Business Strategy for CPA's

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

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Many CPAs work until they're done. And they either hand their firm down, sell it, or turn off the lights and close the door. Some miss an opportunity to be more strategic about what they choose to build with an eye toward future value creation. 

Here today to talk with me about this is my guest, Jody Grunden. 

Jody is the co-founder & CEO at Summit CPA Group, A Division of Anders CPAs + Advisors. Summit CPA is the leading provider of Virtual CFO Services in North America. 

Highlights:

— “High growth and high profit, those are the two big things that companies look for.” 

— “Being remote accelerated growth, because now we could go anywhere and hire anywhere.”

— “There's a great opportunity to get rid of existing clients that are preventing you from making changes [to improve your firm].”

— “Take advantage of the remote atmosphere, whether it's hybrid or fully remote. This is the perfect time.”

— “The most important factors: niche, go remote, and take risks.”

Connect with JODY:

Website: https://www.summitcpa.net/

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jodygrunden

Twitter: @jgrunden and @SummitCPAGroup

Previous episode with Jody:

086 Secrets of Shifting to vCFO Services, with Jody Grunden

https://businessstrategyforcpas.com/086

Book mention:

Time's Up!: The Subscription Business Model for Professional Firms, by Ron Baker and Paul Dunn

https://www.amazon.com/Times-Up-Subscription-Business-Professional/dp/1119893526

Software mentions:

Reach Reporting: ​​https://reachreporting.com/

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?*

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You can create time. 

You don’t have to be busy all the time. 

The accounting space mostly believes that CPAs work long hours, and that’s just “how it is.”

That’s not how it needs to be. 

You can create time. 

You create time. 

You can create time with these seven tactics:

1. Plan to your time
2. Make decisions - faster, more strongly
3. Stop wondering - start figuring it out
4. Constrain - pick 1 or 3 things to focus on
5. Try things - stop thinking of your attempts as failures
6. Say no - stop saying you’re a people-pleaser
7. Stop thinking busy and stop being busy - start saying you create time and start creating time

You CAN create time, and work a 40-hour workweek. Time to put an end to habitual overworking in the accounting industry :)

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

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In this episode, we're talking about value creation. 

In the accounting space, it’s easy for the firm owner to think that revenue comes from clients, work, time, or deliverables.

Because your client pays the bill for the work you did, it can appear that that’s where the money comes from. But the money comes from the value you created. 

The more you think about your clients and creating value for them, and the better you get at capturing the value you create for your clients with effective pricing, the better you'll get at bringing revenue into your accounting practice without having to put in so many hours and so much effort to create that revenue.

When you create more value and capture that value with higher prices, you can meet revenue goals with fewer clients and less work. This is the path to making your accounting practice easier to run. After which, life gets easier. 

Remember: all revenue comes from value creation. Not from clients, not from time, not from deliverables, not from work.

Episode mention:

220 Effortless Value: Price for Access, not Work

https://businessstrategyforcpas.com/220

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

Happy holidays!

Enjoy the annual tradition of accounting humor, hosted by Geraldine’s two kids, Hazel and Remy.

This year: Top Ten 10 Signs of a Bad Accountant.

Wishing you all the best in 2023!

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Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?*

Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe

In this episode, I want to give you 12 reasons to focus on a niche or an industry, or your ideal buyer or a market segment. Whatever term you like to call it.

There are slight differences in the details but what's most important is understanding how valuable it can be to your business to focus on an ideal buyer, to pick a niche and move in that direction. 

1. It simplifies your business.
2. It deepens your expertise
3. Expertise is more valuable than general knowledge. 
4. When you create value, it enables your prices to go up. 
5. When your prices go up, your margins also go up when you niche. 
6. When your prices go up, you need fewer clients to meet your revenue targets.
7. Your business starts to feel easier, because there's just less to keep track of.
8. When all your clients look like each other, it becomes so much easier to systematize.
9. The more you can get your clients to nest the more space you create in your business and the more mental space you create in your mind. 
10. When you niche and you focus on an ideal buyer and you deepen your expertise, you become less duplicatable.
11. You put yourself in a position to sell expertise without having to do any work.
12. Niching and going in the direction of deepening expertise creates options for you in terms of how to create revenue.

And here are some of the objections that I hear about niching: 

1. Letting go of existing revenue.
2. I won't be able to create future revenue.
3. I will be bored.
4. It feels limiting, as in, “I’m eliminating too many potential customers.”

Each of the above objections gets addressed. 

Narrowing your industry, your niche, focusing on an ideal buyer opens up more options for you.

Episode mentions:

211 Pricing for Improved Profitability

212 Hold My Beer and Watch Me Niche

220 How to Price for Access, not Work

179 Digital Products, Courses, and 90% Margins with The Real Estate CPA

Blake Oliver's Earmark CPE podcast

https://earmarkcpe.com/

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

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Here are some different ways to think about what you price. 

Why? 

Because what you price informs your revenue. Depending on what you price has a huge impact on how much you work, or don’t work. Depending on what you price will inform your revenue or the revenue that you do not bring in. 

If you look at the accounting space right now, the going model is to price work. 

But there are at least two problems with this method of pricing work: 

1. When you sell work, you're always on the hook for working.
2. What if you think that clients value work, when in fact, they really value access more? 

