How To Help Clients Through Times Of Crisis

Okay, so welcome to this session. Thank you so much for coming along. I can't believe how many people are here. That's amazing, given I only post this two days ago.

Certainly, as we know, times are incredibly tough right now. The world is just full of so much fear, so much uncertainty. And I'm sure that you're, you're struggling to come to grips with that and certainly your clients will be. And so this is a really important time for us. It's a time where.

Yes, it's tough. And if I'm honest, I've been through a few dark moments in the last few days. Last week, we've had to kind of reevaluate a few things in the business. We've had to cancel a few things that we were going to do. Some big launches, we were due to launch, we've been planning for three months the launch of a brand new training, how to do business advisory. And we decided it just wasn't appropriate to be doing things like that. It's more important to be helping our communities. For me to help you, for you to help your clients. So it's been tough. There's been a lot of things that might affect our personal lives. And yes, I've had some dark moments, but I've kind of come through that. I've been thinking and actually there's a lot of reasons to be positive about the current situation. And that might sound strange right now, but just bear with me. So let me share with you what I want to cover with you during the course of our time together today. Firstly, I want to talk a little bit about why I believe that things are not as bad as we all fear. And hopefully you will come away from today feeling much more positive because this is a time I believe that for us is critically important. There is so much fear, so much uncertainty. There is such a huge impact right now on the business community. As you know, you probably got clients that are already shutting their doors or laying people off. There's a huge amount of fear in the business community. And I think now, now is a time for us as a profession to be the beacon of hope, to show our clients what to do, to lead the community, to be the leader for your clients. But not just your clients, your business community, those other businesses around you. Because not all accounting professionals will rise to this challenge. But I hope by the end of today you will know how to do it. I want to share with you some strategies for doing exactly that. This is a moment where you can really help people. And I think this is what the profession needs to do. We need to step up because. And the reason for this is, as I said, there's so much fear out there with business owners. Who else are they going to turn to their lawyer? Are they going to turn to the bank manager? No, it's you, their accounting professional. You're the person that's going to help them hold their hand and take them through these difficult times. So I'm going to share with you why things aren't as bad, but I'm going to take you through as well. There's an impact on you. I know right now we have various around the world stages of lockdown. Right now in the UK as of Friday night, they shut pubs, restaurants and so on. As of Monday night, we now can't leave the house other than for certain very, very important reasons. And that's the case in many other places. I know that right now in California things are really tough. In New York City things are pretty toug. They've been really tough in Spain and probably wherever you are right now. And so if you're in some form of lockdown, we haven't yet adjusted to that. There's some changes that we have to make internally. And I'm going to share with you some thoughts around some of the things that you can do in terms of technology and so on to take advantage of this moment and turn it into a positive. And then most important, what I want to talk about is how, how some specific things that you can do to become that beacon of hope, to be the leader in your communities, to lead your clients. So I'm going to talk about that then. What I'm going to talk about is a little bit about how this might be an opportunity and that might seem strange at the moment, but kind of bear with me as this will start to unfold. I think that it's an interesting time, certainly and I think that there can be, there is good things can come out of crisis. I'm also going to share with you as well how some of the ways that I can support you and help you for free over the next few weeks. And perhaps most important, I want to answer your questions. So if you do have any questions as I go through today, stick them in the Q and A box, not the chat box. If you come in late, use the chat box for general comments. But if you have questions for me, stick them in the Q and A box. Okay, so let's start off with then.

Why. Why is it that perhaps things aren't as bad as you fear and certainly there's no doubt things are tough right now for everybody, for the whole world. This is one of the biggest crisis I can remember. And I also, the potential fallout from an economic point of view could mean that we. This could be the hardest period since the 1930s, in the great Depression, which I wasn't born then. So put it another way, this could be the toughest time in our lifetime. So, yeah, we're going to have some dark moments. I've had some dark moments. I had some serious worries over the course of the back end of last week, over the weekend. I was worrying about some things that this is going to affect Sarah and I in quite a profound way, a number of profound ways. And it's very easy. It's very easy just to kind of succumb to that and those dark thoughts. And we can't do that.

You have to be strong and you have to be positive for the people that are looking up to you as a leader for your clients, you have to be strong. You have to be positive. However hard it might be for you right now, you have to lead other people. I think back to back in, way back in 1999, I nearly went bankrupt. I've nearly been bankrupt twice and the first time was in 1999. It was back end of 99. I was running my accounting firm. I was a sole practitioner. I'd made a mess of it for the first two and a half years. And I started to make some big changes in 1999. But some of those changes I made had a big impact on me financially, which I didn't really realize at the time until things became a little bit too late. And as November 99 was clawing to coming towards an end, I started to realize I was running out of cash in a big way. I'd run out of overdraft, I'd run out of money completely. And it wasn't until the first week in December it dawned on me. I'd been doing everything I could during November and the end of October to bring work forward, to chase money. And I got to the start of December and realized there was nothing more I could do. I'd brought in all the work I could possibly do. I'd collect all the cash from people who owed me money. I hadn't got enough money left to pay those salaries. I had 10 people working for me. It was Christmas coming up and in the UK we tend to pay salaries a bit early so they'd have the money for Christmas. I got the money. That was a terrible time for me. And I remember that really clearly because it was so painful. I spent two or three days at night just sitting on the sofa, just watching television because I felt numb. I had no idea what to do. I just felt. I felt a failure to my family because I'd messed up, I'd run out of money. And I know there are many people going through that right now. Many of your clients are going through that. They're feeling numb, they're feeling helpless. They don't know what to do. And you might be feeling that way. And fortunately for me, after three or four days of moping around the house and feeling miserable and sorry for myself, I decided I had to change. And for me, that was one of the most important moments of my life because it forced me to jump on the phone and call somebody. Someone called Steve Piper, a good friend of mine, and I asked if I could have a meeting with him. I traveled up to him a few days later, and the outcome of that meeting completely changed my life in a major way, in a major positive way. And that was all because I stopped moping around and feeling sorry for myself and decided to do something about it. So there's always things we have to be positive. You have to be positive for yourself, for your family, but also for your clients. You see, this is a tough time. There's no doubt. And some, if you watch, if you read the newspapers, if you read the news and so on, some people are predicting. Predicting this could last for years. But newspapers are there to sell stories. And whilst nobody has a crystal ball.

I don't believe that this will last as long as some people are fearing. I think governments around the world have a tough time right now, and I'm glad I'm not having to make the decisions that are being made right now, because on the one hand, they've got to be mindful of the health of people. And sadly, people are dying from this, and so they have to be mindful of that. But at the same time, these lockdowns are affecting the economy in major ways, and it's a real difficult decision to know what to do. But ultimately, I think that we will get through this and get through it sooner than we realize. I think that as a. As a species, as humans, we are remarkably resilient and adapting to change, and we will. And we're seeing interesting things, fascinating changes all the time. I think there's some good things that will come out of that, which I'll share with in a couple of seconds. But ultimately, what we have to do is how the bad things feel for you right now. This is an opportunity for us in the profession. We have to rise. We are, as you've heard the phrase, the trust advisor. Who else are your clients going to turn to? So we have to lead our clients now. I ran a session yesterday, it was a Q and A session, a bonus Q and A session for people who've gone through my how to price bookkeeping course. And a couple of people asked me this question, they said, mark, what should I do if my clients are struggling? Should I do work for free? And it was an interesting question and I know that that might be going through your mind right now. Should we stop billing clients? Should we stop charging? And.

