Dawn Brolin's practical playbook: price with confidence and package your services to scale

Well, hello everybody and good afternoon or good morning wherever the heck you are, right? For me, it's afternoon ish. We're just crossing the line of afternoon. I see we've got Debbie and Joyce and Bill, Amanda, Connor. No Connor, not go Blue Jays, let's go Red Sox. All right, some of you probably won't agree with that. That's okay too. Excited to be here with you guys today to talk about my practical playbook and how I price with confidence because trust me, I price with confidence. And I package my services in order for us to scale. And I'm really excited to bring to you some, Ignition did some tax pricing benchmarking so we can kind of like get a feel for what everybody out there is doing from a pricing perspective. You know I'm gonna give you my perspective and the way that I handle pricing and the way I utilize, obviously utilizing Ignition to send out all my engagement letters, making sure clients are not doing any kind of scope creep and all that kind of stuff. It's super, super awesome. So I'm so excited for you guys all today. I hope you can hear me. Refresh your screen maybe. Refresh screen if you can't. Sometimes that helps you out. I just wanna say hello. My name is Dawn Brolin. I am a CPA. I'm also a certified fraud examiner, and I'm the CEO of Powerful Accounting. I am the designated motivator. I want every single person on this call or not on this call to be successful in their firm and whatever that looks like for you, okay? I love working with Ignition. I'm a power user. I use it just about every single day as I'm sending out proposals. Clients are coming in left and right I feel like. So, excited to be here to speak with you guys today. I hope that you can pull away even just one nugget of what I have to help you improve your business as you move forward, as we're moving into extension season, or it's actually really here, and get through that. And hopefully set yourself up for success next year that you have less extensions for those of you who are tax preparers. If I look over here, it's because I'm looking at you. I'm looking at the chat over here because I like to interact with you. So if you see me looking over there, that's what I'm looking at. Alright, what are we gonna do today? We're gonna analyze benchmark pricing data for common accounting and tax services. So these are what I like to call the rules. So we're gonna do the rules of how we're gonna look at these pricing data and what the rules should be around what you're charging people. We're gonna recognize how pricing transparency and AI driven insights reduce uncertainty. Right? So how are we able to just be transparent about our pricing? I am not an hourly biller. We do not bill by the hour. We bill by the project over here. A tax return's a project. Bookkeeping work is project. We do on subscriptions for our business clients. But how can pricing insights, which is built right into Ignition, I actually used it the other day when I was working with a client to get their partnership returns up to date, and I used the AI driven insights. It was really cool because it gave me a really good gauge of whether I was high and I was way higher than it expected me to be and I said, then I'm on point, which I liked. We're gonna also talk about applying practical strategies to improve your pricing confidence, right? I need you to be confident, you guys, and that's what we want and to communicate that value. So, really excited to get through this. We've got quite a few slides. We're gonna do a little demo at the end so you can kinda see the things I'm talking about in concept. You're gonna get to see live and we're excited to do that. So, Ignition Pricing Benchmark, and they did a twenty twenty six survey, which is fresh data from real firms, insights from about three sixty or more accounting firms across the USA, okay? The benchmark method. Ignitions has their it's the annual price benchmarking for accountants. It's not a rule book. It's a benchmark, guys. Right? So it's great if it's higher, if it's lower. I always wanna be higher than what the benchmark is. It's gonna help tell you where the market is at so you can make smarter pricing decisions, and that's the key. Because we all, I do hear a lot of times people are gonna say, oh, well, but I'm in this area of the country, Roland. You're in Connecticut. I do tax returns and project work, IRS representation across the country. The fact that I live in Connecticut and the fact that they live in another state doesn't matter to me. My price is based on my value and the way I make my decisions. I always wanna make them smarter. And of course, Ignition is on a mission to take that guesswork out of pricing. So that's what this benchmark survey report is all about. And we're gonna see kind of some things that are happening. Before we go move into the next thing, because you guys want your CPE poll question number one, when did you last raise your fees? So if we can launch that in the back, when did they last raise their fees? And is three sixty firms? Yes, one was nationwide. So three sixty plus that we have. And so some people are gonna say in the last twelve months, more than a year ago, still sitting in the I'll deal with it later, which I've been there, so don't feel bad if that's your answer. And only for some clients, which is interesting because I can kind of agree with that in that some clients need to raise their prices because over time you start to learn that there are a lot more work to do, there are a lot more maintenance for you as they're maybe calling you a lot more often, whatever it may be. But it looks like for right now, in the last twelve months, which I like that answer, I like seeing that grow, but we still have people, around twenty percent of people who are more than a year ago, I raise my prices every single year. I don't care if it's twenty five bucks, if it's fifty bucks, if it's one hundred bucks, a tax return. It could be even that little. But every year we should be raising our fees. Employees expect to get paid more every year, right? They expect raises every year. Those types of things, cost of living increase. I think three percent is ridiculous. I think it needs to be closer to at least ten, if not fifteen percent as you're increasing prices. Again, just kind of thinking that out loud in my mind. So it does, it looks like we've got more than, let's see, in the past twelve months and more than a year ago are gonna be our two winners for this poll. We can go ahead and close that poll. So interesting, so we think about the benchmark sample. Three sixty eight surveys across the accounting professionals in the US, okay, specifically in the US. They surveyed tax, bookkeeping, full service accounting, advisory and niche firms. Niche, niche, I don't know, you say it however you want, right? Strong representation across the market from small to mid sized firms. I'm a small firm, five people. Small firm, right? So, we have that strong representation not to think of the top one hundred firms, okay? That's not necessarily who we're looking at. We, as the small firms across America, less than fifty employees, I guess would probably be around that range. Midsize firms are between fifty, probably in one hundred. I think it's a really good sample of people. We've got Southwest region and the Pacific region looking like they're leading the pack on their responses. But again, I really believe that pricing to me doesn't matter where you're located, it matters really for me on what the value you're bringing to the client and the good work that you're doing, okay? So price increases are standard, right? Standard practice. Seventy seven percent of those three sixty eight firms that were polled plan