BAM Day 1 - The Critical Foundations on Value Pricing with Mark Wickersham

So what we're going to talk about in the session today is the biggest myth with pricing. Some of the big mistakes that we make with pricing, why we have to start focusing on clients. I'm going to talk about the number one foundation of value pricing and the real reason why people say that we are too expensive. We've got a lot to cover. But also I have got time to answer questions. So please do ask any questions as you think of them. So let's start, let's, let's start off with what I think is the most important thing and that is that as a profession, whether you're an accountant or a bookkeeper, as a profession, we are too deep. We are not charging enough.

I haven't yet seen, very rarely seen an expensive bookkeeper or expensive accountant. So my overall advice to you from this session is you need to put your prices up. The problem is when I say that, when I say to people, you need to put your prices up, I get an objection. I get people say, yes, but Mark, you don't understand.

My clients are price sensitive. My clients are price sensitive and I get that. But this is the biggest myth in the accounting profession because the reality is you don't have price sensitive clients. You don't have price sensitive clients. Trust me, you do not. There's been research that's been done by both behavioral economists, by price psychologists, by. And yes, there are price sensitive people in society. Estimates put it somewhere around about 25, 30%. It's not as many as we think. A price sensitive person is somebody that whenever they buy, they look to buy the cheapest. They want to buy the cheapest car, buy the cheapest phone, they live in the cheapest house in the cheapest part of town. Yes, there are price sensitive people who want the cheapest, but they're not your clients. And I can say that because when we think of the population as a whole, yes, we might have 25, 30% of people are price sensitive. But your clients are not representative of population. Your clients are people who are business owners, entrepreneurs, high net worth individuals, and they are not price sensitive. There's something else and I'm going to come on to that later and explain exactly why. So hold that thought. I'll explain why your clients are not price sensitive and what we can do about it. But what I also want to do is just share what I think are the biggest mistakes in, in our profession when it comes to pricing. There are many mistakes we make. And I know that because back in the 1990s, in my accounting firm. I made every mistake, all of them. So the first mistake that we all make is that we're too cheap. We're too cheap. And I know that one of the things that we, one of the symptoms of being too cheap is that we find ourselves being always busy, working crazy long hours and not making enough money. That was me in 1998. I was working ridiculous hours harder than I'd worked when I as an employee. Before that I was working weekends, I was working evenings, I didn't have lunch breaks and I wasn't earning much because I was too cheap. I didn't know it, didn't know it at the time, but that was my mistake. So that's the first mistake we make in a profession. We are too cheap. Second one, the second one is our old fashioned pricing model of pricing by the hour is a crazy, is a crazy pricing model. We have to, we have to stop pricing based on the hour.

For a whole host of reasons. Whole host of reasons. The single biggest one I think is this. Customers hate it. Your clients hate it. There was a research study done back in 2005 by a huge software company and they surveyed thousands of business owners in the uk and they asked this really interesting question in the survey. What's the thing that you hate the most about your accountant? And the number one answer by some way was surprise bills. Which when I reflect back, it doesn't surprise me because when I buy, I hate that too. When I'm a customer, I want certainty. If I go to a lawyer, for example, and I say, and I want perhaps a contract drawing up and I say, what will it cost? Very often the lawyer says, we charge $200 an hour. Okay, but how long will it take? That's the obvious next question. And they say, well, we don't know, we haven't done the work yet, Mark, but trust us, we're a professional, ethical firm of lawyers. We log every hour accurately on our time recording system and at the end of the project we'll produce a work in report, add up the hours, and then we'll send you a nice itemized invoice that IND lists all the things we've done, the hours, and we'll add up and that will be the bill. And I hate that as a customer. And our clients hate it about us. So we mustn't price based on the hour, if for no other reason, because clients hate it. There's actually many, many more reasons than that. Another is because it's actually not fair on you. Because I've seen over and over again, both anecdotally and benchmarking studies that I've done. Firms that have moved to value pricing make more money than those that price based on the hour or use cost plus pricing. So we mustn't use hourly rates. That's got to be banished completely. There are many, many other reasons for that as well. Partly the psychology of hourly rates. When you quote an hourly rate, it will always be seen as expensive. There's a reason for that. I won't go into that now, but that's mistake number two. Number one, we're too cheap. Number two. Number two, we price based on the hour. Number three is the pricing process. So I think back to way back in the 1990s, this was my pricing process. I would meet a brand new client, I would impress them because I came from a tax background. So I'd share tax planning ideas. Towards the end of the meeting, very often I heard this. Marlon says, great. I've never got this advice from my existing accountant. I really like this, I want to hire you. What will it cost?

