Barrett Young is an accountant who founded The Green Abacus in 2012. He has never kept a timesheet, no longer does tax returns, and has never worked for a Big Four Accounting Firm. Barrett served our country as a Marine in the infantry, and he loves to snowboard.
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Providing Unlimited Access
- What is the most important thing you can share about pricing?
- Pricing is personalized. It is elastic.
- The same thing can be valued by two people at completely different levels.
- He tells his gym that they do not charge enough, because of the value they are creating for him.
- His why is that he loves to feel like he is enabling someone else's success.
- As accountants, it is hard to explain to a customer that you are going to help them grow the company.
- What steps have you taken to educate the customer about the value you offer?
- In engagement letters and proposals, they provide unlimited access.
- It allows the customer the opportunity to rely on them more.
- He pushes the customer in conversations to ask more about their business and how else they can serve them.
- They are proactive and have regular monthly meetings.
- They do not do tax returns because business owners need them year round for value, not just during tax season.
- They offer business tax returns through a relationship with another tax accountant.
- They wanted to have control over the tax-return relationship, without doing the returns.
- Customers expected them to have a hand in their tax returns, so they had to create the option to work with someone else.
Price Before the Work Is Done
- What was your experience with pricing after the work was done?
- He jumped in to solve a problem with a customer on an IRS audit.
- They did not stop and examine the scope.
- It started as an opportunity to create good will and show some added value for which they were not going to price.
- The day before the IRS examination, his team did not think that it was right. They were not going to get paid for the work that they did on the project.
- The customer agreed that he should pay for the work.
- Barrett suggested a TIP charge to resolve the situation.
- You cannot price in arrears, but sometimes you get yourself into the situation where it is necessary.
- What is a TIP clause? And, what was the outcome?
- He learned of it from Ron Baker in Implementing Value Pricing.
- A TIP clause is the same as tipping the waitstaff at a restaurant – you are paying for the service (food) but you tip based on the performance of the server.
- TIP: To Insure Performance is the acronym.
- The TIP Clause for this customer was a sloppy attempt to request payment after the fact.
- It was lazy because he put all the value assessment on the customer after-the-fact.
- A TIP Clause is a valid pricing technique, but this was not the correct time to use it.
- He thought he was making it easier for the customer by letting them say “nothing” is your TIP.
- The customer did not respond for two weeks, and the office manager eventually asked for an invoice.
- The owner pushed him past the TIP Charge because he trusted that he would be charged correctly.
- The price that Barrett provided was accepted and paid.
- How did a Facebook group serve as your pricing council?
- He had no idea how to price an audit or the outcome of the first meeting.
- In his mind, he thought it should be low because it sounded painful.
- Dan Morris asked what kind of value that Barrett contributed.
- There was a suggestion that Barrett provide three prices and let the customer choose.
- Dan also asked if he brought any special skills that another firm would not have brought.
- Barrett thought that he should have recommended his customer to go somewhere else due to his lack of experience.
- However, the value he added was his knowledge of his customer's books.
- As professionals, we create more value for our customers as we continue to do business with them.
- The history allows us to guide them better, make better decisions and think of new ideas.
- As customers learn to trust you more, you can become more of an advisor in their lives.
Creating Accounting Options
- Why do you structure your options with things like unlimited access?
- With the silver and gold packages, there is a “this will not solve” section that explains what is not included.
- Whatever your method of communication is, you can reach out to them for unlimited access.
- They do not want to work with people who feel compelled to work with them.
- He wants to be available to the customer for any reason, for any question.
- The reason unlimited access is the most valuable in proposals is because the customer will benefit more from “being in the room” together than from their accounting skills.
- What is the reason for the “what level of service” question on your intake form?
- Up until the pricing page was released, they asked what the customer's budget was before they talked.
- The customer never answered the budget question correctly.
- The potential customer has no context for a budget since they had not had a value conversation with you.
- How do strength training, cardio and diet apply to business?
- Barrett wrote a blog post You Can't Outtrain A Bad Diet, after listening to The Soul of Enterprise.
- Those three components of fitness align to business as follows:
- Strength training is the same as marketing.
- Cardio is process development.
- Diet is the record keeping and planning – not only do you have your journals of what you ate, but you start to budget your food to meet the other goals.
- What is one of your best stories about creating value for a customer?
- Barrett says being able to help his customers in ways that are unexpected.
- No one thinks of an accountant as being able to offer marketing advice, for example.
- His customers' businesses are better because he is in the room.
About Barrett Young
- Website: TheGreenAbacus.com
- Podcast: The Green Abacus Podcast
- Twitter: @cp_eh
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