How to offer DIY services as a Canadian immigration firm

The immigration industry is changing a lot, both because of the political landscape in Canada and also in the way aspiring immigrants want to work with immigration professionals.

This is why many immigration firms we work with are offering DIY services to their clients (for a full breakdown on what DIY services are and why firms are adopting them, check out our blog post here). In this article, we’re going to cover how you can set your firm up to offer DIY services quickly and why it can actually increase your monthly law firm profits.

Plan it out

The first thing you should do before jumping into the steps below is come up with a plan of action, but don’t get overwhelmed. This is not a majot change to your law firm, it is simply offering many of your regular services in a different way.

Some of the important things to think about are:

• what do you want to offer as a DIY service? All applications that you currently help with, or maybe just a few to start?
• how do you want to price these services?
• are you able to update your website/marketing materials quickly to reflect these new offerings?
• are you committed to testing out these offerings and seeing how they go?

Once you’ve got an idea on what you’d like to try, move on to…

A rock-solid retainer (or services agreement)

One of the most important parts of offering DIY services to your clients is making sure the offer is clearly defined and in line with their needs and expectations. For this, you should make it clear to them in your marketing materials and in conversation/during a consultation about what your DIY services entail, but it should also be explicitly clear in your agreement with them – often called a retainer or services agreement, depending on who you’re regulated by.

Important note: always make sure you’re meeting the requirements of your respective law society or college first and foremost.

As compared to your regular agreements, for a DIY agreement you’ll want to highlight:

• that this is a DIY service and you will not be their authorized rep applying on their behalf
• specifics of what is included in the service
• you may want to point out what isn’t included in this service compared to your other services
• how the pricing and payments work
• anything else important that applies in this case

The biggest mistake I see practitioners make is not clearly defining the DIY service. They keep their offer and agreement very vague, then they complain because since the structure was not clearly outline, the engagement balloons into something that neither party wanted and you end up frustrated that you didn’t just do it your “regular” way.

Believe it or not, this is on you; it’s up to you to design your service, define the elements, make them clear to your client and then stick to them.

For example, you should explicitly state:

• how many calls they get and the length of each (ie. 2 videos call of not more than 45 minutes each)
• how and how often you’ll review and provide feedback
• where your services start and end
• important services or deliverables that are not included
• how you’ll communicate
• what they can do if they need services beyond the scope of this agreement

Remember, these services are only as good as the way you structure them and make them clear to your client.

Pricing

We couldn’t talk about law firm services without covering pricing, especially since DIY prices can be tough to calculate.

Like pricing for any other service, this is very subjective. I know some law firms that charge very premium prices even for their DIY services, while some that take more of a standard market approach.

My usual suggestion for someone just getting into DIY is this: make your DIY services a percentage of your full service pricing. For example, if you normally charge $4,000 CAD for a full service Express Entry file, offer your DIY service for Express Entry at something like 50-75% of that (so somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000).

This is not a hard rule and can vary based on the type of application, your years of experience, location and more, but it’s a good starting point if you’re not sure where to start and you can always adjust from there.

Workflow and profit

Lastly, you want to map out the logistics of how you’ll handle and service DIY clients. This is one of the most important steps and often over-looked by most firms for most of their services.

Simply put, what happens once your client pays and signs your agreement?

If you’re anything like me, you have the rest of the steps mapped out, streamlined and automated as much as possible. This is crucial, especially in immigration where most of our work is fixed fee, meaning the more efficienctly we can fulfill the work, the more profit we’ll earn at the end of the day.

This means automated checklists, communication, form-filling, document management and more, or for those who are ahead of the game, just using all of automated workflows we’ve built into Visto. One of the reasons our law firms love offering DIY services is because they work so well with our tech platform, where you don’t have to set anything up and our AI and automation makes offering DIY services even easier to launch and fulfill.

Again, one thing you should always be asking yourself as an immigration firm owner is “how can I complete files even more efficiently without sacrificing quality?” If your Express Entry file takes you 10 hours, but it only takes me 5 hours due to my innovative law firm workflows, I’m making 2x the profit that you are per client.

Conclusion

Industries are changing – especially with the prevalence of technology – and also getting more competitive. Believe it or not, a large number of immigration firms are already using DIY services + technology as a way to differentiate themselves and also complete files more profitably.

If you’re ready to give them a try, reach out if you have any questions and definitely make sure to check out Visto, our platform that uses automation and AI to make offering DIY services easier than ever.