And I'd panic, I don't know, not start working with you yet. So what I'd say is something like this, great question. Let me go and think about it. I'll send you a proposal through the mail, through the post. You may remember the post, the mail. We now have email, I guess, and that's a huge mistake because what happens is, and perhaps you do the same whenever you, if you've had a proposal, estimate, quote for some painting and decorating, for example. Whenever, as a customer we receive an estimate or proposal.

The first thing we look for is we go through it looking for the price. We want to see the price. And what happens is when we see that number, we make an instant judgment about that number. Usually that's more than I'm expecting. And sometimes that potential customer will never actually ring you back. They'll go back their existing accountant and they'll say, I've just had this proposal for another firm. And they said they can do my annual financial statements for this price. Can you beat it? And their existing account will say, yeah, we could do it for less. Because we all play that game of competing on price. It's crazy. So what we have to do is when we have price conversations with the client, we must do it face to face. And I include in that zoom calls are fine in this day and age. We must have a conversation with the client. And we're going to talk about this more tomorrow. Back on the main stage again, when we look at Pricing advisory services. So that's the. They're the big mistakes.

We have to start with the client. There's only two ways to price. Only two ways to price. That's the good news. Cost plus pricing, which essentially means we add up the costs of doing something, add on a hopeful profit margin and magically there's our price. Time based billing is a form of cost plus pricing. It's a crazy way of pricing for so many reasons, the biggest of which is it ignores the customer. Ignores what the customer values, what the customer wants. The only other way of pricing is value pricing. Value pricing means we start with the customer first, what do they value and then we price based on that value, not based on costs. Costs are irrelevant. When we are value pricing, we price based on the value. And it's a superior way of pricing because now we are on the same side of the table as the client. Our goals are aligned with value pricing. If we create more value for the client, the client's happier. If we create more value and therefore we price accordingly, we're happier because we make more money. Both people are happy.

If you're currently working with a client and you're charging them, let's say £2,000, $2,000 for a year and suddenly you can identify a way of saving them tax or increasing their profits by 100,000 and we bill them 20 grand for that, they created a profit on the deal. They are happier and we're happier because we've gone from 2000 to 22,000. Value price. We both have the same objectives. We want to maximize value. Because we get a higher price, customer gets more value. Time based billing. There's no alignment of goals. If you want to make more money with time based billing. Simple, just work a bit slower, Just work a bit slower. Put more time on the timesheet by going slow. But that's not in the best interest of the client. So we have to start with the client first. And one of the things we want to do, if we want to get better prices, if we want to make more money, we have to think about the client and we have to think about how can we create more value for the client. How can we turn the things that we do into something more valuable? So let's imagine, let's look at annual financial statements, for example. Annual financial statements, bookkeeping. If you're a bookkeeper, you could apply the same thing. How can we take our end of year financial statements and just make them more valuable? What else could we do? So some ideas for you. We could Give the client unlimited free ad hoc advice. We could say to the client, as part of this price, as part of this package, you can call us whenever you have a question, pop in for a meeting, and we don't charge you for that. We don't have a ticking clock. That's a great way of adding value because they now know that if they need help, they can contact you. Now, a lot of people fear that clients will take advantage of that, and the reality is they don't. Because you want to make it obvious to them in your proposals that if in one of those consultations, a telephone call, for example, there's additional analysis, needs doing additional research, then you agree a fixed price for that. So we want the clients to ring us, because when they ring us or pop in for a meeting, it's because they've got a problem, they've got a challenge, and it's something there could lead to another opportunity to do something more for them. So we could make what we do more valuable by giving unlimited free ad hoc advice. We could, for example, take our annual financial statements and we could give comprehensive pre year end tax planning advice. Which is the best time to plan and do tax planning is before the financial year end. So perhaps we build that in. Perhaps we add value by having quarterly business review meetings rather than wait until the end of the year when we have a meeting to go through the compliance work we've done and the tax computation. What if we were to meet quarterly and give people some advice? This is now getting into the realms of advisory what if as well, we perhaps created some valuable reports, perhaps we create a cash reconciliation report. So as well as our end of year financial statements, we also supplied the client with a separate report which explains to them how their profit reconciles to cash. Because one of the things I know from when I was in practice is clients would often say.

