The Most Common Accounting Firm Money Trap [This is costing firms so much new revenue]

What I'm walking you through today was the biggest changer to the bottom line in my 1600 client accounting firm. It truly was. We were a very traditional hourly billing firm and it wasn't until we started getting really serious about like explicitly defining what our annual client engagements were that we were able to set up that work in a vastly more profitable way. And some like surprising data to me that I've gathered from firms recently is the majority of accounting firms still don't do quote unquote annual renewals. Now what does that even mean? There's actually a whole bunch of different versions of what annual renewals can be, some better than others. And I want to get into kind of the most common traps here because done right, and we're not just talking three tier proposals like done right, how you organize this kind of re engagement process that can actually happen multiple times throughout the year will genuinely be the biggest driver of profit in your accounting firm. It's ensuring that we're not just like falling backwards into some sort of fixed profitability rate. And instead we have a plan to make sure we're capturing the most value possible and also lean into upsells throughout the year. We're going to talk about that today and then we're going to get into an actual real life proposal that a listener submitted. I'll offer some practical tips for how to improve it. Increase the likelihood that the client will pay to just a little bit more, make that project a little bit more profitable. I think you'll pick up a couple ideas from it. Let's get into it. So after some polls I ran on various social media platforms the last couple of weeks, around 60% of accounting firms still don't do quote annual renewals. And, and these are like the people that follow me. These are online accounting firms. I would say this is a more progressive subset of the profession than the norm. Who is not offline. And for all the big brain stuff we talk about on the podcast around optimizing three tier proposals and all these things that kind of caused me to hit pause and kind of rewind the clock to like six or seven years ago when I had a firm that was simply an hourly billing firm because that was easy and it felt safe. It felt like this is the, the most likely way we are going to get paid for our time is if we first spend that time and then later go back and say pay me for it. And you know, in practice it like it's not that simple. You got write ups, you got write downs, you will invoice somebody and they'll be like, I'm not going to pay for this. But you've already done all the work. And so you end up in this spot where you're discounting work that you've already done, setting a really bad precedent with the client where they will then end up negotiating things down the road. Setting. So like let, let's run through what the alternatives are and what a progression can look like for any firm. And even if you are a new age avocado toast firm that is, you know, taking money up front and doing all these different things. I want to also talk about how front loading discussions around the engagement can actually lead to upsell opportunities throughout the year. So the most basic version of this that everyone does to some degree is, is your insurance carrier gives you this contract that you need your client to sign, right? An engagement letter. And these are just woefully inadequate because they in general have nothing to do with the actual work that you're going to provide. Like our insurance carrier would give us, you know, engagement letter for 1040, tax prep for business, tax prep for bookkeeping services. Never mind the fact that there's so many different ways that we deliver each of those services. Services like do we do bill pay, do we do payroll? Are we paying the bills or the client paying the bills? How do approvals work? Are we doing tax planning? Are we making tax payments for clients? Are we taking direct deposit information which might be wrong? Like these boilerplate engagement letters from our insurance carriers. While they are better than nothing, they're in no way adaptable to like the different ways that we serve different clients. If only the work we did were so simple that we either did 1040 work, tax prep or bookkeeping. Like no projects, each project has a much different life. They are all much more unique than a boilerplate engagement letter may suggest. And like, the solution for this is proper proposal platforms. They will have service terms that are tied to specific services. So if there's five or six services included in a proposal, then the terms that the client agrees to is the roll up of the services or of the service terms specific to the services in that proposal. That makes sense. So rather than just one single flat engagement letter that is just static and never changes, you instead have service terms specific to the individual items you do for people. And then when a proposal goes out with like five items on it, it rolls up the service terms for those five items. But let me make the case to you to at a very minimum, send over an engagement letter with a price before doing the work. Now the biggest blockers folks have here I think is usually, well, I don't know what the price should be. Cause I haven't done the work yet, they haven't brought me my stuff. And I think the, the biggest place you see this argument is probably around tax work. Like infrequent once a year tax work. You don't know what's changed year over year. And I have real data on this that can hopefully convince you. I think this argument holds up less with monthly bookkeeping where it's a much shorter time horizon, it's once a month. What's going to change month over month? Like