kill the billable hour to earn what you deserve.
by jody padar
the radical cpa
the speed of change is faster than ever. how are you going to react to it? that’s what i’m really preparing you for – redesigning your entire business model to become a more client-centric advisor. value-based pricing models are the key component but not the whole story.
more: stop looking for talent that does not exist | advisory work must be priced by value, not hours
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today’s automation, new competitors, staffing challenges and new technologies are conspiring to bring clients more value than they could have enjoyed before. all of it is shifting the way you need to think about your services, what clients value and how you get paid fairly for the expertise you bring to the table.
you possess something more valuable than time: knowledge. you have been trained to know things other businesspeople don’t know. you have experience doing things of critical value to any business, and the client values your advice because they don’t know what you know.
it’s how all these forces come together that will impact your business model. that’s why you need to rethink pricing.
unfortunately, there is not one single solution on how to price. that makes it difficult for you to figure out what to do, but on the bright side, your pricing model is uniquely yours and can be a competitive advantage.
the time has come to begin valuing your own worth over the billable hour. now, let’s dive into how you can embrace your real-world value unchained from the ticking clock.
before we look into the wonderful world of pricing, i’d like to ask you to take a quick journey outside yourself. it will just take a minute or two, i promise. look at yourself or a picture of yourself.
what are you? what are your experiences? your professional and educational achievements? i’d venture a guess they’re substantial. in fact, i’d dare to say you are probably the most financially knowledgeable person at any social gathering outside your professional life. i’d also wager you are surrounded by skilled professionals at the place you work.
you have value because of the things you know, your work and the people and technology that support you.
and, yet, so many accounting professionals i know think of themselves as a watch. a simple timepiece that measures their life by the hour. they sell themselves short!
the billable hour came into practice during the industrial revolution when the best way to determine how to pay someone was by the number of hours they stood at a machine and performed repetitive tasks. it began as a way to compensate workers with little more to offer than the time they spent working on a factory floor. far be it from me to denigrate people who work as hard as the american factory worker. i’d only like to draw a distinction between those who are compensated for what they do and those whose value is in what they know.
in many businesses, expertise and knowledge are more important to measure than time on the floor. i count the accounting profession as one of those professions.
industrialization led to automation and the ensuing redundancy of labor. the same thing is happening in the accounting space as automation increasingly does the heavy lifting of compliance work. it brings precision and speed to repetitive tasks.
however, automation isn’t making accountants and cpas redundant. rather, it has emphasized the value of industry-specific accounting skills and financial knowhow. it has freed accountants from the mundane to focus on the knowledge and expertise that separate them from hourly workers. these skills and attributes have always been there, but the billable hour obscured their value.