One of our favorite guests is back: Geraldine Carter! Tom and special guest co-host, Hannah Hood, chat with Geraldine to discuss the importance of niching down and specializing in serving a specific market to attract clients who value their services. Geraldine shares valuable insights on how to communicate value to clients and navigate value-based conversations. She also emphasizes the importance of understanding and articulating the value of accounting services to clients, as well as the subjective nature of value. The episode concludes with a discussion on setting boundaries and managing client expectations in the accounting profession.
“One of the pros of niching is that it facilitates being able to dial in your process and create more consistent results for your clients. And when your results for your clients are more consistent, it becomes much easier to advocate, to articulate, the value that you're creating, and you get more confident in your ability to deliver those results because you've systematized it and you've seen it again and again.” Geraldine Carter
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intro (00:00:00) - Welcome to the Modern CPA Success Show, the podcast dedicated to helping accounting firms stay ahead of the curve. Our mission is to provide you with the latest and greatest insights on cutting edge tools, innovative marketing strategies, virtual CFO services and alternative billing methods. Join us as we change the way people think about accounting.
Tom (00:00:23) - Hannah, how are you doing today?
Hannah (00:00:24) - I'm doing well, Tom. How are you?
Tom (00:00:26) - I'm doing great. So we've got a good upcoming podcast episode right here. You want to tell us a little bit about kind of what you thought was one of the biggest things that you took from it?
Hannah (00:00:36) - This is a value packed episode. I feel like Geraldine gave us some really great nuggets to take away some tangible action items. We talked through some tangible questions that you can ask your clients to unpack the value that you give to those clients to be able to lead a value based conversation that is leaning towards a value based structure for your firm. And I think that it is awesome that she has. Can I start over? Sorry.
Tom (00:01:06) - Like, yeah, I think it was really good. I'll get.
Hannah (00:01:08) - In. It felt like I was talking in a circle. Sorry.
Tom (00:01:10) - That's what I always do. I often say I just think I'm just so articulate and start doing intro and just trip all over myself.
Hannah (00:01:15) - Yeah, that's exactly. That's how I felt.
Tom (00:01:17) - Okay, cool. Are you ready?
Hannah (00:01:19) - Yes.
Tom (00:01:21) - Hannah, how are you doing today?
Hannah (00:01:22) - I'm good. How are you?
Tom (00:01:24) - I'm doing really well. I'm excited for our listeners to listen to this episode of the podcast. I'm curious, any particular big takeaway that you had for what people are about to listen to?
Hannah (00:01:33) - Yeah, I was really excited to hear Geraldine's tips for communicating our value to clients and how oftentimes that's difficult to do and why it's difficult. And she gives us some tangible action items to be able to navigate those conversations. So I'm excited for the listeners to learn more about that. What did you think about it, Tom?
Tom (00:01:54) - I thought it was great and as a guest, I mean, she has an experience of working with CPAs directly as a business owner and that leading to an experience of now coaching and working directly with the CPA profession.
Tom (00:02:07) - So I think she's got a lot of credibility. And the way she talks about how CPAs over and over, I'm just like, Yep, that sounds a lot like the way I feel, the way I've heard other accountants feel, things like that. So think people get a lot out of that as well.
Hannah (00:02:20) - Agree.
Tom (00:02:21) - Good. Well, let's go ahead and move on to the episode. Hope people really enjoy it.
Tom (00:02:25) - Okay. Welcome to our episode of the Modern CPA Success Show. We've got a returning guest today with Geraldine Carter, and I'm really excited for this conversation. We're about to have my co-host today. Hannah is one of our virtual CFOs. She works with us here at VCFO for I said that completely wrong. I'm going to start this again. I always think I'm so good until I start to an intro and then I screw everything up. Okay. Welcome to our episode of the Modern Success Show. Our guest today, Geraldine Carter, is a returning guest and we're very excited for this conversation.
Tom (00:03:01) - My co-host, Hannah Hood, is a virtual CFO here at the Virtual CFO, presented by Summit with Anders Hannah. Welcome to our program today.
Hannah (00:03:11) - Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Tom (00:03:14) - I'm Tom Walton. I'm also one of the virtual CFOs here. So our guest. So Jody and Carter had previous jobs as an adventure travel guide. And she also is a co-founder of Climate Ride and she was our CFO. And I'm excited to hear more about this story because as her CFO, her experience with her CPA actually led her to a totally different career path. Geraldine, welcome. And can you tell us just a little bit more about that story and kind of what happened there?
Geraldine (00:03:40) - Sure. Yeah.
Geraldine (00:03:41) - And hi, Tom. Hi, Hannah. It's great to be back with you.
Geraldine (00:03:43) - So the short version is that, like you said, I co-founded a business with a friend in 2008. I was about 35 because of my engineering background. I fell into the managing the money role and we were an events based company.
