The 5 Critical Things Every Accounting Firm Must Do in 2025 to Stay Ahead

Five critical things you must do in 2025. I thought long and hard about what these five were because every thought leader, influencer, every coach, trainer, mentor in the accounting space might come up with different five things. But.

Based on my 30 plus years now of being in the profession, it's actually 36, I think, wow, it's 36. I am that old. 36 years of being in the profession, nearly a decade of running my own sole practitioner firm, and over two decades now of helping accountants and bookkeepers around the world building a more successful practice. I've kind of learned a few things, I think along the way. I don't get everything right, but I've learned a few things that work. I've seen a lot of things that work. And I've seen a lot of amazing success stories in the value pricing academy. People who are here, who are in the live stream, people like Jessica is doing amazing things in her business. I know Michaela is getting her pricing right now, which is awesome. And so many more success stories. So, yes, I've learned a few things and I've been thinking, thinking about, okay, we're about to start a brand new year. This is the time of the year where December, I do my strategic thinking. I always think about the year ahead.

And what's important for the business. And this is what you should perhaps be doing first. So let's go through. And that really is my number one thing I want to talk about. So we're going to have five. So number one is for 2025, you need to make sure that before you dive into 2025 and we're only a few weeks away now as we're doing this, you need to have a clear strategy and plan. You need to know exactly what is your focus for next year. Because if you don't. And I think about the early years of my accounting firm. I started in 1996, I started a sole practitioner business. And I never really thought about what I was doing. I had a rough idea that I wanted to grow as fast as possible, but there wasn't really a strategy at all. It was just all about trying to win as much business as possible. And I learned that's a big mistake. I was reacting to a lot of things. A lot of it was a lot of my first two and a half years in business was reactive and making a lot of mistakes. And it wasn't until really 20 years ago I started studying successful people, what makes success. And when I studied successful people, I found that one of the things they all do is they have a very clear picture of what they're trying to achieve and not just in business, but first and foremost in their personal life. And so one of the things I do every single year at this, at the end of the year is I plan my goals for the next year, my personal goals first, what do I want to achieve? And so, for example, just to give you an example, one of the things that I always think about is.

What is important to me at a personal level. Because as Michael Gerber once said, business is a boring, boring waste of time. The only purpose of a business is to give us more life. And that's should be the first question. What is more life for us and for me? As I thought about these things, I realized that I didn't like the cold, damp weather in the uk. I wanted to live somewhere nicer. And that culminated with moving to Portugal in 2020. And then I realized that I'm also a workaholic. By the way, I've worked crazy hard at times, but I decided, look, there's more to life than just working all the time. So a few years back we went to a four day working week and when I've been thinking about my goals for 2025, next year we are moving to a, when I say we, myself and Sarah, my partner, we are moving to a three day working week. And so that's part of what's important for me. And you need to think about that as well. You need to think about what is more life to you. Where would you like to be a year from now? Not necessarily physically the place, but what's your life want to look like a year from now? Because until you answer that question, you can't start to think about what does the business need to do to give you that. So you need to have a strategy and a plan. And for me, one of the things that's a big part of the strategy is, okay, if I'm going to reduce my working days by 25%, my hours by 25% and Sarah will too, then something needs to change in the business and that might be creating more systems, that might be more development of the team. You need to think about what do you want different next year, what want to change? What are you not happy about this year? What's been not been great for you? Perhaps you are working crazy long hours and so what needs to change to give you the life that you want? You need to think about that and create your plan. You need to think about where do you want to get to, what's Your personal goals, your business goals, what are the problems you're facing right now? What are the challenges you're facing? What are the things that stopping you getting there? And then brainstorming and thinking about what could you possibly do to solve those challenges? What could you do? And then you build a plan. You create a plan, if you like, an action plan, a prioritized action plan where you start to think about, okay, what's the first thing I should do? What should I do in the first three months of next year? What's the things I should do in the second three months of next year? Break it down. It's critically important. You will have a better year if you plan carefully. And if you struggle with that process, if you struggle with that process, particularly with a bit of coming up with strategies, it may be you are fully aware of the challenges in your life. You look back on the last year or two and you might be thinking, I work crazy hard, I'm not making enough money. Cash flow is a big issue. It's easy to come up with the challenges and the problems that we face if you struggle to come up with the strategies, the plan, the things that you could do well in this day and age, thanks to AI, we have tools like ChatGPT, which is an extraordinary tool for doing strategy. It's for brainstorming. I use it all the time for stuff. So that's my number one thing that you must do to make 2025 successful for you. You must start with, okay, let me give you my number two. The second thing that I, that is, I know is important to pretty much every accountant or bookkeeper that I speak to. And by the way, before I reveal number two, before I reveal number two, I said at the outset that this is, these five are the things that I feel from my experience are the most important things. But when I say the most important things, the most important things for most people in the profession. Now, of course, everybody's different. You might be in a different place and there may be different priorities. For example, if you are today starting your brand new bookkeeping business or a tax preparation business, then it may be that it's not these five. Perhaps you need clients and winning more clients is your focus for next year. But that's not one of my five. I'm kind of speaking to what I think is the majority of people because number two is.

