leave the stone age behind. join the new paradigm.
this is a preview. the complete video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to pro members.
the disruptors
with liz farr
when caleb jenkins was eight, he started selling cookies to his dad’s firm during tax season. his dad told him, “for me to pay you, i need you to create an invoice for me.” so jenkins set up his own quickbooks file and has been playing with quickbooks ever since, and eventually joined his dad’s firm.
more podcasts and videos: ira rosenbloom: don’t merge for the money | adam lean: get out of the accountant’s trap | geraldine carter: charging more is better for your clients | 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 |
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.
like most small firms, rlj financial focuses on the fundamentals of tax, bookkeeping, and payroll, but, as jenkins says, “in the eyes of the beholder, there’s really not a whole lot of value there.” however, shifting into advisory – a big talking point in recent years for the profession – is where accountants can bring “incredible value …beyond the baseline of traditional compliance services,” jenkins says. shifting into advisory also means “there’s way more work that happens all year round.”
one way that rlj financial provides extra value is in their onboarding process, which includes a relationship-building, meet-and-greet session emphasizing basic business education for the client. even if the prospect decides not to work with their firm, “they didn’t waste their time because they got value from us,” jenkins says. that meeting also sets “a foundational framework for our relationship in the future” for the clients who choose to work with rlj – and those with whom rlj chooses to work.
jenkins stresses the importance of working on your firm, not just working in it, as michael gerber describes in his e-myth books. many accountants start their firms as what gerber calls technical operators, who “go off on their own, but they are just doing the same technical work that they were doing previously,” jenkins explains. “and that’s not a great way to build a business.”
while there’s a place in the world for micro-firms of two or three, jenkins stresses that as a firm grows, the owner’s role needs to shift away from doing the client work to working on the firm. “and the quicker you can do that, the better,” he added. jenkins explains that making that shift frees you to get out of the busy work, subsequently freeing up the capacity to do whatever you want to accomplish. it also allows owners to “do that advisory stuff on your own practice.” but, as jenkins says, “if you’re just stuck in client work, you’re never going to get any of that stuff done.”
8 more takeaways
- advisory services encompass a broad spectrum that includes tax planning, tax projections, tax strategy, business planning, business coaching, business advisory, financial forecasting, cash flow analysis, budgeting, and forecasting and helping people understand their money.
- if you’re stuck in client work, you’ll never do any of the work to make yourself or your firm better.
- determining your pricing and packages is a process of trial and error. learn from your mistakes and pivot.
- if clients choose the top tier of your packages, they may think they’re a top client. your top tier of services may actually be the baseline of what they need.
- if you offer free advice to clients, they may not pay attention. but if you sell advice to your clients, they will want to get value for what they paid.
- optimizing your onboarding process is never done. there are always better ways to do it and new technology to facilitate it.
- ask prospects about their business, including their mission, vision, and purpose, and why they seek a new accountant as part of your onboarding process.
- stop offering tax returns for $150. that’s the stone age. join the current paradigm.
more about caleb jenkins
caleb jenkins began his career at rlj financial services and currently leads the outsourced tax planning & business accounting services team. he has received many awards, including the top 100 quickbooks proadvisor and 40 under 40 in the accounting profession for seven consecutive years. it has been caleb’s joy and privilege to give back to this community by serving on the intuit proconnect customer tax council and the adp accountants advisory board. caleb has had the distinct honor of serving in numerous developing countries (in each continent) as an educator and quickbooks consultant with the salt microfinance program, working with those in chronic poverty.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr
welcome to accounting disrupter conversations. i’m your host, liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. and in this little series, we’re talking to owners of firms who are doing things a little bit differently than our parents accountants. and my guest today is caleb jenkins, leader of client accounting services at rlj. financial and founder of jenkins consulting. how are you today, caleb?
caleb jenkins
i’m doing great. i just got back from out to my walk in. i’m ready to have a conversation here.
