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the disruptors
with liz farr
geraldine carter wants accountants to get off the treadmill of working too many hours for too little pay. her new book – down to 40 hours – will help accountants achieve the “utterly reasonable” goal of working only 40 hours a week.
more podcasts and videos: vimal bava: when working smarter, not harder, is the only option | dawn brolin says grow your firm by shrinking it | jason blumer & julie shipp: move leaders out of client service | james graham: drop the billable hour and you’ll bill more | karen reyburn: fix your marketing and fix your business | giles pearson: fix the staffing crisis by swapping experience for education | jina etienne: practice fearless inclusion | bill penczak: stop forcing smart people to do stupid work | sandra wiley: staffing problem? check your culture | scott scarano: first, grow people. then firm growth can follow |
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carter helps accountants solve the problem of overwork with a three-pronged approach: creating value for clients, pricing effectively, and delivering services efficiently. a key to this approach is focusing on a niche. by focusing on a particular type of client, you see the patterns that help you create value for clients, “and you’re likely going to be one of the few with that expertise.” providing more value “enables you to increase your prices for the same work,” she says.
focusing on a niche helps accountants understand “what those people need,” so you can package up those services for efficient delivery. creating tiers of service facilitates “breaking out of the cycle of scoping, and then pricing, which almost universally leads to underpricing.”
one of the more counterintuitive ideas in the book is that charging higher prices is good for clients because, as carter says, “higher prices attract better quality clients for your business.” besides helping the accountant get their time back, “higher prices serve a segment of the marketplace that wants to pay more for a better product, a better experience, better service,” while “low prices send your business on a death spiral, and it’s bad for your clients.” in carter’s experience, “there are many clients who would gladly pay two or three times, if not four or five, what you are currently charging for a much better product”
with higher prices and higher margins, carter says, “you can let some of those clients in the bottom 10% of your roster go.
“with that freed-up time, you think about how to create more value for your best clients. and it becomes an upward spiral.”
9 more takeaways
- there will always be trade-offs. the question is, are we happy with the trade-offs that we’re making?
- the process of accounting has no inherent value. it has to be applied to something that’s worthwhile to your client. what is the bigger picture for the client? what transformation would be valuable to your client? how can you apply accounting to bring about that transformation?
- your thoughts about what’s possible and what’s not possible as an accountant may not be true, and they show up in your results and outcomes. do you like those results, or do you want a different set of results?
- revenue does not come from working or from clients but from the value you create and the value your clients perceive.
- the more tightly you niche, the more your clients look like each other. the more you see the patterns, the easier it becomes to standardize your processes.
- get your processes out of your head so your team can put out a more consistent quality of work.
- creating tiers is one way to get off the cycle of hourly billing. it helps accountants rethink how they sell and package services. your prices for packages will always be profitable because they’ve been designed to be profitable.
- think of marketing like a faucet you can turn on when you need more clients.
- how do your clients talk about their problems? what is the dream state they are after? how can accounting solve those problems? put that language and those exact words on your website and in your marketing.
about geraldine carter
geraldine carter is a business coach for overworked solo cpas and firm owners who want to reduce their hours to 40 without giving up revenue. her clients routinely shave hundreds of hours off their to-do lists and get back above water so they can reshape their practice into one in which they thrive. her podcast, business strategy for cpas, has more than 100,000 downloads and is ranked in the top ten podcasts for cpas by apple podcasts.
carter holds a bs in engineering from cornell university and is the co-founder and cfo of a company where her cashflow forecasting models have resulted in millions of dollars for climate change efforts. in her free time, she can be found mountain biking forested trails or running after her two small children in her hometown of ketchum, id.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr
welcome to accounting disruptor conversations. i’m your host, liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. and my guest today is geraldine carter, founder of she thinks big coaching hosted the podcast business strategy for cpas and author of a brand new book called down to 40 hours. how are you today, geraldine?
geraldine carter
i am great. thank you, liz for having me back. it’s good to talk to you.
liz farr
always, always good to talk to you. now, we’re here today to talk about your brand new book. and what i love about this book is that it’s a handbook for somebody who wants a different kind of firm. something that’s different from the one that we’ve been led to think is the only way out there. it’s a blueprint, get this book and follow the directions and you will have a great firm and a great life. now, now before we start, you know, how did you you know, you are a degreed engineer, you’re an entrepreneur, a world traveler, and a business coach. oh, was it that you came to work with accountants.
