Jody Padar prides herself as a disrupter and rightfully so. As someone who thinks up new ways of managing and pricing services and delivering added value to clients, she is at the top of the list. Her ideas shatter the conventional way many accountants have been performing. She is sometimes angry because she knows, rightfully in my opinion, that what we have been doing will no longer be effective in the future.
Any change is disruptive. It causes the abandonment of what has always been done and the adoption of untried methods. Contemplating and confronting change has to be upsetting, causing consternation and vacillation. Jody's new book, "Radical Pricing: How to Optimize Profits, Delight Customers, and Build a Top-Value Firm" is the Rosetta Stone of practice management that will translate what you are doing and will move you into Jody's new pricing methods and models.
This is Jody's third "Radical" book and it deals primarily with pricing, which should be something that is near and dear to everyone in practice. We need to price our services right, present the price in the right way, figure out the price and the value to the client, understand our costs, be conscious of the timing of the services, be aware of the availability of others who will proclaim they can perform the same services at a lower price quicker and whether that is reality, and then present the invoice and get paid. In between there are many inputs that go into this process, while not losing sight of the importance of everything in the previous sentence. It's complicated and Jody's book simplifies it with techniques, logic, methods, approaches, checklists, radical exercises (these are great!) and an appendix with the important questions' readers might have and directed answers that are actionable.
Jody's book starts with a dictum on how pricing affects every area of a practice, which it does. I believe this needs to be thoroughly understood before any effective pricing model can be adopted. She makes persuasive arguments that any responsible practice owner, partner or manager should be aware of when it comes to the approach to pricing and the attention that should be given to it. I further agree wholeheartedly with Jody on the importance of the value premise. That's something I feel, along with Jody, that is greatly overlooked when pricing an engagement. She deals with this superbly.
Pricing does affect every facet of a practice. We are spending huge sums on technology to reduce time and increase the data provided to clients with greatly reduced deliverable time. Likewise with new methods of communicating data with our insights, thoughts and opinions that add greater value to the client experience. Just some specifics that I found insightful were adopting a pricing subscription model, tiered service packages, and how to handle add-ons, a step-by-step guide to adopting value pricing, especially how to get started, which is usually the hardest part of trying something new, standardizing many parts of your practice with an effective road map with allowances for individualization, integrating digitization, customer needs assessments, Jody's new key performance indicator (KPI) metrics, scoping and creating client services packages, getting buy-in from existing and legacy clients, and so much more.
There is really a lot about pricing using radical techniques. However, this book is so much more than pricing. It's a complete practice management "course" wrapped around pricing. I believe everyone reading this book would be able to adopt at least one new method or technique that would immediately start generating revenue or make their operations flow smoother.
This book is a do-it-yourself roadmap of how you could become a Radical CPA and adopt the most current and effective pricing practices. The book also has an appendix with a fantastic list of Q&As to help you get started. You do not have to do everything at once — you can start small with one or two clients. This book will show you have to get Radical.
This book was published by CPA Trendlines and can be purchased at
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