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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Assess Your Client’s Needs

Make this a formal process.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

A client assessment is an onsite or virtual session where you observe the client’s accounting system on which you’ll be working. This is your opportunity to see how they run their business: their software, their processes and who does what. This is when tasks and responsibilities are clarified and assigned. Both the client and your firm need to understand their responsibilities in this new partnership.

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This assessment also allows you to fully understand the client’s service needs. It is a real-world assessment of services, budget and the work required to provide deliverables. It will also allow you to understand what it will take to onboard them. Again, this assessment goes both ways. It’s worth assuming you have competition, so take advantage of this time to impress the client with some consultative advice demonstrating the value you bring to the table – this is especially true if you are charging for the assessment.

One of the key benefits is the ability to limit your risk and as you:

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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Rule #1 of Scoping for Alignment

Plus three more basic steps. 

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

How often have you heard the old saying about having two ears and one mouth because listening is twice as important as talking? Hopefully, often, because it is as true as anything I’ve ever heard. Scoping is all about listening, so when you make a presentation, you’ll know what you’re talking about, and the client will know you know.

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Here are four basic steps you can follow to make sure you and the client are in alignment when the time comes to start a new project or present to a potential new client:

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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Scoping Benefits Both Your Clients and Your Team

This is your map to success.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

There are two basic ways to drive from Door County, Wisconsin, to New Orleans to attend Mardi Gras in February. The first is to chart a course using a map or GPS app. It will tell you the route to take, where to stop along the way and how long it will take to make the drive. The second way is to start the car, back out of the driveway and head south, hoping you’ll bump into New Orleans along the way.

Which do you think gives you the better opportunity to arrive in New Orleans in time for the festivities?

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Scope is a lot like creating a project map showing what you want to accomplish, who’s going to do what, how you’re going to do it, what you’ll need along the way and how long it will take to get there. It includes all the specific details of what you’ll deliver to the client, including, for example, tax returns, quarterly planning, bookkeeping and cash flow management.

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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Make Your KPIs More Meaningful

What are employees working toward? They need to know.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

Key performance indicators separate the signals from the noise. Throwing timesheets into the trash is your opportunity to focus all your attention on what is most important to your firm’s continued success.

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Good KPIs are quantifiable measurements agreed to beforehand. They must be important to the organization as a whole and specific. Here are a few examples you might consider adopting:
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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Profit Sharing Can Boost Your Accounting Firm

Pay for performance.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

As long as you’re changing how your firm operates, you should also look at how your staff is compensated. If your customers are paying for value, shouldn’t your teams be paid on the same basis? Once your firm turns to a value paradigm, the people delivering the knowledge work – your staff – are your most valuable asset and should be compensated as such.

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It’s all about alignment. Clients pay on value. Staff should be compensated on value. There are proven ways to make sure this alignment takes place.

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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Are You Offering Time or Knowledge?

Five areas for grounding new metrics other than time.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

It may sound ridiculous, but the only people who are married to timesheets are professional services firms staffed by people who spend their professional lifetimes building their knowledge. Every other company in the world has figured out how to sell and price products or services without relying on timesheets.

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Why do professional services firms believe you should sell knowledge in increments of time? Ron Baker, an accounting visionary and author of “Firm of the Future,” once asked, “When you’re a knowledge worker, should you be selling your time?” I don’t think so.

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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

How ‘Productizing’ Services Benefits Clients

They can be delivered more promptly and consistently.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

Now that you have hopefully standardized your services, it’s time to look at productization. Productization is the packaging of intangible services to make them feel tangible. You put everything you will do for a persona into an offering that resonates with them because it’s customized for them. It’s then clearly priced so the buyer knows what they get for their investment.

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This is just as useful for your clients as it is for your staff. Clients appreciate it because they know exactly what they’ll get and what to expect. Staff appreciate it because, unlike in traditional firms where there are at least four different ways to get to the same deliverable, this model has one pathway for each deliverable and service product, making it both efficient and traceable.

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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Four Keys to Client Tech Stacks

How to build the ideal connected system.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

Clients use the client technology stack to run their day-to-day businesses. The stack they use depends on their niche or vertical. For example, law firms use Clio, while e-commerce businesses rely on Webgility, among others.

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The next tech layer is data aggregation. All the data feeds will land here, and you can determine what to do with and how to organize this information based on KPIs or other metrics around which you’re building their business success.

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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

How Client Data Comes In Is Critical

Standardization starts here.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

Why is McDonald’s easy to price and why is their product so consistent no matter where in the world you are? You know that if you get a Big Mac in Chicago or one in New York, it will taste and cost the same. This is because of standardization, and you shouldn’t underestimate the role digitized data plays in maintaining this consistency.

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Your firm can standardize and price just like McDonald’s does, if you have the right tech infrastructure, in addition to standards related to both clients and workflow.
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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Standardized Practices Empower Your Firm

Six steps to take.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

The accounting profession will never resemble an automotive production line, perhaps for no other reason than we don’t look good in steel-toed boots. We’ll never be widget producers and, from my viewpoint, that’s a good thing. However, our position among the professional class shouldn’t blind us to the benefits of standardizing many of our services.

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Anyone who has been an accountant for any length of time has certainly seen enough to eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel every time they start a new engagement. An entire firm has even more institutional knowledge to draw from. You can develop reliable and repeatable recipes for different services and deliverables by capturing this institutional knowledge. This is standardization, and it makes your service offerings more efficient, cheaper, consistent and predictable – all good business practices. You’ll be able to predict with better accuracy the time frames required for new projects, and you’ll be able to scope out exactly what will be required to bring the project to a successful conclusion. READ MORE →

PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

How Automation Boosts Staffing

And four ways it pushes the paradigm shift.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

When you have three people in your firm, each doing things their own way, you won’t be able to standardize until you get them all on the same page. Technology makes it easy to do that.

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Technology is spurring innovation and driving automation – and that’s reshaping the future of accounting. Automation is simply using technology to complete tasks that are typically done by humans, and it will help you standardize by providing:
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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Do You Understand Your Clients’ Goals?

What about their weaknesses?

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

It’s up to you to recognize the client persona most suited for your firm, but you’ll want to start by defining your customers’ needs. So, what do people really want, and how can you figure it out?

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Certainly, you can engage in expensive research, from questionnaires to focus groups. But, in reality, most of the clues you need will come from your knowledge of the people you work with within that group.
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