what you're doing now and what it costs you
Fifty-three cents of every dollar leaves before anyone opens a file.
Marketing and the commission on the close are gone by the third day. What is left has to carry every hour of the work.
How a case actually moves
Twelve stations. On 213 of the 270 days, the file is not moving.
This is your month and one of your cases, drawn from your own numbers. Nothing on this page is a criticism of your people. Your people are good at their jobs. It is the shape they are working inside that is expensive — and it was built back when every one of these steps needed a person.
Where a figure is yours, we say so and we show where it came from. Where it is the shape of the industry rather than your file, we say that too. Correct any of it and we will redraw the drawing with your numbers on it the same day.
This is one offer in compromise, drawn as a route with a timetable. Position across the drawing is time — so the width of each station is the days it eats. Seven stations are people doing work. Five are waiting. The waiting is most of the drawing, and it is most of the year.
Read the width, not the labels. The three widest bands — the client gathering paperwork, the chase for what is missing, and the IRS reading the package — are the ones where the firm is paying salaries and rent and nothing is moving.
Measured: the stations and the departments are yours — commissioned sales, a processing department that loads documents, case managers who chase them, preparers for back returns, enrolled agents for the offer. Ninety days to nine months per case is your own disclosed range; this is drawn at the long end of it. Shape: the days at each station and the people each one needs.
You are paying rent, salaries and interest on 213 days when the case does not advance — and your client is watching every one of them.
Two of those twelve stations, up close
Seven people. Fifty days. None of it is the licensed judgment your clients are paying for.
Two rooms on your floor exist only to move paper toward the people who are qualified to sign it. One types documents into the case system. The other spends seven weeks asking a frightened person for paperwork that has already been asked for twice.
Both rooms are drawn on the same fifty days. The processing room is the narrow band. The chase is everything else.
Relayed, not audited: the departments are yours — a processing department that loads documents into the case system, and case managers who chase what is missing. Shape, not yours: the days each room consumes and the three requests are the shape of the nine-month case drawn in section 01, not a file of yours. Arithmetic: seven people is three plus four; fifty days is three plus forty-seven, out of the two hundred and seventy.
You have said you would pay to take the processing burden off your people. That instinct is right. On the next page it is gone by rule — and nobody is cut.
The thing you already wanted removed is seven of your people and fifty days of every case — and not one hour of it is the work you are licensed to do.
What each of these costs, in plain words
Every one of these was the right answer once. Two of them have to be bought again every month.
One month drawn as what it is: a tank with five pipes leaving it. Two of the pipes carry money out and run dry — they have to be filled again next month or the phone stops ringing. The other three are not paid in dollars at all. They are paid in days, and the days are the case.
Follow the top two pipes to the end. They empty, and the loop over the tank is what has to happen next month for the phone to ring again.
Relayed, not audited: $250–300K a month of marketing and a sales commission of 20% of the fee, raised from 15% — the figures given to us, not pulled from your books. Shape, not yours: the days on the three lower pipes are the days those stations take inside the nine-month case drawn in section 01 — the chase 47, the offer package 25, the mail out and back 9. Measured: since March 2025 the IRS has accepted the entire offer package electronically — forms, financials, fee and first payment.
- MarketingNobody in tax trouble arrives on their own. In this industry, if you stop buying the phone call, the phone stops. Ten years of paying for it and you own nothing you can sell.
- Sales commissionSomebody frightened calls, and the call has to be answered by a person who can turn fear into a signed agreement. It buys one signature, and it is spent on day three whether the case is won, lost or abandoned.
- The document chaseThe request went out on paper, the client is disorganized and afraid, and the file has no way to ask for itself. Across this industry, poor communication is the single thing clients complain about most.
- The enrolled agent’s queueThe law requires a credentialed human judgment on a federal filing. That is correct and it should never change. The typing and the schedules stacked in front of the judgment are not the judgment.
- The mailIt is how the whole industry was built, and for a long time it was the only way. The mailroom is now slower than the government.
Not one of these five costs is waste. Two of them simply have to be paid again next month to get the same phone call and the same signature.
One month, drawn as a stack
About $833,000 in. About $125,000 left.
About ten million a year, as relayed to us, divided by twelve, and drawn as the physical stack it is. Ask one question of every layer: does the firm own anything at the end of the year because of it? The two largest layers answer no.
The two bottom layers are rented. They compound into nothing, and after a decade of paying them there is no asset on the balance sheet with their name on it.
