BAM Day 2 - How to Profitably Price and Effectively Sell with Mark Wickersham

Today. What's today all about? We covered so much yesterday. We looked at, just a quick reminder, we looked at what is biz advisory and we looked at those six components of it, which some of you have always said is one of the things you found the most valuable. We looked at. We spent quite a bit of time looking at the opportunity and how we can look at a client's financial statements in a different light and start to really start to see what the, what the underlying story is by looking at things like trends, by looking at ratios. And Jim did a great session talking about how we want to engage the client more with numbers. And he showed some of those little sliders and things so we can do what if analysis and look at what if this happens or this happens.

And then we looked at, okay, so now we kind of know what advisory is.

How might we package up. And I talked about the importance of giving clients choice because they're all different. And we also talked about that journey technique of creating packages or options which build so that people can start off at your entry level and build from there. And we talked about some of the important things with communication like anchoring as well. And we're going to pick up on a lot of that today because today is all about the. Probably two of the biggest challenges I hear is I don't know how to sell advisory work. So we're going to talk about that. And I don't know how to price it. How do I calculate a price for advisory? So today is really all about the sales process and coming up with price. So we're going to dive into that very soon. Just a very quick overview of. Overview of a few things.

I don't know whether you've. If anyone here is here for the first time today, if you missed day one, then we did run an orientation session earlier. But just very quickly on the left hand side you will see up and down the left hand side is the menu to navigate your way around. This is a screenshot of the reception page where you first came in and you'll then find blow up the stage. You're in the stage. So you found that the breakout sessions, expo booths and then there's the replays for the sessions you missed. So if you have any questions about finding your way around the platform, just reach out to my team and they will help you. Also make sure that you've clicked on the link to download the conference workbook because in there we have also instructions on how to use the platform. Here's the. This is the conference workbook you'll find everything you need in here including the guide to the speakers, what the sessions are about and the workbook that you can use for my mainstay sessions. And as somebody said yesterday, I'm sorry, I forgot to say, but when Gabby designed the workbook, you can type straight into the workbook with your, with the answers and so on as we go through it. So someone actually figured that one out. I should have said so today's agenda, it's the same format as yesterday, obviously different content. So I will start things off with looking at how to sell, how to price. We have another special guest joining me in about an hour and a half, Nadine, who does a lot of advisory work and we'll be talking about how to.

Uncover the value. So I'm looking forward to that session with Nadim. Then of course we'll have a short 10 minute break like yesterday so you can go and have a bathroom break, get a coffee or tea or whatever you want and then you can make your way to a choice of two breakout sessions. Kathy Gregory is here, we checked, so she is definitely here and looking forward to that. You have a choice of either Kathy or if you've not had enough of me by then, you can come and hear my session. I will tell you a bit more about those two sessions at the end of this session. So just before we get to the break I'll remind you and let you know which one, what they're both about and which one might be right for you. Then of course we have another five minute break again and then we're back here for the closing announcements. So that's the structure of the conference, same as yesterday. Once again a thank you to the sponsors who are here. These are all people that, who.

A lot of people have recommended into it here because they are releasing fairly soon a new advisory product I've that I've had a sneak preview of. It's very exciting. Watch this space. They will be launching I think in August. I can't say anything more than that. It's I think top secret liveplan I've worked with for many years now. Lots of many people love liveplan and you'll hear more about that later from Kathy and she will have a session I think in her booth and then the other, the other ones, the other sponsors there, Sift Agenda, Fathom RT reporting Helm are people that have been strongly recommended by people in my academy who do advisory work. So go and check out the booths at some point. As I said yesterday, one of the Things that we want to do is make the world a better place. And when you bought your ticket for this, you also helped somebody else build a business. And as I said yesterday, as a thank you for being here, we've then made a contribution. You've given collectively 404 days of financial and business training to women in Bolivia to help them start their own business. Okay, few final things to go through. As you know, we've got a lot of content today, so I'm going to get fast into the content today. But as you know as well, this is an opportunity for you to enroll in the Value Pricing Academy. We only open up twice a year. It's normally closed. We opened up yesterday for enrollment and I'll tell you more about that later. If you did enrol, if you've already. If you are an action taker and you decided you want to be part of this community, of which I know that many members are here already, if you have already taken that step, then let me know in the comments box. What are you most excited about in the Academy? What's the thing you are most excited about? Let me know in the comments. I would love to know.

A few other quick things, please. If you've got any questions, please ask questions on the main stage. There is so much going on in the chat box that I don't necessarily have time to answer questions as we go along, but my team, Gabby and Sarah are here and they will answer questions if you use the. You'll see there's a chat, there's a chat tab and there's a Q and A. Use the Q and A because they can then answer the questions, hit the reply button and and answer your questions. I was answering a few from yesterday. Just now I was adding those there. So please ask your questions if you want. If you have questions for me that you want me to verbally answer, then I will be running a Q and A session at the end of the day in the Value Pricing Academy Facebook group. Sorry, Facebook Group Expo booth. I mean the Expo booth. And I will probably have more time to answer questions in my breakout session as well. But if Sarah notices a question pop up during the main session now that I should answer, she will pull it up on the screen and perhaps remind me about that. Right? What else I need to say? What else does. I was going to say tell me what action you've taken as a result of yesterday, but I know that Sarah's been putting on screen the things that you said you're going to do or the things that you got out of yesterday. So in the interest of kind of getting through the content, let's move quickly onto that because today I think is. Today's the most, I think of the three days is the most intense day tomorrow. Yesterday was kind of a gentle introduction to it. We looked at a few broad concepts like creating different options and communication. So on today we go much, much deeper on stuff, on things that I know are big roadblocks for people, the selling and the pricing piece. And then tomorrow, of course tomorrow is also an important day because it's then, well, how do we do this work? How do we deliver advisory and also how do we use it to win more clients? Remember that you've got a workbook. So I will refer to the workbook a few times. You can fill in the blanks. Someone did point out yesterday and I apologize, my fault. There was one section in the workbook I didn't cover and I will cover it off just so you can finish off the workbook. It was the.

I think it was the seven step process for building packages. It's something that we go really deep in, in the Value Pricing Academy. But I will cover that. I think what I'll do. I can't remember who it was put the comment in there. But if you're in the Value Pricing academy and you're filling in the workbook, you should know, you should know, you should know what the seven steps are because we talk about them a lot. But if you have no idea what those seven steps are and want to know, I will probably cover that off right at the start of the session in the Value Pricing Academy expo booth. At the end of today. I'll probably start that first and then we'll go into Q and A. So if you want to know what the seven steps are to building your packages, I will cover that in the expo booth. At.

What time? At 10 past 7. That's UK time. So that's 10 past. We can do the maths. 10 past 2, I think in Eastern Standard Time. Okay, so this is where we are and where we're going to. So yesterday as I say was understanding what is advisory and spot opportunities. It was about packages, the journey technique and a bit about communication. Today is selling and pricing. Tomorrow is delivering with confidence and also then having fine people for advisory workers, marketing side of things. That's our agenda. So let's start with, let's dive into and should. Before do that, let me just have a quick glance at the comments and see if there's anything important I should be aware of because I've got lots of content. But it's nice sometimes to just acknowledge the contents.