It'S an interesting issue because I sold my accounting practice some time ago. I'm now in what's called the influencer space, apparently teaching people and sharing knowledge. And one of my heroes in the influencer space is Brendan Burchard, who has millions of followers all around the world. And I went to Influence, which was his multi day conference last year, last October, it was in San Diego. Sarah and I went there for a few days. It was amazing. And what was interesting is in the influencer space, one of the big issues that people have is when they start a business to teach other people things. They set up a YouTube channel with some videos, they create an e book, they do some blog posts and they start getting their message out there. But then the biggest challenge that people have is charging customers, charging for their knowledge, charging for their value. And one of the things that Brendan said, which I think is really, really interesting, is he said, you have to stop that worry. If you're delivering value, if you've got a message, if you've got something that you can share with the world, in your case, share with your clients, your business community. If you've got value up here that you can share and help if there's value, you must charge for that. And the reason for that is because only if you charge can you sustain the message. That's the wording that Brendan uses, the if you don't monetize what you do, and if you fail in the process and can't sustain your business, then you can't change the world. You can't get the message out there. And that message from Brendan is equally applicable to you. You can change people's lives, you can add huge amounts of value, but you have to look after yourself first. You have to charge your clients. You have to carry on being a commercial business because if you fold, you have no Help to anybody. Now, let's just refine that slightly. I think you should be charging for the core things that you do. But what we need to do now is do more. We need to do more to help our clients. And I'm going to tell you in a short while what that more is how you do it, how you can lead, how you can add more value, how you can help people by helping them for free. But first and foremost, you have to keep the doors open. Okay? That's really, really important. Now, someone said to me yesterday in that session, they had some specific scenarios. And so a little caveat on that is sometimes it might be you've got a client that's such a loyal client, they've been with you for many, many years. They're a great client. They may be in the bar, restaurant industry. Things are really tough right now, and they will be for a few weeks for them. And so if you decide to waive their fee for the month but carry on doing the bookkeeping, for example, that's fine for specific cases. Then feel free to do that. But generally you, you must not feel guilty about charging for the things that you do because you have to sustain your message. You have to sustain the value that you deliver to people. So I hope that makes sense. So let me just wrap up this section with why do I feel that there is an opportunity? And I know times are tough, it feels like it's crisis, but sometimes the biggest opportunities come out of the darkest times. If we think about, for the moment, just outside of our profession, it's interesting if you've been following the news that for the last few years, the big talking point, or one of the big talking points for you is the problems with global warming and the impact on the world that we're having as a human race. And yet suddenly, in just the last few weeks, we're seeing stories of you can now see the canals in Venice are clear. You can now see the fish, which was kind of, that was unthinkable a month ago. You can now see the fish in the canals of Venice. They're reporting that the amount of pollution, the fall in pollution in, for example, Wuhan in China and other big cities around the world now is completely changing. I saw, I think yesterday that in a lot of the major cities around the world, they're reporting 20 to 30% less carbon dioxide emissions from cars because people aren't traveling so much. And so it's interesting that I think the world as a whole, in terms of this planet will be better off as a result of a few weeks or a few months of hardship. It's interesting and fascinating how we adapt as a race, as humans. And I saw again in the news just in the last couple of days, you may have noticed in the UK that some of the car manufacturers have decided that no one's buying cars right now, so why build cars? So what they're doing in some of the car manufacturers, they're now adapting their factories to make ventilators. We will adapt, we will get through this. And for us as a business, you will have to adapt in ways. Things will change. One of the things that I've said to people for several years now is a couple of things. Number one is.

I've often thought that the concept of employment, of jobs will disappear one day. And I know things are tough right now because many people are losing their jobs, but people have been talking about people losing jobs for a few years because of, partly because of artificial intelligence and machine learning and technology replacing us. But I remember a couple of years ago at a conference, someone said to me, they said, they told me what the definition of a job is and I thought this was really interesting. The definition of a job is solving a problem. And when you think about that, everybody that has a job doing something is solving some sort of problem in some way, however big or small, it's solving a problem. And despite the current changes and challenges right now and people losing their job, the one thing that's reassuring is there are still problems that need solving. They might just be different problems and so we have to just adapt. But there will always be employment, there will be things to do, there will always be problems to solve. It just might mean that we have to adapt. Like some of the UK car manufacturers now making ventilators. We will get through this. There will be some tough times for a few weeks, but we will get through this. The adaption, the adaptation that we're perhaps making, that you're perhaps making right now is you're now having to move, close down your office to work from home. One of the things I've said for several years is, let me finish off, I think the concept of, of employment will disappear one day because we're seeing a huge rise in the self employed. In fact, I think now in the UK it's 20% are self employed, which is interesting. But the other thing I've been saying for some time now is that I also think that the world will move towards much more, to more flexible working, working from home. And it's really interesting. I haven't worked in office now since 2013. So an interesting thing is for me, with this lockdown we now have in the uk, his life hasn't actually changed much because I've been doing this, working from home now since January 2014. I haven't been to an office for years and I think that that's going to become something I've been predicting that will become much more common. But actually what's happening right now is that's accelerating things because now we're being forced to. I was just talking to my developers, we're writing some brand new software at the moment and I've had lots of online sessions with them. And about just before the lockdown, the week before, they'd started gearing up towards this and gradually closing the office down and moving their team to work from home. And so I've been having regular conversations to find out how it's going for them. And they found it tough because despite the fact they were a technology company, they couldn't get the technology to work. All sorts of teething problems. But I spoke to them, I think it was yesterday. One of the team members asked, how are you getting on with this? And there's still a few challenges they're finding. But what they said was quite interesting is that some of the benefits of working from home are. They said, we get more done. And I know that's the case because I've been working from home since 2014. You can get more done, you can be more productive, you can do more stuff. It also means life's just more flexible. You don't work 9 to 5. It's a better work environment. Yes, we have to perhaps give up on a few things that the social element has to change in some way because we're using technology with zoom calls and so on. But I think that has some interesting. I think that has some interesting opportunities for you. I think that this might fast track the way that we change the running of our accounting firms. I don't know what you. If you read this, I don't know what you read. I saw this from somebody many years ago at a conference. I thought it was interesting because when you read that, most people read that as opportunity is nowhere, and that's how many people feel right now that times are dark, we're in a crisis and things are pretty bleak. But actually you could read that in a completely different way. See, what do you read now? Opportunity is now here, not opportunity is nowhere. And I think it's in any crisis.