surely we can spitball what the monthly price for this ought to be and not end up too upside down. But the argument for, for giving a price upfront for tax work, when we made this switch across 1600, 10, 40 projects a year, the way I got all the partners to buy into it, this is actually before I bought the firm was getting them to agree to giving a price upfront, assuming the same scope as last year. And so when you put this price in front of the client, yes, obviously they know that if something is wildly different this year, then, and you don't even know that yet, then of course that price wouldn't be relevant. So in the proposal or in the price that we give them, we say here's your price this year, assuming the work is pretty much what it was last year. And if it's not what it was last year, then we'll have a conversation about what the price will actually be. The way I got the partners in my firm to buy into that approach that felt safe to them was that we would automatically invoice projects out at that price we gave them upfront as long as actual time or WIP came in within an agreed upon rate. I think in our case we used had to be less than, you know, 20% over what we expected and above, you know, 10% under what we expected. And it was basically like a 30% range there that it had to fall within. And as long as all of our projects fell within that range, kind of on a portfolio basis, we knew we would actually make more money on these projects than we did last year. In our case, these are, these are real numbers. 94% of those 1040 projects went straight out the door within that range. And so when we think of all those situations where it was vastly different year over year, are there going to be exceptions where it makes the price you put up front not relevant? Yes, there will be Those, but. But that's not the majority. And there's a risk in honestly, any type of entrepreneurship and building your systems and your way of doing things around the exception when it's like, no, like, let's build around the 95%. Still have an offering for how to handle the 5%. But the fact that there is a 5% is not a rationale to not do the 95% a better way. I think I could hear. I got some amens on that one. To me, that's like a practical way to approach putting the price up front. So much of this is just about like, having a plan for the downside. Like, what. What is the reason why you're afraid to do this? And how do we have a plan for any of the ways that it could go sideways. But the big opportunity here is what upfront pricing unlocks. The first big thing it unlocks is you can take payment information upfront. That was what we did. The beauty of that was that as soon as the project was done, boom, like, we could. We could pull the money and it was paid. We completely removed the accounts receivable process. A lot of folks now are taking deposits up front. That's totally fine. That wasn't like we had never done that with our clients. So there was a bit of consternation around. We've never done this before. How are clients going to react to it? Honestly, they probably would have been totally fine. But the most, like, the easiest transition for us felt like, we're going to show you the price up front now. Which clients appreciated, by the way, took a lot of the mystery out of, like, the. That surprise professional services bill that you get at the end of the project. Which, by the way, if you've ever been on the other end of that, that kind of sucks. Like when they don't understand what you do and they have no idea how much time and effort's going to go into it. That bill you get at the end, it's a spooky thing because you have no idea where it's going to come in. The only point of reference you have is what it's been in the past. And oftentimes things will change in ways that the customer doesn't understand. Could be tax rule changes, could be nuanced, things about their situation that now require more work. And they don't learn about that until they get the bill. And that sucks. So by and large, people appreciate getting that price up front, but you got to put it up there with the disclaimer saying, like, hey, this is assuming that things are more or less the same as they've been in the past. And most of the time they are. But with that, something I'm very glad we did was take take payment information, like as a condition of them being able to accept the agreement. So we're sending them a proposal. Here's the engagement letter, here's the price. But in order for you to accept it, you got to put payment information in. And what you're actually agreeing to is us invoicing you this at the end and pulling those funds. So that is all very clear in the agreement. You're giving us this payment information so that when the work is done and you take delivery, we're just going to pull those funds. And there's, there's a bunch of different ways for how you can do that. Softly. If you're worried about the reaction from clients, they can get a notification seven days before it actually pulls. You know, stuff like that. I think anytime we're changing processes, we build this up in our heads to be more of an issue than it actually ends up being. Because we know there will always be a few squeaky wheels. But the vast majority of people are like, yeah, cool. No, that makes sense. And it's not a big deal. And it's, it's another situation where you run the risk of like building your systems and your processes around the super annoying folks, the squeaky wheels. Right. Don't build your, your firm around your C and D clients. Like build the firm that your A clients would be really excited about. Now this also opens up opportunities to do cool things with three tier proposals which we talk about on the podcast a lot. We'll talk a little bit about it in the next segment. But I