Pricing Your Work

Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhardt.

Well, welcome back. It's the new year and here we are, all three of us. We're back together.

Finally all back together.

Whoop, whoop, whoop.

It has been a long haul.

It has been a long—

You left us, Steve.

I went to Hawaii.

I know.

Well, that's a good reason to leave us.

Yeah. And Sarah, you went to Portugal, right?

Mm-hmm.

Family. Lynda probably just went to the beach, but—

I didn't go anywhere. No, I sat in this room.

No, no, no. She went to the gym and then she injured herself.

That's right. That's right.

And then she injured herself.

I did. I hurt myself trying to do TRX, which I had never done TRX before.

Oh, are you okay?

By the way, I have a cyclothon where you cycle for 4 hours, so— spin on the spin bikes. So that's Friday. Had to get healthy, which I'm better now. But yeah, I never did TRX before. Have you ever done TRX?

No. Yeah, I have. Yes, I have. That's part of the training, the private training that they do. Yeah.

I'm going to try it again, but I'm not going to let my ego try it. I'm going to try to be smarter about trying it because it was all total out on my ego. I'm like, I'm not feeling anything. And she goes, move closer. And I went, And I started to pull myself up and my knees didn't like it.

Is it one of those things where like you overdid it too early on?

Oh, I snapped something. Something went pop.

Well, that sounds like something we just talked about, overdoing it and underdoing it in pricing, which is what our topic is today, pricing your work. And I think Lynda, you really had a good point that you just said about pricing.

About pricing?

Yeah. We were just talking about it.

Well, I was just talking about how with pricing, you know, and I just recently raised my prices on my legacy clients. And it's definitely something that you, when you're pricing your clients, and especially legacy clients, the older ones, the ones you've had for 20 years or whatever, it's harder to raise the prices on them. And I should have been—

That's true.

—evidence of that overall, like month over, I mean, year over year over year. And I never did it. I did get a great email out of ChatGPT. I wrote— I just told Chat, like, look, these are my clients I've had for a long time and haven't raised their rates in between 2 to 4 years. I need to raise the prices, but I wanna say it in a nicer way than how I'm gonna type it. And it wrote a beautiful email. It really did. It wrote a very nice email. And it— maybe I can get that for Tiara. And it really did. And I— then I sat back and I scheduled all my emails, which was good because it allowed me time to kind of go back and review them to make sure that Somebody might have had, we haven't raised your prices in 4 years. Some might have been 2, and I, like, validated that, and I became obsessive compulsive over the stupid email. I put in the amount so they knew what the new amount would be starting on date, blah, blah, blah. And I put all that in. And you know how many clients wrote back to me? One. And it was one of the newer clients. Okay. And it was just, I understand. I just wanna know what the difference in the volume. And his, it was volume of work changed. It was like his work doubled.

So you evaluated each file individually.

Oh yeah. I, I made that a big project. I had my spreadsheet and I have what my costs are for the bookkeeper, for the software that I use, if I'm paying for it. A lot of those I'm paying for the software, I'm paying for the payroll because I did, I fell into that person of You know, I fell into that whole thing when— into it said sell the software and package it in. And I did that, and I wish I didn't because now I'm married to these clients. And yes, I could kick it back to them, and I probably should, because with payroll, I don't have time to look every month to see if somebody maybe hired 5 people and I'm paying for 5 more paychecks on them.

Right, right.

Well, not only that, you don't value the software. You don't look at it as 2 different things. Software and service because it's all bundled in one big package. You know, shame on us that we, we, I mean, we all went through it. All of us did it. You're not the only one, obviously. A bunch of us did it.

I just had this conversation, conversation with someone because I said, you know, I know how to bundle my services now, but I, that's a process of 26 years. And, you know, Sarah, we've even tried things and you try things because now we're in the advisory services world and how do you package that? And do you package it as a separate item?

Yeah.

You know, it's a level of the clientele that we have. We don't package anything because you want us, you want the higher tier type of service. This is the price, this is what you get. And it's not you pick in a menu kind of a thing. We don't do that because we sell a specific service. And it, it costs more to have me and Sarah on a file like you, Steve. It costs more.

