Profitable Bookkeeping Conference - Day 1

with me. So some of them I tripled, some of them I doubled. Yeah, so it's been really, really good for me.

I started Florida Virtual Bookkeeper in 2016. Before then, I had been a corporate bookkeeper, so I was really good at the technical stuff, knew nothing about pricing, I didn't need to. When I officially hung my shingle in 2016, that's when I realized I really do not know how to be a bookkeeping business owner. So I thought I would just do what my previous tax accountant that I collaborated with did, charge by the hour. But because I was a new business owner, marketing is not really my thing, I started to undersharge myself from the beginning. Very beginning, and I did everything that Mark says you should not do. I did when I started. So I used to advertise on Craigslist offering to price match.

Can you believe that?

And my website, I used to use keywords like affordable and cheap, thinking that that will get me SEO and make me competitive. I had very slow growth for those first few years. And the clients that I was getting were not quality clients. And it reached a point where I felt like I wasn't being paid enough to make it worth my time to get out of bed and open a file. So something had to change. So I first came across Mark at around 2017. I started to subscribe to his email newsletter. I used to attend his free monthly webinars. I will catch his YouTube videos. I started to get a pretty good idea that value pricing was the way to go. I was leaving so much money on the table. Yes, I created packages, but I was not creating them correctly. And then I was putting my prices on the website, which I've learned since is a big no-no. So while I did a lot and I got to implement a lot of things, from the free materials. It wasn't until 2019 when Mark released the How to Price Bookkeeping course that things really changed in my business very quickly. I bought the course and because still at that time my business was very small, so it was a big investment, I made the commitment, I've got to get my money back. So I carved the time out. That first session, it was live 90-minute sessions. So I booked it in my calendar. So I could attend live because I knew that if I didn't catch it live, it's easy to procrastinate in catching up with the recording. And I was taking notes, but I didn't stop at taking notes. I then made it a point to implement something. I am happy to report that before I finished taking the course, the changes that I made paid for the course. So that was my big wow moment of, we're up to something here. This is what I should have been doing all along. And that gave me the motivation to keep making the changes.

Now it all seems better in your clear blue eyes. Jumping, jumping, jumping, falling, falling, falling.