to raise prices in the next six to twelve months. That's awesome. Okay? Seventy seven percent, that means the majority of our small to mid sized firms get it. Thirteen percent are unsure. Okay, that's alright. And nine percent have no plans to raise. That concerns me because I'm like, everybody should be raising prices, okay? So I think it's a really good percentage. We've got that seventy seven percent. I'm very happy about that. Fees are definitely rising. Now among those firms who plan to raise their prices, I would love to see, for you and your brain should be thinking about where do I fall in these various buckets. Thirty nine percent plan a five percent fee increase. So the majority there, five percent gonna do a five percent increase. Twenty five percent plan a ten percent fee increase. If you think about it, an S Corp tax return, I charge two thousand five hundred dollars for an S Corp tax return. Now, most of my clients, I would say ninety five percent of them, ninety to ninety five percent of the businesses that I do tax returns for are in a subscription. They pay me every single month. The minimum fee for us is seven fifty a month. In order for you to be in a subscription and have tax planning and having meetings or any of that stuff, you're a minimum of seven fifty, that's nine grand a year. If you think about a two thousand five hundred dollars tax return, if you increase your fee by ten percent, that's two fifty dollars You're now at two thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars That's not a huge increase. Dollars two fifty is not a huge increase, okay? But together, sixty four percent are planning to increase fees by five to ten percent, and that's awesome, and we should be increasing those prices. And why are they? What is the reason that they're increased? Because that's a big number. Fifty six percent say rising business costs as the top of the reason. Now I would say to you folks, if any of you are paying attention to AI, I'd love to see it in the chat. You're paying, yes, Debbie, subscription includes the tax return. What we do with our subscription, seven fifty a month, and again, that's a minimum. That's a minimum. We have people at four thousand five hundred a month depending on their structure. At the seven fifty a month, we do their business return, their personal return. We'll do their tax planning because we have to do their personal return and do tax planning because that's where the tax planning happens. So we're gonna do their business, their personal. If they're an S Corp, we're doing their reasonable comp analysis every year. We might do some benchmarking throughout the year, which I love RC reports for that. And then they're also gonna get, I call it periodic meetings. I don't pigeonhole myself to monthly. I don't put myself in the corner to quarterly. I say periodic on demand meetings. I just had one this morning with one of my clients. So, because I don't, if I pigeonhole myself, then I feel like, oh my goodness, I'm not doing my job. I'm not meeting with them monthly. Well, they don't maybe wanna meet monthly or maybe they're not available every quarter. So we do this periodic. We do a soft tax plan in the summer. We do a hard tax plan in November. And so that's what they get. I don't promise the world, folks. I don't promise the world to people because then I'm putting myself in a position to under deliver. So I hope that helps, okay? But that's how we look at it. Because, let's talk about business costs, folks. AI is here, in case you haven't noticed, anybody? And the costs associated with our subscriptions for the things that we need, whether it be tax software, whether it be general ledger software, they're all implementing AI, and it's going to cost us more money, and it already is costing us more money. So costs associated with us running our business should be a reason for us to ensure that we're charging enough to cover those costs, right? We wanna improve our margins. We wanna reposition, exit low value clients. Raising the fees should raise the quality of the clients that you have. They're understanding value. They see your value. And they work with you as opposed to against you in some ways. People who are price sensitive, price conscious, and yep, there's people out there, someone's gotta serve those folks. It's just not gonna be powerful accounting, right? And I do love it. Yes, Amanda, I am so in love with AI, I can't even tell you. What it has done for me, I actually, real quick sidebar, I did this cool thing with my email and my Zoom meetings and my Fireflies and I set up a chat inside of Claude that says, eight am the next morning, go back and look at my emails and look at whatever conversations I had and just make sure that I did, remind me of what I should have done so I can just go through the list real quick and make sure I did them. And it does it every morning, eight am, when I show up in my office. I can just look at the summary. I don't even have to go in my email. It's like wicked cool. Anyway, just a fun one, okay? Gonna name my future son AI Connor. That's awesome. So anyway, as we move on, the fear is real though. This is where the buck stops, you guys. The fear is real, but if you look at the data, the data is better. What are we afraid of? Twenty four percent of accountants say the fear of losing clients has held them back from increasing prices, either now or in the past. And I will tell you when I switched over to subscription pricing, I had fear. I was afraid that my clients would tell me I'm insane, which they already do that. But I thought they would tell me I was insane and also leave. I knew that I had to conquer the fear because the data surrounding the decisions I was making to move to that concept was going to change my life forever. And what do I mean by that? Because I was conquering that fear of losing the clients, I was not only able to retain the bulk of them, and the ones that went away were people I didn't mind them going away, but my cash flow position and my margins changed dramatically and that made a difference to me. So if you can say, I'm afraid of this, but what is the data telling me? The reality of forty three percent of accountants say, most clients accept fee increases without issue. Now I will tell you, when I send my engagement letters out at the beginning of the year, usually the first week of January, I'm like, yeah, I got nothing to do. I'm gonna send out all my engagement letters. I go into Ignition, I get them all set up, I record my video, I tell them, hey, listen, this is how tax season's gonna go. I explain it to them. Some of them watch the video and they love it. Some of them don't watch the video. But I give them the video so they can know what to expect. And I mention a fee increase. The first year when I moved to make my clients prepay, I did not increase their fees. That was the first year, and I told them that in my video. I said, Listen guys, I'm changing the way I do my tax returns and the way my process goes and you're gonna pay me upfront for it. Why? Because I don't wanna do my own accounting. I'm gonna send you this engagement letter and you're gonna pay me upfront. And that's hopefully gonna get you to get your stuff to me faster and hopefully I won't have to do any accounting because if you charge them at the end, sometimes you forget. Those kind of simple things, right? So the clients, I have not had any resistance on increasing fees. I'm not gouging them. I'm not killing them on it, but if my fees are increasing, my costs associated with running my business, as I would tell my clients, need a client. You gotta increase your cost because look at the cost of this water heater has gone up tremendously by five hundred dollars That means you need to increase your fee to your