Jason Blumer is an accountant and entrepreneur, constantly starting businesses. His focus for the past few years has been on business coaching, trying to change businesses from the inside out. He is trying to single-handedly start a revolution in the accounting industry. He runs Blumer CPAs, a virtual accounting firm. He started the Thriveal CPA Network to help accountants stop billing by the hour and start pricing on the value they create for their customers. He has two podcasts of his own, Thrivecast and the Businessology Show.
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Price is Tied to Value
The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. – Warren Buffett
- What is the most important thing you can share about pricing?
- The future success of a business is in its ability to price high.
- If you can't raise your prices, you have to figure out why.
- Value pricing is a methodology. There is no right price.
- Price is intrinsically tied into value.
- Learning to have the value conversation is at the heart of value pricing.
- How do you know if you are profitable when you are not tracking time?
- You can look at your P&L statement to determine if you are profitable.
- You do have to know your costs; they are hard numbers.
- Cost is the cash you have to pay to deliver on the value promises you are making to your customer.
- Profit is not the same thing as cash flow, which ebbs and flows, depending on how you scope documents and present terms.
- Value pricing can improve and predict your cash flow.
- You price better and your margins are better with value pricing.
- Value pricing is a hard thing to do – it is the right thing to do, but it is harder.
- It is good to have support from a coach to help you make the change.
- What is one of the biggest obstacles when switching to value pricing?
- Value pricing is a methodology where there is no “right” price.
- You have to become comfortable with the fluffy discussions of value and the unknown subjective world.
- You can still use a spreadsheet to calculate the price.
- How do you define value pricing?
- Value Pricing is how to get the maximum price for the value you're promising.
- Business is win-win; you can't price high (promise high value) unless the customer receives high value.
- Both sides have to believe that the agreement is awesome.
- Value pricing forces you to be more intimate with your customers.
- Your customers begin to trust you with their fears and failures in order for you to provide the best value for them.
- How do you push through the “uneasiness” of pricing?
- You can help people push through the uneasiness with coaching.
- Pricing is a skill you get better at, but you never stop learning.
- It is a courageous thing to get aligned on the right things with your customers.
- You have to push through the fear and leave your money baggage conversations behind.
- Coaches can help you unlock what you are struggling with.
- You must believe you create value.
- The business owner does not have to do the pricing; determine who is the best person to do the pricing for your organization.
- Check your own perceptions of value at the door.
- The danger of hourly billing is that it never faces you with the question as to whether or not you are valuable.
- Can you put, “I sell transformation,” on your website?
- You won't get good at pricing until you are willing to be uncomfortable.
Value Pricing for Accountants
- How can accountants successfully implement value pricing?
- Yes, a million times yes! It's amazing to see it happen.
- It forces your hand to define your customer better.
- A scarcity-poor mindset will not align with value pricing.
- There is a cost with change.
- Implementing value pricing in your business requires sacrifices in three areas: Customers, Services, Team
- The team has to be able to believe that you sell transformation, making them high value and higher priced.
- The Dangers of Safety is a blog post about being uncomfortable through the changes.
- Doing anything right is not easy.
- The cost you have to pay to implement value pricing is worth the payoff.
- You have to be ready to see and seize the opportunity to price based on value.
- Pricing based on value happens before the work is done, so the customer has to believe in you.
- The challenges of value pricing are worth the higher prices and the lives that you transform.
- When you sell something that is transformative, you have huge leverage to create huge pricing in return.
- Industries are being commoditized by technology.
- The accounting profession is not willing to embrace that truth.
- Baby boomers run 80-90% of the industry and that generation has the tendency to place more value on a transaction.
- It is a profession with a mindset that is unwilling to change, which is making it hard.
- Innovate or die!
- The “die” part is happening so slowly that it is making it more challenging to change.
- What are you doing to help accountants learn to price by value?
- There are coaching courses offered through Thriveal.
- George Gilder said profit is an index of altruism.
- A lot of young people are coming into Thriveal, and are blasted with discussions on value.
- Jason also speaks and writes on value.
- The message isn't always well-received, so you have to argue about it as well.
- It will be one firm at a time implementing this business model.
- Implementing Value Pricing is much more accepted by younger people.
- What is the Thriveal CPA Network?
- Thriveal is a private, vetted community of entrepreneurial, strategic, creative firm owners.
- They want to run a business like a business, not like a firm.
- They are creating flatter models and giving more autonomy to their team members to help make decisions.
- They do not advertise for new members, and it is not for the majority of firm owners.
- There is a manifesto document with 6 key points that Jason wrote.
- The firm members are not the same, but the entrepreneurs think the same.
- They want to see the members doing courageous things, even if they are fearful.
- The Thriveal Laboratory was started to do experiments, run by Adrian Simmons.
Masterminds and Coaching
- Why should an owner or entrepreneur have a business coach?
- Coaching may be popular, but it is somewhat unknown.
- Unlike a consultant who identifies what to fix, a coach makes you think deeper.
- A coach is trained to walk you through pathways of change.
- Coaching is about transformation.
- It is somewhat like business counseling.
- A third party coach, who is emotionally distant from the issue, pushes you where you can't push yourself.
- For a more detailed explanation, you can read Blumer CPAs Coaching Guide.
- Firms need to proactively add services that are of higher value, to sell their brains again.
- Technology can manage the tax code better than the brains of tax managers.
- How is a mastermind group different from coaching?
- A mastermind is similar to group coaching.
- One-on-one coaching is about transforming the individual.
- For a group coaching, the coach is a facilitator.
- The attendees go through materials, which spark thoughts.
- The group then meets to talk through what they learned from the materials.
- A mastermind is a group of 4-5 people who are at a similar place in the business life cycle to share challenges and hold each other accountable.
- In group coaching, the coach pours into the group.
- In a mastermind, they all have equal weight and it allows for iron to sharpen iron.
- How can a business add coaching as a new service?
- The first thing you need to do is sell something you don't know how to deliver.
- Once you sell a coaching session, then you figure out how to deliver it.
- Jason follows a coach, David Rock, who wrote Quiet Leadership.
- To come up with the right questions, rather than the right answers, Jason suggests reading books by Peter Block.
- What is one of your best stories about creating value for a customer?
- The greatest stories are when you are able to put a price on the transformation of a human through coaching services.
- After 6-9 months, sometimes they don't need the service anymore as they are more aware of how they deal with issues.
- If you are not in the mindset of value pricing, you can take great risks with your pricing.
- Jason based his pricing on how the customer's revenue and profit changed over the next year, but they didn't choose that option.
- When you see the value and go after those risks, you can request a substantially higher price.
About Jason Blumer
- Website: JasonBlumer.com
- Twitter: @JasonMBlumer
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