Yes, no or maybe?

There’s a tendency for business owners and entrepreneurs not to want to pass up the opportunity of a potential sale.

The famous saying attributed to Richard Branson goes something like, ‘If some one offers you an opportunity, say yes and think about how you’ll do it afterwards’. 

There is good sense in this. You want to show confidence and enthusiasm to a prospective customer so making them aware of your immediate concerns is not the smartest sales tactic. 

For lifestyle businesses too where the owner is the person delivering the service, saying yes and being positive at the outset is a good tactic. If it turns out on further investigation that it is not such a great idea you can always offer help in some other way. Perhaps refer the prospect on to someone in your network who would do a great job. That way you make two people happy and spread a little bit of goodwill.

Pricing specialist and business thought leader Ron Baker argues that ‘knowledge businesses’ - those that deliver value by means of their intellectual capital and ‘know-how’, should consider charging less if they gain new knowledge from a particular assignment. They may not make as much profit as on a more routine job but they have added to the bank of the firm’s knowledge which should be beneficial in the longer run.

In these challenging times, where sales and cashflow are at a premium, the inclination to say yes is greater than ever.

There are circumstances however where I believe that turning down a potential sale is the best thing to do. By all means try to refer the prospect on to someone else if you can, but sometimes it is better not to to proceed.

An example would be where the business has a clear niche where they do specialised and highly profitable work. Stepping out of that niche to exploit an opportunity will shift focus and resources from what the business already does very successfully. So it may not be the best approach.

Another instance where caution is recommended is where the new opportunity would require significant input from the owner. If this would shift their focus from managing their core business, the benefit from the potential new sale might not outweigh the costs.

Passion and enjoyment are also important. You may make money on a new assignment but if it doesn’t make you happy or inspire you, you may want to think twice.

So in many cases I would agree with the great man and saying, ‘Yes’ and going for it is the best approach. 

Every now and then though, after reflection, a better way forward might be, ‘Thank you for the opportunity but we are not able to help you this time’.

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Being unique beats being efficient in small business

There’s a good rule in business, especially small business, not to make your product or service a commodity.

Adam Davidson makes this one of his 7 rules for thriving in business in the 21st Century in his book, 'The Passion Economy'.

Another way of expressing this is to ensure that you differentiate yourself from your competitors by more than just having the lowest price.

In a market where there is aggressive price competition lies a never-ending spiral of efficiency gains, cost cutting and wafer-thin margins.

There will always be a competitor who has lowers costs, uses technology better or gets better economies of scale. It’s a dog-eat-dog world and only the biggest, hungriest dogs survive.

So that’s great in theory but if you provide bookkeeping services or sell pizza or make widgets of some description, how can you stop them being commodities?

Bookkeeping is bookkeeping, right?

Well, not necessarily. 

At its most basic level, bookkeeping is just posting invoices, matching bank payments and receipts, maintaining sales and purchase ledgers and reconciling bank accounts. 

There are lots of possible variations in how this service is delivered - at client’s premises or remotely, using the latest technology or ‘old school’ manual ledgers, processing monthly or quarterly or daily, ‘real-time’ processing, with add on management information (what do the figures mean?) or without, digital dashboard or paper reports.

It is these variations which move the service on from being a commodity to a unique service which is valued by your unique group of customers.

If you can find your point of difference and find customers who place a higher value on this, you can move out of the commodity world to a place where there is less of a need to compete solely on price. 

The extra bits you do which are unique to you are harder for your competitors to copy so you can focus on client care and improving your offering, rather than the relentless pursuit of efficiency.

So in big commodity businesses, the focus may be on low prices, cost savings and productivity gains. 

For small businesses, I’d argue that what’s more important is making your product or service unique and for your customers to recognise the extra value which you provide in the price they are willing to pay.

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Knowledge is power

I like the TV programme where antique experts go on a road trip in a vintage car. They start off with a wad of cash and along the way they stop at antique shops and hunt out bargains. Their booty is sold at various auctions and the winner is the one with the biggest profit made on the trip. All proceeds to charity of course.

