Business Advisory Masterclass - Day 2

Requests I get and I know if I'm on holiday and I don't post for a couple of weeks, that dips consistency in terms of what you're posting. But make sure you engage with other people's posts as well because then their network will commented and chances are they may get in touch as well. Be engaged not just delivering the content, but also, you know, interspersing with other people's content too.

So another thing which Mark's always teaching us is to have a drive and a vision and a purpose. So like as soon as I attended one of his December webinars if you like, I thought, right, my vision is to have to, to focus on what I enjoy doing and that's being with incriminating businesses.

And that was when I came across one of your posts in, in Facebook. And I pretty much immediately signed up for the value pricing academy because it was just exactly what I was looking for. Pricing for accounting firms. First I just use that seven step framework that you give as a basic gold thread that you pull through every single session. It went from hourly billing to fixed pricing, immediately implemented menu pricing, giving the clients choice, making them feel they're in control, giving them options also then definitely communicating that value better.

I just want to keep going, don't look back. Get over it.

Yeah, get over it.

When I did this interview with you three years ago now, crazy, crazy where that time goes. I've managed to, to scale it up to 100,000 turnover in year one. It got to a quarter of a million in year two. But at that point I was kind of really starting to creak and figuring out, you know, if I wanted to keep growing, I'd either have to employ people or offshore or I just stop onboarding new clients and you know, kind of plateau and, and just sort of have a, almost a one in one out policy. But I wanted to help more.

Going back full circle, the social media profile and the branding has really helped to attract talent because I've not spent a penny in recruiters fees, I've not had to wait too long to hire people. Whenever I've, whenever I've put up a post saying that I've got a position to fill. I've normally been able to get a decent amount of contact engagement CVs through and I've been able to kind of hire from that.

Worked within industry that I've looked after a multi million pound business. I can advise people from startup started up in the plain eating business, right all the way up to like turning over multi million pounds in Turn in revenue and turnover and what systems, people, processes you need to have within your business in order to make sure all the cogs turn to make sure it functions properly. So I've seen it happen. So by seeing it happen, I can take what I've seen, what I help businesses do and then apply it to smaller businesses.

And I know you'll make mistakes.

Get interference and lose your way.

Mostly. I love all the price psychology elements that you teach us. I, I can eat that up. All those price psychology items I systematically implemented and it is massively effective. Definitely those principles of gold. By implementing those very valuable principles, I have increased my prices by at least 30% and at most up to 200% that I increased my prices with. And that opened up so much more time for me and my family, which was the whole reason why I started this in the first place.

All we got.

This is all we got.

I kind of skipped charging by the hour in terms of a methodology and I went straight to kind of menu pricing with providing options, prioritizing of, you know, starting the business was right. Okay, so I think I can do social media. Okay. And I think I can talk to clients. Okay, so what's the real fundamental thing that I really have no idea of? And it was pricing. So, you know, very early I wanted to kind of get the, you know, the teachings from you in terms of the menu pricing, sort of foundations initially. And then it was about creating packages that I could, you know, I could deliver to clients.

Try to keep things simple in terms of offering four key services and they are accounts and tax, payroll, bookkeeping and business advisory. So it's really kind of super efficient in terms of what we do. There's nothing kind of too complex in there. But then within each kind of service I have, I call essentials full and premium tiers. And I've given clients pretty much a pick and mix style approach.

A lot of the stuff which, you know, as a general accountant, I've just honed it in to the plumbing heating industry. So when I say like specialist knowledge, it's not always specialist knowledge. But I just apply what I've learned and even the teachings from Mark, like I applied that to the, to plumbing heating businesses.

Really seen massive results per client. But then overall as a business as well, I can tell you pretty much over 20, 21 only we've added about $90,000 worth of revenue this year. So that's, that's pretty big. It's, I, I still aim for more, but that's pretty massive for us. From where we were all the time.

The fees that I charge are a lot more. So when I look at average fee per client, so you know, when I look at that, it's. It's more than doubled, I think, really since. Since the very beginning. And I'm still delivering the same services. Yes, we've invested in a bit of tech. We do things maybe in a slightly different way, but fundamentally the way that I conduct myself and you know, the quality of what I produce, I think it still has been the same since the beginning.

Time. Sing along everybody.

Want to sing, sing, sing.

Take it on.

You're a winner when you sing, sing.

Hey, welcome. Welcome to day two and I hope it's been a great day so far. So tell me in the chat that you're here. We're going to kick off officially in five minutes. So let me just welcome you. Let's so far, quiet in the chat today. It was really busy yesterday. So let me know where you are in the world. And also if you've done something, if you're an action taker, what have you done since yesterday? Let's see who we've got. So Flora is here. Hi there. And Flora, you missed yesterday. So for anybody who did miss yesterday, we did record it at yesterday's session. Let me know if you did miss day one in the chat and I'll tell you where to get the recording in a little while, just before we kick off. Anyway, Flora's from Houston in Texas. Hi there, Flora. Great to see you and welcome to day two. Right. We have as well.

I think you pronounce it Johan from Johannesburg in South Africa. Hi there to you. Karen's here from Illinois in the US we have. Teresa Johnson is here again from California. Welcome back. Mary is here from 84. Philadelphia. I've never heard of 84. That's a cool sounding place. Okay, we have. Tanya is here from New Brunswick in Canada. Hi there, Tanya. We have. Lynette is here from Chattanooga in Tennessee. Another cool sounding place. Sherry's back from Park City. I remember from yesterday up in Utah. Gary is here from Vancouver in Canada. Welcome to Lynette. So, Lynette, I thought I didn't recognize the name. You missed yesterday as well. I'll give you the. The link to where the recording is in just a short while. Mary is here and. Oh, she took action. She's joined the Academy already. So thank you so much and congratulations. Welcome. And for anybody else that's joined the academy, we will remind you later, but we have a kickoff session on Monday. On Monday, where We show you where to access everything, but more on that later. Karen also missed yesterday. I'll tell you where the recording is in a short while. If you just joined. We're kicking off officially in about two and a half minutes. Let me just do a few more shout outs.

So where was I? Karen. Yes. Karen missed and Kelly missed as well yesterday because of the school pickup. So we got some new people here today, which is awesome. We also have. I don't know how you pronounce it, so apologies. I think it's Celoan. Celowayne. I'm gonna go with Siloaine. Forgive me if I got the pronunciation wrong. Anyway, there's a few people here from Johannesburg in South Africa. Great to see you here. Kath is here from Barry, that's in Ontario. Flora says great to be here. And Johan also missed yesterday. If I pronounced that right. Leslie's here. Leslie Hickison. Hi there. Great to see you again. Leslie's a value pricing academy member and fellow cyclist as well. Rick Howard is here. I missed yesterday as well. Set up my calendar wrong. I would love to watch the recording. Okay, I'm going to tell you when we kick off in a second what you missed yesterday and then how to access it. We have. Who else? Mary Sullivan is here from Hampton Roads in Virginia. We have. Vivian is here from Sterling, also in Virginia.

Not seeing too many people from the UK yet. Anyone from the UK or anywhere else in Europe. We've got lots of people from the us, lots from South Africa, few from Canada. Amanda's here. She missed the first part of yesterday. She's from Space coast in Florida. And Alison is here from New Jersey. We've got Chris from Cape Town. Oh, we've got someone from Northern Ireland. Hi there, Lauren. Great to see you. I hope it's not raining there. Oh, and Derek's in Ireland as well. Hi there, Derek. We have.

Margot Clark is from Rugby in Warwickshire. That's in the uk. And we have Vicki from Tampa in Florida. And I remember you were with us yesterday. Vicki Kelly is here in a drizzly hail in Cornwall. Cornwall is right down the southwest of the uk. For those that don't know, actually, suddenly everyone's from the UK market is here from Tunbridge Wells in the uk. So hi to you. Alan is here from South Carolina. And it's almost quarter to. Almost time to get started. If you don't know, by the way, if you missed yesterday, I'm from Portugal. I'm actually from the uk, but I've been in Portugal for five years. Now and love it here where the sun's shining. We have Marty is here from Michigan, we have David from Tampa and anybody else. I think I've got through. I think I've got through everybody that's commented. Paul's also Paul Ireland. Is that Paul island or Paul from Ireland? I'll go with Paul from Ireland, but I'm not sure. Apologize if I get that wrong. Right. I think I've got through all the chat. There's lots of people that aren't chatting, but that's fine if you don't want to. No worries, no pressure. But I do encourage you to chat. I do encourage you to chat, share stuff with each other.

And.

It is quarter two, so let's get started. Let's start off with day two and so very quickly, what do we cover yesterday? So yesterday we started off with why the profession has a change. We went through a bunch of different reports and blog posts from various places like the CPA.com and so on. They've been out in just the last few couple of months talking about the need for change. I've been studying AI for a couple of years now, nearly two and a half years and the pace of change is extraordinary. We are going to have to change. The profession's changing. And I talked about yesterday how I think it's an exciting time that's full of opportunities if we want to just grasp the changes. So we kicked off with that. We talked about what is business advisory. I looked at the definition. We went through the six core components of a well rounded business advisory session. Then we looked at how do you spot opportunities. And we'd had that case study with Jeremy with his water jet cutting business, that engineering business. And we looked at some numbers together and we went through some of things, some of the things you would want to do when you are faced with numbers to start to understand what's going on in the business and where to spot opportunities. What we also then did is we start to then look at now we understand what advisory is and how to spot opportunities by looking at the numbers in a different way. We then looked at how do we package it up. We looked at menu pricing and the reason why we offer different choices. We started to get into the pricing piece and then we also talked about how do we communicate value. So that was yesterday. And if you missed yesterday, which a few of you did, then I'm going to just put into the chat the link to yesterday's recording. It's on our YouTube channel, it's there and the recordings will be available until the end of the week. So if you, if you missed day one, you'll definitely want to catch up with that probably before this time tomorrow because these three days are really building on each other. So yesterday was all about understanding what advisory is, spotting the opportunities and then we start to get into pricing with how do we package it up so we understand what it is that we're selling and how to communicate it with what we're going to cover today. Today's challenges that we're going to look at is how do you sell advisory to clients without uncomfortable selling? We're going to look at that first, then we're going to get back into value pricing. We're going to look at how do value price advisory work. We're going to talk about how do you come up with a price, how do you calculate a value based price for advisory. And then our special guest speaker today is Emily, who's our head of marketing and she's going to look at how do we find the right people and turn them into clients. So that's today and of course yesterday. The other thing we covered yesterday, we had an amazing guest speaker. We had Neil Griddle who's got an extraordinary accounting firm. He's been five and a half years in and I think he said he's, I think it hit about a million if I remember right, and he's on track to get close to a million and he's got, I think a team of 12. He's doing some extraordinary stuff and I know that those of you that saw him yesterday where he talked about some practical case studies around advisory work, there were some fantastic comments from you. Anyway, today, today is about how do we do selling without uncomfortable selling and value pricing and marketing. I did ask yesterday as we finished off what were the best bits of yesterday and some of the comments that came through, which are really nice, we had, I'm not sure if that's fareed, I'm not sure but said the chatgpt prompts. Sherry, I know you're here. Sherry the best part of today that was yesterday was realizing AI won't replace us, just make us better. So we talked a bit about some people are saying that AI is going to replace accountants and it will, but not you because if you're ready to embrace the change, it's exciting. Teresa, who's here again, said the prompt library was awesome. Also Neil's personal experiences. Chet said, I love the great tips from Mark as always, so thank you Chet for that. Dion said, AI and how to use it to our advantage and not be threatened by it. And Marcia said the prompts, how to and beyond. So that was yesterday. And so those of you that missed yesterday, yes, A big theme of yesterday was AI and it will be tomorrow as well because it's moving so fast. And as we said yesterday, AI really helps us with advisory. And we looked at some exciting prompts that you can use to make advisory easier. And we're going to do some more later on today and we'll get into some even more tomorrow. Lots tomorrow as we look at the final piece of the jigsaw, which is how do we do this stuff? How do we do advisory?

I also spotted a few things that we had some value Pricing Academy members here yesterday and we often get some come along to the business advisory masterclass, which is cool. And Sarah Bridges said that the best investment in my business was joining the Value Pricing Academy. Alison, I think Alison's here. She said, I joined vpa. I don't take advantage of everything offered and it's still worth it. She said, and most people don't because there is so much stuff. We cover absolutely every part of building a great accounting firm. And so you just pick the bits that are right for you at that point in time. Stacy said, love vpa. Making lots of progress. I think Stacy's relatively new in the Academy. Sylvia says my pricing was very low before vpa. I've increased my pricing and got better clients. Katrina, I don't know if Katrina is here today, but she said tripled net profits by implementing the teachings. Neil, who you met was the guest speaker said, but there's an insane amount of value to be had. I'm learning something new every month and he takes action every month and keeps building his practice. And then back to Sarah Bridges. I thought this was amazing. Sarah said, thanks to Mark Systems, I got a 38% increase on my basic package during a pricing call this past Friday and in yesterday's pricing meeting which was Monday, got a 68%. Got a 68% for that basic package than what I would have gotten without the systems at 68% more.

And I hear those stories all the time. Obviously we focus on value pricing, not just the creating value, but how do we capture that in the price. And we get stories pretty much every week from Academy members getting better results with pricing, increasing their prices, increasing their profits, their margins, making more money. Okay, I did say yesterday, I said, I talked about the fact that there are tend to be two types of people that come along to webinars and training events. There are the note takers who come along and take notes, which is a great thing to do, but taking notes alone won't make a difference. If you want to see results, then you have to go away and do something. You have to be an action taker. And there are some people who just take notes and then go back to doing whatever they did before, hoping something magically changes. But the people that get the results are the ones that go away and do something. People like Neil, who you met yesterday. So my question for you is for those of you that were with me yesterday, then in the last 20 hours, what have you done? Have you taken some action so far? Let me know in the chat. What have you done? Let's see who are the action takers. Let's see who's done something as a result of.

Yesterday'S session. And I know some people weren't here yesterday, but you'll get the chance to tell me what you did this time tomorrow, because I'll remind you again. And for those of you that did miss yesterday, we talked as well yesterday about an opportunity to enroll in a bigger program. There's a special arrangement right now if you want to go even deeper with biz advisory and with value pricing. And I will I'll remind you of some of those details later on today if that's okay with you. Right. Let's have a look at how the day is going to unfold in terms of timing. So we're into the first session today. We're going to have a short break, usually three or four minutes. Just if you do need a bathroom break, of course, don't go anywhere. We'll just play some music for a bit if you need a stretch break. So I'm going to focus on the selling piece first in a bit. And then we'll get into value pricing after the break. And then in the third session of today, we have our special guest, Emily, who's going to be looking at how to attract and win brand new clients. That's today's schedule tomorrow. Same timings, but obviously different focus. We're looking at, we'll look at tomorrow how we how to do advisory, how to deliver advisory. And I'll talk more about that later on. I mentioned this yesterday. There's no magic button with building a successful accounting firm. It doesn't happen by magic. We do have to do the work. But one of the things that I've been doing for the last 25 years is teaching accounting firms frameworks. I was in practice myself. I learned through my Many, many mistakes. And what I found over the last 25 years is the things I teach in terms of the structures, the frameworks for value, pricing and advisory, they work. If you follow the process, if you do the work, if you follow the structure, the process, you will get results. Now, I do encourage questions, I do encourage questions. Please do ask questions throughout. I will pause two or three times today to answer questions. So that's the benefit of being here live. You can ask your questions, but do ask your questions like this. Firstly, if it's a question for me or later on, Emily, if it's a question for the speaker, please put it in the Q and A box rather than the chat box because if it's in the chat we might miss it, it gets lost. So if you could put it in Q and A, that would be really cool. Also, when you put a question in the Q and A, try to keep it short because if you write a question, it's four or five sentences live. It's very hard to read it. Take it all in. It's usually because it's not very clear or it's about three or four questions in one. So keep the questions short and precise. If you want to ask more than one question, that's fine. Just post it as separate questions and you can put questions in the chat, but I will probably miss them. So if you, if it's a question, like I missed the link, for example, a question for the, for my team, then of course use the chat box. That's fine. They are monitoring the chat. I will find sometimes it gets a bit distracting the chat so I will just focus on the Q and A and there are some questions there already which.

I will.