Geraldine (00:03:57) - We grew quite quickly. Before we knew it, we were, in terms of revenue, bringing in more than $1 million. And I found myself alone and in the dark to try and figure out the money piece my accountant was charging 35 bucks an hour. She was way overworked. She was doing first in, first out. I had questions. She didn't have time to answer them. And my CPA was somebody who I met with annually just to handle the taxes and everything. And what I found in that experience was that there were so much to learn, not just about getting the business off the ground and not just about understanding the math and the money, the math. I could handle, the money I could handle. But the taxes, the forecasting, how much does it cost to hire a staff person? What's all the regulation you need to put in place? How do you get somebody on payroll and how much is it going to cost me? When can I afford to hire somebody? And all of that sort of modeling for the future was all up to me.
Geraldine (00:04:49) - I was on my own and my advice for my accountant was use the QuickBooks budgeting tool, which is at the time it was useless. So I felt, you know, I could handle figuring it out, but it cost me a lot of time in the business and it cost me, you know, doing it between 8 and 11 p.m. once the rest of my day had settled down. So I think as buyers of accounting services, there's so much room for a higher value high touch service today, obviously much higher price for your business owners who really need it and can make good use of it. So that's what got me to where I am in the accounting space, working with accountants and CPAs who are trying to make the transition to help their buyers. The kind of buyer that I was to help serve their buyers at a higher level and of course charge a premium for that level of service and the value that comes along with it.
Tom (00:05:42) - Yeah, that's a great story. I'm sure emotionally that was hard to go through where I would think you'd be repeating saying surely someone else has forecasted before and could give a guidance here.
Tom (00:05:50) - Don't have to figure this out, but it sounds like what you're finding is at least when you ask your CPA, they weren't telling you, of course we've got we can help you do this.
Geraldine (00:05:57) - There was definitely no there was not a we can help you do this.
Tom (00:06:01) - Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, That's a real pivotal thing.
Hannah (00:06:06) - Speaking of value based pricing, I know that is a buzzword in our industry. However, if you ask an accountant to articulate their value to their clients, they often have a hard time doing that. Why do you think it is?
Geraldine (00:06:20) - It's a great question. I think one of the reasons is that because when we're good at our craft, it's really easy to just be good at our craft and think that people understand the value of our craft when it's applied. So if I come in and I do accounting for you and I give you these numbers, that you can take it from there and translate the numbers into business decisions. And I think the buyers of accounting services and techs cannot connect the dots in the way that the accountant can.
Geraldine (00:06:53) - The accountant, the CPA is schooled. They've studied for years. They've been working in this way for years, if not decades. And they understand intuitively how the dots all connect up, but the buyer does not. So the accountant, it's easy to assume that the buyer sees the value, but oftentimes they don't. And another piece that's difficult is that value is subjective and it's in the eye of the beholder, right? So every person sees value differently. So if you see a beautiful garden, but the other person, your buddy next to you doesn't think it's beautiful, you're not going to be able to convince them that it's beautiful. Same goes for anything. Monet's Water Lilies or going to Daytona 500 or the World Series or the Masters. If you think golf is amazing, but your buddy thinks it's dead boring, you're not going to be able to convince them of the value of tickets to the Masters. So each person values things differently and it's subjective and it also changes over time. So something that you didn't value six months ago, like an accountant to keep your money organized in your business because you didn't want to drop 900 bucks a month because you're starting up and you don't have money to spend.
Geraldine (00:08:06) - Now, suddenly six months later, when you have lots of money coming in. And because you didn't spend the money, your books are a mess and you don't have any clarity about your money. Now, suddenly that $900 a month to spend for an accountant to keep your books clean suddenly you have a new view of the value of those $900 to keep your money organized. So value also for this very same thing changes over time. And even money itself is subjective when it comes to value. You think that $20 is $20 and has the same value, but $20 to a person with empty pockets holds a lot of value compared to the very same $20 to a person whose pockets are overflowing. Even money. A $20 bill has subjective value and then time has subjective value. Some people have a lot of time and no money, and some people have a lot of money in no time and everywhere in between. So there are, when it comes to accounting and advisory and fractional and fractional controller, your buyers value all kinds of different things.
Geraldine (00:09:13) - And that value is subjective. It changes over time. So from buyer to buyer, if you especially if you have clients who are all over the map, manufacturing, retail, e-commerce and a physical therapist, establishing the value for each of those buyers is going to be enormously difficult, enormously difficult. They will assess the value differently because they have they are all in different situations. So when it comes to value pricing, in order to assess the value, in order to help understand how a client values your service, it requires having a conversation with each one of them to determine the value. And when we're too busy as providers, we don't make time for that conversation. And when we don't make time for the conversation, we can't understand the value. And if you can't understand the value, then you sure can't value price.
Tom (00:10:05) - That's a great description in the conversations. And that was the one I was thinking when it's subjective, of course you have to find out individually what it looks like. Do you think it's some questions? So if you ask someone the value, that can be a potentially an awkward question or maybe someone hasn't thought about it before.
Geraldine (00:10:21) - Yeah.
Tom (00:10:22) - What kind of things would you suggest if you're talking to a client to really understand to them what's important?
