Referring your contractor and freelancer clients

Contractors and freelancers give up a great deal when they leave employment: sick pay, death-in-service cover, an employer pension contribution, and often the discipline of saving at all. Many replace none of it. You see this in the accounts every year, in the healthy day rate and the total absence of any provision behind it.

That gap is the referral moment. A freelancer with a mortgage and children, drawing a good income but with no income protection and no life cover, is one illness away from a crisis. You are not the person to arrange that cover, but you are very often the only professional who can see clearly that it is missing. Noticing it, and making the introduction to a vetted, regulated advice firm, is a genuine service.

The patterns that should prompt an introduction are usually visible in the work you already do:

• A strong, steady income with no pension contributions and no personal protection in place.
• A limited-company contractor extracting profit efficiently but with nothing set aside for retirement beyond the company bank balance.
• A client whose contract is ending or who is moving between clients, and who suddenly has a lump sum and no plan for it.
• A freelancer with fluctuating income who needs a savings and protection structure that flexes, rather than a rigid one built for a salaried life.
• Any contractor talking about buying a first home, where advice on protection and affordability sits alongside the mortgage.

Each of these is a conversation for a regulated specialist, not for the tax return.

Contractors trust their accountant more than almost any other professional, because you are often the only constant across a working life of changing clients. That trust makes it tempting to answer the pension question or the protection question directly. Do not. Whether a particular pension, policy or product is suitable is regulated advice, and it is not yours to give.

What you can do, cleanly and confidently, is say that the client has a gap and that you know a vetted firm who specialises in exactly this. You keep the accountancy relationship, which is the valuable one, and the specialist takes on the suitability question and the liability that comes with it. The client is better served, and you are seen to have looked out for them.

The process is designed to sit lightly on your practice. You spot the client, make the introduction to a vetted, regulated advice firm, and step back. You are not running the advice, attending the meetings, or signing anything off. Your involvement is the introduction and a follow-up to confirm your client was well looked after.

SmartPeer is commission-only, so there is nothing to pay to make introductions, and members typically receive a 60-70% share of the fee when an introduction turns into business. The economics reward you for noticing something the client could not see, and for pointing them somewhere they could trust.

The way you raise it matters. With a contractor, plain language works best: you are earning well, but if you could not work for six months, what would happen? Most have never been asked. When the silence tells you the answer, you follow with the offer to introduce them to a regulated firm who arranges exactly this kind of cover.

That approach keeps you firmly in your lane. You have not recommended a product or assessed suitability. You have identified a risk your client was carrying unknowingly and connected them to someone qualified to address it. For a client base built on word of mouth, being the accountant who spots what others miss is how the base compounds.

Begin with the freelancers and contractors whose files already show a strong income and no provision behind it. A handful of well-timed introductions will teach you more about how referral fits your practice than any amount of theory.