I will definitely. Well, I'll answer those in a second if I'll answer them now because they're quite quick. So Alan says you are a foreigner from the uk. Yes, I am, yes. I'm from the UK but lived in Portugal for five years now. Somebody anonymous. Oh no, it's not. It says Alan says Mark, I definitely would like to talk to you one on one. I don't tend to do one to one calls with people because I want to help as many people as possible. If it's one to one support coaching that you want, we do have a panel of coaches inside the Value Pricing Academy. Neil, who you met yesterday, offers one to one coaching services. If it's about something else, then Alan, just email my team. Email sarah on supportaluepricing academy.com and Chet said isn't a question, but Chet Put in the Q and A. I started working on creating three packages yesterday. Awesome, you're an action taker. Started already. That's amazing. Okay, last admin slide is remember as well, we sent you a workbook. This is a great place to keep your notes. It's also got from the case study, all those numbers and so on. So if you've missed the workbook, perhaps if you weren't with us yesterday, then we did send the link to the workbook in an email, I think on Monday. But I will ask my team if they could put a link to the workbook into the chat if you have not got it already. Okay. I am actually two minutes ahead of schedule, which is great. And that's included answering questions. Okay, so let's get into the first of today's topics, which is how do we sell advisory? How do we sell it without uncomfortable sales techniques? And I say that because, like you, I'm an accountant and most accountants are fairly introverted. I hated selling. I really hate selling. Most of us do. And so how do we sell advisory work? I saw yesterday in the chat, one of the questions I asked early on was, if you are not yet doing paid advisory, what's the reason why? And there were a number of comments as to why people aren't doing advisory. And I noticed a few times people were saying that there was a lack of confidence with selling, a lack of confidence with talking about it, a lack of confidence around raising the issue of the price for it. So today we're going to really unpack that and look at that in more detail, how to sell advisory. And I'm going to talk about how to do it without the uncomfortable selling. And it's about having a process. And I think the starting point is to make sure that we understand the stages of the value conversation or the pricing conversation. And I showed this graphic yesterday and I'm going to come back to this and go through again now because. And talk about it in the context of advisory. And that is that the first thing we do when we are talking to clients about advisory. As with any other service, the first thing we have to do is uncover value. And that's all about asking questions. We need to ask questions of our clients because we need to ask the right questions in the right order. And I teach a process in the value pricing academy called.

The Power of Questions, the fact find. And essentially I talk about the four different stages that we go through. We have to ask the background questions, then we have to ask the problem questions, the consequence questions. And then.

The benefit questions, and we're not going to go through all that today because that's a 90 minute session in its own right. But what we will do later is, I know some of you said, or many of you said yesterday, you loved some of the AI prompts in the prompt library. So I thought what I'd do towards the end of the day is do a prompt that will, for advisory work will help you come up with what are the right questions to ask, what would be great questions. So I'm going to leave it that for the moment, but we're going to come back to this idea of uncovering the value later on with AI helping us out, it's all about asking questions. The better you are asking questions, and this is a skill that takes a bit of practice, but the better you are asking the right questions. What we're trying to do here is really unpick uncover what are the problems, the challenges. We're looking to find out what would be valuable to them because the better we understand their problems, their challenges, their pain points, then we're going to create better solutions for them. And when we create better solutions that solve their deeper problems, they'll pay us more money, they'll say yes to us more readily. We make more money, we make more sales. So this is fundamentally important, this first step, which is why I said yesterday, when you are having a pricing conversation, I recommend in the value pricing academy, I always recommend that you should think about this as a two stage process or a two meeting process, particularly brand new clients. I remember way back when I was running my accounting firm, I was a young lad in a hurry and when I met with new prospects, new potential clients, I wanted to get them signed up as quick as possible. And so I'd have one meeting and try and do it all in one meeting and take shortcuts. And that's just not appropriate. We really should be spending at least 45 minutes asking great questions. And I would recommend that you have an entire meeting just to uncover value, because that shows the client you care, you're listening, you're interested in their business, and it also gives you such valuable information, you uncover gold that's going to help you solve their problems at a higher level, at a better level, to give a better solution. So this is a really important step. Once we've done that, then we can move on to step two, which is building the value. And if you remember from yesterday, I talked about this being really two things. Number one, it's about building a better solution and we can Build a better solution when we understand at a deeper level exactly what their issues are. And we looked at some prompts for doing that. We looked at that one called Service Designer to help us build a better solution. We did that for our case study, Jeremy's Engineering business, yesterday. So building value is about creating a better solution, a solution that better solves their problems. And it's also about communicating that value so they understand it. If you offer amazing solutions to their problems that solve their problems and can communicate it really effectively, then you're going to find more clients saying yes and price will be less of an issue. And then number three in the conversation is then we capture the value. That means we price based on value, not time. We should have the pricing part of the conversation last. We can't talk about price until we understand what's important and what's their challenges. And we can't talk about price until we finish then building up the value and explaining properly so the client understands. If we've done stage two really well, then your clients will be ready to buy and price will become less of an issue. So we're going to look today at, we're going to look at the sales process and we're also going to look after the break, perhaps even before the break, at the idea of how do we then capture the value in the price? How do we come up with the price for advisory work? Okay, so with that said, let's look at how do we sell advisory. And so we've got, just bear in mind, keep in mind those three stages, the value conversation, because they're really important. So if I can now talk specifically about advisory, we first of all do need to uncover the pain. We need to understand what is the problems going on in their business. And yesterday when we looked at the case study and how we look at numbers, you start to get a taste of how we do that. I said to you yesterday that we're accountants, bookkeepers, we understand numbers better than anybody else. So let's start off with the numbers. Let's look at the numbers to identify what's possibly going wrong in the business. That's a great starting point. And then we can start to ask great questions to really drill down on some of those things. So we start there, we always start the conversation there. But what we also want to do is when we are meeting with a client to talk about advisory.

And when you talk about advisory and you're going to talk about price, whether you like it or not, you're in a sales process, okay, we hate Selling, we're accountants. I hate in selling. But whenever you're talking to a client about one of your solutions and you want the client to buy, whether you like it or not, you are in a sales process. But what makes it easier is if we adopt what's called consultative selling. And as part of that process, one of the things we want to do is add some value. Let's create value for the client. Because so rather than it being just a sales process, when we create value for the client in that process, then if nothing else, the client will go away thinking, wow, that was a really, really valuable use of my time. I now feel like I've got some information about how I can improve my business and solve the pain. So let's make sure we add some, some value. And I'm going to show you how we do that. We also want to make sure that in our process, our sales process, we want to do two things. We want to demonstrate and inspire. Demonstrate and inspire. Firstly, we want to demonstrate what's possible in their business. And we can demonstrate in three ways. Firstly, firstly, demonstrate with numbers. We are the numbers experts. We understand numbers at a deep level. So let's use that to demonstrate with numbers. Let's use numbers to demonstrate what's possible in their business. And we're going to go, I'll show you exactly how to do that in just a few minutes. We can also demonstrate with stories. And what I mean by that is one of the most powerful things you can do from a marketing point of view. If you want to win more clients, if you want to win more advisory clients, clients, then you want to start collecting obsessively collecting success stories. Every time you get a great result from a client, you want to ask permission to get the story and use the story. They are so powerful. So let's imagine that taking yesterday's case study, if that was your client Jeremy, with his waterjet cutting engineering business, and let's imagine you'd worked with him and you'd solved some of his problems and his numbers had improved. You want to ask permission to get the facts of the story and share it. Because then the next time you meet a client to talk about advisory as part of the process, you can demonstrate with stories. You can say, let me. If the client says, I have this particular problem, you might say, well, that's interesting. I was working with another similar client just a few months back. He had that same problem and he runs an engineering business. Let me tell you what his specific problem was and I'll share with you what we did with it, what we did with him, and these are the results that we got. So when you use stories, when you demonstrate with stories, that demonstrates that you are the expert. It demonstrates that you get people, you get results. Now, of course, if you've never done advisory before, you perhaps don't have any stories. Okay, never mind, make sure that you start collecting them. We've all got to start somewhere. And one of the things that you might do, a technique you might want to use if you feel, sometimes if you've not done advisory and you perhaps feel a lack of confidence, one of the things that you could do is pick one of your favourite clients that you have a really good relationship with a client that you also have some understanding of their business. Perhaps it's because they have a business where you are a customer of that type of business. Perhaps they own a restaurant, for example. And I say that because I find it's always easier to do advisory work when you are a customer of that type of business. Because when you're a customer. So I'm a customer of restaurants and I eat out regularly and I see the good, the bad and the ugly. I see so many bad things in restaurants from a customer's perspective. And so if I was doing advisory for a restaurant business, I would find it a lot easier because I can certainly talk from experience about how to improve the customer experience because I am a customer to that type of business. So think about, if you've never done advisory before, lack of confidence. Find a client that you like, that you get on well with, that you understand the business. And then you might say to them, I'm just launching a brand new service. We're going to be charging this sort of price for doing it. But because you're a great client, I would love to work with you for maybe free or for just whatever. You can have a low price or even for free. And I would like to do that because you're my favorite client. People love flattery. I'd like to do this for you because you're my favorite client. And all I ask for in return is that in a few months time, when we finish the process, if you could share with me, let me share your story of what we've done together and the results that you've got. That's a great place to start. If you don't have the confidence and then you've got a story, and not only a story, you also will feel more confident because you've worked with somebody, you've taken that first step and done some advisory work. And if it's a client that you get on with really well, they're going to, they're going to be forgiving if you, if you do anything wrong, which you won't, by the way, when you follow the frameworks that I teach, you won't do anything wrong at all. And you've got AI to help you out every step of the way. So where are we? We're to demonstrate. We can demonstrate with numbers, we can demonstrate with stories. And the third thing we can demonstrate with is ideas. And what I mean by that is that when you are talking to a client about advisory work, you're demonstrating with numbers. Also give some ideas of things that they could do.

Doesn't have to be ideas relevant to their business, ideas about a different business.

Because when you share ideas of things that have worked in a business, even if it's a different business that solves a particular problem that your client you're talking to has, then they will think, oh, that's an interesting idea. I thought about that. Even if not directly applicable, their mind will start thinking, ah, how could that work for my business? So what we're doing is in, that is a, we're demonstrating with some ideas, we're demonstrating that we're experts, that we've, we have.

Some commercial ability, which you have because you're a business owner yourself, you are running your own business, you probably know much more than you think. And secondly, we are adding value by giving great ideas, we're adding value. So we want to demonstrate with numbers, stories and with ideas. And we want to ultimately inspire. Our goal is to inspire the client, inspire them about what's possible in their business, so that they want to go and take the next step, so that they are inspired about the results they could possibly get. And whether they work with you or not, they're going to get value from the meeting. But if they're sufficiently smart, inspired by your stories and demonstrations, they'll want to work with you.

So how do you demonstrate with numbers? And.

That'S what we teach in the value pricing academy is what I call the nine drivers of profit. You see, every business, every one of your clients has underneath a mathematical model. There is a mathematical model that runs underneath every single business. There is a generic model that works for all businesses and for certain industries. Industries. We can fine tune it in some way, but most the time we can use the generic one. Basically, it's nine drivers. It's nine things that when we get those nine metrics and multiply them together, it gives us profit. You see, the thing is, most of your clients, I would guess most, if not all your clients, want to make more money. They want to make more money. They want to increase their profits. And in the value pricing academy, we call business advisory, profit advisory. Why? Because ultimately, that's really what clients want. They want more profit. The problem with that is you cannot help your clients to increase their profits. You can't help people increase profits. And the reason for that is because profit is simply the end result of a whole bunch of other activities or drivers. And what we need to understand is, well, what are the things that impact on profit? Because if we can break that down into the individual elements, what we can do is we can work on the individual pieces that drive profit.

And so I'm going to demonstrate in a little way, in a little while how we do that, but by looking at three of them. The three that you should start with if you want to help a client improve their business.

Before we do that, let me just share with you something that one of my mentors shared with me some time ago. His name is Peter Thompson. He's from the uk, And I've known him for many, many years, since I started my accounting firm. And he's always been a huge help to me. I went on his mentoring program once. I spent a year working with him every single month. And I remember saying to Peter, he did a session teaching selling because his background was sales. He was a salesperson. And so he was teaching selling. And I remember during the lunch break, I said to Peter, I said, peter, I'm an accountant. I'm an introvert. As you know, I hate selling. I really do not like selling. And Peter said to me this. He said, mark, don't sell. Don't sell. Don't try to sell. Allow people to buy. Allow people to buy. And he said that. And at first I'm thinking, peter, what are you on about? I'm a slow learner, by the way. And so.

I was with him for two days. So that evening in the bar, I kind of was thinking about this, and suddenly the penny dropped, the light bulb went on, and it made perfect sense. And for me, it just changed so much from a mental point of view. I realized what he was saying was that.

Not every client is going to buy your advisory services, and it's a good job they don't because you haven't got the capacity to work with every one of your clients. I said yesterday, you probably at best have 10% of your client base with would buy advisory and so let's not worry about them all buying. We want to find which are the best ones. The trouble is we don't always know which are the best ones. We should never prejudge who's right and who's wrong. So what we do is we simply allow them to buy. In other words, we demonstrate what's possible, we get them inspired, and then it's okay. This is what we can help you do. Would you like us to. Yes or no. And if they say no, that's fine. Let's not worry about it. Perhaps it's not right for them. Perhaps they're not the right client. Perhaps now is not the right time. And just because now is not the right time, it might be. When we have the conversation a year from now, something might change. So let's not put pressure on ourselves to feel like we have to use sales techniques and convert every client. No, let's just create value. Let's inspire them. Let's share what's possible in their business. Some will buy, some won't, some will, some won't. And that's fine. That's the way it's going to be. And so in your practice right now, it might be 5 to 10% of clients might buy advisory. That's okay. You just have to uncover them, have systematic conversations with your clients and allow them to buy, Give them the opportunity to have you help them change their business, to change their life. So I've talked about a whole bunch of principles for how to sell advisory. But as you know from yesterday with the prompts, I'm a big fan of frameworks and systems. We want to have a process. And so I have a process. I teach in the academy. It's a process that I started when I was doing advisory in my accounting firm at the end of 1998. I developed this process because I hated selling. And I called it the Profit Diagnostic Review.

And we'll build on this and I'll show you some other components of it. This diagnostic review, essentially it's about starting off by asking questions, uncovering pain, seeing what the problems are. And then what we do is we start to add some value by demonstrating with numbers, demonstrating with stories, demonstrating with some ideas, sharing some of the ideas around the nine drivers of profit. And once we've explained what's possible and inspired them, we then allow them to buy. We give them the opportunity, would they like us to help them get those results? Or do they want to try and do it themselves? And if they do that, they probably won't get the results. So we have the same conversation next year. And so that's essentially in a nutshell, the profit diagnostic review. So let's talk a little bit about.

How do we use numbers. And I talked about the nine drivers of profit. And I don't want to go through that. Let's keep it at a high level and simple for now because as well as business owners, very often they want you to help them grow their, increase their profits, their bottom line profit. Another thing that your clients almost certainly want is they want to grow their business. They want to grow their business because if they grow their business, hopefully it grows their profit, hopefully it increases their valuation. It's worth more when they come to sell. Most people want to be bigger, they want to grow their business. And the problem we have with that is that just like profit, if they want your help growing their sales, that's difficult to do. Why is it difficult? Because sales or turnover or revenue is the end result of other processors. And we have to understand what those other processes are, what those drivers are. And again, there's a mathematical model and so we can break it down. There are five drivers of sales. But I'm going to focus on three. I'm going to focus on three that are the most well known. Based on a model that was created by the American marketer Jay Abraham. He called it the three ways to grow a business. He talked about the three ways to grow business. I'm an accountant, I expanded out to the nine ways to grow your bottom line profit. But let's start with three ways to grow a business because this is really powerful. Even if you are thinking, I'm not a salesperson, I'm not a marketer, I don't know how to help a client grow their business. That's because you're thinking about sales. Take yesterday's engineering business, Jeremy's waterjet cutting business. If Jeremy said to you, how can I grow my business? How can I increase my sales?

If I'd have come across that in the early days, I'd have thought, I have no idea. I'm an accountant, how can I do that? But when we understand the drivers, it actually becomes much, much easier. So what are they? Let's have a look. So sales is simply the multiplying three numbers together. They are how many customers you have during the course of a year.

Multiplied by how much on average does a customer spend when they do business, when the customer comes into the shop or the customer makes an inquiry, whatever it might well be how much they spend on average. And that's then multiplied by on average, how often, how frequent do they buy? We just multiply. We just get those three numbers and we multiply them together. And that sales. Why is that important? Because once we understand the numbers, then we can work on any one of those three drivers. We could work on how to get brand new customers. We could work on ideas for increasing the average spend and one of the easiest ways to do that is pricing. Or we could work on ideas to help them increase the frequency. And what you will find with any business is most people, when they want to grow their business, and this may be you as well, most accountants who want to grow, they always think, I need more clients, I need more clients, I need more customers. That's what most people think. But when you understand the drivers increasing the other two metrics are much, much easier and less, less expensive. Acquiring customers is hard, it takes a lot of work. And you might have to spend money on Facebook ads, for example, or sales people. Much easier to focus on the other two when we understand some simple strategies to work on those. I'm going to give you one or two ideas in a short while.

