BAM Day 3 - How to Deliver a Powerful Solution with Mark Wickersham

What have we done so far? Let's have a quick recap of days one and two and what we're doing today. So day one, we really focused on three of the challenges. Remember, I asked people in my Facebook group, what are the big challenges you have when it comes to business advisory? And the first challenge was, well, what is business advisory? What does it mean? And so we spend a lot of the time on day one talking about what is advisory? And how to spot opportunities, how to look at numbers in a different light. Their second challenge was how how do we package things up into a service that we can sell? What is advisory? How do we sell it? We looked at communicating value, and both those we went into practically on day two when we looked at how do you sell and how do you price advisory work? That was a theme of yesterday. You also had the session with Cathy, who talked about where forecasting fits within that. Today we have two themes, two challenges. The first challenge is, okay, I now know how to sell this. I know how to price it, but. But if a client now wants it, what do I do? So we're going to focus on delivery. And then the second side, the second aspect is people want to know how do I find clients? How do I find the right people for advisory work? That's all about marketing. So today is about delivery. It's about marketing. Let me very quickly remind you though, one thing I said yesterday because I saw a comment earlier about somebody says they love the effective pricing software. And so just one thing that you may have missed. Remember that the effective pricing software, you get that as the pro plan, as part of the value pricing academy, if, like Stephen, you'd actually inadvertently already subscribed to the software separately, just let Sarah know and she will sort it out so that you're not paying twice. If you've joined the Value Pricing Academy and you're already subscribed into the software, she will fix that for you. Okay? And also remember as well that when you join the Value Pricing Academy this week, as an extra bonus, one of the things we'll do for you, what Emily will do is she will, if you want, she will create your. She will design your first proposal. And there are a whole bunch of different proposal templates. So you can choose where you want, landscape, portrait, whatever, and then she will do that for you, which means that you can produce really beautiful proposals within seconds after every quote, you agree with a client.

Okay?

So let's talk about delivery, delivering advisory services. And the first thing I want to talk about is something that I started to do back in the early 2000s when I started my accounting firm in 1996. I made so many mistakes and I thought it was all about just getting as many clients as possible and doing the work. There wasn't really a huge amount of planning. And then I started. When I met Steve Pipe in November 1998, I went on his three day masterclass. I then met Paul Dunn in June 99 on the four day counsels boot camp. And they talked about doing advisory work, helping clients build more profitable businesses. They recommended books to read and I became obsessed with then reading business books. I also in 99 was every car journey. I was listening to tape sets from Nightingale Conant. Some people who are younger than me will have no idea what a tape is. Gabby will have no idea what a cassette tape is. But those of you that are old like me, you may remember the cassette tapes that you would play in the car a few years later. It was CDs that you would put in. So I was always listening to audio programs. I guess that was in the days before podcasts. And I was obsessed with business success and what, what makes a successful business. I was, I absorbed books like Good to Great by Jim Bullitt, Jim Collins, Good to Great and Built to Sell and learning about the secrets of success and the millionaire mindset and so on. And so I started realizing there's certain things that all the successful businesses, all the successful people do. And I started to try and model those things. And fortunately things started to work for us. So today I run a business, as you know, the Value Pricing Academy. We have a business that we started this in 2014, so I think we are next month will be the eighth exact eight years on since we started this business. Eight years. And in eight years we've gone from zero to somewhere about $1.2 million a year. And we do that with no offices, a team of two daughters, and that's it.

And it's a business I love, I love teaching people. It's a business that gives me a lifestyle that I kind of could only have dreamed of 20 years ago. We live in Portugal. We go to the cafe every day and sit in the sun. I was there with Tasha just a couple of hours ago, sitting in the cafe. We go out to restaurants. Most nights we're by the sea in. It's awesome here. But it wasn't an overnight success. It took time. I've been in business now since 1996. My first business I made a mess of to start with until I started to turn things around, I sold it to fund managers. My second business was when I went into business with Steve Pike. I ran avn, a network of accountants in the uk. That was an extraordinary business. And I was so privileged to work with Steve. He is an amazing guy. Some of you know, Steve pike, he is extraordinary. But unfortunately, he then retired, as he always said he would. And I decided I wanted to move on and do something different. And so this is my third main business. And this one I built.

Learning and hopefully doing things different based on all the mistakes I'd made in my accounting firm. I made mistakes in avn. I've learned things. And one of the things that I think is the most important when I think about what's the reason why I now have a successful business and one that gives me the life that I've always wanted, what is the key to that? You ask me, what's the one thing? And the one thing is that I meticulously plan every single year. I started doing it back in about 2004, 2003, and I've refined the process and I have a planning process that we do every single December. It doesn't guarantee overnight success, but it means we're moving towards something. This is a process I call from vision to plan. It's something that we teach in the Value Pricing Academy. It's something that I do, a session every December with members, getting members to go through process. Because if you go through the process, you will get results and it's a process that will work for your clients. It's a starting point for advisory. So let me just walk you through through what that process is. So.

