Business Strategy for CPA's

Today we are talking about how to create a different future for yourself, even if you believe strongly in reality.  Here today to talk with me about this problem is my guest, Kara Gaisie. Kara Gaisie is an ex-CPA turned coach, who works with women who want to leave their 6 figure job without sacrificing their lifestyle. Kara talks about the obstacles and fears faced by her clients who are part-time life coaches wanting to transition to become full-time coaches. She shares some strategies to get over those fears, and how entrepreneurs can improve their self-confidence. These strategies can be used by CPAs wanting to make a transition to bigger things.   Highlights: — “Often we can move so much quicker when we take ourselves out of the business and really focus on delivering a quality product or service to our customers and our clients.” — “Do whatever you need to do until you are at a place where you feel confident and you have the demand to continue to offer that service over and over and over again.”  — “All pricing is made up. Everybody's value is subjective. Everybody gets to decide what they would be willing to pay for a certain thing.“ — “What builds self-confidence is being willing to be rejected, being willing to fail, and learning from that without making it mean anything about you. And then doing it over and over and over again.” — “Your worth has nothing to do with your service. As a person, you are wholly worthy, just as you are.” Connect with KARA: Website: https://karagaisie.com/ Want more on pricing and other business topics for CPAs? Join me for “Ten Essentials for Working Less” – a free training series on Crowdcast thru OCT 25th.  More info here.   Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options  

Want to attend Ten Essentials to Work Less as a CPA? Subscribe to my Daily Drip of business strategy for CPAs to get the details, as well as the guidance you need to stop working so hard for your revenue. Subscribe at SheThinksBigCoaching.com/subscribe-main-list   Today we’re talking about How to Price Advisory Services.  If you don’t know how to price or how to think about pricing, you may run into some common potholes, like underpricing your services, overworking in order to compensate, clients who are less emotionally invested in your business relationship and therefore get less valuable results, and so on. In this episode, in order to make it easier to improve prices, we break out what might be a common CPAs client roster into 5 possible buckets. And once we have the buckets separated, then we can get into what is an appropriate price range for not just the services - or even better - the outcomes. Hopefully by giving you some ranges and some examples, you will have a sense of what is "reasonable" and what is in the ballpark.  But your prices will be tied to the value that you can provide. And that value will always be subjective and based on what the buyer perceives the value to be. Want more on pricing and other business topics for CPAs? Join me for “Ten Essentials for Working Less” – a free training series on Crowdcast thru OCT 25th.  More info here.     Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options

Link for FREE training series: SheThinksBigCoaching.com/webinars/   Ready to get your life back after two hellish tax seasons? Join me for the FREE October Training Series: “10 Essentials for Working Less Without Losing a Dime in Revenue.”   Ten great topics over 10 days, like: How to Build Advisory Services Without Getting Killed on Scope Creep How to Improve Profits Through Pricing Without Being an Expert in Pricing Theory How to Niche Without Risk And a bunch more. Check out the full list and save your spot at  SheThinksBigCoaching.com/webinars/   Attend LIVE, for FREE, starting October 18, going through Oct 25th.    One more time :) SheThinksBigCoaching.com/webinars/

Want to attend Seven Essentials to Work Less as a CPA? Subscribe to my Daily Drip of business strategy for CPAs to get the details, as well as the guidance you need to stop working so hard for your revenue. Subscribe at SheThinksBigCoaching.com/subscribe-main-list Today we’re talking about How to Package Advisory Services.  If you don’t know how to package and price CPA services, you’re likely to be forced into the unenviable position of billing by the hour after the fact for work you thought you should do.  This will result in, among other things, getting under-compensated relative to the value you could or do provide. Where a lot of CPAs are is, “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it for you at this hourly rate.” And what I want you to have instead today are 4 examples of packaged up services so you can see what the end result looks like, but more importantly, what questions to ask yourself and in what order, so you can build out your own packages that suit your firm and your clientele in a way that meets both of your needs.  Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options