customer, whoever you're installing that for. It's natural for us to give that advice, but a lot of times we don't take it ourselves and that's where we fall apart. And a reality check of only two percent of accounts, again, in this survey, two percent of accountants said fee increases have hurt profitability. So that was what I call an exception. And I don't know what their process was and how they did it, how they approached it, and that could have been maybe the issue and why those folks had an issue with hurting profitability. I can tell you I did not. My profitability threw the roof. So the pricing confidence gap, like this whole confidence concept of I'm confident in the way I price. Eighty seven percent of accounts say they are very or somewhat confident. I like to hear that. But only eleven percent are very confident that their pricing reflects the true value of their services. So great. Eighty seven percent said, yeah, I'm crushing it. I'm awesome. But only eleven percent were like, out of that eighty seven percent, they're like, yeah, but I'm not really sure. I'm confident in my pricing, but I'm not really so sure that it reflects the value that I'm offering for the services I'm providing. So that's a gap right there. That's a, hey, I raised my hand, but then I'm like, yeah, maybe not. So I'm not sure where you fall as well. So Samantha's saying, are you a tax only practice? No, no, no Samantha, I did not necessarily say the kind of things that we do here. So we do accounting services, so CAS work. We have around seventy four business clients that we manage and we do handle their books start to finish. We do their tax returns, tax planning, advisory services, that kind of thing. So that's the bulk of our practice is tax advisory CAS accounting for about seventy four clients. Then I also do tax returns on top of that. I have around three hundred tax returns I do a year, which is not huge, but it's fine. And then I also do tax represent, yep, seventy four clients. Well, it's not really five people, Amanda. So we have myself, I have a staff accountant who is my full time CAS girl, so she does all that work. Then I have two part time admins because we're transitioning from one admin who's retiring. So one admin is here training. So we have two part time admins. And then I also have another part time bookkeeper. So technically two and a half people doing the work for seventy four business clients, and then I handle all the tax returns. I am hiring a tax person this fall so that she can handle that. So we do around seven fifty, seven fifty to eight hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue between those two and a half people, soon to be three and a half people. So pretty good stuff there. Bulldog, oh Bob, hey Bob. Good to see you my friend. So again, there's a confidence gap here folks. We've got to actually bill for our true value. Polling question number two, let's bring that guy up. Polling question number two, what's your biggest pricing challenge, right? Yeah, this is not CPE, by the way. This is for me to understand who I'm talking to. This is just for conversation. Because really honestly, you guys, I think you all have CPE in the bag while we bring up the polling question. It's again, more for us to understand. You guys have so much CPE. I mean, you do tax, you're getting eighteen. If you don't do tax, you don't need them. But you're probably getting a lot more than the, I need forty hours for me. So I want you here focused on the content and what I can do to hopefully help you change your concept of pricing and the way you think about pricing. So what's our biggest pricing challenge over here? It looks like charging enough for my value is over fifty percent, guys. You're right. We don't understand the value. I don't care if you get a tax notice for a client and you have like all your letter templates and you write a letter, you get the letter out, which by the way, Claude and I are just in love, upload the notice, upload the proof that the thing had happened and it just creates that letter for me now. Like, it's just heaven. But anyway, that takes me now five minutes or maybe ten total instead of a half an hour. Should I charge them less for that? No, the value is getting rid of a penalty they just got assessed. First time abatement penalty for sixteen hundred dollars That's what they're getting and we struggle with charging for that. Know, a thousand bucks. My deal is I'm gonna write a letter, I'm gonna respond for you, it's a thousand dollars, okay? That's just where we're at. So charging it up for our value, knowing what competitors charge, okay? I mean, I'm always willing to share what I charge for things. Raising prices without losing clients. I understand that fear, I get it. There's more clients that we, and if you're struggling with getting clients, that may be a marketing issue, I'm not sure, but I'm getting calls, it's almost weekly where we're getting calls, somebody's referring someone over, you know, to help someone out. Creating consistent pricing across services, that's great. That's another really good one. And that's where standardization works really well and trying to keep up with things that are just standard. Vicky, definitely need to say charge enough for value and raising prices without losing clients. Yeah, Vicky, I'm with you, I get it. I totally hear you. I do know that once I took the jump and moved on, my life is just different, you guys. You could choose all of Samantha, that's great. Choosing all of them. It does look like charging enough for my value is the biggest challenge here. So what I am gonna challenge everyone to do from this moment forward, from this moment forward, I want to see you guys make a decision that for the next client that comes in your door from today forward, that your prices are going to increase. And I don't mean by twenty five or fifty bucks. If you're charging I'm gonna make numbers up. You're charging one thousand dollars for an S Corp tax return, that needs to go to seventeen fifty immediately. If you're charging two thousand, bring it to two thousand five hundred until you start. So that takes away that fear of losing a client because they're not yours yet anyway. So just make that change now so that as you move forward, and then work on the legacy clients and bringing up their prices. That can be a process, and that's okay too. Right? And it's just how we've gotta do it. So what's really making pricing hard, you guys? Like we said, you guys are on point with the survey. Forty five point seven percent difficulty quantifying value. And I just got to a point where I'm like, you know what? If I gotta sit in this seat and I can't be out there right now where it's absolutely beautiful and I can't go golfing, then there's a problem there. That means if I'm doing more work and charging less money, I wanna do less work and charge more money. Again, I'm not talking about gouging people, guys. I'm talking about I get stuff done. And if client needs something done, we get that done. And the value associated with you just calling your clients back or responding to an email is value I don't think you realize you offer. And I had a client who was, they pay me, I think, three thousand five hundred a year to do a business return and a personal return. Not a big deal. And I said, I'm moving to relationship pricing and it's minimum of seven fifty a month. What do you think? And Todd said to me, Dawn, are you telling me? Because he was using some other bookkeeping service to help him with questions. He did his own books. He does a pretty good job. He just had questions once in a while. And I said, Todd, for seven fifty a month's gonna be nine grand, my friend. He goes, Do you mean that if I email you and ask you a question or if I need to jump a call