Let me just quickly remind you of from yesterday. These were the profit loss account for our case study business. So I'm going to pick up on Jeremy's business right now. We're going to look at some of these numbers and we have here the sales from the last five years, they were 810 grand, dropping to 710 in year 10. So is in the latest year. So his sales are declining and perhaps he's worried about that and he wants to turn that trend back round again and increase his sales. So one of the things we can do is we talked yesterday about some really powerful ratios that you could measure. And we talked about with those ratios about tracking the trends. Well, let's talk about two more ratios that are really useful, but they're not ratios you can get from the financial statements. Sometimes the most powerful ratios involve us digging a little bit deeper. And the two ratios that are really worth measuring are what is the average amount of money that a customer spends each time they do business? So if someone, someone yesterday mentioned restaurants. So that would be each time a customer comes into the restaurant, what's the average size of the bill? And then the other measure is how often on average does a customer come back? Do customers come to the restaurant three times a year? Every month, 12 times, perhaps every week? 52 times. So these are two ratios which fit into the framework that we've just talked about in terms of the makeup of sales. So let's, let's now look at, well, how do you get those two metrics? How do you get those ratios? Well, to get those ratios, we need two more pieces of information. We know sales. We've got our sales numbers there from the profit loss account. Two other great metrics, if we can get them, is how many customers, different customers bought during the course of the year. And we should be able to get that from the sales ledger. Obviously, for some types of businesses, that might be more difficult. It may be a retail business, for example, we don't keep track of customers. But for most businesses, certainly ones that raise sales invoices from the sales ledger, we should be able to establish how many customers were active in a particular year. And the other metric would be how many invoices are raised in a year. And that's an easy number. That's easy if they have sequential sales invoice numbers. Because we just have to look at what's the first invoice in the year, what's the last one, and then just from that, we can calculate how many invoices were raised in the year. That's all we need. And it's worth measuring those numbers because then we can calculate the average spend. The average spend is very simple. It's the number of sale, the amount of the sales, the 810,000 in year six divided by how many invoices were raised in the year. And that gives you the average amount of a invoice, the average spend and the average frequency is simply if we have 500 invoices and 100 customers on average, those customers must have bought five times a year. So we just measure those two numbers. They're really useful. And then what we can do, like we talked about yesterday, is we can start to look at some trends in those numbers because they will start to tell some different stories. Just like yesterday, we start to uncover what was going on in Jeremy's business. We can start to the same thing with sales when we start to look at the trends in average transaction value and average frequency.

So let's, let's just for a bit of fun, let's look at some. Let's do some what if analysis. Let's look at what would happen if we could help the client work on just one thing in their business, one of these drivers. And if we look at the results for his business, going back to the case study, then we know that in year 10, the latest year, the number of customers has dropped. He has 75 customers in each of the last two years it's gone down. And we also know, though, that the average spend from that ratio for year 10 was 1820, if we do the math, and actually that's a good number. So although we've got less customers, they are spending more money each time. And if this was my client, I'd want to start to uncover why. What's he doing? Well, what's he doing different in year 10? But if we look at the other metric, we can see that the average frequency was best in year seven and quite a bit different. And what I would then want to do is I want to ask Jeremy, what was he doing different in year 7? Why were customers coming back more frequently? Now, maybe Jeremy has no idea, but it may be, as you start to ask questions, it triggers something in his mind. He might think, well, that's interesting, because four years ago, what I did is I sent out regular emails to my customers to tell them about new things that I could build for them and just to remind them that I'm here.

And.

Then thinking about it, after about a year, some customers complained about too many emails, so I stopped doing it.

Oh, right, okay. So in the year that you were sending out more emails to customers, then they bought more stuff. They came in more frequently and bought. I mean, it might not be that. It could be all sorts of different things that impact on frequency. But if you can uncover that by asking questions, you have the data by asking those questions. Very often, what happens in business. This is interesting what happens in business, and this is probably, probably you as well. It's certainly the case with me. There'll be times in our business when we do something in our business that works. And then for whatever reason, after a period of time, we come across a different idea and we stop doing that thing and do something different. And it's not until an outsider comes in and starts asking questions that we think, yeah, we used to do that. Why don't we do it anymore? So sometimes advisory work is simply just asking the right questions, showing them the data, and the client will come up with the answer. So going back to these numbers, what I would then say to the client is, I might say, okay, let's. You want to grow your sales, you want to grow your business in year 11, in this next year, you want to grow your business. And we could focus on getting more customers, but that can be expensive and difficult. We could focus on increasing the average spend, but you seem to be doing quite well. What if we could simply do what you did in year seven and Repeat that. What if we could, even if we just had the same customers with the same pricing, the same average spend, and instead we get people to buy more frequently because we're going to message them more, what impact would that have?

And we can go back to, let's go back to this formula here and what's interesting about this, by the way. So let me just share with you.

Something.

If you are looking to increase sales, you could work on one or all three of these. You could work on strategies to increase number customers to get them to spend more money and to buy more frequently. Now let me ask you a question. Let's imagine you work with this client and you found a way to help them increase the number of customers by 10%. What impact would that have on total sales? Anyone to just put in the chat box, if you were to increase the number of customers by 10%, how much would sales go up by any guesses? Alan is first in 10%. Correct. You are an accountant. Clearly that is correct. Okay, so what if, what if instead though? And by the way, if you instead just focused on getting to spend more money and just that one, and you can increase that by 10%, same impact on sales. If the customers and the amount was the same but you increase the frequency by 10%, then sales goes up by 10%. But what if, what if you could work with a client and you could find a strategy that would help them get 10% more customers and you could have another, you find another strategy that helps them, their customers spend 10% more each time and they buy 10% more frequently. What would be the percentage increase on sales? Okay, let's see. No calculators. What's your, your gut feel? What would be the impact on sales if you could increase all three of those by 10%? Let me know in the chat. Let's see who's first to answer.

Ah, someone knows the right answer. Alan's pretty clever with this. Okay. Interestingly, when I ask clients this question, I used to do this with advisory work. I would ask them this. Some clients would just still say 10%, which is interesting. 10%. The most common answer people give is 30%. And it's not 30%. It's actually, it's 33.1%, I believe. And the reason for that is because of synergy, because these. What. What's interesting about when you understand the drivers, this mathematical model is if you can work, if you can work on all of the areas, small improvements in each area is better than one big improvement in one area in it's the little things that make a difference because they all, because of the multiplication effect, they all build on each other. So 10% customers, 10% more on amount, 10% more on frequency is 33.1, not 30% increase in sales. Anyway, let's go back to Jeremy's business. And in this, this time we're going to look at what would happen to his business, but where the customers don't change, it's 75 and they spend 1,820 on average. The one thing we're going to focus on is increasing the frequency to what it was in year seven, which is 6.11 times. Now that might seem like a really tiny thing. And if we just go back to here, it was 5.2 in year 10. We're increasing it to 6.11. It's a really tiny change. But let's just. If you do the math, then sales would be 834,000 thousand. Okay. Now if that hasn't sunk in yet, which it probably wouldn't with a client yet, let's now put the numbers into the profit loss account. So here's year 10's P&L account. If we could change that one number, that one metric out of the, out of the nine drivers of profit, if we just change that one thing, then sales would become 834. Assuming direct costs go up in proportion, that gross profit margin remains at 35.2%. And assuming no change in fixed cost base, look at that, it's pretty much almost doubling, doubling the profit of the business. Just one simple change can potentially double the profit. And this is what most business owners do not understand because they don't understand the math. They don't understand the importance of tiny changes in the business.

So when I used to do advisory work and selling advisory, what I would do is go through this profit diagnostic review process which we've kind of touched on, where I'd ask questions, I'd uncover the pain, I'd perhaps do some of the analysis that we looked at yesterday with Jeremy's business with the case study. And then I would demonstrate with numbers like we've just done. But I do it in a little bit more sophisticated way. Back in, when I was running my accounting firm, I created a piece of software that.

Was my number one sales tool. It helped me to convert so much business advisory and it was really easy to use. And it also added value to the client. It added value because it helped them understand their business better. And it also demonstrated with numbers and it inspired them to want to get results and take action. And I call this software, I recently revamped it and it's called Profit Diagnostic. I did mention it yesterday and let's pull it up. And so what Profit Diagnostic is for is I would pull this out in the sales meeting. I wouldn't call it a sales meeting but when I've uncovered the pain in the client's business I would then say okay, so let's Jeremy, let's look at your business and let's look at some of the numbers and see if we what's possible in your business. Let's say see what the potential is. And so I put in the numbers and you probably can't read them, the screen's quite small. But basically from our case study yesterday, this is Jeremy, Jeremy's water jet cutting business. It's the numbers that for year 10, both the balance sheet and the profit and loss account and a few other numbers. So I'd usually put these numbers in before the meeting with the client. And then what I do on the left hand side is go through a number of different areas and I would always start with pricing. Why? Because pricing is the fastest way to change profits. It's the one that most business owners don't understand. And I know that because every when I did in my accounting firm advisory work, the thing that had people the most excited is when I talked about things they could do to change their price. And the thing about price, of the nine profit drivers, it's the one that has the biggest mathematical impact on profit. And secondly it's the fastest impact. If you want to increase the number of clients in your accounting firm, you're going to have to start a marketing campaign. And as you know it takes quite a while to win new clients. It's a slow way of growing. But if like some of the stories I shared yesterday, like Kim Lafayette.

If you can change your prices, you can do that today and you'll start seeing the results tomorrow. And it doesn't cost you anything to do. It's really simple. Which is why we one of the key things in the first six weeks of the Value Pricing academy you unlock the training on repricing existing clients. It is the fastest way to change your results. And so this is what I do with clients. When I met did advisory work I'd start with pricing. I would say something like this. Let's imagine in the conversation with Jeremy, I know he wants to grow his business because his sales over the last few years have declined down to 710,000 and I would always Say something like this. So, Jeremy, your sales have gone down. You want to grow your business, you want to increase your sales. Let me ask you a question, Jeremy. To increase your sales and grow your business, do you think you should raise your prices or do you think you should reduce them perhaps by having some special offers, some sales, some discounts.

Any guess which of those two things? Almost every client says, when I was doing this, when I had that script, that conversation, when I was running my practice, every time the business owner would say, I probably need to lower my prices, I probably need to, perhaps I need some special offers, some sales, some, some discounts. That's what most people think. Except Apple, most people think they need to do that. Now we are the experts with numbers, so let's look at the numbers because the numbers are what's important here. So I would then say to Jeremy, I would say, so, Jeremy, you want to grow your business, you've got these big plans, these goal to grow your business. How much do you think you might consider decreasing your prices by? 5%, 10%, 20%? And Jeremy said, you know what I think if I do some, let me do some campaigns with, let's go with 15% off. Okay, Jeremy, let's put 15%, let the client choose the number and then say, okay Jeremy, if you were to put your price, reduce Your prices by 15% on average through some discounts, some sales, special offers, promotions, how much do you estimate this will increase the number of customers buy?

And what I always found interesting when I did this with business owners, they'd almost always say the same number. They'd say, well, I could probably get 15% more customers. Okay, let's imagine Jeremy's a bit more bullish. Jeremy said, I reckon I can get 20% more customers. Okay, let's look at the impact of that. Now if Jeremy did discounts of 15% and he won 20% more customers, more business, I don't know if you can read the numbers at the bottom. He would, yes, his sales would go up by 14,000, but his bottom line profit would drop by $61,540. That's what he would go from making a profit of 45 grand to making a loss of over 15,000. He would be heading out of business.

And that happens every time. Most business owners, when I show them that are shocked, they do not understand the numbers. This is why so many businesses fail, because they don't understand price. They keep cutting the price all the time. It's crazy. So what I would then do, I'd say I have this middle button. I would say.

Here'S the math. If you cut your prices by 15%, Jeremy.

In order to just stay the same, to break even, you would need 74.2% more customers. And you'd need that pretty fast because until you get to that point, you are making losses all the time. Do you think that's possible? And that is usually eye opening for business owners. Wow, I had no idea.

And I would then in the script I'd go a little bit further. I might then say also, Jeremy, just think about it. If you were to cut your, reduce your prices.

What sort of customer would you attract? Would you attract more of your favorite customers? Or would you attract more of the customers that just looking for the cheapest, that complained and moan and whinge.

And the answer is more of the latter, the sorts of customers you don't want anyway. So then what I'd say to Jeremy is I say, okay, so cutting prices perhaps isn't the right thing to do. Should we look at increasing prices? And what we'll do is we'll share some ideas of how you can do that and grow your business and the client will say yes. So at this point I would then switch to increasing prices and I would then perhaps share an example.

I might share a practical idea. You could talk about menu pricing, by the way, which we did yesterday. There's, there's lots of practical ideas that you could share with them. Or you could make the point that the most profitable companies on the planet, Apple coffee shops at Starbucks, are expensive. And interestingly, very often when you raise your prices, you also grow your market share because you attract more clients, because most clients want quality, not the cheapest. So it is possible to increase price and increase number of customers. Now let's not, let's assume that's not going to happen in this case. For now, let's assume we do lose some. But I would give the client, I'd share a couple of pricing ideas. What perhaps one idea as to what could potentially, what you could potentially do in his business. And I then say to Jeremy, so how much do you think you might increase your prices by? And usually they say something like 10%. Okay, great, Jeremy, let's imagine that you put your price up by 10%. And let's imagine that you do lose some customers. How many customers do you think you might lose? And again, interestingly, they usually say the same number. Well, probably 10%. Well, if you do the math and put 10% of prices up and lose 10 of customers, the maths yes, your sales might drop a little bit, but you will add 30,770 to your bottom line profit. That's often what happens with pricing. When you put your prices up, you're not going to lose your clients. In fact, let me just as an aside, now think about your practice. The reason I teach people in the first six weeks of the Value Pricing Academy, the repricing process, which is something I did in my accounting firm back in 20 in 2000, is this. You have to put your prices up. There is a right way to do it, and I teach that in the academy. But think of it this way, because I'm guessing right now in your firm you are working crazy long hours, probably working way too hard for not enough money. It's because pricing is wrong. You've got too many clients that are paying too little. So you have to change that. And if you were to put your price up by let's say 20%.

And let's imagine that if you did that, one in five of your clients decide to leave, that's 20%, you are still better off. Because if you do the math, 20% price increase, 1 in 5 customers go, your fees are almost the same mathematically, they almost don't change. There's a small change, but not a lot. But if you think about what. So if your fees don't change, your profits don't change, you're making the same money, but with 80% of the clients you're freeing up Friday, Friday is now free because you're only working with 80% of the clients. And I know yesterday we might come back to this point later, but one of the challenges people say to me is I don't have time to do advisory work. Well, the reason for that is because you have too many clients, too many of the wrong clients. So we have to fix that. That's why I teach how to reprice your existing clients the right way. It can have a huge impact. And by the way, I've been teaching this now for 25 years. I don't know anybody. Nobody yet has told me they've increased their price by 20% and lost 20% or more of customers. It never happens. It's usually at worst 3 or 4%. And there's a reason for that, which we might talk about later. Anyway, let's go back to Jeremy. So I would then show these numbers. And.

By the way, are these numbers right or wrong? They're right because they're Jeremy's numbers. If Jeremy believes that he can put his price up by 10% because you've shared some ideas and he will lose 10% of customers. Then they're the right numbers in his head. That's great. So we've now showing the result of that. Now that's the pricing piece. What we can then go on to do is we can look at some of the other growth drivers. So if you remember, if we go back to, if we go back to this idea of increasing the average frequency, if my math is right, I think my math was to go from the number it was before to 6.11. It's a 70 and a half percent increase on year 10's number. Let's just double check that.

It was 5.2. To go from 5.2 to 6.11. I think it's 17.5%, give or take a bit. So.

If you did that analysis, then.

That'S this box here at 17.5%. And you can then see the impact on the business here. And I'm going to come back to this page in a second. But then we can, we can keep working on different drivers and then ultimately what we do, we can change some of the costs. Ultimately what we end up showing Jeremy is as a result of working on different drivers. And we've done two things. We've looked at changing the price and we've lost some customers and we've looked at increasing the average frequency to 6.11. If you crunch the numbers, his profit would go from 33,000 to 122,457. He would increase his profits by 89,000. That's a 271% impact. Mathematically that is correct. Will it happen or not? Depends whether he takes action or not in the future, but that is what is possible. And so that's what we're doing with this software. We're getting the client excited and inspired about what's possible by sharing numbers that he probably has no idea about. He's never thought about numbers in this particular way. And then what we can also do is we can start to look at different scenarios and so on. But let me just go back to here because I said numbers and stories and also ideas. And what I always did with this software is when I, I would go through and change every metric, even if just a 5%, what I would do is I would give the client a little story. I'll give an example and then I would say to the client, thinking about your business, what do you think you could do? So let's go back to the getting customers to buy more frequent. This is the story I always used to say. And in the value pricing academy, my teaching, I teach you all these different stories. But the one I used when I was in practice many years ago was this. I would say to, to the client when we talk about the increasing the frequency of spend on average. I would say, generally when I need my hair cutting, I go to the hairdressers. Now I'm lazy, I hate getting my hair cut. And typically I get my hair cut every eight weeks.

Because I'm lazy. But if I went to the hairdresser, they cut my hair and at the end of the haircut, if they said to me, hey, Mark, are you happy with how your hair looks? And usually we all say yes to that. And if the hairdresser then said, well, Mark, if it were me, your hair looks amazing. By the way, if it were me to keep your hair looking that good, I would recommend that we schedule you coming back in six weeks time. Should we do that now?

I would guess many, many customers, if not all, would say yes. Because I would rather get it booked now than have to go back. And then I get stressed after when my hair gets all shaggy, thinking I must book the next appointment. Much better do it for me as a customer, I'd rather do it there and then. Now that's called the next sales script. It wasn't difficult, it was really simple. Here it is again, Mark, your hair is looking amazing. If it were me to keep your hair looking that good, I would recommend you come back in six weeks. Should we get that in the diary? Now that's not difficult.