would tell you a, a sneaky cool upside to this different approach to pricing was the ability to build in and design upsells in your service delivery. And so in my firm, we grew fast. I mean we were, we grew from basically 3 to 5 million and only a few years. And so we had, we had a good volume of net new clients. But our biggest source of year over year revenue growth was every year more revenue from our existing clients. And this was due to this upsell strategy. So if you think about the way your service offerings are designed, if you got the last podcast episode, we talked about like service library design and how you kind of build the language for the different things that you do in your firm. But the best version of service library design is one that very organically leads to what is the next problem A client's going to have. And like a basic example we talk about is, you know, somebody that's never had bookkeeping, they come to you and the problem is they need bookkeeping. So you do bookkeeping. A trap here is to try to sell them CFO services. And they're like, bro, I don't even know what those letters mean. I just need bookkeeping. What you're pitching me on is 10 times the cost of what I'm ready to pay. And some people will say, oh, we need to educate our clients on the value of this. Because the reality is that CFO service is like six problems down the road from their reality right now. So my take here, you sell them bookkeeping. That's what they need. That solves the problem. Now you know what their next problem is going to be, right? Three months down the road, they're like, I'm looking at these PDFs you send me every month, and honestly, I don't know how to make sense of them. I don't know what to do with this information. So you know upfront that their next problem will be they can't make sense of this. We should hop on a call every month. I should send them a more in depth deliverable or a little video explainer or something like that. You know, that will be their next problem three months from now. That does not mean you need to sell them the solution to that problem. Now. The best time to sell anyone a solution to anything is when they're feeling that problem most acutely. It's yet another argument for giving clients a price upfront before doing a project, when they really want you to do that project instead of after the project's done and you have no leverage. And they're like, I don't know how I feel about this now. So in the way that we design our services, you get them on that bookkeeping package. But then the very basic next advisory package, Advisory one, or whatever it is, a few months into the project, you've got a script, you've got a process for introducing this to people to say, like, hey, we suspect in all likelihood, people at this stage, normally, they're like, man, it could. It would be really helpful if I had a clearer way to make sense of this information. We have that. Do you want to explore this? Here's a proposal, here's what additional ways that we could help you. And now you are gradually getting pulled in more and more to what they do. Let me tell you about an app that perfectly combines three very important things that normally you need a bunch of different tools for the app. It is one of today's sponsors, Client Hub. Let me tell you the three things they combine. Number one, an amazing client experience. Because the whole portal experience, the client facing stuff in Client Hub it was actually thought out from day it wasn't like this bolt on where most practice management systems are like we're gonna make the ultimate operating system for your accounting firm. And then later on they're like oh it looks like we all need to have client portals. Let's make that Now Client Hub was built from the ground up to be super easy for the client to use. That is. That is trifecta point number one. Trifecta point number two is it is also super easy for you to use because my gosh do practice management systems now require a PhD in learning how to use a super complex thing? Not Client Hub, they're keeping it simple in like a good way. Third part of that trifecta, deep bookkeeping workflow. Sorry tax people, sucks to be you. Client Hub very good for bookkeeping, controllership, cast, stuff like that. Cause it's got super deep integrations with Quickbooks and Xero and even has like some built in month end close automation stuff now so you can sign off on like all the all like each account on the financial statements like right inside of Client Hub. Very cool. They're taking it to a very different level of depth specifically for bookkeeping than most practice management systems are. And you get all that one platform. Buddy, what more do you want me to do for you? Worth checking out if you're doing accounting bookkeeping stuff. Learn more about Client Hub See the link down in the show notes. Have you heard the news from one of this episode sponsors? Keeper introducing Keeper Scale. It is a whole new package of cool razzle dazzle stuff including automated accrues accruals automatically tying out like what that schedule ought to be to the books rolling that forward month over month. AI journal entries hold up. It'll take complex source docs like payroll reports, ULTA settlement statements, I don't know what that is and POS exports and turn them into review ready entries you can post straight to the ledger. Buddy, I like what you're cooking. Keeper smells nice. Keeper. It is a month end automation platform for bookkeeping firms. It is like a task management had a baby with a ledger. Got a deep integration there. You can see all the transactions inside of Keeper. Sort of one place to manage all of your month end closes. And they've been working on some pretty cool new stuff. If You're a bookkeeping practice worth learning more