Geraldine (00:10:27) - So if you ask the question, what is the value of this to you, chances are good they're not going to come up with a very useful answer. So we come at it from the back door and you can ask the why questions, which are Why me? Why now? Why in this manner? And what we do with these questions is play a little bit of devil's advocate and set it up like, listen, I'm just trying to understand why. What about this is meaningful to you or is valuable to you so that I can make sure that in working together that we get you what you need. And, you know, I want to know where your dartboard is on the wall. And so it might sound like I'm trying to talk you out of working with me, but really, what I'm trying to understand is what's most important to you? So why me? There are a thousand CPAs in Dallas.
Geraldine (00:11:12) - Why did you pick me? And they'll probably say something. Well, if they say, Well, you know, I just Googled you and you were the first one on the list. Well, you know your answer. That's you don't have a lot of value relative to the other CPAs around the corner. But if they say you came highly recommended, when I said I needed to talk to somebody who was a specialist in flipping real estate investments in Indianapolis, your name veryboedy said that I had to talk to you. You were the guy. So now you know that they value that you're the specialist and you're the one who knows everything about flipping real estate in Indianapolis and that they perceive that having specialized expertise is valuable to them. For some reason. We need to keep digging and find out what that reason is. You can ask why now? Like why not six months ago? That would have been a great time to change CPAs. Right now it's the middle of tax season. Right now it's December.
Geraldine (00:12:01) - The holidays are coming. Right now it's summertime. Let's all go to the beach. Why now? And they might say something like, well, we're doing we're pivoting in our business and we have this huge growth plan and we need to have clean numbers and we need to work with somebody who's a pro and who we can get a hold of. So we have to do this now because we have a big growth plan to get going on next quarter. If they say, well, you know, I just felt like I was kind of bored with my CPA, then, you know, that maybe now is not that valuable to them. Right? Right. And if you say why in this manner, like, why not just go to bench or why not use FreshBooks or why not use wave or why not just have your spouse do it? And they're going to say, oh, no, I can't have my spouse do it. We tried that. We almost got divorced. Or they might say, No way, I can't do automated.
Geraldine (00:12:46) - You know, why not use TurboTax? Why use somebody? Why use a CPA in person when you can just use TurboTax? It's only 4.95 or 1495 and they say, no, no, no, no, no. And they will tell you why not that way they'll say, I can't do automated. I just have too many things going on. I don't understand it. I don't trust it. And I need somebody I want to talk to a real person because a real person is going to take the time to understand my situation and make sure that I'm doing everything right and have everything buttoned up. And they're going to make sure that I haven't forgotten everything. So they will tell you why it's valuable. We need to simply tune our rabbit ears to be listening for the words that they say in they're in the buyer's mind why it's valuable to them. Once you learn how to have that conversation and listen for what's important to them, then you can begin to assess the value.
Tom (00:13:33) - Yeah, that's a great example.
Tom (00:13:35) - I have a new client who is on with us who has said a number of times the main reason he switches because non responsiveness by his previous accountant. Yeah. And he's mentioned enough times. I can tell how much it bothers him, but it's really cute up to me that when he asks questions I make sure and it's nice because I'm like, There's a really low bar if just answer your question. Yeah, but he's told me that's really important to him. Yeah. To have that done. And so that's been a really helpful thing. And we've also being in a niche, we've had people say, Hey, what we want from you is you work with digital agency, so we really want that experience. And so in the same thing they're telling us what's important.
Geraldine (00:14:07) - Yeah, yeah. And your clients, there's chances are excellent that clients are on the hunt, prospects are on the hunt for an accountant or CPA who they can get a hold of because there's so many right now who are so busy, who are overbooked beyond capacity, who have said yes to more clients than they can possibly serve at too low of a price, which has set themselves up to be unable to respond to their clients in a way that's useful.
Geraldine (00:14:36) - And the client, if they're if they have a business that's moving relatively quickly, that client is looking for some answers, some numbers in order to be able to make a business decision. And if the CPA doesn't get back to them until in inside 2 or 3 weeks, that ship has sailed. Right. And now you've used your time, but you haven't provided the value and you've almost decreased the value because you followed up with the client. And that decision was made ten days prior. And now your client is like, Oh, this is not working for me. So if in terms of pricing, when it comes to value, I know that access is a squishy, nebulous thing, but it can absolutely be compensated for. It can be captured with your pricing. And I think it's one of the more underutilized ways to capture the value that you create for your clients is capturing it when capturing the access and your client's ability to get a hold of you.
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Tom (00:16:13) - I've heard you give an example of how you coached someone in doing that. Can you tell a little bit about that? When you look at what they have on their plate and maybe starting from a place of not not having access and how you work through that solution?
Geraldine (00:16:24) - Yeah. So I had a I'm working with somebody in a one on one capacity who's niched into seven and eight figure nonprofits and the what her clients need by and large is the same because she's already niched which makes it really easy in a way to separate your bronze, silver, gold and provide the same level of line item deliverables, if you will, but charge a premium for very good access and charge a platinum premium for high touch access and to vary the pricing by a significant factor.
