The Expert Accountant

Prices don’t matter

I want to talk about stuff that’s CRITICAL if you want to keep growing your business.

Lead generation.

Because you have a lead generation strategy, right?

Don’t worry – if you chuckled or are wondering what you just read, you are not alone. Many accounting firms don’t pay much attention to the active lead generation.

New clients just magically appear, right?

Increase your charge rates?

I wanted to talk about your business model – and the money that you charge for your services.

If you’re a “standard” accounting firm, I bet your business model can be broken into the following steps:

–        Complete a service
–        Charge for the hours that you’ve worked

If yes, then it’s likely that you’ve trapped yourself in a transactional relationship.

Offer Value Not Time

Many of my clients when they first came to me, found themselves with, what they thought was, maximized hourly rates.

No matter how many extra services they added, they thought they just couldn’t justify increasing the amount that they charged for every hour of their time.

Not to mention that often, they spent more hours doing the work than they would charge their clients for!

Overworking and undercharging?

How often do you find yourself working way more than you charged for?

If you work long hours, delegate very little, and do work that you don’t charge a proper amount for, you’re making the three mistakes that are killing most accounting businesses.

In fact, these are one of the most common problems that keep the people who come to me for help from growing. The good news is, your accounting firm doesn’t have to look like that forever.

Value Pricing

When I start coaching an Accounting firm many tell me at the outset that they are ‘value pricing’. I ask them a few questions, do a couple of equations (around average hourly rate) and very quickly I deduce that they are not.

They may be pricing up front, offering fixed fees per month, fixed fees per project, have no time sheets and maybe even charging ‘by the form’ but it doesn’t mean they are value pricing.