Common Mistakes In Accounting Services Proposals

Today, probably the biggest, like most common mistake that I made when proposing and onboarding a new client to accounting services and oftentimes just got us off on the wrong foot. And it's so important when somebody's starting out to like what their experience is in that first 30 days, you really want them to be dazzled. But accounting services, by their nature, the beginning is kind of a mess, right? Like, it's the, the roughest part of the engagement. You're figuring out how to work with them. You're finding all the skeletons buried in the closet. So, so how do we navigate that to ensure that people have a killer experience straight from the get go? But also we're unpacking an example, a very real submitted by a listener bookkeeping proposal. Going to offer some practical tips on how to make this proposal make you more money. Simple as that. All right, let's get into it. I'm just going to kick things off here with a hot take from LinkedIn. This is from Matt Tate, the CEO of Decimal. Decimal is kind of a big, big ish, like bookkeeping practice. Check out Matt's take here. This is a quote from LinkedIn. Accountants should not sell cleanups until you've done monthly work for at least a month. What? Shouldn't sell cleanup until you've done monthly work is a great example of one of those things that people hear and immediately write off. They're like, I don't even understand what that means. That doesn't feel possible to me. Keep, keep, keep listening. Anytime it comes from somebody that runs a firm, you got to give it a little more credence. Back to the quote. Profitability and client happiness improved dramatically when we instituted this simple rule. That is not selling the cleanup until they've done monthly work. Why? One, you can't properly scope even with a peek at their QBO file ahead of time. Two, cleanups are always messy. It's a terrible first impression. Three, you can easily give the prospect a broad range of possible fees. Four, cleanups crush your onboarding team's capacity. And five, cleanups keep clients in onboarding way too long. So they're being onboarded, basically. As long as you're getting through that cleanup. The simple change has improved profitability, client happiness, and more importantly, team happiness. It has not negatively affected sales. Quite the opposite is a great way to demonstrate expertise, show leadership, and build trust. What does that even mean, doing monthly work before you sell the cleanup? How can you do the monthly without the cleanup? Right now there's like so much. I mean, there's A hundred other questions to this post. And what about this and what about that? I can tell you something that I experienced in doing this that actually does take me a bit in the direction that Matt is describing here. A early mistake that I made for context. I acquired an 80 year old tax practice and within that built from scratch a cast practice. I was a bookkeeping sort of managed accounting back office and we grew that to 10 or 15 people within a couple years. And a really common mistake I got sucked into was bending over backwards to make those books absolutely perfect in the very first month and close. I actually learned this from, from a mentor. If you come into this setting the expectation that like over a three to six months month arc we'll get this dialed in. That's a vastly better way to approach these projects than than to front load a hundred percent of the work and say we're going to have all your systems dialed and all that in the first 30 days. Because the reality is it virtually never happens in the first 30 days. And then that first close sometimes ends up dragging on for months because you're waiting for this person and that person. And part of this was my bar as a CPA and sort of the expectations of well, if, if we are going to issue a month end close, it can't be anything but completely perfect make. Meanwhile these were like prepared financial statements. And so like until we kind of got over that, we almost felt like our hands were tied and there was no such thing as a month end close that hadn't gone through sort of the full process of being blessed. But eventually I got over that. I mean even publicly traded companies have interim financial statements with like a lower bar for what is being checked, right? And so in practice, when I'm talking with a client that looks like hey, hey, like over the first six months like we're going to get you dialed into a better place. Because oftentimes the issues are much more systematic than simply errors in the accounting. It's what are the underlying systems that we're using to do this work? Are they actually giving us good information? You'll find oftentimes you get in there and it's like a perfect month. One month end close isn't even possible because you don't have the information. The information doesn't exist to, to do it well. And so it ends up being much more of this sort of archeology project than is realistically possible to nail in the first 30 days. Now what Matt's describing here of not selling cleanup until you've done monthly work. What is some of the trade offs that comes with like for one, I don't even, I don't know in that first month then that you're actually producing a balance sheet probably wouldn't recommend it. For most companies that's totally fine in the short term. Like