Business Advisory Masterclass - Day 1

And that's when my business really started to take off. And instead of having a job which I owned, it turned into a business where I started to take on staff.

Whatever I've lent myself to and whatever.

I've put effort in. I guess the main takeaway is consistency. Whether it's me doing videos or, you know, posting in my Facebook group or just posting on social media in general, I've always tried to be, you know, relatively consistent. You know, on average I post three or four times a week across my social media platforms. And you know, there's always content in my head that I think I could talk about. So, you know, it might be content about the team, it might be something to do with a recent client meeting, it might be a case study that I can talk about, it might be doing an interview with Mark Wickersham that I can talk about. You know, there's so many different bits and pieces from a business point of view that I think would make good content.

The night.

Locally, you know, no accountants locally to me do really anything on social media at all. So there's no kind of personal brand there. You know, their websites are relatively faceless. So I kind of thought initially a good way to stand out would be kind of going down that video route but, but to be consistent as well.

Start to use a lot of Mark's teachings in regards to monthly recurring fees, using value pricing, basically just just sorting, sorting my own shop out if you like. Because I'd gone from working within practice to working with an industry to building my business in the evening and weekends and not having any vision or any guidance on how to run a business for myself. So when I stumbled across Mark and his teachings, that's when my business really started to excel and build a bit of traction.

You know, when I did my first social media video, it was, it was a little bit nerve wracking. And even though I was only talking.

Into a screen then once I did.

One I kind of wanted to do another and then once I did another I kind of kept going. And people that are watching this may or may not know that I do 30 day video challenges as well. So a couple of times a year I'll go on video for 30 Days in a row as a bit of a bit of a segment piece. So, you know, kind of the more I did that, the more I enjoyed it and you know, cynically from a marketing point of view, the more business I was getting on off the back of it with more people engaging with my content as well.

Show me, show me Love.

I've learned so much from other people.

I'm still learning now. And I guess if I can spend an hour of my time trying to, you know, help other people that maybe were in my position, you know, four years ago when, you know, they didn't have any clients or they didn't know kind of how to grow sort of a marketing presence, you know, if it.

Can help in any way, shape or.

Form with that, then, you know, I'd love to do so. Because I think the opportunities in our industry, certainly at the moment with technology and the way that it's so easy to deliver really good content is just, you know, the opportunities are endless.

I think.

Your way.

That was just the only way I knew how people did it was in the accounting world, everybody was hourly. And honestly, and I'm not saying it for any other reason than that brain mentality didn't change until I met you. It was listening literally at the intuit thrive of your talk on the stage. And I'm going, okay, we need to have a talk with that guy. And that was literally, you had the little booth there and we went and chatted with you, but it was, was listening to you talk about that. And I'm going, I can do that. Like, I don't, I don't have to do hourly. So it was definitely. And that was, I signed up for your courses, I started talking to you and, and literally from there, that very next time time when I would have my annual review with the client and I can remember sitting there and saying, so my new fee will be. And then he would talk about it goes, okay. And then your wage of no, my fee goes, yeah, whatever. I'm like, well, no, there is a difference. Changing that mindset helped to break that cycle of I'm not an employee, I'm in control.

Everybody want to sing, sing, sing.

You're a winner.

When you sing, sing, I've got a song, you hum along.

The more times that I do video, the more it seems to resonate with people and the more leads and inbound inquiries I get. Like I said, the 30 day video challenges the month after I finished doing one of those challenges are normally really, really busy for us with emails and Facebook messages and LinkedIn messages that, you know, people have seen that content. They can see that I'm, you know, I'm, I'm in the middle of doing something that's like a segment piece and it's just pe their interest.

Mike, one of the things you've said before is that if you try to talk to everyone. You end up talking to no one. So. So that's why whenever I create a blog or promote my services, if you like, it's always talking towards the premonition industry because that's where I want to take my.

I think the main thing is to not make it too dry, not just talk about, you know, compliance or governance, whilst those things are important and it's kind of what we do. Like, you know, try and sort of spice that with a bit of personality and, you know, maybe a bit of humor. You know, my, my strap one is making finance fun and it's kind of stuck with me almost by accident. Just trying sort of balance it between, you know, delivering insightful content that will be useful to clients but deliver it in a really personable.

The key thing to note is that the majority of my content is live, so I'm not then recording it, editing it and doing all that sort of stuff as well, which, you know, will obviously take more time. I have, have started to experiment a little bit with, with some other videos and adding captions and doing. Doing stuff with a bit of, a bit of a slicker professional style. But in terms of the majority of my content, most of it is live. So it's, you know, shot on the phone, shot in the camera in the office and then it's done, it's posted and then that's it.

Down. Just go for the.

Everybody want to sing, sing, sing. Make it all your.

Hey, welcome. Welcome to the business advisory masterclass 2025. So we've been running this now. I think this is the sixth year in a row and I know there are some people here who are returning who've been before. I can recognize some of you in the. The list. Anyway, let me know in the chat we're going to who you are, where you're from. We're going to kick off officially in five minutes but let's see who is here so far. Let me know we have as I go through the chat. Chet is here. Chet's from Central Pennsylvania and loves integrating best in class tech into as much, as much as the accounting process possible. Abby's here. Hi Abby, Great to see you again. I know you've been before. What she say? Abby says Abby's from Bristol. Always love tuning in for Business Advisory Masterclass. We're excited. So thank you for coming again. Abby. Brian's here as well. Hi Brian from the UK and good to see you. I know you come to a lot of live sessions as well. We have. Jan is here. What does Jan say? I'm attending this from Pretoria in South Africa. And interesting. I started with value pricing when I opened my own practice back in 1996. Wow. So you start at the same time as me in practice, but interestingly goes on to say that.

Have problems with block creeping and considering going back to Audi rates. I guess that's what you're talking about is what we call scope creep. And that is a big issue that needs to be dealt with. But it's not that difficult when you know that some of the techniques for doing that. We might cover some of that later. Mohammad's here from the uk. Sherry is here from Park City in Utah. Wow. We were up that way a few years back. If you've just joined, we're starting in about three minutes now. Yeah, three. Three minutes. Let me do a few more shout outs, see who else is here. So where'd I get to? That was Sherry from Park City. We have Shari, if that's pronounced right, from Dallas. Nicole's here from Colorado in the us we have Sarah from East Texas. Great to see you. Mary Sullivan from Virginia. Marty's here from Michigan. So a lot of people from the us. Jude is up in Canada in Quebec. Montreal, Quebec. We were there back in September. Wonderful place. We loved Quebec City, particularly. Sarah's here. Sarah Bridges. Hi, Sarah, Good to see you. From Louisiana. Julie is here from New Mexico. Great to see you. I think I've said. Have I said hello once? No. Tom, Tom Stocker's here from London. Hi, Tom again. Somebody else I know very well attends regularly. We have. Ali is here. Hi there. Ali from London in the uk, as is Tom. We've got. Latre is here from Laurel in Maryland. Good to see you again. Paul is here from Alberta in Canada. How are we doing for time? We're going to start in 90 seconds. Let's just do a few more shout outs, see if I can get through. Everybody, David is here from Tampa. Hi there, David. Good to see you. Alison's here from New Jersey in the us.

As is Pat from New Jersey as well. Perhaps you know each other. I don't know. Tisha is here from Baton Rouge. That's a cool sounding place. Ridwan is here, if I pronounce that right, from Johannesburg over in South Africa. Cheryl is here from Peachtree Corners in Georgia. Christina's here from la. Dion's here. Hi there. Dion from Aberystwyth, West Wales. Good to see you again. And we have. I don't know the full name, R.D. parker from Houston in Texas. If I've not given you a shout out yet. Just say something in the chat and I will do that. We have, I think about 30 seconds and we will kick off as soon as we've hit quarter two. And, yeah, we have so much to cover over the next three, these next three days. And I think advisory is getting more important than ever before, as you'll. As you'll soon see, in fact, today, today and the next two days, there's going to be probably more than any other previous year we've done this, an AI theme to this, because really, AI is gathering pace at such rapid and sometimes scary rate. We have. Rachel's here. Rachel Love is here from Phoenix in Arizona. Hi there, Rachel. Great to see you as well. I think. I think we are about to kick off, but please keep the chats coming and it's great to see people chatting. Do that throughout. My team are here, they will be monitoring the chat as well. And if you've got questions for the team, you can ask them in the chat as well. So please keep that coming. Right, let's get started. Let's officially start. Welcome to the business advisory masterclass 2025. My name is Mark Wickersham, in case you don't know who I am. And I'll tell you a bit more about my background and how I got into advisory just in a few minutes. But let's kick off with just some of the admin stuff, just so we know how these three days are going to work and it's great to see so many people here live. So just get the admin out the way quickly. We have got three days. Today is day one. And really today I'll be focused mainly on the opportunity, how we can spot opportunities. And we'll also talk about, well, what is advisory? How would we package that up so that we are all. So we know what we are doing, what it is as a service. So that's really the theme of today.

We've got two sessions with a short break in between. And then after the second short break, we have a special guest, my good friend Neil, Neil Criddle from the uk, running an amazing practice. Some of you might have seen a few clips of him if you were here as the Countdown music was playing. I know many people know Neil well. Anyway, extraordinary what he does. So that's today's session and we will wrap up with. With a Q and A at the end, but I will try to answer questions at various points throughout. Then tomorrow, tomorrow we'll be talking same timings tomorrow everything's going to Be the same. But tomorrow we'll look at pricing in more detail. How do we price a business advisory? How do we value price? And we'll also look at how do we sell it? How do we get clients wanting to buy from us? And day three, we're going to have the spot. The theme of day three is how do we do it? How do we deliver powerful advisory solutions to our clients? How do we add more value to our clients? We also have head of marketing Emily doing a session tomorrow on how to attract more clients for advisory. And on Thursday, she'll do a session at the end of the day on how we can use AI to help us with advisory, with building it, with promoting it, and so on. Okay, next quick announcement is, and I've just noticed Lesley is here from British Columbia. Hi there, Leslie. Good to see you. Great to see you back again. Also, if you've never been to one of our sessions before, one of the things we do is to help make the world a better place. We are part of B1G1. What that means is that for everyone who shows up live to one of our sessions, like the Masterclass this week, then we make a contribution on your behalf to a program project. And so this is what you need to do. It's really simple. If you've got your smartphone, hold it up to that QR code or Sarah's going to put a link, she's done that already, into the chat. If you click on the link or use your QR code, it'll take you to a screen that will show you four projects. Not the four on the screen. There'll be four different ones. And all I want you to do is just pick whichever project resonates most with you and click on the yellow button. There's no sign in.

There's a.

There's no email address, no opt in. You just click on the button and what happens is money comes out of our bank account to that project. So we will make a contribution to the project of your choice for being here live. So if you could do that, that would be awesome. As I said, link is also in the chat.

So these three days is all about business advisory. I say all about that because we'll inevitably talk about things like how we value prices and get into pricing. We'll talk a bit about marketing as well. But the overall theme is advisory. And I've been teaching advisory for many years now, and it's becoming more important than ever before that we do it because the world is changing fast. AI is changing fast. I know many of you here, I recognize the names, come along to my sessions on AI, come to our live streams on YouTube and so on regularly. And those of you that do, you will also be seeing that the pace of change, it's getting faster and faster. I was just doing some research this week on some of the latest articles in our profession about AI and the need to change. And let me just show you some of the things from that have come out just in the last couple of months. So the CPA, CPA.com have done a number of articles now, one in 2025 where they said that AI is fundamentally reshaping the accounting profession, accelerating the move toward more strategic advisory service. And I certainly agree with that. I'll give you my take on these in a second. So that's from the CPA.com and they regularly talk about the way the profession is changing and AI, the CPA practice advisor said this. They said AI won't replace all accountants, but accountants who use AI effectively will replace those who don't. Clients are expecting more than more than accurate reports. They want real time scenario planning and strategic financial guidance that help them navigate uncertainty and make better decisions. That's where the value of an experience accounting and finance professional come in. Just a couple of weeks ago, back on the 9th of June, Xero produced a report saying that nearly 3/4 of US accountants and bookkeepers report increased profits this past year. I hope that's you. I don't know. But Ben, the MD of North America0 said the widespread adoption of AI has been a turning point for the accounting profession, giving accountants an opportunity to scale their impact and take on a more strategic advisory role. The real value lies not just in working more efficiently, but working smarter, freeing up time to elevate the human element of the profession and in turn strengthen client relationships. And then I noticed just a few weeks back, Grant Thornton rolled out their new complete AI internal tool. And it's very clear that the big accounting firms are really heavily invested in AI and really heavily invested in using AI to, to move away from compliance towards advisory. And that's been happened for a few years now. And this tool in particular, they are rolling out to the top 10 accounting firms. And so that's going to affect all of us in the smaller firms because we're going to see it trickling down. We're going to see that the larger firms are really investing in AI, they're doing more advisory and you will need to too. So my take on all of that and what's happening in the World right now is, is the speed of change is extraordinary. We are finding that increasingly AI is doing data, anything to do with analyzing data, with processing data, it can do far quicker than we can. And so before the end of this decade, and that's not far away.

I'm sure that we will not be doing a lot of the compliance work. Things like back bank reconciliations will all be automated. Doing data entry, doing bookkeeping, completing tax terms. The AI will do that. And if you watch the pace of change the last year or so, you will see that's inevitable. That is going to happen. And so we have to change, we have to shift as a profession. And I certainly believe that whilst there are many people out there saying that accountants and bookkeepers will be replaced, there's regular reports on how jobs are disappearing and they are disappearing right now. It was interesting. I was watching a couple of podcasts just last week and a lot of big companies like Amazon are laying off thousands of middle managers. So they are very much at risk. And they keep citing that accountants and bookkeepers are near the top of the list to be replaced. I don't believe that. I think that it's a huge opportunity for us. It's an opportunity for us to move up the value curve. As Ron Baker talks about it, we have to create more value, we have to change. We cannot carry on doing all the things we've done in the past. We have to move because the world's moving so fast. But I think that's a great opportunity because we can use these tools, we can use AI to make it easier, easier than ever to do advisory. We can use, do use AI to free up our time. Because one of the things I found over the years is that people that say they don't do biz advisory, one of the biggest reasons is they don't have the time because of all the compliance work. Well, AI is going to make the compliance work much easier and eventually will disappear. So we have, we will have the time, which means we need to make sure that we have different skills. The things that we'll talk about over these three days, we need to change our skill set. We need to be more comfortable with, as we saw in some of those reports, that clients want more real time advice, strategic input. So for those of you that don't know who I am, just very quickly, my background is I am a chartered accountant from the UK. I entered the profession way, way back in 1988, went to work for a large multi partner firm in the uk. I qualified after three years As a chartered accountant. I then spent the next few years in their tax department, became their corporation tax manager. And then in 1996, I started my own accounting firm as a sole practitioner. And I built it up from initially a spare bedroom in my house. I hired my first employee. Two months later, we moved into bigger premises. I hired two more people. There were four of us. After 15 months, I outgrew moving to bigger premises. And I have a picture of, I think this is about three or four years in my accounting firm. This was my team. We just won the investor in people award. And that's me in the middle. I look a lot younger back then. And in the first two and a half, three years of my practice, I made so many mistakes, I had no idea what I was doing. I priced too low, I priced the wrong way. I was growing crazy fast. And you might have thought I was successful, but by the end of 1998, I was working crazy long hours and I wasn't making money. That all changed in November 1998 when I met someone called Steve pike, who's now a close friend of mine. He was one of my mentors. And I went on his three day accountants masterclass. And that was for me, the most significant event of my business career. It changed my mindset on how you run an accounting firm. And that took me on a path where in 1999, I systemized my accounting firm, put systems in place. I stopped doing compliance work. I changed the way I priced. I moved to value pricing by the end of 1999. That had a huge impact on my business. We'll talk more about that later on. But also, one of the things that Steve Talked about in November 1998 was this idea that we could do advisory or consulting work for clients. And I'd never thought of that. Growing up in the profession, I'd always done compliance work. Filling in tax returns, doing annual financial statements, audits. And I guess the only exciting thing I did was tax planning. I did love tax planning. But when Steve talked about how we could help people with advisory work, that changed so much for me back then. In fact, my first advisory project was just a month later in December 1998. And I found that my clients were very receptive to advisory. As I said, In 1999, I stopped doing compliance work. I systemized the business. The team did the compliance work. My last tax return I ever did was January of 1999. The last set of end of year financial statements was May 1999. I spent the next couple of years just doing advisory I loved it. And then I got the opportunity a little while later to then work with Stick Steve. We ran a network of accountants together right up until 2014, when I then set up the Value Pricing Academy. And for the last 10 years, I've been teaching accountants around the world how to create more value through things like advisory, how to create more value, how to communicate that value, how to capture that value in our price, how we can effectively move to value pricing, and how when we do that, we can start to attract better quality clients because we are pricing better and we're delivering more value. I've written several books on the subject of value pricing over my shoulder. You can't quite see them. They are here. Here are the books, some of the books I've written. My most recent one was Value Pricing for Accounting Professionals, published by Kogan Page. And perhaps you've read one or more of the books. So that's what I'm known for. I am known primarily for value pricing, helping people create and capture value in their price.

