Want to attend Ten Essentials to Work Less as a CPA? Subscribe to my Daily Drip of business strategy for CPAs to get the details, as well as the guidance you need to stop working so hard for your revenue. Subscribe at SheThinksBigCoaching.com/subscribe-main-list   Today we’re talking about How to Price Advisory Services.  If you don’t know how to price or how to think about pricing, you may run into some common potholes, like underpricing your services, overworking in order to compensate, clients who are less emotionally invested in your business relationship and therefore get less valuable results, and so on. In this episode, in order to make it easier to improve prices, we break out what might be a common CPAs client roster into 5 possible buckets. And once we have the buckets separated, then we can get into what is an appropriate price range for not just the services - or even better - the outcomes. Hopefully by giving you some ranges and some examples, you will have a sense of what is "reasonable" and what is in the ballpark.  But your prices will be tied to the value that you can provide. And that value will always be subjective and based on what the buyer perceives the value to be. Want more on pricing and other business topics for CPAs? Join me for “Ten Essentials for Working Less” – a free training series on Crowdcast thru OCT 25th.  More info here.     Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options 

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160 How to Price CPA Advisory Services

Link for FREE training series: SheThinksBigCoaching.com/webinars/   Ready to get your life back after two hellish tax seasons? Join me for the FREE October Training Series: “10 Essentials for Working Less Without Losing a Dime in Revenue.”   Ten great topics over 10 days, like: How to Build Advisory Services Without Getting Killed on Scope Creep How to Improve Profits Through Pricing Without Being an Expert in Pricing Theory How to Niche Without Risk And a bunch more. Check out the full list and save your spot at  SheThinksBigCoaching.com/webinars/   Attend LIVE, for FREE, starting October 18, going through Oct 25th.    One more time :) SheThinksBigCoaching.com/webinars/

BONUS: Free Training Series - Work Less Without Losing Revenue

Want to attend Seven Essentials to Work Less as a CPA? Subscribe to my Daily Drip of business strategy for CPAs to get the details, as well as the guidance you need to stop working so hard for your revenue. Subscribe at SheThinksBigCoaching.com/subscribe-main-list Today we’re talking about How to Package Advisory Services.  If you don’t know how to package and price CPA services, you’re likely to be forced into the unenviable position of billing by the hour after the fact for work you thought you should do.  This will result in, among other things, getting under-compensated relative to the value you could or do provide. Where a lot of CPAs are is, “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it for you at this hourly rate.” And what I want you to have instead today are 4 examples of packaged up services so you can see what the end result looks like, but more importantly, what questions to ask yourself and in what order, so you can build out your own packages that suit your firm and your clientele in a way that meets both of your needs.  Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options

159 How to Package CPA Advisory Services

CPAs put all this time and effort into writing a good proposal. They package it up, send it off and it just goes into the abyss. Never to hear from the prospect again. Another problem is that you send out the proposal, the client or prospect comes back, you have a conversation with them, but they end up declining to work with you.  Then sometimes if value isn't fully captured, it can result in reduced fees and potentially leaving money on the table. So, if you can have a system for writing really solid proposals, without burning a bunch of time doing it, you can reduce the time that it spends, you can increase your conversion rate and you can potentially increase your fees without lowering your conversion rate.  And what I want you to have in this episode are the pieces that make up a good proposal.   Highlights: — “You do not have to be a Pulitzer prize winning writer to write a good proposal. Plain English is where it's at.” — “What forms the backbone of your proposal are the situation appraisal, the objectives, the service options, and the payment terms.” — “Everything that you need for your proposal can and should come out of a great discovery meeting.” — “In discovery meetings, make sure you're asking open-ended questions to find out what it is your clients are trying to achieve, what it is they really want, and understand if you're the person that can help them get there.” — “If you can, best to present your proposal live, either in person or on screen. So that you can walk them through it and you can answer questions on the spot.”  Download the PDF for this episode: https://www.shethinksbigcoaching.com/sample-proposal Episode mentions: 106 Better Pricing Strategies for Accountants: Stop Billing by the Hour https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/106   111 Better Pricing Methodologies For CPA Firms https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/111   Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options