That's correct.

Somebody that's a professional that has leveled themself up to knowing law firm accounting. So it's gonna cost more. We're worth it. And you're gonna get your value back. And most firms, when you get in the bigger firms, they don't have a problem with paying our fees. And they pay their own software. We don't pay for their software, although we do pay for a couple of them that are bundled into our package. But, you know, bundling into the package means, well, or it's just part of the service that we're providing.

A couple of things here too that come to mind. One is the type of clients that we work with, which are legal clients. Their scope creep, when it, when it happens, tends to be a lot more intense than a lot of other industries. Number two, having worked in law firms myself, I've watched law firms approach their clientele about rate increases, and they generally send out a letter. That's it. They don't pick up the phone and call them. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that, about— to your point, you heard back from one client. So have you ever, either of you, when you've raised rates— and this, this will help the accounting people out there that are, that are tuned into this podcast today— have you ever had one come back and say, I never saw that email, or I never saw that letter, or That hasn't happened to me. They're usually, they're like, well, why didn't you raise your rate sooner? Or you're worth it.

I got that too. Somebody did say that to me. Oh, you're definitely worth it. I don't, I have no problem with your rent rate increase, which was—

Well, customarily everything increases on an annual basis. It's not, may not be calendar, but— Ours is in a contract though. Fair market share value of who we are. What we were then to what we are today will not be the same. That's just—

Right, because we go through this metamorphosis, if you will, with each of our law firm clients when we start out in the beginning and then 5 months later, it's not the same. Yeah.

You know, you really— No, they hired 3 more staff attorneys or they opened 5 more bank accounts. You know, volume goes up and more to do in payroll and, All those little things that they don't think about can be a factor and it makes the job take longer for us, costing us more. We have to pass that along. But I think sometimes, like I had the one client that asked question, but everybody else was like, nobody, nothing. And I worried about this so much. I scheduled it like on a Monday to go out at 5 o'clock and I worried so much about who's gonna react as you're putting them together and putting all these emails together. I know even from last year for us, we have it in our contract that your rate goes up 8%, 10%, whatever in the contract, baked in the contract. We had a couple people when we raised the rates, they were like, "Oh, you didn't tell me that." It's in your contract. You're an attorney, it's in your contract. You wanna say back, I guess I'd have to ask ChatGPT how to nicely say that back to them. So this year we were proactive and sent them out messages saying, "Just a friendly reminder." Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Because we didn't wanna hear all that anymore. And now this morning I was telling Sarah, I put together, I was on my walk this morning and I put together a message to the clients because this year's a little different than last year. We had the 2nd of January, they were all calling, where's my books? I want my books. I gotta get my stuff. I wanna see 2023, you know? And this year it's today and I already had one person, I gotta meet with you. And I crafted an email using ChatGPT that's basically— and I haven't finessed it quite yet, but basically just saying, this is the dateline that you're looking at. We haven't— we gotta reconcile your books for the prior month, gotta close out the prior month. That will happen this week. And then you've got— we've got to do any credit cards that might not happen for the next 2 weeks and loans and everything else. And then we gotta do a full review of your books, even though we've been looking at it eyes on, checking it every month. We still wanna do a big Overview.

Absolutely.

And then we also have to do 1099s. So we'll get your records to you for your preliminary review no later than the 15th of February so you can get it to your tax professional, who's probably going to file an extension anyways. But I want to write her because that's—

Noticing a lot of the tax preparers and CPAs this year are saying, I want it on January 31st. I've seen this seems to have really accelerated this year.

Well, how do they expect us to do everything?

I know, I know. And so you have to throttle it back. And, but that, you know, all of that goes into when we're considering pricing, you know, what each client needs and requires. And we, you know, we try, we're in a service business. We try to be accommodating and friendly and helpful, but sometimes you have to say, okay, or it gives you the tools to raise the prices. It's like you had this hard stop for January 31st of getting everything. So we worked every weekend late at night and everything, got it done. That's, that's a lot of extra work.

