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Coins and small bills in a plastic box

Ten questions for reconsidering your prices.

By Martin Bissett
Business Development On a Budget

Undercharging – or lowballing as it’s also called – is the scourge of the profession. It has always been present, and unfortunately, it will probably be with us for the foreseeable future.

Undercharging is directly related to fear – fear of rejection.

MORE: Firm Not Thriving? Five Fixes | Five Questions About Facing Challenges | Be Clear About Your ROI Proposition | It’s Time to Prepare the Next Generation | Who Are You More Committed to, Your Firm or Your Clients? | Nine Checkpoints Before Every Prospect Meeting | Three Questions about Conversion | Six Keys to Turning Prospects into Clients | Don’t Overlook Internal Communication
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When you are building your pipeline according to the process, you have assigned fees you think might be in the ballpark of what you believe you could get from a new piece of work or a new client. You may tend to estimate on the low side, which is not a bad idea in theory, because it lets you be pleasantly surprised when it’s anything beyond that.

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Stop Operating from a Scarcity Mentality

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Coins and small bills in a plastic box

Ten questions for reconsidering your prices.

By Martin Bissett
Business Development On a Budget

Undercharging – or lowballing as it’s also called – is the scourge of the profession. It has always been present, and unfortunately, it will probably be with us for the foreseeable future.

Undercharging is directly related to fear – fear of rejection.

MORE: Firm Not Thriving? Five Fixes | Five Questions About Facing Challenges | Be Clear About Your ROI Proposition | It’s Time to Prepare the Next Generation | Who Are You More Committed to, Your Firm or Your Clients? | Nine Checkpoints Before Every Prospect Meeting | Three Questions about Conversion | Six Keys to Turning Prospects into Clients | Don’t Overlook Internal Communication
GoProCPA.comExclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

When you are building your pipeline according to the process, you have assigned fees you think might be in the ballpark of what you believe you could get from a new piece of work or a new client. You may tend to estimate on the low side, which is not a bad idea in theory, because it lets you be pleasantly surprised when it’s anything beyond that.

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Could Mobile Phones Be Next on the Extinction List?

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Image: Rabbit Tech

It’s not technically a phone, but it does almost everything a phone can … and some things a phone can’t.

By Rick Richardson
Technology This Week

Rabbit is a startup that stunned the world in early January with its surprising AI hardware announcement. The Rabbit r1 is a device similar to a smartphone, but it runs a different AI experience compared to what you know from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude and other chatbots.

MORE: AI Named the Highest-Paying In-Demand Tech Skill for 2024 | AI Generates Revolutionary New Battery Design | Breakthrough Implant Uses Excess Blood Sugar to Generate Electricity | Nuclear Battery Could Keep Your Future Phone Running for 50 Years | MIT Tests New Ingestible Vital Signs Sensor | Study: Solar Will Lead Global Energy by 2050 | New Tech Could Let EVs Go 3,000 Miles on a Single Charge | AI + MRI = Diseases That Doctors Might Miss | Your Boarding Pass Could Onboard Hackers | The First Police Officer on the Scene Might Be a Drone
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The Rabbit r1 will handle chats like ChatGPT, sure. However, its primary selling point is a different type of AI experience. The r1 features a unique Large Action Model (LAM) that lets it interact with apps for you.

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Before the Audit: More Than Just Checklists

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Effective inquiry starts with knowing how to ask the right questions.

By Alan Anderson, CPA
Transforming Audit for the Future

To weave relevance into the fabric of your firm culture, your team must shift from just getting the work done, with relevance as an afterthought, to putting the client at the center of the audit. That starts by building a foundation with the four U’s of understanding your client, the industry, the standards and how to audit.

MORE: Are You Correctly Identifying the Relevance Intersection? | Lack of Relevance Drives Audit Commoditization | Five Crucial Attributes for Successful Audit Leadership | Traditional Audits Don’t Deserve Premium Billing | Four Basic Understandings Every Auditor Must Master | Put the Ethics Code to Work for Your Clients and Your Firm | Turning Audit & Accounting into Assurance & Advisory | WANTED: Great Audit Mentors | Is Audit in Crisis Because of Definitions? | Stop Sending the Wrong Message to Audit Teams | Closing the Audit Expectations Gap
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To master these, you first need a natural sense of curiosity. Out of curiosity comes inquiry. We’ve all been taught that inquiry is one of the fundamental components of the audit process. But too often, inquiry doesn’t go any further than getting some answers to the questions on a checklist. And too often, those questions are the same ones that get asked at every audit engagement. The client has probably heard them (and answered them) more times than you can imagine.