Geraldine (00:17:01) - The prices are in the $70,000 range for its like fractional stack accounting services and CFO and simply by varying the access and changing up the response times and how and if you can put time on my calendar and if you you know do you email or can you call and get the office line or do you get my cell phone, which is in the top level package? We're looking at a difference between 70,000, 90,000, 120,000. By doing the exact same amount of work effectively, but simply by varying the speed and response time and white glove, if you will, level of access. So that translates to a lot of dollars for your clients, especially when they are operating seven and eight figure business with businesses where or even nonprofits where fast access and fast turnaround time has big financial impacts because there are we don't want things to bottleneck up behind waiting for the CPA.
Tom (00:18:02) - Yeah. When you mentioned the and you mentioned at the beginning, many accountants have too many clients who don't pay enough. So from an accountant perspective, I'm hearing 70,120.
Tom (00:18:12) - So for someone's not willing to pay $50,000 for me to promise to email to respond to emails more quickly. And my guess is in your example, you're going to say that there were people willing to say, yes, that access is worth that difference.
Geraldine (00:18:24) - Sure, you have to know who your buyers are, right? This person that I'm citing has a certain level of buyer who is willing to pay for it because they see the value. Yeah, but that's not. But you. It becomes so helpful. One of the reasons it's so helpful to niche is because you can understand your buyer's needs and price accordingly more easily. And. I can almost I don't like to speak in absolutes, but I can almost certainly say that you have clients on your roster who would happily pay more for better access and being able to chat with you and those little five minute questions that take up an hour and a half. If you have a ton of minnow clients who ask five minute questions and the answer is 90 minutes. That building a business on lots of clients is really difficult.
Geraldine (00:19:22) - So we want to make sure that we're judicious about how about who we offer this level of service to and how many people we open the doors to or allow in to that level of service. Because if you work with and I just had this conversation inside with my master minders because I have a group program as well, that if we base our business around the startup types who are low buying power, high need, because there's such a steep learning curve at the outset that we will quickly you will quickly exhaust yourself because those folks have a lot of legitimate questions they need your help with but are oftentimes reluctant to spend the money. So their buying power is on the lower side. It's okay to have some of those because they can kind of help. They can percolate up through your pricing structure. But too many of those will just sink you. And I think a lot of accountants are in that space. Of the $100,000, $200,000, $60,000 business owner. And. Whereas, if we design services for the $1 million business owner or the eight early eight figure business owner.
Geraldine (00:20:34) - But I think there are a lot of listeners in this space, a lot of accountants in this space who have, you know, a handful or plenty of seven figure business owners. They can imagine this those business owners to have questions and need access. And those are the ones who have more money than they have time. So if you can imagine designing services for them and protecting white space in your calendar for people who value you having protected white space in your calendar. Then that's where your prices can become more premium and less for the minnows with no offense to minnows.
Hannah (00:21:12) - Of course, I think in this model this would lend itself as we talk about the minnows and who we're going to niche down our market to. It might look like having to fire a client at some point or say, you know, this isn't working, or maybe whatever that conversation is. What is your advice for accountants as they try to navigate that conversation and landing on that and feeling confident enough to go into that conversation?
Geraldine (00:21:39) - Oh, it's a long answer.
Geraldine (00:21:42) - And so it looks like more firing more than one client. So this morning I had a conversation with a CPA and it looks like firing almost 400 clients.
Tom (00:21:50) - Oh, wow.
Geraldine (00:21:51) - Okay. So.
Tom (00:21:52) - Minnows right? I would assume.
Geraldine (00:21:55) - What's that?
Tom (00:21:56) - Minnows, Right? Lots of.
Geraldine (00:21:57) - Minnows. Yes, it is. It's minnows. And these are folks with five minute questions. And quick questions are by nature, by definition, short, it's the answer this long. That's why you get roasted on quick air quotes, quick questions. And granted, she has something like 900 clients. So 400 is a portion, but she is down a staff person. And she also knows that among her higher level, you call them A and B clients. She knows she has clients who have been knocking on her door asking for more help from her. And she knows that in order to be able to serve those folks and design and package and price in a way that's going to serve them, that she has to get her and her other staff free from these other clients.
Geraldine (00:22:38) - So I don't take lightly that we are disengaging a segment of clients and that those people may have a difficult time finding their next situation, their next home. I don't take that lightly. And yet we can't have accountants suffering at suffering and leaving the profession. Right. 300,000 have left the profession, perhaps many of whom because it was just too much of a workload for the money and the time. So we need to solve the problem of accountants overworking. And part of that is disengaging clients who just do not have capacity for. So back to your question. What is my advice? In short, it's focus on a niche. Become more specific on who you work with. It makes your delivery easier. It makes your marketing actually effective. Instead of going down black hole, it makes your sales conversations so much easier. Your confidence goes way up. Your ability to articulate your own value goes way up and then your conversion rates go up, which means you spend less time in discovery and you get more time back and you plow that extra time back into figuring out how to provide more value for your niche.