There's a question here. I think I'll answer this one, Sabrina, because I don't know the Expo booth. I don't think there's replays for the expo booth. I'm fairly sure there isn't. But it's just for the breakout sessions because the Expo booth, my session is just a Q and A. So if you have questions about the ValuePrice Academy, anything I talk about, come along to the Value Price Academy later and I will answer your questions. Okay.

And I think Sarah's just confirmed that. Okay.

And Katrina was trying to figure out. So yes, I will cover that later. Katrina in the booth.

Kim. Kim, you weren't spaced out. Don't worry. You weren't spaced out. And that isn't Kim. Where did that comment go? That comment has just gone off the screen. That was a really funny one. Where'd it go?

Anyway, I think it was Kim said I wasn't spaced out.

What's this? So Neil just says I've been a member of Mark's academy for about two and a half years. Mark literally changed my life. I'll explain more tomorrow. Well, thank you for that, Neil. Neil's our, Neil's one of our speakers tomorrow and he is, he's extraordinary what he's achieving. And.

If you want to grow your accounting firm then you need to go and listen to what Neil's story.

So. Yeah, and I can't wait to hear that, Neil. It's going to be awesome. Let's, let's get started with, let's get started with this whole issue of then how do we sell advisory work? Because selling is that four letter word that we all hate in the profession.

I hate selling. And I struggled with this a lot because those of you know me, I am an introvert. I do struggle with, I struggle with people because I am, I'm an accountant. I just love numbers and doing, you know, playing with numbers and stuff like that. I know I do things like this as well, but I am an introvert and I struggle with selling. I found that a real problem and one of the things that helped me the most was I had a mentor. I've had a number of mentors over my, over my professional career. There was one mentor in particular, his name was Peter Thompson and he was one of the leading trainers in selling skills amongst many other things. He's a genius. He's Peter Thompson. But I remember going, he was mentoring me and I Said to Peter, I really hate selling, I struggle with selling. And he said something to me that when he said it I kind of thought, I don't get that. I'm not sure that fully makes sense, but it sounds interesting. But I then went away and it kept going around my mind for the next 24 hours. And then slowly, suddenly this light bulb went on. And what he said just made so much sense and made this whole thing about selling so much easier. Peter said, don't sell, don't sell. Just allow people to buy.

And as I said, I struggle with it, but it makes huge amounts of sense to me now because when you know you have something, a product, a service, a skill, knowledge that can change people's, then you don't have to worry about selling. So for example, when with the Value Pricing Academy, I know that there are so many people in the academy where it has changed their lives. In fact, Neil just said that so many people have got extraordinary results. And you've seen some of the stories so far. Those of you that came a little while ago, we had the story from Teresa Slack and she shared her story. Extraordinary what she's done in her business.

I showed you Stanley Dean, 47% increase in his prices and he's an established accounting firm. People are getting extraordinary results. I know that people that join the academy, if they follow the process and do things, they get extraordinary results. Whether you're a solo bookkeeper, whether you're a multi partner firm, there are people getting results. And so I know I have stuff that can get results and so I just allow people to buy. We open up enrolment twice a year for six days. And if you want to join, great, we would love to have you join the academy. But it's not right for everybody. And I don't get worried about that. I just give people the opportunity to join that, to join. And you need the same mindset that when you're selling advisory work, not everybody's going to buy from you, not everybody will buy. And that doesn't matter. You can't if you've got 100 clients in your firm right now, you could not possibly do advisory work for 100 clients. You would just go insane with working 24. 7. You haven't got the capacity to work with everybody. You want to work with the right people. Some will buy and some won't. And so you want to have a process.

Where, what you want to do is have a process where you deliver value, turn your sales process into something that's valuable, where you're Just delivering value to people.

Just like I'm doing over these three days. I'm delivering, I'm going, my attempt, I'm going to attempt to deliver as much stuff as I can over these three days along with the rest of the speakers. And if you come away from these three days having learned something that might help you in your firm to take you to the next level, then I've done what I want to do. I'm happy. If you also decide that you would like to join the community, then that will be awesome. But if it's not right for you, that's fine. And you want the same process, you want to deliver some value to people in a structured, systematic way where. And I'm going to share the process, by the way, in a second. This is why I did my accounting firm when I figured it out back in the year 2000 when I started doing advisory work. And what I found was I followed this process with every client I met and with every prospective client I met. And what I found was that some went and bought. They said, look, I want this, I want this. And that was fine. If they did, all of those that didn't said at the end of the process, this is amazing. I've had so much value for this from this. Thank you so much. And if I can help somebody in that way, then I'm happy with that. That's an outcome. Because when you deliver value to somebody, even if they don't buy, when you deliver value to somebody, they will remember that and at some point it will come back in some way at some point. I found in my accounting firm that when I use this process, I'm going to share with you, particularly with prospective clients, people who weren't clients yet, whilst they may not have then gone to buy my advisory work, very often they decide to buy my compliance work because they saw me as being different to everybody else. And so just talking different. Having a process to talk about advisory work may win you the advisory work, but certainly it will win you more business for your compliance services. So we want to take, we want to create a process, a sales process, but it's really a process that's all about creating value. I give it a name in the, in the value pricing academy, we call it the Profit Diagnostic Review. You could call it whatever name that you want. And so the process works a bit like this. And you remember yesterday I talked about the three stages of the value conversation. Uncover the value, build the value and then capture the value. And really this is taking those three steps and Just building on them and turn them into an agenda, a process for a meeting with a business owner. And I used to have these meetings, by the way, if this process I'm about to walk you through, whenever I met a potential new client.

I would then offer them this process as a follow up meeting. And with existing clients, every time I met an existing client to go through, for example, their end of year financial services financial statements, when I'd done the annual accounts, their financial statements, as well as reviewing the numbers, I would then go through this process because I knew it would add value and would allow people to buy. Some people will say, yes, I want that.

And one of the things that we want to do. So one of the things I learned is that we don't need to learn these sales techniques, these things that we don't, we, we don't like, that we feel uncomfortable with. We don't need to do those things. We just need to be firstly confident that what we know, that what we can do can change people's lives. I know that I can change people's lives in the academy.

With your knowledge and with the things that we'll look at tomorrow and with some of the things we touched on yesterday with looking at numbers, you can change people's lives. You really can do this stuff. And if you feel at the moment that you're perhaps doubting that, then just wait till tomorrow. And I know Neil will dispel that myth. You can do this stuff. You can, you can make a difference with helping people build a more profitable business. You just need to have some processes, ask the right questions and by the end of tomorrow you'll, you'll have a lot of that. So really it's about, it's not the sales techniques. What we want to do ultimately is, what we want to do is we want to demonstrate, we want to demonstrate to clients what's possible. And we want to inspire them. We want to inspire them in such a way where they say to us.

