Better Pricing Strategies for Accountants: Stop Billing by the Hour
My guest today is Jonathan Stark. Jonathan is a former software developer who is on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. He is the author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts, the host of TWO podcasts: Ditching Hourly and The Business of Authority, and writes a daily newsletter on pricing for independent professionals.
We’re talking today about better ways for CPAs to price their services so that they can get out of the accounting rut.
We will get into different pricing strategies, the differences between value, price, and cost, selling outcomes instead of deliverables, and more.
“If you can find clients that will get more and more value out of the services that you provide, the prices that you can put in your project proposals just magically go up… In other words, without much more work, you can charge a client a hundred thousand dollars for basically the same thing if the value to them is a million. So your growth comes from finding clients who value the stuff that you do more.”
– Jonathan Stark
Value is not just about increasing prices. It’s a way for you to provide a range of possible solutions for your clients so that they can choose what makes sense to them given the context they’re in and which solution they want, in a way that is always profitable for both parties.
What I see as most immediately implementable when it comes to moving out of hourly billing is to take one thing that you already do all the time anyways, and turn that into a flat-fee service, and give yourself the experience of getting faster and better at it, so you know what it feels like to divorce your profit margins from your time. Once you get a taste for that feeling, you’ll be thirsty for more.
Episodes mentioned:
105 Mathematical Proof Different is Better
104 How Much Would a CPA Pay for a Kid’s Bike?
Connect with Jonathan:
Website: https://jonathanstark.com/
Upcoming training:
GIVE UP CALCULATING $ PER HOUR
Break free of this arbitrary metric: there is a better way
Thursday, October 22, 12pm ET
10 Phrases To Scrub From Your Website And What To Replace It With
Thursday, November 19th, 12pm ET
Schedule time with Geraldine:
https://calendly.com/geraldinecarter/15min