How a bookkeeper increased her net income by 231% - Interview with Jessica Fox

This story is a very typical story of how an accounting professional moved away from hourly billing and the results she got. Her name is Jessica Fox. 

Watch the full video where she describes her results here: https://youtu.be/L1v5QwdRCWU

Jessica Fox’s Success Story

Jessica Fox started Florida Virtual Bookkeeper in 2016. Before then, she had been a corporate bookkeeper, so she was great at the technical stuff, but knew nothing about pricing.

When Jessica decided to become a freelance bookkeeper in 2010, she had two clients. One tax accountant who kept her busy with clean-up work and catch-up projects; they told her how much they would pay her, and she agreed. So, she had no need to know how to price.

The other client was a small non-profit, which Jessica worked for mostly out of the kindness of her heart, not because of the money, so she was only charging them very small amounts.

“I started to under-price myself from the very beginning”

In 2016 when Jessica started her own business, she quickly realised she did not know how to be a bookkeeping business owner. She simply did what her previous tax accountant that she collaborated with did: charge by the hour.

But because she was a new business owner, and marketing was not really her thing, she started to under-price herself from the very beginning. Jessica said, “Everything that Mark says you should not do, I did when I started! I would offer to price match. I used key words like ‘affordable’ and ‘cheap’ on my website.”

This led to very slow growth for Jessica’s business in the first few years, and the clients she was attracting were not good quality clients. Jessica was very stressed because she wasn’t making enough money. Jessica told me, “It got to the point where I felt I wasn’t being paid enough to make it worth my time to get up and do the work. So something had to change. That was when I decided to seek out what other people were doing and find a better way.”

Starting the value pricing journey

Jessica told me she first started following me in 2017, watching my YouTube videos and attending my webinars. That’s when she started to learn about value pricing and became motivated to make some changes.

One of the first things she did is transition into flat rate pricing. Jessica said, “While I wasn’t value pricing right away, value pricing is a journey. Even now I get better every day because there’s always new things to learn and things to tweak and improve. So at least I made that transition to menu pricing because it did help. But it still was a shortcoming because I was leaving so much money on the table. I created packages but I hadn’t created them correctly. I was putting my prices on my website which I’ve learned since is a big no!”

It wasn’t until 2019 when Jessica joined my How to Price Bookkeeping Services course that things started to change in her business very quickly.

At that time her business was very small. Jessica bought the course and made the commitment to attend live, take notes, and implement at least one thing from each session to make sure it was worth the investment. Jessica told me, “I am happy to report that before I finished taking the course, the changes that I made paid for the course. That was my big WOW moment! And it gave me the motivation to keep making changes.”

Jessica’s Results

Jessica reported that at the end of 2019 her net income had grown by 67% because of the changes she had made so far.

By this point, Jessica felt she had a good understanding of value pricing, but she knew she could still do more and attract better clients. That’s when she joined my Bookkeepers Pricing Academy as soon as it opened and implemented most of the teachings immediately. Jessica made a point not to miss a lesson and to take as much action as possible.

Jessica said, “The Effective Pricing software played a big role this year in increasing my fees. Despite a pandemic that led to some customers downgrading their services or shutting down, new customers took their place at higher rates.”

By the end of 2020, Jessica’s net income had increased by 98.75%!

Watch Jessica's full story here: https://youtu.be/L1v5QwdRCWU

If you found this valuable and would like to learn more about value pricing, I run a free live online training session every month with a topic chosen by you. Attend live and you can ask me any questions you have. Click here to register and I will send you an invitation to the next session.

And if you would like to join a community of like-minded accounting professionals learning to price more effectively and confidently, you can join my Facebook Support Group here.

Wishing you every success on your pricing journey.

Mark Wickersham

Chartered Accountant, Public Speaker and Author of Amazon No.1 Best Seller “Effective Pricing for Accountants”