I know from talking to accountants and bookkeepers that still one of the biggest problems we have is that we are working too hard and not making the money that we want to make. It's still the most common challenge that I come across. Working too many hours, not making enough money. And the root cause of that is pricing. We are still too cheap. And I know I say this every single year, but it's not changing. It's not changing and it hasn't been for the 30 years I've been in the profession. That, that's what people keep telling me. And that was me in the early years of my sole practitioner business working crazy long hours and I wasn't making money. And the reason I learned was I was pricing wrong. I was pricing the wrong way, keeping timesheets billing based on the hour. But even worse, I was pricing too low. I was pricing too low because I didn't know how to price. I was pricing too low because I was worried that people might say that's expensive. I was pricing too low because I thought that was what you had to do to win lots of CL and build a great accounting firm. And I realized that those were all big mistakes. So number two is if you feel that one of your challenges, your problems is you're working.

Too hard, you're working long hours, perhaps you do, perhaps like me, you'd like to work a four day working week, but it's just impossible right now because of all the client work. Well, the solution is put your prices up with your existing clients. You must do that. You must put your prices up if you are working too hard or if you are not making enough money money or if it's both of those, you need to do it. And the people say to me, yes, but Mark, if I do that, I'll lose all my clients. No, you won't. You will not lose all of your clients. I've been teaching a process now since 2000, 24 years, which is something I did in my accounting firm. When I figured this out, I created a process for increasing the prices of my existing clients. When I did that in the year 2000, it was partly because I had too many clients. I, I didn't have a strategy, I didn't have an ideal client profile. I ended up winning so much. I had so many clients, but they just weren't paying me enough. I was working crazy hours. And when I realized the mistake I'd made and realized that I got lots of the wrong clients, then I set myself a goal. I actually wanted to lose the bottom 40%. When I say the bottom, I ranked them in terms of the size of the client, from the biggest client in terms of fees to the smallest ones. And I realized you may have heard of the 8020 rule, the 8020 rule, that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients. Well, I ranked my fees, the gross recurring fees, the recurring fees of my clients. And I realized, I forget the exact percentages now, but I realized that if I lost the bottom 40% of clients, if they all went, it was only something like I Forget the number 5 or 6% of my fees. Why? Because I had lots of small clients. Not small in terms of the size of. They weren't all dwarves. They were, they were small in terms of the size of the income. For me they were either. They were tax turn only clients. They were subcontractors in the construction industry that I had, things like taxi drivers and so on. And each one was a small fee, but they were still on a work. I had to have meetings with them, phone calls with them and so on. And I realized that if I lost the bottom 40%, just one or two more good quality clients, ideal clients, would replace that revenue. And so I went about that by putting my prices up. I did it by 20%. I was hoping to lose 40%. And I completely failed. I completely failed. None of the buggers disappeared. I think I lost about 3 or 4%. That was about it. And so the following year I put my prices up by another, another 20%, which over two years. If you do the math, that's a 44% increase in my fees over two years. And that completely transformed my pract. I did have a few less clients. I had better quality clients. I went from making, I was making a loss.

I made some crazy mistakes in early years. And that two year process of increasing my prices went from being a struggling loss making business, losing cash to one that was very profitable. And one that then a year or two later I was able to have a conversation with my client managers about them buying it. So you need to put your prices up. And even those of those people listening who have done it in 2024, you have to, every year, every single year, you have to be systematic. You have to have a system, a process to put your prices up every single year. Partly because of something you may have heard of called inflation. Okay, prices do change. You have to put your price up every single year as a minimum. As a minimum. Sometimes more frequently because of something called scope. Sometimes scope changes and sometimes we have to put the price up more frequently because the scope changes. And I think we fear that, we fear those conversations because we worry about losing clients. But if you are working crazy hard Long hours, then you need to lose some clients. Particularly if you look at your client base and realize that there are some clients you just do not love working with. Life is too short to deal with people that we don't love. So there's probably clients that are just holding you back, that are draining your energy. You need to lose some clients and you need to put your prices up. So please make sure that as part of your strategy and your plan for 2025, you have a plan for how you're going to put the prices up of every single client. Even if it's just a few percent to cover inflation. In some cases it may be much more than that. 5, 10, 15, 20%, sometimes even more. Okay, that's number two. Number three is kind of related to that. Number two is very specific. You have to put your prices up. But number three is.