Hey, welcome, welcome to the Profitable Bookkeeping Conference, and it's great to see so many people here today. We're going to kick off officially in 5 minutes, but I want to do a few welcomes and do a few shoutouts. And I've just noticed that we've got Caroline here from Perth in Australia, where it must be a crazy time in the early hours of the morning. So congratulations, Caroline, on being here. But let me go back to the beginning of all the comments. Let me do as many shoutouts as I can. I may not get through everybody, but we have Travis is here from Lexington in North Carolina. Hi there, Travis. Great to see you. We have Linda is here from Huntsville in Ontario, Canada. Where they— where you've got very gray winter skies right now. Oh, that's a shame. I live in Portugal, as many of you know, and it's bright blue sky right now. I think we finally— I think having had the worst winter in Portugal for decades, I think the spring's now here. We have, uh, where'd I get to? Tracy is here from Nashville. Hi there, Tracy. We have Laura is here from the UK. We also have LaShawn from Bowie or Bowie in the US. Julie Petra is here. Hi Julie, good to see you today from San Antonio. We have Jody from Philadelphia. Ryan Miller is here from Dutton in Ontario where it's surprisingly chilly today. If you just joined, we'll start in 4 minutes. Mark's here from Cheltenham. Hi there, Mark. We have Kelly is here as well. Kelly is from Central Florida where it's always bright and sunny skies. Scott's here. Hi there, Scott. You're from Texas. Hi Scott. And so Scott's having a great time because he says he's working on his front porch overlooking a lake. Sounds like you've got a good setup there, Scott. Karen's here as well from Somerset in the UK. Hi there, Karen. We've got Cindy from Ohio where the sun's shining, the air is crisp. Martin's here from Birmingham in the UK. Hi Martin, good to see you. We've got, I don't know your full name, but it says DJ, so I'll go with DJ. Hi there, DJ, from Southeast Southern, Southern from sunny Southern California, the land of perpetual summer. Yeah, it always seems to be. I love California. I've been many times. It's one of my favorite places. Amazing climate. Grace is here from London in the UK. Hi there, Grace. Lanita is here from— I don't know. She says, good morning, everyone. Hi there, Lanita. Dan's here from Colorado. Hi there, Dan. Great to see you again. What have you said? Weather's crazy. Oh, you've said before on the last live session, yeah, you've got incredible high temperatures for Colorado. Wow. Sharon Turner's here. Hi, Sharon, great to see you again. It's great to see so many names that I know well. So Sharon is here. Tammy is here as well from Columbus, where it's warm. We have Nick Price is here from Kent in the UK. We have, of course, Teresa's here from Canada. We'll meet her later. Dion Sherwood, hi there Dion from West Wales, good to see you and looking forward to seeing you very soon in May. Sandy's here from Iowa. Liz is here from Winnipeg. If you've just joined, we're starting in about 90 seconds. Just do as many more shoutouts as I can. Uh, Garen is here from Idaho. Philip is here from the UK where it's mild, dry, and a little breezy. So that makes a change, it's not raining. Carol's here. Hi there, Carol Kostajuk, great to see you. Hope you're doing well. She's from British Columbia where sadly it's raining. Kat's here from Indiana. Dan says, anyone else having problems with the audio this morning? I did a tech check with the team and I think everything's okay at this end, Dan, but we'll see. Laura says its signal seems jumpy as well. Um, but that's all I can see. Uh, Salma is here from Charlotte in North Carolina. Pat's here from Sacramento, lovely place. I love Sacramento, love the railway museum, great fun. We also have Richard here. Hi there, Rich, from the suburbs of Chicago. I'm just keeping an eye on the time so I can start on time because I've got loads of stuff to cover today. Ruben's here from Texas. Scott's here from I don't know. Oh, he says choppy as well. Okay. That's the audio. It could be a Zoom issue. I don't know. Pat is here from Northern Carolina. Leo's here from Texas. I might get 2 or 3 more in, then we'll have to start. Keith Bassett's here from Orlando. We have Grace from Atlanta. We have Laura from Eastern New York. We have Caroline is from Perth. I mentioned Caroline earlier. Okay. So where else have we got to? Stephen. From Loughheed, I think it is, in New York. We have Jill from Oregon, and I make it course 2. So if I didn't give you a shout out, I apologize. There are so many people here today, and I've got 44 new messages in the chat. So anyway, welcome to everybody, and we— this is the start of 3 days. Um, uh, Terry did— Teresa says the sound was only an issue when the music was playing. Okay, so hopefully it's all good now. Thank you for confirming. Right, we've got 3 days to talk about how do we make one of our core services, bookkeeping, more profitable. That's really the theme of our 3 days. And we've been running this conference now for, I think it's 5th year. I think it's the 5th year that we've done this. And I was thinking a little while back whether perhaps 4 times is enough. Do we do something different? But I got thinking, having seen some of the news recently. I don't know if you know, but Anthropic, who have the Claude large language model, they brought out a really interesting research report very recently based on all the data they've been collecting, and they were listing which jobs are the closest to disappearing because of AI. And the good news is, top of the list was not accountants. That's the good news. In fact, number 1 on the list is coders. And there's been a huge development in the last year, particularly the last 3 months, where vibe coding has become the talked-about thing in AI for most of the last 12 months. And What this essentially means is that anybody can create software now. There's a lot of talk about the SaaS industry going to have to change completely. Many SaaS companies will be dead. And just to— I can confirm that because I can't write a single line of code. But in the last— since Christmas, I've written— I've created 12 different pieces of software. I've created a number of software planning tools, financial planning tools like financial dashboards, retirement planners, and so on. And vibecoding enables us, the AI now can code better than humans. In fact, if you saw the recent announcements from each of OpenAI, from Google, and Anthropic, all of their last models were created by AI. So, and in the last couple of weeks, there's been a lot of news around the number of coders that have been made redundant. So it's pretty much here with coders, they are redundant. Now, junior coders certainly. What's second on the list? Oh, second on the list I wasn't too fussed about. Second on the list is lawyers. And again, the reason for that is because certainly when it comes to creating contracts, legal work contracts, then all this, all the contract law and so on is all, is all been, is up there and been trained. AI has been trained on that. And so it's got access to more information about contracts and so on than any single lawyer has. And so whenever I have to do any legal work myself, rather than go to a lawyer now, I just go to AI because I've learned how to craft the right prompts to do that. So coders first are being redundant right now in huge numbers. Laying— the legal profession has got a major problem. But unfortunately, third on the list is bookkeeping. And I've been saying for a few years now that that by the end of this decade, 2030, which is coming around really soon, by the end of 2030, bookkeeping as we know it will not exist anymore. And in fact, if you've been playing around with the brand new Claude Co-Work, which is extraordinary, we've got, we're starting to see agentic models now this year become really powerful. Claude Co-Work is extraordinary and it can do the bookkeeping for us. Now there are some security issues and a number of other issues, so it's not quite there yet, where we could all do our— automate the entire bookkeeping. But if you look at the speed at which Agentic AI has been going in the last few months, by the end of this year, we will be well on the way to seeing that bookkeeping is totally automated. So is there any point in running this conference? Well, yes, because there's still a role for bookkeepers and accountants when it comes to bookkeeping, but we have to change. We're going to have to change the way that we do things, and we also have to make sure that we are using value pricing more than ever before. I was reading an article just the other day from a firm of lawyers in Australia, and they were talking about how AI means that you cannot price based on the hour anymore, because AI means that things that used to take us hours to do, we can do in minutes. And if we're pricing based on the hour, we're going to see our rates, our prices coming down significantly. So we have to figure out new ways. We have to make sure that we create more value. We have to create We have to make sure that we capture that value in price. And we're going to talk about a lot of those things during the course of these 3 days. My, my role is to, to help the profession stay at the leading edge. And I personally see AI as being a huge opportunity for firms that want to grasp it. But there are many others that are going to get swept aside by the huge rate of change that we're going to see in the next couple of years. Okay, so a few things about the conference. Firstly, we have created a conference workbook, so do make sure that you've got that, and that was sent to you by email, but I think my team might also put a link somewhere in the chat box at some point in time. It's a great place to keep notes, so if you have got the workbook, you might want to make your notes there. I can't guarantee that we'll go through everything in the same order as the workbook because we've got some amazing guest speakers, so we might jump jump about a bit, but it's also, as well as a great place to keep notes, it tells you a bit about the speakers, what we're going to cover, the sessions, the schedule, and so on. In terms of the session, here is today. I know it's quite a small list, the details are in the workbook. Today, I'm going to be talking soon about how to avoid the biggest pricing mistakes that we need to fix. Then we've got some amazing guest speakers, and if you were watching the Countdown Music. You might have seen, seen some excerpts from them. So we've got Teresa Slack from Canada, going to be talking about systems for bookkeeping work, and we've got the amazing Jessica Fox as well, and she's going to be covering some great stuff around scope creep, which is a big issue. That's today's schedule. It's all in the workbook and the timings. Just a quick sneak peek of day 2. Day 2, really, I'm going to get into this whole idea of creating a pricing system. How do we systemize pricing pricing so we feel more confident about it. We're going to look at systems is really the most of the theme of tomorrow, and then we'll get into— and we've got an amazing speaker with Kim who you will meet tomorrow, and then Emily is going to talk about how do we attract high-value bookkeeping clients. And then looking ahead to day 3, which is Thursday, then again we've got another great lineup of speakers. Emily's coming back, we've got Jess coming back, Terry's back, And of course, me. So a lot of stuff to cover over the 3 days. And if you notice, for example, one of the sessions on Thursday, it says exclusive. I'll explain that. We have, by the way, got some bonuses over the course of these few days, some bonuses. I'll talk about, talk about those later. I'll talk about that exclusive session with me later as well. Now, if you've never been to one of our live sessions before, one of the things that we always do we recognize that we're in a privileged position, and there are people much worse off in the world than we are. So we are part of an organization called B1G1, and my good friend Paul Dunn and his wife have built it. And essentially the idea is that every time something good happens in your life, why not give something to other people more deserving? So the way that we do that is when you come live to one of our sessions, you are here today, we will make a contribution to a project somewhere around the world to help people who are less fortunate than us. And you get to choose, you get to choose where we make that contribution. So it works like this, either hold up your smartphone to this, to that QR code on the screen, or wait till Sarah puts a link in the chat. And when you go to the page, it will look like what you can see on the screen. You'll see 4 projects and 4 orange buttons. Simply just choose whichever of those projects resonates most with you. Which of those would you like us to make a contribution to on your behalf, click the orange button. There's no login or anything, no email required, just click on the button. And what happens is it will then take money out of our bank account, not yours, and make it, make a contribution to that particular project. So please do that. Please do that now or wait till, actually I can see that there's a, it's the links there in the chat. And please help make the world a better place too by choosing who we contribute to on your behalf. So a few other quick announcements before we dive in. I know that we've got some people here who are already members of the Value Pricing Academy. So if you are here, great to see you come back. I, I know you've been to these sessions before, probably many, many times, but it's great to see so many people I do know. And if you are an Academy member, I would love to know, put in the chat, what has it meant for you? What's the difference the Academy has made for you with with building your business. Please share your results, the impact it's had, because my team's going to pull them all together and I'll read them all overnight. So please, and please do keep the chats coming. Although I can't read all of them, I will make sure that I read them all overnight because I noticed Tracy said this with regard to the B1G1. This is amazing. Thank you for giving back. You're welcome, Tracy. Marti's here. Hi there, Marti. So she has confidence in giving quotes now, and we'll talk about the system that she uses later. We've got so much to cover in the 3 days. This is a big topic— how do we make bookkeeping much more profitable? We're going to cover as much as we possibly can, but if you, if you want to go further on this, then if it's okay with you, then later on during the course of these days, I'll tell you about an opportunity where you can enroll in a bigger program and go deeper on building a more profitable accounting firm, build more profitable bookkeeping service. Now of course there is no magic button. What we're going to talk about today is how do we make more money essentially. And the, the thing is though, there's no magic button. If I said that all you have to do is this, it's really easy, I would be fooling you. There is no magic button. You do have work to do. Building an extraordinary accounting firm is not easy. We do have to do the work. But what we will be sharing with you over 3 days is frameworks, frameworks that work. If you work the frameworks, if you follow the processes, if you follow the systems, you will get results. So we'll be sharing with you lots of frameworks over these 3 days. I know some people ask, will there be recordings? Yes, we are going to record it and the recordings will be available until the end of the week. However, I strongly recommend you be here live, and I know you are here live today. Why? Because when you're here live, you can interact with other people through the chat. You can also ask questions of me and the other speakers. I'll get to that in a second. Also because we've got some bonuses that you will not want to miss out on that we'll mention over the course of these 3 days. So yes, you can ask questions. Please do ask questions. We have got a Q&A Q&A session at the end of each day. All I will say is, and this is important, the two important things about questions. There's many of you now chatting away in the chat box. That's awesome. Please do feel free to chat away. That's great. If you have a question for me or any of the other speakers, can you use the Q&A box? So you might want to make sure you've got them both opened up on your screen. You'll see in Zoom you've got chat and you've got Q&A. You might have to click on the more button, but there's a Q&A box. So if you've got a question for me or the other speakers, please use the Q&A. And the reason for that is because so much stuff happens in the chat, I don't get to see it as, as it goes through. Yes, please ask questions in the chat if it's of my team who are monitoring it continually. If, for example, you've missed the link, you want to know where the link is, by all means put that in the chat and my team will get to that and deal with it. But I won't see those So please use the Q&A if you've got questions for me. And secondly, when you do ask questions in the Q&A, can you keep them short to about a couple of sentences? Because for a speaker, when it's a long question, it's quite hard live to read it all, take it all in. It's usually a long question, there's one that you need to go away and think about for a bit to get a better answer. So try to keep your questions short. If it needs to be, if it's more than one question, that's fine, just break it up, post them as separate questions. Okay. Please put questions in the Q&A, and please also keep them short. And so think about right now, you don't have to put a question in now, but just think about what is your number one question when it comes to pricing? If you think about that question, we'll try and cover it over these next 3 days. But if it comes to mind right now, why not put it into the Q&A, and then it's there, we'll get to it later. I have another question for you, and that is, I talk a lot about— and those of you like Carol Kostachuk and Linda Curtis who are regulars, and they put some really fascinating stuff in the chat right now— I talk about on these live sessions about there being two types of people that come along to these sorts of sessions, live conference, online conferences, webinars. There is the note-taker, the person that sits and takes notes which is a great thing to do, but taking notes alone is not going to change anything for you and help you get a better result. The people that get better results are the people that go away and take action. They are the action takers. And we're going to cover lots of ideas today. You're going to scribble down lots of notes today, tomorrow, and Thursday, but the people that will get the results are those that go away and do something. So my question for you is, are you an action taker or note taker? Which one are you? And I will come back to this a couple of times during the conference because I'll probably kick off tomorrow and ask you the question. So put in the chat, what action have you taken as a result of day one? So tomorrow we'll see who are the action takers. But for now, yes, feel free to type in there. Are you a note-taker or are you an action taker? I see Linda's put both, Linda Curtis, and I know she is an action taker because she does so many things and gets so many amazing results. Hi Linda, it's great to see you today. Thank you for showing up. For those of you that don't know who I am, let me just give you a quick bit of my background. So my name is Mark Wickersham. I am an accountant. I'm a chartered accountant. I am from the UK, but I now live in Portugal. Been here for 5 years. I entered the profession back in 1988, would you believe? Yes, I am that old. It's over 30 years. Yeah, it is, isn't it? It's a long time that I've been— it's a lot more than that. It's a lot more than 30 years. I've suddenly realized, yes, I am that old. I've been in the profession since '88. I went to work for a large multi-partner firm in Sheffield in the UK. I think it was 8 partners, did a training contract and qualified as a chartered accountant after 3 years. I then specialized in their tax department, became their corporation tax manager, and that then took me up to 1996. In '96, I decided I want to be in control of my destiny. I want to be my own boss. And I decided on the 31st of May, 1996, I would start my own accounting firm. I had no clients. I just had a spare bedroom. I bought a computer. I hired my first person, her name was Anne, to work part-time and help me build this business. And I started growing an accounting firm. It was an exciting time. I remember, I remember back in May '96, I was so excited about what the future would bring. And initially things went really, really well. In fact, I grew insanely fast. I was winning brand new clients every single week. Typically I would be getting couple of clients per week. And after 3 months, I'd moved out of my bedroom into my first offices, hired 2 junior members of the team, and then realized after 15 months I needed bigger premises still, hired more people. I was growing like crazy. I think I was quite good at marketing, but by the end of 1998, my life was a complete mess. 2 and a half years in, I found I was working crazy long hours. I wasn't making money. I was constantly going back to the bank with the begging bowl saying, please, sir, can I have some more money? Can I have a bigger loan? Can I have a bigger overdraft? I was growing too fast, and I was really, really struggling. And it wasn't until 1999 that I realized I'd made lots of mistakes. I'd made every mistake you could think of building an accounting firm. But the single biggest mistake I realized I'd made is, by the end of 1999, I met Ron Baker, who's now a good friend. Friend of mine, one of my heroes, mentors, and it was late 1999 where Ron Baker first mentioned to me the word value pricing. I'd never heard of it. I'd grown up in the accounting profession believing that we had to keep timesheets, that we had to price based on the hour, and when Ron said to me, no, you need to value price, for me this light bulb went on in my head and I realized that's got to be a better way of pricing. So I put my first value pricing system in place in late 1999. It was actually a tax system. And almost straight away, I was getting nearly 4 times the price. It was extraordinary. And so I became obsessed with value pricing. In 2000, I had the opportunity to stand on stage and teach over 100 people at a conference in the UK how I'd transitioned from time-based billing to hourly pricing. I then went into business with somebody called Steve Pipe in the UK. I spent the next decade teaching accounting firms how to build better firms and value pricing. I sold my accounting practice in the end. In fact, if I just pull on— this is a very old photograph. That's me in the middle, a lot younger version of me. I don't know the exact year. I think this was 2000, possibly 2001. We just got the Investor in People Award. Uh, and the, the people in the back row on the top left, top right, Steve and Jonathan, they bought my practice off me. I sold it, uh, I sold it shortly afterwards because I, I realized that I wanted to share this message with the profession. And so I started teaching value pricing. I then in 2010 wrote my first book. It was published in March of 2011. It was called Effective Pricing for Accountants. I've written several books on the subject over the years. I've got another one, I think, over my shoulder here. And I became known as the— along with Ron Baker— the expert in value pricing. I've been teaching it really since the year 2000, so what, 26 years now. And in 2014, I founded the Value Pricing Academy, and the Value Pricing Academy is now 11 years old. I have been teaching accounting firms around the world how to master value pricing and seen some extraordinary results. And we'll perhaps hear about some of those results as we go through. And as I said at the outset, Ron Baker first started talking about value pricing in the 1990s when he wrote his first book. I've been doing it since 1999 and sharing the message since 2000. And still there are so many firms keeping timesheets and pricing based on the hour. But because of what AI is doing right now, I believe that value pricing is more important than it's ever been before. And I have a bonus for you that I'm going to be sharing with you later on today. I did a, a training video, it's about 50 minutes long, and where I talked about how you can build a pricing system for bookkeeping using AI. And I wrote a workbook full of powerful prompts that you can use. I'm going to give that away completely free later on today. As a thank you for coming along live. So watch this space, uh, near the end we will share that link. That's the first of our bonuses. I did say we've got bonuses for you during the course of these 3 days, so make sure you keep showing up, you'll get bonuses. Right, I have a question for you. When you think about pricing, uh, and when you think about pricing things like bookkeeping work, what is your biggest challenge? What's your number one challenge when it comes to value pricing, when it comes to pricing work? Put it in the chat, put it in the chat and let me know. And the reason I'm asking that question is that my goal and the goal of our amazing guest speakers during these 3 days is to help you overcome all the challenges, all the challenges of running an accounting or bookkeeping business, doing bookkeeping work. And so what we'll do is during the course of the next 2 days, my team will be collating everything that you put in there. They'll give me a copy tonight. I'll read it tomorrow. And I will make sure that over the course of these 3 days, we do address all of the main challenges. I think we're going to cover them anyway, but just in case you come up with one that I've not thought about, I will make sure that at some point during these 3 days, we do talk about your biggest challenge. I can see many going through right now, like imposter syndrome, Value creation, what's the right price? I think Tracy means how to fairly assess the scope and determine pricing. I know we'll cover that today with one of our amazing speakers. But thank you for keeping putting those into the chat. We will do our best to deal with all of them during these 3 days. Because of course, there are lots of problems with pricing. Pricing is not easy. It's not easy. It is difficult for a whole host of reasons. So I thought I'd start off by sharing What are some of the big pricing problems? And having been talking about this now for over 25 years, I've come across a number of problems and I thought I'd list for you what I believe are the 10, the 10 biggest pricing problems that I come across talking to accounting firms around the world. So number 1 is the first problem is it's often seen as low-value work. Bookkeeping work particularly is seen as low-value. And compliance work generally, bookkeeping particularly. A lot of people see it as, well, it's just data entry, and it's actually so much more than that. And so we have to address that issue and deal with it, and we'll talk about that at some point during these 3 days. Also, another big problem we have with pricing and pricing compliance work, pricing bookkeeping work, is those cheap competitors. There's always somebody else with a lower price, and here's the issue. It's not— this isn't confined to bookkeeping or accounting. Whatever industry you are in, whichever marketplace you are in, there will always be somebody cheaper. There's always somebody cheaper. And the worst thing that you can do is compete on price. You can't compete on price because it's a race to the bottom. What you want to do instead is compete on quality, on value. You never ever see Apple ever do a sale. They know that you can buy a Motorola phone for a tenth of the price. They don't care because that's not their marketplace. So yes, you will always have cheap competitors. Don't worry about it. Instead, you have to focus on value. We may talk about that more, I don't know. Number 3 is we are pricing too low, um, as a profession. It's a big problem. I see it over and over again. Outside the Big Four firms, I don't think I've seen an expensive accountant or an expensive bookkeeper. We are pricing too low, and one of our big goals over these 3 days is to help you overcome that. Then we have the hourly mindset trap, which is something— it's because of the way that we've been brought up in the profession. When you first started, I don't know about you, but the first firm I worked for, I had to fill in timesheets every week, and they were broken down into 15-minute units. And that's the way I thought you had to do things. And every firm I worked for billed based on the hour. So it took me a number of years when I ran my own accounting firm to get out of that hourly mindset trap. And we must do that. We absolutely must, because there are so many problems with pricing based on the hour, so many problems, and I'm not going to go into them all now. I do remember when I first read Ron Baker's first book, he listed 13 of them. There are so many problems, but if I could just give you perhaps one or two, one of which is if you price based on the hour, you can't get paid until after you finish the work. And one of the things I find very strange is a lot of accounting firms, perhaps accountants more than bookkeepers, have on their balance sheet accounts receivable or debtors, which is crazy. We are in the service industry and we should always get paid in advance. Why do we, why do we create so much pain for ourselves? Well, if you are pricing based on the hour, you don't know what the price is going to be until you finish the work, you've added up the hours, and therefore you can't get the money upfront. So there's a cash flow problem with hourly. Also, the problem with hourly, and the single biggest problem, is customers hate it. Customers detest hourly billing because everybody, when they buy something, wants certainty. They want to know what the price is going to be with certainty. And We don't know that if it's hourly billing. When I used to go to firms of lawyers to ask some work to do, one of my questions would be, so tell me, what's the price going to be? And they would say to me, Mark, Mark, we don't know the price. We've not started the work yet. But what I can tell you is we charge $250 a month. And don't worry, we keep accurate timesheets. And at the end of the work, we will send you a nice itemized invoice that lists everything we've done, the number of hours. And I hate that. I want to know a price. Just tell me the price, because when you send it as an itemized bill afterwards, when it's, it's always a shock, it's always a surprise. Customers absolutely hate it. And so that should be the only reason you need not to price based on the hour. Then number 5 is confidence. And we've seen this mentioned a few times. We might come back to this. Well, I will come back to this later. Confidence is a huge issue. In fact, I would argue it's the— it's probably the biggest issue. It's the first thing we want to overcome on our journey to value pricing. And many of us price too low because we don't have the confidence to have higher prices. And I'll come back to confidence later and talk about, well, how do we start to become more confident? We have to deal with that. Then we have number 6, which is really really is one of the causes of confidence is a lack of knowledge. We don't know how to price. We don't know how to value price, but I would say that's not your fault. Please don't beat yourself up about that. It's just something we've never been taught. It's not part of professional exams, and yet it's one of those soft skills that is one of the most important things. Pricing is everything. If we price too low, we'll always be working crazy long hours and not making enough money. So we need to make sure that we learn how to value price. And the great thing is for you is you are here. So you're going to learn a lot over these 3 days. Then another big problem we have is uncertainty of scope. Someone mentioned it earlier as a challenge in the chat. I saw this is a big issue. This is an issue that companies like Starbucks don't face. If we were selling coffee, it will be easier because with coffee, You know, with every, every latte you sell, how much milk goes in there, how much coffee goes in there. But for us, unfortunately, in the accounting profession, we're selling a complex service and every client is different. There is such a wide range of scope. If we're talking about bookkeeping, then the scope could be how many transactions a month. Some clients have just 2 or 3 transactions a month. If it's a property developer, others have tens of thousands of transactions a month. What about number of bank accounts that we have to reconcile? That impacts on the scope of the work. There are so many things, and so this becomes a big issue. How do we deal with that? We'll talk about that during the course of the sessions, particularly, particularly today with one of our guest speakers. And then another big problem which really stems from that: how do we come up with a price? How do we calculate a price? I'm going to talk about that in tomorrow's session as we start to build up a pricing system. And linked to that is you've probably now heard about the power of giving people choices, options, creating packages. And I know that's now common. When I started doing this back in 1999 and then teaching it, it was less heard of, but now I guess everybody's now aware that we should be creating packages. But the challenge is, well, how do we do it? How do we build them the right way? Because There is definitely an art to it and a science. There is a right way and a wrong way to build out our packages, and we'll talk about that as well over these 3 days. And then another client, another problem I hear over and over again is, okay, so Mark, I know I need to move to value pricing. I never, I haven't been doing that before. How do I move my existing clients? How do I move people across to value pricing? And we'll touch on that as well. So they are what I see as being the 10 biggest problems that we have with pricing bookkeeping work, but also any form of compliance work. And so we'll address hopefully all of those to some extent during the course of these 3 days. Now, of course, those problems then lead to consequences, and those problems mean that many people in the profession, perhaps you, find yourself working too hard. I came across somebody the other day who was working 70 hours a week, and their goal was just to bring it down to 45 hours, which I still think is a crazy amount. We are working way too hard as a profession, and that's largely because we're pricing wrong. Therefore, we're not making enough money, and therefore we feel like we have to put some more hours in. If we work longer hours, if we work longer, put in the work, then we can bill more and everything will be okay. So we tend to be working too hard and working too hard for too little money. We're just not making enough profit. We're not— our margins are too low. And that was me back in 1998 and early 1999. I found when I went into practice in May of '96, one of the big reasons I went in to run— start want to run my accounting firm is because back in the UK, back in those days, the firm I worked for, you got 28 days holiday a year. That's 4 weeks plus the statutory holidays as well, which isn't much. And so 4 weeks is not a lot of time for vacations. And I decided I want to start my own accounting firm because I want to choose. I want to choose how many hours I worked. I want to choose when I went on vacation. What was interesting was that by early 1999, I was actually working longer hours than when I was a corporation tax manager in practice. I was working longer hours and making less money. And I know I'm not alone when I tell that story, because there are many other accountants, bookkeepers who tell me the same thing. They're working harder than ever before, and they could probably make more money if they went and got a job. And the root cause is pricing. We have to fix that pricing problem, because it cannot go on. You cannot keep working harder and harder and struggling to make ends meet. We have to break the cycle at some point. But there are other consequences. Another one of pricing wrong, not knowing how to price, perhaps pricing based on the hour, is complaints from customers. The number of times in my early days of running my practice, I would get people complain about the price, particularly when I was keeping timesheets and billing based on the hour. They'd complain, and I, I always was on— I was on the back foot. I was always trying to justify the prices And I found sometimes customers decided and just chose not to pay and go somewhere else. And another big consequence of all these problems is we end up, if we don't tackle things like scope creep properly, then we find ourselves with lots of unexpected work we weren't expecting. And because we tend to be nice people in the profession, when there's some extra work, we just do it because we want to do a great job for our clients. So we end up often just doing work that we don't get paid for. So a lot of challenges. It sounds quite depressing right now, I guess, but the good news is I think there are lots of opportunities in the profession. And when I— over the last couple of decades now, I've been collecting success stories of firms who have changed, and it's extraordinary some of the stories I come across. For example, you're going to meet later on today, you'll meet Jessica. She's an extraordinary bookkeeper from the US. And I remember she started working with me back in 2019, and about a year or so down the line, she just sent me this post where she shared the results she got within the first year or so. And it was extraordinary. Two years in a row, she'd increased significantly her fees and her bottom line profit. I think it was in the second year of working with me, she said she'd increased her net income by just short of 100%, just short of doubling. And she'd done something similar the year before. She runs an extraordinary firm now. We're going to hear all about it, but you can do this too. When you figure out pricing the right way, you can get those sorts of results. I got an amazing story just 2 days ago, I think it was 2 or 3 days ago, from Sarah Bridges. I don't know if she's here or not. She usually comes to my live sessions. If you, if you are here, Sarah, then welcome to you. She sent this a few days ago in our community. She said, use my QBO setup model last month and got 2 setups for $794 each with no flinching at all from the clients. By the way, what I mean by that is she just set people up with a QBO account, a QBO accounting system, something which I know from experience many firms just do for free or undercharge. Um, she got 2, didn't flinch. And so that raised in her mind the question that perhaps she was even still too cheap there. So she raised her base fee in the software we'll talk about how she did that tomorrow when we look at pricing systems. She raised her base fee, and she just landed yesterday, which I think was about 3 or 4 days ago, a QBO setup of $1,354. And we get those sort of stories all the time of firms who are just doing some extraordinary things, getting much higher prices than they thought might have been possible. You're going to meet Kim tomorrow. Kim's amazing. She, when she first started using the systems that we teach, she sent a long story to us, the highlights of which were, not only did it provide me with 154% increase from what I would have charged using my old pricing methods, but my price is a whopping 902% increase from what his previous bookkeeper was charging him. And I share that because there's something interesting about this story is not only did she get a much, much higher price, but her price was hundreds of percentage higher than what the previous bookkeeper was charging. And it goes back to one of the things I said earlier with our big challenges is that it's the, the cheap competitors. And so we often think we have to compete based on price. If that's what the other people are charging, we have to charge something similar. No, we don't. Because a lot of our clients, they want more from us. They want more value. They want us to do more things. And the right clients will happily pay us more money when they understand what they're getting. But most people don't get that option. They just get said, yes, we can do the bookkeeping, this is the price, and we can do so much better than that. And very often I come across stories of people who have taken on a client from somebody else and they've charged double the price and sometimes more. And in the case of Kim, 902% higher was her price. So yes, you can do these things. So let's talk about— and I can see loads of questions, by the way, in the Q&A. We're going to do the Q&A at the end, so I'll try and answer as many of those as I can today. So yeah, but please keep the questions coming and please come across. Please come. Please also— sorry, I got sidetracked reading a comment. Please keep the chats coming. I just saw Stephen say Mark Wickersham comes across as very clear and understandable. Thank you for that feedback. Um, let's talk about one of the big challenges. And I said this is really the starting point to address is very often the reason why we are too cheap, we are too low with our prices, is because of confidence. We don't have the confidence to price higher. And there's a number of reasons for that. And I think bookkeepers find that a bigger problem than accountants. I know we have a mix here of people who are bookkeepers and some are accountants. Accountants are, have a little bit better here, I think. I think the reason bookkeepers struggle particularly is because a lot of people see bookkeeping as it's just bookkeeping. And what we have to do first and foremost is we have to change our belief. Very often we We don't believe we're worth it. That's the problem. We have to change our belief, our belief. We have to believe that yes, we are worth it. Yes, we can charge higher prices. And one of the reasons why when I do these sessions, I share success stories like the ones that I've just shared, people like Sarah, like Kim, like Jessica. I share these stories because I want you to start to see that what is possible. I'm sure all these, all these people would admit they're just ordinary, normal accountants and bookkeepers, just like I was always an ordinary accountant, but I just figured out a different way. I figured out a different way of pricing. And one of the things we just have to do to start with is believe. So I share these stories so you can see what other people like you are doing, that this is possible. You can get higher prices, and sometimes you can get double the price, sometimes triple, triple the price. When we just follow the frameworks. So we have to first address the internal conversations in our head. Yes, we are worth it. Yes, you are worth it. And one of the ways that we can do that is by making sure that we collect success stories. You'll meet later Teresa Slack. She talks about having a brag book, which I love that phrase. What we mean by that is think about all the years that you've been in business. Think about all the years in business. Think about all the people you've worked with over the years and think about what are some of the best results you've got for people. Think about some of the successes that you've had. When I start to think about this, I realized that I had some— I came from a tax background, so I did a lot of tax planning, but I had some situations early on in my accounting firm where I saved people huge amounts of money, sometimes six-figure sums of money. And in the first three years of doing that, I had no idea how to price. I priced based on the hour. I have one crazy story which I won't go into today, but I remember one of my last tax planning jobs before I discovered value pricing. So this was in 1999. I saved a client. I got them a refund. I got them a refund of— it was— I got a refund of £60,000. And I put something in place that would save them that money every single year. £60,000, they got a refund straight away, and £60,000 saving every year thereafter. I charged them £250. £250 because I had a system that I'd created in my accounting firm, and I had the knowledge in it, and I could do the work for just a couple of hours. This is the problem with pricing based on the hour. But when I switched to value pricing, I thought to myself, I'm worth more than $250 per pound, as it was in the UK. I can make— this was a client, actually changed their life in a number of ways because the sum of money was quite significant. And we can all do that. And if you're listening and thinking, well, I'm a bookkeeper, I can't do that, you can do extraordinary things. Sometimes I've heard of bookkeepers who have done the bookkeeping, found a problem in the books, explained to the client, and and it saved their business because if they had not fixed that problem, they might have had a problem with the HMRC or IRS, the tax authorities. We can do some extraordinary things. So just start to think about the successes you've had, the results that you've got, and then think to yourself, yes, I am worth it. I can do extraordinary things. This is all belief, so we have to change our belief. Yes, you are worth it. We also can improve our confidence when we have the knowledge, when we know how to do something, we become more confident. And so a key part of, of confidence is having the knowledge, the skills that we need. And you're here over these 3 days, you're going to learn a lot of stuff. And I think thirdly, a third component of confidence is also having the systems, having a structure, a process, a system that will get you consistent results over and over again. And tomorrow's theme, for much of tomorrow, we'll be talking about building a pricing system. When you believe you're worth it, when you know how to price, when you have pricing systems, then you will have much more confidence. And what happens, which is really interesting, is that when you have low confidence, then that low confidence comes across in your conversation with clients. They can see that, they have greater pushback, And so when you get clients arguing about your price, querying it, that reduces your confidence. So next time you are worse, you're on this downward spiral. But once you break out of it, once like Kim, for example, her success was extraordinary in just a few months. Once you get some successes, then that increases your confidence. And as your confidence increases a little bit, then the next time you have a pricing conversation, because you feel more confident, you'll get even better results. And that will increase your confidence. And we end up with this upward spiral of bit by bit getting more and more confident and getting better and better results. So when you hear me talk about stories of people who have doubled their prices, people who have doubled their profits like Jess, then this is because they've been on that upward spiral of doing things that are— they're all action takers. They're putting into place, doing, working the frameworks, and getting better results, getting more confident, getting better results, getting more confident, and so on. You can do this. You can do it. So we need to fix that issue of confidence, right? I'm going to talk— we're going to talk a lot about pricing. And I know that we have hundreds of people here today. You're all in a different place. I know you're in a different place. So one of the things I talk about a lot is the idea of the value pricing journey. And what I mean by this is value pricing is difficult. I said that earlier, value pricing is difficult. It's 26 years on, I'm still learning bits about value pricing, and partly because it's a relatively new field. Nobody taught about pricing 50 years ago, and really it's something that's gained momentum in the last 10, 20 years. A big part of value pricing is behavioral economics and price psychology, both things that there's been a lot of research in the last 2 decades, which we didn't know about 20 years ago. So there's a lot of new stuff that we're still learning about pricing. It is difficult. And it's also difficult because value itself is subjective. Sorry, yes, it's subjective. One of the reasons we like our timesheets is because it feels objective. We can measure something. Doesn't matter that we're measuring the wrong things, we feel happy because we can measure time. Value we can't, it's subjective. You can't touch, feel, or measure value. And as my friend Ron Baker says, value is in the hearts and minds of customers. Everybody values things differently, and that makes it It's difficult, but that doesn't mean we give up. So my advice has always been, I teach this process called the Value Pricing Journey. Let's just take it one step at a time. So for example, if you're at the beginning, if you're still keeping timesheets and billing based on the hour, well, the first thing to do is let's just move to fixed pricing. I'm going to talk about that tomorrow when we look at pricing systems. Let's just move to fixed pricing. Fixed pricing, by the way, isn't necessarily value pricing. The way that most people use fixed pricing, it's still a form of time-based billing. The only difference is it's based on our best guess at how long it will take. What I mean by that, if I talk to someone who, somebody who says they charge, let's say, $500 for doing a tax return, if I ask where do the $500 come from, the answer is usually Mark, based on all of my knowledge in the past of doing tax returns like this, I know it roughly takes 2.5 hours, and based on my hourly rate, that's $500. So most people treat fixed pricing or do fixed pricing as a form of time-based billing. The only difference is, is that we give it based on a— we give it upfront, which is a great thing to do, fair on the customer, but it's still based on time. It's not value pricing. Okay. So that's a big mistake people make in the profession. They think that because they're about their fixed pricing, sometimes called flat fees, they think they're value pricing. No, they are not. But it's a great place to start the journey. And I would argue, as we'll see tomorrow, that going from hourly to fixed pricing is the hardest step. Once we've got a system for giving fixed prices, once we've got a system for figuring out the scope of the work and coming up with a price, then we can start to move to menu pricing, which is giving people choices. Once we've done that, we can start to then put in place systems where we can involve the client in the pricing process. And Kim's going to talk about that tomorrow, how we do that. And once we've done that, we can then start to move towards full value pricing. So that's the value pricing journey. We just take it one step at a time. Nothing happens overnight. Okay, let me just check where I am in terms of our next speaker. We have 7 more minutes. I did promise her that I wouldn't be late. So let me ask a question for you to put in the chat box, and that is, when you think about bookkeeping work, what is the biggest pain that business owners experience with bookkeeping? Put yourself in the shoes of a bookkeeper— sorry, of a client. Of a client. When it comes to bookkeeping, what is the pain they experience? Think about that, put it in the chat. And while you're doing it, let me explain why I'm asking that question. One of the reasons why we price low is because very often we give a price and the client says, that's expensive. Have you ever had that reaction where somebody says, that's expensive? And I know it's something we all hate. I used to hate it. We hate that rejection. Well, the question then becomes, well, why do they say that's expensive? And let me tell you what the, what the wrong answer is. They do not say that's expensive because you are expensive. And that's, I know that's wrong because you aren't expensive. You're not expensive. You're too cheap. So why'd they say that's expensive? And the reason is this: when, when you present a price to somebody and they say that's expensive, they say it because it's a knee-jerk reaction. It's an automatic reaction that we all say when we don't understand the value, when we don't understand what's in it for us. So whenever somebody says that's expensive, it should be a lesson to them. It should raise a message in your mind that It's not, it's not a price issue. This, you just simply haven't created enough value or explained the value. And so one of the things we have to do is build into our pricing systems a way of communicating value. And we'll talk about this a bit more tomorrow when we look at pricing systems, but I wanted to introduce the idea now. It's all about language. It's all about words. And I would suggest to you that when it comes to value pricing, The single most important part of value pricing is how we communicate value. It's not how we come up with the price. Price is just a number. The price almost doesn't matter for reasons we'll talk about later. It's how we communicate the value. If the client does not see the value, any price will be too expensive. We have to figure out how to communicate value. And this is about words. This is about understanding the language of marketing. Understanding price psychology, understanding the laws of influence, understanding behavioral economics. So let me give you some examples. And this goes back to why I asked you to put in the chat, what is the biggest pain? Because when we're explaining a service, when we're explaining bookkeeping, for example, we want to make sure that we talk about the pain as the starting point of the conversation, because people are more motivated by the avoidance of pain than they are by the attainment of gain. So words are really important. So you need to figure out what are your scripts, what are your words that you're going to use. So we might say something like, when somebody's asking about our bookkeeping service, we might say, every business owner hates bookkeeping and paperwork. Unfortunately, of course, it has to be done, and it has to be done in a prescribed format, otherwise the taxman will be on your back, which is true, whether it's the IRS, HMRC, whatever it might well be. We have to do it, it's a legal requirement, and so that's an element of pain that if we don't do things right, we're going to have problems with the tax authorities. So we can then go on and say something like, if you don't keep proper books and records, you risk fines and penalties from the tax authorities. It's a legal requirement to keep financial records in a prescribed format. We're building up the pain. If you do this wrong, Mr. Client, then you could be in for some expensive fines and penalties. So you have to do it. You have to keep the books and records complete, accurate, and up to date. So words are really important, the words and the phrases that we use. We want to focus on the pain. What's the pain that they're experiencing? And one of the pains is getting on the wrong side of the tax authorities. But also I've seen in the chat, go through my past, my eye, there are lots of other things that you've said. We have to make sure we communicate pain. Tomorrow I'm going to talk about another really powerful technique. I call it don't wrap your Christmas presents in one box. Here's a quick sneak preview, but tomorrow this is a really important thing to do when it comes to communicating value. We'll do that tomorrow when we look at building your pricing system and we'll look at how to build out complete scripts and the words that you want to say to get better prices so that people don't complain about your price. Systems are just so important. They're the bedrock of everything. And I would argue when it comes to systems that one of the most important systems in your business is a pricing system. You want to be systematic about the way that you price. You want a system for how you communicate the value. You want to have a system for how you calculate the price. When you have a system for doing something, then you feel more confident. You are just following the system. When you have a system for doing something, when it's the right system, you'll get the, you'll get consistency. You'll get the best results every single time. And systems can consist of scripts. That could be the words you say. We'll talk about the power of brochures tomorrow. Scripts, the words you say. Systems could be the way that you break things down to packages. Systems could be the way that you calculate a price. We're going to cover all of that tomorrow. Systems are so important. Pricing systems are so important, but actually it's not just pricing systems in your firm. Systems are critically important for so many other things. And that's exactly what our next speaker is going to be talking about. She's going to be looking at systems. So at this point, I'd like to invite our first guest speaker, Teresa, to come along. Hi there, how you doing, Terry? I'm great. Yeah, I'm doing pretty good, thank you. Yeah, and, um, yeah, you are extraordinary what you do. You might touch on a bit of your story. Uh, you've been, you've been part of the Value Price Academy for— since when? It's been a while, hasn't it?