Okay, a few more important things then. Before we dive into advisory, the first thing I want to say is this, is that there's no magic button. Okay? What we're going to do over these three days, I'm going to share lots of frameworks with you. And these frameworks work if you do the work. And that's what we teach a lot in the Value Pricing Academy. We teach you frameworks that have been proven to work over and over again. But there's no magic button. You do have to do the work. Unfortunately, if you want to build an extraordinary accounting firm, it does take time. And so what we do is we teach people step by step, how to do that. Now, some of you will recognize this next slide because quite a few people have been to my sessions before and even been to the Biz Advisory Masterclass. But I often talk about the fact that when, whenever I do webinars, live streams, events like this, that there are a lot of people show up. But typically we can break people down into one of two types. And that is there are some people that come to these events and they take notes and they are a note taker. And that's great because taking notes is a good thing to do. I hope you're going to take notes as we go through these three days. But then there's the second type of person, which is the action taker. And it's the action taker that gets the results. It's the people that go away from these events, from training events, and implement something and do something. Because if there's no point in taking notes, if you go back to your office tomorrow and carry on doing all the same things that you've done before, hoping something magical will change. No, it won't. You have to change. You have to do something different. You have to take action with what you learn. So my rhetorical question for you is this. Are you a note taker or are you an action taker? And I may remind you of that question as we go through these three days, because I do find that. I do find that through the comments and the chats that go on, I sometimes get a sense of who are the real action takers. And they are people who end up being very successful. For example, I've just noticed in the corner of my eye that Neil is here. He's speaking later. I first met Neil, I think in very early 2020. He joined the Value Pricing Academy. And I could tell straight away that he was an action taker because he kept telling me what he'd done since the last live session. And his story is extraordinary. And you'll hear some of that later on. He's our very special guest. Okay, if it's all right with you, then later on, during the course of these three days, I will talk to you about an opportunity to enroll in a bigger program because we have so much we could talk about. And I'm going to cram in as much as I possibly can, but these three days, they will fly by pretty fast. And so if you decide that you want to go faster, if you want shortcuts, if you want to get results quicker, then I'm going to share with you an opportunity how you can do that. And I do know we have a number of Value Pricing Academy members here already. I've noticed several names. So if you are here and you're a ValuePrice Academy member, then let me know in the comments. What are some of the results you're getting? What has VPA done for you? What results are you getting? What successes have you had?

My team reads every single comment and they share them with me. So please let me know if you. If you are a Value Price Academy member, let me know. How's it going.

For you? Okay. A question I often get is, are there recordings, other recordings of these sessions? The answer to that is yes, there are recordings, but they'll only be available until the end of the week. We then take them down and the reason for that is because if we left them open up indefinitely, then very often people say, oh, I'LL watch that tomorrow. I'll watch it tomorrow. I've got a client coming, coming in. I'll watch it tomorrow. The trouble is tomorrow never comes. And some of the things we'll talk about could quite literally change your firm. And so much more important strategic stuff than having a client meeting. You could do that next week with the client. So yes, the recordings will be available. Sometimes we can't. There's things that crop up, but where possible I try to attend live. When you attend live, then you can ask me questions. You can ask the other speakers questions during the session sessions. You can also engage with other people and who knows, there may be some bonuses and handouts and things during the course of today and the next two days.

Questions I do encourage you, please do ask questions. I want to answer as many questions as I can. I'm here to help you. If you've got any questions about advisory, about value pricing, about any of the themes that we're talking about, please, please, please ask questions. But do it like this, if that's okay. If you've got questions, you'll notice that we have a chat box. Many of you are using the webinar chat, which is awesome. There's also a Q and A box. You'll see Q and A somewhere on the menu bar of Zoom. I recommend you open the Q and A up now. So if you have a question for me or later on a question for any other speaker, put it in the Q and A, please. That will be great. The reason for that is because as a speaker I get to see the list of the questions ready to answer them. Whereas as you can already tell, the chat sometimes goes crazy and so I may miss questions that are in the chat, I will try to look out for them, but it's not always possible if the chat really lights up, which it often does. So put your questions, if it's from me or other speakers in the Q and A. If you put a question in the webinar chat, that's fine because my team are here and they will pick it up. So if you've got particularly admin type questions, I can't find the link. For example, if that's an issue, put those sorts of things in the webinar chat and my team will deal with them. But for me and other speakers in the Q and A box and also if it's questions for me, if it's questions for the speakers, try to keep them short to one or two sentences. And the reason for that is when a when you're Doing live training and somebody puts a long question that takes a few minutes to read, it's very difficult live to take it all in. Usually there are several questions in that, so try to keep it short. If it's more than one question that you have, that's fine. Just make them separate questions so that'll make it easier for us to answer questions. And also make sure that you have the workbook. I think we emailed the workbook out to you. The workbook is a great place to put your notes and there's also some other great stuff in the workbook. So you should have that. If you haven't got the workbook, I guess my team will put a link to it for you. Right. I'm going to ask you a question before we start. And my question is this. I know some of you are doing business advisory great, like Neil is, but if you're not yet doing paid for business advisory, if you're not earning fees from business advisory, then my question is, why not? What's stopping you from doing paid for business advisory? Let me know in the chat and do that. Because my goal over these three days is to try to answer all the challenges, all the things that are stopping you taking this next step and, and moving towards advisory, which is partly we're going to have to create more value, as I said, because of the way AI is coming in, we have to move up the value curve. We saw that mentioned in a couple of those articles I shared earlier. But also when we do that, when we move up the value curve, when we do advisory work, then we can and should charge higher prices because there's greater value.

And also when we embrace and use AI, and you'll see this during the course of the next three days, when you use AI, one of the great things is that we can deliver advisory so much easier than ever before. We can deliver advisory services in so much less time, and yet it's more valuable. And so when you embrace moving up the value curve, when you embrace advisory, when you embrace value pricing, then.

You can significantly increase your margins, you can increase your revenue, increase your profits very significantly. Not only that, it's also more enjoyable, more fun. And one thing, that.

One thing that I don't know if you noticed it was in some of those articles I mentioned, one of the things that I think we're going to find over the next few years as we move into this AI world, as we're more digital and we started that process, if you know, if you remember, we started back in 2020 with lockdowns and covids. We now attend a lot more webinars than we ever used to. We live more in a virtual world. I know there are even some firms I work within the Evalu Pricing Academy who have virtual accounting firms. They deal with clients via Zoom. So we are increasingly moving to a digital world. We're having increasing impact of AI and what's happening not just in the profession, but in the population as a whole, what's happening is people are craving more human connection. And this is really important. We want human connection. We want to connect with other people. And the impact for us in our businesses is that's the same with clients. Clients are going to crave that connection. They're going to want to connect with you more. And that means that the accountants and the bookkeepers that just want to sit behind their desk processing tax returns, doing the bookkeeping, the data entry and then sending it via a report or email to clients, they're the ones that are going to find themselves replaced.

The ones that want to work with clients, that want to work closer with clients, are the ones that are going to be the most valued and will earn the higher fees. So that means we have to be comfortable with simply talking to clients more often. And why wouldn't we want to do that? We should be talking to our clients. And when we can do that in different ways, in ways that they want to hear, helping them run their business, helping with strategy, then they're going to. It's going to build loyalty, we're going to get more referrals, they'll get more value, we can charge higher prices. Everything gets much easier and more fun. So we're going to see these themes coming out over today, tomorrow and Thursday. Right? Let's talk about, let's start to dive in and talk about the challenges. I can see a few people are commenting on reason why they're not doing advisory yet. I'm going to ask my team to summarize all of this and I'm going to read it overnight and make sure that if I haven't covered it today, we're going to talk about it on Wednesday and Thursday. So we will cover your challenges. And I can see, for example, Sarah says how to set up packaging, pricing and offers. We will talk a bit about that today, but what else will we talk about? What are the challenges? Well, from all my research of teaching advisory work, I found the challenges that we face in the profession is firstly, understanding what it is. What do we mean by business advisory and how do we spot opportunities? How do we, as Sarah said in the chat just now, how to package it up into a service that you can sell and how to communicate the value so people want to buy. And we're going to cover all those today. Other challenges, how to sell advisory without the uncomfortable selling, how to calculate a highly profitable value based price. And we're going to do that tomorrow. That's the theme of tomorrow. And then how do we do it? How do we deliver advisory with confidence? Because particularly we've been brought up in the profession to fill in tax returns, to do bookkeeping, to do annual financial statements. And this doing advisory for some people feels like it's outside comfort zone because it needs some different skills. So we will go really deep Thursday on how you do that, how you deliver advisory with confidence. And we'll also be talking about how to find, find the right people, the right clients, the right prospects, and turn them into people who want to buy your advisory. So let's deal with the first issue, which is, well, what is advisory? What is business advisory? What are we talking about over these three days? And I think it really helps to get a definition of what it is.

And I think advisory is really six things. There's six core elements. Not that you need to do all six with every client when you're doing advisory, but they are all part of the advisory process. When I say business advisory, let's start with a broader definition and then we'll go through the six things. So business advisory, it's a term that I know it's thrown around a lot and increasingly people are talking about it, but without really a definition. I think at a broad level it's simply the act of giving businesses advice. Okay, that's what it says. But what does that really mean? And it can mean a whole bunch of different stuff. And to some extent you need to decide based on your interests, your clients, your skill set. So advisory work could be business advisory could be advising clients on how to build an exit strategy and sell their business. Advisory could be how to automate and systemize their business. We are very good with systems because we're very systematic in our thinking in the profession. Advisory could be how do we help them grow their business. Advisory could be how we help them make more money, increase their cash, their cash flow. And it can be all of those.

You'll need to decide when you create your advisory service. Is, is it really niche and special specialized? I know some people, for example, who did some training that I did a few years back on how we can be price consultants because There's a huge opportunity to help businesses with pricing. Most small businesses have no idea how to price and yet price is the fastest way to change profits. So you could, when you build out your business advisory, you could make it broad where it's helping businesses to become more, more profitable, to grow, to be more valuable, to be more efficient, more fun to work. But equally, you could choose, if you want to, to start to really narrow that down to specifically helping people with their pricing or with growing their business or with systemizing their business. That's entirely up to you. But I'm going to really in the main have a more broad focus during the course of these three days as to what that could be. So with that broader in mind.

What I would suggest is the key elements of advisory. And remember, you don't have to do all six of these, but if you're doing a well rounded, completed business advisory program with a client, it would probably cover most of these six. So let's go through them. Number one. Number one.

The starting point of advisory work is we need to do some form of goal setting. Because if you're doing advisory work that's aimed at helping a client and their business be more successful, then we first have to understand, well, what's success in the first place? Because success is different for everybody. Success is different. We need to have an understanding of what success the client, what do they want to achieve? What's important to them? Are they looking to grow their business? Are they looking to just simply have a better work life balance? Are they looking to sell their business? What is their goal? What is their goals in life? What do they want out of their personal life? Because many business owners find themselves working crazy long hours and not seeing enough of the family, the kids growing up and so on. And so one of the things they might want to do is get more control of their life so they can do the things, the things that they've always want to do. Travel more, for example. So we have to understand what's their personal goals and then we have to understand what's their business goals, what are they looking to achieve with their business? Are they looking to grow it? If so, by how much? By when, if they're thinking about selling it. Well, when are they thinking of selling it? Because we need to know this. We can't start to work with them with advisory and help them be more successful until we understand where they are going. And that's the goal setting piece. And I would suggest to you that when you're doing advisory work, it starts with goal setting. And it doesn't just start with goal setting, but it should be reviewed on an annual basis because goals sometimes change, priorities change.

And on that point, one of the things that I think is powerful advisory work and the way and the way you create it and package up, which we'll talk about later, is it should be recurring work. It's not a one off thing, it is recurring. And as we know, recurring work is much more powerful because we have to, we only sell it once. And as long as we deliver value every month, the client will happily keep paying. So we need to make sure we are delivering recurring advisory. We can still do one off projects. Sometimes we might be doing a monthly recurring service with a client through advisory and then we identify one month that another thing that needs doing is a separate project. And we could then have a cross sell and sell them a specific project like setting up a website for them. But I would suggest you that when you're packaging up and creating your advisory, think of it as a recurring service. Okay, so number one, goal setting. Number two, the second element of a well rounded advisory solution is some element of strategic planning. So what is that? What is that? I remember many years ago I went to Durham University Business School, which is one of the universities in the UK that specializes in things like MBAs and strategy. And I remember the professor there talking through a number of different definitions of what is strategy. And the one that he ended up.

With.

Was the simplest one and it's the one that resonated with me. And he said it's the best definition. And I certainly agree because sometimes we see these words, we hear these words like business advisory, strategy and we think, well, what are they? And if we don't know what they are, it becomes scary. But really it's not that difficult. So strategy, the definition that really stuck with me is strategy is we have to figure out point A, where is the business right now.

Then we have to figure out where's point B. And point B is where they want to get to, that's the goal setting, where they want to get to, where are they now, what are the issues right now, the challenges, the frustrations, the pain points in their business that could be they're working crazy long hours, they're not making enough money and this is where they want to get to. And strategy, strategy is simply all the various things that they can do to get from A to B. That's it. So it might be strategy might include putting in place a website, it might be creating a lead generation system, it might be building a sales force. These are all strategies. And really the strategy comes out of understanding, first of all, where are they right now, where are the challenges right now, the problems, the issues, and where they want to get to the goal setting. So strategic planning is a core element of advisory. And you might be thinking, that sounds scary. I don't know how to do strategic planning with a client, particularly if it's a client that you may not understand their industry. Perhaps it's an engineering business and you don't really deal with many engineering businesses and you have no idea what is strategy for engineering for an engineering firm? Well, as you'll soon see, it's actually really easy. It is really easy because AI makes it really, really easy. Okay, so that's number two. We've got goal setting and we have strategic planning. A third element is forecasting, helping the client to predict the future, to look at their forecasts. And this is something I know is comfort zone for you. It's cash flow forecasting, it's profit forecasting, it's forecasting the balance sheet and so on. And there's various tools that we can use to do forecasting. Number four, which is also, I think comfort zone, is reporting or management reporting, that's delivering financial information on a regular basis, not waiting until the end of the year, the financial year, but instead, perhaps monthly, perhaps even more frequently monthly reports which might show them summaries of the key numbers in their business. It might show, we might include in the reports trends, we might include ratios and so much more. So that's something that is probably comfort zone. You probably even have software that does that for you. But certainly as part of advisory, we want to be creating some sort of financial reports for them. Okay, that's four. Number five. Number five is ongoing advice. So that's. I said to you just now that we need to be having people craving more human connection. That means we need to have more conversation with clients, more conversations about things that are really important to them, which is their business and success. And so as part of advisory, we should be talking to them regularly, at least meeting once a month. And as part of those ongoing meetings, it's about then giving ongoing advice. It's about interpreting, for example, the numbers in those reports, explaining, explaining to them what the numbers mean. It's about proactively telling them when we think that something's going wrong in their business because the metrics are going in the wrong direction. It's about helping them to see whether or not they're staying on track towards the Goals and the strategic plan that they've set. So it's giving them advice, it's giving them ideas, it's helping to understand the numbers. That's the ongoing advice piece. And again, like strategic planning, for some people in the profession, that can seem scary because, okay, some of it might be easy. Hopefully interpreting the numbers is easy. I'm hoping that we, we can have conversations around the numbers themselves, but also then giving some advice on things they could do and to grow the business, to improve the cash flow and so on. And if any of that feels scary, again, the great news is, as you will see, AI makes it so easy. The ongoing advice, just like the strategic planning, AI really means there's no excuse. So let's just recap on the first five. Goal setting, strategic planning, forecasting, reporting, ongoing advice. Number six, accountability. And this is the one that I think of. All of these is often overlooked or not considered, and yet this is one of the easiest things to do, and yet one of the most valuable. So what do I mean by accountability? Accountability is when you work with a client on, let's say, their strategy. You have a strategic planning session, you create a strategy. And one of the things that you'll want to do is create an action plan for the client to work through. We'll look at it in more detail on Thursday, on day three. And.

What I found when I did advisory work in the early days was that I'd end up the meeting, I'd give them the action plan, they agreed on the actions, they agreed what needs to be done, and then we'd agree to meet again a month later. A month later, I would show up at the meeting and I'd say to them, okay, how have you got on with the action plan? You said that you were going to do these three things over the last few weeks. How do you get on? And very often the client will say something like this, oh, Mark, do you know what? I meant to do that? But after our meeting, I got back to the office and there was a call from a client. There was a problem. I got sucked into this problem. I was firefighting. It took a couple of days to fix it and sort it. And then I just got back into doing the stuff. I just forgot all about it.

And that's what happens. We have these great intentions of doing things, the things we need to do to build a more successful business. But life gets in the way. Customers get in the way, clients get in the way. And we often find ourselves reacting to other people's issues, reacting to customers. Rather than building a great business. And so one of the ways that we can help people is the accountability piece. It's, it's really coaching and it can be as simple as. And this is what I would do. I had the meeting with the client, we'd have the action plan, we'd meet again, we'd put a date in the calendar to meet up, let's say a month later. And then I'd give it a few days, perhaps four or five days, and I'd call the client and I say, hi there, George, I'm just ringing. We had our meeting back on Friday and I'm just ringing to see you said that one of the things that's really important is to hire your first salesperson and also create this lead page. And I'm just trying to see how you get on with that. And what I often found was that the response would be, I'm so pleased you've called me, Mark. I know I was meant to do that. I just got sucked into something that cropped up after the meeting. I'm glad you called me. I'd forgotten about it. I need to do that. And that's accountability. It's simply holding people accountable to do the things that they said they know they need to do to build the business they want, to build the life they want. And that's so valuable and it's so easy. It's just simply picking up the telephone and having a call once every couple of weeks to see how they're getting on with the plan. So they're the six elements of a well rounded advisory solution. You do not have to all of those with every client. And later on, I think Sarah asked, we will look at how you might package up advisory work. And when you package advisory work up, when you think about what advisory is to you, then having those six things in mind will help you to think about what you will want to put in with packages. So let's talk about how can we spot opportunities to help clients, because certainly not every one of your clients will be open to business advisory. I would guess that probably a maximum of 10% of your client base will be open to it, and that's fine. But even just 10% of your clients, if you start to do advisory work.