CPAs put all this time and effort into writing a good proposal. They package it up, send it off and it just goes into the abyss. Never to hear from the prospect again. Another problem is that you send out the proposal, the client or prospect comes back, you have a conversation with them, but they end up declining to work with you.  Then sometimes if value isn't fully captured, it can result in reduced fees and potentially leaving money on the table. So, if you can have a system for writing really solid proposals, without burning a bunch of time doing it, you can reduce the time that it spends, you can increase your conversion rate and you can potentially increase your fees without lowering your conversion rate.  And what I want you to have in this episode are the pieces that make up a good proposal.   Highlights: — “You do not have to be a Pulitzer prize winning writer to write a good proposal. Plain English is where it's at.” — “What forms the backbone of your proposal are the situation appraisal, the objectives, the service options, and the payment terms.” — “Everything that you need for your proposal can and should come out of a great discovery meeting.” — “In discovery meetings, make sure you're asking open-ended questions to find out what it is your clients are trying to achieve, what it is they really want, and understand if you're the person that can help them get there.” — “If you can, best to present your proposal live, either in person or on screen. So that you can walk them through it and you can answer questions on the spot.”  Download the PDF for this episode: https://www.shethinksbigcoaching.com/sample-proposal Episode mentions: 106 Better Pricing Strategies for Accountants: Stop Billing by the Hour https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/106   111 Better Pricing Methodologies For CPA Firms https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/111   Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options

This week we welcome back Jonathan Stark, a former software developer who is on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. He is the author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts, the host of Ditching Hourly, and writes a daily newsletter on pricing for independent professionals. Often CPAs don't know how to price for expertise and strategy, and they just lump the advice into the delivery. But the advice and the expertise and the planning is so much more valuable than the delivery, then the setup and implementation.  In this episode, Jonathan talks about altitudes of involvement, where listeners will get an appreciation of how to separate out the advice and the strategy from the delivery and price it accordingly.   Highlights: — “Strategy is not a plan. A plan comes out of a strategy. Once you have a strategy to achieve the objective, now you can start planning.”  — “If you're perceived as an execution person, you are not the kind of person that people are going to go to for a blueprint. It's much easier for people to pigeonhole you as a builder and not a strategic thinker.” — “If you are used to saying I'm a CPA, and you want to shift up an altitude, you need to stop saying that.” — “Courage is much more important than confidence. Courage is knowing the risks, but doing it anyway, or feeling the fear and doing it anyway.”  — “The first step: find your top five clients and go out and ask them if they want to have a meeting to talk about the direction of their business and the strategy to get them there.” Connect with Jonathan: Website: https://jonathanstark.com/   Episode mentions: 106 Better Pricing Strategies for Accountants: Stop Billing by the Hour https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/106   111 Better Pricing Methodologies For CPA Firms https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/111   A More Useful Definition Of Strategy https://jonathanstark.com/daily/20200809-0152-a-more-useful-definition-of-strategy-   Book mention: Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239 Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options  

Many CPAs are frustrated because they feel invisible in a crowded marketplace. They know they are better than their competitors, but when they focus on that fact, they get little in return. That's because, to customers, better is not actually better. Different is better. And those who market differently, win. In his new marketing book, Mike Michalowicz offers a proven, no-bullsh*t method to position your business to get noticed, attract the best prospects, and convert those opportunities into sales. Today I speak with Mike Michalowicz, author of 7 books, now including Get Different.    Highlights: If the bulk of your business comes from customer referrals, you have limited control over your growth, putting you in a precarious position We need a way to throttle the flow of leads: to be able to turn the spigot up when we want more clients, or turn it down when necessary, but not be at the whims of referrals.  The smart marketing money is on testing: run small experiments. No results? Fine. Good results? Invest more.  Sadly, many business owners take the random pot-shot approach, and that’s a mistake. Being different doesn’t necessarily mean outrageous. Being different helps you stand out, cut through the noise, get noticed, and attract the right people to you.   Connect with Mike Michalowicz: Website: https://www.gogetdifferent.com/ Purchase Get Different: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0593330633/ref=as_li_ss_tl?&linkCode=ll1&tag=obsidian-20&linkId=eca96009472be51113c717d00aa6ca08&language=en_US Episode mentions: https://www.smartstrategyforcpas.com/083 Fix This Next In Your Accounting Practice Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options  