I think 2017.

I think it is 2017. Yeah, it's about— yeah, it could have been 2016, but I think it's 2017.

2016, you're right, it was 2016.

Yeah, it was 2016. Yes. And you are definitely one of those action takers who's got extraordinary results. So I'm going to shut up now and pass over to you so you can share from your experience some amazing things that you've done in your firm.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Mark. It's fabulous to be here. And I love that you said the word systems so many times because I think it's critical. It is the number one thing that is going to set your business up for success. Now, we're not going to talk pricing systems because Mark's got you covered. But in this session, I'm going to share with you some systems I think you should consider implementing. But before we do that, I thought I might tell you just a little bit about me. And let me just switch over to— so you can have a slide. I think we've got there a little slide for you. So my name is Teresa, if you don't know who I am. Some people call me Terry or Teresa, and I'm one of the two co-founders of Financially Bookkeeping, which is the Canadian leader in e-commerce bookkeeping for Shopify and Amazon. I'm also the co-founder of the E-Commerce Training Academy and the founder of Teresa Slatt Consulting. And since 2016, I have been a member of of the Value Price Academy. I am one of Mark's trainers. I'm a coach. I'm a past bookkeeping business owner. I will tell you a little bit more about that. And I absolutely am passionate about helping other accounting professionals to have success in their business because I've been there. I have experienced all of the pain and struggles of growing a bookkeeping firm. So I thought today I might tell you a little bit about my story of growing our bookkeeping firm. The first half of my story, and then I'll tell you the rest later on. So in— when was it? September 2014, Connie and I— I'll just switch back to me. Yeah, Connie and I started Financially in September of 2014, which is really interesting because Kim, Kim, who you're going to meet tomorrow, started her firm about the same time and we met Kim right at the beginning. So we've been on this journey together. And when we started, Connie and I, we decided to make it a virtual firm right from day one. We offered bookkeeping, we offered training, we offered like QuickBooks setup and coaching and tax as well. We would do income tax. For them. And when we started, we were charging $18 per hour for ongoing bookkeeping support. And that's because Connie had been charging $18 an hour when she was doing bookkeeping on the side. She had 5 clients. So when we started Finance.ly, we took her 5 clients, put them into our new business, and we, you know, things happened really quickly for us. We went to networking events. We partnered with Intuit to deliver financial literacy seminars and the business started to roll in. We went from those 5 clients then to 10, 20, 30 bookkeeping clients. We had over 100 tax clients and I think about 40 training and consulting clients. And it was getting to be a bit much for Connie and I. So it was time for us to hire. So we did. We thought, okay, let's hire some staff. We did. We hired 3 bookkeepers, part-time. Part-time bookkeepers, and we set their hourly rate of pay, and we thought, okay, great, we're going to be able to continue to grow and manage. And we thought by hiring, we were perfectly set up. Hmm, no. Now, at that point, we had raised our hourly rate to $35 an hour, but we still were not making enough money to pay the staff and our expenses, and things got really bad. There were times when Connie and I had to pull money out of our, you know, retirement savings to cover payroll. And Connie and I were constantly stressed. We were not getting paid. You know, the staff got paid, the expenses got paid, but there was nothing left to pay us or even for us to, you know, invest in tools or training or seminars or coaches or anything that might help us to do it better. And right at that time, we attended the first QuickBooks conference in Toronto. They called it Thrive, and I think that was 2016. And, you know, we chose to attend a session on value pricing by none other than Mark. That was the day that we met Mark, and Connie and I came out of that session, we were So excited. We were like, oh my God, this is the answer.

Okay.

