Business Strategy for CPA's Geraldine Carter

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How can CPAs grow their accounting practice when they’re over capacity, underutilizing their talents and not providing optimal client support? 
Many CPA firms still rely on the hourly billing business model, where the firm has to log more work hours providing services to increase revenue. It focuses on hours and deliverables, not on results and value.
A compelling alternative is the subscription business model, where the provider enables serial transformations to the buyer, and continually adds value to the experience. The subscription model creates an opening for predictable, recurring, higher margin revenue. 
In this week’s episode, I talk about the subscription model with my guest, Ron Baker. 
Ron is the founder of VeraSage Institute—the leading think tank dedicated to educating professionals internationally, and is a radio talk-show host on the www.VoiceAmerica.com
show: The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy.
Ron has authored seven best-selling books, including: The Firm of the Future; Pricing on Purpose; Measure What Matters to Customers; and Implementing Value Pricing. His latest book, co-authored with Paul Dunn, Time’s Up!: The Subscription Business Model for Professional Firms, was published in November 2022.
In this two-part conversation (episodes 233 and 234), we talk about:
Why Ron wrote his latest book, Time’s Up Pricing strategy and positioning  Subscription model and DPC (direct primary care) doctors How the subscription business model can help CPAs transform their clients’ life


Highlights:
— “If you go to the market with a common offering, you're going to command a common price.”
— “The true value of accountants lie in guiding transformations. They have the power to advance their customers.”
— “To differentiate, CPAs should be able to guide the customer to the desired future state.” 
 

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Many accountants and CPAs (and business owners!) struggle to manage their time and use it to get done what they want. 
When they lose a grip on time, the tendency is to work more hours than they want to. 
Here today to talk with me about this is Dawn Goldberg, the author of “The Smarter Accountant.”
Dawn shares how accountants and CPAs can get better and more effective with their time. 
It includes 5 simple steps:
1. Plan your time. 
2. Avoid running off of to-do lists. 
3. Manage your mind before, during, and after. 
4. Follow through on your plan. 
5. Assess so that you can learn from your experiment. 
 
Highlights:
— “Working off of a to-do list is the most ineffective way to manage your time because the human brain gets very overwhelmed with a list of things to do, because it cannot put things into context.” 
— “Planning saves so much time. When you make decisions ahead of time you reduce decision fatigue throughout the week.” 
— “You absolutely have to first learn how to manage your mind before you can manage your time.”
— “Our brain thinks everything is urgent and so important. So we have to decide on purpose what is important.” 
— “You will be amazed at how much more you can get done if you put a boundary around your time.”
 
Connect with Dawn:
Website: https://thesmarteraccountant.com/
Podcast: https://cpamoms.com/podcasts/
 
Episode mentions:
193 Create the Exact Business You Want: Introducing The Model
https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/193
218 Mindset Coaching for More Powerful Results, with Emma Richter
https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/218
 
Dawn’s book:
The Smarter Accountant: How To Eliminate Stress and Overwhelm, Create More Time, Gain a Competitive Advantage, and More!
https://www.amazon.com/Smarter-Accountant-Eliminate-Overwhelm-Competitive/dp/B0B7QFYW8N

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Lots of people don’t like change. They have enough going on, thank you very much, and one more thing to change is one more thing they have to learn, and remember to do differently. 
Change, seems like work. 
If we like our currently reality, then there may not be a need to change. 
But many people don’t like their current reality. They want things to change, but don’t want to change things. 
Because they don’t like change. 
I want you to know what change is. I want to unpack it for you, so that it stops being something to avoid or resist or dislike. I want to unpack it for you, so that in seeing what it is, you can make your experience of change easier for you, you can change things more quickly, and better, and eventually, learn to enjoy change. 
Change doesn't have to be this mysterious thing – once we unpack it, we can see how it works. 
Here is change, unpacked, in seven stages.
Learn to observe progress as you move through seven stages. 
And once you know the seven stages, it gets way easier to know where you are in the progression, and you know what stage is next. 
 
Here are the seven stages of change:
Stage 1: Not aware at all.
Stage 2: Aware but believing that you're powerless to change anything.
Stage 3: Aware, and believing you can change things, but aware only after the fact. 
Stage 4: Aware in the moment, but it happens so fast, that you don't change it in the moment. 
Stage 5: Aware that it's happening in the moment and change it while it's happening. 
Stage 6: See it coming and prevent it. 
Stage 7: Permanent change.
 
