Profitable Bookkeeping Conference Day Two

on a monthly basis. And then being able to approach them and say, you know what, you've been with me for a year and a half, haven't raised your prices at all during— we can show that your business has grown by X dollars, by X transactions over that time period. I think we need to update what we're working on, and for your business to grow and to make that up, this is what I think we do. Every single client that I've approached with that conversation, the has overwhelmingly been, yeah, sure, absolutely. And when I come back to them for a renewal contract, then here are the packages that I'm offering right now. Let's talk about these packages that you already have, and this is what you get in this new level, and here are your new prices. And time and again, the prices have gone up, and everyone is just saying, yeah, sure, that's fine. I feel confident with that because I really want to continue having good service for those good clients. The people that are signing up paying me 50% more than I would have priced before. It's helping me then have higher quality clients, don't have to have many clients, and that frees up the amount of time that I can spend on each client. That also frees up my schedule, so if I want to take a Friday off in the summer, I can because my bills are still going to be paid. My firm is still making money.

I'm located in southern Ontario in Niagara Region. I've had my business for about 7.5 years. When I started my business, I was really challenged by— I had been working as a bookkeeper bookkeeper for a company and they were changing all of their staff to subcontractors and they dictated what my opening rate was going to be. They said, oh, we're going to pay you $25 an hour instead of the salary that you've been on. And that sort of— when I opened my business to be a subcontractor to them, that was my rate that got grandfathered into everybody. I had no network. I didn't know anybody. And of course, then I met you and heard about you and got into your program the first time and started working on things. And it's been a joyride ever since. So the challenge, of course, with the pricing was that I had allowed that former client to dictate what my price was going to be, and it's very difficult then to change that. And I wasn't saying no to anybody. I didn't have a niche. I was spreading myself really thin and not making very much money as a result of it. I was surviving, and paying my bills, but I wasn't going on vacations. I wasn't buying the nice car that I like to drive. Like, I wasn't living life to the quality that I would have liked to. Yeah, I think it was my second year in business that I met you at a conference in Toronto, and I joined the Value Pricing Academy, and I made a commitment to myself to— I think I've attended probably 95% of the sessions live. I do I do the homework, I do the workbook. I created a Value Pricing Academy study group, as you know, with your permission, and those people hold me accountable. They're all always so thankful for our meetings and discussions, and I'm like, hey, I'm thankful for you guys because you're holding me accountable. Effective Pricing— wow, mind-blowing software. I've used it 3 times, and honestly— sorry, I get excited— so these are my first time value pricing people now instead of doing hourly. The very first time I I used it, I would have quoted this person $4,200 a year for the services that I provide to them. Using Effective Pricing, they chose my premium package and their annual price was over $18,000. So that was huge. And that just got me, of course, really pumped up. The second time I used the software, my increase was almost 200%. I think it was about 194% or something. So the results that I've been getting with the software has been so significant for my business and confidence, everything. I mean, it just— I get pumped up talking about it.

Hi, my name is Teresa Slack and I am one of the owners of Financially Bookkeeping Solutions. Having the honor of working with Mark for the last 3 years, I have a lot of success stories and a lot of testimonials to share. So we're going to step back in time a little bit. I started Financially along with my sister 7 years ago. Things started to happen fast. We started growing quickly, and then we thought, okay, we're getting too busy, it's time to hire staff. We hired 3 team members, and we thought, yeah, we're good. We were not good. We were doing all kinds of things wrong. One of the big things we had wrong is we didn't understand how to price ourselves. We didn't understand how to value the work that we did. A lot of times I remember both Connie and I saying to ourselves, well, It doesn't take us that long to do it. We won't charge them more. And that was such a bad decision. Then about 3 years ago, I think it was, I met Mark at the first QuickBooks Connect conference, which was actually called QuickBooks Thrive. And we went to a session and we met this guy named Mark, and he did this amazing talk about value pricing. We left there so excited. We went home, we created 3 packages, we put prices to it. We had entry, full, and premium bookkeeping, and the prices And we thought we've done this. We contacted each of our clients. We said, hey, this is how we're doing work now. And they were all like, awesome, that's great. Yeah, we were not doing value pricing. We were doing fixed prep pricing. And the big element that was still wrong is we had not learned to value the work that we do. Because of that, we almost put ourselves out of business. We were at some, at some points, we were paying our staff more than we were bringing in. In revenue from a client. At that point, Connie and I had to make a decision. Are we going to make some changes to what we do, or are we going to pack it in and go get jobs? Obviously, because I'm here today, we chose to continue. We chose to invest in our business. And one of the first things we did was we signed up to join Mark's Value Price Academy, and we purchased his Cloud Pricing 2.0 software, which has now been replaced with Effective Pricing, which is even more spectacular. And within that first year, we turned things around. The key elements Mark taught us was how to understand and appreciate the value of what we do, and most importantly, being able to communicate that to a client so that they would appreciate what we're doing. They would value what we were doing, and they would understand, and they would willingly pay higher prices to have us support them. I remember one time Not too long, about 6 months in, Mark had taught us how to reprice our existing clients. We are good students. Connie and I went away, we did it. We repriced all of our clients, and within a 6-week period, we had increased our revenue by 25%. And on top of that, many of the clients actually purchased an average of 15% more. Like that, we turned things around, and we have never looked back. And I am so incredibly grateful for all of the training and the teaching that Mark has done. So that is my testimonial to the Value Price Academy and the effect that it can have on your business and your future.

Hey, welcome, welcome to day 2. And again, we have So much to cover. I hope you enjoyed yesterday and took loads of notes, but also hopefully you took some action. Let's see who we've got. As, as yesterday, we're going to start in just under 5 minutes, but this is the welcome session. So let's see who's here so I can welcome you. I'm just going through the chat box right now. And first comment comes in from Dan. Over in Colorado. I've got lots of people telling me the temperature, and it means nothing to me because it's all in Fahrenheit, so I have no idea. But I think 87 sounds hot to me, Dan, and I know you've said a few times it's hot in Colorado. But we've got Tammy is here. She says yes. I'm not sure why yes, but hi there, Tammy, good to see you. Jude is here, uh, again, uh, 80 degrees in East Texas. Woohoo! So I guess that's good temperature. We have— oh, Tammy then went on to say 63 in Mississippi. It's like running a weather show, this. We've got Tracy from Nashville where it's bright day at 65 degrees, and then Sarah's here from Yukon in Canada, still buried in snow. Okay, there's a contrast. Right, I wonder if there's anything other than the weather in this chat. Let's see. But Christy says, hello, I'm from Troy in Ohio, weather's nice, coming out of winter is always great. It's It certainly is. It's, uh, Sarah and I go to the cafe every lunchtime, uh, in Portugal here. It's bright blue sky. We've had an awful winter, but the last few days have been really, really nice. It does feel like spring. Uh, Scott's here. Howdy, Scott from Texas. Good to see you again. Uh, we have, uh, Heather's here from Ontario where it's spring. Uh, Doreen is here from UK. She's from London. Welcome to you. Tammy says good morning from Huron. There's a few people from Ohio, I think. It's 41 degrees there, but you're on the cold side, Lake Erie. Travis is here. If you just joined, I'm starting in just under 3 minutes. Travis is here where it's chilly in Lexington. We've got Stan is here from Rockford, Illinois, 71 degrees. Ralph is here from Detroit. Dustin is here from Turner in Oregon. Lots of people from the US. Diana's here from Nashville, 65 degrees there. Hi there, Ross. Ross Radford is here. From London. A bit wet and miserable out there, possibly some hail. That's not so good, Ross. We also have S. Graham from Margate. That's Margate in Florida, not the UK. Autumn is here. That's Autumn by name, I think. Indianapolis. So it's spring for Autumn. That sounds really confusing. By the way, in the UK we call the fall Autumn. All right, Mark Hall was here from Cheltenham. He's in the UK. Linda's here from Huntsville. I'm starting in about 90 seconds. Let's see if I can get as many shoutouts done as possible and then we'll dive in. Dion's here. Hi Dion, good to see you, uh, from Wales. And Francis is here from Virginia. Samantha's here from London. Hi there, Samantha. We also have Shari is here from Rockwall. Carol Kostachuk, love to see you again. Hope you're doing well. Uh, British Columbia 2C. Is that 2 degrees? Oh, that's cold. Julie's here from San Antonio. Hi there, Julie, good to see you. Tamara is here from Maine. We have Tammy, who I've said hello to already, but she says, "To your question." I can't remember what that is now. Apologies. Grace is here from London. Sando's here from New Jersey. Hi there, Sando. We have Salma is here. We have Ruth is here. Paris Sound. Caroline Smith is here from Perth in Australia, and it's 10:40 in the— or 10:44 now in the evening. Well done for being here, Caroline. I hope you make it till the end. Karen's here from Ames, is that— I don't know— Indiana. Keith is here from Orlando, and we're going to start in just under a minute, so I'm just going to do as I'm told by— I've got 36 more messages, so I won't get through everybody, but let's see how I get on. We've got Liz here, we've got Kate Laverty, we've got Ian here. We've got also from Australia, from Perth. Welcome back, Ian. Congratulations on making it so late at night for you. Leo's here from San Antonio. Diana's helpfully done a transition, a trans— whatever for me. 65 Fahrenheit is 18 degrees Celsius. That really helps. Uh, we are almost ready to start. Rebecca's here, Sandy's here, uh, Dan's giving me a conversion as well from Colorado, 30 degrees Celsius. Wow, that is hot in Colorado. Uh, right, it's quarter to, I need to start. Uh, if I haven't given you a shout out, I have not mentioned your name, you're still very, very welcome. So thank you for coming along, it's great to see some of you chatting in the chat, which is great. I have noticed Ridwan's from South Africa. First person I've seen from South Africa so far. Okay, so we'll get started. We have a lot to cover today, and also we have a couple of really great guest speakers as well. It's not just me. And as I said a few times yesterday, I like to share stories because, yes, you absolutely can do this. That, by the way, is a tacky image from ChatGPT. Isn't AI wonderful? Not my favorite image. But anyway, I want to just remind me to say you can do this. All these stories you're hearing over the course of yesterday, today, tomorrow, you can do it all when you follow the, the frameworks that I've been teaching this for over, well, nearly 3 decades now. It's not far off. By the end of this decade, it'll be 3 decades I've been teaching value pricing. And I've had thousands of success stories over the years, worked with thousands of accounting firms. You absolutely can do this. And I did mention yesterday, back to the, the, the AI, the terrible AI image, I did say yesterday that AI is going to change our lives very, very significantly. And I mentioned the research from Anthropic recently that put us third on the list of being redundant, having losing jobs. And that's going to happen, not for you because you're a forward-thinking business owner, but we will have to evolve fast. And in the Value Pricing Academy, we'll be helping you to deal with and navigate through all of these issues that are affecting our great profession. So what's the day got in store for us? Here is the full agenda. It's in the workbooks as well, which hopefully you've got them. I'll be talking, but mostly, basically the first half of today will be all about now let's start to put in place what we talked about yesterday and start to build some pricing systems. And we're going to— you're going to meet Kim, and then later you'll meet Emily, who will be talking about how can we attract higher value clients for our bookkeeping work. Now, I did say to you yesterday, I always do this on live sessions, I talk about the fact there's two types of people. There's the note-takers who come along to webinars, take notes, but then don't do anything. And nothing changes if you don't take action. And then there's the action takers. So my question for you today is, well, rhetorical question, which one are you? But if you are an action taker, what action have you taken in the last 24 hours since we started yesterday? What have you done? Tell me in the chat and I will read all the comments afterwards before tomorrow. So let me know, what actions have you taken? Who are the action takers? In the group. I know we have got some here. I know some people who are doing amazing things. If you haven't got the workbook, perhaps you missed yesterday, I can see my daughter Gabby has just put the link into the chat. The workbook's a great place to put, to keep your notes, and also there's some stuff in there that, there's actually some stuff I noticed that we may not cover during the 3 days, there's some bonus stuff in there. So the link's in the, Gabby's put the link in the chat for you. Now, I did say yesterday, I always read— my team and I read all of your comments in the chat. I can't read them all live because, as you can see, it's going crazy, but I do read them all. And so I thought I'd give a very quick summary of some of the things that you were, were saying yesterday. So if I just move across to here, I know there's a few Value Pricing Academy members who said some lovely things in the chat yesterday, like Carol The lovely Carol, who I met— oh, when did I meet you, Carol? It was a few years ago now, but I know it was at that QB Connect event or Thrive in Toronto. She said, "VPA helped me immensely with switching from hourly pricing to value-based billing. All the resources and templates have been my game changer." Thank you, Carol. Linda, who was here yesterday, said, "The Academy has provided fantastic training. I'm able to keep updated and constantly learning. Business has grown tremendously." Jodie, "I've got money in the bank. I used to have to rob Peter to pay Paul." That was Dion from Wales. Confidence to transition from Shari, getting away from hourly rates. Neil, Cridle, understanding how to build— sorry, Travis— how to build up my pricing and packaging structures. Neil said the VPS literally changed my life. Neil's now one of our trainers. You won't meet him today, but you will at some point in the future. Dion said definitely worth the investment, thank you. And then I also asked Oh, and Keith said charging for diagnostic reviews. That was, I think, the best bit of yesterday. I then asked you what was your biggest challenges yesterday. We went through, I showed you, I walked through what some of the big challenges are. And the ones that you put in the chat was obviously confidence and self-worth is a big issue, and we talked about that yesterday. Things like the fear of charging too much, the fear of underpricing, and so on. Not knowing how to price was something many of you put in the chat yesterday. And we'll definitely be looking at that over the next hour and a half. We're going to go really deep on that. Scope uncertainty was a challenge you mentioned, and Jessica did a really good job of talking about scope with the diagnostic. I will talk about it a bit more today. Value versus the price confusion. What is my value? How do I determine fair value? Client pressure and expectations, like clients asking for hourly rates. Somebody put down in the Q&A yesterday, And I did answer that one, practical execution challenges. So thank you, yes, for putting in what, what your biggest challenges are. I think we either have dealt with all of those or will be dealing with them. I also asked you, from your client's point of view, what's the pain they experience when it comes to bookkeeping? So I summarize what you put in the chat, and I'm going to come back to this later on because this is really useful when it comes to communicating value. So the things that you said were around the areas of If clients hate bookkeeping because they, they feel disorganized, they procrastinate, a lack of understanding of things like where the money's gone, the time burden, the compliance stress, poor financial visibility, emotional friction. And so I'll talk about how we can use these pain points in our pricing systems. What else did I ask yesterday in the chat? At the end, I said, what were your key insights? What did you get out of yesterday? Grace said it was very eye-opening. A few others— Marty said always be double-checking your scope creep. Tracy says her firm needs to start charging for diagnostic reviews. Bill, I missed you out, the systems for sales and marketing. Scott said the thought process of pricing properly. Having a system to enable to engage in value pricing is Samantha. Having confidence in my value from Karen. Setting a price list from Liz. The diagnostic element from Kate and charge for diagnostics from Keith. And Laura learned what value, what value the Pricing Academy is. So thank you, Laura. And then some of you just said some just wonderful, nice comments generally about the day one yesterday. So thank you so much for all the kind feedback. I really appreciate that. Appreciate this. My team and the other speakers have worked really hard to put this show on for you. Right, um, I'm actually ahead of schedule, which is really surprising, so I'm quite pleased with that, which is good. I have so much content to go through with you today that it was good to just claw back a few minutes. Right, I talked yesterday about the fact that pricing is difficult, value pricing is difficult. We talked about the fact that it's because value is subjective, you can't touch, feel, and measure it, and so many people struggle with it. And they find it overwhelming and usually give up and just go back to the timesheets and the old way of doing things. And I talked about this idea of— I teach the, the value pricing journey and the, the idea about taking it one step at a time and, and bit by bit, just learning more, building more into our systems. So what I thought I'd do in this next 30, 40 minutes is walk through this in a bit more detail, starting at the beginning. So when we are pricing based on the hour, which is the way that most of us were kind of brought up in the profession. I was in my first job, I said yesterday I had to keep timesheets and it was 15-minute units, I think it was, that we had to record every 15 minutes. Some firms break it down to 6-minute units. I used to hate the timesheet when I was, when I was an employee, but it's one of the things you had to do. And so it may be you're in that place right now. And so if you are pricing based on the hour, even just for some things, The first step of the journey, which is sometimes the hardest of all of these steps, is to move to fixed pricing. We need to give a fixed price upfront.

Why?