And just like who said it earlier? Was it Melanie or someone? You have to do this yourself first. Which is why every December, I, I run this process live. We do 90 minutes on this and I get people to do the Exercise live over 90 minutes every December to plan the next year. Because if you're not doing this yourself, how can you do advisory work with your clients? You have to walk the talk. You have to practice what you preach. You have to do this. And I'd love to know in the chat box of people in the vp, are you actually doing this? Have you been, Are you revisiting your plan? Did you do the process last December? Not everyone does, but we have got some action takers who work through the process. When you do it, you'll find that it's really powerful and it's the starting point for advisory. I said to you on day one, I looked at the six components of advisory and number one is it's got to start with goal setting. You can't help a client build a more successful business unless you know what success means to them, where are they trying to go? And once we then understand that, we can start working on strategic planning. So let me walk you through the process. So the first thing is that you have to have a vision. Every this process works backwards. So what you have to do is have a clear vision of what are you trying to achieve. What, what is your business? What's your firm going to look like when it's finally done? You have to do that. Michael Gerber says one of the most powerful things you can do in business is to get an architect to draw a picture, a picture of what your business will look like at the end, when you finished it, when it's done. You have to have that clear vision. And you need to work with your clients to help them have a clear vision. Most business owners, most small businesses, have no idea what a vision is and don't do it. We have to do it. It's critically important and you'll see why. Because it's your vision that drives your goals. So we start with what's the end goal? What are we trying to achieve? What sort of business do we want to build? And then once we've done that, then we work backwards from there. So if we're trying to achieve this thing, where do we have to be? What's our long term goal? Where do we have to be 10 years from now if we want to get to that end goal?

What's the turnover going to be in 10 years? Where will the business be based? What sort of customers? How many people we employ 10 years from now? That's the long term goal. Once we've written that down, documented that, established that, then what we do is then say, okay, so what are our medium term goals? And medium term is usually between three and five years. And so we then document where do we. And you choose whether it's three, four or five. I usually go for three years, so I'll stick with three. So three years from now, where do I want to be? What do I need Turnover to be 3 years? How many customers do I need in 3 years time? What's that business going to look like? Where's it going to be based? Will it still be an office based, will it be online? How many people we employ? What do I want to look like three years from now? And that goal should be a goal that, that, you know, that if you hit that in three years time, you are on track to hit the 10 year goal. So we're working backwards and then we work on a short term goal. And I think the best timeframe for that is 12 months. It doesn't have to be, but 12 months is a great way. I think it's what I do. Because the problem with 3 year goals, 10 year goals, visions, and I always struggled with this in my head. I struggle with this because I could never kind of really conceptualize and think about the future. It seems too far away. It always seemed too far away. But I realized you have to know that the destination and then you work back and the 12 month goal, the short term goal, we can usually think about 12 months much more practically because we tend to, if I was to look at your, your 2022 calendar right now, you've probably got it mapped out because you, we tend to book our vacation six, nine months in advance. We might have some weddings in there, some, we will have some work stuff planned in there. I bet you've got a lot of 2022, your diary's got stuff in there right through to December, or at least you've got a rough idea of what you might be doing in November. But if I look to your 2023 calendar and 2024, it's probably empty. Mine's empty. I have a very clear. I find it easy to plan 12 months beyond that gets difficult. But we still need to know the end goal and we work back. And you want to plan your 12 month goals to be goals that when you get there a year from now, if you achieve them, it's telling you you're on track for the three year goal and then the ten year goal. So we start with a vision, we work backwards. And you do this with your clients, you get them to articulate.

So let me give you an example. That's nothing to do with business. Let's imagine that. Let me take you back to when you were 16 and when you were 16, you might have had a big picture vision that one day you want to be the President of the United States. That's possible. I have no idea. And that could be your vision. If you're in the uk, perhaps you want to be the Prime Minister, I don't know. But perhaps your vision is one day to be the President of the United States. You do not need to know exactly the process for getting. You're 16 years old, you might have a rough idea that perhaps 10 years from now, if you're going to be President of the United States, ten Years from now you probably need to have a job that's in some sort of government office somewhere. I don't know what you call people in America, but in the UK you would perhaps want to be an MP ten years from now, three years from now you probably need to have got a university qualification so that you can then get that sort of job. So your three year goal might be to get a university degree. You're 16 years old, that even seems too far away. But where do we have to be a year from now? Well, a year from now the first major goal is we perhaps need to get into a good university. And that's the goal. And so if you think about your 16 year old self, that's something we can work towards. We want to get to university, who knows what will happen in two, three, four years time. We just know that's the first step on the journey. And if we achieve that, if we get and achieve our short term goals, if we get to university, get into that university, then we sit down a year from now and repeat the process. And by then a year later we'll feel much more, it's more tangible, it's more real. We can start planning the next 12 months and then the next 12 months knowing that we're working towards something.

So it's your vision that drives your goals. You have to start with vision, your goals, then drive your strategy. So once you know where you want to be in 12 months or once your client, you're talking to your clients now we start to think about, okay, strategy, remember is how we get from where we are today, the problems, the challenges to where we want to get to, what do we have to do to get to.

Our goals, what's the strategy that we're going to do, get to that first 12 months. Perhaps we need to hire a key person. Perhaps another strategy is to put in place a marketing campaign. Perhaps a strategy might be to redesign the website. Perhaps a strategy might be to launch a brand new product. So we think about what do we have to do to get to where we want to be a year from now. If we think about.

Your 16 year old self, it might be okay, so I want to get to university, that means I'm going to have to do things like research, what's the best universities research, which one I want to go to. I need to get my grades, I need in the uk, I need to get my A level. So I need to complete that assignment which goes a long way towards my grades. I need to pass my exams. What are the Things I have to do over the next 12 months, what are the strategies, the things I have to do? So your goals drive what you need to do, things you need to do to get there. Your strategy then it's your strategy that drives your milestones. So what we then do is we then say, right, this is what we need to do over the next 12 months. Let's now break that down to milestones so we know that we are on track. Think of the milestones as your KPIs, your key predictive indicators, the key numbers, the key ratios. What are the things you need to measure along the way so that you know you're on track to hitting your 12 month goals?

