Business Advisory Masterclass Day 3 - How to Deliver Advisory

Into the night.

One of the first things which Marks teaches is, is to have like free tier pricing like one silver gold. So I was learning all this stuff about like, like how to price in industry and the light bulb moment went off. I was like Joe, well this can, you can do this in any.

Sat down with one of the lead engineers at the plenant heating business and we sat, we sat down and wrote out a bronze silver gold for a boiler replacement. I was happy with it. I presented it to the directors and I showed them look, I was like guys, we need to start implementing like value pricing, menu pricing. I'm doing it within my business and getting great results. And I know, I know it can work for you guys.

Right into the night.

You know, we have repricing conversation with clients every year, at least every year. And on a session that you did a little while ago, I dug out some stats and actually all the repricing conversations that we've had with these existing clients have led to a 54 uplift in those clients original fees which when I looked at the numbers equates to about another 100 grand from an annual perspective in terms of fees. So you know, clearly if we'd not had those conversations, we'd be 100 grand less in terms of our fee structure right now.

When I came to the TB connect and heard you speak then it really, I said there's a system and I need. That really made the difference. It made it so much less stressful for me to get that confidence built up just through watching the videos and attending because during that time you had some repricing webinars that I went ahead and attended those again and just sometimes you need to do things more than once.

Show me life.

You know, clients are contacting us now aren't going to get the same sort of fees that you know, they would have done had they contacted us three or four years ago. You know, off the top of my head we would probably charge 150 pounds a month on average. And that figure is shot up now. It's probably about maybe 275 to 300amonth on average. And that's just because there's twofold. There's, you know, we work with bigger clients that require more work and therefore more services to deliver. But also like I said, my base, my base price has, has just increased and there is a floor level in terms of what we're prepared to work with now. And.

This is all we got. Show me it. Show me love.

Mark said you need to have a book or you need to have an ebook, you need to establish yourself as an authority within your industry and the best way to do that is to have a book. So another light bulb moment went off. It's like, well, wait a second, I've, I've produced a free tier pricing structure for a plum heating business. I've got an asset here which I know it's got a lot of value but no one was listening to me, no one wanted to take it on. So I thought, you know what, the best, like the best thing for me to do is to turn this concept and expand on it, turn it into a book and then someone, people might start listening to me. And that's exactly what's happened.

You know, we've restructured our business to kind of maximize our wealth from a selfish point of view. So why would I not want to give that knowledge and an insight to all of my clients as well?

What's happened since my book has been released since February is I've been on a podcast with someone who's got 20,000 people following, but the podcast is called off the talk. I've been a guest host on his podcast. My next door neighbor is a BBC reporter so, so I had a good five minute interview with her on, on BBC Radio Sheffield. I actually got an email off a multi million pound plain and heating manufacturer of pipes. He was quite impressed with what I've done and he said that there definitely see some sort of partnership working towards us too.

Sing, sing, sing, I've got a song you hum along and we have fun, fun, fun when we're moving.

A huge win for me emotionally and relationally with the clients and, and financially it just, it was huge to be able to get through that. But overall, this last what, four years, it's made a big difference for us time wise because we don't have to have as many clients. We know better what kind of clients we want to have, what kind of work we want to do. Not having to keep track of the time, that's wonderful. I mean it's wonderful to be free of the time clock.

You know, we're in a service based industry and it takes a lot of years for us to get qualified in our industry. So to kind of not deliver, you know, a decent service that I consider, you know, we should be doing is doing ourselves a bit of a disservice. I don't think I'm doing anything that's, that's really scientific or taxing, excuse the pun, but yeah, I think for whatever reason it's just it's just something that our industry is not very good at at the moment.

So. So I don't say this to like to boast or to gloat or anything like that, but, but these opportunities have happened because I put myself out there. I've said I'm an expert. Well, great. But I've done something to prove people that I know what I'm talking about. So, Mark, only, only good things has happened since, since the book's been.

It.

Everything that you're teaching in terms of both pricing, marketing, how we should be talking to clients, how we should market ourselves on social media and chat, GPT and AI. I'm just kind of riding the crest of that wave because if I think if I can do those things, then I will continue to stand out and hopefully deliver a service that's far different than anyone else is doing locally. And I think that would be a thing for a while to come.

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 three, the final day of the Business Advisory Masterclass 2025 and we have got a lot of stuff to cover today. It's really quiet in the chat at the moment, so let's get going with the chat. Let's light it up. We have five minutes before we officially start, so I'll give a few shout outs. Otherwise I'll just pick on people. So let me know you're here, let me know where you're from and I'd love to know who's been here for all three days. Who is here for day three. That's made day one and day two. Let me know in the chat and I'll give a few shout outs. I know some of you were here right at the start of that 10 minute countdown and were perhaps listening to all the various stories. Some of the things that stood out to me as I'm listening to them was, I don't know if you caught it, but Neil, who some of you met, if you came on day one, one of these Neil said was he was looking back at how he had been repricing existing clients and he said that he had increased his prices from existing clients by on average 54%, which is really impressive. Most people get about 20%. He did 54% and he said that adds about 100 grand onto his bottom line. So very impressive. And the other thing that was a takeaway for me listening to those stories is Aaron, I think he is from Sheffield. And one of the things he talked about was really picking up on what Emily said yesterday. If you were in Emily's session yesterday, she talked about the importance of having a niche. And Aaron is one of the people who've done it really, really well. His is the plumbing and heating industry. You got that perhaps from his little excerpts. Plumbing and heating industry. That's all he works with. And he's very successful there. And one of the things he did is I talked about the importance of creating an ebook and positioning yourself as an expert. He went one step further. He wrote a complete book which is actually on Amazon. So if you go to Amazon and search on books on Aaron McLeish you will find. I think it's called something like. Oh, I forget what it's called now. It's something anyways, it's all about. It's a proposal system for plumbing and heating businesses. So you might want to check that out. It's fascinating. Anyway, I can see now that people are commenting, so that's great. Delwin's here from South Africa. Delwyn missed day one. I guess that means you're here yesterday when I told you where to get the recording. The recordings are available. Chasity's here. I know you've made it to all three days. I've seen you. David is here from Tampa. Hi there. And you've made it to all three days. Congratulations. Awesome. We have. Carol is here from. I know from South. South Africa. He says all three days. Well done. Looking forward to another great session. Thank you for that. Jan is here from Pretoria. Been here all three days as well. It's great to see so many people from South Africa. We have. Flora is here from Texas. I think you've been to at least one if not all three days.

Flora, Christina. All three days. Hi there. Christina and Dion from sunny Wales. And I know you've been all three days. I've seen you commenting away. I missed the beginning of yesterday. Personal, not business got in the way. Dion, you can. You can catch the recording sometime if you. If you need to. So Flora said two days only. Virgil's here. Hi there. From. From Johannesburg again, South Africa. Here on Tuesday. Couldn't make it yesterday. So Virgil, if you need to catch up, the recording will be available to the end of the week. I will perhaps remind people on that later on. Theo's here from New Jersey and if you just joined, we'll start in a couple of minutes. Just under. Theo's here from New Jersey. Tom is here again. Tom Stocker from London. I know you've been here every single Day because you, you keep commenting in the chat, which is awesome. Looking at developing his niche medical therapists and offering management reporting where possible. So Tom is clearly an action taker and is here from sunny Glasgow. Okay. And been here a week. Hi, Andrew, great to see you again. Sherry is here from Park City.

I've been here for all three days.

I think we were in Park City, Park City, weren't we, Sarah? Back in 2020, I think in 2019 we went to Scania Heights in, in Utah and then we had a couple of days and I think it was Park City up in the hills. Wendy's here. I'm in PC2, I assume. Oh, that's a comment to Sherry. Yes. So Park City. Okay, so both of you in Park City. That's cool. Wendy and Sherry and Sarah's just confirmed. Yes, we were in Park City. I thought it was Park City. We had a. We had a great time in Utah. Really loved it. Went to Salt Lake City. I think that's what it was, wasn't it, for the sky, New heights. It was very fun. Anyway, anyway, let's stop waffling. It's quarter two. It's quarter two here in Portugal. It's quarter two everywhere. Actually, it's quarter four here in Portugal and we need to get started because again, we've got a lot of stuff to cover.

Let me just shout out to Paula, who's from Northern Virginia, US and only catching. Missed that. It's flick pass. Only catching today due to payroll week. Okay. So welcome Paulie. You've missed a couple of great days, but you can catch up with the recordings. So let's just quickly recap on where we have got to for those of you who either missed some of the days or have even just forgotten. So we kicked off on Tuesday, which to me feels like a long time ago, where we talked about why the profession needs to change and the state of AI. And then we looked at how we looked at what is advisory. We created a definition of advisory. We looked at the six core elements of a well rounded advisory service. We looked at a case study. We looked at this case study and some numbers. We analyzed those numbers. We looked at some things that you can do to help you spot what's going on in a business and spot opportunities to help clients through advisory. Then we moved on to the challenge of, well, how do we package it up? How do we create different packages? And then we looked at the really important skill of communication and we had our first guest speaker, which was Neil. And he talked through. He talked through a number of different practical case studies of what he's doing in the area of advisory. That was Tuesday and if you missed that, then the recording is on our YouTube channel until the end of the this week. So if you want to catch up, you can do. I will ask Sarah, perhaps she might put into the chat the link to that. I think then yesterday, yesterday we looked at, then we built on that. Yesterday was about, well, how do we sell it now? Now we know what we're doing, we know what advisory is, we're spotting opportunities, we've packaged it up, how do we sell it, what's the sales process? And I walked you through that profit diagnostic gnostic process and then we talked about value pricing. How do we come up with the price, how do we calculate a price? How do we calculate a price based on value and how to do it confidently? And so that was the theme of yesterday from me, selling and value pricing advisory. And then Emily was our guest and Emily's our head of marketing and she did an amazing session all around. How do we find the right people for advisory, the right prospects out there and turn them into clients? So that was what we've done so far in the last two days. And you can catch up with the recordings if you did miss some of that today. What we're really going to focus on today now is, well, how do we do it? How do we deliver advisory? And what we'll also do a lot of today is because the world's moving fast into AI. We've talked a lot about it and today we're going to do a lot more talking about AI. And one of the things that's come out over and over again over these last two days is you've really enjoyed the prompts and the stuff where we've. I've shown you how to use AI to do many of the things we've talked about, so we'll do more of that. I think I have two or three really powerful prompts to share with you. Two, three, four, can't remember. We'll see how we go. I've got a bunch to show you as part of today. And then we have the sessions at the end where you're going to get even more prompts. So let me just remind you of.

The schedule, the timings, if you need them. It's going to work the same as the previous days. We'll have a brief break in just over an hour from now. And then we probably won't do the second break because I will hand over to Emily Just before we would have the second break, because I need to disappear to a different Zoom room. So just to remind you, if you, in case you've forgotten, the last session of the day is I am running a special session for those people that are the action takers that have taken action, want to go deeper, want to work closely with me and my team on.

Building up your advisory solution. And so I'm going to do a session, a private session for new members. And what I'll be doing is I'll be going through my favorite advisory prompts. We're going to build on that case study from Tuesday. And one of the things that we will do is I will show you the step by step process for how you can create a highly impressive and valuable business plan for a client in less than 20 minutes. And what you can see on the screen, we'll go through that step by step. It's really easy to do when you know how to use the AI, the prompts and so on. So we'll do that live. We'll build up a, we'll build a business plan for our case study clients and then we'll do some analysis and other advisory stuff around that. And what Emily will be doing is she'll also be talking about AI as well. She's going to look at AI prompts for promoting your advisory service, building on yesterday's session. If you are joining, if you've joined the Value Person Academy, you will not miss Emily's session if you come to mine because it's being recorded and you'll have access to it indefinitely. As a VPA member, you get access to all the recordings of all of our live sessions, our conferences. So please don't worry that you'll be missing out. You won't miss out on anything at all when you come to my private session. Okay, let me at this point as well, let me introduce you to the team here at the Value Pricing Academy. We are a family business. Some of you do know that we are a family business. It's me, of course, Mark, and my partner Sarah. And so you might recognize, you might notice the surnames here. So Emily is Sarah's daughter. Emily has been working with us for, I forget now, something like five or six years. And Emily now does a lot of the training. She's our head of marketing. She does a lot of training, online marketing and also AI. Then Gabby is my eldest daughter. She's been with the business, I think about four or five years. I forget exactly. Now, Gabby is also an expert in marketing, also Building pages, websites, she created our website and many other things. She's very good at technology and very good at marketing and copywriting. She writes the blog posts, for example. And then my middle daughter is Tasha. Tasha does our video editing. And then Lara's was the most recent addition to our team and she's doing a mix of things, creating some content through using AI and ChatGPT. So that's the team. We are a family business. And the most important person on this screen is arguably Sarah because she's the person that will be helping you with any issues. So Sarah is behind the email supportaluepricingacademy.com so if you ever need any help with anything, if you ever need any, have any questions, then when you email us, it's Sarah. That's the one that will be getting back to you and helping you with any issues you have. And Dion, thank you for that. Dion says Sarah is wonderful. Yes, she is. Okay, I've shown this slide a few times over the last couple of days. This is, this is.

Jeremy, our case study that we introduced you to on Tuesday. And I just thought I'd show this again just to let you know you can do this. I know that there's, it came out on Tuesday. People say there's a lack of comp. They have a lack of confidence over advisory work because it sometimes feels like out of comfort zone. Yes, we need some different skills perhaps, but really we need more important. We need some frameworks, we need some systems. And we've talked about a lot of frameworks over the last two days and today we'll look at some frameworks and systems for delivering advisory. And when you've got those frameworks, and in particular, as you learn more about how you can tap into AI tools like ChatGPT, you'll realize it does all the hard work for you. So yes, you can do this. You can build an extraordinary accounting firm, attracting different types of clients, better quality clients, charging higher prices, creating more value and doing advisory. And here's another slide we've had a few times over the last two days. Remember, I've said there are typically two types of people that come to webinars and training events. Those people that sit and listen and take notes and that's okay. But then there's the action takers who go away and do something. So on that note, as I've said I would do at the start of the day is let me know in the if you, you are an action taker, let me know in the comments. What have you Done. We're on day three now. Hopefully you've taken some action. You've done something. What action have you taken? Let me know in the chat. And while you're doing that, I'm just going have a quick look to see if there's anything that I need to be aware of. No, there's lots of comments about Sarah. We love Sarah. Sarah's the best. Love that it's a family business. My firm is as well. That's Mary. And Linda says Sarah's fantastic. You'll be amazed at how helpful she is. Thank you. Okay, so where are the action takers? Let me know. And as ever, my team will be keeping a track of all the comments that are coming in. So I can just see Leslie out the corner of my eye. Lesley's comment, not Leslie, because she's over in British Columbia, but I can see. I can see the comment. Okay.

Right.