It'S how we react to it, it's how we react to it. If we are just a bit more open minded, if we are more positive, then there will be good comes out of this a bit like me when I nearly went bankrupt in 1999. It was terrible for a few days and I could have just moped around on the sofa, but I chose to change my mindset and say, no, I'm going to do something about this, I'm going to take control and that's what you need to do. I want you to rise up, rise the challenge of being the leader for your community, your clients and other businesses in your area. So let's look at some practical things to start with. Let's just look at you internally before we start to move on to thinking about how we help clients. One of the biggest changes you're going to have to make right now perhaps is gearing up to working from home. Some of you have done that, some of you perhaps haven't. This might be new to you and so it's a different way of working, particularly if you've got teams of people. If you work on your own, it's easier. But if you've got a team of people, then we have to change the way that we work. Working practices change. And so I want to share with you some of the things that I do because I've been doing this since 2014. This is not new for me. Nothing's changing. So I thought I'd share with you some of the things that I've done, some of the technology and the things I do, because hopefully they'll give you some ideas that a to help you with this transition from having to have everybody working from home. But also because even if you've already made this transition, you've got a ton of clients out there who have been used to working in office environments that now have to change. Like my software developers, even though they're an IT company, they find it quite tough to make the transition. So let's look at a couple of things. Let's look at some of the software issues and some of the equipment issues that might help you with this transition to the way that you work. So starting off with software, one of the things, if you have a team of people, that's challenging when you suddenly start having everybody work remotely is let's imagine that you're the partner of an accounting firm and somebody else has just done a piece of work. It could be the tax return, for example, and you're reviewing it right now.

And I'll use the Tax turn, as an example, you're just reviewing the tax turn that's just been done by a member of your team. It's Johnny Boy next door. And all you do is you shout out, johnny Boy, can you come through here? I just want to go through the tax return with you and what you've done and you'll walk through and give your feedback. That's how we do things historically. But now Johnny Boy is working from home. How on earth can you, how can you give feedback in an effective way? Now, we could just revert to emails, but emails take ages to. You can spend hours writing emails because sometimes it's quite hard to describe certain things, particularly when you're giving feedback on something like a tax return or some work that somebody else has done in your team. That can be really, really challenging. Writing. It takes forever to do that. And as you know, there can be so much miscommunication with emails because sometimes we don't take the time we need to write them as thoroughly. And so somebody might read that in a different way and then they're going to do something completely different to what you wanted and. And suddenly you've just wasted a whole bunch of time. They wasted time. It creates inefficiency. So emails are slow. They're not a great way of communicating people, particularly when you've been used to just calling your team member into the office and sitting down with them to go through. Also doesn't help that, as you may know, if you've ever studied nlp, there are three different learning styles. Audio, visual and kinesthetic. And the reality is, most people in society, visual is the most common and in particular with accountants, accountants and bookkeepers. The accounting profession, we tend to be very often visual people and therefore we struggle, we learn best with visual. And the problem with things in writing, for example, is written stuff suits auditory people. Now, the reason for that is I didn't understand how to ask NLP person why writing is for the auditory people. And that's because when we're faced with something in writing, we read it in our heads. It's auditory. We're reading it as we read something. A visual person, and I'm visual, I hate reading stuff. I like pictures, I like diagrams. And that's the norm in the most common learning style in the accounting profession. So if you're now communicating with your team remotely via email, it's going to be slower and open to all sorts of miscommunications. So let me share with you a couple of tools that I use that Just make my life so much easier. And the first one, which some of you know because I rave about this, in fact, my good friend Jamie Selby told me about this, is a piece of software called Loom, which I absolutely love. It's the website, actually. I think useloom.com use l-o m.com if you haven't got Loom up and running yet, go and grab it. I think it's still free. I pay for it, I upgraded. But essentially it's a really quick and fast way doing videos. In fact, I've got a video to share with you, which I did literally minutes before I jumped online. And I'm going to give you the link to it later on. And you can therefore see a Loom video in action. Essentially, it's a simple piece of software called Useloom. And all you do is, if you want to communicate somebody, you just need a webcam, which we all have. I'll tell you more about in a second. You just need to have a webcam and a microphone. You then hit the start recording button. Okay? It couldn't be much easier. And you can choose whether you record your webcam, what's on the screen, or both. So let's imagine you're reviewing a tax return and there's some problems with it. And Johnny Boy is not in the next room, he's at home working. So all you do is you have the PDF, the tax return on your computer screen and you just simply hit the start record button and you say, hey, Johnny Boy, I've just looked at the tax return. As you can see on the screen right now, I'm on page three right now. This is wrong. Can you change it? And then you hit the stop button. And what happens is within seconds, and I mean seconds, it then opens up a page with a copy link button. And all you have to do is hit that green button and then paste it into an email or message to your team member and say, hey, Johnny Boy, just reviewed the tax return. Click this link to see what I've the feedback. It saves you a ton of time in terms of communicating with your team. This is amazing. I think it's amazing technology. It's so simple. It saves hours. But not just for communicating with your team. What about your clients? What about if you've just reviewed their annual financial statements and you want to give them some feedback, you've just worked out their taxes, why not just stick it on? Stick their financial statements or their taxes or whatever on the screen and just do a quick loom Video and send that to them. It's a great way of communicating with your clients as well. Now, another piece of technology that I use, which I use this pretty much every single day, by the way, Loom. And another piece of technology I use in conjunction, it's a little bit more of an investment, but again, if you're reviewing work of other people, if you're reviewing Johnny Boy's tax return, for example, then I think a great investment is an iPad pro, a pencil. And then my favorite piece of software on here, my favorite app, which is it costs next to nothing, is Notability. I use Notability every single day. It's my go to app. It's the perfect app. Essentially what it means is I can open up a PDF of something. I did it earlier. Emily, who does all of our blog posts and so on, she drafts all the written stuff. I review it, I open it up on my iPad in notability as a PDF and then I can read through it and I can scribble notes, I can draw circles and so on and so forth. I can make notes. Then what I do is I've got Notability on my desktop. It syncs straight away. What I do is I open up the PDF, the tax return, or whatever you're reviewing, but because it's from Notability, it's got all your scribbles. And then with loom, you can then walk through what you've done with all the scribbles and the highlights as well. You've done Notability. So two great tools. Let me move on to something else, the third and final piece of software. So note Loom, Notability. What about meetings? How are you going to handle meetings now that you are working remotely with your team? So what you need to have is meeting software. And you may well be using it, but if you're not, you must be using some sort of meeting software. There are many different choices. The best two are probably Zoom or GoToMeeting. You could use Skype. And I predict in the next three or four months, you will see a whole bunch of brand new meeting software tools coming out. Because suddenly now everybody's having to get to grips with virtual meetings. And so if you've not yet got to grips with virtual meetings, you are going to have to. Okay, you have to do this, and you're going to have to do this for what I'm going to tell you next. Okay? So this is going somewhere. You need to be doing exactly what I tell you, okay? And fast. So you need to make sure you've got the software. Which one you use is up to you. Personally, I think it's a choice between GoToMeeting and Zoom and I think most people prefer Zoom. It's a simple piece of software. It's even free. Okay. Now there's some like all these software tools, there's some restrictions and I recommend that you actually upgrade. And the reason for that is because, for example, the free version of Zoom, I believe has a 40 minute maximum meeting. And if you don't know that in advance, that can be embarrassing. So I don't know if if Jan Bodar is here or not today, but I had some of my firms I work with were on a meeting with my developers. They were giving some feedback on their thoughts on this software we're writing. And so they did a couple of meetings. They'd not really use Zoom much before. Forty minutes into the meeting it kicked everybody out and they didn't know that. Panic, okay, we're having a great meeting with a whole bunch of accountants getting feedback for the software and suddenly it's closed itself down. There are restrictions with free versions. Always make sure you know what they are. But if you don't need long meetings, the free version of Zoom could be great. But I believe that you need to be paying for it because there's something that you're going to be doing with this over the next few weeks and I'll come on to that in a short while. So you need to make sure you're geared towards virtual meetings. That's critically important.

