If you don’t define the finish line, you can’t deliver an ROI.
How do you know a race, a game or a contest is over and who won? You know because the end was specified before the event even started. The finish line was defined in advance.
Your firm needs to define the finish line for your clients.
A finish line is a result, an outcome or as I prefer, an IMPACT. It is the point towards which client work is directed.
Your firm charges a fee to do this work.
Clients will look for some relationship between the fee and the outcome.
You might think of it like this: It costs $XXXXX to achieve Y outcome.
Your firm will calculate a profit margin.
The client will ask themselves, “Is this outcome worth paying the fee I’m being asked to pay?”
If there is no defined outcome and a total pre-determined fee for a particular period of time for the work, the client can’t answer that question for themself.
Whether you’re a CPA, lawyer, consultant, coach, or fractional executive, you surely believe that your expertise delivers a return on the client’s investment.
Right?
Then explain to me, or to yourself, how you can demonstrate an ROI when your engagements are open-ended and payments are month-to-month, cancellable at any time.
Real life examples
The business coach who charges a monthly fee for a certain amount of access to support the client in a variety of ways. How can the client see progress when there’s no specific target? (I paid a coach for years without any targets and when I look back, I realize how wasteful that was. My bad. Never again.)
The law firm that offers subscriptions, which means some amount of access per month but doesn’t include end points or firm targets for completion. Why would they stay if you haven’t identified any outcomes or endpoints for them?
The fractional executive or consultant who gets paid a monthly fee for access to their expertise but who doesn’t require the client to work towards any specific goals, whether monthly or for periods such as 3 or 6 months. Somewhere along the way, the client is going to pause before sending the next month’s payment and ask themselves, ‘What is my ROI on this monthly fee?” There’s no answer if there’s no defined finish line.
CPAs are adding “advisory services” to their list of services. Can advisory be a service when there are no parameters and no defined outcomes or targets to work towards? How can the client know they’ve benefited from this service if nothing is measured against an end goal?
I’m arguing that your firm and your clients will be better off–WAY better off–if you make it your regular practice to define outcomes (and IMPACTs, which is how the outcomes change their life) and set fees proportional to the significance of the outcomes/IMPACTs.
That’s the finish line and the ROI follows.
This is one of the most important ways to ensure that your firm STOPs leaving money on the table.
The larger the ROI, the higher the fee.
To learn more, schedule a meeting here.
