How to Master Cash Flow With AI and Value Pricing with Mark Wickersham

Speaker A: Welcome to the Modern CPA Success show, the podcast dedicated to helping accounting firms stay ahead of the curve. Our mission is to provide you with the latest and greatest insights on cutting edge tools, innovative marketing strategies, virtual CFO services, and alternative billing methods. Uh, join us as we change the way people think about accounting.

Speaker B: We've got another really good episode of the Modern CPA Success Show. I am here with founder of the AI Academy and Value Pricing Academy, Mark Wickersham. Mark, welcome to our show.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. And thank you so much for inviting me. I'm very excited by this one.

Speaker B: Good. I'm really happy to have you here. So tell us a little bit more your background. What's your career story that has you in the room with me today?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I've been in the profession now for, uh, I usually say over 30 years, but it's even more than that now. It was 1988. I left university in the UK and went to work for an eight partner accounting firm. Spent three years qualifying as a chartered accountant, then spent the next few years in their tax department, became corporation tax manager. So for many years, tax was my thing. And that was right through until 1996. I decided to start my own accounting firm. As a sole practitioner. I had no clients. I just had a spare bedroom, a desk and a computer. And, uh, surprisingly, I managed to pick up clients very quickly, moved into my first offices after three months, hired three people, outgrew that after another 15 months and basically grew like crazy. And I thought I was doing all the right things. I thought I was ambitious, I was young, I was naive, uh, and I didn't realize at the time I was excited by building something and winning clients. Uh, and I realized after three years that something wasn't quite right because I was working longer hours than when I was a corporation tax manager, making much less money. And actually, I know you've had, uh, my good friend Ron Baker on the show. He was one of the people that changed my life. It was. I first met him in late 1999. He explained value pricing and a light bulb went on. And that's when I realized that I'd been pricing the wrong way for the first three years. That's why I was making no money whatsoever, uh, why I was often chasing money because I, I couldn't give people, I couldn't get paid in advance because I didn't know what the, what the, um, the bill would be, the invoice until after the work was done. The hours were added up. I had so many problems, and so Ron really changed my life. And um, when I implemented value pricing in my firm, immediately I had significant results. So much so I was invited to speak at a, ah, conference in 2000 in the UK and that then sent me on a really interesting journey. I then sold my accounting firm to my team. I then started teaching value pricing. I wrote my first book in 2011. I've written many books on the subject since I founded the Value pricing academy in 2014. And I've been working with hundreds of accountants around the world, teaching them initially, uh, value pricing, but also how to create more value for advisory. And then more recently in the last few years I've been doing a lot with AI and uh, having great fun with that. So yeah, that's my journey.

Speaker B: Uh, that is fantastic. Well, I'm curious, you really jumped in both feet into the value pricing. Is that your nature or was there something unique about value pricing? I mean to adopt it in your firm and then dive in and say, okay, now I'm going to teach other people.

Speaker A: Yeah, interesting question. I think it must be my nature. I am an accountant, so there's an element of being risk averse. But I do tend to make decisions fast and do things. I jumped straight in with ChatGPT in early 2023. I jumped into value pricing early. Uh, yes, I do tend to jump in on stuff.

Speaker B: Okay, okay, I love that. Okay, so value pricing. There are probably a lot of people who've said, oh, I've heard this forever. I'm curious. You've been doing this for 25 years. My guess is 25 years ago you wouldn't have thought that we'd be sitting here today. I'm not. Well, you can tell me whether you think you still have to convince people that it's smart or if it's just people don't want to change. But what Was your perspective 25 years ago? Did you think we'd be in a different position now than where we are?

Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Uh, but then again, I now know being in the profession for so long that we are in our profession we're quite slow to change. But I really did think we, we would be further along. And I found particularly uh, the first 10 years of uh, talking about value pricing. So from 2000 to 2010 there really wasn't much change whatsoever. It was uh, just the few firms I work with were getting results, but generally it was all time based billing. Uh, I think that things start to change a little bit, uh, about 10, 15 years ago because I know that some of the big companies Like QBO were talking about it in their firm the Future program about 15 years ago. So the measure is getting out there. But I think there's a lot of misunderstandings as what value pricing really is. I started to see 10, 15 years ago a bit of a shift towards giving fixed fees up front, flat fees, monthly billing, which is great. It's a great step because it's fairer on, on the customer to tell them up front in advance what the price will be. But uh, it's still not value pricing. It's still pricing based on our best guess at number of hours. And I keep thinking surely now most of profession are value pricing. But no, it still seems to be. Every webinar I do, every poll I do, every time I ask the question, it still seems to be a minority. There is now an increasing number that are giving fixed prices up front, which is great. But the true value pricing, no, it's still in the, uh, minority.

