People that are new to business, approach the situation with little or no knowledge of what ‘profit’ is and how to generate it. Some people incorrectly see the salary that they earn from the business as profit. In business terms this is of course incorrect. Profit is what you have left after all the costs associated with carrying out your business have been deducted – including your salary.

Fortunately there are a few ways of determining what your pricing should be – in order for your business to be profitable. But bear in mind that no method is absolutely accurate or foolproof. The most prevalent method seems to be: making enquiries with existing agencies (covertly or overtly) in order to find out what they charge and fall in line or adjust your rate up or down. Of course it is necessary to know what the competition is doing and also to know what they are charging in order to have the opportunity to compete.

The problem with that is that you don’t know what their overheads and costs of doing business are and you have little idea of their skill-level or experience within the industry. Therefore you could be overpricing your services effectively putting off your potential clientèle or possibly under-pricing yourself and making a loss for your business. It makes sense that someone new to the industry may be unlikely to commission the same fee as someone who has been operating successfully in the industry for twenty years or more and has established a credible and reputable business.

With that in mind, I came across a particular method of determining fee levels which I feel may be of benefit to share. It is not a method cast in stone; it is more of a ‘rule of thumb’ or a guide to help you come close to getting your fee structure to a level that is right for you and your business.

At the outset you have to bear in mind that self-employment or running a business is totally unlike working for an employer. When you are employed, you are legally entitled to be paid for 52 weeks of the year. Which includes, holiday time, paid bank holidays and statutory sick pay for those occasions when you are unfit to work through illness.

As a self-employed person or a business owner you are not entitled and unlikely to get any of those benefits. When you run a business your time is split into three distinct categories.

1. Personal time (Personal time includes annual holidays and bank holidays and also periods of sickness).
2. Business/Company time (Business/Company time is how much time you spend on your business for which you will not be able to charge your clients i.e. marketing, book-keeping and administration tasks).
3. Billable time (is the amount of time that you will be carrying out work for clients for which you can invoice).

Once you have split your time you need to decide how much time you expect to be devoted to each category.

Example (calculating billable time)

Personal time: 20 days holiday each year + 6 bank holidays + 10 sick days = 36 days

Business/Company time: 78 days each year (1 ½ days per week) for promoting the business and admin tasks.

Billable time: On a 5 day working week basis, within 52 weeks there are 260 days per year that you could be available to carry out work for clients.

In order to arrive at your billable time you need to take the total amount of billable days available per year and subtract the personal and business/company time.

So this is how it stacks up:

260 – 78 – 36 = 146

The total amount of billable days in this example is 146 days. In order to determine an hourly rate you need to add up all the costs associated with doing business plus the salary that you would expect to earn and then divide it firstly by 146 to obtain a daily rate and then divide the daily rate by 8 to obtain an hourly charge out rate.

Costs of Doing Business

The costs of doing business can be variable and therefore need to be calculated and attributed to a particular business in order to work out costs with some semblance of accuracy. It is perhaps simple to see and therefore easier to calculate your costs if you work out of an office. But many start-up businesses initially operate out of the business owner’s home and use the family car for business.

With this in mind, it’s tempting to think that working from home and using a car that you already own and pay for means that it is cost free. But this isn’t true. When you work from home you use extra power and utilities over and above that which is used for household purposes. You are allowing your home to be used to provide a service – therefore the costs should be factored into your pricing strategy. By using your family car for business increases the mileage and servicing costs – these increases in costs should be picked up by the business and not paid for out of your own salary.

If you have seven rooms in your house and one of them is your dedicated office, the cost of running that dedicated office would be arrived at by dividing your total household utility costs by 7 and factor this into you calculations. In using your own car you would note the total annual mileage and keep a log of all business usage then deduct this from your annual mileage in order to ascertain the percentage of business use that the car gets. Once you have established a percentage, you can then apply that percentage to all the other costs associated with using your car i.e. insurance, road tax and servicing.

Add to this, any regulatory costs in respect of licensing, memberships of professional organisations, professional subscriptions, insurance etc.