I want to get to that place, I want those results. Can you help me? Because that means they then want to buy, want to inspire them to take the next step on the journey with us, which is then your packages. And if you're using the journey technique I talked about, it might just be the first step on the journey where your entry level, they pay you a fee to do something and they can then build on that. So we want to demonstrate and inspire. We want to demonstrate really with three things. We demonstrate that.

We can help them build a better business, achieve their goals. We demonstrate through three things. Number one, we demonstrate with value by showing them stuff. I'll show you some stuff in a short while. How you do that. We want to demonstrate by giving them ideas value on ways that they can increase their profit, their cash flow, their business. Secondly, we want to demonstrate numbers because we are the numbers experts. I said that yesterday. We understand numbers better than anybody else. So let's use our skills with numbers to demonstrate what's possible in their business. And then, number three, we demonstrate with stories. In other words, you tell people stories about other people that you've helped. You'll notice through these three days that I've shared lots of stories because stories are inspiring. And you might be saying, yes, but Mark, I haven't got any stories. Well, you won't have any stories until you start doing advisory work. And one of the things we talk about in the academy is how do you get your first client? But what you want to do is when you do work with a client and you help them get some results. And I noticed in this, in the session a little earlier, Teresa called it about her brag book. I love that Teresa talked about the brag book. You want to make a note of all the times you've done some great things for your clients. And then as you do great things, when you do something that helps someone improve their cash flow or improve their profits, then you get the story. Either you could get them to write your case study, or better still, if you can get a video, that will be great. But what you do is in your meeting with the client, you then say, let me share with you how we worked with a similar client to you a year ago that was in a similar situation to you. Let me share what we did with them and the results that we got. And then you share that. And when you share stories, what happens is people can then relate to that. They then think, well, if you've helped that client double their profits, that's demonstrated that you can do this stuff. That's the result that I want as well. So we demonstrate adding value with ideas. We demonstrate with numbers. We demonstrate with stories. So what is the process? The process is we want to have a structured process that's at least 45 minutes. I used to run it up to 90 minutes because this was, to me, important. Talking about people's business, how we can help them improve it. And the starting point is asking questions. The starting point is we want to want to uncover the value which we looked at yesterday. We want to uncover the pain. What's the Pain in their business. Right now, we want to understand what is the hard problem? What is the pain? And it may well be things like they're not making enough money. It may be that cash flow is really tight, the business is stagnating. It's not growing the way they want it to grow. Anything you hear that's like this, it should be telling you, this is a client that needs advisory work, business advisory. If they're running out of cash, if their profits aren't where they want them to be, if they want to grow their business and stagnating, then this is the sort of client that needs advisory work. So we want to uncover pain by asking questions. And then what we want to do is start to look using numbers, just like Jim said yesterday, you know, the what if analysis is wrong. Well, what if we could do this, what if we could do that? If you can use numbers and at the same time share some value, some ideas that they could use, that's going to deliver value, and the numbers will demonstrate that.

The sort of results they can get in their business.

So I'm going to show you the exact process I use in a bit, and it involves understanding the nine drivers of profit. Every business, every business has an underlying mathematical model. Most business owners have no idea what it is because they don't understand numbers. But. But there are things that drive profit.

And there's nine drivers. But if we take it right back to its simplest level, we kind of know this because we know that the thing about profit is if somebody wants to help improve their profit, you can't do that. You can't manage profit. You can't help somebody improve their profit, because profit is just the end results of a whole bunch of other processes. We have to break it down. Now, at its simplest level, profit is the sales that we make in the business minus the cost. Sales minus cost is profit. And so we know that if we want to increase profit, we either increase sales or we figure out a way of reducing costs.

But even that's a little bit too vague. Because if a client says, I want to grow my business and make more sales, we can't really help a client increase their sales, partly because we're not marketing experts. But let's not worry about that. What we have to recognize is just like profit, sales is the end result of a number of drivers. We just have to understand what the drivers are and then just focus on one or two little areas of the business. Because when we understand the mathematical model and every business has one, when we understand the model and we then start to pick work on individual drivers. You will find that small, tiny changes can work their way through the system and have a huge impact on the end result. Let's look at this at a really simple level. If we start off simple and then we'll just build on this a bit. So if we think about sales, we can't help a client increase their sales because it's just the end result of a number of drivers. If we break that down, there are a number of different drivers of sales, but at its simplest level, there are three. There are three ways to grow a business. This was made famous by the American marketer Jay Abraham in the 1990s. There's a bit more to it, but at a simplest level, there are three ways. Let me walk you through what those three are. So sales for any business is made up of, firstly, how many customers does the business have? How many customers do they have? Secondly, in a year, on average, how much, when a customer does business, how much does that customer spend each time they do business? On average, if it's a restaurant, how much does a customer typically spend? What's the average amount spent on food each time a customer comes in to the restaurant? And then we multiply that by on average, how often do they buy? How often do they buy? So you might have, let's say, 100 customers. And each of those hundred customers comes to your business 10 times a year. That means those hundred customers, that's a thousand sales over the course of a year, 100 customers buying 10 times, that's a thousand sales. If those thousand sales, if those hundred customers on average spend $10, 10 pounds, then that's 10,000 of sales. So we can't manage the 10,000 of sales. But when we understand it's made up of 100 customers buying 10 times a year, spending. Sorry, did I say 10 times? And spending 100. When we understand that, we can now start to work on individual drivers.

And one of the things that you will find, and one of the things you'll find is that most people, when they want to improve their profits, focus on the wrong things. Most people focus on the wrong things. Firstly, most people, when it comes to increasing profit, they focus on reducing costs. And whilst costs are important, it's one of the least important drivers. There is much more power in working on sales. There's only a finite amount of profit we can eke out of a business by saving costs. We can only save so much. Whereas when we work on top line, there's infinite possibilities. But even when we break things down, when somebody wants to grow their business after cutting costs, the next thing that most people look about, look to is I need more customers. I know accounting firms are guilty of this. Bookkeepers, I need more clients. No, you don't need more customers. You don't need more clients. You have enough. There's other things we can do that are much easier. And it's much easier to work on increasing how much they spend on average and how frequently. I might give you some examples in a short while to demonstrate this. So when, when you're working and doing advisory work and a client wants to grow their business, don't panic and think, I'm not a marketer, I don't know how to help people get more customers. Doesn't matter. There's much simpler things that you can do that are more effective. And the other thing that you want to be aware of is as well that.

Small changes in lots of areas of the business can have a huge impact.