the, the things they really wanted to see month over month are coming from the P and L. And if you can dazz with a nice clean one month experience where you get that stuff done and done like hopefully within a reasonable turnaround time or whatever you've scoped in there, then at least they know you can get it done right. And then that's when the archeology project begins. You're trading one issue for another potential issue here a bit the notion that you're going to learn more like over the course of doing that one month end close. But have we still gotten them to agree to exactly what the scope of what that close cleanup is? Because oftentimes that's a, a big one time cost. Oftentimes we would let folks spread this over the first six to 12 months. But if they're coming in with 15 months of a mess, oftentimes the solution to that it comes. There's a bit of sticker shock there because that's a lot of work to go back and sort all that stuff out. Right. So if it's me, I think I still need to set an expectation of ballpark range. Like what do we expect the work of the cleanup to be? But then this does give us a little bit more flexibility. And he does allude to this gives us a little more flexibility into when we will tackle that cleanup work. Because that's was another hard aspect of bringing a new client in is you got somebody at the doorstep and you're excited to work with them and you want to get cranking right away. But it means you got to throw a whole bunch of team at this to get this stuff done concisely like within a reasonable amount of time. And if we're trying to capture the clients or the prospects like peak excitement, we gotta do that stuff fast. Like we have to get to it. Like they will, we will have sort of an intro call with them, a discovery call and then it's like if we know we want to move forward with them, how can we get that going like in the next week. The problem is a week is not adequate time to like capacity plan the number of man hours it often times requires to be able to do that cleanup work. And if you're all, if you always have a full team on standby that can pick something up, you know, within a week's time. The reality is if, if no new work comes in the door, then that, that whole sort of cleanup crew, they're potentially sitting on the bench with nothing to do oftentimes. So the whole notion of like having a discovery conversation with a client, then being able to hop straight into big hairy cleanup work a week later, it kind of stinks from a capacity planning standpoint. Right. I would say this is maybe my favorite benefit of this approach is you get straight into the month over month work as much as it is possible with whatever state the books are coming to you in. But then you plan the cleanup for a later date, like within the first three to six months. Probably depends on what the trade offs are like. Is the balance sheet just a total dumpster fire? Maybe that's cause for, for accelerating that. But I can tell you what we got wrong in our journey is the notion that we're going to pick somebody up and that every single month end close is going to be like absolutely pristine. From one month one when that was what we wanted. But oftentimes it wasn't even possible. And the goal was saying, that's going to be flawless in month one, man, it created a lot of friction in like trying to race to sort of solutions to what were hard problems. And we're going to take longer to unpack. And then the client's first experience with you is like, geez Louise. Like, this is a lot harder and a lot more work than I thought it would be because usually it takes a lot of effort on their side also and other stakeholders in the business. And you don't want their impression to be like, is this what's going to be like every single month? Like, man, this feels like a lot of work. Right? I. I'll admit I'm still kind of grappling with what Matt said here, not selling cleanups until you've done monthly work. But also, to a degree, it feels like a more extreme following through of the things that I was already feeling where it's like, man, we really shouldn't kill ourselves to fix absolutely everything in month one. Curious to know your take on that. Cleanups are something that people are super opinionated on, especially when it comes to the pricing of cleanups, because very commonly we will underprice our cleanup work and then the client will be like, okay, well how about instead of month over month, we just do this, you know, once a year? Because I'm realizing if I Just do cleanup once a year, that's like half the cost. And so we're actually incentivizing them to do it less frequently. But it creates these workflow messes for us. A lot of folks will say, never price your cleanup work less than what the month over month would be. And a lot of people hear that and they're like, well, that would be. I mean, I've got people that come to me needing 24 months and if I'm going to charge them 800 bucks, that's going to be the just big astronomical number. There are some firms who will die on that, that hill just because they don't want to incentivize the wrong things. I think in practice it's not, I mean it's not as much work as a standalone month end close. Maybe the bigger consideration to me is like when that work hits, because the worst thing we can do is incentivize people, especially if you're a tax firm, to bring you a