geraldine carter
so it’s been a journey. but i started as something of a generalist business coach, i had clients in a variety of industries, i had a psychotherapist and a physical therapist with four offices, or rock star clothing designer, a somebody who owned a number of automotive franchises. and even though i genuinely enjoyed working with all of them, some of the industries it was were more complex, and it was harder to make a difference. inventory is challenging franchise franchises are complex. but accounting practices are relatively straightforward. and i found i was able to make a meaningful difference in a reasonably short amount of time just by better pricing getting chipping away at that pile of ar shedding a bunch of clients who are dragging the cpa down or holding back. and i found that despite the stereotype of being mousy, boring and dry, the the people i was working with were really interesting and super smart, hardworking and funny. so i kept getting more curious about why they were working long hours, and how to solve that problem without a dip in revenue. so we kind of found each other. but when i found them, and they found me, it turned out to be a really great match. so i’ve just kept going with the direction of working only with accountants and cpas. and it’s been a great match.
liz farr
that’s great. and i agree, you know, accountants really are funny, at least some of them are. some of them are not.
geraldine carter
but i the ones i run into are incredibly funny and very clever.
liz farr
yes, yes. so i would say some of the ones that i worked with, were not in that. now, what would you say? are you know, you touched on them a little bit? what are the biggest challenges that accountants face? and why is getting down to 40 so appealing to them?
geraldine carter
so i see accountants who are owners, firm owners, it facing a number of challenges, i think of that, i think they think of the challenges they face as symptoms of a larger problem. and those symptoms include a never ending to do list working long hours feeling overwhelmed pain in the butt clients, and no visible way to make it stop. and it’s like they want to get off the treadmill. but their clients keep coming along and saying, hey, you know, i know i said i wanted to go on extension, but i changed my mind, let’s get that thing done before the deadline. it’s like the client is pushing the speed up button and the cpa just can’t make it stop. but like i said, i see these as symptoms of the larger problem. and the larger problem, i think has three main components. the first one is around knowing how to create value for clients. and the second one is knowing how to price effectively. the third one is deliver efficiently. if you create value for clients and you price effectively, that informs the revenue section of your p&l. if you deliver efficiently that informs the the expense section of your p&l. we can fix these problems serially which is exactly what i do in my master program in my mastermind program, and it’s exactly how i get cpas to go down to 40 hours in four months. and i think the appeal of 40 hours is like number one it seems so utterly reasonable to want to work a 40 hour week, anything beyond that, and your quality of life just suffers. and there can be a lot of noise in the accounting space around scaling and taxing this or that. and, you know, growing to 50 million by age 35, even if you have to drop dead to get there, and that might be all well and good for some people, but that’s not what my people want. they tend to want a nicely profitable business that’s fulfilling, without sacrificing the quality of life. and when they hear that message, they think yes, please. how can we do that? can we do that? and, you know, how do i do that? because working 70 hours a week is for the birds, and they know it. they just haven’t been able to find a reliable, predictable path down to 40 hours. but once they find it, it’s the obvious choice.
liz farr
absolutely. i remember working so many hours. and the only time that i was able to really limit my hours to just 40 was my very last tax season, when i was working as an hourly contractor, and my writing business was gearing up. so i told the partner, i can give you 40 hours. that’s it. so i worked for 10 hour days. and that was it. yeah. but the other three days of the week, i was working on my writing business. so it wasn’t just 40 hours of work.
geraldine carter
sure. and sometimes we need to put in the time, in order to make the transition in order to build where we want to get to. these things tend to not be given to us without some amount of time and effort along the way. there will always be trade offs. the question is, are we happy with the trade offs that we’re making?
liz farr
right, right. now, one thing i like about your book is that you have this dream scenario that you describe so clearly, can can you kind of describe that for us.