I hope understanding and appreciating the seven stages of change helps you befriend the change.

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Not all accountants and CPAs get stressed during tax season. They've got their systems down. Stress isn't their go-to thing. 
But for many CPAs and accountants, stress is a common experience. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. 
Here to talk with me about how to go from being stressed to not being stressed in tax season is my guest, Dawn Goldberg.
Dawn Goldberg has been a CPA in public accounting for over 30 years, as well as a mom for over 27 years. She has worked for large firms like Deloitte & Touche and Ernst & Young as well as smaller firms. Dawn is also the author of “The Smarter Accountant – How To Eliminate Stress and Overwhelm, Create More Time, Gain A Competitive Advantage, And More!”
 
Highlights:
—  “Tax season is stressful, is actually an optional thought.”
—  “Accountants have this badge of honor. If we're not overworking or not stressed, then we must not be very good at what we do.”
—  “In coaching jargon, the intentional model is about thinking thoughts on purpose that are going to create the feeling that you want to generate, that will lead to the actions that you want to be taking, that will create eventually the result that you actually want to have.”
—  “Ask yourself this: Do you like what that thought will create if you keep it?”
—  “Using the fuel of focus gets me much better results than the fuel of stress.”


Connect with Dawn:
Website: https://thesmarteraccountant.com/
Podcast: https://cpamoms.com/podcasts/
 
Episode mentions:
193 Create the Exact Business You Want: Introducing The Model
https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/193
218 Mindset Coaching for More Powerful Results, with Emma Richter
https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/218
 
Dawn’s book:
The Smarter Accountant: How To Eliminate Stress and Overwhelm, Create More Time, Gain a Competitive Advantage, and More!
https://www.amazon.com/Smarter-Accountant-Eliminate-Overwhelm-Competitive/dp/B0B7QFYW8N

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Would you love to get paid in full up front for tax returns?
There’s a long history of paying for your tax return when you pick it up at your CPAs office, or when they send the invoice, which might be weeks or months after you did the work. 
Despite knowing the benefits of getting paid in full up front:
 - You can have a clearer sense of how much of your capacity is now paid and on the books, and how much more you need to sell
 - You have clients who have agreed to your price, so you don’t have send invoices and duck for cover
- You don’t have a pile of A/R, dangling out there in space, that you need to burn time tracking down
- You’re no longer held hostage by client you want to fire, but you don’t want to fire them until they pay you, for the last 3 years
 - You have access to and use of the cash, and cash is queen
You still get hung up on 3 common objections, which are:
1. I haven’t done it this way before, I don’t know how to do it 
2. Clients aren’t used to paying this way
3. I'm worried about underpricing, I don’t know how long returns take, I can’t price if I don’t know how long it’s going to take, what if they show up with some surprise, what if I get killed on scope creep. 
Each of these objections may have some validity. But each objection can be overcome – and I walk you through how, in this episode.

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Can you tell what this is?
Sugar, unbleached enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), palm oil, cocoa (processed with alkali), high fructose corn syrup, leavening (baking soda and/or calcium phosphate), salt, soy lecithin, chocolate, artificial flavor.
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Would you pay $4.25 for two sleeves of them?
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If you’ve ever bought Oreos, then yes. :)
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Most regular buyers cannot reverse engineer their way from the ingredient list, to the product, to what the product does.
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Oreos, satisfy your sweet tooth craving.
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Regular buyers also face the following ingredient list:
Document review, secure file exchange folder, calls, projections, calculations, planning, strategy, preparation, state return, estimates, portal, filing, emails, correspondence.
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Most regular buyers cannot reverse engineer their way from the ingredient list, to the product, to what the product does.
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What it is:
Gold-level tax prep and filing
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What it does:
Get taxes off your mind, so you can do something fun with your weekend.
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Next time you’re in the cookie aisle, stand before the Oreos and imagine the casing with only the ingredients listed. No Oreo, no glass of milk. No dunk. No quench.
Just an ingredient list.
In black and white.
Flour, sugar, niacin, palm oil, leavening.
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Now imagine your client.
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Now imagine the list of a la carte ingredients you sell.
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Now you can imagine what your client might be experiencing.
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For some, a milk-dunked Oreo is a heavenly experience. 
 
For some, painless, seamless tax prep is a heavenly experience. 
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Sell, what it does.
 
Sell, the experience. 
 
Not, the ingredient list.