What else? Yeah, let me just do a few shout outs because I know some people have decided they want to join me and my team on this journey. And so, so far, during the course of the event, we've got. Stacy Baker has joined. Welcome, Stacy, if you're here. Shari James, I know you're here because I've seen you commenting away. Mary Sullivan, welcome to you. Great to have you on board. Paul is here as well. Hi there, Paul. I'm not sure I've seen you in the comments, but you are on board. So great. I'm looking forward to working with you. Another Mary is here. And then I think it is the Guy Robinson, who I know very well. I think it is. So, Guy, welcome on board. Benjamin has joined as well, which is awesome. I know that. Benjamin, I've come across you a few times before as well. So it's great to see you in the Academy. Dion, I think Dion might have been. You might have been an academy member before, so I'm not sure. But I do know you. I do know you well. And then Paul has joined as well. I remember if you joined before the end of today, there are some special bonuses and I'll remind you of that later on. But the biggest bonus, I think is the session I'll be running later, the private session. If you want to come along to the private session and learn how to, for example, build a business plan in less than 20 minutes with AI. And you'll get all the system in that during that session. By the way, you'll also get access to all the prompts I've shown over these three days in the session. So if you're still not sure whether to join. There's no rush. You can the price goes up on Monday at the end of the week. But remember, if you make the decision today, then you will be invited to the private session later. But don't leave it till about three or four minutes before because we need Sarah needs to be able to send out the specific private the email with the private link to make sure you get into that session. For those of you that have joined, there is a live kickoff session on Monday. Sarah hosts that she will it's about typically it's 45 to 60 minutes. It takes place at 11 o' clock Eastern Standard Time. That's 4 o' clock in the afternoon in the UK, 5 o' clock I think south Africa. So if you have joined the Academy already or if you join over the weekend, then you will be invited to come on to the kickoff session. This is where Sarah will show you how to access everything. She'll walk you through where to get access to how to download the software, where to find the training courses. She'll walk you through the website. She'll tell you everything you need to know to get up and running and answering your questions. I do recommend that you attend the live kickoff. It's a great way to make sure that you know where everything is and you hit the ground running. It will be recorded. If you do miss it, don't worry, you will get the recording, but best to be there live because you can ask Sarah questions about accessing stuff.

Here's some comments from yesterday. I wrapped up yesterday by saying what was the most valuable part of the day. I just grabbed this particular screenshot because it's shock because it kind of made me smile a bit. Linda said, the Profit Diagnostic tool. So thank you for that Linda. But interestingly, Rhonda said don't sell. Allow people to buy Mary said what Rhonda said Mary said Tracy said ditto what what Rhonda said So it seems like some of you that idea resonated like it did for me when I first came across it with my hero and mentor Peter Thompson when he explained it to me. Some other comments from yesterday is Linda again said, I joined last year and this month I have been a member for a year at the mastery level and I agree with John that it's worth it. I'm constantly learning. Wendy said, this is the most valuable free masterclass I've ever attended and I've been to a ton. So thank you so much for that comment Wendy. I really appreciate it. John. These prompts and the prompt library are amazing and really time saving. And then this one stood out. Jerry's comment yesterday said 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. So that was some of the comments from yesterday that I picked up on.

Okay, so we are bang on time and we're going to start looking at powerful frameworks for delivering advisory. Before I just do that, let me just quickly remind you, please ask questions throughout. I'm here to answer questions. I want to answer every question. So.

If you have questions for me or for Emily later, please put your questions in the Q and A box because the chat, as you can see, the chat starts to go a bit crazy and I probably won't see all questions. There's loads of comments there. I'd love to read all the comments but obviously I'm busy teaching you so.

I will read those later. But please use the Q and A if you've got questions and try to keep the questions short.

Because it's easy for me to answer. But if you've got somebody yesterday, I think their name was down to anonymous attendee. They, they answered about four or five quick short fire questions and that was great. That's much easier than one big paragraph because it means that if it's, if it's multiple questions, make them separate because some of them it may be appropriate to answer now, some later. So I'm just looking right now. There are some questions in there and let me just go through them quickly. Wendy says can you touch on the security of using ChatGPT with client information? I will try to do that if I get chance. I will do my best to do that later on. So I'll leave that question there. I'll do it later in the session.

Stacy says. Stacy has joined. I am not able to attend the private session due to another meeting that was previously scheduled. Is there a way to get a copy of it? Absolutely. Stacey, because you're a member, we don't want you to miss out on anything. We make the recordings available. I'm not 100% sure how we make that available, but Sarah will know that. So I'll leave that question for Sarah to type an answer at some point. But don't worry if you have joined the academy and you're missing the session. Don't worry.

I will come back to Rebecca later.

Audrey has got a question. I think Sarah can answer that one.

Barry Clifton says is the intro meeting the kickoff on Monday only For new members who joined at mastery level, it's also actually open to any exist. I don't know, Barry, if you're an existing member, if you're an existing mastery member, we also invite you back to these kickoffs if you want. I believe that's right, Sarah, you'll confirm that because sometimes members have forgotten what they've got access to. And so it's sometimes just a good, it's a good injection of enthusiasm and a reminder of things that you may have forgotten about because there are so many resources. I think somebody said on the first day that they don't use everything yet and they still get value from the few things they have picked. And so yes, I encourage you if you're an existing VPA member, you can come on Monday because it may remind you of something you've forgotten about.

Right.

Let'S get into then the session, the content for today. So we're going to talk about frameworks for delivering advisory. That's going to be most of my session today. I will come back to questions later. We'll answer some more questions. So the first one I want to talk about is if you remember way back to Tuesday, you may remember I talked through the six elements of a well rounded advisory service. And I started off by saying that the starting point is goals. We need to establish what are the client's goals. Because advisory is about helping clients be more successful. But we can't help anybody be more successful until we know what success means. Because success means something different for everybody. For some clients, success might be increasing their profits. For others, it might be paying off their overdraft and their loans. For others, it might be exiting the business. For others, success might be not having to work so many hours and having more vacations. Success is different for everybody. And so we need to understand that right at the start of the relationship, at the start of the advisory arrangement so that we can start to work with them towards what is important to them. Them. So we start, we always have to start with goals. And I said on Tuesday that we should start off every advisory session there. But also because advisory, I strongly recommend you turn, you make it a recurring service. I would also do an element of this every 12 months because.

Nothing sticks in stone. Goals and things can change, they will change. And so you should revisit it annually with every advisory client. And then I also talked about, the second thing that I talked about out of the six is we looked at strategy. And so I suggest and recommend and what I have always done is I start off the very first session with a advisory client would be a strategic planning session, a session where we.

Identify what they want out of their business, what they want out of life. And then we start to put it together, pull together a strategic action plan, we look at strategy. And you may remember from Tuesday I gave you that definition of strategy, which is simply this. It's about establishing where are they today, Point A, the pain, the problems, the challenges they've got, where do they want to get to, which is their goals, point B. And strategy is everything that they could possibly do to get from A to B, that strategy in a nutshell. So how do we do that from a practical point of view? Well, I'm going to share with you a framework that you could use. There are many different frameworks you could use, but the one that I use and teach is one that I've used personally for over 20 years now. It's an exercise that I go through every December. I call it. I call it From Vision to Plan. And I'm going to walk through the framework. It's something that I strongly recommend that you do, or at least create your version of it. I said again sometime earlier that when it comes to advisory, your firm, your business is your most important client. And so all these things we talk about, all the things we'll cover today with delivering advisory, you should be doing as well you should do in your accounting firm, because how can you possibly talk to a client about the importance of having a vision or of having a business plan or of having an ideal client profile if you don't do these things yourself? Okay, you should practice what you preach. You will come across as being more credible. And also.

You'Ll come across as being more of an expert because you can say to people, let me show you what I do in our business. Let me explain how we do this. So always practice what you preach. Always apply these things yourself, including the Vision to Plan framework. So what does it look like? Let's pull it up here. So the Vision to Plan framework looks like this. What we should always do is start off with the end. As Michael Gerber says, we begin. We should begin with. Sorry, not Michael, Stephen Covey. Begin with the end in mind. We should start off with where we're trying to get to first. And that is the vision. What is your vision? What is your client's vision? Talk to your client about what is the vision for their business? What do they want it to look like when it's finally done? That could be ten years from now. That could be when they exit when they sell, retire, whatever, try to get the client to articulate what they are looking to try and build. That's the vision, the vision for their business and also the vision for their life. What sort of life do they want to do? We want to paint a picture of the end point and it's the vision that then drives the goals. So what we do is we work backwards and what we want to do is work back towards, well, what would be Our short term 12 month goal? Where do we want to be a year from now? And the way I always do it is I start with my vision and then from that I work out my medium term goals. And so with vision I tend to think about where I want to be ten years from now. And my medium term goal is typically three to five years from now. And what you do is you start with the vision and you work backwards from there. So once you've, once you've got a picture of what the business wants to look like, then the medium term goal is going to be guided by that. You want to come up with a set of goals that will indicate that the business is on track to achieving its vision. So think of the goals, if you like, as being little mile markers along the way. If you're doing a marathon, you have mile markers. If you have a goal in mind to do a, a marathon, to run a marathon in a particular time, then you would use the mile markers to gauge whether you're on track. Each mile marker you'll look at your average pace and that'll help you to then adjust if you're not on track. Well, similar idea. The vision is the end goal, the end result. And then we have medium and short term goals to see to what extent we're on track. So we create our medium term goal, typically three to five years. Then from that we create the short term goal. And I always recommend that's 12 months away. Why 12 months? Because 12 months is far enough out that we can make some big meaningful change in our business. But it's not so far out that we can't imagine it. Sometimes it's difficult to picture what the business should be 5, 10, 15 years from now. We need to start with that. But if we work back from that, certainly 12 months is much easier. If we think about 12 months from now, it's easier to get a handle on things like, well, do we want to be in the same premises? How many people do we want? What's the revenue? We want, how many clients and that becomes your short term goal. So start with the end result, the vision, then develop medium term goals from that and then end up with short term goals, which is where you want to be a year from now. And I always do this in December personally, just because I find it easier to plan calendar years and I've done this for over 20 years. I plan out my calendar in December. Everything's planned in December because my short term goals is set to the end of the year. Do you have to do that? No, you don't. It depends on the client you're working with. It may be the 12 month is 12 months from when you start working with them. If you're working with them today, they just joined your advisory solution. You might create the plan around the year to June 2026. It might be they prefer to think of it and do it around their year end date. These are all, it doesn't really matter. I personally just prefer to have calendars for when I do my own personal goal setting and vision to plan process. And what I also do is every year I run this process in the academy live because I encourage all value pricing academy members to do this process themselves. And I walk through it in detail every December. Encourage you to create your plan.

Excuse me, I could feel that coming on a little bit of hay fever, right? So that's the, the first part of this framework that it's your vision that drives your goals. Start up with the vision. Where do you want to be, where do you want to end up? And then use that to identify and articulate what your goals are. In particular, what is your goal for 12 months from now? Then your goals are what drives strategy. So what I mean by this, if you go back to the definition strategy is about where are we now, what are the challenges, the problems, where do you want to get to and what are the things that we need to do to get there? So now we have, now we have some clarity over what the client. We know where they want to get to in their business and their personal life. We've also now got some clarity. We've worked back, we know where they want to be a year from now. They perhaps told us where they want to be in terms of their, their revenue, their profits, the cash in the bank, the hours they're working, the size of their business, where they're based, and perhaps some other interesting things. They might want to open up an office in another country or something. So we identify where they want to be a year from now. So that means we have that point B. And so strategy is what we then do is we work with the client and brainstorm what are all the things we could possibly do to get from where we are now to where we want to be. And that might be things like we need to create a new website, we need to hire Salesforce, we need to open new offices, we need to put in place a lead generation system. We need to put in place some of the things that Emily talked about yesterday if we want to grow the business. So we start to come up with the strategies, the things that we're going to do to get us to where we want to be.

And this is largely brainstorming. But there are frameworks that we can use for coming up with strategy, and I'm going to share one with you in a little while and we'll look at how we can use AI to help us with the strategy piece. So as I said a few times over the last few days, it might sound scary thinking I've never helped clients with strategy before, but please don't worry. It sounds complicated, but when we understand it, simply helping clients get to where they want to be, just brainstorming ideas and when you recognize that we now have some consulting frameworks we can use and I'll share with you one of them and we can use AI to then help us pull together those strategies.

So then the strategy drives your milestones. So this is going back to the analogy of running the marathon. So we've kind of got the bigger picture. But once we know where we want to be 12 months from now, and we know what we're going to do, what we want to do is break it down into chunks, into milestones along the way. Because a year is still quite a long time. And the way that I've always done it and the way that works for most people is to break down the year into quarters, into four. Four different milestones along the way. Why quarters? Well, a quarter is three months. No surprise there. Three months. Why does three, three months work? Because three months is short enough. It comes every three months. Every quarter comes around fairly quickly. So we can kind of plan out in our calendar. We can, we can really start to picture what's going to happen over the next three months. The big, the things in our calendar, we can start to plan that out, but it's far enough out that we can achieve some big things. So when we look at the strategies, very often they are quite big things. I call them big rocks. These are the big things we want to do in our business. So a big rock could be creating or rewriting the website, A big rock could be hiring my first salesperson or sales team. A big rock might be creating a lead generation system. And most big rocks, if we apply some focus, can be done inside a three month period. So that's why we look at quarters. And so we break things down into the milestones. And what we then do as well is we start to create some KPIs, some measures, so we can then track the progress. And that's one of the things that's comfort zone for us as accountants. We're numbers people. One of the things I would recommend you do in this strategic planning session is identify some appropriate KPIs, key predictive indicators, perhaps some ratios, other measures, and then put in place a measurement system so we can see how they're tracking along and are they making progress towards each of their quarterly milestones.

And it's the milestones that drive the plan. So the plan then is we break down to the, into these quarters. What we do is we look at all the things that are in the strategy.

So when you spend a strategic planning session with a client, which by the way, I would recommend, that's at least a full half day. A full half day, Half a day, a morning or an afternoon. And that may be sufficient if it's a small business, perhaps with a single business owner or husband and wife business. If you're looking at larger businesses, perhaps there's two or three directors, I would recommend at least a full day for a strategic planning session. And sometimes for big businesses you may need two days, a two day strategic retreat. So because obviously the more owners, the more stakeholders in the business, there's going to be a lot more opinions, different people's views and so on that you want to take into account. And so you'll need a longer session, of course, your pricing will factor that in anyway, so you, in your strategic planning session, whether it's half a day, whether it's a full day, two days, what you will do is most of it will be exploring the strategies, the things that you can do. And what you are likely to end up with is a long list. You'll probably find many, many things that could be done. And so what you will then do is help the client to prioritize that so.

They'Ve got a prioritized strategic action plan and then break that down into the quarters. So what are the things that they should do first? What are the things they should do in the first quarter? And I always recommend, particularly if it's.

A business with a sole owner, when it comes to big projects, big rocks never have more than three in a quarter. And the reason for that is because you can't focus on more than that. So when I do my planning for my business, it's always what are the three big rocks? What are the three big things we'll do in quarter one, what are the three big things in quarter two, quarter three and quarter four, with three being the maximum. Otherwise you just, if you have too much to do, it gets overwhelming. So that's really the process, that is the vision to plan process. We start off at the end with the end goal in mind. We think about the vision and we work backwards from that. And what we end up with by the end of the planning session with the client is we end up with the action plan broken down into priorities, broken down into quarters. So they now know what to work on over the next three months and that then determines what they're going to do. When I do this myself, it's that that determines my weekly to do list. And I have a process where my weekly to do list is always aimed at doing the things that need to be done in Q1. And if you do the things in Q1, then you can forget about all the other stuff in your action plan for the year because that can be overwhelming. Focus on Q1 and then when you've ticked those things on off, focus on Q2. And by the end of the year there's a good chance you will hit your goals for the year. And if you do that, you're on track to hit your medium term goals, which means you're on track to achieving your vision. And if you're not, then adjust it. And that's an important role that you play with advisory because during the course of working with the client as they implement the plan, yes, things will need to be adjusted. Nothing goes perfect, things sometimes go wrong. When you measure the key predictive indicators, the KPIs, sometimes you'll notice they go off course. And that's why when you'll need to have work with a client to come up with some plans, some corrective action.