liz farr
fantastic. well, first of all, can you tell listeners a little bit about your firm, where you’re located, what services you do? how long you’ve been in business and all of that?
caleb jenkins
yeah, so i, our businesses rlj financial services, as you stated in the beginning, and the where we’re located we’re in series, california, it’s part of a smaller, tiny little city outside of modesto, california, it’s in the central valley of california. right in the heart of agriculture in the central valley, there’s a lot of almonds, as others would call them all the growers would call them ammons. and the so there’ll be a lot of those are some of our client base. and then there’s a lot of walnuts and other types of fruits and citrus and, and all kinds of other agriculture here. so the love california, it’s a great place to be i say where we’re at is, is a really cool spot, we got an hour and a half to the ocean an hour and a half to the mountains, if we want to go experience the snow. and then we can live our life with without crazy, crazy heat and crazy cold in the in the winter. so it’s kind of best of everything breed. but at least that’s how i see it. not everyone sees it that way. but that’s where we’re located the services that we offer. in some respects, we you could call us a traditional accounting firm. we do tax income tax and bookkeeping and payroll and etc. but, and when we also do wealth management that might be a little bit unique and the from a traditional firm. but i would consider most of those as kind of your baseline products or baseline services that kind of are just your compliance, they have to be done. now who does them is kind of, sometimes the client will do them, sometimes the firm will do them. but that that is a, i would consider that all of those are just kind of the things that have to be done. and there’s absolutely value there because we want to make sure that we do it correctly, but in the eyes of the beholder. if i was to go walk up and down my street in a survey of 100 people and ask them if they find any joy or value in filing their tax return, i’d probably get 100 of them that said no, unless perhaps i ran across one of them. that was another accountant that might answer yes. but i would actually argue that 100 of them should say yes, because it’s probably one point in the year that most individuals actually pay any attention to their financials, and actually make decisions of what they’re going to do differently in the future, at least financially. so i think it’s a really good thing that is needed to be done. but again, in the eyes of the beholder, there’s really not a whole lot of value there. but where there is value is as most of the talking points of the profession have been for the last five years is shifting into the advisory services. so that enters areas like tax planning and tax projections and tax strategy and tax. and then also areas like business planning, business coaching, and business advisory. and then financial forecasting and cash flow analysis and and helping people understand where they can or do their budgeting and forecasting all of those different topics or there’s incredible value in those areas. beyond just the baseline traditional compliance services. so that’s, that’s a lot of what our firm does and what we we’ve shifted into. probably it’s been an evolution over the last seven to 10 years. a lot of that has to do with pricing changes. i think we you, you had talked about that previously that you might want to talk about that. so i’ll save that for later. but, and that’s, that’s a lot of what we do for our clients is just offer. again, we do offer those compliance, the baseline services, but we, but we try to go beyond those into the higher level higher value services and the advisory space. the existence part, my dad started our firm 38 years ago, he had lived in a little town outside of lafayette, indiana. and he was actually working in a on a pig farm. and then he got asked by individual in his church if he wanted to be an accountant. and he said, sure, i’ll, i’ll change. so he went to college a little bit, and then joined that firm and then got married to my mom, my mom was from out here in california, and they live back there in indiana for a couple years. and then they moved out here and then eventually he decided to start his own firm. so that that’s how that came into existence. and then i end to the firm just by natural evolution there just by joining. growing up in the firm, literally and figuratively. but for the first 10 years of my life, the the office, for my dad’s accounting firm rlj, financial was out at our home location was two separate buildings. two separate offices. but yeah, so i would go outside go out and i was homeschooled as well grown up. and so i would go out and finish with my school and gotten the office and just i love to chat with the employees, that probably was the notion to at some point, but love to shred paper, do whatever tasks that they wanted me to do their grunt work. and so that’s kind of got to learn the ropes and learn what was happening. so that’s a little bit of story there.