If, for example, you're running a marathon, you know the goal is to finish the marathon, but you might want to do it. Let's say you want to do a marathon in less than four hours. Well, you'll have milestones along the way, you'll have the mile markers and you'll probably say, I want to do it in less than four hours. So to do that I need to be doing this sort of pace in the first mile, I need to be doing this pace. And then, you know, when you hit mile marker one, you can tell from your pace, are you going too fast, are you going to burn out, are you going to blow up or are you going too slow? Do you have to pick the pace up? So we start to then create the measures along the way, the milestones. What are we going to measure to tell us that we're on track? It's the strategy that drives the milestones. It's the milestones that then drive the plan. And the way that I've learned, the way that I do this part of the process, which works for me and I think works for many people, is whilst we can create, we can think of a goal 12 months out and we can, we know the strategies that we have to do, but sometimes that seems a lot like a lot of stuff. And if there's a lot of things we have to do over the next 12 months, we need to hire a key team member, we have to launch a new product, we have to create this marketing campaign, revisit our pricing, launch a brand new website that's overwhelming and we get overwhelmed. When we feel overwhelmed, we don't know what to do. So we do nothing. So what we do with our plan is we break it down to quarters because three months, if we bring our 12 months back to a three month time frame, three months is long enough to do a Big project, but short enough that it's actually not that far away. So there's a sense of urgency to do it. So what we do is we break down into four quarterly.

Sections.

Along the way. And what we do is with each of our strategies, we then allocate the strategies to each of those quarterly targets. And the advice I always give to people is don't try and do anything more than three big projects in a quarter. That's too much to focus on. So it may be that in this quarter we're just going to focus on revisiting the pricing because that's the most important of the strategies. Let's get the pricing right this quarter and let's get the key person hired and we can forget about the marketing campaign, redoing the website and all those other things because we'll schedule those in for quarter two, three or four. Let's just now keep our entire focus around those two or three key projects for this first quarter. If we think about going back to your 16 year old self who wants to become president, that's their vision, to become President of the United States. Our 12 month goal is we need to get into a good university, Harvard or whatever it might well be okay. So over the next three months, what are the things I need to worry about now? And there might be two main projects. Project number one is I need to complete this assignment which is 25% of my final grades. So a project I have to do, I have to submit that. Let's work on what are the things I have to do to get that assignment to in and to pass and get a long way towards my grades. The second thing is I need to identify what are the universities that are right for me. So in the first quarter it may be that I do some research about different universities. I do a short list, I contact them for prospectuses, I find out when their open days are. I block in the calendar, when am I going to do, when am I going to go to open days and, and I create a little scorecard so I can assess them all based on my particular needs so that at the end of it I can rate them all and decide which are my top two. That's all I need to worry about because next next quarter then I'll worry about applying to those universities or whatever it might well be. Next quarter I'll worry about my, I'll start to worry about exam preparation. Let me get the project of the assignment out the way first.

And then once we've done that, once we've broken Everything down into those four quarters. The plan is what determines what you do. So a lot of people feel overwhelmed. And I'm actually doing a live session. I think two weeks time, Sarah might put the date in the calendar. I'm doing a session, a live stream to my YouTube channel. I think I've got it right. Sarah. I think it's how to avoid overwhelm. And you might want to come along if you feel overwhelmed. You might find that useful. And overwhelm really comes from a lack of clarity because we have all of these things in our mind that we feel we have to do.

The most important thing for you to do on your weekly planner is to do something that's going to move you towards where you're trying to get to. So if you're a 16 year old, want to be president of the United States, don't worry about the steps you have to do. In two, three, four, five years time, you'll get to those. What do I have to do this week.

Towards hitting those projects for the first quarter? And that's the process of vision to plan.

It's conceptually simple, but it is so, so powerful. I do this every single December. And those of you in the value pricing academy will know this. I teach my process, I share it with you. I have, I use a trello board we have and I go into the detail and this drives my weekly planner. This is how we get so much stuff done. This is how I built a business that gives me the lifestyle that I want because I've been planning it every single year. This is so important. This is where you can add huge value to your clients by doing this process. So.

That'S really the starting point of every business advisory engagement. You have to do some goal setting and that's a process that you can do with your clients at the outset. That can be the first month of working with the client advisory. And then when it comes to. So the second thing I want to talk about is, number one is that's a process that you can use at the start of working with a client. But I said to you back on day one that business advisory, one of the great things about advisory, it's a recurring service. It's something they pay you every single month for as long as they get value, which could be three, four, five years. It's a recurring service and we make it recurring. Firstly because when we work with the client in month one, week one on the vision to plan process, that's not the end of vision to plan. We do it again. With the client 12 months later. We do it every year. Every year we do it. And in year two, we actually start off by looking at, okay, so what we said, your 12 month goals a year ago was this. Did you achieve them? Have you achieved those? If you have, great, let's celebrate. And if you didn't, what went wrong? And it may be that priorities change and that's fine. Sometimes priorities do change, but we have to have a plan. And the second thing is the work you then do every single month with the client. Yes, you will do things like producing reports with. We talked about ratio analysis, trend analysis, and there's amazing software tools that are sponsoring today that can help you create those reports. Yes, we create reports. Yes, we meet with the client once a month or once a quarter to interpret the numbers to see if they're on track. It may be we're doing monthly forecasting as well. So we have to amend the forecast, rolling forecasts. But one of the things that we do every month is what we talk about that month we based upon their plan. So if their plan was that in quarter one, they need to hire a key person and revisit their pricing, then one of the key things you talk about in each of month one's meeting, month two and month three is how's it going with the pricing? Let's share. So let's throw around some ideas of what you can do. Do you need me to use any help on how to find a key person? And we just help them where we can. We have that accountability. We, I think the primary way that we add value is keeping people on track. The accountability piece, keeping people on track. And it's the vision to plan, that's the start of everything. We use that then that, that vision to plan process becomes the agenda for the entire 12 months. That's the structure for the 12 months of working with the client. And at the end of 12 months, you just repeat the process. That's how you deliver advisory work. Now in the academy, when we do the monthly profit advisory live, that's the monthly sessions, I do 90 minutes where I teach you business advisory as well as the six month recording program, the pre recorded training, we go live every month and one of the things that we do every few months in the live sessions is I will share with you.

