1.16.24 - Compliance vs. Advisory - A Pricing Conversation

Michelle and Dan discuss pricing Advisory services vs. compliance work. Recent offerings in the QB Live space has now brought this conversation to Tax preparers. We'll have a discussion about these new offerings, other low hanging offerings, and what you can do to differentiate yourself in this space.

QB Power Hour is a free, biweekly webinar series for accountants, ProAdvisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants presented by Michelle Long, CPA and Dan DeLong who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks and apps that integrate with QuickBooks.

Watch or listen to all of the QB Power Hours at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/blog

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Transcript

Michelle Long: 0:30

Welcome everybody. Glad to have you joining us today for compliance versus advisory, a pricing conversation. My name is Michelle Long. I'm the CPA and owner of Long for Success and very glad to have you joining us for today. I am a trader for Intuit, contract trader for Intuit and the author of five different books available on Amazon. There is the link for the Facebook group. We'd love to have you join us there or the LinkedIn group. That's enough about me. Dan, go ahead and introduce yourself.

Dan DeLong: 1:00

Yeah, I am about five seconds behind everyone in the Bahamas. I worked at Intuit for nearly 18 years, co hosting today, as well as Workshop Wednesdays over at schoolbookkeeping. com. Okay. So a little bit about the details about the QB Power Hour. We're here on Tuesday at noon Eastern. You can always check our website for upcoming events. And we also have the PDFs, the recordings the podcast at qbpowerhour. com slash resource. So a little bit about the housekeeping. So if you have specific questions about things that we're going to talk about today, please put them in the Q& A, especially if we need to follow up. If you have general comments about how cold things are, go ahead and put that in the chat. And then also we have links there available for the handouts in the slide. We'll put those in the Q& A as well as the chat so that you can access them. But we also should have I'm trying to be a little bit more diligent about when the updates go out for the, from Zoom, that you have those links handy as well. A little bit about something new that we're trying this year is that we're trying to simulcast in the Facebook group and on YouTube and in LinkedIn. There's no need to register when you do that. So if you do have a per preferred platform of choice, like in the Facebook group or on YouTube or or in LinkedIn. There's no need to register with the QB Power Hour on Zoom. Some, Zoom has some great things and it also has some not so great things. But if you don't register you only have to register once at the qbpowerhour. com website for the series. But you then can't take part, participate in the polls and the Q& A and those types of things. We're going to try to mirror that experience in those other environments as well. One thing about the Facebook group is we are going to we are broadcasting it in the Facebook group as well, but because the Facebook group is private, Facebook has some just needs to be allowed with the stream platform that we're using, you can just use that QR code there. There's a link to be able to allow Facebook to see who you are. Otherwise, it will just say Facebook user. If you do comment in the stream that's in the Facebook group or the QB power user group. So enough about that, let's talk a little bit about what we're going to be talking about today. Now Michelle and I were talking about this presentation, which she had repurposed or she had done a while ago and and we wanted to re talk about a little bit, but we wanted to talk about it because there's a lot of I don't know what's the best way to describe it, but sometimes there's a little bad. Blood, between into it and it's in the accounting community with. Some of the things that are coming out and there's another one that we want to talk about today but we want to talk about it in a way that, a lot, we want you to be prepared. Michelle, you were talking about you saw something 10 years ago when you went to New Zealand and I think we'll talk about that a little later, the writing has been more than on the wall about some of the things about. Compliance versus advisory, and Intuit has been well aware, or at least documenting, or I don't think of the word, the right words, but they have forecasting that the way things are headed. And I think I want to turn most of it over to Michelle because I'm I'll add in, I'll jump in, but I'll run things in the background so that you can Kind of breeze over some of these slides and then we'll have a more meaty conversation about the news that's coming that has been announced from Intuit.