Let's go back to Jeremy and his water cutting business and let's just take this three ways to grow a business. And let's imagine that if we worked on any one of these three things, what would happen to Jeremy's business if we increased. If we could find a way of getting 10% more customers, if we could find a way of getting, helping get 10% more customers, it could be something as simple as putting in place a referral system. There's no rocket size to a referral system, but most businesses don't have them. They are really powerful. So you could add huge value by talking about referral systems. And if the client could get 10% more customers, then if you remember from yesterday, and it's in the workbook, Jeremy's water cutting business was 710,000 in sales. So if we can get, if we can get 10% more customers, that's 71,000 in sales. Okay, simple math, okay, that's not difficult. And if we work that through in terms of profit, that's an extra 25 grand in profit. So just helping a client with perhaps a referral system could add on 25 grand to profit. But alternatively we could instead work with the client to come up with some ideas and strategies for getting customers to spend more. And let's imagine we can get people to spend 10% more. Well, the impact on sales and profit would actually be the same. If we could get customers to spend 10% more, that would add on 71 grand to sales, 25 grand to profit. And probably no surprise here, but if Instead, we focused on the other driver, getting people to buy more frequently. Then again, same results. But here's the question. What if we could work with the client, if we could work with Jeremy, and what if we could come up with some ideas in an advisory session to get 10% more customers and get the existing and new customers to spend 10% more each time? And what if we could get them to buy more frequently? We could do all three at the same time. What would the impact be? Now, a lot of people would say, well, the impact on that would be, well, multiply 71,000 by three. 231,000 in extra. Sorry. 200 and 211,000. No, 200. And I got this right earlier. I'm an accountant. 231. I think it is 213. 213. It's 213. Oh, I can't remember. 213. It's not actually. If you do the math, it's actually 235,010. The additional in terms of profit, we might think, well, if we do all three of those things, that's 75,000 of extra profit. No, it's not. It will be 115,644. And this is because of something called synergistic impact. This is really powerful. Rather than try to do one big thing like a big campaign to get more customers, if we can do little things on.

More than one of the drivers, just do little things here, a little thing here, a little thing here. What happens is they all impact on each other. We get synergy, the sum of the parts. I always get this wrong way around. You know what I mean? The whole is more than the sum of the parts. Okay? That synergy and it's just the same here. So bear that in mind. An important thing when we're doing advisory work and playing with numbers is we want to look at doing little things in multiple areas because they compound, they build on each other that. Let's look at Jeremy's business and let's look at something else that we can do, which is really powerful. If we saw the numbers yesterday and we did some ratio analysis, we looked at some trends. There are two other really useful bits of information you can get from a client. And we put them in the workbook. So we saw yesterday, year six to 10, that Jeremy made sales in his business, and in year 10, it was 710,000. We can get that from the financial statement. But there's two other numbers that are really useful to get. They're not in the financial statements, but you want to get them. One is the number of customers. And you can get this for any business that raises sales invoices. You just look at their sales ledger. You should be able to see how many customers they do business with in a year. So as I put in the workbook yesterday, let's say we find out that Jeremy worked with, he now works with 70, has 75 active customers. He had 100 five years ago, he now has 75. 5.

Also look at how many invoice did do they raise in a year. And if they raise sales invoices, you just have to look at what's the sales invoice number for the first invoice in the year, what's the last one? And then you can see how many invoices were raised. So let's put those numbers in as well. Why is that useful? Because when you, when you get those numbers, the number of customers, the active customers in the year who have bought at least once and the number of invoices raised, or the number of sales transactions, then we can calculate two really useful pieces of information which goes back to three ways to grow a business. We can calculate what is the average spend, how much do customers spend on average. And it's a very, very simple calculation. It's just simply what's the sales divided by the invoices? And the other one is how much, how frequently do they buy? And in this case, we just take the number of invoices and we divide that by the number of customers and we see that they buy. If there's 100 customers and they buy and there's 500 invoices, then on average, the customers buy five times every single year. Okay. And yesterday we talked about, you met Jim Rayner. Jim creates tools for the Value Pricing Academy for just churning out this information. You just input the numbers and it comes up with all the reports and does that for you.

And so what we can then do, if we do those calculations every single year, we can look at the trends. We looked at trends yesterday. So now we can look at the trend in average sale value. How much do people spend on average? And we could also look at the trend on how.

Frequently do they buy. So what we're doing is we're taking that trend. Yesterday we had a very simple trend. What's the trend in turnover in sales? And that's useful, but if we can break it down, we can get some more interesting information. And if we look at these, if I was meeting with Jeremy, if he was my client, one of the things that would stand out here for me is I'd say to him, I can see from the right hand chart, Jeremy, that the number of times that your customers buy is very, very consistent across the years between 5.2 and 5, roughly five times a year. But I noticed, Jeremy, four years ago, it was significantly different. They bought six times a year, 6.1 to be precise. Jeremy, do you know why that was? What did you do four years ago that got people buying more frequently?

And very often what happens in business is people do something that works and then they go and do something else and then something else and something else and they forget what it was they did in the first place that worked really, really well. This happens all the time. And so when you're doing advisory work with a client, a great question to ask people, a really powerful question, is something like this. So tell me, Jeremy, of all the years you've been in business, what's the best thing that you've ever done that's helped you to win customers?

Great question. I think the best way that I got customers was I ran, I went and attended a trade show and had a little exhibition stand and I got loads of customers. Jeremy, when did you last do that?

It must be four years ago. So, Jeremy, why don't you do that again? What happens is we all do this. We do something in the past that works, but because we're entrepreneurs and we want to do different, try different things, we then stop doing the things that worked and do something else. So just. That's a powerful question that you have. Whenever you're working with a client, ask them, of all the years in business, what's the best thing you've ever done to win more customers? And you can adapt that question to all sorts of different things. So let me go back to Jeremy. If.

So, if we go back to this data and if we now calculate these numbers, if we look at the average spend, so Jeremy has 75 customers now in year 10. And if we look at the average spend, we can see that this year something he's done in year 10 is getting 1,820. But as we saw from that last chart, four years ago, he did something different that got a different average frequency. And so one of the things you might do, I might say to Jeremy, is, Jeremy, if we can identify what you did in year seven to get people to buy more often from you, if we could repeat that, and if, therefore we could in year 11, in this next year, if all you did was just have those 75 customers, let's not worry about winning more customers. If we just had the same 75 customers spending 1,820 with you each time on average. But we get them to spend 6.11 times a year, which you know, is possible because that happened four years ago. If we can replicate that, let me show you what the results would be. So if we take those numbers, then going back to here, the three ways to grow a business, that's 75. If we just keep the 75 customers spending 1,820, but this time we increase the frequency back to 6.11, which we got four years ago in year seven, what impact would that have on the business? Well, if you chunk the numbers and do the math, you just simply multiply the three things together because that gets back to sales. Sales would be 834,000 next year if we could just make that one change. So what impact would that have on Jeremy's business? Well, we can then just plug into the profit and loss account. And that was last year. That was year 10. 710 grands of sales made, 45 grand of profit. If we could change just one thing in the driver and get customers to spend on average 6.11 times a year rather than, I think it was 5.2, that's the results. That's almost a doubling of profit. That's almost a doubling of profit. Just changing one thing. And so this is what I would do when I was working with clients. I would be showing them what's possible and just playing with numbers and the drivers. Jim showed this yesterday. When you engage the client and you get them involved in the numbers and look at what if and stuff that gets people excited. So one of the things that I did back in 2000 when I was doing advisory work and I was creating this selling process, I built a piece of software that helped me, helped me to sell advisory work. Because it's software that then allows to demonstrate with numbers, which is our skill, it's our comfort zone. Demonstrate with numbers, demonstrate with value because we throw in some ideas into the pot as well and inspire people to want to take the next step. So I just need to. Just bear me a second. I did set this up earlier, so let me just show you a little bit more and dive deeper and let's.