Because as I said yesterday, amongst other things, clients hate not knowing what the price is going to be until the work's done. That's always a surprise to them. Sometimes people call that ambush billing. And so we must make sure that we give them a fixed price. We tell them exactly upfront what the price is going to be. Then we can deal with, then we can deal with those price issues before we start the work. What I found, my my experience running my accounting firm in the early years was I was a coward. I was terrible with pricing. I didn't know anything about pricing in the first few years. I priced based on the hour. I usually went in too cheap because I went with a price that I hoped they would say yes to because I didn't want them to say— I hated the no reaction. And so I gave them what I thought was a low price. But very often I couldn't even give them a price. I just said, look, we'll tell you at the end of it. And the number of times that I got complaints when I sent the itemized bill. Uh, and very often they'd say, that's just ridiculous, that's so expensive. And I was thinking, it's not. Um, I'm a sole practitioner. I was keeping my hourly rate fairly low compared to the large 8-partner firm I used to work at. And they still kept saying I was too expensive and I didn't realize why. Anyway, when we moved to fixed pricing, give a fixed price right up front, then we can put that into the agreement. We can perhaps get paid up front and we don't have this issue then of clients complaining about the price after we've done the work. And as somebody said yesterday, I think they put in the chat, they currently have about 50,000 on their balance sheet as accounts receivable, I think it was. We shouldn't be owed money. We're in the service industry. We should get paid upfront. And that's easy to do when you've given the price, a price upfront. So that's the first step in the process, arguably the hardest one, because of all the things we talked about yesterday that Jess talked about with scope, So how do we give a fixed price with confidence? So let's work on, on, on that first. That's the first piece we're going to look at, the first step on this journey. And so if I go back to my story, I made all sorts of mistakes in the first 2.5, 3 years when it came to pricing. It wasn't until 1999 I started to— in the second half of 1999, I met Ron Baker, my hero, I said yesterday. And Ron explained to me what value pricing was, and this light bulb went on. And when I figured out what value pricing was and how to do it, I realized that value pricing is easier to do. It's easier when you've got, um, a service where you can quantify some level of value. So the first service I applied it to was a tax planning service in corporations. Because I could quantify the, the tax I could save them, and I used that to help me with the pricing. And that was fine, but I was an accountant. I didn't do a lot of bookkeeping, but I did do annual financial statements, and that was my core service. And I was scratching my head thinking, how would I give somebody a fixed fee upfront for annual financial statements? Because I don't know how long the work is going to take. I have no idea, but I knew I had to come up with a process. And so the process I came up with was I had to think about what is the primary scope factor. So Jess talked about scope yesterday a lot. And one of the things we teach in the Academy is that there are lots of scope factors, things that impact on the price, but you will have a primary scope factor. This is the thing that has the biggest impact. What's the thing that has the biggest impact on price? Now, when I looked at the work I did as an accountant, I realized the number one most important thing was the size of the business in terms of their turnover, sales, fees. In other words, the price I would charge for a client doing, let's say, $100,000 in fees, a small little business doing $100,000 compared to one doing $5 million, I would charge a much higher price for one doing $5 million. There's a lot more work to be done. And so I realized that that was probably the primary scope factor. But there were also other scope factors involved, secondary scope factors. These were things like, well, what sort of entity? Because there's more work if it's a corporate than if it's a sole trader, for example. And so I had to identify the secondary scope factor, the entity, the quality of their bookkeeping, the books and records, and other things. So having then done that, I had to figure out a pricing system. And I, what I did was I used what's called regression analysis. And what I did is I, I get, I I got a random sample of my existing clients and I went into an Excel spreadsheet and I put in the spreadsheet what was the fee that I charged them historically and what was the, the number for the primary scope factor. In other words, the size of their business. And I went and did some analysis. It gave me a formula and that was the starting point of my fixed pricing. So let's make that more real for you because I'm going to share you a system and how you do that, and we'll talk about bookkeeping. Now, I did do a survey a few years back on how firms price bookkeeping, and one of the questions I asked were, what are the most— what are the biggest scope factors when it comes to bookkeeping work? And this is a screenshot from the report which listed— this is the top 5. I think I've got many, many more, but the people who did the survey, bookkeepers and accountants, said the number 1 scope factor is the total number of transactions in a month. So that may be the primary scope factor. And then other ones would be things like the number of bank accounts they have, the number of credit card accounts they have, whether they're registered for sales tax or not, the accounting system they, they use. And of course, I know there's others as well, but those are arguably the, the 5 most important ones that we need to think about if we're coming up with a pricing system. So, uh, With those in mind, let me walk through in a little bit more detail the, the system. And this is a tool that we've created for Value Pricing Academy members. It's a, it's a tool for helping you come up with the starting point of your pricing system for fixed pricing, not value pricing. That's going to come later in our journey, but let's talk about this. So if I just go and, uh, open up. It's a 5-step process. This is essentially the process that I went through in my accounting firm back in 1999, and it's what we teach in the Value Pricing Academy. And the first thing you want to do is to establish what is the primary scope factor, what is the thing that impacts on the price more than any other thing. And as I said in that survey, total transactions. But I've had other bookkeepers tell me in the past that they price based on a multiple of the, the, the fees or sales of the business. Some people do what I did for annual financial statements. And there are other things that we could measure. So what we could do is, and what I— this is what the process I recommend that you go through, this is the process for you to come up with a fixed pricing system, is in step 1, think about what might be the most important scope factors for you and come up with what you think are the top 3 or 4. I've put in here for now the number of bank transactions, the bank transactions, the number of purchase invoices, and then the number of total transactions, but you might have other thoughts as to what it might well be. And having then done that, what we then do is we do some research. We get together some of our clients, we just pick a number of clients at random. I've picked 10 here, And what we do, if I take the first one, we just put in, well, what is the fee that we charge them? And by the way, you could do this on an Excel spreadsheet. I've just turned it into software because it makes it much easier to do. What's the fee that we charge at the moment or should charge? And for each of those scope factors, what are the numbers for this client? So this client does 40 bank transactions, they do 50 purchase invoices, they do 100 transactions. And then we go through a list of sample number of clients I don't know why I just changed that by accident. What was that number? I think it was 100. I forget. Anyway, we, we just record the clients and what we then do is we do what's called regression analysis. And that's a statistical approach of basically looking for the line of best fit. Essentially, what it does is it takes all the data points. And because I've got 3 possible primary scope factors, I could have done 4. I've got 3 charts, one for each. So if I take bank transactions, for example, it plots on a graph all of those 10 clients and what is the fee we charged against the number of bank transactions. And it carries out regression analysis. In other words, what is the line of best fit? What is the line that best fits the data? And then we can calculate something called an R-squared number, which basically means the closer to 1, the better the fit. And it does it for all 3 different sets of data. The fee against whichever the primary scope factor is. And in this particular case, it's telling me that there's a weak correlation with bank transactions. The strongest correlation is total transactions. So we now have— we now know that total transactions is the best primary scope factor. But what we also know, as well as the R-squared number, which is a really important and useful number, which at the bottom, it defines it. In this case, this equation explains 81.2% of variations in fees. What it also gives us, which is really cool, is a formula. That line has a formula. And we could use that line, that formula, to price going forward. Now, there's potentially some problems with this, which you may be seeing straight away. There's some potential problems with this because not all of the data points, not all of the clients are on that line. If I take this point up here, for example, if I can move my mouse to the right place— oops, it doesn't do it on this chart, I need to change this— but if we take this point here, then this is one where we're charging 3,000, we charge 3,000 but the line suggests a lower number, and so we would be charging less with this formula than what we've actually charged the client, and vice versa. In other words, some of those data points or clients are further away from the line, and so you might be saying at this point, hang on, Mark, this isn't very accurate, it's not very accurate, and you are dead right. Let me give you 4 reasons why that doesn't matter. So if I just switch across to here, there's 4 reasons that it doesn't matter. The first reason it doesn't matter is because our existing system isn't accurate. In other words, if you're pricing based on the hour, how do we come up with the price? Well, the price is made up of 3 numbers, and those numbers are firstly, how many hours did we spend? Now my question is, how accurate is that number? Now I don't know about you, but when I worked in an 8-partner firm, everybody fudged the timesheet for all sorts of reasons. We were allowed to have a number of units every week for general office. We'd make sure we maximize those because we make out— we want to make our jobs look more profitable. When I worked on big audits, I would dump time to the big audits where it gets lost, and my smaller clients, I wanted them to look like I was profitable. Let's not kid ourselves that the number of hours is accurate. But then what do we do is we multiply that number of hours by another fictional number, the hourly rate. Where on earth does that come from? Well, it comes from something, basically, the 3/3 model. And what a lot of firms do is they take a multiple, typically between 3 and 3.5 times salary costs. Why? Why that number? It's kind of a bit made up. But even worse, if you're the owner of your firm, if you are a— particularly if you're a solo firm owner, what about your hourly rate? You don't charge a salary to your business. So what hourly rate? You just, you just plugged an hourly rate out of your head. So it's a second made-up number. And then we multiply that by a third number, and that's called commercial judgment. In other words, how many times have we had a situation where we've run off the timesheet, we're about to raise the invoice, we look at the timesheet and we say, oh my goodness, there's no way the client's going to pay that. Let's write it down, or sometimes write it up. That's commercial judgment. So we multiply 3 numbers together that are all made up: the number of hours, the hourly rate, and then our professional judgment, our write-ups or write-downs. So we don't have an existing system, let's not kid ourselves. Number 2, and I know Ross, you're here, we talked about this briefly, the goal should not be to maximize the profit per client. It should be to maximize the profit of your firm. And my friend Ron Baker explained it like this. Imagine your firm as an investment portfolio. The goal of an investment portfolio is to maximize return on investment. And to do that, what we do is we spread our risk by having a mix of different investments from low-risk ones like government bonds to more higher-risk investments like crypto. And when we get the right balance right, we are maximizing return on investment. If I go back to, uh, the chart, you see, if we are using the formula that we have here, then yes, for sure, there'll be some clients where we're actually probably undercharging and not making as much money. There will be others on that line where we're actually making more money if we use the formula. Well, across the entire firm, with that formula, you're going to make money. It's just the individual clients— some you'll make a bit more on and some you'll make a little bit less on. So that's the second reason why it's not an exact science. But thirdly, and we now get really important, we've only looked at one scope factor. We've looked at the primary scope factor. There are other things that we need to consider, like how many bank accounts they have, how many credit card accounts they have, and so on. So let's talk about that in a second. In fact, we'll do that. Yes, let's do that now. Number 3. So as I go across back to here, all we've done so far is we've analyzed a bunch of clients to identify what we think is the best primary scope factor, and we have a formula, but we've ignored secondary scope factors. So what we do is we carry out what I call outlier analysis. So on stage 3, we've got our chosen formula. I've chosen regression analysis, and we can see, yes, David Goliath is— normally we would charge £3,000, the formula's coming up with much less. Some are a bit below the line, and what we can do statistically is identify which are the ones that are furthest away, which are the outliers. And so it creates this chart, and we can do this in Excel, by the way. We can build a chart out where for each client we can see what's the fee that we should charge them, what's the predicted fee if we use the formula, and it'll give us some statistics and tell us with a red light which ones are the furthest out. And so what we then do is, based on our knowledge of, in this case, 10 clients I've put in here, we ask ourselves a few questions. What are the possible reasons for the difference? So it may be that for Anne Cleaves, if I open this up, this client is on a desktop system, so it takes longer to process. They also have out-of-pocket expenses. So what you do in the second stage of your analysis is identify why some, some clients need to be a higher price or sometimes a lower price. And then we can also do the same thing and come up with a conclusion. So perhaps what we do is we add 35% to our price for a desktop system, and perhaps we add an extra 20% if they've got out-of-pocket expenses. I just pick numbers at random, but you would perhaps think a little bit more about what would be an appropriate price adjustment for those other scope factors. And you could do that for all your clients or just pick out the ones that are red. So we're just looking at and trying to come up with the reasons why we have the outliers. It marks them in red on this chart, but you could do it for all your clients, because what we then do is we refine our model. What we do is we then start to add secondary scope factors. So for example, for a desktop accounting system, we might decide to add 35%. For— it may be for— it's a restaurant business, so we want to give a 5% deduction because we find restaurants are more easy. I'm making the numbers up, you would apply your own judgment. What's your judgment of a multiplier upwards or downwards for different secondary scope factors? And you can add more scope factors here and think about what might be the adjustment. And what we can then do is, having then identified secondary scope factors, we can go through our list of clients and say, well, which ones apply? So Anne Cleaves, she has a desktop accounting system, which means more work, and out-of-pocket expenses, and so it works out a total multiplier. And what it will then do as a result of that is we can take those secondary scope factors and rerun the regression analysis, and we should hopefully come up with a higher R-squared number, and it gives us a revised formula. And so we're now factoring in the secondary scope factors. So if you're happy with that, what it will then do is give you a summary, and we can then test it out. So we've got a revised formula, and So now what we can do is test it. So let's imagine we have a brand new client and they've got, let's say they have 200 transactions a month and we know that they've got out-of-pocket expenses. We know they're in the construction industry. It's now giving us a suggested price that we can charge, a fixed fee that is based upon regression analysis, based upon us analyzing some of our clients. and this is going to get you pretty close to a price that's going to mean that you make profit. And of course, with a model like this, you can always then refine it over time. You might then come up with situations where you charge this client this figure here, and then it turns out it took longer than you thought because you suddenly realized another scope factor. And sometimes, well, it may be you have to iterate over time as you figure out the different scope factors. So that's the process that I went through back in 1999. It's a process you can go through if you haven't yet got a system for coming up with a fixed price in advance that will give you some confidence. There's one more thing that's really important. So as I say, it's not an exact science, regression analysis. There will always be some outliers. But our existing system is not accurate. Also, our goal is to maximize the profit of the firm, and we've now factored in secondary scope factors. There's one more thing. The purpose of this is to establish a base price. In economics, economists refer to two phrases: the buyer's reservation price and the seller's reservation price. What does that mean? The buyer's reservation price is the highest price someone will— a customer would be willing to pay. Sometimes it's called the maximum willingness to pay. And your goal, by the way, as a pricer, is to set a price as close to that as possible. We'll come back to that. But the supplier's reservation price is the minimum price that you would charge to make a profit. So what we're doing here is coming up with a base price that with this formula, across our entire firm, we should be making profit. But what we want to do is make super profits. We want to increase our prices, want to get better results, which will then make up for the odd occasion when we get the price wrong. Just like in an investment portfolio, we decide we're going to, we're going to invest in Doge, we've had one of the risky crypto coins, the meme coins. We invest in a meme coin because it might explode. But we know that we've got other investments that if we just make a little bit less, if that one makes a loss, it's not a huge problem because we've got other things in our portfolio. In this case, what we do to mitigate the risk is we're actually going to go above the base price. With what we do next. So as we're moving along our pricing journey, the next thing we need to do is we need to create packages. And what I mean by this, I call it menu pricing. It's almost nobody did this back in 1999 when I was— it was my first pricing system was menu pricing. Uh, I've been teaching it for now 26 years. Essentially, it's think of it as the bronze, silver, gold. Sometimes it's called bundling, sometimes more correctly it's versioning. I call it menu pricing, but some people call it something else. Basically it's creating different packages. And the reason this is important is that— there's a lot of reasons it's important. Firstly, every client values things differently. Your goal, as I said, is to maximize your price, to get as close as possible to the maximum willingness to pay. The problem is you don't know what that number is. And somebody said yesterday in the chat, they said, I have a hard time understanding what the value should be. Yes, you do. You have no idea what the value is.

Why?

Because only the customer can determine the value. It's up to the customer. Different customers value the same thing in different ways. Different customers— I've got an iPhone here. If I asked you all in the chat box to tell me what's the most money you would pay for this phone, you're all going to tell me a different number. Some of you might only pay $500, some might pay $1,500. Okay, everybody values things differently. You don't know how much somebody will value something. And so if you only ever give a single price, it's the wrong price guaranteed.

Why?