about. Keeper. Check out the link down in the show notes. Now if you zoom out to like, if you're doing full on like bookkeeping cast services, accounting department in a box, there's huge. I mean there's so many ways we can do this. Literally like by department, by my role in their accounting department. We would do this where we'd start with bookkeeping, but we would end up like kind of mapping out the org chart and seeing what were the roles within that business, what were the things that we could step into. And honestly, every quarter in most cases we're having a conversation and this works really well if you're delivering and if they're very happy with what you're doing, which in most cases, especially in a cash practice, they're very happy because you helping them is infinitely better than them having to hire and manage someone internally to do that work. That's not the domain expert that you are. But, but we could see very consistent patterns where folks that were using this service very soon would want this next service. Folks that were using this combination of services, this other service worked really well with it. And there's a trap here. There's a risk. Anytime we send a client a proposal, especially around quote unquote annual renewals, where we think we're locking in everything they're going to engage us to do over the next 12 months and that's not actually what you're doing. This is such a big unlock. What you are doing is setting the floor, the minimum for how much you will support them over the coming year. And this is, this is the best place to start is the floor, the minimum expectation. Here's what you need to do for them. This does not mean that the rest of the year you can't do more. You can't have more conversations and say, hey, let's add in this, let's add in that. The alternative, what we often try to do is we, we try to see into the future of here's all the things I think they're going to need in the next 12 months. Let me pile all that up into, into a proposal now. And the client's gonna see that and they're gonna be like, that feels like a lot. I'm not totally clear yet on why I need all of that stuff. And then we try to educate them or like, oh well, what's going to happen is this and this and this and this. Don't do that. Sell them what they need right now and have a plan. For when those subsequent conversations will happen. Because you're pretty sure in six months time they're going to be like, oh dang, I got this new problem, can you help me solve it? And now that they're hungry, they want that thing. They'll take you up on it. They'll pay better for it. Don't sell somebody a sandwich right after you gave them a sandwich. Wait till they're hungry again. Sell em the next sandwich. And this is like very foreign thinking for most of us who are more technically minded. We just do the work and then people pay us for the work product at the end. I can tell you, like on this podcast we talk about how do we run our accounting firm more profitably. It's in all the ways that we dress up the doing of the work, which I know sucks. Like we're accountants. We benchmark our value as accountants on our technical abilities. We see how good are we at this stuff compared to that firm that we just got the client from? Wow, look how bad of work that firm just did. We're so great when the reason the client actually left that client was because they wouldn't call them back. And so then we start doing the work for that client. We're like, we're going to do this work so much better than the last firm. Meanwhile, we're still not calling the client back and then they leave and go to somebody else. So as much as that grinds my gears, the path to like a cool business, a very profitable business, unfortunately, is usually not the technical stuff. It's how we dress up the delivery of the service and make clients feel like, understood and taken care of. Now I am very excited for this new segment. Brand new segment. Are you ready for this? Let's do 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. That is right. The segment is called Indecent Proposals. It's where firms send me the proposals that they send clients. Like a template or something like that, an example proposal. And we walk through it, offer some ideas for how to dial it in just a little bit. There's like this. There's so much optimization that can be done to proposals. You think about all the checkout experiences and how every little aspect of them is dialed in to increase the likelihood that you will buy something that you'll pay another 20 cents. All of that same stuff applies to the human beings that buy our services. Which means the smallest little optimizations that you can Build into all of your proposals across an entire year. Each of those little optimizations, the delta that is going straight to your bottom line. This stuff makes a really big difference. Okay, we're not going to talk like names or firms or get too specific on any of this stuff, because I do this stuff anonymously. But let's take a look at this proposal here. This is a proposal for 1040 tax services. But almost everything that we talk about is going to be equally relevant to bookkeeping. So this firm, they've got three packages. Let's start with just the naming of the packages. The first package name is Tax Concierge. The second package name is Tax Advisor. And the third tier, by the way, is the three tier proposal. So you got three tiers, three different prices. The third is Tax Planner. Now, this kind of confused me originally, but what they've done is they've put like the most premium option first. So option one is tax concierge. That is $410 every month. So is that about five grand a year. The second option is tax advisor. That's 775 every quarter. About three grand a year. Third option is tax planner. $825 