year's worth of cleanup to do during tax season. I think most of us can agree that's that ought to just be a non starter, like doing people's accounting for their tax return in tax season. You have to set the expectation that if that's going to happen, it has to happen before the calendar year end. That is like the catching up of the books so that at the end of the day, like you're really just at worst case completing one month in busy season. But man, I mean, we had so many examples in my firm of folks who for decades would just bring in a pile of bank statements, a big old nasty Excel spreadsheet, and that was just part of the drop off for their tax return. And you're doing bookkeeping that is now like 12 months past when it actually happened. And you go and ask the client questions, they're like, buddy, I got no idea what I was doing 12 months ago. And so the information isn't all that great. And you're wasting time in your busiest season. Definitely don't do that, taking on a whole bunch of cleanup during your busiest time. But cleanup, it is, it is kind of an art and it is one that clients will give you as much grace as they believe that you are the best person who can help them. Right. So if we are just a run of the mill bookkeeping shop and they don't know us different than anybody else, the client or the prospect is probably price shopping. And so if you take this ideological stance to say like no, like cleanup working, it's the Same as month over month bookkeeping. The people who are gonna say yes to that, like the scenarios where clients will be like, okay, that's fine. It's gonna be when they're like, okay, you are, you're the premier option for beekeepers. We just, we really wanna work with that person. So what you can get away with, like there, there is, there is not a perfect, always right answer here. I would say the right answer for you depends on the degree to which you are a price taker versus a price maker in the market. Because, you know, if the, I mean that the like average shop right now, they're just going to charge hourly for the cleanup. And then it's like, who knows how long it's going to take. Might be more than you, might be less than you, but that just becomes a race to the bottom. Then the, then the prospect is shopping hourly bookkeepers based on their rates. Where can he get the lowest rate? Then they're turning to, you know, offshore and upwork and stuff like that. The solution, what makes all of this easier is if that prospect doesn't see other people as viable alternatives to you and your expertise and what you do. So how opinionated you're able to be ultimately comes down to like, how much control do you have over the market? Boo. You know what's the worst, man? When you hire somebody and they start working for you and you're like, I thought this person knew stuff. The number of times I've been hoodwinked by somebody that interviews well and they have umpteen years of experience and you pull them in and you're like, you don't what? You don't even know your stuff, man. This isn't going to work. Let me tell you what one of this episode sponsors cloud accountant staffing is doing about that. So cloud accountant staffing help accounting firms find talent around the world, be it the Philippines, South Africa, Latin America. And they have an online portal where you can go out and see folks that they have recruited, schedule interviews with those people directly on their platform. And one of the things now that every single one of those people have is a collection of, of assessments. I'm looking at one right here. Assessments for business tax, for individual tax, for critical thinking, for understanding instructions, their personality type. And so many of these things like individual tax, this person I'm looking at, they're in the 93rd percentile. And so cloud account staffing, they have a huge volume of folks that they have go through these assessments and they hand pick the highest performers and they serve them up for you to make your wildest dreams come true. Cloud Account Staffing's backstory there I actually ran an accounting firm how hired some offshore folks, had an amazing experience, and then just started helping other accounting firms do the same. Interested? I thought you might be. Check out the link down to Cloud Accountant Staffing in the Show Notes. If your firm still runs on spreadsheets, sticky notes, or a half a dozen different apps to manage work, there is a better way Enter this episode Sponsor Financial Sense. It is the all in one platform for accounting firms to manage everything workflows, client requests, capacity, billing and team collabs all in one place. Automate recurring work, track deadlines and get visibility into what your team's working on. Built specifically for firm owners who want less chaos and more control. That's actually an important detail. If you're the type of firm owner that wants more chaos or if you want less control, this one's actually not for you. Now this December 12th to 13th, Financial Sense is hosting WorkflowCon, a free virtual conference built around the theme Clear the chaos. Find your calm and middle me. I'll be joining for a live Q and A on the subject of smarter client comms, but comms of all kind using AI alongside a bunch of other firm leaders. It's pretty like Rockstar. List of speakers they got. Register for Workflow Con via the link