Mark, you're telling me that I've made this profit and I've got this tax to pay, I don't have any more money, I'm broke. Because clients don't understand the difference between profit and cash. As you know, being an accountant, you know that there are many things that have an impact on profit, but not cash and vice versa. Like earlier, we talked about depreciation and amortization. There's a cash flow implication when you buy the fixed asset. But in the profit and loss, we account for depreciation, which isn't a cash issue. So we have to perhaps do some adjustments. That's a cash reconciliation report. Perhaps we could also add Value to our end of year financial statements by perhaps at the end of the year, as well as going through the compliance work and what we've done. What about having a review of their goals, having a different conversation rather than just simply, well, here's your NDA financial statements, here's your tax bill. This is when you have to pay your tax. What if we had some different conversations about their business, about their life, about where they want to get to? Of course that adds value, but it might open up possibilities for advisory work. So that's the first idea I want to share with you. With the foundations of value pricing. You want to think about the client. How can we create more value? And this is the same with every service you offer, whether it's tax returns, bookkeeping, payroll. How can we be more valuable? What value can we create? Let's be creative here. Now, once we've done that, once we've created more value, once we've come with other, come up with other things that we can do, you'll know I said earlier that one of the most powerful things that we can do is to then give people a choice. Customers want choice.

And this is, this is the number one foundation of value pricing, as my friend Ron Baker once said. He said value is in the hearts and minds of customers. And what he means by that is that everybody values things differently. No two people place the same value on something. And this means that when we value pricing, we have to figure out a way of charging different customers different prices. This is what economists call price discrimination. And if you study economics, there's three different types of price discrimination. Economists call them level one, level two, level three. They're really creative guys, but. And there are lots of different things we could do in terms of price discrimination. But there's one in particular that works really well for our profession, as it does for many businesses. And that's menu pricing. It's what we talked about earlier. So wrong button. Was it like that one? So many pricing. Think of it as the gold, silver, bronze. We give people a choice or a choice of three. And let me explain, let me tell you how I first came across this and the impact. So back in 1999, late 99, I discovered value pricing. Ron Baker, I met Ron Baker, he explained value pricing to me. And for me, a light bulb went on. I've been time based billing, I've been too cheap.

I always had price complaints because.

It was always a surprise bill because I would wait till I added up the hours and then sent the bill to the clients. And they weren't expecting it. And when I heard this idea of value pricing, it just made sense to me. And so the very first time I put it in place was at the back end of 1999. I applied it to one of my services. So I came from a tax background and one of the things I did a lot of was tax advisory tax planning, where I had a sole proprietor or partnership and I recognized they could save tax by moving to a corporate structure. We call it incorporations. And back then back in the 1990s in the UK, based on my benchmarking studies, most accountants would charge between 200 and pound 400 for moving an unincorporated business to a corporate structure. In US dollar terms that would be about 3 to 3 to $500. And that was a normal UK. And that's what I charged. I charged between 200 and 250 pounds. And very often the client said that's a bit expensive. Which I found a bit annoying because I knew it wasn't, it was cheaper than what I charged. When I was the manager in my previous eight partner firm accounting firm I was, I was employed by, I would charge 50% higher prices. So one of the mistakes I made in my accounting firm is because I, I'd moved from an eight partner firm as a manager, set up my own firm as a sole practitioner. I stupidly thought, oh, my overheads are less, I can, I can have, I can get, I can have cheaper prices. And that was just crazy because if you think about value pricing, costs are irrelevant. If you think about the value that I create for a client, the value I created for a client when I did, for example, incorporation work was just the same value as when I was the manager in a multi partner firm doing the same work and arguably more valuable because they're now actually dealing with the owner of the accountancy business, me.