So that's the, that's how I always start off sessions with business owners. And it's what I do myself. Practice what? Practice what you preach. We do this every December in our business. I have done for 20 years now.

And that process really then that sets up the rest of your business advisory process. That's the starting point. It's so critical. Everything else flows off the back of that. So a question I often get is, okay, Mark, what do I do each month with the client? What do I do in month one? What do I do in month two? Because as I said to you, this is recurring work. What do I do each month with the client? Well, there are many different things that you could do over the course of, let's say a year of working with the client. I'm going to give you some more ideas later. But really the most essential thing, the most basic thing you could do is, is simply working through the plan with them. And so if you think about what I said way back on day one, what you might do is after the strategic planning session, you then meet with the client once a month. Those meetings I would recommend would be a minimum of an hour, but they more likely a couple of hours every month. And what you would do, the structure of those monthly meetings I would recommend is something like this. Firstly, revisit the plan. What did they say they were going to do a month ago? Have they done those things? I'll always start off the meeting by looking at what they've done since last month and what they didn't manage to do. And if it didn't manage to do them, why? Let's have a conversation. What stopped them doing those things? Perhaps their priorities changed, perhaps had a challenge that needs to be talked about. What was the reason they didn't do them? So I always kick off with reviewing the previous month's action plan.

Then what else can you do? Well, you're the experts with numbers. So we talked about how you might do some management reporting. It may be that you also present some management reports which show some of the key numbers from the financial statements. You might show some ratio analysis. You might show the trends, the things that we looked at back on Tuesday with the case study. You might present some financial information to them.

And then you might interpret some of those numbers. Look at what those numbers are showing. Look at, are they on track based on where they're trying to get to? Are they on track, which areas need improvement? You might notice some ratios going in the wrong direction. Again, all the things we talked about on Tuesday when we're looking for opportunities, we would carry on doing those things. We would look at those numbers. We'd look for, for things going in the wrong direction. And then we bring that up in the meeting. What else might we do in our monthly meeting with a client? We might spend the meeting with a particular issue. It may well be that every time you meet with them, there'll be something that's important in their Business, something they're struggling with, something they need help with, maybe the next thing on the action plan. So you'll then start working with them to think about and brainstorm. How can they, let's say that in Q1, one of the things they want to do of their three big projects is they want to redo their website and they want to hire Salesforce and they decide the first thing I want to do is they want to focus on the website. So it may be that meeting number one is to.

Talk about what's the website supposed to do, what's the objective, what's not working about it, what sort of things could they change and improve? And you might be thinking at this point I'm not an expert in websites, I can't help that, I can't help with that. And that's why I said yesterday one of the things we do in the academy is we teach, Emily teaches marketing because we all need to have marketing skills. We are business owners. And one of the great things about learning how to the marketing is not just for your practice but you can apply those ideas as well. So Emily does a session usually once a year on how to build a great website. What's the sort of things that make a great website and that can help you with your website but also you can take those ideas and you've then got some knowledge to talk about with the client. You've also got the help of AI. AI is really powerful. We have one of our prompts is a prompt for analyzing a website and giving feedback. So all these things that you might think, you might have thought in the past, I could never help a client with those things. Today it's easier than ever before. AI makes it really easy and also we give you the training to do it. So it may be that one of your sessions you agree that next month you're going to get together and one of the things you'll do is share and throw out some ideas for improving the website. And every month thereafter there may be a different theme that you set and that might end up being a 30 minute conversation in your two hour meeting.

And also remember.

The value that you bring to the table and never, please do not underestimate the value of what you do. The value you bring to the table is a you understand the numbers and can interpret the numbers. That's easy. Remember I talked about accountability on Tuesday and that is so valuable. Holding the client accountable to do the things they say they're going to do, the things they know they need to do to achieve their goals. Accountability is so powerful. And the third thing is just asking great questions. You do not need to come up with the ideas or the answers. The client will come up with the answers. What you're doing is facilitating. What you're doing is raising the issues.

When you're working with a client. Things like we talked about yesterday, the profit drivers, and we're going to go back to this later.

We looked at increasing the average transaction frequency. This is something I can guarantee pretty much that none of your clients ever even think about. They want to grow their business. They've never stopped and thought, oh, today do you know what? I'm going to have a really, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to think about how I can improve that metric. Your clients won't do that. Why? Because they're so stuck in the day to day of the business. They are. They're firefighting, they're reacting to customers. They've got all these things on their action plan. Business owners do not take time to take a step back and think about something like how do we increase the average transaction frequency? But when you sit down with them and say, right, today you've said you want to grow your sales. And one of the things we're going to do today is we're going to look at this metric called average transaction frequency. I've noticed by measuring the numbers that it's going in the wrong direction. Let's talk about how we can improve it. And then you might share some ideas. Like the hairdresser story I shared yesterday. Remember that simple idea, that simple script.

Could increase potentially the revenue of a hairdresser's by up to 33% without spending money on marketing, without spending money on acquiring customers. Sometimes simple stuff's really powerful. You just need a few little ideas like that and that will start to sow a little seed in their mind. They will come up the answers. They will know.

How they can apply that idea to increase the frequency. The value you are bringing is not in coming up with the answers. They will come up with the answers. The value you bring is creating that discipline of getting to sit down and think at a bigger picture about the really important things about their business that will help them achieve their goals. Because right now they're not doing it. Right now they are not achieving their goals, which is why they'd want to work with you. This is why they need help. They need you. Because they can't do it on their own. This is why there's so much value in hiring Coaches, whether it's life coaches, health coaches, fitness coaches, whatever the value of a coach is because for most of us, we do not have the discipline to do it ourselves. If, for example, you decide that you want to get fit and healthy and you want to go to the gym three times a week, what happens is January, New Year's resolute resolutions. We go and sign up for the gym, we go for the first month religiously. Stuff gets in the way in February and it tails off. And then we find reasons not to go because we can't hold ourselves accountable. Most of us don't do the things we know we need to do. And so by hiring somebody as a coach to hold us accountable, we're then more likely to get the results. That's what all athletes, athletes do. They hire a coach to help them get the results, to keep them on track. That's essentially what you're doing. You develop. That is the value bring, which is huge. You do not need to have the answers. Okay, so let's.

Let'S talk about, let's go back to AI because I know, I know from the last two days you love the prompts. And let's do a, let's do that, let's do a, let's do a prompt and get practical. Let's think about strategy so you know where the client wants to get to. You've gone to the goals, you've started to do that. Now it's about strategy. How do you help a client with strategy? Well, one of the things that you can use is consulting frameworks. There are lots of different frameworks we can use and they are really powerful when we know how to use them. So let me share with you perhaps the most.

Well known framework and that's the SWOT analysis. Do you use it regularly? If you don't, you should. People often dismiss SWOT as being not very valuable because it sounds too simplistic, but that's because most people don't know how to use it. It's extremely powerful. If you're not sure what it is, then essentially SWT stands for Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and Threats. And the first two are internal, the second two are external. What I mean by that is that the strengths and the weaknesses are internal. It's the strengths of the business and the business owner and the weaknesses, what are they good at, what are they bad at?

And we want to help the client identify those things because if we know what they're good at, then we can start to, as part of strategy, think about, well, how can we Capitalize on those. It may be, for example, that there's something that they are so good at as a strength. They've never really thought about it. And it may be from a marketing point of view. They've never had unique selling points. Well, if we can help them identify the strength, we could turn that into a unique selling point and build that into their.

Promotional material, their website text and so on. If it's a weakness, then we can start to think about, okay, what do we need to put in place in the business to mitigate that weakness? How can we make sure that doesn't cause us problems? And then the external is the opportunities and the threats the opportunities are what are the opportunities in the industry and what are the threats? And sometimes, sometimes something can be in both those camps. So if we think about everything we've been talking about over the last two days, previous two days, a big thing coming into the accounting profession, as it is for most businesses, businesses is AI and AI is external. And we can see it as either an opportunity or threat. And so I would say it's both. So AI in the accounting profession is a huge opportunity. How do we capitalize it? Capitalize on it? Well, I would suggest that if I was working with you, I would say.

Let'S make sure that we are skilled, our entire team is skilled in prompt engineering, that we understand how to communicate with AI tools that we know how to use ChatGPT, we create a prompt library of standard prompts and we start to build that into our system. So we automate much more stuff, but we could view it as a threat. And so if we see AI as a threat, then we ask ourselves the question, okay, so what can we do to make sure that we protect ourselves from the threat? If you're a bookkeeper, the threat might be, AI is going to start automating and doing all of the data entry, the bank reconciliations, the bookkeeping in the next three years. That could take away my job. What am I going to do about it? That's the threat. And so when we identify that, we can then have a conversation about, okay, so what strategies can we put put in place to protect ourselves from that threat? How do we do SWOT analysis? Well, the old fashioned way. Prior to AI, what I would do is in my session with the client, I would usually have a flip chart and I would write on four separate sheets strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And I'd start off and I'd say to the client, okay, let's have a look at what are you good at? What are your strengths? What are you good at personally as a business owner and your business? What are the strengths? And.

Sometimes that conversation was hard to get started because the client thinks. I've never thought about that. I don't know. So one of the things that I would often find useful would for me to do a little bit of thinking beforehand and come up with a few ideas. I might say, well, Jeremy, based on what I know about your business, I think one of the things you're good at is this. I think this is a strength of yours. Do you agree? Yeah, probably. I guess so. Oh yes. And I suppose actually I'm good at this. In other words, when you give a few ideas, it usually gets them started. Once they're started, they get on a roll. This is the case with brainstorming. Brainstorming. Sometimes you just have to get. Once we get into a flow, it gets easier. So how can we make it really easy to come up with to do some thinking in advance and give some suggestions as to what their strengths might be or their weaknesses, their opportunities and threats? Well, that's where AI really makes this so, so easy. So let's, let's go to Chat GPT and we are going to do a SWOT analysis for this business. And I'm going to go to the prompt library.

Okay, I have been kicked out.

Let me just remember what my.

I have to remember what my password is.

Okay, bear with a second. I have it in. I think the developers worked on something overnight because on all my computers I've had to re log to the prompt library and that's never happened before.

So let me just grab my password. Here we go. It's there.

And on this particular computer I use, I've not turned on Remember password. Okay, I'm in. I'm in. Okay, let's go back. Where are we? So let's. I'm back into the new software and the prompt library and it's a business advisory prompt. If I just type swo, I'm going to get SWOT analysis. And as we already know now from the last two days, I just need to. Here's the prompt. But we don't need to go through that. I'm just going to grab the markdown, copy it and I'm going to paste it into Chat GPT. So what I would do, I would do this before meeting. Don't do this in front of the client. Don't let the client know that this has taken you seconds to do. You do this as your advanced preparation and they're going to think, wow, you've spent ages thinking about my business when it actually took you probably.

Less than five minutes. So we've got the prompt here. This is a prompt for doing a SWOT analysis. I'm not going to go through all of it in detail. I am going to in the private exclusive session later on today we'll spend a bit more time going deeper on the prompts and how to construct them and so on. But I want to make sure I have time to cover a few prompts. So we have a variable at the end and we just need to put some information in there and I could sometimes that's just a. You could just put the wet the business's website. It does a really good SWOT analysis from the website. What I'm going to do is if you remember from day one, I, with our case study, Jeremy the waterjet cutting business, we created a. I shared a document with the case study in and it had the details of Jeremy's business, where they're based, what they do, they're a water jet cutting business, it's an engineering business. So for the variable I'm just going to say I have attached a summary the business.

So it will, it will read that. So that's what I have to do. Let's send this off and see what it does.

So it's probably paused because it's just having a look at that attachment. Yes, reading documents and now it's doing it. So here we go, let's see what it's done. It's saying this is the name of the case study. As you know, Jeremy's business, Precision Wave Water Jet Ltd. Is a UK based specialist in CNC, abrasive water jet cutting and precision fabrication. Founded in 2014, 10 years ago, it serves mid sized to large manufacturers and specialist job shops across sectors like aerospace, motorsport etc. With advanced capabilities including a five axis cutter because that's what he bought in year eight, if you remember the case study that we covered on, on Tuesday. So that's useful because I know that it's, it understands the business. It's obviously read that document because it's got that absolutely correct and it's gone on to say here's a full SWOT analysis of precision wave waterjet. So firstly the strengths based on this business, it's suggesting the strengths are advanced five axis cutting capability. I have no idea what that is because I, I know nothing about waterjet cutters but this is the, the machine that it bought, they bought in year eight and it's Obviously a great machine. It does some, some fantastic stuff. So it gives them a strength, a capability to do some pretty cool stuff. They also have high on time demand delivery rates. So customer service is obviously great. They have a strong technical team from analyzing their personnel, their team, they have diverse revenue streams and by the way, a lot of this I put in there a three page summary of the business. The more context that you give a model like ChatGPT, the better. Context is really important, really key. The more information you give, the better the analysis. So if you have got some information about the business, like a business plan, like for example, in this case it was a business summary, that's great. But it can be until today, I usually do this prompt just by putting in the website. And you'll find that with the website, with this prompt it'll go trawling through all the pages. It'll learn about the business and from everything on the website it'll identify what it seems to be good at.

Strategic location in advanced manufacturing. Corridor is based in Sheffield, close to. So those of you in the UK will know where that is.

So that's the, that's the strengths it's suggesting. So what I would do, having spent all of 60 seconds doing this, I would print this out, I would read it perhaps beforehand, I'd take it to the meeting and when I do the SWOT analysis I'd say, okay, so Jeremy, let's do, let's do some think about your strategies and let's start with a SWOT analysis. And I want to look at, I want to get a good feel for what are your strengths and I've done some initial thinking, I've looked your website and I've got expertise in the, in your, in the engineering business. And based on my expertise, based on what I know about your business, I think these might be the, the main strengths of your business. Let's go through them and you can tell me if you agree with that and then let's brainstorm, see if there's anything I've missed, any more strengths. And so by going through it in this way it shows it adds more value to the client because they now think, wow, you really care about my business, you have expertise in my business and you've spent time doing some analysis and thinking about this. You just spent 60 seconds running a prompt from your prompt library. But they're going to be impressed with that. And what also will happen is once you've gone through these five, it's going to help them start thinking of other things. So it May well be within 20 minutes. You've got a list of a dozen things on the flip chart for strengths. So then we look at the weaknesses and in here it's suggesting that weaknesses might be fluctuating sales and customer retention. Well, we know that from the numbers we looked at on Tuesday. Low net profit margins, again, we looked at that on Tuesday. So very often you're the expert with numbers. You've got the numbers, you'll find weaknesses there. Debt burden, post capital investment. So they've got a big long term loan because of the machine they bought two years earlier. Underutilized production capacity. With the new machine doubling capacity, current production levels might not yet fully leverage this investment, especially given the flat customer base. So again, if you remember the case study, they bought this machine, that should allow them to increase capacity. But sales haven't gone up and limited digital tools for customer engagement. Plans for a client portal are still in development. That must be something I picked up from the the summary. So we've then got the weaknesses, then we can look at opportunities. And this is where ChatGPT will start to look at the industry as a whole. So you might not know anything about the engineering business, the water jet cutting business. Don't worry, the hard work will be done by AI. So it's suggesting that we could expand into opportunities, expand to laser waterjet hybrid services. We could launch a cloud based client portal. We could scale to 24, six operations. We could leverage green credentials in bids, and we could grow training and maintenance as standalone services. So again, I'd run through those with the client and I'd say to what extent, Jeremy, do you agree with that? Do you think those are opportunities that you could tap into? Let's see which of those five you think are opportunities. The others we can just cross off. And what other opportunities do you think of? What opportunities can you think of in your industry? And by now the client will, they'll have all the answers. They know their industry better than you do, so this will help start the conversation. And finally, same thing with threats. So price competition from low cost providers, economic uncertainty in manufacturing sectors, equipment downtime risks, skills retention and niche sector, and rising finance material costs. That's a SWOT analysis. Okay, it's not difficult.

