You’re here because you’re wondering if you’re undercharging your clients…
Hint: Most small accountancy firms are..
One of the first things we work on with our AGC members is the confidence to charge what they are worth and to go ahead with that long-needed fee increase.
If you want to get your firm to go from growing to scaling, i.e. above £150k in revenue, you need to ensure that your prices reflect that. This is why one of the 6 profit pillars we check in our free Growth Assessment is Pillar 2 – Pricing, Fees & Profitability.
Written by Heather Townsend, author of Profitable Pricing for Accountants and founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club.
What does self-esteem have to do with pricing your accounting services? A lot actually. Your self-esteem affects how you feel about yourself and your accountancy firm, therefore, you could say that it is quite a major factor in determining growth and success. This article explores how your self-esteem can determine your value pricing accounting services and how you can increase both your confidence and your prices.
Getting your pricing right is fundamental to how easy (or not) you make it to grow and scale your accountancy firm. This is why one of the 6 profit pillars we check in our free Growth Assessment is Profit Pillar 2 – Pricing, Fees & Profitability.
To see whether your issue is just with pricing or a bigger more systematic problem, take our 10-15 min free Growth Assessment here.
The advice given in this article on client onboarding for accountants is drawn directly from our book, Profitable Pricing For Accountants .
To buy your copy of the book directly from Amazon: Click here
To download the first 4 chapters of the book for free: Click here
Download our letter template to implement a fee increase successfully. Click here
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Chapter 5 will show you how to increase your firm’s cash flow and profitability.
Chapter 11 talks about how to turn your Leads into paying Clients.
Chapter 14 covers how to package your services and make your firm irresistible to your niche.
Order your free copy here.
“Self-esteem is defined as having confidence in one’s own worth or abilities. It’s about how much you respect and value yourself.”
When your self-esteem is higher, you feel better about yourself and your firm, but you also have more resilience. Studies have shown that high self-esteem, and therefore resilience, means that you are:
Not everyone naturally has high self-esteem and resilience, of course. But both are essential qualities to have as an accountancy firm owner, as they are vital to the sales process.
What we mean by this is that, to achieve the goals you have set for yourself and your firm, you need to charge what you are really worth and to charge what you are really worth, you need to have the resilience to get comfortable with some rejection.
By raising your fee level, you will become too expensive for some Clients and Prospects; not every client will want to pay your new fee level, and not every great Prospect will want to come on board at the fees you are quoting. This means you need to be confident that you are charging what you are worth so that you can take the rejections. This confidence will keep you pushing ahead to find bigger and better clients that you actually want.
Put simply, if your self-esteem is low and you don’t value you or your firm’s abilities, then why should your clients?
As you can see from what we’ve already discussed, the fees you quote will be limited by the level of your own self-esteem.
This doesn’t mean that if you have low self-esteem, you’re stuck with a life of busy work from lots of low-fee-paying clients. It also doesn’t mean that you can just “fake it until you make it” with your confidence to try and win better work. Most Prospects and Clients can spot contrived confidence a mile off!. This is a bad first impression to make as it introduces doubt in the mind of the buyer; the very person who you want to be confident in you and your firm’s services.
So what’s the solution to finding the confidence to charge the right price? Finding easy ways to increase your self-esteem!
We are not saying improving your self-esteem is easy, as low self-esteem is often associated with mental health issues such as depression, which may need medical advice or a clinical solution to improve. We are saying it is worth the effort, however.
If you work with a coach, such as our Growth Experts, they will help you find where your self-esteem is lacking. Or what self-limiting beliefs are stopping you from charging what your firm is really worth. Listen to our club members Lorna and Kerrie talk about the difference having a Growth Expert helped with their confidence to increase their prices.
Lorna Leonard (Leonard Business Services) My confidence has gone through the roof since joining the club
“Before I started in the club my business growth had plateaued, and my confidence was holding me back. The confidence I have gained from getting the right advice from my Growth Expert, and listening to other club members, is amazing. I am now valuing my time more, and this confidence has been instrumental in doubling the size of my business within 9 months of joining the club. Winning £140k of new business within 9 months is nothing short of remarkable.”