158 How CPAs Can Write Better Proposals without Having to Be Good Writers

This week we welcome back Jonathan Stark, a former software developer who is on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. He is the author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts, the host of Ditching Hourly, and writes a daily newsletter on pricing for independent professionals. Often CPAs don't know how to price for expertise and strategy, and they just lump the advice into the delivery. But the advice and the expertise and the planning is so much more valuable than the delivery, then the setup and implementation.  In this episode, Jonathan talks about altitudes of involvement, where listeners will get an appreciation of how to separate out the advice and the strategy from the delivery and price it accordingly.   Highlights: — “Strategy is not a plan. A plan comes out of a strategy. Once you have a strategy to achieve the objective, now you can start planning.”  — “If you're perceived as an execution person, you are not the kind of person that people are going to go to for a blueprint. It's much easier for people to pigeonhole you as a builder and not a strategic thinker.” — “If you are used to saying I'm a CPA, and you want to shift up an altitude, you need to stop saying that.” — “Courage is much more important than confidence. Courage is knowing the risks, but doing it anyway, or feeling the fear and doing it anyway.”  — “The first step: find your top five clients and go out and ask them if they want to have a meeting to talk about the direction of their business and the strategy to get them there.” Connect with Jonathan: Website: https://jonathanstark.com/   Episode mentions: 106 Better Pricing Strategies for Accountants: Stop Billing by the Hour https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/106   111 Better Pricing Methodologies For CPA Firms https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/111   A More Useful Definition Of Strategy https://jonathanstark.com/daily/20200809-0152-a-more-useful-definition-of-strategy-   Book mention: Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239 Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options  

157 Altitudes of Involvement for CPAs with Jonathan Stark

Many CPAs are frustrated because they feel invisible in a crowded marketplace. They know they are better than their competitors, but when they focus on that fact, they get little in return. That's because, to customers, better is not actually better. Different is better. And those who market differently, win. In his new marketing book, Mike Michalowicz offers a proven, no-bullsh*t method to position your business to get noticed, attract the best prospects, and convert those opportunities into sales. Today I speak with Mike Michalowicz, author of 7 books, now including Get Different.    Highlights: If the bulk of your business comes from customer referrals, you have limited control over your growth, putting you in a precarious position We need a way to throttle the flow of leads: to be able to turn the spigot up when we want more clients, or turn it down when necessary, but not be at the whims of referrals.  The smart marketing money is on testing: run small experiments. No results? Fine. Good results? Invest more.  Sadly, many business owners take the random pot-shot approach, and that’s a mistake. Being different doesn’t necessarily mean outrageous. Being different helps you stand out, cut through the noise, get noticed, and attract the right people to you.   Connect with Mike Michalowicz: Website: https://www.gogetdifferent.com/ Purchase Get Different: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0593330633/ref=as_li_ss_tl?&linkCode=ll1&tag=obsidian-20&linkId=eca96009472be51113c717d00aa6ca08&language=en_US Episode mentions: https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/083 Fix This Next In Your Accounting Practice Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options  

156 Get Different, Get Noticed: Better Marketing for CPAs with Mike Michalowicz

JOIN or WATCH REPLAY – Pricing in a Nutshell https://www.crowdcast.io/e/pricing-in-a-nutshell SUBSCRIBE – SheThinksBigCoaching.com Hourly billing is like radioactive waste:  invisible, and given enough time and quantity, it'll kill you. Make the shift to pricing your services and reap the benefits, like 3x'ing profitability. But you need to know which pricing tools to use, and in which situations.  If you're a CPA, these are your most important pricing tools: Value-based Flat/Fixed Fee Segmented Curves Using these even only  reasonably well will guarantee that you will be more profitable on all your engagements. 

