Special Factors With Regard to Pricing

Here are some factors that come into play when considering what to charge for those "special assignments" that come up.  These are important to consider as they do effect the overall revenue and the efficiency of your process service business.

Speed of delivery. It is one thing if you have a court document that needs to be served. It is another thing if your client needs it served right now. Charge a rush fee for that. Why? Well, if you have five routine papers you need to serve and four of them are all situated in one general locale, but then you have the fifth one needs to be served that day … no, that very instant, and it is on the other side of town, thereby taking you away from the $240.00 you will make from the four other papers, it just makes good business sense that a premium charge needs to be assessed. After all, you are now delaying four other papers from being served just to insure that one gets done. Don’t be shy about charging for a rush. Sure, if you want to score points with the client, then perhaps you might occasionally consider not charging the rush fee. But do that too often and you will find yourself working harder for a lot less profit than you can reasonably expect to make.

Level of difficulty of the assignment is another key factor. What if you have to deliver court documents on a military installation? What if you have wait two hours at a particular location for the defendant/witness to appear so you can serve them? What if you have to develop some sort of complex operation in order to find yourself in front of the defendant/witness because they have been or are known to evade service? These things should sometimes be factored into the equation on a case by case basis.

Number of documents to be served. This is another area to keep in mind. Now I have seen this vary from server to server. If our basic service rate per paper is $60.00, for example, but you have two different types of documents to deliver to the same individual, should you charge for that extra document? Some servers don’t. Others do but only at half the price of the first document ($30.00), and others charge full price for the second document ($60.00). In terms of pricing second instruments (or second documents), to charge or not to charge is the question. If you ask your client, especially those who operate in family law, they do not like to be charged for second instruments for the obvious reason that the costs go up for them. But in the case of family law, where it is typical you will see second and third and sometimes fourth instruments, there is the issue of your time for completing the various affidavits of service that come with those extra documents, there is the factoring in that should you forget to deliver one of those extra documents that this could mean the difference between a court appearance or a cancellation because you forgot to serve that extra document, and you have to consider that your liability towards your client goes up considerably if you fail to complete or fail to serve everything properly. What I have mostly experienced is that second instruments are charged at half the going rate of a first instrument. Very few servers charge nothing for the extra document, and those that charge full price very rarely get the assignment at all.
These are just three areas to consider when additional pricing for services above your basic service rate could apply.  There are others and you think about assessing reasonable rates for them.  In future posts we will discuss other examples of special additional pricing rates.