Nineteen years in, fourteen staff, and no pricing system

The firm: Mel Curtis, Melanie Curtis Accountants, Wokingham. Nineteen years old, a team of around fourteen. General practice, narrowing towards construction business owners.

Nineteen years. Fourteen people. And until this year, no pricing system.

That sentence tends to get read as a criticism, and it is not one. It describes most firms of that size, including some very good ones. It certainly is not a comment on the pricing itself, which was done by an experienced accountant who knows her market and her costs.

It is a comment on where the pricing lived. It lived in her head.

Why pricing is always the last thing to leave

Firm owners hand over the work in a fairly predictable order.

Accounts preparation goes first, because it is the easiest thing to write down. Then tax returns. Then, slowly and with more discomfort, the client relationships themselves. By the time a practice has fourteen people in it, the owner is usually doing very little of what they were doing on day one.

Pricing survives all of that, for two reasons that reinforce each other.

The first is that it genuinely is the hardest thing to write down. Everything else has a process you could describe to a new starter in an afternoon. Pricing is nineteen years of pattern recognition, and pattern recognition is not a document.

The second is that it never looks urgent. Nobody in the firm is blocked by it, because the owner is always there to be asked. The cost is invisible precisely because it is being absorbed, one interruption at a time, by the person least able to spare it.

We wrote about that trap on its own in if you are the only person who can price, you are the bottleneck. Mel's story is what it looks like when a firm actually walks out of it.

What changed

Her own words, filmed earlier this year:

"We now have Power Pricing, which is amazing. Finally I have a pricing system within my business, and my team have actually just started using it as well. The first time in forever."

The word doing the work in that sentence is finally.

Not because the tool is clever. Because for nineteen years the system already existed and only one person could reach it. What changed was not that the firm got a method. It is that the method got written down somewhere other than her memory, in a form thirteen other people could open.

That is the whole distinction. A method one person carries is a habit. The same method somewhere the team can use it is a system. The pricing may not even come out much different at first. The difference is who is able to produce it.

Why this was the change she needed

Mel had been clear for a while about the direction she wanted to move in. In her words, "moving myself out of the business, so I'm more sales and marketing", and, on the same theme, stop doing the ten pound an hour work and the hundred pound an hour work and focus on the thousand pound an hour work, which is growing the business and getting the right clients.

Every firm owner says a version of this. Rather fewer manage it, and the reason is usually not commitment. It is that one job stays behind.

You can hand over the compliance and still be in the office every day, because a prospect rings on Tuesday and only you can tell them what it costs. Pricing is the last door out of your own firm. Until somebody else can walk a client through a number, you are not really out, whatever the org chart says.

The order matters, and it is the opposite of the way most people attempt it. She did not free up her time and then sort the pricing out with it. She got the pricing out of her head, and the time was the consequence.

The niche makes it worth more, not less

The firm is also narrowing. In Mel's words, they are getting clear on working with construction business owners, which is what they had been doing all along, but are now making explicit.

It is worth saying what that does to the value of a shared pricing system, because the instinct runs the other way. Specialising feels like it should need more judgement, not less, and therefore more of the owner.

In practice it is the reverse. The narrower the firm gets, the more the same shape of client keeps arriving, and the more expensive it becomes for two similar clients to be quoted two different numbers by two different people. In a general practice nobody notices. In a niche, your clients know each other. They are in the same trade bodies and the same WhatsApp groups, and eventually they compare invoices.

What the system actually priced

It would be easy to read all of this as housekeeping. Better process, tidier fees, less riding on one person's memory.

Then this landed in the group, on a Friday night:

"The big potential client that I got via LI [LinkedIn] signed! Just over £50k GRF! Ended up doing a call today whilst on holiday and then going through some commercials too but all done!"

Just over £50,000 of recurring fees. Her largest ever, priced through the system.

Now read the middle of that sentence again, because it is the part she throws away and the part that actually matters. She went through the commercials on a call while she was on holiday.

You cannot do that from memory. Not on a client that size, not with any confidence, and not sitting somewhere with none of your usual props around you. It was possible because the pricing no longer needed her desk, her spreadsheet, or a quiet afternoon to reconstruct itself first. She opened the system, answered the questions about the business in front of her, and the number that came out was solid enough to walk a client of that size through there and then.

It also answers the objection this piece otherwise leaves hanging, which is that a system caps the number rather than raising it. The worry is always that putting the price on rails will cost you the judgement you spent nineteen years building.

What happens is the reverse, and not because the system is cleverer. It is that judgement under pressure rounds down. The person carrying it is the same person who then has to say the figure out loud and watch the client's face, which is not a neutral position to be reasoning from. A system is not in the room in that way. It does not reach for the easier number at the end of a long call. It adds up what is there, and the only question left is whether you say it.

What is worth taking from this

The temptation is to file this under "big firm problem". Fourteen staff, nineteen years, of course they need a system.

But the size is not what created the problem, it is only what made it visible. A sole practitioner pricing from memory has exactly the same gap; they just have nobody standing next to them to show it up. If anything, nineteen years made it harder to fix, not easier, because by then the method is so fluent that writing it down feels like a chore rather than a discovery.

So the useful test is not how big you are. It is whether anybody else in your firm could produce a fee for the next client who calls.

Try it properly rather than in theory. Take a renewal sitting on your desk this week and hand it to someone else to price, without telling them what you think it should be. Then price it yourself and compare the two numbers. Whatever the gap is, that is what having the system only in your head has been costing you, every single time somebody else could have done it and did not.