geraldine carter
so most of the folks i work with, have a dream scenario that is pretty similar at the outset. at the beginning, they’re working 5570 hours a week. and they’re not taking home the revenue they want. and they’re like god, it’s just like, i don’t want to give up my career. but this is the it’s not really worth it. but i don’t know what i don’t know how to get out of this situation. and at the beginning, their dream scenario is to just get down to a 40 hour week without losing revenue. and they think if i could do that, that would be amazing. so we can do that. that’s pretty straightforward. without losing revenue, it’s not a big deal. it’s not rocket science. and once we get there, typically it takes four months, six months, just depending on where they start, they often recognize that more free time is still more valuable to them than more new take home pay. and what they want is to go down to 25 hours while maintaining their take home pay where it is yes, if it went up great, but it doesn’t need to go up necessarily. and they think that was going to be shangri la. and then they get to 25 hours. and then the dream kind of splits into a couple of pads. some people say okay, now i’ve done it down to 25 hours. now that things are calm and steady. now i want to grow my team and build my business and i’m happy hanging out at 25 hours. another path is some people say i want to keep my staff small. i want to dial in systems and processes get more niche attract higher value higher paying clients and get myself out of the day to day. another one is i just want it to be me and my bookkeeper or something of a soloist get everything super dialed and i want to go down to 10 hours. and i want to do only client meetings have a dozen or two clients and do none of the transactional work. and then some of them still say i’m i want to be completely done with the transactional work i want to get into the expertise space, have no monthly accounting under my roof and step into consulting. and a fifth option is i’m done. i want to sell which is usually done on the back of having built a team and really dialing process dialing in processes. so there you know, at first the dream the dream kind of comes in three phases. at first the dream is 40 hours would be amazing. help. let’s do that. then 25 hours that would be amazing. once they get there, they’re like ah, and then the dream kind of splits just depending on where they want to take things.
liz farr
wow. well, you know, if i had known about that back when i was in public accounting, i might have stayed in public accounting. but then i’m not sure i would have met people like you is, though.
geraldine carter
really an options back then, you know, like it’s been hourly billing for a long time, it’s only recently that the thinking is finally changed. so, yeah. so give yourself some credit.
liz farr
that’s true. yeah, that’s true. now, your book talks a lot about value. and that is kind of a hard thing for accountants to wrap their minds around. what do they usually get wrong about the value of their services?
geraldine carter
that the doing of accounting has no inherent value, just like the doing of math itself has no inherent value, or that the doing of coaching has no inherent value. so i remember, when i was in school, i used to walk across the arts quad to get to the engineering quad, and i would pass a building called the thurston center for applied mathematics. and i was 18. and i was like, what on earth is applied mathematics? don’t you just do math? how do you apply it. and then 10 years later, the stock market crashed, and i was talking to a bunch of friends who had gone to wall street, and they were explaining to me what they had been doing, which was very sophisticated, high level of math and modeling of financial products, that made people a lot of money. and it was in that moment that i understood what the purpose of applied mathematics was. and it’s the same for coaching, nobody buys a session of coaching, they want some kind of outcome that is valuable to them, right? so it has, so accounting has no inherent value, it has to be applied to something that is worthwhile to your client. and usually it creates a transformation for the client. so what we have to understand is, what is it that are what transformations do our clients value? and how am i going to apply accounting to facilitate enable, create that transformation. and that’s what your clients really are paying you for. that’s where that’s how to create value for clients is just to think about the application of accounting instead of the doing of accounting.
liz farr
that really makes a lot of sense. i remember so many times, we would just be doing the tax return. and there would be this oh, by the way. this business owner says that he wants to sell his business and retire on the proceeds. and, dang, if we had latched on to that and said, okay, how do we make that happen? how can we help you your what is your timeframe, then that would have served him so much better than just going? oh, well, that’s interesting. well, we’ll see you next year.
geraldine carter
good luck. good luck. if you need to call us we’ll bill you 175 an hour. or more
liz farr
or more. yeah, so
geraldine carter
yeah, miss. yeah, like countless missed opportunities to create value for clients.
liz farr
yeah, yeah. or, or the client too. i noticed that one of the owners was drawing social security. and i asked the partner in charge, well, what’s their succession plan for this business? and the partner and got this glazed, you know, deer in the headlights look, and said, i don’t know, never asked. you you’re missing the boat. yes,
geraldine carter
yeah, you’re missing. there are yeah, there are more important higher level things at play that are far more valuable. it’s not to say that the tax return or whatever isn’t about isn’t valuable at all. but it’s all in the context of a much larger picture for the client. yes.
liz farr
absolutely. yeah, what are the first things you have in your book is the importance of focusing on on a niche, how is that helpful?