So we went home, we created 3 bookkeeping packages, an entry, a full, and a premium offering. And we met with all of our clients and they loved these fixed prices. They all signed up immediately. And we thought, okay, thanks, Mark. This is great. What we quickly realized was that this was actually even worse than the hourly. Because when we created these packages with these prices, we set the monthly prices at like $200, $250, $300. You know, I think our top one was maybe $400. And the clients loved that because they had, you know, surety. They knew exactly what it was going to cost. It was not going to go up and down based on the hours. But we were paying our staff hourly. And you know, a smaller client might take me 3 hours, 4 hours to do the work. Our staff was taking 5, 8, 10 hours to do the same work. And we were paying them hourly. There were times that we were paying our staff more than what the client was paying. Us. It was incredibly stressful. You know, Connie and I weren't sleeping. We, you know, we had a lot of challenges to overcome. And if you want to hear how we overcame all of those challenges and were able to build a million-dollar-a-year bookkeeping firm, come to my session on Thursday and I'll tell you all the things that we did to turn things around completely. Okay. All right, so back to systems. Let me switch back to my slides for you. So when Connie and I started the firm 11 years ago, we had tons of years of experience in bookkeeping but very little experience in creating streamlined processes and systems. And in the beginning, that wasn't really a big deal because it was just Connie and You know, I had my set of clients, she had her set of clients, and it didn't really matter that I might be doing things a little bit differently than the way Connie did them because it was just us. Not a problem. But you know, as soon as we hired that team, that's when things got really bad because I might train a team member, I'm showing them the way that I do things, and then Connie would train them and she might do things differently. The team was getting confused. They were making tons of mistakes. And I do remember that we even lost a client or two because we were missing deadlines and, you know, things weren't getting responded to. Stuff was not happening. And it was really bad. Now, Connie and I, remember Connie and I would train them over and over again they would continue to make mistakes over and over again, and they were very costly for both us but also sometimes for our clients. Now fast forward, here we are 11 years later, and I can honestly say the firm is completely different than it was in those first few years. We have very clear systems, processes, workflows, and training programs to make sure that our team all handles the work the same way. We have robust checklists that walk our team through exactly what they need to do to deliver the highest quality bookkeeping work for our clients with minimal mistakes. Dead missed—

Terry, can I just interrupt a second? Maybe you can see slides.

Oh, well, that's strange.

I have the slides on.

Hold on. This is very strange because my slides are showing. Let me go over to you. Yeah, I see it's not, but up on my, on my Ecamm, it's showing the slides.

Huh, interesting.

Uh, let me see.

Give me a sec. One moment, please. See, okay, so that's just showing me. Let's fix the setting.

Just in case it helps, I've made you a co-host. So if you want to just use the old-fashioned show screen.

Share screen if I have to. Well, let me see. Did this fix it, guys?

Oh, yes. We're there.

Yeah.

Okay.

You know, another little button I didn't push. Excellent. Thank you, Mark, for letting me know. Excellent. You could see my slides.

I love it.

I love it. Okay. Thanks. Okay. So let's carry on. So we now are systemized, we're, you know, we're getting things going. And I have to say, it wasn't easy. It was a lot of work. I'd say Connie and I really focused on systems for a full year. Now, not full-time, of course, we were running a business, but over that year, we were able to create all the systems and processes we need. And we continued, we never stopped. New systems were always coming in, the systems were constantly being updated. Updated. Can I say it was worth the time investment? My answer is absolutely. You know, when we sold Financely in October of this year, one of the main reasons the buyers wanted Financely is the systems. That is the piece that really attracted them and why we were able to set the sale price as high as we were able to do. We were cloud, 100% cloud, and incredible systems, checklists, and processes, and they wanted those. That made our firm incredibly valuable. So today I'm going to share with you 8 systems that I think you should consider implementing in your firm. Now, whether you're growing a bookkeeping firm, an accounting practice, a consulting and maybe CFO practice, I think all of these systems you need. So for everybody that's here, whether you're running a bookkeeping firm or not, I think these ones come into play. Okay, let's do it. You guys ready for 8 systems? Okay, let's do it. System 1. Our first one is to systemize the way that you market your business and then also having a systemized approach to the sales process. Marketing and sales aren't the same thing. So I actually thought I'm going to look up the actual definition. So marketing is the action or the business of promoting your products or services, including market research, advertising that leads to a purchase. Sales is the exchange of a service for money, the action of selling something. So when I look at this from an accounting professional's perspective, marketing is the action of promoting your services and warming people up to the point that they're ready to talk to you. Sales starts when that lead reaches out to book an appointment with you. Marketing your business encompasses all the activities that you do to build awareness of your services and attract potential clients. And it can be a whole pile of things. But here's some things that you would want to consider as part of your marketing system. Number 1 is having a great website that uses good SEO, which is search engine optimization, so that when your potential clients go to Google or wherever they're going and they type in, you know, bookkeeping for e-commerce, you're going to come up. So a great website that has good SEO can help bring them to you. And I think everybody should have that. Also, part of marketing can be using social media to engage with potential clients, finding out where they are, where they hang out, and becoming part of that community. And, you know, putting ads on social media, doing all kinds of things on social media. Another really powerful piece of your marketing system would be to have what's called a lead generation system attached to your website that lets you capture leads' email addresses so that you can now communicate with them with email marketing. And email marketing is still a very powerful tool. And I remember Mark taught that to me years ago and Emily teaches it now and does an amazing job of showing us how do we actually do these things. It's great. I love it. The other part of marketing could be things like attending networking events. Like when we started, we went to networking events, we talked to other businesses, we, you know, we partnered with people to connect with and build leads that we could talk to. Another way could be speaking. You could offer to speak at a chamber event. You could offer to speak to the small business group at the bank. You can get out in front of people or doing it online too. And this helps to position you as the expert, which will help bring leads to you. And then of course, there's the traditional types of advertising, things like ads on TV, radio, and printed material, or of course, doing ads on social media as well. And really so many more things. This is just a quick rundown of some of the things you want to start building into your marketing system that's going to help bring you new potential people to talk to. And when it comes to marketing, it's really, really important to create a clear strategy. If you love social media and you know your clients are there, then leverage that to build your brand and When it comes to social media, it's really important to be consistent and systemized. You know, they say most people need to see an ad between, I don't know, I think they say between 5 and 10 times before they do anything. So if you get all excited and you create 2 ads and you're like, yay, let's do, you're probably not gonna get what you're hoping for. It's about consistently posting, consistently sharing valuable, useful information that Finally, when they've seen it the 9th time, they're like, I'm clicking that link and I'm going to contact them. So be consistent, use tools. You can use apps to help you with social media, things like MeetEdgar or SocialBee or Hootsuite or Buffer. There's lots of them. That, that's just the ones that come to mind for me. And if of course you have that awesome lead generation system where you've been able to to capture email addresses on your website. Now you can market to them. And again, you can use apps and tools to help you. You can use things like MailChimp or HubSpot or Constant Contact or Salesforce or Keap. There's tons of them again as well. And these help you to build automated email campaigns. So you invest the time once to create it, and now the system runs and all the leads will get all great content and it's just happening for you. It's about systemizing it because you're busy and we want to create an opportunity for you to be able to do all of these things. But you're not the one personally doing all of it. Now, when that lead finally reaches out and says contact us, this is when your sales system is coming into play. And when you're building your sales system, we want to think about things like automation that's going to really allow you to not be personally doing every single part of your sales process. And some great things that you can think about automating in this process would be maybe a prequalification survey that kind of automatically goes out when they click that Contact Us on your website and invites them to complete a questionnaire that helps you to decide if they're a good fit for you. You can automate that. Also appointment bookings using things like Calendly or Book Like a Boss or Acuity. There's all kinds of them, I believe. You don't want to have to go back and forth. Just send them a link and they can book. Also, if you're doing a sales email sequence, maybe whenever a brand new lead reaches out, a nice series of emails is triggered telling them more, getting them excited, that kind of thing. That can be happening automatically. Also, you could look at automating information gathering because we need to gather a lot of information, don't we? And agreements and payments. Let's automate that. There's lots of tools that you can use. What comes to mind for me? Ignition, 17hats, Dubsado. There's lots of them. Just automating these things can save you incredible amounts of time. And really, from the client perspective, you look organized and professional. The other thing as part of the sales process, you might want to be systemizing your meetings so that every single lead goes through the exact same process. Maybe you do an introductory meeting and you have a series of questions and it has an agenda and you follow it the same way. And then maybe you always do a second meeting that is more the proposal on the pricing meeting. At each step, you want to have a clear agenda, task list, steps so that everyone gets that exact same professional process. Another piece of your sales system is, in my mind, a paid diagnostic review. This is going to allow you to accurately determine the scope of work and to then price it appropriately and really It's also about getting a good understanding of what is the pain that this client is experiencing and what is it that this client is going to value so that when you meet with them to do your proposal and your pricing, you really understand where they're at and you know how to price it and you know how to deliver the best value for them. It's a very powerful piece piece of your sales system. And then lastly, considering nice clear agreements. In our business, it is so important to have a good contract or agreement with the client covering all the legal stuff you need to, but also things like a detailed list of the scope. What is it that we're going to do for you? What are we not going to do for you? This really helps you when it comes to value pricing and making sure that you're able to manage scope creep, which I know Jessica is going to share a whole bunch about that later today, I believe. Okay, our second system. If we have extra time, we'll answer questions if possible, but we'll see how it goes. If not, we will get to them later. Our second system, it really does tie into your sales and marketing, and that is to have referral systems and to really be able to track your, your success at getting referrals. And referral systems come into play not only during, you know, sales and marketing, but really throughout the life of your client relationship. We want to have a clear, consistent way of asking for referrals, and not only from brand new clients who are just coming in, but also asking for referrals from associates within the industry or outside of the industry, and also from your current ongoing clients that you're working with. Our referral systems at Finance Li do start during the sales process, and I use Mark's effective pricing software, which I believe you're going to get to see tomorrow, for all my quoting. And I have built my packages and my options. And I do offer what Mark calls behavior rewards, which is a way for the client to control the price. I'm sure they'll be talking more about that. And one of my methods of them to get these bonuses is a referral. And I let them know that, hey, if you refer us a new client and that client becomes a customer of ours, we give them a $100 thank you discount off their next next monthly fee. It seems to work well. It doesn't have to be money. That's just what we chose to do. Our next one actually comes into play during onboarding our new clients, and we have a very step-by-step process to take our customers through to get them effectively into our systems. And part of that checklist again goes over our referral system and reminding them, hey, if you can think of another business owner that would benefit from working with us, let us know. Another really powerful one is referrals with associates in industry or colleagues or outside of the industry. And I have to say, for us, this has been an area where we get a lot of wonderful referrals. And there's lots of different ways that you can do it. One way is for you to have a niche and then partner with others in a different Now, Finance Lease specializes in e-commerce, but I have colleagues that specialize in law firms, in restaurants, in, you know, all construction. And what we do is when I get a lead that is construction, I send it over to my colleague, and when they get a lead that's e-commerce, they send it to me. And this creates just a wonderful win-win where you're winning, you're your colleague is winning, and really the client is winning as well because they're getting the right accounting professional for them. Another way that you could look at it is maybe you have your clients feature you on their website and you do the same thing where you're kind of cross-promoting and helping each other to grow their business. Creating this kind of a network can be incredibly powerful. And of course, our current clients, and this is a very valuable place to have a nice recurring system is to talk to your current clients about it. If you have a series of emails, like maybe you have an email group that is for your clients and you send them newsletters, you send them updates, one of the emails can be about, hey, can you think of anyone else that might benefit? And that happens automatically, so you're not having to remember. I love things that we can automate. It also can become part of surveys. Now, you know, we always do client satisfaction surveys every quarter, and one of the questions is the same. Hey, is there anyone that you can think of that we could help? And then of course, if you're doing regular meetings with your clients, that could be a standing agenda item. And if you remember to send the agenda out in advance, your client has a minute to think about that and possibly come with a referral. In all of these ways, you can have your business thriving with reliable, consistent referrals coming in that can really position you to grow. And the key to me is that we want to systemize it. We want it to be a process. We want to automate what we can automate and create this consistent stream of wonderful leads. So that is a powerful system that I recommend you look at implementing. Our third one is to have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual client management systems. Now, this is a big category of systems, and when I was preparing this, I'm like, oh, what are we going to talk about? So I picked two for today. One is to have task lists, and two is to have quality control lists. Now, for you to create a systems approach to your accounting business, one of the first systems is to have comprehensive task lists or to-do lists. And depending on the services that you are doing for that client, you would want to have step-by-step checklists of everything that we need to do to deliver that work at, in the highest quality and of course on time. And this is where a good practice management system can really help you. And There's tons of them out there. What comes to mind? Jetpack Workflow, Asana, 17hats, Carbon, ClickUp, Pixie, Pure Workflow, which is actually the one that we use. And in our practice management system, we have a checklist for every function. If the client purchased ongoing bookkeeping, we have checklists for accounts receivable, accounts payable, for processing documents for all the reconciliations we need to do for us, e-commerce tasks, sales tax, payroll, year-end. And we attach the appropriate checklists to that client in our practice management system. We set the due dates, we assign it to the correct team member, and now that work can happen and it can be systemized. Things are not getting missed. We don't forget to file the sales tax returns and things like incredibly powerful to have quality checklists. And if this idea is really freaking you out, you're thinking, oh my gosh, how long is it going to take me to do that? If you're running a bookkeeping firm, you might want to have a look at the Pure Bookkeeping system, which actually can give you all those checklists that you need. So the second one is around quality control, and we want to also have quality control checklists built into the system so that we are checking the work. Now, at Finance.ly, we have two of them. One is done by the client manager after the bookkeeper has finished their work, and then the other one is done from a management level. And depending on how long the team member has been with us or, you know, how far through their training they are determines how often we do sort of that second level check, and it's just to make sure has everything been done, have the checklists been done, is the work good, do we see a training opportunity, maybe the team member missed something and now we can identify a training opportunity. So quality control makes sure that your clients can feel confident that the work you're doing is of the highest quality and that they can trust the information. Our fourth system is a feedback system. And first, we really do want to have a clear system in place to get feedback from our clients. Now, this is a system that sometimes we don't want to do because sometimes we're not so sure that we want to get the feedback from our clients. I remember feeling that way back before we implemented all of our systems. It's like, no, I don't think I want to ask at this point. But I challenge that. There are a ton of reasons that you want to ask your clients for feedback. So I thought I'd share some of the ones that come to mind for me. Number 1 is just the fact that you are asking your client for feedback already makes that client feel more valued and appreciated, and that is a big win. It also gives you an opportunity to kind of measure your client satisfaction rates, like how good are we doing. It gives the client a chance to tell you how much they love working with you or with your team. And you know, the good thing about that is it makes them think about Think about, well, why do I love working with them? Oh, this and this and this. And that helps to reinforce your value because you're making them think about it, right? It gives them also a place where they can praise your team members and that can become success stories, testimonials. It can help with performance reviews if you're getting this feedback from your clients. It's super powerful and it does give the client a place to voice any issues or challenges they're having. I don't know about you, but the worst thing is when a client, you get that email that says, "I'm disengaging and going elsewhere," and you're like, "What?" You didn't even know that there was a problem. They didn't tell you, so you didn't get a chance to fix it. So by asking, that gives them a chance to tell you. And then you can immediately jump on that and you can reach out to the client and say, hey, let's come up with a solution for this. Let's fix it. Incredibly powerful. And when you have a client that has had a problem and you've been able to fix it, their loyalty goes way, way up. So don't be afraid of any negative feedback. Take that in as an opportunity to deliver more. And it also gives you really good insights into what your clients value. If they're upset about something, that is an area where you can focus and be like, oh, okay, this matters to them. This is important. So it's incredibly valuable information. I always like to say to make it a goal within your firm to kind of raise the happiness score and the satisfaction score of your clients. Have a program around it. Provide your team with training on, you know, how to deliver excellence for your clients and then celebrate as those scores start going up. And the easiest way to come up with a feedback system is to do, you know, surveys and use tools like SurveyMonkey or HubSpot or 17hats, Dubsado. There's lots of them that will do surveys and you can set them up to go out every month or every quarter or annually. However it feels appropriate to you. What is key is that it has to be really short. These surveys shouldn't take them more than maybe 3 minutes to fill out because if it's any longer than that, they're gonna go, ah, I don't have time for that. And then you don't get the answers. So keep it short. And I like to have a couple of questions that are a scale, like, you know, not so good, good, great, fantastic, or 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then a couple of where they can actually put words. So, you know, maybe 2 scale ones and 2 word ones. And then don't forget to include a referral question as well. And I like to have the scale ones because it lets you get numbers, right? Oh, in total, we were a 3.5 when we average out all of our scores, and you can work on that that number. But having the long fields where they can put in feedback, that can become opportunities for testimonials and things like that. So include a little bit of both. Keep it really short and tell them in the email, this will take you no more than 3 minutes. Because there's nothing worse than getting a survey. I've had it happen to me, and I click on it and I start, and I'm in 7 minutes. It's like, oh, I forgot I don't have this much time. I like the email to tell me how long it's going to take before I decide to do Okay, our 5th system. How are we doing? I might have to talk even faster. No, we'll just, we'll get through all of this for you. The 5th one is a system for monitoring your goals and your targets. Each year you're going to do your strategic plan and you're going to set the goals and you're going to set what, what Mark likes to call your big rocks. Big rocks and your little rocks. You want to set your big goals first, and then we want to break down those big goals into what do we need to do each quarter, each month, each week that will lead to that big rock being achieved. A goal that isn't tracked is not likely to happen. You know, if you set a goal, okay, I want to increase my revenue by $100,000 this year, but you haven't really broken that down, it's not that likely to happen. But if you sit down and say, okay, I want to increase my revenue by $100,000 and oh, I'm going to create a new marketing system, I'm going to set up a new referral system and I'm going to do the marketing plan in this quarter and I'm going to do the referral system here and you're breaking it down and then you're tracking it, it is way more likely to happen. So create your big rocks, create your little rocks, then set them up with due dates for each piece and who is responsible to do that work and have a tracking system so that you can achieve those goals. It can be something simple. It can just be, you know, an Excel file listing your goals, the individual, you know, smaller goals, the due dates, who's responsible, and then set up regular check-in meetings. To see where are we at and help push those goals forward. You can also use your practice management system, set it up in there with all the tasks, the due dates, and again assignees as to who's to do the work. It can be something simple like this, a little Excel file, right, where you just put all your stuff in and you track it. So it doesn't have to be fancy, but it does need to be tracked. Number 6 is a system for monitoring and measuring your results and your KPIs. So your key performance indicators, and these are going to be different for everyone, and they may change each year based on your strategic plan and the goals that you are setting. So only you can decide what are going to be the right things to measure for your So here's some examples. There's others too, but just to get, get you thinking about some of the things you may want to measure. Here's a bunch of marketing things that you might want to measure. Maybe one of your goals was to be creating these marketing systems and you want to see how are we doing with that. These KPIs might help you get there to know where you're at. How about some sales? Tracking. Maybe you want to increase your gross profit, so you're monitoring a KPI on what's your monthly gross profit margin, right? How about some finance goals, right? Really taking a look at the health of your business. And if you've got some goals around that, then tracking some of these.

