Strategic Growth for Bookkeepers: A Conversation with Jeannie Savage

Okay, so I think I'm about ready to bring in our special guest for today's session. Her name is Jeannie Savage. She's an amazing bookkeeper. She's the founder of Cloud 9 Strategic, where she delivers strategic bookkeeping and helping business owners build the life they want. We're going to find out how she does that. And she built up a lifestyle business within five years. It's an incredible story. I believe she was Bookkeeper of the Year by Women in Finance. She's an author, certified trainer, and host of the Strategic Bookkeeper podcast. And she's also the creator of the seven step method. Hold your profits in a short space of time. What was the key to that? How did you do that?

Yeah, it was interesting. So at the time, until I got through. So I went home rough and ready, packaged it all up. So I said, here's what's happening in the practice. I'm going to give you all one fixed price bill. That's how I presented it to them, really, value billing. And then I began to understand more put putting value into your products. So just by fixed pricing. Now, naturally, as a bookkeeper, you're going to get more efficient, right? Technology, your own skills, your standard operating procedures. We should be always, every single day getting more efficient. So I got more efficient. And over the space of that year, some new clients came in. But honestly, without a lot of focus on revenue, naturally my net profits just, we got more efficient. My net profits doubled. I was shocked. I was embarrassed. At the end of that year, my client satisfaction 10x the clients were thrilled. And that has continued. So getting rid of that bill shock and stacking the value of those products, which I continue to learn about today, I think we're always getting better at that. My clients teach me that. We're always learning from each other.

So one of the things I talk a lot about on my sessions, I know people listening know I talk about this, is that there's two types of people. There's the note takers that come along to events and take notes, but it's only the action takers that go away and actually do something. It sounds like you are an action taker along with some of the people listening here, like Jessica Fox, who's amazing as well.

We had that because I'm table coach and you were the main speaker back in 2015. I'm a very direct communicator. And you communicated very directly that you should be value pricing, fixed pricing, and. Yeah, that's what I needed to hear. Yeah.

Which city was that in Remind me.

Briefing.

Okay. It was just before I flew back home. Yes, I remember that. That was my one trip to Australia in 2015 to do a road show for Intuit and I spent all my time there just jet lagged. I was in a terrible state. I don't know if it came across on stage or not, but I remember the Intuit team said to me beforehand, have you got any needs? I said, yes, before I go on stage, I want you to give me a great big can of Red Bull. And I think that's what got me through the session.

Yeah, I didn't notice it at all.

Anyway, enough about me. You have this bookkeeping practice blueprint, which sounds absolutely amazing. So what is this? What is the bookkeeping practice blueprint and how do firms, how do people follow it?

Because that's what it's all about. Especially as a trainer and assessor. I want everyone to walk away today knowing what to do next. So the bookkeeping practice blueprint is something I developed. So I was working with my clients a couple of years ago and I thought it's going to be really great if I make visual what they need to learn, build, implement. Very important three things, right? Learn, build, implementation to build a thriving practice rather than a busy practice. Because for everyone watching, I want you to think about which bookkeeper you are. You're either a startup, no clients you've just started, or you're planning to start. The second one is you're growing. So I've got some clients, but my books aren't full, I'm growing. The third one, which I would like us all to avoid, but 90% of us end up there, is booked but broken. If you are watching, if you are listening, and you can relate to feeling booked up but broken, overworked, underpaid, that's that third, third stage. And then the final stage is scaling. Now the booking practice blueprint is like a one page mind map that helps you to build a thriving, not busy practice. And how you can use it is. So I have a second book, the Book of Impact blueprint. So if you grab both my books as ideal, they're all also audiobooks on Spotify, but a resources page, you can grab all of this. Then I recommend that you print it out on the left hand side. You're going to see all the things that you should diagnose. Look at your practice, do I have these dialed in? Because you shouldn't even answer the door to a prospect until they're dialed in. So as you can imagine, products and pricing is there and then the whole mind map represents what you need to have in place. So learn, build, implement to build a pipeline of pre service standard operating procedures. So it's a visual mind map.