Geraldine (00:23:54) - And it becomes a virtuous cycle. So niche. Focus on your marketing. Focus on your. Your niching improves your delivery. It improves your marketing and improves your sales conversations. And it makes your business, your accounting practice so much easier to run. And then you can get out of the overworking cycle and then you can focus on ways to continue to increase plow value back into your services for your existing clients.
Tom (00:24:23) - How confident I'm curious of 900 clients to get rid of 400. That's a large portion. What do you think? Is this accountant's state of mind? Is this a Oh my God, I'm stepping off a cliff and hoping this is going to work? Or do you feel like there's a they've done enough work? You're like, no, this is a direction. Maybe the scary part is saying goodbye to people and that that's a painful conversation.
Geraldine (00:24:44) - Yeah, it's both at once. Okay. In all honesty. Right. These are people. These are relationships. And it's a large number of clients to let go of.
Geraldine (00:24:52) - And it also looks like money, right? Sure. Clients look like money because you have the invoice for the time and the deliverables and you send it to the client and the client sends you money. So it looks like money comes from clients, but money comes from value. So it looks like firing this number of clients is like, Oh my God, all that revenue is lost or going out the door or I'm letting go of it. And and at the same time, when I say it's both, she also recognizes that on the other side of the door of letting go of these clients is an ability to sit down and focus on her 500 remaining clients who she knows she could do so much more for when it comes to like we're talking about access, but also facilitating profitability. Right. How many accountants do I talk to of my own clients when I say, If you could do what you needed to be doing, what you know you need to be doing for your clients, what would you do for them? And they list out all these things that they just don't have time to get to.
Geraldine (00:25:52) - And I say like, What are we talking here in terms of dollars? Let's go through. And they're like, Well, best case scenario, worst case scenario, if the cookie crumbles our way and we assign dollar amounts to those different things and we total it up and it routinely adds up to 15% of improved revenue. So on $1 million business, you're looking at $150,000 of improved revenue. Why aren't you doing that to your client? Well, for your client. Well, I'm too busy. You're too busy to help your client be more profitable. Well. Oh, right. So she knows that on the other side of the door of letting go of these 400 clients is an ability to help her remaining clients be that much more profitable. To have that much more financial clarity, to understand where their business is, where it's going, how she can help them improve profitability, how she might help them improve all kinds of things, maybe tighten up controls inside their inside of their business. The list goes on.
Geraldine (00:26:42) - So the back to the answer to the question. It's both things at once. You're going to feel some level of walking off a cliff. While your brain also knows that it's the right thing to do.
Tom (00:26:59) - Yeah.
Hannah (00:27:01) - How was she able to connect the dots in terms of I know you said that is a struggle. Whenever we do try to communicate value to our clients. How did she help connect those dots to her client base that she is keeping and even those that she is going to let go? I feel like that's a matter of bridging that gap to of making sure that they understand part of that reason why the nature of the decision that she's making is how does she get to that point and bridge that gap?
Geraldine (00:27:28) - How does she bridge the gap for her, for the clients that she's keeping?
Hannah (00:27:32) - Yes.
Geraldine (00:27:33) - So in her case, she's niching into trades. So the questions that we ask are, well, what do people what do business owners in the trades, what do they need? These are people who tend to work with their hands.
Geraldine (00:27:47) - They love working with their hands. They like building things. These are not people who, for the joy of it, hang out in spreadsheets. These are not people who, for the joy of it, sit around and tinkle and tinker with numbers and model out and forecast cash flow. Right? They just don't have a sort of natural propensity for doing that or interest for it. So what are they? But they do want to run profitable business. They want to put in an honest day's work and they want to be able to call it good at the end of the day. And they want to make sure that they're saving for their just like everybody else, even the white collar professionals, just like those. They want to make sure that they're saving for their kids college, that they're setting their kids up for a solid future, that they have their family and their needs taken care of, that they're going to be able to pay off the mortgage, pay off the car and the truck, and can they afford to buy a new truck? And if not now, then when? So those are the kinds.
Geraldine (00:28:36) - So when we get into the mind of the buyer of the client in the niche, it becomes pretty. There are a lot of answers that are readily available. For ways that we think we can help them. This isn't rocket science. We're not trying to divine calculus here. Right. You guys, as accountants, you know this stuff. You know your clients. You've been working with them for a long time. You know what they need? It's just a matter of having the time to think about what is it that they're really trying to accomplish with their business. Why do they have it in the first place? They probably have it because they didn't want a boss. They want to work for themselves. They want to make good money and they want to knock off at 5:00 and be done right. Some may be more ambitious than that, but for your ones who are happy with that, help them actually make that a real reality instead of the current reality, which is so many business owners who are struggling to figure it all out and they think of their business as their personal slush fund.