Let me think.

Yeah, by the way, I think if I do the math right, if they. If Jeremy goes from 5.2 to 6.11 times, that's a 7. It's effectively a 17 and a half percent increase in average transaction Frequency. Just hold that thought in mind. 17.5%. I might come back to that. So let me just move across to here. This is a piece of software called Profit Diagnostic. And this is a piece of software that you can use for doing advisory work. But its real purpose is the sales process. This to help you sell advisory work. And so we simply put the client's numbers in here. Sorry, wrong screen. Put the data in. And these are the numbers that are in the case study from the workbook that you have. So Jeremy's business has 710,000 in annual sales. He has a 35.21 gross profit margin. He's making $33,000. I have his balance sheet in there and a few other little bits of information which are really useful, like sales conversion rate and so on. So under that information, we can do some really interesting things and look at the different drivers. Let me just. Okay, we can look at the different drivers. So as there's nine drivers, we've looked at three. There's actually one. We can break those three. One of them we can break down into two. Because one of the drivers of the nine, the one that is the most powerful is price. Price is part of the equation. If you increase your average price by 10%, that's going to increase your sales. The thing that's interesting about price and what makes price the most powerful driver and the place I would always recommend you start when you're working with clients, partly because they price way too low. But the thing about price is, mathematically, it has the biggest impact, because if you increase your average price by 10%, it doesn't impact on costs. You don't have to buy in more materials. If you get 10% more customers, then your direct cost or variable costs go up by 10% as well. But if you increase your price by 10%, your costs don't change. Mathematically, price is the most powerful driver. It's also the most powerful driver because if you want to grow your business by 10% and you had a choice between a price change or winning 10% more customers, to win 10% more customers can perhaps take a full year to achieve that. It takes time to win a customer. But change your price, you can do it like that. So I always start with price. And so what I would do is when I met with clients.

I would ask the question to uncover the pain. And I realize they want to grow their business. And let's say this is Jeremy. And I say, and Jeremy says to me, I want to grow my business, Mark. It's Been stagnating. I want to grow my business. So I might say to Jeremy something like this, okay, Jeremy, one of the things that you could do is we could look to change the price. And so tell me, Jeremy, in order to grow your business, do you think you should perhaps increase your prices or do you think you should reduce your prices through some sales, some discounts, some special promotions? Now, interestingly, every time I asked that of a business owner, they always said, I think if you want to grow the business, we're going to have to reduce our prices a bit. They always say that. Okay, let's look at something really interesting. So I would say to Jeremy, okay, so how much do you think you might reduce your prices? What sort of promotions might you do to grow your business? And Jerry might say, if I reduce my price by 10%, then that will get me more customers. Okay, Jeremy, so tell me, how many extra customers do you think you'll get if you reduce your price by 10%? And interestingly, I usually found that people would answer 10%, they'd have the same number. But let's say that Jeremy's a bit more switched on. He goes with 15%.

I don't know how well you can read the numbers at the bottom, but if Jeremy with his business reduced his prices by 10% and if he won 15% more customers, yes, he's going to increase his sale by 24,850, but he's going to wipe 44,150 off his bottom line profit. He's going to wipe out his profits with that strategy. And every time I do this with business owners, their mouth drops. Wow, I had no idea.

And if you were to actually do the math and every business is different depending on their cost structure, in Jeremy's case, if he was to reduce his prices by 10%, he would actually need to get 39.7% more customers just to break even. Remember Jim talked about break even and how important that is. Is it really likely that your business client could get 39.7 new percent more customers just like that as a result of a 10% reduction in process? Absolutely not. And so what I would then do is, let's start this again, Jeremy. The reality is, and at this point I would give some advice around pricing, I would talk about how I might talk about, for example, and show how you could perhaps use menu pricing and do some calculations. Let me.

Go back, I'm not going to do that now, but we could play with that. So save. And next.

Oops, I've gone Back a screen. So what I would.

That'S the button I wanted. Okay, so what I would do is I'd give some ideas and the client would then say okay, perhaps that's a mistake. So let's reset, let's, let's change that to if instead we looked at some strategies for increasing price, like menu pricing, I would share, I would just share an idea that the client's not thought about. And then I'd say so let's think about, let's see if we can increase the price. How much do you think you could increase your prices by? And usually clients now fully bullish and perhaps might say let's say 15%. Okay, let's imagine that you do lose some customers, Jeremy. And I mean the reality is very often people don't do it the right way. Just like, and I'm just going aside for a second. Many, many people in the value pricing academy follow my process for repricing existing clients and they increase their average prices by between 15%, in Stanley Dean's case, 47%. And very often they tell me they haven't lost a single client. And there's reason for that. When you do it the right way, when you increase prices, you can do that with, without losing clients. But let's imagine that, let's be conservative here and let's say to Jeremy, okay, you put your price up by 15%. Let's imagine you do lose some customers. How many do you think you might lose? And very often they answer with the same number. Well, if I put my price up by 15%, I will probably lose 15% to customers. Okay, well Jeremy, if you were to do that, if you were to put in place some pricing systems in place and you lost 15% of customers whilst your sales will drop by 15,975, your bottom line profit will be 50,025 higher. You will more than double your bottom line profit with just that one thing. And most people, most business owners have no idea how powerful pricing is until you show them. Now at this point Jerome is getting exciting, but wow, could I really double my profits? You could double your profits when we focus on price in that particular way. And what we'll actually do, Jeremy, is we'll try and do it in a way where you don't lose any customers. And in that case you would add 100 grand to your sales. But let's keep with 15, let's be conservative, let's not get too over eager. And anyway, Jeremy, there's another benefit with this. So tell me Jeremy, if you put your price up by 15% and lose 15% of customers, tell Jeremy, which customers will you lose? Will you lose the ones that you love who value you, or will you lose the ones that are always complaining, moaning about price and asking for discounts? And the answer is, you lose the worst customers when you do that. So it's a win, win situation. We make more money working less hard for less customers and people that actually value what you do. Okay, what we can then do. So that adds on 53 grand to bottom line profit. Okay. So even though it reduces our overall sales because we're also reducing our direct costs, that adds 53 grand on. So what we could then do is start to look at some of the other drivers. So do you remember I showed you the numbers that what if we could. And I think I've got them here. What if we could increase the number of times customers buy on average from 5.2 to 6.11, which I think is 17.5%. If we could do that. Going back to here.

That'S this one here. If I put that in there, have I got the right number?

