Welcome to the Escaping the Accountants Trap podcast. It's a podcast to help accountants, CPAs and bookkeepers escape what we call the accountants trap. It's where accountants are not getting paid for their value, and are forced to work long hours with high, demanding clients with little pay. Well, how do you escape the trap? One way is the topic of today's episode, and that's by making the same, if not more money, by working with less clients.

To help me with the discussion, I've invited Don Roland. Don is a respected educator and self-described designated motivator. We're going to get into that shortly. She's a member of several accounting boards and is the president of the accounting cornerstone Foundation, a nonprofit that sends accounting and bookkeeping professionals to local, in person events so they can do continuing education.

Don, welcome to the show. Adam. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super pumped to talk to you today. I can tell you right now I am super pumped as well. And this term designated motivator you are sort of describing before the show what that was. And it was so fascinating. So tell us, tell the audience what is a designated motivator and why do you call yourself one?

Yeah. You know, a lot of people and many people know my story. Not everybody. But I decided that I was going to break the mold of the normal accounting tax season and turn it into something totally different. And I decided to start volunteer coaching college softball. And, you know, in the beginning, they give you a bag tag and they're like, hey, you're a volunteer assistant.

I'm like, no, I'm not. That's that's not what I'm here for. So I sat down and I said, what am I going to call myself? What am I going to be? And I said, oh, I'm going to be the co head coach because nobody wants to be an assistant. And then I said, you know what? Why am I here?

Why am I investing this time into a sport I love? But why am I really here? And I sat down and I said, you know what? I know what my job is. What's your role like? I know I'm not going to teach some technical softball. I mean, I played 30 years ago, I'm not going to teach. The game is totally different than it was back then.

I said, I'm going to name myself the designated motivator. And what my job is, is I'm going to pull every ounce of opportune money out of each of those kids and pull out the best qualities of them, and learn about who they are and make them believe in themselves and be the best that they can be at the sport and themselves, as people, as they move on and out of college.

I love that. And so essentially you're applying that same concept to how you approach your softball team to the accounting profession. So your own firm. So tell us about that. Yeah. So I you know obviously taking time during tax season I took time away from the firm. I knew I had to solidify my tech stack. I needed my technology work for me while I wasn't here.

I had to make sure I had my systems in place, those kind of things. So through that experience of and that college team went from 12 and 26 the prior year to third in the country, which is with the same kids. It wasn't like we had this ringer that came in one special year. You know? And so I said, wait a second, I need to do this for my accounting friends, all my colleagues.

I want to make their lives better. So why can't why don't I pass on the knowledge that I have? Not that I know everything, but what I do know and how it's helped me be successful in transitioning from an 80 hour a week firm to a 30 hour week firm. I needed to do that for tax season, and so I want to share that with every accounting professional, help them with their systems, whatever it takes to help them be the best they can be, make more money, working less.

And so that's been my mission. It's my new mission to help my my colleagues. Okay. And so you've essentially successfully transitioned your firm from this long traditional, you know, every accounting accounting firm feels I must work 80 hours a week, especially during tax season. So you've you've changed that on as head in your firm and you're helping other people.

So what are some tips or suggestions that you would give to accounting firm owners that are listening now? Our bookkeeping firm owners that want that. Yeah. Well, so here's how it worked for me to first of all, you got to find something you love to do outside of the office. It can be anything. It can be horseback riding, golfing, going to the gym, whatever.

We have this mindset that we've got to work 9 to 5. So if I'm going to go to the gym, I'm going to go at 7 a.m.. You know, and we, we get stuck in this. I've got to be in my office now. I've done it, I've listened. I can sit in here for 14 hours. No problem.

I mean anyone can do 80 hours a week but are you being productive. So my big message is all around productivity. So habits and boundaries and setting those habits and boundaries so that you can be out of the office more. And even if you don't find this, it doesn't have to be a hobby. Maybe it isn't a hobby, maybe it's you just like to watch TV.

I don't care what it is, it doesn't really matter. But I knew I had to become more productive. People will say, oh it's tax season, you're busy. That is the absolute worst word in the world because being busy is not being productive. It's a very different word. Yeah. So setting a boundary when you come into your office here's a simple tip.

Come into your into your office. What is the first thing you do when you come into your office. And you have to ask yourself that, what do I do when I first sit down? Do I go directly into my email because that's a rabbit hole? Email is the least productive tool we have least productive. You're letting other people dictate your schedule, your time.

That's exactly right. And it's like we have this need to respond immediately. Like people need my information immediately. It's like you know what? That's not necessarily true. So I sit down and I that's one thing is I sit down. The first thing I do is I look to see what tax returns do I need to do today because I've got practice at 2:00.

