BAM Day 3 - How to Use Online Meetings to Grow your Accounting Firm with Mark Wickersham

And I want to start with.

I want to start by making sure that I press the right button. I want to talk a little bit about the importance of this topic, just so you really appreciate it. And I want to talk about something called. And not that.

That'S the one I wanted. I want to talk about something called the power of context. So when in the academy, we talk a lot about price psychology, prices.

Communication, words and so on are so important. And the power of context is extremely important. Back in 1983, a behavioral economist called Richard Thaler, he did some interesting experiments. And what he found was he. And he was experimenting involving beer. I love a lot of these experiments by behavior economists, by price psychologists, often involve beer and wine, which is really cool. And what he found was that experimenting is that.

The amount of money that people were willing to pay for a particular bottle of beer would change dramatically based on the context in which it was sold. In other words, he found that people would. If a bottle of beer was sold in a corner store, people expect to pay a smaller price than the same, exactly the same beer they could buy next door in an upmarket hotel where it was served from a chilled fridge and poured into a nice cold glass. In other words, the context in which it is sold makes a huge difference to people's willingness to pay. And then later in 2002, Adval and Monroe, a couple of price psychologists, they kind of summed it up in another way. They said the context in which a product is seen influences the internal standard that consumers use to judge both this and other products. And they did a number of experiments. Two experiments showed that a product was judged as less expensive in high priced context than in a low price context, even though the product's actual price was recalled as higher in the first condition than in the second. So let me just make this more practical for us in terms of how that applies to us. So one of the things I used to teach before this age of lockdowns and moving to online and so on, in those days when we used to have physical meetings with our clients, one of the things that I discovered, and I then thought was that if you want to sell high value services like advisory and get good quality prices, fees, then the context in which you sell makes a huge difference. So for example, if you meet with a client in a small messy office where your desk is full of rubbish and you have client files piled up in the corner, and you serve them a cup of coffee in a mug where it wasn't quite cleaned properly from the last client, there's dribbles down the side, then that client is going to expect to pay a lower price for your services. If on the other hand, you invite the client into a beautiful boardroom, somebody comes along and serves them a drinks menu and the drinks they want tea. And it comes on a lovely silver tray with a beautiful silver teacup and lovely china glasses. And you then do your presentation in this nice, pristine, clean boardroom. And rather than huddling around a laptop, you have a big screen, a flat screen tv and you've got things you want to show that show them on there like numbers, the profit diagnostic software. And it's all, it's big, that impresses people and people think this is a professional firm and they will be willing to pay a much higher price. That's the power of context. It sounds, it's subtle, but it makes a huge difference. Now of course, since the pandemic and really in the years leading up to that, we've seen the increase people using Zoom meetings of moving away from physical to online means of communication. You are probably finding that you're doing Zoom all the time or other platforms. And when you're talking one to one with clients, let's say it's a brand new client, you meet that client for the first time on a Zoom meeting. When you meet somebody on a zoom meeting, the power of context is just as important. It's just as important. And so one of the things we want to do is if we want to position ourselves, the experts be seen as being better quality. If we want to win better quality clients, if we want higher prices, then we have to think about the way that we present the professionalism. And the great news is is most people are awful. For example, I was on a meeting just the other day, a Zoom meeting. And you've probably seen this Zoom has all this functionality of things like green screens. And I hate green screens. Most people, they use them very badly. It's extremely tacky. This particular person was using green screen with a background that was so distracting I couldn't concentrate on what he was saying. I was too distracted by the background. As he moved his head, his ears would disappear and occasionally there was a big green blob appeared on his face. Every time he spoke, it was so distracting I lost the message. I hate green screen, I really do. Because it takes away from the message. We have to be much more professional. I see green screen as being the equivalent of back in the 1980s, the 1990s, sorry, the 1990s, late 1990s, Microsoft started bringing clipart if you're as old as me, you might remember clip art and at first it seemed really, really cool. But when we look at Clipart now, it is so tight, it's awful. Never use Clipart in your presentations. I think green screen is the same thing. So let me share with you. If you want to come across as more professional, if you want people to really think, wow, that you are, you're somebody I need to listen to, you are so professional, you are the sort of accounting professional I need to talk to, then there are a number of things we have to work on that we have to get right. The way that we position ourselves, the way that we present, which are going to position you as being different and better than everybody else. And the first of those is when you do an online meeting, like a one to one meeting on zoom, the quality of the video, what people see, is very important. And so you will tend to find that if you use a webcam, a webcam, an external webcam, external webcams can be much better quality than what you might have on your laptop. The webcam on your laptop is usually not very good. Apple are getting better now, to be honest. But an external webcam is much better if you want to go to another level. What's even better still in terms of video quality is iPhones are great and they're apps that you can use that can convert your iPhone camera to a webcam signal and then you just mount your camera and use that as your webcam. They are even better than a lot of the webcams you can get. An iPhone is great as a webcam.