But I think the reason why people don't do it is because they don't appreciate the power of it. And I guess that's also partly because, I mean this, so far it's quite easy. The question then that might go through your mind is okay, so what now that I've Done SWOT analysis. What do we do with that? Well, what we do with that is once we finalize this, we've gone through with the client, we might spend 20, 30 minutes with Flip charts and we'll end up with a final list that the client agrees with of what their strengths are, their weaknesses, what are the opportunities, what are the threats. What you then do next is you go through each of those and identify strategies and brainstorm. What could they do? So, for example, if the client agrees that this is a really big opportunity, expanding into laser water jet hybrid services, then we could ask the client if that's a big opportunity, when do they think they might want to look into that? What could they do about that? What would they have to do to be able to tap into that opportunity? Would they have to buy more machinery? What else? What will be different? And so you'll start to, for each opportunity, for example, work with the client and get their ideas as to what they might do to tap into these opportunities. And they'll know the answers. You don't need to know the answers. They will have the answers. They understand the business. And as they come up with ideas and things they can do, you just add that to the strategic action plan. And so you'll find office SWOT analysis. If you end up with, let's say.

6 to 10 strengths, 6 to 10 weaknesses, 6 to 10 opportunities, 6 to 10 threats.

You will probably be able to brainstorm for each of them something the client could do, a strategy. And if you add that all up, you end up with probably 20 or 30 strategies that they could work on over the next year or two. And that's strategy that's coming up with strategy that's using this one particular tool. There are other tools we could use, but SWOT analysis is a great one to start. Start with. Okay, let's do a dov, a prompt. Let's look at something else. And let's pick up on yesterday. Yesterday. How long time? Yeah, doing good. Yesterday we looked at, we looked at this idea of the.

Profit, the drivers of profit. And I mentioned there were nine of them. And we looked in a bit of detail again, using the case study, we looked at the specific, specifically three of the drivers of revenue or sales. And we played with some numbers. And you may remember that with the numbers for this particular business, we identified that we could potentially double the profits if we could improve just one metric, which was the average transaction frequency, how often customers buy in a typical year. And you may remember yesterday I shared with you the hairdresser story and how a simple next sales script.

Could grow a hairdresser's business by up to 33% with a simple system.

And I said to you yesterday that you just need to have a few examples to seed corn that conversation with a client. Well, if you're now working with a client and let's say you're working with Jeremy, this engineering business, and you've been looking at the numbers which we did on Tuesday, and you've identified this one metric, so they were yesterday. You've identified this metric is going in the wrong direction. And so what you want to do is in one of your sessions with the client, you want to focus on how they can grow their business by focusing on the frequency or how could you do that? You might not feel you have the confidence or the skills to do that. Well, no problem, because we could use a.

And if you just bear me a second because I just need to remember where the prompt, this is a brand new prompt, by the way. If you're a VPA member, you've a mastery member, you've never seen this one before because it is, it is hot off the press. So let's go to, let's go across to here. So this is the first of a number I'm going to be building for you. They're going to be called Profit Driver Optimizer and basically it's going to work. You're going to have a series of prompts for all nine drivers of profit. And I've done the frequency one, I worked on it in the last 24 hours. So let me open up this particular one, let me copy to the markdown, let me go across to ChatGPT and I'm going to keep in the same chat, I think. Yep. Okay. So this one, I've called it Frequency Boost Strategy Generator. This is if you're working with a business, they want to grow their business, they want to grow their sales and they want you want to work with them to come up with ideas of how they can get customers to buy more frequently. Okay. If you missed yesterday, you will probably want to catch up on yesterday's recording because this will then make more sense. So this really builds on yesterday. And so here's the prompt. It's quite a long prompt. I spent quite a bit of time working on this one to get it to give me exactly what I wanted. I also had to feed it a lot of information, examples of strategies and ways to increase average frequency. So one of the things I do with these prompts, they typically take me a few hours to write the prompts. I think I've written about 180 now for mastery member firms. I've been doing this for over a year now. I love writing prompts. They are long prompts because from prompt engineering, the more guidance you give, the better the and more consistent the outcome, the better the outcome. And for many of these prompts I've built in my intellectual property the things that I've been teaching in these areas. And so with this one, all we have to do is.

Answer the variable, give it some information about the business. And in this case.

I'm going to put read the attached summary. Now it's already got that because it's the second chat that I've done this. I probably don't even need to do that. But I'm just going to just for I'm going to put the, the overview of the business in there and I'm just going to run this and let's see what it does Again, do not do, never do these prompts in front of a client. Okay, this is your secret sauce. This is what enables you to deliver huge amounts of value in with very, very little preparation time.

This is why I'm so excited by the possibilities of advisory work.

So what this is going to do, what this one does is.

So getting customers to purchase more often is a critical profit lever for Precision Wave. We discussed that Yesterday with just 75 active customers generating about 390 jobs. That's around 5 jobs per customer per year. They were the metrics from yesterday in the case study. If you remember, even small increase in job frequency can drive substantial revenue growth. You could print this out and make it a handout, but use it initially as just your notes for when you then have the meeting. So it's coming up with five things that you could do specific to this business. So just like the hairdresser example of the next sales script, in this particular case it's suggesting we could have scheduled maintenance partnership plan. What is it? A proactive subscription style service that offers regular scheduled water jets, system maintenance, calibration and wear parts checklist for customers with in house cutting machinery. This keeps their operations running smoothly and creates recurring service income. It then gives another example in this case a fictional example and then it talks through. This would be the steps that you could go through to implement this.

And then this would be the potential impact on the business. So this might help you to quantify the impact. It's suggesting that you could also do a prototyping to production loyalty path. So this is a Retention program that rewards R and D clients who return for full production runs. Offer progressive discounts or bonuses tied to repeat phases of a project Lifestyle. Now these ideas, you might not know what these are because you're not an engineer, but when you share these with an engineering business, they're going to go, that's a good idea. I've not thought of that.

Or.

They might think, yeah, that's an interesting idea. I'm not sure do it that way, but actually think about it, I might do it this way. Basically what you're doing is starting off in their mind.

The thinking process. We've got CAD file archiving, an easy reorder portal. We've got quarterly material usage workshops. So this is the idea of. So offer free or low cost educational webinars, workshops on lean material usage, nesting techniques and design for cutting, followed by timed incentives to place their next order. The idea here is that very often customers don't know everything that you do. If you can educate them about the things that you do and the benefits to them of those things, then when they realize you can do that as well, they'll come back and buy more stuff. And this is an education process. Now it might be the client says I don't want to do webinars. Or workshops. But what you could then do is say, okay, what about doing some, perhaps having a newsletter where you share these ideas. Once a month there's an idea in the newsletter. You can take the idea and just run it in a different way.

Repeat rewards Job credit scheme so for every X jobs placed in a year, customers earn a credit towards their next job. Redeemable like cash creates an incentive to batch orders and consolidate work. And then what it does is it ranks them in order of ease of implementation and expected profit impact. So that might help you to decide which of those the client might want to work on in the next quarter over the next three month period. So this could be, I mean this might create, you know, they might do two or three of these and then that means they've got projects for each of the next two or three quarters in their business which will help them increase frequency. And as you've seen for the numbers with the hairdresser and yesterday, the numbers yesterday, potentially we could double the profits of this business with one or two simple strategies to get customers to buy more frequently.

So hoping you're starting to see that once you start to understand with advisory the frameworks like SWOT analysis, once you start to understand the right questions to ask AI tools, having the right prompts Suddenly it becomes really easy.

Doing this stuff. It's so, so easy. I do a lot of helping local businesses here in Portugal. I have a monthly business mastermind. I've helped lots of businesses here and they think I'm wonderful, but all I've been doing is running my prompts. It's really, really. I almost feel like I'm cheating, but that's because I've invested the time building up these prompts. In your case, investing in the value pricing academy, investing in these prompts. It's an investment you make so that you can then help more clients in bigger ways going forward and they will pay you based on that and you'll make more profit because you've invested in your business and invest in your clients. Right, I'm going to share one more. We're going to share some more prompts in a bit. I'm going to share with you. Yeah, I've got one or two more to go, but it's a break coming up. What I will just say, though, very briefly, is I ran that prompt through the standard Chat GPT4O, which if you've got a free version of Chat GPT, you can do amazing stuff with the free version. I'm on the teams account and one of the things that's great about the teams account is I have access to a lot more different models or if you've got the plus one. And one of the things that is interesting about ChatGPT is they have two different types of models. They have their GPT series and then they have their O series, which is Advanced Reasoning. And there are certain things where Advanced Reasoning is better. And so I could rerun this prompt with O3, which I did earlier and which is doing now. This takes longer because it goes through a thinking process. What I found with this particular prompt is the result that you get is even better when you use the Advanced Reasoning model. And it's doing it now. And we've got a break now. I'll let it do its thinking and I might show you this when we come back from break. I'll just show you what it looks like if you use the Advanced Reasoning model. Anyway, we're going to break for three minutes. Don't go anywhere. Don't leave this. Or, sorry, don't leave the Zoom Room. But just if you need a bathroom break, if you need to top up your water, I'm going to play out with music for three minutes. I might then answer a couple of questions and then we'll get into some more. How do we deliver advisory. See you in three minutes.

I really try my best to change.

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

We can cry over.

Now.

We forever Forever means nothing and we don't give it up either we be cry when it's over.

We can.

Cry when it's over.

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Can yeah.

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

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

The writing world we can play when it's over.

We can play.

When it's over.

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We can play when it's over.

Hey. Welcome back. We'll kick off again very soon. I was just reading some of the. The comments, some of the. Some of the points that people have made and I did notice earlier, I don't know if I said a shout out or not. Rebecca says I've joined the vpa. Looking forward to getting started. So thank you and looking forward to working with you. Rebecca. I know I mentioned Dion. She says I've signed up as well. And I think somebody just said how do I join? I've put the link in the chat as well. There was something else that jumped out. Yes, Andrew. Okay, I talk about action takers. So Andrew said earlier. What's he done? He's designed a profit improvement workbook stroke system based on day one strategic planning review of Precision Wave. Awesome. And he's close to having an ebook for marketing from day two from I guess listening to Emma's session. So Andrew, that's amazing. Taking action. Love it. Right.

Questions. I'm still Wendy, I've not forgotten your question. Audrey asked a question in the Q and A box and Stacey's answered it quite well as well. So Audrey, I'm hoping Audrey, you've seen Stacey's question. So I won't go through that myself. But if you need any more advice, you can reach out to sarah on supportalupricingacademy.com okay. And I can see that Sarah's typing an answer. But Wendy, I haven't forgotten yours. I will definitely. Actually I'm going to do with Wendy's now. So Wendy says can you touch on the security of using chat GPT with client information? Yes, gladly. I will do that. It's a huge issue. A huge issue. And I did recently in one of my Leading Edge sessions, I did do a session on this very issue. And we have to be careful. I think that probably most accounting firms unwittingly.

Breaking the regulations Particularly around client confidentiality. So first of all, we have to know what the issues are around privacy, security and in particular client confidentiality. And that differs from country to country, it differs from institute to institute. So, for example, I'm from the uk, I'm a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, the ici, and they have particular guidance around client confidentiality. So we do need to be aware of that and we need to be aware of what we can and can't put into AI models. We also need to understand which ChatGPT, which, sorry, which models are more secure. So, for example, if we're talking about chat GPT, then the teams plan and the enterprise plan for big businesses are the safest ones to use. And when you have a teams plan, the default situation is, for example, they don't use your chats to train the model, which is one of the reasons we went for the team plan. So you need to be aware of the different plans to know which ones are the most secure, which ones the best ones to use. And then there's the whole issue of putting that aside is so what can you and what can't you put into ChatGPT? And the first thing, one of the things you need to do, you, you need to do is have a system in place. You should have a, you must have a, an AI policy in your firm. And you need to. Also, if you're using AI in your firm, which you almost certainly are, even if you're not using ChatGPT, I would guarantee that whatever accounting software in your tech stack right now you use has AI built in. And so you need to get clients permission to, you need to get clients permission. And so that should be built into things like engagement letters.

It's easy to do and if we word it in the right way, clients won't object to it. If we're talking about biz advisory, I would certainly make sure I get their permission.

Now, even if you. So the other thing to think about is, okay, so what can you put into ChatGPT? And there's a number of things to consider. Let me just give you a couple for now. I do complete training on this, by the way. There's full training where I guide you through it. But the two main things are be very careful about putting sensitive information in. That's for example, never put details of clients, bank details, for example, into an AI model. You shouldn't do that.

If you are going to upload Excel spreadsheets of numbers, then make it anonymous data where possible, make it Anonymous or use synthetic data. But also at the other, the other end of the spectrum, you can always put in information, which is in the public domain, which is why I've said a few times in a lot of the prompts I've created, when it asks for some context, it often says upload the website. And it will then create, for example, a SWOT analysis based on reading the website and analyzing the. In this case, the engineering industry. So information, the public domain, you can use in your prompts. Okay, I hope that helps, Wendy. It's a big subject, but there's a few pointers that will, I think, guide you in the. Help guide you there. Right.

That's all the questions for now. So we've got so much more to cover. Yeah, we'll do. I want to show you at least one more really powerful prompt. And I also want to talk about as well, I want to talk about something that came up a lot on Tuesday, which is the challenge that many people said the reason they're not doing advisory work with clients is they haven't got the time. You're too busy to do this work. And so we want to deal with that as well. But let me ask a question first. So we're two and a half days in, we're getting close to the end. And I want to ask a question, and that is, are you ready?

Are you ready to.

And do you accept the fact that you need to embrace the change that's taking place in the profession right now with the AI? Are you ready and you want to be at the leading edge?

Put yes. If you agree with that, that you, you want to embrace this change, you want to be at the leading edge. Stacey is 110% absolutely great. I love the positive attitude because there are many people in the profession who will get left behind. That's going to happen. We're going to see, I believe, over the next three years a big polarization in the industry. We're going to see those that get ahead, that embrace this change, that embrace AI, embrace creating more value for clients. And I think most of you are already got that mindset, which is awesome. People like Regan, Linda, Flora, great. Others will just. Others won't even know what's happening. And I know that because I do lots of webinars on AI. I do webinars a lot in the US I've done webinars in front of thousands of people. And one of the questions I do ask is to what extent they're using ChatGPT. And it staggers me that A third of people in the profession on the webinars don't even have an account yet. They've not even started on this journey. And almost all the rest are just playing around with it. So as you're now seeing, there's a huge amount of potential and power, power with using these AI models. And I just think it's such an exciting time. So I want you just to.