geraldine carter
so, i love this section because i get so many questions about niching. i have 17 podcast episodes alone on niching. it’s, i know, it’s such an important topic and, and such a challenge for accountants to pursue and i get it because i’ve been there and i remember it feeling like my toes were curled over the ledge into empty space. i get how scary it feels like it looks like you’re going to lose revenue and miss out on opportunities, say no to clients exclude people, and it’s going to tank your business. so i go into real depth in the book on the value of niching, and how to think about niching and the journey and the timeline and give examples so that people can start to see them. so that people can start to imagine what it might feel like to walk that journey and to hopefully reduce the fear or the threat of it. but simply put the value of niching is that when you focus on a niche, a market segment, an ideal buyer, whatever you want to call it, it does a number of things to your business. it helps you see the patterns in the clients who look like that. and when you see the patterns, it deepens your expertise, and you’re likely going to be one of few with that expertise deep into expertise creates more value. more value enables you to increase your prices for the same work. higher prices for the same work means higher margins. higher margins means you can let some of those clients in the bottom 10% of your roster go without adding to your revenue or a meaningful one anyways, you let the bottom 10% or 20 ego frees you up to not be kind of sucked into minutia for low prices. with that freed up time you think about how to create more value for your best clients. and it becomes an upward spiral. so that’s how it helps on the revenue side. and then on the expense side. the more tightly you niche, the more your clients look like each other. the more you see the patterns, the more, the easier it becomes to standardize your processes. when you can work on your processes, because you have time to work on your processes, you can get your processes out of your head and into software, you can get your staff to work on their processes. so the same kind of task gets done equally across all your staff members. so you put out a more consistent quality of work across your staff. when you standardize, and you get better at systematizing. and then you potentially find steps to automate. all of that increases your efficiency. now, assuming that you’re not pricing by the hour, if you’re pricing by the hour, you get more efficient sucks for you, you price lower, it’s why it’s so terrible. but if you have flat prices, you get more efficient than your margins go up. so now you have margins going up on the revenue side, you have your margins going up, because you’ve brought your expenses down because you are more efficient, your staff is more efficient, your margins keep going up. you can let go of more minnow clients off the bottom and it becomes this virtuous cycle.
liz farr
i can definitely see that. because when when you figure out what an industry needs, what the quirks of some industry is, and how best to do that efficiently, you know, jumping from a law firm to an oil and gas company to a construction company to an md which is what i did that that’s that’s incredibly inefficient, because they’re very different. the counting is very, very different for them. so yeah. now now once somebody settles on an industry niche, the next thing that you work on with your your clients is to define the services that they’re going to provide and to create tiers of services. and how does that help get that flywheel moving even faster?
geraldine carter
so creating tiers of services is one way to get off the cycle of hourly billing. it’s not the only way. but it is a way. and it works because it, it does a couple of things, it helps the accountant break out of having to find the in air quotes right price. there’s no such thing as a right price, the right price is at the end of the rainbow hanging out with the easter bunny, you can try and find it and spend a lot of time looking for the right price, but you will never find it because it doesn’t exist. so creating tiers of services helps you put prices on different levels of service. and then your client choose what they value and what they’re willing to pay. it also forces the accountant to think through who their buyers are inside their client roster, and what those people need. because we cannot take the entire client roster of a typical accountant who has a smattering of clients across a across a broad range of industries, and make tiered services that makes sense for all of those clients. rather, we have to pick one client type and say, okay, what does this person want? what are they trying to accomplish? it helps focus on the desired outcome or transformation that the buyer wants. perhaps they want to better understand their money, perhaps they want to save on taxes, perhaps they want to increase their profitability, and so on. so if those are the cases, then we ask, okay, let’s just say a construction company wants to better understand their money better understand their profitability on projects and bid profitably on projects instead of under bidding ghost. okay, how are we going to design the service so that the construction company owner can have that and what needs to be included, and we can do a gold level that is white glove, high touch vip, we could do a silver option that is eminently practical. and we can do kind of a cheap option, a bronze option that is like a hamburger that’s just a bun and a patty, nothing else. so it enables the accountant to rethink how they sell and package accounting services at prices that are always profitable, because they’ve been designed that way. and it facilitates the accountant breaking out of the cycle of scoping, and then pricing, which almost universally leads to under pricing, we’re much better off establishing the transformation, the value of the transformation, then the price, then scope, the service.