And eventually when you get really professional, you might want to go to the level where you use a proper camera. So I have a camera because it's got proper lenses, professional lenses, and it nicely blurs out the background so it's not too distracting. So think about the video and the quality of it. Is it nice and sharp or are you blurry? Have you got a cheap, a cheap, poor quality webcam? That makes a big difference. The next thing to think about is think carefully about your lighting. So I've got studio lighting here, but lighting can be really simple. The big mistakes that people sometimes make is they have a zoom meeting in their office, they sat at their desk and behind them is a big window. You know what happens when you have a big window behind it's daylight. Then what happens is the camera closes down and you end up being a silhouette. You're having a meeting with somebody and they think you're in witness Protection. So think carefully about your lighting. You want to be well lit up and the great thing is you, you don't need. I've got huge number of studio lights right now, but you can now get some really good quality lighting that you can mount, like Elgato, for example, that you can clip on to your desktop behind your computer and you can have it permanently there. I have a desk somewhere else in my office here and I have one of those lights and all I do is I reach across, I turn the on switch on and it gives me a nice diffused, soft light that works really, really well. And I've got no lighting behind me to create that silhouette. So think about lighting. It does make a big difference. It's really important. Also think about number three. In fact, I think I've got these points on it so you can write them down in case you forget. Then think about the studio or the environment that you are in. So a bit like I said to you, the green screen can be sometimes really distracting. You want to have a nice background. It doesn't have to be a plain background. You can have things in the background that get across your personality. Just make sure it's not distracting, not messy, not untidy. If you have a very untidy office, you can get around that by some simple. I have paper rolls behind, you can have pull up backgrounds. It's really simple just to create a nice clean background. If you want much, much better to do to use a background than green screen. So think about your studio. It makes a big difference. Now even more important, the most important thing so far is the audio. When you are talking to somebody online, the audio quality is much more important than video.

People will watch a video or listen to you in a meeting if they can hear you clearly. And they'll be forgiving if your webcam is a bit blurry. But if you have a great camera but the audio's crackly, there's perhaps some echo or you're too quiet, then people will get lost, they'll get dist. They can't hear you properly, there's distracting noises, you've got background noise, you've got a poor quality microphone, then that's going to make it hard for people to hear you. And if people can't hear you properly, then they will phase out, they won't probably listen to you, they'll miss the things that you're saying. So audio quality is really important. And there are some really good microphones that you can get now that are not that expensive, that give you great audio quality. Never ever rely on the audio that's in your computer. It's not designed.

It'S usually too quiet, too tinny. You need a good microphone. It'll make a big difference. The next thing to think about is really you and the composition. So think about what's the impression you're giving people? What are you wearing? For example? Now you may have noticed that Neil didn't wear a suit and tie. And the reason for that is because that's not his personality. And that's fine, you don't have to wear suit and ties. But you want to have something that reflects your personality, that reflects you. And also think about you in terms of the composition. In other words, if you're having a one to one meeting with somebody, you would probably really want to. If it was a meeting, let me just show you this quickly. You would probably be better off if you had something more like this. Fill the frame. One of the things you want to do with composition when you are, when you want to look professional is make sure that you, you minimize the amount of headroom above. I see people doing zoom meetings and things where they're like this, they've got it like this and you can see all this space around them. And what you find is it's distracting from the viewer's point of view. And you also look, you come across as unprofessional.