I it's and of course, you know, well for me I get in around nine 3010. Yeah. So I've got four hours I can do more work in four hours than I can, and eight when I set the correct habits and boundaries within my firm. And that's a huge tip. Okay, that's make sense. That makes sense. I mean, in terms of time management, I, I'm a firm believer in that.

I ever since I read that book, getting things done by, Oh, man. David Allen. Yeah. I can't remember the day I was maybe. Yeah, a but but he highlighted the fact that there's, you know, there's the urgent and then there's the important and it may not be the same thing. Right. And so a lot of people mistake the urgent for the important, which you need to focus on the important first and then get to things that maybe other people have deemed urgent that may not advance your, you know, your firm or your time.

Yeah. And I think one of the other other big tip is calendar blocking. So I was like, listen, Adam, some people like to work a 50 60 hour week during tax season and God bless those people. And that's awesome. And it's it's not that you and it may not be you want to work 30 hours a week, or you may want to work 40.

I don't believe in the fact that we need to define our roles or our jobs by hours. You know, we don't track time here. We don't track time. Get your work done and take your vacations as many as you want. I don't care as long as your work gets done. And so calendar blocking is another way. You know, we have tax appointments, we have people that come in and we do those appointments.

But are you blocking time to do I call them in-house returns meaning they've uploaded their stuff to your system. Are you doing are they dropped off or whatever it may be. And we've got those returns to do as well as the ones we do in person, which I'm not a really big fan of doing returns in person. One of the things we did change about that was that we have people give us their stuff.

Even though they're coming in. They either have to upload their documents or drop them off before their appointment so we can prepare the return as thoroughly as we can. Then we may have questions. They come in now it's a 15 to 20 minute appointment, not an hour. Right? I'm not going to be very productive or even maybe accurate, doing a return with you sitting here in front of me because you want to tell me about Sally and the soccer team and then this and that.

And I want to be able to look you in the face and listen to what you're saying instead of, oh, yeah, oh that's great. Great. Oh, they play soccer now all the time. How many kids do you have? It's just distracted. It's distracting. And it's not productive. And it's. And they don't need to be in here for an hour.

They just don't. So if you had to start your if you know now if you know, then when you started your practice, what, you know now, what would you have started differently. So in other words somebody that's starting or I have has a brand new accounting firm or bookkeeping firm or maybe been in business for a year or so, and they want to do what you're saying.

They want to be able to, to, work on higher priority things and not have to work 80 hour weeks, especially during tax season. What would you recommend or what would you have done differently? Well, what would have been the unfortunately, Adam, we probably wouldn't be talking now if I had done this 25 years ago because I would be retired already at 53.

Okay. Because I believe, number one, I would make sure you're pricing accordingly. Okay. Do not lowball yourself. And I think that that's something I know for myself. When I got my first client, it was $200 a month to do their bookkeeping. I was on fire. The second client I got hired me. It was $18 an hour. My husband and I were like, we are going to be millionaires, right?

We ten bucks an hour, right? And so the undervaluing, over the course of probably 22 of my 25 years, that was that is probably one of the biggest things is making sure you my my tax partner says price accordingly price accordingly. That is one of the huge things. Why do you think that such an issue? Because I agree with you.

Why do you think that's an issue in our profession? I just think we believe I think we are still trading dollars for hours, even if we're charging like a tax return. By the form, I think we're thinking, okay, this this client needs this done only took me 15 minutes. I'm only going to charge them for 15 minutes. Right?

Instead of the value of what the product, whatever it was I did, maybe it was, you know, a verification that they're self-employed. I've been doing their taxes for, you know, five years or whatever. That's a letter that you give to the bank. It's considered a comfort letter. Charge accordingly. That shouldn't be. Well, I have a template. It only takes me five minutes to get the letter over to.

And so, you know what? They're a good client. I'm not even going to charge them in. That's insane. We we have a way. The one thing we have a value, and that's our coconut. That's our heads, our brains, our our knowledge, our experience, all those kind of things. And I think, you know, sometimes in the beginning, if you've not been in business before and you're or maybe you don't even really have a lot of experience, that's different.

But if you have experience, you know what you're doing. We've got to stop thinking that we're trading the dollar for the hour and start saying, you know, what was that letter worth? Well, if the client is trying to buy a house and they buy it, you know, a $300,000 house, what was the value of that letter? Right. Oh, I couldn't get the house without the letter.

And that's the kind of thing I think we lowball ourselves. That's a big one. Got it. Okay. And and by the way, how do you in your firm what's your philosophy on pricing. Like how do you price the engagements whether in bookkeeping tax or whatnot. Sure. So now we've moved into I, you know, Ron Baker. Time's up. Ron Baker writes big.