liz farr
that’s, that’s great. you know, i and i always find it fascinating with people who’ve grown up around accounting and how they, so many of them just gravitate to that. you know, i didn’t grow up in that kind of surrounding at all. i grew up in los alamos, new mexico, where the, you know, our parents were phds in physics and chemistry, in business and accounting was what you did if you weren’t smart enough to get a phd in chemistry. so yeah, it’s a little different perspective there than in the rest of the world. but something that i really love about rlj financially seeing you and your dad working together for decades. and can you talk a little bit about you’ve already talked a little bit about how you came to work with your dad. but how does that continue to evolve from just being you know, the paper shredder and the menial task person to doing the actual work?
caleb jenkins
yeah, so going back in that story, so when my dad’s office, he moved to a separate building in, in town, and then we’d lived in the country prior to that, and, and so, at that point, like, i wasn’t as involved in the day to day activities anymore, because i couldn’t just walk out, go into the office, but the, i don’t know, sometime around that frame timeframe, too. i had some other passions too. and i don’t know, i had a dream of becoming a doctor or whatever. that was a short lived, short lived dream, whatever. but i had various different small business activities. i did too. so for probably, i don’t know, 10 years i did or 810 years. i baked cookies for my dad during tax season. so i have my own recipe for chocolate chip bread or cookies. and some people say they’re pretty good. i don’t know. but i did those that so i, my dad was like, hey, for me to pay you. i need you to create an invoice for me. and so i started my own quickbooks file and started printing invoices for him. that was when i was about eight. and then i pretty much learned quickbooks just by messing around with that i had helped my i loved computers part of out, but i had helped my mom with some of her bank reconciliations prior to that, because she, i loved computers, and she got stumbled on on different parts of it. and so it was pretty natural for me to just start playing with quickbooks, i would have been way back in the early 2000s of quickbooks desktops. so i have used quickbooks for quite a few years, even though i am young still. and that i, i do love quickbooks desktop, but i also love quickbooks online today. and, but back to the evolution and our story. so i when i was late, then a couple years later, i mean, i had some other businesses, i had a chair stand at the end of our road. so pick cherries and sold them for two weeks, whatever, for a couple of years. and then i had a lawn mowing business for some of our neighbors and whatever learned different components of different things, or all of those different enterprises than the lawn mowing one. my i had one of my brothers working for me as as to help lawn mowing. and one, one day, he backed the lawnmower into a older stored pickup truck. and so i and i didn’t realize that but it wasn’t, wasn’t really bad, it would just scratch the paint on the truck. but i didn’t realize that and the owner, or the the person that i was mowing for came and told me that he’s like, he chewed me out and whatever. and i am like, i learned the value of customer relationships or that. so learn that you need to fess up when you do something like that. and, and then i also learned that you have to do things financially to make things right. so yeah, so there’s those, those are some lessons that i learned through all of those. and then it was, i don’t know, a couple of years later, i started working full time for my dad then. and so through that, then i started kind of at the bottom, doing again, just menial, whatever basic tasks, but pretty pretty quickly was doing a lot of the quickbooks worked for our clients. and then that started done, tax data injury and all of that stuff. so very quickly, i mean, evolved from there up into more higher level started meeting with some of the clients and to do the tax work and help them with quickbooks stuff. and so i just continued advancing there. then later, i got involved in different educational conferences. and that’s where i, i feel like i really started to thrive in this career, just because of the relational connection with others, and the educational component to it. the things that i learned outside of our paradigm that changed my viewpoint, my my framework for understanding what was good and bad, and what could be done differently. so working with my dad through all that i i appreciate working, that he gave me the opportunity from a very young age, i would have not had that opportunity had i went down the street to some other, an accounting firm or whatever. so i’m very grateful to them for that. and it’s, it can be a challenge sometimes. but it’s also i mean, i do appreciate the the opportunity to work for my dad.
liz farr
that’s, that’s so wonderful. you know, and i hear so much about, you know, kids following their parents. so that’s great that you’ve made it work. now, recently, i heard you talk about the importance of owners getting out of the weeds of direct client work to work on their firm is a business. can you explain what that means to you?