You need to move to value pricing. It's not just putting your price up. You need to move to value pricing. And that's been a message I've been teaching for years. I came across it in 1999. That's when I first met Ron Baker, who's a good friend of mine now, one of my heroes. He was the person explained value pricing to me back in 1999. And for me, a light bulb went on and I realized that's a far better way of pricing accounting services, far better than time based billing. And the results I was getting when I moved to value pricing were extraordinary. Some of you may know the story. The first value pricing system I had I put in place in late 99 was how I priced in corporations. I came from a tax background. I love tax planning. And one of the things I did a lot of is giving pure tax advice and the benefits of moving their trade from a unincorporated sole proprietor business into, let's say, a corporate structure. Often tax benefits of doing that and I was charging way too little based on time because it was for me a relatively simple process because of my experience. And I changed to a value pricing process. I gave people three different options and my price for that service over the next two to three years increased by almost four times. It became one of the most easiest and profitable services I did. So we need to change to value pricing. We have been, we've needed to do that for a long time, but more pressing than ever before. We have to now, if you have not done it yet, it's going to become more important than ever before. And the reason for that is what links into my number four. So I'm going to Go backwards and forwards with three and four a little bit. Number four is the world's changing as it always is, but so flipping fast right now with technology we've seen, I mean technology has transformed our profession. If we look back over the last 20, 30 years. I certainly remember when I started in the profession. I came out of University in 1988. I worked for an eight partner multi partner firm in Sheffield in the UK. Eight partners, I think there were six full time partners and two that were on the basis of retiring. And in that firm they did not have any computers. That was 1988, no computers. Everything was done by a word processing department. We also had as well in a little quiet little room, a lady who was a comptometrist, if I remember right. I don't know if you're as old as me and remember that, but she had one of these strange machines with great big lever like a typewriter, which was used for checking the maths on stuff. So that was the comptometrist. He was a really important person in the business in 1988. If you are, if you are much younger than me, you will have no idea what I'm talking about, but there you go. Times have changed a lot since 1988. But if I think about all the things that have changed between 1988 and let's say, two years ago, I would say to you that the change in the last two years are as big as the changes in all of those previous years. Since 1988, the pace of change is accelerating so fast and the single biggest reason for that is AI. AI is extraordinary. Obviously now you are aware of it because it is everywhere. Every single tech company is building AI into their tools. And this is going to have a really big implication on our profession over the next few years. If you've been, if you're a regular of my live streams, you'll know that I have this prediction that by the end of the decade, and I think actually well before then, much of the compliance work we currently do will not exist. Bookkeeping, for example, as we currently know it will not exist because the AI is getting smarter and smarter so flipping fast now that the problems it's solving in other fields like health, medicine, how it's now starting to find cures to things that we've, we thought would we never cure it is extraordinary. If you follow the AI space like I do, the pace of change is quite extraordinary. In fact, if you just look at what's happening right now with OpenAI, I don't know if you're aware, you need to be aware. They are running their 12 days of Christmas. Today is. Today is day 10 and it's extraordinary what they are doing at OpenAI. That's the company behind ChatGPT. They are happening for the last 10 days. There's two more days to go. They are releasing a brand new feature every single day. And these are not small features, these are big jaw dropping features. Day three, for example, is they finally released Sora, which is the video creation. It is absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, it's not available in Europe right now. I don't think it's in the UK either. So I can't get it in Portugal, which is really annoying. I have to wait because for some reason the EU don't like AI. They are like King Canute trying to hold back the waves, which is a complete waste of time. So us poor people in Europe have a slight disadvantage to the rest of the world because we're getting some of these things later. But Sora is just a good. Sora is a great example of some of the extraordinary things that AI can do now. Things that two years ago I didn't think would be possible, I did not think it'd be possible two years ago to write a little prompt and it creates a video that you would not know was AI generated. There's no way I'd have predicted that two years ago and yet it's here today. Now, that particular change probably doesn't. Isn't relevant to the accounting profession, but many of the other things certainly are. And certainly a lot of the things that OpenAI are bringing out right now is extraordinary. And so.

My number four is you have to be on top of what's happening with AI. You have to leverage the AI tools. I was talking just a couple of hours ago, I had a meeting with a lady and she's bookkeeper, but she also teaches other bookkeepers. She's based over in Australia and we were talking about doing some stuff together. She's doing a conference next year which she's invited me to speak at. She wants me to be on a podcast.

And I was talking to her assistant setting it all up and assistant was telling me that the plan they've got is because she has a bookkeeping business as well as being a teacher of bookkeepers, is they are really going heavy on using AI to do all of the compliance work. And that's going to happen very, very soon. Faster than you realize the AI is going to do all of this work. And when you understand how AI works, then you realize that things that are rules based, anything is rules based, bookkeeping is rules based. And there's a set of rules. They're in our head. If you have an invoice from Hilton Hotels, then you know that almost certainly goes to travel and subsistence. Unless you're a company that hosts conferences and things, then that would go to event costs, likely. We kind of know, we know these things in our head and the AI is getting so smart, it will know where to put things automatically. That is happening particularly as we start to move towards ChatGPT and other AI tools, moving towards Agentic AI. So if you've heard this phrase, Agentic AI, what it basically means is Agentic AI is, is AI that does stuff. So at the moment, things like ChatGPT, anthropic things like Gemini, they are very much text based. We write something, we can now speak and video has now been launched. But essentially we have a conversation with it and it will give us an answer back, usually in a written format, but it doesn't go away and do things. What agentic AI will do and chatgpt are very much working on this is that the AI will then connect with other things and just make it happen. They'll not just write the email, but they'll send it to your client automatically. They won't just create.