So I used to charge less because I, I was just crazy. And I would give them a price and they say, they'd often say that's expensive because they didn't understand what was in it for them. And then I discovered value pricing in 99 and I created these three sheets of paper. Okay, I know you can't read them, but don't worry about that. They are, they should be in a museum. These are my first, this is my first attempt at valid pricing. I found them on a hard drive drive some years ago from an accounting firm. And basically I came up with a bronze, silver, gold. It was actually called two star, three star, four star, two star incorporation, three star incorporation, four star incorporation. Now I was charging between 200 and 250 before and I now gave people a fixed value based price. Well, fixed price, the cheapest one was actually a cut down version of what I was doing, which is really only appropriate to new business startups. And I know you can't read the numbers with the red circles, but the cheapest one, the two star or the bronze, I then charged 350 because I knew I was too cheap. The middle option, which was doing the service that I was doing for between 200 and 250, the middle option was 750. The top option was 1250. I thought about, well, how can I create more value? And I built into it. I could do some company car tax planning, I could do their company secretarial work for the first year. In other words, notify company's house when they change shareholdings, bring in a new director and so on. Some of that corporate compliance work, which is actually really simple. And so when I then spotted an opportunity to save people tax if they were a sole practitioner, a partnership, if I could see tax savings incorporating and they got to the how much will this cost? Bit of it, I would then show them these three sheets of paper and I'd let them choose. And what was interesting is for the next two years, year 2000, 2001, I noticed something strange happening. Two things happened. Number one.

Nobody ever said afterwards that's a bit expensive.

And yet my price is much higher. Number two, and this is really, was really fascinating me was that over half of people, about 60% went to the middle one at 750 pounds. I was charging between 200 and 250 before and people said that's too expensive. Now people were choosing the middle one at 750. What I also found interesting was that more than twice as many chose the premium, the 1250 over the cheapest one. Not many people chose the cheapest one. Now between 2000 and 2001, I had no idea why, but I was happy it was working. I've since studied it and I've realized there's a science behind it. This works. When you present people with choices, you will find that a significant number will choose the middle option. And the reason for that is because we are, we learn from behavioral economics is that we are risk averse, we don't like taking risk and when we're presented with three choices, the middle one feels the safest because we worry that if we choose the cheapest one it might not give us everything that we need. Whereas if we Buy the most expensive one. There may be a worry that perhaps we're paying more money than we need. So the middle one feels the safest. And many people just choose that. This is profound. When you start to introduce three choices and you can start to test and measure this, this becomes fun. You will find people start paying you hyper will choose to pay you high prices. And we know it works because the most profitable companies on the planet do this. So if we think about, if we think about the most profitable company on the planet, it's Apple. You go to Apple's website because you want to buy an imac computer. They give you a choice of different packages. If you go to thinking close at home, Intuit, QuickBooks, QuickBooks, a choice of different packages. So we must give the client choices.

One of my favorite students in the academy who's now one of our trainers in the value process Academy, Teresa Slack, a few years, a couple of years ago she sent me this email. She said, just had a wonderful win today. I quoted three packages to a client for three different services. Shopify integration to QBO, two years of cleanup work and QuickBooks training. And she said, I received the following email today. I would like to commit to all three services, all three programs, please. I'll take the middle option on all three. Okay. This happens over and over again that people choose the middle option. Okay, so what have we looked at so far? We've looked at some of the, some of the foundations of value, of value pricing. We've looked at the fact that the biggest myth is that we think our clients price sensitive. And I'll tell you in a bit how we get around that. But one of those is to give people choices. You see, I thought people were price sensitive when, when my clients said to me, when I, when they said, how much will it cost to move my business into a corporate structure? And I said between 200 and 250. Very often I said that's expensive. And I just thought they're price sensitive. But I then presented three choices in end of 1999 and suddenly they are cheap. Choosing to pay me more by picking the middle option. That didn't make sense to me. I thought, that's weird. How can people I think are price sensitive suddenly start wanting to give me more money? I'll explain why in a short while.