Speaker B: Yeah, I completely agree with you. And just for some background for our listeners, I'm in the virtual CFO service world and we do value pricing and subscription billing. So set amount per week that we can tell people in a one hour discovery call we can say here is what your cost is going to be with a set of base services. And then if you want to add on some things like taxes like accounting and things like that, and if the scope, once we get into the engagement's dramatically different, then we change it. But that's a pretty small percent than we have. So let me. One of the articles on your site says moving straight to value pricing will lead to failure. I think I know why you would say that. But I'm curious what Give us a little bit more of the double click there for someone who's saying, okay, I've heard it long enough, I should change my whole firm over to value pricing.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think it goes back to your earlier, uh, comment that when I came across it in 99, for me this light bulb went on and I jumped in with both feet and had immediate results straight away. So I was kind of hooked on the whole thing. But, uh, over the next decade, as I'm teaching other accountants what I did, I thought they'd all do the same thing. I thought they'd immediately get it straight away and start doing it. And I found it was hard work. Some firms did, but majority struggled. And I realized after about a decade that trying to teach people who are, uh, entrenched in the timesheet to move to value pricing, it was too big a Stretch. Because value pricing is difficult, uh, because, um, value is subjective. As my friend Ron says, values in the hearts and minds of customers. You can't touch value, feel it or measure it. And I think that's what people struggle with. And so I now teach it for the last 15 years as a journey. Ah, let's. At least for firms that are still keeping the timesheets and pricing based on the hour and sending an itemized bill at the end, at least let's get this first stage of moving to giving a fixed price upfront, which I think is almost the hardest step in the process, because people aren't comfortable with that. Always worried about. Yes, but what if it takes longer? So we need to figure out how to give a fixed price upfront at least once we've done that, even though that's not value pricing, uh, it gives us a stepping stone that we can then build on. And so the way I teach it now is let's just create these stepping stones, this journey, and let's start to work on it bit by bit. And yes, it might take us 2, 3, 4 years to get there, but at least we're on this journey. Whereas trying to get from the timesheet to value pricing is just too big a shift for many people.

Speaker B: Yeah, I could see that. Would you recommend. If I'm looking at my group, there may be a few clients where I'm like, okay, I can measure the value of what I'm giving to them or the services I provide fit better. So I will move those and do that sort of. You could call it a pilot, you could call it a step in that direction. And once that's done, then you could pick up others and continue moving that, whether it's a service or client or things. Have you recommended that type of an approach?

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Anything that really works. And because as I said, value, the thing people struggle with, I think more than anything is this conceptual idea. What is value? How do we put a value on value? Um, how do we attach a price to value? And of course, the difficulty is that it's very difficult. Um, every customer perceives things differently, and it's easier with some services. So you mentioned cfo. Um, if you're doing any form of advisory work, that becomes a bit easier because we could at least perhaps put some sort of number on the advice we're going to give. It may be that we're going to help a client to. We think we can help them to increase their profits, increase their cash flow. There's something measurable. If we think about tax advisory, there may be a quantum of tax savings, but it gets harder. I think when we're talking about the core work for many, which is compliance work, how do you put a value on what somebody would pay for a tax return or completing their books and records, that's where it gets harder. Uh, and that's where we then have to realise it's not us, the accountant, that we can't determine the value. It's down to the customer what they value in terms of us, uh, taking away the hassle of doing the compliance work, of doing the tax turn. And that's the struggle.

Speaker B: Yep, I agree with you and I can tell you one of the simple ways that we explain the value to our prospects and this is the easiest to understand. But I'll tell you when we work with clients, another way that we talk value, but when we talk to them, you're getting to clients who are $5 million in revenue maybe, and you're saying you need the forecast and the advice. What would you think the cost would be if you're going to hire a cfo and of course they're going to hire some kind of a staff, even if it's one person, it's pretty easy to say that's going to cost you maybe three, $400,000 a year to have these two people, all benefits, everything else. Now that compared to our service is a dramatic difference. And so that's one that people can comprehend quickly. But I also recently took a client through a long range plan and said, here's your existing profitability and growth. Now if you were to go toward benchmark and here's the value of your company based on that. If you went more toward benchmarks and faster growth, the value of the company about doubled in size and it was millions of dollars more value. And this is a client who wants to exit. So not necessarily all the value we have, but we can say us walking along that path with you gets you a couple million dollars more at exit if you can try to hit these benchmarks. And we're not committing doing that, but we certainly have a way of showing them how that could be done. I'm curious your thoughts if that's good or I'm happy to open to criticism.