Workbooks that you can use with your client if there's particular things that they want to work on. So if the client identifies in that plan a vision to plan, the thing for this quarter is they've got to get their Pricing, Right. It may well be. You identify, for example, that one of the things they need to work on is they need to work on.

Better price discrimination, charging different customers different prices. And one of the things that we do in the academy is I did, and I did it just a few months ago. I did a whole training program on how you would help a client with price discrimination. There's a workbook full of ideas. So if you had a two hour meeting with the client on that one thing, there's a workbook you can go through, you can do exercise, you can ask them questions and you can build up a plan just on that one thing.

What you will find with advisory is that, and this I think is my last point on the delivery piece. One of the things about advisory work is that the monthly work will be largely producing the numbers, seeing if they're on track, the reports meeting with the clients, holding accountability and keep going back to what is their plan. The other great thing is that advisory work will sometimes lead to other projects. And you have to be careful at the pricing stage when you plan the scope of the work, make it very clear in your proposals what, what's included in advisory, what are you doing, but what's outside the scope. But it might be, for example, that during the course of a year, perhaps a year down the line, the client decides that one of the things they absolutely have to do is they have to revamp their website, but they have no idea about what to put on their website. They're not very good with writing words and stuff. And they might say to you, is that something you could help with? And it might be, you can. If you've done my marketing Monday sessions, you'll know that I teach you how to write copy, how to build an awesome website for your firm. And you could take all that learning I teach you and think, do you know what? I could work with a client and help them build their website. I know that a great website has to have some testimonial, it has to have some videos, it must have an opt in on there. I teach all the key elements of a great website. And so when a client says, I need to change my website, can you help me then? Yes, you can. Or if you fail, you can if you've got the knowledge. And then that would be. But that would be a separate fee. So as well as doing, the great thing about advisory is you do monthly recurring work. They pay you every single month. And sometimes when you get closer to a client and understand their challenges and what they need to Achieve. You will find that will open up other opportunities for special projects. Special projects where you go deeper on something helping them to implement menu pricing, to revamp their website, to help them hire a person to do a customer, to do a customer feedback process with for their customers. You could create that, for example, you could put systems in place. This is going to lead to other projects. Okay, let's move on to the other thing we want to talk about. We're going to come back to delivery, by the way, because our amazing guest Neil is going to be talking about delivery as well. But I want to now move on to. I want to now move on to the marketing piece. How do we start to attract clients? But before I do that, I'm just going to have a quick look at the chat box because I haven't looked at the chat box for a while and see.

If there's anything in there. There's a lot of chat about I think different tools, apps and so.

I think that's most the conversation.

Okay, Felicia says he just confirmed breaking down my goals into quarters was very helpful last year after joining vpa. So awesome, Felicia, that you took action, did the process. Yeah, I think somebody said it. Lisa said what do you all use to record such plans, projects, etc. And I think that's then a whole bunch of of gap based on that. I will read that later because I'm interested.

Okay, I'm going to move on. I'm going to move on.

What's this out Beatles, 45 singles. Was there some relevance to that? Rennie, where did that come from?

And Jim's obviously said something that's funny. Okay, so Jim says only 66. So not nearly old enough to be U.S. president. Okay.

Yeah, I love Jim's sense of humor. Some of them may remember when, when Jim did a video with a lampshade on his head. Jim will remember that it was really, really funny. Nobody else has a clue what I'm talking about unless you're in the online live academy. Okay, new comments. Who else?

Okay, more comments about as people use Center Keeper and all ones other stuff. I'll let you carry on. We're going to talk about next then what I'm going to share with you is I'm going to share the three most powerful strategies for using advisory work to win new clients. So.

Now you're doing advisory work. Now you're. Even if, even if you're not yet selling it. But sorry if you're not yet doing the delivery bit but it may be that you're now Doing the profit diagnostic review that I talked about yesterday, you're having different conversations with clients. You're having now fun. Ask them questions that you perhaps never did before. Because in the past, perhaps your conversations were all around compliance work about getting their tax turns done and about their bookkeeping and so on. But now we're showing a real interest in their business. We're starting to ask them, where do you want to get to? What are the challenges you're facing right now? Let's look at what might possibly happen if you changed your pricing or won some more customers. All that stuff I talked about yesterday with the three ways to grow a business and, and the nine profit drivers and the things we looked at on day one. Now you're talking to clients in a different way. They're going to see you as being different to just the normal bean counter, the normal accountant or bookkeeper. You are now different. You are positioning yourself as being different. So the question is, how do we use that to win better quality clients, to win more clients who are interested in that sort of accountant or bookkeeper? And I'm, I'm going to give you three ideas. There's lots of things we could do. I'm going to give you three ideas and they all fall into something called expert positioning. So expert positioning is, think of it, if you like, as marketing. It's about your brand. Expert positioning. Is this.