What would happen if you priced your packages and differentiated your services based solely on access?

If work is what you want to be doing less of, what if you consider the option of selling less work?

What would happen if you safeguarded your time and you priced and sold access?

If your clients value access and access to you is in short supply, consider pricing for access, so you can do less work. 

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?*

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Accountants and CPAs have loads of systems running through their tax practice. Perhaps some things must still be done manually. But what if more of your work and your staff's work could be automated? 

Here today to talk with me about this is my guest, Jason Staats. 

Jason is a CPA turned automation nerd who enjoys sharing new ideas and memes on Twitter, Youtube, and Tiktok. He also built Realize, an online community of accounting firm owners.

Highlights:

— “Automation today looks a little more bottom-up. It's automating the very workflow and client-specific problems that we have.”

— “If you can surround yourself with people who are at varying levels of the same journey, that's just going to accelerate your learning so much.”

— “The best way to think about where to start, especially if you do a lot of accounting is, what could you just automate inside of a single accounting file?” — “Inbox rules are the greatest automation hack there is.” 

— “In your decision-making feedback loop, you need to have trusted peers or an external coach who can give you honest feedback that isn't subject to the groupthink that you have within a firm.” 

Connect with Jason:

Podcast https://www.automationtown.fm/

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@jasoncpa

Twitter https://twitter.com/JStaatsCPA

Community https://rlz.io/

Software mentions:

Zapier: https://zapier.com/

Make: https://www.make.com/en/

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

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Today we are talking about stress and overwhelm and overworking because it's not just common in the accounting space, but it's almost as if it's expected. It's almost assumed that a firm will have or being a CPA will include long hours, and it will include the stress of meeting client demands and client deadlines.

Not only does mental health suffer as a result of setting things up this way. But what we want to dig into today is a conversation about mindset because people talk about it, but it doesn't typically get understood what it actually is. 

And in my program, CPA Mastermind, we face it head on and we tackle it. I have a team of coaches who coach mindset one-on-one in private coaching with CPA masterminders. 

And today I brought on one of my coaches Emma Richter to talk about what coaching is and isn't, and how it's beneficial inside that program in particular. 

Highlights:

— “This mindset work is actually very logical, and emotions and the reactions they cause are logical.”

— “When you can bring the drama out of your statements about time, you'll be surprised at how much more efficient and effective you are with your time.”

— “In reality, your price is up to you. And the market will tell you whether that is a good price or not.”

— “There is no failing. There's only learning. And that is especially true in running a business.”

— “When you help you, you also become a better CPA, a better business owner. And therefore you can help your clients become better business owners.”

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

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In this episode, I share with you how you can get down to a 40-hour workweek, work with great clients you enjoy, all without forsaking revenue. 

It's what we do in Down to 40 Hours with CPA Mastermind, my four-month program designed to help CPAs like you build simpler, more profitable, easier to run businesses. 

It is the best program out there for the CPA who wants to get down to a 40-hour workweek, and now is the best time to give it to yourself.

So an episode today in five parts: 

1. What you want
2. What you have instead and how you got here 
3. What the solution is 
4. The process for getting out 
5. What you'll have when you travel the length of the process

If you're a CPA who is ready to have a practice you love making solid money, working with clients you enjoy and doing rewarding work without the insane hours, check out CPA Mastermind and get on the waitlist:

https://geraldinecarter.com/waitlist

If want more details, and have questions, check out https://geraldinecarter.com/cpa-mastermind.

And if you still have questions, email me at [email protected].

Highlights:

— “When you sell work, what that means is that you're going to do work all the time because that's what you're selling.”

— “Focus on the value that you can create for your clients.” 

— “We help you get better at communicating value so that you don't have to feel like you have to justify your prices or your bill to your client after the fact.” 

— “When we focus on exactly your ideal buyer who you want to work with, and you begin to work with only those kinds of clients, you generate efficiencies as you see ways to improve systems and stop doing all kinds of stuff to please all kinds of people.”

— “Knowing what to do is only half the battle. The other half of the battle is having your head in the right space and having a mindset that works in your favor.”

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

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Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

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We're talking with Sheila Hansen, who is a participant, a masterminder in my program, Down to 40 Hours CPA Mastermind, to get her perspective on the experience of what it's like, and the value of being in this program.

Sheila helps female-owned creative businesses understand their numbers while increasing profit and scaling to $500K-$2M in revenue.

Highlights:

— “One value of this program is really digging into niching. In some ways it was giving myself permission to go the route that I wanted to go.”

— “We don't have to have it all figured out exactly today.”

— “Clients care about if we can provide a solution that helps them see where their cash is going, and how to keep more of it and spend (or not spend) in a way that aligns with their goals.”

— “In the 10 weeks since we started, I have grown my monthly recurring contracts by 65% in revenue dollars. And in doing so, I only grew my client roster about 25%.” 

— “The mindset coaching sessions help me go from being paralyzed and not taking any action or avoiding it all together, to actually moving forward and getting something accomplished.” 

Connect with SHEILA:

Website: https://www.hansenllc.net/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sheila.hansen.cpa/

Get first access when CPA Mastermind enrollment opens:

https://geraldinecarter.com/waitlist

Announcing the *NEW* Client Success Stories podcast: 

https://business-strategy-for-cpas-success-stories.transistor.fm/

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