You might find that they end up paying you 2, 3, 4 times the amount for advisory work as they do for compliance work. And if you just chunk the numbers and the mass, you'll see that would make a significant difference to the results of your firm. So you don't need to be working with every client, you just need to be working with 5, 10%. So how do you spot the right clients? How do you spot opportunities? And so I'm going to give you, we're going to work on a case study now, a little case study to show you some of the little techniques that we can use to help us find opportunities clients. And I'm going to introduce you to a business, a business owner. His name's Jeremy and Jeremy owns a engineering business. It's actually a water jet cutting business. It is a fictional business. It doesn't really exist. This is Jeremy stood next to his water jet cutter. And this is a niche form of engineering. And we're going to look at over the course of today and later on as well, we might pick up on this tomorrow and Thursday. Will we use this case study as a recurring theme over these three days because I think it'll help you to really start to grasp some powerful concepts that you can use when you are helping clients.

And I chose this particular example because I remember when I was running my accounting firm way back in the 1990s, that one of my clients that I got on really well with did run a water jet cutting business. And I did some advisory work with him. And I found it difficult because I knew nothing about water jet cutting. I thought it was fascinating when he explained what it did. But in terms of the strategy, the advisory, I found it quite difficult at the time because I didn't have many engineering clients. But now, as you will see over these three days, it's really, really easy because we have AI to help us.

So this is Jeremy, he founded this business and he even has a website for his business. It's called Precision Wave waterjet. And what we're going to do is we're going to spend a few minutes now looking at some of his numbers and looking at what we can learn from the numbers because at the end of the day we should always start with numbers. We're accountants, we're bookkeepers, we are the numbers experts. Let's start with comfort zone stuff first. Let's start with numbers. And then as you get more confident with advisory work, you might start to go down more specialist areas. But always root things in numbers because that's your credibility, that's your expertise. And so a little bit about Jeremy's business. He's been 10 years in business and I'm going to share with you the numbers for the last five years of his business. And one of the key things he's done recently is he Started off with a second hand water jet cutter but as the business progressed he, he. Two years ago he purchased a brand new waterjet cutter for 300,000 with a five year loan for 200,000. And we've got his financial statements, I've put them in the workbook. But actually I also have for you, I've created a, this is a case study as a, with a three page document. Let me just show you it and I'm going to get some Sarah to put a link to it. Just bear me a second. Yeah, Sarah's going to give you a link to this document which you may, if you want to have it available, you don't need to. But this just, this is a little bit of information about Jeremy's business, other people in the business, where they're based, what they do, some other key information and it's got the financial metrics that we're going to look at. So Sarah's done that. The case studies is, the link to it is in the chat and you might want to grab that because, and the reason, the reason why is over these three days we are going to look at how we can use AI to help us. And what you might want to do is use some of the AI stuff that we talk about. You might want to try it out for yourself on this case study business. So that's why I've given you that case study because then you could feed that into an AI system like ChatGPT and then you can do some practicing. Okay, so that's the case study. Let's look at the numbers which is what we're good at. So we've got here the profit and loss account for the last five years. We can see the sales has fluctuated a little bit. We've got direct cost, gross profit, all the key things there in the profit loss account. You'll see them in the case study, you'll see them in the workbook. And we also have the balance sheet.

So when you have this financial information, what can you do with it? What would be useful to better understand the business? And one of the things I recommend you do as a great starting point, it's really simple to do. There's no rocket science here whatsoever. One of the things that you should do is trend analysis. Just look at the trends, look what's going on in the business and you should look at the trends of all the key metrics. So for example, you might look at the trends in sales and in this particular case if you saw the trends then you can see that there's been a downward trend, but it starts to go back up again. And what I would do, if I was working with Jeremy, I would use this to start asking some questions. I'd say to Jeremy, I've noticed that the trend in sales has been going down up until a year ago. What's the reason for that? And it may be the client doesn't know and they want help with that, or maybe there's a reason for it. You want to ask questions. You want to start to understand what might be the reasons. Does the client know what the reasons might be? If they don't, then we should perhaps work with them to try and identify what's going on with the business, what's going wrong. So definitely look at trends in sales, definitely look at trends in gross profit where that's appropriate. Obviously, in some industries it's not, but in many it is. So look at the trends in gross profit. And we see here in this case that it's been downward until the last two years. It's going back up again, which is good. I wonder why. We could look at trends in net profit, and we should definitely be asking questions about this. So that's the first technique that we should use. It's really simple. It's not rocket science. Just look at the data, look at the trends, create some graphs and charts to see what's going on, and then just ask the client questions to see if they understand why those trends are taking place. So that's the. That's where I'd always start. Start with trends. The second thing that I would do when I look at numbers, the second thing is ratios. Ratio analysis is really, really powerful, much more than trends. The trends are great, but the trouble is with those trends is they're only looking at each metric in isolation. And what we really need to do is look at how different metrics move compared to each other other. And with ratios, we can look at a number of different categories of ratios. We can look at the profitability ratios. We can look at liquidity ratios. We can look at efficiency ratios and investment ratios. So the profitability is the ratios on how profitable they are. Liquidity affects cash efficiency, is how well they're using their assets. And then investment ratios, we'll look at that in a short while with roi. So what should we measure? What ratios? Well, to some extent, that will depend. It will depend on the client, because there are some ratios that are particularly important for some types of clients and not others. For example, it may be ratios around stock, as we call it in The UK or inventory in the US that might be really important. Things like the quick ratio might be important to certain types of business, like a manufacturing business, but obviously not appropriate if a client doesn't hold stock or inventory. So obviously we'll choose the ratios that are relevant to that particular industry. But there are certain ones that apply to most and the ones that we might look at might include the following. So certainly gross profit margin, a really important ratio. You should definitely be measuring this. And this is simply the gross profit divided by sales. It's not difficult. So we should definitely measure that systematically. Usually most accounts production software will chuck that number out and not just measure the number in isolation, but also the trends. Look at the trends of ratios. And so when you see.

Changes in gross profit margin, let's say there's downward. If margins are going down then that's a worrying sign and we should always have a conversation with the client to ask why. Why are the margins going down? And there's a number of different reasons for that. We can start to drill down. It could be a pricing issue, for example, it could be an efficiency issue. There's a number of reasons. It could be a cost issue. There are various reasons that impact on margins and simply asking the question of the client is a great starting point. So let's measure gross profit margin. Let's also look at the trends and we can with the trend, we can look at the, the trend in terms of the absolute gross margin and also the percentage which is why on the right hand side there are lines and bars. Okay, that's that one. We we should look at the net profit margin which is net profit before interest and tax divide by sales. Again a really simple metric and an important profitability one. And again we should be looking at the trends in that. And in the case of Jeremy's business it plummeted in year three years ago. And so we definitely want to find out why. Now it may be you immediately know that there is a reason why by the way, we'll look at in a bit. One of the things that we have to do is when we look at these ratios, when we look at the trends, we need to look for explanations. Sometimes, sometimes we have to adjust the numbers. You'll see why in a second. So we're going to come back to net profit. Another really powerful one that you should measure. If the business does debtors, we call it in the UK accounts receivable is debtor days or accounts receivable days. This is a really important one for anybody that has customers Owing money, simple ratio. Again, we should look at the trends because if the trends are going in the wrong direction, if the trend is going up, if it's taking longer to collect money from customers from our credit sales, then if we don't deal with that, then at some point we'll run out of cash. And so you should be measuring that. You should be measuring that at least annually in this case. But as you're working with clients with advisory, measure it every single month, look at the trends and if you see a worrying upward trend, in other words, it's taking longer, more days to get paid by customers, then have a conversation with the client to find out why and what can they do about it.

Another great one is asset turnover. For some reason my graph has disappeared. But asset turnover is an efficiency ratio. Asset turnover is simply the fixed assets divided by, sorry, the sales divided by fixed assets. It's how often those fixed assets, we turn them over into sales, how efficiently we take those fixed assets and create sales from them. Sorry, charts disappeared. I apologize for that. And then finally we have our return on investment, which is a really cool calculation. This is in some respects the most powerful for certain types of business. One of the most powerful ratios, and.

What'S interesting about this ratio is you can either use the formula on the screen, but actually it's a multiplication of two other ratios. If you take the net profit margin ratio, the net profit margin and you multiply it by the asset turnover, sorry, my graph disappeared. But if you multiply those two ratios together, you get the ROI or ratio analysis. And what's important about the ROI measure is it's basically a combination of looking at profitability, how well are you managing the business to manage the business and fixed costs and so on. How well are you managing the business to produce profit and how well are you utilizing those fixed assets, the fixed assets and the current assets, how well are you utilizing those assets to create sales? And you multiply the two together, you can look at the trends and that'll show some really interesting stuff. And as we can see, there is a big drop in three years ago. But I also said to you that we do sometimes have to adjust the numbers. And I don't know if you spotted this or not, but when we looked at the net profit, it dropped significantly two years ago. Why? Well, as I put at the outset in this case study, and you might have it in front of you, is in this particular case, Jeremy went out and replaced his or decided to buy his first brand new water jet cutting machinery for 300,000. And he financed it with a long term loan of 200,000. And so what impact does that have on the financial statements? Well, it has impact in terms of interest will go up, interest on the loan and also depreciation will go up on that expense. Expensive asset. And so the depreciation and the interest is going to distort the net profit. And so another measure that we could use when you see things like that is we could replace net profit with ebitda. So EBITDA is earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortization. And so if we take net profit, this is what it was. And EBITDA is earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortization. In other words, we can then redo these measures by adding back the tax and the depreciation. And when we do that, it's actually not as drastically bad as it was before. So the key point I'm making here is that when we look at ratios, when we look at the trends, when we see significant changes, certainly we should talk to the client, but also using our skills with numbers, we should look at them and see, well, has something happened in the business that might be impacting. So before we panic and say this profit, this business is unprofitable, about to go bust, then it may well be because of the, in this case the purchase of machinery.

Okay.

Hopefully that's helped, given you some ideas on how we can, how we can start to analyze and interpret numbers more. But if you are still finding that difficult, then this is where AI comes to our rescue. AI just makes this so easy.

So let's look at how we could analyze those numbers using a tool, a large language model like CHAT GPT. And so what I'm going to do at this point is shut my laptop. I don't need that. What I'm going to do is we're going to go to Chat GPT. I'm going to run a prompt, I'm going to run a prompt and I'm going to feed it that information, those profit loss, account and balance sheet and, and then.

Yeah, we'll see what Chat GPT comes up with. So if, if I just go to spare a second, yeah, here we are in ChatGPT. I'm going to kind of assume, I'm going to assume everybody is familiar with large language models. You know what ChatGPT is and you use it, or you use Claude or Gemini or some other large language model. And if you don't, if, if there's anything I say which doesn't make sense, just Ask the question in the Q and A. I will at some point today answer all, all the questions. But I'm, I know that from teaching Chat GPT and AI over the last two years, I've seen a significant shift. Now, up until, up until nine months ago when I did webinars, I found, or even less than that. Back end of last year, 33% of the profession still didn't have access, hadn't even used Chat GPT, let alone used it for sensible things. Anyway, I'm going to assume that you do. I'm going to assume that you understand ChatGPT. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to feed it a prompt and I'm going to get that prompt from a prompt library. So those of you that follow me regularly when it comes to AI, I'm a big fan of systems of processors. We should look to systemize as many processors as possible. And that includes how we use AI. It's a great way to systemize processors. And what we should do is, is for any common things that we do in our firm where we can use AI, let's systemize it by creating a standard prompt that we can just reuse every single time. And then you just need to decide, well, where do you store that prompt? You want to store it in a prompt library. And there are a number of ways that you can store things in a prompt library. But one of the things that you could do is you could create your own prompt library. There are some tools that you could use for creating a prompt library, or if you are in the value pricing academy. We are about to launch officially this month.

A prompt library for members, a prompt library that I use myself, as we'll see in a second. So for some of you, this is, this, this piece of software here is something that's completely brand new. Only a few people have got it so far. And it does a number of things. It's got a dashboard, it's got a trail map if you like. It's designed to help accounting firms build a great firm by accessing training for all the core areas of a accounting business. But what I'm going to go to today is the prompt library itself. We're going to focus on prompts, and I've written over the last years, year or so, lots of specific prompts specifically for accounting firm owners that can do amazing things really, really quickly and save us huge amounts of time. And we're going to look at a few of those during the course of the three days. And I'M going to start off with.

One I just wrote this morning for this case study. So I'm just going to click on my prompts and open up this one which is for the water jet cutting example. So the way the prompt library works is it's a library of standard prompts which you can then simply grab a prompt, copy it to your clipboard, go to ChatGPT and paste it. And I'll just read this to you very quickly. It says you're a financial analyst with expertise in evaluating business performance through key financial ratios. I've attached two images showing both the profit and loss account and the balance sheet. So let me just do that. Let me just put those in there. I'm just attaching basically screenshots of the numbers I showed on the slide I did see Anne put into the Q and A. How do I get the numbers for this case study? The numbers are in two places. Number one in the workbook that we sent you by email. And I think the link may be in the chat or go to the chat and at the end of the chat Sarah put in there the link to a case study. So just click on that case study and you should be able to grab all the numbers. If you can't find it, just put it in the chat. Sarah will help you out. Right, so here we go. I've just fed it two images of the numbers. So one of the things you will find if you're not familiar with large language models like Chat GPT, it's really good at analyzing data just from pictures. You can take a screenshot which is what I did. I took a screenshot of the slides. Okay, so I've attached two images showing both the profit loss account and balance sheet for years 6 to 10. Here is some information about the business. It's a water jet cutting business that started 10 years ago. In year eight, the owner purchased a new water jet cutter for 300,000 with a five year loan. And then it's got.

The task. For some reason it's not done. The page breaks, not that it matters. Task I want you to, I want you to analyze the data. I want you to analyze the data in the attached images and carry out these steps. Step one, create a table that shows the trends in each sale, each of sales, gross profit and net profit. And then provide some commentary on the trends. Then I want you to calculate the ratios to two decimal points and create another table showing the ratios for each of. And this is the ratios I gave you earlier. And, and then step three, comment on the ratios and give an assessment of the business. What is it doing well at? What are the concerns? What are the recommendations? So if I press this button, it'll go away. It'll analyze those two, which is doing now. It'll analyze those two images of the last five years. And now it's creating a table for me. And I can tell you I know this case study inside out. I've used it for, for a few years now. They are the right numbers for years six through to 10. So we have it in this table here. And then it's giving me some commentary. So it's saying that sales start at 810,000 in year six and gradually fall to 650 in year nine. There's a modest recovery in year 10. We saw that on the graph, if you remember. So the business experienced a dip, but it's starting to bounce back. Likewise, gross profit trend is dropping from 272 to 220 between 6 and 8. There's a slight lift in year 9 with a further improvement in year 10. This suggests the business has been able to maintain its gross margin quite well despite sales fluctuations. And then it's giving us the net profit trend. This big drop in year eight aligns with the purchase of the new machine and associated appreciation and interest, which significantly impacted profitability. So interesting that ChatGPT picked that up. As I said that sometimes we have to analyze the reasons for the numbers and it picked that up because I simply put it in as part of the the context here. This is what I put on that earlier slide. So it's picked that up nicely, which is good. Then it's gone through to work on next step, step two. And what it's done is if I just expand the table, it's done a table of all of those ratios which you could, you can see the trends in those ratios. You could turn it into graphs if you wanted. And I know they are the right numbers. I did a test again earlier. ChatGPT is pretty good with the math. It was reported two years ago that it's not good at math. It's got so much better. And so yeah, these numbers I know are right. Let me collapse the table and then what it's done. And I know you could do that yourself on an Excel spreadsheet. I know that's not difficult. But where it then gets really powerful as well is it can start to give us and analyze those numbers. So it's telling us that.

Gross profit margin, it held strong all the years 30 to 35%. Year 10 even sees a margin of 35%, the best in the five year period. Okay, that's interesting. This shows consistent cost control on direct inputs. Receivables improved significantly to 24 days in year 10. This signals better credit control and cash collection, improving liquidity. And then it's got some stuff around the EBITDA margin. So it's got some good analysis of what's going well in the business. So when we meet the client, when I meet Jeremy, I could say some positive stuff around these particular measures and make him feel good. But there's also some, there's some areas for concern that I'd want to talk to the client about. Certainly net profit margin as we saw it fell sharply in year seven, hitting just 0.414%.

And that coincides with the depreciation and the interest costs. Even in year 10, the margin is 6%. It hasn't returned to earlier levels. So two years down the line, this investment in the machinery is not producing the results they had before the investment. So there may be a conversation around, around that. We've got.

Analysis of ROI return investment indicating poor capital efficiency. The large asset investment hasn't yet paid off. I just said that. Yep, absolutely. And then again we've got some information about the asset turnover and then finally it's given some recommendations that we could then talk to the client about. So perhaps it's about improving equipment utilization, perhaps it's reviewing the fixed cost cost structure, perhaps it's monitoring debt and depreciation impacts, perhaps it's tracking ROI quarterly, perhaps it's driving sales growth.

So I hope you can now see that with a little bit of knowledge about.

How to interpret numbers, trends, ratios, but also then using the help of a large language model like ChatGPT or even you may have specific software tools for the accounting profession for advisory work that has AI built in. Most software companies are building AI in now. It actually makes it really, really easy for you to analyze a set of financial statements and get some interesting insights. Which means that when you then go and talk to the client.

You'Ve got things to talk about. It's going to point you in the right direction of the questions to ask the things to look at the areas of concern concern which is going to make your life much, much easier. You can have these conversations that perhaps you didn't do in the past when all you did was talk about the tax return or the bookkeeping. Now we can have more deeper questions.