Speaker A: No, that's really smart because as you're saying that I'm thinking there's a few things that there that are really interesting and clever. So the second point you're talking about is one of the things we have to do with Value is we have to, wherever possible, put a number on it. Because firstly, we're numbers people. So put a number on it because it then becomes more real. If you said to somebody, hey, I can do some, uh, tax planning, I'm going to save you some tax, they have no idea what that means and what the value is. If I said, I'm going to save you, I think $50,000, suddenly that becomes more real, it becomes more tangible, it becomes more measurable. Even if it's just an estimate, it creates something in their mind as to what that value might be. So your, uh, second point makes a lot of sense. And the first point you made about what would it cost to hire a cfo, um, this is really going back to price psychology. And the most powerful principle in price psychology is anchoring. And what that means is that we are all clueless when it comes to price. Nobody knows the price of anything. Price is an arbitrary number. And so as a customer, when we are faced, uh, with a price in a nanosecond, and subconsciously our brains go and compare that to something else and come back with a feeling. Prices are feeling. And so we come back and think, oh, that's expensive, or that's a great deal. And so as an accounting firm owner, the job is to make it so that feeling comes back as, that's a great price. And so therefore we use anchors. And so your idea of a CFO would cost this price. Now their brains got that number to latch onto. That's the anchor. So when your price is lower than the cost of hiring a full time cfo, they now think, oh, okay, that's fairly reasonable. That's a good price. Without the anchor, they'll say, that's expensive.

Speaker B: Yes, I agree completely. And some of the people who come to us have an internal bookkeeper who's not doing any advice or forecasting or things like that. And often they will keep that person and at our service. So if that were their anchor, then we're very expensive. Right? Um, now I'm adding, and I was going to pay zero for that. Before we move on to AI, if people wanted to work with you and on your site, you've got a value pricing tool, you've got different subscriptions, you've got different levels people can do. Can you tell people a little bit about how they could work with you if they said, okay, I'm finally convinced. This conversation has gotten me saying, I want to move. How could this guy help me do this? What would you tell them to do?

Speaker A: Okay, well, uh, I always recommend to people, start off and grab all my free stuff. I've created lots of free stuff over the years. If people want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I always send out a list of links of resource I've created. For example, I have an ebook on how to price bookkeeping, how to price cleanup work. And we also have a free value pricing Academy community on a platform called Skool, spelled S K, double O L that, uh, we launched last year, uh, which is really a replacement for Facebook because many people don't like Facebook. So we have this very active community where people can join for free, ask questions, and other people in the community will answer those questions and my team will help as well. And that's just a great starting point. Uh, that's why I recommend start with the free stuff.

Speaker B: Okay. Okay, that sounds fantastic. Okay, let's move to the AI Academy. So a little more recent. This is where you're spending more of your time now than the value pricing. Tell us about the AI Academy and then I've got some questions for you.

Speaker A: Yeah, okay. Well, I guess just to go backwards a little bit in time. Ah. One of the things that I've always been, I guess, obsessed with is the idea of how to get more, how to get more stuff done, um, faster. And I remember back in late 1998, I came across someone called Michael Gerber who wrote the E Myth Revisited. And he talks about systems and the importance of getting the systems out of your head and documented so that you can then start to delegate properly, hire a team and grow your business. And so I've always liked the idea of how can we get more done? How can we automate things and systemize things? So when ChatGPT came out, which was originally in November of 2022, I felt I was late to the party. It was February 23rd when I came across it. When I did, I thought, wow, that's going to change everything. And so I got obsessed with figuring out, well, how can we use this to become more productive, to get more stuff done? And I then spent the next few months trying to learn as much as possible about prompt engineering. How do we communicate with AI to get better results? And I was finding some extraordinary results. And then I started teaching accountants. I, uh, got asked to speak on webinars and conferences about it. And I found that there was such amount, a huge amount of interest that I then founded in March of 2025 last year, the AI Academy. And it's a community now of nearly 600 accountants I work with, helping them to use AI to get better results, uh, be more productive and be at the leading edge of the profession. Okay.

Speaker B: Oh, that's fantastic. 600 different accountants is an impressive community. So how do those people interact? Is it all an online community or how else might people interact with each other in that group?

Speaker A: Again, I use a platform called School, so it's on there. And there's a number of things that that platform enables, one of which is it creates a vibrant community where people can ask questions and learn and share their stories. And so I'm on there every day answering people's questions and sharing stuff, posting new things, because it's changing so fast. Something new every day. Uh, and then I also do lots of training, so there's a classroom page where they can see all my courses on how to use AI. And, uh, then I've created various, uh, apps, uh, and tools for people to use.