Geraldine (00:29:37) - And they have no idea their accounting is wrong and their taxes are wrong, and they get letters left, right and center from the IRS and they don't know which ones to pay and which ones they should fight. And they're trying to run their business and they need guidance and support with these things. And the write in air quotes kind of clients will happily pay you for the financial clarity, for the guidance, for the expertise, so they can get out of being stressed about money and get into a place of being calm with their money.
Tom (00:30:05) - Right. Yeah. And without the tools that they can be offered, like you said, using it as your slush fund or things, they're just winging it and they're totally winging a better solution. Yet if you said, where do you want to get to? They'll say here, but I think I'm on the path or I don't know if there is a path, so I'll just keep doing what I think I'm doing. And that's where we could help them.
Geraldine (00:30:24) - Yes.
Geraldine (00:30:25) - And. One of the things that I find with the folks I work with is that sometimes accountants can be hesitant to sell because in air quotes, selling is dirty. Right? And a lot of us have been on the receiving end of smarmy and gross and pushy sales, and we don't want to do that to our clients. So what we do instead is the opposite, which is push the pendulum, all the way, the other way, and we don't sell it all. And there like, here it is. It's on the table. If you want it, you can have it. But I don't want to push you. One of the things that I help my clients with is to get in their shoes and advocate for the client. And say, look, I know that this is an investment. I know that it's whatever it is, 1600 bucks a month to work with me in order to keep your books clean so that you understand your numbers, so that you have a sense of cash flow and how much money is coming or not coming.
Geraldine (00:31:25) - And if there's a pothole, how can we avoid it? It's six months down the road. If we start avoiding it now, we can avoid it with very little heartache. But if we get a month in front of that pothole, it's going to be harder to turn the ship quickly. So here's all the reasons. So, look, listen, here's why I think it's great for you to work with me in this capacity, because we're going to do this and we're going to do this and we're going to do this. You're going to have clarity around your numbers. You're going to understand your financials. You're going to feel more confident with your decisions. You're going to make better decisions. You're going to understand if you can afford to pay for your staff or not. And when you can afford to hire ones and hire new ones and for how much and your business is going to get so much easier to run and you're going to run it better. And when you run it better, it's going to be more profitable and you will have higher margins.
Geraldine (00:32:06) - When you have higher margins, you can sock away more for college and more for retirement and then you can retire sooner. So if that sounds of interest to you, I think I can help you. But I think many accountants are reluctant to advocate for their clients because they don't want to be pushy, be salesy, and sales is dirty.
Hannah (00:32:31) - Do you think the opposite from a lack of confidence around being able to speak to the value that we provide to clients?
Geraldine (00:32:40) - I think it can come from a few places. It can come from a lack of confidence around the value and a lack of confidence from around the value can come from a place of when you're not niched. It's hard to know what value you can provide and what you can do for your clients because your process may not be as dialed in as it might be if you were niched one of the when one of the pros of niching is that it facilitates being able to dial in your process and create more consistent results for your clients.
Geraldine (00:33:12) - And when your results for your clients are more consistent, it becomes much easier to advocate, to articulate the value that you're creating and you get more confident in your ability to deliver those results because you've systematized it and you've seen again and again and again. For clients like this, we've been able to do that for clients like this other we've been able to do this other kind of result and you can speak with it enables you to get out of the sense of I don't want to overpromise and under deliver and instead say. Listen, I can't say exactly what's going to happen for you, but when I take on clients who have been in similar situations as you, here's what has happened. And being able to give a client a sense of what's within the normal range. The guardrails of what's possible is far more valuable and helpful to them than just putting your palms toward the sky and saying, Well, I don't know what we can do for you. We'll just have to get in there and see what happens.
Geraldine (00:34:16) - And it's 225 bucks an hour.
Tom (00:34:21) - Yeah. Not the best solution when you hear it.
Geraldine (00:34:24) - It's not really what they want to hear because they don't know how much that's going to cost them to go somewhere that they can't identify.
Tom (00:34:29) - Yeah, I love in your descriptions as you went through and described to the client, very little of that was accounting speak and think often we come from a debits credits tax code, things like that that our clients expect us to know that, but they're not really interested in the details. They want us to tell them to boil it up and say what all that means to them. I have heard you mention the bronze, silver and gold. Are you always an advocate of multiple levels of service that you're offering to clients? Is that usual? I've got packages. I've got some way to group things.
Geraldine (00:35:01) - I'm a fan of bronze, silver, gold because it gives your buyers a choice. It gets them out of the ultimatum of this is the price. Take it or leave it.
Geraldine (00:35:11) - That's one choice. Two is what's the right or wrong answer. And three is which one of these do I want to buy? It's a choice of yeses. It also gets you as the CPA out of what is the air quotes, right? Price There's no such thing as a right price. There's just prices that you assign. As Matthew People we like. We want to get to our price by way of formula, but we get there by way of choice. So having bronze, silver, gold helps you get out of your head of what is the right price kind of panic. And then we don't offer a price and we don't find out. The way to find the right price in air quotes is to simply test it like an experiment and see what people respond to. If their eyebrows go up, they're surprised by the price. If their eyebrows go down, they're like, Oh yeah, that definitely yes. We need that sort of feedback from them in order to know if our prices are in the ballpark or not.
