As a strategy for Compliance clients, which makes more sense to you?

1. To charge clients (and prospects), £300 to £600 to attend a valuable programme of Financial Education, or
2. To offer Financial Education as part of your service, and increase fees across the board

We will come back to that question in a moment because to answer it you need more information…

If you have not heard of FiMBO, it stands for Financial Management for Business Owners. It seems we’ve struck gold. Business Owners love it, and it’s a perfect way for everyone in your firm to’ up their game’ when it comes to helping business owners understand and use financial information to improve their results.

In practical terms, the FiMBO training programme consists of 12 one-hour workshops that help business owners understand Business Growth Drivers and how small, incremental improvements have a dramatic compounding impact on financial results.

The FiMBO workshops can be delivered face to face but are typically delivered online to an audience of business owners, and their managers. The content is highly educational, and feedback demonstrates business owners value the knowledge highly, but it gets better for two very important, potentially critical reasons:

1. Train the Trainer: Delivering FiMBO is an incredibly easy way for you and your team to master a whole vocabulary of invaluable business growth advice, tips and hints that are invaluable, at the same time as being quick and easy to implement.
2. It is much easier to sell to an educated buyer: Educating business owners to understand financial information and how to use it to improve their sales, profit and equity value makes them desire it, so this is perhaps the ultimate form of ethical, professional, value based selling by not selling, ‘educating’.

Let’s return to the opening question, should you charge for it as a one off optional service, or to include it as a standard service you offer all clients, for owners and managers, and increase fees across the board: Which is the best option?

Plan A: Optional one-off charge – chances are most of your clients will not see the value in it, or not perceive sufficient value to want to pay for it, so you will only monetise a small percentage of your client base, and you only get paid once.

vs

Plan B: Make FiMBO a part of the service and increase fees shortly after. Done carefully Plan B will be far more lucrative because 100% of clients will pay for it and not once, but every year. On a purely financial calculation this has to be the better option.

You might be thinking: “But some of my clients would not be prepared to pay more”. A fair point, but you will be pleasantly surprised how few would actually leave, this is part of the invaluable business information shared with clients as part of FiMBO module 5: Strategies to Increase Gross Margins when we discuss the impact of increasing prices and the Pricing Table for a Price Increase, (courtesy of Paul Miller of Cornish Accounting, thank you Paul).

Several of the VFD Pro firms increased fees across the board by 25% recently, when asked how many clients they lost as a result, of the three firms asked the response was:

1. We lost 5 clients
2. We lost 1 client
3. We lost no clients

We also asked if there was anything they regretted about their decision, all had the same response: They wished they had been bolder and all wished they had done it sooner.

If some clients do leave this frees up time to onboard new, higher value clients and as you should be telling your clients, the increased profit generated by the fee increase will be far greater than the profit lost from a handful of ‘cost conscious’ clients who are looking for the cheapest compliance option, rather than the best value for money.

Use the new VFD Pro Client Discussion Model to auto populate your Agendas to make Year End meetings highly engaging supported by ‘future focussed’ financial information, add your offer of practical, invaluable Financial Management training for Business Owners (FiMBO), whilst you decide when and by how much you will increase fees.

What would a 35% increase in fee income do for your bottom line and more important, what difference would it make to the value of your practice, food for thought, or better, a good reason to act right now.

Click on the ‘Live Chat’ on the right to find out more, or ‘Contact Us’ to book a time to discuss.