Michelle Long: 4:45

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And thanks, Dan. And you're right. Intuit, we will talk about it later, Intuit has been helping us to stay on top of things and ahead of things. And, Intuit does a lot of forward looking and, looking to see what's coming in the future. We were ready for things when COVID hit because we already were in the cloud. So anyway, but yes. So thanks, Dan. And yeah, this is a repurpose deck here. I did this for the mid market VCon. So this deck was actually for a 90 minute session and we don't have 90 minutes, but we would have left all of the slides in here. Dan and I, talked about it said, Hey, this is great stuff. Let's just leave it in here for you guys. So you got bonus stuff here. But we're going to breeze through a lot of this really quickly. But we did leave it in here for your guys benefit. We really want to talk about the middle where we talked about, Dan and I, the discussion of advisory versus compliant. And Dan said, this is something Intuit has been telling us and warning us about that we need to be getting more into advisory. And they've been warning about this for a number of years. I went on the road show and we were doing seminars and workshops on advisory and, doing workshops on things like this. Gosh, five years ago, I saw some stuff that was popping up on my on Facebook, on your memories. It was four or five years ago where we were doing workshops on this kind of stuff, on the roadshow, going around different cities. Intuit was doing this a number of years ago, trying to help accountants move into more of an advisory role with their clients, just like Intuit was helping us move to the cloud way before. We were doing freedom in the cloud webinars or seminars. And going around, training people in various cities all throughout the U. S., all throughout Canada, before COVID hit. So when COVID hit, we were already in the cloud working with clients remotely. We were there. We were ready. Because Intuit had us doing that years ago. And it's the same thing with advisory. And it all ties into pricing, if you're still hourly billing you've got to get away from that and so that's where you know, I did this session, you know how we have to go to the new pricing model So i'm going to blow through these slides really quickly here at the beginning the whole opportunity for the new pricing model The old workflow, we were doing manual data entry after the fact. It was error prone, inefficient. We were really quick at manual data entry. We could type that, we could get the check register. We could sit there and type, enter, tab three times, tab this. We could do data entry really fast. We could enter that check register and go through there really quickly and enter that stuff. I even had somebody come up to me one time after one of these seminars where we were doing the roadshow. And I was telling them how we had to stop doing manual data entry, and we had to stop doing hourly billing. And I told them how, you set up all these bank rules and automate the process and how fast it was, and how we had to start doing value pricing. And they were like, why would I want to do that? Why would I want to why would I want to, why would I want to do all this? I get paid by the hour, why would I want to do that? Why would I want to make it faster? Why would I want to import all of this stuff? I get paid by the hour. And they couldn't understand that concept. And I was like, are you kidding me? And they wanted to keep inputting stuff. And it just, It made no sense. You only have so many hours a day. And it just it's ludicrous. You cannot do that. If you can only work 8 hours a day, you can only make 8 hours of work. Let's say you're charging 100. You're only going to make 800 a day. That's your capacity. You're never going to make more than that. You're limited. And anyway, a lot of problems with that. It's just, it doesn't make sense. It's not making sense at all. So we've got to get away from that. So your firm, if you've got capacity and staffing challenges, if you're working too many hours, you've got no work life balances, you can't make more money. You can't work any more time. You can't, You're just so stressed out and everything. You've got bad clients that you need to fire. You've got too many industries. No bitch, you've got no time for higher value services.'cause you're so busy doing all these other things, you're not as profitable as you like. This is a problem that we have in our industry and we've gotta get away from it. And it's a symptom of hourly billing of too low of our prices. We've gotta get our prices up. A lot of us are facing this. And it all stems from pricing from charging hourly and not charging enough and I've got a great video here you know what in the interest of time because we've really got a lot to talk about today I'm not going to play this for you, but it's hilarious. It shows you the absurdity of charging by the hour for stuff or charging based on time. So i've got the link here for you It's and it's great. It's Ties into time on doing something that ties into Kansas City and barbecue. So I encourage you after we get done today, click this link and go watch this video. And it shows you when you charge for time, like for barbecue. Okay. So how much does it cost for a barbecue sandwich? It's based on how long it takes to make it and how much for the hush puppies, how long does it take to make it? So watch that video later and you'll see. So this is a great time when we're going from, let's say, desktop to QuickBooks Online. When we're automating all of these manual processes and going to QuickBooks Online, it's a great time to switch from hourly to a different pricing model. And so this is where, as we're doing all these changes, it's a great time to switch to a different pricing model. We've got all of these third party apps that are going to be in the cloud. We're switching to QuickBooks Online. So we've got automation and efficiency. It allows us to be more profitable. It allows us to grow. It allows us to work with way more clients than we've ever worked with before. And this is what Dan was talking about when I went down to New Zealand. It was approximately 10 years ago. I don't remember exactly, maybe nine years ago or something. I went to New Zealand to the Zero Con actually. They invited me to come down and I got the opportunity to go look at some firms down in New Zealand and I saw firms that were handling hundreds of small business clients using Xero. And what was most astounding to me, the people running the firms We're an accountant. They were small business owners that did not have an accounting background. It was an entrepreneur who realized the opportunity with something like Xero where they could automate the process and I was telling Dan It's like McDonald's. Ray Kroc, the guy that started McDonald's, automated the process for making hamburgers. It was like a machinery, like making a Ford car. Where it was a, it was the manufacturing process. They took that to hamburgers in a restaurant and automated the process. Like a manufacturing system for hamburgers. And down in New Zealand, they automated the process for bookkeeping. And they had rules for the bank system and banking and classifying and all this stuff. And a guy who is an entrepreneur. Just like Ray Kroc automated the process for making hamburgers in a restaurant, you have an entrepreneur who is automating the process for bookkeeping. Because it's not rocket science, and you can automate that process, and you can code it, and that's what's happening in our industry, and in the accounting industry. It's not rocket science to code. Oh, 89, 80, 90 percent of these transactions can be Set up as a system and that's what's happening with AI is all being set up through the bank rules. And so it's all being automated. And so all of this stuff is now automated and it's all compliance work and it's all just happening automatically. And this is where we've got to get away From the hourly bookkeeping because it's just happening now. We're just managing the data And so all of this compliance work all of this improved efficiency the bank rules. It's fetching our bank statements It's pulling in the bank. The check and images but people aren't even writing checks anymore. They're setting it up and they're doing the payments online So all of this stuff is happening They're doing recurring invoices and the payments are being done automatically. The fees are being done automatically. So the whole the whole sales process is now being automated with the invoice, the payment, the fees, all of that's being automated. The payment side is being automated. So you've got the income side being automated, the payment side being automated, like everything's getting automated. So the whole compliance side is getting automated. Now we're going over to the tax side. The tax stuff is all getting automated. Everything is getting automated. Dan, do you want to say anything about all this stuff?