But here's the thing. If customers say yes to that, and for all those customers like me that would have normally gone back every eight weeks, if I go back every six weeks, if you work out how many times I go to the hairdresser in a year, that increases the average frequency by, if my Math is right, 33%. 33%. So if you're running a hairdressing business and you want to grow your sales by 33%, you don't need more customers. You need a simple system, a next sales script. And this is why I said earlier that the easiest ways to grow a business is not getting more customers, it's working on those other drivers. And sometimes it's really simple stuff. And so what I would do is, if it was Jeremy, I'd say.

That'S a hairdresser. That's what a hairdresser could do. Tell me, Jeremy, what could you possibly do in your business to get customers to come back more. Now, here's the interesting thing. You've got the stories, you're demonstrating with ideas. You don't need to know the answer for Jeremy's business because Jeremy knows his business better than you. He will take that idea and think, that's interesting. I think I could perhaps send out some emails to clients, you know, whatever it is, usually your clients have the answers. We think with advisory that we have to have the answers. No, your clients have the answers. They know the answers. They need somebody else to just help them find those answers. So that's what I mean by demonstrating with numbers and how using a tool like.

Profit Diagnostic is demonstrated with numbers. It's how we can educate our clients, add value and inspire them as to what is possible. That for me was my, for me, the thing that helped me sell advisory work more than anything else. And even if clients didn't buy, they went away thinking, wow, I've had so much value from that meeting, even though it was a sales meeting. So we have a few minutes before we go to our first break of the day, I believe. Yes, in six minutes.

So let's move on. That's the sales process. Let's talk a little bit and introduce the next topic, which is how do we then value price? Because now we need to talk about the price. So let me just share some initial ideas and then we'll come back to this in the next section. So value pricing, we touched on it yesterday. We must, must, must price based on value. Okay, Time is irrelevant. The customer doesn't care how many hours you spend spend preparing for an advisory meeting. The only thing the customer cares about is the value. The customer cares about the results. And so we price based on the results. And therefore the bigger the results that we can get for clients, the more we can price. And this is where partly again, profit Diagnostic, using a tool like that, demonstrating with numbers really helps because when you demonstrate with numbers as to what's possible, then those numbers will help you with your pricing process. So that's the first point and we're going to get practical later. I'm going to show you exactly how to do this. We price based on value, not time. And this is, as I said yesterday, this is how advisory becomes insanely profitable for you because it's highly valuable.

When we price on it. And yet, as you saw yesterday, and you'll see tomorrow, when we use every AI, the time it takes is minimal. We can save huge amounts of time. Some of you, I'll be showing you my process tomorrow. Of how we can do a complete, detailed 12 page business plan that would used to take at least a full day, if not a week and we can get down to 20 minutes. We'll see that tomorrow live in my exclusive welcome session. More on that later. So we must price based on value. Number two. We must give people choices, options. We looked at that yesterday. You do not know how much somebody's willing to pay for advisories. So we give them some choices. We create different packages. Number. So we give three options number three.

As well as menu pricing, giving three different options. We also want to, as we get better at value pricing, we want to give other choices. The more choice, the more attention client can get exactly what they want, the more likely they'll buy. And so there's other things that we can do as well as giving three packages, we can give them other choices like upsells. And I'm going to show you exactly how you do this later. It's really, really powerful. And the fourth principle I want to share, which is really powerful. The most powerful of the lot, particularly advisory, is price psychology. But in particular the most powerful principle in price psychology, lot of P's there is anchoring. We need to use anchors because we know from price psychology that people are clueless about price. We don't know the price of anything. The price is just a number. And so what happens is when we see a price, our subconscious goes off in a nanosecond and comes out with a back with a feeling. We convert prices to a feeling. Something like that's expensive. All that seems reasonable. And so we can influence how that feeling comes back using price psychology. And one of those is anchors. It's so powerful because people have no idea what advisories should be because they've probably never bought advisory before. And so we need to create some anchors that will impact and influence how much they think the price should be. And there's a number of different anchors that we can use. I'm going to show you two of them later on in today's session. This is really powerful and will help you sell more advisory. We are about to go to a very short break and then we'll pick up on the pricing piece. But let me just, let me just remind you and show you just a couple of other.

Great stories that came in last year. I think. Is Abby here still? I think Abby, she was yesterday.

She put this in last year. She said, I met with a new client this week, secured with the help of the Academy, runs independent cafes. He charges one price for every type of coffee on his menu. And I said have you heard of menu pricing? He said no. So I said having small, medium and large price for your coffees. He was so happy with the advice. He said yesterday that the service we have provided in the first month has been exceptional and I couldn't have done that without the Academy. They have really helped me to pull my socks up, which is interesting because if you remember from yesterday's from Neil's session, he had a similar story. And the point being, and the reason I wanted to share that with you is.

When it comes to advisory with these ideas, it's the simple stuff that works. We don't have to understand complex stuff. The things that are most powerful in any business is simple ideas. And most small businesses do not know things like next sale follow up scripts like the hairdresser script. Many small businesses don't have menu pricing even even though it's really powerful. Here's some more comments from last year. Mikayla said hello. Loving the value pricing Academy. So much more than pricing, marketing, AI systems. One of the things I love is the community, everyone helping each other because I forgot to mention that one of the things about the Academy is you'll get to know these people. You'll get some of my trainers and you'll meet them in the chat. And some once a year we host a session in Portugal called the Portugal Retreat. So many of our academy members start to know each other and learn from each other as well as me. It is a community that you will be be part of. A community of people looking to build extraordinary accounting firms. Right, I'm going to go, I'm absolutely bang on time to the second. We're going to have a short break of three minutes. Don't go anywhere. I'm just going to play some music for three minutes. It's just time to go get a coffee if you want have a bathroom break or if you want to use that to put some questions in the Q and A box or some comments, that would be awesome. Thank you. John just said very inspirational with everyone in the Academy. I was on a paper for three minutes and I'll come back and I'll address some comments and then we'll start again and build on this pricing piece. See you in about three minutes.

Myself, I really try my best to change something's in another thing right.

Maybe we stay.

We might just enjoy it now.

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

We can cry when it's over.

Over.

We can cry when it's over.

We can cry over.

We can cry.

I know it was special but baby you can't really stop.

I love it was special but baby.

We can play when it's over.

We can cry when it's over.

We can pray that it's over.

We can cry when it's over.

We can cry when it's over.

Hey, welcome back. We're going to kick off officially in one minute, but I'm going to do a couple of questions. I think we haven't had many questions yet today. In fact, there's only one I can see in the Q and A and A comment. I don't know who it is. It says anonymous attendee just said hopefully credit notes are in a separate number sequence. Yeah, hopefully. Obviously I was talking about those numbers earlier. There's extra metrics you can get out of the system. Every client's different. You'll know with each client whether you can get those numbers or not. But if you can, if you can get the number of invoices, number of customers in a year, that's going to be really useful analysis, as is many other things that we could measure in terms of KPIs Claude Claude Campbell says is your profit diagnostic software available to members of the vpa? So let me just clarify. The software that I've just gone through. It's exclusively, you can't buy it separately. It's only available to VPA members who are Mastery members. If you've got, if you're in Mastery and access to it. It's part of the business advisory toolkit. So that's the profit diagnostic software. Right. It's on the hour. It's time to carry on with the value pricing. So I've talked about these principles of value pricing we've looked at. Or we talked about offering menu pricing, three options, which we covered in a bit more detail yesterday. And I showed you an AI prompt to help you with that. I talked about the fact we've got a price based on value, the fact that we should use anchors, give people other choices. The question is how do they do that in practice? And if we think about the three stages of the value conversation, I said that we uncover the value first, then we build up the value, which we can do by. Well, we've just done that with Profit Diagnostic. That helps. By the way, the Profit diagnostic I mentioned, it's my favorite sales tool. You can use it as well as part of the delivery and go back to those numbers and then stage three is we capture the value in our price. So we have the price bit last. It's the last bit of the, of the sales process, the pricing process. We cover price last. And here's the most important thing about this. You must have the price conversation with the client face to face. But just to be clear, when, when I say face to face, I include zoom meetings like this because increasingly we meet clients online. That's fine. What you should never ever do is hide behind proposals and emails. Big mistake I used to make prior to 1999 when I started my accounting firm. It was a stupid mistake, but I didn't realize at the time I would meet potential clients and I'd have an hour long meeting. I'd usually impress them. I came from a tax background, if you remember, from yesterday, and I would share ideas for them, saving taxes. And most of the time they said, wow, Mark, this is amazing. I've never had this advice before. We are looking for an accountant just like you. And everything would be going really well until the bit I really hated when they would then say, so how much will it cost, Mark?

I don't know, I'd panic. I don't know. I've never worked with you before, I've never done an advisory before. I don't know. How do I know what the price should be? No idea. I didn't say that. That was all in my head and instead I would just say, great question, let me go and think about it and I'll send you a nice proposal and put it through the mail. We had mail back in those days. Today it's probably email. That's a terrible mistake because you are losing control of the process. What happens is when you then send your proposal with the price and they get that proposal, doesn't matter how good your proposal is, you might have an amazing proposal. I can guarantee, because we all do this, you would do this as well. When you get a proposal, what's the first thing you want to see? We're all the same, we want to see the price. So your client goes flicking through it looking for the price and as soon as they see that number, their brain goes off in a nanosecond and comes back with a feeling. Usually that's expensive because I've not read the rest of the proposal. It's out of context of everything else. It's just a number. And that number will always seem expensive if we've not created some contrast, if we've not built up the value. So you must, must, must have the pricing conversation with the Client. This is critical if you want better prices, if you want to make more money. But how do you do that? Because the challenge here is that we are selling complex services. We're not like Starbucks, where we can have a menu on the counter or on our desk. Here's our menu. We can't do that with Starbucks. It's easy because every cup of coffee they know what the costs are and they can have three fixed points prices. We can't do that. Every client different, the scope of the work is different, particularly with things like bookkeeping. Some clients have 10 transactions a month, some have a thousand transactions a month. Every client is different. So we have to find a way to price in front of the client. And this was my challenge in my accounting firm in end of 1998. I was really struggling with this idea of pricing. And then it was last half of 1999 when I discovered value pricing. I met Ron Baker. He explained value pricing to me. And one day I sat there and suddenly I suddenly realized this isn't that difficult. I just need a system. I need a system. And so I created some pricing software. And that pricing software had a significant impact on my accounting firm, helped me turn the profits around, helped me sell it to my client managers. And that software has been improved over the years and we completely rewrote it in 2020. It's now called effective pricing. So let me show you effective pricing because it really will start to demonstrate some of these concepts that we've talked about and show you how you can price advisory. So the process that I would go through is I would ask questions, I would then add value, perhaps look at the numbers, go through Profit Diagnostic. I would also then go through my brochure of my advisory service and talk about the three packages, the three options. I build up the value until they were ready to buy. And when they say yes, I now want to buy, what I would then do is open up my laptop or my iPad. If it's a zoom meeting, you could do it like this. And I'd say, okay, let's go through. Let me show you what it's going to cost for us to help you get these results in your firm. Jeremy. Now I wouldn't start with this page. This is just so you can see. You can price any service with this. But I'm just going to go to business advisory and I'm just going to just select. I've got Jeremy in here and I'm going to move on. This is the page that you would open it up at. You do that what I've just done behind the scenes. So what we do is we ask a series of questions. We want to gather some more information to help us with price. And there are three types of questions that we should ask, two which are important and a third one which is really powerful for advisory and certain other services. So question type number one is we do want to ask scope questions. A few people said yesterday about scope creep and we talked about scope creep a little bit yesterday. We want to make sure we understand the scope of the work because the more work there is we must have a higher price otherwise we won't make a profit. Scope questions are particularly important with compliance work, with bookkeeping, for example, cleanup work and your financial statements. Less important with advisory because the scope of the work is a bit more standardised but nevertheless there will be some scope issues. So we ask scope questions. Secondly, we ask what I call preference questions. And this goes back to the point I said earlier. We want to give them more choices. Yes, a bronze, silver, gold, three packages is great, but we can also offer preferences so that people can fine tune and get exactly what they want. And preference questions are really powerful and you'll see in a second why. And then number three, with certain types of services like advisory, there's a really powerful question what type of. Which is a question that helps to understand the value to the customer. And you're about to see that's the first question that I would ask if it was advisory. So the first question is what is the profit improvement potential?

And at this stage I would go back to the software, the profit, because you've gone through this process with either an Excel spreadsheet or using the profit diagnostic. And if you remember, we could improve the profits by 89,457. In reality it's usually bigger than that because we only looked at two drivers. We could have done it, we could have gone, spent a bit more time and got a higher number still. And when I used to do this in practice years ago, it was almost always six figure numbers, even with small clients. But anyway, we'll go with that. 89,457. I would just put that in here. 89,457. You could round it. I mean I could just put Jeremy. So it looks like we could probably over next year, a year or two, add ninety grand to your bottom line profit.

Now why do we want that? Number.

Two reasons.

Number one, it's an anchor.

Because the client will remember that 90,000. We've gone through software, they remember the 90,000 or the 89,000, whatever number it is, they remember that in their mind. It's in their subconscious. When you then reveal your price later in the process, what will happen is in their subconscious they won't know it's happening. This is price psychology. They will subconsciously compare your price to 90,000 and your price, I'm going to guess is going to be much less than 90,000, particularly if you use some more techniques. I'll show you in a little while. And so your price will, let's say your price is, for argument sakes, 5,000amonth. Okay, if you just said if in the meeting the client said, what's it going to cost? And you said 5,000amonth, they're going to say that's really expensive because they have no context. That's what happens. But if you immediately beforehand tell them, we can increase your profits by potentially 90,000 and possibly even much more over the next year or two, it's going to cost about five. It's going to cost 5,000 a year. Sorry, a month. They're going to compare the 5,000 to 90,000 and they're much more likely to say, well, their brain will go, yeah, that feels about right. That feels reasonable. Not every time, but in most cases it will. It has a huge impact. So that's the first reason why I want to use that number. The second reason though is we're value pricing. So if you want, you don't have to. But this is what I would say do is I would use that number as part of the pricing process, in other words, in calculating the price. Because let's imagine you see advisory work in the main in terms, if we were to price based on time, it's the same for most clients. You might have a half day strategic planning session and then you meet for an hour a month or two hours a month. You do an hour of preparation a month, you do an hour afterwards sending a report, it's perhaps four or five hours a month. And that would be the same whether it's a client that's doing that. Could, you could add 50 grand to profits compared to one, you're going to add half a million. Okay, it's the same amount of time roughly with advisory. But when we think about the value, if you've got two clients, A and B, client A, you can help them add 50 grand to their bottom line profit. Client B, you can help them add half a million. Which one's a higher value? It's the second one. And in value pricing we should be charging more when we create more value.

So that's why what I would do is I would use that number as part of the pricing process. And that's the third type of question. It's the question to start to uncover what's the value. Then we have our scope questions. So obviously as part of advisory, we're going to do some management reporting. We're going to report on the numbers and there is some scope issues there. Because if you have a client that let's say for argument's sake is using a spreadsheet, then every month you're going to have to do quite a bit of work to take that spreadsheet and identify the numbers for the management report and to calculate the KPIs. Whereas if, in contrast, let's say you're a Xero user, if they're on Xero, then it's going to be much easier because you could probably then take that zero, integrate it with something like Sift or something and it just automatically creates all the numbers for you. So you might want to ask what accounting system they use. You also might want to ask the quality of bookkeeping. And you can have whatever scaling whatever system you want. And hopefully the best quality bookkeeping is where you do it for them. Because if you do the bookkeeping then you know the numbers every month. But it may be they do it that themselves and they don't do it very well. Let's imagine they do it themselves because I'll show you how we can use this to sell bookkeeping as well. So this is a side benefit. Let's imagine they're doing. They've got a good. They've got their own bookkeeper. They're not qualified, they do an okay job. It's not perfect. And we might also want to ask what industry they're in. So Jeremy's is manufacturing engineering because you might decide it's up to you, but you might decide there's more work or more difficulty or more value in certain types of industries. It may be you're an expert in some industries. I'll skip over the next question for now. So there's scope questions, we don't need many. But then we've got the third type of question, which is the preference question. So this is really powerful, the sorts of things. This is where we give people choices. We might say to the client, how often do you want the management reports? We recommend monthly, every month, what we recommend. But you can have them weekly if you want or less frequently. They'll probably say monthly. They'll go with your recommendation. You might also say, how often do you want to meet? Every meet with us. And you would recommend monthly as well. You have the monthly meeting to go through the management reports. You might also give them a choice, for example, of where the meeting will take place. You could say that generally. Usually clients come to our office for the monthly meetings, but if you prefer, we can come to you. What would be your preference? And Jeremy might say, do you know what? If you can come to my engineering works, that would be great. Okay. That means Jeremy values you traveling to him. If he values that, guess what? You charge a higher price.

What else could we do? We could ask questions also to go deeper on the book. Maybe you want to ask questions like whether they reconcile numbers or whatever. I'll skip over that. All these changes, these prices can be changed. Sorry, questions can be changed. Here's some more preference questions. You could say, who do you want your primary contact?