155 BONUS - Pricing in a Nutshell, for CPAs

As more and more CPAs make the shift to Advisory services, one question that comes up is how do I run meetings, what’s the agenda, what am I showing my clients, what are we talking about? Meetings of course are great opportunities to add value for your clients and increase their clarity and help them better understand what’s happening and what decisions to make.  Here today to talk with me about how to hold great CFO meetings is my guest, Mark Gandy.  Mark has been working as a part-time CFO for more than 20 years, and he's made every mistake in the book and he knows exactly how to run a fractional CFO meeting. HIGHLIGHTS: — “How do we hold effective meetings when we make this shift to advisory? It depends on where you are in the relationship.”  — “During meetings, we don't always hit the financials head on that much because usually, the issues are either marketing-related, sales-related, or operations-related.” — “The 10-30-60 rule is essentially 10% of any change is going to be all about the data or the numbers, the 30% is all about the new process, and the 60% is all about behavior.”  — “Most of the issues I deal with CEOs are behavioral issues — getting people engaged, getting people excited.” — “Great CFOs should be able to run a business. That means they need to understand marketing, sales, and operations.” — “What's keeping businesses from moving the needle? It's usually people issues, not necessarily process or data.”  Connect with Mark: Website: https://g3cfo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markagandy/ Software mentions: Tableau https://www.tableau.com/ Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/   Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options

155 CFO Meetings: Go Beyond Dashboards and KPIs with Mark Gandy

For business owners to make more money, it helps if they can make better informed decisions.  And though a P/L and Balance Sheet are very useful tools, for many every day business owners those two documents require a lot mental extrapolation to be able to forecast from.   And they hire accountants and CPAs to help them understand where their money went… what they get is a P/L, but a P/L is really tough tool to use to understand how to make more money.  What many business owners want is a simple tool that can help them understand and forecast the impact of decisions, before they make them.  Here today to talk with me about this tool is Rowan Eister, US Head of Business Development for the financial reporting and forecasting tool, Fathom.  HIGHLIGHTS:   — “For CPAs looking to build more advisory relationships with clients or deepen those relationships, Fathom serves as your all around toolkit. It opens up that revenue stream of advisory and improves your relationships with clients.”    — “Fathom was created with the idea to make clients understand their performance in a way that really resonates with them and that they can get involved with.”   — “Fathom is focused around design so the visuals are really at the core of how unique it is.”    — “Fathom takes those financial results and brings them to life in a way that is more meaningful than just that income statement or just that kind of spreadsheet of numbers that you may be giving to clients.”   — “Fathom's forecasting tool is going to evolve with your business and allows you to continue making strategic movements based on how things happen.” Connect with Rowan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rowan-eister/ Software mentions: Fathom 14-day free trial: https://www.fathomhq.com/signup Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options 

154 Help Your Advisory Clients See the Power in their Data with Fathom

Accountants have a hard time getting their head around assigning a price to squishy stuff like peace of mind, quick response time, and ease of access. While they understand that these things are valuable, it’s not widely understood how they can be converted to dollar prices. Today I speak with Mark Stiving, a pricing educator and advisor. He's the host of the Impact Pricing podcast and is the owner of Impact Pricing, where he teaches clients how to win, keep and grow customers to drive higher revenue. Mark talks about perceived versus real value, and the concept of the value table to come up with quantifiable results that can then be used for pricing. Highlights: — “Understanding how our customers perceive our value is not only how we set our prices or how we should be setting our prices. It also should be how we communicate through our marketing messages or our sales efforts. It also should be how we choose what products to build or services to offer.” — “Nobody cares about your product. What they care about is the problem they have that you're going to solve for them. They care about the result they might get after they buy and use your product or service.” — “Buyers are using perceived value when they make a decision to purchase something.” — “A value metric is how your customers measure the value you deliver to them.” — “The key to a really good pricing metric is understanding our customer’s value metrics.” Connect with Mark: Website: https://impactpricing.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Previous episode with Mark: Value and Segmented Pricing for CPAs https://smartstrategyforcpas.com/125 Free 5-day email course - Better Pricing Strategies for CPAs Get here   Want some help in your CPA firm, but not sure where to start? Schedule a free discovery call with me: https://calendly.com/geraldinecarter/15min   Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options 