below. Start your free 14 day trial of financial cents using the link below with coupon code JASON10. Grab all that stuff down in the show notes. Speaking of that, we've got a real life proposal here from a firm that specializes in not for profits and churches and I got some thoughts. Let's take a look at it. It's time for Indecent Proposals where we fine tune your client proposals to help you land better paying projects. Let's get into it. How you like that transition. It's called Indecent Proposals where we go through like real firm proposals and just share some practical advice for how to make improvements. Got some very kind comments from folks when we did this, either last week or the week before. I'd love to do more of these. If you've got a proposal you want to send me, message it to me, email it to me, text it to me. Phone numbers 1-516-980-4968 okay, this consistent with the theme of this episode. This is a bookkeeping proposal and as with most bookkeeping proposals, there is way more than bookkeeping happening here. Man, I'm I've just have a really hard time calling Any of what a firm does bookkeeping. Just because the perception of book and the definition of bookkeeping literally look it up, it is entering and classifying transactions. That's just not what a professional shop does. Like you're doing so much more than that. And by calling it bookkeeping, people then anchor to people who have told them that they are bookkeepers who are not bookkeepers. It's like their mom. It's like somebody that watched couple of Hector's videos on how to use QuickBooks and they're like, yeah, no, I'm a bookkeeper, buddy, that's not what we do here. We're doing something different. Okay, so this proposal, it's got three options. If you haven't dabbled in the sorcery that is three tier proposals yet, then buddy, do I have good news for you? Can only get better from where you are. So this firm is doing this right? They are giving the client three options. The client is then able to opt in. Like here is the option that's right for me. And that that sort of self selection better captures the some of the softer qualities about that person and how they make buying decisions. Like if they're going to get on a flight, are they going to buy a first class ticket, are they going to buy a coach ticket or are they going to fly on Southwest? In all three cases you are going to the same place. So then why are people willing to pay wildly different prices? I don't know. It's true though. We do it too, you and I. Just think about the automobile. You could be rolling Kia soul on a $99 a month lease. But many of you are not. Consider why got four wheels get you from A to B. Kia Soul's got the cool dancing hamster commercials. Somebody's listening to this and is like, did he record this podcast like five years ago? Is the Kia Soul even still a thing? I don't know, but you know what I mean. A car is a great example. Whole lot of ways to get from A to B. Why do we all choose such vastly different options and different levels of expense? There is, you know, there's status in there, there's safety, there is justification of the former with the latter. The reality is we all buy into like the option that we believe best aligns with our identity and how we want to be perceived. But the average accounting proposal, well, the average accounting proposal doesn't exist because actually the majority of accounting firms don't send proposals, don't send anything in the way of annual renewals. And so they don't have the opportunity to play this game. They bill after the fact, you know, based on hours. They say it's based on hours, but they, they calculate what the number based on hours would be. And then look what the price was last year and they look at what the whip is this year and they look at what the price was last year and look at what whip is this year and they're like, man, we could probably get away with this. And then we call that hourly billing. It's not, it's value billing. You're billing what you think you can get away with. And so the evolution here is to, instead of giving the client a price at the end, we give them a price at the beginning. We say, hey, assuming scope is the same as what it was last year, here's what the price is going to be. And you actually do that exact same calculation of like, ah, what do I think they'll pay? That's step one, giving them a price to agree to upfront benefits of that is you can take a payment method, you can totally eliminate ar, you can just pull the money when the project's done. But the bigger opportunity here is that moving the price to the front gives us the opportunity to let the client kind of self select into a different way of working with us. And this is where kind of the, the second big mental shift has to happen. Because historically we've been very focused on what we do and what the work is and what the scope is. When what does the client care about? They really don't care about the nitty gritty behind the scenes like we do. They care about like where they interface with us. They care about how that impacts them and what, what the overall experience will be. And so the next trap that, that most of us fall into is we put a big old long proposal in front of the client. That is all the nitty gritty of here's all the really hard things that we're going to do for you. And you should be impressed by this. When