But I want you to remember, but I want you to remember your clients are not price sensitive. The right clients will gladly pay you more money. We'll see why in a bit. I also, we've also looked at so Far we've looked at the fact that we mustn't use hourly rates, we must price based on value. We've looked at, we must increase the value. We need to find ways of adding more value. We need to give people choices. And menu pricing is a great way of doing that. Let me just quickly share with you, one of the things I'll talk about tomorrow is a bit more about the Value Pricing Academy. One of the things we have in the Value Pricing academy is we have about seven live training sessions every single month. One of them is called Foundation Wednesday. One Wednesday every month. So 12 times a year we run Foundation Wednesday. We go deep on the foundations of value pricing. Each one is 90 minutes of training. They're not with me anymore, they're with my trainers. It's my content, my slides, my resources and workbooks and so on. But they're now taught by other accountants doing this stuff in their practice because they can then share with you how they are doing these things and the results they're getting. So it's not theory this stuff that people, people are doing. So some of the other foundations is. I've mentioned menu pricing now both early today and in this session. One of the things we, we go through is something called seven step menu pricing framework. Because one of the things people struggle with is well, how do I create my packages? So we go really deep on that. And Nadim, who you'll meet Nadim tomorrow by the way. Nadim is an accountant who's does great stuff in business advisory. He's now as of last month become one of our trainers. And he, he teaches, he taught that session just last week. And so if that's of interest to you, by the way, if you join the academy this week, you'll get chance to catch up on the recording of how to build your packages. We also talk a lot about repricing existing clients because that's one of the quickest ways to increase your bottom line results. How do we reprice our existing clients? So one of the trainers that does that is El Niece from South Africa. How do you calculate a price? How do you come up with a fixed price? With confidence. And Jessica Fox, amazing lady, you may have seen on the video earlier, she's one of our trainers. She, she taught that recently the structure of the value conversation. So I shared that briefly today. Remember, there's those three elements. There's the uncover the value, build the value and capture the value. So we go much, much deeper on that. It's one of the foundations how to create a Great proposal. So once you have agreed a price, how do you create a proposal that looks awesome, that says all the right things in there? So I think Jonathan Aldama is doing that. Jonathan's a guest speaker during the masterclass. Teresa does a session also on repricing existing clients. It's a two parter because that's such a big topic. How to price one off project. So what do you do? How do you price something where you've never done it before? A client wants some help with some advice on their exit strategy. For example, what about price psychology and the laws of influence? We do a session on that. You need price psychology is so powerful. We talked earlier about anchoring. Tomorrow in the main stage I'll talk more about anchoring and price psychology. We go much deeper on that in the academy communication strategies. We're going to come on to that today by the way and we touched on it a little bit earlier but we go really deep on that. I think Neil is teaching that next understand value equation. We have to understand if we're going to create more value, we have to understand what makes up value and what are the things that we can do to improve value. So Cindy is teaching that very soon and you post a brand new client. So we focus a lot on how to reprice existing clients because that's a big challenge. So what about new clients? What's the full process? And Neil teaches a 12 step framework for how the 12 stages of pricing in his brand new clients. And then last but not least once a year we also teach your pricing strategy, how to get the strategy right. So there's some of the other foundations of the foundations of value pricing. I'm trying to get many to you today as possible but there's other ones like pricing strategy and so on. So let's look at next. How are we doing for time? We have. I think just bear me a second. I don't. We. We're supposed to finish. Oh, we got plenty of time, have we? No, we don't. 30 minutes, 13 minutes. If you've got any questions, put your questions in the chat box. We are going to finish on time. I do have time for questions by the way, but I can't see anything at the moment. But if you have a question, put it in the, in the questions box. So we have. Did I say what are they? Seven. Seven minutes.

I have to be on time because I'm on the main. I'm on the main stage soon as you. As you know. Yeah.

So why do people say you're too expensive. I said to you at the outset this con, it's really confrontational. I said to you that it's a myth that your clients are price sensitive. Let me explain what I mean by that and how we get around that. So I said to you that the reality is that only a small proportion of people in society are actually price sensitive and they're not your clients. So most people are what's called value sensitive. Most people. And this is why one of our sessions is the value equation. What this basically means is that for most people when we buy something, there are two main elements. There is when we buy something, it's going to give us something, it's going to give us some benefit. And to acquire that benefit, there's going to be some sort of cost, the price. And if the benefit that we get is much higher than the price or the cost, we will buy. Now, a price sensitive person only cares about the price. They want the cheapest. It doesn't matter what the benefits are, they just want the cheapest. But most people are value sensitive. They want to see a profit on the deal.