So he's amazing. He's the one who said to the accounting firms years ago, stop hourly pricing and value price, which was a great concept and I didn't agree with Ron and I. He knows this and he now has come up with what's considered subscription pricing, which you'll you'll find a lot of service providers are moving to that model.

Yeah. And so from a pricing perspective, if we get a business client, they have to be in what I call relationship pricing. It's the same thing as subscription pricing. But it's like, hey, listen, let's build a relationship. You don't want to worry about me sending you invoices for, you know, we work ten hours on your stuff and, so yucky.

So now from pricing when it comes to that stuff we're doing, hey, listen, it's 2500 bucks a month. We're going to do your bookkeeping, we're going to do your tax return, blah, blah, blah. And this is what you're going to pay every single month. Then we have the concept around tax returns. If you're just doing a tax return, let's say you've got an individual that comes in or even a business for all their they need you to do their tax return.

I 100% believe in doing it by the form. How much are you going to price by the form? And I also believe we as accounting professionals need to set a minimum. So for me starting. So we've been increasing our prices. But we will not do a tax return for less than 750. Okay. And the reason for that is in my opinion, is that I want to work with less clients.

I want to work with. I don't even want to work with sophisticated clients. I don't want to be I don't want to be doing tax return, a C corporation tax return with, you know, 17 shareholders and all this. Like that's not my wheelhouse. I and that's the thing you've got to define what you want to do. I know when I first started my firm I did anything for money like anything.

And I figured it out if I didn't know how to do it. And I've now shifted to these are the things I love to do, and that's all I'm going to do. And so from a pricing perspective, though, I mean, I still today have people come to me with their tax return. They want me to give them a quote.

They give me their prior year tax return. And I see they paid $200 for their tax return, right. And I'm like, I can't, I, I can't afford that from a tax software. You know, insurance, all this stuff I can't afford that. So I tell them right away I'm like, listen, I'm not your cheapest game in town. And I'm going to tell you that I'm probably the most expensive in my area for sure.

I'm going to give you my price, but you're not going to hurt my feelings if you go somewhere else and you have to be okay with that. You have to be okay with clients not wanting to stay with you because you're expensive. I'm. I had someone yesterday. Even in the relationship pricing, people are like, well, well, if you see it's like an annual subscription and they want to cancel their contract.

We had a happened yesterday like, you know, we want to go with somebody local, blah blah blah whatever. Okay. No problem. Next. Because I mean you for but essentially everything that you do revolves around this idea that you want to make sure your lifestyle and your employees lifestyle are good. You don't want to you don't want the tail to have the dog.

That is. So I love that you said that. Yeah, because that's how we when we started this relationship pricing, which we just started last October, I sat down with Nicole, she's on my team. And then Tracy and I said, okay, you guys have three of us here. I know what I want to make. What do you guys want to make?

Like, what do you want to make? And Nicole's like, well, I don't want to be greedy. And I'm like, for the one time in your entire dream. Yeah. What do you want to make? What would make you happy? And she told me. And she's six figures. She makes six figures. She's a bookkeeper. She doesn't even have an accounting degree.

Yeah, she's certified in bookkeeping. But I tell you what about this woman? She is the hardest worker, and she works hard. She doesn't make excuses. She shows up. She actually played basketball at the local university. You know, I don't know, I have this thing about athletes. I just think that they like they have goals. They understand setting goals interesting and right.

Right. And so that's exactly Adam. If I had to do it again, would have been another thing would have been, hey, because I've had up to ten employees at one point in the year, I grew to ten employees. And I was like, I don't really like this. But if I had done that differently, I'd be in a very much different position now.

And I loved my people. I loved my employees. Right. And so I was letting the the tail wag the dog for a long, long time. And if you can, if you can wrap your brain around not doing it that way and actually setting those boundaries and really pricing yourself correctly, and again, like you said, I mean, so we sat down with our clients.

Here's another thing that we did is when we went to this relationship pricing, we evaluated our client list. Who do we want to work with? Now, if you're doing business right, if you're new in business, here's another tip. Define your ideal client. People say that and they're like, oh yeah, I've heard that before. You haven't done anything about it yet.

That's one of the motivation comes like, take the tips and apply them and whatever works for you doesn't have to be my way. Yeah, but if it's if you're like, I got to do something different, then do something different. Do it. Yeah. I'm telling you by by changing this was this decision to relationship pricing with our business clients has changed my life, changed my client's life, and my staff works better than that.

What's better than that? I had a guy he would pay us just to do his corporate tax return. It's all we. He did his own bookkeeping. He had another firm that would that he would worked with for QuickBooks. And we didn't know how to do stuff. I called him up and I said, we're moving to this pricing model because I really like the guy.