Dan DeLong: 14:10

Yeah, that is That's really what's happening here is that the the compliance side of Bookkeeping, tax preparation the transitional, transactional types of things are, this was something that even Brad Smith was talking about when he was CEO is that you want one action and then everything else just happens. He kept using the words the phrase automagically, right? Because It, and you use the example of payments, right? So here's someone out in the field, a landscaper taking, doing a, an estimate, they have them sign it in, in, in the app, or they have them pay for it right there on their mobile device, their billing and their bookkeeping is done for them because of that action that they've already taken. And that's just something that's inside of QuickBooks, these other. Applications that expand on the functionality because, there is a glass ceiling in inside of quickbooks online of doing things that you want to do. And when you start adding these other 3rd party applications, that 1 fly that had. QuickBooks as the center and then the Intuit based applications that are around that with payment, payroll payments, there's other, and then the whole new world that's on that 3rd ring that really brings in the value that. That people in the accounting profession can really bring with okay Expensify may not be your best bet for expense transactions because there's a cost, the cost that's associated with that or the user permissions or something like that. Maybe bill. com isn't the way to go when it comes to AP or AR or, some things like that. So that's where. The accounting community is really stretching itself and, most of the time when you stretch it hurts, so that, that's where, that's where we are and where we have been for the past, few years and the people that, aren't limbering up are the ones that are feeling the pain when it comes to the, okay, I've been living in the compliance And now it's really I was using the comments of the, we're using a bookkeeping with cheese, use that McDonald's example of how it's just getting so commoditized with those compliance

Michelle Long: 16:38

things. Exactly. And the thing of it is what I saw down in New Zealand is. The entrepreneurs and the business world has realized that just like in manufacturing, and we could automate it, and then in the food industry, we can automate it, and the robots make drinks now, the robots cook and flip hamburgers. And in McDonald's, people now order their own stuff, and you're seeing that getting automated. In the accounting industry, we're seeing things getting automated. With AI, more and more things are getting automated, and it's where you're getting more and more efficiency and automation and stuff and we have to see what's happening in our industry. It's attracting big bucks and big money and big investment and big data is here and it's changing our industry. And what's happening is we can't compete because we don't have the big bucks and the millions of dollars and stuff. So anyway, here's