I want you to imagine something and you might close your eyes if that helps. I want you to think about what is the size of your firm right now in terms of revenue in annual fees and I don't know what it is. Perhaps you're doing 100,000 in fees, perhaps you're doing 250, perhaps half a million. Perhaps like Neil, it's a million. Now just in your mind, think about what is the annual fee of your accounting firm right now. And I want you to imagine that you, based on the things we've talked about, I want you to imagine that you, you follow the process and you increase the prices for your clients by 20% on average. Some might be a bit higher, some a bit less, but on average you increase the price by 20%. And as a result of that, nobody leaves. Now Neil said if you saw the opening thing, he did 54%, but let's just imagine 20% that you are able to put your price up by 20% and nobody leaves. Now if you were to do that, and the maths is quite simple right now, if you to put your price up by 20% and nobody leaves, then whatever your fees of your firm are, what's 20% of that, what's a fifth? So if your fees are 100, then that's 20,000. If you're half a million, 500,000 is the size of your firm, that's 100,000 is a 20% increase. If it's a million, that's 20,000. So just think that number. What would be the extra revenue for your firm if you were able to put up Your price by 20% on average and nobody leaves.

And so grab that number in your mind and remember that that number. So if you're doing half a million right now, that could be a hundred thousand of additional revenue. That number will all flow down to bottom line profit. Because when you change your prices, nothing else changes. You don't need to hire more people, you don't need to have new officers. That number all goes to bottom line. So think about that extra income, that extra profit. What difference would that make to your life? What could you do with that money, it may be that you use it to pay off your debts. It may be used to buy a holiday home, have some vacations. It may be that you, you want to open a new office, hire some more people. It could be use that money in your business, it could be, use it personally. So have a think about what would you do with that money. And I want you to then think about, try and picture in your mind what that is. I showed the picture of the red Ferrari with Jeremy, the waterjet cutting. I've shown that red Ferrari. But what's your equivalent? What would you do? What would your life look like different? What would your firm look different if you had had that extra money in your bottom line? Profit. And the last thing I want you to imagine with that is then I want you to think about how would that make you feel? How would that make you feel if by the end of that this year you're making more profit and you've got those extra things that you'll do with that extra income? How will that make you feel? Just think about that emotion.

Because that's what's possible. That's what's possible. When you understand the frameworks of how to embrace value pricing, how to move to value pricing, it's why in the Value Pricing Academy, the first thing we, the first training program I always recommend you start with is the how to reprice your existing clients. And we deliver that over six weeks, whereas most the other ones are six months. Why six weeks? Because I know from teaching this for nearly 25 years and I know from doing it in my own accounting firm in 2000, 2001, I know that when firms follow this process, they typically get 20% more average price with almost nobody, in fact, usually nobody leaving. Some people like Neil get 54%, some people like Stanley Dean get 47%. But they're exceptions. But 20% is the norm. Most people.

Realize after following the process that yes, you can put your price up by 20%. And usually nobody leaves. If they do leave, it's the ones that you want to leave.

And the reason why people don't do this, I think, is because they're scared, they're worried. They think if I put my price up, all my clients will leave. They will not all leave. In fact, you'll find it hard to get them to go. And the reason for that is there's a number of reasons, but there's a stickiness in our profession. Believe it or not. Believe it or not, this might surprise you, but believe it or not, your Clients love you. They love you. If they didn't, they'd go somewhere else. Okay, your clients love you. And so there's this. Better the devil you know. If you put the. Nobody wants prices to go up but your clients, what's the alternative? They go somewhere else. They go and risk somebody else. They don't know that they might not like or might not love like you. They have to start the whole process of the array of building a relationship again. And it's difficult changing accountants, it's difficult changing bookkeepers because we have this relationship with our clients.

So they won't leave now. Some might leave, but it depends how you do it. There's a way of doing it. It's about communication, it's about words, it's about how we position our prices. We talked yesterday about price psychology and anchoring and we talked about giving three options. And certainly when we are going through a process of putting our prices up, you should do all of those things. You want to use anchors. You want to make sure you use the right words, the community. You want to make sure that you give people choices. Absolutely. And I teach that in the six week program you can achieve that. So as I said a couple of times over the course of the last two days, my goal is to help you build a better practice, a more successful practice, and at the heart of that is getting your pricing right. Because most firms of accountants are pricing wrong. They're working crazy long hours, not making enough money. And so I always suggest you focus on the pricing first. I know we're talking about advisory work and it's great if you want to dive into that, but let's get the pricing right to start off with, get the pricing right.

Then it's about creating more value and that's advisory. So I want to help you win better quality clients to do more interesting work, to do advisory work, or even perhaps some people in the academy. Go another step, start scaling by running a business club. I teach how to build a business club and what you might do as part of that. I also want to help you to win better quality businesses, which is why we do the marketing. And I want you to be at the leading edge. I want you to be at the leading edge of the profession. The profession is going to change fast. It's the reason why one of the I do 90 minutes of training every month, which we call Leading Edge. The curriculum is called Leading Edge. And what I teach every month is what is the very latest thing that you need to be aware of. Usually, not always, but usually I'm teaching AI and ChatGPT and prompt engineering because this is what's going to set you apart. This is what's going to save you hours of time. This is what's going to help you create much more value for clients. Like you've seen with some of these prompts I've shown, this is what's going to set you apart from everybody else because you will become, you'll be the leading edge, master the use of AI tools. That's my goal, is to help you be at the leading edge, price better, make more money, attract better quality clients, create more value, have more fun, because you're doing stuff that's more interesting than just adding up numbers. So if you like the sound of that, if you're ready for that part of your journey, if you want to embrace the change, if you want to be at the leading edge, then join me and my team on the journey. I will ask my, I will ask somebody, Gabby, Emily, somebody, just to remind you of what the link to join is. And it looks. This is the page, I'm not going to go through it now. I went through it on Tuesday. You can read it all. You'll see all the things that we do to help you get there. I just want to remind you that some of the things that people love is that it's a tiny monthly payment compared to the value you'll get. And you're in control. You can stay for as long as you want. You can be here like John was here from the start, John Johnston, back in 2014 when we started. Some people have been with me for years and years and years. Some people, their circumstances change and that's fine. You can stop whenever you want. And we even have this guarantee that give it a try for 30 days. If at any time in the next 30 days, if you don't feel it was right for you, if it wasn't valuable, you can stop the payments. And if it's before the second month goes through, if it wasn't valuable, just email Sarah and say, I've not had much value, it's not for me, this, can I have a refund? So you've got nothing to lose, nothing to lose by giving it a try. And the other thing that people love is you lock the price in. Today is the cheapest price. It will be. The prices go up at the end of the week. We always put the price up. And so today is the best time to join the Academy.

And of course, if you decide within the next 30 minutes, if you join during the masterclass, then you will also get some bonuses. A very quick reminder of what you'll get is you will get my course on the complete guide to menu pricing. It's a few hours of training workbooks so you can master menu pricing. We talked about that. On Tuesday you will get the training on how to use the profit diagnostic software. Otherwise it's usually month four. I think that's unlocked in the how to profit from advisory course. But if you really want to get started and use that software, you can have access to that on Friday. You also get the proper growth formula and most important, but you are running out of time fast. If you want to come to my session in a bit, you'll need to make sure that you've, you've joined by now because Sarah's going to be. Sarah will send out the, the zoom links to join me whenever that is in about 40 minutes, 45 minutes from now.

In that meeting, what I'm going to do is walk through.

Some really powerful prompts like building a business plan, something that will create huge value for your clients. You could even offer this as a service. You could sell business plans that takes you 20 minutes to create. You could sell these business plans you should do and you know, just one business planner, one business plan a month would pay for your academy membership. Also, if you decide to join us during the course of the masterclass will also my team will design for you your first pricing template in the effective pricing software, which of course you do get as part of your membership. Right.

I've got how long left? I have.

40 minutes and so what are we going to do in 40 minutes? I think I'm going to do a few things. If you've got any questions, by the way, I have got time for questions. You've only got 40 more minutes left to ask me questions and then it's. Then it's the session with Emily. So do make sure. If you've got questions about the Academy, if you've got questions about anything we've talked about, make sure you put them in the Q and A.

Could you please repost the link for vpa? Absolutely.

Hopefully I've done it right. There you go. And it's in the chat. So let's, we'll do at least one more prompt. But I've got a couple, perhaps two prompts. But before that, a couple more things I want to talk about. Let's talk about. Not that, let's talk about this. How to find time to do advisory, which people talked about a lot on Tuesday. How to find the time the reason why you haven't got the time to do advisory is very simple. It's because you have. Well, it's actually two things. One is priorities. It's obviously not a big enough priority, but I think the biggest reason is you've got too many clients. You've got too many clients. And this is, I believe this is the number one thing holding most accounting firms back. And I think it's because I think back to when I started back in 1996 and started my accountancy practice. And in the accountancy industry.

When you look to sell your. When you look to sell an accountancy practice, it tends to be a multiple of gross recurring fees, recurring income recurring fees. And I knew that back in 1996. So when I started, my goal was I just want to win as many clients as possible and I wanted to grow my top line and I did. I grew crazy fast. In the first couple of years I went from zero clients to 200. In just over two years I went from zero in terms of income to just over to £200,000. That's about $260,000 in the first couple of years. I was growing really fast and I thought I was, I thought I was doing a great job until I realized by the end of 1998 I was working crazy hard and I wasn't making much money. I was also up to my neck in debt. I'd maxed out my overdraft. I was in a mess by the end of 1998. Fortunately, I met Steve Pipe. And in the three day encounters masterclass in November 98, that changed everything for me. I learned about advisory, I learned about marketing. I learned to how, how to build a proper practice. I learned about the importance of systems. Steve introduced me to Michael Gerber. And then a bit later in 1999, I met Ron Baker. He introduced me to value pricing. So for me, the 12 months from November 98 to November 1999 was the most significant year in my business life because I learned so much stuff that I just wish I'd learned when I started because I would have done things very different in my accounting firm. And one of those was it's not about taking on everybody. Because what happens is if you take on everybody, you become a busy fool. I was a busy fool. I was working crazy long hours working for most many clients that didn't even didn't value what I did. So you probably have too many clients if you haven't got time for advisory, it's too many clients. And the reason very often for that is because we think we need clients. And when we have, when we meet potential clients, we want to win clients. And what we do from a pricing point of view is we give them a price we think they'll say yes to, which almost always is way too cheap. We always leave money on the table because we don't understand value pricing, we don't understand the strategies for getting better prices. And so if you go in too cheap and if you continue to go in too cheap, then every single client you win from now onwards is just going to make life harder and harder and harder and make you busier and you will not have the time to do advisory. So we need to have less clients. How do we do that? Well, one of the ways we can do that is put our prices up. And I said to you yesterday, I think I said, imagine this. Imagine you put up your prices by 20% on average across your firm and imagine 20% were to leave. That would be amazing because you'd still be making the same money, but you'd free up 20% of time. You would then have one day free every week to focus on building your advisory skills, on building your packages, on talking to more clients about advisory work. You need to have less clients. The downside is, the problem is, is when you put your price up 20%, they probably won't leave. And that's annoying. I think back to. So back in, back in 2000, I was doing this analysis in my accounting firm. By then I had, I don't know, 250 clients. I was working crazy hard and I. What I did was I created an Excel spreadsheet. I list all the clients, one column, second column was, what's the fee income? What's their fee? I ranked them and I then did, you may have heard, a Pareto analysis, the 8020 rule. I ranked them, I did some analysis and I realised this. I realized that if I lost the bottom 40%, the smallest 40% by fee.

I could replace that fee income. When I looked at my A grade clients, the bottom 40%, I could replace all of those fees with three or four good quality clients.

And so the reason I put my prices up and started this process, I now teach the reason I did it was because I was desperate to get rid of some of the rubbish. And so I put the price up by 20%, hoping that. I was hoping to lose 40%.

I lost about three clients. I was disappointed, so I did it again. The following year I did another 20%. That's 44% over two years. And that's when things start to really change in my accounting firm because I then started attracting better quality clients. I was keeping the best clients. I was making more money for less effort. That's the key to finding time for advisory. You have to make sure that you are only working with great clients. Think about your clients right now. Do you have clients in your accounting firm right now that you don't love? That perhaps it's Gregory, Gregory the builder. And you've got a meeting with Gregory next week and you're thinking, I've got to meet Gregory again. He's always complained, he's always complaining about the fee. You do not need Gregory in your business. Because when you have clients like that, what happens is they just bring your energy down. When you have a meeting with Gregory for the week leading up to it, you're just thinking, I'm not looking forward to next week. I'm not looking forward to Gregory. And when your energy levels come down, then you're not at your peak. You get less stuff down. You are less stuff done. You are less creative, you are less energetic. You are, you're not getting, you're not performing at your best. When you love your work, when you love your clients, then that comes through in your energy levels. You do your best work when you are enthused, when you are happy with your work, with your clients. So what you need to do if you want to do advisory work and the issue is time, is start to step back and think about your practice, think about the challenges, think about your client base, think about how you're going to start changing that. Okay, I hope that helps. On that issue I want to talk about, I'm going to talk about.

Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to do one more prompt. And I think you get. I know you're going to like it. I think it's a cool prompt.

Before we get to that prompt, let me show you something else that we mentioned.

Very brief, very briefly back on Tuesday, if you can remember that far back. So we are in the process of launching some new software. Some people have already got it. We've had beta testers in the academy. We are officially launching it to our VPA mastery firms next week. So this is coming out next week. And the software does a number of things, one of which is it's a prompt library. And I think, you know, you're now familiar that we've seen the prompt library. And so if I just go back to the prompt library, you will get access to dozens and dozens of different prompts that you can use in your firm. It's a lot of prompts that we've written and there's many more to come. I love writing prompts. I love systems. And so that's coming your way. If you have, if you're in the academy, if you are, if you've joined during the masterclass and you come into my private session, I'm actually, we're going to give you the link. We're going to get you signed up with this software straight away today. But it's not just about the prompt library. It actually does some other things as well. Let me show you what it does. So the main purpose of this software is to help you identify where to work on next. Because when you're building an accounting firm, and this is the same with any business, there are so many things that we need to work on, so many things and it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. And so we need to, in no set order, we need to have systems in place. Systems are so important. I talk a lot about the E Myth Revisited. Michael Gerber Essential Reading we need to have systems. We need to have systems for everything. We have systems for how we onboard new clients. We have systems, systems for how we generate leads. Emily talked about that yesterday. We need to have systems for how we run our appointment, our meetings with new clients. We have systems for everything. And so we need to work on that. We also need to work on our strategy. So I talked about vision to plan. We need to do that not just for our clients, but for us as well. You need to have a vision, you need to have a strategy. You need to be pricing for profitability. You need to be pricing in in the right way. And more important, you need to be value pricing. So you've got all that to work on. You also have technology, tech stacks, AI to work on to help you improve your effectiveness and your efficiency. You also want to think about scaling and exiting. You might want to build a team and you want to think about where you are going with your business, how can you scale your business. You want to think about marketing and client acquisition and there's so many aspects to that. You also want to be thinking about how you're going to create more value for your clients, which, which is advisory. So we have always these areas to work on. Where do you focus on next? And so the purpose of this software is to help you focus on the areas and it's through a scoring system. This is the dashboard. The dashboard is your summary of how you're doing. But the heart of it is the next tab down, it's the roadmap. So if I just pull this out and we can zoom in. What we've done here is let's take marketing.