Just get the composite. It's little things can make a huge difference. I need to turn this back to where it was, where was it? I think it was here. So little things are really important. That's the composition. Also think about particularly. This is particularly the case if you want to do something like a group meeting, a webinar, a live stream. One of the things you want to do is think about the production. And what I mean by that is if you're doing a presentation and you then want to show something on the screen to illustrate something you may have remembered earlier, Neil showed he was talking to webcam. He was, he was engaging and then he wants to show something on the screen. And it was there. It wasn't just hang on a second, I've got something I need to show you, but I don't know where it is. Just I've got to find this share this screen share button and I've lost it. It's down here somewhere. When you bumble around like that, people just think, well, you're not very professional. And that's this power of context. You want to be professional, you want to be slick. So Think about if you are presenting and you're going to show things, have it ready, have processes, ways that you can do that. Sometimes it's really simple. If you want to go to an advanced level, there's all sorts of things that you can do that. I teach in the online live academy. I know that Neil used what's called a stream deck. He'd set up a scene in ecamm. He just pressed a button on his desktop and it went straight to that.

Packaging that you want to show you, you wanted to show you to illustrate the point of that web designer. And then he pressed another button on his desk and it went straight back to him. It was professional, it was great production. And finally, the final point I want to share in terms of coming across more professional is then it's your message. It's about you, it's about how you communicate the message. And this, I think, is. Of all these points, this is the most important one, the most important.

So what I mean by this is that when you are communicating with somebody.

In the past, when we have physical meetings, communication is a bit easier because we're used to meeting people face to face. It's how we communicate. And a lot of communication is through body language, for example. But once we meet online, once, whether it's meeting online, whether you're doing a video, whether you're doing a livestream, a webinar, suddenly, suddenly we have to learn different skills because we want to make sure that we engage people. If, for example, you're having a physical meeting with a client, and let's say that you've just asked to get a little bit boring, for whatever reason.

They can't suddenly leave the meeting. They're there in front of you. They're kind of forced to listen to you. But.

In a zoom meeting, if you're starting to lose their attention because you're starting to drone on and be boring, then they might start checking their emails, checking their Facebook. They're not listening to you. And they can get away with that in an online meeting because you don't really know particularly. They haven't got their webcam on. You don't know if they're listening or not. They could be fidgeting around with something else. And so it's so much more important in this online world to be engaging to get people listening to you. So how do you do that? And. And that's all about learning the skills of communication. And I would argue that of all the skills that you can learn, the soft skills, the soft skills about leadership skills, marketing skills, sales skills, and so on. I believe that communication skills are the most important skills that you can have. The ability to communicate is when you become a better communicator. You can influence people, you can lead better. More people will sign up and join you as a client when you communicate better, when you communicate in a way that's engaging, when you communicate your value, better people will. You will convert more people to clients at higher prices. Communication is so important if you want to motivate your team. Communication sits behind everything. We have to communicate better now. When I started my accounting practice, I was a normal accountant. A lot of accountants, bookkeepers. We are not good communicators. I wasn't, I'm an introvert. I found it very difficult, but I was okay at dealing with one to one meetings just because I had the knowledge. I came from a tax background. I gave people great information, but I was a terrible communicator. I realized how important it was and I spent 20 years hiring people to teach me how to communicate. And I realized it's so important in this online world. So things like when you are talking to a potential client on Zoom, or you might be going and doing a webinar, or you might want to do a live stream, I'm going to talk about those in a short while, so bear with me. Or you want to run a business club, which could be a huge opportunity. You want to make sure that you are engaging people, that people want to listen to you, that people want to hear your message. And there are a number of skills that we need to work on. One of those is we need to make sure that we.

Vary the tone of our voice. One of the things that we, we often do, people who are new to doing their first video, their first webinar, and in our profession particularly I was like this, we talk at same level. Hi, I'm Mark Wickersham, I'm an accountant. And in this session I'm going to teach you a little bit about how you can price more effectively. That's going to bore people so much. Because the thing is we are.

We want to hear the pitch change, the tone change. And so we have to figure out and learn how we do that. And there's some simple tips that we can do. If you ever watch my very first YouTube video, I cringe when I watch it. In fact, I think I might take it down because that's exactly how I spoke the first time I went on video. And then I realized that's so boring, Mark. And so we have to Start changing the way we speak. And it's not that difficult to do when we just learn some simple techniques.