Dan DeLong: 17:43

what I have. I had an example when just last week we took a family trip to Disney, right? And Disney has, ron Baker said, what if what if Disney actually created an accounting bookie, practice. And I was thinking of that as I was going there and they are in, in, in adoptive of technology and change in the name of the experience. And they have this thing now called a virtual queue. Because nobody wants to go to Disney and stand in line for an hour to see a picture of Winnie the Pooh, right? So they have these things called virtual queues and ultimately they'll they will turn that into all rides. Basically you log into their app you say, here's the things that I want to ride on. And then they'll know where you are in the park. And when they know when you're. You're that you're near there. They'll call your group and then you'll just walk, walk to the ride. And, in a perfect world, you just get on it. You may have to wait a little bit, but you won't be waiting that hour. And then your whole day is shot at Disney. And I really thought it was, serendipitous of, a company that is always adopting and changing in the name of the experience for their customers and how, that, that thing about okay what if Disney got its feet wet into we'd all be out of a job.

Michelle Long: 19:08

And that's where we have to start thinking, what do we need to start changing and what do we need to start doing differently? So that's our goal today is Dan and I, we want to open your eyes to, like somebody said, I've had my head in the sand. That's our goal is to get your head out of the sand And to get you looking around to see what is going on out there And how do we need to start looking differently because everybody's been talking about advisory. We got to do advisory We got to get away from compliance and into advisory So we want to help you to learn about what's going on in the industry about how do we got to move? From hourly to the other types of billing, but also how do we talk about advisory? How do we get to advisory what's out there in advisory? So there is a bit additional advisory training out there, and I'm going to show you how to find it in a little bit, but there's in the training tab in QBOA, I'll show you in a little bit, and also then from Mike Mylan, and we had him on our last QB Power Hour, and I'll show you how to get to his in a little bit, because a lot of us, especially if you're a bookkeeper, you're You know, you're like wait a minute. I'm not sure. How do I do this? Or if you're even if you're a CPA, you may be like I don't know how to do this. I had this when I had You know, I had some class on it in college 30 years ago. I don't remember or I'm not sure how to start talking to my clients about this. I need some help. There's training available for you out there. There's help for you available on this. How do I start talking to my client about this? I'm going to show you how to get to that. But let's go look at some examples of some stuff of what's going on in the industry. I'm going to show you some firms and some examples, but Dan, let's do this first. What is your pricing strategy currently? Are you still hourly? And Dan, I'm not sure if we did a one option here or multiple, but go ahead and type in the chat box. What is your primary? Billing method or pricing strategy right now. What is your primary method right now? How are you pricing primarily and Dan asked me because initially this is called a practical pricing is what I call it like, why do you call it practical pricing? And this is where I was telling Dan, we have value pricing and we have subscription pricing. And at the time, Ron Baker's book had just come out, Time's Up, and Ron talks about subscription pricing. And the thing of it is, with subscription pricing, it's brand new, and value pricing has been around for a while, but a lot of times people get hung up on the definition. What is value pricing? What is subscription pricing? And my point is, and this is what I told Dan, Don't get hung up on all the definitions and all the terms and all the theory because when you start implementing this you should start with just a couple of clients to begin with and start with a few test clients and implement it and learn as you go anyway. Don't get hung up on trying to understand it. And all the theory understand the concept at a high level and learn as you go implement it with a few clients learn as you're going it's an art not a science you're going to learn and evolve and get better as this as you go understand the theory and the concept and learn and get better as you implement it with a few clients and get better as you go along this is an art that you will do better as you do this. So pick a few clients and do it and get better as you go along. So I call it practical pricing. Let's get started and learn and do better. And so don't get hung up on all the theory. And I love to see that you guys are doing a variety of things over here. And then, so some people are talking about the different types in there and yeah, that's why sometimes people will have a blended method of doing it. Some people have more than one in there, so that's good. All right, Dan, I'm going to go ahead and let's go ahead and move on, because we do have a lot to talk about. So I'm going to go ahead and skip that and move on. So you do need to add value, and here's some examples of adding value to your services. Then you want to work on setting up, whether it's value pricing or subscription, talk about your practical pricing. You want to talk about three different choices. For your clients. Okay? This is where I have different examples for you to look at. And instead of all these different slides, I just wanna go in here and share with you looking at them. So I actually pulled these up. I have different examples. Dang it. Let get to the right one. Here we go. Nope, that's not the right one either. Dang it, I'll get to it eventually. Oh, you know why it's not coming up? I had to kill my screen share. Here it is. Okay, what I have out for you, because when it comes to offering free choices, I have slides and there's links for examples. For example, Bookkeeping Simplified, this firm has out here, they're offering Enterprise established growth and starter. You can go through look at the examples of what other firms are doing to give you ideas. So that's what I've given you here. Some real world examples to go through and see what they're including in theirs and some of the examples of pricing that they're also offering. And you can go through and get some examples. So here's the first firm Here's another one out here and this qbk accounting actually happens to be hector garcia You guys know and love hector and you can go in here and look at what hector has and I notice hector Used to have QBO out here and also QB Enterprise. I noticed that is gone. He's now got his packages up here with QBO only and down at the bottom he has somewhere I saw him here Turnkey QB Enterprise down at the bottom. So he's pulled out Enterprise and made it separate and has QBO up here on its own. So take a look at some of those that they have. Then there's another one here. This is where I really specifically wanted to call out two of these bench And pilot do some research on some of these bench and pilot These are companies in firm. I'm going to call them companies. They're not a traditional accounting firm. They have a lot of bc financing with a lot of funding behind them millions and millions of dollars they have Different plans Different services here, but look how low they start. They have millions of dollars with their own kind of proprietary software. They're not using QuickBooks. They're not using NetSuite. They're not using some of that stuff. They have their own kind of proprietary system back there. They have built. If you will the, the McDonald's of accounting system they have this set up with a system for, doing the bookkeeping, streamlining it and doing this. And what's really interesting with pilot, they have a bookkeeping and a tax and CFO services. They have pilot CFO services. Look at this. They've commoditized CFO services.