Because So let's, let's talk about cleanup work. So moving to QBO, I shared those stories that Sarah Bridges had the other day where she got $1,300 and something for moving someone to QBO. Now I know that wasn't the only price she offered, but let's imagine your price for doing that is $1,000. Somebody comes in, they want to move to QBO, they ask you the price, you say $1,000. That's the wrong price. It's the wrong price because the probability, the chances that that's the exact number in their head, in their subconscious, as the maximum willingness to pay are so, so remote, it's almost zero. It's not going to be $1,000. The number in their head is going to be one of two things. It's either going to be more or less. If it's less, let's say they're thinking this is worth $500 and you say $1,000. They're going to say that's too expensive and walk away and go somewhere else. You've lost out because you've gone in too high. But even worse, and this is worse, trust me, this is worse. What if they're thinking, wow, this is amazing, this could be worth $1,500, and you say $1,000. Great, they make a sale and you're probably thinking, yes, I'm a great salesperson. I've nailed this pricing thing. No, this is really important. Take a note of this. If you ever give a price and the customer says yes straight away, you've left money on the table. And that's worse because we're already too busy. We can't afford to leave money on the table. We can't afford to take on more work at too low a price. So we don't know what they're willing to pay. We have no idea. We're not mind readers, but a single price is always wrong. So what we do is we give them choices. And so going back to QBO setup, it may be you give them a choice between a $500 option, a $1,000 option, and a $1,500 option. That way you don't know which one they'll choose because everybody is different. You let them choose. And it goes deeper. There's a lot of psychology with this. Customers like choice. When customers have choice, they feel in control. When people are in control of the process, they tend to spend more money. The more control we can give people, the more they're in control of the process, the more they will pay you. A lot of science behind this. So we must give them 3 choices. Now, how do we do this? How do we build up our prices? Well, we go really deep on this in the Value Pricing Academy because it's fundamental to get it right. And I see increasingly people getting it wrong because they miss out some important steps. I teach a 7-step framework for menu pricing. Let me cover 3 essential things when you are building out your packages. Number 1 is called segmentation. This is so, so important. What you need to do when you build your packages, when you think of your bronze, silver, gold bookkeeping, you want to think about who are the different types of clients. If you're going to, if you're going to give 3 different packages, you want to think about who are the 3 different types of clients that might buy bookkeeping, and what are the specific characteristics characteristics, pain points, etc. We want to do customer segmentation. This is a little bit like what marketers do. Marketers do customer segmentation. It's a, it's the same idea but a little bit different. We want to identify the different types of people that buy bookkeeping because what we do is we then build packages that are based on their specific needs. This is really important because the mistake I see most people doing, and I see now people doing this on their websites, I go on to bookkeeping accountants' websites, I see their package and it's a mess, and they've just thrown everything into these packages. And the problem that we have is if we, for example, put too much stuff in our packages, then we suffer from this: people do not like to pay for stuff they don't need. So if you have 26 items in your bookkeeping package and there isn't a single client on earth that wants all 26, you might find somebody wants 20 of them, but they're going to say, no, I don't want those 6, why pay for those 6 things That's too expensive. I'll go somewhere else. So we have to understand the different types of customers for each of the packages we build. Secondly, what we have to do is we do have to recognize that some customers, for whatever reason, have a lower budget. And so let's stop doing what most accounting professionals do, is we sell people a Rolls-Royce for the price of a Mini. We overdeliver because we're great people, we're lovely people, we want to do great stuff. So we give them more than they are willing to pay for. But some clients can't afford all— they can't afford to buy a Rolls-Royce or Ferrari. Okay, that's fine, but let's have an option where we strip it back. Let's have an option which is the bare bones essentials so that some clients will go for that. You'll find it's only the minority when you do it right, but have an option so that if somebody can't afford your, your fuller service, you've still got a profitable solution to you. You just do a lot less stuff. And then thirdly, Think about how can you create more value? What more can you do to create a more expensive package? You want to create, you want to create more value and you want to build more expensive packages, partly because that helps create an anchor. So that is, that is an introduction for how we build packages. And so going back to what we talked about with the, the analysis, the regression analysis, and that we can then, we can create a formula, which I then, we could then chuck in some numbers. And it's telling us in this case, it should be £1,957 as our price. That's only a base price. In other words, what you want to do is make that the price of your bronze level service of your cheapest service. Yes, some people might go for that, but actually what will happen for various reasons is more people go for your middle option, partly because of some psychology, partly because of behavioral economics, and partly because you're going to put more value in the middle option. It's going to be a better package. And so going back to anybody who's thinking that regression analysis isn't accurate, it's a starting point. And then we use menu pricing to get higher prices still. So let's talk about the concept of relative price. So we've built, we've built our 3 packages. I say 3, by the way, there are times when you might want 4 or 5, but that's more advanced. I think Kim might mention it briefly, but, uh, you start with 3, always have 3, but there are some reasons when you get more advanced at menu pricing and the psychology, sometimes there's a reason to have 4 or 5, but let's stick with 3. Because I want to talk about the concept of relative price. And this is, okay, so how do we price our 3 different packages? How do we price our 3 packages? Well, what we do is we can take our fixed pricing system, as I said, and we can use that to price the cheapest option. That's our base price based upon the scope of the work. But what we then do is we price our other packages based on the value of those extra things that we put in. And what we tend to put in— one of the great things about our profession is that the things that create more value also tend to be the things that are the easiest to do, and they take less time. For example, the basic bookkeeping is what is, is data entry. It can be quite time-consuming, but then we could create really nice reports with ratio analysis, with trends, we can have really nice reports that are really valuable to the client, but we can set them up to the press of a button. 5 seconds, we have an amazing report. And with AI now, we can do these sorts of things really, really easily. So that stuff that adds more value, we can charge higher prices for, but it takes less time. So when they buy their middle and your middle and top options, this is where you make your real profits. Because of the way we now value pricing. And so what we do is when we create our middle and top options, we want to make sure we price based on the value, not just on the scope. We want to build, we want to make higher prices. And some of you might be thinking at this point, yes, but you just said, Mark, it's not for us to determine value, it's the customer determines value. Yes, let me come on to that in a second. So relative pricing is, there's a science in terms of the prices that you set for your packages relative to each other, relative to each other. Now, it depends what your goal is and which package you're trying to sell, and it depends on when you set— whether you're selling compliance services or more higher-value advisory services. So there's different ways of doing this, but if you're selling compliance work, if you're selling bookkeeping work, My recommendation is your starting point is this, and you might want to write it down. If you've got the workbook, I think there's a box for it. 1, 1.3, and 1.5. In other words, once you've got your base price for your bronze level, your entry level, the middle package, aim for 30% higher, multiply by 1.3. And for the top level, multiply by 1.5, make it 50% higher. And what you'll find is that many people will choose the middle option. There's some science behind that. We learned that from behavioral economics, but also I'm using a technique there called the upgrade nudge strategy. So when you go for 1, 1.3, 1.5, many people will gravitate towards the middle option and see 1.3. And if it's then a fairly small jump to the top level package as opposed to the cheapest one, you'll find that many people will say, do you know what? It's not much more to have all this extra stuff. It's what they do with— it's how they sell popcorn and Coke in the cinemas. It's a really powerful strategy. I call it the upgrade nudge strategy. That's your starting point. Now, you can't determine value. It's only a starting point. But one of the nice things about having a pricing system, which we've now started to build, and having menu pricing— a great thing about packages and menu pricing is we now have something that's testable. So let's say you do this and you do have your prices as 1, 30% higher, 50% higher. If you then find over the next few weeks and months as you have your pricing conversations, everybody is choosing, let's say, the premium option. Yes, you might be celebrating, wow, they go for the most expensive one, great. But it's telling you something. You're too cheap. You don't want everybody buying the most expensive one because you're too cheap. Or you might find that everybody's choosing the cheapest one. And if that's the case, it's because there's either not enough value, it's not the right things in the middle and top packages, or what we're going to talk about next, we're not communicating. So the next stage of our journey is once we've got our pricing system and we're giving people choices and we've got a way to price those choices and we can test those things The next thing we have to do is make sure that we communicate the value. And we started to talk about this yesterday. I just want to wrap up with a couple of things on this. You need to have systems in place. And I mentioned this, don't wrap your Christmas presents in one box. This is one of a number of communication techniques I teach in the Value Pricing Academy. I think there's about 20 techniques. This one is very powerful. Just imagine it's Christmas. It's Christmas and your family, your spouse, your children, perhaps even your dog, go down, rush down Christmas Day to see the tree, and there's only one present. There's only one present because what you've done is you've— yes, you've bought all these presents, but rather than wrap them up individually, you've put them in one box and put that under the tree. Why do you never ever do that? Why do you never do that? It's a crazy thing to do. Why? Because it feels like people are getting less. They'll be disappointed when they see one wrapped present. Now, it might be the same value in total as if you'd wrapped them all individually, but the perception when it's all wrapped into one box, it feels like less. So you must never wrap all your Christmas presents in one box, and I guess I'm hoping you don't do that. And it's the same process with when you are talking about what you do. If you say to clients, yes, we can do your bookkeeping and it's going to cost you £1,947, they're going to go, oh, that's expensive, because they don't understand the value. It's because we've wrapped all our presents in one box. You see, when we start to unpick bookkeeping, there are lots of things that we do that are valuable. We just don't tell anybody about it. There are so many processes. There's value in doing a bank reconciliation. There's value in doing the sales and purchase ledgers and coming up with aged debtor lists and/or accounts receivable lists if you're in the US. There's all the processes that we go through when we do a set of books is valuable, but we never tell anybody. We just wrap it up in one thing. We do your bookkeeping, and they don't understand the value, and therefore they're disappointed. So what we have to do is unwrap that. We have a system whereby we have a script, the words that we say to tell about everything that we do. And this is why brochures are really important. One of the things we do a lot of in the— is I create complete brochures with all the words and the scripts that you use, with all the psychology, all the words that we want to use to build up the value, build up the value, because when we do a great job of building up the value, they desperately want to buy, and price is much less important. What's happening when you build up the value in their subconscious, it's moving up their maximum willingness to pay. The communication is the most important part of value pricing. And so one of the things we do is we create, I think it's 15 brochures in the value pricing campaign for different services. We've We start within month 1, the 22-page pricing brochure for bookkeeping, but over the months as you work with us, you'll have brochures for all the core services, whether it's payroll, cleanup work, moving to a cloud accounting system, annual financial statements, tax returns, payroll— I forget what I said— forecasting, business advisory, and so on and so forth. Because scripts are so important, the words that you say are critically important. And so going back to, very quickly, I'm doing good for time, this is unusual. I'm going back to earlier, I said to you, what I did was, what I did was I summarized all the things that you said yesterday about what is the pain points that business owners experience. With bookkeeping? Well, one of the things that we want to do, one of the techniques we use is when we're talking about service, we want to talk about pain, focus on the pain. And the better you do that, the more it builds up in their mind, the pain, the more they're thinking, yeah, this is a pain, I need to get rid of this, this is more involved than I'm thinking, I think I need to pay more money for this, I need someone to sort this out for me. Building up pain is really important. So what we can do is I took this earlier overnight, I took all of your comments in the chat and I thought, you know what, let me create something, a form of words, a script. So let me explain, taking the things that you said here yesterday in the chat as the pain people have, I might say something like this. Let me tell you a story. This might sound familiar. A business owner starts out with good intentions. They plan to stay organized, keep on top of things, maybe even enjoy the numbers, but then reality kicks in. At first it's just the odd receipt missing. Then paperwork starts to pile up. A few weeks turn to a few months. Before long, they're completely behind. They know they need to sort it, but they don't, because every time they look at it, it feels bigger than it did the day before. So they put it off again and the problem grows. Now something else starts to happen. They look at their bank account and wonder, where did the money go? They have reports, but they don't really understand them. The numbers are there, but they don't mean anything. So bookkeeping becomes something they should do rather than something that helps them run the business. And when something feels like that, it drops down the priority list. So then, so they decide to handle it themselves evenings, weekends, late nights, trying to figure it out, clicking around software, guessing, Googling. What should take an expert an hour takes them 5, and all that time it's taken away from growing the business, winning clients, doing the work they're actually good at. Then the pressure builds. Deadlines are coming, tax returns, VAT, sales tax regulations, and now there's fear. What if I've done this wrong? What if I've missed something? What if this costs me money? Bookkeeping is no longer just a task, it becomes a source of stress. At this point, the business is running but without clarity. There are no up-to-date numbers. Cash flow feels unpredictable. They might even be making a loss and not realize it until it's too late. Decisions are made based on guesswork, not facts, and that's risky. Now step back and look at the bigger picture. Bookkeeping feels overwhelming. It gets avoided. It feels like a chore, something they dread rather than something that adds value. And when that's the relationship with numbers, the business suffers. So what does that mean? Here's the reality. Poor left creates problems across the entire business. It wastes time. It creates stress, creates opportunities, and increases risk. And, and that's why this isn't something to do yourself. And it's not something to hand to the cheapest option either, because cheap bookkeeping often means the same problems just hidden behind someone else. What you need is clarity. You need accurate, up-to-date numbers. You need someone who understands what those numbers mean and helps you use them. Because when bookkeeping is done properly, everything changes. You make better decisions, you see problems early, you gain control, and instead of avoiding the numbers, you start using them. So the real question is not 'Can I afford to pay for proper bookkeeping?' It's this: 'Can I afford the cost of getting it wrong?' Because that cost is always higher. Always. Now, they might not be words that you choose to use, but can you start to feel how that's really building up and we start to think, 'Wow, this bookkeeping is really important. I need to pay for— pay somebody who is the expert to solve all these problems of stress, time I'm wasting, uncertainty, cash flow problems, and so on. That's the communication piece. We need to become skilled at communicating value. This is why you hear a lot of stories from people in the academy who talk about how they've doubled their prices, tripled their prices, quadrupled their prices, sometimes even more. The key is normally to do with the way that we communicate. It's by far the most important part of value pricing. So if we go back to the value pricing journey that I've talked about a few times, If you're on hourly billing, the first thing you have to do is figure out a way for fixed pricing. And we can use regression analysis, is a great statistical tool for doing exactly that. Going through the process I did in 1999 of just looking at some of my clients and doing some analysis. And I, we have the tool in the Value Pricing Academy to make that really easy. Once you've got a way of coming up with a fixed price, let's now figure out the best way of coming up with our different packages, our menu pricing, because now we're starting to get into the realms of value pricing. Fixed pricing is not value pricing. I said this earlier, fixed pricing is still time-based billing. It's just that we're giving a price upfront based on our best guess, based on a regression analysis, based on a formula. We're not value pricing with fixed pricing, but at least we're getting started. We've got over the biggest hurdle and we're solving the client's biggest issue, which is they want certainty with the price. But once we move to menu pricing and giving 3 choices, we're now starting to get into the realms of value pricing because the client will choose based on their perception of the value of each of the options we present. Now what we have to do is involve the client in the pricing process. And this is about communication. It's about how do you communicate the value so they understand what's in it for them. They understand they need to pay a proper fee. We're pushing up their maximum willingness to pay, and they will now pay higher prices. And once we've done that, We're then ready to move to other elements of value pricing, such as behavior rewards, upselling, price psychology. So the next step in the process is to fully involve the client in the pricing. We should always have a face-to-face meeting or a Zoom meeting like we're having to talk about pricing with a client. We should not be hiding behind emails and proposals. We must price with the client because when we involve the client in the pricing process, we know they pay much more. There's a lot of research around this. When the client feels in control and they're choosing things, then they will pay more. When there's greater transparency in the price, they will pay more. So it's time for a guest speaker. Now, our guest speaker is an amazing bookkeeper from Canada. Her name's Kim, Kim Lafayette, and Unfortunately, someone said yesterday, is this, is this live? Well, yes, it is live. Unfortunately, Kim was due to speak today, but she told us a couple of weeks back that something had come up in her life. I think it's an exam. She loves deep sea diving, and an exam came up that she has to take. So she's got an exam this week and couldn't be here live, but she very kindly did her presentation as a recording. and I did watch it this morning. It's extraordinary. This is, this next 40 minutes, 45 minutes is going to pull together a lot of the threads of what we've talked about, particularly today so far. You'll start to see this pricing system come alive. So I'm going to go across to Kim now and, uh, let's her talk about how she's just getting extraordinary results in her business, uh, and how she uses a pricing system that will get you extraordinary results. Here we go. Let's go to Kim.