caleb jenkins
yeah, so again, some of that is from experience, and some of that is just working with my clients. some of it goes back to the e myth theory book. and where michael gerber writes about a forget how i how i phrase it, but the technical operator versus the business operator or something. and so you might have a technical operator that goes out and decides to to go off on his own, but they are just doing the same technical work that they were doing previously. and that’s not a great way to build a business. to build a business. you need somebody that is going to actually work. on the business, rather than just working in the business, those are common phrases that are repeated very frequently. and it’s totally fine to be a technical operator, as long as you stay, again, small solo, whatever. and if that’s all your dream is, that’s all you want to accomplish, that’s perfectly fine. there’s nothing wrong with that there’s a, there’s a tremendous place in the world for that. but if you want to grow, and if you want to, to hire other employees, again, maybe that’s still okay, if you’re, if you’re a micro business two to three employees, or whatever, to some extent you have to be. but as you continue to start growing, when you hit five, seven employees, 10 employees, whatever your role, and your nature needs to start shifting, and the quicker you can do that, the better. because then that allows you to shift your focus from clients to your own firm, and that allows you to get out of the busy weeds, get out of the busy work, get out of the nature of what’s wrong, and just being stuck and frees up capacity to do whatever you want to accomplish. so the problem is, i mean, a lot of accounting firm owners that go into tax season, and they hit a huge compression of work that needs to get done. and they’re working 60 plus hours a week, whatever, doing just client work, and the working on your business goes out the window for four months, and then then you have travel season and then it’s difficult and you know, conference season, and then you never get back to actually working on your business. and especially now in today’s environment. i think tax season is kind of a never ending item to because even though you might have a short compression of normal, busy season, there’s there’s all kinds of other work. like we said previously, especially as you’re shifting from compliance into advisory, there’s way more work that happens all year round, then. and so if all you’re still doing is client work, it’s great that somebody might shift into advisory. but if you’re still just doing the client work, and advisory, you’re not able to do that advisory stuff on your own practice or on your own firm. and if you’re not doing that, then then you’re not allowing yourself to to become better. so the i mean, some of the things that i see as a part of that is, hey, like, create some teamwork, team meetings and set a recurring schedule that there’s some great books on that topic, patrick lencioni writes and death, death by meeting or death, death, death of meeting or whatever, great, great stuff about the challenges with the meetings. but then he creates a framework for them for different types of meetings. there’s also other other books that are on that topic to that or i tractions, a good book and some other other books as well. there’s some great stuff in terms of resources, to create better team meetings and create better working together as a team. and some of that takes a good facilitator to be able to facilitate those meetings, and it takes some actual ability and capacity to actually go then and pivot and make differences and how you’re going to operate your your business. but again, if you’re just stuck in client work, you’re never gonna get any of that stuff done.