Now I know that from researching your stuff. You talk a lot about bookkeepers and strategic bookkeepers. Talk to me about the differences. What do you mean by a bookkeeper versus strategic bookkeeper? And how would somebody who feels they are very much in the bookkeeper camp, how would they make that shift to be a strategic bookkeeper?

Yeah. So, okay, and I go into this in my first book and I do encourage everyone to grab that quite simply from my point of view. A bookkeeper prepares numbers, right? So it prepares beautiful up to date accurate numbers. A strategic bookkeeper investigates those numbers. So that for me is the simplest definition of the difference. And I really think the future of bookkeeping is strategic bookkeeping. Because when we go from preparing those beautiful up to date accurate numbers, which is bookkeeping and I think that is pillar one for success. Right. You can't see how your business is performing without that. But to go that step further and actually investigate those numbers strategically, that's where we get the results and the impact and that is what's valuable.

Absolutely. So when we think about strategic bookkeepers, when we think about advisory, going to the next level, adding more value, what advice would you give to people who are moving towards, want to move towards that more advisory, more strategic approach?

Okay, so I would say that in my first book I have a chapter called succession that means what's next on the menu. So, so when we as bookkeepers, so we're engaging with our clients, I have a little flowchart here and I call it the three stages of conversion. So I want you to think about when you first meet someone. Oftentimes what they need is a file health check. Then they generally need some kind of catch up notification. And after they are up to date and accurate, then we're ready to bring them into being a membership client. Right. So we're going to give them a monthly service, keep them up to date. They and it is at that stage that we should be selling through that level one advisory. And I'll give you an example. So one of my clients, Linda and she reach recently featured on our podcast. So she was a startup about bit over a year ago. Now over the space of about a year she's built $200,000 worth of revenue. But almost every single client and startup she was nervous, she was brain, she was all those things and had to work really hard to build from Scratch. But almost every single one of her clients bought advisory from the get go once she had got past that initial kind of project work. So Mark, you taught me to offer up three options when we're converting. And so when we get to that, what I call three stage conversion and I go into all of this in the book is we like to say, okay, well the kind of bare ass minimum that you need is that bookkeeping, compliance. And then maybe the better package is to take up a quarterly investigate the numbers. And the best package might be that monthly investigate the number. And then just to use that story as an example, what we find with advisory is that is a very easy sell. Right. So those new clients, that makes sense. And then once we do that and we start investigating those numbers, the rest of the advisory work comes because you're investigating the numbers.

Right.

So that leads to what do you need in your business? Maybe you need to recruit staff. Well, if that's in your wheelhouse, you can sell a recruitment package as an advisory line, which we do as well. So for anyone wondering how to get started with advisory, I would say I give you so much in my first book and it's targeted for bookkeepers. And then I would say use that. Exactly what I've had said here. But the three packages methodology, where you can offer them that advisory from the get go.

Great advice. And one of the questions I get from people when I talk about advisory is people say, well, what do we mean by advisory? So what's your definition? If you could to give a definition, how would you define it? Because I know bookkeepers sometimes particularly struggle with the concept of what it is.