Geraldine (00:36:03) - Of course we can key off of what other people are, how other people are pricing and our community is see what a sort of normal range is. But at the end of the day, we pick our prices. I don't always bronze, silver, gold is a useful starting point. But it's not where everybody has to land. It's a useful starting point out of everything custom a la carte all the time. And it gets us into thinking about. So just this morning I was talking to a CPA who has niched into dentists, is niching and a dentist and trying and working on his packaging and pricing and by thinking in terms of bronze, silver, gold, he can think okay, what is what does the dentist want? What's the outcome that they want? And knowing that outcome, what do I need to include in the line items in order to get him what he wants? Rather than a sort of potpourri of line item accounting services. Right. So we have to remember that for your buyer, for example, who's buying a plane ticket, they're not buying the fractional use of the airport, fractional use of TSA and the pilot's time and the drink cart.
Geraldine (00:37:17) - They're buying a ticket to Vegas, but they're not even buying the plane ticket to Vegas because nobody wants to just go to Vegas and sit there. They're going to Vegas for a reason. So are they going to catch a show or conference or game seven of the Stanley Cup? And if they're going to Game seven of Stanley Cup, they're going to what they're buying is the rush of adrenaline and the goals and the fans going bananas and the lifetime memories that they're going to take home because they were at game seven and they watched their team bring home the Stanley Cup. They're not buying the fractional use of TSA. So like you said, it's easy to talk about accounting services, but what your buyers most likely want is utterly divorced from anything that has to do with accounting services. Yeah.
Tom (00:38:01) - Yeah, that totally makes sense. So one of the things we haven't talked about, I would imagine the behavioral change for many of your clients is also difficult. That yes, now I've told people they can have more access, but if I'm used to working 60 hours a week and having my calendar completely blocked every single day, even this person who's firing the 400 clients has the same risk of I'm just going to do the exact same thing.
Tom (00:38:22) - So is that also a really difficult thing to say? Okay, you've done this for years and we've all agreed you have to stop, but how do you actually do that?
Geraldine (00:38:29) - Yeah, this is such a great question. I'm glad you brought this up because this too has also come up in conversation inside my mastermind that people are they what they'll say is if I separate my tiers, bronze, silver or gold based on access, when somebody calls me and they need me and they're inside bronze, which is compliance only, no touch, like we're just doing your books and we never talk to you, I'm going to have a hard time saying no. So what do I do? And. There are. You have a couple of options. One of them. You have three options. One of them is they're in bronze and they're paying you bronze prices and you answer them and provide that gold level. So don't do that. Other options are don't sell bronze. If you know that you are going to have a hard time saying no to the client who's in bronze, who gets basically no touch.
Geraldine (00:39:27) - Then don't make that an option that you sell and then you don't have to manage it. Then you only have clients in gold and silver who are paying for high touch and you give them high touch. Or the other option is to get good figure out, learn how to get good at leaving your clients who are in bronze. Leaving them alone and saying, Hey, sorry, you're in bronze. You'd find a nicer way to say this. Sure. At the bronze level, this is what's included. It sounds like you're asking for this other thing that's not included. If you would be interested in upgrading to Silver, where that is included. Press this button and it's 1595 a month, right? You decide. And in working with clients, they're we need to train our clients. For how to treat us. And we establish we, as the business owner, establish how this rolls. We don't just leave it up to the client because the client then will dictate and they will drive your business bus all over, kingdom come.
Geraldine (00:40:31) - So those are your options. Number one, get continue getting underpaid. Number two, don't offer bronze service if you don't think you can say no. Number three, get good at saying no, right?
Tom (00:40:44) - I love that you say we teach our clients how to treat us because that's so true. An example. I think we have a controller level of service which a differentiating factor is we meet with the clients two times a month. CFO service will meet with them four times a month. If a client were to send me a message and say, Hey, I just hired someone, can you model what that looks like in the forecast? The usual response is we're going to meet next Wednesday for the forecast. It's on the agenda. Yes. We'll talk about it then. And if they were to really push like can you meet sooner? Can we do this or that, it would be the exact conversation of that you said is, hey, would you like to move up to level service? Because once per week we can do that.
Tom (00:41:20) - But I know that if I turn around, if I say I'm going to be wonderful and I've got time tonight, so I'll turn around and have a two by tomorrow morning. Of course, the next time you ask, you expect that I've just taught you that that's part of what you should expect. You ask a question and here comes back and answer. And I almost get punished for going above and beyond because it becomes a the expectation.
Geraldine (00:41:39) - Yeah. It's, you know, one of the things that I love about this profession is it is a helping profession and people genuinely have a heart for trying to help their clients. Out of sticky situations, help them understand their numbers. And I think that there's I think that accountants give themselves a bad rap for the value they provide. And that desire to help people becomes a slippery slope into people pleasing.