So that's another point I was going to make was, and this Is these are just simple conversations we can have with all of our clients. One of the things that I would encourage you to consider building, building into your systems is every time you go through, let's say, end of year financial statements, do some analysis like this, have a different conversation with the client. Some clients that I can guarantee they'll all find it valuable. Some clients will say, this is so valuable, please tell me more. I want to know how to fix this. And this is the client saying, do you know, I'm ready to buy some advisory services. If you can help me fix these problems, I will buy from you. So what I did back in the year 1999, 2000 in my accounting firm, I built in a system we'll talk a little bit more about tomorrow. But I systematically spoke to every single client as part of their NDV or financial statements to go through some numbers. And what I found was that every client got huge value in the conversation. And some of them went on to buy advisory. It was about 5 or 6% went and bought advisory advisory. Just because I had a systematic, different conversation with every single client. Okay, so that's spotting the opportunity. Let me just show you.

I've shown you1 AI prompt. We're going to go deeper on AI during the course of these few days, I'm going to show some more prompts. For example, one of the things that I've done is I'm going to talk about in a special session on day three, how you can create a business plan for a client in less than 20 minutes. And we can do it through using AI, using large language models. I created for this particular business, a comprehensive. It was a 12 page plan going through all the core elements of a business plan. Something which, when I used to run my accounting firm, if I did business plans for clients, they would typically spend, I would spend probably a full day, probably multiple days creating a business plan. It was a long, long process. We can now take a day or two's worth of work down to 20 minutes. When we are using AI, this is the size of the opportunity that we have in the profession right now. This is why I'm an optimist. Yes, everyone's saying that AI will replace accountants and bookkeepers. No, it won't. We just have to adapt the ones that are ready to adapt, like you, because you're here. When we decide to capture or use this AI to our advantage, we can do some extraordinary things for our clients if we can create business plans in just a few minutes and then we're able to talk about the value to the client. Then you can start to see. I hope that advisory should be your most profitable work. I hope you don't keep timesheets because that's a different story. But if you're a bookkeeper charging $75 an hour for bookkeeping, for advisory work, you should be charging way more than that, at least three or four times that, because that's what it's worth. And then when you're able to reduce the time to do stuff because you're using AI, then your effective hourly rate can just skyrocket. You could be earning easily 500, $1,000 an hour because you're then compressing what you're doing. Don't charge on that, by the way. Don't charge the. Do not charge based on the 20 minutes to create the business plan. Charge based on the value of that business plan to the client. That's when we combine creating value with AI with value pricing. That's when margins go crazy.

So.

We'Ll talk about that more on day three. Day three is more focused on how we deliver advisory. What I'm going to do is, so far we've looked at how to spot the opportunity. And then what we'll do on Thursday is we'll say, okay, so what do we do next? What do we do with the client? How can we go deeper? And you can do this stuff. This is Jeremy again, outside of his engineering business. And that might be you. That's his bookkeeper. That could be you. Imagine how you would feel when you've been helping a client. And perhaps Jeremy's goal was to buy a red Ferrari and you've been working with him for a year and now he's bought his red Ferrari. He's so proud that he's done that and you helped him to do that. Just imagine the loyalty you'll get from clients. Just imagine how pleased you'll feel when you've made that difference to people's lives. And you can. I know there are. I've worked with thousands of accounting firms over the last 20 years and I've heard so many stories of accounting firms that have changed clients lives. That's the power of advisory. And you can absolutely do that. Okay, so what we're going to talk about next is, is we now need to figure out.

How we package this up. What are we actually selling? And that's what we're going to talk about after we've got a short break coming up. Now that's what we're going to talk about in the Next section we're going to talk about how do we package up advisory work. And I'm also got some questions to answer as well. But we are going to have a quick break. We're going to break for a couple of minutes, probably three minutes. Just so in case you need a bathroom break. If you want to get a coffee. But don't go anywhere. Don't leave the zoom. I'm just gonna play some music for three minutes and then as soon as the three minutes is up, I will then probably start answering some of the questions that have come into the Q and A. In the meantime, if you don't need a break, perhaps in the chat, what's been the most valuable thing you've learned so far? I'd love to know. I will get all of your feedback overnight. So please let me know in the comments what was valuable. Right. I'll be back in three minutes. See you very soon.

Everything's the same Just a little.

Means nothing if we don't give it up we got it we can cry when it's over.

We can cry when it's over.

I love it was special but baby can't be stopping.

We can cry when it's over.

We can cry when it's over.

We can cry that it's over.

Hey, welcome back. Okay, let's move on to the second part, which is pricing. But I will answer some questions first. I think that Marty said, if there's time, can I show the slide from earlier? Yes, here is the slide. I'll keep that up for a few seconds. So, Marty, I hope you're here. Grab that. Andy says, would you suggest to clients that there is a financial penalty if they don't stick to the action plan? For example, a donation to charity. Interesting idea, Andy. I don't know. I don't think you need to have penalties for them. I think that just simply the accountability is they will because they're doing things that they know they need to do. The guilt and the need to do those things which should be sufficient.

Ali said, what is the monthly recurring advice for a restaurant? Can you provide some examples? Because it's scary, as you said just now, I can't go into detail in other industries just because we've only got so little time together and we have to cover how to package things for advisory, how to price advisory, how to do advisory. But I picked an engineering business because I know that many accounting firms have engineering clients and sometimes they can be quite tricky. But basically, Ali, everything I teach, I said earlier, there's no Magic button. But the frameworks work and it's the same with AI. And we're going to look at loads more AI prompts. And so it doesn't matter whether it's a restaurant, whether it's an engineering business, whether it's a corner shop, whether it's a software company. Essentially, once you know the right questions to ask, once you've got the AI tools to do it, then you just run. You just run the frameworks. If you are using the prompts that I've created in the prompt library, I know we have a lot of VPA members here already, then you just run the prompts and it'll give you all the answers, whatever industry. Next question was from Angel. I've heard that we can't rely on ChatGPT math calculations. Has this changed? Yes. So this was a big thing two years ago. It's got much, much better now. It does mean we have to have an understanding of different models in ChatGPT. If you are doing complex math, then you would probably want to have advanced reasoning models using code interpreter and so on. And I don't want to go in too much detail today about how to use ChatGPT and other LLMs, but basically it has got much, much better. You do need to use your own skills with numbers to make sure you're happy with the numbers. So when I got it to do that prompt just now, I ran it earlier and I just looked at the numbers compared to what I think they should be and they were high, 100% correct. So yes, it's pretty good with math, but do check it yourself. Okay. Anne Marie, Anne Marie says, why aren't you including inventory in the ROI calculation? Only fixed assets. No, I was, I said something, I said it wrong. The formula is got fixed assets and current assets. So sorry, my fault. It was actually was included. Okay. And Ali says thanks. Right. I think that's all the Q and A done for the moment. I will come back and do some more questions towards the end of the day, so please keep the questions coming. But let's talk about pricing and packaging. So one of the things we have to do is figure out, well, what is advisory and what are we selling? And we've talked about those, those six things earlier. And so the next thing we want to do is whenever we. And this applies to every service you have when, whether it's advisory, whether it's tax returns, whether it's bookkeeping. One of the things we should do is we have to recognize that everybody values things differently and we don't know how much somebody is willing to pay for something. And so if you have a single fixed price for anything, it's the wrong price, guaranteed. You have to give people choice, you have to give people options. It's fundamental to value pricing. And a. And so one of the ways to do it, and one of the most powerful ways to do it, and it's not that difficult, is to use what I call menu pricing and what I mean by menu pricing. I've been teaching this for 25 years now because I applied it in my accounting firm. It's simply giving people a range of choices. Think of it, if you like, as the Bronze, Silver, Gold. So when you are talking to a client about advisory, perhaps you've, you've done the analysis with Jeremy and he's now really interested. He wants to know how you can help him solve some of those problems and improve those numbers. Well, what you want to do is talk about your advisory service and you want to present different packages, Bronze, silver, gold. Don't use that name, by the way. But I say bronze, Silver, gold simply because I think you know what it means when you say, when I say that it's really powerful. There's a lot of science behind it, there's an art to it. There's a lot of psychology as well, price psychology. And I'm not, I'm going to go to all the detail right now because what I want to do is show you how you can use AI to help you here because I think that's more useful to you right now. But if you follow me or join the academy, we'll go really detailed into the science and how to build your packages properly. But essentially the idea is create three options. And we see this everywhere. The most successful company on the planet at the moment is Apple. And if you go to their website to buy an imac computer, you will see on their website they offer you a choice of three different packages. And this is everywhere. Now when I first came across it in 1999, it wasn't so prevalent, but it was the very first thing I did with value pricing. What I did was I took one of my services. It happened to be in corporations. I came from a tax background and I had a lot of clients where clients or potential clients where I would go visit them, I'd look at the numbers and if they were a sole proprietor or partnership making a certain level of profits, I would realize that they could have saved so much tax and other benefits by moving that business into a corporate. That's what we Call incorporation. And I used to charge a crazy low price for that. I had no idea how to price it. And I got lots of pushback on the price. People said that was expensive when it was really cheap. And that was until late 1999. I met Ron Baker, who's now a good friend of mine. And Ron explained value pricing to me, which is when everything changed for me in my accounting firm. Because I then the very first thing I did was I took that service and I created a value pricing system with three packages and I created three options. And these are screenshots of the original sheets of paper from my accounting firm way back in 1999. Back then, before I had these sheets of paper, I was. When people said, what will it cost to incorporate? I said between 200 and 250. So roughly, I was charging about, let's call it 225 on average. And very often people say, that's expensive. And then in 1999, I discovered value pricing. I created these three sheets. I created three packages. I called it a three star, four star, five star. And I made my cheapest one 350, way more than what I was doing before. My middle was 750. My top one was 1250. And I just created three different packages. And what was really interesting was the middle package was what I was doing before. So my 750 package was what I was charging between 200 and 250. I came up with a smaller, lighter one, the three star, which actually was a higher price. I had a middle option, which is what I was doing before. And then I had a premium option, which is 1,250. And what I found was over the next two years was that nobody said that's expensive. And I explained the reason for that later on. Today, nobody said that's expensive. But the other thing that was fascinating was that most people over half, it was about 60%, chose the middle option. Most people chose to pay me 750 of the rest. I sold more premium ones than the cheap ones. Very few bought the cheap. And so I measured this because I was fascinated. I didn't know why at the time in my accounting firm, but over the next couple of years, I realized that I was charging almost four times the price for this service with no pushback on price. That's the power of it. And so I rolled out menu pricing over the year 2000 across all of my accounting services. And it completely revolutionized, changed my business so much so I was able to sell that business a few years later to My client managers, Steve and Jonathan, they were in that photo I showed earlier. And I then started working with accounting firms around the UK with Steve Pipe. We ran a business called avn. And now I've been teaching accountants around the world and I say it's more prevalent now. There are many accounting firms now doing it. You go to many firms websites and you'll see different packages, different options. The only problem is many firms do it wrong. Like this particular one. There is an art and a science to it. And if we get it wrong, if we make our packages too complicated, for example, then we can actually cannibalize sales. But when we do it right, it's so, so powerful. And you know you're doing it right because when you do it right, you will find most people choose the middle option. So that's menu pricing. And that's what you want to do with your advisory. You want to come up with three different options. And so what I'm going to do.

In a little while, what we're going to do is we're going to go back to AI and I'm going to show you how you do all that and make it really, really easy with advisory. And I'm going to show you two prompts that you need to run. The first one is to figure out, well, what would you do? What could you do as part of a business advisory solution? And then the second prompt is, well, how could we create three sensible packages that meets the needs of specific customer avatars? So we'll go through that in a little while before we dive into that.

Oh, and we'll also look at communicating value before we do that. I did say earlier that if it's okay with you, let me tell you about an opportunity. If you decide that you want to go deeper with this, if you want a shortcut, if you want to go faster. So as we, as you know, I run the Value Pricing Academy. We founded it back in 2014. We have a number of members here already, which is great. And my goal in the Value Pricing Academy is to help you build a extraordinary accounting firm. And so we help you in the academy to create more value through advisory, to be able to tap into value pricing experience. That's why it's called the Value Pricing Academy. We help you master value pricing so that you get much higher prices. You have systems for pricing, you can price with confidence. That in turn helps you to increase your profitability, your margins. It helps you to do more enjoyable work and attract better quality clients. And then we also help you to attract Those clients through better marketing. Marketing is going to attract the right sort of clients. The clients that do want to grow, that want to work with you, that want help with building a better business, because they're the ones that will pay you more money. And they're the ones that, as you move up the value curve, they're the ones that will be most profitable. And so that's my goal. My goal is to help you build a more profitable accounting firm, a firm that you just enjoy so much more, have more fun with. And also because we're getting better margins, we don't have to work so hard. We can work less hard in our business. We can make more money for less effort. And so that's the Value Pricing Academy. And I'm going to ask my team in a couple of minutes to just put a link into the chat, but let me show you. In fact, I think I'm going to do it right now. Let me.

Okay, you might want to go to this page afterwards. You don't have to do it right now, but this is where you can find out more about the Value Pricing Academy. Let me just make sure I'm pressing the right button. Here we go. And I'm going to go through this very quickly and just show you some of the things that you get access to. I won't show you everything because there is so much stuff that we've built over the last 10 years to help you build an extraordinary accounting firm. And you can read this at your leisure. You can watch the video on this page and.

You can read the stories and so on. I just want to tell you what you get access to the Value Pricing Academy, which is listed here. So what we do is we help people get better results and we do it through live training. We have a number of curriculums where we go live every month. We teach you the essential foundations of building a great practice. These sessions are delivered by different trainers. I do. Some of them marketing ones are done by Emily. You'll meet her tomorrow. And we have a panel of trainers who are some of our best students running amazing accounting firms now, taking the content and teaching how they've implemented the ideas in their firm. So it's not just theory, it's people doing this stuff, getting amazing results that will teach you. And so every month you'll get access to training on the essential foundations on how to do business advisory. We call it Profit advisory. The fundamentals of pricing Communication Mastery is where I teach how to communicate better, how to write copy, how to get more clients, because you're writing better words on your website, in your emails and so on. Communication is so important. We teach marketing fundamentals. Emily does that. You'll meet her tomorrow and Thursday. We teach advanced pricing strategies. We have group workshops if you want to work with a small group of other members. In my leading edge training, I teach the latest things you need to be aware of, which is very often AI. We do 90 minutes every month where I teach the leading edge skills so that you are at the forefront of the profession. As I said, Normally AI, normally advanced use of things like ChatGPT. We teach you what are the essential systems. And the amazing Teresa Slack, who's got an extraordinary business. She focus on systems. What systems do you need? And as well as teaching you, you get all the systems you need. The onboarding system systems, for example. You get systems every single month. We have practical pricing if. I'll show you that in a second. We teach you AI. We teach you how to use the effective pricing software to get better results. So you have lots of live training. Every single month. There is live training you can access. And if you go to the website, you'll find out about the trainers. This is Jessica from the U.S. she has a waiting list. She, she is so good with her firm. She has a waiting list of people wanting to be her clients. It's extraordinary. She is incredible with technology and incredible with systems. And so she teaches all the things that has helped her build her business every single month. Then you have other trainers teaching the pricing fundamentals. Emily and I do marketing. You have group workshops. Teresa teaches systems. I mentioned that earlier. And you can see here you can get see some of the topics and things that we teach. Practical pricing is one of the things that people love the most. So one of the things we do is we create all the pricing systems for all your major services. So every month you will get new training and everything you need to price. Things like bookkeeping, payroll, financial services, annual financial services and so on. Cleanup work, tax returns, everything you need the whole system for pricing more profitably. And what we found over the last decade of working with accounting firms is very often people tell us they are now getting double the price they used to, sometimes three times the price. We've got some extraordinary stories. We teach profit advisory, that's the business advisory. Every month you get access to training that we've done. You get access to communication, mastery, how to write more effectively, advanced pricing strategies and so on. So you can read that at your leisure afterwards. What we also do as well as the live training is we also, this is all AI stuff. We also have core training, so there's live training and then there's structured training that comes out across a number of different core training services subjects. One is we teach the core foundations of a super successful firm how to price bookkeeping. And we have a six month training program where every month, in a logical order, we build up the systems for pricing bookkeeping more effectively. That will, if you do bookkeeping, which most accounting firms and bookkeepers do, that will significantly transform the fees you get for bookkeeping work. And you can see all the things we teach in there. How to build an extraordinary accounting firm is building out your strategy and your foundation. We teach that, I teach that over six months and you can see all sorts of stories from people that have got results from the vpa. We also have a how to profit from business advisory. I teach over six months. I go into detail on all the things we're going to cover over these three days. I teach you in more detail how to spot opportunities to build out your selling systems, your pricing systems, everything, so that within six months you'll be ready to start making money from high value advisory services.

And then we have as well, we have a number of bonuses when you join the academy. So the bonuses that you get are firstly, you get a copy of effective pricing software. Normally people would pay separate for this. We give it to members. This is a piece of software that I will look at later on over these three days. This is software that you can price in front of your clients with confidence. It's a system that will get you better prices. You'll get more people saying yes to your prices at higher prices. We'll see in action later on over these three days. You also get access to our profit diagnostic software. This is exclusive to academy members. We don't let anyone else have it. It's basically a tool to help you convert clients to business advisory. We might look at this tomorrow and we'll look at that. I also created a little while ago, a couple years ago, a bonus course which we deliver over six weeks called Repricing existing clients. This we gave away as a bonus because this is so powerful. What we find is that most accounting firms are right now working crazy hard not making enough money. And the single biggest reason is because our existing client base is not being priced right. And so over six weeks I deliver training once a week for six weeks on how to put in place a repricing system that you can reprice your existing client base and see immediate results. And there's A story from further up from Stanley Dean. You can watch that he put his price up the first year and I think he said he got an average of 43 or 47% higher prices on average across his firm. The impact on bottom line of that is extraordinary. So you get that as a, you get that as a bonus. Where was I? And there's a number of the bonuses you get as well. We have a course on ChatGPT. We have a. The amazing Jessica Fox did a course on how to optimize your QBO Pro advisor to get top of the list. And you also get access to free conference tickets for all of our events. We ever run everything, any online event. And you get all the recordings in case you missed them. So although we'll close down the recordings of this at the end of the week, if you're an academy member, you can access them whenever you want. Okay. That is what we do in the academy. There's a lot of stuff there. I know. And coming up very soon is by the end of this month there'll be brand new software and a prompt library as well that we looked at earlier. This is being rolled out right now to academy members and this is where you'll be able to.