Yeah, I remember sitting in a room and everyone's talking about advisory and it was like the emperor's new clothes. So how I define advisory is so bookkeeping, let's define that. That is preparing up to date accurate numbers. Done. Double entry accounting, Preparing up to date accurate numbers. I would say in the bookkeeping bucket, maybe we can pop some software training those core services that are everyday natural now everything else is in the advisory bucket. It's natural to go beyond those in to investigate the numbers. Really simple. And another natural one that I give you an agenda for in my book is like a workshop to dive into those numbers, to make sense of those numbers. But then whatever's in your wheelhouse, for example, let's say in your previous life you were a graphic designer and you would like to be able to help your clients with graphic design. For me, I love recruiting admin in house bookkeepers. So we do that. I love creating brochures with my clients. So strategically I do monthly end to end business coaching with my clients. So whatever you feel comfortable with, which is going to change over time. Right. So anything that is not preparing those numbers is in the advisory bucket. And the other thing to remember is this is about solving problems for your clients. So once we get those numbers up to date and accurate and then we start investigating them, you're going to naturally find out about the problems that your clients have and then either you're going to offer to solve them with a product which is advisory, or refer them to someone else to do that. So that's how I would describe what it is.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I like that. My phrase I took away from that was it is solving clients problems. I would probably then just add a word to that, solving clients deeper problems. So going beyond obviously the bookkeeping, it has to be done. It's compliance work. Everyone has to have their bookkeeping done. But it's then figuring out what are their other problems and how can we, based on our own particular skill sets, our knowledge, our experience, how can we solve those? And so I see advisory as being one of those things. It's such a vague word because it could be absolutely everything, as you would probably imagine. Jeanne, when I was in practice helping small businesses with advisory, I called it consulting back then, but it was advisory effectively for me. I always found it was helping business owners with pricing was the thing that I love doing because business owners have no. Small businesses have no idea how to price. And all the things that I learned, like you've mentioned earlier, giving three different options. I was amazed how many business owners had never thought to do that. And the impact that had on their business was huge. I also love marketing, so I always naturally help businesses how to grow their business, which is something else that small business don't know. But essentially, as you said, I think it can be anything that whatever is in your wheelhouse, your experience, I love that.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I'm seeing it's really common with my bookkeepers. I noticed systems audits are common. Bookkeepers love standard operating procedures. So systems audit I'm seeing these days virtual business manager where they're really helping to helping the business owner with the business management from a distance. One of our clients sold recruitment to a recruitment agent. So not having any limiting beliefs, making sure that you offer to solve that problem with that product, even if it's a recruitment agency and you think they need recruitment.

Yeah, and you make a really good point.

There.

Jeanne Systems. I remember back in 1998 I came across Michael Gerber and read the E Myth Revisited. I was a sole practitioner back then. Every system was in my head. And when I read the E Myth Revisited, I thought, wow, he's talking about my business. I soon realized that actually as an accountant we are very systematic in our thinking. We love systems, we love our standard checklists, whether it's audit checklists, tax term preparation checklists, bank reconciliations is a system we go through. We are very systematic in the profession. And so systems comes naturally to us. And yet for most business owners, they're just running on chaos. And so I think you're right. I think that one of the areas that we can add huge amounts of value when it comes to advisory is helping people systemize what they do. And I did a course recently for members of the AI academy where I taught how you can use a whole series of pre written AI prompts that basically systemizes any business. And there's a huge opportunity there to add value and hopefully charge premium advisory fees for doing that. Which I guess leads me onto another question because you also talk about, when we talk about advisory, you also talk a lot about the idea of productized services. What do you mean by that? Let's talk about that a bit.

This is game changing and I think your productized services, your product ecosystem has to be at the heart of the win the work side of your business. So baptizing services in a nutshell I think is where we are taking a range of features and benefits, giving it a name and then turns into a product. But the key here is the benefits. So stacking the value of that product with benefits. So I'm looking at the bookkeeping practice blueprint, which as I said you can get a copy of and you can easily find us in our products and pricing. We've got smart simple suite of products, robust pricing strategy and incorporating advisory. So for us it's those three things combined. And I'll give an example. So just working with one of my clients and we love like you using AI for products, particularly advisory right now. So we have a beautiful catch up rectification service. And she said okay Jeanne, I want to give them one of our other products included to stack the value and thank her for her patients during she waited because this bookkeeper had a personal emergency. So she linked it and said as a thank you for your patience, I'm going to provide you with. Now this client had said I feel like I've lost control and clarity. So it was A control and clarity package, right, valued at $1,000. Where we were going to do some great kind of things in there might be an hour's worth of work. But advisory is much higher value. What the market will bear is much higher. So the thing I love about productizing a service is you can constantly be looking at how to stack the value and so the client could not press go fast enough. And in your products, please make sure that you are including those high value benefits. For example, we give everyone who's joining us as a monthly bookkeeping client an annual planning session valued at 1500 dollars lead magnet into more advisory work. But it's fantastic for them as well. So we're stacking the value and we give away a business fundamentals training that we've recorded. So stack the value of those products and give your clients what they really want, which is the benefit, the destination, not the long haul flight. So your bookkeeping is the long haul flight. The benefit of your bookkeeping being able to optimize your business performance in terms of profit and cash and time wealth and actually scale your business. That is the benefit of the bookkeeping. Sell the benefit by stacking your product.