Tom (00:42:14) - Yeah, I think you're right.
Geraldine (00:42:15) - And at some point we need to get good at saying these are the bounds. It's good for everybody that we know exactly where the bounds are.
Geraldine (00:42:26) - And if you would like to change lanes, here's how you do it. Because the one of the risks when we over serve our clients, especially our needier clients at the lower levels, is that we become overworked. We don't have the same attention, availability, access to our creativity that our best clients need. And the risk of people pleasing especially your lower end client, is that your best clients leave you and now you're stuck with a batch of your lower end clients and that's a harder place to dig out of. So if you're going to choose if you're going to have discomfort either way and you're going to it's business, you're going to have some discomfort either way. Would you rather have the discomfort of saying no to your lower end clients or having your higher end clients saying no to you because they didn't get what they were asking paying for?
Tom (00:43:19) - Yeah.
Hannah (00:43:20) - I think there's still a fine line even with our higher end clients in terms of the expectations that we set with them and the boundaries that we have with those clients as well.
Hannah (00:43:29) - I know I had a situation with a client who emailed me, I think it was 9:30 at night and I happened to be online working at 9:30 a night that night. And I was like, Oh, I can just answer that email right now. And I caught myself and I was like, I'm not. I'm going to schedule that for in the morning. To go out to him because I don't want to set the expectation that if he emails me at 9:30 at night, that I'm just going to immediately respond no matter what level of client that is. But I think even especially in those higher levels, we could just, oh, they're paying for that hire service. I need to just go ahead and jump in and respond and fix it and help while I can. But there's still some boundaries and some guardrails that I think need to be respected and set. And those are set usually by us. And we've got to be intentional about doing that with those clients, too.
Geraldine (00:44:18) - And I would also worry about my accountant who's answering email at 9:30 at night.
Tom (00:44:23) - That's a great, great point.
Geraldine (00:44:25) - And I also don't want my accountant tired from a long day answering what might be wasn't there for the email, but I want their sharp brain in the morning when they're fresh, not their tired brain at the end of at the end of a long day..
Hannah (00:44:42) - Sure. Good point.
Geraldine (00:44:44) - And also, that's what schedule send is for. Yes, exactly.
Hannah (00:44:47) - Yes, that's exactly what I.
Tom (00:44:48) - Love that option. Okay. As we start to win this down hand, I'm going to start with you. If this is pique someone's interest, I would love you to kind of One big takeaway for someone who's listening going, you know, is I hear some of the things that maybe we could be doing better. I'm checking boxes saying don't do those things. Great. What do you think is one takeaway from our conversation today?
Hannah (00:45:07) - I think a takeaway is if you are not niched figure that out. I feel like it all circles back around to that in terms of how we communicate our value and be able to determine what that is for a specific market by tapping into, like you said, their brain and understanding their pain points and building off of that and how we service those clients.
Hannah (00:45:29) - So that was a big takeaway for me that I think is super valuable.
Tom (00:45:33) - Geraldine, how about you?
Geraldine (00:45:35) - Oh, my goodness. I keep coming back to four CPAs, how much value they can create for their clients in onboarding processes that are smooth and ongoing monthly. That is smooth communication, that is seamless access that's available and providing the results that the clients are looking for. And I can't think of a better time to be a CPA than now because of the technology that's coming that's facilitating this and the supply and demand. It is a seller's market. The market is in your favor. So take advantage while the tide is rising.
Tom (00:46:13) - Excellent. Yeah. For me, I think and you had mentioned you're going to have that pain one way or the other. Think if I'm looking at my own self five years out and saying I don't think I can sustain at this level. And if I'm honest with myself and saying I don't think that my clients are probably getting the best version of me, then I have to think of some of these things and say, What is it? And think You've given a lot of these different steps that are in there.
Tom (00:46:37) - So one of the steps might be working with you. I would love you to tell us a little bit more about how people can continue listening to you, learn from you, connect with you.
Geraldine (00:46:46) - Yeah. Sure. Happy to. Thank you. So for people who thought this conversation was helpful and want to dig in a little bit more to have a podcast for accountants and CPAs, it's the Business Strategy for CPAs Podcast. They can also check out my website. geraldinecarter.com And for folks who are looking for ways that they can create value and prompts, I have a 72 item checklist for your listeners They can get it at geraldinecarter.com forward slash value and it's my effortless value creation checklist so you can go through and sort of prompt yourself for ways that you can create value for clients without having to do extra work.
Tom (00:47:24) - That's great. Love the idea of a checklist because the I'm sure for many of us, the idea of here's a blank. Oh, no, marker board, go ahead and write up.
Tom (00:47:31) - Put your value values. You get a lot of people staring and just saying, don't look like. Yes, that's great. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. This is actually hope. It really piqued people's interest and gives us a different way of thinking about things, but even more importantly, delivering better value for our clients and making more money in the process.
Geraldine (00:47:49) - This has been great. Thanks, Hannah. Thank you, Tom, for having me.
Tom (00:47:51) - Thank you.
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