Ed Kless: Clients Don’t Want Outputs. They Want Outcomes

The Disruptors: Too busy? Raise your prices.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr for CPA Trendlines

What do clients – or, as Ed Kless prefers, customers – want from their accountants? It’s not the tax return or the financial statement but the outcome for the customer, which is most often peace of mind.

To remain relevant in disruptions like online tax preparation and automated bookkeeping tech firms like Pilot, accountants need to consider other ancillary services they can provide above and beyond those basic services.

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“When you bill by the hour, when you have to measure your time, and when you tell the customer, ‘Pay attention to my efficiency because that’s what I’m going to charge you,’ then they start looking at your efficiency instead of your effectiveness, which is the wrong thing to be looking at,” Kless explained.

Additionally, Kless said CPAs who are “too busy” need to raise their fees.

He said, “One of the mantras in pricing is innovating for growth, pricing for profit. When an organization wants to grow, the focus has to be on innovating, creating new things to offer, not necessarily what we used to be called rainmaking, which is getting more customers.”

Kless maintains that accountants or CPAs should strive to be the first person called, no matter what the customer wants, whether it’s Super Bowl tickets or a recommendation for the best medical team in an emergency. But experimenting with adding additional services or converting to a subscription-based business model will not be possible for firms that remain wedded to the timesheet, which, Kess said, quoting Ron Baker, is cancer of the accounting profession.

Posted on November 13, 2022

Liz Farr

About the Author

Liz Farr, CPA, is a special contributor to CPA Trendlines, bringing an insider's clear-eyed view of the tax and accounting business and a passion for advancing the profession.

She's the host of the hit CPA Trendlines podcast series "The Disruptors," available everywhere: Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music and Audible, Player FM, Audacy, Gaana (India), and Boomplay (Africa).

As founder and proprietor of Farr Communications, she is the secret weapon that her clients use to get their messages out. She has written blog posts, web content, articles, white papers, case studies and books for accountants and accounting tech companies. Her specialty is ghostwriting for coaches and consultants who want to move accountants into the future. She can bridge the gap between the dream these visionaries have for the future and the mindset and reality that today’s accountants are living in.

Five of her past and current clients have been named to Accounting Today’s annual list of 100 most influential in accounting. She has written under her name for the Journal of Accountancy, Intuit’s Firm of the Future blog and AccountingWEB. She has also appeared in Forbes, CFO.com, and Accounting Today.

Farr has a broad educational background, studying biochemistry at the University of Munster, Germany, and obtained her bachelor's degree as a double major in biochemistry and German at the University of New Mexico. She also studied German, Spanish, computer science and linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and continued her studies in linguistics at the University of Washington. She earned her master's degree in accounting in 2004 from the Robert O. Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico, qualifying as a licensed CPA in 2005.

Professionally, Liz began as a tax preparer at H&R Block before working at several local CPA firms in the Albuquerque, N.M. area. At her last assignment as a tax manager, she helped a team develop streamlined processes for getting tax returns out faster and more accurately.

After spending 15 years working as an accountant in the Albuquerque, N.M., area, she traded in her ten-key for a pen and has been writing full time since 2018.

She can be contacted at Farr Communications.

When she’s not writing or studying the accounting business, she’s hiking or skiing in the mountains of New Mexico.

Click here for more by Liz Farr

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