Thank you so much, Mark, for that warm introduction. You know how much I absolutely love, like seriously love, talking about effective pricing and the enormous impact that it has had, not only on my professional life, but my personal life as well, because it affords me so much extra time to be able to do the things that I enjoy personally without sacrificing the amount of money that I'm making, which in turn actually helps me support my personal activities even more. So thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk about it. And hello as well to everybody at the conference and watching today. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you're learning and getting so much much good information from all the speakers that you've, uh, listened to so far. I know it can seem like a lot to digest. Uh, when I'm teaching about something or presenting to people, I always like to try and say, even if you just walk away at first with a couple of nuggets that will help you move the needle on your business, then that's gonna at least get the ball rolling. It's kind of like that proverbial joke about how do you eat an elephant? And the answer, of course, is just one bite at a time, right? So don't think that you necessarily have to tackle everything. I know we tend to leave conferences and events like this really excited and really pumped up and stoked about all the things we want to do. Try to shift your mindset and prioritize the things that may have the biggest impact for you right away, and that will get the motivation going even more as you start to see results. So anyways, no more corny jokes, I promise that was the only one. Let me tell you quickly who I am. I'm a certified professional bookkeeper located in Ontario, Canada. I celebrated my 12th year in business. My firm has won multiple awards, and it is more of a boutique-y type firm regarding the number of clients that I have, but whereas I do larger volumes of work for them, and I do— there is a lot of scope where my clients tend to bring more and more things to me along the way, so I reprice them for that. And when I'm not, uh, working, I love chilling with my dogs who are sleeping under my desk right now, keeping my feet warm, uh, scuba diving, which is that personal activity that I mentioned that I was referring to a few moments ago when I said making more money helps me support my personal lifestyle. And that is purchasing scuba equipment and going on scuba trips, which leads me to my next pastime, which is of course traveling. Today, as you can see on the screen, I am going to be talking about the Effective Pricing software, but I also want to start with a couple of general concepts that you need to be aware of before you start using the software because there are some foundational things that will help you. So let me start with a quick question, or maybe a couple of questions actually, and as I ask these questions, I'd like you to think in your own minds if you could relate to these. So my first question is, have you ever sent a quote to a client and then immediately second-guessed yourself? Like, did I just underprice that? Or maybe you might think the opposite, did I overprice that and they're going to push back on the price? Let me tell you, I have definitely been there. Um, I used to have these types of concerns and some other ones. A big one that I used to always have is, how will I compare with other bookkeepers that they are getting quotes from. And that one was a real doozy for me, and it took some time for me to get to a place where I am today where I can confidently answer that question and any other self-doubt questions that I used to have related to my pricing. And I'm 100% certain on the way that I do my pricing nowadays. Which is very different from me saying that I never tweak things, because I do. My models are always shifting and changing. It's just that my confidence level is not, uh, to the point where I have self-doubts anymore. I want to, um, tell you, for the first 4-ish years running my business— I'm just going to speak frankly with you here for a minute as well— Um, my pricing was all over the place. Looking back now, the one way that I would describe my pricing strategy, if I had to do it in one word, was inconsistent. Every client had a different story because I didn't have a niche. I didn't have an ideal client. Some clients looked simple at first glance until suddenly I would get started doing their work and figure out that they weren't as simple as I initially thought, and that's because I wasn't doing a diagnostic review first. Scope creep. Scope creep, oh my gosh, it was a normal everyday occurrence. I didn't really think about it too much back then because I was billing by the hour, so I used to tell myself that scope creep wasn't a concern because I was still getting paid for the work that I was doing. But when it did start to become a concern is when I found myself week after week after week working 80, 90, 100-hour weeks. And, and I'm talking about all the time, not just during busy season. I had no time for my family, my friends, my recreational activities that I like to do. I basically had no life outside of work. And also, doing it that way, I had hit a ceiling of my earning potential. I had limited hours in a week, and although I could compete a little bit on my hourly rate with other bookkeepers, and I could push the envelope a little bit and charge more, it still had to be within a reasonable range. Like, I couldn't charge $200 an hour more than somebody a couple miles away from me. That just would not fly at all back then. So that's the way that I was pricing. Um, and I used to think that if I was charging more, the customers would turn me down if I was charging those rates that were double or triple what other bookkeepers were charging. And that's the way my sales process was back then. And so because of that, my pricing became a mix of trial and error, instinct, and if I'm being honest with you, there was a lot of guesswork that was built in as well. Sure, I could tell someone my hourly rate, but naturally the question that would inevitably come out of their mouth is an estimate for the number of hours it would take me. The short version of that is that people want to know with certainty what their monthly bookkeeping is going to cost. And I'll share with you the part that frustrated me the most is even when I thought I was getting it right and I thought I was doing a good job with my pricing and my profit looked good, I still didn't feel confident explaining my price. There was always those kind of nail-biting, butterfly-in-my-tummy kind of feelings when someone asked me my price and I gave them that quote. Those moments of self-doubt would click in until they said yes to my price, and that's when I realized there had to be a better way. I network in the accounting industry community a lot. I knew several other successful firm owners, and I reached out, asked for meetings with them to see how they were doing their pricing, asked them to kind of reveal behind the curtains a little bit about their strategy— not their actual prices, but just their strategy. And I, from all of those successful firm owners that I chatted with back then, I got a resounding answer from every single one of them. 100% of them told me that they were doing value pricing. So naturally, I started investigating. The first couple of names that I heard about was Ron Baker and Mark Wickersham, both of them standing out as the leading sort of industry experts about value pricing. And even though I'm likely age-wise older than both of them, I affectionately refer to them as my pricing godfathers. Um, so after I did a bit more research and started absorbing some material from both of them, I landed on doing more training with Mark because he's just a chill kind of dude. Like if you've ever had the opportunity to meet him in person or anything, Um, he's just great to hang out with. His style really resonated with me. It was a good fit, and I have been part of his community ever since. So in today's session, I know you saw the little write-up about it. Um, I did just share with you some of the challenges that I was personally facing, but I want to shift away from those challenges now and tell you what I did to fix them and turn things around. I'm going to share with you some of my actual personal successes. I am going to open the curtains and show you some prices that I have charged some of my clients. There's no shame, there's actually a bit of pride in what I charge people. And, and then I'm going to move into the software very quickly because I want to to spend the majority of our time showing you effective pricing, um, with a demo of that. So first, I want to share some of my successes. I'll mention I've been part of Mark's Value Pricing Academy for several years now. I'd have to actually go back and look at my my billing of when I first joined, but it's been a long time. There's been a ton of knowledge that I've gathered over the years, not only from him but also from the other instructors, um, because it's always— I always like to learn what other people are doing too, even effective pricing. I, I teach the effective pricing for Mark. I still like to know how other people are using it. I'm, I'm like a sponge when it comes to learning new things. So while the software is really user-friendly, which you're going to see in just a moment, there's still that base understanding of how it generates prices that you need to know to help you with that confidence aspect that I was talking about. So you still need to have a base layer of education, and that's where the Academy really comes in as well. You can use the software without being part of the Academy. I don't recommend it because, like I've just said, you know, the Academy is where you get the base knowledge. But giving a client the price, like if you went to directly using the software, giving a client the price is actually the second last step that I do. When I'm pricing somebody, and signing the agreement, the service agreement, is actually the very last step. So the entire academy will share all kinds of aspects with you to build your confidence and help you get the kind of results that so many people in his group are having. So if you've ever attended some of my sessions before, depending on what the topic was that I was instructing about. You might have seen these numbers before, but I do think we will have some new people here as well. So I want to tell you, I used effective pricing my very first time doing value pricing. Like I said, I was previously hourly billing. And I just noticed my screenshot went a little wonky there. For some reason it's showing up differently than it did when I tested, so apologies. Um, but what I would have charged this person previously, if I was estimating the amount of work that I was going to do, I would have charged them $4,200 a year using effective pricing, the quote that I got from them in a value pricing method was $18,000 a year. This was an increase of $13,000— don't worry, I know you're all accountants and bookkeepers, but I'll just do the math for you. It was $13,800 a year increase of what I would have charged. That was more than, I don't know, 3 or 4 times what I, um, pay for the software and Mark's Academy and stuff. And it was a definite, definite confidence booster right off the go. The second time I got over a 200% increase of what I would have previously charged on an hourly billing rate, estimating what my work would have been for the year. The third time I got $22,000 a year more than what my previous method would have been. But not only that, the best part was that it was $30,000 a year more than what they were paying their previous bookkeeper. So Mark talks a lot about— well, not a lot, but he mentions that people are not price sensitive. You know, you see people with fancy phones and fancy cars and stuff. People in, in those kinds of lifestyles and with that kind of equipment are not price sensitive, they're value sensitive. So if you're trying to sell them something and they're saying no, it just means that you haven't demonstrated the value to them enough. So to date, and this is all, um, from the software My average increase, um, that I charge now after years of using the software is almost 200,000— 200,000— 200% more than what it would have been when I was hourly. So some of you, like I said, will have seen these numbers. These are old numbers. Let me share with you some of the numbers that I'm doing right now. I will tell you my lowest lowest price client right now is $1,500 a month, and my highest price client right now is just shy of $10,000 a month. So I'm doing some pretty decent numbers by using value pricing. So before— this is my last slide, and then I'm going to move over to the software demo. I wanted to take a closer look at how I got those results. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I want to show you the software. Um, I did mention about how the software is my second last step and about how you need to take steps to build your confidence first. I completely get that confidence doesn't come automatically and that it takes time. Um, it's kind of like like building confidence layers, like a cake where you're putting layers on top of each other. And I like to consider the foundational knowledge that I got in the Academy as the layers of my cake, and then effective pricing is simply the icing on top of that. So to summarize my process now, the other steps that I do before using the software, I start with a quick pre-qualification. I was combining my words there. Whether that's a form on a website that you use— for me, I like to do a 15-minute Teams meeting and actually talk to the person. There's different methods, but I definitely start with that pre-qualification, and that just lets me rule out the tire kickers. Then I do the diagnostic review, and I do charge for it on between $500 to $1,500 depending on a few different variables. So call it $1,000 average. Then I have the longer Teams meeting that's about 60 to 90 minutes. It's in this meeting that I'm really starting to build the value more. I'm starting to use the tactics that I've learned in the Academy to get them talking about their pain points. And these are really going to be the gold charms, um, that you can use in your pricing. I'm not selling a bookkeeping service. I own a bookkeeping firm, and providing bookkeeping services is what I do. But what I'm selling is solutions to remove the pain from their life. That's going to be a really key point to remember from this session that I'm giving to you today. Then I have a brochure that I show them, and, uh, which I got from Mark's Academy. He gives you a template for it, and as long as you're only using it within your own firm, you're free to edit that any way you like. And then is the effective pricing meeting, and then like I said, my last step is, um, the service agreement. I wish I could do a little, I don't know, drum roll sound. I don't know if my mic is picking that up, but this is the really exciting part for me to move over to now. Let me just get— I hope it hasn't timed me out. So this is effective pricing, and I wish I had more than more time to go through it in a lot of detail with you. I, I do do a monthly course with 90-minute sessions each about this software program, so you can imagine how much detail we can actually get as opposed to, you know, the 20 or 25 minutes that I have left today. So I'm going to be going through it at a really high level. And I may go through it a little quickly, but just know if you do want more information, you can of course reach out to Mark's team and they can direct you to where you can either watch some of the longer recordings that I've done or become a member of the Academy and, and start attending some of the live sessions. So at a very high level, I'll just spend a couple of minutes here. Almost anything— so this is the sort of homepage. There is a dashboard page that you can view here. Again, this is a test memo, but this is where you can see that the screenshot that I pulled for you before from my actual version This is where I pulled that from. Most of what I'm going to show you today is going to be starting in the gear icon window. I want to very quickly show you the My Profile section. This is where you can do a lot of customization. So guys, this software is super customizable. There's so many things that you can do to make it work for you and your business and your ideal clients. Almost anything that you want to do, there's a way that the software either lets you do it or workarounds that you can do. Um, so in here you can change this logo to your logo, you can change the colors, you can retrieve any of your invoices, you can add team members depending on the plan that you have. So if you're not the only person in your team doing pricing, you can add other people. You can of course add your company details, upgrade or downgrade your plan if you need to, uh, cancel your account. Keyword section I'll talk about in a minute. And this also integrates with QuickBooks and Xero. I'm not going to get too much into that today aside from to say that it does integrate. For that, you would— it's a more kind of advanced level step that we would cover later in the year on the course that I do. So just know that you do have that option. So then I'll go back into the gear icon. If I pop into quickly here, the theme and design, here's where you can change your logo and it gives you direct instructions about how to do that. You can change your display currency, your date format, your time zone, your number formatting, and then down on the bottom half of the screen here, over on the right is where you can change various colors. So if I wanted to change the color of these buttons from red, blue, and green, I could. If I wanted to change the color of this yellow line right here across the top of the page, I could change that to whatever my company colors were. And you can either choose from the color screen or if you know the hex code numbers for the colors of your company, you can actually just type in the hex code number and it will do it for you automatically. So lots of customization that's available in here. I'm not going to be going into too many of these other sections. I want to spend the majority of our demo in Model Management because that's where we do our pricing from. What I did want to state, state though, is that there is a section here for proposal templates. So the, so the software does actually do proposals for you as well, and it will— again, you can set up your own custom proposal or Emily on Mark's team. They offer a service where they can do it for you. Uh, you just give them the wording and the images that you want them to use, and they'll create the template for you. And then what that does is it allows you to automatically extract information from the quote that the customer has agreed to into a proposal, and boom, you can send it off in just a couple of seconds. You don't have to go into Word and, and show them— or sorry, you don't have to go into Word and edit it and send it to them the next day or something. You can do it right away. And then also there's this keyword manager section. Basically what that is is an area that we can pick what keyword. There's a whole bunch of default ones in the system for you already, but we can also create our own. For example, if your niche industry is travel agents and you want to ask your client what is their dream vacation country that they've never been, uh, visited before, and you want to put in a keyword for them to answer Jamaica, you can then extract that keyword field into your quote that— or into your proposal that will say, you know, thanks for agreeing to work with me. I can't wait to help you get to see Jamaica one day, or something to that effect. Okay, model management. This is what I think is the moneymaker of the program. You're going to see a lot of different models in here. Like I said, this is my student version that I'm using for when I'm teaching. If you were just going in here for the first time, what you would see is all of these versions at the bottom with an orange button over on the right-hand side that says Use Model. And depending on which plan of the software you are using, will indicate, uh, how many models that you have access to. So if you're on the Starter Plan, for example, you likely would not be seeing the same number of models that I'm showing here. This is a full version of the software. But essentially, let's say I do bookkeeping, so I'm going to click on this use bookkeeping model. I'll just quickly show there is a Create New button up here as well. That is the option if you ever want to start a pricing model from scratch. I, in all my years of using the software, I've never needed to, but if you feel the need to, you can. I've always found that with all these templates that Mark provides. Even if I need to change one by, you know, 50 or 60% of it, it still gives me a starting point. I've never needed to change one by that much, but it still gives me a starting point that is faster than creating one from scratch. So as I said, I'm a bookkeeper. I'm going to use this as an example. So I'm going to say I want to use his bookkeeping model. The next screen it takes me to, it's going to create the date and time that I'm making. Essentially, it's making a copy of his template. You can never actually override his template completely. You can choose whether it's recurring or not. In here, there are hundreds of different icons that you can choose. I love dogs, so there's a little picture of a dog there, so I'm going to choose that one. You can choose whether it's live or not. I like to leave it as not live, um, until I'm finished editing it, and then I will change it to being live. This fixed price template and payment plan template, I will show you that shortly, but this is where you would choose from the dropdown list of which template you wanted to use. Very important in the software that you're always clicking save and continue on every screen that you're doing. So this is now our internal behind-the-scenes look of the software. Before we wrap up today, I'm going to show you what it looks like from a customer perspective as well. Um, but basically what we have here is our menu over on the left-hand side. Then each of these— let me see if I can get one all on one page. Use the scroll bar a little bit. Each of these, we have this About Your Business and then a bunch of questions. This is what we call a section. And then here you can see there's this little space in between. We have another one called Bill Pay Services and some questions. This is another section. And what sections do is it divides what the customer sees on their end, and you'll see that when I show you the customer view in a minute. And the reason that's helpful is because if you have a really long list of questions in your model, it can be a little daunting to them when you do this in front of a client if they just see this long list of questions. When you're doing in front of them, they're only going to see one section at a time. You do have the ability to move things around. You can move sections, you can move questions by just clicking and dragging on those 3 little icons. We have a couple other options here which for today's purposes, um, I'm going to skip because they're more advanced items. I want to show you how you can control the questions. So these are all the questions again that Mark gives us in his template. Let's say, for example, we don't deal with customers that have PayPal accounts. I can easily delete that from my model. It's not affecting his template at all, and that question is gone. Maybe I don't deal with people that have foreign currency, and that's also gone. So that's how we can delete questions. We can add questions by clicking on the plus. It's currently named as Test Button. That's because I've been playing around with this a little bit. You can actually rename what you want these buttons to say as well. And in here I can say test question. I can add a little description of the question if I want to. And then here we have question type where you're going to have 4 choices. Do you want it to be a dropdown type of answer? Do you want it to be a yes or no answer? A value answer where you're actually, uh, typing in, manually typing in a number, or a free text, uh, type of answer that you can just type in anything you want that they've said. Those free text fields will not impact the price at all, but the other ones will. I'll show you, for example, if I choose use dropdown, that, that's the type of question that this is. Again, this is a template, so this is all here for me already. Let me actually cancel out of this new question, and I'll go to an existing one so I can show you what it looks like in the template. So this is the template that Mark has set up for us automatically, where he has a dropdown type of answer. And then the dropdown choices that will appear when I use this model in front of a client is— so I'm asking them how many sales invoices do they use. They're going to see this list of answers over on the left-hand side. They are not going to see this list of prices on the right-hand side. That's what you program internally, and that does not show to them As you're asking each question, there's just going to be, uh, it's going to count. These are annual prices, and it will add up and calculate as you go through your questions, and then it will reveal a price at the end. Then we have different calculation types. So there's 8 of these. We can do percentage increase, multiply, A simple add, number of units and unit price— those two need to be used in tandem with each other— raised to the power, root, and minus. And of course, as you start using the software, you would learn more about each of those. On our next screen, we have this Expressing Price section, which we can see over on our left menu. In here is where we can set a base price. It does default to zero, but you can change that if you want. We have a global adjuster, which is great when you're doing an annual price increase. Let's say you're increasing your prices by 10% across the board. You basically have two options of how you can do that. The first one would be to go into each and every single question and increase all of your prices by 10%, or you could simply go in here and say 1.10, and what that will do for you is the software, when it calculates its price, it's going to look back at this global adjuster and it will automatically add 10% on to the price that was calculated And again, just to reinforce, the customer is not seeing any of this addition that's happening behind the scenes. A little bit of formatting, um, that you have the choice of whether you want to show or hide decimal places, uh, if you have sales tax. These are free-form text fields that appear on some of the other screens. I'm going to leave these as they are for now, and you'll see where they show up when I show you the customer side of these. Our next page is the pricing parameters. So one of the questions that I get a lot from people is about being afraid that the software will reveal a price that's lower than what they want it to. You can set minimum and maximum prices in here. So if you don't want the software to go below a certain price, then you absolutely can set a min— a minimum price in here, and it will never reveal a price lower than that. So let me take that worry off your plate right away. If you've got your settings set up properly, that is not going to happen. You could rename your package names. You can choose up to 5 packages if you want. Enter tooltip descriptions about them. You can set your maximum price, the sky's the limit if you want. And then we have some, some more kind of advanced options that are in here for relative price multipliers and add-ons, rounding options, the period that you want the price to be spread over. So perhaps it's a cleanup job that you're doing, and there is a cleanup model template there that you can use. But let's say it's a cleanup job that you're doing and you only want the price to be revealed over 3 months instead of over 12. You could change that here. And then your display options, you can either hide, show, or reveal. So in this example, we're only using the middle 3 packages. So the super and the light are both chosen as hide. Show just means they're going to show all at once, and reveal means that you're going to need to do a couple extra clicks to reveal them. So now I'm going to just save and continue. I'm really in the habit of that, even though I didn't do any actual changes on that screen. I'm just really in the habit of clicking on Save and Continue all the time. So here is where you will add your packages. The software is not dynamic where if a customer chooses that they don't need sales tax returns but they want the premium package, that this will automatically X out It doesn't work that way. It's— I like to compare it to, um, like when you go to a restaurant or something and you want to order, uh, I'm just going to use fast food as an example. You go and you order a sandwich, uh, a burger sandwich, and you don't want tomatoes. They're not going to deduct money from the price of combo, or at least here in Canada they don't, um, because you don't want tomatoes. So your package is preset. This is some work that if you haven't done already, you'll want to make sure that you've done before you're setting up your software. And your packages are set. It is what it is. If the customer doesn't want something, they're still purchasing the package. Another example would be when you're buying a car, right? A lot of new vehicles nowadays come, you know, lots of things— power, power windows, power locks, everything. Maybe you don't want power windows, maybe you want the old crank style. I don't know if you can even get cars like that anymore. So you have to kind of— there might be some mind shifting that needs to happen here to grasp about how the packages work But this screen is where you would enter them. You can add another line much like the questions section. You can go in and edit them. You can choose whether it's included or not included. If you want it to actually say the word free. Um, so let me just do a couple of these. To show you what it looks like. So you can see this one, I was editing this first one. You can see here where I chose the word free. Here's where I chose the not applicable option. So it puts a little dash mark through. And then here is, uh, where I typed in the freeform text. Word. This is an option where we can add behavior rewards. Again, there are some examples here for us. Basically, it's called behavior reward in the software because we don't want to call it discount. Because I'm, I'm going to use the last couple minutes to show you from a customer perspective, of what the end of this process looks like. But if I was to have a button that said discount, that will prompt them to ask, oh hey, what's that button up there? Whereas with it being called behavior rewards, we have the option to choose whether we want to allow them to use it or not. Again, you can edit them, you can delete them, you can add different rewards. Next we have our enhancements page. This is otherwise known as upsells, so you can add various extra items in here. Much like everywhere else in the software, you can choose, uh, to edit things or add things. And then finally is our review page, which when you're setting up your models, I I promise you, you will use this page a lot. But you'll see I just quickly hit the calculate button there, and it will show me how my price is adding up as questions get answered. So this is what's happening behind the scenes. So let me just jump over into a live model. So I'm moving out of now our behind-the-scenes look into our view of what it would look like in front of a customer. I will usually have entered this screen before I turn on my screen share with the client, and I will start with them on this screen. They don't need to see me setting up their name and stuff. So I'm just going to accept all of the default answers that are here. You would be going through this with them, asking them questions, choosing from dropdowns. This gives them control over their pricing, and I promise you, they love control. They like to feel involved in the process. So I want to get to this end screen. This is where we are about to reveal the price price now. Before I reveal the price, I always ask them which— I would review my packages and then I would ask them which package they are leaning towards, and I would tell them, you know, we're not committing to that yet. And then I would select it, and when I click on this button, Fixed Price, now it's going to reveal the price. So here's that Freeform field where I could type in 12 payments of, and if they— here's my little behavior rewards button where I could choose to show it or choose not to. They can switch to a different plan. I'm just going to— I think I have about a minute left, so I'm just gonna say that they're sticking with the full plan. Here is now my enhancements page, my upsells page. Here is a payment plan page that, um, I know that they had selected, that it was in my model for them to have 12 payments. So the software calculates everything annually and then breaks it down into number of payments. I would quickly review this with them. And then if everything looks good, I have a review page here at the end. At this point, I would typically end my screen share with the client and I would complete things from here. If they agree to the quote, I can click the Create Proposal button right away and it will do that for me. So I just want to, um, quickly review a couple of my notes. Um, I wanted to mention that the software really helps me guide my thinking. There's no more willy-nilly. It's not a guessing program for me anymore. There's, um, a lot of consistency. I can still adjust it when there's complexity with different niches. But it becomes a repeatable process. So I know I've gone through that really quickly, but I also know that this wraps up my time. I'm about 45 seconds over now. I could go on and on talking about this forever, but I know Mark has a great lineup for you still. Um, if you do want to know more, like I said, I encourage you to reach out to Mark's team to get more information about how you can learn more about that. There's just not enough time to show you everything in, in a half hour or so today. So I'm going to hand things back over to Mark. I hope you all enjoy the rest of your conference. And Mark, thank you again so much for inviting me to speak today and to demo the effective pricing software. Bye everybody, have a great day.