So assuming you're the senior partner or the owner of your accounting firm, you might say to Jeremy, Jeremy, every month we'll have a meeting. Who would you like that meeting with? Do you want to be me, the senior partner, or are you happy to have a meeting with George, my manager? Now, I'm going to guess, when you ask that question, every single person you speak to wants to work with you. And that's great. Why do they say you? Because they value you. They value you. And if that's the case, you should charge a higher price. Okay, you charge a higher price. So let's go with you, because that's what they'll say. And then you might ask them which of the three packages. So then what we do is we can then talk through the different packages. You might have done this already, but they said they want the premium package. This is a reminder of what they get in the premium package. We looked at this kind of idea yesterday, and you would say to the client, do those things sound like what you want, what we went through in the meeting earlier? And they'll say, yes, that's. Yep, that will be amazing if we can do those things. So at that point, when you're ready, you reveal the price. Now, in this case, it says here, the price is 12 payments of 1,600. And here's the important thing to remember.

Only one of two things can possibly happen at this point in time. It's predictable. Either the client says, oh, that's great. Yeah, let's get started. That would be a good result. Not a great result, by the way, a good result, or they might say, wow, that's a bit expensive, and argue that's a better result. And I'll tell you why. Because if the client says yes to your first price, guess what, you're too cheap. You want some pushback. It's actually better if the client says, oh, I wasn't expecting to pay that.

You probably wouldn't in this case because you've got 90,000 of that anchor of the profit improvement potential using the previous software we looked at here. And that creates an anchor that makes this, this seem less 1,600amonth compared to potential 90 grand of extra profits. But they probably might say that's a bit expensive. So what can we do about that? Well, we have a number of options. What we do is this is why you work with the client, with the pricing, because you change the package. You work with them, you're on the same side of the table and you could offer a different package. But before we do that, let's not offer a different package yet, let's go back because we might say to the client, we might say, Jeremy, one of the reasons it's that price is because you'd like to have the monthly meetings with me. You want me to travel to your premises. Now, my George, my manager actually is an expert, specializes in the engineering business and he deals with all the engineering clients. And so I recommend you deal with George every month. You will love him. In fact, would you like me to bring George in and introduce you to him? Yes, why not? And would you like to see what it would cost if you deal with George every month rather than me? And they will say yes to that. So we just switch to George and then we go back and this has gone from 1600 to 1200. Now, you can change the numbers behind the scenes as to what you think is appropriate, but here is the really important point, okay? This is so important with pricing. This is the idea of anchoring. Again, we've now got a second anchor. The first anchor is the profit improvement potential, the 90,000. The second one is the first price you reveal. Jeremy has no idea what the price should be. 1,600 might seem too expensive. Now he will judge 1200 in the context of 1,600. Remember, he was wants to buy, he wants you to help him improve his business. He wants to buy. So this is now feels like a better price. He will probably say yes. Most times he will say yes.

Because we've created that anchor, because we've created a higher price. Now, if we'd have gone instead with this as the first price, he would have probably said, that's expensive. But he's judging this against 1,600. So you've probably made a sale now at 1200. But if not, we can just go back. We can change things. We could go back and change any other of the settings, including. Let me go back to.

Yeah, we could say one of the reasons it's that price is because I know your bookkeeper's great, Jeremy, but we know from experience that there are various adjustments and things we have to do to produce the monthly reports. And I know you did say to me that you're not totally happy your bookkeeper. And we're wondering whether to change bookkeeping. Well, we could do your bookkeeping for you and we can talk about that. That's a separate service. But if you buy our bookkeeping service, it will reduce the price of your advisory. Would you like to see by how much? And of course, they'll say yes to that. And so if we go back, we can now see that it's 940. Okay, we started at 1600. It's now 940. And Jeremy's thinking, oh, that's really affordable. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think. Let's talk about your bookkeeping. I think we do that. So now you can actually. You could use this pricing process, if you have the right questions, to also sell other services. Now, if the price is still too expensive, we've still got another package. We could then say, well, why don't you just go for the full reporting package? You won't get these things, but it does bring the price down to 4.55amonth. And Jeremy, this is what I recommend. If. If that feels better for you, let's start with 4, 5, 5amonth. Because at any point in the future, if you decide you want to upgrade and get more support, you can always change your mind later and move back to 940. So we've gone from 1,600 to 1,200 to 940 to 455. You probably won't go this far. The client would have said, well, yes, well before this point in time, but I'm hoping you're seeing the point now that. And we can just keep going. We can offer other packages. There's other things we can do in the software. The point I'm trying to make here is that when you involve the client in the pricing process, it creates transparency. They can see how the price is building up. That transparency creates credibility and trust. We're not just making numbers up off the top of our head. The client can also see that the price is rated the value. Because we're talking about value all the time. The value of traveling to their office, the value of the potential profit improvement. We're always linking things to value and we're using price psychology throughout. I've only touched on one thing. There's actually lots of price psychology built in. But one of them is the anchoring. And we've done it twice in this particular case. Once with the profit improvement potential and secondly with the first, price becomes an anchor. So this is how you get higher prices with the effective pricing software. And if you've got questions about it, let me know. We'll come on to questions in a short while, but just a few more things about it. The purpose of the software is to help you is a system to give you confidence to price in front of the client or over a zoom call, kind of like we've just done. It's a system, it's a system that works and its primary reason is to get to that stage. You can also, once you've done that, you can then print out really nice looking proposals if you want. That is possible in the software. In fact, we do have a number of firms that have built their proposals, got beautiful proposals. They produce at the touch of a button. It's not a design piece of software, it's designed for pricing. But you can build proposals. And if you're not a designer, one of the things that we will offer is if you join during the course of the masterclass today or tomorrow, then if you want you could reach out to my team and they will design within the software a proposal template for you. We have six templates and they'll add your colors, your logo, your face if you want, and they'll build out your proposal template that comes off the back of the software. That's if you would like that, we will do that for you.

So the software is one of the most popular things in the value pricing academy because we get stories all the time about firms that are using it not to get 5, 10% improvements in price, usually get 50% double 3 times, 4 times significant price increases when you use it. It's a system. I said before, there's no magic button. But if you follow the processes, if you follow the things that have been proven to work, the frameworks, you will get results. The firms that use the effective pricing software, they get significant increases in their price. And the great news is we give that software to you As a gift. We used to sell it separately to Academy members, but we changed our mind. We know that it has such a significant impact on you that we give it away as a bonus. Okay, I have a question for you. And if the answer is yes, type yes. If the answer is no, type no. So yesterday, I know in the feedback I showed you earlier, quite a few people love to the AI side of things and the prompt. So my question is, would you like me to show you some more prompts today? Some powerful things you can do with prompts you can just cut and paste into ChatGPT? Say yes, if you would like me to do that. And we will. So who's. Let's see, we have got some yeses. I've got some questions as well. Oh, actually there's lots of yeses. I can see the yeses. You want me to show prompts, right? Okay, I will do that. I will do that in a short while. Awesome. Before I do that, let me very quickly remind you of I said to you earlier that if you want to go deeper on this, if you're enjoying these, the masterclass so far, and you want to go deeper on value pricing and biz advisory and so on, then that's what the Value Pricing Academy is all about. So let me just quickly remind you, my goal and my goal has always been to help you to build an extraordinary accounting firm. We focus first and foremost on on pricing because it's the fastest way to change your profit. Hence the way, the reason we call it value pricing. Secondly, we want to help you create more value through advisory, which we're going to have to do because of AI, as we said yesterday. And when you combine creating value through advisory with value pricing, you can get extraordinary margins, much higher, much better clients, more fun work, making more money. And when you do that really well, you will also then attract better quality clients. And later on today, you'll hear from Emily. So my goal is to help you really grow your practice profitably through advisory, through value pricing, through marketing. But we go beyond that. We teach you things like how to build a great strategy for your firm, a strategy that's going to be one that will give you the life that you want. That's what we do. And we do that in a number of ways. I'm going to.

I'm just going to put into the chat, I'm going to put a link again. It went in there yesterday. I'll put it in today for you to find out more. I've just put the link in to the Chat, which you might want to grab that. This is the page it will take you to. If you are interested in finding out more, you can watch the video from me. There's a lot of stuff in here. I'm not going to go through it all again today. I went through it yesterday in a bit more detail. But just to remind you as I scroll down, we have, oh, this is Stanley Dean by the way. I mentioned him yesterday. You can watch the video. He followed the process I teach of repricing your existing clients. You get that process in the first six weeks and when he applied in his accounting firm in the US he got an average fee increase of 47%. Just do the math. Imagine I don't know what your top line is, your sales, your revenue, your fee, but if you could get that increase by 47% and no clients leave, what impact would that do on the bottom line? Stanley did this. That was the first year he did it and he's done it every year since. He keeps increasing his fees. He follows the process, not so much the next, the next time around, but nevertheless that's had a huge impact on his firm. So we teach you. What we do is we teach you all the core areas of building a great accounting firm firm around pricing. We have curriculums, we have live training. Every month you get live training with sometimes me, sometimes Emily and also with our amazing trainers. You met Neil yesterday. You may have seen a couple if you saw the Countdown music. Teresa Slack. Someone said yesterday Jessica Fox is amazing, which she is. She's one of our trainers. So you hear not just from me, but from some of our best students who are doing this stuff in their practice and getting extraordinary results. There's live training covering everything from advisory to pricing to marketing and how to use the effective pricing software. Kim does that every month. She goes live and teaches you an aspect of the software. She gets extraordinary results in her firm and you can find out more about what the curriculums are, what you'll learn effectively. You'll learn everything you need for every aspect of building a great accounting firm. If you want to make more money, build a better firm, make it more sellable, more valuable, we'll teach you everything you need. In addition to that, there's structured training which is video based videos that I've done, which is delivered every month and those, we call them core training. Every, I think every two weeks you get more videos drip fed. There are a number of courses. The ones that I'll pick out particularly people love the how to price bookkeeping. It's a six month course. And the other one I'll mention is because it's relevant to today is how to profit from business advisory. It's a six week, it's a six month course. We go deep on everything we talked about so far. We go really deep. Every two weeks you get more videos, more workbooks and I walk you through exactly how to do, for example, the profit diagnostic. I give you the scripts, the words to say, the words to say when you're using the profit diagnostic software. You get the agendas, you get everything you need to package price, sell, deliver business advisory and it's delivered over your first six months. And then there's a number of bonuses as well that you get which are, if I can remember the bonuses. You get the effective pricing software we give you that other people pay for. You can buy it, but you get it as part of your academy membership. You also get the profit diagnostic software which is great for selling advisory. You also get the six week course on repricing existing clients and that will start from whenever you join the academy and then a number of other things as well. So go and check out for example, a course on ChatGPT and many, many other things. So you get live training, you get structured courses, basically you get all the training you'll need to build an extraordinary and profitable accounting firm. And of course you also benefit from being part of the community. Our goal is to help you be successful. One of the things we do is we do ask for success stories regularly. Just like I said you need to do earlier, you need to collect success story. We get success stories every week from members. Here's one that we got a few years back from Kim, which is amazing. I mentioned it yesterday, she was using the effective pricing software and the first three times she used it she got these extraordinary results where the first time she got 18,000 when she was expecting she would have charged 4,200, almost no over four times the price. And that's not unusual. People do get those sorts of results. And what's great about Kim is that we reached out to her last year to ask Kim if she would teach other people the things that she's doing. And she does exactly that. Every month there's a live session with Kim. She'll walk you through how to set up the software and she'll answer your questions and so on. So our goal is to help you get results like Kim with pricing. Our goal is to help you help your clients. So that, as I said yesterday, this was an image of a case Study. Just imagine how you would feel if that was you on the right congratulating your client because you've helped them to achieve their dream to buy a red Ferrari, whatever it might well be, as you've been working with them on advisory. This is a story from Rennie Evans. This is a video you can get. Rennie is an accountant who focused on advisory. He used the effective pricing software to win a 31,908 pound advisory project in the US that was about $40,000. So that's what the goal is to help you get results. Whether that result is from pricing, from doing advisory work, from winning new clients through marketing or all those things, there are lots of ways that you can get a return on investment. Your investment in that is though a really small, tiny monthly price. And as I said yesterday, in fact I think I showed you, you'll need to go to that page to check out what it is in your currency. But if it's in US dollars, it's just $490 a month. That's all. To get access to all the training you need to build an extraordinary firm. And remember, you're in control. So if you decide at any point in time when you join the Academy you want to leave, then you can leave, that's fine. We make it really simple. We have a. I think it's two buttons you press on our website to leave and we do a video show you how in the onboarding process. Because I want to make it easy for you, if you change your mind, if it's not right for you, that's fine. Also, we have a guarantee that anytime this is on the, this is on the page. If you go to the page, I've given you a link to anytime in the first 30 days, as long as it's before the second payment goes through. If you decide it's not been valuable to you, just email Sarah on supportalupricingacademy.com and ask for a refund of your initial payment. And we'll do that with no questions. If you don't get value, we don't expect you to pay. So you've got nothing to lose by at least giving it a chance. But you have got things to win and gain. If you do, say yes. Two things. Number one, one of the things our members love about the academy is that you lock the price of in. The price goes up at the end of the week and it's partly because we've got some brand new software we're launching next week. I gave you a Sneak peek yesterday of the brand new software. It's a trail map where you can assess your progress in your accounting firm and see what resources will help you get there. And the prompt library, which we'll perhaps have a look at later on today.

As and so that's why the price is going up at the end of the week, because there's more value. But not for you if you join. The thing is that people love is when you join the academy, you lock in that price for as long as you stay a member. So today is the cheapest price it will ever be. It will never go up for you. And if you join today or before you finish tomorrow, we do have some special bonuses. The four bonuses we have for you are.

My menu pricing course, which is hours of training and workbooks teaching you how to do menu pricing the right way and avoid the mistakes that many people make. I used to sell that for $597, but you get that completely free. So if you want to master menu pricing, that's worth joining just for the first month alone. But you do need to join today or tomorrow to get that. If you're an action taker. Also if you're an action taker, we will send you on Friday a 54 minute training video showing exactly how to use the Profit diagnostic software and how to get it. You normally don't get it till I think it's either month three or month four. In the academy it's part of the process of we're teaching advisory. When we get to the sales stage, I think it's month three or four. Month four, I think. But if you're an action taker and you can't wait to get started, then we'll send you a video and the link to get the software on Friday. And we'll also send you a workbook called the Profitable growth formula with 24 ways to increase price profits. Now why is that important? Because I mentioned that you want to share ideas. I shared with you the idea of the next sales script for hairdressers that's in there and there's 23 other ideas. So if you're thinking I don't know what ideas to share with clients as I go through the software. Well, given you 24 and there's even more in the training that's going to come your way. And fourthly, last but definitely not least is when you join today or early on tomorrow, you'll be able to join the special welcome celebration session with me which is at the end of tomorrow. At the end of tomorrow. There are two sessions. There's Emily and me. Emily's doing a session for everyone else. I'll be doing a session in a different Zoom room for those people that have joined before the break preceding it. And what I'm going to do in that session is in those 45 minutes, I'm going to share with you my favorite AI prompts for delivering advisory. For example, I said yesterday that I've got this series of prompts that will create a 12 page business plan in less than 20 minutes. We're going to do that live and I'll show you how to create a business plan that alone could be really valuable for clients, particularly when you start pricing that as a service, selling it. So we'll do that tomorrow. And I'll go through some other great prompts as well that you can do to get amazing results when you're working with clients and helping them. So that's in the session, the special session for people that join. Okay. And then some other things that people said last year, I think you've heard, actually Contrida says something. Katrina was here yesterday and shared something amazing. She also said, last year, once I took action, my net profits doubled within a year. And Neil, you heard his story yesterday. That's an update. John I know is here. John Johnston, I think he's been commenting. He said, hi, I've been a member for a very long time. He has, actually. He was the first person to join or one of the first people when we started in 2015. So John's been with me now for. This is a year. Number 11, John. And John often comes out to our Portugal retreat as well. I love John to bits. He's amazing. He says, I have been a member for a very long time, 11 years and always getting value from the sessions and resources. Best investment ever. Because of course, John got the 2014 price. As John knows. John will confirm his price never changes. And so the longer you stay in the Academy, the better the value is every single year. Today is the best time to join the Academy. If you wait till next month, it'll be more expensive. So join now. You absolutely can do this. Whether it's advisory, whether it's pricing, we will be teaching you and helping you every single step of the way. And there are other people in the Academy as well to help you. People like Neil, Jessica and many of the other people. When you get to meet people like John, either through the chat box or perhaps one day out in Portugal. Okay. So if you have any questions about the value pricing Academy. Then make sure you ask them today in the Q and A because I might come back to tomorrow briefly. But really tomorrow I want to dive into the delivery piece. So if you've got questions, ask them today or have them lined up ready to ask tomorrow when we kick off. Right. I want to do some prompts because I love doing prompts and I think you said you would like to see some more, so let's. I think you're going to love this one. I don't think I've ever showed this one before. So this might be new to everybody, even value pricing Academy members. So I kind of held this one back because I think it's really, really powerful. And so let me go.

Firstly to.