One of the questions goes to my mind was just for clarity is when you were talking about productizing the service in that way, do you have standard advisory products or is it a case of each client you create a product for them that meets their specific needs and solves their specific problems.

Stock standards. So I'm literally looking at it right now. So I've got a folder of products here. So on my blueprint where you see smart simple suite of products. One of the things when I back in 2015 changed to productization, I went from asking my clients what do you need? Creating a product, attaching a fee, which is a recipe for. I feel like a time sucking nightmare to realizing that when it came to the bookkeeping, everyone needed the same thing. So there's always going to be those like I like to product stack. So okay, you need the double entry accounting bookkeeping really that looks like this then. Okay, well you also need for example, I mean they're going to do your payroll or support you to do it. So I have stock standard products that I stuck in. But now with AI we can create extra really cool things on the go. But a lot of my products just work stock standard and I stack them and then create a few little out of scope products to add in. And my goodness, it has been transformational.

Okay, well that makes sense. How many little mini products they can Stack up. I love that you mentioned AI. How do you use AI to help with that?

Yeah, it's probably one of my favorite ways to use AI. So I've actually created a custom GPT and it is my product designer. So I've got all my products in the background and I even say to my clients, just load them into ChatGPT or custom chat. And then I will say, okay, chat, we've got this client we want to create a great bonus product. For example, ChatGPT created the profit and scale game plan valued at just under $2,000. It contains a business health check which we've got stock standard in the background and now future analysis. We've got that stock standard, a bit of a file review and then a call to discuss that. The 90 minute planning session that we give away to our clients and then an AI powered action plan where we just feed it in and AI does that. Now we can sell that for 1997, which one of my clients did immediately. But we also created it to again, sweeten the deal, so to speak. So that if a client is humming and haing over a package or we can say, well, I know you said that you wanted to improve your profit and scale. I'd love to provide you with this profit and scale game plan, but I've only got three clients I can do that for and voila, you're more competitive, your value goes up and so on. So honestly, without ChatGPT, I was not creating these, but ChatGPT has given me that artificial human, like that person, the intern, that now that I've trained it properly and it's human intelligence, LED can push out these products just beautifully.

Yeah, well, I just love that. That's just amazing how you build a custom GPT that does that. That's yeah, really impressive. Okay, we probably got another five minutes or so left before I open up to any questions. One of the things you said, which I thought was just interesting is you talked about how you, you might sometimes do a workshop for your clients and then talk about, just talk about how when you do workshops for clients, are you talking about getting their whole team together and teaching them something? Is it just one to one with the client with a presentation, perhaps over zoom? I'm just intrigued to know how you might run your workshops with clients.

Yes. Okay, so at the more basic level, you might even have a sole trade or a small business. It might be. We have something called a numbers dive workshop that requires us doing a bit like a pre work. So diving into the numbers that we Come up with more questions and answers in that. Then the client comes into the room for a session for an hour and a half, and we dive into those numbers preliminary. We ask lots of questions, get more questions, and then we go away, recategorize the chart of accounts to make those numbers. So that is a core workshop that we feel like we have to do at the beginning of the advisory journey to investigate the numbers. So that's one example, but yes, another one. So the other day I started a really exciting project for an accountant or bookkeeper. And that is I had seven in a room. And it's a year project on job costs. So I'll facilitate the team getting started with that in a workshop. And I know that over the space of this year we've got the potential to add a million dollars to that bottom line through that job costing project. And for everyone in the room, I like to think of any major project, even though it might feel like it's just job costing, we can get this done in three months. Think of it all as a lap around the sun. Any big project should be a year, so you can go from zero to done over the space of a year. And then other workshops that might be anything. It could be a brand day where we're just really looking at getting everyone cohesive across the vision and the mission. If you love that, like you would love that, Mark. But for anyone thinking I can't do it, that's okay. You are perfect the way you are in whatever. My clients do things that I think, oh, I don't want to do that, but I love job costing. I love what I do. So that's an example of a couple of workshops and, and even our annual planning session that we do with a nice canva sideshow is a workshop where they can spend 90 minutes looking at where they are now, where they want to be in the future, what they need to do to get there, and then if they would like our help getting there as well.