Dan DeLong: 26:49

And Michelle, I don't know if it's Pilot or Bench, but I thought I saw on one of those websites that they actually white labeled their service for accounting. So it's something that you can actually have the engine underneath doing these things, and then It frees up you to do the advisory stuff because you're not doing the compliance and the commoditization piece of the transactional work. The day-to-day drudgery, that's why I think this year should be for a lot of people is getting from drudgery to advisory

Michelle Long: 27:26

Yeah. So bench and pilot have, and I wanna say. At least 40 million on one of them one of them I can't even remember half. I don't want to say who's behind do some research if you want to There's big names and big vc companies and big names behind them. There's might be hundreds of millions, but there's at least Tens of millions behind those companies. Then we get into QuickBooks Live, there's other big companies that are doing this stuff too, including some of the big firms out there, some of the big four firms and stuff. Then you get into QuickBooks Live and their bookkeeping, their full service for bookkeeping, they're doing it interestingly. They have on their tiers, excuse me, they have three tiers and they're basing it on their expenses. So if your monthly average, so you'll see here the business average expenses, they have zero to 10,000, 10 to 50, and then 50 or more, 200 to$400 a month. So$50,000 of expenses is$400 a month for the monthly bookkeeping. Now this is basic bookkeeping. It's not everything. It's not payroll You can look through here and see what all it includes and things like that. It's basically working the bank fee All right, they're not doing invoicing It's basically working the bank fee if you want to know what quickbooks live includes You can look through here and see what all it includes. It's basically working the bank fee. But now, not only do we have QuickBooks Live, full service bank bookkeeping, they also have an assisted bookkeeping plan out here that they will do under the assisted bookkeeping. We also now Have TurboTax Live and TurboTax Live has the, you can see, you have your do it yourself with TurboTax, you have TurboTax help you, in other words, I do the TurboTax, I do my own tax return with TurboTax, and then you review it. Somebody with TurboTax or we have an expert do your tax return for you And I was looking at this a little bit and trying to understand it So if I do my tax return And I want them to review it Sometimes, though, it kicks it up, and I was telling Dan, I was trying to look at this say, for example if, let's say, somebody had RSC, restricted stock units, that might be complicated enough that they won't just review it for you, it automatically will kick you up into, it's complex enough that they're going to have to do it for you. There's some different limitations on it, but. Intuit is definitely competing with us on bookkeeping and taxes. And now, Dan, do you want to explain what they're doing now on the taxes to the QuickBooks Live