Speaker B: Okay, so a lot of free resources for the people who are the members. Right. If you wanted to take that one's paid for.

Speaker A: So I have the AI, uh, Academy as a paid for one. I have a free version called the AI community with 3,000 people in it. And I put lots of stuff in there. So again, I would recommend go to the free one first called the AI community, uh, and be part of the 3000. And then if you want to learn even more, the next step would be joining the AI Academy, all on the school platform, which many people love.

Speaker B: Sure. What advice? I was recently at a conference and one of the niches we work in is digital agency. So this was for them. This wasn't just accountants. In this group, AI was a big part of the topic, as you would expect for any conference. But the overwhelming comment I kept hearing from people was two things. I'm overwhelmed by the number of possible tools. I've got three, four, five different tools that everyone's saying, go use this for that. And I can't keep track of it. And then also, it's getting expensive, the subscriptions for each tool. I'm watching my software budget go up and I'm wondering, is there an actual return for that? Like, is this an investment in the short term or should I be getting a return? I'm curious. Accountants must be feeling the same thing. What advice would you have people buy with those reactions?

Speaker A: Okay, some great points there. There's a few things we could unpick. So in terms of, uh, feeling overwhelmed by the tools, my advice is always pick one and learn how to use it. So Whether you prefer ChatGPT, whether it's Claude, whether it's Gemini, they can all do extraordinary things. And then what happens when you get sidetracked by other tools? There's lots of tools that do very specific things that we think, oh, we need that. But actually, when you figure out how to use all the more advanced features in the core tool, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude, for example, you can do a lot of things in that. Normally you would pay for other people, other things in your tech stack. So my advice is pick one tool and learn it. Learn all the features, learn about how to use projects, how to use, um, the agentic stuff. That's been a big thing of the last couple of months that changes, changes, uh, so much as to what we can do. Uh, just stick with one and then once you're getting great results, that's when you can start branching out and perhaps using different tools. So, for example, I will be using simultaneously ChatGPT and Claude because they're both great, uh, sometimes one slightly better than the other. But, um, I'm multitasking, I've got different screens set up and I'm just working on, uh, multiple projects all at the same time. But that's because I've been using it now every day for several years. To start with, pick the one, pick the one. And I usually recommend start with ChatGPT. I know there's been a lot of things this year about Claude, but ChatGPT is the easiest one to start with in my opinion. And then in terms of the roi, the return on investment, uh, initially, yes, there is an investment of time perhaps, um, but it should pay back fairly quickly, mainly in the freeing up of time, getting stuff done. And I think what a lot of us forget is that, what's the worth of your time? And, uh, for example, I created a, uh, guide today to go with a live webinar I'm going to be running. And the guide I would have spent two to three hours writing. And today it was done about 10 minutes. And so I think about the value of my time and what I can then do with those extra couple of hours I've saved. And, um, it's huge. It's a huge return investment.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great example. And if you think of, I don't know what the monthly cost is, but I'm paying 1, 2, 3, $400 a month maybe for some of these tools. Just that one example you have might have paid for the month's worth, right? I've saved two hours of time or maybe a couple of Those, yeah, we'll

Speaker A: take it to another level. Uh, the big thing of this year has been this is the year of agentic AI and so now we can be using. I've just done my financial year end, it's my year end at end of April and I've used AI to go into QBO and it's been firstly it's been going through and looking for any missed posted transactions by my bookkeeper over the year, uh, any potential issues and then it's gone in and corrected all of those. And so the way this is going to be going is uh, we can now start using AI to do stuff that we might have employed people before. And so you've only got to save, you know, one person. If you pay $30, sorry, 30,000 a year in salary costs for somebody, well very soon you'll be able to have an AI system do all that. You can do it now if you've got skills. So it's going to have huge savings in terms of the amounts of things that we can do automatically through agentic AI uh, without having to hire as many people.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're right. And would you agree that for many people you've got that savings? But the other thing is people probably just wouldn't have even done that. Right. I look at my year end and my books are okay, but I'm not sure the coding is all correct. I don't have time to fix it so I'm just going to live with it. With AI you're like, no, I can actually get this fixed. And now when I look at things I feel like it's accurate. I think that there are a number of things that we wish we had time to do that we just wouldn't have done. That maybe AI gives us a chance to do them.