for ten minutes with you, you're gonna do that? I go, Absolutely, Todd. He goes, Done, I'm in. Nine grand a year. He saw the value. What he wanted was my attention. And because we work with so many clients, our hair is on fire. We can't give the value. If you're not given the value, you can't charge for it. How do we get you to be able to give that value? So important, right? So, forty one point eight percent said uncertainty about what others charge. I am not a big what are you charging, what are you charging, what are you charging? I'm charging what I know in order for me to do this work. This is how much money I need to be paid. I feel confident. I've been doing this for twenty eight years. I feel really good about that. But if you're not sure, I mean, I've given you some numbers on what we're charging over here. Fear of client pushback. Fear. We've gotta conquer the fear. We gotta get rid of the fear. What are we afraid of? It's just accounting, you guys. We're not performing heart surgery over here. We're doing accounting, though we are extremely responsible for the financial lives of the business owners and the individual taxpayers that we are interacting with. We do have a responsibility there. So I understand where that fear may be. Thirty seven percent inconsistent pricing across clients. We gotta make rules, guys. My pricing for S Corp return is two thousand five hundred dollars It's two thousand five hundred dollars for every S Corp. It's not two thousand five hundred for this person or two thousand five hundred for that person. I understand that maybe one S Corp might be a little bit lighter of an S Corp than another S Corp. That makes sense. If it gets more complicated, there's more factors. Maybe it's a partnership with twenty one rental properties versus a ten sixty five with two. That might be a little bit different. That's not what we're talking about here. We're just talking about the emotional roller coaster. We've lost our hair. Okay, Bob's lost his hair. So inconsistent pricing across clients, that is more of when we get our emotion involved. So I don't bring emotion into my practice unless absolutely warranted. If I have someone that calls the office and my staff always talks to new clients first, I don't talk to them first, and they are telling their story about how the husband has leukemia and they've been really struggling and they've got three years worth of returns to get caught up, I am going to be inconsistent with that. I'm probably doing those returns for free because that's an opportunity for me to give back and care and have empathy and compassion for someone who's struggling in a spot. But that's not the rule, you guys. The rule is consistency. And some people say thirty three point four percent say time required to scope and price the work. And that's where Ignition solves that problem. I'm just gonna tell you that right now. I go to create, so I get a new client situation, I'm gonna go create a proposal, bing, bing, bing. I have all my pricing in there standardized and I know when I'm gonna increase my prices. I go in, I change my prices. I do that sometimes twice a year, it depends. But the time it takes to scope and price the work, I'm looking at a ten forty. I've got three Schedule Es and a Schedule C. Alright, seven fifty for the Schedule C. We're gonna do five hundred for each of those. Alright, we're around three thousand five hundred bucks for this tax return. It doesn't have to be, I even know there's some people who are still charging by the hour. We gotta get rid of that entirely. So we have to get ourselves in a situation where we have the technology it takes to get through this stuff and stop thinking so much about it. We overthink, we kill it, we crush it. We're like, what are we doing here? We're so detail oriented in our skill, in our craft, which we should be, that sometimes we beat, and I don't think anyone should ever beat a horse, but we beat these dead horses to death over and over again. Let's move on. Let's start with doing something and increasing our prices and making that happen. So Judy says pricing on legacy clients when you have been seriously undercharging is the hardest. Judy, I'm with you one hundred percent. The key is you've gotta start at some point. And you've gotta figure out how to say, okay, listen, I've been charging you three hundred dollars for this tax return. I know there's people out there charging three hundred bucks for a tax return. Listen, it's way under market. It's not worth it. I always tell people, Listen, if I need to increase your prices, if I have to move you to another accounting firm who will do that at that price, I said, But I don't have any firms that I can refer you to who will only charge you that. Because the firms that I work with, the firms that I communicate with are charging more, and I need to bring you up fifty bucks. I'm gonna bring you up fifty bucks a year until we're at the right price point. And I'm with you, Judy. I agree. It's harder and harder. But if you lose them, the key is that's why I'm telling you starting today, start increasing those prices. Let's start getting the higher people in so you fear less about losing the ones that you've had forever that you've been charging hardly anything for. That's the whole point of starting today with a different mindset, for sure. Okay, so where do services stack up? So basic individual returns, sixty four percent are charging under eight hundred dollars That's shocking. Business tax returns, fifty two percent are charging a thousand to two thousand dollars. Okay. That's so far under the market, it's crazy. Because the minimum should be two thousand five hundred in my opinion. Business tax returns are not straightforward. There's a lot of rules and laws around a partnership return and what they can do on reimbursed partnership expenses. Are you helping them with that? Are we doing S Corp tax returns? Are we signing off on a reasonable comp analysis? That alone is two thousand five hundred dollars to do a reasonable comp analysis. Tax planning and advisory. Forty five percent are charging one thousand plus. This is part of why I moved to subscription because all of these things pretty much get included and they're priced accordingly, right? Lynn, so the two thousand five hundred is my minimum. If they have PTE, it's another one thousand to be able to plan out the pass through entity tax because here's the thing, we do the safe harbor and that's great and we set them up for success by having them automatically paid. But we do a mid year check on the PTE to see if we need to increase in maybe September, do a higher, another, maybe an additional payment. Then we do another one for January. That's gonna be at least another one thousand dollars for PTE planning for sure, right? Monthly bookkeeping, fifty eight percent charged two fifty to seven fifty a month. That at two fifty is no, absolutely not. Nope, no no. So the seven fifty a month, again, if we're doing their books, no one starts at seven fifty. If I'm just doing their taxes and doing their tax planning, reasonable comp if necessary, that's the seven fifty a month I'm talking about. When you come to bookkeeping and accounting, no way less than fifteen hundred a month to be able to at least do that bookkeeping and do it right, okay? Yes, we're gonna show that at the end. CFO controller services, fifty four percent charge fifteen hundred plus a month, okay? And that, again, I think that that's not unreasonable. I think if that was on top of what we're charging on a monthly basis for other things, because if you're doing cash flow planning, doing all that kind of stuff, fifteen hundred a month just for that service, I think is pretty good. Pretty good. This is US pricing, Wendy. This is US pricing. So from pricing