The best clients, the ones that you want, those great clients, the ones that are ambitious, that want to do great things, that want to work closely with their accounting professional, the best clients, the problem with them is there are only so many best clients around. And every, there are, there are millions of accounting firms, bookkeeping firms, we all want those best clients. There aren't enough to go around. And so we have to recognize that the best clients, the best clients, they're looking for the best accountant, the best bookkeeper, the ones that we really want, the ambitious business owners who want to grow their business are looking for the accountant that is the expert in, in helping them to achieve their goals, to build a better business. Just like if somebody was paying a huge amount of money in tax. They're a high net worth individual. They've got extremely profitable business. They're paying huge amounts of tax. They want a cpa, a tax advisor who can help them reduce their tax. They're going to want the best person, the person who has the most innovative tax strategies, the best tax ideas. The best clients want the best accountant, the best bookkeeper. So what we have to do in all of our Marketing is we have to position ourselves as the best, as the expert. It's called expert positioning. So let me show you three ways that you can position yourself as the expert. Number one. Number one is you want to write a book or an ebook. Because once you, once you are an author, you've written something, people see you as being different, see you as being an expert. Now a book might sound too daunting. So please don't worry about writing a book. You don't have to. I think I've written six books. My next book is being published by Cogan Page. It's out on the 3rd of July. Watch this space. And there are success stories in that book from people that you've met today and this week. I think Jessica's in now, I think Neil's in there and a bunch of other.

Great.

Accountants and bookkeepers. Jonathan's in there, I think, and many more. So I've written books and what I found my first book was Effective Pricing for Accountants. I wrote it in, I think it was published in May 2011. It was my first book. Before that, nobody knew me once I'd written my first book. Suddenly people asked me to speak on stage at conferences, people asked me to interview me on podcasts. It changed so much once I wrote a book. And writing a book doesn't have to be difficult. It's actually easier than you think, but even easier as an ebook. An ebook is not difficult. And I teach the process in Marketing Mondays about how to write an ebook. So.

You might write an ebook. You want to write an ebook that.

Gives valuable information about how to, for example, increase profits, grow a business, improve your cash flow, something around biz advisory, something that's so one of the things that we do in the, in the value pricing academy, when you work through the six month training program. In month six, I give you a whole bunch of marketing resources including I've written ebook that you can use. And it's all based around the nine drivers of profit because most business owners have no idea what that underlying business model is and how important it is to understand the individual elements. We talked about yesterday, a bit of it looked at the three ways to grow a business. We played with some numbers. It's really powerful when you understand.

The underlying business model. So you could write a book, an E book that could be something like.

The nine numbers you absolutely need to understand in your business to make it explode with growth. I've just made that off the top of my head. It's not the best title, but it's okay. And when you create an ebook like that and people read it, because most accountants and bookkeepers don't do that, they're going to see it as being different. When you meet a brand new client and you start having a conversation about their challenges, their pain, their goals, and how you can help them with their business, and you end the meeting by giving them a copy of your book, your ebook immediately going to think, do you know what that person is? An expert. They obviously know what they're doing. I want the best. That's probably the accountant. For me.

The reason I've mentioned an ebook is because actually an ebook serves two purposes. The first purpose is expert positioning. It positions you as the expert. But an ebook has also one other extremely powerful benefit to you as part of your marketing. I'm going to come on to that soon, so hold that thought. The second thing that you can do to improve your personal brand to get people seeing you as the expert is what many people widely regard as the most powerful form of marketing and that's video marketing. And I know that scares the life out of you or many of you, but the reality is when you do videos, whether it's on your website, whether it's on perhaps you have a YouTube channel, when people see you doing a video sharing, great comment, great content sharing people.

When you do videos on the most powerful way to grow your business, a video on, here's the nine numbers you need to know in your business to make it successful. Here's the big mistake most small business owners make. That's stopping them grow their business, whatever it might well be. When you do videos like that, you share some ideas. If it's YouTube, it could be just three minute videos. When you do that and people watch your videos, then again you position yourself as the expert, as being different. And here's the great thing about video marketing.

We're in the relationship business. In other words, clients aren't buying things like cups of coffee from you. They are buying from you because they want to enter into a long term relationship. They're looking for an accountant or bookkeeper that they're going to, they're going to be comfortable with that they can feel they can work closely with someone they like, someone that they trust because it's going to be a long term commitment. And so when somebody's looking to hire an accountant or a bookkeeper, they, a big part of that is do they like you? Do they.

Do they get, do you have a personality? One of the things that with a lot of traditional marketing like emails and so on emails, they don't get across your personality, but with a video, with a video, people can see you, they can see your personality, they can see your passion, they can see your energy, they can see that you love the stuff you talk about. And when you do videos, that gets across your personality, people will watch those and think, do you know, I like Nadim. He comes across really well. Nadim is smiling on his videos. Nadim seems like a really nice guy. I think he's an accountant I could work with. Now. You met Nadeem yesterday. He is a lovely guy. And if somebody's looking for an accountant, looking at websites, for example, and they check out three or four websites of people in the Luton area, the London area, and one of them is Nadeem's website. If Nadim's got a little welcoming video on his homepage that said, hi, I'm Nadeem, this is what I do. I help people build more successful businesses, and talks a bit more about how he helps people. And that business owner looked at three other accountants websites where there's nowhere no video, because most don't. Who's going to stand out? Nadim's going to stand out because they feel like they're starting to know him. He looks like a great guy. He's great on video. He smiles, he's sharing some content, some value that's different to all the other websites. So video is so powerful from a marketing point of view. It's so powerful with expert positioning. It's so powerful because it gets across your personality. And number three, the next strategy for using advisory work to win new clients is.