Speaker A: Oh, you're so right there. Uh, yes. I mean this year my end of year financial statements are more correct than ever before because it created a report of things that needed fixing and I just said go and fix it. If it was down to me a year ago I'd have thought, well that's not that important, I'll leave that till next year, I can fix that another time. And then you never get around to it.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. On the agentix side, I'd like your reaction to this. One of the speakers I really enjoyed and he talked about examples but he talked about starting too many AI projects and not finishing them. And his suggestion was plan for a 16 week project build to get something in production. And he gave sort of a Timeline of start with it and maybe after four or five weeks start sharing it with your coworkers so they can improve it and then get to an implementation. But his suggestion was if you do this in this kind of timeframe, you'll actually get things delivered that you can do versus AI. Lets you think of 100 things that you might start and then nothing gets finished. Would love your reaction to that. Because he gave an example, I'm like, that does sound cool. And if you get to the end of the year you've got. I'm bad on the math. Three, four, I guess three of these completely done and implemented, where maybe it would have been none. But I learned some really cool stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree on 100% on that. It goes back to my earlier comment about all these different AI tools. Pick one, pick one and start to learn it inside out and use it properly. I've just done a video on um, uh, Claude for my audience because Claude has got so many features and people are shifting to Claude but don't know where to start because you've got it. When you, when you first look at it, you think, well, you've got Claude, you've got Claude Cowork, you've got projects, you've got skills, you've, uh, got Claude Design. The list goes on and on and on. And you do not need to know all of those at once. Just pick. Just start with the basics and then over time try some new things, uh, add some more skills. When um, when Claude Cowork first came out in uh, start of this year, I felt a bit overwhelmed and I teach this all the time. I felt overwhelmed. And so I. The first thing I did, the very first thing I did as my agentic project was a really simple one. It happens to save me hours every week. But I just got it to connect to a folder on my desktop called, which I've called to sort of. And then whenever I get attachments in emails and things, I drag them into that folder and I've set it up so that what it does is every week it goes in there, it looks at the folders in the root of that folder, it renames things in the logical filing structure I've given it and then files it in a subfolder. And uh, that just saves me uh, so much time every week filing all my attachments to emails. And it's a really, really simple thing to do. And that's what I usually say with agentic stuff. Start with something simple like that and then you'll start to Think, oh, if it can do that, this is the next thing I can work on, the next automation. And bit by bit just start off with something simple and then add something new, add a new idea and a new automation and then before long you'll find you're doing things like uh, doing year end financial statements, which does take a bit more, uh, understanding. But start simple.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's great advice. I'm curious, how would you have. Well, I'll give you an example of something I did, but then I can see some of the risk of doing it this way. So at this conference we had a magnetic board that had columns and it was like financial statements, forecasts, let's say cash management. We had others. Well start with those three on the table. We had emojis. And so we're asking people, hey, when you look at financial statements, sort of, how does that make you feel? Smiley face, frowny face, terrible. And so people were placing them on there and it was a nice interactive thing to do at the conference within our AI tool. Then I uploaded one of the articles that we would write and publish and uploaded the picture and said, can you analyze this picture? There are emojis on here, here's what they mean. And just write the article. And it wrote a really impressive three page article that sounded like ours. Part of it was that feels like magic. I can't believe it could read the picture that well. But then at the same time I was thinking, okay, there's also a risk because I feel like that could have been a really lazy thing to do. It took about 10 minutes for me to do the whole thing and I want to make sure that we're writing good articles and it's not just a what can it do? So I'm curious, how would you suggest that? That was more of a trial. But if I want to say I want the best article, how might you suggest I would approach that to leverage AI, but also put in the work and make sure the thought's what I want it to be.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot of interesting thoughts there. And you've probably heard this phrase called AI slop because it's so easy to create written content now and get it out there. Um, and so my uh, advice would be, uh, that certainly, as you've said, it saves so much time, how can we not do it? But we want to make sure the quality is right. So some of the things to think about is we need to make sure that firstly we are training AI systems on our writing style. So I'm an author, I've written many books. Uh, and that's really important to me. It's got to sound like you. Uh, secondly, I'm a big believer in the content that comes out still has to be your content. And so as long as the source information is something that's from your knowledge. In my case, what I often do is when I write blog posts, which I don't, the AI writes my blog posts, but I do them from transcriptions of videos. I love videos, I do videos, get the transcription and then the AI writes it in my style. Uh, and therefore I know it's my content in my writing. So that's the first two things. Thirdly, we have to be aware of hallucinations. It does sometimes make mistakes, it does get things wrong. And so we should always be checking the output. Particularly if we're doing things like financial analysis and doing reports for clients based on analyzing the numbers. Then that becomes really critical that we, that we do read through what's coming out and don't just, don't just automate it so much. There's no human in the loop.