We also have to as well make sure that we get rid of those filler words. You know, the words, the ums, the ers, the so.

And many other things that just creep into our language that we repeat. I remember somebody who was a financial advisor, used to training sessions and every sentence, and I mean every single sentence, he said the word. Actually, every sentence. We hear a lot on TV now, a lot of the younger kids now, they say the word like in every sentence and it doesn't mean anything the way they say it. And what happens is when somebody says a certain word over and over and over, over again, like the urns and the urs, what happens is it becomes distracting. We start to focus on that and we're thinking actually, every sentence is actually. And when your brain's thinking about that and latches onto that, you can't then, you then can't listen properly because you're always counting the actual is or the ums or the ers. They're called filler words. So we have to get rid of the filler words. And again, there's simple techniques that we can do. One is just simply being aware of them. Do a video of yourself, do a three minute video and watch it back and see which words that you say, which are superfluous, which not necessary. Why do we use filler words? The reason we use filler words is because they give the brain, our brain to think about what we're going to say next.

Instead, one of the most powerful things that you can do is pause. We think we have to fill up all the space and just keep talking and talking and talking and talking and then we can't think what to say next. And like I just said, that's a filler phrase. Just pause. Pauses are so powerful for so many reasons. When you pause, it gives the audience a chance to really let what you just said sink in. When you say something really important. The most important thing that you can do with your presentations is get the audio right.

Pause, let that sink in. That's a really important point. What pausing does is then gives your brain a quick moment to think about what you're going to say next.

One of the big mistakes I made when I hired my speaker coach, I'm passionate. I love what I teach, I love teaching stuff. And I know that you love your stuff, whether it's teaching bookkeeping, paperwork, apps, advisory, tax planning, when we love what we teach, when we're excited about it. We tend to talk way too quick. And again when I watched my first few videos, that was me, my speaker coach said watch this and I listened to it. He says that's way too quick. And what I found was when I spoke too quick, I still sometimes do it. I have to tell myself to slow down. When you speak too quickly, what happens is you say things that aren't clear to the audience. You mumble words, words come out too quick, you don't pronounce the word properly and then what happens is people can't really understand the message. Now you might be thinking these things aren't important, they are. Go back to the power of context.

When you engage people properly, when you learn how to communicate, you will stand out way above all the other accountants and bookkeepers who have no idea about communication. They're talking in a monotone, they are boring the pants off people and people aren't listening to their message. You've got a great message. You've learned for three days about business advisory. You can change businesses lives. You can talk about the profit drivers, you can talk about how they can change their pricing, you can talk about things that Neil talked about. Why not turn your one off service into recurring service? You've got so much great stuff that you can share with people. You want them to listen to you. When they listen to you, when they're engaged, when they see your passion, your personality, they're going to see you as being different and better than every other accountant and book they spoke to. When you communicate better, they're going to want to work with you. And the price isn't important because the right clients want the best accountants, they want the best booking firm. I can't stress enough how important communication is. Hopefully I'm going to have jump some questions in a short while but I want to talk about a few other things in session because the starting point is you need to master those things when you master those things and you don't have to be perfect but as you get, as you master those things, you'll become more confident and that means that you'll come across more professional in your one to one meetings.

And I call this in the online live academy. Level one training. Level one training is about both being more professional in our one to one zoom meetings with prospective clients, with clients in terms of our lighting, audio, our setup being more professional and secondly being better at communicating. When you are more professional, when you are better at communicating you can move to level two.

Level two is where we now start doing Videos. Neil said earlier, video is so powerful. And hopefully you saw Neil's an introvert. He's not been doing this long, but.