every six months. So like 1600 bucks. This one, I don't know how you feel about this. This one is actually more confusing to me because each of the three options have different billing terms. One is every month, one is every quarter, and one is every six months. And the proposal doesn't show the total annual amount. And so it actually makes it difficult to compare the prices of each of the three tiers. I don't care if you do the most premium one first and the most premium one last. Doesn't make a big difference to me. But let's talk about the naming, because right now I don't think that a client just from the naming would necessarily know which of these is best. The most premium one's Tax Concierge. Middle one is Tax Advisor. The lower level one is Tax Planner. Now, what I always love to do in my lowest level option, in the bronze option, if you think of these as bronze, silver, gold, I always like to use a name on the lowest level option that will hurt to pick. Name it something like minimum. Make it something that is painful to opt into, because again, the goal here is to get folks opting into the more premium levels, which, by the way, need to be more profitable. Done. Write a three tier proposal. Each level you go up. It is not more work. It is better work. It is more profitable work. If the third option is Three times the work and three times the price. You're doing three tier proposals wrong. That is just more, that is not better. So the goal is to push them up into the more premium end of the spectrum. So that lowest option for me, I'm going to name it something that hurts, something like minimum, something like starter that people are unlikely to self select into and gang. If that is the only thing you hear from this podcast episode. One change like that, if you have 50 clients, if you have 1500 clients, one change like that, that is a big money change. It really is. And that's, I mean there's so many aspects of this that we got to think about how we dial this in because it makes a real money difference. Calling that entry level plan entry level, you know, something that people don't want to be will push a huge percentage of folks up to that next tier simply because they don't identify as what that option is labeled. And we're getting into like the psychology of which button do I press on here? And that's the point because like it is real and it impacts every single decision your clients make. In a world where there's more just AI over hyper than ever before and you see a new landing page every day that's like, oh, this sounds exciting. But then you can't actually tell if there's anything real going on there. When all that's going on, it's nice to know what things actually work, what are real, what is tested and firms are big fans of. I'll give you one. What firms are like actively using and having success with. I'll give you one tool, Stanford Tax buddy. They were kind of first aboard like the AI tax workflow hype train, but they're now, I don't know, three or four years in. I know I probably well over a hundred accounting firms that love Stanford Tax is a really, really good solution for better organizing your 1040 work. It gives you a single place where you can pile all those documents in. It creates this like AI checklist based on the prior year tax work of exactly what items we need from the client. Then I can just chuck all those documents into one place, regardless of how they come in, and it'll automatically check those items off the checklist and then give me like an actual like work paper in the cloud as an alternative to an Adobe Acrobat PDF. Whether your clients want to work with another portal or not, there's a lot of people that are just now using Stanford Tax internally because it saves you a pile of time on the just the managing of the documents and all that stuff. It's a great company. They've been around an AI accounting solution that's actually really, really good. Worth checking out if you do 1040 work. Learn more about Stanford Tax. Check out the link down in the show notes. Can I let you in on a secret about offshore hiring? This was actually my experience and now that I've talked with more folks that have done it, a lot of people go through this progression. So in my accountant community, realize about 40% of those firms, it's almost 600 firms, almost 40% of them are doing offshore hiring. And that is, that is way higher than that was like three years ago. World's just gotten smaller. I think Covid had a bit of play in that. Distributed work is kind of the norm. Right. So it doesn't matter where your team is. American accounting, it's not that much different than elsewhere, even US Tax, you find experts around the world for that sort of stuff. But the team behind this video sponsor, Team up, they notice the same thing that I did and that's that most firms go through a progression where they first hire a middle person to employ the staff and all that because they trust that that service a little more and that service handles a lot of the logistics with the employee. But then you end up paying as much to that service as you do to the employee themselves. This is where most firms start with staffing. But once you get past like higher four or five, what I commonly see is they then just start hiring people direct. They're like, I actually just want to employ this person directly because half of what I pay I don't want to go to this other group. This is what Team up was born on. What Team up does differently is they will help you directly hire accountants in the Philippines. No middle people. All you actually pay to Team up is a recruiting fee and that's it. So whether you're just getting started or whether you're maybe further along and you got now talented people that are trapped inside of these other organizations, by