That's going to add on 43,000. If we do, I'm just going to jump forward for a second. There's loads of stuff we could play with. What we can then do is as we look at all these different things, we get this synergistic impact taking place. And so if we could increase average frequency by seven and a half percent, if we could put the price up by 15%, and even if we lost 15% of customers, then what happens is in this business with Jarrett, for Jeremy, his top line grows by $105,000 from 710 to 815. But most important is the increase in his net profit because of his price increase, his margins higher. And with higher margins, he's now doing 43% growth profit margin, not 35%. That means his net profit goes from 33,000 to 139,000. That adds 100 grand on. And I've done this process with dozens and dozens of clients when I was doing consulting work in 2000, 2001 in my accounting firm. And every time the business owner is, wow, I had no idea. Could I really get those sorts of numbers? Absolutely. And so when we demonstrate with numbers and show what's possible in their business and work with the customer, perhaps share a few ideas as to what they might be able to do, we're getting them excited, we're inspiring them, we're inspiring them to want to take the next step. And so when they say, wow, can you help me get that? That means they want to buy. So now what we do is we say, absolutely, we can. Let me tell you how we help clients. And then you talk about your biz advisory service. You would talk them through your different options, the packages we talked about, and then we allow them to buy. Which one do you think is right for you?

So what we're going to look at next is because I'm conscious of time, we've got a huge amount still to cover. Let me talk a little bit about the pricing piece then, because now we've inspired them, we've also then walked through what we do, our different packages. Now they're going to ask, they want, they're going to say, yeah, I want that one, I want to buy. The middle option. Eventually going to ask the price question. Once we're ready, once we've finished building up the value, now we're ready to reveal the price. So how do we, how do we value price? How do we value price advisory services? Let's talk about that for a few minutes and then we'll talk about exactly how you, how you do it. So.

Pricing, the first point is we have to price based on value. We have to price based on value. It's not to do with costs and hourly rates. If you price based on your hourly rates, you are throwing away huge amounts of money.

In the case of Jeremy, if we crunch those numbers, if we think there's a possibility to add 100 grand to his bottom line profit each and every year going forward, that's a huge amount of value. And so we can charge a price to reflect that value. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. If all you do as part of advisory is print off a report that comes from one of these amazing software tools that are sponsoring today. You could spend five seconds hitting the print button, get a report, meet with the client for 60 minutes and every single month, an hour meeting a month and perhaps an hour of prep, two hours a month. You do not price based on the two hours a month because that is throwing away money. If you're charging.

$100 an hour and therefore that's $200, that's way too deep for the impact that you can have if helping the client get those sorts of results. So the first point is we must price based on value. We must price based on value. And an element of value is what do you think the results are that you can get? This is why in the sales process you want to have a system where you play with some numbers because not only do numbers inspire people, they get excited when they see what's possible in their business. You can then use those numbers as part of your pricing. I'll show you how you do that in a short while.

Next piece about value pricing and advisory services, which we talked on yesterday. You must give them choices, you must give them different options. You must have at least a bronze, silver, gold version, at least three options. And think of the juror technique. I'm going to show you again in a little while and bring this alive with a practical application. We must, I mentioned this yesterday. In communicating a value, we must create anchors. We must create an anchor because people have no idea what the price of advisory should be. Your clients that you're talking to probably have never bought it before. They don't know what the price of advisory is. They only know the price of the things that you've done before a tax return. And this is something completely different.

So we have to create anchor in their mind. And I'm going to share two anchors with you. The first one you've now seen. One of the reasons why we play with numbers is because when going back to here, when we show numbers like this, then Jeremy's going to be thinking about, wow, I was making $33,000 before, I'm struggling and I could possibly do 139 now. That 139, that's in his mind, he can't help thinking about that because everybody wants to make more profit, everyone wants to make more money. When you do some calculations in front of them and you show them what's possible.

Then Jeremy's got 139 grand in his mind. And so when you reveal your price later, he's going to judge that price partly against 139, not against the $500 you charged him last year for a tax return, you've now got a new anchor in his mind.

So next idea with value pricing, let's just take things, let's just take these up a notch. So when we're value pricing, I often talk about, and if you're in my breakout session yesterday, I talked a lot about this menu pricing, give three choices. I describe that as being the first step towards value pricing because.

When you give people a choice of packages, they pick the package based on their own perception of what is value to them. So if you've got, let's say in your premium package, if you've got full three way forecasting, which you review rolling forecasts, Every month and someone says, I want to, I want to be able to. I love the idea of rolling forecasts and three way forecasts and all the things that Kathy's going to talk about in a little while. If they see value in that, they will choose to buy the premium option. By giving people choices, they will choose based on their perception of value. We're starting to get into value pricing when we give people choices, but what we can do is we can go beyond that. When we get really sophisticated, we can give them more choices. So we might have a bronze, silver, gold, and that's great. The only problem with menu pricing is we're still only giving them, we're giving them three choices, which is better than one. It's much better than one. There's a lot of reasons for that. I said yesterday, the minute you go from one to three, the conversation subtly changes. When you give them one option, the conversation is, will I buy or won't I buy? When you give them three options, the conversation is, now which one shall I buy? And for you, that's an easier conversation. Which one will they buy rather than will they buy? Yes or no?

Giving people three choices is really powerful, but it's only three price points. We can do something even cleverer still. We can give people further choices to customize things to exactly what they want. Like for example, do they want to meet with you every single month to talk about their results? Or is quarterly sufficient or is twice a year sufficient? If we give people choices, they can then customize the package to exactly what they want. And I'm going to show you exactly how you do that very, very soon. That's what's coming up, coming up next.

Before we do that, before we look at exactly how you come up with the pricing, I'll show you that. What I want to do very quickly is just tell you a little bit about more about the Value Pricing Academy. Yesterday I mentioned what we do with the Value Pricing Academy with the profit advisory, with the advisory work with. We didn't really talk about the Value Pricing academy. So let me just show you very briefly, tell you a little bit more about what we do to help people build extraordinary accounting firms.