His personality comes across. When I see Neil on video, I think that's a really honest guy. He's real, he's not fake. He's telling it as it is. He's admitting his faults. Comes across as a really nice guy. If I was looking for an accountant, he would be exactly the person that I would want to work with. Exactly the sort of person and that comes across in his videos. Videos are so powerful. I said earlier that video marketing is arguably being arguably the most powerful form of marketing. You must have a video on the homepage of your website so that it's different to everybody else's. Video is so, so powerful. It'll win you more business. It's part of expert positioning. So once you're better at communicating, once you've got a nice setup, you've got better lighting and so on, you can start doing videos with confidence and really impressing people. I call that level two in taking things to the next level. How can we take these skills, we've got these communication skills, being professional, and start now doing videos? Whether it's a video on your website, whether it's a video on your lead page to tell people the reason why they want to grab your ebook and give you their name and email address, whether it's a video because you're building a YouTube channel, for example, check out Nadim Roger. You saw him yesterday. He has. He's just started his YouTube video. It's. His videos are really impressive because he's doing all this stuff. His lighting was great yesterday, his audio was great. He's got a nice smile. His communication style is great. Nadim is one of my students in the online Life Academy, the value pricing academy and the online stuff. He goes and every live session he's been building his skills up. It wasn't like that a year ago. He wasn't that confident. I was talking to There's a lovely man from the US in trying to think who it is now. It's Tom.

Is it Tom? I'm just trying to think now. It's completely forgotten. I should have thought about. It's an idea that came to my head. Who is it? I think it's Tom. Anyway, he told a story about how he went to a conference and the speaker for one particular session hadn't turned up and they'd seen him do some sessions and speaking and they said, look, you're in a counter time could you run this session? He did. He went straight in. Tom. Thank you, Sarah. Tom. Yes, he did the speaking session. And because he's one of the people that always comes to the live sessions, he has improved his presentation style no end. And they said to him, that was amazing. And your presentation was so engaging. That was great. Can you speak about finances? Many more of our events. And so when you can communicate better, that's going to open up doors, doors that you might never have seen Jessica Fox. You might have seen Jessica. Before we kicked off on the main stage, she was doing a session with Neil. Jessica. She regularly gets asked now to do training sessions for other organizations, for bookkeepers. People reach out to Jessica because she's been learning this stuff and she communicates so well. So this is a powerful stuff. And I just dropped in a filler word. Then you might have noticed it's my one filler word I have to get rid of. Let's now take Things to Level 3. Level 3 is when you become confident and you can present to a camera, okay, like a video. Let's now take it to another level by. Let's go in live. Let's go live to. And rather than, rather than going one to one, like a zoom meeting with a client, prospective client, what if we can now have the confidence to go live and run a webinar or a live stream? Now, that opens up huge possibilities in terms of growing your business. Let's say, for example.

We'Ve just had Covid. And in the course of COVID all around the world, governments were doing things to help the business community. Whether it's. Whether it was grants, loans, financing, giving money away. In the uk, furlough payments, all sorts of things to help small businesses. And certainly in the uk, there were so many things and the rules were changing all the time. New things were coming out. It was confusing. What if you went in, Neil's got a Facebook group of 1400. What if you went to some social media places, you went to some Facebook groups, you posted social media.

New announcement. You can now access this particular grant to help you in your business with cash flow because of COVID Want to find out how to get it? I'm running a webinar next month. Just click on the link below, register for the webinar. Imagine you post that in various Facebook groups of business owners on your LinkedIn profile and so on. And let's say 100 people show up for your webinar and you run a webinar where you talk about the latest grant furlough. Payments, finance, whatever. And you're talking to business owners about how they can tap into that money, how it will then help them with their business. And at the end of it you say to them, if you would like to talk one to one, I'm going to put a link below to my booking system. You can book a one to one appointment or I'm going to put a link below. I've created a guide for this. I've created a worksheet, a guide walking you through the steps you need to do to access this finance. Just click on the link below, which then takes to a page where they put in their name and email, email address and they then get the guide.

If you deliver that webinar, some of those hundred people are going to be so impressed they're going to say, my existing accountant isn't telling me about this, I've had to learn it from somebody else. This person knows what they're talking about and I've seen it. I like them. They've actually got a nice personality. I'm going to click that link. I want to have a meeting with them.

If you want to win more clients, talking one to many is hugely powerful.

So that's webinars, the other one's live streams. Interestingly, my first time on stage, let me tell you. So sometimes people look at me and say, mark, you're not an introvert. Mark, you were born to do this. No, I wasn't. Nobody was born to present. I am extremely introverted, probably more introverted than Neil and Jessica.

I had never spoken before in front of people until 1999.