liz farr
love how you emphasize the transformation. because it’s not the deliverable. it it’s not the hours you put in, but it is what they get out of it. and and just in focusing on that transformation, instead of the tax return or the the number of entries i keyed into your quickbooks that helps you to get off of the cycle of pricing your your work by the transaction. yeah, and pricing is something that accountants really struggle with. you would think that since we work with numbers and people’s businesses, it wouldn’t be so hard. but i like one of the things i love in your book is you have a very radical idea that charging clients a higher price is good for the clients. can you walk us through this, this kind of backwards logic? it feels so
geraldine carter
it’s certainly counterintuitive. yes. so it of course depends on which definition of radical you want. if you think of radical as extreme, then i would say, here’s an extreme idea, let’s all price really low, so that we have to take on 40 bajillion clients so that we can run ourselves ragged not have enough time to hire well or train staff properly, not make the net income that we want and quit the profession because the sacrifice is no longer worth it. that seems like an extreme idea to me. that’s what tends to be happening in a lot of cases. but if you mean radical as root cause then yes, higher prices attract better quality clients not better human beings, but better quality clients for your business. many listeners will know the feeling of their clients who pay the least grousing the loudest. higher prices also allow you to get your time back. so you can do a better job for your clients, which is what they want, they want a better job done by you. higher prices allow you to get your time back. so you can deepen your expertise, which is better for your clients. higher prices serve a segment of the marketplace that wants to pay more for a better product, a better experience, better service and so on. higher prices, serve your best clients by putting you in a position to help them get better results faster with less hassle, less headache for them. higher prices are in the best interest of your best clients. low prices send you send your business on a death spiral. and it’s bad for your clients. and they don’t want it. but it’s counterintuitive. it does feel like it can feel like it’s something you are doing to your clients. but you can rethink it. it is something that you are doing for your best clients.
liz farr
absolutely. it’s it’s like the difference between checking into one of the high end hilton’s and a motel six. you know, when you when you go to the hilton, even just going to the front desk, it’s ma’am, how may i serve you today? and at the motel six is like, oh, you checking in?
geraldine carter
let me hold on, let me reply to this facebook post.
liz farr
yeah, yeah. yeah. and so i really get that it’s, it’s putting your clients first and serving them at a much higher level. now, not everybody is going to be able to afford that. nobody, not everyone will want that. but let’s be real, we can’t help everyone. there just aren’t enough of us.
geraldine carter
and the fewer cpas there are, the better it is for you have absolutely. in a way i like that as a i say that slightly tongue in cheek. but certainly cpas are very much in a seller’s market right now. and there are many clients who would gladly pay two or three times if not four or five, what you are currently charging for a much better product for a much better product.
liz farr
yes, yes. they want the hilton. they don’t want the best thugs at the motel
geraldine carter
one a motel six that smells like cigarette smoke.
liz farr
yeah. yeah. were there drug deals going on outside your door? right,
geraldine carter
totally. and police sirens all night?
liz farr
yes, yes. now, getting into charging higher prices. that really takes a mindset shift. so what are some of the mindset shifts that cpas need to make? to make it feel okay?
geraldine carter
so, let’s first ask what is mindset? and so that we don’t go into where we land and like, oh, that’s airy fairy and not for me. for simplicity, i think of mindset simply as the set of thoughts produced by your brain, we all have thoughts all day long. and we tend to think that our thoughts are the truth. and we tend to think that our thoughts are accurate. after all, i’m an accountant. why would i think a lie or an inaccurate thought. so we tend to operate as if everything that we think was true and accurate. but your brain wasn’t designed for accuracy. your brain was designed for you to propagate dna. it’s designed to avoid pain to seek pleasure and conserve energy. that’s its job. it’s doing its job all the time. the problem is that it was designed for survival, not for owning and running a business. so part of our jobs as business owners is to become aware of the set of thoughts that our brains are producing all day long. and ask ourselves, wait a minute, do i agree with that thought? does that thought make any sense? what happens when i think this thought? how is this thought, propagating or perpetuating my reality? see? what happens if i think a different thought what other thoughts? could i think that might create a different reality for me? so, when i work with my clients, they say things like, you know, i would love to take four take home 400k, that would be amazing. 500k would be even better, but i don’t want to feel guilty. or they might say, i don’t want my clients or people around town, people around town thinking i’ve gotten too big for my britches, or who am i to charge that much or i came from humble means or that’s not fair. that’s extortion, highway robbery, surely, if i can charge that much, i’ll go to jail. i’m an accountant, i just want to do my thing in the background. no one likes an accountant with a fancy car. you get the idea, right? we think all of these thoughts all day long, and we just behave as if it’s normal, and that those thoughts are accurate and should be believed. so i help my clients, i’m just a neutral in some ways, when it comes to the mindset aspect, i may neutral backstop to help them see what they are, in fact thinking that they may not have been aware that they were thinking, and then ask them how those thoughts that they might be thinking, are showing up in their results and in the outcomes that they’re getting? and do they like those results? or do they want a different set of results, i don’t have any judgment about their results, i just want to help them get the results they want. but so often their their own thinking is not aligned with the results that they want. so when it comes to pricing and charging higher prices, it helps to have the conversation that we just had just a moment ago, which was tell me 10 reasons. it’s good for your clients and good for your business. when you raise your prices. they tell me all those thoughts and we contrast them with nobody wants an accountant who drives a fancy car, or everyone in town is going to think i’ve got too big for my britches. and we say, okay, side by side, which set of thoughts do you want to choose to think on purpose, and then help them set into a new pattern of thinking for themselves so that they generate the results that they want to have in their business and in their life?
