Are you wearing handcuffs to work?

You get ready for work:

Morning routine? Check.

Clothes, hair, shoes? Check.

Laptop or phone? Check

Handcuffs? Check.

Wait, handcuffs?

You know handcuffs.

Those steel contraptions that bind your wrists together.

They severely limit your movements.

You feel stuck.

“But look,” you think, “my arms are free to move about, no handcuffs in sight.”

True enough, physically.

What’s handcuffing you is your pricing model.

Your choice of hourly billing. Or any other time based pricing approach.

Let’s take a look.

You sell time. Time never changes. It doesn’t get more valuable or less. It never grows or shrinks. It is the same minute after minute, hour after hour.

When you sell time, every other hourly billing firm is your competitor.

Time vanishes right before your eyes. Once it passes, it’s gone forever. You can’t stockpile it for later.

Time doesn’t allow you to differentiate your firm. You may think “We have the best lawyers, accountants, designers, subject matter experts, and so on, but clients think they’re buying time, not your special sauce.

Isn’t this getting hard to take?

Then there are the resources you use to track your time. Time sheets or tracking software. It’s not free.

Someone to administer the collection of time records. Making your associates and staff spend time every day filling out their time sheets.

Or they don’t and then you have to harangue them at the end of the week to remember back 5 days to that 6 minute call they had with a specific client. Talk about handcuffs!

(One accounting firm with 70 associates requires them to submit their time sheets daily. Imagine all the tremendous value they could deliver to clients if 70 people weren’t spending 30 minutes every single day on this admin task. Add in the cost of tracking the tracking. The mind boggles!)

Of course we can’t forget about cash flow. Since invoices are based on how much time an associate spent the previous week or month, invoices are always billing for the past. Then you give clients 30 days to pay.

It’s too easy to shrug off cash flow as “not really a problem” because you have payables coming in from prior months. But a true cash flow report will show you the ugly truth. You’re paying your expenses, including employee compensation, in advance of getting paid by your clients.

You are effectively financing your clients’ purchases and not getting compensated for that.

Since when did your firm become a fee-free lender?

I didn’t think that was your intent.

Do you want to remove the handcuffs from your daily life?

First, you have to say “YES”!

You won’t do it or do it well if you hem and haw.

You, as the owner. CEO, Founder, Managing Partner, or other title, are the person to decide.

Your firm’s pricing approach or pricing model is a strategic decision, not an operational one.

It’s yours.

You with me?

Once you decide that the handcuffs have to go, you can begin the transition to a pricing approach that does one thing: it ties fees to the IMPACT or life changing differences you deliver to your clients.

That’s a must. Differences to clients, compensation relative to those differences.

Talk about throwing off the handcuffs!

Instead of limited movement, you have unlimited movement.

You can use a small amount of knowledge and deliver a small difference and price accordingly.

You can deliver a huge difference and price accordingly too.

We use two tools to help our clients adopt IMPACT Based Pricing.

The first is the Issue Chart. This helps you guide the client conversation, so the client tells you what they want or need. No guessing!

The second is the Continuum of IMPACT. Once the client has shared their need or want, they place the IMPACT of your solution on the continuum, somewhere from 1-10.

The small impact, for a small fee, is likely to fall between 2-4 on the Continuum. A medium impact falls between 5-7. A large or even huge impact falls between 8 and 10.

Are you ready to throw off those handcuffs? Get unlimited freedom to charge for the life changing differences you deliver to your clients?

Life changing differences! Small medium or large, they’re important to clients. Your fees are important to you.

IMPACT Based Pricing brings the two together.

Trivers Consulting Group brings your firm together with IMPACT Based Pricing, and unlimited movement, and revenue growth.

You can test drive the Issue Chart and Continuum of IMPACT by scheduling a STARTER Call with me.

Reply to this email or text STARTER to 703-801-0345.

 

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