Speaker B: Yes, yeah, I agree with you and some of the things I thought of that it was saying here's in general, people feel good about financial statements, but any kind of forward looking metrics like forecasts, they don't feel good about and they don't feel good about their sales outlook. The way we could improve that is we have lots of advice around each of those things that I had not fed at that. So you could then say so what now that you know that, here would be our advice to make you feel better about that or take actions so that you're not just feeling bad. So you've taken it from here's where the data told you to advice that it wouldn't have had that. And I agree with you about the hallucinations. One of the things we use in a tool called Ovoma to record all of our meetings. When I do a financial statement review with a client, what I used to do is once the meeting was done, I would send them a PDF of their financial statement. What I'm doing now is I go into my Ovoma and say, hey, can you give me a six or seven bullet summary of what their month was? And I'll attach that. So I give them sort of a way to reinforce the message. It's really easy to do, but I have found I have to check that there will be things that it is putting in the wrong numbers that you are under your forecast by X dollars. And it's not what I said during the meeting. And so it's just one, that I need to spend a little bit more time double checking that I've got the right numbers in there and whether, how it's getting those numbers, I'm not sure, but huge time savings. But I completely take your point. If I just cut and paste it, I'm going to get myself in trouble with assuming that it's right, but I can give a better result.

Speaker A: So another thought that's going through my head as you were saying, that is one of my uh, uh, concerns is that the more we get into this AI world, the more that human beings will crave human connection. And so one of the ways that the smart accounting firms can differentiate themselves is to make sure that they, they build on that, that they keep, they keep the connections. That, that's really, really important. We can't just delegate everything to an AI system because clients will want those conversations. And so what you're doing is great. But what I would consider doing is when you summarize in the meeting, why not do it as a short little loom video, for example? Use loom. You could do, you could just record a few minutes and then you can. That then gives you a transcript and an AI summary anyway. So you then give them the AI summary and um, but they also get to see you. And the reason I think that's important is because uh, I think that there is the more that written stuff is AI generated, I think people start to dismiss the value of it and perhaps don't read it. Whereas if they were to get a short little message from you, even if it's just two or three minutes on a loom video, they're more likely to watch that and think, oh, my accountant cares for me, he's on a video for me.

Speaker B: Mm, interesting. Yes. And in this case, just to clarify, it's actually after a meeting, a face to face meeting with the client. Um, so, but one thing people have suggested is in the meetings, could we spend more time talking about the strategy and what the client should do than the results? And some of you guys have been, could you send that kind of loom video before the meeting to say, hey Mark, I want you to think about the month. Here's a five minute overview about what happened. And now we're in their meeting. I'm saying how are we going to change this? That this is the third month where something bad happened and let's spend our time doing that rather than me trying to explain all the variances and the detail behind the variances and the things that take up that time. And we would like our clients thinking we have a chance to sit back and think about them, come up with strategies to come up with ideas to improve their business, not just explain the business. And if AI could help you, where I know the numbers are right and I get that summary more quickly, then I do have more time to sit and think about the client that's in there.

Speaker A: Yeah. And as you know, one of the things that AI is particularly good at is strategic thinking and advisory and interpreting the numbers. Uh, but a huge mistake would uh, be to use the AI to create a report and just send it to the client because you're devaluing it. The real value of advisory work is the conversations. Whether it's face to face, whether it's a loom video for example, um, use the AI to do the research in the background and then deliver it face to face via video. That's where the value then sits.

Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. I have found it really good at saying what questions should I be asking my clients around this? It uh, maybe gives me 10 questions and one or two are good, but their questions phrase in a way I might not have or I wouldn't have even thought about that question. So it's great to look through and say yes, that you've reminded me of something that's in there. What about AI tools specific to accounting? We happen to be using a tool called basis right now that works well with QBO and it can do some really good things from an accounting perspective. What is your thought about some of those versus the more just public ones that can also be good at the accounting?

Speaker A: It's difficult for me to speak on that. And the reason for that is because I don't. Because there are so many AI tools coming out all the time, it is overwhelming. And because my audience is worldwide, predominantly the us, Canada, uk, uh, there are lots of specific tools for for example AI tax tools, but they're specific to various countries. And so whilst I'm aware of them all, I never look at them in detail because they are for a particular audience. So I do tend to focus more on what's the stuff that's country agnostic, what uh, are the tools that we should be using. And I do feel that um, whilst there are some good tools out there, um, once we start to understand how we can use these, uh, chatgpt with its, uh, with Codex for example or Claude Cowork, um, we can start doing some extraordinary things just within Those platforms.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're right about that. Okay, let me. Well, tell me if there's anything. I'm going to shift away to a little bit different topic. So, AI Academy, if someone wanted to work with you, you had mentioned the community that you have. Any other things is going to be similar. Start with what's free, then you can come to the community. Or what would you tell people?

