I met recently with one of my students who told me about her immense success. Here’s what she posted in my Facebook Support group:

I just had to interview her!

You can watch that interview in full here.

Lana’s 3 big pricing successes

Lana signed up for my How to Price Bookkeeping course, and after studying value pricing and implementing the new practises throughout her business, there were 3 clients in particular that she managed to get great results from and demonstrate her improvement in pricing.

Client #1

The first client was an education consultant.

She had a bookkeeper but wasn’t really satisfied with them, so asked Lana to double check everything was in order.

Lana noticed there were a number of accounts that weren’t entered, and several holes in the paperwork needed sorting.

She priced this clean-up work at $2500.

But, the real value pricing achievement came when Lana priced her bookkeeping…

“I...

When you have a price conversation with a client, the better you are at communicating your value, the more business you will convert at higher prices.

One of the things I teach my students in the Bookkeepers’ Pricing Academy and the Value Pricing Academy, is the importance of a professional looking brochure.

Recently one of my students asked how to create a pricing brochure for bookkeeping services, so I’m going to share with you how to do that.

You can watch the video here.

Why is a brochure so important

1 - Your brochure is your positioning. 

Having a professional looking brochure shows that you are professional, you are the expert, you are experienced and have clearly done this before.

 When people see you as the expert, they are more likely to want to buy from you because they want to work with the best, and they will be willing to pay a higher price for the privilege of working with the best.

2 - Your brochure also acts as your packaging.

...

2020 was a unique year for everyone. So much has changed and will surely continue to change over the coming years. But here are my predictions for businesses in 2021…

You can watch the video here.

What is the most important thing for your clients this year?

2020 was tough. A phrase I found myself using a lot was ‘we need to reinvent’… 

We had to reinvent ourselves and adapt to a new lifestyle of working from home. We had to reinvent within our firm and learn how to communicate with our team and our clients.

Our clients have had to reinvent as well. Many of them will have gone through some very dramatic changes, potentially struggling to keep their businesses open or trying to adapt to new technology such as Zoom.

It’s been a year of confusion and challenges – however, I believe for your clients 2021 is only going to get harder. Businesses will be hit much harder in 2021.

In 2020, the governments around the world have been doing...

When meeting with potential clients, there are some best practices, structures and processes that you need to follow. I’m going to walk you through 5 of those critical steps…

You can watch the video here.

Research

The purpose of the initial meeting with a client is to understand whether or not you are a good fit for each other. A lot of that information you will uncover during the meeting with your fact-finding process.

But before the meeting you should visit their website, but also their social channels to find out something a little more personal about them, perhaps something you have in common. This could be a great starting point to create some rapport in the meeting.

Do a Google search on them and their business. It may be they’ve been in a news article because they have been avoiding taxes. It would be useful to know that before you commit your valuable time to them.

Just do 10-15 minutes of research and make some notes of potential questions or...

Recently, one of my students has been dropping some frankly amazing success stories into my Facebook Support Group:

The results she is getting are absolutely incredible, so I just had to interview her!

You can watch the full interview here.

Lana’s biggest challenges

One of the biggest challenges Lana had to face was scope creep.

“Client’s didn’t understand that no, you hired me to do ‘A’, and now you’re asking me to do ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ as well!”

These clients tended to become difficult and reluctant to pay the bill at the end. This was hard on Lana as she was trying so hard to provide for her family, but clients were refusing to pay her for her work.

The tax season rush was another big issue Lana faced.

Come January, all her clients panicked as the tax year end was approaching, and Lana was struck with a huge influx of enquires and new clients wanting her to bring their...

Recently, one of my students – Cathy - left me this question in my Facebook group:

“I need to do more marketing but I don’t have the time. I’d love to outsource it but I don’t know how to hire someone because I don’t know all of what I need – it’s a catch-22! Plus, I don’t want a regular digital marketing agency, I would prefer my own offshore marketing employee. Any suggestions on how to get good people in that area, especially as I don’t know how to judge their work performance.”

My first response to this is to avoid the big mistake we tend to fall into when we hire people…

 You can watch the video here...

You need to learn

 Michael Gerber talks about this in his book ‘The E-Myth Revisited’ – he calls it abdicating responsibility.

This is when there is a function in your business that you don’t want to get involved with because you are to busy or don’t enjoy the...

One of my students asked me this question in my Facebook group the other day:

‘I’m thinking of selling my practice in 5 years. What should I do to build it up for then?’

 I came up with 5 thoughts on that. You can watch the video here:

First let me share with you a piece of advice…

Built to Sell

Go and read the book ‘Built to Sell’. It’s by a good friend of mine, John Warrillow. He specialises in helping businesses to become more sellable.

It’s a really interesting story that illustrates a lot of powerful points that will help you to build a more sellable business – whether it’s your own you are intending to sell, or you are helping your clients with the same issue.

I highly recommend you follow John for more of his great material on this subject as well.

Now, here are my 5 thoughts on how to make your business more sellable…

#1 – Be Profitable

If you want to sell your business, it needs to...

Back in 1996 when I started my own accounting firm, I was very ambitious and wanted to grow.

Within the first couple of months, I hired my first team member and 2 trainees, and the firm just kept growing. With this small close-knit team, I found the business really enjoyable to work in. 

But things started to change as my business grew. 4 years in, I had 12 employees. At that point, the fun went out of the business…

With 12 people in the office the dynamics changed. There were internal politics going off and I had to become very careful with hiring decisions.

In the late 90s, I had a team member who was quite good with technology, so they set up the whole office with all of their computers and set up a server for us all to communicate on. The server crashed at one point and that team member demanded a pay rise before they would fix it. 

I was so shocked! It made me realise, I don’t like working with people.

I love client work – I enjoy consulting,...

There are 6 critical steps to building an extraordinarily successful accounting or bookkeeping firm. Let me take you through them…

You can watch the video here.

#1 – Plan

This is a critical step that most businesses skip over.

If you want to build your business up into something really successful, you need to decide on what that vision of success means to you. What do you want your business to look like when it’s ‘done’?

When you have that vision, you can then work backwards. If you know what you want to achieve, what key milestones do you need to reach in order to get there? What strategies do you need to have in place to reach those milestones?

As part of that plan, you also need to consider who your ideal client is. A huge part of your business is about getting the right clients, you need to have a crystal-clear idea of who your ideal client is so that you can really work towards those ideals.

#2 - Pricing

Pricing is the most...

We meet with potential clients all the time. Sometimes face-to-face, more recently it tends to be online through online meeting software like Zoom.

We meet with people because we are in the relationship industry. We want to work out if the client is right for us and also if we are the right fit for the client.

Meetings are the heart of our sales process. It’s how we convert brand new leads into paying clients.

Without a system, this process can be a bit chaotic.

You can watch the video here.

Systems are so important

Your system will help you to position yourself as the expert and attract the right sort of people – the sort of people you want as your clients.

With a great appointment generation system set up in your firm, you will start to meet with better quality clients.

If you build into your system a pre-qualification process, you will also avoid wasting time on bad clients, tyre-kickers and PITA clients that are just not right for your business and will never...