So let's look at the equipment side of things. What equipment do you need now that you have a virtual environment to communicate with your team in team meetings, but also to communicate with your clients. Let me share with you some of the key things you need to have. So you need to make sure that if you're using something like Zoom or GoToMeeting, you want to make sure that you have a webcam. And most computers these days have a webcam built in. Most laptops do. My imac computer has one up there. However, I'm going to recommend to you that you get an external webcam. And there's a couple of reasons for that. They're relatively inexpensive. I happen to use the Logitech C920 Logitech C920 and I use that because A, it's only about 40 bucks. It's not that expensive. It's got a Carl Zeiss Zeno lens hd. Well, you can see it now. It's amazing quality. It also has actually a Pretty good inbuilt microphone as well. You can use it as the microphone. It's much, much better than the microphone on my computer. So that would be the webcam that I would Recommend. The Logitech C920. I think there's now a C930. The difference is marginal. But get a Logitech webcam. They're great, awesome, quality, visual. But also the reason why I recommend an external one is because if you're communicating with clients, you want to make everything as professional as possible. And when you're communicating with clients, you want to engage with them. And what that means is you want to be looking them in the eye, and that means you want to be looking at your webcam. It feels strange the first few times you do it. But the problem is, if you're using the webcam on your computer, which is up there on mine, and you've also got things on your screen, you're reading the things on the screen and so on like this, and you've lost the engagement with the viewer because you're not looking at them. And so with an external webcam, what you can do is you can mount it in front of your computer and I'll show you a screen. I'll show you exactly how I do that in a second. It just means that you can engage better, which is really important when you're communicating with clients. In a team meeting, you might be able to get away with not looking at people, but even then your team's important, so try to maintain eye contact when you're communicating with people, even in a virtual world. So, external webcam, that does mean that you will need to have a tripod to mount it on. But again, they're very inexpensive. I will show you in a second on the screen. The one that I'm using right now, I can't show you it now because I have to pick it up and you won't see it. The third thing you need is good quality audio. So get a good quality microphone. Again, they're not that expensive. And if you're on a tight budget, use the one that's built into the Logitech C920. Okay. It's a pretty good. It's a pretty good microphone. It'll do the job perfectly well. If you decide you want to take it up a level. I use normally, I have a big rode podcaster, but that's now in Spain at the moment, and I can't get into Spain, so most of my equipment isn't here at the moment. So I'm using what's called a blue snowball, which you can hear right now. And as you can see here, rather as you can hear, the sound quality is pretty good. And sound quality, by the way, when you run virtual meetings, particularly with your clients, audio quality is more important than voice. Visual quality. If people can't hear you properly, they'll give up and they'll log out. So a microphone is really important. But as I said, if you're on a tight budget, the microphone built into the Logitech C920 for about 40 bucks is pretty good. Last piece of equipment that you will need, though, as well, is you want to come across, if you're talking to your clients as professional and therefore think about your lighting. The big mistake that you must avoid is if you're sat at a desk right now and behind you is a window and it's sunny, you know what happens? You're a silhouette. Okay, that's not good. So make sure that if you've got natural light, it's not behind you. Ideally, it's in front of you. If it's next to you, you're going to get shadow on the other side of your face, and that can be not very flattering. So make sure your light's in front of you. If you've got great natural light, that's okay. But I strongly recommend what you actually get is a studio light. Okay, I happen to have two in front of me right now. So here's my setup. Just so you can see, this is exactly what I'm doing now, so you can see my blue snowball. But most important, I want to show you my webcam by doing it this way. What happens as well, if you're having an online meeting with webcam on your screen, as you can see is you speaking, or if somebody else is speaking. And naturally, when that's on your screen, that box, you have a tendency to look at the box on the screen. What I do is I purposely mount behind my webcam, the video part of it, of the online meeting, because that's where your eye wants to look and you want to train yourself to engage with your clients, to engage with the audience, to engage with your team. So that's the reason why I have an external webcam. Not just the quality, which is amazing, but because you want to keep engaged with people. That's really important in a virtual world. And as far as the tripod's concerned, there's lots of options for tabletop tripod. Just go onto Amazon and you'll find Options. The one I've got is a relatively expensive one. It's by Joby. You've probably heard of the Joby Gorillapod. I forget the full name of it, but it's basically a giant Joby Gorillapod because normally they're much smaller. This is just a big version which is about 30cm tall. You want one that you can raise your webcam. Because what you really want to do is when you have a webcam, is you want it to be on eye level. Okay, you need to have some lights. Lights don't have to be expensive. If you want to get some lights, there are so many options. You go onto Amazon and type in studio lights. There are so many options. Starting with, for example, if you're on a tight budget, if you've got the top one on the screen here, that ring light. There are lots of very inexpensive ring lights, very often designed for the beauty industry, people that do things like makeup and so on, or makeup videos and so on, because it's quite a flattering light. So you can get a very inexpensive ring light. LED ring light. The one on here is pound twenty. Twenty. Pound thirty bucks gets you a ring light, and then you can mount it on a little tripod. I have one of those. I have one of those which I take on my travels. If I'm doing a WEBINAR in the U.S. for example, it goes in a suitcase nicely. The only problem I find with those ring lights, because I wear glasses, is I end up with a halo reflection. So I personally, I have a challenge with the ring lights a bit. But whilst I haven't got them now because they're in Spain, the other ones you can see on the screen, the LED ones, they're really good because they give you a really bright light and there's usually a button behind that allows you to control how bright or dim it is. So they're a great option. There are so many different types of lights that you can get. But the point is, they're not that expensive. And because we're increasingly going to be doing more of this, you're going to be doing more of this type of communication, certainly for the next two or three weeks. But I think what you'll find is working patterns will change. So why not just invest in a good quality light? You will need a light stand to mount it on. It might not come with a light stand. They're not that expensive at all. The world's changing. The world's changing to virtual. You'll need this stuff. This isn't me saying this is an option you need to get this stuff. It's not that expensive. If you're on a tight budget, you can get started. That's about how you can get prepared for communicating with your team, communicating with your clients whilst you're stuck at home for the next few weeks. And what you'll find is that you'll get used to this. I know there are many accounting firms now increasingly now starting to run virtual offices. We were just about to upload into my YouTube channel an interview I did the other day with an extraordinary accountant from Durango in Colorado, Zeb Smith. And Zeb was. We were having a bit of a chat on the video about how he's now, most of his client meetings are done in the same way that we're talking right now, we're talking about the benefits of that, that you actually get a lot more done with an online meeting. And so that's his main way of doing business. Now this is. This is a trend that will continue. So we might as well get started now and get on the. Get on the start of this bandwagon, particularly as we have to with this current climate. Okay, let's move on to number three. How can you lead your business community? You want to be the leader, you need to be helping people. And I did put, by the way, those of you here on time on the opening slide, I did say put in the chat box. What are you doing right now to help your clients? I'd love to know. I put it in my Facebook group and some of you have been telling me what you're doing to help your clients. And that's awesome. I've seen people say, I've been sending out an email to people with updates on things. That's great. However, I think we'd go a step level. We need to go another level up because as I said, this is a time as a profession, the accountant, we have to step up. We can be the leaders.