guesswork to strategy because the data's telling us, right? Data's telling us where the market is but strategy is telling you where you belong. What is your strategy to make these changes? And like I said, I made my changes over the last five years now, it's been, I think, five years, where I changed the subscription pricing and then two years later, it was a year or two years later, I moved to prepay for tax returns. I don't think about money anymore. I don't think about it. I can do my proposals and send out a proposal in moments, getting it out, making sure the scope is correct. Again, under promising and over delivering. I don't make this whole huge detailed list of the things I'm gonna do for people. It's pretty straightforward. Any bonus that we do on top, we just had a situation as a matter of fact, thinking about a strategy. A client, they're on a fifteen hundred dollars a month plan, doing their accounting, tax planning, doing all the fix and everything that the last accountant did. That's always fun. They just got audited by the DOL because they were not paying their people properly, which he needs just a new client so we're still working through things for him. And I said, Chris, sorry man, but this is out of scope. This is not what we agreed to for the fifteen hundred a month. This is out of scope. This will be a separate project and you're gonna have to pay for that. Another example, having a tax person, a non filer, somebody hasn't filed in six years. Okay, the first thing is, do they have bookkeeping? That's scope one. We do the bookkeeping, get their books up to date. Scope two, get all those tax returns all up to date and done. Step three is dealing with all the collections, payment plans, voluntary disclosures. They are each a different scope in the project. So what's your strategy when you're making those proposals? That's a strategy and how you're gonna think through it. So mental shift, right? Stop selling time. There may be some of you in here who are still doing by the hour. And that's, for me, let's get into AI. A lot of people were all into the AI. When AI takes time and puts it back into your hands, that's what AI is gonna do for me. I want the AI to do the work and put the time back in my hands so what I'm more spending my time doing is talking to my clients and giving them that value because they're not gonna use AI. If you have clients that are dumping their tax returns into AI, run away from them. That's insane. What are you doing? But the time tracking burden is one thing, but the other thing is as you get better, as AI helps your general ledgers auto reconcile, all those types of things that are happening, are you gonna start charging less for that? Because you know how to use AI to save yourself time and maybe even be more accurate than you're being now. If you're selling, you get really good and you spend fifteen minutes on something, suspend an hour, you're just losing money hand over fist, right? What are we doing? Ruth, that's a great question. What if the bookkeeping is super easy? Exactly what we're talking about. A non profit condo board with low entries. Is two fifty still too low per month that it takes me three hours? And Ruth, that's my point. That's my point. Doesn't matter how long it takes you. Those condo associations have to have their reports ready for their monthly meetings, right? Business owners. I had a guy, guy just never gets back to us. But he's like, need a P and L and a balance sheet. I'm like, that's great, but we have no idea about these fifty transactions that we've been asking you for three months to give us. Now, that chasing thing's a whole another conversation. But what we do is we start to think our time is money, okay? Time is absolutely money. But as we get better, and yes, Ruth, you're good at the books, girl. You are killing it with the books. Hand it off to one of their people. What's gonna happen? Somebody who doesn't have an accounting background, that doesn't know bookkeeping. Might take them five or ten hours, number one. And number two, probably isn't gonna be right. Not so sure the accounting's gonna be right. Is there a balance sheet balance? They don't know how to do that. You're bringing your knowledge, your experience, your education to the table. Dollars can't put, it's hard to put that value, which is what everybody said in the survey. But it is if you start to realize it. I think that's the difference. The mental shift is realizing it may take me fifteen, three hours to do that bookkeeping. What is that worth to them? Three hours to do the bookkeeping. If they have accurate financials when they need them. Returns can be done when they need them, right? All those types of things. Mental shift, you've gotta stop selling your time. Delaying invoices, oh my goodness, I remember Monday mornings sending out all the invoices and praying that everybody would pay me so I could pay people on Friday. We don't do that anymore. Everybody gets paid on Wednesday. Everybody's getting paid on Wednesday. My money's in the bank between the first and the third of the month whenever their stuff processes. And when somebody signs their agreement, I mean, have money coming in throughout the whole month because I don't need it on the first. Whenever you sign your engagement letter, that's when the engagement starts. That's when your first payment is made, and it'll process on that day every month. We gotta think about, of course, waiting on payment is horrible. I probably took fifty years off my life from stressed out from money. And if you're doing that, if you're stressed out about money, I'm begging you to change your mind, to change your mindset on how you're doing this, right? The client isn't buying your minutes, they're buying your outcome. So in the condo association example, they're buying the outcome of accurate financial statements for their condo association members. And that is value, okay? And that's what we have to start thinking about. So what changed from the old way? What changed when pricing changed? For me, the reality check happened the old way. Chasing documents, chasing payments, work getting missed, stressed out, paid after the work was done, no money. That was my reality for like twenty two years of my business. That's how dumb I am. Okay? I look like I have it all together here, which nobody has it all together, by the way. Anyone says that their firm is perfect, it's not. Is my firm perfect? Heck no. It is absolutely not perfect. But I'm doing the best I can, and I'm making changes, and I'm doing things different because I'm not gonna go through the same crap I've been through for the prior years. I'm just not doing it. And I want every one of you guys to go through the same thing. Current practice. Now, clear client process. We have clear processes. Mikayla's been working her tail off in making sure our processes are working and it makes sense. Upfront payment, I'm not touching your tax return. I'm not looking at anything until you agree that you're gonna pay me to do so. That's obviously you have to take a look for the pricing. Don't get that confused. But I'm not actually gonna do any work until that happens. I'm not chasing people because they're paying for my value and they're paying good money. So it's more of a priority to them because they understand. People are paying you three hundred dollars for a tax return. You know when you're gonna get those documents? Whenever they feel like it. You know why? Cause it isn't a priority. They don't see the value in a tax return. I tell them, go do your own tax return. Go to H and R Block. I don't care because I don't wanna chase you for three hundred bucks. I'm sorry if that seems like cocky or whatever. I'm not. I am confident that if I'm going to be working with someone that they