Here. So we're in ChatGPT. I'm going to assume everyone's familiar with ChatGPT. Most of you were here yesterday. But I'm also going to flick across to the new software coming out next week. And so when you join me in the welcome session tomorrow, everything I show you the prompts, you will get access to those. In fact, when you join me in the session, we will give you the opportunity to get the software immediately. We're not going to everybody until next week, but yeah, you're here. We can release this to you on Friday if you want to get started. So one of the things that people love about this, we've got a few people beta testing it is we've got lots of prompts. I'm just going to hide the left hand menu bar. I've written lots of prompts specifically for the accounting profession. And this prompt library will help you find prompts. You can add your own, you can edit them, prompts so much more. And so what we're going to do is I'm going to type in.

In the search develop.

I'm going to do this particular prompt here. So we've talked about today, earlier and yesterday, the three phases of the pricing conversation. Phase one is uncover the value. Critically important. It is one of the things that people find find difficult. It's a skill that takes a while to learn. What are the right questions to ask. So I teach it in the Academy in detail. We have workbooks and so on. But one of the things that I created was a prompt that will help you to come up with the questions for a specific type of meeting. So let's do exactly that. And so all I need to do with the prompt library is grab the prompt. It's all here. You can see it's a long prompt. I explained yesterday why they're long prompts because the more, the longer the prompts, the more specific you are, the better and more predictable the results that you get. This is all something we learn from prompt engineering, which I've been teaching for a couple of years now. Anyway, I don't go through the full prompt right now. That's for another day. But all we need to do when we have a prompt library with our standard prompts, all we do is, is we just copy them to our clipboard. So I've copied the markdown to clipboard, we hop across to ChatGPT, we do control V and paste it in. And the prompt here, this one, it's a sales strategy expert and it goes on to explain that it's an expert in spin selling and that it's going to go through a series of steps where it's going to identify some great background questions for us. Problem questions, outcome questions and consequence questions. I've given it some terminology to use so I want to. This is how I. This is how I have been teaching the process for years. I've given it examples for it to follow. That's all in the prompt. The only thing you need to do with the prompt is just give a bit of background information about the meeting that you're about to have. That could be the website of the client. It could be. As it says here, I'm meeting a two partner small engineering business. They're looking to change accountant because they're not getting any practical advice from their existing accountant. Let's say that's the client you're meeting. It'll come up with some questions for you. I'm going to delete all that because I'm going to do something for Jeremy, the water jet cutting business. So I'm just going to say.

I'm going to say. Did I?

Yeah, just bear me a second, I'm going to type this one. Here's some information. At the client meeting.

I am meeting with Jeremy to.

Help him grow his business. I have attached details which you need to read. And then yesterday, you may remember from yesterday, that case study.

There'S a three page document which is an overview of his business, the case study business and those numbers, his profit loss account and his balance sheet. So I'm just giving it some context, I've just given it some information about the client and I'm just going to run this. And so it now knows about Jeremy's business, it knows about his numbers, about his challenges, it knows that we are meeting with him to help him run his business. To help him improve it. And so now what it's going to do is give us some great questions that we can use across the four stages of the four question types.

So let's just look at some of these. Let's look at. We will start off by asking background questions. These are the easy ones. This is about gathering some more information. If it was a brand new client, we might say to a prospect, why did you start in business? When did you start in business? What are you looking to do with your business? What does your business do? They're the comfortable questions, they're the least important ones. But nevertheless we do need to get some background information. And so for this client it might be, we say, so Jeremy, what originally inspired you to start Precision wave back in 2014? Or Jeremy, how has the business evolved since investing in the new 5 axis water jet experience? Jet cutter. Remember we talked about yesterday in the case study that in year eight, two years ago, he bought this water jet cutter. We looked at it when we were looking at the numbers. Jeremy, what type of clients or projects have been most rewarding for you recently? So we want to get a feel for what type of clients he likes. Ideal clients. So these questions are useful ones to gather information. If you are meeting with Jeremy, talk about advisory, you could answer any of these or ask any of these or just some of them. You don't have to ask five, but it's giving you five suggestions of great questions that you could ask Jeremy to start the conversation. Now, the much more, much more important questions is the problem questions. Because we really need to uncover what's going wrong in the business. So we might say things like, Jeremy, what's been the biggest constraint on growing your revenue or capacity lately? Because as you know from the numbers, it's been trending down. So we might want to find out a bit about that. Or we might want to say, are there areas where you feel your team is stretched too thin or underutilized when it comes to forecasting or decision making? What numbers are hardest to get clarity on? These are just suggestions of problem questions. There are some other ones that they're not in here, but are ones I always will ask. So when I teach people how to do this process, there's some particular questions that I love I would ask every single time we want to try and uncover the problems.

But then we get to step three and this is even more important still. This is what I call the consequence questions and this is where we drill down. What we should do is when we ask a question and Uncover a problem. We never stop there. Every single problem that we uncover, we, we want to go deeper and ask more questions. And this is the bit that people sometimes find challenging.

But the great news is that we're getting some great stuff from ChatGPT. So if we're talking about what's the biggest constraints on growing your revenue, what's the constraints? Then a question might be, so how is that affecting your ability to take on larger or more urgent jobs?

It may be, has this impact on customer relationships or turnaround times? It may be a question like, if nothing's changed, where do you see if nothing's changed in terms of forecasting and decision making? If nothing's changed, where do you see this becoming a bigger issue in the next 612 months? If we don't fix this problem, how big a problem could it be further down the line? Because what we want to do with this consequence question is really make the problem bigger and bigger in the client's mind.

Oh, sorry, those are all drilling down questions to the first one. I should have read this better. So that's. So what's the biggest constraint on growing your revenue? We could then say, so how is it affecting your ability to take on larger jobs? This constraint has it impact on relationships, this constraint, and if we don't do anything about it, where will it be in six or 12 months? These are three great, great consequence questions of that one pain question. This is where people struggle with this, because what we want to do is ask pain questions. And then for each of them, we drill down. And so step two and three becomes iterative. We uncover a pain in step two and then in step three, we drill deeper with questions. We go deep. When we've gone as deep as we can, we go back to stage two and uncover another pain point. And then we go deep, deep. And then we ask more questions. And then finally, when we've done that, we ask the outcome questions. Things like, Jeremy, what would it mean for you if you could increase capacity without major overhead? Jeremy, what would it mean?

Let me, let's pick this one. What would it mean to you? What would be possible for the business and your role personally if your team could operate more independently day to day? Now, these outcome questions obviously will depend on what the challenges are and how the conversation goes. These are really important because.

When you ask outcome questions, when Jeremy tells you the benefit to him of that outcome, they're effectively selling themselves. They're now picturing what their business and their life will be like, fixing that problem. And it's One of those powerful parts of the sales process, when they tell you what the benefit to them is of that being fixed, that you're going to help them to fix. Okay. They're telling you the benefits of what you're going to do for them effectively. They sold themselves. This is such a powerful process.

So that's that prompt. If you're in. Those of you who are already VPA Mastery members like John, I don't think you've seen that prompt before. So I'd love to get your feedback as to what you think of it. I will do a session at some point where I go deeper into that and teach exactly how to use it step by step. But I love that prompt. Really powerful for helping you come up with some great questions. You don't have to use them all, but they'll be a great starter. If you're struggling with questions, let me give you a tip and I've actually created an AI prompt for this.

When you are having a pricing conversation with the client, when you're uncovering the value.

Always say to the client, as a minimum, jeremy, is it okay if I take notes as you tell about your business? They'll always say yes. And it shows that you're more professional. It shows that you're more interested in them if you are taking notes. So definitely take notes. And also you want to do that because then when you go to stage two and build up the solution, you've got those notes to look back on. But here's a power tip. If you have a phone, which I'm sure you have, I do this a lot. Now. I have on my right, on my home screen is voice memos. I've got an apple, it's voice memos. And when I meet people now.

What I would do is I would say, jeremy, we're going to cover some really important stuff in this meeting. And sometimes it's easy to forget important things. So rather than you worrying about taking notes, are you happy for me to record it? And then I'll send you a summary of the meeting. Guess what the client's going to say almost every time?

Yes.

Great. You hit the record button, you put your phone on the desk and you then ask the questions, which could be 45 minutes of uncovering the value. Why do you do that? Because then what you do, and this is what I do all the time. Now, once you've hit the stop button with Apple, now with the Apple one, there is then on the menu, you can then copy the transcription somewhere else. Guess where I do it I copy into a chat, I have a standard prompt and it then summarizes the meeting notes in a particular format which a, you can send to the client, which creates more value for the client for the meeting. But even more important, it now gives you. You don't have to take notes, you can listen to him. Because the thing about asking questions and consequence questions, you really want to listen because the more you listen, the easier it is to then, to then come up with more questions. If you're writing notes and stuff, it's hard to listen. So audio record it and then you've got all those notes and then what you can do is you can put them into ChatGPT and then do further analysis. Okay, I'm going to do one more quick prompt. I'm going to have to really, really quick because I think we are running out of time. Yeah, we are. I'm going to do it really, really quick just to show you it. So I'm going to go back as ChatGPT. I'm going to start a brand new chat. This is completely different. Now let's do a, let's do a marketing one because there's some really powerful stuff we can do in marketing and I know you're going to get some more from.

Let me not do that one. I hope Emily's not going to show this one. I don't think she is.

That's what I want. Okay.

One of the things I teach is copywriting in the academy and how to write better copy. And so one of the things we want to do is make sure that we have great headlines. Headlines are really important. So I've got one that helps you improve your headlines. And so I'm just going to copy and paste this and it's using a particular framework. Here's the prompt and all you do is you give it your headline. So let's imagine, let's imagine that you've worked with Jeremy and what you want to do now is you want to send out an email to other people that run engineering businesses and you need a headline for that email. And you've currently come up with Discover how to engineer, Increase the profits in your engineering firm. Now that's an okay headline at best. So we can improve our headline with a copywriting prompt. And this is going to use a framework called the four U's. And it's going to come up with, I think, some alternatives. So it could be this one. Only until Friday. Learn three proven ways to boost engineering firm profits by 27%. And the reason that that A better headline is because it has urgency only until Friday. It's unique. It's three proven ways. It's useful because it's promising to boost profits. It's ultra specific because it's 27% is a concrete benefit. Now you might not like that. So what about urgent briefing? How 147 engineering firms unlocked higher profits without hiring more staff or Final week to register. 60 Minute Workshop reveals the number one profit killer in engineering firms. How to fix it. They are great headlines and you can always ask for more if you don't like them.

So point being is that inside the prompt library there are prompts for not just advisory and pricing, but marketing, copywriting. Anything that you need help with in your business you can do with the right prompts. With chat GPT it is so, so powerful. Right. I did rush that a bit, but actually I do have six minutes so I'm going to answer some questions, then we'll go to a break and then you're going to learn more about marketing because we've got the amazing Emily coming soon and I'm looking forward to reading. There's some interesting stuff I think happening in the chat. John says these prompts in the prompt library are amazing and really time saving. Thank you John. I love the prompts and I've got and those of you in the academy, by the way, I have a really long list of brand new prompts that I know you're going to love, which I'm going to be releasing over the next few weeks and months. I've just been waiting for the prompt library software to be ready for you. So I've got that to put them in which will make it easy for you to find them.

Somebody anonymous attendee has asked a question.

And I'm going to ask Sarah to perhaps do a typed answer to that one. Wendy might be similar question.

I think. Wendy Wendy asked if we enrolled during the masterclass for the first or second tier package, would the pricing remain the same if we upgraded, say four months? No, if you upgrade. If you upgrade it will be to whatever the price is for that level of membership. So my advice is if advisory is important to you, I would recommend that you go in at that level and then consider downgrading if you decide that there's more stuff than you need. But it's up to you. I think the best thing to do Wendy, and also whoever anonymous is is if you reach out. If you've got questions about that type of stuff, feel free to just reach out to us this week. Email Sarah on support. I think she put the email address there.

Anonymous attendee, what is the cost to join the Academy? I did put the link you just go to. Let me just paste it one more time.

You go to this page here, link there, and then when you hit join the Academy, it then takes you to the page that shows the prices in different countries. So that's the link you need to go to. It's in the chat now.

Also, a great question is again from anonymous attendee, apologies, I don't know your name because it's not coming up. What is the monthly time commitment? That's a really good question. And I think Sarah will address that in the kickoff session on Monday. It's really up to you. It's up to you. It depends how fast you want to move. It depends how quick you want to change your practice. One of the things that I recommend is I started to change my practice at the end of 1998. If you remember my story from yesterday. I met Steve Pipe on his three day Accountants masterclass and he completely opened my eyes to the power of systems marketing, which I was not very good at, and advisory. And over the three days I had all these ideas of things I want to do. I was making this action plan. I'm hoping you're making notes as well. I had all these things I wanted to work on. And as I'm driving, also as I'm working through the day two and day three, what I was doing, I was making an action plan. And as I'm driving back, I'm thinking about my seven or eight page action plan, thinking, how do I do that? I've got all this client work. And so I made the decision.

From when I got back that I would block out in my calendar every single Friday. So for the next few months I only did client work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And I spent the whole of Friday just working through the action plan. And what I found by doing that was every week in a day I would get something substantial done in place. I'd put in place a marketing system. I'd have built my advisory packages, whatever it might well be. And what I found was that although initially progress was slow because I did something every single week, within a matter of months I started seeing big changes in my accounting firm. So I always recommend that you block time out now. A day might be too much, and that's fine because I know you have client work. I was just in a rush in my accounting firm to get more done. But I do recommend that you block something out Every single week. I would strongly recommend at least a couple of hours, perhaps the last two hours of Friday, you leave the practice and go somewhere quiet to work on the action plan. And the other thing I would recommend that you do is block out in your calendar to attend at least one live session a month. You don't have to go to all of them. Pick the one that's most relevant. If profit advisory is your thing, go and watch the. Either watch the videos or go to the live session. Do something. Do not try to do everything. The Chinese proverb, man who chases two rabbits catches none. Focus on one thing. Focus on getting one thing right in your firm. Whatever's right for you. I normally recommend for the first six weeks, work through the repricing your existing clients because that's where you're going to get the biggest, fastest, quick wins. And hopefully when you do that, some of the clients will leave because that gives you capacity. Okay, hopefully some will leave. Unfortunately, it doesn't always happen. They stay with you, but at least you make more money. But ultimately, the firms that are really successful, particularly with advisory, is they are working with less clients and work with better quality clients with better pricing. They're making more money with less clients and working less hard. I hope that helps.

Okay, we've got. How are we doing? We've got one minute.

And the same person. What if I just want to perform business advisory, CFO services? Well, just do that. There's nothing wrong with just doing business advisory. You will still get value out of the entire academy because it's not just the advisory. You'll get the marketing, which will help you market and promote advisory. The value pricing will help you get your pricing right for advisory. And the AI tool training we do will help you get better results as well.

Okay, that's that question. And at this point I'm going to stop and pause the questions because it is now on the hour. We have a short break. We then have a guest speaker and then I will come back and answer any more questions that come in. So I will introduce our next speaker after the break. What I'm going to do is play some music for three minutes. Don't go anywhere, don't leave the zoom. Go get a coffee, get some water, Go for a bathroom break. In three minutes, I will come back, might answer a couple more questions. If you've got some more questions, stick them in the Q and A. I will see you in three minutes and then we'll focus on marketing and winning more clients. See you soon.

Right.

That baby. We Changing we can't really help it we might just enjoy it now.

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

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We forever Forever means nothing.

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We can cry when it's over.

We can cry when it's over.

Yeah.

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I know it was special but baby, you can't stop.

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We can cry when it's over.

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We can.

Hey. Welcome back. Okay, we're into the final session of day two and we're going to kick off in a couple of minutes with our next guest. But first, let me just answer a couple of questions. And also, Latray said, all the trainers are excellent. I love Jessica Fox. Yes. I have to confess, I am not the most loved trainer in the Academy. There are people that are way better than me. Jessica is always. People love Jessica because she's doing this in her practice and doing amazing things and she shares exactly what she does. She shares her systems, her tech stack. Teresa, also similar. People love Teresa's training. Elnees and Neil, you've met Jerry Watson said, Jerry, this is amazing. The effective pricing software with the training is incredible and very thorough. With two quotes, I got 69.2% increase in revenue. The training is huge. Jerry, thank you for sharing that. Tom said, where exactly can we access the prompt library? And I know Sarah has answered that, but just to clarify, because Tom is a Mastery member in the Academy, we are rolling it out next week to all Academy Mastery members. But we've had beta testers testing as of last week. Everything's going really well. We're going to be rolling out some more people this week. They can be you. And what I'm planning is rolling out Friday morning to everybody who joins the Academy this week, the mastery level, level three. And so everybody comes to my session tomorrow, the final session. I will give you access to the software and also if you are an existing Mastery member, just email Sarah support and say, can I also have it early? And yes, you can have it early.

So I know many people are really excited by getting the prompt library and so on. Right. It's time to see if our guest is here. Who's our head of marketing? Emily. I think she's there. Hi there.

How you doing?

I'm good, I'm good. I'm ready to go.