the way, virtually impossible to get those people out of those contracts. Team Up's a great way to find folks to come work for you directly. Learn more about Team up, check out the link down in the show notes. So what do you call the middle one? What do you call the top one? I don't care about those as much as I want the bottom one to hurt to self select into normally the bottom one. Especially if you're doing three tier proposals for the first time. It's Going to be whatever they paid last year, you know, plus, you know, 10% or whatever the minimum bump is. So the bronze, the lowest cost option is usually whatever they had in the past, because we just want to push them up that premium ladder now. Check out the pricing here. And I'm just going to give the annual prices for this. The Top tier is $4,900 for the year I'm rounding. Next tier is 3,100, lowest tier is 1,600. That's a pretty equal spread of pricing. Keep in mind, anytime you're putting three options, three prices in front of people, that how you position the pricing relative to those other options will have a really big factor in what seems like the best deal. So just, just to simplify this, you could have three options that were $40, $60 and $80. Right? The price then is not ultimately influencing what looks like the good deal. But if you instead made the three options $40, $70 and $80, that then makes the middle option seem like a bad deal and the top option seem like a good deal. It's only another $10 to get all this stuff in the top option. Right? This is what's called decoy pricing. And how you like, stage each of these prices can steer people towards the option that you want them to pick. Do the same thing with the bottom option. Instead of 40, 60, 80, you could do 55, 60, 80. Now the middle option looks like a really good deal. Now does it matter, like what the items are beneath those options? It definitely does. But we actually, we underestimate how big of a psychological factor the relative pricing is, even services aside. Now there's all sorts of like studies around this stuff because obviously how you optimize buyer behavior is, is big business. But some people will take this as far as two options being the same price, even though one has more features. And so like the old example of this, I can't remember who it was, maybe the economist. They were offering like three forms of the subscription, and they wanted people to buy the biggest version, the print and web subscription. And if they positioned the print only option in the middle, a lot of folks just went print. But if they made the print only option the same price as the print and web option. Everybody bought print and web, right? The you're getting more for the same money. Why would you. You're a sucker if you take the print option. You see this when you go to the movie theater, like relative popcorn bucket sizes and prices. You can set this up to where the person will feel like a Sucker for not picking the one that you want them to pick. So consider of these three options, which one do I want them to pick? And can I influence the collection of features or the price of one of those to make one of those a no brainer? And it's dumb like it seems like what ought to matter is the outright price. But what plays a huge impact here is do you feel like you're getting a deal? And there's another example of the power of three tier proposals. You can set this stuff in up in a way so that even if it is a more premium thing than they've ever had before and in a vacuum, you look at it and it's like wow, maybe I didn't ever expect to pay that for what we're doing here. But if it can be framed as a good deal that has a really big influence on their buying behavior. Let's pick out one other thing from this proposal we can go into and there's so many like levels to this should do some more of this. Obviously we're coming up on renewal season. If send me an example proposal, email it to me, message it to me, text it to me. Phone number is 1-516-980-4968. Last thing I'll call out in this proposal is more around this. The items like the service items in the proposal. So I'll, I'll, I'll walk you through what's in the minimum tier and what's in the maximum tier. Minimum tier has tax services, 1040 individual tax return level 2, has tax projection level 2 and meeting annual tax projection. They're using ignition here. Nice thing about Ignition is then once you select the option it will show the detail of what each of those services are and then over to the top most premium level here has everything the minimum level had but it also has meeting annual tax planning, meeting other professionals year round support and then IRS state notices coverage. I think this is like transcript monitoring. A really common trap here, and I made the same mistake is for all of the items listed in your proposal to be about the, the work product, to be about the doing of the thing, the technical stuff. And there's a real risk here that we get way too into the technical weeds in a way that the client doesn't care about, just to look impressive. But the proposal should be equal parts about the product like the work product and the doing of the work as it is. The client experience and who they have access to and what the expected turnaround time is, what sort of things they can they can delegate to you because that's oftentimes what will be the bigger driver of will they pay the premium price than the nuts and bolts of the work that we're doing? They ultimately don't care about the volume of the work that they're doing. They care about, like, what is the value they assign to this and dressing it up a bit, meeting them halfway and, you know, giving them a more premium delivery or delivering it in a way that's a little bit easier for them, they oftentimes get