Dan DeLong: 30:37

customers? Yeah the end of December, there was a Firm of the Future article. Talking about QuickBooks Tax and QuickBooks Live Tax. So they're branding it QuickBooks Live, but it is actually the TurboTax Live service, right? I've used the the full service TurboTax service. And and for, but I did it for individual, for individual return but the now they're, and they offered it last year this is a business filing service. For businesses originally last year was just with TurboTax and that's where they were. We're branding it now. It's this year it's going to be a QuickBooks live tax where they will be offering the services for for within QuickBooks. And then when we talk about that, this is where, there's a. Salt in the wound, right? Where we've all had this knee jerk reaction about, QuickBooks is or Intuit is directly marketing to my customers. We will actually have Jessica McCracken joining us next. Next QB power hour to talk to have a Q, a more of a Q and a about this, but really in the grand scheme of things, what this is it's tax prep, not tax planning. So this is again, a complaint based service and there is a lot of people out there that don't want that, right? They don't want that as part of their services because they have realized that Okay, advisory is where it's at. So tax planning or tax advisory, those services is where I'm going to get the more value and the clients that I really want to work with. I don't want the people who want a quarter pounder with cheese tax. Tax preparation, just give me, here's what I need to fill out your, your, to file your forms and and thank you very much. Have a great day. Would you like price with that? That's not what that's not what the services are. That's what they that's what they essentially are, but you will be. And these things starting to be marketed to, to, to QuickBooks clients or to QuickBooks users. And there is there is a one of, one of the discussions that, that we were having and I want Jessica to expand on that, is the way that QBO services can be signed up. Even though you are an a connected accountant that doesn't mean that you are. The pro advisor or you are the tax preparer, they can't tell. So there is a certain option or a way that, that QuickBooks online subscriptions are created that even though you are the pro advisor that is connected to them, they could still potentially market to that as a QuickBooks live customer, which is where I think a lot of the the challenge that we have with Intuit is marketing to my customers. Services that I offer. And those are some of the questions that hopefully we'll be able to discuss with Jessica. If you're next time, but that's what's happening. And we wanted to make sure that people are aware that is happening. So that they're 1, they're not surprised. So we don't want this to be a surprise for folks. And just again, to be clear, Michelle and I no longer, we are not Intuit employees, right? So we are not here to, beat the drum of Intuit and apologize for their shenanigans. We are here to. Listen to what they're doing and offer that as a I don't even know what kind of thing, we were trying to dissect it enough to. See it for what it is and let you be aware of it. So again, you're not surprised when it comes to, Oh, Hey what the heck, QuickBooks is is marketing and a tax service. I do that. Why is that happening? So we want to make sure that you're aware of that, Michelle,

Michelle Long: 34:47

Dan, and I think the thing of it is. If you have a client that somebody comes along with the lower price, you're going to lose them anyway, whether Intuit comes along with the lower price, or Bench, or Pilot, or Johnny Tax Service, or Omar's Tax Service, or H& R Block Tax Service, it doesn't matter whose tax service, it comes along with a lower price service. The problem is we are now competing on a global basis. And we, it's commoditized, and AI is here, and there's, the technology is here that's made this inexpensive and cheaper, and we can't compete on price anymore. We can't compete with Walmart and we have to differentiate ourselves. And that's where the advisory comes in and there's tax advisory and there's people like Sean Duncan talking about this and there's other people out there that are, talking about some of this stuff on the tax side and on the financial and accounting side, we've got to differentiate ourselves from an advisory basis and a relationship. People want relationships and they want someone that they can come to and talk to. Hey, I need a new truck. How should I do this? Should I do a trade in? Should I sell this? Should I lease it? Should I buy it? How many years? Should I take out a loan? How should I do, how do I structure it? They need somebody that they can talk to, that they consult with, that they can advise with. They need someone to be there. They need someone to talk to about these things and they need That relationship and that's the thing is you have to have that relationship to differentiate yourself from these other people so that when somebody cheaper comes along, they're not going to leave you. And honestly you don't want those type of clients anyway. And unfortunately, as you have your firm, You learn that over the years, and it's one of the things when you're a new firm and you're just starting out, you have clients, you take everybody because you have to, get going, but a lot of us, what happens is we do that to grow our firm, and then we get happy, fat, and lazy, and we just sit there and keep doing the work over and over, and like some people said earlier, my head's been buried in the sand, I'm And it's time to make some changes and we have to do the hard work to make the changes, get rid of some of those clients so that we can get better clients because I see some people that said in the chat up here, my clients don't want advisory. Then you need better clients. You need different clients. It's time to Get rid of some of those clients let those clients go and get some better clients Raise your prices and if you lose clients, okay Those are the clients that you want to lose change your pricing to your new model Hopefully it's a subscription model Or a new practical pricing model and we change our pricing model and Dan, I'm going to go back. I'm, I think I'm still sharing because this is where we want to go back to Oh, it was the summit CPA slide and let me find it because this is really important. Everybody. We were talking about different models and everything and it was the slide on summit CPA. I have too many things open. You guys do that when you have too many things open and you lose

Dan DeLong: 38:37

track of where everything is. Oh, I am terrible about that. I'll have five desktops and I'm sliding. What, where was that tab? It was 40, 000 different tabs open.