Or how—

whoops, going backwards instead of forwards. How about some human resource or Production goals. Okay, so there's a ton here and there's lots more, but I don't want you to have KPI overload. Pick the, I don't know, 6 to 8 or 10 metrics that really help you keep your finger on the pulse of your business and help you to see how you are doing at achieving your goals. Okay, I'm interested in the chat while I move on to the next one. What KPIs are you guys tracking right now in your business? Drop it in the chat and I'll have a look at that in a minute. I'm just interested to see what are you guys tracking. Number 7 is— okay, we're good. Number 7 is human resource systems. Now, there's a lot of systems in here, but we'll just again touch on a couple of them. The first one is to have a good system in place for hiring your team members. Now, in the Academy, I've taught a whole session on creating your own hiring system so that you attract good people. I told you in the beginning we had hired those 3 team members. We made so many mistakes. We did it all wrong. They were not the right people. So having a good hiring system that brings you good candidates is incredibly important. And then we need to have one around performance management. If you have a team, your team has responsibilities and they have goals and things they need to achieve each month. And you want to have a system to track how are they doing. So you want to have a mechanism where you are tracking how they're doing, where you're getting feedback kind of both ways. So start by creating a performance management system. Now, I remember I had talked about this in a session and I had said I hate the term performance review. I think it makes everybody uncomfortable. And I remember a member named Sarah Kelly coming up with the name a celebration and reflection review. And I'm like, huh, I like that. So that's actually what we call it at Finance.ly. It is a celebration and reflection Reflection review. Sounds better. It's a little bit less scary and it really is exactly what it is. What did— where did we do really great? What are the things we can reflect on and improve? It's great. Okay. It's a much better way. Now at Finance.ly, we have that in a document. It is a full, you know, 8 or 10 page document and it outlines Finance.ly's mission, vision, values, and the 8 key areas of success. Including customer satisfaction, teamwork skills, skills and knowledge for the position, problem-solving, communication, accountability and ownership, learning orientation, and deadline management. And this document outlines what those look like. So it isn't— it doesn't just have that title. It is a whole paragraph that explains, well, what does customer satisfaction look What are we looking for? And we give this to our team when they join and we take them through it because it helps set the expectation of what we are looking for. And it also helps them to know how can they excel in their role. And you know, what are the things that they can do to be a top performer? It's all outlined in there. So it's a beautiful document that really keeps things clear. There is a section in there for goal setting, and we work with each of our team members to determine what their goals should be. And we do regular check-ins with them. We do, you know, weekly mini check-ins. Then there's a more formal quarterly check-in on their goals and where they're at. And then at 6 months, and then the final annual review. And really, anything that's in a review should never be a surprise. You should have already been been talking about it at either the weekly check-ins or at the quarterly check-ins. Okay. And I do think it's important to incorporate a bit of a feedback piece in here where the team can give you feedback. They are on the front lines. So we have a series of questions that we include in those quarterly reviews about, you know, what could we be doing better? You know, what is a roadblock? What can we remove for you? That kind of thing. Okay. And feedback. Okay, our last system. Got like 3 minutes. I'm going to be on time, Mark. I know I promised I would. And the last one, in my opinion, is super important, and that's to have a very clear onboarding system. When a new client comes to you, they are super excited, but they're also really afraid that they might have made a stake. And we know, especially with bookkeeping, onboarding can be a pretty harrowing experience for the client. You know, they hired you to take over this stuff because they don't have time, and at the beginning you're asking them to spend more time, you're asking them to help you. Oh, my power's flicking. Hopefully we don't have any issues. My power just flicked off on me. So that new client, we want to have a very systemized approach to onboarding them so that we have opportunities to wow them, to make them feel really great about working with us. And when you're building your system, let's think about, again, automation. What things can I automate that can help build a really nice system that emails are happening automatically? You know, are we doing surveys to gather things? You know, use automation to help you make this process professional and consistent. Look at how you're collecting information, and we need to collect a lot of information. So we actually have a full new client onboarding system checklist of tasks to go through with them, and then We actually meet with them every week to keep things on track, and this helps us to set expectations so the new client knows what they can expect from us and how we're going to deliver for them, and also what we expect from them so that it can be a healthy professional relationship. And really, when we're doing these weekly onboarding meetings. It's usually— it depends on the size and the complexity of the client. It can be anywhere from 2 to 6 meetings. Again, depending on what we're doing, it could be a large, very complex e-commerce client and we've got a lot more stuff to do with them, or a very simple one. And also having those scheduled weekly meetings helps keep it moving forward, right? Part of your onboarding should also be to think about How can we deliver an amazing experience for this client, right? How can we make them fall in love with our team and with our firm and feel, yep, I made the right decision. But you want to systemize that. Also think about how can I add value for them? They've just signed up for you. Maybe you've got a white paper or an ebook that you've written that you know is going trying to help them, or maybe you invite them to your YouTube channel, anything like that. And don't forget, talk about your referral system. And at some point, you want to tell the client all the other wonderful things that you can do to help them. So consider all of these as part of your onboarding system. As I wrap it up, just a quick review. My 8 systems that I think you should consider is sales and marketing systems, referral systems, client and quality management systems, feedback systems, goal and target monitoring and measurements and KPIs, human resources, and your new client onboarding. And of course, tomorrow Mark will talk all about the pricing systems. As we wrap, I always just like to ask, drop in the chat, was there something you heard today that was a bit of an aha moment or a yep, I'm going to go and do that? That. And I'm going to pass you back over to Mark, and I'm going to read the, read the comments. So thank you so much for your time. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. And I will see you guys again on Thursday for another session. Back over to you, Mark.

Well, thank you so much, Terry. What a great session. And a really powerful session because I think back to, I think back to when I was in practice, I came across— when was it? End of 1998, I came across someone called Michael Gerber. And Michael Gerber wrote what I think is— well, my favorite business book is, is The E-Myth Revisited. Terry, your screen's still on. I don't know if you want to turn it off or not. Okay. Yeah, my favorite book was The E-Myth Revisited, which if you've not read it, I strongly recommend it. And it talked about the power of systems. 'Cause I realized that when I read the book, end of 1998, I realized that my practice was starting to stall in terms of growth because everything was in my head. I was the limitation. I was the limitation in my practice and my team couldn't do much of the work because the systems are up here. So I started putting systems in place in 1999 in my accounting firm, very similar to the ones that Terry talked about. And that had a huge impact on, on my firm. It enabled me to delegate much more stuff that I used to keep to myself. So systems, really important. That was such a great session. And we do have another great speaker coming up soon, as both Terry and I've alluded to. Anyway, I've seen some great questions going on in the chat. I know in particular, there's one question that I know is specifically for Terry. Which I'll just read now, but we'll get to it later. I don't know if you're around. I think you're around for the Q&A, Terri. I'll leave it up to you. But Philip said, I'm currently on my own. A key growth risk for me is my first hire. How did you decide who to hire? How did you know they were the right one? So that's a better question for Terri, and I'll get her to answer that later. I know there are some questions about her lists and so on from other people. I'll reference that in a short while, but I wanted to share I want to share another success story with you because, uh, Tara's story was inspiring, which she started off with, and I know she's going to share some more on Thursday and talk particularly on how she turned things around. But let me just share this story. It was, it's an extract from a video, and if you're here right at the very start when the countdown music was playing, you might have actually seen extracts of this, but I I interviewed a lovely lady called Melanie, Melanie Jury, a few years back. And I thought I'd extract a couple of minutes worth because this is such an inspiring story and it'll tie in nicely to what Terri will talk about on Thursday. So let's go across to this short interview with Melanie.

Well, I started my bookkeeping journey in the mid-'90s. My family had a business and I was bookkeeping for that company, and that led me into other companies. So I started my own little bookkeeping business, but I knew my pricing was wrong and I needed to fix it, and I didn't know what to do. I wasn't making any money, I wasn't going anywhere, and I knew I was doing something wrong. I'd moved to cloud software, but I knew that something wasn't right. So I reached out to the Canadian Professional Bookkeeping Organization and had a few roundtable discussions with them. And they said— I'm like, what am I doing wrong? Like, I'm pulling out my hair. I'm working so many hours and I'm not getting paid. What's going on? What am I doing wrong? And they said, you're doing everything wrong. You need to talk to Mark Wickersham and you need to be a part of some different organizations. So I started doing some research and started watching all of what you had available via Facebook or YouTube and realized that this was where I needed to be. So I quickly joined your Value Pricing Academy and then made some changes, took some action, and now I've tripled my revenue. Revenue in 6 months, not even 6 months. I tripled it in overnight. It was an amazing feeling now that I actually have some money to be able to invest in my company, invest in myself. So I've just became limited and it's just still me, but I've got lots more to learn. So I'm still in your academy and I'm going I need to do some more business advisory, but I need to get my packages organized, and that's my, my first number one of what I need to do. I think that we are so conscious of pricing, and I was scared to charge too much. That's when I, I joined the Canadian Professional Bookkeeping Organization and, and got a hold of you, and I'm so grateful. Well, I went into Your Effective Pricing, and I went to the bookkeeping special module and put all the parameters in there and came up with a price for each individual client that I have. And I spoke to my clients and said, I gave them forewarning, your prices are going to increase and I'm worth it. And they were all, yep, you're worth it, we know it, we've been underpaying, and yeah, you're not going you're gonna stick with me. So some of them I tripled, some of them I doubled. Yeah, so it's been really, really good for me.

