11 Ways to Accelerate Your Success in the Cloud (August 23)

11 Ways to Accelerate Your Success in the Cloud (August 23)

Sandi: Here we go 11 Ways to Accelerate Your Success in the Cloud. We have Michelle Long, hi Michelle.

Michelle: Hi Sandi.

Sandi: And I’m Sandi Smith Leyva and we’re going to get started right now. I am thrilled to acknowledge our Gold sponsors of our Ultimate Accounting vCon and we’ll tell you a little bit about this event a little later in the broadcast. I do want to acknowledge that we have Xero, ScanWriter, Cloud9 Real Time and Intuit who are all helping us bring this program to you today. So thank you to those vendors.

Here is our agenda for today, we’re going to talk about why we’re here and we want to introduce us just in case there are any of you that are maybe not all that familiar with Michelle and me we’re going to introduce ourselves.

We’re going to talk about the agenda as promised which is 2 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Starting Your Business, 2 Management Pitfalls and How To Handle Them When They Come Up, 3 Questions From Accounting Clients That You’ll Need To Be Prepared to Answer, 3 Tips on Transitioning Clients To Cloud Accounting and One Resource That Will Help You Profit From Cloud Accounting Services.

So if you’re looking for that then you’re in the right place and we already have a question that says will we be able to receive the recording? Yes you will. We also have a request from someone; Vicky you need an audio pin so let me send that to you. So you’re connected to your computer so you might do better signing in and so there is no pin unless you dial the phone number and you can go get the phone number if you look in the audio box. You may have to click the red arrow and open your control panel again. Client phone and dial in, those who might want to ask a question it’s easier to do that from the phone.

I want to introduce Michelle. I’m so honored to have Michelle with us today. She’s the founder of Long For Success and she’s a CPA and MBA and has so many awards. She’s 1 of 10 Women Who Inspire a Profession by Accounting Today, the Small Business Influencer Award, Financial Services Champion and one of the few national trainers for Intuit.

She’s written 2 books on Successful QuickBooks Consulting and How To Start a Home Based Business. Michelle welcome!

Michelle: Thanks Sandi and I’m glad to be here. I see some names I recognize on the attendee list but lots of new people as well. Welcome everybody glad to have you and I’m thrilled to be here. Sandi let me talk a little bit about you.

Sandi has more initials then I know what to do with. She’s also a CPA and the founder of Accountants Accelerator which is a great program that’s really helping a lot of accounting professionals to take their business to the next level and get it more profitable. Sandi started writing for Intuit way back in 2001 and I remember reading a lot of her articles and following her for many years.

She’s written 6 books, as well as, numerous resources for marketing and helping accounting professionals. I’m really thrilled to partner with Sandi. She has an MS in Neuroscience and so she knows all about this brain and how we learn. And I think are you the only female who has co-piloted a plane around the world?

Sandi: I think there are about 20.

Michelle: Well still very few people who have done that. I just think that’s really cool.

Sandi: Thanks Michelle. We want to make sure you’re in the right place too. Hopefully if you’re on the call then you’re an accounting professional. It may be that you have your own business or you’re thinking about starting your business or you’ve been in business for years and years and wondering what is all this cloud stuff.

I made up a word. If you’re interested in starting, restarting or cloudifying your business or just helping your clients better then you’re in the right place. Some of you may like your job but may want to go out on your own or you may work for someone who is interested and assigned you the task of finding out more about this cloud stuff and how to be more successful in business. So you’re going to learn both of those things on the call today and so you’re in the right place if you fall into these categories.

You might know that my middle name is Bonus and so Sandi Bonus Smith Leyva and those who work with me and I wanted to announce a bonus right here that if you have already registered you guys need to listen carefully for a second. If you’ve already registered for the Accounting vCon we want to gift you with one extra hour of CPE today.

So if you meet our requirements, you’re on the log and logged in for more than 50 minutes we’re going to give you a certificate for CPE today for the CPAs who need that and so just a little bonus gift.

This email at the top I need you to email, if you haven’t already, because some of you already have and if you do want CPE then please send an email and all you have to say is “I want CPE” in the subject or body, we’re not picky and we manually do this. We manually build that log.

It doesn’t have to be perfect but if you’ll send it to then we’ll get you that CPE certificate for today. Again, it’s only for the people registered for the vCon and we’ll be talking about that towards the end of the presentation.

Michelle: Sandi can they register for the vCon after this call if they want to?

Sandi: Absolutely! As long as they’re registered we’ll actually retro, if they register at any time we’ll retro the CPE as long as they were on this call and meet all the other requirements.

Our first bullet is to talk about a couple of mistakes in business. I thought it would be fun if both of us shared the day that we had epiphanies come that maybe we can help you prevent going through some of the trauma we did early in our business.

Michelle: I’ll share one of my mistakes. I’m a CPA and so I started my own practice and doing all the traditional bookkeeping and payroll and taxes, etc. I had a neighbor, it was a neighbor of my parents and a friend of theirs and he was neighbor of my parents and a friend of theirs and he was being audited.

He had H & R Block do his taxes and he was being audited. He’s a traveling salesman and so had lots of expenses and wasn’t very organized. He knew I was a CPA so he asked me if I would represent him in this tax audit. I don’t know what I was thinking. Why on earth would I take that on? But I did and said sure I’ll do it.

So I represented him and it was a field audit which means it is way more in-depth than just an office audit. I should have said no. I spend hours and hours researching and this was back in the day when we didn’t have the internet and I had to go to the library and do all this research reading about representing a client before the IRS and all the rules.