Your website code, it'll build the website automatically. This is happening really, really fast. And to some extent we can do that if you use GPTs, because GPTs can call APIs, you can build GPTs that can do that. You could get it to write email for you and then you can have an API to make or Zapier and then that can push out your email system. We can do it with, with tools like make and Zapier already, but very soon those things will be inside tools like ChatGPT where it's going to go and do the work for us. Okay. This is happening so fast and so you have to be aware of what is happening. It's moving so fast. The profession is sad to say, because I love this profession. I'm an accountant, a chartered accountant. I love this profession. But it's sad to say that we are very slow to change. Generally speaking, there are still firms today that keep timesheets. Even though Ron Baker's been talking about it since the 1990s. There are still firms that don't do advisory. The profession is slow to change. I was doing a webinar yesterday for CPA Academy. There were I think 900 people on the webinar. It was about ChatGPT. I was teaching ChatGPT and how to use it to get to save hours of time using, using great prompts. And I ran a poll at the start to ask to what extent people are using ChatGPT. 44% don't even have an account yet, 37% are just playing around with it. And I find that extraordinary. It's been out for over two years now and the vast majority of people either don't have an account or just playing with it. And I'm thinking, wow, this is extraordinary. And when I saw the comments afterwards, because CPA Academy, they always send me the feedback afterwards, which was, which was extraordinary. So many people said, right, I need to do this. I didn't know this was possible. This is going to save me so much time. Someone said, I love that example of getting it to write your emails. That's going to be. That's going to save me hours of time every single week. Yes, it will do. But the profession is so slow to change. I know some people listening here are absolutely not in that. People that I know and work within the academy are doing some amazing things with AI right now. You have to make sure you are keeping up to date with the change because it's not going to slow down, it's going to get faster and faster and faster. So let's just go back to. And link number four with number three. So, number three, I said we have to move to value pricing. And I said to you that we need to move to value pricing. It's more urgent to do it now than ever before. And part of that is because of what's happening with AI. I said to you that my prediction is that by the end of the decade, compliance work as we know it won't exist. Bookkeeping won't exist. I think it will actually be shorter than that. I think it'd be more like three years from now, perhaps even a bit less. That doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be a need for bookkeepers. Of course there will be, because clients won't necessarily do it themselves. At Some point the AI will do it and that might be 2030, but there will still be a need to at least check what the AI is doing and so on. So there will still be a role to do in compliance work. The difficulty I think people will have those that are not value pricing is that if they're still pricing based on time, what AI will do is AI will significantly reduce the time to do stuff. So whereas you might spend an hour reconciling a bank account for a client, perhaps as part of cleanup work. The AI might do it in a second and then you just check it. So it might take you, by the time you've checked it, five, ten minutes rather than an hour. So it's gonna make our life much, much easier. It's gonna be great. It's gonna make life easier. But what will happen is unfortunately, many accountants and bookkeepers who are wedded to timesheets and pricing based on the hour, they're going to reduce the prices. So eventually we'll be doing compliance work for free.

If we're not changing our pricing systems. And I know that's going to happen because that's happened many times over the years in the past. Let me just tell you a story if that's okay, just to demonstrate. Let me just take you back, if that's okay, to.

1988, 1989, I left university. I went to work for this large multi partner firm on a training contract to train as a chartered accountant. That firm, remember, had no computers, they had a word processing department. And so what I would do, one of my jobs as a junior was called calling over. What that would mean is that the manager doing the job would ask me to take last year's financial statements, go down to the photocopying room, photocopy them, use that white stuff called Tippex to tip x all the numbers out. Then when it dries, then photocopy it again. And then somebody in the team would take the manual trial balance and write all the numbers in. And then it would go to the word processing department to be word processed. Now once that was then done, when the accounts were processed, the financial statements, my job as a junior was to find another junior to go into a quiet space. One of us would have the word processed accounts. The other ones would have the ones with the manually written. And we'd go through and read each number out to the other to make sure they've been correctly typed. Okay, that was a time consuming process. Now in the UK.

We had, and we still have something where corporates, limited companies have to file their annual financial statements with. In the UK it's Companies House, they're on public record. But if you're a small company, there are certain things that you do not have to disclose. So and most companies are small companies in the UK so most companies can file what back then was called abbreviated financial statements. I keep forgetting what it's called. They changed the name now, but it was abbreviated financial statements. Basically they didn't have to file, for example, the profit and loss account, which meant that if somebody, a competitor did a search, they'd only see limited information. If you did a company search on something like a major bank, yes you could, or a major bt, the telecoms company, you could see the full financial statements. But for a small company you couldn't see that. So that was great for. That was great for small businesses. They didn't have to share that information on public record. Now therefore, that was a big benefit, big value for doing that. There was value to the client of having the abbreviated financial statements as well as the full ones they needed for the tax man and for their own purposes.

When I worked at that company, that firm in 1988, 1989 through to 19, I think I was there six years ago, every time they sent out the invoice, the bill, they used to use time based billing, but they used to send an itemized bill. And for every corporate there was a line item that said abbreviated financial statements. And I remember back in those days the price for doing abbreviated financial statements was £400 was the typical price. £400 for doing abbreviated financial statements. Why was it £400? Well, firstly, clients happily paid it because it was valuable to the client. And number two, it was actually quite time consuming to do it because of the manual processes that we had. Now a few years later, technology started to come in. We had software that did annual accounts production. And the software start to get more and more sophisticated in the 1990s, so much so that it would produce the annual financial statements and there'd be a button in there that would say do you want to have a abbreviated? And you would press a button or tick a box and within seconds there was the abbreviated version as well, seconds. Now, in the 2000s, as I started working with firms of accountants, I did lots of benchmarking studies, benchmarking to see how much firms price for different services. And one of the things I did several Times in the 2000s is I asked the question how much do you charge for doing abbreviated financial statements? And I do this at conferences. Occasionally I'd ask for shows of hands and so on. And what was fascinating is I almost never, ever, ever came across a firm of accountants that charged for doing abbreviated financial statements. They didn't charge.