That's a fee for that, that extra accelerated pace of time. But I mean, I ultimately, I do feel pricing for your work in general is, it is always, there's like a market share price and there's also this customary price. And to, to your point, Lynda, the reason why I've not been a big proponent of a 3-service-based line item to us that— and you said this too, Steve— it, it is tailored services. We are tailoring to your needs. Your needs are changing, and we have the ability to accommodate with staff. We have the ability to have the knowledge that we've trained up on and continually train on. We invest in people going to training courses and going across the country to conferences to learn all of these things. That takes money and time, just as it would in any other service-based business. Right. That's what continuing education is in any format, whether it's tracked or not. So I feel like pricing your work when you're at the beginning of it, it's like you take what you can because you got to eat, right?

And it's a dartboard. It's a dartboard.

Yeah, it's an art form, really. I mean, it's a— yeah, you find you make mistakes. You can make a mistake in a good way and then make a mistake in a bad way. It'll all balance out. And it is scary if you're trying to price your work. It's very scary. I mean, if you're talking about like, how do you price your work?

Mm-hmm.

And you're pricing a project, that's one thing compared to doing monthly. And you kind of look at it like from that monthly lens and multiply that out.

Yeah.

So that you've got that to look at if you're doing a big project. But then you gotta look at anything that could majorly pop up that could be a big issue, like trust account being out of balance is a big one.

Mm-hmm.

And that can happen very easily. And then you're sitting back, oh, everything's all done for the year, but that trust account's way out of balance for 5 years. And then what?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I think also the varying degrees of it too, because we've had this happen to us where we've started out with one, and Steve, you're probably— this is probably right down your alley. You start out with one and you find out there's another set of books.

Yes.

Because there's another entity, or that wasn't part of the conversation. And then you're, okay, well, this style of accounting whether it be a trust accounting format or something, is being handled by X. Okay. And then, oh, this part over here is being handled by this group because it's payroll. Okay. But you've now just told me this is who you are, and now I've got to go communicate with all these other factors that come into the house-based books, this total home, so the umbrella, right? So, so now we have to price according to what is that extra time Oh, and then yes, that's right, you got a coach now. Okay, so there's an extra set of metrics and working reports that need to happen.

Or there's the credit cards that all of a sudden have all these personal transactions on them.

Oh, that's a lot of extra work too.

A lot of extra work to do your personal accounting on the books and parsing all that out.

IRS doesn't like that. The IRS isn't happy when you do that. So it's not a good practice. Yeah. Once in a great while mistake. Yeah, but not like if that's a general practice every month, that's not a good practice.

Or if you want the mileage reimbursement and you wait till the end of the year to tell the accounting people about it, even though they've asked for it every month. You know, that's a lot of extra work that's going to delay getting those reports to you even by February 15th if you wait until January 27th to tell us about it.

Yeah, yeah. Or you do a refi on another building that you own in a different entity, but it's impacted because it's your one person, right?

So the whole books. What about the law firm that comes to us in December and says, would you pre-bill us your January fee so we can include? Oh guys, let's, I mean, there's so many pieces to this that affect our pricing and our workflow to perform for you.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's true. And when you evaluate, to your point, Lynda, what you did was you used a metric, a measure, foundational measure. How much am I paying? What is this? What is included? And from there you can kind of piece it out. Now, a lot of people have their books set up for this kind of stuff and be able to line it out. Sometimes it's just doing the exercise. I have found I'm like Lynda. I like the exercise of doing it. It takes me a little bit, but it reminds me of where I'm at because, oh, I had to sign up for this extra communication platform or this extra thing because that's what you use, but I didn't have capacity for it, so now I have to pay an extra fee for it. So these are like little nuggets of things that I'm doing in addition to that. I— it's creep, it's, it's cost creep. So yeah, I, I prefer the method. I think pricing your work is a combination. This is my personal opinion, is a combination of, of your— is a— of yourself, right? The value of the time that's spent and/or the value of what you think is going to get you excited to do that work, which is somebody we know and love near and dear who says that. What am I excited to get out of bed and do that work? Because I can't care more than you. And then the costs involved to it. And ultimately, you're running a business. Yeah. So pricing your work as a business, it's a business. And so that's— it's hard because we come, we're accountants, we care so dang much that we forgot to turn off the I care button.

