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Canopy has a knack for connecting client experiences to the firms that serve them. To find out more, you can contact Canopy directly here:

Lisa Tobias
lisa.tobias@getcanopy.com

Well, that’s not actually true. I think you can innovate around those compliant services by offering different levels of service, so that’s an innovation. For example, in our payroll services, we offer different levels of innovation, or different levels of service, and that is the innovation in the service. So we don’t just say, “Buy payroll from us.” We say, “Do you want level one, two or three?” Because we’re going to do different things in those.

And when you create different levels of service, you’re basically creating different levels of value. And when you create different levels of value, it means you’re automatically creating different pricing levels. You get to charge more if you’re doing more valuable things. And so instead of just saying, “Do you want to buy a payroll,” ask them which level? That’s one innovation around compliant services.

Now, there’s another side that you can innovate on as an accounting firm. And that’s the non-compliant stuff that you sell. That’s the advisory stuff. That’s the consulting. And man, you have all kind of ways to innovate around non-compliant services, because those are just anything the client wants to buy. Basically, non-compliant services are just knowledge that you sell.
So a lot of times you’re going to find that your non-compliant services, or what a lot of people called, “Advisory services,” this is knowledge base, which means it’s done with your mouth and in meetings with clients. So you want to sell a meeting where you show up and speak. That is an advisory knowledge deliverable, and that’s kind of what you’re trying to sell.

So when we sell a advisor, or when we innovate around a non-compliant service, which is the delivery of some kind of value, financial advisory value, we sell those in sessions. So 12 sessions, which is one a month in our contracts, or every other month, six months, or quarterly, four times. And that’s basically, “We’ll do your accounting monthly, but we’ll meet with you quarterly.” So those are two different things because they’re two different values.

One is something we do with our fingers, that’s accounting. That has less value, but still very valuable. And one of them is done with our mouth and our brain, that is highly valuable, and it requires our presence and attention. So those are the things that bring a lot of value to something. So if you want to create more valuable things, more money, then attach yourself to a meeting where you speak and talk about financials. That is an advisory service, and it’s one way you can innovate.

So I hope that helps to drive some clarity around, what does it mean to innovate? If you need any more help around that, just hit us up at Thriveal. This is the stuff we do. We coach firm owners through creating innovative services. You can hit us at thriveal.com or you can email us info@thriveal.com. We’ll see you. Take care.

Here’s what we tell firms. If we work with them to build a really robust, let’s say, client onboarding process, something that is really robust, what we want to see them do is raise their price at the end of the process. Why is that? Because anytime a firm increases in its ability to provide consistent value to a market that it’s serving, anytime it can do that or prove that it does that over time, then it’s more valuable, and if that firm is more valuable, the price should increase.
As we work with firm entrepreneurs over the years, as we see them mature, we try to push them to raise their price, too, because as you mature, you become more valuable, hopefully. Hopefully your maturity comes out in more value to your clients. Then you should be asking for far more money in return because of your value.

Just keep that in mind. If you’re thinking about some things you’ve been doing that drive more consistent value to your clients, it may be time to raise your price and start to get the money that really is required for you to scale and get your capacity paid for in different ways.
I hope that helps. We do this kind of complex work with firms in Thriveal, so if you need our help, let us know at info@thriveal.com. Thanks so much. Take care.

But here’s the thing we hear and I know other firms hear often when they get a new client, they always say, “That last firm never cared about me. They didn’t follow up, they didn’t lead me. I would’ve given them more money. They didn’t tell me new things I could purchase from them.” We hear this disparity often where we know accounting firm owners care about their clients, but yet when you hear clients change firms, they describe something that sounds the opposite where the other firm didn’t care about them. There’s this disparity and what is that?

Well, there are some client management strategies called onboarding where you can actually bring a client along to understand how to work within your firm. A lot of times the difference in disparities is really a lack of education. It’s a client not fully understanding what that firm intends to do for them and how it doesn’t match what the client wants them to do. There’s this disparity often in the knowledge or education in the service being provided. accounting firm owners think caring looks one way because they do it for all their clients whereas a client is looking for very specific care in another way. It takes education through an onboarding process for a firm to tell a client exactly what they’re buying, what they’re going to get, what they’re not going to get, what they can do, what that client can not do, these kinds of things help a client understand, “Oh, this is the kind of care I’m paying for,” and that clarity alone really keeps a client coming back to a firm over and over and over.