And so I can demonstrate that you don't have price sensitive clients because if you think about it, any clients that you have that own something like this, an iPhone, any product by Apple, any clients you have that owns an Apple product, that owns an imac computer, a tablet, for example, any Apple customer by definition cannot be price sensitive because there are cheaper phones, cheaper tablets, cheaper computers on the market. An Apple customer is not price sensitive, they are value sensitive. If you think about your client's coffee buying habits, if before they start work they go into Starbucks or Costco or Pete's to buy a coffee, customers of Starbucks cannot be price sensitive because there are cheaper ways of getting your coffee fix. Most people are not price sensitive. Most people want to spend more money because they want more value. So why do we think our clients are price sensitive? And the reason for that? Because we make a big mistake. It may be that at some point you presented a price to somebody like I did with my incorporation service, it's between 200 and 250, and we get that reaction, that's a bit expensive. And when we hear someone say that's a bit expensive, we naturally assume that they are price sensitive. And then after a period of time, when we present a price to several clients and we often get this, that's a bit expensive in our minds, we extrapolate and we start to assume, oh, right, well, everybody's price sensitive. And then what happens is when we think people are price sensitive. When we have the conversation, we focus on the price, we focus on the price and that's a huge mistake. The reason why is the big thing. The reason why somebody says to you that you are expensive, you, price is too expensive is not because the price sensitive, it's not because you're too expensive, you're cheap. When I charge between 200 and 250 pounds for doing incorporation back in 1997, 98, I know now I was way too cheap. I was cheaper than when I did the same work as a manager in an eight partner firm. I was cheap. And yet people said that's too expensive. So why do they say it? People say that's expensive.

When they don't understand the value. And that's our fault, we haven't communicated the value properly. Remember I said to you when I showed you those three sheets of paper that I created in 1999.

Firstly I gave people a choice and people chose the middle option. But I also learned afterwards the reason why they didn't say that's a bit expensive is because I focused on the benefits. Those three sheets of paper became my system so that I could explain. Let me tell you what I do as part of each package and how you benefit from them. I start to explain, whereas before my strategy was this, I would impress them and talk about the tax benefits of incorporating. They say that sounds great, Mark, what will it cost? And I would say between 200 and 250. And they would say that's expensive. One of the big mistakes I made, and we must learn this is we must never ever answer the price question with the price. The price question is what will it cost? You do not give a price, you do not give a price until you finish building up the value. And so we have to communicate value first. We have to focus on value. That's why things like a professional looking brochure gives you a script to build up the value of what you do. So we have seven minutes, I think eight minutes. There's no question. So I'll just carry on. So let me give you some ideas.

One of the things that we should do is focus on the pain. Focus on the pain and build up the pain. Because one of the things we know is that people are more motivated to take action to avoid pain than they are to attain gain. Yes, we all want things in life, but the things that really drive us are the pain. Marketers teach us this because they tell us that you get better conversion rates with pain avoidance subject lines in emails than Gain related ones. We're all moving away from something. And so what you have to do is better understand what is the client's pain. And that's about asking the right questions. That's about in the uncover the value phase of the conversation we have to ask questions to understand what's the problem right now, what's the difficulty they're facing. And we have to really drill down. We don't take the first answer, we keep drilling down and then as we uncover the pain, we then want to, we then present that in it. When we then talk later about the benefits of what we do, we talk about the pain we're taking away. Let me give you a quick example. Client says to you.

I'll give you an example in a bit. Let me share a couple more points. I can pull them all in, then pull it all together. So focus on the pain, build up the pain. Number two, uncover the emotion. In other words, how do they feel about that?

Because people are more motivated. Well, yes, we deal with numbers and stuff, but what's the real emotions going on? And I think Jim covered it as well to some extent in his session where he talked about we need to understand that they have an emotional connection to their business. And so we have to talk more about. It's not just about giving them the numbers, it's about working with them and.

Understanding a bit more about the business, showing empathy with the problems and so on. Emotions are so powerful. I'm going to give you an example to hopefully bring this alive. The other thing we need to do in our conversation is as well as focusing on the pain that we're taking away is what's the afters, what's the end result? What would their life look like when we're finished? We spend too much of our time in the conversation with clients telling people what we're going to do. When you buy the service, we're going to do this. We're going to have a 60 minute meeting with you every single month. The client doesn't really care about the 60 minute meeting. What they care about is what will that do for them? What will their business look like when you have a monthly meeting with them? There's no value in the monthly meeting. The value is in what it will do for them. We have to communicate the value and we also have to, and I touched on this earlier, quantification is critically important. Important. We have to quantify things. So let me give you an example. You have, you're talking to a client, somebody comes to talk to you, they're looking to change accountants or a new bookkeeper and you ask what their problems are. And they say, well, one of my big problems is my books and records are a mess. They're a mess. Now straight away, we might jump into solution. Okay, we can do a cleanup project, a catch up project. We, we can do your bookkeeping. We don't want to jump in with a solution. We want to better understand. We ask more questions. So tell me, what is it about your books and records are a mess? Tell me, give me some examples. Well, one of the things we know is that we know that we don't. We have a problem with posting the sales invoices and matching them against the bank receipts.