I really enjoy this, partly for adding to my limited knowledge of antiques, partly for the banter and mainly for the haggling. Yes, the haggling.

That, for me, is the essence of the show. Can the expert find a treasure and negotiate a price with the shop owner which leaves them with a healthy profit and the shop owner satisfied?

After watching a ridiculous number of episodes (I’m on repeats of repeats of repeats now) I’ve reached the conclusion that there are two main types of antique expert. 

There are the ones who have an uncanny knack for sniffing out the genuine treasures and noting with glee that they are under-priced. The shop owner has not realised they have a hidden gem in their cabinet and left it jumbled together with sundry bric a brac.

Then there are the less observant, or perhaps less able experts. They mooch around the shop for a good while and eventually settle on something shiny which catches their eye. Inevitably these items are fairly-priced, which makes turning a profit a little more challenging.

Then the negotiation starts.

Our savvy expert knows he has a bargain on his hands. He shares his thoughts with the camera and goes off to find the shop owner. Negotiation is simple and quick. ‘Is this the owner’s best price?’ or, ‘Can they knock a couple of quid off’ The deal is done and both the expert and the owner are happy. Both have achieved good value. The owner has achieved their target price (or thereabouts). The expert has achieved outstanding value - a result of their knowledge, acquired from years of obsession, research and experience.

Our less savvy expert takes his shiny object to discuss with the owner. He looks for flaws, “There’s a bit of a crack here’, ‘Did you pick this up for a song in a house clearance’ or, ‘Is this one you’ve had for a while’. He makes a ridiculously low offer. The owner is clearly not happy and is reluctant to drop. They eventually reach a grudging compromise. The owner’s body language shows disappointment. They accepted a lower price than they wanted to and have barely covered their costs. The expert has the chance of a small margin if all goes well at the auction. If not, they'll make a loss. It’s a functional and unsatisfactory deal with neither party terribly happy with the outcome.

My take-out from this is that the expert with the knowledge is the big winner in the profit stakes. Haggling skills alone are unlikely to result in a great outcome.

I think this has relevance beyond the world of antiques. 

Knowledge has value, particularly in professional service businesses.

If businesses can find ways of applying their knowledge to address customers’ needs and wants, at the right price, there lies the potential for healthy profits and satisfied customers.

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Pricing for profit

It’s nothing new that different industries and sectors can learn from each other.

In my previous life as a management accountant with a major UK food retailer we learned from ‘Just in time’ supply chains in the car manufacturing sector. Modern computing and more famously non-stick pans were by-products of the space race. So how about accountants learning from builders?

Something which builders tend to do better than accountants is pricing their jobs. They put a significant amount of effort into it. They really think hard about what is involved. What time will be spent by people with different skills and knowledge, what materials and resources will need to be deployed, what stage payments are appropriate, what the possible risks are, what the timeline will be and so on. And the price. Yes they think very hard about the price.

The detailed scope of work and price are presented in a professional proposal and guidelines are included for ‘Variations’. These being the steps to be followed if something unexpected crops up, outside of the anticipated scope.

All very sensible stuff and managed well, it works.

The customer gets what they want at the price they were willing to pay. The builder gets a fixed price with stage payments at agreed milestones to assist with cashflow.

In my experience, accountants aren’t terribly good at this. 

The worst of us still charge based on time. Imagine a builder turning up to quote for your extension and saying, ‘We’ll log our time and materials, see how we get on and we’ll give you a bill when we’re done.’ I suspect this builder would not get much work.

Almost as bad is agreeing the scope of work and price and carrying on regardless, despite the nature of the work changing significantly when the project is underway. The inevitable result of this is an unhappy accountant and ultimately an unhappy customer. Instead of a win/win it quickly becomes lose/lose.

Variations or ‘Change orders’ as pricing guru Ron Baker calls them are the answer. If a builder starts work on your extension and finds special engineering expertise is required to hold up a supporting wall, he doesn’t just grit his teeth and ‘crack on’. He discusses what the additional work involves with the customer and they agree a price before he continues. All very sensible, fair and mutually beneficial. 