Wow, what a, what a great story. Another example of people who— someone who's doubled prices, tripled prices. And you can do this too. You absolutely, you absolutely can when you just understand the frameworks and follow the frameworks. So I have, I have a question for you, and that is you've already met one amazing bookkeeper doing this stuff, Terry. You're going to soon meet in a little while Jess. Tomorrow you'll meet Kim. And some of these stories are people who that a part of our community. So my question for you is this: would you like, would you like me and some other amazing accountants, bookkeepers to guide you through this process? It's a difficult process, pricing, but when you take things step by step and follow the frameworks, you will get results. So just let me know if that's something that you would like to do. And I have something very special to tell you about today. But I can see already lots of people said yes. So Liz, Stephanie, Kelly, is it Dajuana? I think it's called, pronounced, forgive me if I got that wrong. We've got Mindy, Hattie, and so on. So what I'd like to just tell you about briefly before we then, before we get into some of the great questions, and there are some really good questions I want to get to, and then we'll get to our next speaker. Who's going to talk about the whole issue of scope creep. What I want to talk about is give you an opportunity to join a community of people focused on growing profitable accounting firms, and with a particular focus on value pricing, and with pricing compliance work, and particularly bookkeeping. It's the Value Pricing Academy. It's a growth membership focused on firms that want to master value pricing and grow their firm profitably. And so I'm just going to open up, if I can find the right button, and I'm going to just, just talk you a little bit through, uh, what some of the things that you get are. I'm going to keep this very short because I'm going to spend more time tomorrow going through a bit more detail, but I'm going to ask my team right now to share the link to the page that you can see. And this is a page that tells you all the things that we do to help people and have been helping people for a few decades now in value pricing. And as you go through this, you'll find out all the things that we do to help you. I'm not going to go through it in detail now other than to say that what's in here, what we give people is the, is everything, the complete toolkit for mastering value pricing. You'll find in here there are live sessions we run. I'm just finding the right part of it. There's live training. Delivered by some amazing trainers. We have pricing training, but also some marketing training. We'll talk about how to grow your firm as well, and we teach you all the pricing systems you need. We have a number of different curriculums where we teach people. So Emily, who you'll meet tomorrow, teaches things like how to grow your firm, marketing fundamentals, Terri is one of our trainers, and she's— one of the things she's really good at is systems. So we had a few people ask questions in the Q&A box. Can I get Terri's systems and processes? Well, the answer is yes, you can. If you join our community, you have access to live sessions with her, also some pre-recorded sessions you can access, and all those systems come with— all those sessions come with workbooks, systems, everything you need to systemize your business. So as you— I'm going to let you explore that particular page. I'll talk a bit more tomorrow, perhaps, if there's questions, but you can read about all the things that we do. Essentially, we give you everything you need to build a more successful, profitable accounting firm and grow it. Anything that you need, it's in there. We teach you systems, pricing, and marketing. Including training such as how to price bookkeeping work. We have a 6-month training program with videos and workbooks and resources coming out every couple of weeks, taking you on a journey. And then we also have software tools and resources. We give you everything you need to get the sorts of results that you've been hearing about today. It's not just the theory, it's not theory This is practical stuff that works, and it's not just me that you'll hear from throughout the training. You will get live sessions from people doing this. We have our best students who have done some extraordinary things walking through how they've applied the ideas, how they've done these things in their firm. So it's not theory, it's practical stuff that, that works. And When you— so if I go back to this page, you'll see, I know there's a question coming. Well, what's the investment? Well, the investment is a tiny investment compared to the results that you're going to get. If you think about, for example, Melanie's story, how she was able to double, triple prices, how she got huge increase in her revenue. I talked about, you'll meet Jess later and the results she got. When you apply the frameworks and start getting higher prices, you will start finding that not only will you get better margins and make more money from your existing clients, you'll also attract better quality clients. And to get access to all this training, it's just a tiny monthly price, and that monthly price depends on which currency you prefer. So it depends on where you are in the world, but when you click on the, the big yellow button, it will take you to a page where you can then see what the price is in your currency. So I'm not going to go through that now. You can go and have a look at the, the page later on today. But what I, what I want to talk about is something very special that we've never ever done before. It's the first time that we've done this because we want to— I'm on a mission to help the profession, and I think it's getting more urgent than ever before because of AI. It's more urgent than ever before that we have to fix our pricing. We have to understand value pricing. We have to understand how to create more value for our clients. We have to understand how to be at the leading edge of the profession. Because as I said at the outset, by 2030, much of what we currently do will be automated by AI. And I know some people disbelieve that, but I, teach this stuff every week, and the speed of change is extraordinary. Just in the last 3 months this year alone, I've seen more change than the previous 2 years, particularly in the area of— I mentioned coding. It's a real problem for coders. They are pretty much redundant right now. Well, this is coming. And so our job in the Value Pricing Academy is to help you stay one step ahead, is to help you master value pricing, to be confident with pricing, to attract better clients, to create more value and to get the sorts of results like Sarah Bridges, which I mentioned earlier, who just a few days ago this week used one of our systems, one of the pricing systems, to get $1,354 from just setting somebody up with a QBO system that was priced based on value, absolutely not price, price on time. But I have another question for you, and I know many of you said that you would love to get support from me, from Terry, from Jess, from Kim and other amazing people in our community. My other question for you is, what if you could try it before you commit? Well, one of the things that we've done today for the first time ever is we're going to allow you to have a 7-day free trial. You can join the Value Pricing Academy, our growth level, which is focused on people that want to master value pricing and grow their firm's profit profitably and get access to all of Terry's systems teaching, amongst many other things. And you can get that for a 7-day free trial. And if you love it, then you don't have to do anything by the end of it. Your payment will then go through after 7 days. But if it's not for you, if you decide that it's not for you, then it's very simple. You can cancel in one click. And we're going to have a— we have a orientation session next week where we'll show you how to cancel. It's really simple in our platform. And we also, in onboarding email, I think it's email number 2, it tells you how to cancel. It's really, we make it really simple. So you've got the opportunity to try out the Value Pricing Academy for 7 days and start your journey to value pricing with no risk. There's no risk, no obligation to carry on. It's entirely up to you. And just spend the next 7 days going through some of the training, watching some of the videos, looking at some of the resources to decide whether it's right for you and to see if it's what's going to— if it's going to make the difference you've been looking for to finally get the prices that you deserve, to attract those better quality clients, which is our goal. Our goal is to help you build a more successful firm. And one of the things our members tell us about over and over again, and I know we have some existing ones here, so we know this because they keep telling us, one of the things they love about the Value Pricing Academy is you lock in your price for life. We change the price several times every year. It goes up because we create, we create more value every year. We create more training, new training. All of our trainers like Terry, Jess are doing new things this year. And existing members don't pay anything more for that. You lock in the price. So today's price is the cheapest it will ever be. And so the price goes up on Monday, by the way, just so you know, Monday morning we are putting the price up. So I guess the smart decision is to join now, particularly given that we have this completely free 7-day trial. If you decide to participate in this free trial, you also benefit from locking in the price. You won't be affected by the change on Monday. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about the, the Value Pricing Academy tomorrow. We'll talk a little bit more about some of the software that you get and so on. But let me just go back and just, if we go to the page that my team has shared, when you go and find out when you click on enroll now, just so you know what to see, it'll take you to this page and you will see it says 7-day trial. We turn that off at the end of this 3-day conference. We've never done it before. We'll turn it off at the end of the 3-day conference. So if you do want to take advantage of 7 days access to the Value Pricing Academy, you really need to take action now. Do that, do that today. The link is in the chat, I believe. I'm just going to double-check. I think my team's usually ahead of me here. Yes, Gabby's put it into the chat. And then also make a note to yourself that we have a kickoff session on Monday. It's Monday, March 30th. Time-wise, it's 11 o'clock if you're on Eastern Standard. It's 4 o'clock UK time. And it's typically 60 minutes, sometimes a bit more if you've got questions. It's going to be with Emily. You'll meet Emily tomorrow. Emily is our Head of Marketing, but she will also walk you through in that kickoff session how to access all the resources. She'll talk through how to access the software and so on. If you can't make it, by the way, we will— we do record it so you can catch up on the recording, but it's best to be there live. And if you are an existing VPA member, you are welcome to come along. If you want a refresher on where all the resources are, how to access them, then that is going to be on Monday. If you've got any questions about what I've talked about, put it in the Q&A, ask questions. We'll come back to questions later. And also tomorrow I'll, I'll share with you a few other things about what we do in the Value Pricing Academy. I'll talk a little bit about some of the software that you get access to. The software as part of our systems to make it easy for you to get results. As I said, my goal is to help you get results fast, to become confident at pricing. So we give you all the systems that you need, we give you everything. If you follow the systems, then like all the other people I've shared their stories today, you will get those results. You can do this, you can get better prices, you are worth it, you create enough value You just have to know the systems and we give you those systems. And we'll talk more about systems tomorrow. That's my main theme of tomorrow. We'll talk about the systems for how you communicate the value. We touched on that earlier. We'll talk about the systems for how you create different packages, how you present those packages. We'll talk about how you come up with a price. We'll talk about tomorrow how you have a price conversation in front of a client and how you can use tools to get better results, to make it much, much much easier so that you don't have that worry that you feel like you're making it up as you go along. We give you a system that you just follow and you will get better results. So that's all coming tomorrow. Okay. Before that, let me just remind you as well, we talk about the value pricing journey, and we're going to talk a lot more about the, these steps as we work through these few days. So I will every now and then remind you about the pricing journey. If you feel overwhelmed, please don't worry. You just take it one step at a time, one step at a time. Right, we have got— I'm going to do some questions in a bit. How are we doing for time? I think, I think actually we've got, yeah, we've got a Q&A later, but we do have another guest speaker. So I do need to go across to our next speaker. Her name is Jessica Fox, or Jess as we call her. Another amazing person. If you're there, if you want to put your webcam on, that would be awesome. Yes, how you doing?

Hi Mark, I am doing great.

How are you? Yeah, I'm doing really well. Thank you so much for asking. Let me just hang on a second. I'm just going to just turn your audio down just a small amount. It was a little bit loud at my end.

Oh, sorry about that.

No problem, I can sort that out. Okay, that's better. And I think you've been away on one of your cruises recently, haven't you?

I was earlier this year, and I am getting ready to go on another one in May.

So I usually go on about 4 cruises per year because you're pricing right, aren't you?

Yes, I priced right, so I am able to afford to only work 20 to 25 hours per week. And still have a lifestyle business, work-life balance, be able to afford to cruise. I'm not going on debt to be able to do that. And a lot of it is thanks to the systems and the guidance that I received from you and the Academy.

Well, thank you so much. And I know you've got some amazing stuff to share around scope creep and so on. So I'm not gonna steal any more of your time. I'm going to let you take it away.