Okay, so that, so that I'm guessing that means that you probably then when you look at your age, debtors report who owes you money, it may not be correct. So what, what's happening as a lot of that. Well, actually, I think you're right because one of the things we do is we every, every Friday we send out statements to our customers to tell them what they owe us. And we find sometimes the statements are wrong and they come back and they shout on the phone because.

They paid that last week. So why are we chasing that money?

And so I would then say, so what sometimes happens as a result of that? Well, there have been some situations where we've actually lost the customer. They just got so sick of us sending the wrong statements and asking for the wrong money. That's interesting. So how many customers do you think you've lost in the last, let's say last three months?

I can think of three that we've lost. Okay, so tell me. So that's three in the last three months. That could be 12 over. 10 to 12 over the course of the last year. Could that be about right? Yeah, perhaps. Yeah. Okay, well, let's go with 10 because the math sees. So tell me, how much is a customer worth to you? How much does a customer typically spend over the course of year or in a typical week?

Well, in a typical week they probably would buy or in a month they perhaps spend with us 2000. Okay, so a customer over a year might spend 24,000 over a year. Yeah, 24, yeah, yeah, that could be. Right. So that's, they're worth 20. So the customer's worth 24,000. And potentially you're losing 10 of them every year because of you upsetting them with statements that are wrong and so on. That's 10 customers worth 24,000. That's a $240,000 problem. Does that, does that feel about right? Well, it could be something like that, yeah. Now what's happening is the customer is now thinking, yes, it's a 20. That's nearly quarter of a million dollars. It's a big problem. So then I would say.

How do you feel about that? Uncover the emotion. How do you feel the fact that you lose customers potentially worth $240,000 in a year? Sometimes I have sleepless nights. I'm so stressed sometimes about, you know, I'm not building the business I always wanted. I feel like a failure. These emotions are so important. When we can uncut, when we can unpick and get those emotions. Now they need this solving. And so when we produce our solution to that which might be a cleanup project, a catch up project, book doing the bookkeeping, whatever it might well be. As we now explain our solution, we will also talk about as part of that solution, these are the problems we're going to solve. We're going to make sure you're, we're going to make sure that every single day your account receivable, your debtors is absolutely right. We're going to make sure the statement shared sender are right. We're going to make sure you don't lose $240,000 of business every single year. We're going to solve that pain. This is what your life will look like once we fix this problem. You'll have control over your books and records. You will understand the numbers better. We'll teach you how to get the right reports so you can make better business decisions. So you can start to grow your business again and build the business you've always wanted.

Now the client wants to buy and the price for that is now it doesn't matter. They need it doing okay. We have I think 30 seconds left. I'm just going to see if there's any questions. I, I don't think there are any questions. I'm also just checking I'm right with the time. There's no questions that I can, that I can see. So.

I'm still waiting. Oh, there is, sorry, the question. I've just seen it. It says anonymous. I don't know who it is. The workbook has seven step framework for building your packages. Which session covered that? I don't remember seeing that.

That's a great question. I think I was going to cover that earlier and I didn't. So apologies for that.

We'll get the seven. One of my team will post an answer to what those seven steps are.

If I get a chance to cover it or ask me in my Q and A session later. I can go through it in the Q and A if you. If you want. I do need to go now because I'm on the main stage. So we've got. You've got a five minute break, bathroom break, get a drink if you want. Might have time to check out an expo booth. I've got some closing announcements on the main stage. Start in 5 minutes and then I'm doing a Q and A session in the Value Pricing Academy booth where I can answer any questions that you've got. Thanks for coming to this session. You'll be able to catch up on Peter's when the recording is up in the replay area, if you want to catch Peter. Thank you so much for coming along. I will see you on the main stage in four or five minutes.