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A Friendly Chat or a Billable Discussion?

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two older men pausing on golf course to talk, one has hand on other's shoulder

Make your intentions clear at the outset.

By Ed Mendlowitz
202 Questions and Answers: Managing an Accounting Practice

Question: I have a close friend who is also a client. He went through a rough time with his wife threatening a divorce and we spent a lot of time talking about it (out of office settings).

MORE: Busy Season Is Over, So It’s Time for Some Resolutions | Hold Staff Accountable If You Want Them to Listen to You | How to Raise Your Rates | Three Ways to Start an Accounting Practice | How Much Is Your Tax Practice Worth? | Merge in Lower-Priced Work without Losing Out
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I sent him a bill and he returned it with a notation that “we spoke as friends and not as a professional consultation, and the bill should be canceled.” What should I do?

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Eleven Possible Pitfalls of Mergers

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illustration of merger: four jigsaw puzzle pieces, each held by a different person's hand

What is driving the sale? Is your firm ready?

By August J. Aquila
Price It Right: How to Value Accounting Services

The trend for small and midsized CPA firms to merge is accelerating as the competitive environment becomes even more demanding. While hundreds of firms merge every year, history continually shows that at some point in the future, things don’t always work out. Like marriage, some mergers are successful while a great majority fail. Many of the reasons for failure can be avoided if firms do their homework at the front end before entering the merger.

MORE: Dodge the Four Curses of a Production Orientation | Clients Buy Solutions, Not Features | Make Sure You Know What You Will Get from Your Marketing | Three Pillars Support a Successful Accounting Firm | Clients Have Six Reasons for Needing You | Six Ways to Market Your Technology Consulting Practice | Sixteen Marketing Activities to Try | The Four Steps of Your Personal Marketing Process | How Does Your Firm Measure Up? | Six Questions Before Asking for All the Referrals You Deserve | Five Rules for a Marketing Orientation | Ten Keys to Marketing Success
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The merger and acquisition drivers are constantly changing. Some of the drivers we see today are a constantly changing marketplace, the creation of megafirms beyond the Big 4, the sophistication of clients, the high demand for qualified people, technology, the cost of acquiring new clients, and finally, the accounting industry being in a mature market.

As we will see, most mergers fail because of non-financial reasons. Unlike the sale of the manufacturing company, mergers of accounting firms are a lot more difficult to accomplish.
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Change Is Inevitable, Even in Marketing

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Sometimes it’s improvement. Sometimes it isn’t. What role will you play?

By Bruce Marcus
Professional Services Marketing 3.0

EDITOR’S NOTE: CPA Trendlines was privileged to have a long relationship with Bruce W. Marcus, who was ahead of his time in his thinking and practice in marketing for accounting. We are publishing some of the late expert’s evergreen work, which retains wisdom for the present.

Speaking of change, as we have been, in the several months it took me to write my book and to choose from the hundreds – maybe thousands – of articles I’ve written over the years, a great deal has changed. And not just trivial stuff.

MORE: Do You Want More Publicity? Or BETTER Publicity? | How to Write Media Releases That Capture an Editor’s Attention | Why Accountants Should Be Nice to Journalists | Ten Keys to Crafting Ads | Four Things to Know About Social Media | Internal Communications Are Underrated | Four Things Better Than a Company Song | Let’s Lose the Word ‘Image’ | The Risk In Not Understanding Risk | What Your Marketing Program Can and Can’t Do | Nine Reasons That Prospects Say Yes | How Marketing Evolved to 3.0 | Accountants Don’t Sell Soap.
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The movement to replace the hourly billing with value billing has accelerated. Firm mergers, consolidations, new boutique firms that bear little resemblance to the historical professional firms, new technology that makes obsolete technology that was itself only months old. It seems that observations (I don’t make predictions) that I made decades ago about the need to go outside the firm for new sources of capital to finance growth have turned out to be accurate. New professional/marketers partnerships are springing up. Professional Services Marketing 3.0 is in full swing.
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