Kerrie Jenkins (Atek Accountancy) Within a month of membership I had covered my membership fees several times over
I have only been a member of The Accountants’ Growth Club for about a month, but in that time I have already been helped to increase my fees and sort out my client base which will make us more profitable and also cover my membership fees several times over, and that’s in the first month. Working with my Growth Expert I have been given the confidence to take action and believe more in what I do. Using their coaching my Growth Expert was able to make me feel confident about what I should actually be charging my clients and this has given me a boost to have these difficult conversations with some of my clients.
Listen to Sue Penney of Penney’s Accountancy talking about how her lack of self-belief and self-esteem stopped her from increasing her prices. It was only when her Growth Expert helped her ‘get out of her own head’ and stop the overwhelm and overthinking her fee increases did she manage to have the confidence to increase her fees for existing clients.
Here’s an example of the “rewards” of self-improvement. One of our previous members Mohammed took years to build his confidence to move away from bargain-basement pricing (which resulted in a lot of low-fee-paying clients that restricted his resources and time) to price his services for what he was really worth. As a result of this newfound confidence, and requoting for his existing clients, over 12 months he was able to ditch half of his clients but actually increase his actual net profit by 50%!
To help you create positive daily habits to improve your overall self-esteem, here are some simple ways to build your confidence when it is low:
Doing stuff that we don’t like or know we are no good at over a prolonged period of time is enough to get anyone down. You start to doubt your sense of self-worth. One of the great things about being your own boss is the ability to delegate or outsource the tasks which don’t fill you with joy or play to your strengths. For example, if marketing is really not your thing, then give it to someone who is good at it; even if that means outsourcing it to a marketing professional or agency.
It’s very easy as the owner of an accountancy practice, particularly a growing practice, to get stuck in always being busy. Always doing something. Always striving towards the next milestone. As a result, you can often lose sight of exactly what you have achieved and how far you have come. You can feel like you are making no progress and this can bring you down. So, make sure that you give yourself a little bit of time every day, week, month, quarter and year to review you and your firm’s progress. This progress review can help you realise just how good you and your team are.
Read the difference that Paul Wareham, founder of PS Accountants, found by being able to step back with his Growth Expert to see what needed to be done.
Paul Wareham (PS Accountants): This year has been revolutionary for me and my team. We were pretty maxed out with work and I was always too busy firefighting so I knew I needed some help. While working in the business, I had become too focused on day to day operations and was not taking time to plan the direction of the firm. Working with my Growth Expert, he was able to help me to see what I truly wanted and what I needed to do to get there. When we get back to full firepower in 2020 we are all looking forward to welcoming the new clients. This growth will definitely allow me to take more time off to be with my family and get back into cycling more often.
Everyone is surrounded by people in life who either build them up or, sadly, bring them down. As much as you can do, minimise your interactions with people who act as a drain on your self-esteem.
Everyone is always their worst critic. It’s our old friend the Amygdala at work again. When you find yourself being critical about yourself, turn it around. List the positive or good things that you did. Or list out your positive qualities. This is particularly good when your self-esteem has recently taken a hammering.
As there is such a strong link between your self-esteem and pricing your accounting services, try to start implementing these 4 ways to increase your confidence so that you can start charging what you are worth. It may be difficult at first to deal with the initial rejections to your higher fee level, but you’ll soon see over time that you will win bigger, better clients at a much higher fee rate. If this doesn’t increase your self-esteem soon after, then we don’t know what will!
Need help with your Price Increase Letter? Download our letter template to implement a fee increase successfully!
Only when the personal benefit of addressing your firm’s pricing outweighs the perceived personal cost, e.g. having difficult conversations or possibly losing clients, will you sort out your pricing and fee levels. This is why it is so essential to identify your why! However, sometimes you need the services of a good coach such as our Growth Experts, to help you identify your why and what’s holding you back.