When you start doing speaking. Whether that's speaking at events, whether that's webinars, live streams, perhaps. For example, the local bank is running an event for business owners on how to be successful, and they ask you to be the guest speaker, the accountant, to talk about the numbers behind building a successful business. Then that's going to put you in front of a room full of the bank's customers, many of whom will be great clients for you when they see you on the stage talking about how numbers are so important, about the nine drivers of profit, about which is the most important one, how you can transform your results. You're going to have people in that room say, that Nadim, he knows his stuff. He's exactly the accountant I'm looking for. And I love his personality. And at the end of this session, I want to ask more. I want to find out how I can contact him. That's a physical seminar, but you could do Webinars, you could do live streams. And that might sound scary to you, but.

The great thing is most accountants and bookkeepers aren't doing this because they're scared. They don't want to get on camera. They are worried about it. And yet when you do that, when you get your personality out there, when you deliver value about your knowledge and how you can help people, you're going to find people want to work with you, the right clients want to work with you. And in my breakout session later, if you want to know how to be more confident on camera, how to be more come across more professional, how to do amazing videos, webinars, seminars, live streams, that's what my breakout session is about. So if you want to find out more, we will, we will be looking at that shortly. So they're three great strategies for positioning yourself as the expert, which will then help you to attract the best clients, the clients that are going to be interested in you helping them grow a more successful business.

The next thing we'll talk about is. Let me just check. I don't want to, I've got to remember 20, 20 minutes before we get into Neil. I don't want to overrun for Neil because he's going to be awesome. So the next thing I'll talk about with marketing is when we start to build our marketing foundations for our business. I'm guessing that you want to win. If you want to win more clients and you want to win great clients, then we need to put in place the systems, the structures, the foundations. And there are really, I think there are six essential pages that you should have online pages. Fortunately, technology these days makes it so easy to build what I call lead generation systems and appointment generation systems. A lead generation system is a automated system that will collect for you the contact details, the names and email addresses of people you would love to have as clients. I have a question for you. If, let's say you want to run a webinar next week about the nonprofit driver, for example, and you want to run that webinar not for your clients, but for people that you haven't met yet or people that you, you want to just deliver some value and at the end of it, you're going to invite them to have a meeting with you so you could perhaps a profit diagnostic review because you want to win them as clients. And you know that the more people that come to that webinar and listen to you, the more people that come along, the more people want to book a meeting with you, the more people you'll Turn to clients. That's how it works. The more people come to your webinar, the more business you will get. So my question for you is this. If you had to do an email today, not to clients, but people on your prospect list, if you had to do an email today to your prospect list to invite them to your webinar next week, how many people would you be inviting?

Because the more people on that list, the bigger the webinar is going to be and the more money you'll make. One of the things I've learned over the years is that there is a direct correlation between the size of your list. That's the names and email addresses of people you would like to have as clients, the size of your list and the money you make. If you want to grow your firm faster, you need a bigger list. And you need to be, if marketing is your thing, if you want to grow your firm, you need to be obsessed with list building. So we need to have a lead generation system. The other thing we need to have is an appointment generation system. We want to have a process whereby we attract the right people to meet us and a pre qualification process. Because your time's precious and you don't want to meet with everybody. There are people out there who are tire kickers, people who just want a cheap accountant, cheap bookkeeper. That's not what you want. You are a business advisor. You want those ambitious, growing businesses that want to work closely with you. How do we pre qualify them? So we have six pages in our business. So page number one is, and I think the most essential page you must have in your business, a lead page. What is a lead page? A lead page is a standalone page. It's a landing page. A landing page. A web page. Okay, It's a landing page. It's not part of your website. It's a separate page somewhere. And that page has one purpose and one purpose only. It's to gather, to collect names and email addresses. And you do that through an opt in box, an opt in page. How do you do that? You do it by giving something away for free, something that's valuable, something that your ideal client, your target client, would want to have. What could that thing be? Well, one of the best things is an ebook. So I said to you, if you write an ebook, it does two things. Number one, expert positioning. But it's also something you can give away for free, a digital ebook, in return for a name and email address. I know you've seen this because in the last five years, almost every marketer does this. Now you've probably got your Facebook feed is full of people offering eBooks and PDF checklists and all sorts of things. You click on the link, you put in your name and email address. You need to have a lead generation system just like that. So you need to have a lead page. And these aren't difficult to create now. So, and I'm sure I'm just picking on one person that springs to mind, Rennie Evans. Rennie is in the uk. He's special and you'll meet him on Tuesday next week. Rennie specializes in, I think it's manufacturing and engineering. I'm almost certain Rennie has got an ebook that's all aimed at, that gives value and is aimed at people who run manufacturing engineering businesses. And he probably promotes that. People can get that ebook and in return they give him their name and email address. So Rennie builds up his database, his list of people he would love to have, people who run engineering businesses and manufacturing businesses. I'm assuming that's right, Renny, I'm going to be completely wrong, but I assume you have a lead generation system, so you need to have a lead page and an opt in page. And related to that, you also need to have a thank you page. So in other words, when someone puts their name and email address, you have a system that takes them to another page that then says thank you so much for requesting a copy of my ebook. You can download it here or look out for an email in your inbox which will tell you how to get the ebook.