I was scared at the thought of doing that. When I was at school as a kid growing up, I hated it when the teacher would say, I want you to stand in front of class. And I think in the U.S. show and tell, I would fear those things. I'd have to stand in front of the class and say something. It was an awful experience.

In 1998 I met Steve Piper. I went on a three day masterclass and it changed my mind. And a bit like Neil, I kept then sending messages to Steve saying, I've done this, I've done this idea, it's worked. Neil kept doing the same thing. He kept messaging me saying, mark, I've tried this, it's worked. I've got this result using your ideas. I was doing the same thing, Steve. And.

So Neil became. I became aware of Neil fairly early on and now asked Neil if we could do some stuff together like today in the same way. Steve said to me, Steve, Pipes said 11 months later, it was October 1999. Mark, you're doing some amazing stuff at my October three day masterclass. Will you come along and do an hour's presentation in the afternoon of day two?

No way would I have done that except he said, and for that hour I'll pay you £600.

Now I still had cash flow problems and I thought, that's £600 for an hour, that's pretty good. So I said yes. I was on 2 o' clock on day two. He was up in Leeds. I was based in Sheffield, it's about 30, 40 miles away. I don't like being late, so I went extra early. I got there for about half past 12 before the lunch break. I got found the room, the doors were shut and it had those little peephole things you see in hotel room. I could peep through and I could just see Steve delivering the message. I could faintly hear Steve talking. And I'm there and kept checking. I'm waiting for one o' clock for lunch, getting more and more nervous about this whole thing. One o' clock comes and Steve hasn't finished. You always overrun. But eventually, about ten past one, he announces lunch. The doors open, everyone surges out, all these accountants surge out. As soon as I get a chance, I walk into the room, Steve comes up to me, shakes my hand. Hi, Mark, great to see you here. Looking forward to your session at 2:00'. Clock. While you're setting up, can I get you a drink? Now I know that what really Steve meant, can I get you a glass of water or something? I was so nervous.

I don't do daytime drinking. But without thinking I said, steve, can I have a pint of lager, please? Look really puzzled. No speaker had ever asked for a pint of lager before. I was just nervous, my stomach was in knots. He went to the bar and while I was sitting on my laptop with my PowerPoint presentation at the computer, he then brings me his pint a lager. At 2 o'. Clock. I start the presentation an hour. I am so nervous. I spend the whole hour of that presentation clutching with two hands this pint of lager, taking little sips out of the lager because I just needed something to calm my nerves. I was in a terrible state.

At the end of the hour I finished, I got a round of applause. And what happened is Steve then had a straight break. And something I said about my story, the struggles in my accounting firm, the things I'd done in the last 12 months to change my results Suddenly everyone came up to me in that break. They were asking me questions, they were saying, mark, that was amazing. I loved that. And I came away thinking.

I've helped people. And one person came up to me and said, we have a multi partner firm. Can we pay you to come do some work? I got paid to do some work. I wasn't expecting that. I got paid to help them put some systems in place in their multi partner firm, account firm. A month or so later, they paid me a good fee for that. I'd learned value pricing by then. And so Steve then said, and Steve said to me a few days later, he said, mark, I run feedback system every single day. On day two, they said, you were the best. Can you do all seven guest speaker slots? My seven master classes next year. And I did. In the year 2000, I had seven speaking sessions the same session seven times for Steve. I launched my business club and before I knew it, I was doing presentations pretty much every month, sometimes multiple ones. And I was nervous the first time. We're all nervous. We have to start somewhere. But after a few years of doing this, I realized I enjoyed it because people loved the message. People appreciated it. Just like you said great things to Neil about his session. And when you realize that your audience loves what you've got to share, you've got great knowledge and you're a great person and you share so much, people are going to want to listen to you.

So one of the things I do in the, in the value pricing academy is I teach the skills based on the things that I've learned. How can you become more, more confident on a camera? How can you engage people better? How can you start getting to the stage where you do webinars and livestreams? Because they are so, so powerful. In.