more excited about paying more for that than more for more technical stuff. And so just to give you some ideas here, this is a 1040 proposal. Some ideas of how we could dress this up in ways that are not about the actual work product. One thing they have in here, which, in this proposal, which I like, they call it Meeting Dash. Other professionals, there's probably more sexy versions of these names we could find, but that's basically, they will do meetings with the client and their attorney or their financial planner or something like that. A very, very premium framing of that is the client can send their attorney or financial planner direct to you, and you will interact with them. So the client gives you authorizations to work with these folks directly. For someone who's like a business leader or something like that, that does a ton of delegation, that stuff being able to just happen without their involvement is incredibly valuable. And so if you think about the relative value of, you know, having three meetings a year with the client versus saying, we'll meet with. We'll meet with you once a year, but we'll also meet directly with your attorney, with your financial planner, with your whole team to keep things moving along, to keep stay in sync with what everybody's doing. That's actually even better, I would argue, than meeting with the business owner, because they don't have to be there, because that stuff can just happen, which is the dream, right? When you're delegating, building a team and all that, it's a great example of something you can make available just in the premium tier. That would not be all that much work to you, but when the right person sees that, they're like, oh, awesome. That's exactly what I'm looking for. That can. That can just happen. Now. You are not someone, like, doing a task for that person directly. You're part of the team. Like, you're solving for the accounting problem, for the tax problem. You're part of the larger squad, and what's going on. Those people can now come to you directly rather than Having to go through the business owner to then go to you and something as simple as that. I mean, you could charge 50% more for an engagement for the right person, where the value of that, you know, really lands with them. So that's the only other bit of feedback I would give without going too deep into these proposals, is make sure that your three options are not just laser focused on the work product, but are equal parts the work product and equal parts. Here's how we will help you and the people you'll have access to and how quickly you can expect us to respond. Do they have access to staff person, to an ea, to a cpa, to a manager, to a partner? Within a day, within a week, over the phone, via text? All of these things are different levers that we can pull where something as simple as being able to interact with you via text instead of just email could make them pay another 50% for the engagement. And so if we can build the support level that is necessary and the time to be able to service folks, then the underlying work is much more profitable. I would love to hear from you because this is the first time we've done indecent proposals. Any tidbits there that were especially helpful for you, let me know down in the comments and maybe we can go deeper into those aspects of the proposals. Let me know what was most useful. And gang, you want some free anonymous coaching, send over a proposal. We'll probably do some of these segments down the road just to keep sharing ideas. I mean, we ran through a few things here that for everyone listening, could genuinely put more money in your pocket. That's why I'm excited about this segment. It's very nerdy, very, you know, nuanced thing. But to bring this fully back to the beginning of the episode, you can't do any of that until you're doing proper renewals and giving people prices up front. That's the opportunity. You got a proposal you want me to look at? Send it over. I can't promise we'll look at all of them, but you miss 100% of the proposals, you don't send me. That's not the expression, gang. Thanks for being here. I'll catch you in the next one. Hey, real quick, podcast friends. I'm coming to a city near you running a bunch of live events. Before the end of the year, we're going to be at Intuit Connect in Vegas. We're going to be in Toronto, in Atlanta, Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, L.A. atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Washington, D.C. philadelphia, and Boston, if you are there or anywhere near there, within a half tank's gas up there, buddy, I want to see you. We've put together some super cool events that I'm very excited about all around getting you and your team aligned. Heading into 2026, the biggest problem I had running a firm was I had an abundance of ideas but was always blocked by trying to get my team bought into those ideas and everybody working in the same direction. And it's why I believe the biggest way I can help you is actually getting your team inspired, getting everyone energized for the year to come. So it's not just you, but also because these are live events, events, you're going to meet a whole bunch of other local practitioners as well, which can almost certainly unlock some cool things for you. I'm especially looking at you solo firm runners and side hustlers where your team effectively is the people you meet along the way, the relationships that you build, the people you can go to with questions when you get stuck on this or that. Going to be a super fun experience. Including for some of these events we're recording like a live interactive version of the podcast where you'll get to be part of the conversation. Very, very excited for these. I want to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.