If we take marketing, we've broken all those eight areas on the, on the, the dashboard into three different aspects, three different places. So if we take temple of traffic as example, as an example, if you decide that you want to work on your marketing, you loved Emily's session yesterday and you want to work on your traffic generation, then if you go here, what it will tell you is it'll tell you the areas that you need to work on within there. You need a social media plan, you need to be better at speaking and you need to have generate traffic. If I was to go to another one, let's say the prospect, well, you need to have landing pages, referral systems, email marketing. If we go to the ultra authority and this is about having, collecting success stories, I mentioned that we need to have optimize our website and a big one is content marketing. We need to create content ebooks and stuff again, Emily touched on that yesterday. And so you can visit these places and see what needs to be done. And then what you can do is you can score yourself to see how you are doing and it's self assessment. You decide you can score yourself on how you're doing in these different areas. And depending on how you score yourself, badges will appear, the map and badges will appear on the dashboard. The purpose of that is so you can see how you're doing and it'll help you to prioritize. If, for example, you're struggling to grow your business and you know marketing is the right thing to do and you've got no badges there yet, then perhaps that's the thing you focus on over the next three months. So it's a way to identify where you should work on next. In addition to that, in every single area, take content marketing. You can click through and see all of the resources that are in the value pricing academy we've created. Now. There's a database behind this. There's.

Over a thousand of the resources that we've created, whether they're videos, workbooks, audios. We've been doing this for over a decade. We have so many resources and the reason we created this was because we found that sometimes members were telling us they don't know where to start. Where should I start? There's so many resources and so that's why we created this so that you can self assessment yourself, score yourself and see what resources are available for different areas. If you want to see what resources are available for social media, then you can go and see that inside the roadmap. Okay. That's the latest thing we're bringing out to the academy. It's coming out next week. Some people will get it today and I just want to make you aware of that.

So let's move on to, I think, another prompt.

Make sure you do ask questions.

Jack. Jack says is part of the prompt library available for VPA level 2 members. Yes. So we at the moment we are only releasing it to mastery firms. Later on we will release it to other members and there will be, you may have noticed if I go back to here.

And I know I've not got screen share on yet, if you go to the prompt library.

As a mastery firm, you'll get access to everything. But Jack, you won't get any of these prompts here. You won't get the business advisory prompts, for example, but you will still get prompts. There are other prompts that you can access just that most the prompts are at mastery. So when you get access to it, Jack, you'll be able to see which prompts you can, you can use and you'll be able to see which ones are not available to you at this point in time.

Right.

Any other questions?

Vicki said I am part of your AI academy. Is that all included in the pricing academy? Yes. This is the, what we're talking about over these three days, Vicki, is what you get as part of the value Pricing Academy.

Let's do.

Another prompt and this one's a really cool one.

So what we're going to do is I'm going to go back to. Just bear me a second. Let's go back to.

This one of these prompts. Let's see if I'm in the right place. Yeah. Oh, yes. I said to you I'd show you.

I reran this prompt. This was the, this was the different ways to increase the frequency and I used for this one, I changed the model to an advanced reasoning model and it's saying current baseline precision wave issued 390 invoices to 75 active customers in year 10, roughly 5.2 orders per customer per year, which is actually more detailed math. The math is more correct. Got it to 5.2. But what I found when I test this earlier today is with advanced reasoning, when you look at its ideas. So number one is a Waterjet Care subscription turn today's ad hoc preventative maintenance package into a tiered whatever, whatever. And.

I tend to find that it's giving a more detailed answer.

A better answer to all to this. So when it comes to creative thinking, when it's doing things like looking at strategy, the advanced reasoning models are a little bit better. Now, if you're on the free account, you don't have this, don't worry because you've still got great results with the, the GPT4O. It's just that if you want to go further with AI, particularly if you're doing really important work like advisory, I would recommend that you consider making sure you got access to the plus or the team's account.

Okay, so I'm gonna, what I'm gonna do next is run another prompt. I'm just having a look at these to see which one's gonna be fun to do.

That one or.

That one. Okay, so let's imagine, let's imagine that you are, you're working with Jeremy Biz advisory. And you did the strategic planning, you did the SWOT analysis. You identified that he needs to grow his sales. They've stagnated. You looked at the numbers and you've identified that one of the things he could focus on is increasing one particular metric or driver, which is the average transaction frequency. And so perhaps in month number two, when you work with Jeremy, perhaps you did this homework, perhaps you did this and you've gone through some five. And Jeremy says, this one, I love this. This is such a great idea of a rapid repeat prototype program. What is it reward design engineers who iterate frequently offer a price rebate or expedited slot for every second prototype, etc, etc. So we've got this.

And Jeremy might then say, so, yeah, I want to do this. Can you help with doing this?

Can you help with doing it? You might think, no. Well, one of the things that we are good at in the profession.

Is systems or processors or sop standard operating procedures. The reason we're good at this is because accountants and bookkeepers, we're quite detailed in, in our thinking. If you. For anybody who understands the personality profiling like disc model disc.

Certainly a lot of my profile is very much a typical accountant. We tend to be quite high S and quite high C. We don't tend to make great salespeople because we're introverted, but we are very good with detail. That's why we're good bookkeepers or accountants. We are good with detail. Now one of the things that businesses are here usually very bad at is they don't have systems in place. They don't have step by step processes. They tend to be all over the place with their mind. They tend to be disorganized. And that's where we can bring a lot to the table. I said to you on Tuesday that when I talked about the definition of advisory work, business advisory, I gave you this broad definition, but you could make it more narrow and focus on a particular area. And one particular area that you could focus on is being the expert in helping businesses get control of their business by putting standard operating procedures or systems in place, helping them systemize so the business is more predictable and less reliant on the business owner. That's something that a lot of accountants and bookkeepers can do because we're good at that thought process with the discipline of building systems. And so one of the things that we should do, certainly build systems into own firm. And if I go back to my story back in November 1998, which is when it all changed for me, Steve Pipe introduced me to Michael Gerber and the E Myth Revisited where he talks about systems. And this light bulb went on for me and I thought, wow, this is amazing.

I've built a firm where everything needs me to be there. I, I dealt with every single client. I reviewed every piece of work that went out the door. I did everything. I was working crazy hours and I realized that I couldn't delegate to other people because there weren't systems to follow. I spent 1999 focusing on writing systems. I wrote system after system. I took Fridays off on in 1999, Fridays was systems day. I spent Fridays writing systems and I found I could write a system in a day. I could write a system for doing taxes returns, a system for incorporation planning, a system for reviewing a set of financial statements. And over the course of a year I had about 50 odd systems. And.

That was just, that was so, so, so powerful. Now we can use AI to help us with that. And so I have a whole bunch of prompts in the prompt library. Let me just go filter and I'm going to go to categories, systems and processors. So we have a bunch of prompts specifically for creating systems and processors. And the one I want to look at is called SOP Creator. This is for creating standard operating procedures. And if I just open that up.

Let me scroll to the bottom of it. You don't need to read these systems. Remember they're templates. You just cut and paste them. Them you can't copy and paste. And then you will put at the end the variables in this particular case. The variable will be something about your business, like your website. It doesn't have to be a website, but I tend to, I often put that in there for the reasons we talked about earlier with security. But then most important, well, what's the process you want to work on? So you might, if you're doing it for yourself, as you can see perhaps from the example, you might have some information about your accounting firm and then say the process you want to work on is completing a tax return. And what it will do is it will build out for you an SOP for completing a tax return.

So this is certainly a prompt that you would want to run in your own accounting firm if you want to create more systems. In fact, there's another prompt which analyzes your business and comes up with a list of all the recommended systems you want to put in place. So you could run that prompt first, create your list of systems that you should have in place in your firm. And then for each one, you just run this particular prompt and all you do is copy and paste and just change this last bit here for each of the systems in turn. So you could, what took me 12 months, 1999, 12 months of creating systems. If I had this, I could probably create a system in an hour. I could perhaps create some seven a day, seven a week, rather than, what's my math, rather than one a week, I could create seven times as many systems in a year than what I did in 1999 with this. Now, I designed these systems. So these systems, prompts, these were designed first and foremost for you to use in your accounting firm. But remember I said to you yesterday, I said, remember the concept of just duality. One of the great things about running an accounting business is that anything that we can do to build a better business, whether it's putting in place a lead generation system, which Emily talked about, building a better website, creating better systems, anything that we can do to improve our business, we have this duality. It will probably apply to any business. And that's what I love about learning. That's what I loved about learning about how to build my accounting firm. Because in 1999, 2000, I was learning everything I could about how to build a great accounting firm. But also in my mind, I was thinking of duality. It was Steve Pipe that gave me this phrase, duality. I was continually thinking about as I build this system for me, how could it benefit my clients? Could my clients do with this? So although these systems in the prompt library are really aimed for you, when you're Doing advisory. There are not just the prompts in the business advisory section, but you could go and raid the systems and processes section, the marketing section, the content creation section. There are so many prompts littered throughout the prompt library that you can use for business advisory. So I'm going to copy this one. I'm going to go back to here. I'm going to. We're going to do number two. So I'm going to go control V to paste in the system. I'm going to go to the bottom and I'm going to. I'm just going to.

Did I write this down earlier? I can't remember. Let me do again. So I'm going to go and put in here, I'm going to put no website. Instead, use what you know about precision.

I've forgotten the name of my client. Precision Wave. Okay, I'm going to just do that and I'm just going to put in brackets just to be really super clear, details attached. Okay. There's never any harm with social media, with AI of just repeating stuff. It does remember things in chats, but I tend to repeat myself. Just I want think of it as dealing with a team member. Sometimes you have to repeat instructions even though you told them yesterday, you have to repeat it. And then for the process, for example, completing a tax return, I'm actually going to go back to my list of systems. I'm going to go to number two.

Which was I want to assist. So the client loves this idea of the rapid repeat prototype program. And so I'm just going to grab that. That's probably all I need Control C. And so that's in that prompt. In this prompt, I'm just going to paste it here. So rather than completing a tax return, I'm going to do rapid repeat prototype program. What is it? And it will remember it from above. Anyway, it now knows that we're doing a system for that particular method of increasing the average transaction. So let's see what it does.

Let's see what's going to come up. So it's thinking, because I've got the O3 model turned on, it's reading documents. Okay, great. It's making sure it understands this client. I probably should have done the GPT4 because.

This will take a little bit of time, not a huge amount. There we go. Okay, 17 seconds. Here we go. So you can see now it's building out an SOP for us. It's giving us a rapid response. Repeat prototype program. Standard operating procedure. We've got a document number that we could use it's version number 1.0. It was created on the 26th of June by Mark Wickersham, FCA. Every system or SOP should have a purpose so that whoever follows the system knows what it's for. The purpose of this SOP is to standardize the rapid repeat prototype program at Precision Wave Waterjet limited. The program rewards customers who place a short run production order within 60 days of an initial prototype by offering A a price rebate or B a guaranteed Expedition expedited production slot. The procedure ensures that every eligible prototype is tracked, customers receive timely reminders and incentives are applied accurately, thereby increasing repeat order frequency and strengthening customer loyalty. It's then got the scope of the work. This SOP applies to all employees involved in quoting, scheduling, producing and invoice prototype and shortened production jobs. And it covers eligibility check at quotation stage, internal job flagging in the ERP CRM system, Customer communication, incentive authorization, performance reporting, it doesn't cover these things. Then a good SOP will also list who's which roles are involved in the responsibility, who's responsible for the system. In this case it's a number of different people across different departments. And then we have the step by step process. So we have phase one is the quotation and job flagging. So we should confirm the prototype status, there's the detail. And we can then have a reference to a quotation workflow manual.

Next is to explain the program, provide the customer one page flyer, explain the rebate or expedited option and the 60 day window. And so we might then have a flyer called the marketing flyer. So we've got three steps for as phase one of quotation and job flagging. Then we've got prototype production itself. And there's two steps that we should go through. Schedule the prototype. So book the prototype on the nearest available machine slot, maintain 24 hour quote turnaround standard, etc. Etc. And then phase three is our follow up and reminder sequence. So we'll have an automated reminder. We want to make sure that day 45 the CRM auto emails the engineer order your short run by day 60 to unlock your rebate expedite slot. So we're reminding customers to make sure they do book their slots.

And then sales call. At day 50 the sales and marketing team phones the contact to discuss next steps and offer technical support that will help them buy more stuff. And then we've got our short run order incentive application process. This is where customers apply for the process. And then we've got completion and reporting. So it's broken down to five steps and each one really, really detailed as a system.

I don't know about you, but I think that's really, really impressive. I remember back in 1998 when I came off a three day masterclass and Steve introduced me to Michael Gerber and talked about business advisory. The very, very first client of mine that wants advisory work actually called me the week before, went away and they said, mark, we need some help in our business. Our business is chaotic. We need some help putting systems in place. Can you help? And I said yes out loud. And in my head I said, I have no idea. I'm an accountant, I've done accounting, tax returns. I don't know how to put systems in place. But I said yes because I never turned workaround down. And then I went to the three day accountants masterclass with Steve and he talked about, he showed me the Michael Gerber video. This whole thing about systems. I thought, oh, that's amazing. So I went back to my client straight away and I said, yep, let me work with you and we can start to systemize the business. And we did that. I ran a program with him. I didn't charge enough because I was still learning the process, but I ran that program and I also did not do a very good job of the systems because I didn't really know what I was doing with that. I did some other stuff really well, but I know in hindsight I didn't do a great job. If I had this wow, I know that just a couple of these systems would have blown that client's mind completely. Because this is really in depth. This is, I mean, for you to create this for a client, like an engineering business that you may not know much about, even if you could do this, it would probably take you a full day to write it. You'd have to do research, ask the client questions. This is a full day's worth of work, minimum. And you've created a really powerful system for a client to solve one of their big problems, which is customers are buying less frequently. You've written this system in.

About two minutes. So again, don't show the client this. What I would then do is go to the client. You walk through it with them. Yes, it'll probably change. They might say, well, actually we can't do that, let's do it a different way. But you've got a starting point here for the client. I don't. I'm hoping you're starting to see here the value that you can create for clients in helping them build A better business. We have to move away from compliance work because the AI is going to replace that. We have to move away and start doing more valuable stuff. And we can use AI to help us do that. Now sometimes people say to me at this point in time, but won't the AI replace advisory work? No, it won't. And the reason for that is because your clients do not know the questions to ask to get things. Like I've just shown you, they don't know that they don't know the questions to ask. So I would guess that 99% of your clients even three years from now will have no idea how to ask the right clients of an AI system because they're too busy in the day to day running of the business. This is where you can, for years to come create huge, huge amounts of value. I hope you are seeing this. Okay, we're about to.

Wrap up.

I think I might have one question. I'm not sure. Let's see. So we have our breakout sessions coming up.