Assess yourself on how you're doing across all the strategic parts of your accounting firm. Okay. So that's what you get within the, within the academy. And we have workbooks. For example, if we think about business advisory specifically in the sessions that you get, I do 90 minute training sessions, you'll get access to those on things like how to communicate the value of advisory, how to package your business advisory. We're going to touch on both these in a second. We're going to look at consulting models and how you can use consulting models with AI to deliver powerful strategy. I teach how you can use your pricing skills that we teach, apply that to clients. One of those powerful things that you can do is help your clients with pricing. It's the fastest way to change their profits. And so I do, I teach how to help clients with pricing. So you'll become in the academy, you'll become a master of value pricing. And then what you can do is take that skills, that knowledge and then help your clients. Really powerful stuff. I teach you how to coach clients. I teach you how if you want to do some mini advisory services on things, things like helping clients get out of debt and how you could package that up into a complete service that you could offer. If you want to launch a business club. I teach you how to do a Business club. There's a scalable way of growing your firm and a scalable way of doing advisory work. It's great fun. We have a lot of firms that do that using the systems that we've created and the training. And I also teach in biz advisory how we can use AI systems like ChatGPT to get faster and results. You've seen one prompt already. You're going to see many more. You'll see two more in a bit, and you'll see more prompts during the course these three days. Examples of how we can get fast results using AI. Okay, so what can you expect when you join the academy? Well, you can expect when you, you get access to all these, this training, all these frameworks that have been proven to work. And when you follow the frameworks, yes, you have to do something. When, when you follow the frameworks, you'll get results. Like Kim. So Kim uses the effective pricing software. In fact, she gets such good results, she now teaches people every month how to use the software. And she said to me a little while back, the first time she used it, she said, I would have quoted this person $4200 a year for the service I provide them, but they chose my premium package, and their annual price was over 18,000. So that was huge. Just imagine that. What if you could get four times the price using a, a pricing system like effective pricing? She said, the second time I used the value pricing, the effective pricing software, my increase was almost 200%. Extraordinary. And then the third time, she said, this is really interesting. She said, the third time she used the software, the increased price that I was quoted was over $22,000, and that's over what she would have charged before. But she went on saying, that's not even the biggest part of that quote. The biggest part was that it, it was an increase of over 30,000 on what they were paying the previous bookkeeper. And that's an interesting point, because what you will find is when you communicate the value better, when you price better, your clients will pay you more money when they perceive they're getting more, when you create more value, when you have different conversations, when you talk about strategy and advisory, you will attract better clients and clients that will happily pay you more so that when you do that, you can start having these sorts of situations where you'll be working with clients and they'll be thanking you because you've helped them achieve their goals.

Rennie Evans is one of our coaches. He's an extraordinary accountant. He specializes in advisory work and he does a training video on how we use that software to win a 31,908 pound per annum advisory service with an existing client. And these are the sort of results that you can get. So what's your investment in the Academy to get all of that, to get access to training in every part of running a successful accounting firm, biz advisory, value pricing, marketing. You get all this advice, all this training, all these resources to help you get results. Like Kim, who gets tens of thousands extra when she prices her bookkeeping Rennie, who £31,000 for advisory work. It should be a significant investment to join the Value Pricing Academy, but we keep it to a tiny monthly investment. And the monthly investment at the moment is just US$490 a month. That's all it is to join the Academy. And so all you need to do to find out, to find out the price in your country, just go. So we let you pay in your currency. All you need to do is click on Join Academy and that will take you to a page where you can see the price in your country. And here's the big thing, and this is something that people tell us all the time. The price is going up, by the way, at the end of the week, the price goes up. We change the price at least once, if not twice, every single year. But one of the things our members tell us over and over again is that when you join the Academy, you lock in the price. The price will never change for you. You'll get more stuff every year. Like we're about to release some brand new software next week and new members will pay for that software in a higher price. But when you join this week, you get the old price and it will never ever change for you. Every year you'll get more and more stuff every year. It'll become a better deal and a better deal all the time. Not only that, not only that is you also are in complete control. There's no minimum period to be part of the Academy. You can change your mind whenever you want. If you decide it's not for you, you can leave. We make it really easy to cancel your subscription. In fact, so easy. I think I've done a little video that goes in the onboarding series. I think it's email number two or three. We show you the button to press to cancel your subscription because I hate being locked into stuff. We make it really easy so you're in complete control. And not only that, if you go to the page that I've given you the link for, then you could try it for 30 days. And.

If at any time before the end of those 30 days you feel it's not been valuable, if you don't have value for money and it's your judgment of that, then you can stop the payments. But also if it's inside the first 30 days, you can email my team and ask for a refund of what you've paid this week. Okay, so you can join today, try it for four weeks, and as long as it's before the 30 days, if you decide that it's not for you, just email the team and ask for a refund.

So.

What'S the worst that can happen? The worst that can happen is you explore what you explore some of the training, you perhaps even attend some of the live sessions, you get some, you get some training. And at the end of the day, if it's not right for you, you've not lost anything because you can get your money back. What's the best that can happen is you can start getting results like Rennie, results like Kim, and just transforming your firm completely so you've got nothing to lose. And yet you can do amazing things. And we do have some bonuses for people that join today and tomorrow. So let me just run through the bonuses very quickly and then we'll get into the next part of our training today. So if you want to learn more about menu pricing, I created a course on that. You can buy it for $597, but if you join during the course of the masterclass, we will give you that for free as a bet, as a bonus. So because this is so important, menu pricing is going to change the way that you price and this course will really help you master it. We'll also give you a training program on how to use the Profit Diagnostics software. This is something that normally unlocks in month three, but if you're an action taker and you take action today, then we'll send you the video and access to the Profit Diagnostic software this week, on Friday, you'll see that tomorrow. And to go with that, we also have something called the Profitable Growth Formula, which is dozens of ideas of how you can help your client grow their business. And then if you also act in today and tomorrow, I'm running a bonus session on Thursday. So you may see on the agenda that we have a. You have a choice. On the last session of Thursday.

If you take action and join the Value Pricing Academy, you can come and join me in a very special session. And what I will be doing in that session is I will be showing you the best AI prompts around business advisory to get fast results, including, I will show you how to build a business plan in less than 20 minutes. We're going to do that, going to do that for this fictional business together, we're going to build a business plan. And by the end of that session on Thursday, you'll have all the prompts to do that yourself. And so that alone, I mean, you might find that you've got a client needs a business plan. Right now, you should be charging more than the 490 bucks it costs to be part of the Academy. I'm going to show you how you do it in less than 20 minutes. Okay. And then I've not seen what we've had some members say some great things today. I've not had a chance to read them. I'll read them tomorrow. But looking at last year's and the year before, here's some things that members tell us. So Teresa, who's now one of our trainers, says the Academy turned our business from failing and broke, successful, profitable and fun. I'm so thankful for Mark and his teachings. Love the live training, the resources and the closed Facebook group for support. Leslie, I noticed it here. Leslie from British Columbia, she said, you may remember this, Leslie. This was a couple years ago, I think you said, hi, Mark, I'm having fantastic success with the effective pricing software. I have been successful in winning contracts up to five times the price I would have bid prior to learning from the bpa, which is the predecessor VPA that you were in. So thank you, Lesley, for that. Other people have said things like Katrina Coltes. I've not seen Katrina here today, but she says, VPA member here. Once I took action, my net profits doubled within a year. She's extraordinary. She is an action taker. And Katrina does amazing things in her firm. And you're going to meet Neil. You'll meet Neil today. He said, and this is a couple of years old now, I think he said, help me scale a business from 0 to 1.5 million cumulative revenue in four and a half years. I believe that was a year ago, Neil, I think, because I think you're in year. I think you're in year six now, if I remember right. You'll find out. Neil will share that story, his story later. Okay, let's go into.

Some fun stuff. But yeah, it's getting some fun stuff. If you have any questions about the Value Pricing Academy, just ask in the Q and A and I'll answer perhaps later on after Neil's session and I also might recap on some of the stuff tomorrow and Thursday. So you have a couple of days to think about it. But do remember, you lock in the price. You can always change your mind. It's really easy. And you'll get access to resources immediately once you join. Right, let's look at, let's look at how can we build our packages? How can we do advisory work? How do we build advisory work? And so what we're going to do is we're going to go back to our good old friend.

Not there. We're going to go to ChatGPT and.

I will start a brand new chat for this. I'm going to start a brand new chat and we're going to use a couple of prompts. One of the things you want to do when you build out your advisory service, then we can use ChatGPT to help us identify what should we include in that service. And so one of the things that I created in the prompt library, which, when you join the value Pricing academy, this is being released this month. You'll get this. You'll get all these prompts next month.

Yeah, next week. Probably next week. I mean, not next month, next week. Next week you'll get every prompt I share with you and many, many more. There are lots of prompts, as you can see. I'm going to go to a pricing one. I'm just going to search on pricing. It'll simplify things. And I'm looking for Service Designer and I'm just going to grab the markdown at the bottom of the screen. Just hit copy as markdown. I will go across to ChatGPT and I'll do Control V. This, this is why I say having template prompts and a prompt library is going to save you so much time. Because as I've just done, you can just. When you've got all your prompts to hand, they're like little mini. Think of them as mini, little systems. Systems to get you better results in less time. These are revolutionary. I use ChatGPT every day for everything. And so here's a prompt for helping you. This particular prompt, you'll see, it's a long prompt. I've been teaching prompt engineering for a couple of years now. And if you want to get better results from AI.

If you want better results, then you need to just make sure you know how to craft prompts. But I do it all for you. I've created the prompts. So this one is for designing a service. It's called Service Designer. And you could use this for designing your advisory service, which we'll do now. But you could do this for any service design. If you're going to do something brand new. If you want to create a brand new service and you're not sure how to price it. Sorry, how to build it out, what should be in it, then this prompt is designed for that. It might be, you've never done payroll services and you want to do payroll. Well, you could run this prompt and it'll build out your payroll service for you. If you want to offer a debt reduction service to clients who are drowning in debt, which is a form of advisory, you could do that here. So it says you are a product manager specializing in service design with expertise in customer centric product development and feature prioritization. One of the things you'll find is when you give ChatGPT a role or any large language model, you do get a better result. So all the things that are in here are based on everything I've learned over the last two and a half years of prompt engineering. It then says your task is to design a service offering for a business task, that service outcome. And you might be thinking, well, that doesn't make sense. Well, it doesn't. From a purely, you know, you read that it doesn't make sense. That's because what these two things are are variables. And so when I create these prompts in the prompt library to make them, to turn them into systems, I've done it in such a way where you don't have to edit or change any of this. The only thing you have to do is fill in the variables and I put them at the end. And so when I am using these prompts myself, I've got some that I use in my business. I just know that I just copy and paste it and then go to the bottom and put in the variables. So what is the business type? Well, save you watching me type. I'm going to put these, copy and paste. So the business type is a small accounting firm. That would be whatever you are. Perhaps more important is what's the service outcome? And I just typed in here to help a client like Jeremy identify his goals, to create a strategic plan, understand the key financial metrics and ratios every month, give advice and hold him accountable every month to the plan. Remember we talked about the definition of advisory? I'll just put that in there. So what he's going to do now is going to run this prompt for that particular service. And the prompt, I'm not going to go through this in detail right now. But I will teach you all of this in the academy. It includes things like examples. Examples are really important because they ensure when you give examples you will get a more consistent output and more consistent results. Because large language models like ChatGPT, they learn that they basically look for patterns. It's pattern recognition. So when you create prompts, then when you give it examples, you're going to get better results anyway. Let's see what we get from this. So we've asked it to design a service to help clients like Jeremy identify goals, create a plan and so on. So let me hit this button here. It's going to now come up with what we could possibly do as part of our advisory service to help people like Jeremy. And off it's going. So it's saying that what we could do is we could run a vision and goal clarity workshop where we'll hold initial in depth meeting to understand what what success looks like for you personally and professionally. We'll help you define specific goals for your business such as growth targets, profit margins or freeing up your time. We'll do a one page strategic business plan. We'll do a 12 month financial forecast. We'll do a KPI dashboard. Each month we'll update a tailored dashboard showing your critical numbers. We'll do monthly management accounts.

We'll do a monthly strategic review meeting. We'll meet with you every month to review progress, discuss what's working, what's not and agreed on next steps. You'll always leave with one to three clear actions to stay on track. We'll do accountability coaching. We will act as your sounding board and accountability partner. We'll do a quarterly plan reset. We'll do profit improvements, strategic strategy sessions, cash flow clarity tool, personal goals and lifestyle alignment and WhatsApp email support between meetings.

Now you don't have to do all these things. It's just brainstorming and telling you what would make a great advisory service. And so what you would then do at this point is you would have if necessary, a follow up chat where you might say that's great, I don't want to do these three things because I don't like those things or they're outside my comfort zone. So if there's something on this list that you don't want to do or do, don't like the idea doing, then just say to ChatGPT, I don't want to do those things. And at the same time you might add to the list and say that's a great list. But could you also add to that list, whatever it might well be. So it's there to give you a starting point as to what you might put in that package in that service and then you can add things to it, you can take things out. Now let's assuming, let's assume that you're now happy with that. Let's. You're thinking that sounds like a really good comprehensive business advisory service. But I remember Mark said you've got to have different packages. Yes, you do, because every client is different. Not every client wants all of that stuff. Some clients can't afford all of that stuff. So we have to give different packages for different types of clients. So let's do that with a follow up prompt. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to the prompt library, let's close down Service Designer and I'm going to use it. So these are pricing prompts. I'm going to use one called Package Builder. And here in the library I can see what it does. That's the instructions, this is the prompt itself. You can see again, it's a long prompt.

And when you get this software, by the way, by the end of next week, what you can do is you can duplicate these prompts and change them and make them your own and you can add your own prompts so you can build your own prompt library. But you'll get a head start because I think there's over 100 prompts I've written for all the key aspects of running a great accounting firm. Anyway, you just need to click copy the markdown, which I've done. I've copied that to my clipboard and we're back to ChatGPT and then going to paste it into here. And before I forget, I'm going to just go straight to the bottom where you put in the variables. There are four. The variables here are number of tiers, business type, service outcome and features. And to save you watching me type, I actually wrote these down.

Before we went live. Control C. Let me just overwrite. Oops, let me overwrite that. Here we go. So here's my variables for this one. So number of tiers, that's number of packages. Okay. And I always Recommend Start with 3. In the value pricing academy, I do teach in advanced pricing when sometimes four or five might be better. But start off with three because of something called the magic of three. Really powerful. So default, I suggest go with three. These next two variables are what we had before. And you might be thinking at this stage, if you are familiar with large language Models. If you're familiar with ChatGPT, you might be thinking, well, why are we putting those two variables in? Again, why are we telling ChatGPT it's a small accounting firm and it's to help a client like Jeremy identify his goals when we had that in the previous problem prompt. Because as you know, as you perhaps know with, with chats, Chat, GPT and the other large language models, they, they remember the previous things in the chat, you build on it. Okay? So you wouldn't need to necessarily put those two things in. The reason why they're in this particular prompt is simply because I designed this prompt to work as standalone. It may be that you've already designed the service, you've already got a service, you've got a list of things. And so this is the first prompt that you run. That's the only reason there's a replication of variables in this and the previous one. Hope that makes sense. And then for features, again, if I was running this as a standalone prompt, I would then list and copy and paste all the features of, let's say my payroll service. But in this one, because we're continuing the chat, it knows the features because it's up here, it's this lot that it's come up with. Okay.

So before I hit send, what's this one going to do? Let me just go back to the top. This second prompt is helping us build out our packages.

So this time it's acting as a pricing consultant and I'm going to give it a detailed list of features.

And the features in this case says the list in your previous response. And for this particular service, your task is to allocate them across specific tiers. But what it then goes through and does is it talks through a step by step process for doing this. So let me just step back from the prompt for a second just to explain. With menu pricing, one of the things we teach is when you build up your packages there is a real science and an art to it. And I teach something called the seven step framework for building out packages. And the seven steps are in overview is decide how many packages you're going to have. And I usually say default with 3. Then what you want to do is do some customer segmentation and identify different types of customers so that your packages are aimed at specific types of customers. This is critically important. Most people don't do this, but this is going to determine how successful your packages are. And I'll give you a bit of an insight to this in this particular prompt. But also I Believe later on when Emma's going to show you a bit more about this seven step framework and some more specific prompts, then what you want to do is come up with the names of your packages. So don't call them bronze, silver, gold. You want to come up with something more creative.

Because bronze, silver, gold is lazy language. Nobody wants bronze. Who values bronze? It's seen as being worthless. We want to come up with better language. So how many packages, what are the customer avatars or what's the customer segmentation? What we're going to call the packages. Also how we're going to describe each package in overview. So what we want to do is come up with a form of words to describe the package that we might use when we're having a conversation with the client. To describe, say we have our three options and to help our client choose the right one for them, we want to make sure we describe each one in simple terms in ways that helps might identify which is the right package for them.