In our communities. And that means we have to be talking much more to people. The trouble is we haven't got the time to be jumping on calls with every single client. And so what I'm going to suggest to you is that you.

Do a session just like this. You use the technology I've talked about and you run an online session for your clients, for your community.

And I'm going to say to you, you have to do this in the next seven days because there's so much fear, so much panic right now that they need help. The businesses out there in your community need help. And who else will they turn to? Nobody else will help them like you can. And we can't rely on the other accountants and bookkeepers down the road because most of them won't do this stuff. Okay.

You'Re here, you're listening to this message. Most aren't listening to this message. Most aren't going to change. You can do this. You can help people. You can step up and be the leader in your community. And so I'm going to implore you to do what I'm about, what I'm going to tell you in the next seven days.

I want you to run an online session. I want you to make sure you've got the technology, the equipment, it's dead easy, don't worry about it being perfect. And I want you to go out there with a message, an email through your Facebook group, if you have one, through your various social media connections to your clients, your prospects and everybody else that you're connected to in your community and send an email out saying that you're running a session. These are difficult times.

The email that many of you came today because I sent an email out, if you're thinking this is something that's time critical, you cannot put this off. I want you to commit to doing this in the next seven days. I was last week I was running my value pricing academy. Last week was a crazy busy week. I spent, it's my one week of the month where I'm training my audience and I was writing brand new content. I was online, teaching, teaching, teaching. At the back of my mind, I'm thinking, as this crisis is unfolding, I'm thinking I need to help my community. But I just couldn't do it over the weekend. I'm thinking I need to do something Monday, I said to my team, to Sarah and Emily, I said, on Monday, I said, we need to do a webinar. Let's look at the calendar. Let's do one on March 31st. And so we planned March 31st, which at the time of recording, this is next Tuesday. I decided, we'll do that at the end of the day. I said, no, this can't wait. This is way too important. This is critical. The accounting profession has to rise up now. Not in two weeks time, not in three weeks time. It's going to be too late for some of their clients. We have to rise to the challenge now. So I decided, you know what, we're going to go with, yes, we'll do the 31st, but let's do one on March 26th. It was two and a bit days out. I wrote an email or a little message to go in the Facebook group. I posted in the Facebook group. I had no idea what I was going to talk about at that point in time. I just put a message in the Facebook group that said, how to help your clients through these tough times. And it wasn't my best piece of copy, but I got over 100 responses from people saying, yes, I want to come along to this. We then sent out the same message as an email. It wasn't a great email, but this is important, this is urgent. This has to be done. Take my email that you got. Just take a version of that. Create your version of this, something for your clients. Just a simple headline. Time's a tough night right now. Let me share with you how we can get you through this crisis, whatever it might well be. Get something out there, pick a date to do this, and then what will happen is as you get closer to the time of doing this, you'll start to think of things that you can do that you can talk about. But what I'm going to do now is I'm going to tell you what you can talk about. And by the way, if you find this valuable, this message I think is too important to not share with other people. So if you think this is valuable and you know of other people that could benefit from this, I'm going to, I'm recording it just, you know, as a video. I'm going to post the video in various places. So you are welcome to share. When you see this as a video, please share it with people. So how can you lead your community if you're going to run an online session? How can what you, you're probably thinking right now, I've never done this before. What am I going to say If I invite people to a session and I've got my zoom camera on and I've got 10 clients turned up, what am I going to say? Well, let me give you four ideas. Okay? The first one is the obvious one. Just give them the facts and ease the fears. The facts are.

I don't know what country you're in right now, but all the governments are doing amazing things to try and help the business community. The trouble is, it's complicated. I know that in the UK that Boris Johnson's announced all sorts of measures for people over the last week and tonight the Chancellor is going to announce some more measures specifically for the self employed. I'm not an accountant in practice. I'm confused as to what I can Claim what I can do. I sent an email to my bookkeeper, Caroline, who might actually be here, and she kindly sent me an email back and with some thoughts which kind of confirm what I knew. But many business owners are just confused by it all and some of it's difficult. There are all sorts of things like loans and things, but in reality it's hard to get those loans because everybody's claiming for them. It's not as easy to benefit from some of the measures the government's doing as you perhaps think. If you're a business owner, your clients haven't got a clue, they are lost, they are confused. But you know the answers, or at least you should know the answers because this is the industry you're in. You need to make sure you know the facts. You need to know what grants are available, what loans are available, what are the various reliefs that the government's doing right now in the uk you can defer your VAT for a quarter, that's sales tax. You can defer your July, I think, tax payment by six months. There are many things that you can do. You need to know this. And just simply giving your clients the facts is adding massive value. So if nothing else, just do an online session to share with them all the various ways that they can get help through the government and how they do it. Okay, just give people the facts, ease their fears because they're worried, they're worried about the finances right now. Just by doing that is going to be hugely valuable. And it doesn't matter if you've only speak for 30 minutes, your clients are going to love you for it. When you offer to run a session for them, they're going to find that so valuable. So that's the first thing that you could do. The second thing you could do if you feel a little bit more confident is don't just give the facts the technical stuff, but you could teach, teach them, teach them how they can change their businesses, teach them some business advisory, teach them some ideas to help them grow their business.