And I said, and he was paying maybe $2,500 for his s-corp return. I said, tell you what, for $1,500 a month, you have access to us whenever you need us. He goes, no way. I said, yes. He goes, that's all I've ever wanted was access to you are access to a team of accountants who, if I had a question, they would answer me, like timely.

Yeah. And so with I think we're 17 relationship pricing clients right now, which generates over $30,000 in revenue a month. Wow. Two of us are doing the work for 17 clients. Yeah, and we're making the money we want to make. And we're and we're doing good work without killing yourself. Without killing ourselves. Like, this is summer. Like, I'm barely working this week, right?

I figure, like, one week a month is my new goal. Yeah, I'm going to work one week a month and get my work done. Yep. Do a good work. Do good job. One week a month. Yeah. I liked what you said earlier that accountants especially need to define what they want when they're they're running their firm. They're they're busy.

Yeah a lot a lot of accountants, bookkeepers, you know, like what they do. They just need to define what they want. Where is their Northstar? What is their goals? What's their vision for their life? What motivates them? Right. That makes complete sense. And some people, like I said, some people do like to work that long week and there's nothing wrong with that.

Yeah. But at the same time, if you're in that position where you're working, you're just working so much and you're overwhelmed and you just like, I mean, I watched through Covid, I watch, you know, social media a lot, and I just read a lot. I don't necessarily always interact, you know, and respond to everything that's going on. But I want to hear I want to see what people are up to.

Yeah. And Covid through Covid, we got the crap beat out of us, Adam. We did. We got pummeled between PPE loans and stimulus checks and questions and oh my goodness. And I didn't file. So I'm not going to get my stimulus check. Please help me file. And, you know, then they would go online and they would say that they would do this thing and it jacked everything all.

But anyway, we got hammered during Covid and there were a lot of depressed accountants. And that was that year is when I wrote that first book, The Designated Motivator. And I wrote about that season because it was so it changed my life just in so many ways. And it's an experience I'll never forget and never I've just I still am in touch with those kids, and it was amazing.

But during Covid, when I was watching, it was almost like I was watching my fellow accountants lose. They were losing and I'm like, we got to have them winning. We can't do this. So that's where I said, okay, designate a motivator for accounting professionals. Like, I got to help these people. And so we saw a lot of depression and I feel like it broke my heart.

Yeah. So I had to do something about it. And that's where it kind of all came together. But that's the whole thing is like, I want the accountant to define what they want their life to look like. And interestingly enough, when you started your firm, for those listeners who been in business for a long time and had a firm for a long time, where you did start, doesn't mean that's where you have to land.

That's a good point. Right. And it's amazing, as Ron Baker said to me, I had dinner with him a few weeks ago and he said Roland it's okay to close a chapter. Yeah. Like it's okay if you're like, well, this is what I used to do a lot of bookkeeping, and I was really good at it.

I really like doing that anymore. It's okay. You have permission to stop. Yeah, right. I've done this has been fascinating. And if somebody is listening and they're like, I want to learn more from her and I want to check out our book. I want to, you know, see what how she can help me. Where do you suggest they go?

They should go to Dawn bruin.com. Okay. So Dawn Incom has like I have a free resources tab. So for the pricing perspective I have my A list of all the how I charge by the form okay. Like pricing by hours. You can go in if you just have to get on my email list. It's the only rule. Got it.

Well otherwise there's I have templates up there. My relationship pricing templates are all up there with my letter and how I described it to my clients. So I go to Dawn Procom. And there's another thing. If you click on the events tab, I do something called Dawn's dug out. Oh, surprisingly, Adam. Right. Dawn stuff I love it. So, we just had a good.

On Monday. We had Dawn's dugouts from 2 to 3 and then 4 to 5. We've been doing it on the second Monday of every month. So a second Monday. But if you go in there, sometimes we change the dates depending on holidays and other things, but if they go there and they sign up, you just can come and we just talk.

We've had we had 25 people on one call on Monday and another one, we only had ten. The later time seems to be less people, but we just talk about this stuff. Yeah. And and it's not just me. I mean it's other people can give their advice and and we all it's just an opportunity to follow up on a podcast or a webinar or a conference where we have the podcast.

Oh, that was really great. Okay. Now what? Yeah. So I said Dawn's dugout. Come, let's talk. Let's ask questions. Let's do things. Wow. So and of course LinkedIn, Twitter all. You know I'm all over that stuff. Well we'll put everything including your website and then their socials in our show notes. But it's Don Roland bro. Lynn.com. That's correct.

All right Don thank you so much for being with us today Adam. Thank you. This has been amazing. You call me anytime. Adam I'm on I'm ready to go anytime I appreciate that. Thank you. And to everyone listening or watching. Thank you so much for spending the last few minutes with us as we discussed how to escape the accounts trap.

Bye for now.