And then what we want to build the packages. So that's deciding which things go in which package. And we do that based on the customer avatars, the customer segmentation really important. And one of the things I teach in the academy is that just because you've got a list of 20 things you want to do as part of advisory, don't necessarily put all those 20 things in your packages because if your packages become too complicated, people don't buy. If your packages include things that people don't want because you've not thought about the customer segments, then people won't buy them because people don't like to buy a package of stuff when it includes things that aren't relevant to them. So that's why customer segmentation is so critically important. And that might mean if you've got a list of 20 things for advisory, only put into your three packages the things that are relevant to each of the different customer segments, the customer types with anything left over. There are other things that you could do. You could use the other things as options or upsells. And tomorrow you'll get a bit of an insight to that because tomorrow we're going to look at the value pricing piece in more detail. It'll build on this, so we'll come back to that later. And then you have to figure out in step seven, well, what are the price? What price do you charge for each package? And again we'll look at that in more detail tomorrow when we look at value pricing. So this is the prompt, it's aimed at what it does in the steps is going to first of all identify for us the likely customer avatar for each of our three tiers for this service. And it's going to do that in a generic way, in a way that I teach in the academy. And then it's going to create the packages based on that. And I've given it templates to follow and examples to guide it. What I've done with all these prompts, I've been teaching value pricing for over 20 years now, 25 years. And so all the knowledge that I've got in value pricing, I've built into these prompts to guide the AI to, to come out with things that have been proven to work in the last 25 years of teaching this. So let's run this, let's see what it does.

And so it's building out. This is step one. So it's telling us for our advisory service that we might have three possible customer avatars. So package one might be a. Which we might call the essentials, not bronze, but essentials perhaps. Actually, I like that word. That works good for me. So package one is essentials, your bronze. And it's saying that this would be offered to the price conscious small business owner who need help getting clarity on their goals and basic financial structure, but aren't ready to invest in deep ongoing advice. Does that sound like a type of client you might have where you know you can help them with advisory, but they're just at this stage, they're price conscious, they're perhaps a small client, they need some support and their desired outcome is a simple plan with some light guidance so they stop flying blind. Important factors are affordability, clarity and structure without ongoing hand holding. So does that sound like that might meet the needs of a certain type of your client? And if so, great.

I meant to be saying my screen. Sorry, I forgot to turn this back on again. Okay, thank you, Sarah. Right, that's the package one, Essentials. Then it's suggesting that our second package might be called Momentum.

These are happy, the final names. I have another prompt, by the way, that does a whole bunch of brainstorming on what would be great names for your packages. But anyway, Momentum. This might be aimed at the ambitious business owners who want consistent guidance and accountability to grow their business but still watch their spend. Their desired outcome is they want regular progress towards growth, improved profitability and smart decision making. And so important factors are practical support, ongoing advice, clear reports and insight into numbers. So you would ask yourself the question, does that seem to meet the specific Characteristics and needs of another type of client. And I would say probably yes. If I think about my accounting firm, I've definitely got this type of people in my client base who perhaps are price conscious, they're small business owners, but they do need some help with clarity. And I then have some people who are more ambitious that want ongoing guidance. Okay, that sounds great so far. Then it's calling package three partner. I quite like that. And so this is for the avatar. Here is the growth focused entrepreneurs or high value clients who see their accountant as a strategic advisor and want premium service, deeper insights and proactive support. Their desired outcomes are strategic partnership, consistent progress, peace of mind and higher performance. And important factors are they want high touch services, strategic thinking, fast access and accountability. And this might be your top two or three clients. I don't know how many clients you got on your client base, but I think about my practice. I had I think 150 clients and there were definitely three or four that wanted this sort of level of support. When I was doing advisory before I sold my practice, I had two, two clients that bought a £30,000 12 month program. One was a two partner firm of electrical contractors, Wayne and Jed, and another one was a two partner firm of lawyers. And they both went for something very similar to this. And so at this point you would ask yourself the question, does this sound like three types of clients with their particular outcomes and so on. And if the answer is yes, great, you can just move on as you. And usually with ChatGPT, partly because of the prompt that I gave it, the way it's written, usually chatgpt is pretty good at analyzing your different client types. It's got a really good knowledge of customer segmentation, of building avatars, Personas and of understanding an accounting firm. So when you're armed with a great prompt, it takes all the heavy lifting out. And so then what it does, it then suggests packages. So essentials. It's now saying that so this is for business owners who need help getting started with planning and performance tracking. This gives you the foundations without regular reviews or coaching. You could use this as that short description I mentioned. Now we can go better. I have a specific prompt for coming up with better descriptions, but this is a great starting point. You might use those words on your website, you might use them in your pricing brochure, for example. And it's suggesting that for this client we might do the vision and goal clarity workshop, the one page strategic business plan, the 12 month forecast, some monthly management accounts and some support between meetings, for example Whereas for momentum for the business who want to go beyond the basics, what we might do there is everything in the essentials. But we might also for the middle package, build a KPI dashboard. We might do monthly strategic review meeting. We might do the accountability coaching, we might do cash flow clarity tool.

And then when we look at the partner level for the premium, they get everything in the previous one. But we might also do a quarterly plan reset. Every three months we review and update your entire plan to match changing priorities. We have profit improvement strategy sessions focused on time to identify specific ways to increase profits, personal goals and lifestyle alignment, priority support. And then.

It'S suggesting here is an optional add on and we could do tax planning and personal wealth strategy. That's interesting. It's suggesting an upsell or an add on.

So that's that prompt. So I know I've done a lot of talking, but with those two prompts, if you had that prompt library inside about five minutes, probably the most five minutes, you could run those two prompts and you've built out your entire service. Yes, you might want to change it, you might want to tweak it a bit, but that's going to really help make a start. Okay, let's now move on to something else. How many questions have we got, by the way? We've got.

Three questions.

Let me answer.

Some easy ones. But I've got one more thing to talk about before we have a break. And our amazing guest speaker, David said.

Will your formats and access work with the free versions of ChatGPT? David, you can do some amazing things with the free version of ChatGPT and certainly all three prompts I've showed so far. You could run with ChatGPT with a free account. Absolutely you can. There are some features that you can't get in the free version, like custom GPTs, like the advanced reasoning models and so on. And you get limited use of deep research. And some of the prompts in the prompt library, some of them do work better with different models, but I would guess that 80, 90% you can run with the free version of ChatGPT. Having said that, David, you will find as most of my value pricing members have found over the last year and a half of teaching them every month is that most of them have now got the $20 a month version because they've realized that the more you use it, it saves you so much time that those extra features are well worth it. Things like projects. My favorite feature, one of my favorite features is projects, particularly powerful for projects. Powerful if you're doing advisory. And I'm going to talk about that in my, my welcome session, my exclusive session on Thursday. We will talk about why you might want to create projects when you're doing advisory work. It's really, really powerful. But you would need at that point to upgrade. Okay.

Let'S.

Melissa says what about using the prompts with Copilot in Microsoft? Yeah, you could do that. I, I've been following AI for a while now, a couple of years. I've been teaching it for two, I've been teaching for two, over two years now. And consistently Copilot gets really bad reviews. ChatGPT is always the, the even strange. Even though, even though Microsoft is the major shareholder in OpenAI now, consistently across all the benchmarks, ChatGPT performs the best. So I always recommend people use ChatGPT unless you've got a very specific reason for using Copilot, Gemini, Claude or something else. And sometimes there are reasons. But anyway, go back to the question. All these prompts would work there as well. These prompts that I share with you would work also on Claude, on Gemini, whatever. Okay, we have six minutes before we have a quick break. There are more questions. I will come back to questions before we wrap up today, but I want to just talk a little bit about.

Communicating value. The most important part of value pricing is communicating the value. It's not coming up with the price. That's the easy bit. Coming up with the price is easy. We'll do that tomorrow. But the most important thing is how do is the words that we use, how you do, how we build up the value. And I said earlier that one of the things people love the most about the academy is for every major service we've built up complete pricing systems, including pricing brochures. And you might say, well, why are these important? It's because words are so important. When you're having a conversation, a value conversation with your client, there's a way of doing it that's going to get you much better results. And I have so many stories, you'll see some on the page about the vpa. So many stories of firms that tell me they've got double the price, sometimes three times the price, sometimes four times the price, not by doing anything different, just simply having a different conversation. And that was also, if you think back to my story earlier with menu pricing, when I first explored it in 1999 within corporations, I had those three sheets of paper and I said to you, nobody questioned the price, even though the price was much higher than what it was before. And the reason for that is those three sheets of paper that I created was my first pricing system. Those three sheets of paper gave me the language, the words to properly build up the value. So if you want to get higher prices, then you have to be better at communication, you have to be better at the pricing conversation. And there are three stages to the pricing conversations. Let's just quickly look at those. And the first step when you are having a pricing conversation is what I call uncovering the value. And what that means is we have to build up our skills of asking questions, of asking the right questions in the right order. We teach this in advanced pricing, in the value pricing academy, in detail. You want to ask questions first. In fact, this is so important that I'd always recommend, I'd recommend that, particularly with brand new clients, is that you have at least a two meeting approach, where meeting number one is just to ask questions. It's just to learn about the business, to uncover the value, to uncover what's important to them, what's their goals, but also to uncover what's the pain, what's the challenges, what's the problems in their business. And we want to drill down and really use questions to then uncover what are the consequences of those particular challenges and pain points. So there's a process that we go through. And when we uncover the value properly, it also helps us to make sure when we understand them better, we can then build a better solution. The better we understand what's really going on, we can then create a better solution for them. That's a solution that they're more likely to say yes to and pay a higher price when it deals with their deeper issues. Usually we don't go far enough. A huge mistake is in things like a client says to you, I need a cash flow forecast. Can you do one? The worst thing you can possibly say is, yes, I can do a cash flow forecast. It's going to cost you 500 bucks. That's crazy, because we have to ask questions. Why do they want a cash flow forecast? We have to ask questions in the right order to properly understand what's going on in their business because then we can create a better solution for them. And that leads us on to number two. Step two is we want to build up the value. And we do that in two ways. Number one, we do it by making sure we build a better solution. The better we are at stage one, the better we are uncovering the value. Then it's going to help us think, you know what, we could also do this. This will help them get that result. We could also do this in the service. So we build value by adding things in that we know will help solve, solve their real problem. And then what we also do in building the value is we make sure that we communicate that properly. That's the communication piece. And so that's why brochures are so powerful. Because in here we can create our packages. You probably can't see this with the light, but the different options, the three different options, we build up the value and then we've got scripts to go through to make sure they understand the value. And then finally in step three, we capture the value. When the client finally understands what it means, how it's going to solve their problem, how it's going to take away their pain points, how it's going to change their life, they're going to say, yes, that's exactly what I want. It's what I've always been wanting from the accounting firm. That's what I want. Then they're ready to buy. And when they're ready to buy and they understand the value in step three, you capture the value in a premium price, in a price that's based upon the value you create. The more you create value, the more you communicate that the more people will pay you a higher price. It's so important to communicate value. So tomorrow we will talk about in the value pricing system, how do you capture that value? How do you do it? But for now, I just want to share with you this idea of we want to have a value pricing conversation of uncovering. First we ask questions. We then build up the value by building a better package that solves their deeper needs. And we communicate that with perhaps a system like a pricing brochure. And then we capture that in the price. And as I said a few times, we created pricing brochures for all the core services, including a 28 page brochure for delivering powerful advisory services. So we've done all the hard work for you. It's all in the academy. Okay, we have.

I think we have a break coming up. We do have a break coming up now. So what we're going to do after the break, I'm going to play out some music for about three minutes again. And then I'm going to introduce our special guest speaker. You do not need to want to, you don't want to miss this. Neil is extraordinary. He's built an amazing firm and doing amazing stuff in the area of advisory. So after the break while introducing Neil, and then we'll wrap up by answering whatever questions are left. And then I'll tell you about tomorrow. Okay, Three minute break. Don't go anywhere. Don't go anywhere. And if you've got any questions, stick them in the Q and A box. See you in just a few minutes.

So I really try my best to change. Something's in another F, right?

Maybe we stay.

We might just enjoy it now.

We forever whatever means nothing if we don't give it all we got here we can cry when it's over.

We can cry when.

Is over.

Something we don't give it up.

We can cry when it's over.

We can cry.

I love it.

I love it was special. But baby can't be stopping.

We can play when it's over.

We can play when it's over.

We can play when it's over.

We can.

Cry when it's over.

Hey.

Welcome back. Okay, I will be introducing our guest in about two minutes, but I have a couple minutes, I think, just to answer a couple of questions. Sarah said I'm an enrolled agent and an accountant, but not a certified public accountant. Will this program work for me? And if you mean the Value Pricing Academy, yes, we do have enrolled agents in the US part of it because it will help you with pricing tax and accounting services. As far as advisory is concerned, then I don't see any reason why you can't do advisory as well. So if there's anybody else here who is an enrolled agent, perhaps they might want to.

Add something to that. We have Gene says, is there a standalone prompt library, webinar and a standalone prompt library for purchase? No, not at the moment. But historically people have used. Basically a PromptLab is a database. It's a database of your prompts. And I'm not aware of anybody else that's created a database of prompts for the accounting profession. But in terms of a database, I know some people use Trello, some people use Notion, some people use airtable. There are databases that you can buy.

Right?

I will come back to Alan's question at the end because it's a longer one about scope creep.

Dion Sherwood. Have you got any one person firms that have been able to get benefit from your Value Pricing Academy previously had a team member, now it's only me. And I'm not sure it's that old chestnut called Time Dion. Absolutely. I'm 99% sure that one of our trainers, Jessica Fox, who's got an extraordinary accounting firm, I think she's a solo practitioner. I think we have quite a lot of solo practitioners. We had One that came to our Portugal retreat a few weeks ago, Linda Curtis. So, yes, there are solo practitioners and Dion, I think that today is easier than ever before to be a solo practitioner because of technology, because of AI. I mean, you've seen a few prompts now and you'll see certainly a lot more as we go through these two days. You can achieve so much more without a team, when you're using AI properly and it's in the Q and A, so you perhaps can't see it, but Stacy Baker says Jessica is amazing and she absolutely is. I get the feedback from other Academy members regularly that Jessica Fox is extraordinary. Her firm's extraordinary, her teaching's extraordinary, as is our special guest coming up, because Neil joined the Value Pressing Academy right from day one when he started his business. Actually, he'll probably tell that story. Neil, are you there? Do you want to put your webcam on?

Hi there, mate. How are you doing? Hello. Good, yeah. I've known you, Neil, since the start of your business, and you are absolutely extraordinary. You've built an amazing practice. I'm sure you'll talk about it. And so much so that we invited Neil a few years back to be one of our trainers. So he now teaches people in the Academy the extraordinary things that he's doing and it truly is extraordinary. Neil, if you're ready, I'll shut up and just hand it over to you, yeah?

Thank you.

Awesome. Take it away, mate. Have fun.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Super intro. Thank you. Yes. So for those of you that don't know me, my name is Neil. I formed my accountancy business called Neil's Data consultancy in January 2020. And I guess before that I spent sort of. Just to give you a brief introduction, I spent probably 12 or 13 years first in technical finance. I got my stripes, got chartered, I did loads of boring kind of tax and stuff, and then I found management, accounting and business advisory and I kind of fell in love with it. And for the last sort of eight or nine years of my career before setting up the business, that is what I did. I effectively took numbers and told stories with them. So that was a big passion of mine. I'd always wanted me in business, but I kind of fell into my business by losing my job. And it was the third redundancy I think I'd had in about nine or 10 years. And the first thing I did, I've been following Mark since 2019, roughly middle of 2019. So I thought, well, I've got no clients, I've got No money, I've got no real idea of what I was doing. But I knew that I wanted to join the Academy because I'd kind of seen his free webinars and speaking at conferences and things like that over the previous kind of six months prior to starting the business. And so that's what I did. I, you know, I, I had no, like I said, I had no money, I lost my job overnight, my wife is a stay at home mom and.

I knew that I just wanted to do and had a passion for having a business and wanting to work with small business owners. I knew the stuff, I just didn't really have the confidence. But anyway, I started on that journey and obviously, you know, within two months Covid happened. That was the thing back then, kind of rode that storm and I'm now in a position five and a half years later with about a million pounds turnover business with a team of 12 and approximately 600 clients. So we have grown massively over the last what, five and a half years. I don't just do advisory services, we do compliance to do tax bookkeeping and accounting as well. So yes, and I think was it Dion, Dion that said a question about being a solopreneur? I was on main for the first two years of my journey with the Value Pricing Academy and by the end of 2021 I'd got to about a quarter million turnover just from sort of learning and implementing not everything that Mark taught because we're all human, we all have finite amount of time. But yeah, I cherry pick the most important things and I still managed to grow the business just on my own. So definitely, if you're on your own, 100%, this is the academy for you, shall we say. But anyway, I'm going to kind of maybe answer questions if anyone's got any questions at the end. I've allocate a little bit of time for that. I've only got about 45 minutes and I've already waffled for about five of them. So if my eyes are flitting around, I'm just kind of looking at the chat screen and bits and pieces. So I guess today.

What I wanted to kind of sort of talk about today is not just about business advisory services, but how we can sort of put that on steroids. And by that I mean giving business advisory services to our clients, clients effectively. So whenever, whenever I get like a trades guy come around my house or whether I'm like using a service or buying a product and there's like only one option to buy or it's it's kind of like a binary decision. I get quite frustrated, especially if they're my clients because I know that they can do better and I know that their clients will probably either say yes or no to a quote or an estimate or whatever. And so what I've tried to do with not all of my clients because it's not relevant for all my clients, but a lot of my clients, I've tried to almost step in the shoes of being their customer and with my financial hat on, kind of almost be that sort of unbiased person to go, well, okay, this price might be too expensive, but how about we, we upscale a service or downscale a service or product in order to fit kind of a range of a budget. And so I've got three case studies that I wanted to share with you. And then at the end I've got like a five point or five step blueprint that I will share with you, which is what I do when we kind of onboard new clients. And.