liz farr
i like that, that it is so keyed into the results that they want. you know, it’s not good or bad. it’s what do you want? and how do we create this? and spoiler, it’s not by working a million hours for nothing. that doesn’t work.
geraldine carter
no matter how hard you try, that will not work?
liz farr
yes. yes. now, something we’ve talked about, we’ve touched on is overwork all the hours that people work. but it seems like just recently, accountants have been making the connection between working too much. and capacity issues between overwork and capacity issues. so why do you think people work too much?
geraldine carter
hourly billing is the short answer. and believing that revenue comes from working. so think of the incentives when you billed hourly. if you wanted to make money, you were incentivized to always have a stack of work on your desk, so that you could show up on a tuesday and have 10 hours to work and bill for you were incentivized to be inefficient because if you got faster, you got paid less, and then you had to take on more work. so for people who are hourly billing, get off it right now. challenge yourself to never again invoice for your time, starting the moment that you hear this episode, because it is killing your business and it is killing your profits. and for the people who have quit hourly billing, but still scope first and price second. it’s still a kissing cousin mindset that revenue comes for work performed overtime for clients. but thinking that revenue comes from clients is like thinking that time comes from your watch to get that it looks that way. but it is not that way. so we need to work on assimilating this concept that your clients are paying you for the value they perceive. and it takes time to assimilate this concept. i’m talking 12 to 24 months i watch my clients in mastermind and in private coaching. take time to really get this concept of the money that i make comes from the value i create not for the billing my clients doesn’t come from clients. this doesn’t happen overnight. but once you understand that revenue is a function of value creation and effective pricing, you’ll put yourself on the path to working a lot less. and that is how you will get yourself out of overwork.
liz farr
yes, overwork is deadly, i would say.
geraldine carter
yeah, and like 50 hours a week is for the birds and so is 40 hours a week, there’s so much more to your life, then sit then cranking out numbers on work all day. now, i’m not saying that you should never work a 40 or a 50 hour week. but doing it for week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. you have to ask yourself, is that really what i want?
liz farr
and a lot of people if they’re honest, they would probably say, no, no, they don’t. and i’ve talked to a couple of people recently who, who went to their doctor and their doctor told them, you have to stop working so many hours. and what is more valuable to somebody spending 20 minutes manually keying in individual keystrokes to key in the trial balance, and spending two hours doing that, oh, i’ve been so. so careful, my keystrokes are perfect. or getting that trial balance, putting it through a couple of different apps and going ha, the i see some troubling trends here for you. yeah, or compared to the other clients in this industry. these are some things that you should watch out for. or here are the kpis that are that your peers are monitoring. some of these are not financial, let’s set up a system to monitor them so we can compare how you’re doing compared to your peers. because it’s not just those beautiful keystrokes that are made to key in the numbers. it’s not the effort.
geraldine carter
yeah, i mean, it’s like if you’ve ever watched somebody play the piano, do you care how their fingers look? or do you care how it sounds, and knowing the difference. and i think that’s in fairness, it’s a challenging thing to get your head around, because so many of us came up through the ranks of w2, where we were often compensated for our time. but once you hang your shingle as a business owner, you’ve stepped onto a different game board. so if you before you were playing checkers, and you had red and black disks, now you have, let’s say, stepped onto a backgammon board, you still have red and black disks. so you’re like i’m playing with the same pieces. but the game is different. and the rules are different. and if you’re not getting where you want in your business, it might be because you haven’t come to recognize that you’ve stepped onto a new game board with different rules and different strategies. but the amazing thing is that none of this is rocket science, i promise you it is not that hard. i went to school with the rocket scientists. and this is not that i went to cornell and went to the end went through the engineering program. i knew the rocket scientists. this is i don’t want to make it sound like it’s child’s play. and it’s just so easy to snap your fingers. and it’s all done. but this is all of these changes that we are talking about are imminently doable. and if we put them in place, step by step, i promise you that we can get your accounting practice down to a 40 hour week and down to a 25 hour week without losing revenue.