The most effective strong whys are where there is a strong personal reason. These are real examples of where understanding their real “why” helped our club members finally, often after much procrastination, address the prices of their firm:
A good way of understanding the impact of your low prices is to take our Free Growth Assessment. It will give you a personalised report against the 6 profit pillars that determine whether your firm is in a position to be grown and scaled.
Q: How do I build the confidence to increase my accounting fees? A: It all comes down to your self-esteem. Your self-esteem affects how you feel about yourself and your firm, which directly determines the value you place on your services. To build that confidence, start by playing to your strengths and outsourcing the tasks you don’t enjoy. Give yourself time to step back from firefighting the day-to-day operations to review how far you and your team have actually come. Most importantly, you need to identify your “why”; the strong personal reason (like funding your retirement or securing a mortgage for a dream house) that makes the discomfort of raising prices worth it. Sometimes, working with a coach or Growth Expert from The Accountants’ Growth Club is exactly what you need to help you “get out of your own head” and finally take action. Just like Sue Penney of Penney’s Accountants did (see her talking about how her Growth Expert got her to take action here)
Q: Why am I struggling so much to raise prices for my existing accounting clients? A: If you are struggling, it’s highly likely because your fees are being limited by your own self-esteem and self-limiting beliefs. It is very common for firm owners to get stuck doing a lot of “busy work” for low-fee-paying clients because they lack the confidence to charge what they are actually worth. You have to remember: if you don’t value yourself or your firm’s abilities, why should your clients? Until the personal benefit of addressing your pricing outweighs the perceived personal cost (like having difficult conversations or the fear of losing clients), you will likely keep putting it off.
Q: What should I do if clients reject my accounting fee increases? A: You need to build the resilience to get comfortable with some rejection. The truth is, when you raise your fee level, you will become too expensive for some clients and prospects. Not every client will want to pay your new fees, and not every great prospect will come on board at the prices you quote. However, having the confidence to take those rejections on the chin is what will keep you pushing ahead to find the bigger, better clients that you actually want to work with. For example, when Shaileen Shah, owner of Price Mann increased his fees by on average 25-50% he lost 3% of his fee bank by value and 10% by volume but added on over £250k of profit to his practice.
Q: Should I just ‘fake it till I make it’ when quoting higher fees to prospects? A: We wouldn’t recommend it. Most prospects and clients can spot contrived confidence a mile off! Faking it makes a bad first impression and immediately introduces doubt in the buyer’s mind. You want the buyer to have complete confidence in you and your firm’s services, which means your confidence needs to be genuine. Instead of faking it, focus on finding easy ways to increase your genuine self-esteem. For example, like eliminating people who bring you down, being kind to yourself when the inner critic takes over, and remembering your positive qualities.
Q: How do I stop doing busy work for low-paying clients and fix my pricing? A: Waiting and wondering won’t help you; you need to take action. A great first step is to take our Free Growth Assessment, which will give you a personalised report against the 6 profit pillars to show you exactly how much your pricing is hindering the growth of your practice. If you already know you need to make a change, consider getting expert help. Working with a Growth Expert at The Accountants’ Growth Club has given over 200+ accounting firm owners the confidence to ditch bargain-basement pricing, sort out their client base, and significantly increase their fees.
Waiting and wondering wouldn’t help you. You need to take action.
A good next step would be to complete our free Growth Assessment to see how much your pricing is hindering the growth of your practice.
If you know you already need help them book a call with us to see how we can help you sort out your accountancy firm’s pricing.
Getting your pricing right for your accounting firm is fundamental to how easy (or not) you make it to grow and scale your accountancy firm. This is why pricing is one of the 6 profit pillars we check with our FREE Growth Assessment.
Complete the assessment (it takes about 10 mins) and you’ll receive a free personalised report that helps you prioritise what to action first.
Written by Heather Townsend. Heather has spent the last 15+ years helping Accounting Firm owners increase their prices (without losing clients). She is the founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club and the author of Profitable Pricing For Accountants.