Can a Royal honour be guaranteed?

No it can’t. Nothing in life is certain.

You can appoint a professional driving instructor to teach you, but that won’t guarantee to make you a good driver and pass your test.

You can hire the best lawyer in the land, but that won’t guarantee you will win the court case.

What appointing us will do is significantly increase your chances of success and save you time, effort and aggravation.

The average success rate across all honours nominations is estimated to be about 1 in 10 (just 10%). Our success rate is an industry leading 2 in 3 (about 65%). 

Why are you 6.5 times more likely to succeed with our help?
 
Because we are experts in our niche and we know we are the best at what we do. We have honed our skills on over 900 nominations during the last 13 years and have learned what works and doesn’t work. It’s like most things in life: if you do something enough times you tend to get good at it! Furthermore, we spend on average 100–150 hours crafting each nomination and many people just don’t have that amount of time to commit to it.

Another reason our success rates are so high is that we politely dissuade as many people as we persuade to go ahead. Some people simply assume that when we are contacted about potential nominees for an honour we just tell them all they are brilliant and take their money. About half the people who contact us are advised that, in our opinion, they shouldn’t go ahead because we don’t think their case is quite strong enough yet. These people appreciate our honesty. And of course they still have the option to draft a nomination themselves, free of charge, should they choose to.

We took the decision some 13 years ago that you can’t build a sound, growing business by implying that people are going to get something they have no realistic chance of getting. It’s not ethical either.

There is another reason we politely turn away so may people and it’s self-serving. If put no-hopers forward our success rate will take a nose dive and people will stop using us, then the company will fold, and we will all be out of a job!

The easiest way to constantly improve our success rates is to keep raising the bar to entry, which is what we do. People are essentially applying to be clients and we keep making it harder and harder – a bit like membership of an exclusive club. It’s a win/win approach for both us and our clients. 

We have always been happy to say “keep your money in your pocket” if we are not convinced the nominee has a strong chance of success. 

Why don’t we have a 100% success rate? The main reason is that we can’t control the quality of the other nominations being judged alongside yours.
 
If, for example, there are several eminent surgeons being considered for a particular round, and you happen to be an eminent surgeon also being considered at the same time, you may not make the cut. Unfortunately, we can’t control the competition.
 
Having said that, the Cabinet Office will often carry over a strong nomination to the next list if they think it may well make the grade next time around.

We are aiming for a 3 in 4 success rate over the next 12 months (75%) and eventually 95%. Nobody’s perfect after all!

Can an honours nomination success rate be measured and what is the average success rate across all nominations?

We have been around for over 13 years, which is years longer than any of our competitors, none of whom choose to divulge their success rates or how many nominations they actually submit a year. Why not? Err…best ask them and then draw your own conclusion!

We are very open and transparent. We currently submit well over 100 nominations a year. Our current success rate is about 2 in 3 (65%). We measure the number of honours nomination submissions we’ve made in the previous 24 months (divided by 2 to get an annual average) and divide that by the number of honours we help our clients receive based over a 12 month period. (The Cabinet Office say that it takes 12-24 months for a nomination to be considered). It’s a relatively simple calculation for anyone who really wants to divulge how good they are at getting honours for their clients.

We estimate that the average success rate across all honours nominations is just 1 in 10 (10%). The government don’t publish an official figure for this for some reason so it’s an educated collective guess by a selection of experts in the honours world including some past judges, people who have worked at the Honours Secretariat, journalists who cover the honours system and our CEO (who is widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on the honours process). So it’s about as accurate as an educated estimate can be.