give me the same respect I give them and they see the value that I see and what I'm providing, that they see the same value. Better boundaries, boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. A client wants to work with me, they can't call me. If I'm out, I'm rolling, as a matter of it happened yesterday. I'm at a golf tournament. Met big Poppy yesterday. Was so exciting. Anyway, who's like, Hey, I'd love for you to be my accountant. No problem, that's great. We are taking new clients. I'm gonna give you the office number. You give Mikayla a call. She'll take care of it all for you, right? So boundary is Dawn doesn't do that. If Dawn does that, she jacks the whole process up. It all gets all muddled up after that. Better boundaries. What is in the scope and what's out of the scope and more predictable cash flow. This has just, I'm literally, you guys are not kidding, changed my life. So modern pricing models are already winning. People are moving away from hourly, right? And in this benchmark, only five percent use hourly pricing for tax prep. I would like that to be zero. I want it to be zero. I don't want anyone pricing by the hour for tax prep ever. I don't want anyone pricing by the hour for bookkeeping either. It's just watching your margins. Am I charging enough? My margins aren't high enough. My margins aren't forty five percent. I'm not happy. Fifty one percent use fixed fee or value pricing, which is a really thing that people have had, Ron Baker talks a lot about fixed fee or value pricing. Now we're onto the subscription. You shut the subscription off, man. You're done. We don't come back. If we don't work together, we're done. There's no returning at Powerful Accounting. Once that relationship is over, it's over, and that's kinda how we did it. So sixty four percent use fixed fee or value pricing for bookkeeping, and I love that. I love that people are starting to get away from that hourly pricing, so thank you for those guys that do that. Back work and cleanup work, Samantha. Again, I do it, I price it by the project. So if I know I have six years worth of, I had this one client, one bank statement, six years worth of work, five grand. I have a tool that we'll be announcing sometime soon where we can literally take those PDFs, stick them into a tool called Bridge Books, and Bridge Books will actually get those transactions all ready, all done through AI, and then pushed into QuickBooks for us. And so for five grand, those used to take us probably a week, probably thirty, forty hours to do that work is now taking us four to five with this tool that we're using. Does that mean I should not charge five grand that it would've taken me for the week? Or do I charge five grand and I'm just really slick and I got good tools that I use that make it go faster? You know what the client wants? They wanna get in compliance. They wanna get their books up to date. They wanna make sure that the IRS stops levying their paycheck or their bank accounts. So for five grand, they're like, yes, thank you. Right? I that's the, and I will also tell you, this is a really cool tool, a cool thing too, is that I had a client, I made this mistake last November. They wanted to do the bookkeeping themselves. And you know how long it took them? Six months. Would've taken us probably a day or so. And boy, did that drag them out? And the IRS did not like that. And I said, Well, I'm sorry, the client doesn't wanna pay for my services. And so therefore, the value wasn't there. They didn't see the value in it, but they sure did when the IRS was really knocking on the door. So we gotta think about those things. Data's gonna support your decisions, you guys. It's called Bridge Books. It's not out yet. It's gonna be out. I'll put it in the chat here, but it also brings in Venmo business and personal correctly and pushes it into QuickBooks the way it should be. No more bank feeds. So PDFs, multiple credit cards, it's really awesome. Anyway, data analysis, benchmark data, tech enabled insights, right, is gonna help with that professional judgment. You've got the judgment. The benchmark data, all the tech, that's great. That's data and analysis, but you still have the professional judgment of complexity and those kind of things that happen there. Poll number three, again, just wanna know, do you have the right tech setup to increase your fees this year? Like, guys, I'm just telling you right now, I had a client last, a new client last week. It's partnership return. It's gonna be five grand for the partnership, which is a few years worth. And then she just introduced this week that there's bookkeeping, we've just like stopped the project. But I literally went in to send my proposal out. I wanted three grand up front, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's all set up in Ignition. I don't even think about it, you guys. And you know what I do? Show up on Monday morning, I lay in my bed and I look at my, I open up my phone, I look at my Bank of America bank account, I look at my app and I'm like, oh look, another seven thousand dropped in my account today. That's where we stop worrying about paying our people and paying them well and buying something, a technology that is actually really good and efficient. Do you know what I'm saying? Invest in the technology that set you up for success. Be like, Oh, but technology, Dawn, your tech stack's so expensive. I don't care. My tech stack runs my firm so that I can enjoy things like going golfing yesterday and meeting big poppy. Those are the things I wanna do. You're gonna wanna do different things. Everybody's gonna wanna do different things. But what do you want your life to look like, you guys? You've gotta have the tech set up and you've gotta have it in place in order for you to be successful in your firm. So build a pricing matrix, not a guessing habit. That's one of the keys, right? Price by the factors that change the work. What are you doing? What type of client is it? Is it complex? How frequent do they wanna talk to you? What does the scope look like? What's the risk? That's a whole another conversation. What's the margin you want, right? I reverse engineered the pricing and I wanna make sure I leave some time for Connor to give you guys a demo, but reverse engineered the pricing strategy. What I did was I figured out how much I wanted to make, how much did my staff wanna make, how much were my subscriptions and all the things that I have. What is my insurance? What are all those costs? My overhead. I said, people, we need thirty grand a month. We can do thirty grand a month, we're at least breaking even, right? And we just kinda revert, all right, now we know we need this many clients. We shop for eighteen total that would accomplish this thirty thousand dollars a month goal. Was what our goal was the first year. And we accomplished that goal. It took us two months. We got up to the thirty thousand. A year later, we revisited it. We looked and we said, okay, we priced these people this way. We didn't really know what we were doing. Yeah, okay, remember that client that we were charging two thousand five hundred a month? She's got six entities. Let's break the entities out and let each entity pay their own. She was at thirty thousand dollars She's at one hundred thousand dollars a year with us because of all the multiple entity stuff. But you see, I didn't know what I was doing but you know what I did do? I did something. I changed something, Right? I accounted for inclusions, frequency, client expectations, and I said, you know what? And now we're at forty two thousand a month. And so we're at, like I said, we're doing seven fifty, dollars eight hundred thousand a year. Our costs are around half a million with everything that we have. So I've got two fifty to three