Good stuff. Good stuff. I know we had in the tech check earlier because you're not in your office. Your wi fi wizard, sometimes a little bit dodgy, but I think it's okay right now. So let's hope the technology doesn't let us down. I'll be here anyway if there's any problem. Emily, what are you going to talk about?

Yeah, so today I'm going to be teaching about how to win more high quality business advisory clients. So kind of a marketing piece.

Sounds awesome. Are you ready to go?

Yes, ready to go.

I'll shut up and I'll be back later. Okay, see you all soon.

Okay, so quick introduction first. Obviously Mark's already said, but my name is Emily Cross and I teach both marketing and AI, sometimes a little bit of value pricing in the value pricing academy. So I'm one of the trainers from there. So if you do join, you will see a lot more of my face. What I'm going to teach today is I'm going to teach the marketing side today and then tomorrow I'm going to teach you a little bit more about AI and how to use that to build your business advisory packages. But today's session, what I want to talk about is not just how to win more clients, but how specifically to win more high quality clients that are actually going to appreciate the stuff that you do, really value the work that you do, and are willing to pay a high price for that service. Those are the kind of people that we're trying to bring into our business. We don't just want to bring in anyone that live that, that lives and breathes. We want to bring in people who are right and people who are going to be interested in that advisory service. So the first thing that I always talk about when it comes to marketing anything in your business, as I always start by talking about having an ideal client profile. So what this means is it's having.

A really crystal clear idea of who it is you want to work with so that you can target all of your marketing to attract that specific person. So if we don't have the ideal client profile, what we end up doing is, is a lot of our marketing becomes quite vague and quite generalistic and, and we try to attract everybody. And when you try to attract everybody, you end up attracting nobody because what you're not doing is being relatable and being situational and circumstantial. So as a, as a person that is, is potentially a prospect, I want to know that I'm working with somebody that has the exact information for Me and my business, that is going to help me get the best possible results. So when you can directly address that by knowing that client inside and out, that makes your marketing a lot more effective. And it means converting those people is a lot easier because you are being more relatable and you are directly addressing the things that they're going through. So when it comes to your ideal client profile, there are several different things that you might consider having as criteria.

You might look at things like the general demographic, so the age, the gender, the location of people that you're bringing in. And that could refer to, you know, if you're, if you're doing specifically tax things based in the US and there's different laws around different states, then you want to consider the location of the people you're working with. But it could also refer to whether they have an online presence or whether you like to physically go in and see them and have that relationship with them. We also want to look at things like what industry do they work in? Because maybe we have preferences for what industries we like to work with and we have expertise and knowledge on different areas. We might want to look at what stage the business is in. Whether we like to work with startups or businesses coming to the end and looking to exit. It may be that we look based on the services that we like to provide. So today and the three days is all about business advisory. So maybe we want to be trying to target and bring people in who are interested in those business advisory services, they're interested in growing their business or learning more about their numbers, whatever that might look like. We might also consider things like the attitude and the personality of the person that we're working with. This is a relationship based industry, so you're going to be spending a lot of time with that person and vice versa, they're going to be spending a lot of time with you. So it may be that you like to go based on the personality of whether you like to work with that person, whether they've got a good attitude, but also the attitude towards their business. You know, are they working towards growth or are they more wanting to find a work life balance? Are they more working towards exiting their business and therefore delegating a lot more. Those sorts of different attitudes might impact on how you bring that person in and what services they would be interested in. So you want to think about those kind of things. You also want to think about things like the size of their business in terms of revenue or employees, what kind of software are they using, are they using QuickBooks or Xero? Do you have a preference over which one you would like them to be using? All these kind of things can help define what kind of client we are bringing in.

And I also want to address that.

Having a niche is really, really powerful here. So Mark said earlier in his session at the, at the start of the day, the first session that there are three areas that you can use to grow your business. So you can bring in more clients, you can increase the amount that they spend, or you can increase their frequency. And as, as discussed, many people focus on bringing in new clients and bringing in new customers because they think that that is going to be the way to boost their business and to grow their business. Whereas actually it's really, really difficult to do that. So what we focus on is bringing in more clients. So the idea of having a niche for a lot of people feels, if they feel reluctant to go towards the niche because it feels logically like there is a smaller pool of people that we can work with. If we niche down to a certain industry or to a certain, you know, we only work with startups, whatever it might be. It feels logically like that is a smaller amount of people. But what we know that we need to be doing is, is working with less people but charging a higher price for that. So when we can bring in the right clients, when we can niche and offer a super high value service that is very specific and work with less people to give them more time, develop a better relationship and just think about more opportunities for those less people because we have more capacity to help them. That higher value service we can charge a higher fee for so we can work with less people. And having that small niche isn't going to be a problem. It actually helps draw more people in because it helps with various different things. First of all, your targeting can be better. So when you have this ideal client profile and you know exactly who you're trying to put yourself in front of, you can be more specific with your marketing, whether that's social media or emails or websites. We can be more targeted on that in terms of the wording that we use. If you are using paid ads, things like Facebook ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn ads, anything like that. We can also be more cost effective with our budgets that we're using because we are putting our ads in front of the right people in the first instance so we can be a lot more generally more efficient, better targeting, it's going to help bring in those high quality clients because it's bringing in the people with the right Criteria that we want to be working with. You're going to convert people much better, much easier, because the wording that you're going to be putting out there and the understanding that you're going to have of your client, you know, as well as looking at things like age, location, gender, we're also going to be looking at what things do they struggle with, what are their challenges, what are the obstacles that they're having to overcome in their particular business? What are their goals and their aspirations? What are their worries? We want to have this really deep, clear understanding of all of these aspects of the ideal client so that our marketing and the content that we put in front of them is going to be super relatable for them. It's going to address those pain points, it's going to give them a quick win or offer them a solution to something they've been struggling with. That is so much more powerful than just kind of really generally and vaguely saying we offer business advisory or we offer bookkeeping to all businesses of all shape and sizes. It's so much more powerful. And you're going to convert people a lot better when you can have that clear wording. Okay. Having a niche as well also helps to position you as an expert in that area, which is really powerful because people then find you more desirable as an accountant or a bookkeeper. As an accounting professional, they find you more desirable and more attractive to work with because they now know that you have the very specific skill set and experience to help them with their particular industry or their particular problems. Whatever it is that you niche on you niching with business startups, they know that you are specifically well equipped to help them with that. So having an ideal client profile is super important and it's something that we need to start with before we do anything. Once you have the ideal client profile, we can then use that to build our packages, to promote our packages, and to do everything else, you know, to bring in those right clients. So let me just quickly bring up this slide for you guys.

There we go. So hopefully. Oh, there we go. Like that. Yeah. So hopefully you can see that what we then want to do, once we now have our ideal client profile, we can break down the process of bringing that prospect to a client. We can break that into four steps. So first of all, we want to generate traffic. We want to push those ideal people towards a place where we can then capture their contact information. So this is people who have a problem. This is our ideal client. We want to put content in front of them and drive them towards our pages where we can capture their contact details. What we then do on that page is we qualify that lead by, and we generally do this through our lead generation system, which is what I'm going to talk to you about in a minute. We qualify them by offering them a piece of content.

And based on their interaction with that content, them signing up for it and saying, this content is relevant to me, we now know what services they might be interested in based on that. So for, for an example, we're looking today at business advisory. It may be that you create some sort of resource, a book, a webinar, a video that helps with 10 top growth strategies in the dental industry, if that's the industry that you want to work with. So somebody that would download that, we already now know that they are probably a dental business and that they are interested in growth. So if that's something that you have a service to offer to help them with, you now know that they are more likely to be somebody who will buy that service from you. So first we want to push them to that place. We then want to qualify them with that piece of content and we want to capture their information so that we can continue to market to them further. So that is the next step is we then want to nurture those leads to build what we call the KLT factor. So this refers to, we want them to know, like and trust us. So if somebody doesn't know you, they're not going to buy from you. If they don't like you as a person or like the way you come across, or the services that you provide, if they don't trust you, if they think you're a bit of a scammer on the Internet, or they don't trust that you have the particular skills to help them with their particular industry or their particular business, then they're not going to buy from you. So once we capture their contact information, we want to work to build a relationship to get them to a point where they are then ready to become a client. And that's where we then push them towards an appointment with us. And that's where the sales side comes in. And you then go through the, the, the sales side of, of talking to them through their, the business advisory that you're offering. So these are the four steps that you would take them through and we're going to look a little bit at that lead generation system of how that might work. But just to give you an example of all the kind of areas that you could then look into based on this and These are all areas that we go through in our marketing fundamental curriculum in the value pricing academy. So we look at the strategy piece, which is that first idea of the ideal client profile, but also setting goals and having expert positioning and those kind of things. We look at the traffic. So that's going to be your social media, your content marketing, paid traffic, if you're doing that, your website. We then going to look at the lead generation system and how that works. We then want to onboard them as prospects. So that's sending them email marketing, how are we going to do that? And warm them up to a point ready to buy from us and then we put them through to book an appointment. So all of these different areas, we look at all of those in our curriculum today. What we're going to look at is the lead generation system in particular. So first of all, what is lead generation? What this refers to is building a list, a database in your business so that when you are ready to take on new clients, you have an audience to reach out to. So here's a really powerful thing to think of. The size of your income is directly proportional to the size of your list. So let's say you're interested in setting up a new business club so that you can bring your business advisory clients together, bring them into a community and teach one to many and have that business club opportunity. You're starting that up and you want people to be able to promote that too. So you need to have a list so that you can promote that to them. Okay, if you have 50 people in that list and let's say you have a pretty decent conversion rate of around 10%, you might end up with five people in that business club. If you have a hundred people and you still maintain that 10 conversion rate, you're not going to have 10 people and so on and so forth. If you have a thousand people in your list, you might get 100 people in that business club. Okay, so the size of your list is really going to impact on how many people join you in your business club. It may be you're speaking at your local chamber of commerce and you're doing a teaching session there. It may be that you have a new video that you want to share with them, you've got a training course, whatever it might be, it may just be your business advisory service direct when you want those new clients. We want to have that list of pre qualified people. So remember, these people that we are adding to our list are people that we have pre qualified to know that they are likely to be interested in our business advisory service because they have engaged with content around that area. So growing your business, or, you know, if you have a tax planning strategy, then you would have content around that and that would show that they're interested in that. Okay, so we want to be growing our list. And the thing as well here is that this is something we want to be doing all the time in our business, constantly. Imagine it as a tap. So some people, they think, I need some more clients, I'm going to turn the tap on, bring more people into my business, and then once I feel like I've got enough, I'll turn that tap off. But unfortunately, that's not how marketing works. What we need to have is that tap on, a constant drip. So what we want to do in order to have that constant drip of people coming into our list is build an automatic system, an automated system that you don't have to monitor or manage. You set it up, you put the work in at the front end to set it up and then it runs on autopilot to bring people into that list for you. So that's what we're going to look at. So a couple more reasons why we might build a list. As we've just said, we want to capture those leads so that we now have an audience for the offers that we are going to be talking about. We also want to nurture those lists. So remember that was part three there. We want to nurture them. So when we build that list, we're going to continue to build our know, like and trust factor with that lead by following up with an email. So what, what we're doing with our list is we're capturing their contact details. That's generally their name and their email address. We're then going to follow up by sending them a series of emails that is related content. But also also in that email, content is going to be talking about who you are. You're getting your personality across, getting your brand across, what services you provide in your business, and just getting them a general understanding of who you are and what the business is about, but also giving them that nuanced content about what you know, they're interested in next. We also want to build a list because it helps keep you top of mind when that person is ready to make that decision to get the business advisory service. So let's say somebody is a solo entrepreneur and they've been doing their own bookkeeping. And you're building a list of people because you're offering a bookkeeping service. That person not might not quite be ready at that point to give that bookkeeping away to somebody else. They're still doing it themselves. They're not quite ready to do that, but they've got you in their inbox. So every time when it does get to the point that they are ready to take on a bookkeeper, you're the first person that they think of because you're there in their inbox. And you maybe did an ebook a while ago that they downloaded that was top a checklist of all of the best ways of keeping on top of your bookkeeping. If you are a solo entrepreneur, you might have done something like that, which they found super valuable. They really used it well, but now they're ready to hand that on to somebody else. You're there in their inbox on a regular basis, so you're now fresh in their mind. Okay, so that was a bookkeeping example. Of course, today we're looking at business advisory, so it might be something similar. Maybe they have an accountant, but they've not ever had bookkeeping advice, business advisory before. So they're not really sure what that entails. They're not really sure whether it's something that they want. We can get them into our list and then start to help them build an understanding of what business advisory is going to look like, what kind of things it could do for them. And we can do that by sharing success stories of other people that you've helped. You know, telling them what is included in your services, giving them extra content. You know, if you have another great blog article or a video where you talked about some other great principles to help them with their business, their business, then you might send them that kind of stuff in their email. So it's staying top of, top of mind. So that when they are then ready to make that buying decision to take on some business advisory, you're the first person that they think of. Okay, next, we want to warm them up. So a subtle difference here that I tend to use between nurturing them and warming them up. So nurturing, it's more about building the vibes, building the relationship, getting to know them on a personal level, getting to know the brand and your business, warming them up. We say this because when somebody has no interaction with our business, they completely don't know anything about us. We call them a cold audience. And then when they are, when we've had a bit of rapport with them, we've got a bit more in front of them, they've interacted with us a bit more, we then call them A warm audience or a hot audience. So we're warming them up to a point where they are ready to buy. So this is getting them to make a series of small micro commitments to you by getting them to do certain small things. So this might be following you on your social media, if you have a social media account, or joining your group, if you have a community. It might be making a very small purchase. Maybe you have a really awesome formula spreadsheet with a great formula in it that you sell for $20. It might be getting them to make a small purchase of that. That sort of style. It's getting them to make those small commitments to you and say it. It's psychologically, it's them saying, I trust this person. I'm making this decision to interact with them or to give them my time. So we want to be doing that with our list as well. And then also with our list. We're building this because it shows your authority and your expertise. It's your positioning. If you are niching, what you're doing is you're positioning yourself here as the expert. You now have their name and email address so you can send them content that is related to whatever they have subscribed for. Demonstrating further that you have the ability to help them because you have all of this great content around that subject. So it positions you as the authority. You get the chance to demonstrate how knowledgeable you are. You can also be sending, like we said, success stories and things like that case testimonials from people that you have helped. And that just further demonstrates that you have this ability to help them. So for all of those reasons, we need to be building a list. So how do we get people into that list? Okay, how do we get those leads? Now what we need is an automated system. We want a system that we build once and then we forget about it. But it's like that constant drip on the tap, always bringing new people into your list. So that when you do have something to offer, like a business club or you just want to do a promotion about making an appointment to learn about business advisory, your business advisory services. When you do have that opportunity to put something in front of them, you now have a growing list, ever growing list of people that you can reach out to. So you need a system. We call this the lead generation system. There's four elements to this system. So the first part is the lead magnet. This is sometimes called a golden carrot. And it's something that. It's a valuable piece of content that you give away for free. But in exchange for that name and email address. So it's going to be a valuable piece of content that either answers a question of theirs, solves a problem that they've had, gives them a quick win, gives them a quick result. You want to, you want that content to be valuable in giving them something quick and fast that they can do to their business, that they're getting a quick win from that. So it wants to be valuable enough for them to part with their name and email address. So it's not a monetary transaction, but there is still a value transaction happening here. The content needs to be good enough for them to willingly give that name and email address. Okay, so we want to create that content and we'll look at what those, what that content could look like in just a second. What we then do is we put that content on an opt in page. So I'm sure that as you have scanned the Internet over the years, you all have come across something like this before where you've landed on a page and it said, hey, why don't you sign up to our newsletter? Or why don't you download this freebie? And what you do is you put in your name and email and it subscribes you to the list and you then grab that free piece of content. So we want to create that opt in page where they have to put their name and email address into that to get that piece of content on that opt in page. The sole function of that page is to get those contact details. So it may be that this page is completely separate to your website, that you set it up somewhere else on a different domain. What we don't want to have is our website navigation bar along the top. Because if somebody lands on your opt in page and then they go, oh, there's a website over here, let me go and look at this other page. They might not return to that first instance, that first page, and you've lost that opportunity to grab their contact details. So the opt in page only function is to grab those contact details. Once you have done that, once they have signed up, they are then redirected to a second page, which is what we call the thank you page. And on this page, it confirms that they have successfully signed up. It delivers that piece of content and you can now offer those next next steps, those next call to actions, which are those micro commitments. Would you like to now join our Facebook group? Would you like to now book an appointment with us? Okay, whatever it is that you want to also add, you can add at this point. So people Going through this process as well. Another kind of analogy here is that, you know, if we look back here at the, the four steps.