that isn't something that the client ultimately will pay more or less for. They will pay more or less based on how they are inconvenienced or not inconvenienced by the process. So a good example in proposal I went through a couple of weeks ago, say it's a tax client. Will I work directly with your financial advisor, with your attorney, with your executive assistant, with the other people to get stuff done without that person even having to lift a finger. That that is what the entrepreneur cares about. They're Delegating a job to us and they're going to trust us to tell them what are the things that absolutely have to be done. And we will just go and do that thing. That is delegation, that is them trusting our expertise. It's what we want. By outlining here's all the things that we think you have to do, we're actually inviting a debate or speculation into like, well, does this really need to be done or that need to be done? We're the expert. Like we should be deciding that that shouldn't be the differentiator between the different ways that we can serve you. The differentiator ought to be are we providing you with the Kia Soul or a Mercedes? And it requires, it requires a few different things. For one, having a, like a depth of conversation with the client to nail down exactly what that scope is. But also for us to not only have a service library and kind of this sort of internal vernacular for what's all the work that we're willing to do for people, but also a library for the different ways we're willing to deliver that service. And this is something I've, I feel like I've gotten really hot on the last six months as I've sort of stewed more on like what were our most profitable engagements and what were we doing differently on those that made them three to four times as profitable as, as the others in the past. I would talk about this as like there were these small things that we could add on in like a niche sort of industry vertical where it wasn't tax work, wasn't bookkeeping work. And so there wasn't this agreed upon value to what we were providing. And so we could price it more through the lens of like an fte, a full time equivalent, like we can do this for you or you can hire another person to do this for you. You know, 80 grand, fully loaded a year. But increasingly I'm realizing those things that people got excited about that they were buying from us were simply a higher level of service, a more premium, more hands on way of, of helping them. And at the end of the day the service delivery, the actual work to deliver it was very simple. It was also had nothing to do with accounting. And so I actually hired really good non accountants to do a lot of this stuff. But ultimately the reason that the client said yes was it was taking a painful thing off of their plate that they didn't want to have to manage anymore because we would instead have like a client concierge type of person manage that for them. And there's a trap here. There's a risk that if we get too sucked into the business of selling bookkeeping work and selling tax work, that we become totally fixated on the technical aspects of what it is that we're doing. And when you look to your left and you look to your right, the whole team is full of these technical experts. Increasingly, I'm, I'm becoming convicted that that is 50% of the equation. The other 50% of the equation is, is how is the service delivery carried out by conscientious people in a high touch way. That's almost an entirely different thing to staff. Because if you go to the technical people and you're like, listen, this company's going to make money by really thinking through, like, how premium the delivery is. They're going to be like, brother, this is the last thing in the world I want to think about. I've already got more technical work on my plate than I can handle realistically. And it's very hard for me to mode switch from, from deep focus work on this technical thing to let me go glad hand and be this amazing, happy go, lucky person with all these other people. Very difficult for one person to context switch between those two things. Which is why I think a worthwhile investment is in focusing on how we deliver the services and ensuring we have the people that can deliver them well. And oftentimes those actually just won't be the technical people. This is an argument for like a standalone sort of client concierge that runs interference and works with clients directly and liaises with the technical staff to get answers back to the client. And I get like, nobody likes this. Clients will say, I don't want to have to. Well, some clients may say, I don't want to have to play telephone tag. I don't want somebody to transfer me to the tax department. There's bad versions of this, but even if they have direct access, like the clients have direct access to your technical people, you have the same problem. Do I go to the tax person? Do I go to the, the accounting services person? Do I go to the senior, the junior, the wealth management person? Like, who do I talk to to get an answer? Is the solution really one more person on top of all that? It's not a perfect answer, but I think it may be the least bad of all of the bad answers because of what that person can do that your technical people can't. And that is for their focus and their aim to be that the clients are being taken care of and feel heard and