Relayed, not audited: $250–300K a month of marketing, 20% commission on the fee, 15% profit (it was 30%), about $10M of revenue — the figures given to us, not pulled from your books. Correct any of them and this redraws. Arithmetic: commissions are 20% of the month; everything else is what is left after those three are taken out, and is shown as the remainder, not as a claim.
Fifty-three cents of every dollar is rented. After ten years of paying it, there is nothing on the balance sheet with its name on it.
What the client lives through
Six conversations in nine months. Two hundred and forty-two days of silence.
The same case again, drawn the way the person who paid you experiences it. Six marks are every conversation they get in nine months. Everything between the marks is silence, and the silence is most of the drawing.
Nobody is negligent in this drawing. The client simply cannot see anything happening, for eight months, while the number they owe keeps growing.
Industry figure, not yours: of 2,786 complaints filed against 70-plus firms in this industry between 2023 and early 2026, 39.2% are about poor communication — the largest single category — and only 20.2% were resolved to the customer's satisfaction. Source: analysis of BBB complaint records published 27 March 2026 by Precision Tax Relief, itself a firm in this industry, which excluded its own clients from the count. The contacts and silences above are the shape of a nine-month case, not a file of yours.
Two hundred and forty-two days of silence while what they owe keeps growing — that is exactly what the number one complaint in your industry is made of.
What an owner keeps at the end of a year of this
One hundred cents in. Fifteen left for the owners.
Everything above is one month. This is the whole dollar, drawn twice — the way it divided up when the owners kept thirty cents of it, and the way it divides up today. Same revenue. Same work. The only thing that changed is where the cents went.
Instrument 6 · one hundred cents of revenue, then and now
Thirty percent, eaten down to fifteen.
Both columns are the same hundred cents. The work did not get harder and the revenue held — two costs that compound into nothing simply climbed until they had taken half of the profit with them, and the half they took is roughly one and a half million dollars a year, every year, out of what the owners keep.
That money is not gone. It is being spent. That is a very different problem, and it is a fixable one.
Relayed, not audited: 30% profit falling to 15% on roughly $10M of revenue, $250–300K a month of marketing, and the sales commission raised from 15% to 20% — the figures given to us, not pulled from your books. The two named costs are the two you told us grew. Arithmetic: both columns are one hundred cents of the same revenue; today's marketing is the midpoint of your range, commissions are 20% of the fee, and everything else is the remainder. The left column is drawn with its lower seventy cents undivided on purpose — you told us what the margin was then, not what the mix was, and we are not going to invent it.
Half of the owners' share is not lost. It is being spent, every month, on two things that stop working the moment you stop paying for them.
The same money, spent a different way
The same $275,000 month. About $110,000 of it never leaves.
You asked what the plan for the two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand a month actually is. Here it is, drawn at the midpoint of your own figure. On the left, your month as it runs now: one channel, rented. On the right, the same money split across channels that are aimed at the person who has just opened the letter — and three that cost nothing at all, because we have already built them.
Both columns are the same money. The left one buys attention from everybody. The right one buys it from the person who is holding the letter — and leaves a remainder.
Planning figures, not quotes, and they must be read that way. The local-presence ladder is priced against a 2026 industry rate curve, and no written wholesale quote has ever been requested — requesting one is the next move. The channels on the right were costed against a $150,000 month, not against $250–300,000, and have never been re-run; they are shown here at the prices they were actually costed at, which is why a remainder appears rather than a bigger plan. The left column is the midpoint of a relayed, unaudited figure. The three marked as costing nothing are built or in build on our side and carry no monthly fee to you.
Their marketing rents attention. It stops the day you stop paying. Ours is owned — the letter reader, the pages, the films, the referrals and the phone keep working next year whether or not anybody buys anything — and it compounds. Those are a few examples of what is already built, not the list of everything we have.
And nothing about this happens in one jump. The transition is three plain rules:
- 01Your pipe keeps running while ours ramps. The radio does not go off on a Monday because a website went up on a Sunday.
- 02Nothing is cut on day one. Not a channel, not a contract, not a person.
- 03The spend moves month by month, as the channels you own start bringing in calls you can count. Every dollar that moves has to have earned the move with a number you can see.
The same money, aimed at the person who has just opened the letter instead of at everybody in the car — and roughly a hundred and ten thousand a month of it never has to leave the building.
What all of this would cost to buy anywhere else — every piece, added up, with the total — is in one place: page seven, the offer.
Nobody on your payroll designed this shape. They inherited it — and then they held it together with their own hands for years.
Fifty-three cents of every dollar is gone before the work starts, and the work itself sits still for 213 of the 270 days. Page four is what happened when we rebuilt the shape in a day.