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The Revolutionary Firm's founder Melanie Power has weighed into the ongoing pricing debate in bookkeeping - in particular, addressing value pricing versus billable hours.
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'Grassroots relationships' trump pricing considerations
24 January 2018
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9 minute read
The argument for value-based pricing has been mounting for several years now in bookkeeping and accounting broadly. Some remain staunch defenders of time sheets, while others believe scrapping billable hours is central to running a progressive and productive firm.
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However, for Ms Power, there's no hard-and-fast answer in bookkeeping, and she encourages professionals to look past what is often scaremongering.
“There's more than one way to skin a cat, you can have that argument about pricing, with hourly, fixed and value, they kind of all work but it just depends on what you want to do as a firm owner and make it,” said Ms Power.
“You might have a bookkeeping practice that specialises in a particular sector like the professional services, it could be trade, it could be ecommerce, but you can still offer different types of services to them.
“And then you still have firms who do the whole general practitioner thing and offer lots of different things- it just gets down to where the firm owner actually wants to do with the business, where they want to go.”
Instead, Ms Power believes principals at bookkeeping firms should worry about their approach to marketing and strengthening relations with their client base in the year ahead.
“You have to start focusing on the client and working out ways you can really add value to the business. Adding value is the strength of the relationship with the client and the trust which is what really gels things together,” said Ms Power.
“You've got to market, identify who your ideal client is, where are they hanging out and figure out how talk to them.
“As much as we have all of these incredible digital tools on our hands, I am still a firm believer that you cannot beat on the ground grassroots face to face relationship building. You got to get out there, hit the pavement, talk to people, go to the networking events, demonstrate your expertise- the way we do business in that sense hasn't changed, it's just now that we got extra tools like social media to amplify that.”
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