Sometimes these conversations about variations can be difficult. The customer expects a fixed price and in their mind, a fixed price is a fixed price. In these cases the customer should be referred back to the scope of work and the assumptions made about the work involved. Polite, informed discussion about the scope and the nature of the variation can help to get things back on track.

In the best business relationships, both parties win. The customer gets a great product or service and the supplier makes a fair return. 

That takes careful management, not just of the project delivery but dealing with variations too.

We can learn a lot from the builders.

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The billable hour is dead!

Or it should, be according to business guru Ron Baker and others. 

But it lives on. Buoyed up by years of habit and entrenched thinking.

Ron is a writer and radio host and one of the founders of Verasage, a US think tank committed to researching and promoting best practice in professional firms. I first came across Ron when I went to my Institute’s conference for accountants working in practice just before starting my own practice 16 years ago. The other speakers at the event were pretty forgettable and Ron stood out as the one with the most radical and authoritative message. His delivery was good too. Confident in his subject and put across with a dry humour, laced with anecdotes. His brilliant book, ‘The Firm of the future’, co-written with Paul Dunn, is 16 years old now but still feels fresh and innovative and full of great ideas.

So in my own accountancy practice I have tried to avoid timesheets from day 1 and reject invoicing customers on an hourly basis. I say ‘tried’ as I haven’t always been imaginative enough to avoid returning to the dreaded billable hour. 

Ron and his acolytes advise pricing based on value. Start with the price and the hours expended and other internal costs really shouldn’t matter to the customer.  Although sometimes it does. Occasionally when I quote a price a customer will want to know how long the project is going to take or afterwards (very rarely) they may ask to see a time log. Maybe for some people their perception of value is still based on how long it took to deliver it? As customers we don’t ask that about cars or the latest iPhone but in some cases we do it seems about professional services.

Value Pricing’ as the term goes is, ‘The highest price a customer is willing to pay for a product or service’. 

Wow! What business wouldn’t want their customers to pay the highest price for their product or service? The important phrase here is ‘willing to pay’. In value pricing both the seller and the customer are happy as they have achieved what is valuable to them.

Lets be clear. This is not about over-charging. In accountancy firms some services like monthly payroll and a basic tax return might be 'commoditised' and the price standardised and set by the marketplace. For more complex advisory work or for a bundle of services where a customer's requirements and perception of value are unique, value pricing can be a win/win for the seller and the buyer.

Getting back to why I occasionally fail with this and revert to the billable hour. It tends to be on projects which are ‘open-ended’ and you don’t quite know what is going to be involved or how much effort and time will be expended. An example might be a tax enquiry going back several years. Under value pricing you would quote a fixed price to achieve certain results and offer appropriate guarantees. I usually ‘bottle it’ and quote an hourly rate and the prospect is invariably happy. Value pricers would argue that the prospective customer is looking for a solution and certainty and a fixed price would be more attractive than an open-ended bill based on time spent on the project. Next time this comes up I will try to be braver and see how I get on.

The accountancy sector is slowly changing and more firms seem to be moving away from timesheets and billing based on these. There are even software products which help firms set prices based on their own set of rules. I have tried these and I couldn’t get on with them. Although I set the rules, the price the software churned out didn’t necessarily agree with my judgement of the where the value point was for my prospective customer or for me. It felt like I was passing the pricing decision over to a machine.

That’s not for me although I can see the benefits of standardisation and rules for pricing. 

But going back to the definition of value pricing, “The highest price a customer is willing to pay...’. How can software decide that unless it is very clever software indeed? 

Value pricing seems to be an art rather than a science.

A dance between the seller and the prospective customer. For the seller to establish the needs and wants of that prospective customer and then address them with a compelling proposition with service guarantees, a certain outcome and a price which reflects the value delivered.

I will be sticking with my judgement for pricing for the time being but who knows, with the progression of AI maybe the machines will take over before too long.

That really would be the death of a salesman or maybe, more accurately, the death of a value pricer

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Is the price right?