Or you could even assuming if perhaps you're not confident with consulting work and advisory work, I know some people here are and if you are great, there's a of ton, ton of stuff that you can teach that will help them rethink their business and rethink about how they can win new business, and some of you have done my price consulting training, might be able to help them with their pricing. There's a ton of things that you can teach, but it could even be as simple as teaching them You've got clients that have been used to running busy offices. Now, like my software developers, all their team are working from home. So what I've shared with you today, you could teach them that. And by the way, I am more than happy for you to steal my content from this webinar today and use it if you like. Some of. If some of the things I said at the start was inspirational or motivational, use it with your clients because they need some inspiration right now. They need some motivation, they need some hope. So steal my content. There will be a recording. Go and steal it. Use it yourself with your clients. If you've got clients that are moving from the office to the house and they're having to communicate with the team again, use my content. Share with them how they can make that transition to working from home and communicating with their team and their customers. Okay, so there's plenty of things you can. There's no shortage of stuff that you can do to help your clients. You are in the knowledge industry. You know a ton of stuff, a lot more stuff than you perhaps give yourself credit for. You can teach people stuff. Let me give you a third idea that what you could do with your online meeting, it may be thinking, I'm not sure I know enough stuff to teach. Okay, fine. Instead, facilitate. Facilitate. What that means is, let's say you get 10 clients on board, 10 of your clients jump on your meeting. One of the things that you can do, which is very powerful with zoom, is if you've got a fairly small group, which is maybe what you get to start with 10 business owners, it may be that what you do is get them put their webcam on. This happens to be. I saw this a day or so ago. I was actually on it. I was being coached last year by Dan Martell, who runs SaaS Academy. He teaches SaaS businesses how to build a more successful SaaS business. And because of the crisis, he acted very fast and said, look, reached out to his community and said, let's jump on a zoom call. And what he did, it wasn't for teaching. It was just facilitating. It was just letting people talk to each other. This in itself is valuable. You do not need to have all the answers. Let me just share with you.

From a personal point of view. Back in February 2000, I was running my accounting firm. And in February 2000, I decided that what I would do is launch a business club, which I think ran for about two and a half years, two, three years now. I sold my accounting firm every month. I hired a venue.

And for a morning, typically about 15, sometimes 20 business owners, clients, prospects, sometimes a couple of bank managers would come to the venue and I'd set it up with a U shape of table. So everyone sat in a U shape. I was at the head of it and for about 45, 50 minutes I would teach, I would teach some business building content like marketing or how to systemize your business. I teach something, then we go and have 15 minutes for a break. Coffee was served, we do a bit of networking, do 15 minutes. And then for the second half, which was about 45 minutes, 60 minutes, we had a session which I called Meet yout Strategic Board. But essentially I facilitated. And all I did was I said to people, I said, who's got a challenge right now in their business or question? Someone would put that in and say, well, I'm struggling with this right now. And I wouldn't attempt to answer it, I would just say, okay, who else has got some thoughts on that? Could you help John here with that particular issue? And what you find is when you get business owners together that if you have 10 business owners, the wealth of experience in that room is mind boggling. And what I found was that facilitating was actually really, really easy. Once one person has a challenge, three or four more people will have some sort of insight on that, how they've got around that problem, how they've dealt with it. And the interesting thing was is I kind of thought the teaching bit would be the most valuable bit where I'm teaching something. But what I found out through feedback forms is that many, many times people said to me the most valuable part of the whole morning was the meet your strategic panel or meet your strategic board was just learning from other people. And so you can lead and add value to your clients just by bringing them together, just bringing them together and you facilitating. When I listened to what Dan did on this particular one, he basically threw some questions out and other people then came in with their thoughts and shared with each other. Sometimes he would chip in as well. That's fine. If you as a facilitator have got some thoughts, some answers, then by all means give those. But the great thing about facilitating is that you do not need to have all the answers. You don't need to be teaching all the time. You're just pulling a community together.

A self help support group. It's really easy to do. Okay, number four, the fourth thing that you could do to add massive value. And I think of all these, this is the most important is answer their questions. Because right now Today, in this current climate, your clients are confused, they're struggling.

They've got so many questions going through their mind, and they need somebody to turn to to help them get through these troubled times.

I think I mentioned before yesterday I ran a bonus session for the people who'd been through my how to price bookkeeping course. It was a bonus session, which was a Q and A session. We had 90 minutes. I spent, I think, 30 minutes just giving an overview recap of what we covered. But we spent 60 minutes Q&A. I just spent 60 minutes fielding questions. And I used to think that's not that valuable. And in my early days of doing webinars, I would either not do Q and A sessions or I'd keep them really short. Now, the Q and A session I've learned is probably the most important part. And sometimes I do sessions like yesterday, which is just a Q and A session. If you come to my monthly free training sessions, I do 60 minutes every single month. Then I do 30 minutes of content and typically 20, 25 minutes of questions. The questions are really important. And I used to think, I mean, there's hundreds of people on this webinar right now, and there's probably only about 13 questions in the chat box. And I used to think people don't value the Q and A section because only a handful of people ask the questions. No, that's not true. You see, what happens is many people who are on a session like this, particularly in the current climate, where they're really confused is they just don't know what questions to ask. They haven't got a clue where to even start. They've got so much going on their mind, so many problems, they don't know what questions to ask. But somebody else will ask a question, and you'll say, oh, I noticed that the Johnny Boys just asked this question. And what happens is other people think, I'd not thought of that. That's a really good question. I want to know the answer to that. So answering questions is incredibly valuable, not just to the small percentage that you actually answer their questions, but everybody gets value. And one of the things I found is because if you use online meetings, in the attendee box, you can see the numbers of people that are actually here. At the moment, it's 272. And what I find fascinating is when I then move to the Q and A session, what I find is that the drop off is fairly small. It's not like everybody, bar 10 people disappear. No, people want to hear the answer to questions because the reality is not everyone can even think of the right questions. But when somebody else comes up with a question, then there's real value in the answer.

Most of the questions that come out are actually ones that everybody wants to know the answers to. They just haven't thought through the questions because they've got so much going through their mind. They're so confused. They're in this crisis mode. So if nothing else, you could run an online session as just a Q and A. It could be a. You could call it a clinic, whatever you want. Get business owners together and answer their questions. Okay. Some people might have a few worries with that. What happens if nobody answers a question? What if there's no questions? I have 17 now. It's gone from 13 to 17. What if there's no questions? Have a little bit of content up your sleeve is one option. Another one is make some questions up. Think about what questions might people have, and then either just say, we've got no questions at the moment. But here is a couple of questions that we've had from other clients we've been speaking to. Because you will have had clients asking questions. You will know the sorts of things they're asking. So create a list of questions. If you're doing a Q and A session and that's all you're doing, just come up with some questions. And what you'll find is that. And I always find this, is that once you start going through the answers and questions, other people start coming in with questions. In fact, what's interesting, and some of you, if you come to my sessions regularly, you'll notice is very often the case, I'll say, okay, we're almost. We're kind of getting close to the end of our time. And actually I've noticed there's only one more question left and there's only three or four questions come in. All of a sudden, just about to finish, more questions come in. So that worry of what happens if people don't ask questions, just prepare for that and have some up your sleeve. But you will find the questions will come in. I have 18 now. I'll probably find that there's probably going to be 20 or 30 before too long. That's the way it will work. Okay, perhaps a bigger challenge that you're having right now with the idea of questions is this.

What happens if somebody asks me a question and I don't know the answer?