Salary

In determining a desired salary, you could use your previous employment salary as a yardstick – although you would need to be realistic and flexible. If you earned £70,000 in your last employment it would be unrealistic to start out in any business and expect to earn the same wage. Whatever your desired salary turns out to be needs to be added to and factored into the other costs associated with your business.

Profit

If you are in business generally you are in it to make a profit. Therefore, in the ideal business world, a percentage mark-up on your hourly rate needs to be added and that is the profit. It is what is left after everything else, including your salary, has been deducted. It is the basis of capitalism, free enterprise, entrepreneurialism or whatever you wish to call it and is essential if you want to grow and further develop a business.

Flexible Approach

As I have already mentioned this method isn’t written in stone – it is intended as a guide to help those who are new to the business and are unsure of how to price their services with profit in mind. Like all businesses, allowances and adjustments in pricing need to be made to take into account market forces, competition or whether you are offering a service which is in great demand or highly specialised.

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Unfortunately, the extent and application of privilege can be difficult to determine. Assessing whether a document is privileged is a regular challenge for investigators, whose enquiries will often necessitate a review of someone’s communications, occasionally including communications with lawyers. This article seeks to provide some useful guidance for investigators about when lawyer / client correspondence is likely to be privileged. If a document may be privileged the investigator should highlight this fact to any instructing solicitors.

A Brief Explanation of Legal Professional Privilege

Types of Privilege

There are two types of legal professional privilege: legal advice privilege and litigation privilege.

Legal advice privilege attaches to confidential communications between a client and a lawyer, where that correspondence was written for the purpose of giving or obtaining legal advice. In this context, legal advice means that it relates to the client’s legal rights and obligations, and extends to strategic advice in that context.

Litigation privilege, applies to confidential documents that were created for the sole or dominant purpose of actual or pending litigation which is reasonably in prospect. Unlike legal advice privilege, a document protected by litigation privilege does not need to be between a client and a lawyer; it can also extend to communications with employees and third parties.

Confidentiality

It should be emphasized that privilege will only apply to documents which are confidential. As such, if a document has entered the public domain, for example by being posted on a website, it will no longer be privileged. By contrast, privilege is likely to subsist in a document which is disclosed to a limited number of people who were expressly instructed not to divulge its contents.

Legal Advisor

A “lawyer” for the purposes of ascertaining whether privilege attaches to a document is essentially anyone in the legal profession, including solicitors, barristers, in-house lawyers and foreign lawyers. This broad interpretation reflects the underlying purpose of privilege – allowing uninhibited access to legal advice.

The Fraud Exception

It is worth noting that a court can order that a document is not privileged if it was created for the purposes of furthering a fraud or crime.

Whilst the above principles are fairly easy to explain, their application can be difficult. As a result each communication needs to be assessed on its own merits. With that in mind, there are a number of useful questions which should be taken into account when considering whether a document is privileged.

Useful Questions to Ask

1. Is the document confidential? If a document is readily available to the world at large, privilege is unlikely to be an issue. Similarly, any communication between two parties in a dispute is unlikely to be privileged, unless the information was disclosed by one of the parties on a without prejudice basis. In such circumstances, the communication would remain privileged even if the party who received it wrongfully disseminated it to a wider group of people.

NB. Where a privileged document is disclosed by its custodian to a third party who has a common interest in the subject matter of the communication, it will remain privileged.

2. Were legal proceedings a reasonable prospect when the communication was created? If so, it must be assessed whether the document was produced with the dominant purpose of conducting those proceedings or giving or receiving legal advice in relation to them. In these circumstances, the document is likely to be privileged.

3. Is the document a confidential communication between a lawyer and his or her client?  If it is, the document will be privileged so long as it records the giving or receiving of legal advice or discusses what course of action the client should take in a legal context. However, it is worth noting that correspondence which does not meet this description may nevertheless still be privileged if it is for the purposes of keeping either the lawyer or the client informed about the progress of matters so that legal advice can be dispensed.

