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 practices 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...

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...

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...

I want to share with you 7 practical tips for how you might price bookkeeping services…

If you prefer you can watch the video here. 

Tip 1 - Don’t Move Straight to Value Pricing

This is a big mistake I see often.

If you try to move from hourly billing to value pricing in one quick jump you are going to fail without a doubt.

Value pricing is a difficult concept to grasp in the first place. Trying to apply it to a complex compliance service like bookkeeping is going to make it even harder.

The move to value pricing is going to be a journey, not a quick fix, so be patient.

Tip 2 - Remember It Is Valuable

You need to recognise that bookkeeping is valuable.

The perception is often that it is a low-value service, it’s just data entry. But bookkeeping can be so much more complex than that.

I know that my bookkeeper is quite expensive, but I don’t mind paying that price because I know I am getting great service. It gives me...

Is the bookkeeping profession in crisis?

There is such a huge amount of change going on in our profession right now.

We are seeing the rise and increase of Cloud accounting. We are seeing artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation like bank feeds, and not too long ago we also saw Intuit QuickBooks launching Bookkeeping Live - alive bookkeeper, at really low prices.

What we are going to see over the years to come is increasing downward pressure on prices for compliance work and particularly for bookkeeping.

If you are a bookkeeper, CPA, accountant, or do bookkeeping services, this blog is for you.

I’m going to share with you my thoughts on where the profession is going and how we can overcome that.

How do we rise to the challenge? How do we make sure that we can continue to build a very successful accounting practice? How do we beat technology, outsourcing, low-cost competitors, and now software companies that are getting in on the bookkeeping action?

Here are...

I recently caught up with Jane Aylwin who is, quite simply, an extraordinary bookkeeper.  During our interview, she told me how – in the last 5 months – she had added £53,000 in fees, almost entirely from pricing (which means most of it goes straight to bottom-line profit) in a different way.

She started off, just like many bookkeepers, working from her kitchen table.  And getting OK results.

But those OK results got worse and worse as her business grew and she took on people to work for her.  Her old pricing models were no longer working.

The big epiphany

A few months ago, on the way to a client she had a big realisation… she needed to do something different.  Otherwise, she’d keep getting the same results.

That meeting with a client was the first of 4 meetings that week; a week she now describes as her ‘week of wow’.  In that week she had a pricing conversation with each of those 4 clients…

…...