I mean, why am I talking about this and why does it matter? Well, because I've got that sort of engaging, kind of proactive business advisory, business partner industry background. I just like if our clients win, then we win. And I like to think that I'm quite personable and you can look at me on social media. I post all the time on social media. We do video content, got a big Facebook group. I do lots of stuff online to make myself seen as like first of all the key person of influence within my area and certainly my locality as well here in the uk. But also because I absolutely love talking to people. I love communicating numbers and seeing kind of light bulbs flick on in people's minds. And it's a bit of a, to be that finance and you know, money, it's a bit of a taboo subject. People get really uncomfortable, they find it really confusing and they just automatically switch off. But I've made it my mission in life to kind of debunk the mystery that accountants are suited and booty corporate stuffy individuals that speak in ridiculous jargon and just speak to clients one time a year to deliver a tax return. We're far more than that and I do believe we're back in the trend. So that's, that's, that's what I feel, why it matters. And then certainly in the days post Covid, you know, things like cash flow modeling and things like, you know, just understanding how a business works is just so important these days. And it's very easy for people to create a Business, it's very, very difficult for them to run it and scale it. So that's kind of what we do in our firm. Okay, so in terms of the three case studies, three individual clients, I'm just kind of gonna go through each one individually and just kind of talk about the points around what we. What we did. So the first client was a piano tutor based, quite local to me. They were actually one of my first clients. I think I signed them up. It would have been. It might even have been when I. Just before I lost my job. I lost my job middle of January 2020. And we signed a couple of clients the Christmas before. So they were probably kind of in and around that bracket. They've been a client for a long time. I remember going to the house to do a tax return. It took me about four or five hours. There was paper everywhere. Records were really confused. This person just didn't really have a clue what they were doing. They were an expert at their field, being a piano tutor, but they were terrible at the business side of things and especially the finance side of things. And so I spent a lot of time doing this tax return in time for the 31 January tax deadline, which is a tax deadline here in the uk, personal tax deadline. And so she loved, absolutely loved and adored to teach. She mainly taught children, but she loved to teach. But she was hampered by a calendar because what she was doing was pretty much in person lessons in her. In her abode, in. In her apartment. And. And that was great in terms of the rapport that she was getting with the students. But she was kind of had that sort of fixed capacity. And if. If somebody got ill, then that kind of hampered lessons as well. And so kind of her productivity sort of hit ceiling, really. She was totally maxed out. I mean, most of her lessons from memory were probably in and around sort of 3pm to 8 or 9pm so we're talking like outside school hours, because most of her students were children. And then she would do a few. A few lessons during the day for maybe more mature students. But she had a finite amount of time. And as a result of doing what she did, she had limited reach. You know, she only really dealing with local people.

Because they had to come to her apartment in her studio. And she had a massively variable income stream as a result of that as well. And so one of the things that I kind of said to her at the very beginning was, well, why don't you do things online? We've got zoom. I mean, this was what, two Months before COVID when the whole world went on to Zoom. So I'd been using Zoom or Teams or Google Meet. I said to her, I said, have you looked into maybe doing lessons on Zoom? Which, you know, geographically, I mean she could have serviced, let's say somebody in the U.S. and she's actually American, Greek origin, somebody in the U.S. or maybe somebody in Australia, different time zones depending on, you know, kind of her routine during the days here in the uk. But servicing someone online was something that she never really thought about before. And so I set her up on Zoom. Nothing too, I mean she's quite sort of technically illiterate to a degree. So I helped her with, with kind of set up and Zoom and, and then the world went a bit crazy with COVID and she actually transitioned, transitioned purely from in person onto Zoom. And so the work that we've done really kind of saved her business because I think she would have really struggled in that sort of March to April, May 2020 time. Yes. I mean kids were being homeschooled, so her lesson plan actually opened up a little bit, but she couldn't have anyone around and so therefore twofold. She could service more people because they were on Zoom, so she didn't have the social distancing issue to contend with. And then also she had more, more slots available as the kids were being homeschooled during the day at home. So going on to Zoom was, was really super key for her. The, the one thing that I did say to her, she had a whole library of like music library resources and she, she does these things called cards and they're like kind of learning devices. She's got textbooks, she did revision papers. She had a whole plethora, a whole library of content that she used to hand out to her students in person. She used to print things out and students would use them. That was part of their package and always good. The quality was super high and the students really, really like the content. But I said to her there were two things that we, we thought about. Number one, now that she was on Zoom, I said to her, rather than do a one to one session, why don't you do a one to many? Like you've got all this theory and all this, this musical stuff. You like, you don't have to play or like get someone to play an instrument. I mean, can you imagine like a zoom room of 20 people playing the piano? Be quite, quite confusing. But she could do music theory. She could teach to a Zoom room full of 20 people and charge whatever per session. Times 20. And so she started to do that and that provided her with an additional source of revenue again sort of during COVID initially and then.

So she had that. So that was kind of like something a bit new for her. So she went online and then she did these theory sessions, but then she opened up her library and she had, I think the online system was called My Music Staff. I think that's what she used. And essentially what she started to do was she offered an additional tier of, excuse me, an additional tier of sort of membership to say, well, if you want to access all of my resources, all of my content, all the library stuff that I do, here's an extra level for you.

And so that's what she did. Not only did she have another revenue stream, but she was earning money while she sleeped because people were signing up and downloading resources and she made that available.

And I kind of sort of taught her that on the back of a really interesting chat that I know called Mark Wickersham that kind of had like a similar concept, you might have heard of him. And so that was something for me that I thought was, was absolutely applicable to her in a similar context.

Some stats. I got my notes to the screen here, just got some stats here. So she, she doubled her revenue within 12 months and her time per student dropped by 40%. So that was kind of just a little bit of insight. And like I said, she built that library of on demand, on demand content that just continued to, to sell and does to this day. So that was case study number one. And I've got a bit of box. I'm just going to drink.

Busy talking all day. Okay. Case study number two.

Was, is all about a removals company. Now this is a removals company that were actually quite ahead of the game in terms of their approach to doing business. So they were quite sort of savvy online. They did a fair amount of social media content locally. They were sort of in the sort of top, let's say maybe three to five removal companies in town. And let's just say that there are quite a few One man and His Van kind of organizations. So they were doing quite well. But they were hitting a bit of a, call it a situation or maybe a challenge that they felt that some of that ancillary services were not really generating much money. And it's kind of like, what's the point of offering this to our customers? And one of them that they, they used to offer was insurance, which, you know, if you're going to move home, you want to make sure that your goods are insured. And what they used to do is they used to just offer one kind of flat insurance option, let's say was an option, it was kind of take it or leave it, but it was for a set fee and it was. We would ensure the amounts were kind of variable depending on the move that they were doing. But essentially it was you can either insure your stuff or you can't. And I remember we had a, we had a meeting where I was creating a pricing model model for them based on some different parameters in terms of like size of property, number of rooms, type of stuff that they were were moving. So we were sort of generating a bit of a pricing model to kind of give them some insight into the core offering. And then when we said like, you know, where the upsells cross sells or whatever else that you do, then they talked about insurance and they go, oh yeah, well we'll have it, yes, on or off in terms of insurance. And I said, well, why don't you offer some options in terms of the insurance? And they kind of looked at me and go, well, how the hell can we do that, do you know what I mean? Like, we either offer the insurance or we don't. And I kind of, knowing how I ran my business. And again, this was a client early on in my journey, like we signed these guys that probably mid-2020. And I've always offered options in terms of the proposals that I send out. I call them essentials, full and premium. You could call them bronze, silver and gold if you wanted to be a little bit sort of default. And I said to them, I said, why did you have some sort of like a bronze, silver, gold kind of tiering for your insurance? And at that point they were like, well, like, how does that work? And I said, well, not only could it be insurance, you could bundle it maybe with something else. And so the key thing that we thought about at the time was the quality of their packaging. And so we kind of had this upsell opportunity in terms of the insurance and their packaging on a bronze, silver, gold level. And effectively what we did is we offered a higher quality of insurance. So let's say, for example, that people had specialist items. I got a massive Lego collection and you can see it like some bit in the background up here. Lego is fragile, it's delicate and it costs a lot of bloody money as well. And so would want that to be insured maybe to higher degree or maybe like take out like a separate sort of premium for insurance. And so we talked about some of those things in terms of the sorts of things that they see from their clients. And things like antiques came up, like really sophisticated, like furniture or tech, like, you know, my office space for example, my Lego. And so they thought about that. And then in terms of the packaging there was like, I don't really understand too much about the world of removals, packaging, but let me just tell you, there are so many things that you can have in terms of like the bubble wrap, the cardboard, the boxes, you can have chilled, storage. I mean there was, there was loads of things that they came at me in terms of what options they had in order to, to store stuff. And.

And the packaging, packaging went kind of in line with the storage in terms of the kind of the upsell cross sell opportunity. Because let's face it, if somebody is doing a big move, there's a chain of properties. If sometimes, if you sell in the morning and move in the afternoon, that's the utopia. But that can't always happen. And so a lot of times, a lot of moves that they did, especially the larger properties, they had to put stuff into storage. And so they looked at storage options as well and they looked at size of containers, they looked at the quality of the container. Again, whether it needed to be refrigerated. I mean, I'm not entirely sure other than like food, what you'd want to have refrigerated on a house move. But nevertheless that was some, one of the things that kind of cropped up every now and then. But again with this sort of one tier approach that yeah, you can have storage or not, you can have insurance or not, they felt like they were money, they were leaving money on the table, but they were really struggling to kind of have the upsell opportunity. And so we discussed, like I said about these tiers, we introduced the bronze, silver and the gold kind of frameworks. They train their staff on the kind of, the things that they needed to ask, the sorts of questions that they need to ask their customers. And again, kind of, you know, Mark has already mentioned it several times and he will for the next couple of days. Just like communicating that value was just so key to them. And you know, I mean look, this is a house move. You're hopefully not going to move house too many times in your life. When you do, it's super bloody stressful and when you do, you want all your stuff to be protected. So if somebody's paying 5, 6, 7,000 pounds bucks for a house move, are they going to pay an extra 100200 pound for like decent insurance cover. Oh, I know I certainly would. And so kind of getting their staff to have that conversation and kind of really communicate that value was, was really, really important. And then they created almost like a little mini version of one of my brochures in the fact that they had the three it is at the top and then they had the checklist system. So they kind of, on the gold package, they had absolutely everything that was included from like an insurance and a storage point of view, laser ticks along along the column. And then the silver one maybe had like two thirds the amount of ticks and then the bronze one had a third of the amount of ticks. And really for that, again, like the stuff that I've learned from Mark, it's, it's about that kind of that fomo, right, that fear of missing out. So if you see something that's ticked over here, it's on a different, like a higher package. Then like, what's the difference in price? An extra 50 quid? 100 quid? Oh, yeah, go on. Then I might as well have it for a better peace of mind. And so that's what they did. And, and again, just in terms of some statistics, so they, they put, I think they actually called it bronze over. God, I told them not to, but I think they did call it bronze over gold in the end, their gold package total. So if we're thinking about like kind of overall revenue streams, they raised a 45 additional revenue. So we sort of modeled it on, well, what would happen if they kind of said yes at your old rate of insurance and storage. And what actually happened once you've implemented the tiers and they get, they got an extra 45 overall revenue based on having these tiers in place and people just opting for that silver or gold option. And, and what we tried to do was if it was, I don't know if it was £200 for the insurance cover, let's have £200 as the bronze level. And then the silver and the gold, let's add more stuff. So it could be higher insurance cover, it could be more specialized, it could be better packaging, like thicker cardboard boxes or something. It could be a bigger storage unit. And so we did that for the silver and then the gold in order to kind of give that sort of additional value to, to their clients. And when we looked at the insurance, this was really interesting actually. With the insurance, the average insurance revenue per job increased by 60%. 60%. And because most of the COVID was already kind of in Place that kind of just went to the bottom line. They didn't really have to pay anything additional for the insurance side. Yeah, the packaging a little bit, the storage costs a little bit, but again, factoring that margin in, they made 45% extra. But the insurance itself was a whole 60% more so. And that was really, really critical. Especially when I think about sort of around maybe 2021, the summer, autumn 2021, when the world started to open back up. The housing market here in the uk, locally in the Southwest, went absolutely crazy. And everybody felt like they were kind of released from their properties back to the office. And it stimulated a massive surge in house movement. And our clients kind of made the most of that. We did a lot of this proprietary work kind of probably back into 2020, beginning of 2021. So again.

Because, I mean, I've just moved house three months ago. They actually helped me move my house. I did offer the gold option of course on their, on their packages, but we've been planning to move house for a couple of years. And I said to them, I just, you know, I sit myself in your customer's shoes and you give me an insurance package of £200 and I'll probably say yes. But if you give me an option for 300 and it's going to protect all my Lego, I'm absolutely going to say yes. And so for me, just stepping in their customers or their clients shoes was really, really important for that, for that kind of scenario. Okay, so that's number two. Let me just check for time. We're good. Okay.

So in terms of the third one.

This is one of my favorite ones, mainly because this guy is quite a good friend. We met. Well, we didn't actually, we scheduled some meet two weeks before COVID two weeks before the first day of lockdown. And he was introduced to me by my graphic designer. So this is a web developer locally and it was just him and his business partner. Well, actually wasn't his business partner. It was a, it was a technical guy that he subcontracted work to, but he was kind of running the show in his business. And we were due to meet up for a coffee. His, his kids nursery called up to say we've had lots of illness or whatever, so we're going to shut the nursery in preparation for this flu thing that's coming along. And then we didn't meet for probably six months because lockdown kicked in. We met, got along really, really well. He then became a client and then probably I had a really crap website for at Least, I don't know, a year, 18 months. And as soon as I got into position where I could afford his services, he built me a beautiful website which you can now see www.ndconsultancy.net Little Plug. It needs a little bit of updating. Somebody said about time earlier, I totally get it. But it's, it's a beautiful website and it captures what we are as a business and my personality and the kind of a sense of humor that we've got as well. So he's been a really important person on my business. Journ and one of the things, when we first started working together, one of the things that, that he really struggled with in his business was that it was, it was totally feast or famine. If he had a busy kind of pipeline with web projects booking him in the diary. Like he would take deposits and stage payments and cash flow was relatively predictable once he got projects on board. But then for a few weeks, no leads and then he was struggling for the next four weeks because he had no cash flow come into the business. And so he was solely relying on these project fees and because the sort of the ebb and flow nature of the workload, like he was doing networking. I mean he's, he's a sales guy, he's really confident and he was generating work but he was living in constant fear. When was the next job going to come in? Like, is it going to be a small website but let's say £1,000, is it going to be a nice big one, five, six thousand pounds? He had no real kind of assurity, no steady income and you know, some of his cost base was, was fixed that he had to pay for. He was working from home, so he didn't have a huge, huge cost base and he was only paying his technical guy for actually doing the work. So if no work came in, his costs had, you know, kind of were reduced. But it was really hard to plan growth. He's like super ambitious and yeah, he, he kind of just felt like, I need something where I can predict cash flow. I've got a model where I know what stuff's coming in and if I have a bit of a dry period, then I've got some sort of bread and butter revenue to rely on. And so he came to me and he said, like, what can I do? I'm really struggling. Like I'm a graphic designer who actually referred the web developer to me. She, she said, she has said in the past similar things like Neil, like you get your clients to pay you on a Monthly basis by direct debit, you've got retained income. You know, if no clients leave, what the next 12 months are going to look like. I can't do that because all my work is project based. And I said, guys, that there is a way, there is 100% away. And so from my web developer client, we just sat down and I said to him, I said what sort of things could you charge for on a monthly basis that could be on a direct debit, let's say, for example, as a retained service to say, well, if you've got no development work coming in for the next month, it's okay because you've got this kind of cohort of clients paying you this monthly direct debit. Whether it's enough to satisfy his lifestyle. We didn't really worry about that at the time. We just tried to figure out a bit of a mechanic to go, what could you offer? And we just wrote a list. We just, I just said to him, I said, look, you know, in terms of sort of like during and post web development. So let's just say, you know, the website is being constructed and it's kind of almost finishing. Like what's the follow on stuff? Like what things do you do right now? And he listed them out for me and it was things like posting, it was things like, and I'm going to get technical, so I'm not a technical IT guy, so if I get this wrong, I apologize. SSL certificates, I think is something that he said. He also said some bits of support, he said some updating bits and pieces like policies and things. Anyway, and when I said okay, well that's, that's great. So I said what do you do with this? Do you charge this annually? Like how does that work? And he said well, 90% of it I don't actually charge. Which I had to do. A bit of a double take sort of filled me with a bit of trepidation. It turns out that the majority of the hosting he was charging, he's tending to charge that on an annual basis, which is, which is fine. You know, it was, it was kind of covering his cost, putting a bit of margin on, but he wasn't getting that until at least one year post website development project on, on the project, on each one. And so, and I said what about everything else? He said we just kind of do that stuff as and when. So for like somebody emailed in and they said can you change the font on this banner or you know, kind of like small level updating. I'm not saying like can you create a new page or can you sort of write this like you know, 2,000 words of copy or whatever. But the very, very small stuff he was doing for free. And so we got kind of like a basket of goods to say what, this is what we could potentially put into some sort of a bundle at different levels and potentially charge monthly for. And I don't have the stats for this, but we actually did sort of topped the amount of hours that he estimated that he, him and his technical guy did from like a support perspective. And it was thousands of pounds, it was literally thousands of pounds worth of work that he wasn't charging for. And it was great because like their clients were going oh they're super receptive, they do this stuff and it's great. They're not, they're not charging me. And it's done through a really high, this is, this is a high end web development business. This isn't like you do it yourself wix. This is, this is a proper word space type web developer, really high end websites like mine. And so we had that conversation. So we sort of got this basket of goods and then I said okay, that's great. So we've identified like a list of things that we could potentially offer to your customers on a monthly basis. And I said to him, I said as soon as that website has been signed off, as soon as it goes live, in goes the request for this direct debit for the hosting for support. At this time we just kind of, we didn't really have much in the way of an idea in terms of what we were thinking of. But hosting support, the certification, the updates, the policy stuff like all that stuff great, it needs to be done, it's important. I don't really know what an SSL certificate is.