Well, what you don't do, please never, ever, ever make up an answer or guess at something. Okay, you're a professional You're a knowledge. We're in the knowledge industry. People look up to us, okay? Don't guess, don't make stuff up, okay? The reality is, most the time you will know the answer. Because the reality is that most people's questions are things that are hard to them, they don't know. But this is stuff you deal with day in, day out. This is your industry. You know the answer to these things. These things. So for you, most the time the questions are really, really easy. But sometimes, sometimes you get a question you don't know the answer to. This is what you do. It's really, really simple. If somebody asks a question, you just say, that's a really good question. I've never been asked that one before. And if I'm honest, I don't actually know the answer to that one. But what I'll do is I'll make a note of it, I'll go away, I'll find out the answer and I'll come back to you. Is that okay? Also, we have 270 people on this call right now. So if anybody else knows the answer to that question, stick it in the chat box and that will really help. Johnny boy. So two things we're doing there. Number one, I mean, just be open and honest. If you don't know it's not, people will respect you for that. Just say, I don't know the answer. I'll go and do some research and I'll come back to you. That's great. But also, make use of the people that are there. Because the great thing about these online sessions, I mean, the chat box has gone absolutely mad today. I'm not going to look at it because it's gone absolutely crazy. People on these online sessions communicate and help with it, help each other, and that's great. It doesn't have to be you giving the answer. If they come away with the answer, their burning question, then you're the person that pulled this community together. You're the one that's the hero. You're the leader. It doesn't have to be you that gives the answer, okay, this stuff is not difficult. You can do this. You now know what the technology is. It's not expensive. If you haven't got it, go and get the technology. Go and get it today and then decide what you're going to teach in the next few days or what you're going to share or what sort of session you're going to do. If you decide to do any of the first two, still do a Q and A as part of it. Because Q and A's are where a lot of the value is.

Let's talk about the future opportunity. Because we, this, this crisis, this change that's taking place is forcing us to adapt in various ways. We're having to adapt to working from home, we're having to adapt to communicating in different ways. We're having to now adapt because.

We need to get this message out to our clients, to our communities. And so, and by the way, I want every one of you to do something in the next seven days. I want you to get the technology and run a support session online for your audience, okay? Even if three people show up, the great thing about doing it this way is it's a scalable way. You can deliver real value for 30, 60 minutes to people in a much easier way than to go and have one to one conversation with your clients. All your clients want help right now. They want you to talk to them, but you probably haven't got the time to do that. You have to scale. They use the technology. But here's where the opportunity then lies. You see.

Once you start to get used to this way of doing business, you'll find, as I said earlier, you may well find that working from home and having virtual meetings enables you to be more productive. It enables you to get a better work life balance. For example, I've been doing this for many, many years now. I start work early because I'm an early morning person for the last 11 days now, I've gone on the bike at 11 o', clock, I've gone for a ride, I go out most days on my bike when other people are stuck in an office, can't do that. And then if I have to work in the evenings, that's fine. There are so many benefits of this working arrangement. But here's an opportunity for you. You see, if you run a session in the next seven days, and you are going to, aren't you? When you run a session next seven days, even if only five people show up, what you'll probably find at the end of it is that wasn't as hard as I thought. And what I want you to do is think about doing another one. So I'm doing this again next week, do another one.

You might decide to do one a week. At the end of that, you might find you've got certain clients that keep coming back because they're getting real value from what you're doing. So why not then do what I did in the year 2000, but I didn't use Technology. Why not launch a business club?

Why not say, right, I'm doing this now. Why don't I do this every single month from now onwards? Every month I run a session for 90 minutes. People then come along. I invite my clients, I invite my prospects, I invite my key introducers like the bank managers, the IFAs. I invite people to come along where I'm going to teach some stuff, I'm going to do some Q&As, I'm going to facilitate. And then what you do is you charge a membership subscription for that, and it may be for the next two or three months, it's free. You say to people, after you've done a few of these, you might say to people, and they're saying to you, this is valuable stuff. If they're saying this is valuable stuff and they keep coming back, then you might say, do you know what? I've had so many people saying this is valuable. We're going to do this every single month and we're going to add huge amounts of value and it's going to be a membership and it's going to be $97.

Just think this through. What if 10 business owners decide to show up every month and pay you $97? That's $970 for delivering 60 minutes of content. Bit of preparation, bit of other stuff. This is scalable. What if over three or four years, those 10 clients grow to 20, 30, 40, 50 clients turning up every single month paying $97 to come and hear you share your knowledge? This could be the start of an interesting opportunity because in our profession, in the accounting profession, we've always worked one to one historically, and that's the way most of the stuff you can't do, group tax return, it has to be done one to one. We can't do group bookkeeping. It's one to one. And that will continue that way. But of course, we're basically swapping our time for money with that model. So why not think a bit different and think, could we change our business model here, still keep that model for compliance work, but could we change our model to something more scalable, where our clients pay us a subscription? And what we do is we jump online with a group of them and we deliver content and we do sharing sessions and we facilitate conversations and we answer questions. And it may be, as that grows, you do other things, you send them some videos and some resources in between, and then perhaps you can then put your membership up and it may be four or five years from now, you've got A hundred people paying you $97 to come and listen to you every single month and to get the other resources you create. You could do the math. It's not that difficult to do, but that's the opportunity that I think you have.

You have to do this now anyway because your clients are looking to you. You have to do this. But just think what it might turn into. I'm going to share with you quickly some stuff that I've got for you for free, some free support. I also want to deal with what there's one big objection many of you are having right now. Some of you are thinking, I know you're thinking this thing, Mark, I can't do this. And I'm going to smash that one a short while. So hold that thought. I've got something really important to share with you. And then I'm going to answer your questions, which there's 20 now. Okay. One of the things I do, as many of you know, is my goal. I'm a chartered accountant. I love this profession. I only work with the accounting profession and I want to change this. I think it's a great profession. I love this profession and that's why I do a lot of. Most of what I do is free. I do. If you, if you're not aware, I have a YouTube channel and there's pretty much a brand new video goes up every single week. I don't know if you knew that. There's a new video every single week. So if you want to help with pricing, go and check out my YouTube channel. I do a blog post pretty much every single week as well. So go and check out the blog post. But here's some more other things that I do and I'm going to put the links in the chat box. I have a Facebook group called Value Price with Mark Wickersham. I guess many of you are in it right now. It's a community of just short of 6,000 accountants and bookkeepers who want to learn more about value pricing. If you're not in that community, make sure you join it because even though the theme is pricing, I'm happy for you to use it to ask the group other questions. And I'm going to encourage you to put in the group, what are you going to do over the next seven days? Or what have you done to help your clients? Because that will inspire people. By the way, in the chat box, I am going to put all the links in a second. Let me just. In fact, I'm just going to grab them right now and I'LL put the links in the chat box. So I also wrote an e book last year called how to Price Bookkeeping. If you've not got that yet, I will put the link to that in the chat box. I also did a benchmarking survey last year. 2,683 accountants and bookkeepers took part where I looked at how people price bookkeeping services. I will give you a free copy of that research report. Another thing I do every single month is I jump online just like this. This is a big an extra unscheduled one. But every month I do a free live training session where I teach for 30 minutes. Usually value pricing, sometimes it's marketing, depending on what the audience tells me they want and then I answer questions. I do that every single month. I send out an email to everybody once a month to say next week it's this topic. And then I remind you with 15 minutes to go if you want to get access to me teaching you some content every single month, I'll give you the link to go to if you don't already get the emails. Before we get on to Q and A, I want to just deal with one more thing I've said to you that you have to rise to the challenge. I want you to make a commitment today to do a live session in the next five working days and invite your clients, your prospects and through social media, any other business owners in your community.