Amazing. And these workshops, are these your each of them productized services or they part of a productized service?

Yes. So the, the numbers died workshop is. It's very productized, very structured, beautiful. And the annual planning session, again, very structured, very productized. So stock standard, ready to go. And then we can take something like that and say to chatgpt create another version that's a mini version and it's going to be a bonus offer as a sweetener. So we can take those and then create new products on the fly.

Wow, amazing. So one of the things that has been going through my mind is I think I'm right in saying you, you are still running your bookkeeping business and at the same time you are helping bookkeepers. How do you juggle all of that?

Yeah, I have to have a very scaled practice so I don't get to do much at Cloud 9 Strategic anymore. I've got an amazing right hand, Joe McMahon. Shout out to Joe. And so I only handle high level advisory strategy for my clients. Joe's doing, I don't even do the numbers anymore and then the business just completely runs without me. Small but mighty high profit. The turnover is not our focus, the profit is our focus. So that business has to run without me so I can help everyone at the Strategic Bookkeeper. And I focus on mindset and productivity first. Which is all in my second book before the Mechanics of what we need to Do.

Amazing. So when you're working with bookkeepers, what do you see? What are the challenges, the roadblocks they have?

Yeah, I discovered I went down a rabbit hole to look at this recently. The biggest challenge is the busy books. But Broken, I've noticed that with my startups, if I get my hands on them at the beginning, then we can avoid that. And for example, let's say Taryn, one of our startups, I would get a client and sell like low value stuff by the hour. And I was building this busy booked but broken business. And that is the biggest problem because Taryn, for example, her first sale to a client was $10,000 and raving fan clients. If we get you in at the start and you know what you're doing and you nail this left hand side of the blueprint, Honestly, what I've noticed is everything else is fine. Your only challenge is growing mindset, that kind of thing. But the busy book. But broken is in the weeds of their business, terrified to fix the products and pricing. I've seen clients just sit on it, not take action for a year. So because of that we've taken a champion and turned them into a coach. So we find if we can get that busy bookkeeper with the broken products to focus solely one client at a time, feel the fear and do it anyway and fix that one thing, then they've got the space and this is what we see. So Jen Vanderwaer, where she went from that to then selling through all the advisory, etc. But she focused solely on fixing products and pricing first. So if your book's but broken, your products and pricing is broken. You have to do the hard yards and get that fixed first.

Great advice. And I can relate to that because I think of. I look at some amazing people I work with. I know many people watching now know Neil Kriddle. Neil joined the Value Pricing academy on day one of his business in 2000, and he's got an extraordinary business because he was lucky to do things right from day one. And then I think of me in end of 1998. I was busy and broken. I was two and a half years in, did everything wrong, price wrong, took on the wrong clients, didn't understand ideal client profile. And it was 1999 I first met Ron Baker. I came across Value Pricing and that certainly opened my eyes. This light bulb went on my brain. Despite the huge successes I had in the first few months, I started doing advisory work, getting higher prices. It still took me about two years to turn the practice around because I had made such a big mess of it. I wish I had come across somebody like a Ron Baker when I started in 1996. It would have saved me two and a half, three years worth of, of real heartache. I guess there's the old phrase that when's the best time to start anything is to start now. If we're in that position, as soon as we start. It's a long journey, but it's a.

Worthwhile journey and it's a forever journey. Right. It's not like you start this and then, yay, I finished it. It's like being an athlete. You're going to need a coach and support for as long as you're in practice in business.