Thank you. So hello everybody. I am Jessica Fox. If you were here early and saw the countdown video, you may have gotten a hint of my history, but for those of you that didn't, I am located in the beautiful North Georgia mountains in the United States, and I run what I call a boutique lifestyle bookkeeping firm, fully remote, serving clients nationwide, being award-winning, and able to have a waiting list. And be able to get choosy as to which clients I choose to work with. So today I want to talk about one of the pain points that I know many of us have, because I know that before I joined the Academy, this was an issue that I had. So please let me know in the chat, have you ever finished a project and realized that you worked twice as hard as you quoted for? Let me know in the chat if this has ever been you. Even if you were billing hourly, you may have estimated it's going to take you 20 hours, but after you're done and everything is said and done, it was 40. I know that I am not alone, and I am seeing lots of yeses. So yes, I absolutely agree with you that, uh, this is a common problem in our profession, and this is called Scope creep. Scope creep is the uncontrolled, unauthorized expansion of a project's requirements or deliverables without adjustments to time, budget, or resources. So what this means is when you're first taking on a project, you are making some assumptions as to what you need to do. And what the deliverables are, what the client expects from you, what the budget is going to be, hopefully how long it's going to take you, and that goes out the window when the project is underway. And this leads to undersharging, and undersharging is stressful. I know that I had a lot of stress when I was undersharging. And it creates resentment, resentment for the work, sometimes resentment for the client because you're like, oh, why didn't they tell me about this before? When it's not their fault, they don't know any better. Undercharging is unprofitable. It's really eroding your bottom line because you want every project that you work on to be profitable. And it can make you feel trapped. And those are not good feelings to have. That's not why we went into business for ourselves. It's not why we decided to, you know, start our own bookkeeping firm. We did it because we want freedom, independence, but we need to love what we do. So scope creep is not bad luck. It's a systems problem. And systems can be fixed. I really enjoyed Teresa's session right before mine because I am a systems nerd. They have revolutionized my business from top to bottom, and you can have a system to prevent scope creep from ruining your life. So the 3 root causes of scope creep are vague or verbal agreements because you're either not spelling out everything that you're going to do or you just have a virtual handshake or perhaps an in-person handshake, but nothing is ever truly documented. I made the mistake of doing this when I first started my accounting firm 10 years ago, where my engagement letter will say I will do monthly bookkeeping. That is so broad. What exactly is included in there? What classifies as monthly bookkeeping? How many accounts? How many transactions? Does that include reporting? Does that include meetings? Nobody knows because I did not quantify that. So that's one of the most common root causes of scope creep that I find. And another one, number 2, is giving a price before fully understanding the client's situation. We have a conversation with the prospect. We may ask a few questions. but the client either forgot or just did not know that they needed to tell us some key detail about the work that they are looking for. Many times it's just that the client really doesn't know. They know their pain, they may have an idea of what outcome they want to get to solve that pain, but they are not clear on what exactly is it that you need to be able to fully understand what's needed. Because let's face it, a lot of our clients are clueless about the work. They are clueless about what the state of their books is or their complexity or anything like that. So usually this falls on us. It is our mistake to give a price before we have a full understanding of that situation and what exactly they are looking for. And then the third root cause of scope creep is saying yes to just one more thing without a process to push back, because you may have the opposite of a vague agreement. You may have a very detailed agreement, and you may have asked all the questions and gotten all of the information that you needed to be able to give an accurate price. But if you are letting the client to just ask you for those just quick questions, or I need this report, or can you do this thing for me really quick, those things, as we know, are never truly quick, and over time they add up. So we need to have the strength to be able to say, yes, but wait, let's pause for a moment and then push back and make sure that we're properly compensated for that. So the hidden cost of scope creep is time. You're losing hours on, on priced work, work that you did not anticipate it. And I personally, I am very protective of my time. Because I am a recovering workaholic, if I don't keep good tabs on my capacity management, I could very easily be working 60, 80 hours a week, not because I have to, but because I let myself go. So now that I only work a maximum of 25 hours per week, I am very protective of my time and my capacity. And that is something that if you are not, I recommend that you are, especially if you have family or just want to enjoy life outside of work. Make sure that you're not losing hours on work that you're not being compensated for because that— the next hidden cost is what the consequence of losing those hours is: profit. Your margins get eroded on fixed fee engagements where you did not accurately price. I know that a lot of people that have not yet done value pricing, because this is part of the pricing journey, you know, you start on hourly billing, the next step is going to fixed fee billing, and in there you usually take your your desired hourly rate and multiply it times how many hours you think it's going to take. But if you are letting scope creep come in, that's going to just go out the window. And suddenly, I've seen this, I've had bookkeepers tell me, I essentially paid to work on this project because after their time and their tools, they just— there was no profit left. And the third hidden scope cost of scope creep is energy. The frustration and resentment it creates. That is not healthy, that is not positive. It affects the quality of life, it affects your alignment, it can spill over into other scenarios, onto other clients and other projects who are completely unrelated, but it can really affect affect your mood. And we really need to like love what we're doing. I believe that if it does not bring you joy, why are you doing it? And for that reason, I need to always be excited about coming to my desk, not going, ah, let's see what fresh messes am I gonna encounter today and how long it's gonna take me to unravel. Because that was me 10 years ago. I never want to go back to that. So think about your last scope creep experience. Where did the clarity break down? And if you feel comfortable sharing, please put it in the chat because this will be beneficial for others. There is no judgment. We've all been there. And I see that Adrian is a recovering workaholic too. Glad we're in good company. And yes, I've done it. It does accumulate. The effects of scope creep are cumulative. So think of the last time that you experienced scope creep. Where was that the clarity broke down? The right questions asked early are your first line of defense. Most accountants undercode because they ask "what" but not the "why," the "how," or the "how messy." What I mean by this is that a lot of times accountants may have a conversation with the client and they'll ask, "Okay, what accounting software are you using?" When were your books last reconciled? Are they up to date? And the client will say yes. And those of us that do diagnostics know the answer is hardly ever yes. We may ask them, how many bank accounts do you have? What platforms do you sell? But we are not looking into the why of— why did they reach out to you? Because something had to happen besides I need a bookkeeper, I need an accountant. There is a pain that made them act today instead of tomorrow or the day after. And it's important to uncover that because that helps give us some clarity about what the expectations for the deliverables are. Because it's not just about understanding how much bookkeeping you need to be done, it's what they are expecting from the results from that. Perhaps you thought you were just going to generate some reports and send them on their way and thank you and "See you next month." But they may have been expecting, you know, in-depth meetings where their hands are being held through forecasting scenarios and making decisions, which— that's advisory, that's not bookkeeping. Or we do not ask about how messy things are. And this is something that you cannot accurately ask the client because the clients don't usually know. This is something that you need to see to be able to quantify. So the mindset shift is you move from reactive to diagnostic. Instead of being an order taker, because we are not a waiter at a restaurant, we move to trusted advisor. And a diagnostic review should always be the first step for a new client. I did not do this when I started my business, and I really paid for it. So ever since it has become a must-do, my life is so much better. So you first have to determine what the scope of work is and the how long it's gonna take. I don't do it to come up with a price because I don't care how long it takes me when I am pricing. That's not value pricing. But like I mentioned, I am very protective of my time. And my capacity, and I like to give clients accurate estimates on how long it will take me to get their books done. So that's why I need to know going in how long it will take, because that way I can determine whether they need to go on my waiting list or I can take them now and give realistic timelines. Because one of the things that I like to do is under-promise and over-deliver, where if I think that their books are going to take me 6 weeks to clean up, I'll make I tell them 8 or 10, and as long as they're not causing delays, which we, you know, that sometimes they do, uh, I can meet that timeline. Then that diagnostic allows you to solve the right problems because sometimes what they are telling you is not truly what they need. There may be other issues that you're just not aware of that need attention in order to get to the desire. Outcome, and then you can confidently price this work and avoid scope creep. So the way that I have learned to do this is via what I called the unscripted discovery call. A lot of the time people ask, do you have a script for the consultation? I need a list of questions to ask. I used to have that mentality as well. And what I realized is that having a list of 20 questions was not doing me any favors. First of all, it felt like when I go to the doctor's office and the nurse, you could tell that they couldn't care less. They're just going down the list of questions. It's like, what medications are you taking? When's the last time you had your physical? Do you have allergies to any medications? And they're just going robotically down this list, not even listening clearly to your answers, just jotting your answers, yes, no, this, that. The clients don't want to feel like this is such a game of 20 questions as I used to play growing up, an interrogation, because we are in a relationship business. And in this consultation, this initial discovery call, this is the first impression that this prospect has of what it's like to work with you. And if they feel like they are being asked question after question after question in rapid succession without being given any, like, opportunity to, like, really think about their answers or being asked about stuff that they just don't know, I mean, so many times— tell me in the chat yes or no— if you encounter people that say, "Yes, my books are clean and up to date," and then you go in and they're anything but. Why are you going to be asking questions that the client does not have the answers to? So for that reason, I eliminated those scripts. I don't ask many questions. I might discovery call is unscripted. I have 2 questions that I always ask in a discovery call, and those are, what made you reach out to me? And then I just shut up and I listen. Some clients may give me a 20-second answer. Some prospects may give me a 5-minute answer. But the key is to listen because their answer is going to give you the clue about what your next question should be. So the second thing that I ask then is, "Tell me more about blank." Tell me more about whatever it is that they just brought up in the answer to the first question. This does wonders for that first impression, that relationship building, doing what Teresa calls filling the goodwill bucket, but also it makes the client feel heard. And a lot of the information that they'll tell you will give you some hints about what you may need to look for when you are preparing the proposal later on, because then you'll have an understanding about their pain, and their expectations, but we are not asking for the what during this session because they may not know or they may forget and give you incomplete information. So for that reason, once I have the discovery call and I've asked those questions, and I may ask, "Tell me more about..." more than once because there may be multiple things that I will want to know more about, then I move on to the diagnostic review. A diagnostic review is a paid structured assessment before the full engagement begins. This is separate from the onboarding and is the step before the price is finalized. So once somebody has a diagnostic, uh, sorry, a discovery call with me, we are not discussing How much the monthly bookkeeping or how much the cleanup or how much the advisory is going to be. At that call, we are focusing on their pain, what led them to reach out, starting to get an idea what potential solutions they'll need. And then we discuss the diagnostic. So the only pricing that I am discussing during that call is how much the diagnostic is going to be. And I make it clear that prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. That this allows me to provide the exact solutions that they need, so they are paying for only what they need to seek the solution to the problem that they have without any surprises or having to make changes later on. So there is a 4-layer question framework of information that you need to be able to create the price. And these are questions for you to find an answer to, not necessarily ask the client. This is done through that diagnostic. So first is the situation. What does their current setup look like? This is software, team, processes. Are things set up correctly? Are things up to date? Do they have good workflows or are their workflows a mess that are creating bigger mess? And then the history. What happened before? Why did they have a prior accountant? What happened to them? What were the issues? Is there a backlog? And then there's the complexity that— what are the hidden variables? Multiple entities, transactions, jurisdictions, And then what is the expectation? What does success look like to them? And we need to come and realize, is it realistic? So the questions that you should always be able to answer before pricing, and these are just some of them because we can spend a much longer session going into the in-depth of everything that you would be looking for, but some of the main ones are: When were the books last reconciled? This is key important information to have because somebody may come to you for monthly bookkeeping, but they really need catch-up and cleanup first. Have there been any tax notices or compliance issues? And then how many bank accounts, entities, or payroll staff are involved? As you know, these different amounts of transactional volume can definitely affect the scope of work. So you want to know how much they have going in so that you can document that and build in buffers. So if there is growth, then they will be able to address that. Later on without the scope creeping in. And it's very important— this is, this one you do get from the client, not from the diagnostic— is what outcomes and deliverables is the client seeking? Because we may have assumptions as to what they want, but different business owners, different stakeholders may have different expectations. And you need to understand what it is that they are looking for to make sure that you build that into the scope of work. So a structured diagnostic gives you and your client certainty before you commit. So one of the questions that I oftentimes get is what services to offer a diagnostic review. It's not just limited to bookkeeping. You can do this for cleanups, for catch-ups, for recurring bookkeeping work, for controller or CFO services, for tax planning and advice, for advisory services, and any service where you will need clarity of scope before you can accurately price. Of course, The how you do the diagnostic will differ based on the service, but there are some components that are standard across the board. Because, for example, you need to have clean books for the advisory even if you're not the one that is going to do the bookkeeping. So the 3-step diagnostic process is: first, you request Next, this is where you ask for access to financials. This meaning their accounting file, any spreadsheets they may have, uh, prior tax returns, reports from their payroll provider, sales tax, uh, e-commerce platforms, POS systems, whatever they may be using, any other software. And records, and you request those upfront because you are not looking at just their accounting software. The accounting software may be hiding key components from the financial story just because whoever came before you may not have been educated enough to know that it needed to be reflected and recorded. So it is important that you're not just looking at the financials that you're looking at the supporting documentation and see, does this tie in? Are the books telling a complete and accurate story, or are there chapters missing? Then the second step is review. This is where you assess the actual state of play against your checklist, and it's not what the client thinks it is. This is— you will have a list of things that you look for when you're reviewing the file. And I know I can see, I can just sense people in the chat starting to type in the question, can you give me your checklist? This is not in the scope of today's session, but I will give you a little bit of a hint that you can take a screenshot of momentarily. But if you join the Academy, both Theresa Slack and myself have taught webinars this year on how we do our diagnostic process. And I know for sure in the recording for my session, I provide my whole in-depth, uh, things that I look for. But you need to review everything, not just take a quick look. Is it reconciled? You need to do a deeper dive. Are there best practices being followed? Is the software set up correctly? Oh, what is the status of accounts when you run reports? Do they make sense, or are there red flags, numbers jumping out of you, like debits where there should be credits, uh, things like that? Does it match the last filed tax return, or is it a completely separate work of fiction? Those are all things that we need to look into to be able to understand and if what they are providing us is clean enough for us to just pick up and take over, and if not, what exactly needs to be done to make it whole. And then the third step is to report back. This is where you present the findings to the client, provide clarity of scope, make sure that they are understanding the scope that you're proposing. So that is the time where they can tell you if there's something else that they expect or there's something else that they wish they could have, so that then you can price with confidence. So things to look for when you're doing the diagnostic: you're looking to see if there's catch-up or is there cleanup work required? So many times I get prospects telling me, oh, I did my books, but now I got too busy, but they're up to date. All you need to do is take over. How many of you tell me in the chat have found that they are accurate when the business owner is the one that does it? Because sometimes they'll tell me they are up to date and reconciled, but in reality, when I go in, All they did was post from the bank feed because the business owner does not know what a reconciliation means. They don't understand that that's a separate step. They have no clue what it is, how to do it, or why it's even important. And even some that have had prior bookkeepers, most places in the world, there is no standardized licensing for for bookkeepers, meaning anybody and their mother can just wake up today, decide I am a bookkeeper, and start charging to do bookkeeping without ever having any formal education. And even those that seek education, the education is not standardized. The comprehensiveness of the knowledge that you gain can vary depending on where you learn. Or who taught you. So you can put 10 bookkeepers in a room and many times get 7 to 9 different ways of doing something just because there is no standardization in the industry. So even if somebody tells you, I had a bookkeeper and my books are up to date, you still have to go in and look because perhaps they were not practicing best workflows, implementing best practices, or, you know, I see this a lot where they reconcile the checking account and the credit card, but the rest of the balance sheet is the Wild West. Complete disaster. Nobody has ever verified those numbers, and they are just a total mess. Am I alone? Let me know in the chat if you've encountered that as well. And so you are looking Is there are missing records or incomplete data? I see this a lot where I, you know, in the conversation with the client, they let me know how, oh, at tax time is such a burden because I have to find all of the receipts for the things that I paid for the business that are my personal funds so my tax preparer can include them. Well, that should have been tracked in the books all along. So that means that the previous board bookkeeper did not know to ask the question. There was no workflow to request this information. It should have been a part of the monthly bookkeeping workflow for a while. So that's just an example of incomplete data or missing records that you can find when you are looking in the diagnostic. But you're also looking for complexity markers. You need to understand because no two businesses are the same, even within the same industry, and some industries are more complex than others. So for example, the legal industry, usually they have trust accounts, IOLTA tracking, three-way reconciliations that need to be done. On construction, there's usually job costing In nonprofits, there's usually class tracking, but you cannot rely just by their industry to determine the level of complexity because within the same industry, some businesses are more complex than others. You need to find out if they have multiple entities or intercompany transactions. Those can add a whole new layer of fun. And you need to look for compliance gaps because sometimes the books just don't match reality. They don't match the tax return. Sometimes they may not be even up to date with their compliance. They may be filing income tax returns but not sales tax or things like that. So I want to show this to you, and this is just a very abbreviated checklist of what things that you can look for and look into when you are doing a health check. This was the very first checklist that I used to use back when I instituted this process around 2017, 2018. Over time, this has grown into a much bigger, more in-depth diagnostic. And I tell my clients, so I am big on analogies and comparisons. I let them know that though, just like they take their vehicle for an oil change and the mechanic has that checklist where they check the fluid levels, the battery charge, the tire pressure, I do the same for their vehicle. So these are just some of the high-level things that you want to look for. It's like, are all bank accounts, credit card accounts reconciled? And then, are there any additional accounts that should be reconciled? And this is one of the reasons why you want to ask for records like statements. Are all accounts even reflected in the ledger? Because sometimes they may forget that this money market account, because there's hardly ever any activity in it, it may not be connected to the books. Or how many times do we see that they have a credit card but the credit card does not have its own register in the accounting software, and you only ever see the credit card payment. And then they're trying to split that credit card payment based on what things they charge to the card. That's not the correct workflow. So accounts receivable, does it reconcile with a balance sheet? Sometimes it doesn't. Is accounts receivable real, meaning is it Is it truly outstanding? Are the accounts payable the same? Does it reconcile to the balance sheet and is it real? Are payroll tax liability balance outstanding for the current period? Same for sales tax. Are tax settings correct? Just last week I had a new onboard client and their sales tax is a disaster. They're charging the wrong tax rates for their products and services. And then you want to review the balance sheet for, you know, actual balances and accounts. And before I even have this checklist, and this is an easy way to start, is you can use the balance sheet as your initial checklist once you've confirmed that it contains all of the accounts that it needs to contain. So one of the things that I do is I reconcile the balance sheet from the accounting software to the balance sheet in the tax return, because that lets me know sometimes there's things that only the tax preparer knows and the bookkeeper is never told about. And then I review multi-period income statements so that I can look for unusual balances, trends, or inconsistencies. I check into any miscellaneous accounts to see what's in there. Should it really be miscellaneous? Because miscellaneous should be a rarely used account. It shouldn't be 20% of expenses. And let's look into app integrations that meet the client needs. So the process that I follow is the first step, I have the discovery call. In there, I explain how I work and I give the customer choice. I do use value pricing for pricing the discovery engagement. So I have a model in effective pricing software, which you'll get to see tomorrow what that software looks like and see how easily customizable, customizable it can be for any type of work that you want to price. Then the next, second step is the engagement, where we have a signed agreement and we go through the data collection of all the information that is needed. Then I do the diagnostic review where I conduct the detailed assessment of the file. And then the fourth step is the delivery. That's where we have the report and a follow-up meeting where we go over the plan of action. One of the things that I wanted to show you is this is a template for the health check that I currently use that is a lot more in-depth. Just wanted to make it bigger, and it has placeholders because I automate the creation of this information where, when I am doing the diagnostic, I type in a form, and when I submit that form, it automatically generates this. I went in-depth on how to do this on the Academy, and I do have a brief YouTube video that you guys can contact me and learn what that app is. But that app existed long before AI. Nowadays, you can use AI to create your reports. So you don't— if you are starting from scratch, you may not even need to reinvent the wheel. ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity can help you with this. But as you see, we have some information that is explaining the purpose of the process, of why this is important, why it— what it means. And then it goes into very detail on file setups and transaction entry and reconciliations, the balance sheet, and every section I have a why this matters. Because that way the meeting is shorter if I'm not having to explain why each of these little things are important. So as you see, by the end, by the time this is done, it's 8 pages that the client gets as a tangible deliverable for these first steps of the engagement. So that's just a little glimpse of what that can possibly look like for you. I strongly recommend that this be your first portion of working with all new clients. The first step for me is a non-negotiable, is this diagnostic. It's important that we do that. So to protect yourself from scope creep going forward, the scope creep protection system has 4 pillars. The first one is a written engagement letter. Always, without exception, you need to define what is included and what is not. And mine essentially says anything not explicitly listed is not included. So if the client's only asking for cash flow forecasting and the scope of work does not explicitly list cash flow forecasting, then I can very easily go to the client and tell them, I will be happy to help you with that. That is not included in your current scope of work, so we need to do a change order to add that in. And by then we're starting that conversation and they realize, okay, great, I was not paying for this. How much is it going to be? So that leads to the the second pillar, which is the change order process. This is a simple, non-confrontational way that you say, that's outside of scope, here's the cost. So my change order is one page, it's not even one full page, and it essentially says, this is what is changing in your scope of work. So here's your revised scope of work, Here is your new rate. All other terms from the agreement, or, you know, we sign agreement, remain in place. And my clients love that because they are not having to go through an entire new 14-page engagement letter with me. They can see and agree to just what's changing, which is the scope of service and the final price. Then the third pillar is scope Check-ins. This is where you build brief mid-engagement reviews into longer projects. And this is particularly critical when you're doing monthly bookkeeping because there perhaps the scope is fine for the first few months, but then the client starts to grow and their transaction volume increases, or they start opening credit cards left and right because they're getting cashback rewards. They do a lot. Or perhaps they are expanding and adding new locations. Whatever the case may be, you need to periodically do reviews into these projects to make sure that the scope is not being exceeded. I used to have it done quarterly. Now it's part of my checklist where my monthly checklist, I ask what has, what is new for this client. And that's the trigger. If there's something new, I need to review the scope. Oh, they open a new account. Is this to replace an old account that they closed, or is it a new additional account? Things like that. Or they chose to change how they're taxed. That can also trigger a change of scope. And then client education, which is where we help clients understand the process so they don't feel blindsided. So when clients say, can you just quickly, you can always say, yes, I'll be happy to help with that. However, that is not included in the scope of work of our current agreement. Would you like me to send you a change order? And then that opens the conversation. If it's just one simple thing, you may not be able to just send a change order, but most of the time This becomes a value conversation of which you'll learn more throughout this conference, and it can even lead to additional upsells. And when a client says, "I thought that was included," then you can redirect them with confidence and clarity to the written scope of work. This reinforces the professional standard because clarity protects the client too. It builds trust, not friction. So your immediate action step that I recommend is write down 5 questions that you wish you've asked your last difficult client before onboarding them, because that will be the clue, the foundation for what information you'll need to learn to prevent that from happening again. So I think we are right at the top of the time. I thank you so much for your time. I hope that you enjoy the rest of the conference. I will try to see if there's questions in the chat and answer them if I see them, but I cannot promise that I get to all of them. So thank you for so much for joining me today and back to you, Mark.