hundred thousand, that's even counting my salary. Like two fifty, three hundred thousand dollars in profit over here. And that was because I just was so tired of not having money. Can we just be honest about it? I was tired of not having money. Am I in love with money? No, but what I'm in love with doing is going to golf tournament. Yes, I love golf, but helping children with diabetes be able to go to camp for a week in the summer so that their parents can have a week of knowing that they're at a place with people with doctors that can take care of their kids and their kids can have an experience that they would not have otherwise had. That's what money does for you guys. That's what it does. It's not about buying nice things. It's not about doing all this other stuff, man. It's about helping others and if you can't put your own mask on, can't help other people. I just wanna say that, okay? Because that's really key to me. So know your floor before you quote, right? Cost and delivery of the services two grand, target profits of twenty percent, two thousand five hundred. We know how to do all that stuff. But that's the reverse engineering that I came up with. If I need three hundred grand to run my firm, I need five hundred grand to run my firm and my target profit is what? Fifty percent? I know where I have to price things, you guys. I know where I have to price things. So know that floor before you quote, right? And it's critical. Package the value so the clients can choose, right? I did this. Hey, you want the basics? I'll give you the essentials. You wanna do the growth package? It's gonna be this much. You want the advisory package? Premium price? Pick three numbers. We started with seven fifty, fifteen hundred, two thousand five hundred, and then we have the custom where we have some clients at four thousand five hundred. But at least get yourself some basic three tier strategy, right? It's not gonna be a yes or no decision. We're giving them some options. Usually, I will call out the option I think they belong in. You know, there's some people I'm like, you can't even pick seven fifty. You're not qualified for seven fifty. It's just, there's too much complication. There's too many things we've gotta do. Your minimum mid tier value. And so we make those decisions and that's how we do it, right? Yes, Samantha, I hope you're over it, girlfriend. And yeah, being good to your clients for so many years, we're these martyrs, we to take care of the world and we're just gonna do that for everybody while we suffer to death. While we suffer. Not a good plan. It's not a good life plan. It's just not. So think about packaging value. Individual tax client example. I've got tax prep only, tax prep with transcript monitoring if you do that service or a tax return with notice management, payment plan, just examples of things that you can do where you give them levels. Are you only sending a tax return prep only? First of all, are you even sending proposals out? Number one. Number two, are you just sending for tax prep? Why don't you give them upsell options? You know what? There's a tool called Tax Help Software in Canopy. These tools that will actually go auto fetch these transcripts and you can just look at them once a month. AI will take those in Claude and tell you where we're at and what's happening. Of course, the model's gotta learn. Don't get too ahead of myself here, but think about that. Monitoring their transcripts and helping them do that, right? And how it happens and how it operates. Bruce, it's a great question. So the same pricing tier for every client. So no. Well, so what I do, the tax return, individual tax return obviously is gonna be different depending if they have Schedule E, Schedule Cs, seventeen ks ones, all those kinds of things on that basic tax prep only part is key, So that's gonna be its price. But transcript monitoring, dollars two fifty a month. I'll do two fifty a month for me to monitor your transcript. They would pay the basic amount and they would pay two fifty a month on top of that. If they wanted me to handle notice management and get them into a payment plan, I tell them, Listen, you want me to do because I know you owe money. I know you're gonna owe money, owe money every year. Do you want me to handle your notice when the notice comes in, get you on a payment plan? How do you wanna do that? It's gonna be one thousand bucks for me to handle all that now. If you don't wanna pay for it upfront and you think now I'll deal with it after the fact, it's gonna cost you two thousand five hundred dollars for me to deal with all that. And I'm very upfront about it. So we kinda like, as far as like the businesses go, we're pretty standard with, and I know pretty well where people are gonna land and we've stopped taking on bookkeeping clients. We don't take on anymore. But we do have standard pricing for tax returns and planning and things like that. So scope is gonna protect your price, okay? Because if the scope isn't defined, you're gonna be donating your time, period, okay? So scope is gonna protect that price. My example about the Department of Labor audit. The scope is I'm doing your returns, we're doing this, we're overseeing bookkeeping, we're not doing bookkeeping. If you want us to take over your bookkeeping, the pricing is gonna change. Very clear on how that scope works. DOL audit comes around, we're moving on, right? Protect our margins by defining what's included and what's excluded, but be careful about not being too detailed. I would warn you about that. What triggers an add on? Well, something outside of the scope. Well, didn't expect to do that. Do you want us to do your annual workers' comp audit? That's gonna be another price. If you've handled it in the past, if you want us to take it over, that's gonna be something different. So just thinking through those types of things. When is payment gonna get collected if you are a tax preparer telling you right now, start with twenty twenty seven, get paid up front. If you have people on extension right now and you haven't gotten paid by them, change it right now. Hey, listen, it's whatever today is, right? September fifteenth's around the corner and October fifteenth's around the corner. Who wants to do returns on the fifteenth or the fourteenth or the thirteenth or the twelfth? Nobody. Why? We rush. This week, send those proposals out. Get your proposals into Ignition, send them out, and make the people prepay. You know what, dude? You knew taxes were due March fifteenth or September fifteenth. You still haven't even connected with me. But you're gonna come walking in the door on the tenth and you folks are gonna say, You know what? I need the money and I'm gonna do the returns. And you're gonna support their terrible and poor behavior. We need to change that, right? What I like the most about Ignition is how easy it is for me to send proposals out without emotion. I'm just going in and I'm being factual. This is gonna cost this person this because here are the factors that I've evaluated. Click, click, click. My templates are set up. Engagement letters are set up. They have to pay. And that's our indicator. If they sign and pay, it's the indicator that they are a client and that we're gonna do the work. If they don't sign, let's say I send a proposal out today and they don't sign it today, they don't sign it tomorrow, and they don't sign it the next day, I've decided I no longer care. I'm done caring. You came to me, you have a need. You need a service. You need it from me. I'm not chasing you. And after a few days, that proposal will expire and the proposal's gonna change because you've already indicated that you're a PIA client and so I'm gonna charge you more. And so that's how the confidence and that's how we wanna handle