Michelle Long: 38:48

Yeah. That's where I'm at. Okay, it's the Summit CPA slide. There it is. Okay on this one summit cpa Make sure that you click down there in the bottom see where it says download free guide Okay, download the free guide. I want you all to do that because in the slides, we will talk in a little bit about implementing it blah blah blah blah Anyway, this is a firm summit cpa is a cpa firm that did this they went and implemented subscription pricing So we'll talk a little bit about, and I'll show you this in just a minute, but let's go through some of these slides and then I'll show you this but they went through we'll do that polling question in a minute, Dan, is that okay? Okay. You want to do it now? No, go ahead.

Dan DeLong: 39:36

Let's do that. Since we are talking about. Into it and then into it offering. Do you feel that into it is in direct competition with you? And and we'll talk a little bit about that. But Jennifer brought up a good point. Advisory without Nietzsche is very difficult. And what are your thoughts on

Michelle Long: 39:55

that, Michelle? I think niching is a very good point there. Linda is exactly right. I suggest that you do pick a niche whether it's construction or nonprofit, or maybe it's family owned firms or high growth firms. It doesn't have to just be, or I specialize in QuickBooks consulting, or some people specialize in tax advisory. So it could be a type of industry, it could be a, type of client, like family owned firms or high growth firms, or it could be a type of service like QuickBooks or TAC. So you can pick different types of a niche or niche to specialize in, but when you do specialize, there's a lot of benefits to that with because you have the expertise and you Linda's saying there. You can charge higher prices Then you also when you look at that, app stack like dan was talking about the outside circle there You then have the ability to focus on specific apps and that makes it easier to have the expertise on those apps and then yes, you can command higher prices and everything So there's a lot of benefits to learning the language for that industry or that niche, commanding higher prices and better expertise, and you learn the apps in that industry as well. So a lot of benefits for that. Yeah, somebody was

Dan DeLong: 41:18

saying that the somebody was saying the guide wasn't there, but I just tried it myself and it does. It is available. You just have to you know, give them your email

Michelle Long: 41:29

Yeah, I did it. I did it right before this webinar as well. So it's there or this podcast. Okay, so Okay, so that's interesting on the poll So we had about 24 percent who have lost some clients about 49 percent have had no impact And I like that we've had 12 percent have actually gained some clients from qb live after the fact cleaning up that aspect of things Okay, and this is somebody said, if you're not a CFP, certified financial planner, how do you include these types of services in your material? You don't have to be a certified financial planner to provide advisory services. You don't have to be anything special to help a client with cash flow, and helping them understand their cash flow. To helping them understand how to improve their their gross profit margin, how to help them understand how to reduce their expenses, to help them understand how to do different things in their business to improve their profitability. You don't have to have any certain designation to help them with some of those things. So you don't have to have any, certain credentials to help with helping them with their business. Help them to understand how to renegotiate their insurance and get a better rate with their insurance and how to get new terms with their payment on their, vendors all of that stuff, that's just general business advice, and there's no credentials that you need to do that's advisory services. Nothing required to do that. Okay. Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 43:05

Jennifer's comment is really just puts it in their advisory is nothing more than bridging the gap between the story of the numbers, the story that numbers tell and the client's desired outcome. Perfect.

