, just to name a few. Go here for an abbreviated list of clients we have worked with.
We are a performance-based firm, which means that we take on all the risk and we never charge any upfront fees for our services. We only charge fees when we are able to put money back into our clients’ pockets. The fee we charge clients to obtain their ERC refund is 30% of their credit amount.
You will be relieved to know that your job as a referral partner is not to learn the technical details of filing for ERC refunds. Bottom Line has a team of specialists that takes care of all this, and our team works with precision to ensure that our clients recover every dollar that they are eligible for.
Your only job as a referral partner is to introduce an interested business owner to Bottom Line, and their sales team will take it from there. In return, your commission is 10% of what Bottom Line collects.
Here is an example of how much you can make as a referral partner for Bottom Line. Let’s say you refer a qualifying business with 20 employees, which is pretty typical – many will have a lot more employees than that. With 20 employees, an organization can generally expect a credit of about $200,000. For this example, Bottom Line’s fee would be $60,000, and your commission would be $6,000 – just on that one deal! How many deals like this do you think you could refer in a month?
That of course depends on the amount of effort you are willing to put in. But even if you just sent out 10 emails a day to qualified organizations, you could probably get at least a couple of deals like this every month.
This is always a concern for some people when they look at a referral program. The good news is that the ERC opportunity will never become saturated. The reason is that there are approximately 6 million organizations with US employees who qualify for the credit, and it is estimated that only around 100,000 of them will end up filing for their credit before time runs out.
If all of us do a really good job and reach out to thousands or tens of thousands more organizations, we might be able to bring that number up to around 200,000, but that still only scratches the surface. The market is absolutely wide open, there is less than a two-year window for this opportunity, and there is absolutely no concern whatsoever about saturation.
This is always a concern for some people when they look at a referral program. The good news is that the ERC opportunity will never become saturated. The reason is that there are approximately 6 million organizations with US employees who qualify for the credit, and it is estimated that only around 100,000 of them will end up filing for their credit before time runs out.
If all of us do a really good job and reach out to thousands or tens of thousands more organizations, we might be able to bring that number up to around 200,000, but that still only scratches the surface. The market is absolutely wide open, there is less than a two-year window for this opportunity, and there is absolutely no concern whatsoever about saturation.
You will receive your commission as soon Bottom Line receives its fee. In general, it takes about 3 to 4 weeks from the time you refer a client to Bottom Line for the refund to be calculated, then another 4 to 6 months for the IRS to send the check to the client. Once the client receives the check, they pay Bottom Line and Bottom Line pays you.The timeframe for getting paid will definitely be a concern for some, but you have to look at this as a longer-term opportunity. That said, if you are willing to work hard on this for the next one to two years, you could realistically walk away with seven figures.
This is always a concern for some people when they look at a referral program. The good news is that the ERC opportunity will never become saturated. The reason is that there are approximately 6 million organizations with US employees who qualify for the credit, and it is estimated that only around 100,000 of them will end up filing for their credit before time runs out.
If all of us do a really good job and reach out to thousands or tens of thousands more organizations, we might be able to bring that number up to around 200,000, but that still only scratches the surface. The market is absolutely wide open, there is less than a two-year window for this opportunity, and there is absolutely no concern whatsoever about saturation.
There are numerous marketing approaches you can adopt to find organizations that you can introduce to Bottom Line. Start with the people you know and the places you frequent. Restaurants, dry cleaners, car washes, retail shops, basically any service-oriented business in your local area is likely to be eligible. And don’t forget that churches, private schools, and nonprofit organizations qualify as well.
From there, you can visit local businesses in person, do cold calling, cold emailing, direct mail, various forms of online marketing, or whatever you are most comfortable with. Whichever methods you choose, the approach is pretty straightforward. Start with the question, “have you claimed your employee retention credit yet?”
The answer will either be “yes”, “no”, or “what are you talking about?” If it is one of the latter two, this opens up the conversation to introduce Bottom Line as their risk-free solution.
This is always a concern for some people when they look at a referral program. The good news is that the ERC opportunity will never become saturated. The reason is that there are approximately 6 million organizations with US employees who qualify for the credit, and it is estimated that only around 100,000 of them will end up filing for their credit before time runs out.
If all of us do a really good job and reach out to thousands or tens of thousands more organizations, we might be able to bring that number up to around 200,000, but that still only scratches the surface. The market is absolutely wide open, there is less than a two-year window for this opportunity, and there is absolutely no concern whatsoever about saturation.
Some do, but as we talked about earlier, most accountants are not specialists in this area of tax law. If you make enough contacts, you will certainly run into businesses and nonprofits that have already claimed their credit, and this means that they either did it through their accountant or another organization like ours.
However, if they are sitting here in mid to late 2022 or 2023 and haven’t filed for their ERC yet, then most likely their accountant either doesn’t know about it, doesn’t know how to file it, or thinks their client doesn’t qualify because they are unfamiliar with the updated rules. When this happens, you can simply suggest that they get a second opinion from Bottom Line without any risk on their part.
This is always a concern for some people when they look at a referral program. The good news is that the ERC opportunity will never become saturated. The reason is that there are approximately 6 million organizations with US employees who qualify for the credit, and it is estimated that only around 100,000 of them will end up filing for their credit before time runs out.
If all of us do a really good job and reach out to thousands or tens of thousands more organizations, we might be able to bring that number up to around 200,000, but that still only scratches the surface. The market is absolutely wide open, there is less than a two-year window for this opportunity, and there is absolutely no concern whatsoever about saturation.
There are very few objections that a rational person could have to receiving free money that has no conditions on how it has to be used and never has to be paid back. When you receive an objection from someone who has not already claimed their credit, it will likely be some variation of “it’s too good to be true”.
In some cases, their accountant may have wrongly told them that they don’t qualify. Or they might not believe they qualify because their revenue increased in 2020 and 2021 and they do not realize that they can still qualify for the ERC if they had an operational disruption. When you get objections like these, you can lean heavily on Bottom Line’s credibility.
Remember, Bottom Line has already helped thousands of clients and recovered over $2 billion in ERC refunds on their behalf. The company has been around for a decade and a half, and as mentioned earlier, they’ve worked with some of the biggest names across a wide range of industries. Show them who Bottom Line is and who has worked with them and explain to prospects that they are taking on absolutely no risk by getting a second opinion from one of our ERC specialists.
This is always a concern for some people when they look at a referral program. The good news is that the ERC opportunity will never become saturated. The reason is that there are approximately 6 million organizations with US employees who qualify for the credit, and it is estimated that only around 100,000 of them will end up filing for their credit before time runs out.
If all of us do a really good job and reach out to thousands or tens of thousands more organizations, we might be able to bring that number up to around 200,000, but that still only scratches the surface. The market is absolutely wide open, there is less than a two-year window for this opportunity, and there is absolutely no concern whatsoever about saturation.
Although anything is possible, this scenario is highly unlikely. The ERC is a refundable tax credit on payroll taxes that are paid in by US employers every week, so the program never technically “runs out of money”. However, the rules for claiming the ERC have been changed several times already, and there is a chance that they will be altered again before the program expires.
This is always a concern for some people when they look at a referral program. The good news is that the ERC opportunity will never become saturated. The reason is that there are approximately 6 million organizations with US employees who qualify for the credit, and it is estimated that only around 100,000 of them will end up filing for their credit before time runs out.
If all of us do a really good job and reach out to thousands or tens of thousands more organizations, we might be able to bring that number up to around 200,000, but that still only scratches the surface. The market is absolutely wide open, there is less than a two-year window for this opportunity, and there is absolutely no concern whatsoever about saturation.
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