One thing I will always remember working as an ERISA attorney for third party administrators (TPAs) is when a plan sponsor would tell us that they wanted the maximum savings for retirement and when we came back up with a design for huge retirement savings for them, they’d back away.
That happened to me again a few weeks back when I meet a company about their lack of a retirement plan and I was able to develop with the help of a TPA a combo 401(k)/cash balance plan where the owner of the company would have saved $160,000 per year with both plans and would’ve only had to make an employer contribution of $21,000 for both plans. It was a no brained to go with this plan design and they balked.
The point is that while you can help with plan design and lead a plan sponsor to hue retirement savings, sometime you just can’t get them to sign on as a client and help them save huge amounts. That’s just part of the game.