153 A Formula for Quantifying Value with Mark Stiving, PhD

Many of you are familiar with the overwhelm that comes with a mountain of tax work. It is so easy to get bogged down with the countless details and its never ending so-called quick questions from clients. But before you know it, you're working 70 hours a week with no end in sight. And the money might be good, but at some point it stops being worth it. The desire is to tighten your workload by doing higher level work for just a fraction of the clients so you can get your weekends back, but that just seems like a pipe dream. Here today to talk with me about this pipe dream is Prithi Daswani who owns Prithi Daswani CPA, a firm based in Orlando, Florida specializing in Medical Practices, and those with Real Estate Portfolios.  She started her own firm 6 years ago after 10 years with the big four.  She has doubled her business year over and learned a lot in the meantime. Her favorite activity is finding money, and her goal is to get more people talking openly about money and stop treating it as taboo. We talk about her journey, about what has changed and what she’s learned along the way, so that you can get a sense of what's possible in your accounting practice. Highlights: “Understanding the client base, the client mix, allowed me to take a step back and get a bigger picture of what I've been doing and what I should not be doing. And who do you say no to and why to say no to it.”   “When a client calls me who does not fit that niche, it makes it a bit easier for me to tell the client, this is not what I'm specializing in. You do not want me to help you. I know how to set up your business, but I would rather you call somebody who knows what they're talking about, so you're set up for success in the future.”    “I started with very basic pricing that included everything, sometimes even for million dollar clients. Because I didn't know how to necessarily price it out or what value I was providing.”    “As we get started through the process of offering different prices to different clients and different services, part of it is just doing it so that you have the experience. We need to test the marketplace to find out how people are going to respond.”    “The only way I sometimes get things done, especially the stuff that I don't want to do is by saying I'm being accountable to someone.”  Connect with Prithi: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prithi-daswani-1a12277b/ Free 5-day email course - Better Pricing Strategies for CPAs Get here   Want some help in your CPA firm, but not sure where to start? Schedule a free discovery call with me: https://calendly.com/geraldinecarter/15min   Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options

152 How to Build $250K in CPA Advisory Services in 4 Months

Most CPAs struggle with pricing - some have moved to flat-rate or subscription pricing, and some still bill by the hour. What they often struggle to understand is the full depth of the value they offer to their clients, and because they don’t fully understand value, they are leaving Everest Sized Mountains of Money on the table, which means they have to work a lot harder to compensate for the missed opportunity.  Here today to talk with me about this problem is My guest, Jose Mirabal .Jose is the Author of the Value-Based pricing framework and the founder and Director of the Pricing Institute, where he has advised more than 1,500 companies in 42 industries on their pricing strategies.   HIGHLIGHTS: PART 2: - “What is need based segmentation? It's actually uncovering your market and figuring out and brainstorming the possible needs behind a client possibly buying your products.“ - “When you start seeing the problem from a value standpoint, not from a price standpoint, then things start making sense. That's why need-based segmentation is so helpful. Every single time you uncover needs, it gives you a lot of information.” - “Needs-based segmentation figures out the who and the transactional analysis tells you exactly how they are consuming.” - “Sometimes the need has nothing to do with your service, but it has to do with all the other items or attributes that are orbiting around your services.” - “The secret to pricing is options. It's like a menu at a restaurant.” - “Uncover your value, but figure your value based on two things. One, what are the needs that the clients have? And two, what are the current options out there that best satisfy those needs?”   PART 1:  https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/150 - “Everybody's concerned about their costs.  Nobody really worries about the price ceiling. The idea is to figure out and uncover value perception to see which specific services that you offer actually might have a higher willingness to pay from clients.” - “Everybody worries about value but they go down into figuring out costs. And there's no relationship between cost and value.” - “To monetize value, the first thing you need to do is uncover value. How do you quantify value? You monetize based on differences. When people buy, they buy based on differences. People compare items.” - “When clients are telling you that your prices are similar or too expensive in comparison to other companies, that's a sign that you probably need to work more on your differences. And that's a sign that you need to better assess how your product and services differ from the next best alternatives.” - “If you want to do value based pricing, all value based prices are supported by the price of the next best alternative. Every price based on value should be in reference to the next best alternative.”  - “If you want to start with the pricing, don't look for what others are charging as much as what others are offering.”      Podcast Mentioned: [in Part 2] Impact Pricing Ep125: Can We Really Price Value? with Jose Mirabal https://impactpricing.com/podcast/ep125-can-we-really-price-value-with-jose-mirabal/ Connect with Jose Mirabal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrmirabal/ Website: https://pricing.institute  

