At the time of my writing this, not you reading it; I will have delivered a 60-minute webinar on increasing fees with existing clients.
It is our highest attended webinar of the year, bearing in mind that I do paid and not free webinars, I can tell you now that there will not be enough time to answer everyone’s questions.
With such demand from subscribers, I sat down to write the content for the session with one thought in my head – why is this STILL a subject that needs addressing in accounting?
We can speculate on the answer to that for hours, but I diagnose that the reason is a cocktail of two ingredients – fear and low self-esteem.
Fear: because in practice we often possess a scarcity mentality and despite client attrition being below 8% in most firms, we still irrationally reason that each client loss will no doubt lead to more client loss, redundancy and eventual bankruptcy. The fact that it never does is neither here nor there, there’s no room for facts and evidence in emotionally charged reasoning.
Low Self Esteem: because, well, it could be any number of causes, couldn’t it? The condition is remarkably prevalent within the accounting profession though, perhaps because of the juxtaposition of a detailed orientated practitioner who likes certainties being subject to event driven work and an unpredictable flow of new income. It sets them on edge.
For all the marketing speak about ever changing markets and hyper-connected worlds and so on, issues of pricing, practice technology, business development, recruitment, talent retention etc., all remain evergreen issues to try and solve within accounting.
Someone should write some webinars on those topics to help solve them.
To your success
Martin Bissett