Sometimes we care more than the client.

Yeah, we can't. Yeah, it's crazy.

But, you know, circling back on, on studying what your expenses are by client and all of that, I really like to look at, um, for the staff, our staff that works with us.

Yeah.

How— and we have them tracking time, so it's really easy to get these metrics. How much time per client is being spent as a percentage of all clients? And that really, that really tells you a lot right there. Oh my gosh, this one client is taking 40% of all of our time. And so study that. Why is that? You know, then that's not a bad thing. It's just what it is. So, you know, you need to price accordingly.

And sometimes you might have to temper that back. I mean, that can happen where you've got a client that you thought it was gonna be one thing and then all of a sudden they become something else where they're constant, constant meetings that are really not necessary. I mean, I'm all about meeting with a client, but if it's for nothing, you know, I'm not your therapist. So if it's for nothing and it's just a chat, sometimes you get clients like that, that they just constantly wanna meet with you just for 5 minutes and it's not, never 5 minutes. You know, wish there was a way we could make Zoom blow up in 5 minutes.

Look at the smiles we all have going, yeah.

There's never a 5-minute call. They all go over an hour.

Right.

And it's, in that time, you factor in your own time into that. Like Sarah said, that's important because, you know, we kind of don't count our time and we really should because anytime we're spending a lot of time on a file, that's gonna be a factor. It's a factor in how we price it. I think that a lot of times it's not just transactional. Like, it's not, okay, you had this many transactions and now you have this many transactions. It's definitely not a transactional thing because it has a lot to do with the type of workflow that you're dealing with. And are you getting the documents? And am I having to beg for the documents? And are you ignoring my emails and/or my messages?

Alicia.

You're just flat out ignoring me. And those are things that you really want to— I mean, that takes time as opposed to a client that maybe gives you all the details that you ask for. Regularly.

That makes a difference. Well, I personally, I think too is capacity, what you were saying back to Steve's thing, and then like Lynda and I, it's like there's only so much capacity we have in a day. It's capacity of like time and value of the individual. So I'm fine building a relationship with you, but I'm also, I'm okay with saying, hey, look, as a professional courtesy, We're beyond what was allotted. We gotta, we gotta figure this out because if I'm gonna coach you along, that's different versus we're providing a service, which interesting enough. So I, I kind of wanna swing back for a second pricing your work and do the controversial thing of what happened on December 27th with Bench going out and making it a commodity.

Oh my goodness.

And this low pricing model and then you're locked out. So again, then you're working with a commodity-based style, trying to take our profession and shove it into a space that's easily sellable, like in the wholesale market of Amazon, like all the widgets that you can sell.

Yeah.

Right? And yet now you've lost all availability of your financials. You have no means to get it. How crappy is that at end of year? It was critical. I mean—

Oh my gosh. Can you imagine getting that message?

I, well, also, like, Lynda, I'm thinking of the payroll, all the payrolls I did between the 30th and 31st. Yeah.

And the rush.

Well, and to be honest— They're not getting that kind of service.

I don't think they can. That part, they did have, depending on their service agreement, did have payroll involved. They had quite a bit of payroll.

But they were lower-end pricing, correct?

Not, no, actually, that's kind of a misnomer.

Is it?

Yes and no. In the entry points, yes, they had service packages, but I think from what I'm gathering from other professionals, there were some significant-sized set of monthlies. But that's not how they approached it though, Steve, to your point. They made it look like pricing that work was X. That's not what you hire when you get people like us. I'm sorry. We go beyond that.