Understood, by the way, totally separate thing from are their problems actually being solved? Are they being heard and are they being understood? Are we delivering a premium experience? Because that is the very hardest thing for a technical person to do. In fact, most technical people will be like, what do you mean? We got the financials out by the 15th of the month. That's the engagement. There's so there's so much more that goes into like, is that client feeling like they're being taken care of? Right. Very hard to balance those two things. But this can be a real stumbling block for us as we don't actually invest in the delivery of the service. Now this proposal, it's got three options. First option is basic bookkeeping. Second option is called controllership services. Third option is called full client advisory services. Couple, couple odds and ends here. I think it was just the format I was sent in it. It's very important for your three tier proposals for somebody to have a summary view to see all three of those side by side. If you think about this, think about like a software tier comparison. There's a reason they do it this way where you know the, the most premium tier, the gold tier, it has the most options and you can see what items fall off with each cheaper tier. That's a very important thing to visualize because this factors into how we design the pricing and the naming of each of these tiers. So let's start with the pricing I have. Sorry, the naming. I haven't even told you the pricing yet. Tier one, let's just say the bronze tier, the worst tier, it's called basic bookkeeping. After that we've got controllership. After that we've got client advisory services. The way these are described in the detail of what makes up each service is more based on scope. So if I look at full client advisory services, we've got, you know, liability recording and tracking, accounts receivable, accounts payable, receipt capture review, Fixed asset tracking and depreciation Management, Budget creation and management, cash flow management, 1099, transaction tracking and compliance, Payroll admin, Employer registration oversight, goal setting and KPIs documentation of SOPs. What I would say for the buyer on the other side of this, by the way, the whole thing is seven pages. It has a summary at the top, which I think is really important. That's where people will spend 80% of their time. It is good to then have detail after this. It is a balancing act. This maybe feels like a little bit too much detail for me because I think what will happen when a client reads through this is they will say, I understand all of these things, but I've never had them in the past and I don't know what they are and if I even need them. I would rather that we position ourselves as the experts and be the one to tell them when those things are going to be worthwhile. They're either worthwhile or they aren't. And your opinion about whether they are, that's actually very valuable. Like, don't just do a thing for me because I'm willing to give you the money to do that thing. Tell me when the ROI will be such that it's worth doing that thing. Like that is how I would think about it. And so what I'd. What I would rather see for these three sort of tiers of options is that the scope is more or less set. Like, do we need to be managing AR&AP? Is that necessary for this type of business? And that's mostly what the escalation through these different, three different tiers of services are, is. We're taking on more and more of this stuff, but I would rather do a deep dive with that prospect. To say, here are all the things that we think that you absolutely need and this will evolve over time. But, but like, this is why you're, you're tapping into our expertise, is to be able to tell you with what we see from other folks. This is going to make sense for you because as it stands, we're asking the client to decide how much of this more complicated stuff do I need. And even if they had a bit of acumen to, like, know what each of these things are, they don't have all the context that you have. And what you've seen works with other companies to know if it makes like if it's worthwhile or not. So try to get to, like, what is a very specific scope that I would recommend that isn't going too hard. We're not overselling. If it's something they've never had before, be very careful adding it in. We can always add later. So here I like to start with something actually very basic, close to what they think they need. And then if we're going to upsell them on stuff, we'll upsell them down the road. So if you follow my main YouTube channel, you know that about six months ago I ditched my traditional bank for Mercury. Mercury, now sponsor of this episode. I actually made the move before they sponsored any of our stuff. Mercury, over 200,000 companies now trust them for banking and managing their finances. It's Everything that you wish. Traditional banks were like good access management. Not having to do two factor authentication Olympics to get into your client's banking stuff, which is by the way like a major security risk to your firm. When the strategy to get the info we need is to tell the client to forward you the code that came to them in a message that says never share this code with anyone. And we feel dumb about it, right? We're like, yeah, no, really sorry for the inconvenience. Don't