So I asked a few why? And they said, well, why would I charge? It's just a button in the software. But my question to you is this. If you compare the value today of that service compared to the value of back in, let's say 1990 to what extent the value changed? The value, as in not having to disclose your full financial statements so anybody can look them up. Well, the value is just the same today as it was before. So if it's just as valuable, why aren't we charging for it? Why aren't we charging for it? And we do that over and over again. Because we are so wedded to the timesheets. We have this cost mentality. We are focused on time, that as the costs of doing something go down, we tend to find the prices we charge also go down. And that's why I say that there will be firms doing bookkeeping for almost nothing and perhaps even for free at some point in time. And yet there will still be value. We can create value and we should be charging based on that value. So I hope that makes sense. Going back to number three, Number three, moving to value. Pricing is more important than ever before because technology AI is going to significantly reduce the time it does stuff. And we shouldn't be pricing based on time. We should be pricing based on the value to the customer.

So then let's look at number five, the fifth thing that we want to focus on next year. The fifth thing is if we're going to find that AI is going to start replacing a lot of the compliance work, automating processes, particularly the more we move to agentic AI, where agentic AI means that the bookkeeping will just be done by the AI system. If that's going to happen, then it's more important than ever that we think about how can we add more value to our clients. What more value can we create? We have to be thinking about the value all the time and that might be within individual services. So if you are a bookkeeper, then think about how can we make the bookkeeping more valuable? What else can we possibly do? Ask your clients. Ask them. Do some. Do a feedback survey. Ask them what else you can possibly do to create value. What are their challenges right now. And you should be asking your clients every single year to start really understanding what are their challenges, their pain points, their problems, so you can start to figure out better solutions, different solutions. We have to add more value, and we can do that. For example, with business advisory. I'm a big fan of business advisory. I did a lot of it in my accounting firm in the 2000s before I sold it. And it was the most profitable thing I did and the most enjoyable thing. I didn't enjoy doing tax returns, I didn't enjoy doing compliance work, but I loved working with business owners and helping Them solve their problems and improving their pricing, helping them with marketing ideas. Business advisory was much more fun, much more enjoyable, but also it was incredibly profitable compared to the compliance work I was doing. And that's just the same today. And so if you're not already doing some form of advisory, you need to be thinking about that as part of your strategy for next year. Because we have to start doing different stuff. We need to evolve, we need to adapt in this fast moving world. An advisory. Advisory can be, it's a broad term. I don't like the term, by the way. Business advisory is a very broad term because it can mean all sorts of things and it really depends on your skill set, your passion and your client's needs. But if, for example, you're a bookkeeper, then a great thing that you could do is help the client understand themselves, how they can use systems in their business processes and how they can start to use tech and AI. Because I know many bookkeepers I work with are really good with their tech stack. And there's a lot of things that we can do to help clients improve their financial systems, but not just finance any of their systems. Because we are, whether you're a bookkeeper or an accountant, we are very, very, our brains are wired for, we are good at processes, we are very systematic in our thinking. That's I think, one of our biggest skills. And we don't use it enough. We use it in our own business. I know there are people that I work with that have amazing systems in their accounting firm, their bookkeeping firm, they're extremely systematic.

So why not take all of that expertise that we've got, that attention to detail, that love of connecting different tech stacks up and start to help our clients do that, but recognize that that's extremely valuable and we should be charging premium prices, we should be value pricing. And this is what I love about any sort of advisory. Whether it's helping people with their systems and processes, their tech stack, or whether it's the sort of advisory that I love, which is helping people to improve their profits by increasing their prices, by better marketing. Whatever it happens to be for you, whatever sort of advisory you do, the great thing about advisory is it's more valuable than compliance. Compliance is valuable. But advisory take things to another level. When you can solve people's biggest problems, when you can solve their cash flow, help them solve their cash flow problems, help them solve their problems of working too hard or the lack of systems in their business, whatever it might well be, when you can solve people's problems At a higher level, you are creating more value. And when you are also using value pricing, you are capturing that value. And that should be your most profitable work, your profitable services. You should be creating more value and then charging based on that. So these things are getting, you'll start to see some of these things are all linked together. The world's changing fast. We need to move to value pricing and we also need to add more value. When we do adding value and value pricing, we build, we do more, we create more profitable service offerings for our clients.

And, and my last point on the adding value in the advisory particularly, there's a lot of people I speak to in the profession, particularly bookkeepers, when I talk about how we can help people by building a more successful business, helping people get their pricing right, because I know most small businesses have no idea how to price. That's something that we can have a huge impact on our clients with. Helping them price, helping them win better business, help them with their marketing, their sales. Very often people say to me, oh, I can't do that. I'm just a bookkeeper, I'm just an accountant. I can't help people with their strategy, their marketing. I can't help them with pricing. Well, firstly, you're a business owner. If you're a business owner, you've got more skills than you realize. You are doing this stuff.