Well, and to the point, when a client whose trust account is out of balance and they want to hire us to reconcile it, And they go, "Well, how much is it going to cost me?" I don't quote. I do not quote at that point. I quote an hourly rate at that point and say, you know, we don't know till we get into it how much time it's going to take, what we're going to see, what we're going to come back to you with, you know, and it's— you've got to really communicate with them on those one-off projects. You need to communicate with them really regularly. Yeah. Because in their mind the pricing can just go crazy. But you've got to show what the value is of that pricing as you go through the project.

There's no value when you're one of so many to one bookkeeper and you have to only get answers via a chat. You can only get it like you— there's no value. You can't pick up a phone and call somebody. There's no value to that. And if that's the type of business you need and want, that's fine. That's not— everybody's out to grow business. Not everyone's out. But the profession we serve, I mean, I don't know if you guys see it, We serve a profession that you need somebody's ear on the phone.

You're making— We service the coolest profession ever, I think.

But yeah, I feel that it shined its light on it. This isn't the first one that's gone down either. I forget the other ones that have gone down. Do you remember, Lynda? There's other—

Well, somebody bought Bench, I saw over the weekend.

Yeah, but that's what a horrible way to buy a company though. Don't you make the deal before all that comes down? So just like, this is where it shifts over and don't have that Hail Mary pass.

Well, and then to tie it to—

I wonder if there's no way, I don't think it could have happened like that. Uh-uh, that's not how I see that.

And then to tie it into pricing too, for all of the us accountants out there, don't think that you have to rush in and undercut your pricing to get the business that people are searching.

Yeah, true, true.

You know?

Yeah.

Because it's not apples to apples in that case.

Yeah, exactly. This is where you can show 'em, okay, I'm gonna do this right for you. And this is what it's gonna cost, and then you've gotta prove it.

Yeah.

You've gotta prove it. You've gotta stand behind it. But it's an opportunity to really bring professionalism into it.

True. I just don't, personally, my opinion, you don't just overnight do something like that. I think—

No, no, no. There was a lot of work.

There was a sequence of timing. Yeah.

Just bad timing overall though. I mean, I don't know if they were on their last breath monetarily that they couldn't wait till the end of the year and give people a bigger heads up.

It's probably that whole thing, Lynda, when you're disengaging with a client, where does that line in the sand happen?

Yeah. Where's your— maybe it's the— maybe lawyers were involved and you had to stop the bleeding and you had to end the contracts because of the liability issue of it. But you don't give people a lot of time to figure out where to go. And they're not in a QuickBooks where they could just change people. They're in a system.

Because they had their own software, right?

And a ledger. Yeah. And it wasn't a great software. I mean, Sarah and I had a client when we got out of that. Oh, not a great software. And the work we saw wasn't that great, but that doesn't mean it all was that way. They had 11,000 clients, so they had clients, a big client base.

It was the scalability, though. It was how they structured that system. And you know what? We've been doing this all for a long time, and you come in with this idea and you think you're going to commoditize it with people in the way that you're going to do it. And you learned obviously that that's not the case.

It doesn't work that way. No, it doesn't. I mean, none of our clients— I wish I could have like little templates in our contract-making thing that would work for every single one, just plug and play and say, hey, Tiara, this— I have a little checkbox to add this, add this, add this. It's not like you're buying a, you know, my purse. You know, it's not like it's this one thing. You're buying this service. But everybody's got these little things that you need to know about, and it can And all that's part of figuring out the pricing. And it usually— the way we have it set up is you want to talk to us about hiring our firm, you have to pay us to consult with us. Then you have to pay us to do the filing review. If they are that interested, then there's a good chance that they might become a client. But we are getting rid of the tire kicker people that are just in there to waste our time. And I think make sure that you are— maybe not if you're just starting out, you're probably not going to get the consultation fee. But you should definitely get the file review fee. It's something I didn't do and I wish I had done. And that way you're going to get paid for anything ongoing. If they're invested enough to pay for that, which they should pay for that. It's just like getting your mechanic looking under the hood. It's the same thing. They should pay for that and get paid upfront. So whatever pricing you agree to, get paid before you do the work because you can't unring the bell.

Yeah.