And they do. They start to understand. You allow the client to be a better partner of yours when you educate them on what the scope is that they do get or don’t get and then they’ll stay with you. Often a client will say, “Hey, I know this is not in scope, but I want to give you more money to do a new thing for me.” That’s when that client’s become a great partner, when they understand how they’re meant to inform you as their firm how to help that client grow.
But how do you lead these client management strategies? Well, that’s up to the firm. It’s the firm’s responsibility to build an onboarding process, to bring a client into their firm in a way that helps them understand how they’re going to be cared for. If that’s something you struggle with, we help firms with things like that in Thriveal. Hit us up at info@thriveal.com and we’ll walk you through the complexities of how to figure this out. Thanks so much. Take care.

So what’s a pivot? That’s when you’re just walking along in your firm, running your firm, doing what you normally do, and some grenade is thrown in by the Congress, or a pandemic, or people, or whatever it may be, and it kind of blows up your plans. And so what do you do when you have to pivot? Well, the best thing for us in our firm that’s helped us when we’re pivoting is that we already had a plan. And sometimes, we can’t even tell. But that’s more helpful than we realize. And so anybody that watches what we do, or listens to some of the things we teach, calendar work blocking is a huge part of how we plan our future. And we really believe in it. It really does help us. It’s sustained us for managing and planning our work for years and years.

So what we have is a plan all the way through the end of the year. And so that plan tells us what we want to help us know if we’re going to achieve what we want to achieve. And when we have a grenade of a pivot come in, it really blows up that calendar. And basically, what that does is it tells us, all right, we need to slow down for a little bit. We need to change the pace of our business. So a pivot can really just disorient you so bad that you don’t know what you should do. You don’t know if you should keep going, change, stop, close down, whatever. It’s hard to know.

But if you’ve already had a plan in place that is a plan on a calendar, you can actually see should you just slow down, should you change the pace of your growth? If you were going to hire two people, should you just stop doing that now? And so a preformed plan, you can really see how it gets blown up when you go through a pivot. So that’s probably the best advice we could give about pivots.

Now, if you have no plan at all and a pivot comes, it’s so disorienting. You don’t even know what plan just got knocked off course because you didn’t have a plan. So that’s why locking yourself into a plan is very safe. So that when you do have to pivot, you can see that plan blow up. And that is so beneficial, even to watch your plan blow up, and know, “All right, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that.” At least you can choose the three or four things you’re not going to do anymore.

So that’s our advice if you’re dealing with pivots in an entrepreneurial firm, is that go ahead and get your plans in place for the rest of the year. Be bold enough to lock those in. And when pivots are forced upon you, you’ll know how to change those. So we hope that helps. If you need any help, you can reach us at thriveal.com. Just go to info@thriveal.com to email us. Or you can go to thriveal.com on our site. Or reach out to us at @Thrivealcpas on any social channel, and we’ll help you if we can. Thanks so much.

And so what do I mean by movement lane? Well, that’s the lane of the company where you start moving the work along. That’s like somebody scheduling appointments, keeping up with contracts, putting the contracts into a workflow system. It’s somebody that’s always doing the details of making sure work is moving along so that the technical revenue team in the other lane, they don’t have to worry about some of that movement stuff. And so when you get to a certain point in a services company, you want to split revenue production with movement in a company. And that starts to create a lot of strategic decisions. Now you have one person, the movement person, that’s project manager, an ops manager, even an administrative person, whatever you want to title them, support, strategic support ops person, whatever that movement is, they don’t have to worry about being client facing and revenue generating. They just get to think about serving the company and moving things along.

And so that’s a real, solid, strategic way we found for people to keep their services company going, and one they overlook or don’t know about. And so we’ve learned it over time, and it’s been such a help to our team, and allow us to really provide proactive service to our clients. So I hope that helps. Let us know if you need more help on that. We teach these kind of things in Thriveal. You can find us at thriveal.com. Thanks so much. We’ll see you.

