Every renewal still has to come through you

Most firm owners get themselves out of the work in a sensible order.

The accounts preparation goes first, because it is the easiest to write down. Then the tax returns. Then, more slowly and with more discomfort, the client relationships. By the time a practice is a few people, the owner is usually doing very little of what they were doing at the start.

Except one thing.

Pricing is almost always the last thing left in the owner's head, and often the only thing. Every new client, every renewal, every reprice, every bit of extra work has to come past you before a number can be given to anybody.

This is not really a time problem

The obvious complaint is that it is a demand on your week, and it is. But that is the smaller half.

The real damage is what does not happen.

Repricing an existing client is never urgent. Nobody is chasing it. No deadline attaches to it, no client is waiting for it, and there is always something in front of it that genuinely cannot wait. So it does not get done, and it does not get done again, and a client who came on four years ago is still paying the fee you set four years ago for a business that has since doubled in size.

Fees do not fall behind because a firm decided to charge less. They fall behind because the one person who could change them was busy.

Multiply that across a client base and it is not a small number. It is usually the largest single sum of money a practice leaves on the table, and it is invisible, because nothing ever goes wrong. The clients are happy. The work gets done. The fees just quietly stop keeping up.

Doing nothing is not neutral

It is worth being blunt about this, because a lot of firms have talked themselves into treating a static fee as the safe option.

Your costs go up every year. Salaries, software, insurance, premises. If your fees do not move, your margin is shrinking on a schedule, and the decision to let that happen is being taken by default rather than deliberately.

Your clients, meanwhile, are not confused by price increases. Their electricity went up. Their broadband went up. Their insurance went up, twice. They are not sitting there believing that everything in the economy rises except your fee. A firm that has not raised its fees in five years has not been kind to its clients. It has been invisible to itself.

Pricing is a system, like everything else you have systemised

What makes this tractable is that you already know how to do it. You have done it repeatedly, with harder things.

When you handed over accounts preparation, you did not hand over the judgement and hope. You wrote down what the steps were, what to check, what to do about the awkward cases. The system was what made the handover possible.

Pricing is no different, and firm owners tend to believe it is, because pricing feels like judgement rather than process. Some of it is. But far more of it than most people expect is a set of decisions you have already made and never written down.

What actually drives your number? Usually something like:

• The size of the business, because a larger client carries more risk if something goes wrong
• The state of the records, because a shoebox is a different job from a maintained ledger
• How many of the things there are, whether that is employees, properties, transactions or entities
• How complex the work is, and whether it needs your eyes rather than anybody's
• How the client wants to be dealt with, and how quickly
• A floor, below which no client goes at all

None of that is mysterious. It is just never been written down in one place, so it lives in your head and can only be run by you.

The test

Here is how to know whether you have a pricing system or whether you are the pricing system.

Take a live enquiry. Hand the details to whoever runs your admin, without discussing it. Can they produce a fee that is within a few per cent of what you would have said?

If they can, you have a system. If they cannot, everything you charge depends on you having a free half hour, which means your fee income is limited by your diary rather than by your market.

When it works, the change is not subtle. Renewals stop being a project and become an admin task that happens once a year for every client, on a schedule, whether or not you are thinking about it. In our own practice that job sits with our practice manager, not with me, and it is the single most valuable process in the firm.

"But I am on my own"

Then this matters more, not less.

A solo firm has exactly the problem described above, with none of the slack. There is no one else the repricing could fall to, so it falls off entirely.

And the point of building the system now is precisely that you are the one who will hire. The moment you take somebody on, the question is what they can be trusted with, and the answer is always whatever has been written down. A firm where pricing is a system can hand pricing over on the first day. A firm where pricing is a person cannot hand it over at all, which is how owners end up buying themselves a job with staff attached.

Where to start this week

Not with software. With a sheet of paper.

Write down the last five fees you set and, next to each, why it was that number rather than a different one. Be honest, including the ones where the answer is that it felt about right.

You will see the same handful of factors doing nearly all the work, and you will see the places where your reasoning is not reasoning at all. That is your system, most of the way there, in an afternoon.

What Power Pricing does is hold that system somewhere other than your head. Your bands, your questions, your minimum, your uplifts, set once. After that anybody in the firm can put a client through it and get the fee you would have given, which means new quotes stop waiting for you and renewals stop waiting for a quiet week that never arrives.

The software is the easy part. The valuable part is deciding, once and properly, what your prices actually depend on. Most firms have never sat down and done that, which is why so many of them are the bottleneck without ever having chosen to be.