Speaker A: Yeah, let me give you two free things. So there's the AI community, which is my free community. And then I also just a few weeks ago, wrote a, uh, ebook called My Top five AI Tools. Uh, I did a webinar on it a little while back. It was really popular, so I thought I'd summarize it in an ebook as to what would be the five tools I would pick to increase my productivity. So I'm happy to share the link to that. Great.

Speaker B: Yeah, we can put that into the show notes. Okay. So I'm curious for you and your career a couple different ways. Well, maybe not as much career, but away from these two topics, where do you think firm leaders should be spending more of their time than what they're spending it on right now? Just in general, what are you seeing?

Speaker A: Yeah. So when you say firm leaders, I know that you, uh, I think we both work. Tend to work with smaller, uh, accounting firms.

Speaker B: I'm thinking that a little bit smaller firms. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yes. You are referring to firm leaders as in a small accounting firm.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, I think that every, um, small firm leader should be thinking about three things. There are three things that I think are critical. Number one is, of course, AI because it's just moving so fast. It's changing so fast. What we can do this year, uh, was just unimaginable. Just a year ago. Uh, a year ago I didn't think that I'd be getting AI to do stuff inside my QBO file. Some of it's extraordinary. So we have to keep abreast of AI so that we know a, uh, what can we do with it to improve productivity, for example, but also so we're aware of the dangers because there are pitfalls and dangers. And we do have to be aware of privacy, security, client confidentiality. That's a big topic as well, so that you've got to be abreast of AI. Uh, secondly is, I do believe that Value pressing Academy, sorry, value pricing. That wasn't supposed to be a plug. Value pricing is more important than ever before. Uh, and the reason I say that is because as AI enables us to do stuff in less Time. If we are pricing based on the hour with the timesheet, we're eventually going to give everything away for free. And I can give examples of where we have done that historically. Uh, where we've. Things that I used to charge for or, sorry, the firm I worked for many years ago used to charge for. Most firms in the UK give away for free now because technology allows you to do ah, at the touch of a button. So what we have to do is value pricing becomes so important, uh, because AI can just do things so much faster.

Speaker B: Okay, great example.

Speaker A: And then thirdly is that uh, because AI is going to, it's going to suddenly automate a lot of things. Um, I've been saying for a couple of years now that it won't be long before compliance work will be fully automated. And so if we want to stay relevant, we have to move up the value curve. I know Ron Baker talks about that a lot. We have to create more value for clients. And uh, that may be moving more into CFO services, moving into biz advisory, perhaps tax advisory. And uh, there are many other things that can do. Even I was, I, I had a conference in Portugal just a few weeks back and um, we were talking about how we can move up the value curve. And some of the things we could perhaps do is help our clients with AI, um, because many small businesses aren't using it to its full potential to automate processes and simplify. So there's many things that we can do to create more value. And of course, when we combine those three things, when we combine those three things, um, AI makes advisory much easier than ever before. So we can do extraordinary things for our clients. Um, if it's. I mentioned we could, um, strategic planning, uh, chatgpt. Claude is brilliant at strategy. We can come up with complete strategic plans, growth plans and so on really easily. We can even, uh, we can even start creating uh, apps for our clients. We can build dashboards and things through vive coding. There's so many things that we could do to create more value using AI. And if we combine that with understanding value pricing, then what we're doing is we're creating more value for our clients, but using AI to do it in less time. And so our margin should go up, we should be making more money, um, putting more money in our pocket. And that's the combination of those three things, AI, value pricing and um, creating more value for our clients.

Speaker B: That is an excellent answer. I wonder if you agree. I talked to somebody named Rob Har recently and Rob is in Agency Space has a company called Sparkbox. But his big pitch is he thinks owners are leaving behind their firms as they're jumping into. He mentioned AI, but other things. They see the future. They're running really fast for their future, and they're not bringing their team along that would allow the firm to change. Do you feel like you're seeing that as well?

Speaker A: It's really interesting. I'm not seeing it yet, but okay, I think it will happen. I think we're going to find that, um, we can get so much more stuff done. Automated Again, going back to a conference I had here just in Portugal just a few weeks back, um, which I run every year with the accounting firm owners. One of the biggest challenge, and it comes up every year, it's one of the biggest conversations is to do with people. I can't find the right people. I can't motivate them. My, uh, somebody said the other day to me, um, I've got these bookkeepers and they never follow the systems. They never check things off. Well, that's interesting. I know who will follow the systems. And that's an AI system. If you give an AI system checklist to finish at the end of every single job, it will do it and it'll do it overnight. So you'll wake up in the morning and it's all done. So people issues are always the biggest issue. That's not to say we shouldn't hire people, but look, I've gone through that, had lots of people problems over the years. It's the part I've always hated the most about being in business, is managing people. I think accountants aren't so good at it. Uh, and so I can understand why there will then be this trend towards saying, okay, I don't like managing people, but I can get an agentic system to do the work overnight, and I wake up and it's done.