liz farr
yeah. yeah. now another thing that i really, really like about your book is that you put together the whole package of everything that accountants need, including the marketing, which which i love, because that’s something that accountants think they’re really bad at. but you break it down. so it’s really simple. can you can you kind of lay out some of the things that you have people do.
geraldine carter
yeah. and i want to lead off by saying that i used to look down my nose at marketing, because i always thought of it as marketing. forgive me, please don’t judge me. but marketing was for the people who couldn’t hack it in the harder disciplines. and so i had my own set of snobbery about marketing. and boy, was i wrong. so i want, i talk to my people, my clients about marketing like this. imagine you have faucets in your kitchen, right? you want to drink a water, you turn on the faucet, you get water. why? because there’s 80 pounds of pressure behind the valve. so now imagine you have no running water and you want a glass of water, what do you have to do, you better hope that you have a big roof with gutters and a downspout and a barrel. if you want to drink, you go out to the barrel. if you’re super thirsty, you don’t care how cloudy that water is or how gross it is. not having running water is like waiting for the gods to do their rain thing when you need a drink. not having marketing is like waiting for the gods to send you a referral. and if your cash flow is thirsty, you’re gonna drink any water you can get no matter how cloudy it looks. having good marketing is like having 80 pounds, the pressure behind your faucet. the clients or the prospects are sitting there waiting until you are ready. and when you’re ready, you turn on the faucet, you get as much as you need. and then you turn off the faucet again, that is super valuable. because it puts you in a more confident stance. so if a client emails you and says, hey, i’m leaving goodbye. you don’t have heart palpitations, you’re like, okay, great, let me off board, you successfully send you on your merry way. and i’ve got 80 pounds of pressure behind my client faucet. so if we can get business owners, accountants and very much included on board with the value of marketing, then the question becomes, okay, how do i do this? because so much of what we see out there is terrible marketing, the marketing, that’s really great. we tend to not see we don’t recognize it. it’s just like, it’s just like air. it’s not really that visible. but we see terrible marketing. and we’re like, and oftentimes it’s like corporately polished, gobbly gook that makes no sense, right? you see these headlines on websites? and you’re like, what does that even mean? who is that for? so i help my clients really simplify marketing and talk to them about listen, what are your clients saying to you that their problems are? and how do they talk about their problems in regular english? and how do they talk about what they want? what’s the dream state that they want. and once we identify the problem, which is you know, i don’t know, if i’m going to make payroll, i’m stressing out because i don’t know i have all these bills to pay. and i don’t know which ones to pay first. and i don’t want to run my bank account dry. i don’t understand my financials, i don’t know why p&l is telling me just regular english. once we know what that is, and what we know. and once we know what the dream is, you know, i want to be able to understand my money, i want to be able to make better decisions in my business, i want to make sure i’m doing everything within reason to save on taxes. and i want to be able to sleep at night knowing that my money’s being done properly, and that i’m not at risk anywhere that i’m not aware of super simple language. once we know those things, for the client, for the buyer, it’s like the file folder that it opens up in their mind. and suddenly they think, oh, yeah, i have that problem. and yeah, i do want that dream scenario. now i’m open to listening to you talk to me about how counting can get me from the pain that i’m in to the dream that i want to have. but until we open up that file folder, the pain on one side, the dream on the other, the brain has no tension and its mind about like so well, why do i want to pay $10,000 a year for monthly accounting? like i don’t get it? what problem does it solve? because i don’t want to throw $10,000 a year at accounting if i don’t know what it does for me. so we need to help the buyer understand if you have these problems, and you want this situation instead, here’s how accounting can fix that. and once we make it really simple for the accountant, and they stop, you know, we can kind of spin out in our heads about like, oh my god, i’ve got to drop four grand a month on an accounting service. and that’s just money down the drain. once we can get out of that and just be like, no, look, let’s start with your website. let’s understand what your client wants. pain, dream fix. once we know what that is, then we can decide where we want to say those words. and your marketing strategy is informed by what kind of business you want, right? because the other question is, where do i say all this stuff? and if you want a 10x scale thing, then you’re going to have to put your words in front of lots of people so go internet, but if you want a small business with a dozen or two clients, you probably don’t need to put your presence in front of 50 bajillion people. you could just put it in front of a small amount of people which might meet a different marketing strategy that’s more personal in smaller scale. and helping unpack that for accountants and cpas, who like me probably haven’t learned much accounting along the way or hadn’t helps make it so much easier and so much more approachable.