But when it comes to pricing, for sure, it's hard to do. I mean, Like I said, you're gonna get it right, you're gonna get it wrong, and then somewhere in there you'll be fine. But don't be so crazed and fixated on making the perfect price. 'Cause I mean, we've had it happen where we send off a contract and we think we did a great job. We think we're gonna get that one and the client's gonna sign with us and nothing happens. And then we've had that one where we send it out and it's like, like, Sarah, did you send it? And she's like, they already signed.

I'm like, what? Damn it.

We didn't put the right price on it. They signed within seconds. They were always gonna sign from the minute we talked to them. But you know, it's, those are the ones that are like, ah, I wish I had maybe pushed it a little bit more. But, and then you find, we, we pushed our prices up at one point. We were just so overwhelmed with work. We're like, ah, throw spaghetti at the wall. Let's put, and then we stopped getting the jobs. And then you knew you'd hit your level. Yeah. And that's kinda how you're gonna figure it out. And you get enough work that you're comfortable.

Yeah.

Start pushing those prices up. And if you find that they don't respond and you're not getting anything, just bring 'em down a little bit and you found your level and talk to other accountants. I think that's important. Be in a group like the Law Lab where you're collaborating with other people so you can hear what people are charging. Everybody's different. Just because you see somebody, you think, oh, they must charge a lot, doesn't necessarily mean that that's so, you know?

Well, you gotta feel confident.

You have to.

You have to right-size yourself too. That's another big thing that we've learned through the years is, and I know we've talked with you about that, Steve, it's the volume of work might be there, but right-sizing it the quality of life may not be there, right?

Right.

And the craftsmanship of the work. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, there are— I'm not saying this is us, but when you look at certain levels of like luxury items, let's say, there's a lead time, there's a craft, there's an art to it, and there's tenure behind that to get to that price point. And so I feel like Sometimes, if you're not like to what you were— we were saying earlier, Lynda, if we're not reinvesting in ourselves, if we're not crafting ourselves to a better space, yourself included, Steve, we talk about this all the time. What is it that's on the, you know, calendar year? What are you guys looking to invest in time-wise, spending tools? The art itself, it is— that's not a commodity. That's not going and getting frozen yogurt from the store. I'm sorry. Like, that's You know, we're not 31 flavors. We're dedicated to a certain level of people and a caliber of people, and we really invest our time deeply. We want your— the success of your business to be just as important to us as it is to you. Sure. I mean, funny things happen in business, but that's business. That's the art of business, right? Like, yeah.

Well, and you know, um, just one other quick thing, and going back to the consultation fee.

Mm-hmm.

When you're consulting with a potential client, ask questions that will get you the answers as to what they do. In other words, what is your fee structure for your clients? What type of legal work do you do? How do you charge for that? How do you bill for that? How do you do your consultations? Ask all of those questions upfront, and they're going to tell you right away, hey, you know what? You can't even become a client of mine unless you pay a $500 fee. 'Oh, and guess what? I roll it into your first bill if you sign up with me.' So, there's a key right there. So, that gives you permission right away to say, 'Well, to consult with us is $250 an hour or whatever, and we'll roll it into your fee.' I mean, there's a lot of ways to be creative with it, but it creates trust between the two of you. It creates a relationship between the two of you, and it leaves you at the end of the consultation having a lot of questions answered. Yeah. That are going to help you do that proposal letter and get the right pricing structure to start out with.

You want to do the work, right? You want to do the work, you know, the way it's supposed to be, the way that you've worked, you need to work to. And, and there's so much value. Like, I think about it too. Sure, the tax professionals have to work to a certain thing and they sign off on an ethics thing and they're part of this IRS embodiment in that way. We're, we're right before it, but we do all the heavy lifting.

Correct.

We're putting the picture together so that it can be put in the right places on the report. We have more value sometimes in that respect. We have equal value with them in so many ways.

Well, and I insist, I insist on working with the CPA if I take on it, when I take on a new client, it's like I want to know who they are. I've got to have a relationship with them. They're going to be involved in the process throughout the year. I'm going to be communicating with them, finding out how they want meals posted on the books, how they, you know, they all have their different ways of doing it.