liz farr
exactly. exactly. and if you stay in client work is i observed in the firms that i worked in, that makes you the biggest bottleneck around. and, you know, i remember you know, i worked on an estate tax return, and even though it was extended, you know, the due date was coming up pretty soon and i saw that it just been sitting on the partner’s desk just waiting for him to take a look at it for months. and i finally said, you know, that’s due in 10 days and we got to mail it to texas first and then they gotta send that to the irs. so you know, that is always a danger of being a big bottleneck in in your firm. now, another thing that i think you do really wonderfully is your onboarding process. i heard you talk about got another podcast? it because i think this is something that too few firms do at all, and very few firms do. well, could you talk about how that works? yeah,
caleb jenkins
so i’m not sure that i would say we do it well, there’s always acting onboarding as a topic that is a never done topic. there’s always better ways that you can do it, and there’s better technology to facilitate it. but i think, onboarding, i’ll just describe our process and describe how we’ve got to where we’re at here. but the basically, how it starts now is, is you contact us and say you’re interested in working with us? well, we direct you to a form on our website, that you can fill out a questionnaire, it’s very, very basic, it’s just gathering some key data points, your name, your address, your contact information, whatever, and then what services you think that you’re interested in, and then tell us more about why you are interested in those services, and tell us why you are more about your business. just what you offer your vision, mission, purpose, etc. and then, and then tell us who you worked with previously, and why you’re looking to make a change. and then once they schedule, they fill that out, they get a link and schedule a meet and greet meeting, we try to keep those to 20 to 30 minutes, sometimes they run longer than that we don’t do a paid version of that. i know a lot of others are pushing for paid consults on that, we, we find that there’s a lot of just good relational building in those phases that we we like and so we’re perfectly fine with that. after that, or during that meet and greet meeting, we, i dive in to find some more details of what they felt on their questionnaire. and then they they walked through a little slide deck that we prepared, whatever just to explain who we are, as a firm some of our what sets us apart from other firms and then have them again, tell us more about who they are. as a individual, i like to say now setting aside the the details of of all of your your income and w twos or whatever, just like who is liz farr. and and so just in your own words, and so i love to just hear what they say. and then i take that and then we talk a little bit then about our services. and then we listen to see what what based on that what what interests them at the moment. and then we talk a little bit about how we work with our clients, we talk a little bit about security, some of the other components, some of the software that we utilize. and then after a business, we talk about our onboarding package, and then our we talked briefly about our monthly pricing packages. and then we talk about the next steps to get started, if that’s of interest, or if it’s a good fit. sometimes in that process. i like that’s not a good fit for us either. we’re not a good fit to work with a very micro business. and we have quite a few of those fill out our questionnaire. but as when we get into the meeting, like i try to offer value to someone so that they didn’t waste their time in meeting with me for it. but i also tried to i don’t waste their time just going through the whole educational component of that. but after they after they say hey, that sounds good. we will send them a proposal for our onboarding engagement. that’s kind of what i would call our dating process. before we move into marriage or not, that’s probably a bad way to phrase it. but because yeah, there’s some other problems with using that terminology. but the but it’s it’s kind of that pre pre process where we get to learn them better, and they get to learn us better. and in that process, we do a lot of education. and part of that education is because we have from from many years of working with new businesses, we would jump in we’d get their tax return would match and then our system would roll it over to the next year. and we’d get started and b and then we look at their books and it’s like, hey, you don’t understand any of this stuff. like did you do 1099? yeah, i did it for this one guy, well, what about all the what about your agency that you paid for advertising, whatever, i didn’t know that i had to do that they’re a business. they’re not a contractor, no other subcontracted services and just huge amounts of lack of education. even for a business that’s been in operation for 1020 years, there’s a lot of things that people just do not know. and so for many years, we’ve kind of joked about, man, we wish the irs would require somebody sit through a course before they got an ein number. well, then we said, who better to do that than us. because we know what we want our clients to be educated on. so let’s let’s go through and educate them on these different topics before we get into working with them. and then we dive into their current bookkeeping infrastructure, and we offer input on on better ways to do things, and, again, educating them on best practices on all of that. and then we move into our ongoing pricing for the business. so that would be we build that out monthly packages, and the they can have a couple different choices, choose what level of service are looking for with us. and then once they choose that, then we move into the ongoing operational work with the client. so the onboarding is, it’s it’s, it’s a phase in the front side, that adds a that, i would say, it’s a great thing. because in that process to somebody might learn that our prices are higher than they want to pay, but they, but they didn’t waste their time, because they got value from us. and i would say our onboarding process is something that somebody can take away what they did with us and go, and maybe they take that to the firm down the street or whatever. even if they don’t work with us, they got educated, and they got extreme value from us in that process. and if they choose to work with us, or if we choose to continue working with them, then we’ve now set a foundational framework for our relationship in the future, rather than just accepting anyone that comes in through the front door.