That's so true. Because the world's changing so fast, particularly now with AI and stuff, that there's just so much stuff to do all the time. Okay, this has been amazing. You've shared some great stuff. I guess my final question is, what would be people's best next step for applying this blueprint?

Yep. Okay. So it does take effort. So you absolutely should grab my first book, the Strategic Bookkeeper. As I said, just Google it. It's all over the place. Personally, I love the audiobook on Spotify or Audible. Grab the second book. They're short books. They're only about. The first one's about six hours audio, the second one four and a half. You want to digest those books. Even if you are going to come and work with me, you need to get across that and then also tune into the podcast so you can get that education. Because you're going to need to learn before you build what you need to build like a product suite. And Then implement in the market so you learn, do learn, do mastery. So just start with the books and the podcast and if you can register for the summit at the bookkeeping practice is a great thing to do there as well.

Awesome. That's great. Okay, I finished my questions. I think I'm looking at the moment. I can only see one question that's come in. So if anyone does have a question, but I know you've shared so much. It was Patrick, I think had a question and he wants to confirm is the bookkey. I know the answer, but I'll let you confirm. Is the Booking Summit an online event or is it a physical address?

Yes, good question. It is an online event so that we can make it available to globally. Yes, three day online event.

That's. That's awesome. Is it a Gold Coast?

Yes, the Gold Coast, Australia. It is glorious. It's just. I say God's country. It is just beautiful.

And because I know it's something like one o' clock in the morning for you perhaps getting on for two o' clock in the morning. A lot of people listening live right now. They are probably in the us, Canada or the uk. So good news, it's online. Yeah.

Yes. And we have lots of clients in Canada and America. Followers in the UK and some clients too. And New Zealand and Australia is where we primarily have clients. So working with bookkeepers all over the world.

Amazing. I do have one question come in, just come in from Connor. If you can't. It's fine just if it's outside of your. But let me say it says if one was trying to acquire an established bookkeeping business, what kind of confirmatory information should one seek in due diligence? It's not my skill set.

Yeah, look, I think bookkeeping business, from what I've seen of my bookkeepers doing that, number one, I think you need a spreadsheet with to understand the pricing matrix. Because if you're buying a lot of bookkeepers I see buy practices with broken pricing. So you're buying a busy book, but broken. So the first thing I would look at is pricing and the second thing is the risk management around phasing the new owner in so that there's less risk of the clients leaving. Because remembering that there's three reasons someone gives you money every week. Relationship, convenience and price. And if your business is flying on convenience or price, it's breakable and that's why clients leave. If your business is working on relationship, you could double your fees and your clients won't leave. And that's just food for thought when acquiring a practice.

Awesome advice and Conor, I hope that helps. Can't see any more questions. Jeannie, you've been absolutely amazing and I'm looking forward to presenting at the summit myself in a few weeks time. And this. Let me just check. Audrey, is this a question or not? I'm getting ready to take on several new clients. How do you recommend I incorporate them into my practice so I can stay current with all my clients I have for profit and not profit clients?

Yeah, it really depends. So if you're getting. If you've got a bookkeeping practice and you're bringing on new clients, they're getting ready in court. It just depends. So making sure number one, you've got capacity, you don't have capacity for new clients, if your diary is full, don't take them on, they go on wait list which only makes them more eager to work with you. So yeah, capacity management, please never take on more work than you can handle. It's a recipe for broken promises which has to be the beating heart of the back end of your business. So as long as you've got capacity and you're bringing them on with the right products and pricing ecosystem, then you'll be fine. But if you don't have capacity, put them on wait list and open up your cap capacity by either firing some clients or recruiting some team.

Great answer. Awesome. I can't see any others. Jeanne, that's been amazing. You've shared so much great stuff. Thank you so much, Jeanne.

Thanks.

Thank you. Bye for now. What I'd love is if you could perhaps put in a comment. What's the best thing that you learned from Jeanne today? Just give me feedback. I'd love to know. And also if you got some value from this, please click the thumbs up the like button. I'd really appreciate that and I will see you online soon. Bye for now.