4. Was the document created for the purpose of furthering a fraud? If so, it is unlikely to be privileged.

Alexandra Underwood is a partner in Field Fisher Waterhouse’s Dispute Resolution group. 

The Inkerman Group will be participating in International Fraud Awareness Week, 11-17 November 2012 as an official supporter to promote anti-fraud awareness and education.

Fraud in the UK is now thought to be at record levels and according to a study conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE); organisations around the world are losing an estimated 5 per cent of their annual revenues to fraud.

As an official supporter of the movement (also known as “Fraud Week”), The Inkerman Group joins hundreds of organisations who have partnered with the ACFE, the world’s largest anti-fraud organisation and premier provider of anti-fraud training and education, in a commitment to proactively fight fraud and help safeguard business and investments from this growing problem.

As part of The Inkerman Group’s on-going fight against fraud and in association with Fraud Awareness Week, the company is offering readers a special discount on its monthly fraud publication, The Inkerman Economic Crime Review.

The ECR is a monthly publication written by a team of specialist intelligence analysts. The publication monitors global fraud activity, providing information and advice on fraud, corruption, bribery, extortion, IP theft, counterfeit goods, cybercrime and scams, to help prevent businesses and readers from becoming victims of fraud.

The first 50 people to subscribe to The Inkerman Economic Crime Review before 30 November 2012 will be able to buy a six month subscription to this specialist fraud publication for just £30.00 per month.

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The LRLLD is a complicated piece of audio surveillance equipment that uses an invisible infra-red laser beam to ‘listen in’ on any surveillance target. The Model AA79106 is said to be the most effective LRLLD in the world that allows the operator to perform undetectable audio surveillance operations on any room at an impressive distance of over 450 meters – as long as the target room has at least one window.

The equipment was specifically developed with government and law enforcement organisations in mind to use in clandestine operations in situations where accessing buildings to place listening devices into the targeted area is not suitable or indeed possible. The LRLLD is undetectable because it uses an infra-red laser which is completely invisible to the naked eye. Both the transmitter and the receiver are built into standard single-lens reflex cameras, allowing for ideal concealment.

The equipment is an easy-to-assemble and easy-to-use system consisting of three main components: laser transmitter, laser receiver, and amplifier unit with audio recorder. It operates by transmitting an invisible infra-red beam to the window of the targeted room which detects vibrations on the window glass that are caused by sound waves created by someone speaking inside the room.

Once these vibrations are bounced back off the window, they are sent back to the receiver where the signals are converted into electronic signals, filtered, amplified and fed into a dedicated recording unit connected to its own amplifier with speaker and headphones.

With a restrictive price of around £32,000, and sale of the equipment restricted to Law Enforcement or Government agencies through authorised suppliers, you’re unlikely to find this kit on the shelf of your local spy equipment shop.

That said, it is a ‘nifty’ piece of kit which should give our national security and law enforcement services the edge in their fight against terrorism and organised crime.

Take a look at the equipment specs

The SIA will always carry out a criminal record check on anyone who applies for a licence. If an applicant has a criminal record, it does not necessarily mean that they will not get a licence.

The Criminal Record Indicator was launched in 2004 as an on-line tool to give individuals an indication on whether they may or may not meet the criminality criteria in order to obtain an SIA licence.

Earlier this year; the SIA asked for customer feedback on the proposed developments to the criminal record indicator. Changes have now been implemented to:

• make the Criminal Record Indicator easier to use;
• identify at an early stage those people whose criminality would not affect their chances of being granted a licence;
• add a search function so that users can more easily find offences;
• introduce a new function where the ‘refuse’ and ‘consider additional factors’ results screens will display the offences to be taken into consideration;
• introduce a new feature that tells the user when their result may change.

The Criminal Record Indicator is part of the SIA’s on-line step-by-step guide to applying for a licence, which can be accessed here: www.sia.homeoffice.gov.uk/guide.

Ruth was praised for her tireless efforts to build trust and confidence between the SIA and those operating within the private security industry.