that. Again, communicating the fee increase, lead with your value. What are you gonna do in order for us to do this? I actually admitted to people I wasn't doing things I should've been doing because I didn't think they wanted to pay for it. I'm like, I'm sorry guys, I should be doing this. I haven't because I don't think you wanna pay for it. I don't know if you see value. Do you see value? Have you ever asked your client that? I'm pretending the client's over here. Have you ever asked your client, do you see value in what I do? Like, what do you think about it? Have that conversation. It's a great way to open up those things. Okay, I gotta stop now. All right, let's bring Connor in. Let's bring Connor in. This deck, you've got some good nuggets in here. You see my emails, all kinds of stuff you guys can have. Pain in the anonymous area is what a PAA client is, Jose. So, okay. Connor, take it. Okay, thank you. Can everyone hear me? Don, can you hear me? I can hear you perfectly. Okay, beautiful. If I had a walkout song, then that would be perfect. But let's jump right into it. Don, you're amazing. I love the motivation. If I could hire you to coach my Beer League hockey team up here in Toronto, Canada, then I'd have you in the dressing room getting us pumped up right away. But let's jump right into the Ignition demo. I'm just going to start presenting, start screen share. We are going to share the entire screen. Okay. Amazing. Standby. Awesome. Can I get a thumbs up that my screen is successfully being shared here? Good to go. Okay. Awesome. So jumping into Ignition. What we're going to go through first is the AI price insights tool that launched, this year, which will allow you to compare your service prices like we've discussed in this webinar to benchmark pricing. This is anonymous billing data that Ignition taps into from our client base of over eight thousand five hundred businesses, where we can take your firm profile, your firm size, and your geographic location, And with our security profile, anonymously inform you and give you that gut check on, am I charging too low? Am I charging too high? So this is how it works. You come into the Ignition platform and you come into services, where we have our service library, our line items, scope of work, and the price per service. Now, I'm going to keep this very simple. And I've just selected a very basic bookkeeping service right here. As you can see on the screen, I have, the line item that would appear on the invoice. I'm charging four twenty dollars per month in this. I don't know if it's too high or if it's too low, and the scope of work. So this is what the service will include based on the conversation that I have had with the client. How often is this being billed? I'm going to do monthly billing. I want it to recur on the first of every month. And if there's any other contacts that might affect the price. So if you want to prompt the actual AI tool within Ignition, if there's a very niche element to this service based on the call with the client, put that in right here. Okay, let's run this insight. It's going to take a minute. What I'm going to do for the sake of time is toggle to a client's experience of an Ignition proposal. And I'm actually using Dawn's relationship pricing template that lives inside Ignition that all of you can access alongside the other templates that are in Ignition. But if you were to send a proposalengagement letter to a client, this is what that client's experience would be like to view a professional proposal. They would see your branding, the client's name. If you'd like to include a video in the proposal, you can do so and a quick note to the client. As we move through, you're looking at a three tiered fixed fee proposal package with three options. And these are right from Don. I believe we first got this from you back in twenty twenty four and it's been updated over the years. But you can see the recommended package that she will recommend CFO foresight. We're doing monthly two thousand five hundred dollars a month. I've just added in to show everyone on this demo that you can add in multiple service line items, whether it's one off, variable pricing based upon completion, or fixed pricing, all within three different packages. Now, if you're not offering three packages, then the proposal will take you directly to the scope of work. So here is everything that can be expected to be received in the engagement. And when we talk about scope creep, like clients asking us for extra work that's not included, this is where we're setting that ground rules and that foundation that, hey, this is what you're paying for. This is what you're going to be receiving in terms of services. And when it starts to get outside of the scope, then you could leverage an ignition change order, or you have just the fallback to have a conversation about the right price. So maybe I'll compare the different packages and I'm gonna go with the middle package and I'll continue next. If there's any add ons, you can increase revenue and scale by giving your clients an a la carte, shopping experience. And we'll go through. Okay, here's the pricing. In this case, it's just a fixed price every month, fifteen hundred. And we're gonna collect that first payment on acceptance. Meaning, once they sign and pay right here, because with Ignition, we are running zero account receivable firms on the platform. We are collecting payment details upfront. Now you can choose when you want to bill. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to surprise all your clients with a bill every single month on the same day. If you'd like to send out the bill with a collection delay of two days, you can set that up based on your requirements. But we always recommend requiring payment upfront. Next, we'll sign off on the engagement letter, so your legalese right here. And if you have any other additional documents, I threw in a seven thousand two hundred sixty disclosure agreement, but this could be an NDA, a power of attorney, you name it. We want you to be able to get all of your documents signed in one workflow so we can consolidate proposal, scope of work, quote, payment collection, and signatures all in one place. And what's great is that once this proposal is signed, you can outline post onboarding steps, whether that's scheduling a first call, logging into your portal to start sending you over tax documents. If you use another tool that Ignition integrates with, like FinancialSense or Carbon, or CCH, or Thomson Reuters product, then Ignition can push information into your practice management tools to help streamline the workflow. But we're here today to talk about setting the right prices and increasing prices over time. So I just onboarded with Don and I signed for fifteen hundred dollars. Twelve months from now, how is Don going to increase my fee? And how are we going to do this in bulk consistently at scale? What we'll do is we will go into proposals. And from here, we're going to go into all the contracts that are ending soon. And we can see that I've got sixty contracts that are coming up for renewal. I'm going to select all sixty in bulk, click Renew. And don't worry, I'm going to go back to that AI price insight and show you what the result was. But while we're on the topic of renewals and price increase, what we're doing right now is recreating sixty proposals and engagements all at once. Do you know how many of our clients used to have to do this one by one in PDF and pop that into a DocuSign and their admin staff would basically spend the entire month of November renewing contracts? So it says that the original value was four hundred and thirty thousand dollars That would be great, isn't it? And we are going to do a six percent price increase and round our prices up. .