Speaker B: Interesting. Yes. Yeah. To think of it even as an employee, which I've heard a lot of people using that as sort of an analogy. Okay, let me shift to a completely different question. Um, so is there a pivotal moment that changed the trajectory of your career? I know you talked about meeting Ron Baker, and maybe that's the one you'll do, but I'm curious if there might be another one. You're like, this particular thing really changed the direction of my career.

Speaker A: Yeah, good question. I always go back to 1998, 1999. I'm at three five point people that changed my life. The first one was at the end of 1998. Was a guy called Steve Pipe in the UK. Uh, now a very good friend of mine. I went on his three day accountants masterclass and that blew my mind. I realized that there was so much more I could do as an accounting firm owner. Uh, he talked a lot about how we can do business advisory. I came from a tax background, if you remember. But, uh, he talked about the idea of helping clients increase their profits. And then the following year, uh, I was so inspired by that message that I then went to see Paul Dunn of the Accountants Boot Camp and spent four days on Paul Dunn's Accountants Boot Camp. Again, another good friend of mine, one of my mentors heroes. And it was Paul Dunn that recommended me to Ron Baker. So those three things happened in a short space of time and I always think that was the 12 month period that really changed my career. Uh, if I think about the last 25 years, there's nothing quite so pivotal. Writing my first book in 2011 was perhaps a big moment and then I guess diving into AI. I, uh, will probably look back at some point and I've often said to people in the last few years that November 2022 was the year the world changed. That was when ChatGPT came out to the public, um, opened up a Pandora's box. Um, the world is going to change extremely fast. And that was kind of the pivotal moment. So for me, from a personal point of view, I think of February 23rd when I discovered it and thought, wow, that's going to change so many things.

Speaker B: Yeah. I had asked earlier if you usually just jumped into things in that 98 to 99 time period. I think reinforces that. Yes, you do. There was something you were searching for during that time period. Time. And looked at three things and I can see you made a huge change after that during that time.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Mark, is there anything you were hoping to talk about or any key message you'd want to leave people with before we close out for today?

Speaker A: We've covered a lot of stuff. Um, we have, uh, yeah, I mean there's always stuff we could talk more about. As we've said, I've been teaching value pricing for 25 years. We could talk forever on that subject. AI biz advisory. There's so much we could talk about, but I think we've covered a lot. Um, and if anyone wants to reach out to me, please do. Uh, but yeah, nothing particular comes to mind.

Speaker B: Okay. Okay. Is I think of, I mean for me personally, I think this is what you've been doing. Dedicating more time to Say I just need to learn these tools and I need to spend an hour a day or so doing that and just diving in and doing those things because it's so easy. Especially if you're a firm owner. There's plenty of work to keep your day really busy. But if you don't take the time to do it, I think people will fall behind more quickly now than what they would have five years ago. Things are moving too fast and I don't think you can, you can't take the risk of not doing anything and thinking, I'll do this in a few years.

Speaker A: No, I'm lucky because, uh, I think I'm a lifelong learner. I'm a learning junkie. So I don't watch normal TV like Netflix. I would rather sit down with YouTube and watch what's the latest happening in world with AI. So I, I just naturally love that stuff anyway and then love teaching, uh, it. But I know for many other people they're busy, they got busy lives, they got children. So my advice is always this. My advice is that uh, you've got to keep learning, uh, you've got to keep developing your firm, you've got to keep adding more value to clients, learning value, pricing, learning AI. Devote just one or two hours a week to uh, working on your firm, learning something, applying something new, and you'll find that as long as you do it consistently, I always say, uh, a little bit frequently is going to start to change things. If you decide to spend next week, spend a whole week doing something because you're excited. By the following week, you've got so much work to catch up with the clients, you'll have forgotten it all anyway. So little and often is my advice. Devote one or two hours to learning something new, implementing something new, and bit by bit things will, will change in your firm.

Speaker B: That's fantastic advice. That's a great place for us to close. Mark, thank you very much. This is really enjoyable and I do hope people will reach out to you because there's a lot of knowledge that people can get from you.

Speaker A: Well, thank you Tom. I've really enjoyed it. It's been a great conversation.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Enjoy this podcast. Visit our website summitcpa.net to get more tips and strategy for achieving modern CPA firm success. We're here to be a resource in this ever changing industry.