Getting the price right, or setting price at a level which provides good value to the customer and profit for the business is one of the most important business decisions. It is an area that some businesses give little thought to however and as a result they get by on poor margins and struggle to make ends meet.

Steve Ballmer, ex CEO of IBM puts it more starkly, 'This thing called ‘price’ is really, really important. I still think that a lot of people under-think it through. You have a lot of companies that start and the only difference between the ones that succeed and fail is that one figured out how to make money, because they were deep-in thinking through the revenue, price, and business model. I think that’s under-attended to generally'

So what is the right price?

Ron Baker, Value Pricing expert argues it should be based on value provided to the customer rather than 'accounting' methods like chargeable hours or 'cost plus'. In his book, 'The firm of the future' he gives an example of an accountant who helps a wealthy client sell their business. He is at the client's beck and call for many weeks, uses his knowledge and lifetime experience to deliver an exceptional deal and then he is very pleased with himself when he eventually presents the client with a quite a large bill for hours worked. The client is even more pleased  because in the context of the business sale the fees charged were minuscule. If the accountant had charged a fee based on value delivered, his client would have still been very happy and he would have been able to charge significantly more than the self-limiting hourly rate. The same principle  applies to tradespeople who often limit their pricing with day rates when the value delivered is often significantly higher.

Let's be clear. This is not about overcharging. This is about thinking carefully about the value provided, agreeing terms in advance and then delivering on your promises.

'My business is different' you might say. 'It's very competitive, the price is set by the market'. This can be true of commodity products or services. If you are trapped in this mindset it is not a nice place to be. The challenge I think is try to differentiate your product or service offering so that you provide some unique value and are not competing solely on price.

All accountants know that an increase in price feeds straight through to the bottom line. It is additional profit with no energy expended other than making the decision and presenting it to your customers. A decrease in costs also increases profit (to  a lesser degree) but often there are consequences - you need to give something up, improve productivity, work with another supplier etc. Pricing is the biggest lever for increasing profits.

So I don't have all the answers but I do know that getting the price right is critical for business success. As Steve Ballmer says business owners need to think it through and keep thinking it through. It can be the difference between success and just muddling through

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A lesson in value

It sounds rather grand but for the last few years I have hired someone to help with the gardening. It's never been my favourite thing, more a chore than a hobby, so getting some help to do the pruning and heavy lifting seems to make good sense.

The chap I have been working with is his own man and he works around his own schedule. I've tried to book him for specific times in advance but he prefers to keep it more flexible. So it turns out that when I need him he's not always available and when I don't need him (in the depths of winter) I get a text asking if we have any work.

That said, he knows his plants and generally his work is tidy and he's reasonably efficient. His hourly rate is quite high but all in all, he is reasonable value for money.

I was walking to town the other day and saw a young chap with a hedge trimmer attacking my neighbour's privet. I stopped for a chat and found out he charged half the hourly rate of my man. This seemed too good to miss so as the garden needed a tidy up I arranged for the young man to come along and have a look. We had a chat about what needed doing and arranged a time.

Big mistake! Turns out this chap is basically a 'man with a lopper' who appears to know nothing about plants. He has butchered the Rosemary at the side of our steps so it has gone from being a luxuriant shrub to a misshapen bunch of leafless twigs. He carved all the flowering heads off the Buddleia to leave a sorry looking clump of withered leaves and he left when the bin was full of debris so one half of the garden was untouched and half was left scarred by his indiscriminate attack.

As the saying goes, 'You get what you pay for'. My new guy was cheap, but an unmitigated disaster. He sent me a text asking if I would like him to come round and finish the other half. I have gently said that I have this covered

So I am back with my somewhat inflexible but knowledgeable and expensive original gardener. I rather sheepishly told him about my trial with the other chap and he took a little too much pleasure in letting me know what a mess he had made. I think I heard him whistling and chortling while he went about his work.

So a few lessons learned there but the main one being that 'cheap' isn't necessarily good value. I will take a little more care next time I think something is too good to miss.

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