Oh wow, isn't Kim great? And I hope she does well with her diving exams. There were so many great things she said there. I loved early on she said that, that the phrase, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And as with value pricing, it's not easy. There's a, there's a process to go through. But those people that are action takers that just work the work through one step at a time, they get results. And Kim's a definite action taker. She just took action immediately when she joined and got the software. And it was interesting, said she never had the confidence beforehand because that's what it does. Having a system gives you confidence. And it's also, if the client has an issue with the price, well, it's not your fault. That's the system. It's a bit like someone once said to me, I think Kim made a similar point. It's a bit like you go into a restaurant and you get the menu and you don't argue the price with the waiter. That's the, that's the price. And that's what a system gives you. It gives that confidence. And she also made the point, she loves learning from what others are doing, which is why we have this as a community. There's some great people. I've seen the comments in the chat, people like Mark Wickersham, Neil Criddle, Dion Sherwood, and, and many more. One of the things they love about the Academy is just sharing and learning from each other, because we're all on this journey to build more successful accounting firms. I thought it was interesting she talked about the results she's getting from diagnostic reviews, and I saw some other people commenting and saying, oh, we, we don't do that, we don't charge for that sort of thing. And that's an issue in our profession. Very often there are things we don't charge for But if we stopped and thought about it and built a system, then we can. And I love that, I love the comment that effective pricing is the icing on the cake, because the point she was making is, yes, it's a great tool, but you do also have to understand all the other parts of the pricing process, the parts of the system we talked about. It's about having great options, adding value, communicating the value of what you do. That's really key. But I guess if I was to summarize, what's the key benefit of the software? And she demonstrated it really well. I mean, it's very flexible in terms of you can price anything with it and you can change the prices to suit. But the real thing about the software, when I created it, it's based on the software I first created for my accounting firm back in 1999 when I came across value pricing, and it's evolved over the last 20-odd years. The key thing is this: everybody has a maximum willingness to pay, the buyer's reservation price. We've talked about that. Our goal is to find a price as close to that as possible. Apple do it really, really well. And because if, if we can get better prices, we make better margins, and therefore we can invest more time on doing, learning more skills, implementing more things to add even more value to our clients. Clients. If we are overwork— working long hours, we don't have the time to step back and start figuring out things like advisory work and so on because we're just too busy doing the basics. So we serve our clients better when we make more money. But like Apple, Apple make a lot of money, but that means they can develop some of the best products, which then develop, which then gives more value to us. And the thing about back to the software is it's about what we want to do is figure out what's the maximum willingness to pay, which by the way is not ripping the client off because that's what they want to pay. Apple didn't rip me off for charging me €1,300 for this because I love this device. I use it every single day. I love videos. The video is amazing in this and so many other things. And so our goal is to find out for each customer, what's the maximum they're willing to pay. Now, giving 3 choices is a great place to start. That's 3 choices, But the purpose of the software is we involve the client in the process. And when we go through the various options and give them choices and they say, yes, I want that, I want that, very often the price will come out too high. And that's fine. We want— this is really important— we want the first price to be too high because remember, if somebody says yes to your first price, you've left money on the table. They would have happily paid you more money. We want the first price to be too high, but when they say that's too, too high, we need a system to work with them to change things. And what the software allows you to do is to go backwards and forwards and take things out of the virtual shopping basket. They might have said that they want you to do the bookkeeping weekly, and it may be that if the price is too high, you offer to start by doing it monthly. And you can change things and change the price. You work with them until you find the price that they're willing to pay. And when you go high above their maximum willingness to pay and you work down, you get a better price almost every time than the usual way where we think, hmm, I wonder what they might accept. And we usually go in way too low because we hate that negative reaction. We don't have a system for dealing with the 'that's expensive.' So we've had lots of questions on the software itself. I'm going to do Q&A later on after our next guest speaker. But the main point I want to make is the software itself, the middle version of the software, is part of our Value Pricing Academy growth. Somebody did ask the question, and can you buy the software on its own? Yes, you can, and you can buy on its own, but for just a small amount extra, you get all the training and support in the Value Pricing Pricing Academy. So we always recommend get it for free as a bonus as part of the Value Pricing Academy. And for those of you that do use the software, I know some do, let me know in the chat if you have used Effective Pricing. What's it done for you? What sort of benefits? We've heard Kim's stories and we've heard that Jess and, and Terry use it and get amazing results. But everybody else who does use it, I'd be interested, what results What results are you getting? Put it in the chat. I'll review them later. My team will share, will share the comments with me. Okay, so I've shared some stories with you. Just a few more. Doreen Abbott, when she joined, she said, thank you so much for your help. I'm also so excited to finally be using this program. I was able to get 32% increase the very first time I used it to renew and upsell a current client. I'm so glad that I'm part of this group. Please let Mark know that I'm very glad, and he has so much patience with all our questions. Sarah, you are the best, which she is. Many people say she's the one that answers all of your emails. Sarah, my partner, I'm so glad that you're available to help. Thank you so much again. And then of course we heard, I mean, Kim's, Kim's numbers were extraordinary, but she's not alone. Many people, if you follow the system, the framework frameworks, if you follow the frameworks, you will get, you will get the results because I've worked with thousands of accountants now since the year 2000 and had hundreds and hundreds of success stories. So I showed you the page yesterday. My team can give you the link again. Where is it? If you want to find out more about the Academy, this is the page, but what I thought I'd do now is I could go through this and And in here it tells you about all the training you get, all about the different trainers, the curriculums that we teach. So, and you can start to see some of the topics that we teach here. But what I thought I'd do is instead take you behind the scenes because when you join the Value Pricing Academy, and remember there's a free trial, when you join, one of the pages that you'll, you'll go to is your library. And in here you will find it says Value Pricing Academy Level 2 Growth, and I'm going to click on that in a second. But also there's lots of bonuses you get, uh, bonus courses, and the one— the two I will particularly point out is these two. So we have a 6-month course on how to price bookkeeping services that every 2 weeks you get more training, more content, more resources over 6 months. You you can work in bite-sized chunks and build up a complete system for pricing bookkeeping work and making more money. And there's another course that I recommend people start with, which is Repricing Your Existing Clients, which Terri is going to talk about tomorrow. And this is a 5-week course which is designed to get you results fast, just like Melanie Jury, the story I shared yesterday, the video from Melanie. There's some other stuff as well. But what I do want to go do is click into, uh, behind the scenes. This is what the heart of the Value Pricing Academy looks like. You will see on the left-hand side all the various training that you've got. It is drip-fed. You don't get it all straight away because we don't want to overwhelm you. There is a lot of training because we give you everything you need to master pricing, to master marketing, to also get those essential systems that Terry talked about. So every month you unlock more and more training. So for example, in month 1, Terry has her training on getting, getting more sales and have a better, happier team with better communication. One of the, one of the courses which people love is Practical Pricing. So in this one, every month you unlock training on a complete system, starting with bookkeeping and your financial statements, payroll, tax returns, setting up cloud accounting systems, cleanup work, and so on. Each of these months there's a 90-minute training and it unlocks a brochure. I mentioned there's 15 brochures, your scripts, the words to say to build up the value, and so much more stuff inside the Value Pricing Academy. So I'm just just touching really the tip of the iceberg. But the point is, is that we— you get access to everything you need to build an extraordinary firm. And you just take it one step at a time. As Kim said, how do you eat an elephant? Just one bite at a time. Just show up to the live sessions, work through the courses bit by bit. Start with the ones that are most important to you. And you will see bit by bit over time you'll start getting better results. And as I said yesterday, what if you could try it before you commit? Well, for the very first time yesterday, we, we decided to give you a 7-day free trial, and you can access that free trial at any time today. Tomorrow we'll stop the free trial. It's gone by the end of the conference. So if you haven't yet taken advantage of the 7-day free trial, do that. If you then decide by the end of 7 days you love it, then you don't have to do anything at all. Payment goes through and you can carry on learning and moving on your journey to value pricing. And if it's not for you, that's fine. You can cancel with one click. When we do the, when we do the kickoff session on Monday, Emily will show you how you cancel your subscription. It's really easy. It's just a setting in the settings of your dashboard. You'll see that on Monday, and we also put it in one of the emails as well. So there's no risk, no obligation to carry on after 7 days. Just give it a try, see what you think of it, and if you can see that it's going to be helping you solve your pricing problems and other pricings around building a great accounting firm— we focus a lot of it around bookkeeping, but actually it's about all services This is for accountants and bookkeepers because we dive into all the compliance services, how to price them, as well as marketing and systems. And remember I said yesterday, members keep telling us they love the fact that you lock in the price. Yes, we will keep putting the price up, but when you join today, you will keep that price. It will never change for you. So I guess the best thing to do is to act certainly before Monday, even better, in the next— today or tomorrow— then you can, you can benefit from the 7-day trial. And we also have some special bonuses for you if you are an action taker. That's— and we know we've got some action takers here— if you take action and take advantage of the 7-day free trial during the course of today or tomorrow's conference, then we've got some bonuses. Number 1, I wrote a book a few years ago called How to Build a Successful Bookkeeping Business. You can buy on Amazon. But if you prefer, then if you join today, we will send out an email, I think on Friday, with a link where you can download a digital copy of that particular book. If you want some more advanced training, then we also have an amazing 90-minute video that Jessica did on how she prices bookkeeping, and we'll get that to you as well. And I think Kim mentioned it, Yes, you can create your own proposals inside Effective Pricing as well as the pricing. You can then build the proposals. They do take a bit of time to develop unless you're a designer, but one of the things that we offer to do is anybody who joins during the conference, my team will, if you want, design and pull together your first, your proposal template for the Effective Pricing software so you can get up and running faster with that. And another bonus, is tomorrow there is two sessions taking place at the same time. One of them will be here. I will be doing a special set exclusive session tomorrow for anybody who has joined the Value Pricing Academy by just before that, up until that point. And what I'll be doing is I'll be walking through in 45 minutes really where to start, how to get the fastest results, where to, what resources to use, what things to do in your pricing, what's going to get you the best results, because we've covered loads of stuff over today and yesterday, and there'll be more tomorrow. And my goal is to then identify where should you start, what's going to give you the fastest possible payback, start getting results. That's the session tomorrow, and that's available to you if you join before then on the free trial. Okay. Oh, and of course, remember we do have on Monday the kickoff session. I do recommend you mark down your calendar now. That's at 4:00 PM UK time, 11:00 in Eastern, Eastern time, and so on. It's about 60 minutes plus time for Q&A. Emily's going to be running that. You'll meet Emily very soon. And that's where we show you where everything is. If you haven't figured out already, we'll show you how to download the software, will show you how to get access to all the courses and much more. That's your Getting Started Fast session. We'll answer questions. If you can't make it, then it will be recorded. You'll get access to it. But if, if you do attend live, you'll get the chance to ask Emily questions. And I have another bonus for you as a thank you for being here. I know some people said yesterday their big challenge is, well, how do you go and how do you price cleanup work? So we, we do have a full course on that that you get at the end of the House Price Bookkeeping Course, but we also pulled together some highlights of that and created a resource on how to price cleanup work, and we're going to send you that as a thank you for being here today. When I say send you, somebody, I think Gabby, is going to put the link into the chat, so look out out for that coming your way. Right, how are we doing for time? I think I am absolutely bang on time, I think. Yeah, I am, surprisingly. So we are going to run questions, ask questions, answer questions later. So please do, if you've got questions, put them in the chat. I can see 13 questions already, and so I be getting to those. Those of you— I mentioned my bonus session tomorrow. Of course, if you join my bonus session, if you join the free trial, you might be thinking, yes, but I'm going to miss the session with Terri where she'll go through one of the most important things, which is repricing existing clients. Well, please don't worry, because if you join the Value Pricing Academy, you'll get, you'll get access to the recording of the entire event, these 3 days, to access whenever you want. So you'll get access to that. And also, you get access anyway to my 5-week training on repricing existing clients, which goes even deeper than what Terry is going to cover tomorrow. But so don't worry, that's a really powerful session, but you won't miss it. It'll be recorded, and you will get access to that. Right, on that note, I'm going to invite in a second our our next speaker. Her name's Emily Cross. It's actually Sarah's daughter. She's our head of marketing, but she also does a lot of our training. She, she's pretty much learned everything that she— that I know about value pricing because she sat in all of my sessions, consumed all the stuff. So she does a lot of stuff on value pricing as well. But her main expertise, number one expertise, is marketing, and particularly building marketing systems. And she runs our marketing curriculums, teaching you how to win better quality clients. So Emily, are you there? You are. Hi there, Emily. How you doing? Hello. I'm good.