We'Re not going to go straight in with the cell. We're nurturing these people, we're getting them into our list, and then we're nurturing them. You don't go on a date with somebody and propose marriage on the first date. You just don't do it. You go for a few dates, you know, you go through the motions, you move in together, and then maybe a few years down the line, you propose the marriage. We want to think about marketing in the same way that they are on a journey and people will buy and join at different stages of that. So it may be that they grab your lead magnet, and in that lead magnet, you have a link to book an appointment. And they might immediately go and book that appointment because they immediately think it's great. They might download the lead magnet, not even look at the lead magnet. But they hit your thank you page and they see that you have a service where you can do that, implement those things for them. So they click on it right there and then any book. Some people will be really quick. Other people might need to hear the, the same message 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times before they take action on that. So what we then do is now that they've got the magnet that the lead magnet, they've landed on the thank you page. We now follow up with emails. We follow up with emails and this is going to help us present our brand, our mission, who you are, your personality. You're going to put more related content in front of them so that they can again see your expertise and you can demonstrate that and so on and so forth. But your email is where you then nurture the leads and follow up with that. So what kind of lead magnets might we be able to create? What might that look like? So basically anything that is a valuable piece of content that you can create once and then you don't have to keep doing it. So generally speaking, we don't want to be using live videos or anything like that, other than the one appointment consultation option, which I will talk about as well. You want to create something once so that you can set this to run on autopilot, which by the way, when, when somebody goes through this system and they opt in, they're added to your list. You can then set up automatic emails so you don't have to then go in and email them every day. You can set up automatic emails that go out to them on a regular basis based on however you set that up. So you might create a webinar or a video training. Okay, maybe you've got 10, the 10 best. What did I say earlier? The 10 best growth strategies for the dental industry. You could do a webinar or a video, maybe half an hour long, just talking two or three minutes on each of those points. That could be something that you offer to people that they go and look, they can go and then learn to do those things or implement them in their business. But you also have a bit at the end that says if you would like some help on setting those things up, I have a service service to help you do that. It might be you do a webinar. Okay, it might be you do a workbook, which is similar. But remember that people consume things in different ways. So maybe you have a written format, maybe you have a video format. We do know that in today's day and age, with the over saturation of content that can be made really quickly and easily using AI These days with blog content.

Video is really powerful and it does help you stand out massively. Okay. Particularly in the accounting industry because a lot of people are too nervous, too shy to do that, to put the camera on themselves and talk. But if you can do video, it's really powerful. It gets your personality across, it gets your energy and your enthusiasm across. And this is the relationship industry. You're going to have a relationship with that client, they're going to have a relationship with you, they're going to work with you, hopefully for a long time, at least yearly long. They want to know who they're working with. So putting yourself in front of them in that video format is really, really powerful. Now video is a great option. You could also do that as audio if you're really uncomfortable having your face on there. But we know that we, we can speak through the points really, really clearly. Then we could just put something on, record the audio and offer that as some sort of podcast.

And we do also talk in marketing fundamentals about how you can repurpose content. Especially if you start with a video. You can extract the audio and have the audio. You can then make a workbook from that as well. Okay, so video is super powerful to start with. But if you are not confident in doing that, then audio might be a second option.

You could do something like a checklist or a cheat sheet. So maybe it's a checklist on if they are doing their own bookkeeping. Here's the top 10 things that you need to do to stay compliant with your own bookkeeping, you know, something like that. Of course you can apply that to business advisory and do something similar. Your cheat sheet might be things to know for that particular industry. Here's a couple of kind of hacks and top tips and secrets about the industry that's going to help boost you and put you ahead. Something like that. Okay, so the next one we have here as well is a free appointment or consultation. Now I've talked about this before and somebody then asked the question, if you were to offer.

A paid consultation initially, would you then offer that as a freebie? Now that's not what we want to do. We don't want to be taking our paid content and giving it for free. What this is implying here is potentially once somebody has already downloaded a piece of your content, you then offer them a small, maybe a 15 minute phone call where you address one of their questions for them. Now this is powerful because you're directly meeting that person and as we know that video helps get your personality across. Directly meeting and having a conversation with that person can help them put in their mind what it's going to be like to work with you. Okay? So it's a great way of setting a good impression and building that relationship right up from the start. Well, this wants to be something that's relatively short, it doesn't take up loads of your time. And it might be that you put this as a second option after pre qualifying them with the content. Okay, so you know that they're going to be appropriate for your business, you then offer them the appointment. Or it may be that you say, let's have a quick 10, 15 minute phone call and I can answer your first quick question. Okay, you might have a piece of software that you want to give away that they, that might be useful to them. Or similarly you might have a, an Excel spreadsheet which has a couple of really useful formulas built into it that they could use. So you might have something like that that you can offer to give them a free trial on that, or it could be that you just give it to them. And then right at the bottom here, which is the one we generally suggest to go for, is having an ebook, or even more so you go for a full length book. If you were able to write that sort of level of content. Now you might think initially you might think, well, I don't have the time to write an ebook. I don't have the time to film a webinar. I, I don't know how to do that. That's where Chat GPT can come in and really help you. I'm not going to talk about it today, but I am going to show you tomorrow. But Chat GPT can help you write your ebook from scratch. It can actually help you with this entire process. And I have done sessions before. I think there's actually a session on YouTube where I've gone through this process and showed you how ChatGPT can help with each element. So it can help you create the idea for your ebook, do the research around your ideal client profile and then create the idea for an ebook or a piece of content that's going to be appropriate for that. It can help you write that ebook. Or if you're going for a webinar, it can help you give the script for that or some bullet points that you want to hit. Okay. It can write the website wording for the, for that opt in page. It can write the wording for that. It can write the emails that you want to follow up with. So there are so many things that Chat GPT can help you with. We, we could be here all day showing you all of the different things. But if it's, if it's a problem that you think I don't have the time to write something like that or to sit down and make something like that, ChatGPT is going to help you do that. In an hour, you could have a lead magnet set up. In an hour you could have the entire landing page and an opt in funnel and the whole thing. You could have that whole set things set up in a day. If you're using Chat GPT to help you, there's, there's really no, no excuse these days. Okay. So ChatGPT can be massively powerful in helping you get those things put in place. Okay, so let me just show you, let me show you what it looks like. So I'm gonna put, I'm pointing on the screen right now. If anybody wants to. You can scan the QR code right now and it's going to take you to our opt in page here. Just if you want to see what ours look like so that you can, and you can sign up for it if you want, get the emails, see what kind of things we're putting in our email so you can see how that whole system works in practice. So the QR codes on the screen right now. And, and once I've hopped off of here, I will put the link in there as well. It's a free ebook. This is our five key ingredients to a successful business advisory service. So by the way, if you are here today, it may be because you downloaded this ebook. We then sent you more business advisory related content and you're now here on our webinar. Okay, so that's what you can be doing something similar. So this is what it's generally kind of going to look like. It's a very simple page. So you can see on the left hand side there, hopefully it might be a bit small, but you can see it on the left hand side. We've got a big title, we've got the wording along the left hand side which is going to do a couple of kind of key bullet points of the benefits of getting that ebook. You then got an image, a visual of what they're getting on the right hand side there and a big orange button. Grab your copy. We then also have there on the bottom a bit of a bio for Mark. So for anybody who's coming to us brand new and doesn't know Mark, there's a bit of information there which helps build that trust piece. Right, okay, so. And we have full sessions by this on marketing fundamentals of how to optimize that page to get it to perform really well as well. But what's going to happen is they're going to click on that button to grab your copy and they're then going to get something like this, which says, yep, you can grab your copy. You just need to put in your name and email address into here and you can download that. That will then redirect them to the next page which is going to look like something like this, which is going to be their thank you page, which says, okay, thank you, you've been successful.

You can download that freebie here. And you know as well there's also a couple of schools of thought whether you give them the freebie at this stage or you only send it to their email address to make sure that they have given you a correct email address. Okay. But you can put it here because it's important that you give them that value.

And then you have the opportunity to now promote other things and to get them to take the action on other areas. So you might now be interested in joining our social media group, joining our Facebook community. You might like to purchase one of our AI courses, which is only $25. Or you might like to be, you might be interested in joining the Value Pricing Academy, which is a full flagship model. Remember, people move at different speeds. Somebody might go on a date and it might be five years until they propose marriage. Some people might Only need a year. Okay. Some people will download your ebook and they will immediately think, this person knows their stuff. I want to work with them. I'm going to book an appointment straight away. Some people might need a bit more time and that's where the email part comes in. Okay, so what you would then do is you would follow up with emails and in those emails you're going to be talking about your various different.

Talking about your personality, your, your brand, your vision, your services, what you offer, and also similar content that they have been interested in downloading. So they've grabbed that ebook. That's around 10 growth strategies for the dental industry. You can then talk about more growth strategies or, or take that apart and put it into different emails so that you send them 10 emails that go into depth on each of those different strategies. Okay, you can follow up with things like that. And in the PS there's going to be, by the way, if you would like help implementing this, you can book an appointment with us here. So that's what that's going to look like. Okay, so I'm just going to have, I'm just going to stop and see if there's any questions come in. So I'm just going to look over here to our separate screen.

No questions in here. So if anybody has put any in the chat box.

I might not see it.

So if you do have a question, please do put it in the Q and A box. And I've got a couple more minutes which I can answer any questions you have. And I'm also going to linger in the webinar after, afterwards when Mark comes back on so I can answer things in the chat box as well. If you guys want, I've got time. So I'll show you a very quick ChatGPT demonstration. I didn't want to go through every kind of element here, but.

Here'S an example of using ChatGPT to create a topic for your ebook. So we've got a long prompt here. I'm not going to go through what's in the prompt. It's something that we teach, but it's got a long prompt, basically asking it. You're a marketing strategy expert and what I want you to do is generate ebook topic ideas for a specific service and a specific industry. So it's going to go through a couple of steps to do that. It's going to first understand the audience. It's then going to generate ebook topic ideas. It's got a couple of rules. So I want to make sure that it doesn't repeat similar ideas. I want lots of different ideas. I've got an example of what that might look like. Okay. But then what we do is we get right down to the bottom here and there are a couple of variables. So if anybody actually wants me to do this right now, if we have time, tell me the service, the industry and a little bit of context of who you work with and I can type this in for you right now. In this example, I put that the service that we're providing here is bookkeeping. The industry that we like to work with is the hospitality industry. And the context is based in the US and they're using QuickBooks. So that's just a little bit of extra information here. So it's generated me some topic ideas. So first of all it's going to tell me a bit about the audience. We understand that there's a high transaction volume. They might want to manage cash flow. They might have difficulty separating personal and business expenses. These might be things that they're struggling with. So the topic ideas it's come up with, we've got the hospitality owners, QuickBooks Playbook, tame the Chaos bookkeeping system for busy hospital business owners and a little bit of information about what might be in there. So discover the step by step workflows to streamline your bookkeeping even during peak season and mastering cash flow in the hospitality industry. From rooms to receipts. Categorizing hospitality income and expenses in QuickBooks. Okay. Avoiding bookkeeping mistakes. So I think we've got how many. We've got 10 there. So we've got 10 different options. So I can see that some people are, are posting in the, in the chat. So let me just quickly, I'm going to copy and paste this prompt and I'm going to give, I'm going to do it for somebody else's.

So these prompts, by the way, we get those in the, in the prompts library that Mark showed you. So I'm gonna just gonna go, Marty has put here, she said bookkeeping and then real estate and in the US So I'm just going to change the industry there to real estate because that's who she works with and she's based in the US I'll just take the QuickBooks bit off and then I can send that.

And you'll see how quickly if anybody's not used chat GPT before this, this is so quick. Within a couple of seconds now we, we have potentially 10 ideas here. So it's going to understand first the audience. We've got their pain points, challenges Goals of an of and the interests of a US based real estate businesses. So it may be that they're managing multiple property related income streams like rent commission sales. They're tracking expenses for each property. The difficulty spreading personal versus business expenses especially for sole proprietors, poor or inconsistent record keeping, lack of clarity on cash flow, inability to generate investor ready financial reports and limited time and bookkeeping knowledge. So our our ebook topic ideas that we have here we've got Real estate bookkeeping basics, a practical guide for agents, investors and landlords. The property by property Profit tracker How to categorize income and expenses for maximum clarity. IRS proof your books Real estate bookkeeping to stay audit ready Cash flow confidence how real estate professionals can master monthly bookkeeping. Okay. And so on and so forth. We've got 10 different options there. So you could then take that title and ask Chat GPT to help you create that ebook as well. But it's giving you 10 ready to go options of you know, different ways that you might do that. Okay, so.

Let me just hop back to here.

For anybody that's interested. The next marketing session. If you've enjoyed this session. The next marketing session that I'm doing is on July 14th and I'm going to be talking about how to build your own Facebook group. I'm going to kind of make it a bit more generally how to build a community. We know that with the advance of AI, human relation and human connection is becoming ever more important because we're oversaturated with AI and it is incredible and powerful and I am a big advocate of AI. But we know that because of that move towards that community and engagement is becoming super, super more important and powerful. So I'm going to be teaching that in on July 4th in the next session. So if anybody is wanting to join the Value Pricing Academy, you will get that session in the next 30 days before you can hit that, you know, return. If you, if you, after 30 days you're not happy, you can refund your Value Pricing Academy. You can leave, you can cancel, but you will have had that session. So. And there are plenty more sessions as well. That's just the next one that I'm doing in marketing. Okay, so let me just bring that back. And that's it from me. So if Mark's here and ready to pass it back over.

Awesome. Thanks Emily. That was amazing. And we'll have you back tomorrow which would be cool with the AI stuff.

Yeah, back tomorrow and I'll be teaching AI how to use AI to build your advisory packages. So I'll be same time tomorrow. I'll be back here.

Amazing stuff. Thank you. Okay, let's wrap up. I think we've got one question that I'll come to in a second. There may be some more by the time I've finished.

Let me just remind you one more time that the toll question Are you a note taker or an action taker? No need to answer right now but tomorrow morning I'll see who the action takers are. So you might want to be thinking about what are you going to do between now and tomorrow? You only do just one thing. What's that? One thing you might do. So you might want to think about that overnight. And what I would love to know is you can think about now is when we play out with some music and a bit what's been the most valuable part of today? It's really useful feedback to us, for us. If you think about all the things we've talked about today, what has been most useful tomorrow? So today we've focused on how to sell advisory work without uncomfortable selling. I looked at the profit diagnostic process and the software. We then looked at some some more value pricing ideas like anchoring. And then we showed showed how to do it with the software. And then Emily's done finding the right people and turning them to clients. Tomorrow is unfortunately the last day. Tomorrow is really about two main things. One is many of you said how do we find the times to advisory and also predominantly tomorrow is about.

How to do this stuff. And so we're going to do tomorrow quite a lot of AI stuff. We'll talk through some frameworks and so on for you to deliver advisory services with confidence because I know some people have a lack of confidence. They've never done this before. How do I help an engineering business with strategy, for example? Well, we'll show you exactly how to do that tomorrow and we'll show you how you can use AI systems to do that. So before that are there any other questions? I think there's one I can see and that was Tom from London. Tom Stocker says could this be a copy of our a copy of our business advisory ebook? I believe that was when Emily showed the lead generation system that we use and the business advisory ebook. You wouldn't want it to use it the same as ours, but the framework that's in there, there may be some inspiration for that.

But as Emily said, we do have an entire training session that she delivers on how to write an ebook. We also have a series of prompts that make it really, really easy. And as I was listening to Emily, one of the thoughts that.

Came to mind, which you may be thinking is one of the reasons that we, we teach the marketing is even if, even if you're happy with the client base you've got and you don't really want to do much marketing in your firm, you are here because you want to learn about business advisory. And when we talked about the different profit drivers and we talked about things like helping clients to increase the number of times customers come back and how frequently and so on, that's basically all marketing. So what we teach or what Emily teaches, almost everything. And I think actually everything, everything that you learn in the marketing, firstly, it's aimed at helping you and your accounting firm. But all of these ideas, you could also then use this knowledge. You learn to feel more confident when clients ask you as part of advisory questions like, well, how would I grow my firm? How would I increase the average transaction value? You're going to learn these skills as part of the marketing sessions. And one of the things that going way back to 1998 when I first met Steve Pipe, who I said on day one yesterday, one close friend now mentors. One of the things he said way back then which really stuck with me. He said one of the great things about the accounting profession is duality, the concept of duality. And what he meant by that is that as we're learning how to build a more successful accounting practice, so in the value pricing academy, we teach you pricing, we teach you marketing, we teach you strategy, all so that you can build a better accounting firm. But everything that we learn to build a better accounting firm, almost everything applies to any business. So all these skills that we teach you will also help you to become a better business advisor. You will, as you start implementing things in your practice, systems, strategy, marketing, then it's going to make you feel more confident talking to clients because then you can say, this is what I recommend you do. Let me show you how we do it in our accounting firm right now and perhaps that'll give you some ideas for how you can do it in your engineering business. So that's why we spend so much time teaching you marketing, not just for your firm, but because of the concept of duality. Okay, we are, I think four minutes early, but I can't see any questions in the Q and A box, which is fine. So we will wrap up. I have got some music to play out with for three minutes, just like yesterday. Please let me know as the music's playing out, what is the best thing that you've learned today, the key insight because my team will pull that together. We read all the comments and tomorrow unfortunately is the last day. It seems to have flown by. Tomorrow's the last day but it's also my favorite day because it's how we now get into doing this stuff. How do we start helping clients with their business, with strategy. So I will see you tomorrow same time and enjoy the rest of the day. Bye for now.

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

We can cry when it's over.

We can cry when it's over.

Feel we can cry when it's over.

We can cry when it's over.

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I love it was special but baby can't stop.

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