Michelle Long: 43:16

Perfect. Yes. Okay. I'm going to go back to screen sharing because there's a couple of really important things that I want to show people. So you should be seeing my scene. Here is that guide, because what I wanted to tell you about that summit CPA firm is they did it, they transitioned from if I remember correctly. So if I misspeak, please just read it.'cause this was over a year ago. And I have CRS, can't remember what I did yesterday. Summit Virtual CO, this is a firm that transitioned to subscription pricing. So this. Is intended for clients. So it will give you a blueprint of the types of services that are included in their subscription. What they're giving to clients. So the types of services, types of pricing, what they're presenting to clients and how they're packaging this and how they're doing it, it's a blueprint of a firm that is million dollar firm and how they're doing it. So this is a blueprint of what another firm is successfully doing so that you can then say, Hey, this is how they're doing it. How can I do this for me with my client? So it's a blueprint of something that you could go by. To just show you A firm that's doing it. So this is why I wanted to show you this is a firm that I think is doing a great job. So please take a look at it. Yes, you have to give me your Email address and then it does work. I did this right before the webinar today or the podcast today so please take a look at that check that out that does work for you. The other thing I wanted to show you is some free advisory training Those of you that like help I can't do this. Yes, you can do this You just need some confidence and you need some training. So log into qbo qboa. I'm, sorry It is free to join the pro advisor Program. If you haven't done that yet, proadvisor. intuit. com. If you work with multiple clients, it is free. If you're an accounting professional working with multiple clients, log into QBOA, ProAdvisor, training, go to your training library, scroll down. And you'll find advising clients. You have training on apps. If you're interested in learning more about apps, you have apps in the QBO system and you have integrating apps with QBO. So you have some stuff there. But here's the big thing. Under advising clients, the framing your advisory work, four hours. The core of the work, almost five hours of training. Optimizing your work, you have four and a half hours. And app demos, three and a half hours. You have like I forget if you add it all up like almost 20 hours of training down here Maybe 18 hours of free training right here. All right. This is a lot of really good Advisory training right genie white house did some of this. Oh gosh, I forget her name, but Great training in here. Okay, so check this out then also on cashflow advisory stuff, Mike Myland. I love Mike. He used to be with Cinegraph seven men advisory conversation we did with him last week. He has got a great, whoops, I didn't mean to actually play it. But if you click on this, it was a great discussion we had with him and he had some great information as well as a great cashflow plate. I forget what he had, but cashflow, Mike and stuff had great stuff for you. Dan, what do you want to say about

Dan DeLong: 46:41

Mike? Oh, yeah, he has a he has a book having the 7 minute conversation where you have the home run system, which really. It's all the basis which is why he calls it the home run. And it's a way to read the TV in a really quick way and have that conversation and start that advisory type of conversation where it is something as simple as, okay, your growth profit went down, your expenses need to go down at that same level. Okay what do we need to do that in order to do that? Let's take a look at the numbers at the profit and loss or the cash flow statement. And then he gives you that, what to do when you see that and how to frame the conversation with the.

Michelle Long: 47:24

Yes, and it even tells you how you can go and get that book for free. So he lets you download the PDF of that for free. So check that out as well. And George, he says, Can either of you comment on Intuit's evilness by not allowing small practitioners to be able to align the 1099s and print them? It's not Intuit! That's the IRS. The IRS said you can't you cannot print and mail in, you cannot send in more than 10 of those. That's not that's not into it. It says you can only do 10 of those. You have to e file if there's more than 10 of those. That's not Intuit doing that. That's the IRS. They're just

Dan DeLong: 48:06

playing by the rules.

Michelle Long: 48:08

Yeah, I'm like, that's, I could be wrong, but go check the IRS guidelines. I think the IRS is the one that did that, not Intuit. So don't blame that one on Intuit. Check the IRS guidelines.

Dan DeLong: 48:19

There's plenty to blame on Intuit but maybe not, maybe this isn't one of them.

Michelle Long: 48:23

And like I said, when it comes to Intuit, and I agree, the relationship between Intuit and accounting professionals has changed. I said my piece on that a few times ago when we talked about Intuit's announcement with, And it has changed and, technology's changing things and the whole industry is changing. We have to change with it. And, it is changing. Our industry is changing. And we have to change with it. And we're very grateful that Jessica is going to come on next time with us. And right, Dan we hope you guys will be coming on with us next time as well.

Dan DeLong: 49:04

Yes, ma'am. And hopefully we'll be, I'll be in a better place as far as the internet is concerned, and I certainly won't be freezing like you. But I will have a better better, better internet connection. So appreciate you joining us Michelle, thank you for your wonderful insight into this being the tip of the spears and the charge changing and adapting and being who you are for the for the accounting industry.

Michelle Long: 49:32

Oh hey. Thank you guys for joining us today. Hopefully you will get away from that hourly pricing. Even if you're doing cleanup work, give them a range. Hey, this is going to cost two to three grand. Don't do it hourly. Anyway, we're going to let you guys go today. Dan's going to go enjoy the sun. I'm going to go try to thaw out and warm up here, but thank you guys. I hope you guys will all join us next time and everybody have a great day. Dan, thanks for all you do. We'll see you guys next time.