December of 2020. That's right, 2020. I'd known for several years that live streams, doing a Facebook Live, a YouTube Live, was really powerful. And yet up until December 2020, I'd never done one. I was scared. Despite the fact I present a lot. I do webinars, I do videos. I was scared to do a live stream. And there was something about pressing that Go Live button that caused me fear. So I set myself a goal that in 2021, last year, I would go live every single month. I hit that go Live button. I figured out how to do it. I hit Go Live. And I now find the thing that I enjoy more than anything else is just going live to my YouTube channel. I do it every month. I have one session every month. I do sometimes other sessions as well. It gets to YouTube, Facebook, it goes to LinkedIn. Perhaps you, perhaps you've seen one of my sessions. I found I get a real buzz out of that because through social I can then.

I can interact with people. People come to see me every single month to those sessions. It's the same people. I can have fun with them in the chat box and then I get into the teaching bit of it. I love doing live streams. I would never have thought that back in 1999 when I was clutching my pint of lager, taking little baby sips just during my presentation. Like anything, we are not born to do this, but when you have the skills, it can transform your life.

So what we do in level three is we teach live streaming, we teach webinars. What we do in level four, when you're ready to move to that level, I then teach you, I then teach you in level four how you can now tap into a commercial opportunity by run a business club. If you're comfortable with teaching people stuff online, why not do like the piano teacher, Neil's piano teacher. You could now build a scalable business and business advisory is a great way of doing that. You could take your business advisory skills and as well as working one to one, you teach people business skills one to many and that can become extremely profitable business model. Just look at mine. I started with six people in my first session in June 2014. Six people. I have about 500 people now. You know what the investment is. You could do the math. It's an extremely business, profitable business model. I'm not saying that you would ever get to 500 business owners listening to you every single month. But you might get 10, 15, 20, 30 people paying you and you're just delivering one session one to many. It's an extremely powerful business model. So I launched this last year online Live Academy. We launched in April 2021 because I saw a need in our profession that because the world's moving to online and zoom meetings, we have to stand out. The power of context is so, so powerful. So what I now teach in the value Pricing Academy every single month. And there are also access the curriculum bit fed as well. I teach you everything you need to do, whether it's the communication skills, whether it's the equipment, what's the best equipment to use. How can you be more professional? I teach you how to video, I teach you how to run a webinar, I teach you how to do sales presentations. I teach you how to structure the sales pitch. I teach you everything you need to run a business club. I teach and in the profit advisory work we're doing, as I said earlier, we are now working on ready to use presentations that you could then use presentations in a box that you could use as a webinar, as a live stream or use them as a business club. Okay, I think we need to break in about 30, 60 seconds. I'm just having a look at a few comments in the chat box and then we'll finish In I think 30, 60 seconds we'll. Wendy Rose says, what's your favorite lager? Actually I've kind of as I've matured and got older, I prefer stouts and reds but I love beer so any lager will do. But I prefer the more I prefer the higher quality ones. My favorite beers are Belgian beer. Belgian beer is the best beer in the world. They do something completely unique. I also love the German weiss beers. They're great. When I went to Texas, the red beers in Texas were amazing. So I'm a bit of a beer connoisseur and I don't like lager. My least favorite is Heineken. I hope nobody's Dutch. I think Heineken is cheap and nasty. Natasha Roberts Are all levels a part of vpa? Yes. We created the Online Live Academy last year and then I decided let me just give it to Value Pricing Academy members. I said to you earlier that when you join the Value Pricing Academy you lock the price in. Every year I create new stuff. I have no idea what's coming next year, but all the new things I create you just get as a VPA member. So we introduced a year ago Online Live Academy. All Value Pricing members get that automatically because I want to help you get results, whether that's with your pricing, being more confident doing training, doing a business club advisory, whatever Timothy says. Is there a code to use to sign up for the VPA and get the bonuses? There's a link. Sarah will give you that code and if you've got any more questions. Anyway, I'm going to be running a session at 10 past the hour, a Q and A in the Value Pricing Academy booth. So I have to stop now because I have to move across to the main stage. We have a four minute break. I start at 6:50. If you've got any more questions, if you've got questions about anything. I've talked about Online Live Academy, Value Pricing Academy. I'm doing a Q and a of about 30 minutes in straight after the main stage presentation. So I'm just checking my timings. Yes. I'm going to leave now because in four minutes we need to be starting on the main stage. I'm going there now just to get set up. So I will see you there very, very soon. Bye for now.