One thing that hit me is that I didn’t like taxes. Why was I doing this? It’s not something I’d ever do again. I didn’t want to specialize in representing clients in an audit. I didn’t even want to do taxes. That’s when it dawned on me that we need to learn how to say no. there are some jobs we get where clients will come to us and we need to learn to say no.

So the lesson I learned is identify what I’m good at, what I want to do and also develop referral relationships with other accounting professionals for things I don’t want to do. I just sure spent a lot of unbillable time on that job.

Sandi what about your story?

Sandi: Yeah, I was going around serving QuickBooks clients. I was driving in my car and I don’t know about you guys but isn’t it the client that lives about 20 or 30 miles away are the ones who want you to come onsite and do their staff, do their training, do all sorts of things with them.

I remember I was in Rowlett, Texas or something like that doing training for mom and pop where the woman was doing the books and the man was the landscaper. I’m sure everybody has a client just like that. I was about to leave and go to my next QuickBooks client and I actually had a wreck because I was going from one location to another and I was looking at the map, before I had a GPS in my car, and I had a wreck and it was my fault because I changed lanes. I was trying to exit the freeway so I wouldn’t miss my exit.

I thought I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to earn $25 an hour and spend 2 hours and then drive 2 hours and earn $25 more an hour, which is what I was doing when I first started out.

So we’re going to speak to some of these starting out mistakes. Also, the beauty of the technology today is the answer when you don’t have to drive around anymore and your business doesn’t have to look like mine did in the 1990’s and hopefully it doesn’t anymore.

What we want to share with you today is we’ve been there and done that and we both changed our services and there are so many ways in terms of wherever you are now there is a way to move to where you want your ideal business, however you want to define that for you. For me it certainly wasn’t driving around the car and having a wreck that day. Instead it’s like we’re walking our talk today Michelle because you’re in, I believe, Missouri and I’m in California and we’ve got people from all over the world logged in and this is how to do business.

I can be wearing whatever I’m wearing and not have makeup on if I don’t want to. This is the way I love doing business.

Okay so we talked about our mistakes to let you know that we’ve been in some of the places that you guys might be experiencing now and there is definitely a way to change.

There are 2 other big mistakes we’ll cover in the agenda and I believe Michelle you’re going to talk about this next one.

Michelle: Yes I will and Sandi it is so true, you and I have been in business for quite a while but we still make mistakes. I wish that I had learned some of these things sooner rather than later. So I’m hopeful that us sharing our stories and sharing some of this with you will help you to avoid some of these mistakes now and in the future.

One of the biggest ones that I see a lot of accounting professionals make is we price our services too low. Why do we do this? It might be that we don’t know what the average billing rates are. I know when I first started my practice I had no idea what to charge. I had been working at a firm and I knew what that firm billed me at and gosh I just didn’t think I could charge that rate to my clients.

So you don’t know what the average billing rates are. One thing I’d like to mention is if you go to my website in the resources section under Practice Development, so go to www.LongForSuccess.com/...

Sandi: You want me to go there now?

Michelle: Sure if you want to because I have links to Intuit’s average billing rate surveys and that’s going to help you see what the average billing rates are. Yes Sandi if you want to pull that up it would be fabulous. It’s www.LongForSuccess.com under resources and website.

There are a lot of practice management resources out there for accounting professionals and so I would encourage you to take a look at that under the websites and links, under Practice Resources if you scroll down a little you’ll see there is Intuit’s Billing Rate Survey and there are a couple of years in there. Some of the older years Billing Rate Survey broke it down by geographic area and some different ways to look at the information.

So that’s a great resource for you to take a look and see what are the average billing rates and you don’t want to set it too low. Another thing is I find and I was guilty of this too is that we might have a lack of confidence in what will really work. We don’t value our services as much as we should. We tend to make excuses. I’m new so I shouldn’t charge that much. I work from home so I don’t have all the overhead and shouldn’t charge that much.

Plus the other thing is a lot of times it’s a lack of clients. I need work so I need to price myself cheap so I’ll get clients. So there are several reasons we might set our billing rates too low but there is a lot of consequences from that.

First, your clients are going to think you’re cheap. If you don’t value your own worth then your clients aren’t going to value it too. So you don’t really want to set your billing rates too low, plus it’s hard to increase your billing rates later. I encourage you to, no matter how tempted you are, don’t set your billing rates too low and look at what the average is.

A good alternative would be to let someone know and so let’s say you’re trying to get a potential client, let them know you can say, for example, if I’m talking to Sandi. I can say Sandi my normal billing rates are $75 an hour, however, I do need to get started and I’d like some testimonials and ratings I can use on my website. I would like you to write a rating for me on the Pro Advisor website, so in exchange for that I will discount your rate for the first 3 months or 6 months or whatever. Instead of charging you $75an hour I’m only going to charge you $50 an hour.

That way you’re giving them a discounted rate, you’re also getting a testimonial or rating from them that will help you. Plus you’re letting them know what your normal billing rate is because if you just say I’m going to charge you $50 an hour and then this is a long term client, how do you increase that billing rate later and tell them hey I’m charging $75 an hour now? That’s a huge jump.

I think a good alternative would be to offer them a discount for a period of time upfront. So avoid the mistake of pricing your services too low.

Another big mistake that accounting professionals will make, so Sandi please go to the next slide, is when you are first starting or even when you’re in business it’s not identifying who your ideal client is. You just try to market to everybody and you wind up not reaching really anyone. Again, this is because when you’re new or in general you just need more clients and also you may not have clarified what your services are.