A big, often overlooked skill needed of business owners is the ability to let go. This takes many forms, such as knowing when to let go of clients, or let go of staff, but what about letting go of your workload? Often, if there’s a specific service you’ve positioned yourself as the expert in, or a client has an issue you know you’re best experienced to fix, then you’ll just do it. You’ll know you can do it 80% – 90% right. And delegating it would mean it would get done 70% right. That’s why it feels easier to keep hold of it and do it yourself. The problem arises when you k ..read more

Business is easy until you start employing people. This is because people are awesome and people are awesome and they will always be your greatest frustration. These are ten steps to better hiring which I learnt from Dave Ramsey. SUMMARY Make it hard for people to be employed by you and set up hoops and hurdles for them to get through and over. Employ thoroughbreds, not donkeys and understand that they do not mix and won’t enjoy each other’s company. Conduct a minimum of 4 interviews per person and the first interview could be just 5 minutes. Conduct spousal interviews where you get ..read more

You only need one thing to combat the fear of repricing clients in your Accountancy business. Before you go into a fee review meeting with a client, where you know you’ve got to increase their fee, before you come up with a whole plethora of excuses, all you need is need self-awareness. Self-awareness is so, so important. You’re afraid of having this conversation around repricing, so in order to become self aware you need to think about what it really is you’re worried about. Then you need to chat through it, out loud, with somebody else. Because in our own mind, these thoughts spi ..read more

Discussing the importance of giving back and how your Accountancy firm can make an impact. Imagine if, every time a new client signed the proposal, a set of clean pyjamas was automatically sent to a child in emergency care? Then, that new client got an email to let them know about the impact they just made, all because of your firm. and THEN.. Your team were notified automatically about the winning of the proposal AND the donation. All because they signed up to be a client of your accountancy firm. GoProposal member, Keith Lesser, Partner at Lesser & Co, made this all possib ..read more

Present your prospects with ONE solution It can be tempting to offer more than one option to your clients and prospects, maybe with different tiered prices and services. Initially it might seem like the best way to bring them on board, we might think, using some sort of sales psychology, they’d go for the ‘mid-range’ fee or the ‘silver’ package. But by doing this, you’re actually doing your clients a disservice. We should only be offering ONE solution to prospects and clients of our accountancy business. That’s the RIGHT solution.  Free Download: How successful Accountancy Firms h ..read more

Don’t just raise your prices across the board It might seem like a great idea initially. Raise all of your clients fees by 30% and THEN you’ll be making a profit. Right? This would be the case, if all of your clients were the same. But fact is, they aren’t. When you’re repricing clients, they should be split into three distinct sections: Profitable clients Clients who you break even with. Clients who are losing you money. If you increased your prices by 30% across the board, you will just annoy the first group, who were profitable anyway. You should start to see a profit on the second ..read more

T here are other MARGINS that exist in your accounting business, other than PROFIT margins. These margins remain largely invisible but decision by decision, they get squeezed, taking you closer to the edge. You then only need something like the Corona Virus to push you up to, or over the edge. Now hindsight is a wonderful thing, but as we rebuild and prepare for the new world, I think it’s important that we bring these ‘margins’ into view, so we can be more intentional about protecting them moving forward. (This video and podcast was heavily inspired by my frien ..read more

Igot a very emotional phone call from a business owner this week. She was totally overwhelmed with everything that’s going on, couldn’t see a way through. Her revenue had taken a 40% hit and she was about to make a series of decisions based on this bleak perspective and from a position of fear. She was at rock bottom, a level 0, and within 24 hours I was able to take her to a level 10 and thinking very differently. It’s this approach that I want to share with you here. This is her… and this was her meeting with her team today which was VERY different to what she thought she WAS going to s ..read more

Even if you’re one of the few firms which has figured out how to correctly charge your clients in the first place, the complexity of the services you provide and the constantly changing nature of your client’s businesses, means that the scope of work can quickly become out of alignment with what they’re paying you. So unless you have a system which flexes throughout the year which is driven by your team , you’ll end up over-servicing and undercharge your clients. This then leads to a lot of accountancy firms not making enough money to be able to deliver the level of service your clients a ..read more

This one idea has helped us to understand a lot of frustrations we were experiencing in our accounting firm towards the end of last year. Initially, I just couldn’t figure out what the problem was. We had more staff, they were better trained and demonstrating great values. We had better processes and systems, powered by better technology. We were attracting our dream clients and our MRR was higher than ever before. But things still felt…….tough… tougher than ever in fact. But why was that? Wasn’t technology supposed to be making our lives easier? THEN, one day, I came across this concept ..read more