You have these challenges yourself and you're figuring out solutions to the systems, to how to find new clients, to pricing. So you are a business owner and you have more skills than you realize. Also.

You also have the best tool possible for business advisory at your fingertips right now. And those of you that follow me a lot will know exactly what I'm talking about. And that's chatgpt. It's amazing for so many things. I think the best use case of ChatGPT is for strategy, strategic thinking, business advisory. It's extraordinary. It is so easy now to create complete strategies for clients in a fraction of the time that it would been done before and to a much higher level. And if we price that as well, it's extraordinary. And I know the value of this because in Portugal I have a little business mastermind here. I work with nine business owners here. I think they're all expats and help them with their business. I don't charge them, I do it for fun. I do on a Friday, once a month. I don't work Fridays and it's partly a social thing. We go out for dinner afterwards, but we spend two hours in the afternoon and I help them with their business and we help each other. But a lot of things I'm sharing is my experience. And it's really interesting that across all of these businesses and some of them are quite successful, they don't know how to price. They don't know how to price. And sometimes simple things that I say, like giving people, talking to them about having three options or I'm working with a guy who currently builds GPTs and little automations for people, including Mercedes. Extraordinary. And he doesn't know how to price. So I've helped him write his version of a pricing brochure. I've taught him the words to use, how to break up in different options. He is so grateful. I could have charged him a lot of money for that. But he's a good friend of mine, he's helping me. I know that small businesses have no idea how to do these things. And this is massively valuable. This is what they really want from a great accountant or great bookkeeper to solve their biggest problems. You just have to ask them what's their biggest problem, what's their biggest challenge right now? And then figure out how to solve it. You can do it either through your experience or using a tool like ChatGPT, and then you just figure out how to package that up value, price it and sell that as a service. Okay, so they are my five big, big things for next year. Let me just quickly recap. You need to have a strategy and a plan for 2025. You need to put your prices up. If you find yourself working too hard, too many hours and not making enough money, you need to make sure that you are keeping abreast of all the major changes happening in the world of AI and starting to use that in your business to save hours of time. But because of that, you also need to then transition to value pricing more than ever before. So the price based on the value, not the time it takes to do things, which is going to go down. And we also want to look to create more value for clients through things like advisory, helping people put their tech stack in place, their create processors and so on, all of which AI can help us deliver those sorts of things. Now, I said to you at the outset, everybody's different. There may be some things I've missed off the list. If you have different circumstances, if you are starting your accounting firm today or your bookkeeping firm, then of course also marketing, winning new clients might be more important. If you're thinking of the other end of the spectrum, exit strategy, then there's other things that May be more important, like putting the systems in place in your business to make it more sellable. But for most people in practice today, most accounting firms, they're the five that I think are the most important for 20, 25.

Okay, we have four minutes left. I'm going to use those four minutes to answer as many questions as we have. If we don't have questions, we finish early. If we do, we'll keep going till the end of the hour. I will just say one couple more announcements and then we'll go to questions. For those of you that don't know what I do, what we do is.

We have accountants and many, many members are actually here right now. Today we run the Value pricing academy. It's 10 years old today. And we help accounting firms around the world build more successful practices. We help people master value pricing. We help people get better quality clients. We help people with their systems, their strategy and business advisory. And also now grasping AI and using it. If you are not part of the Value Pricing Academy, then one of the things you might want to do as a starting point is we have three levels. If you want to dip your toe in the water, the best place to start is level one. We call it Value Pricing Academy Foundations. And I'm going to ask my daughter Gabby to put the link into the chat. So if you don't know about the Value Pricing Academy, go to this page. You'll find there's a video from me. You'll also find lots of information about what we do. And if you then decide that this might be for you, click on the Join the Academy today button and you will see that I can't tell you the price because it's in whatever currency you prefer. So if you are in Canada, you can pay in Canadian dollars. If you're in South Africa, you can pay in South African rand. We make it really easy for you. So go and click on the join button to see the price we still have for Level 1 Foundations Special Founder. We launched this a year ago and so we are putting the price up very, very soon. But one of the things that people tell me in the Academy, they love over and over again. We've been doing this for 10 years now and I actually have one person here today who came on day one is the price never ever goes up for existing members. The best time to join the Academy is today because although we put the price up twice a year, it does not affect existing members. And we also create brand new stuff every year and existing members get all the new stuff every year for their same old low price. So if you want to get in at a great price, go and check out the details. Right. Let me go and see what questions we've got. Remember to put two capital Q's in front if you have a question.

And also, I haven't got questions jumping out of me at the moment. There should be some questions. Remember, this is your last chance of the year to ask me questions. Is there anything about today that you want to know more about? I can't see any questions at the moment. I'm going to go and read the comments while I wait for questions. So think about what is it you want me to tell you more about in particular? Nobody's yet asked about what's happened this week and last week in the world of ChatGPT. Extraordinary. Some of the new stuff that's come out. So if you're interested in that, just ask me and I'll tell you. We have 11 minutes. In the meantime, let's have a look at what people said. So I think there's a conversation. Jessica said, I agree 100% this year I reduced client count but increased revenue over last year thanks to price increases. Jessica's amazing. She's one of our, not just one of our best students, but she also now runs some of the live training.