And if you want to recommend next step.

We have a Facebook group just for the owners of engineering and manufacturing businesses where they help each other build more successful businesses. If you'd like to join my Facebook group, I put the link here on the page. That's a thank you page. We thank them for, we thank them, we give them the ebook or the link to it or tell them about what to get in their email and we might then ask them to take a next step. That's a lead generation system. There's a bit more to it because what we then do is having got their email address, we then can automate a process of standard emails that go out to add even more value to build the relationship with them. Okay, that's two important pages. The next page that you want to have in your system is you want to have some and this may now be part of your website. On your website you want to make sure that you have something that positions you as an expert in advisory services, a business Advisory page. It could be a separate website, but it could be a page. You've probably already got a page talking about your bookkeeping services, your tax services and so on. But you want one about your advisory and you want to make sure that that page grabs people's attention. The words are so important, the copy, the way you write that page, you want to make sure that you address what are the typical challenges, the problems, the pain your target client has. So Renny may well have a page that says these are the typical problems owners of engineering and manufacturing business have. They struggle with this, this and this.

If that feels like you. One of the things we do is we help clients do this, this and this. In fact, below you'll see a story from one of our clients where they share how they turn their struggling engineering business around. And now they make six, six figure profits. What we do with clients is this, we do this, this and this. If you would like me to help you get this sort of result, then why not book a meeting with me? So we use our, we use our webpage to explain, give people a compelling reason to reach out to book a meeting.

The next page we need is we then want to make sure that we don't meet with everybody. And I talk about, in the academy about the importance of having an ideal client profile. I talk about marketing strategy. We have to be really clear about who is the right client, who is the wrong client. And we don't want to waste time meeting the wrong clients. So one of the ways to do that, and there are several ways of pre qualifying but one way to do it is having an application form. So if somebody wants a meeting with you and it says this on your, in your page, if someone wants a meeting with you, explain.

This is what you do. If you've, if you are the owner of a manufacturing business or an engineering business and you want to grow your business, then you sound like the right person for us. Click on this link, ask a handful of questions and then we'll reach out to you and let you know if you're the sort of person we work with. And so they fill in an application a handful of questions and those questions will help you decide whether that's the person you want to work with. It might be things like how big's the business? Because you might not want to work with anyone less than half a million, for example. It might be business, it might be questions about what's their challenges. And if you feel you can help their challenges, then that might be the right sort of client. For you. So we have an application form so we understand a bit more about the client. And then we have a system of we then take to a page where we acknowledge and say thank you for filling the application form. This is what happens next. And what may well happen next is that you and your team get that application and then you might decide that, okay, what we do is within 24 hours we will get back to them and say yes or no whether they're the right sort of fit for our firm. So you tell them what happens next and if they then are a right fit, then you send them a link and you've probably got one of these to your appointment booking systems. You probably use a tool like Calendly or something. But there are some things that we can then do to improve the process with appointment bookings. One of the things that many people in the academy do now is, and it's a pre qualification process, there are a lot of people and perhaps tell me if you do this, there are people that will charge a fee for the initial meeting. It's another wonderful way of getting rid of tire kickers. And it also helps to position your meeting as being valuable. You see, your first meeting might be that profit diagnostic review we talked about yesterday. We make the first meeting valuable. Okay.

Let'S move on to something else. Let me just have a quick look.

Michaela has some tech issues, but you're here now, Mikaela. Okay, if you missed the start, Mikayla, you can catch up on the replay. Rennie says yep, took action marks. Doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Ready?

So where's the comment?

Okay. And he's even. Oh, he's even kindly shared the link. Thank you, Rennie. As you probably gathered by now, people in the value pricing academy have this abundance mentality. In other words, they just help each other. We don't see each other as competing, we just help each other. There's some wonderful people. Thank you, Rennie, for confirming. Confirming that he takes an action taker. He does stuff and I'm looking forward to your session next week. Okay, let's.

Yeah, we've got loads more coming. But tell me what's the best thing that you have learned so far?

What's the best thing so far today? Please tell me in the chat box what's the thing I've said that might have you thought, yeah, I'm going to go do an ebook or I need to revisit my website, whatever it might well be. Meanwhile, I can see people who do judge for their discovery diagnostic review. Carol, Kostachuk does. I know that she does an awesome job with that. Leah does, Sharon does. So most accountants on their website it says we will give you a free initial consultation. If everyone says free, how does that differentiate you? But what we are finding is that some people are charging for their meetings and it works really well. Okay, we've got more stuff covered today, but what I want to cover next very quickly is just to remind you that today, the next few hours is your is your last chance to join the Value Pricing Academy if you want to get the bonuses. And I went through yesterday and I explained the four key things we focus on the academy. So one of them is pricing and.

One of the pricing and the goal here is to help you increase your average prices. You've probably heard lots of stories now most people in the academy who come along to the live sessions take action, do something, end up increasing their prices by 10, 20, 30, 40% on average. And sometimes with some services and some clients, they double, treble, quadruple the price. Pricing is the quickest way to get results. When you follow the processes we teach.