The award was presented by Interconnective Ltd Managing Director Bobby Logue and Brian Sims, Media Solutions Manager for UBM Live’s Security Portfolio.

Before presenting the award to Baroness Henig, Bobby Logue said:

“She has been a champion for the industry and its regulator, and we feel her contribution over the last six years has been enormous.”

Baroness Ruth Henig said:

“I am greatly honoured to receive this prestigious award. I would like to thank my friends and colleagues across the industry and at the SIA for all their help and encouragement over the past few years.

“The successes we have achieved are the results of collaboration and strong partnership working between the regulator and the industry and we must ensure that it continues.”

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The SIA is making everyone aware of a company claiming to offer free door supervisor training, a free SIA door supervisor licence, and the offer of employment. On application, the company asks for the applicant to pay £50 towards the cost of a criminal record check.

Please be cautious of any company which asks you to pay money up front when offering employment. Your payment may not be protected and you may lose your money.

Please Note:

• The SIA does not issue ‘SIA Student Cards’ or ‘SIA Trainee Cards’.
• The cost of a criminal record check is included in the SIA licence application fee. It is the SIA that carries out the criminal records check for licence applicants.
• To apply for an SIA door supervisor licence an applicant must have completed an approved training course and attained a recognised qualification.
• If you are looking for a training company that offers the door supervisor training, we recommend that you use the list on the SIA website.
• If you are unsure about a training company, check the company with the qualification awarding body that oversees the training company; such as Edexel or HABC etc.
• Before parting with any money, or making a payment at a PayPoint, check that the company is genuine, check that it exists, check that the address is real.

I lament the article in today’s Daily Telegraph entitled ‘Private detectives are out of control in Britain’. Although the article, written by Jake Wallis Simons, a well-respected journalist and author, is an effective piece of persuasive writing; for me, the subject matter is somewhat tired and worn  – an old chestnut which brings nothing new to the ‘table’ in respect of issues within our industry. Whatever there is to say about the private investigation industry has already been adequately explored and analysed by public enquiries such as the ‘Leveson enquiry’.  And as a consequence is in the process of being addressed by means of the implementation of a licensing scheme.

We are all more than aware of the previous activities of Southern Investigations as well as one or two other individuals that were employed by journalists; therefore to continue to bring their activities into play whenever a newspaper article is written only goes to show that Southern Investigations and those individuals are in the minority – illustrating that illegal activities are not the norm within our industry.

Contrary to what Jake Simons says, the reputation of the private investigation industry has by no means taken another turn for the worse this week; rather, it is the reputation of Southern Investigations that has slipped further into the mire. The majority of private investigators in the UK can still operate with their head held high knowing that what they provide is a valuable and entirely legal service to their clients.

As private investigators we are perhaps not familiar or comfortable in dealing with attention from the media. We naively believe that when we are contacted by a journalist for help with ‘their story’ that somehow it is a chance to get some PR – some free media exposure. Perhaps we will get a chance to appear on TV or maybe the name of our agency will appear in mainstream print.

Consider this before you ask an investigative journalist on a ‘ride along’: it is not the job of a journalist to act as your publicist. Why would a journalist, who is in search of a ‘scoop’, be concerned with your public image? Journalists are not there to write nice things about you or your agency – good news does not sell newspapers or hook viewers. Bad news and controversy is what sells news. The exposure that results from an ‘uninformed’ handling of the media very rarely results in positive PR – it more often than not ends in crisis for you and your business.

Next time you think to invite a journalist to ‘shadow’ you on confidential assignments or feel the urge to share your trade secrets – think again and be mindful that nothing is ever off the record.

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As the cost of online crime rises year on year confidence in the police’s ability to tackle e-crime is decreasing.

The BRC’s Counting the Cost of E-Crime report  estimates that e-crime cost retailers £205.4 million in 2011-2012.  The figure represents 0.75 per cent of the total £28 billion in online retail sales.