be sorry. Tell them there is a better way. Mercury. It gives you firm level access where then you can give the members of your team granted granular access to whatever they need, even down to like specific bank accounts. Much better from a security standpoint, but also like from a workflow standpoint is going to make your life, oh my gosh, so much better. Now Mercury, they will literally pay you money to put your clients on Mercury. Thousand dollars referral bonus per eligible client. Terms and conditions apply. Of course you get Mercury Pro for your firm. It's worth checking out. It's really good. Mercury's a fintech company, not a bank. Terms apply for bonus eligibility. See Show Notes for details. Totally worth checking out. I really like Mercury. Get all that down in the show notes. Hey, real quick. I write a weekly newsletter, goes out every single Thursday. And let me tell you, it is a banger if you ever struggle to keep up with like a high news updates. Things are happening so fast, Jason. Where do I learn more? What is the most up to date? Tippy, Top hot goss in the industry and tech advice and all that. It's the newsletter, buddy. Straight to your inbox Every single Thursday, 2pm Eastern. Thousands of accountants read it. I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. You aren't on that list yet. You better get on it now. The names of these packages, the names kind of track with, with how the packages are designed. Like it's based on scope. And I used to do this myself. We used to do this in my cast practice. We had a bookkeeping tier, a controllership tier and a CFO tier. And that is, that is to me more like setting up your tiers based on scope rather than how premium the delivery is. That ought to be the go. And so here I would go away from the, the naming that is based kind of on the nature of the work. I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't say bookkeeping anywhere in this proposal. I mean it might be a bullet point to say like, yes, it's inclusive of bookkeeping but if what they actually need is closer to controllership, I would communicate the whole thing, the nature of everything that we're doing as controllership. And then that first, lowest option. I always want a name in a way that makes it hard to self select into. So we're calling this starter, we're calling this minimum. We're calling it something that gives them a little bit of consternation to opt into it, to know that they are like just getting by and that's what they're choosing. Believe it or not, this will have a really big impact on how many people will bump up to the second tier. And the second tier is where most of us will make our money. So right now the pricing is bronze tiers, 950amonth. Second tier is 1200amonth. Last year is 2300amonth. The absolute numbers here do not matter at all. Like average pricing, like don't take any of these figures. Price based on where you're at today and what you think somebody will pay, that could be 20amonth, that could be $20,000 a month really doesn't matter. The goal is simply to get to the next thing that's better. Don't compare yourself to anybody else. Let's get to the next better thing. But then also be tactical in how we set these things up. So this is, this is very similar to the spread that I would use price to price. So they're at 9, 50, 1200, 20, 300. What I think your goal for the silver tier ought to be is to get them to something slightly more premium. So bronze in most cases, especially if you're doing three tier proposals for the first time, it is whatever the price was last year with a small bump, 5 to 10% bump. So for them to stay at basically where they were last year, they would be opting into the bronze, the minimum plan. I would price your silver plan, the next plan to double profitability. So if you're a 30% margin firm, I would price silver 30% more than bronze. I want to be able to do the quick math. That is to say, for every client that opts into silver instead of bronze, that project is now twice as profitable. Now, I probably wouldn't go any less than 30% of a bump. So like if you're not running a 30% margin, I probably wouldn't do any less. At a minimum, I'd do a 30% margin. If you're a solo firm and you're not factoring in your own pay, like that margin number isn't really Real right. You got to think about what would it cost me to hire someone who could come in and do all of this stuff. And that's usually, you know, a minimum $250,000 a year person, if they're stepping in to do the role that you, the owner is currently doing. I would just say by and large, at a minimum, that silver option ought to be a 30% bump to then double the profit of that project. And I didn't like, I can't overstate enough how quickly this can change your life. Well and truly 30% margin firm, obviously, and we're ruling out the 5 to 10% bump of that bronze tier. But if, you know, 1 in 5 people opt into that silver option, I mean, we cut, I don't know, cut 20% of your clients and you're making quite a bit more money in less time. And this is the dream and this is the process. This is what you do year over year that gets you to the business. It's better and better each year. So it gives you the time to invest in higher quality people finding you getting a larger volume of people to come in. Because if 5% of people that go to your website book a call and 10% of the people that book a