Your membership of the Value Pricing Academy will soon be paid for. And of course you get the effective pricing software. I'm not going to the detail right now. If you have questions about so tell Mark what does what's how to Thursday. If you have any questions, come to my Q and A later. We also focus on strategy and systems and Teresa does a great job of looking at the essential systems you have in your accounting firm, your bookkeeping firm. We give you the systems. Those systems include things like a lead generation system and a point generation system, pricing systems, referral systems. I am very much because I'm an accountant and I love the Michael Gerber E Myth book. To me everything is about systemizing what we do. Imagine what your business might look like a year from now if you don't have to work so hard because it's all systemized and you hire people to run the systems so that you can spend more of your time either having more time out or doing the work. You really love advisory work. That's what getting your strategy and systems is all about. We also help you to win to win more clients through the marketing Monday sessions, through things like the lead generation system. We by the way we help you the whole process. We create the words you need if you want to position yourself as an expert in advisory. We can give you all the words to go on your website. We give you all the questions to ask in your application form. We do it all for you. We want to make it really easy. We want you to get results. So if you want to win clients, we really focus on that deep. Imagine a year from now having five or six more great clients who love what you do, who are paying you premium fees, perhaps premium fees for advisory work. Just one new client is going to pay for your investment in the academy. And we also have a bonus called the online Live Academy, which I'll talk a little bit more about when I teach in a breakout session about how to communicate more effectively and use communication to win more clients. And then of course, last but not least is the theme for these three days is we also if you want to then go to the next level. Once you've got your firm, the foundations right, once you've got your strategy right, your pricing right, you're now winning clients automatically because you have the systems in place now. You're able to do this with your clients, help your clients do that by running a profitable business advisory service. And so we have a whole suite of resources. Let me quickly remind you, because we didn't talk about this yesterday with the biz, with the, in the area of biz advisory, then what you get access to is live training. Every month with me Profit Advisory Live, you get access to a six month training program that starts the minute you join. Every two weeks you get a series of videos, resources to help you implement advisory. We go deep on everything that we have covered. Today you get as well as a six month training you get. For example, we look at numbers even more. I did that case study back on day one. We have an even more detailed case study that we work through in the first few weeks. And this is an interesting case study because when you look at it, when you first look at the numbers, you will probably come to a particular conclusion about the business. But when we start really diving deep with the trends, the ratios and so on, we actually uncover a very, very different story. And I use that case study to illustrate that it's really important to get, not to take the. When we look at a balance sheet, it might look okay or it might look terrible. But we have to understand what's really going on. We have to look at some of the things we've looked at like average transaction value and so on. We have workbooks for every stage of the training, like on essential ratios, workbooks on things like how to diagnose what's going wrong if margins are going gross, profits going the wrong way, wrong way. We have pools that you can use to create reports to do analysis. These are all created by the amazing Jim Rayner who is here. So Jim kindly creates tools and resources and I know there's one more coming very soon. He mentioned on day one, all the tools that Jim creates and they're amazing tools are available to academy members. We have resources like the five margin killers. So this resource is where I teach you. There's a training video, there's a resource to tell you what are the reasons why margins fall and how do we find out which is the reason for our particular client so we can work to fix that. We use Trello a lot. We use Trello boards to help you plan your packages. We give you for example, suggested recommended packages how you could turn into a brochure. We have a 28 page pricing brochure with all the packages built in and the words that you use, the communication so that you can really build up the value of your biz advisory and get people wanting to buy. And there are reasons why brochures are really powerful. It's about expert positioning, it's about packaging, it's about looking like you are really professional. We have resources like how to sell, for example, the whole profit diagnostic. We suggest agendas. We have the nine drivers of profit. I go through all of those with you. The there's 101 ways to grow your business. There's 101 ideas that you can use. If you've got a client that wants to grow, which is probably every single client and you're thinking I don't know how to help clients grow their business. Just imagine that you've got 101 ideas over the course of a year or two, you could every now and then give them two or three ideas every single meeting. How much value is that going to be to your clients? We have a whole suite of marketing tools. We get to month six like a ready to use ebook and it's ready to use ebook, which you could use with your lead generation system. And we do all that in marketing Monday as well. So you get everything you need to start collecting leads and position yourself. You get the profit diagnostic software for the duration of your membership of the academy. And then we also introduced last year online Live Academy where you can position yourself as the expert. I also teach you in that if I'll come on to it in a second. I've got three minutes left.

So very, very quickly, as you know, we've talked about your investment. There are many ways where you can turn this into a return investment. Just repricing your existing clients will Pay for a year's worth of Academy membership and more. Getting higher prices with the software. I have people that are getting, like Rennie said, I got 30. 30. What was the number? 31,908. Using the software to get an advisory client that's paid for Rennie's membership of the Academy for years to come. And your investment is just $395 or whatever it is. And you'll go and check out your currency. Sarah, put the link in the chat box one final time.

Remember of course, that I have this guarantee that if anytime the first 30 days you don't find it valuable, you can reach out to Sarah and request your money back. So there's no risk to give it a try. Why not give it a try? Best to do it today because there's bonuses. And then come along on Monday to the welcome session knowing that if a week or two down the line you think perhaps I was a bit. I was too quick to sign up. It's probably not for me. I'm not ready right now. That's fine. You can change your mind. That's no problem at all. Okay. Remember that the bonuses that you get, I'm going to do them really quickly is you get the complete guide to menu pricing. You get straight away a video teaching you how to the Profit Diagnostic review the sales process we talked about and how to use the software. And also to go with that, you get 24 of the ideas from the profitable growth formula so that you have plenty of ideas when you're using the Profit Diagnostic software to give clients ideas, add value to that meeting, give them ideas for what they might be able to do to get more customers to increase average transaction value, value and so on. And of course we will remember as well. Emily will create, if you want, in your effective price software. She'll create your first and design your template for you. Normally we charge for that, but if you join this week, we'll get you on the list to do that soon.