By far the most costly type of crimes are those relating to identity theft, which account for £20 million of the annual total.  Card fraud came in at a close second, costing £15 million while refund fraud netted £1.2 million.

Perhaps the most surprising figure to emerge from the report is the estimated losses incurred by businesses by increasing security measures in an attempt to safeguard customers from falling victim to fraudsters.  Research suggests that increased security actually scared customers away to the tune of £112 million last year.

The report goes on to state that at least half of retailers were disappointed with the police response to e-crime, with more than a quarter of respondents expressing strong dissatisfaction.  A paltry 14 percent said they were satisfied with present support from law enforcers.

The report states:  “The reason for such low levels of reporting and satisfaction was that e-crime is not considered to be a priority by many police forces.  There were also concerns that national units such as the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau or the Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) do not have the resources or capacity necessary to carry out further investigations.”

Low confidence typically leads to low levels of reporting, with 60 percent of retailers saying they would be unlikely to report more than one in ten e-crimes to police.  The report continues:  “This was largely due to retailers’ concerns with the law enforcement approach to policing e-crime offences.”

Could there be a role here for private investigators?  While it may not prove cost effective to investigate e-crime on a case by case basis, the size of the fraud, coupled with the inability of already stretched police forces to deal with e-crime suggests there could be.

Bob Clowrey is a copywriter with www.privatedetective.co.uk a private investigators specialising in due diligence and corporate investigations.

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Image source: Parentingteens.com

Anyone who conducts research online knows about deep web searches, but there is an even deeper underground of evil on the Internet and unfortunately, it isn’t so secret anymore. Anarchists, criminals and people who think it is the right of everyone to have access to certain illegal sites are providing tips on how to access this world.

The website Gawker.com published an article last year called “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable”.

Silk Road is a website where people can buy any illegal drug, including cocaine and heroin. The only way to access this site is by using an anonymizer called Tor. This software is an Onion Router. It works by directing Internet traffic through a network of volunteer servers to conceal a person’s location. Onion layering works by encrypting and re-encrypting data multiple times. The information is sent through a number of successive Tor relays which decrypts a layer of encryption and passes data on to the next relay.

Tor has legitimate uses. It is free software and can be used by anyone, including journalists, investigators and law enforcement. It is also the only way to access Silk Road, which is known as the “Amazon of all things illegal”

Silk Road also runs a site called The Armory, which sells illegal weapons. The only way to purchase items from these sites is by using a “crypto-currency” called Bitcoins. This is a peer-to-peer currency which is not issued by any banks or governments.

An article on Daily Anarchist encourages people to join the site, not necessarily to purchase drugs or weapons, but because the underground market will provide more revolutionary products in the future. The article points out that in the future there will be assassination markets where assassins will market their services for contract killings of “corrupt politicians, judges and police officers.”

According to an article published last week on Forbes.com, Silk Road makes on average, $22 million in annual sales. Silk Road is run like many other online marketplace that sell legitimate products. Sellers are given a rating by purchasers, just like eBay.

Nicolas Christin, a Carnegie Mellon computer security professor conducted a study to measure the sales activity on Silk Road’s underground marketplace. As of February of this year, there were over 550 sellers making approximately $1.9 million a month. Christin noted that the level of customer satisfaction was high: 97.8% of customers gave sellers positive reviews.

One of the comments on the Forbes article was from a happy customer of Silk Road, who claimed “High-quality drugs, great customer service and timely arrival.”

I don’t think I even have to mention that buying street or prescription drugs online and then taking them is not only illegal, buy highly risky. You have no idea what you are receiving, although if the reviews are to be believed, people are happy with their products.

The fact that this secret part of the web isn’t so secret anymore is scary. The site is worried about infiltration by law enforcement, and so it should be. In the meantime, Internet savvy teenagers and young people are probably online right now, buying or selling LSD or crack, or some other dangerous drug, just like you would purchase an antique lamp on eBay.

The author, former FBI Assistant Director Tom Sheer has recruited the best from the FBI, DEA, IRS and Secret Service to build a formidable team at Sheer Investigations.

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