Just one more time. Are you a note taker or an action taker? Are you going to take action? What action are you going to take? I know some of you, like Andrew said earlier, he's going to take some amazing action. He's done some amazing actions already. So I would love to know my team will share with me tomorrow everything that goes in the chat box. I would love to know what actions you are taking. So we've spent three days covering a lot of stuff that we haven't quite finished. We have a couple more things so we've got. If you join the academy, then I will be seeing you in, in a different Zoom room. You should have the link. I'm going to disappear in two minutes to go and open up that room. You can then join. I should be ready by the hour, perhaps a bit earlier. So once you've got the link, join the meeting. I will let you in. If for any reason you can't find the link and you've joined the Academy, message Sarah. She will get you in. I will be starting in a different Zoom room on the hour, perhaps a little bit earlier. Emily is going to do a session for everyone else on using AI to build and promote your advisory services. So if you love the AI stuff, there's much more to come. So I'm going to see. Is Emily here? Is Emily here? Let's see. I'm hoping she is. Yes, it's looking good. Hi, Emily, how you doing?

Hello. I'm doing good. How are you?

Amazing. Yes, I'm Great. And I just can't wait to now walk through this workflow for building business plans and I know you've got some amazing stuff to cover as well. So, Emily, I think we've decided we'll do something a little bit different and we don't have a break, are we? You're going to use go straight into just welcoming people and getting into your content. I think that's right. I'm going to leave you to it. I'm leaving this Zoom to set up my other Zoom and I will see some of you on the other side in the other Zoom meeting. So if you're happy, Emily, I'll say goodbye for now.

Thanks. Bye Mark. Bye. Okay, so whilst Mark's leaving, just a little recap there for anybody else. If you have joined the Value Pricing Academy and you want to join Mark's session, he's going to be doing some quite advanced stuff with ChatGPT there. Um, if you want to be in that session and you have joined the Academy, you should have received an email. If you haven't received that email but you have joined, then just email support. Valuepricingacademy.com and Sarah should hopefully be able to send you that link so you can join that session. Of course, if you have joined, you will also get all of the recordings for everything. So, you know, it's up to you which session you you join now. But I'm just going to go ahead and get started straight into the next one, into the next session. So if you do need a break, you know, you can just go and run off and grab a coffee, go to the toilet, whatever you need to do. But I am going to go in, get started straight away. Just excuse me for looking off to the side because I have my chat over here. If anybody does have any questions during this session. Now I'm going to do the content for you and then I'm going to save some time at the end to do the final questions. So that will be your last opportunity to ask any live questions with us right here this week. So if you do have any questions, be sure to put them in the Q and A box and I will have some time to come back to those at the end. Okay, so what I'm going to teach you in today's session, for anybody who is there yesterday, I taught you some marketing principles about how to bring in your high quality business advisory clients. So we looked at building an ideal client profile and then using that to create a piece of content that you would give away in free. For free in exchange for somebody's name and email address, which is what we call a lead generation system. And that's part of growing your list so that you can then reach out and have a database, a list of people who are, are pre qualified to be interested in that topic. So generally business advisory is what we're talking about today, but you could have done it with bookkeeping or tax planning or anything like that, or industry specific. Okay, so we looked at that, we looked at then setting up the emails afterwards and all those kind of things. So today what I want to talk to you about is, and I think Mark has briefly mentioned this subject, but he knew that I was going to be going into it. So it's only briefly that you've heard about this, but what we're going to look at is a seven step process to set up your business advisory packages. Okay, so previously we've been charging by the hour, right? A lot of people been charging by the hour. If you're one of those people, let me know in the comments right now if you're charging by the hour, just put yes or I'm charging by the hour, let me know. So we can got a consensus here of who's doing that? Uh, yes. Ann says yes. Delwin. Oh, Delwin has packages. Rick says yes. So we've got a lot of people who are still charging by the hour. And what we teach in the academy, which is the value pricing academy, is how to move to value pricing so that we're pricing based on the value that the customer is receiving, not based on the time. If we get so good and all of the stuff that you've seen Mark teaching previously on how to use these prompts to get really, really fast, good, high quality reports. That content is still super valuable for your clients.

And it's taking you a fraction of the time to get that material and to create that report. The value that they receive isn't, isn't less so, it's probably more so, but it's taking you less time to do it. Okay. So you shouldn't be penalized for that. They're still getting the same amount of value. But if you're charging based on the hour, you're not going to be able to charge the high figures that you deserve. Okay. But when we're, when we're charging based on value, the client's getting more value because they're getting this amazing report. You're having more time to think of more opportunities for them and more and more, you know, strategies and put things in place for them. So you're actually doing them a, a service. Okay. By, by charging based on value, you're actually helping them. Okay. But we know that that transition from the hourly charging, from the hourly rate to value pricing can be quite a difficult transition. It's very much getting your mindset changed and finding a way of, of switching over to that style of pricing. So what we're looking at today is a different style of pricing, which is kind of the stepping stone to get you to value pricing, which is what we call menu pricing. Okay. So just bear with whilst I bring up my slides. I think it's this one. There we go. Okay, so with menu pricing, what we're doing here is instead of giving somebody one price that they can either say yes or no to, which is what we're doing with our hourly rate, it's what we're doing if you're giving a fixed price up front. Because if you are doing that and you've, you've transitioned somewhat to give a fixed price up front, that is still only one price. Okay. The only thing that they can do with that one price is they can say yes or they can say no. That's it. There's no room for maneuvering there. It's a yes or no, which means it's a 50, 50 chance really, of whether they will get the business or not. And if that package, the service, the offering, is not perfectly correct for them, it's not perfectly right. There's no way of adapting that or adjusting that. So with menu pricing, what we're doing is we're giving them more choice. We're giving them, generally speaking, three package options so that they have an opportunity to buy. If they don't like the middle one that you've talked about, they have this option to go for the lower one. If they don't like the top one, they've got these options to go for the middle or the lower. So it's not just a yes or no binary anymore. It's a would you like this package? Or if not, we have this other package, okay. So you've got a lot more choice in that. And with menu pricing as well, when you can give them that level of choice and the more choice you can give them, the better. But with menu pricing, at the very least, we're giving them those three package options, they are more likely to make that decision to buy from you because they feel like they are in control of that choice. You're not a lot of people, they said they resonated with this concept that Mark talked about yesterday. Don't sell, allow them to buy. Okay. A lot of that res, A lot of that. You said that that resonated with you. This is kind of what we're doing here by giving them the choice of, we're not saying this is your option, you can buy it or not. Because that's quite a, you know, a binary.

We're, we're giving them more choice and saying we think these packages would be suitable. Which one would you prefer? Okay. It's more of a choice for them. So when they are making that choice, they feel like they've got more control, that they're not being, you're not selling it, you're not forcing it down them. They're also likely more likely to spend a higher amount with you because they have choice, they have that control.

And especially when we look a little bit further at this and you're using something like the effective pricing software, which I believe you've seen during the course of these few days, where they can start putting things in their cart, essentially you can ask them preferences. Do you want to work with our top CEO or with our junior manager? Would you like to have a quarterly meeting or a monthly meeting? And the price can vary depending on this. Okay. So they can go through and they can say, actually that's something that's super valuable to me. I'll take that, I'll put that in my cart. And the price goes up and up and up when they do that. But they are the ones making that decision. Okay?

We don't know what their true willingness to spend is. We don't know what their true top budget is. You ask somebody what their budget is, they're probably going to say, oh, I don't really know. And they'll give you a lower figure than what they probably have in mind because they're not going to go in and say exactly what their budget is. They might not even know it. Okay? So when you can do this process, you're gonna, it's gonna help you to get closer to that maximum point that they are willing to spend. Okay? Because they have control, they can make that decision. You don't know what they're willing to spend. So giving them that choice allows them to choose to pay you more based on what they value. Okay? So this is the first step towards menu pricing. Now towards value pricing. Okay? If, if, if value pricing is too big a jump, we start with menu pricing. So this is a seven step process that we go through. And I'm going to tell you about all the steps. And then I'm going to show you how you can use AI to help implement all of those steps and get your packages ready within the next sort of couple of hours, if you wanted to.

So step one, step one, you want to consider how many packages are we giving them? So unless you have reason to believe otherwise, and you have evidence to prove otherwise, you want to be going with three packages. Now, there's a bit of a magic with the number three. There's a lot of psychology that goes behind this. When you present somebody with three choices, we are drawn to the middle option. And that's because of our aversion to risk. We're trying to avoid risk. Now, when they've got three options, there's this perceived risk. You know, it's a psychological thing. There's this perceived risk that, well, if I go with the lowest option, I might lose out on some value, whereas if I go with the top option, I might be spending more and not utilizing all of the things in that package, and I might be spending more than I really need to. So the middle option becomes the most attractive, the, the, the least risky. Okay, so we can make that middle package our most appealing package by putting.

The majority of your service in there. We can then save some items that are premium items. So this will be speedier service, you know, extra reports or extra stuff. We can, we're going to look at a couple of examples will go in the top package for those that want that extra stuff. And for those that maybe aren't as interested or they just want the bare bones, the bare minimum, we can have a lesser package which reduces the amount of stuff that we're doing. We can say, okay, well, there's this package here which means you'll get less reports. Maybe we can have an annual meeting rather than a monthly meeting, and it's less work for you, but they're still getting the value that they want because they've got that lower option. Okay.

Now when you get more complex with this, you can start to think about having extra hidden packages. For example, you know, if you wanted, if you really, really liked a person and you really wanted to work with them, but it was just not in their budget, but you knew that you could get them to a place where next year they would be able to really.

They go for one of the higher packages, then maybe what we do is you have a secret hidden package that you only reveal to people that you really, really like. Okay, well, to start off with, we're looking at three packages. We know the Psychology behind that is really powerful, and they will be drawn towards the middle one. Okay, so step number two, and this is probably the most crucial step of this process, and it's the step that a lot of people, people skip over, and it's the reason why a lot of people fail with menu pricing if they don't do this step. So this step is about segmenting your audience, your, your customer, your client, your ideal clients, and then creating the packages with each of those segments in mind. Okay. If we just decided to create three packages and just randomly put items in each one.

Somebody might see those packages and think, well, I don't need that item in that one and I, I don't want that, but I want the ones from that one. And it's not, it's not suited to them and it's not appropriate for them. So we need to really understand what the client's needs are, what their requirements are, and how we can create tailored packages that suit those appropriate needs. Okay, so obviously to do that in the first instance, as I talked about yesterday, we need to start from a really deep understanding of our ideal client profile. We need to have a really clear ideal client profile. I'm going to show you how to create a great profile with AI in just a minute. So it may be that you vary your packages loosely on the theme of the lower one is more of a budget option, more of a less work for you. But of course, we still want that package to be presented as super valuable because it is. So we're not calling it budget or cheap, but that is the lesser work option for you and the, the lesser price option for them. Then we have the middle one, which is more, maybe the popular option which includes that majority of your services. We make that one really appealing. And then we have the pro premium top option for the people that want to go above and beyond. Now it could be that you tailor it based on something slightly different. So if we're looking at business advisory, perhaps what we tailor it on is the first one is for people who just want their basic strategy. They want some help with, like Mark looked at earlier with having their general vision to plan. Okay. They just want some help with larger, larger picture things, setting some strategy and getting some clarity around their business. So that one might be the strategy package. Then the next package might be on growth. So this might be people who are wanting to scale and grow their business and that will incorporate different services. So as part of that, you might have meetings where you give them marketing strategy or you go, you have, you Go through reports to look at what opportunities they have to grow. And you look at things in a slightly different way there then in the, the top package. It may be that some people are really interested in automating their business and putting systems in process, which is what Mark just talked about having systems, maybe they're really, really keen to apply automations and technology and systems and that's what you want to kind of focus that package around. Okay, so each of them are slightly different. They're going to include more work for you going up, but they are the ones in control of choosing which option is the most appropriate for them. Okay, so what we're doing is we're taking our ideal client profile and we are finding ways to segment them based on what we know that they might be interested in. Okay.

So next up is step three. We want to describe who that segment is and we want to describe the package. So we want to describe it in their language if we can. If we know that they're using language where they're saying.

If we're talking about their pain points, maybe they're stressed, they're overwhelmed, or maybe looking at the other side and we look at their aspirations. This is for the accountant, this is for the business owner who wants to grow and franchise and work larger, you know, boost to their business by doing X, Y, Z. We want to use that kind of language and we want to describe either their pain or their aspirations and then relate the package to that and explain if this is you, this package is going to be perfect for you because it includes these things. So we want to have a very clear description that directly calls out to the person that you are targeting with that, with that particular one. Which is why it's always very important to return back to this customer segmentation. If you just kind of put a description that said this is what's in this package, that's fine. But when you can say we've put these items in this package because we know that you struggle with these particular pain points and therefore this package is going to be suited well to you. If this is you, that's just a little bit more nuanced. It's a bit more. The wording is talking one to one, directly addressing their pain and their, and their goals. So it's going to be a little bit more effective in the way that that wording comes across. So step three is to describe who that package is suited for and describe the package itself as well.

Step four then is to name your packages. So this is actually a fairly crucial Step as well. What we don't want to do is devalue any of our packages. So I know I've kind of roundabout said that the lower package is kind of the budget option, if you will, but there's still going to be immense value in that option. There's still going to be a lot of value that you're delivering to them. It's a valuable choice. So we don't want to be calling that the budget option or the cheap option. So it's really important that all of the names that we choose for these packages, Packages are engaging, they're clear, they're clear as to what they are getting in those packages, but they also demonstrate the value of that package as well. Okay. So we're not calling it the budget option. So as an example, what we sometimes say that we would call these packages is we might call them the bronze, the silver, and then the gold. But what this language does is it makes that bronze seem really unappealing. Because who wants bronze when you can, when you're going to win gold? Who really wants the bronze? Who really wants the silver? It's not quite as appealing. So even just in very simplistic terms of changing the packages with, before we get creative with stuff, we can change the name of that to something like gold, platinum and diamond, because all of those are super valuable. Even the lowest one, the gold is really valuable. Gold's super valuable. So we, we just want to change the way that we're naming those so that each package demonstrates its value. Okay. And we can get really creative with what we put in that. And ChatGPT is going to give us lots of options in a second as well.

So step number five is to then create your packages. So you now, now that you know who, who you are trying to target with each package because you've done your customer segmentation, now that you know that we went, we then want to consider, okay, so what items, what services are we going to put into each package? What does each person need? What, what are their requirements and what might be their extra things that they desire? Okay. Because we can save those, we can hold them back. And, and as well.