But I know by the way that he communicated it to me that it's pretty important it stops like hacking and stuff. And so I said I don't want my website to be hacked, so just kind of do it. That's. Yeah, that's really. And it kind of got the fear of me and I guess that was him like communicating the value of what that was to me as somebody who's like, I mean I'm a bit of a tech geek but on the IT coding side not got clue. So we sort of come up with some words from script in terms of how we could communicate that to his clients in terms of. Because. And again a lot of this stuff was done in the background like the certification stuff, the updates and all that kind of stuff. It was done about. He wasn't telling his clients what he was doing, he was just doing it as part of that service.

So we've got the basket of goods. We then went into full Bronze, silver, gold methodology. Again, I kind of, kind of do this with my eyeshadow with him. And we said, okay, brilliant, but you have to offer something that gives people a bit of a range to buy because somebody that can't afford 100 pound a month is going to say no. Even if we think that's really, really important. They might just say just pay for hosting annually. But everything else, no, but somebody like me that really, I guess, appreciates the, the security of the website and the way that he spoke to me, if he had a 200 pound option to do things, I guess more proactively or more support or whatever, then I would, I would say, yes, let's absolutely do that. I've just spent several thousand pounds on this website, you know, what's 50 quid a month between friends. And so we came up with the bronze, Silver, Gold. And effectively for. I'm just trying to think now in terms of like the bronze aspect, I think it was something like everything that I discussed in terms of the certification and the hosting. But some of the things that we did. One of the main things that we did was the support. And so for the Bronze, I think it came with half an hour's worth of pre, kind of development time, support time every month. And then the silver plan was I think about an hour and then the gold one was an hour and a half or two hours. It was something like that and big. And we did that. I say we. He identified that the support was the main thing that he wasn't charging for, that he was really losing out on from a revenue perspective because most of the technical support work he was outsource, outsourcing to his technical guy who was a subcontractor. So not only was he not charging for it, but he was paying his guy to do it. And so he was kind of like a double losing out. So we identified that the support aspect was really, really, really super important to kind of tear that, but give people on the Bronze plan like maybe half an hour support and that would cover things like little fixes, like I said, like font changes, banners, like very, very small stuff. But. And if somebody wanted to create like a whole page or something more technically kind of proficient with the website, they could go onto the goal plan, they could have the two hours free per month. And it might be that. I mean, I know, I did one project, I think it was like putting, putting like the team buys and photos and stuff for the very first time. And it took us over two hours. And what happened was I got my two hours free and then I paid for the overage that I used in that month. I think it was like an extra like hour or two. And I can't, I can't remember the mechanic of how he invoiced for that, but he did, I paid extra for that. And so that's what we proposed.

Then in reality, what really happened.

He said to his customers, if you don't use your support time, you lose it. And I thought that that was quite a sensible decision. It would have, it would have taken quite a lot of maintaining to kind of understand exactly how many.

How many.

Things that people have requested or not all those clients will pay monthly with different tiers. Who's used what amount of time, who, who has time. That's rolled over too complicated. If you don't use your time in the month, your free time in the month, you lose it. And what he actually found was that, well, not only did a lot of people not go for the bronze option, they went for the silver and the gold because they valued the security aspect and actually they thought, well, website looks really good, it's brand new, but probably want to update it a bit when, you know, over the period of time, half an hour is not a huge amount of time on that bronze tier. So a lot of people change the silver and the gold.

And again, kind of, I mean, he was, he was earning revenue where he wasn't before, but like just the hosting aspect was just kind of covered by the bronze tier, so everything really fell to the bottom line in terms of generating more money. But then what he also found was a lot of people weren't using a lot of their allotted time. So if somebody paid for two hours a month, let's say an extra 1,200 pounds a month on a support plan and they weren't using their time, he'd effective, effectively baked it into his budget. He was going to pay two hours worth of time to his technical outsourcer to do that work. And if no work came, he didn't have to pay that person, but he still recovered the revenue because if you don't lose, if you don't use the time, you lost it. And so went straight to the bottom line. And over a period of, let's say, six to nine months, I want to say every website project that he completed, it was. And he said about this upfront before any work was done. He said after this website's completed, if, you know, if you want us to do your website, you have to go on a support plan after. These are the options. This is what it looks like on a direct debit. And so that's what he did. Kind of like a bit of a subscription model, but it gave him predictable income and it, you know, you could just imagine that it started off quite low. But then as he did more website projects, he had more support plans and his monthly recurring revenue increased and his kind of base level increased and gave him a bit more predictability and well, let's just say a bit more confident his business. And again a couple of stats, his monthly recurring revenue grew to 30% of his total revenue in three years. And we're not massive, massive business, just a couple of people in that business. But again, a third of his annual income was taken up from these support plans. In which point like a couple of years previous, he wasn't charging anything for cash flow became stable and actually something that was really important and yeah, I've noticed it in my business, clients become stickier if they see a monthly direct debit going out every month. It's, it's, it's hassle to change it, but you kind of know what you're paying for. You know that you're getting a service in the background. He was telling people about this certification stuff now, which he wasn't doing before. Clients stayed longer as a result of that. You know, something like a website is quite sort of embedded into day to day operations. You know, people can change accountants, people can change web developers, but actually if you're delivering a decent service and you're transparent with your fees, then his client stayed relatively long. So what's the time? Okay, going. Well, I just wanted to very quickly just take you through my sort of five step blueprint. I do this with all clients irrespective of whether I feel that they would need it. And some obviously don't. We don't do this with all of our clients. But my five step blueprint is as follows. So number one is map your clients clients. So who are they? What outcomes do they pay for? Like I said before, I tend to put myself in the shoes of their customers and I tend to go, if I was one of their customers, what would I be happy with? Like my web developer, like if he gave me one price for doing a website, okay, I probably would have still used him, but if he'd offered me something higher up, I probably would have paid more. Now he did offer me options but I'm just saying like if you've got a decent relationship, just figure out what they want. Like what outcomes do they want to pay for, do they need? Number two was list the add on services so like things that they already offer. So for the removals company it was the packaging, the storage, the insurance. For the web developer it was the hosting, certification, support, etc to get an idea from the client exactly what they offer. Number three is create tiered packages. You could call it bronze, silver, gold. I personally wouldn't but again sort of create some packages and start with a very like basic service for bronze and then kind of move your way up to silver and gold and go what else could we put into silver? What else could we put into gold? I wouldn't just do it for the sake of it. It has to be valuable to their customers as well. Number four was all about communicating this. So clients are great at doing what they're doing, web developing, moving people, houses, whatever. They might not be articulate having pricing conversations or a kind of like demonstrating value of pricing and like how they do things. It's easy for me to do it because I've had a lot of experience in industry and now in this business. And so like the main thing was don't like don't have it too scripted, try and make it relatively organic, natural. I think you just come across a lot better. Just be yourself, have a personality but obviously know your options and know that the service that you can give in the higher ones and how that can help overcome the challenges that their customers have. And number five, probably the most important one of all, I've given some stats today and that's because I've measured absolutely everything that I do in my business and we track things with clients as well. So number five is measure and also iterate. So if you measure it and it doesn't work, can it like do something else? If it does work, double down on it and keep doing it. But you have to measure it a bit like where your referrals come from. If you do marketing on LinkedIn and you get in no work from LinkedIn, stop doing it or maybe change your approach. And so yeah we kind of track all that kind of stuff and in terms of iterate, like, like I say if it doesn't work, try something else. If it does work, double down on it, maybe tweak it slightly and refine your offerings let's say. And that is my five step blueprint and I've got a Couple of minutes, I think spare. I don't know if Mark's lurking in the background, whether he's gone to sleep or not. I don't know if there's any questions or anything.

There you go. 45 minutes. Absolutely. Fly by. Well, 41 minutes, so there you go. How was that?

That was amazing. Yeah, I didn't fall asleep at all. I was listening. I was listening. Yeah, that was. That was fantastic. I love that. I know I've heard some of your stories before, but there's certain things I really like about the stories that I think that, number one, you illustrate really well that you can do this stuff with a wide range of different types of client in completely different businesses, different industries. That's the first takeaway. Second one is you don't need to have big clients. Your first one was it piano teacher. You don't have to have big clients to do this stuff. And then number three was a lot of the ideas you shared were not rocket science, but most small businesses have no idea. I loved it when you talk about the story about give three choices and they'd never even thought of it. And yet you and I, we know it's just so, so powerful and surprising how many people don't do that. I run a. I think, you know, Neil, I run a business Mastermind here. There's 10 of us. I host it in Portugal here. And every. We had ours on Friday. And every month I just basically ask a few questions, share a few ideas, and it's amazing how many of them don't do the basics, particularly when it comes to pricing.

Yeah. I think from my point of view, because, like, you know, I've. I mean, this hasn't happened overnight. And I think some of the soft skills that you learn will develop over time. I mean, I've been looking at the chat, like, throughout this afternoon, this evening, and a lot of people have been saying, where do I start? I don't have the confidence. And I guess for me, like, you gain confidence by being uncomfortable. Right. Like putting yourself out there. I think I'll forever have imposter syndrome. But that for me tells me that I'm challenging myself every day. And if I'm doing that, then hopefully I'm progressing. And most of what I've talked about today is just having conversations with human beings. Yes. I'm obviously a part of the academy. I've got a big bookshelf behind me. I read a lot, I learn a lot, and I've had to sort of refine and define what my skills are. And yeah, I'm not, I'm not brilliant at everything there, certain things that I do struggle with, but I think like being a business owner and knowing the fundamentals of my business and how I make money and what I do with my clients, why can't we give that information to our clients in terms of their clients? And then if you give that sort of advice, well, that's your superpower because you'll stand, you'll make yourself stand out. A million miles from the tax accountant that has one conversation a year.

Yeah. Amazing insights there. It got me. Yeah. I was thinking, when I think about the first few that I did back in 99 or end of 98, at first I thought, will they value this stuff? These are fairly simple ideas. But when you share a few ideas with people and you realize, and they don't say, well, that's a stupid idea, that'll never work. They never said, usually it's, oh, I'd not thought of that one. And they don't have to. Like every idea, you give them four or five ideas and just one or two they go, wow, that could be amazing. I found about you, Neil, but I found that doing advisory work all those years ago.

It just increased my confidence in business. It made me realize that actually I know a lot more than I perhaps thought because like with the mastermind I'm in now, I'm amazed how often people just love the advice I give. And I would never have dreamt of, I never thought that would be valuable when way back in, when I started my accounting firm.

Yeah, I mean that last point on my, my five step blueprint around measuring and iterating. Like if you can demonstrate that what you're doing is working, clients are going.

To be super happy.

But then it gives you a bit of a portfolio of case studies where you, you can demonstrate this stuff on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever you hang out, wherever your clients hang out. And that's the social proof then to say, well, you might only have one or two case studies, but just, just tell people what you can do and how you've transformed another client's business and someone else will look at that and go, well, my accountant doesn't do this. Where can I sign up? Hopefully? Yeah.

Awesome. That's amazing stuff. Thank you. Thank you so much, Neil. That's amazing. And I did notice actually someone's asked how you outline those steps. Again, I don't know if that's something you could just type into the chat quickly if you got time, or do you want to just Repeat them quickly. Is that quicker?

Yeah, I'll type them as well, but yeah. Number one was map your client's client. Number two was list add on services that they provide. Number three was create tiered packages. Number four was train your, train your clients in having value conversations. And number five was measuring iterate. But I'll type them in the chat as well.

Love that. That's great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Neil. Catching again sometime soon. Bye for now. Cheers. Okay, we, we've got a few minutes left. I just want to wrap up with a few things and then I think there's one or two questions I will deal with. So the last few things just to set up for tomorrow is, I'm going to ask this question tomorrow. Are you an action taker or a note taker? So if you are an action taker, think about what, what action you're going to take as a result of the things that you've learned today. You only have to do one thing. If you just do one thing as a result of the day, and then perhaps one more thing tomorrow and one thing Thursday, three things and you'll start to see results. So tomorrow the focus is on two main things. How do we sell this stuff to clients? How do we get clients to say yes? And also we're going to get into the value pricing piece, which, yes, we're going to focus on value pricing for business advisory. But this is actually something that will help you with everything you do in your practice. So tomorrow it's the same structure in terms of the times, same time, same place. And then we have a different guest towards the end, which will be our head of marketing, Emily. And she's going to talk about how to attract business advisory clients. And then remember, if you, in the end of day three, Thursday, there are two sessions. One of those is a exclusive session when you join the value pricing academy. And what I'll be doing in that session is showing you some of the best prompts to create some really powerful stuff for client strategies. Building a business plan inside less than 20 minutes. We'll do that live and you'll get access to all those prompts and immediately we finish. If you're not part of that, Emily's doing a session on AI. If you come to my session because you've joined, you won't miss out on Emily's because you will get the recording. Okay, I'm going to deal with some questions. I just thought I'd pick up on another thing that came up last year from Charlotte Darby. She says Hello. I'm a VPA member. It's the best investment for my business. Lots of resources and we're getting great results. We have hundreds of stores that we get from people. I think you saw some earlier. Anyway, questions. I think there's one from Ray. I'm not sure I fully understand it. Zoom address to capture. So I don't know what that means. Ray, I apologize. I don't know whether you've typed something or not for the team. So I'll. I'll leave that one. But I do have one from Alan that came in earlier. I know Alan, you are here. I can see that. So Alan said, how do you prevent scope creep? And yeah, so it's a little bit slightly off topic, but it is a really important topic when it comes to value pricing. So scope creep. First thing to say about scope creep is this is partly a pricing issue and it's partly a project management issue. So scope creep is often talked about with project management. And that's fine. There's things that we can do when we are doing a project to manage scope creep, but really the best time to deal with it is at the pricing stage. So what we want to do is make sure that we firstly become aware of, well, what is scope creep? What causes scope creep? We do a session in the advanced Pricing curriculum of Value Pricing Academy. I go deep on this and the first thing to do is to be consciously aware of what is scope creep. Because what tends to happen is scope creep happens and then we then do another job in the future. We don't do anything different. We just carry on doing things the same, the same as we've always done them. And these things keep cropping up all the time. So what we have to do is be aware. What is scope creep? Think about the last time that you had scope, scope creep and ask yourself, well, why did that happen? What was the reason for that? Because once you become aware, conscious of scope creep, we can then start to build that into our systems. And to some extent, Alan, I'm going to talk about this tomorrow. When we look at value pricing, this will make a little bit more sense. But in your pricing systems, when you are pricing, you want to make sure that your pricing system is really clear on the scope of the work in terms of the pricing conversation that you have. And I'm going to show you how you do that tomorrow, which creates that clarity. And also we want to have that clarity in the fixed price agreement or the proposal. We want to make it really, really clear what is the scope of the work. But what the great value prices do is they then realize that what we need to do is then not just tell them what is in the scope of of the work, but we need to tell them what is outside of the scope of the work. We have to be very specific in the written agreement, what's outside the scope. And we also have to be really specific in the agreement as to what constitutes a change of scope. And when you make that really clear in the pricing process and in the written proposal or fixed price agreement that goes a long way to solving the scope creep. Then we have the project management side of it where what we need to do is make sure that we have some systems in place to spot scope creep. And we also have systems in place the way that we get back to the client to let them know that the scope has changed and the price has changed and there are ways to do that. It comes back down to communication. I've talked a lot about communication. The words we use are really powerful. And so it's one of the scripts that we use to tell the client that the price needs to change. And if you've got great scripts and you've made them aware in the pricing process, it then becomes much, much easier. So there's my initial thoughts on scope creep, how we deal with it. It is a big topic and it's one that I do a 90 minute live session inside the vulnerability pricing academy. And also there's workbooks and scripts and so on that go with that.

Julius says I have a monthly subscription. Is this the same as vpamember Julius? I'm not sure with that that question just come in. I recommend Julius that you message unless my team's doing it now. Someone's typing. Someone's typing now. Okay, I can't see any more questions for me. Maybe my team's got some questions, is doing a few things like Julius, I can't see any more questions. So I think we are going to finish exactly on time. But tomorrow we have some, you know, some big stuff to talk about the value pricing and the how do we get clients buying advisory and really looking forward to those sessions tomorrow and listening to Emily as well. And then Thursday is my favorite is Thursday because Thursday is then. How do we do this stuff? How do we do advisory? We touched on it today with some of the stuff around the case study with Jeremy's waterjet cutting business. But on Thursday we'll do some more stuff. We'll do some more cool prompts and I noticed in the chat while Neil was Speaking I was watching in the chat and it did seem like there's a lot of people said the best bit of the day was the. A lot of the idea about having a prompt library, about having standard prompts. Which doesn't surprise me because for the last year value pricing academy members keep telling me that one of the things they value the most over the last year has been all the help the training around AI because when you have these standard prompts, as I said, they're like mini systems and we, and you know, systems are so important, you know, step by step processes. Your onboarding system is critical. We need to systemize everything in our business and what I love about prompt templates is these are just little mini systems that allow us to do things crazy fast, like a day to do a business plan we can do in less than 20 minutes. That's the power of these prompts. So I, I'm looking forward to sharing some more tomorrow and, and certainly lots more on Thursday. Anyway, thank you so much for coming along. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much for Neil as well. I'm going to play out some music it which I normally do and it would be great if you could tell me before you leave what was the best bit of today. We love getting feedback and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. We'll close down the zoom when the. When the music finishes. Bye for now.

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