151 Design and Create Pricing Strategies from a Value Standpoint Part 2, with Jose Mirabal

Most CPAs struggle with pricing - some have moved to flat-rate or subscription pricing, and some still bill by the hour. What they often struggle to understand is the full depth of the value they offer to their clients, and because they don’t fully understand value, they are leaving Everest Sized Mountains of Money on the table, which means they have to work a lot harder to compensate for the missed opportunity.  Here today to talk with me about this problem is My guest, Jose Mirabal .Jose is the Author of the Value-Based pricing framework and the founder and Director of the Pricing Institute, where he has advised more than 1,500 companies in 42 industries on their pricing strategies. HIGHLIGHTS: PART 1: - “Everybody's concerned about their costs.  Nobody really worries about the price ceiling. The idea is to figure out and uncover value perception to see which specific services that you offer actually might have a higher willingness to pay from clients.” - “Everybody worries about value but they go down into figuring out costs. And there's no relationship between cost and value.” - “To monetize value, the first thing you need to do is uncover value. How do you quantify value? You monetize based on differences. When people buy, they buy based on differences. People compare items.” - “When clients are telling you that your prices are similar or too expensive in comparison to other companies, that's a sign that you probably need to work more on your differences. And that's a sign that you need to better assess how your product and services differ from the next best alternatives.” - “If you want to do value based pricing, all value based prices are supported by the price of the next best alternative. Every price based on value should be in reference to the next best alternative.”  - “If you want to start with the pricing, don't look for what others are charging as much as what others are offering.”    Connect with Jose Mirabal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrmirabal/ Website: https://pricing.institute   Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options  

150 Design and Create Pricing Strategies from a Value Standpoint Part 1, with Jose Mirabal

There is endless conversation about technology, software, and automation disrupting the accounting space.  Do you feel like your systems are pretty much automated, where you can just show up and mouse click one button, and it spits out all the reports and dashboards you need for your hundreds of clients? If that sounds like the dream, but you’re a ways off, stay with us, because today I am talking with Ryan Lazanis, founder of FUTURE FIRM, and we are talking about what to do right when it comes to tech and automation. Ryan founded Zen Accounting that he grew to the point of being acquired in just 5 short years, thanks to the tech-oriented, scalable model he put in place.  HIGHLIGHTS: – “The overemphasis on using technology and automation is not what's really going to move the needle the most.”  – “The big reason why people want to use more technology and more automation is because they just want to make their life easier.” – “Once we can have standard processes for everything that we do in the firm, that's when we can really reap the rewards of technology and automation.” – “I would recommend a person in your firm when you're ready to really leverage automation. Especially those modern firms that probably know about all those latest tools, they need a person to help put it all together.” – “Why not have all the routine tasks automated so that you can get freed up to do more of what's valuable to your clients?” Connect with  Ryan Lazanis: Website: https://futurefirm.co/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlazanis/ Podcast mentions: Future Firm Accounting Podcast: My 6 Favorite Accounting Communities to Learn From Software mentions: Zapier - https://zapier.com/ Karbon - https://karbonhq.com/ Teamwork - https://www.teamwork.com/ Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options  

149 How to Leverage Accounting Automation with Ryan Lazanis

Here are 5 apps, extensions, and plugins that can make your life easier.    Text Expander - Available on Android and Mac - I use it on my iPhone but for short things I just use the built in keyboard shortcuts, especially for all the forms that need filling in. Other options: aText and Gorgias, which is a Chrome extension Video Speed Controller - Speed up, slowdown, skip ahead, and rewind, all with keyboard shortcuts. Screen Resizer - stop being a masterful mouser, and use a Screen Resizer to make your screens snap to specific guidelines. Try MaxSnap, Divvy, SizeUp Email Tracker - Streak or Hunter Screen Recorder  -  Loom - For screen recording or any window, tab, or screen. Send the URL of your video with a URL.   Want some help in your CPA firm, but not sure where to start? Schedule a free discovery call with me: https://calendly.com/geraldinecarter/15min   Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options

148 5 Productivity Apps to Save You Hours

For CPA's who want to grow their accounting practice. You know how to be an accountant. It's running your business you need help with. With interviews from leading experts to coaching calls to solo episodes, you will get simple and practical advice that will grow your income and your profits, so that you can serve your clients better in turn. If you are a CPA who is ready to get back to a sane, thriving life you deserve, Epic Business Growth for CPAs is the show for you!

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Epic Business Growth for CPAs by She Thinks Big

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