Articles on charging properly for the work you already do. Written by Reza Hooda, who runs a UK accountancy firm and built Power Pricing to use in it.
What is getting in your way?
Where the number comes from, and what it needs to include before you say it out loud.
Think of the client who queries every invoice, emails at eleven at night, and never has their records ready. Now check what they pay you. It is rarely a coincidence.
Two limited companies, same services, ten times the turnover between them. Almost every instinct says no. Almost every firm charges them nearly the same anyway.
Ask a firm owner what clients pay for and you get a list of deliverables. Ask a client why they stay, and you get something else entirely.
Firms are reporting four times the client contact and clients walking over fee increases. The workload is real, but the reason it hurts is that the old fee was never built to carry it.
Getting to a price while you are still in the room, and what to do the moment you have said it.
The best moment in a new client meeting is when they ask what it costs. If you find yourself introducing the price unprompted, something earlier in the conversation went wrong.
You have the meeting, then go away and build the quote, then send it a few days later. By the time it arrives, the thing that was going to win you the work has gone.
When you send a prospect your fee, do you give them one number or three? The difference decides what question they end up answering.
A client asks whether you can do anything on the price. You take a bit off to get it over the line. What you have actually just taught them is worth thinking about.
The fees that never reach an invoice. Most firms are giving away several of these every year without seeing it.
If a client joins you in month ten of their financial year, who paid for the first nine? Usually you did, without noticing.
A firm owner told me about a practice he was buying. It was in financial trouble. Part of the reason turned out to be several hundred software subscriptions it was paying for and had never recharged.
Take the client on in April. File the accounts nine months after the year end. Invoice, then wait for payment. Count the months and it is close to two years.
Payroll the day before payday. VAT records long after the quarter closed. There is a reason, and it is not that your clients are disorganised.
Which is why they still say what they said five years ago. What is missing from them, and the clause that decides who pays when a client leaves mid-year.
Most firms wrote theirs once, from a template, and have copied it forward ever since. Three things have changed underneath it since then.
Mid-March. A client is leaving. They have paid nine months and the accounts are not done. Their new accountant is on the phone asking about a refund.
Read your own confidentiality clause, then think about who actually touches client data in your firm. For most practices those two things no longer match.
Getting your pricing out of your head, so a renewal does not have to wait for you to have a free afternoon.
You have got yourself out of the delivery and most of the client work. Pricing is the one thing still in your head, and it is quietly costing you more than the rest.
Most pricing software gives you every option and calls it flexibility. I call it a lack of conviction. This is the one thing Power Pricing will never do.
Connecting Power Pricing to the software already in your firm, so the work after a signature stops being re-keyed by hand. Your accounts, your data, your client relationships.
There is a gap in most firms that nobody owns. The client signs, and then days later somebody re-keys the whole thing into Xero from a PDF. That is where the alignment fee quietly goes missing.
The client says yes, and then you have to go back and ask them for their passport. It is the least impressive moment in the whole relationship, and it is entirely avoidable.
The proposal is signed and everyone is pleased. Now somebody has to set the client up in Karbon and start the onboarding, and that somebody is usually you, on a Friday.
Real firms, real numbers, and what the change looked like from the inside rather than from the outside.
Nine staff, £700k turnover, hourly since the day it opened. In January they stopped. Thirty-four proposals and eleven signatures later, here is what the switch actually looked like from the inside.
He used to price clients based on how he felt that day. Then he priced one live, in the room, and quoted £51,000 a year. Around ten times his average fee, and they said yes.
A Berkshire practice, nineteen years old, fourteen people, and pricing that had never once left the owner's head. What changed the month her team started doing it instead of her.
Ten of his clients through the pricing system showed a £9,700 a year gap, on work he was already doing. Then he repriced the first one and found out what the client had been expecting all along.