You are stuck in the Accountant's Trap if you are not able to earn more without working more. So, if you want to escape the trap, here's five ways to do it:

#1: Upsell clients to higher-margin advisory services like CFO Advisory services.

Most members of The CFO Project - 71%, in fact - offer some combination of bookkeeping and/or tax services to their clients. In fact, most of our members started by offering only accounting services and then grew their practice by upselling clients to CFO Advisory services.

#2: Outsourced lower-margin services to third-party providers (so you and your employees are spending more time on higher-margin services).

By outsourcing or offshoring compliance work, you free up your time to engage with your clients on higher margin services. This allows you to leverage your time and your employees' time to earn more.

#3: Automate lower-margin services as much as possible (so you and your employees are spending more time on higher-margin services).

Sooner or later, most compliance work will be automated. Embrace it now, and get ahead of the curve. Besides, do you really want to spend your time (or pay for other people to spend time) manually entering data?

#4: Cross-sell or down-sell existing clients to ancillary services such as tax, HR, IT, or bookkeeping.

By offering advisory services you'll gain the trust of your clients. Once this happens, you'll have the opportunity to cross-sell or down-sell other services to your existing clients. Examples include selling tax, HR, IT, and/or bookkeeping services.

#5: Replace yourself as the “technician” and spend your time focusing on managing and growing your practice.

You can't scale your business if you are the business. A great way to increase your earnings is by scaling your practice. To scale your practice you need to replace yourself with systems and a team that is working the systems.

If you want to see how much you could earn as a CFO Advisor, check out our earnings calculator.