liz farr
that’s fantastic. you know, i love the emphasis on delivering value, you know, you’re really over delivering, as opposed to a lot of firms that really don’t deliver much value at all, they just say, oh, give us your quickbooks file and your passwords. and here’s what it costs. and then you dive in, and it’s like, oh, my this is, this is a disaster. you know, this looks like, like kittens we’re doing the bookkeeping or something,
caleb jenkins
or worse, or worse yet, they don’t give them the pricing, and they dive in and do all the work. and then at the end of it, they feel guilty for all the time that they wasted on their stuff. and then they don’t invoice them anything for or very little for the work that they actually did. exactly. and then the client and then the clients upset because they didn’t realize that they were gonna get invoiced at all.
liz farr
right? yeah. yeah, it’s best to always set up clear expectations of how the bookkeeping needs to be done. and whether that’s done by by rlj, financial or by themselves or by somebody else, you know, that’s extremely important to set that expectation up front. now, separately, you also operate jenkins consulting. can you tell us a little bit about that business?
caleb jenkins
yeah, so that kind of evolved out of rlj. so it’s just a very small side gig. but it is a fast item. so over many years, i did a lot of different consulting for different app companies are sas based companies. quickbooks is one of those and numerous others. and a lot of times like, i’d start working with an app and like, i would start offering my input or opinion and advice on what they should do. and interestingly, they all every, all of those experiences, i think they all appreciated it, but they didn’t value it. and, and, and so it was kind of fascinating because i when i started i want engagement with someone i said, hey, let me let me, i’ll sell you a service for this. and so they, they’re like, sure, let’s, let’s, i’ll pay for it and whatever. so we did it. it was, it was awesome because like, they listen, and they developed based off of what i was telling them, they should do. and i got to see direct results for it. so i was doing the exact same thing. and i was getting paid for it. and i was seeing the accomplishment of what i wanted from step one, i would, in one sense, i would be happy to do it without getting paid for it. because i want to see the product get better. because if the product gets better, i get better. rlj gets better as a result of it or whether or not it’s an app rlj uses. maybe it’s our clients or just the overall american businesses or worldwide businesses or whatever get better as a result of a better application. but hey, if, like, if i get paid, and if it accomplishes stuff better in the process, that’s, that’s remarkable. and i’ve seen the exact same thing happen and multitude of other relationships as well, ever since. and so it’s like, hey, i love that. and that’s also where i so it’s it’s kind of a three pronged business, i do the app consulting. and then i do speaking engagements, like through podcasts like this. and then i also do, speaking at conferences, like scaling new heights or other conferences that i’ve spoke at previously. and then also do not as much as i, i maybe would like, but it’s also probably one of the areas that i that i don’t like until i have it done, which is writing. and so whenever i think about writing, i always push it off. and then when i’m done with writing, i’m like, hey, i’m really kind of proud of myself for what i did. so, but all of that would be done through the jenkins consulting business.
liz farr
that’s, that’s great. and i love the your insight, your aha moment that when you got paid, then not only did you get value out of it, but the app company actually really took your input seriously, they put more value on it, i think that too.
caleb jenkins
to some extent, it makes perfect sense as well. because if it’s free advice, free advice is always there. they’re always available. but if you’re paying for something, and a somewhat of a capitalistic mindset, you’re always you’re going to want to get some return for what you paid. and so if if there’s no return on investment, then that’s a failed investment. so you’re going to try to, to receive some return on investment. and so, like, there is no return on investment for free advice.
liz farr
right, exactly.
caleb jenkins
and so i that’s where i see the the beneficial value on both sides of the equation. and i think there’s there’s a lesson there to be learned in the tax and accounting space as well. so if you’re offering free advice to your clients, a lot of times they’re not paying attention to it. if you’re selling it to them, they’re going to try to get their value out of what they paid you for.
liz farr
exactly. and i agree 100% with what you’re saying. now, what are some things your firm does that you wish other firms would also do?