I guess the one thing some of you are definitely thinking is I can't do this. I'm an introvert.

I'm sorry. That's not an excuse. That's not an excuse for rising to the challenge. But let me also share with you. It's interesting that in the Bookkeeper's Pricing Academy and the Value Pricing Academy, Theresa Slack was doing a session just this week on disc profiling, which is really, really powerful. I profiled myself about 15 years ago. I don't know if you come across disc or not disc, but and I'm not going to talk, I forget what they all stand for. But I essentially is how much of an extrovert or introvert are you? And my profile is I'm pretty much off the charts. I am as introverted as you can get. When I was at school, I had a real challenge. In fact, I had a real problem because I was that shy. I seriously struggled. I had some close friends, but I was the one that I got picked on and bullied. In my final year at school, I did economics and in my final school report, my economics teacher put in My school report, he said mark has an economy with words. I didn't speak. I was that shy. I only got through university and house parties because I discovered alcohol. Alcohol was a real help for three years through university. I then felt much more confident. I then started my accounting firm in 1996 and I found actually because I knew my stuff, I found that I was okay in one to one conversations and I even enjoyed meeting prospective clients one to one. I hated it with the larger clients when I was in a boardroom of five directors that was scary but one to one I was fine. But what I really hated in business was I knew I had to go to networking events and, and banks would invite me to various events and so on. I hated those. I was scared of networking events. I seriously struggled and I still struggle to this very day. I only ever. My rule to myself now is when I go and speak at conferences I'm going to speak at three a year. We decided this year after attending every single Account X in London, we weren't attending this one as it happened, it's been cancelled, which is strange but I've exhibited at every single Account X and it's the one time in the year, the two days that I have the most dread because for me to stand on an exhibition stand and have to talk to people scares the life out of me. I go to QB Connect in San Jose every November I have done for the last five years now. I love speaking on the main stage but I really struggle when there's a thousand people there and everyone's coming up to me wanting to talk to me. That to me is really uncomfortable and I find it tough when I look at other people who I look up to admire who are holding court and people like some of the Aussies like Clayton Oates who can just talk to loads of people. Some of the Canadian friends I have like Tamatha Denyers and like Jenny Moore, they just love talking to people. And I look at these people and think why can't I do that? Why do I struggle with that? I also found that I also had a fear. I have a fear of the telephone and it's completely irrational. In my accounting firm I used to dread making phone calls to clients. I used to dread particularly talking about money. And bizarre as it might sound, I don't even feel comfortable on the telephone talking to friends and family. I am about as introverted as you can get and I know you're watching me right now and people say to me mark, you're not an introvert because because you do webinars, you do videos all the time. You're on the stage talking to a thousand plus people at scale New heights. I am about as introverted as you can get. And one of the things I think about the accounting profession is you may well be as well because in our profession accountants and bookkeepers do tend to be more introverted, whereas salespeople are extroverts. So I guess you might be able to relate to me and say some respects. One of the things that really helped me was a few years ago I came across someone called Susan Cain and she did a TED video called the Power of Introverts. And I'm going to strongly suggest to you that if you're an introvert, go and type this into Google and go and watch this. I cried in this because.

I've struggled being an introvert in my life and I mean now I've built a business that I don't have one to one, I don't do one to one consulting because I struggle with people. It's not. I don't love people. I have so many friends when I go to these conferences, when I go to America to QB Connect and Canada, I have so many friends. I love to visit them but I struggle in crowds, I struggle in social situations. I watched this and I cried.

And I cried because I finally understood who I am.

I finally understood that I have a place in this world that's really important.

And I'm sorry if you're an extrovert for a minute for what I'm about to say, if you are an extrovert, I apologize. But one of the things that Susan said, and I think this was really hard hitting, she said that it's the introverts, the people that change the world.

And I think there's a lot of truth in that. Because I am an introvert, I spend most of my time in my own head. I can't stop thinking. I go on my bike every day not just because I enjoy it, in fact, sometimes I hate it in the weather. In the UK I go on the bike because I do my best thinking. I scripted today on my bike today and yesterday. The words came to me in my head. I live in my own world. And when Boris Johnson announced that we have to isolate ourselves, for me, an introvert, that's kind of heaven because I don't have to talk to people. When Boris said on Monday night.

We'Re allowed to go out on our bikes and do exercise once a day but you must go on your own.

For me that was great. Because when I go with other people, they just want to talk to me and I want to think. I want to think. So if you're an introvert, watch this TED video. It's 18 minutes. It changed my life. It told me who I was. It told me the place I had in this world. I have a message to share. I have stuff I want to teach the world. I want to change the world. I want to change the accounting profession. And that's what I do. And one of the things I've learned over my journey over the years is, interestingly, I follow a lot of the other leaders. I follow people like Brendan Burchard. I learned video from a guy called J. I forgot his surname now J. I always think it was James. An American guy called James who used to be a bartender and then start teaching video. And all these people have also said to me via video that they're introverts. And I find that hard to believe. If you've ever seen Brendon Burchard, he is the on stage, he's just amazing. He's just jumping up. He's got so much energy. But he explains why he's an introvert. And I think it's interesting that if you are, if you're feeling that way, then this isn't an excuse to do what I'm telling you to do today. Because if you're an introvert, you've got a message to share with the world. You've got value. You have to get that out there. You have to help your community. You can be a leader, okay? If you're an extrovert, you can do it anyway. It's easy for you. You talk to people. But if you're an introvert, you. You can do this. And what I learned was that I can't. Dinner parties is my worst fear. I hate dinner parties. I hate interacting with groups of people. But what I learned was.

Being able to speak on the stage in front of a thousand people, being able to do a webinar, being able to stand in front of a video and do YouTube videos. It's nothing to do with introversion or extroversion. It's got nothing to do with that. Introverts struggle with conversation. But I have a message to share. You have a message to share. And when you're passionate about something, when you have some knowledge you want to get out there, you're passionate, you want to help people, then you'll get that message out there. This isn't me. I'm putting on an act. Whenever I'm on the stage. If you see me as a bundle of energy and joy and getting a message out there, that's not me tonight, tonight, I'll just go into my own little world and say nothing. Okay? So you have no excuse, no excuses whatsoever. I've given you everything you need to go and change the world. The technology that you need right now, how to go and run an online session. Your clients need you. They are begging for you right now. And whether you're an introvert, an introvert, or an extrovert, I don't care. You can do this. You must rise this challenge. So I'm going to ask you to, in the next seven days today, commit to a date in the next seven days when you're going to do this. Okay? Just help people. There's no excuses. This is the time for the accounting profession to rise up. You can lead. You can be the beacon of hope because people are struggling right now. Go out there, support your community.