Because she runs an extraordinary business where it's every year she puts her price up and gets better and better clients. And for her, her business is all about work life balance, which is great. She has a lovely family and she doesn't want to work every hour God spent every hour available. She wants to spend time with her family, which makes perfect sense in fact. What else? She says I have an automated reminder 45 days prior to for every engagement anniversary to reprice them on time. I recommend everyone to do that. It's easy to lose track of how long since the last increase. Amazing. Jessica has the most amazing systems in her business. She's highly systemized. So much is automated, including her repricing every single year is automated. I do have a question. I'll get to that, Jonathan, Brian says I remember calling over. Okay, so I know Brian must be kind of my sort of age, I'm guessing, right? Jonathan, there's a question here. Jonathan, what is the best way of keeping up with accountancy tax business? AI. What's the best way to keep up with AI? That's a great question. I think that one option is you could do what I do. I spend hours just watching YouTube videos. I love watching videos and most evenings I'm not bothered about Netflix series and things. I watch the occasion one but I would rather learn stuff. I find it fascinating. So I watch a lot of stuff on YouTube. I also have signed up to many courses. I've learned prompt engineering. A good friend of mine who's in my mastermind group because he moved to Lisbon, he's one of the leading YouTube thought leaders. So I'm part of his academy. I subscribe to that get updates all the time. So that's one option. You could go and spend ages looking for the best people. The other option if you want specific stuff for the accounting profession is if you do, if you are in the value pricing academy then we do that a lot. In level one we have now we just launched a brand new 90 minute once a month live session that Emily runs and we have a full prompt library. And those of you in level three.

Mastery program get access to Leading Edge where once a month I do 90 minutes on the deep dive on the latest AI and that's what my next session will be in a few weeks time in January. And so if you join the academy you will get lots of AI training. If you're not ready for the academy, make sure that you use that link I shared earlier where if nothing else, you'll at least get our prompt of the week.

Okay, I hope that helps. Jonathan. Right, where else have we got to? Michaela said happy VPA anniversary. Thank you Michaela for that.

Gabby shared the link earlier. Thank you Gabby. We have eight minutes left.

I love the Academy. Thank you for that feedback. I really appreciate that. Brian says now getting higher prices using Mark's systems and effective pricing, which is our pricing software. That's awesome that you're using the effective pricing, Brian and getting results. I know some people getting extraordinary results with that. Right. We have a question from LinkedIn. I think it's from Olive Koch. Give us an update on what happens this week with ChatGPT. Actually all the questions are coming in now so I need to hurry up. I've got seven minutes so let me see if I can answer the three. I'm going to try and answer Lindsay if I can as well. And a couple more. Oh Mark. So Olive.

Lots of stuff happened so they've launched. I may forget some of them because we're on day 10, but let me pick out the ones I'm most excited about. They've launched their O1 model which is their most powerful model so far. But for advanced reasoning you won't need it for all things. But if you are doing things like anything like which requires deeper level of thinking. It's great at. I've been using it just to today actually to analyze the Excel spreadsheet summary of all the feedback. We've had a feedback VPA members have been giving us feedback on stuff. We do it end of year feedback and I'm using the new O1 model to analyze the Excel spreadsheet and analyze the feedback. They also launched as well their Pro subscription, so there's a free account which is amazing. Then the plus account and the teams account which we have is $20 a month which I think is tiny for the save the amount of saves. But they've now launched a $200amount version as well which looks interesting because you get access to even more stuff. But I wouldn't start there. That's for a power user. What else have they done? One of my biggest complaints and bugbears and it has been for over a year, is as you have more and more chats on the left hand side then.