Then you move down from that and you may have a leadership team. A leadership team has a more limited level of context of strategy. Now, the leadership team is being taught the organizational strategy from the owners, but they’re not deciding that. Now, they would influence it. What the leadership team is doing is really building the service strategy. That is how this firm is going to pull off service and deliverables to their clients. That’s a big deal. And so then the leadership team takes the context of the service strategy and jumps down another level and shares that with the team. The team has less of the service strategy. And what are they focused on as the team? They’re focused on boots on the ground work, their executionary work. And so the leadership team we’re teaching to not share all the context with the team because that context gets confusing. The team just needs to go, “All right, here’s the service strategy. Let’s go knock it out.”

Then that conversation direction of that context goes all the way down to the clients. Of course, the clients don’t care at all about the context of our organizational or service strategy, right? That’s internal stuff. All they care about is the outcome, the external outcome that they’re purchasing, they’re paying for. And so we share even less context with the clients about our strategy for growth or our service strategy to fulfill our service to them. Now, we do tell them some of those things as clients, but it’s only towards the goal of serving them and producing the deliverables and justifying the revenue that they’re paying us.

So in the first video, we talked about a conversation alert system to know what system we’re on, what number we’re on. This one, we’re talking about how much context you pass down to different levels of groups of people in your company and the direction of that context, and how it goes, and how you limit the context of things you share in conversations. This all gets very, very complicated, but this is something we would love for you to come to thriveal.com, join us as a member, and we’ll be able to help you understand how these things work, and you can start to learn more about these things. So I hope that helps. Let us know, info@thriveal.com. Take care.

But in this first part, I want to talk about a numbered alert system. Just knowing where you are in a conversation is really helpful, so what we’re building right now is a one, two, three, four, five-numbered alert system about our conversation. The conversations in service-based companies are so murky, and you don’t often know where the other person is or where you are, or you’re making assumptions all the time based upon our past or experience that you just don’t know where you stand.

We’re trying to come up with a system that allows somebody to go, “Hey, we’re at a level-three conversation,” and that means a certain thing. As a firm, we’re creating and publishing what this alert system is. What does one mean and two, three, four? What does five mean as far as the conversation alert system? Five would be the worst. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, we’re blowing up. It’s emotional and everybody’s off at each other.” If people go, “Hey, I’m walking into a conversation number five,” everybody can know what that means, and we can come and support that person. So just a numbered system. We’re trying to come up with better ways to make our conversations more defined, more understanding.

What it’s going to do is just help us all stay on the same page. When we do that, we’re more clear and we can do our work better to serve our clients and make more money efficiently. This is part one about a conversation alert system, just defining what would it mean if you could tell somebody you were at a level-three conversation or four or five. We’re using a range between one and five, and we want to teach this to our team to help them understand. They could call out a number. We can all agree what number we’re on.
It sounds like an odd thing to try to define what conversation number you’re on, but conversations get off the rails so often, or people misunderstand each other asynchronously or over email or Slack or speaking. We just want a way to define our conversation so we can move forward and be successful.
Let us know if you need help, info@thriveal.com. We’ll see you.

Well, Thriveal’s been on that journey for over a decade. It doesn’t mean we’re the best community in the world, but we have an interest and some thoughts and opinions about community building. And one thing about our community is that it is not a free community. We are not free. And what that means is there is a barrier to get in, and we recognize the value of that barrier. In fact, when we put a price on a community, we’re saying, “Our community is of such value, you do need to pay to get in.” And that means we’re not right for everybody. Some people are like, “I don’t know that. I don’t believe you.” Or, “I don’t need to pay for a free community,” and that’s fine. But by putting a price on a community, we are really making a statement about what we believe our value is. And we believe the Thriveal community is very strong. Julie and I love to lead this community. Jon Lokhorst, our coach, loves to lead this community. Our team, Mariela, Amy, Lauren, all these people involved in seeing the mission and efforts of Thriveal move forward, we all care about this community, and we’re devoted to the value of these people and the education that they get.