liz farr
absolutely, you know, i remember when when i used to write website copy. one thing that i always always asked for is, how do your clients describe working with you? what did they say about it. and that was usually worth its weight in gold, it was sometimes very hard to dig that out. and they really didn’t quite understand how profoundly powerful that could be. because, like, well, i’m just an accountant. and this is what i do. and of course, the value i have is self evident, isn’t it?
geraldine carter
this is back to the the idea that accounting in and of itself has no inherent value. and i say that knowing that that can be difficult to hear, and a hard pill to swallow. because after all, we spent such a long time developing the skill of being a good accountant. in the same way that i have an engineering degree, i put a lot of hard work into getting that thing. but nobody wants to pay me to do some studies on laminar flow and turbulent flow. and the duty right? nobody cares about cavitation. and nobody cares that i know all three laws of thermodynamics. what they want is for their farm to be dry, so they can plant their seeds. now, so i could come along and be like, okay, cool. here’s how we move water, i’ll take care of the rest. right? that’s what the farmer wants. so i need to be able to think in terms of what is my farmer want, if i’m a you know, agriculture role, and, you know, fluid dynamics engineer, what do they want, they want to dry farm so they can plant their seed, because their seed will grow crops that will make them a lot of money. so how do i need to figure out the soils and how the water moves through and the size of the pipes and the size of the rainstorms in the 100 year storm, and do all the engineering but the farmer doesn’t give a crap about my ability to do engineering services by the hour and how hard i work and whether my finger position is very good on my keystrokes.
liz farr
no, no, it’s not. i was tackling as you went through that, because i don’t know if i ever told you but i started out in engineering. and i did take those classes in fluid dynamics. i remember that. no, yeah. i have a soft spot in my heart for fluid dynamics. but i don’t tell that to very many people. no, it was it was kind of cool. you know, it was so cool. turbulent flow, and when does it become chaotic? and when is it orderly? and what are the velocities and the viscosity? where’s the boundary layer? yes. so good. yeah, yeah. yeah. well, back back to accounting. you know, if you could sum up your book, in just a few words, for somebody who really needs it, what would that be?
geraldine carter
so i will sum it up with the words that those who have read the book and have been so kind to leave reviews on amazon. they say that it is a simple, clear, actionable, read, that there’s no fluff. it tells you what you need to know, to make changes in your accounting practice. so that if you follow it step by step, you will begin to bring up your prices, bring up your revenue, and bring your hours down in a way that is fun, because it has lots of fun stories in it. and many people say i wish i’d had this book five years ago. so for any listeners who have been especially an accountant for decades or more. running your business requires a separate skill set. and that skill set is not harder to learn but if you learn it and you invest the time to learn it, it will pay off handsomely.
liz farr
amen. i would agree with that. 100%. and i would say that yes, indeed, if i’d had that book back when i was in public accounting would have been useful, though, i’m not sure that the firm owners i worked with would have really deem that this is a viable way forward, i’m not sure they would have seen that, they will just just say, oh, that’s an interesting idea. i’ll look into that when i have time.
geraldine carter
yeah, that’s good for other people. but, you know, we do bite a strong cultural message that there is human value, and quality of character baked into the number of hours that we work, and that working hard is virtuous. so i think it’s fair to recognize that that is a current and a lot of people it’s, it can be difficult for people to undo the working hard, you know, an honest day’s work as virtuous, undo that mentality and only work 15 hours, because for some people, they’re gonna think that that’s cheating, or too easy, or for the suckers, or for lazy people. so it takes some time to undo. but i think you know, the proof is in the pudding. and we’re seeing more and more people work 25 and 15 hours a week, and take home multiple six figures and they’re not stressed. and the more examples that we get of that, the harder it is going to be to deny it.
liz farr
absolutely. well, that’s the perfect place to end our conversation. i want to thank you so much, geraldine for coming on and taking the time to talk about your new book and, and for writing the book in the first place. now, if listeners want to connect with you, where’s the best place to find you?
geraldine carter
sure, so they can get the book at amazon just search down to 40 hours if you’re in a national go to geraldine carter.com forward slash book to get the international amazon link. and you have podcast listeners. i have a podcast. it’s the business strategy for cpas podcast. and i also get engaged in conversations on linkedin. i love connecting with people there. so lots of ways to find me depending on what you’re looking for.