Unless you have a filing system, a way to name them, there was no way of filing or having folders. They've now introduced last week projects, which means that you can put chats into think of it as folders to organize your chats. But it goes way more than that because when you create a project, if you think of it as a folder with a project, you can then give that project a name. You can give it in for documents and you can give it a particular custom instruction, which means that every time you have a chat with something in that project, it will know about the documents you fed it into the project and the customer instructions. So I've set up five of those so far. Loads of great use cases for doing that. So one of the things that you could do is if you are doing strategic planning for your business, then you could set up a project with your business name. For example, I have one called Value Pricing Academy and I've put in there my business plan, my ideal customer, a whole bunch of documents in there and then I can start a brand new chat anytime I want to do a brand new chat and say help me with this challenge. What can I do with this challenge? Then it's got all that information inside the project. So I love projects. I think it's going to be amazing. They also introduced a few weeks back Canvas and they made some major changes to Canvas just last week. If you want to use it for doing any form of written stuff, Canvas is extraordinary. And what they've also just done last week is Canvas is available in your GPTs. So for example, I have a GPT called Email Responder where when I open the GPT, I hit the let's get started button and basically ask for two things. Number one, copy and paste the email I've received. Number two, is there anything in particular they would like me to say I can put some context in? I hit the button, it then writes the email response on my behalf. And the GPT's got my writing style guide and other stuff and I almost never have to edit it. It saves me hours of time with writing emails. But even better now what it will do is it will open that email up in a separate canvas which you can edit some more incredible stuff with the AI system. I know some of you have no idea what canvas is, but there was so much to share. They brought out Sora. They, they brought. Now some of these things don't work in the eu, which is annoying, but they've now brought out in advanced voice mode. They brought out video. I can't access it yet because I'm in, in Portugal, but it's coming. It is. If you're in the, if you're In Canada, the US, you've got that. They've now integrated ChatGPT with Apple with their Apple intelligence and they were demonstrating some of that just a couple few days ago. Extraordinary. They've done some major changes last week to their search facility, so much so that I'm now thinking I'm not sure I'll ever need to use Google ever again. Because what ChatGPT Search Net can now do is mind blowing. So there you go. There's just a really, really quick thing. Olive. There's so much other things I could talk about. I'm going to do an entire 90 minutes in a few weeks time to the Leading Edge, to my VPA Mastery members, all about the new stuff that's happening with ChatGPT and how you can use it in an accounting firm. I'm going to share the best stuff. Mark says, is there a way, is there a way to raise prices if when I took your advice last year to raise it, I let them know I wouldn't do it again for a couple of years. Oh, did you any spin to do it again? I don't want to be unethical. Okay. So, okay. At least Mark, you've recognized the mistake. Don't tell people you won't raise your prices again for a while because you might have to. Who knows what's going to going to happen, what's going to change what Might change the scope and so on. So one of the things that you would do is. Any spin on that? Well, one of the things that you would. One of the things that works really well is giving people the more advanced notice of a price rise, the more it lessens the pain. So one thing I would certainly do is say.

Is tell them that you need to increase the prices, give them a reason why. And off the top of my head, I can't think of one, Mark, but because you're an academy member, if you message me in the VPA Facebook group and tag me, I'll think of some wording. It's hard to do it on the fly, but then say for some clients we're putting up the price today, but for you, because you're a value price client, we're not going to do it for three months or two months or whatever. And just doing that alone makes them think, oh, they value me. Most clients won't remember what you did last time, the wording. And as long as you put a reason in it anyway, if they come back and say, I thought you weren't putting the prices up, you can say, well, we didn't want to, but we have to for this reason, Mark. I hope that helps. If you want some specific help with the specific wording, as I say, let me know. In the VPA Facebook group, Lindsay, virtual assistants, etc. How can ChatGPT open GPT or Copilot Assist? I'm not sure, Lindsay, I fully understand the question. How can Chat Stroke, Open GPT or Copilot Assist? I'm not really sure what you mean. Sorry, Lindsay, I'm struggling with that one. Copilot is Microsoft. I know that. And it uses ChatGPT behind the scenes. I don't use it because you get better results from using ChatGPT direct. Let me do. I will answer this one. I think, Mark, you might have already talked about this, but what role do you see ChatGPT playing to improve the client experience in 2025? I think delivering a superior service will be key to retain clients. Great question, great question. So.

And I think you're in the academy, aren't you? So again, if you want to ask me a question in the VPA Facebook group and tag me, I will give it some further thought. But one of the things is simply ask it for some ideas. And now the more context you give, the better, which is why you want to train. The more you can train ChatGPT in your business, the better. And the academy, I talk about different ways of doing that you could build a GPT, but now we've got this project. So you could create, you could create a project for your business. You give it some information, some files about your business so it understands your business. And then you just ask some questions and say.

I want some ideas for how to improve customer service next year. Give me 10 great ideas and it'll give you some ideas. And then, and then you can start to drill down and ask more questions. If you've got any more help with that, Tracey, again, just reach out if you're in the Academy. I can't remember. Then I'm more than happy to spend some time doing a loom video for you if you put it in the VPA Facebook group.

Thank you Meryl for that feedback. To Mark, I know we're out of time, so.

We'Re out of time, but I'm just going to read Tom's out quickly if that's okay.

Because Tom always shows up. He's an academy member as well. So what does Tom say? I increased all my limited company clients up by 20% plus only one client queried the increase but accepted anyway. Accepted anyway. I was obviously undercharging as no other client complained. So okay. It's not a question. And he says exceptional webinar. Mark, wishing you and your family a wonderful Christmas. I wish you a great Christmas as well. I think I've got through all the questions. Thomas, thank you for that feedback. For those of you that are skeptical about putting your prices up, I've been teaching a process for 20 odd years now and that sort of feedback I get over and over again that people put their price up by 20% and struggle to lose clients. Struggle to lose clients. And there's some reasons for that. It's partly because.

There'S a lot of lock in with an accountant or bookkeeper. There's a relationship there and it's very difficult to find somebody as good as you somewhere else. It's not like buying cups of coffee where you can switch your coffee shop very easily. So there's a natural lock in there. Okay, I'm two minutes over. I am going to wrap it up as usual. I will play out with some music so I can get a chance to read any further comments. Thank you so much for coming along. Have an amazing Christmas. Have an amazing new year. Spend some time not working too hard. But do think about your strategy for next year. Do create your plan for next year and I look forward to seeing you all in the new year. Goodbye for now.