And then of course, Julie and I are always in tune to building, writing, creating new educational programs for accounting firm entrepreneurs. So it’s a big deal. That’s why we put a price on it. Because we believe there’s so much internal. We’re even having some … We do classes on a quarterly basis for our members to teach them and engage them. So we really think there’s a lot of value, and a price is our statement to the world. Hey, if you want to come in here, we’re valuable. It doesn’t mean you’ll agree, it just means it’s what we believe is true. So that’s one thing about our community, it is valuable. That’s why it has a price. Which it doesn’t mean free communities don’t have value. That’s not what we’re saying. We’re just saying ours is so deeply defined with value, we have to price the community for people to join. So that’s a really differentiator for communities, and we’ve been doing that for years.

Another thing is that our community is centered around education. Thriveal is centered around really a language. If you come into Thriveal, you have to seep and soak in a lot of the community conversations, because you’ll learn a lot of people are speaking a certain language. And it’s not necessarily that we plan that, it’s that we teach certain things in Thriveal. We teach methodologies, we teach ways to operate and work and grow your firm. And so a lot of people come through our programs, the Incubator, the Future Firm Groups, Deeper Weekend, and then they come into this community having known really some of the beliefs we have about how do you run firms in effective and efficient and profitable ways. And so you’ll find this language.

So our community, when you’re invited into our community, it’s centered around a common sense of learning. There’s some kind of sense of we all understand the same things we’re talking about. And man, that drives such a tribal language and knowledge through the community. People really start to get embedded into how they can challenge each other better. It becomes more of an intimate community where they’re speaking to each other in a language that we all truly understand. And it’s all because we center the community around some education and learning. And so that’s a really important part of what our community is all about.

Now, if it’s centered around some community learning and education, it makes Julie and I are deeply embedded in teaching this community. We think about it, we read, we write, we research. Learning and teaching, we put graphs together. We build tests and assessments and curriculum, all these things. That’s what Julie and I do for a living is build these things to teach and help firm entrepreneurs grow. And so all of the community is centered around this learning.

So that’s just a couple of things around a community as we’re looking back at 2020, and we see all that this year brought, community was a huge part of this year. And so we wanted to give a little refresher as to why we’re different and why it’s valuable. So we put a price on it. In how this language is adopted in this community, centered around a lot of learning and methodologies and teaching. So we welcome you to think about coming into our community. A lot of people are coming in to be led and to grow and to understand that being with Thriveal members, just having them wash their thoughts and ideas over you, is what makes you a better firm owner. So we welcome you to our community in 2021 if we’re right for you, and if you believe some of these core principles of our community. We want to help you grow too, and we want to care for you, and we want to be with you in 2021, because we have a lot of care and learning and hope to give, and we hope you’ll come join us if you need those things.

So, thanks so much. Hope you had a good 2020. Here’s to a better 2021. Take care. We’ll see you.

And having to be forced into a place to produce content, what it really does for me, personally, is it really helps me think through a lot of the things I’m learning and growing in. And I’ve been doing it for years. And it’s something I never realized, but when I want to write something or create something like, if you’ve come to any of my webinars, I take time to research those thoughts in my head. And I have a notebook where I journal my ideas about new webinars and content I want to create.

There’s a process I go through. Things start coming up in my head. Then I get my notebook out and I journal these ideas down. And then I form them into a webinar. Well, what this does for me is it really solidifies my thinking and understanding about the things I’m writing about or creating webinars about. So if you read anything I’ve written, or if you see any webinars I’ve done, there was a process behind that, a pretty intensive process for me to understand those things. I had to learn them myself first.

And so when you produce content for yourself, you are going to grow and learn so much more than when you’re not outputting a lot of your thoughts and ideas. So as people, we’re not meant to be only consumers. So if we consume information, that’s good. We’re meant to output that information too. And it makes us better people. And it makes us smarter people because we learn more about the things we’re thinking about when we output them in an organized way. It forces us to organize them. And by doing that, we understand it better.

So the value of writing is just huge. And I wanted to say that out loud, how we do that and the value it’s been to me personally. I hope you can commit to some writing and creating videos in 2021. It’s going to make you a better professional. It’s going to make you smarter too, because already you have those smarts in your head. Just organizing those will allow you to speak about those in more concrete terms and really deliver education in a different way than most professionals can. Hope that helps. Happy 2021.