I'm good. I'm ready to get going.

Awesome. Good stuff. Well, we are bang on time. I'm not going to take up any more of your time. I will be back later to answer questions and to wrap up, but take it away, Emily.

Thank you very much. I'm just going to, before I start, I'm just going to double-check that all of my things are on the right settings because I often get echo, but I think I should be good. Um, if I am giving echo, then people just please let me know. Um, thumbs up from Mark, thank you very much. Okay, so, um, as Mark said, I'm one of the trainers in the Value Pricing Academy, and my sort of specialty is marketing. So I do teach a lot of the marketing stuff in there. I also know a little bit about AI, so I'll be sharing some stuff with you today about how you can do some marketing stuff with AI and kind of combine the two together. What I'm going to be talking to you about in my session today is how to attract high-value bookkeeping clients. So this is specifically how to attract high value, okay? So this is not just about trying to bring in lots and lots of random people to the business that aren't going to be the right fit for you, that are going to be, uh, difficult to work with or not going to appreciate you or complain about about the price. We want to really avoid trying to bring those people in and instead have a more targeted approach to make sure that the people that we are bringing in are those high-value people, high-quality clients who are going to appreciate the work that you're doing. They're going to be willing to pay you a higher price because they appreciate and respect that value that you're delivering. They're not going to complain about price. They're gonna, uh, you know, they're going to be great clients to work with and they're going to be a good fit for your business. So that's what we're looking at today, and I'm going to look, um, teach you about a foundational kind of piece of your marketing strategy that will play into every other area of your marketing that you do as well. So, and I'm also going to show you how you can very easily and quickly make it using AI. So before I get into that, what I wanted to just first address is why you need to fix your pricing before you start looking at your marketing. So if, if you're in a headspace where you think, I'm not earning enough money, I need to bring in more clients— oh, by the way, I can share my screen here as well. So if you think, I'm I'm not earning enough money, I need to bring in more clients, that's the way to make more money, then obviously that is a logical instinctive thing to be thinking about. But if you don't fix your pricing first, then there are some issues that you're going to come across. So first of all, you don't need more clients to make profit. There are other ways we can approach that. We can, we can increase the amount of clients we have, or we can increase the amount of spend per client. Okay, we can also increase the frequency of spend of each— how, how frequent people pay you. So there are lots of different ways that we can approach increasing the, the profits, um, and having more clients is not necessarily the best way to do it. It's time-consuming to try and get new clients, um, and it also takes a lot of your, um, your time and your effort and your energy to to do that. So you don't need more clients to earn more profit. If you haven't adjusted your pricing before you start then trying to bring more clients in, and you have a flawed pricing model or you're underpricing, then what you're going to find out is that you, you just end up working a lot harder because you now have a bigger workload because you've got more people to you know, to, to work on, but you're not actually going to see any real extra profit from that. You're not going to actually see the benefits of that because you— because your pricing structure is fundamentally flawed. Okay, what's also going to happen if you do that, if you bring in lots and lots of clients and you are underpricing yourself, then you're going to find that you are stretching yourself too thin because you're going to get into this cycle where I'm not really making any much extra money? Well, I know I need more clients. And it's this, this vicious cycle where you keep bringing in more and more people. You stretch yourself too thin because there's only so much capacity you can have to work with people. And as a result, your standards may start to slip. Now, that's not because you're low value or because you're doing anything necessarily wrong, but you don't have the capacity to go above and beyond for for people when you're working with 500 clients. You just don't have that capacity. Whereas if you work with less people and we work with them for a higher fee, then what we can actually start to change our focus on is we can focus on delivering more value to those fewer people. So we can work with less people, spend more time on each person that we're working with, with, so they're getting a better result. That's where you have the opportunity to— what— to find those extra great opportunities for them, to go above and beyond for them, to have a more personal approach, maybe where you're meeting with them in person. You know, what things can you be doing and focusing on to deliver extra value? When you work with less people, you have more time to dedicate to each one, so we want to be able to do that. And we want to be able to charge a high fee because we are now focusing on delivering more and more value. So when we work with less people for a higher fee and the focus is on delivering value, that's where we are able to grow a more profitable firm, and we're also focusing more on what the client deserves, which is getting more value. Okay, so It's also— your price is also a part of your packaging. So packaging for, uh, a product, uh, Mark's shown several times the Apple iPhone, it comes in a super sleek, beautiful box, um, and all of the, the marketing and the branding, that's all a part of that. But what we're selling is a service, so it's a little bit more different in how we approach the that packaging sort of side of that. How do we present that? And your price is a big part of that. So if your price is low, what you are signaling is low quality, because people understand, and especially business owners that you are working with who understand things like return on investment, these people understand that you get what you pay for. So if this service is really cheap, it's really low price, priced, I'm probably going to expect it to be a low-quality service. So when you raise your prices and you have a high price, that actually repels those low-quality clients who are just seeking that low price point, and instead it brings in the high-quality people who are looking for a high-quality service and will willingly and happily pay that extra amount to know that they are getting that really, really good level of service. So your price is a part of your packaging, and it's really important that we consider that. Okay, so another thing that I really want to point out to you is a lot of the time people think, I don't have time for marketing. So if that is you, let me know in the comments. Say yes, that's me. Or if you, if you feel like you really don't have time time because you're bogged down with client work, or maybe you just don't know how to approach it and you feel like you've got to learn it before you then do it. A lot of people feel like they don't have time for marketing. But what we— this is a phrase or kind of like an equation that we like to tell you about to change your mindset about that a little bit. So if you increase your prices first and you focus on that, if you increase your prices by 20%, and let's say worst case scenario, you lose 20% of your clients because of that— because a lot of us have this fear that if I raise my prices, I will lose my clients because my, my clients are price sensitive, and I raise my prices, they're not going to be happy about that, and I'm going to lose them. Now, what we actually find when people use the strategies and the templates and the scripts that we teach them in the Value Pricing Academy, the majority of people say that they don't lose a single client even when they actually kind of wanted to, because they perhaps have some clients that they don't really enjoy working with, or they're in the wrong industry and they wanted to get rid of those clients. So you're very unlikely, if you follow the right systems and structures, to lose 20 20% of your clients. But even as a worst-case scenario, if that does happen, you increase your prices by 20% and you lose 20% of your clients, that means you now have the same pay. But if you're working Monday to Friday, 5 days a week, you have 1 extra day per week, okay? You get 20% of your time back. The, the pay is the same, but you're getting the same, same, you're getting that extra day back back. So what can we use that day to do? We can apply marketing strategies, we can build the systems that we're going to talk about tomorrow. I'm going to talk to you about a system. We can work on our marketing, we can work on delivering more value to our clients, okay? We can work on growing our business. We can use that time to apply the marketing that we need to be doing, okay? So that's one way of thinking about it. So what I want to talk to you about today is the fundamental foundational thing. This is always where I tell people to start whenever I teach anything to do with marketing, is the very first thing that you do is you need to have an ideal client profile. You need to have complete clarity on exactly who you are wanting to work with and therefore how to attract them. If we don't know who we're trying to work with, then all of our marketing is going to be very vague, it's going to be very generic, and that doesn't resonate specifically with people. Okay, when we can more directly address the pain points, the challenges, and those sorts of things that they're going through and their specific circumstances, that resonates more with people, and they are— you're more likely to convert those people to be clients clients, and you're more likely to also put yourself in front of the right people in the first place as well. And also at the same time, repel the people that you don't want to work with. Okay, so having an ideal client profile, a physical document in your business that you can refer to, is absolutely fundamental. And if you are using ChatGPT a lot as well, it also becomes very, very useful as tool to input that as a resource before you start prompting anything so that ChatGPT inherently knows who you are trying to reach before you even start doing any, creating any, any content. Your ideal client profile is also going to influence the services and the content that you create. So earlier, Mark talked about segmenting when you're creating your packages. And that segmenting is really important, and, and having that idea of who am I trying to serve, what are they interested in having, what services or products can I add to my package that is going to be specifically suitable to that person. So the content and the service that you create is also impacted based on who your ideal client is, who are you trying to serve, and how can you best serve them. So what things do we want to consider when having— when creating that ideal client profile? Okay, so in order to attract the right clients, those high-value clients, we need to know who the right clients are. So we need to consider what criteria is important for you. Okay, so I'll talk about a lot of, um, you know, giving you a kind of loose idea of the things that you might consider, but there might also be things on top of that that you specifically really, really want to find in your ideal client. Okay, so who are we targeting? Several things that you might consider. Number 1, maybe the revenue. Okay, I want to work with people that have a certain a certain level of revenue because I know that my price point is this, and therefore I need people to be able to afford that price point. But equally, if they've got a really high revenue, does that link to how many transactions you're dealing with? What else can go into that? Maybe they have multiple credit cards, maybe they have— they're dealing with foreign currencies. Maybe we want to consider all of these kind of things. Maybe that also impacts on the payroll and whether they've got a larger team. What kind of things can we consider? We also maybe want to look at the industry. So do we really like working with dentists or e-commerce businesses or traveling nomadic businesses or content creators? You know, what kind of industry do we like working in? And that can, that can kind of depend on what services you like to deliver or don't like to deliver. If you really have a reason that you don't really like doing payroll work, then maybe your choice is that you decide to work with solo entrepreneurs or people with a very small team. Or perhaps you really don't like helping, um, dealing with stock and inventory, so you would rather deal with service-based industries that don't have stock, you know, like restaurants or retail businesses that have a lot of stock and inventory, or vice versa. You might really like dealing with that, and therefore that kind of guides you towards which industry you might like to work with. We also want to consider the attitude of the people that we're working with. Now, this refers to a couple of different ways. So the attitude could be what is their attitude to business. It could be well, actually, they, they really want to step away from their business because they've been there for a long time, and their attitude is that I really want more of a work-life balance, and I want to delegate a lot or systemize a lot or automate a lot so that I can pass a lot of work away and I can spend more time with my family. Or it may be that their attitude is I really, really want to grow my business. I want to franchise. I want to deal with, you know, more stuff and bigger stuff. Stuff. So what is their attitude in terms of growth, in terms of what position they would want to have in their business, but then also attitude in terms of personality? This is a relationship-based industry, and these are people who are going to be working with you hopefully on at least an annual basis. It's a long time that they will be with you, and if you are delivering things in person, you're having conversations, you're having meetings, you're going over their finances with them. Being able to get along with that person on some level may be something that is a really important factor for you. It could also be— I know that Teresa in the Academy, she teaches about, uh, she, she does a DISC profile, um, which is, uh, I, I, you— I can't remember what they all are, but there's like dominant, conscientious, and each person has a different type of way that they communicate. And she learns and understands that so that she can communicate with them in the best way. And there may be people that you like working with that are a bit more blunt and a bit more direct and professional and straight to the point, or it may be that you actually quite like the more personal approach where you can chat a bit about their life and their family and get to know them on that personal basis as well. So how is that going to impact on who you're bringing in? What are their goals as well? So, you know, do they have a goal where they want to massively grow their business, or Or do they just want to make ends meet and, and travel a little bit in between, or spend time with their family, or go on holidays? You know, what are their actual goals for their business? Location is another one to think about for several reasons. Again, if you are dealing with things like taxes or specific regulations in specific countries, then the location that they are in might be significant to who you decide to work with, because there's different laws and things that you would have to learn if you were working with somebody in UK versus in the US, or even by different states in the US. Okay, so location might be something you think of. It might also be, do I want them to be in an online space where I can meet with them on an online level, or am I— do I really want to work with people that I can physically go and meet and see and sit in their office with them and have a coffee with them? Maybe I like to have that kind of relationship with people. So there's lots of different things that you might consider of, of to who you are going to be targeting. What criteria is important to you? Some other things might be what accounting software are they using, because you might be using QBO but they might come to you with Xero and you might think, actually, I really don't want to work with somebody who's not on the right system, so I will— I would not work with that person. Or it may be, actually, I'm attracting a lot of people who use Xero, I'll create a service where I can transfer them over to QBO. Or it may be something that's not massively important to you. Maybe it's how long they've been in business, okay? It may be that you have some sort of personal passion where you really like working with Christians or nonprofit businesses or single moms or single dads, you know, people that are running their own, their own businesses. What kind of things might you decide to target, okay? And that also goes into having a niche. So the next one is having a niche. So you can niche based on a couple of different things. It could be those personal passions I just mentioned, you know, maybe you like Christians or charities and nonprofits, or you, you resonate with people who are single parents because you're, you're a single parent running your own business. So you like to work with people who, who have those values and those ideals. That might be something that you choose to niche in. It may be that you choose to niche based on the service that you like to offer. So maybe you, you do the bookkeeping, but you also really like to do business advisory as well. Or maybe you have— you like to deal with AI and technology and automations and systemizing things, and that's really your strong suit. So you have that as a specialism where you can offer that as a different service. Okay, it might also be the stage that the— of the business that they're in. So maybe you particularly like working with people who are startup businesses because you know that they potentially need quite a lot of help in getting themselves sorted. They might have a lot of urgency. They might need more of that hand-holding that you quite like doing. Or it might be that they are at the exit stage, and you like working with the exit stage people because it's more about, you know, wrapping things up and, and helping them move to that point, and they're very well established. Okay, so what is it that you like working with? And then we also have the sector. So this is the industry. It could be that you like working with dentists, restaurants, content creators, online businesses, e-commerce, that sort of thing. Is there a particular industry that speaks to you? Um, you know, I think— I, I'm pretty sure that Kim works a lot with, uh, services like dog groomers and stuff because she really likes dogs. So she likes working with, with animals. So you might— that might be you if you really like animals. I want to work with pets, okay, and, and groomers and dog sitters and walkers and trainers and that sort of thing, so that you're spending time doing what you love, okay? So do you have a niche? Um, you also want to consider what does your ideal client want. So what things are the goals that they've set for their business? What do they want? What are their needs as well? Because it may be that they need certain things, but then they also want other things, okay? And what are their desires and their ambitions? We also want to look at what are their challenges and their pain points. What things do they struggle with? What obstacles do they commonly have to overcome in their business? Because when we create the copy— so copy is just the word for marketing talk— so when we create the, the wording for our websites, for our brochures, for our social media, for our adverts, for our any promotional copy, any wording, we heavily talk about the benefits and the pain points. Okay, so pain is what people want to avoid. We are more motivated to avoid pain than we are to attain something of gain. Okay, the tax man's breathing down your neck, that's a scary pain point, it's a consequence. I really want to avoid that. And we draw a lot on that in our wording when we are trying to attract those people. So, is this a pain point that you have? Well, we can solve it, and here's the benefit of the service that we do. So the benefit is the next part, is what is the result or the outcome that you can get them, okay? And then we can go really deep on that benefit as well, where we can have a practical one that's, you know, do you want more profit? You want more profit in your business for sure. But maybe a deeper benefit is is, well, I want to go on more holidays with my family. And what's the emotional benefit of that? Well, I want a sense of achievement. I want to be able to relax. I want the pride knowing that I've built a successful business. So we want to know what our ideal client wants and desires so that we can express that as we are communicating the value of our service. So if we can understand they really really value work-life balance, then a lot of what we can say in our service is we take a lot of the time off of your plate so that you can dedicate that time back to doing what you love. So it builds into the value conversation that we end up having with them, and it also goes into targeting the right people as well. So when you use targeted copy, it can resonate better and it can convert better as well. So here's an example of a headline maybe that you have on your website. It might say reliable accounting support for your business, or today we're talking about bookkeeping, so it may be bookkeeping, reliable bookkeeping support for your business. Now that's fine, but it doesn't call out who you're specifically working with. It doesn't talk about any, you know, specific pain that they're going through. It doesn't talk about any specific benefit that they're gonna get. There's no differentiation there for any other website that they come across. Whereas if we have something that's a bit more targeted, so for example, you, you like to work with restaurants, it says, finally, understand your restaurant's numbers and keep more profit on every plate. Okay, so I like that, that's a little bit of a pun. It's calling out that you are working with restaurant owners. So somebody that lands on your website that's not in the restaurant owner, owner business that you wouldn't want to work with anyway because it's not your ideal client, they would land on that website and say, well, this isn't for me, and they will leave. But the people who are your ideal client, those restaurant owners, will land there and say, this is great, this person must know a lot about how to specifically deal with the, the specific circumstances of my business. They must know a lot about, you know, the, the taxes and stock and the inventory and the, the staff and the payroll and stuff. They must know a lot about all of the stuff that specifically relates to my business. And even better when you have things like case studies where you have helped people and say, this is you, we can help you in this way just like we've helped these other people and got them the great results. So having that niche and that specificity, that specialized wording, can make people convert a lot a lot easier. So we also have another one here: we are a professional bookkeeping service helping small businesses stay organized and compliant. So that is probably what you're doing, okay, but it's very simple, simplified. There's no differentiation there, there's nothing that makes you stand out. So when you can have something that's a bit more targeted, where you have decided that actually you really like to focus on AI and automation and systemizing, then your wording can We are AI-powered bookkeepers helping modern businesses automate and systemize their finances using smart tech and streamlined workflows so you can save time, reduce manual work, and scale with ease. So when you understand that my clients really value that, those things, saving time and scaling, and they, and they are interested in modern, you know, tech advancements and things, if I understand that, then the wording that I put on my website can be a lot more specific, and that's going to be a lot more powerful in converting that person. Okay, so let's talk about niching, because for a lot of people, niching is quite a worrying thing where they think, well, if I niche and I, I reduce the amount of people that I can potentially work with, then that's You know, that's a difficult thing for people to accept. They think, well, you know, if I only work with restaurants, then I'm reducing the amount of people, and I want to bring in more and more clients. Okay, but what actually happens is that niching helps you to stand out, and it also helps to attract people from further afield because people want to work with the specialist.

