How A Bookkeeper Increased Her Prices By Almost 60% After Just 12 Months

Recently, one of my students has been dropping some frankly amazing success stories into my Facebook Support Group:

The results she is getting are absolutely incredible, so I just had to interview her!

You can watch the full interview here.

Lana’s biggest challenges

One of the biggest challenges Lana had to face was scope creep.

“Client’s didn’t understand that no, you hired me to do ‘A’, and now you’re asking me to do ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ as well!”

These clients tended to become difficult and reluctant to pay the bill at the end. This was hard on Lana as she was trying so hard to provide for her family, but clients were refusing to pay her for her work.

The tax season rush was another big issue Lana faced.

Come January, all her clients panicked as the tax year-end was approaching, and Lana was struck with a huge influx of enquires and new clients wanting her to bring their books up to date and file for taxes.

She ended up working ridiculous hours to try and get all the work done…

“I was putting the kids to bed and then going back to the office until midnight or 1am…”

She couldn’t go on in this way…

How did she turn it all around?

The first thing Lana did was she started learning. 

She signed up to my How to Price Bookkeeping Services course and started making tiny changes here and there to her business.

Eventually, something clicked in Lana’s mind, and she decided to go all out with implementing her new learnings across her business.

She did 2 big things…

She asked herself this question…

“Who are the people I really want to move forward with?”

Lana had a lot of clients that she hated working with, they didn’t get the information to her on time and they were always trying to get discounts and avoid paying altogether.

So she got rid of them.

Then…

After axing a big chunk of her bad clients, she then returned to her remaining clients and started to review them.

She had been charging some of her clients the same price for years, and some of those businesses were really growing and thriving from the work she had done.

So, she upped the prices…

“Your business has grown by X dollars, by X transactions over the time we have worked together. I think we need an update…”

The responses she got were overwhelmingly positive.

She took them through her renewal contract and introduced her new packages.

This worked so well, she went to another level…

The response from her existing clients was so positive, she went even further with her new clients. 

She gave them all a diagnostic review first – which she charged for – allowing her to accurately work out the scope of the work and also get a better sense of the client.

She could then vet the bad clients and offer the right package to the good clients.

“It’s ok if I’m not the right fit for every single business owner because the people that are signing up are paying me 50% more than I would have priced before – and I have higher quality clients!” 

By being strict in who she decided to work with, and by raising her prices by 50%, Lana found she had much more time to spend on each client – and more free time to spend with her family.

Due to Lana’s amazing success, her business is now at a point where she is looking to expand and scale it up to a much higher level taking on more employees and continuing to give the same level of service to all her clients. 

I highly recommend you watch the full interview to learn exactly how Lana managed this incredible success.

Lana learnt about value pricing from the How to Price Bookkeeping course, which we open up just twice a year. You can check when your next chance to learn is here. 

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.

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”