So the primary objective is, the thing we focus on a lot is getting your price right. Why? Because I just said price is the fastest way to change your profits. If you've seen Stanley, if you watched Stanley Dean yesterday, if you watched Theresa this morning, if you were there earlier today, then they've done extraordinary things with their pricing and got very fast results So a lot of the focus is around getting your pricing right because that can really make a big difference. And so we do that through live training. Foundation Wednesday. We have other trainers who will do the teaching, like Nadim, you'll meet soon, Neil tomorrow. Teresa Foundation Wednesday. Every month you get live training for 90 minutes. How to Thursday is where we then go really deep and give you all the systems, the brochures, the full pricing system each month for a particular service, whether it's forecasting, whether it's how to price payroll, how to price, how to price annual financial statements, whatever it might well be. That's how to Thursday. And then after your first 12 months, you then automatically, for no additional fee, get advanced Tuesday, where I have 22 more advanced pricing topics that we then build on so you can get even better results with pricing. And then we have our core training, we have brand new, we introduced last December a five week course that unlocks as soon as you join. It's called Quick Wins and repricing your existing clients. I share the five strategies for getting a fast result, getting cash quick through pricing quickly. And we focus on how do you reprice your existing clients. How does Stanley Dean get 47%? What was the systems that use? And I share the exact systems that I used in my accounting firm when I did this. I increased my average price by 20% two years in a row. Stanley Dean did even better with 47% in his first year. And all the systems that I use and other people use, you get as part of that five week training. We make that available now because we want to get you results fast. I want you to be getting higher prices straight away. Straight away, within a month or two you could be getting these results. And then if you do bookkeeping work, one of the things you get is we go really deep on how to price bookkeeping and cleanup work as well because very often people tell me that's the thing they struggle with the most. So that's the first key component of the Value Pricing Academy. My goal is to help you get much, much higher prices so you no longer end up looking crazy. Long hours at to struggle and struggle making ends meet. And as an extra bonus, you also get the effective pricing software, which we'll talk about later, which you can subscribe to separately. But if you subscribe separately, the Pro plan is $2,940 a year. You get that at the moment. People in the academy get that as a bonus. We'll talk more about that later. So pricing is the number one thing we focus on secondly, we focus a lot on just getting the foundations right, the strategy and the systems. So once a month, once a year, December, we have bonus sessions where I teach the big picture stuff. We run a process which I'll talk more about tomorrow, called Vision Plan. Every December, I help you to plan the next year. I take you through a process. I'll tell you more about that tomorrow because it applies to delivering to your clients as well. Teresa does amazing sessions every month on the core systems you want to have in your practice. Every month she picks a system. You get the systems, the resources, so you can systemize your firm, which means you can delegate more stuff with confidence so you can focus on the more important things, the strategy, the pricing, and so on. And you also get the how to build Extraordinary Accounting Firm.

Which talks about strategy. The third area is if you want to win more clients and grow your accounting firm, then we do a lot of stuff around that. We have our marketing Monday, that's 90 minutes of live training with me once a month. And we'll look at all sorts of topics like social media strategy, referral systems. That's a great one. Because those referral systems, when you learn those and implement them yourself in your own firm, any of those you can apply to your clients as well. So I said to you earlier, what if you could help Jeremy increase his number of customers by 10%, where you could put in place referral systems. And so first you have to have some referral systems in your business that gets results and then you can share those with your clients and add value. And then we also have in the core training, how to build an extraordinary accounting firm. You get a complete, we teach you a complete marketing system, a lead generation system and appointment generation system. And as a bonus as well, we introduced last year the online Live Academy where we teach and I go live every month teaching you how to use online meetings. Because we're in an online world now. How do we use our online meetings to grow our. Grow our firms? I might mention that more tomorrow in my bonus in my breakout session, if that's something you want to find out more about. How to be more confident on camera, how to use that to win new clients. And then of course, the other focus on profit advisory, helping you to profit advisory, business advisory, helping clients build a more profitable business. And we do that through the profit Profit.

Advisory Academy resources. We have once a month Profit advisory live. That's 90 minutes with me where I teach you and go deeper on these concepts. Every month, something new, we go deep and you Also get the structured six months of training with dozens of resources, videos and so on. I'm not going to go through them now because there are some so much I could talk about. We touched on it yesterday and coming soon, coming very, very soon. This is probably a secret I shouldn't share with you, but every year we create new stuff and every year we create new stuff, Academy members get it for no additional charge. So I said to you, when you join today, you lock in the price, but you'll always get more stuff. So one of the things that we're launching later on this year is ready to deliver business advisory training. In other words, we will give you the marketing material, the slides, recordings, audios of advisory topics so that you could, with confidence run a seminar, a webinar to win more business. You could run a monthly business club. There are so many ways that you could use that content, deliver it yourself to win more clients. And I might touch a bit more on that as part of my breakout session tomorrow. And last but not least, with advisory, you as well as all the various tools that Jim Raider creates, and we've touched on a few of those, you also get that profit diagnostic software. That profit diagnostic software is exclusive to Value Pricing Academy members. We do not sell that because I think it's too powerful. I don't want everybody having access to it. It's an incredible sales tool for getting people inspired and wanting advisory work. I think somebody yesterday, I think Jessica, I think you said, yeah, Jessica, you said yesterday something about the profit diagnostic software. I forget the comment, but thank you for that comment that you said. So what's your investment in all that stuff? There's a lot of stuff in the Value Pricing Academy because my ultimate goal is I want to help you get results. I want to help you get results. And.

That could be resolved by focusing on advisory work. And on Tuesday of next week, and we will invite you, Renny Evans is doing a session where he's going to talk about how he's used the processes that I've shared with him to win a 31, nearly 32 grand annual fee from a client. That's next Tuesday. I think we will get you an invite to that.

So if you just reprice your existing clients, that will probably, just following that process will probably pay for a year or more of Academy membership.

If you.

Get higher prices with the effective pricing software, that will probably just one or two pricing processes will probably pay for your Academy membership. With one brand new client for Marketing Mondays that will probably pay for your Academy membership. For a year. The first business advisory client will probably pay for it for a year and your investment is just $395 a month. Or if you're in a different currency in the UK it's 297. Go to the page that Sarah, if you could put the link in the, put the link in the chat box and you can go there, you can read all the details and when you click through, it'll tell you what the price is in your currency. The most important things to be aware of and remember is that firstly, you lock the price in. The price will never, ever change. So the very best time to join the Academy is now. If you wait a year, it'll be a higher price. Secondly, so you lock the price in. Secondly, we close enrollments on Monday anyway, so you can't join after Monday until we next open up. We do it twice a year. And thirdly, you're in control. You can stop whenever you want. You're not locked in forever. You can give it a try. And fourthly, and this is most important, when you join this week, when you join this week, if anytime in the first 30 days you decide it's not for you, that's fine, just email Sarah, let her know that it's not for you and you can ask for a refund of that first month as long as you do it before the second payment goes through. Inside 30 days. Do it inside 30 days. So why would you not give it a try? Why not give it a try and then come to some of the live sessions over the next few weeks and let us show you some of the ways that we can really make a difference to your accounting firm. And these are the sessions we are running in June, by the way. So, for example, we have a kickoff session on Monday to welcome new members, tell you where your resources are and so on. Then we've got the appointment generation system with a marketing system, a complete system for systemizing your appointments. We will. I'll tell you more about the Wednesday session later. How to price forecasting. So you're going to learn in Kathy's session today about forecasting. And if you want to make more money from forecasting work, I will be teaching in the Academy how to price forecasting. And you'll get ready to use brochures, you'll get pricing systems and everything. On Tuesday, the amazing Teresa is going to be teaching about repricing existing clients and how she did that. Cindy Tan is going to be teaching the value equation in Foundation Wednesday, which is really important to Help you to understand how to add value to your clients. I'm going to be teaching about essential software for software and tools and equipment for delivering great presentations and online meetings. And then once a month Teresa hosts a roundtable session where people can get together and share with each other. And if you do, if you join while we're still running the masterclass, remember we've got some bonuses for you. You will get my complete guide to menu pricing if you're an action taker and take action today, we'll also be sending you a 54 minute video training to show you how to use the profit diagnostic software and how to use it and that whole idea of a profit diagnostic review the sales process. I'll be sending you a 54 minute video that goes deeper into the sales process and how to use the software so you can start talking to clients straight away and getting results. And I'll also share with you as well a Excerpt from my 101 the profitable growth formula which is 101 ways to increase your class profit profits. I'll share with you straight away rather than having to wait. I'll share with you 24 days. So these are really powerful because when you are I talked about make your sales process valuable. So as you go through the profit diagnostic software or as you go through numbers with the client, share a couple of ideas of how they could change that result. If they say, well, how do I get more customers? You might talk about referrals systems. That's one of 101 ways to grow a business. I give you 101 of them. You only need two or three to add some real value to clients. And of course you will get to keep all of the recordings from this three days. When you join the academy. Other people get the recordings till the end of the month. Okay, where are we next? We have, I have eight minutes left before I bring my guest speaker. So what I want to do next is next is I'm going to talk about, well, how do we come up with the price and what I'm going to do at this point, just bear with me a second. I'm going to flick across and show you how I would price advisory services using effective pricing. I'm just going to just bear me a second. I'm just going to log myself out and log back in just to make sure that everything's working okay. So let me switch to here and show you.

