Pricing for Growth

When you're first starting out as a consultant, your two main priorities are to grow your client base and to gain experience. Even if you've been using QuickBooks for years as I did, you'll find that every client has different needs and it's a huge learning curve. So I recommend keeping prices low to start. A good starting point is to price yourself as a very good bookkeeper. That's about $30-$45 per hour in my small town (population less than 100,000). If you're in a bigger city, go for $40-$50 per hour. In any case, you want your pricing to come in under your competitors'. I also made a point of telling prospective clients that if I didn't know an answer, I would research it for them and not charge them for my time. Clients like that because they get the answer they need at no charge, and you get the learning experience you need.
If your business is already up and running, and you're ready to expand your client base, you can offer money-back incentives for referrals or discounted package deals as a way to lower your prices indirectly and grow your client base.

Pricing as a Tool

Somebody out there is worried about pricing. We're all worried about pricing. When I started my business, I asked business advisors, read magazine articles, and did research online. The most common advice was to "price competitively". Well, that wasn't very helpful to me. And so this is the first part in a four part series on my experience on setting prices. The main goal of this first blog is to make you think differently about pricing. Short-term vision makes you want to price to make enough money to live on. Don't go there. Think of pricing as a tool to move your business in the direction you want it to go. In my opinion (so far), there are three pricing stages that take effect and not necessarily sequentially:
1. Pricing for Growth
2. Pricing for Stability
3. Pricing for Optimization
I will describe these different pricing strategies in future blogs (coming during the next month - stay tuned...). For now, consider pricing as a tool that fluctuates (up AND down) as your business needs change. Back soon with more.

Get Yourself Certified

I've been emailing some QuickBooks support to a person in Indonesia that's volunteering with the tsunami relief work. They're using QuickBooks and tracking many of the nonprofits involved as subsidiaries. I won't go into the details, but this brings me to the importance of getting yourself listed on Intuit's QuickBooks Referral database. Certification is not cheap, especially for those starting out in consulting, however you get your money back in software, support, visibility and credibility so it's well worth the effort. I'm thrilled to be doing at least a little part for the tsunami relief work and am sure they would not have found me if it weren't for Intuit's database. I can't tell you how many new clients just check in the database to see how credible I am. It gives you that one step up over your competition. Good Luck with the tests!

Maximum Client Hours

Friday was a 6 hour day, and that means 6 billable hours which I spent working with clients. When you're just starting out and don't have too many voice- and e-mails to answer, you might be able to handle 6 hour days. Remember that a 6-billable-hours-day really turns into an 8 hour day when you include travel time to and from clients. And then you still have office work to do. A more reasonable schedule for consultants includes an average of 4 billable hours per day. That turns into a 5 hour day including travel time and you still have time to do office work.

A Day in the Office

This was a highly unusual day since I remained in my office the entire day. I spent a lot of time on the phone with an accountant I am particularly comfortable with going over our common client issues (common clients and common issues). We have such different takes on handling people and issues that we always both come out ahead after our conversations. If you're going to be a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and not an accountant, I strongly suggest you get to know some CPAs who you like working with. These types of partnerships bring many rewards both financially and educationally.

Treo becomes laptop

If you're going to be an efficient consultant, you need to be able to track time and consulting notes. The Treo 600 is the most awesome smartphone out there. A long time ago, I actually lugged a paper calendar around with me and wrote in my client times for billing and made appointments. Once in awhile I double-booked myself. I graduated to a Personal Palm Pilot (remember those?) and a cell phone and literally had my hands full. The day I got my Treo 600 was a day of beautiful synchronization. Find the number, and press it to call. A typical day of data flow is so easy: park at client, open QBMobile (now PocketBooks at www.pgsoftinc.com) and enter client name, start timer, serve client, get back into car, stop timer, enter notes of visit to be poured into invoice, go to next client and repeat, get back to office, hot sync Treo to desktop, import QBMobile info into QB, pour info into invoice, print and mail. The beauty of single data entry at its ultimate.

Discipline Day

Today I met with my employees for a pseudo-regular staff lunch. What arose from the lunch meeting was that one client was interfering with our bookkeeping schedule with an auditor (it's that time of year for nonprofits, which we have A LOT of). So after meeting with the auditor to make sure all was going swimmingly, my role was to politely tell the client that things are under control and to butt out. Sometimes clients can be hurting themselves without realizing it and need a little help in the discipline area. That's my idea anyway. I consider myself not so much as a consultant but a partner to my clients. However, it helps to be the consultant so I don't worry too much about being fired for bringing bad news - or disciplining as the case may be.

So You Want To Be a QuickBooks Consultant

I decided a blog might be just the thing to help those up-and-coming QuickBooks consultants learn what they're in for. Some good, some bad, some great, some really exhausting. Been a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor since 2002 and started as a regular (read "no fee") QB Advisor in 2000. Really started my biz with QB in 1997. I'm not a CPA and don't do this stuff "on-the-side". It's my bread and butter. Your's too? Great - what do you want to talk about?