Thank you so much, Jess. Awesome as ever. And yes, there were a few questions just at the very end of the chat box specifically for you. So if you want to type the answers, you can do. Yeah. And also, Jess, if you— just so you know, there was some feedback that your mic volume was quite high, so people did turn their volumes down. I don't know what the issue there. It may be a setting somewhere you want to just check out. Anyway, that was amazing. And people love Jess and her training because it's so practical and because she's doing this stuff. And what's really interesting is, as I was listening to her, I was thinking of another one of our trainers that people love who I think was here earlier. I might still be here, Neil. And when I compare Neil and Jess, one of the things that's really interesting is that Neil's extremely successful and he's gone down the route of building a practice that's grown crazy fast. With a great team of people. I think he just moved into brand new impressive premises in just the last few weeks. And so Neil's extremely successful by building a big practice with a team of people. What I love about Jess is that everyone's definition of success is different. For her, I love the fact that work-life balance is so important. She loves her vacations, her family time, And so she's so good at figuring out what's the tech stack, the systems, the processes that makes everything just work like clockwork. So she can choose whether to work longer hours, uh, or whether to spend more time on her cruises, uh, going out on vacation, spending time with family. And so it's great listening to those two to see two opposite perspectives because for everyone, the definition of success is different. Some people want to build a big firm, some people want to have just a nice life, or some combination of the two. Okay, I'm not saying Neil doesn't have a nice life. I know he does as well. Right, I've— we're going to get into some questions soon. There's lots of great questions. But before I do, I thought I'd just mention a couple of things. I do have a bonus for everybody that will come into the— which will give you the link in a second. And I've talked a bit, you've now met some of, two of our trainers, and I gave you, my team gave you the link earlier to find out more about the Value Pricing Academy. And if you've read through there, you'll see details of other trainers, other amazing people as part of our team, extended team, helping you to build a more successful business. But what, what we don't talk about on that website is is the internal team. And some of you, I know you've been seeing the comments in the chat from various members of my team, like Gabby sharing links, and you might've thought, Gabby, her surname's Wickersham. Is there a, is there some sort of relationship there? And the answer is absolutely yes. So we are a family business. We are a family business. There are 6 of us internally. Sarah is my, my partner in life and business. And everything. And we have our daughters working for us. So Emily, you will meet tomorrow. Emily's our head of marketing, and she does a lot of training to help you build your practice, grow, and attract more clients. And then Gabby— Gabby's responsible for pulling this whole event together. So the emails that you responded to to come here, she created those and the pages. So that's Gabby, my eldest daughter. And she's been in the chat box sharing links with you. And then they're not here today on the session, but Tasha is my middle daughter and Lara is my younger daughter, both work in the business. And Tasha is going to be editing the recording of today's session to make that available later. So she does a lot of video editing and so on. So I thought you might be interested. That's the team. We are very much a family business. Uh, right. What else have I got for you? I have a couple— I have a resource for you. I promised you a free resource as a thank you for being here today, and it's a video I did of about 50 minutes long where I'll walk through how you can use AI to start to build your pricing systems. Comes with a powerful workbook as well, full of all the prompts that I talk about in the video. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask my team now, I think it's Gabby, to put the links into the chat so you can grab those 2 links and, and get those resources. So make sure you do that before the end of the session. I have another bonus for you for tomorrow. So when you come live tomorrow, towards the end, I have a bonus. So what is it? Well, I've seen at least one person say in the chat, how do you go about pricing cleanup work? Which is a great question. And that's exactly what we do. We have a full course in the Academy on exactly how to price cleanup work. And we've got so many people with amazing, amazing stories of how they got better prices. So we've taken the best bits of that training and built it into a resource that you'll get as a bonus when you come along tomorrow. Before we get into the Q&A, let me just remind you of some of the things that we've talked about today. We've looked at some of the problems with pricing bookkeeping. I went through 10 of them. We've also looked at the opportunity. I've shared some stories of some amazing things people are doing. We've also looked at how the profession is pricing. Jess has talked about her diagnostic review. We've talked about the importance of scope. We've talked about systems, and I've talked about how to be more confident with your pricing. But we're not finished yet because tomorrow we have a lot more stuff to cover. We're going to look at how do you start to build your pricing systems? How do you create packages? How do you move from hourly to value pricing? How do you calculate a price? So Jess has talked about the scope issues. I'm going to show you how you then take that and start to build prices. We're then going to look at complete systems for pricing. As she mentioned, effective pricing, you're going to hear from another amazing speaker who's going to talk more about that. And show you how she uses it to get amazing results. So you'll meet Kim and you'll also meet Emily tomorrow. So here's a quick rundown of day 2 tomorrow. We start at the same time and I'll start with a welcome and some shoutouts. Then I'll be talking through systems. Then you'll meet Kim, who will be showing you how she uses effective software to pricing software to get amazing results with her pricing. Which I know Jess mentioned as well. And then you'll meet Emily, who'll talk about how you can start to attract higher-value bookkeeping clients. So that's tomorrow, right? We're going to wrap up the last 10, 20, 30 minutes by me answering as many questions as possible. Lucy says can't see the link either, so let me just shout out to Sarah, Sarah, I'm not sure if Gab is there or not, but Sarah, if you could just grab the links for the two bonuses, we'll get those sorted out for you in the next few minutes. Right, questions then. I know that, I know Jess has been kindly answering some of the questions in the chat. So if you asked a question of Jess, I think it was Liz and I think, and a few others, I think that's in the chat. Right, I'll go through a few. I've got Philip said, what is a healthy rate of customer attrition? Is this a sign of optimal pricing? Great question. Yes. If you're not— if when you present a price, nobody objects, if everybody, everybody accepts your current price, then you are too cheap. You are leaving money on the table. You want to have some pushback on price. And it's the same with your client attrition. If nobody ever leaves you, you're probably not charging enough. You do want to have some, some churn. You do want some clients to, to leave because of price. It shows that you're starting to push the boundaries. And also, we talk a lot about one of the big challenges that a lot of firms have is just too many clients in the first place. If you've If you're working crazy hours and busy, then you need to think about how we color a few clients, and we can do that by repricing our entire client base, which we'll talk about much, much more. That's really the subject of Terry's session on Thursday, and you'll love that session. Grace says, how to price with system that my assistant can do it without asking me? Great question. We're going to cover that tomorrow. Kim's going to show you a system that your team could then do the pricing. Then I have— it says H Park— how do you answer the, what is your hourly rate? Most will reduce it down to an hourly rate. Okay, so you do not. There is no requirement to have an hourly rate. So if a client asks you what your hourly rate is, you do not have to answer it. And what I recommend you do, and we'll talk about this more tomorrow, but you need to have scripts, you need to practice What are the words that you say? And one of the things you need to do is figure out, well, what is the script? What are the words you're going to say when somebody says, what is your hourly rate? You do need to have one. You don't need to have one. And what you should do is come up with a form of words which explains why you don't and why you give people a fixed price in advance. Uh, right. Tracy says, um, what's the best strategy for addressing new pricing with legacy clients? You're going to get that on Thursday. Terry's going to be focusing on that in her session. Hattie says, hi Mark, my biggest problem is determining how to price. What is your best suggestion? Thank you. Okay. So in terms of coming up with a price, Hattie, that's tomorrow's session. I'll be talking about and showing you how to come up with a fixed price. And then Kim's going to build on that with a complete system for coming up with a price. So Hattie, that's tomorrow. Lorraine, the biggest challenge I have is pricing cleanup projects. What is your recommendation on how to approach and price cleanup projects? Well, that's a— that would take me a couple of hours to answer that properly, but the good news is, Lorraine, that's our bonus resource tomorrow, and that'll give you probably more than what you're looking for in, in the answer to that question. So tomorrow, Lorraine, when you show up, you'll get that bonus resource on cleanup work. Ross, hi there, Ross. Good to see you. Ross Radford, how do you price for advisory when full scope may be unclear after your initial discovery call, but you need to agree a price to start the work? So Ross, I'm going to keep it brief because we run our next 3-day event. I think it's 3 days still, is in June called the Business Advisory Masterclass. So over 3 days, Ross, I'm going to, I'm going to go deep along with some other guest speakers on how do we, how do we deliver business advisory, but also how do we price that? That'll be part of that. So Ross, you're gonna, we're gonna go deep in June on that. But just to give you some sort of answer for now, essentially everything that we are going to talk about over these 3 days when it comes to pricing, yes, we'll cover some other things as well, like tariff sessional systems. Emily's going to talk about growing your firm. But a lot of today and tomorrow and Thursday is about pricing, and all the things that we talk about in pricing, whilst we are focusing primarily on bookkeeping work, really the same principles apply with advisory. So as we go through the various elements today, tomorrow, Thursday, Ross, think about how you can apply those to advisory. For example, tomorrow we'll talk about coming up with packages, 3 different options. So I hope that helps for now, Ross, but come along in June if you really want to go deep on advisory work and how to price it. Laura says, okay, this is a long one, so just bear with me. I'm not sure if I can answer it. Mark, I have a few clients for who I act as QuickBooks super support, not doing bookkeeping but researching their periodic questions or help where they are stuck. I charge hourly for them. Is there an offer I can give them that is fair and helpful but gets me out of the occasional hourly project. Yes, there's no— you don't have to charge hourly, and I would recommend you don't because you are probably leaving money on the table, plus all the issues I talked about earlier about the problems. Clients don't tend to like it. So the question then is, how do you give a fixed price in advance when there's uncertainty? Well, we've covered that with Jess's session. Ross asked a similar thing with business advisory. One of the things that you can do is to give people some different choices, some different different options, which we'll look at tomorrow when I look at creating packages. You would want to do exactly the same things with your QuickBooks Super Support, and the reason for that is because you don't know what people are willing to pay. If you give a single price, then your single fixed price is always the wrong price because they may well have been willing to pay a higher price, and you don't know unless you give them choices. So I hope that helps a bit, Laura, but my answer really is the same as Ross. Everything we talk about, which is going to be focused more on bookkeeping for these 3 days, you could still apply the pricing ideas to advisory and to super support, training, anything else that you do. I hope that helps for now. Inside the VPA, by the way, Laura, we do cover, if you want to go deeper on pricing other services, we do that inside the Value Pricing Academy. For example, we have a complete system that I created a couple of years ago on how to price training, which is similar to your super support. It's, it's how do we do training in things like QBO, not doing the bookkeeping but training and the support. And we've built a full system for that. Right, anonymous attendee I'm just starting out. My biggest challenge is getting clients. How to get clients? Okay, Emily is going to be doing that tomorrow. Emily's session is all about how do we attract more clients for our bookkeeping work, so you'll get that answered then. Keith, how do we price a books cleanup? All right, we've covered that one already because that's the resource that you're going to get tomorrow. Um, he goes on to say, what are the drivers of price? Uh, and, and same question for monthly bookkeeping engagement pricing. Well, some of what Jess has talked about with scope creep, that's a lot of the issues with scope are very similar between bookkeeping work and cleanup work. Cleanup work has some additional things like how many months has the books been a mess and so on, but there's a lot of similarities. So Keith, hopefully Jess's session helped with part of your answer, your question, and when you get that resource, the bonus resource this time tomorrow, that will help with the rest. And JL John says, how to price a cleanup or catch-up? Okay, same thing, bonus resource tomorrow. Selma, as I start working on my own, I see my value as advisory, not just bookkeeping. How do I attract the right clients who value that, and how can I confidently price my services without worrying if it's too high or too low? So How to attract clients. Again, Emily's session tomorrow is all about that and how to confidently price my service without worrying if it's too high or too low. We'll cover that a lot tomorrow in the pricing system where we'll look at creating different options, different packages. I'll talk about the, the psychology behind it, why it works, how it helps you to deal with the fact that the worry of whether your price is about right or not, it takes that worry away. So Salma, that's all coming tomorrow. Astrid said— this was more for Teresa— can we have a list of the software you use? That's something that, unless she's done it already, she goes through in huge depth in her training in the Value Pricing Academy on all the systems. So I've seen Linda say, Terry, can you please share your task list and quality control lists? Those are resources that you get inside the Value Pricing Academy. I do have a question here for Theresa. I'll— if she's here, if Terry, you are here, um, if you've not already answered it, you can turn— yeah, so I'm here. Yeah, you're here. Perhaps you've seen it, Philip's question, um, about his first hire. What advice do you have? I don't want to read it.

Yes, um, so when it comes to hiring, as I said before, we need a good system, um, and I think you need to have a good way to test people, especially if you're hiring bookkeepers. So I recommend that you actually put people through testing. We have a multiple choice test they have to take. They have to get a minimum of 80% for us to even continue talking to them. Then we also have a live QuickBooks test where I send them a fake data file and I have them show me how would you organize this work, how would you do the work, and I watch them. Because so many times they'll be like, oh yeah, I know QuickBooks. And then when you get in front of them, they don't know how to create an invoice. So when it comes to hiring, I think slowing down. I know when you're hiring, you're usually in that like, I need to hire, I need to hire now. Force yourself to slow down and take the time to test them and put them through and ask them questions and don't be afraid to say, hey, Hey, if you want to work with us, you need to do these things because it is hard to find good people. So slow it down and follow a process. And in the Academy, we have a whole session I do on your hiring system.

Awesome. Great. I don't know if you can ask the next one. Liz said, why is a cloud system favored?

That was about selling, I believe. Yes. So if you are considering selling your bookkeeping firm, having a fully cloud-based system where there's not paper, that everything is online, is much more attractive. One of the reasons— there's a lot of reasons, but one of them is location. So for example, the people that bought Financely are in BC. We're in Ontario, which is the other side of the country. It's a good 4-hour flight away. They could not have bought us if we were a physical location. So that limits your ability. It also makes it easier for the buyer because everything is online, everything is automated. They can access files online, making it easier for a new owner to take over the firm. So that's— there's others, but those are some of the main reasons they are considered more worthwhile of a higher price.

Thank you. Next question, perhaps keep it— is a bit off topic, so perhaps keep it brief. But anonymous attendee said, I don't know who it is, how did you go about selling your bookkeeping business and how did you let go of it?

Really quickly, one, we hired a firm that specializes in selling accounting firms that know how to do that. That made it really easy. And I'll be completely honest, I haven't let it go. I am still working with as a consultant, but working maybe 10 to 20 hours per month rather than full-time. So I haven't totally let it go.

And then the next question I can't answer, and it may be you can't either, but it's about the charity sector. But if you can't answer it, I'm going to suggest a different way for her to get the answer.

Grace said, um, I've never worked in the charity sector, Yeah, I don't work in charities either.

Um, okay, let me, let me— I'm gonna, I'm gonna do some research on that one from Grace. So I'm going to ask Sarah if she can take a note of that question. I know there are people in the Value Pricing Academy who deal with— we call them charities in the UK, so I'm guessing Grace is in the UK. You call them not-for-profits, I think.

Jessica does. She handles charities and not-for-profits.

So, okay, I know she's been answering some things in the—

maybe she can.

Yeah, well, if she knows the answer, she could type away. Um, yeah, Afshane said that as well. Otherwise, I'll find out the answer. We'll find a way to get an answer for tomorrow. Um, and then I'm just going to skip over for a second, uh, the next ones. I don't know if you can answer, Liz, or not. How do you deal with people hiding income by taking cash payments?

I'd love to take that one. Yeah, if you discover that in your diagnostic review, first, it's a very serious conversation with the client. And if they're not willing to immediately change and stop, we do not engage with them. It's as simple as that. You do not want to work with clients that are trying to do unethical things. Your reputation and professionalism are incredibly valuable. So just don't go there. But teach them first, because sometimes it's because they don't know, and once you educate them, they will change their ways.

Well, I'm so glad you're here. I think it's one last final question, which again you, you might be able to answer certainly better than me, which is Janine says, what are different ways to pay staff bookkeepers working for us? I found that paying hourly can eat into profits, as you described.

Okay. Yeah, hourly can be a challenge, especially when you're just getting going. So what we did back then is we actually put them on a percentage of revenue. So we were billing the client $2,000, the bookkeeper got a percentage of that. And I have talked to lots and there's a bit of a range there. I've seen some as low as 25% and up to about 45-50%. So you need to figure out what level of your profit are you willing to give away while also making sure that you are protecting your own. That is a really safe way to do it. And then you always know, and the bookkeeper always knows how much they're going to make. It's a safe way to do it. And then of course, as you grow, you might be switching more into salary and things like that.

Awesome, thank you so much, that really helped me out. I'm gonna deal with the last couple of questions, I think they're really easy for me to deal with. So yeah, I look forward to your session on Thursday.

Thanks, Mark.

Thank you so much. Okay, wasn't, wasn't Terry awesome? Right, just a couple of quick things, a couple of final questions I'll deal with. So Tammy said, wants to sign up, just doesn't have the money at this time. My job didn't give me any hours the last 3 weeks. Is there a way to still lock in the price? No, and we don't do discounts as the price does go up on Monday. So if you want to lock in the price, it has to be by Monday. But the other point I would say is when people say they don't have the money, that's usually because— it's usually because the way they've been doing something in the past isn't working for them. If you want a better future, if you want to make more money in the future, then you have to make different decisions. You have to do something different. And so it may well be that the Value Pricing Academy is exactly what you do need to figure out how to make those better decisions. And another question from Karen, which is I think the last one I'll deal with before we wrap up. I know Linda Curtis— thank you, Linda, for chiming in there as well. Karen said, is the Academy best for bookkeeping businesses that already have clients. I'm just starting my journey, still learning bookkeeping skills and launching business soon. Seems premature to join academy since I don't have any clients. Well, when I think back to 1996 when I started my accounting firm, I thought I knew it all because I was a qualified accountant, I was a tax expert, I was— I could save people lots of tax, so I thought I knew it all. What I then realized 3 years later was that when it comes to running a business and things like pricing and managing people, I realized I had no idea whatsoever. And I made so many mistakes that in 3 years cost me tens of thousands. I so wish that on the, at the start of my journey, I had access to something like the Value Pricing Academy so that I didn't make those mistakes. It took me, when I did meet My heroes, my heroes who helped me with my practice was Steve Pipe in the UK, Paul Dunn through the Accountant's Bootcamp, and Ron Baker. And I met all three of those in a 12-month period back end of '99 to '99, '98 to '99. And that changed my life. But because I'd made such a mess of my practice, it took 2 to 3 years to just fix the mess and start to get out of debt. And because I'd made such a big mess, And so I sometimes am envious of people like Neil Criddle. I mentioned Neil. He's one of our trainers. He joined the Academy in January 2020 when he'd been made redundant. And so he started the Academy at the same time he started his accounting firm. And so he did everything right from day one. And his growth has been extraordinary. He went from zero to a million in a very short space of time. So yes, it's difficult if you have just started and you don't have clients because perhaps you don't have yet the working capital. But also, if you try to do it yourself, I know from experience that it's actually— it costs more in terms of mistakes that you'll make rather than getting access to the experts who have the frameworks, who have done it, who'll teach you step step by step. Karen, I hope that helps there, and I know Linda did answer to some extent as well, so thank you, Linda Curtis. Right, I think I've dealt with all the questions apart from Grace. I will make a note of that and come back to you. I'm going to leave a final question, and that is what I would really appreciate is this: what has been your key insight so far? If you could tell me in the chat box, what has been the thing that you've learned today that's been the most valuable, the key insight. And while you're doing that, we always finish off by playing out with some music for a few minutes before we close down the Zoom. So I'm going to start playing some music, and I'll see you all tomorrow. Thank you so much for coming along. We have some more great stuff and some great speakers tomorrow. See you then.

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