caleb jenkins
oh, boy, i wish number one i wish there would stop be $150 tax returns offered. there’s i see i see it way too many of them in our when we when we bring on new clients and it’s like, you gotta be kidding me. like, that’s ridiculous. i say that. and then at the same time, i remember back 10 years ago. i mean, we did a lot of the same things. so other firms need to start a process of business change business adaptation, they need to leave the stone age’s and join the current paradigm. so
liz farr
absolutely. i agree with you completely. now though, sometimes what we learn most from is mistakes that we’ve made. are there any mistakes you’ve made that you learned a great deal from?
caleb jenkins
probably a there’s there’s many multitudes of them questions which one do i feel is the most important to share here? so probably, i would, i would say in this in relation to our conversation today, it’s been our pricing journey. and so one of the one of the things on that front, so as we started our change from a, after the fact hourly pricing to do fixed pricing, or value pricing, or, or whatever label we want to put on it, there are different different actual definitions, each of those different items. so they’re not all just one in the same like some people say, but the, we’ve made some changes on that side and on as we started, what we what we did when we created packages, we were told i listen to ron baker a lot. well, i, i, i listen to him, but i didn’t actually understand what he was saying. but what i heard from him was developed packages. well, so how do you develop packages? well, so we took our services, and we created three packages based on our different service offerings. so kind of the low end of it was just bookkeeping, the middle end of it was bookkeeping and tax and, and maybe i forget, the third one was, i think, bookkeeping tax and payroll or whatever. but it was just kind of the three core services. and it was in three different packages. it the value of that, though, was it created a a very pivotal change in our relationship for onboarding a new client. so instead of talking about the services and the things that we do after the fact, after we’re already engaged with them, we were talking, i was talking about it with them upfront, but the problem with that pricing was, those businesses needed the highest tier. and then when somebody chooses the highest tier, they immediately think you’re the you’re the you that they are your top client. and in reality, and reality, they were just choosing the baseline of all of our services. so as we pivoted our pricing model a couple more times, or many more times, since then, we have redeveloped it into all of those things are kind of just part of our core package. and, and now we’ve actually broken that out, because sometimes others already have a bookkeeping firm. and we’re okay with that, to work with someone that works with an external bookkeeping firm. so we we have that as an add on to our core base package. same thing with payroll, like, if somebody’s already doing their payroll with a, we have some some restrictions or whatever on that. so like, it has to be something we can access as to be on that cloud based platform, like gusto or, or onpay, or, or quickbooks online payroll, or adp or whatever. so. but once once it’s there, then we can see the data, we can then access it, but that’s a change. but the biggest change in our pricing packages has been those are all kind of the the core baseline and then we differentiate based off of the service. like the service level, you might say, and the value of services get more in our higher or middle and higher level packages. so it’s it’s differentiating based off of baseline versus other advisory services. so we really added our advisory and added our frequency of meetings and frequency of education frequency of coaching into our middle and higher level packages. and there’s other things in there too. but i would say that’s, that’s a mistake we made. but it was a valuable mistake in the sense that we we learn from that and we pivoted from there.
liz farr
that’s, that’s awesome. and i wish that more firms would do something like that and get away from just hourly billing and just giving the minimum possible. there’s just so many more things that they can do. well, i know that you’re up against kind of a deadline here and time, so i’m going to respect your time it’s been so great talking to you, kay, love after all these times that we’ve met at conferences and everything. if listeners want to connect with you, where’s the best place to find you?
caleb jenkins
i mean, you can find me on most of the social media platforms but my favorites probably x what was previously twitter and i’m also fairly active on linkedin as well or i’ve played around with the with threads but i haven’t fully got into the threads environment yet. but those would be my three i mean, you can also connect with me on facebook, or an instagram or whatever to those are more maybe slightly personal for me, but i i mean, i have many multitudes of work friends on those platforms as well. so that’s, that’s a good place or you can always email me. my email for the jenkins consulting is caleb at jenkins consulting.us. or you can email me through our lj which is caleb at rlj financial.com. or better yet, just go to our website and fill out the contact page and then we can have a conversation.