Okay.

If you had a really, um, specific brain tumor, would you go to your generalist, your doctor, your local hospital, or would you seek out the top brain surgeon, okay, and go to the specialist who's dealt with that surgery 3 times and can do it to a really high level? Would you rather go with a generalist or the specialist who knows exactly how to deal with that problem, right? We're gonna go to the specialist. We've We want to work with the person who can best deal with our problem, and we're likely going to be willing to pay a much higher price for that as well. Okay, so niching helps you to stand out. It also attracts people from further afield because somebody wants to work with that specialist. It helps you to convert a lot easier because you are targeting that exact, you know, industry or that exact service or that exact person. You know, we work with single parents who are running their own business 'People are going to see that and think, oh, that's exactly me, I really want to work with this person.' Because remember as well, it is a relationship industry. So if it is something like that where you're a single parent running your own business, then you're going to resonate with that person and share values and have a good connection with them as well, because you're both doing the same thing. So it does— it gives you a lot more connection to those people. So it also— having that niche helps you to attract attract the right clients and also very importantly repel the wrong clients. Okay, so you can earn a lot more when you niche as well because people are willing to pay that higher price. Those people have more confidence that you can handle their specific problems and get them better results because of this authority that you have, this expertise that you have in this particular niche. I more likely want to work with you because I have the confidence that you can handle my exact problems, and therefore I will pay a high price for that. Okay, so niching can feel scary. It can feel like you're reducing the pool of people that you can work with, but it actually allows you to work with fewer people for that higher price point, which is what we are trying to achieve. It also allows you to go really deep and, and learn loads and loads about that one specific industry so that you can go above and beyond and deliver massive value to those people when you get them. Okay, okay, so I'm gonna jump over then to ChatGPT because I really want to show you how you can create this kind of ideal client profile using a GPT that I have already made. So let me press this button. So for anybody here that doesn't really know AI or hasn't really used ChatGPT, what I have created— and this is available in the Academy— um, what I have created is a custom GPT. So this means I have built this and trained this model to do an exact task for you. Okay, so the task that it has is to help you create an ideal client profile. So when you follow this GPT, and you'll see, you can see the responses that I put in. I'm gonna go through it with you now. It will help you to piece together that ideal client profile. I also have another one on niching, which if I get time, I will show you that one as well. So the simplicity of this is you hit the button, you say let's get started, and it goes, hello, I'm here to help you create an ideal client profile. Are you ready to begin? So I say yes. Best guess. Okay, simple, very simple. What it's now going to do is it's going to go through a series of questions with you so that you can start to piece together in your mind who my ideal client is. Okay, if you don't have a really clear image of who your ideal client is, then you can start by deciding who your ideal client is not. So maybe there's an industry you really particularly don't like working with, or there's a type of, you know, personality type that you really don't like working with, or there's a particular service that you would rather avoid. We can start by ruling out the things that we don't like working with, and we can think about the clients that you already have. If you do have clients, you can picture them in your head. Who are the kind of clients that if so they were to ring you and they would call you and you saw their name up on your screen would you roll your eyes and think, I really don't want to answer the phone to this person? They are probably the clients that you don't like working with. Whereas if you get that same phone call or you get an email from somebody and you think, oh, I, I like working with this person— so, so think of it as that gut reaction, uh, do that little test for yourself. If that person was going to ring you on the phone, do you— are you excited to work with them, to, to talk to them, or do you kind of wish that you could just ignore the phone call, okay? Because that can give you a bit of an indication of who those people are. You can write those people down then and then see if there are any commonalities between the people that you do and don't like working with. Maybe there's some similarities in the industries that they're in, maybe there's some similarities in the type of person that they are, maybe you just really like having that, you know, personal approach with those people, okay? So it's going to go through a series of questions with First one is, where are they located? So I'm going to go through and I'm going to answer all of these questions with this GPT as I go through. It's then going to help me organize it all into a nice neat document. So, online only. I work with digital nomads who travel and constantly change locations. So this is, um, an example that I show a lot is, um, I want people who are nomadic, that they travel and they work a lot in different locations. So this is the one that I'm going to go with. But of course, you just fill in whatever works for you, the kind of person that you would like to work with, or specifically not. You can just say to ChatGPT at this point, I'm not really sure, but I know that I don't want to work with these people. Can you help me with that? And it will help and give you advice. So we've got that. Next is what business sector are they in? So I've put digital nomads. So generally that's things like they're influencers on social media, content creators, they're in e-commerce, maybe coaching, consulting. These are online spaces. Um, next question is what size is the business? So I've put solo entrepreneurs. Now that can refer to, as it has, as it says here, the revenue. It could also mean the size of the team, or it could mean the the stage that the business is at as well. Okay, what is their attitude to business? So I've put here that they are aiming for that work-life balance. They're seeking the high productivity for the lowest amount of time, so they're interested in automation and systemization, and they want a steady income stream, but they might have several different business ventures. So that's the kind of person that I'm thinking that I might like to work with. What is their financial situation? Okay, so they need to be able to afford the services, but I generally like to work with people who have more urgency. So maybe they have cash flow issues, um, so understanding tax in different countries. So that, that might be something that, you know, if you do like working with startups, it's because they have cash flow issues and urgencies, and there's more value in you coming along and helping those people because there's more pain. There's a greater pain if they have those issues. So you coming along and helping can be really, really valuable. Um, how long have they been in business? Okay, I've I put 1 to 3 years. What is their personality? I like to work with people who are driven, risk-takers, life is for living, adventurous, these kind of people, big picture thinkers. They're more concerned with experience and connection than money, um, but they're creative, they're independent. These are things that I like in other people, so I might like to attract those kind of personality traits. What accounting system do they use? Okay, I said we use QBO, so it needs to either be that, or we have a system that we can get them set, uh, set up on QBO if they're using something basic like a spreadsheet. Okay, so it may be that I avoid people who are set up on other services like, uh, like Xero, but if they've got a spreadsheet, then I will take them on and set them up on QBO as an extra service. Okay, do they use online communication? Yes, that's probably essential with this particular niche I'm going for. And are they willing to refer business Yes. So what it then does is it takes all of that information and it puts it into this nice neat little table for me, which you can copy and, and save somewhere so that when you are then having a meeting with potential new clients and leads, you can refer to this and almost have a bit of a ranking system where maybe you score them on a 1 to 5 as to how well they fit that each individual criteria. So 'You know, business sector, are they in within this? They're an e-commerce business, yes, so they get 5 points. They've been in business, they've been in business 7 years, so actually they're a little bit older, so maybe I'll give them 3 points.' You know, and you can go through and you can sort of give yourself a bit of a checklist and a bit of a grading system for whether that is the right client for you or not based on the criteria that you have decided is important for your business. Okay, so that's the first step, that's the criteria. But what we also want to look at were all of those things— their wants, their worries, their frustrations, their desires, their ambitions, the challenges that they have. So we also want to look at all of those things. So what this particular GPT does is it's going to take all of those criteria and what you have already said and suggest what their first 5 frustrations might be. So you can add to it, but it's going to give you that good starting point. And this is going to be really helpful when it comes to writing the wording for your marketing, for your website, for your brochures as well, and all of that sort of stuff. Also could come in handy with the services that you create as well. So the first 5 frustrations of this particular nomadic entrepreneur might be that they have inconsistent income and unpredictable cash flow. They might be feeling overwhelmed by managing finances across multiple different countries. It might be that they're wasting time on manual tasks that could be automated. They're struggling to keep up with tax obligations and what's required legally. And there also might be a lack of clarity on where their money is going or how profitable their business really is. So these might be 5 things that they really struggle with, and therefore on our marketing we can say things like, you know, on our website can be, do you struggle with these things? If so, we have the solution for you. And when they see that, they're going to resonate with it because I've, you know, I've been traveling around the world in my, in my caravan, in my camper van, and I've been trying to run my own business, but I'm so boggled by the different tax things, and I land on this website right? And it exactly says, are you struggling with the taxes of different countries, of moving around different countries? And you go, yes, that's exactly me. So you're speaking more directly to their pain points, and it's going to resonate more with them. Okay, so I've said I want you to use yours, but I can also add information in here as well if I want. I also run a business club to connect traveling solo entrepreneurs. So can you add something about the pain points of being a lonely nomad and having no one to discuss business with. So if you've got an idea, you can add it into this GPT, but if not, you can just say, let's go with your 5 that you've come up with and we'll stick with that. Okay, so it's then updated that for me to add this one: feeling isolated, no trusted community or peers. So next is what are their immediate wants? Okay, they want a clear financial system that gives them peace of mind. They want help understanding and meeting tax obligations while traveling. They want simple automated tools and systems to time. They want a reliable, steady income, not necessarily huge but consistent. And they want a sense of community with like-minded, uh, traveling solo entrepreneurs. Okay, so I'm just gonna say yes, I want you to use— I want to use those ones that you've come up with. If you have your own ideas because you have experience in this industry or you've done separate research, you know, you've put yourself in communities with those kind of people and you see what they're talking about and what they're saying, then you can add that into this as well. But this is a good starting point if you don't have the ideal client profile. You can start with this and then add to it as you grow your own experience and knowledge on these things. What thoughts keep you up at night with worry? Am I doing this right, or am I missing something important with my finances? What if I get hit with a huge unexpected tax bill from a country I didn't account for? Can I keep up with this lifestyle if my income drops or dries up? 'Am I working all the time but still feel like I'm not making progress? What's wrong?' 'I feel like I'm figuring everything out alone. Who can I actually talk to about this?' So these ones are really, really powerful because this is drilling into the pain points that they have. And specifically as well, a lot of those are the emotional pain points that they're having. You know, 'I'm worried,' 'I'm stressed,' um, 'What are the—' you know, 'I'm thinking about the consequences,' 'I've got anxiety,' And those are the, the real drivers to take action. If I have real anxiety about the consequences of not paying my tax bill, if I've got real, you know, worry and frustration, that's what's going to really push me to make the decision to get a bookkeeper to help me with this thing, with this stuff. So the emotion is really what drives making purchases and decisions. So what are their aspirations as well? So, you know, I want to build a financially sustainable business, create systems, feel confident, connect, and diversify my income, and so on and so forth. So it's then going to take everything that I've given it and all of that information and summarize it into this little— excuse me— into this nice concise little paragraph that's maybe a couple hundred words. So what I do is I take that, those 300 words or so there, that's explaining exactly who my ideal client is. I'm a driven adventurer, solo entrepreneur, entrepreneur, building a business I can run from anywhere in the world. I might be a content creator, coach, consultant, or run an online store, but what I value most is freedom and connection and creating a life filled with meaningful experiences. Okay, also stuff in here about using QuickBooks. Um, I really need someone to help me get control of my finances. So that's all in there. I'm going to copy and paste that and save it onto a document, and then whenever I create any marketing copy, any wording for my website, for my brochures, for, for adverts, you know, if I'm running Facebook ads or Google ads or anything like that, or I'm doing social media, I'm writing blogs, I want it all to consider this before it creates anything else. So that is my ideal client profile. So, and you can now— I can now use that. So use that to create wording for my website, for example. So this is— I've asked it to create my position statement. So my position statement must us should say, you know how most digital nomads struggle with managing their finances across multiple countries, juggling inconsistent income and trying to stay on top of tax obligations, all while running a business alone on the road, which means that they're often stressed, wasting time on manual tasks, missing opportunities for automation and feeling isolated. Well, what we do is we help adventurous solo entrepreneurs get financially organized and systemized through cloud-based accounting automation and international tax support, which means that they gain confidence, clarity, and control over their finances. So you can see that something like that is going to convert a lot better than we do bookkeeping for all businesses big and small. That is much more specific and much more nuanced. So I'll very, very quickly as well just show you the other one that we have, which is the Choosing Your Niche custom GPT as well. So these are all in the academy. With this One, this is going to help you identify a specific niche. So it also at the end does help you create an ideal client profile from that niche, but it's going to ask you again a series of questions here. So it's going to ask you about what your business goals are, your ideal working style, your interest, and your strengths. So I've answered a bunch of those here with just a, you know, I've just gone through and answered. But we have, you know, what are you aiming for in the next 1 to 3 years? Do you want to grow a team or stay solo? What kind of revenue target do you have? Do you prefer high-touch, you know, connected advisory work or straightforward compliance? Or do you like working with a few large clients? Do you enjoy fast-paced environments or more predictable? What types of clients or industries have you enjoyed working with? Where do you feel you most add the value? Are there any industries or client types you definitely want to avoid? So it's going to go through and ask me all these questions, and I just need to give it a very brief brief idea of, of what my answers might be for all of those. So for this one, I've sort of gone through and said, you know, I've got a loose idea that I, you know, I quite find AI and automation interesting and systemization. So I want to maximize on automation for compliance, but I also want to move towards delivering advisory as well, but also help with tech setup and systemization and optimization and that sort of stuff. I want to keep a small team. I'm aiming for fewer clients that are niched. Um, we want to enjoy businesses— we enjoy businesses that are modern and growth-minded. Um, I want to avoid heavily location-based businesses. I'd rather work with online spaces. Okay, so I can just give it some, some general information. It's going to summarize that for me, and it's going to keep asking me more questions to try and narrow that niche down even further. So, you know, do I want capability-led? Do I want to work with Online businesses. What's your current client, client base like? Let's evaluate your current client base. Okay, and we're gonna go through that. Let's find what your best fit is. So you've maybe already identified, well, actually I quite like working with e-commerce clients. So it's pulled that out from what I've said and said this might be a good one for you. And then it starts to go into, you know, creating some of the wording for that as well, saying, okay, your, your position might be, um, e-commerce is your starting point. We can go into more niche within that. So we know you like to work with e-commerce, but let's go even further and say we want to work with Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, eBay, that sort of stuff. So you can use this one as well, um, if you want to try and get more of an idea of what your niche is. So, um, that's all the time I have today. I'm going to pass it back to Mark and he's going to do some questions. I am going to stay and help with any questions that have come through around the marketing stuff. And I'm also going to be here tomorrow where I'm going to continue on sort of from this session and talk about, um, creating a marketing system that brings these kind of leads into your business as well. Uh, okay, so if, if Mark's there, I'll hand it back over and then I'll stick around for some questions as well.

