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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You refer a business with 200 employees that get approximately a $2,000,000 refund and 25% of our fee, which is a total $500,000. As a referral partner, you will receive 10% of this fee, earning you a total of $50,000.