They all have their different ways. You're working to two people, so there's value to that. But there's also value to the fact that we're business owners. Lynda and I know this. We have to work to it ourselves. You have to work to it yourself, Steve. And so, there are things that we just inherently have to know. Where we don't, we just share our opinions. We don't give advice because ultimately the advice has to come from the certified person who is scheduled to do that work. And that's where the other value is. But yeah, I mean, pricing your work, there's so much involved. If you want us to be really involved with the tax person, let's say every quarter, well, there's a price to that. There's a price for them to do that and there's a price for us to do it. And we have to make sure that the books are done and it meets the deadline and we're all on the same page.

Yeah. Then you follow up and celebrate together as well.

Absolutely. Yeah. So pricing your work goes beyond just the commodity of just looking at, okay, let me go see what somebody else is doing next door.

And pricing is confidence. Pricing is confidence. If you don't have confidence in what you're selling, it's gonna be hard to sell it no matter what kind of put on it. You have to be confident and it takes practice. Practice at home if you're new to this and just practice. I think it was Patanjali, one of the, one of the great yogis. Just his answer was, if you wanna get really good at your yoga pose, it was practice, practice, practice. That was his 3 key words he wanted you to know about the pose. It's the same thing. Yeah. Practice, practice, practice. Getting that confidence. The more you do it, the more you're gonna get confident and the more work you get, the more you'll be able to shift and raise your prices as you go. I think that's important too, that to look at it and, and if you lose a client, part of doing business. Don't freak out about it. Like, I was sitting back and I actually sat back. As far as confidence goes, when you're raising the prices, step back mentally. And I said to myself, what's the worst thing that could happen here? Everybody leaves me. Not gonna happen.

The sun will come up tomorrow.

But I mean, it's— that's something that you sit back and say, okay, when you're looking at it and you're so terrified and your stomach's in knots and you think, what What's the worst thing that can happen? Somebody yells back at me and says, oh, I'm gonna hire somebody else. Okay. Okay, then we weren't the right fit for you cuz you didn't value me. And that's fine. That's fine. Cuz these people are so lowly priced to begin with that I have on my legacy clients that I needed to move them up to the more to be more in the future. I tried to be decent about it and I, I really would have to raise them every single year, a good chunk to get them to where the level where they should be. And if you actually look at it, if somebody wanted to call me up and talk to me on the phone, I'd be like, divide that by the weeks and tell me what cost you for accounting services.

Yeah, exactly.

And what would it cost you if you had an employee doing this and you were paying your—

I think a lot of times they think they can do it themselves, and that's where they're going to go, you know, we've seen those records. That does not go well. It's not what you do.

Again, that goes to the value of what gets put on that report that goes to taxes, and you're most likely going to overpay because you've forgotten things, you didn't put things in the right place.

You booked your deposits in the bank feed level, and you had invoices and payments same time, guess what? You just double paid your income. And that's what's going to happen. Those are the things because I think a lot of times they think, oh, QuickBooks is easy.

No. Danny DeVito said it was, Lynda. Danny DeVito said it.

Danny DeVito did say that. And that commercial needs to go away forever. I think it—

Oh, and that— or the commercial they had where they had the veterinarian driving down the country lane and she jumps out of her truck and does her books on her phone and then goes and sees the client. I'm like, Oh no, no, no, no, no. That's not how it works.

That's not real life.

No.

Great conversation today, you guys.

Yeah, good topic.

It was, it was a good topic and it's a good way to kick off the year in a big way at the first quarter of the year, you know?

Yeah. So if you haven't raised your prices and you're pricing your work, take a look at it, evaluate it, and raise the prices. We know you've got this.

It doesn't matter what time of year too, by the way.

No.

Exactly. It really doesn't. It's just—

They need us more in January, so it's kind of hard for them to leave if you do.

True, true. So, well, thank you.

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Up? Hit that subscribe button.

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Thank you.

Bye everybody.

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