call become a client, and 15% of those people that become a client will become gold clients, then the path to building an entire client list of gold clients to increase that flow. Right? Get more people flying through there. Well, that takes time. That takes investment. How do I get myself out of the day to day work and get some time back? It is by landing better paying projects so that we can do fewer of them. So that either you now have the money to hire somebody to oversee it or you've got some time back to work on kind of the pipeline. Like the bigger, the bigger business issues. Gold tier. I reserve gold tier for YOLO pricing. YOLO pricing being like, I can't imagine anybody saying yes to this until somebody does. And I think it was Ron Baker that first said this. Like, the only way to guarantee you will never get somebody to say yes to a crazy price is if you never put it in front of them. I had two or three times in my career where somebody said yes to a number that we're like, we were like, okay, everybody hit pause. We gotta kind of reassess and consider why did they just say yes to this? And how do we go out and get a bunch more of them, right? So I would instead frame like the more premium end of the spectrum here to be. I'm just, just skimming through like some of the things they provide for not for profits. That could be stuff like support direct to donors, you know, like where are donors submitting their questions to get copies of statements and stuff like that. Is it out ofdonors@theirdomain.com and we can just help them service that stuff directly and we get and because we do it much to not for profits, we can say this saves most people, you know, half an FTE equivalent or something like that. Then you're really justifying that price bump because that jump from $1200 a month to $2300 a month, that is a tiny, tiny fraction of some internal team members time. Like eleven hundred dollars a month difference. You know how quickly you can consume $1,100 a month with one of your employees time like we can get that back so fast. And if the decision maker gets their head around that, if they're thinking about making that next hire that's going to cost them all in another 80 grand a year, they'll be like I will happily pay you $4,000 a month instead of $1,000 a month to do this at a higher level. And I don't have to manage you. So how do we become a resource to the decision maker here? Take some headaches off of their plate. That would be the stuff that I would stack in that gold tier. And it's usually not more, not a tremendous amount more work. It is more around the service delivery and what work we're able to take off of their plate. Like to be clear, the bookkeeping, that's the door in. That's the advantage that you and I have over quote unquote consultants. It's all this stuff on top of that where we will make our money. Not on the stuff that's, that's very quickly being commoditized. Other note here that I had is each of the tiers offered Delivery by the 15th of the month. Almost like that's a firm wide policy. Speed of delivery is something that can and ought to be monetized because something always has to be done on the first of the month, right? So why not charge for it? I don't know. I'm not going to promise anybody first of the month. But this is another thing where reserving that that fastest turnaround time to the president's club members, you know, that very premium tier. The reality is we have to do that work all month. Wouldn't it be nice if the work we were doing at the first part of the month was twice Twice as profitable, right? I got so many other things, so many other things to say on. On proposal optimization. Keep those things coming in. I don't want to overwhelm with too much here. My goal is each time you hear these, you pick up like, oh, yeah, I'll do that next time. Yeah, no, like, I'll make my silver, you know, twice our margin. So that I know for every person that says yes to silver, that's twice as profitable. And now if I wanted, I could cut a bronze project. And we're making the same money in half the time, right? I want you to pick up a nugget or two like that each day we're doing these and keep those proposals coming. Any thoughts, man? Anything we missed? Any feedback you would share? Also thoughts on cleanup work and how to price that stuff. Pop that stuff down in the comments, gang. Thanks for being here. We'll do this again soon. I'll see you there. A heads up for my podcast friends. We put together the biggest, scariest project my team has ever worked on. A big old run of live events around the country headed up until year end. To ensure that your 2026 is just the best year ever. Let me run you through the cities real quick. We're coming to Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, NY City, and Boston with some super cool half day workshops that roll into dinners. You get CPE for it. It is an event that is built for you, your entire team, to get the whole squad feeling inspired so that if you are a firm leader, you're not feeling like you gotta put everything on your back. Headed into 2026 gonna be a super fun experience. It's gonna be a surprise guest at every city. We're gonna record an installment of the podcast live at each of these events, you're gonna be part of the podcast itself. What? And man, I would love to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.