We don't have to put every single service that we do into our packages. If, and the things that you put in your packages is really important. So for example, if you were doing a bookkeeping service and your bookkeeping packages and somebody had a solo business, they had no team members, if you enrolled your payroll into those packages, that person's going to be less likely to buy that package. Because it's got something in there that they don't need. They don't need that payroll. So it may be that what we do is we, I mean, we would sell those as separate services, but maybe in the sense of business advisory, maybe there's an element in there that not everybody's going to need. So therefore we hold that back and we can offer it as an upsell afterwards. Okay. We don't have to put everything into our packages, but what we need to be doing and need to be very clear that what we're doing is the items that we're putting in there make sense to the people that are going to be that we're targeting these, these packages towards. Okay. We don't want, just want to be throwing things in there randomly because we feel it maybe adds value. We want to make sure that it's very well suited to the person that we are trying to market that towards and that we're not putting random stuff in there that they're not going to want. Okay. So we're going to look at how ChatGPT can help us organize that as well. So step six and we're not going to go into steps, step six today because it is a very full on topic, but this is to come up with a price for your packages. Okay. So Mark's maybe looked a little bit at this, but we go into masses and masses of detail. There's so many things that we can do with price. It's, it's an essential part of this process when we're using a tool like effective pricing, where we can go through and iteratively change the price. That gives them a lot more choice. But we also want to consider the way that we price the packages and how those prices relate to each other. What are the gaps between them? There are different techniques we can do where we talk about anchoring and we give a, a big price up front at, which makes our packages feel smaller. Okay. There's so many different things that we can do in terms of price and it's something that we go into massive detail on in the academy. It's the whole, it's a big, big, big chunk of what we look at. But coming up with the price for your package is an important part of this process. And then step seven is to present your packages. So how do we want to display those packages? How can we make them look appealing and clear as to what they're getting? And then also kind of, kind of how do we promote them as well? So how do we present them to our client face to face. But then how do we also present them, you know, in our brochures or on our website? How do we present that? Okay, so those are the seven steps. What I want to do is I'm going to bring up Chat GPT, so just bear with me whilst I do a little switcheroo here.

Oops. So hopefully. Oh, I'm on the screen twice. There we go. Okay, so hopefully we've now got ChatGPT up on your screen.

And what I want to go through first is I have created a custom GPT that will take you through the process of creating an ideal client profile. So what we looked at yesterday is how important it is to have this ideal client profile. And of course, step two, customer segmentation. The really important part, we need to first know who we are trying to appeal to with our packages. So it's really important that we start by creating an ideal client profile. So for those of you that aren't really well versed with with ChatGPT.

What Mark has showed you so far today is he will put a prompt into there and he will send that off and it's one prompt. What I'm showing you right now is a custom GPT where I have built into it a process and that when you then interact with it, it's gonna go through that process with you step by step. So it's like having a conversation. Okay, it's like having a conversation with ChatGPT to work out that ideal client profile, which A, is great for you and B, you can go through this with your clients as well out or do this for your clients to help them create an ideal client profile for their business as well. So having something like this is super powerful. So I'm just going to go through the conversation. I've already done this because sometimes we have tech issues and it doesn't load. But essentially all I've done is I've just answered the questions that it's given me. It's built into it, all of the elements of an ideal client profile. So first of all, we hit the button and we say, let's get started. So it says, hello, I'm here to help you create an ideal client profile. Are you ready to begin? So I've said yes. So great. Let's begin by getting clear on the type of client you most enjoy working with. I'll ask you a series of questions to help shape this profile. So the first question, where are they located? This could be by region, country, city, or something like online only. So I've Given an example, this is an example I often go with. I'm looking at digital nomadic entrepreneurs. So people who travel maybe work from their camper van, which is what I'm doing right now. So I just said I deal with English speaking nomadic businesses that travel a lot. I'm based in the US but I need to work with businesses that have an online presence so we can communicate online. Okay, so and I'm going in here with a kind of pretend demo niche. Of course you would answer this with whatever the specifics are for your business or your clients business if you're doing this on their behalf. So next question, what business sector are they in? Okay, so I've just put online businesses, so maybe that's consulting, training, marketing, etc. They're all digital entrepreneurs, they're all online. That might also include things like content creators, that sort of thing.

You know. And I'm answering the questions here as well. You could also ask ChatGPT for advice, you know, in a different chat you could say and I do actually have another GPT that helps you choose a niche as well. But anyway, let's keep going through these questions. So next is what size is the business? So think in terms of revenue, team size, stage of growth, for example, are they solo entrepreneurs? And for this I just put solopreneurs. You might, you might also want to put in there the revenue that they're bringing in, the whether they've got any extra employees, whether they've got multiple different franchises of a business, you know, whatever could apply to that question of what size is the business? Give as much information as you can. I've just put solo entrepreneurs here. Next we want to look at what is their attitude to business. So for example, are they purpose driven, growth focused, do they prioritize lifestyle first, is it innovation, orient oriented or casual, stuffed and etc. So these are people that you are probably going to have at least a year long relationship with them if you're working with annual contracts that generally speaking you want to make sure that you're working with somebody with a personality that you get along with or at the very least somebody who is going to be suited to business advisory because they have an attitude for growth, for learning, for systematic systemizing their business, you know, whatever else it is. So what is their attitude? We want to consider that. So I put in here going with this theme of travelers, traveler entrepreneurs who are traveling. Their main goals are to travel and the business funds that travel. So they're very focused on reducing their work amount. So this would Be things like automation and systemization and they want that work life balance. So they want ways to scale their business but also keep it manageable as a solo entrepreneur. So this is the example that we're going with.

So that's they've said that's really clear and compelling. Their lifestyle first focused on freedom, flexibility and travel. And they value efficiency, automation and smart systems.

Next up is what is their financial situation? For example, are they just starting out or they consistently profitable? Are they making enough to travel, Are they looking to increase revenue? You know what, where are they at in their business? So here I put making enough to travel and looking to increase revenue.

Next is how long have they been in business? So for example, one to three years, three to five years, five plus. So I've just put one to three years because maybe we want to look at people who have a little bit of something established, but they want to grow and we can help them with that, with that growth.

Next up is what is their personality. So this might be ambitious, creative, easygoing, detail oriented, high energy, introverted, extroverted, you know, that sort of thing. Neil, who you met on Monday, not Monday, Tuesday, on day one, if anybody was here with Neil, he, he has told us before he speaks about this, that he doesn't have a particular niche based on industry or anything like that. He really just likes to meet with people and see if he gets along with them and see if he could have a beer with them, you know, see if he could be a friend to them and likes to work with those kind of people that he has that kind of relationship with and that's the, the most important thing to him. So it may be that that is what you niche on if you wanted to. So the kind of personality I've put people who are organized and sensible, but also have a fun personality, they're adventurous and interesting. They also need to have an open mindset and be willing to accept advice. Okay, that's pretty important because we're offering business advisory and for a lot of people, they don't know what business advisory is. So you offering to give them advice on their business is something that people have to be open to. Next question, what accounting system do they use? So I've just put for an example, QuickBooks is the preference, but it's not essential. Of course, if you're using something else, Xero, anything like that, then you just put that in there. Next question, do they use online digital ways to communicate? For example, are they using Zoom, Slack, WhatsApp, email Voxer, or are they comfortable with remote collaboration. So because of the example I'm going with here that they are travelers, it's going to be pretty important that they have an online presence and that we can meet in an online way. So they must have online communication as we are working with different countries. So Slack, Zoom, WhatsApp, etc. The preferred method of communication is email for queries and Zoom for meetings. So we can incorporate that into the promotion that we do and also into our packages because we can get them set up with that stuff if they don't have it potentially. Next is are they willing to refer business? So we pretty much always want to say yes. We want people who are actively open to referring you to other people. Now what it's going to do is by the way, as I'm going through this, it's asking me the question and I'm just giving it that quick answer. This is like having a conversation with ChatGPT. So I can go away, I can think a little bit about the answers or I can just give a very rough kind of vague answer if I'm not fully sure on my idle client profile at this point. And it's going to help you pull that together and put it into.

A nice easy framed way that you have now something to reference.

So it's now putting it into a table for me which is kind of collecting all of those answers. So we have the location. Well, they're English speaking so that's generally you're going to be looking at Americans, Brits, Australians, New Zealand, etc. English speaking, nomadic, online based, accessible digitally. The business sector is online service based business size. We've got solo entrepreneurs attitudes. Business is lifestyle first focused on freedom, travel, automation and balance. Financial situation is making enough to travel now looking to grow one to three years in business organize, sensible, adventurous, preferably quickbooks. But we're flexible on that. And the communication style is Zoom email for queries and Zoom for meetings and they are willing to refer business. So it says is that accurate to you? Is there anything you want to change? You could copy that if you wanted to. You could copy that table and save that somewhere. And then when you meet with new potential clients, you can kind of go through and tick off and say is this person ticking off all of the criteria that I like to work with? So you can click that, you can save that somewhere. But I've just said it says do you want to move on to the next step? And I said yes, I'm ready to move on to the next steps. So all you're having to put here is just, are you ready to move on to the next step? Yes, ready. Very simple to move along. It now asks you the next set of questions. What are their current frustrations? Okay, so I've put a couple of examples in there, but then I've also asked it to suggest some of its own as well. So here are my suggestions. But I'd also like you to suggest some based on your understanding of the ideal client so far. So if there's something, if you can't really think of this, you can't really think of what their frustrations might be. You can ask ChatGPT for help with that. And also what would be an amazing thing to do is we've not looked at this, I don't think during this conference, but ChatGPT has a feature called Deep Research. So when you ask ChatGPT a question, you can ask it to, generally speaking, it's going to reference its database of what it has been trained on first. You can also ask it to access the web if you want it to find its answers online. But with Deep Research, it's going to do that kind of a hundredfold and it's going to go and look at maybe 500 different website sources to give you its response. So if you wanted to create an ideal client profile and get lots and lots of research as to what kind of things they're saying in that industry, what things they may be struggling with in that industry, maybe you want it to access community forms, forums, see what people are saying, what questions they're asking. You can get ChatGPT to do all of that research for you. Okay, so we don't have time to look into that today, but that is a super, super powerful. When they introduced that, it was mind blowing. The Deep Research tool is incredible. So that could be a real help with you getting that market research of what kind of clients you want to work with and what they're interested in, their goals, their worries, those kind of things that could be super helpful to do that. So for this example, I just put a couple of options in there, understanding different tax complications because they're moving countries a lot, maybe they're managing personal or business expenses and they're trying to keep the two apart, keeping track of financials whilst on the move, spending more time working than ideal and trying to understand their financials as well. So it's kind of said that's a great list and it's also added its own own. So we've got inconsistent income streams, difficulty setting financial goals, overwhelmed by admin tasks, no clear separation between personal and business finances and lack of trusted financial advice. So it's then listed them all in this kind of table format. For me here it says, does this feel aligned to you? Because what I think it first of all did was just kind of reword mine. So then I've said, can you add five of your own? I think at first they gave me one or two, so I just said, can you give me five extra ones? Because the more the merrier, right? The more information we have there, the better. So I just said, can you add five of your own? So it's added these extra ones for me. Inconsistent or unpredictable income. Difficulty creating financial systems that work across borders. Feeling unsure about how to set aside taxes. Set aside money for taxes in different countries. Lacking clarity on whether their business is truly profitable and struggling to prioritize between client work and business growth tasks. So if we know that these are things that they struggle with, this can be what we incorporate into our packages.

Next is their immediate wants. So it says, would you like to move on or create more? So I've said yes, keep all of the 10 that you just created and let's move on.

So next is our immediate wants. And again, I have just put a couple of examples in there. Maybe they want systems and automatic automation. Maybe they want ways to scale without increasing workload. Maybe they want clarity over financial situation of the business, tips and opportunities to maximize on tax opportunities. Or like choose the best location, for example, clarity over different compliance requirements across countries. So that's a couple of examples that I came up with. And you're the professional and you know the people that you want to work with. You could type, you could put in there the things that you know that they're struggling with. Okay, you could do the deep research, but you also have this experience and you at least have a good idea of what kind of things they might want.

Okay, so it's then organized that for me we've got a simple mobile friendly way maybe to track income. Trusted guidance from someone who understands both finance and nomadic life. A step by step financial game, game plan. More time for traveling experiences without sacrificing income and the confidence to make smart business decisions without second guessing themselves. Okay, so it's given me that list of 10 potential wants. Next we have, would you like to move on to what keeps them up at night? So I said, those are good, let's move on. What thoughts keep them up at night then. So again, I've given it a couple of examples. So maybe they're worried that they're not being completely compliant with the different countries, that they'll get fines maybe. Maybe they are worried that they're getting fines, might affect visas and travel permissions. Maybe they have a lack of knowledge on how the business is actually doing. So they want more clarity on that. Maybe they're worried that they're not making the best financial decisions or maybe they're stressing about sustaining their business or scaling it. Okay, so those are a couple that I've come up with. But I want it to come up with its own as well. So if we go down here, we can see what it's come up with. So what if I make a mistake and it cost me thousands or worse my freedom to travel? That would be what they are kind of saying to themselves. It's almost their language there as well. Am I actually building something sustainable or just getting by month to month? What if I burn out trying to keep everything running by myself? Is my business really secure or is it one missed invoice or lost client away from collapse? Am I falling behind because others falling behind others because I'm not focusing enough on my growth and strategy? So all of these things might be legit concerns that they have next up. We have aspirations. So I said, yes, that's great, we want to move on. What aspirations might they have? Okay, they're travelers, so they're really looking for a good work life balance. They want the work to fund the travel comfortably. They maybe want to grow their business in a manageable way and support their future travel plans and their lifestyle. And they want that freedom to travel. They want peace of mind, they want clarity, they want security, they want confidence. So I've given it all of those ideas and then it's put all of those into a bit of a table for me and given its extra ones in there as well. So once it has all of that information, the next step. Step is to then give me a summary of that profile. So we now have a couple of paragraphs here that explains from that first person, from that person perspective of the ideal profile. I'm a solopreneur running an online business in consulting, marketing or training. I've been doing this for one to three years. And while I make enough money to fund my travels, I know there's more potential for growth without working more hours. I'm organized and sensible, but I've got an adventurous streak. I use zoom for meetings. Email for call queries, may use QuickBooks. Okay, so it's, it's taken all of that, and it's put it into a couple of paragraphs for me. I'm frustrated by unclear tax rules across borders, messy finances, and the feelings that I might be missing out on better strategies. So it's taken all of that information that we've just gone through and put it into a summary. Now, I, personally, I think that summary is maybe a little small. So I've asked it, can you expand on that for me so that I've got a really detailed summary? So I've, I've said, can you make it around 500 words? So I now have this long summary here which explains all of that criteria, okay? Their size, where they're based, their wants, their frustrations, their worries at night. That's all summarized now into this paragraph. So this is now something that you can save somewhere on your notes app, on your computer, save it as a file on your desktop. And whenever you do any, anything to do with marketing or creating your packages, as we're going to do, you can input this profile so that ChatGPT now has the context of who you're working with and who you're trying to appeal to with your marketing or with your packages, okay? So Wherever possible with ChatGPT, you want to give it as much context as you possibly can. So just in that brief example right at the end there, Mark, Mark, put, you know, I've attached. You can find the details in the file attached. The more context that you can give it, the more information you can give it, the, the better the response is going to be. So there was this phrase that we used to say right at the start of the whole ChatGPT journey, if you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out. So if you put good stuff in, you'll get good stuff out. If you can put more information in at the start, you'll get a better response. So we now have our ideal client profile that we can go and save. Put it on a document in our desktop, in our Notes app, wherever. We keep that somewhere safe, and we then utilize that. So, I mean, another great thing actually to do is you could add this to your custom instructions. So if I go over to the top, top right where my blue diamond is, and I go to customize ChatGPT, this is where I can add.

Sort of permanent information, things that aren't going to change. So what do you want chatgpt call you? What do you do? What's your job? What traits should chat to be? Have anything else? ChatGPT.