The way that you want to price. You want to have the pricing conversation face to face with the client so you've gone through numbers, you've inspired them, they want to buy. You've gone through your three different options, your packages. They told you which one they want, they want the middle one, most want the middle one they want to buy. So the last thing we do is we price. And so I have a model here somewhere which I should have. Here we go.

So what the software does is allows you to price anything that you want in front of the client. I've got loads of models here. You could price cleanup work, bookkeeping work. You could price annual financial statements, forecasting work, and so on. We've built into the pro plan the version you get as a value plan, the VPA member. We've built models in there you can start using straight away or you can edit them. So we've created a business advisory model. So if I'm talking to Jeremy, I don't think I've got Jeremy set up here. Yes, Jeremy's water cutting business. Okay, Jeremy, so you want to buy the middle option. Let me just, I just have some questions I have to ask first. Jeremy and I noticed that, I noticed that we said that you could probably add 100. I forget the number now. Was it 100? $3,000 to profit. So, okay, let's. A few more questions. What accounting system do you use, Jeremy? So one of the things we have to do is after our scope questions because if somebody's using, if you're going to produce monthly reports and they're using an Excel spreadsheet, that could be a nightmare. You want to charge more because there will be more work to do. But if they're using qbo, for example, and you're a QBO pro advisor, then you know that you can produce customized reports in QBO or you can import the data into things like LivePlan for example, to create your results reports. So the software that they're currently using might impact on how much work you've got to do and therefore the price. Let's imagine that they're using qbo. So we want to ask scope questions. We want to ask about the quality of the bookkeeping. Let's imagine that they're perfect qualified. You pass, you do the bookkeeping for them, so you know it's perfect. And therefore the information that means you can. If they're bookkeeping is terrible. Every time you produce those monthly reports, you might have to go and you might see that the information is wrong and therefore you're going to have to go back and get to correct it or whatever else you might want to ask. What business they're in, what sector they're in. Well, he's in engineering. It's Jeremy. I'm going to leave the next question for now. All these questions, you could change. But then what we want to do is, remember I said to you, we want to give people three choices, but if we give them other options on top, we can really build a find a price point that's just right. So we might ask them, how frequently do you want the reports? Do you want them monthly, bi monthly, quarterly, bi annually, Annually, weekly. Let's imagine the client says, do you know what? Weekly sounds pretty good. Can I have weekly, please? Yes, of course you can have weekly reports.

We'll come back to that in a short while. You might then want to say, well, how many times do you want to meet? Most people meet 12 times a year, once a month. But we can meet in a different frequency. You want, what would you prefer? Jeremy? Yeah, monthly, Fine. Where would you want to meet, Jeremy? Most clients meet at our office in our boardroom. But if you want, we'll travel to you and come to your offices. Oh, if you can come to us, that's brilliant. What's happening when you ask these questions? It's the client's way of saying, I value you coming to my premises. Okay, Jeremy. Well, if you value me coming to your premises, I'm going to charge a premium price because we value pricing. If you value weekly reports, it's going to be a higher price.

So then he can offer all sorts of things. Do you want to. If he's doing his own bank own bookkeeping, you might offer to. Do you want to review your bank reconciliations? We could offer to do industry specific reports. We could offer. I love this one at the bottom, if you can read it. Do you want a video commentary to accompany your reports every month? Well, have the meeting, but we'll also do a video for you. Great way to add value. Great way to add value. So we give people choices. Behind the scenes, the software is calculating some prices. Another one, that's a great one. Jeremy. When you have those monthly meetings, who would you like those monthly meetings to be with? Me, the senior partner or my assistant George? They always say they want to meet you, that's fine, but that's their way of saying they value you. If they value you, the price should be higher. So let's say they choose the senior partner, you. So what we then do is once we asked our questions, now we can remind them what's in the three packages. Jeremy wants the middle one. So now we show the price and you can see the price is 1965. Actually, you can see on the left hand side the premium is 4,000. That's much more expensive. That's kind of in Renny Evans territory of the client he got. We always want to show an expensive price. Why? Because that creates another anchor. And here's the interesting thing. So you might be thinking right now, I could never sell monthly advisory work for 1,965 every single month. Okay, don't worry what we're doing. The first price you show is to create an anchor. So when you say To Jeremy, it's 1965, only one of two things can happen. Jeremy either says, okay, that's cool, let's go with that. You're happy, he's happy. But probably more likely, Jeremy says, Really? 1,965 every month? That's not sure I can afford that. So what we do is having gone high, we now know where their maximum willingness to pay is above that number, we just have to work our way down until they say yes. So we might say, Jeremy, the reason why it's 1965 is because you said to me a couple of minutes ago that you'd like weekly reports.

I don't think you need weekly. And if we meeting once a month, you might find monthly sufficient. Should we just go with monthly? It's a low price. Yes, let's look at monthly. And Jeremy, we can come to your offices, but because of the size of your business, we could probably just do a zoom call and an online meeting. By the way, I don't change one of these things at a time, but I'm conscious of time right now. And so what we do is, having changed a couple of things, we then show them the new price. I've changed two things. It's gone from 1,900 to 600amonth. I would have changed those both separately, so it had gone from 19 to perhaps 1200. But I'm conscious of time. In other words, when we price in front of the client, we start high and then we work our way down until they say yes. And the key thing is the first number they say, see, 1,905amonth becomes an anchor in their mind. They want to buy, but that's too expensive. So every price you reveal after1905 feels cheap, feels a better price. And so you will get a higher price at the end of the day than if you start off by saying it's going to cost you $400 a month. If you have a single price, just say $400 a month. And they say yes, you probably left a ton of money on the table because they would have paid more. We have to use psychology, anchors and so on.