Awesome, thank you, Emily. Uh, that was great and I don't think it's up to you. You don't need to stick around because I don't think there's that many questions and they tend to be pricing related, but I'll leave up to you. Okay. So I'll deal with some questions in a short while, but a few other things to say. So today we've covered a lot of stuff. We've covered, we start off with the pricing system. We looked at things like how to create packages, how to formula for giving fixed prices. We look to the idea of relative pricing. We built a complete system of how to have the pricing conversation with confidence. Kim went through that. And also we've, we've looked at marketing as well. So tomorrow is the last day, sadly. And just a few things about tomorrow. Number 1 is Emily is going to be kick-started tomorrow. So it'll be because she's doing, she's doing the first session. So Emily will be doing all the welcomes tomorrow. She's going to be, as she just said, she's going to build on what she's talked about and talk about building a marketing system for you and how to do that. Then we've got the amazing Jessica Fox back, and she's got a really powerful session on what do we do when we have ad hoc requests, something that we often give away too much stuff away for free. So she'll deal with that. I'll then be back to go through one of the key lessons I've got. I'm going to show you the 10 things that you need to do first in, in that session, and then we're going to break out into 2 groups. So if you, if you want to stay with the conference, then Terry's going to be doing a session on how to raise your fees with confidence with your existing clients, which is a huge challenge for many people and a great way to get some fast results. I'm going to run an optional session in a small group session, which is for people who are going to join us on this journey. So what you need to do is make sure that sometime today, take advantage of the free trial. And what will happen is at some point tomorrow, about an hour before that session, you'll get an email from Sarah telling you the link to join my session. So if you want to take advantage of the free trial and you want to come to my session, don't leave it to the last minute because you won't get that email with the special link. So I'll be moving across to a different room to go through, and what I'll be doing is looking at what are the 5 things that you should do first to get the biggest payback, to get results, to put money in your bank account, where are you going to get the fastest results? And I'll signpost you as well to the resources that you can access inside the Value Pricing Academy. The goal of my session is to really help you to turn everything into a quick return on investment, to get some wins fast. So that's how, that's how tomorrow is going to unfold. And, uh, And so some more great stuff there, right? What else? I think I've, I think that's about my last slide other than to say before we answer questions, before we answer questions, I will ask Gabby just perhaps one more time just to put the link into the chat. Because I know someone earlier missed, missed the link to join the free trial. If you still have any questions about it, by the way, put in the Q&A. And if you're not sure about a few things about the, like, for example, what you get, the software and so on, then please do ask away. And if we don't deal with them in the next few minutes, we'll deal with them tomorrow. And so my final question for you before we do Q&A, my final question is, I'll do some questions, then we'll play some music. But what I will ask you, and you can think about now, is what's been your key insight today so far? All the things you've learned from either me or from Kim or from Emily, what's been your key takeaway? Put that in the chat. As, as, as yesterday, we will then summarize everything. It's great feedback for us to know what's been valuable, what's worked for you. Okay, I'm going to now answer the questions that have come in. So going to the start, I've got Ed. I think Ed left, but Ed said, what was your hourly rate back then? Okay, so I can't remember exactly, but way, way back when I started my accounting firm, which was in 1996, bear in mind it was GBP, UK pounds, I think I went for 75. And it was just a number I plucked out of my ass. It was as simple as that. There was no science behind it. It just felt like a number I should use. So it goes back to what I said. We just make these numbers up sometimes and think that they are— there's something meaningful in timesheets. Okay, next question. Ruth, in the pricing software, the top package includes things that their accountant does— depreciation, filing tax, etc. So I'm steering potential clients to my middle package and not letting them choose. Not good. Should I take out the default features that are listed in the top package in the software? So Ruth, I'm guessing you're using the software. You're obviously using the software already. I'm going to assume you're a bookkeeper. And so yes, if there's things in the packages, the top package that you don't use, then don't offer yourself, then take those, take those out and put something else in. The software is fully customizable, as Kim said, and so you can build in your packages in any way that you want. I think there's a related question to that, but I'll get to it whenever. There's a— I'll work through them in order. Kate said, when moving clients towards value pricing, do you advise moving through each step fixed, then menu, then etc.? Or is it possible to move to menu pricing first? Okay, you can go through, you can go through faster if you want. I'm just kind of talking about a logical step that we should be giving at least fixed prices up front because customers want certainty. But you dive into wherever you are, and certainly menu pricing is so powerful for so many reasons. It's to do with price psychology, to do with behavioral economics, and so on, that you you can dive straight into giving people different choices. Now the next question is a really long one from Dustin. I did say yesterday, please keep your questions short, so I'm not going to read Dustin's question out in full because it'll probably take me 5 minutes to read it. I think everyone can see his question. I'm just going to summarize it. The question was— actually, I'm being distracted. I saw a comment from Dion earlier. Dion from Wales said, A little success here, not bookkeeping related, but I've got one of my advisory services set up on effective pricing and sold the service to one of my existing clients. Congratulations, well done. I know some people have mentioned advisory. Uh, we will go deep on that in our June event. Right. Dustin's question, in short, the shortened version is many local small businesses don't value or can't afford quality bookkeeping. While larger firms undercut our prices. Should we lower our rates to compete and gain clients or focus on higher pricing and risk losing them? I know there's more to his question because he, because it's quite a long one, but just to deal with some of the key issues there is if you're finding many local small business, small businesses don't value your service, then that's either because you're not communicating the value properly, It could even be there's not enough value, but that's unlikely. We deliver loads of value. It's probably because we're not communicating value. But equally, which Emily's touched on, we're probably targeting the wrong types of clients. So there are some sorts of clients who notoriously don't pay well or can't afford. Farming is one that I avoided like the plague when I ran my practice because the 8-partner firm I worked with, I knew that they had farmers and they were always is a problem. So just specialize, just focus on a different type of client. So there are businesses that can afford and want quality bookkeeping, you just have to find them, and that's to do with the marketing piece. Now he went on to say that many larger firms are undercutting on prices, which is interesting, but larger firms don't necessarily know how to price. And one of the things you mustn't do is be influenced by other— by your competitors. As I said yesterday, there will always be cheaper cheaper people, and your goal isn't to be cheaper. Your goal is to be better. Don't compete on price. Now, if in the case of you're competing against larger firms, what you want to do is focus on, focus on what makes you different and what makes you better. Because many people, particularly solo bookkeepers and solo accountants, solo firms, often think because they're small, because they've got less costs, they should be cheaper than the big firms. But with value pricing. So what's the benefit advantage you have over the large firms? Well, one of the big things that you have if you're a smaller firm is you, the owner of your practice, spend time talking to your clients. Whereas if you go to KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, you're gonna be dealing with an employee as a client. You won't get to talk to the boss, but you as a smaller firm, people get to deal with you. That's a huge thing. People want to deal with the, the partner. And so make a big thing of that. It's all about how you communicate the value and how you differentiate yourself from everybody else. And so going back to, back to the question, should we lower our rates? No. Instead, it's all about focusing on the ideal client, the right client, and And it's about communicating value. Okay. Next question. I think it was from Keisha. Um, uh, where can we find the slides from today? All of the slides will be wrapped, packaged up from all the speakers to go with the recordings to be made available to people who are in the Value Pricing Academy. So if you do take advantage of the free trial, you'll get access to the slides. Uh, it'll take a few days to pull them together because I'm still working on my slides for tomorrow. Um, okay. Um, I'm not sure what happened today. I pressed the wrong button, but never mind. Uh, um, and Kisha also asked, is there a way to get a copy of the chat log? I don't think there is, but what we'll do is summarize the key points for tomorrow. Uh, okay. Laura, is the effective pricing tool that Kim is showing, um, what is in— that is in Mark's Value Pricing Academy, or her own system. It is, it's, it's the software she was showing, just to confirm, is created by me. And it is a— you can buy it separately, but you get it for free as a bonus of being part of the Value Pricing Academy. And so you get so much more value being in the Academy. Okay, this is an anonymous attendee, so I don't know who you are. For the full plan, it says 50 clients, that's the full plan of the software, Effective Pricing. What's the timeframe for that per year, per month? When does the limit refresh essentially? Apologize if it's answered, my team has been interrupted as I watch. The full plan is the total number of clients that you do quotes for. So if you've— if you're a very large firm and you need to have a lot more clients that you use the software for, then you can you can upgrade either to the top tier of Value Pricing Academy, or you can stay in our growth, growth level, but upgrade the software separately. Uh, Chet King, does the software handle contracts and payments, or do we need to use separate system for that? It doesn't deal with contracts and payments, and likewise with Grace, it doesn't do DocuSign. So if you then want to do engagement letters and get people to sign and so on, that's where tools like Ignition then come in. And what I do know is there are quite a few firms that use effective pricing to come up with the price because it's the best tool for coming up with the price. It's got some psychology in. They agree the price, and then what they do is they go into Ignition and then do the engagement letters and sort out the payments. In fact, I know some firms, what they do is they use effective pricing to have the pricing conversation and then produce the nice, beautiful-looking proposal and then they upload that as a PDF into Ignition. Grace, I answered that one as well. DJ, so is the idea to customize the value packages with the pricing software instead of having, for example, 3 packages to choose from that are pre-made? Great question, and I think Kim sort of talked about it. So what you want to do is create your packages. And start with 3, 3 packages. And what the software allows you to do is not only offer 3 packages, but you also can offer further choices. We call them preference questions. I can't remember what Kim exactly said, but when you work out, you create your questions, there are different types of questions. The main 2 are: what are your scope questions to make sure you make a profit on the job, and But also, what are your preference choices, questions? So these can be things like, do you want weekly bookkeeping or monthly bookkeeping? Do you want to deal with me, the senior partner, or do you want to deal with John, my assistant? We can give people choices because that's a further way to identify what they value. And so our packages are fixed. We create that, we create our fixed packages because we've created them based on what we know about what our clients like and need and want, that's the segmentation, but then we can give them further customization outside of the fixed packages through additional choices. So the idea, I think it was DJ, is your fixed packages are fixed and you can have— and when you build your fixed packages inside your, your website or your other pricing systems, you will just replicate those inside the software. They are fixed. But then there are other things that you can make variable around them. So they have a choice over 3 options, but within those options there are other things that they can choose. I hope that makes sense. Right, how are we doing for questions? 7 more. KB, when is the next time you'll do this presentation? I have a few people I would like to refer to this. And if you mean this exact presentation, we run the Profitable Bookkeeping Conference in the first couple of months of each year, so the next time we'll run this will be February, March of 2027. That's the next time we run this conference. We do our next conference is the Business Advisory Masterclass in June, where we talk about how to build a business advisory service offering. That's in June. And we sometimes run something at the back end of the year. We just haven't decided yet. But if it's this one, it will have to wait. It'll be a year before we run this again. Now, you said you have people you'd like to refer to this. On that note, when you join our Value Pricing Academy, we do have a referral system. You can, if you want, be a referrer, and if you recommend other people to join, then we pay you a referral fee, which means that if you recommend a few people, it can start to pay for itself. Salma said, how do you approach pricing when a client's accounting is very messy and requires a lot of work, but their revenue is still low? What is the best strategy here? Okay, well, if the bookkeeping is really messy, then you have to educate them as to the issues, talk about the pain of that. You will probably find that you've got a cleanup job, and we do talk about how to price cleanup work in the Academy with full systems and so on. That comes at the end of our How to Price Bookkeeping course. So it may be that you had a cleanup issue to sort out out. But it may be you're talking about there, and it's a client that it's not a cleanup because they're always messy, in which case you build that into your pricing. You build it into the scope, for example. You charge a higher price. And because— and if therefore it means that it's such a mess you have to have a high price, but you've just said what if they're also very low revenue, a small client I presume, then it may well be that they're just people that are not right for you. They're not the right fit. Fit. And it's okay to say no, not every client is the right client. And you've probably got people right now who are not the right clients. And though— and so sometimes you're better off without them. The goal is not to accumulate as many possible clients as possible. It's about the right clients. I know Emily talked about it. I think Teresa will talk about tomorrow, and I'll talk a bit more about it in my session tomorrow as well. Hope that helps. Shari James, where can we find those two ChatGPT prompts? I don't see them in the AI prompt library. No, because they're custom GPTs that Emily has created. Emily, I don't know if you want to answer that verbally, you can turn your webcam on, but, or you can type an answer. I don't mind if your webcam comes on, I'll stop. Otherwise I'll just carry on. Sandy, how can I access the recording of all three days? Do you send it automatically? To everyone who has registered to attend. I believe that there is a link going in an email that goes out to everybody for the recordings. Gabby might confirm that in the chat. I think it is in the email, so watch out for the email, and the recordings will be available until the end of the week, and then we close them down unless you join the Academy, in which case you always have access to the recordings. Okay, next Keisha again, I signed up yesterday for the free trial. Will I get the link and other products from today mentioned? Yes, you will get the bonuses. So please don't panic. I think it's Friday, we'll send an email out with all those bonuses that we've mentioned. You will not miss out. Brenda, can we get the prompts from Emily's presentation on HelpToHear? Again, same, same as Shari's question. I don't know whether Emily's— she's answered it. The GPTs will be in the VPA roadmap prompt library. So you'll get them if you're a VPA member and Emily's doing the kickoff session on Monday. So if you haven't found them by Monday, well, you've got two options. You can always email— if you're a member, you can always email support@valuepricingacademy.com. And Sarah answers emails every day apart from the weekends, and she will help you out as best she can. So you can email her, or you can wait till Monday to the live session, and Emily will show you where to find everything that you need. Brenda— oh, that's the same question. I dealt with that. The prompts— two more. How much is the Value Pricing Academy membership? Yeah, well, I can't answer that because it depends on what current currency you want to pay in, and so it's different for currencies. So you need to go to the page that Gabby is going to give you in the chat. So the, the— when you click on, uh, when you click on the link that Gabby is going to give you that's in the chat, you can find out all about what you get. And then when you hit Join the Academy Today right in the top right, it'll take you to a page that lists all the different prices in different currencies. And then when you click through from there, you will see if you take action in the next 24 hours, you'll see it says 7-day free trial as well. Okay, that's, uh, Yen's question. And then I think this could well be the last one. Ricky Beck, I can't find a link to the software. I assume you mean a link to the Effective Pricing software. I don't know if you're, if you're a member, if you've joined and you want the software, we can send you the link to where to go to get access to it. If you just want the page for it, I think, okay, Bill's put a link into the chat, the chat. So hopefully that's the link that you're looking for, Ricky. And if not, if not, ask again tomorrow. And also remember, you can just email Sarah on support@. I think that's all the questions. So thank you so much for coming along. Some great questions there. We do have one more day left and some powerful stuff to tomorrow. And again, great speakers. In fact, we have 4 speakers tomorrow as well as me. There's Emily, Emily's back, Jess is back, and Terry's back. So you're going to learn some more extraordinary stuff tomorrow. I look forward to seeing you then. In the meantime, as I play out, please let me know if you haven't already. Please do let me know what's been your best insight for today so I can then see what, what was most enjoyable, most valuable for you. Thank you for the feedback coming through, I can see already, and I'll see you tomorrow. But remember, Emily's kicking off tomorrow. I will join you, I will join you after Jess's session. Okay, bye for now.

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