JOIN or WATCH REPLAY – Pricing in a Nutshell https://www.crowdcast.io/e/pricing-in-a-nutshell SUBSCRIBE – SheThinksBigCoaching.com Hourly billing is like radioactive waste:  invisible, and given enough time and quantity, it'll kill you. Make the shift to pricing your services and reap the benefits, like 3x'ing profitability. But you need to know which pricing tools to use, and in which situations.  If you're a CPA, these are your most important pricing tools: Value-based Flat/Fixed Fee Segmented Curves Using these even only  reasonably well will guarantee that you will be more profitable on all your engagements. 

As more and more CPAs make the shift to Advisory services, one question that comes up is how do I run meetings, what’s the agenda, what am I showing my clients, what are we talking about? Meetings of course are great opportunities to add value for your clients and increase their clarity and help them better understand what’s happening and what decisions to make.  Here today to talk with me about how to hold great CFO meetings is my guest, Mark Gandy.  Mark has been working as a part-time CFO for more than 20 years, and he's made every mistake in the book and he knows exactly how to run a fractional CFO meeting. HIGHLIGHTS: — “How do we hold effective meetings when we make this shift to advisory? It depends on where you are in the relationship.”  — “During meetings, we don't always hit the financials head on that much because usually, the issues are either marketing-related, sales-related, or operations-related.” — “The 10-30-60 rule is essentially 10% of any change is going to be all about the data or the numbers, the 30% is all about the new process, and the 60% is all about behavior.”  — “Most of the issues I deal with CEOs are behavioral issues — getting people engaged, getting people excited.” — “Great CFOs should be able to run a business. That means they need to understand marketing, sales, and operations.” — “What's keeping businesses from moving the needle? It's usually people issues, not necessarily process or data.”  Connect with Mark: Website: https://g3cfo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markagandy/ Software mentions: Tableau https://www.tableau.com/ Qualtrics https://www.qualtrics.com/   Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options

For business owners to make more money, it helps if they can make better informed decisions.  And though a P/L and Balance Sheet are very useful tools, for many every day business owners those two documents require a lot mental extrapolation to be able to forecast from.   And they hire accountants and CPAs to help them understand where their money went… what they get is a P/L, but a P/L is really tough tool to use to understand how to make more money.  What many business owners want is a simple tool that can help them understand and forecast the impact of decisions, before they make them.  Here today to talk with me about this tool is Rowan Eister, US Head of Business Development for the financial reporting and forecasting tool, Fathom.  HIGHLIGHTS:   — “For CPAs looking to build more advisory relationships with clients or deepen those relationships, Fathom serves as your all around toolkit. It opens up that revenue stream of advisory and improves your relationships with clients.”    — “Fathom was created with the idea to make clients understand their performance in a way that really resonates with them and that they can get involved with.”   — “Fathom is focused around design so the visuals are really at the core of how unique it is.”    — “Fathom takes those financial results and brings them to life in a way that is more meaningful than just that income statement or just that kind of spreadsheet of numbers that you may be giving to clients.”   — “Fathom's forecasting tool is going to evolve with your business and allows you to continue making strategic movements based on how things happen.” Connect with Rowan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rowan-eister/ Software mentions: Fathom 14-day free trial: https://www.fathomhq.com/signup Want to find out what options you might have for working together? More about 1:1 coaching, roadmaps, and DIY courses here: https://shethinksbigcoaching.com/coaching-options