Value First

Today, our guest is Geraldine Carter. Geraldine is a business strategist, coach for CPAs. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Geraldine for a few years now, at least. Oh, I’m guessing that’s three plus, maybe even four. I don’t know. Do you, do you know? 

Well, I think I knew you really well for a while, ’cause I listened to your podcast. 

Wow. Look at that. 

Then we really actually met. 

Well, that’s what I think. You are a podcast host as well. And I think you’re getting close to what? 300 episodes now. 

Yeah, almost.

Alright. So I went a little backwards from when we normally do this. So I normally don’t let the guests talk until I say, Geraldine, welcome to The Unique CPA, so I’m going to do that now. Geraldine, welcome to The Unique CPA. 

Thanks, Randy, for having me. It’s always good to talk to you. 

Oh, it’s fun. I had the pleasure, hopefully you did too, of being able to speak to you a few times at conferences last year. And it’s always fun. We won’t go into it, but we had one really interesting night, sitting on couches having a conversation. That was a very interesting night. 

That was a really interesting conversation. Sorry listeners, we can’t fill you in.

No, we’re teasing now. But we’re not going to get into that, but it was very, very interesting. Alright. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. I asked you to come on a few weeks ago because I saw this exciting news on LinkedIn that you had just released a book. Tell me if I got it right or not, but Down to 40 Hours, or what’s the entire title? 

Sure. It’s Down to 40 Hours: A Roadmap for CPAs to End Overworking without Giving up Revenue. 

It’s just, that alone, you hooked me. I mean, that, I think it’s a great title, because it’s something we’ve talked about in the past. We have a lot of, I think people that get to see the profession from, you know, the angles that we do are, are passionate about that and so I’m so excited that this book has come out and I’ve got that you were kind enough to send me a couple of different versions to look at. So I’ve been into it a little bit.

Before we even get into that, before we get in the book, the forward that you write of the, was it the forward in the book where you tell the story, the dedication, I honestly started reading that and I’m just tearing up, but this was, do you want to tell that story real quick?

Sure. So the dedication is to a woman who I saw when I was in a traffic circle in Delhi in 2004. And it’s one of those moments that just stays with you for your life. And, you know, I was—I won the lottery ticket of birth, right? Born to parents who valued education. I got a great one. All the, you know, all the paths and opportunities open to me. So I was aware, I am aware, that I sort of won a birth lottery ticket and I’m aware that not everybody gets that. 

And I was in a rickshaw in a traffic circle in Delhi and a woman walked up to me and my mom and she had something I’ve never seen before—a humerus, her upper arm just broken and in a dogleg shape. And in her other arm, a small baby. And she faced—I can’t even tell without crying, she put her palm in the, she faced her palm up and I was like, it just hit me. I was like, what do I do in this moment? I’m aware of how much I have, and I also don’t want to support this industry. But if I don’t give her a little bit of money, then what’s going to happen? She’s going to go back to somebody who I don’t know what’s going to happen to her. It’s already clear what’s happened to her and what’s been done to her. And the book—I got to not cry. Part of the motivation for this book is so that every woman in the world knows exactly how to make the money they need so that no woman in the world is in that kind of position.

Yeah, I thought that, when I read that, just to have that, you know, obviously motivating moment that, Hey, what can I do? How can I help? And then having that, the dedication was, I mean, powerful to say the least. 

Yeah. And I hope that it is a reminder for us because in the accounting profession—I’m not a CPA or an accountant—but we are helping people, and I think that there’s a genuine desire among accountants and CPAs to make meaningful contributions and to make the world a better place. And I think most of the people that we talk to are on the same boat, and doing their part and looking for their ways to make the world a better place.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I mean, again, the motivation to do that, and what you saw, and that dedication, like I said, was extremely powerful. And now you were able to put knowledge in people’s hands to make a difference. And so let’s talk about the book, you know, let’s get into a summary. But the book itself, you know, can you share, really, what inspired you to write this? I mean, obviously we understand down to 40 hours, that the industry can be crazy. People think they have to work crazy hours. And so can you explain what inspired you to write it? And then what the main problem was that you saw in the industry that you want to address with this?

Sure. So the motivation for writing the book is really to broaden the impact, because as a coach, I can only work with so many people at once in a sort of one-on-one or a small group setting. And I found that the number of accountants who are working longer hours than they want to be for less revenue or take home pay than they want, is gigantic. Not everybody is going to sign up for one-on-one coaching. Not everybody wants to be in a mastermind. Not everybody wants to learn or work with somebody in that way. And I wanted to still be able to reach the people who were suffering from working longer hours for less money than they wanted, in a way that was more accessible at a lower price point and as sort of a rung on the ladder, if you will, that’s much closer to the ground for them to easily step on to.

I also found myself—because my niche is so narrow, it is single owner CPAs making mid-six figures of top line revenue, who are overworking, who want to stop overworking and don’t want to lose revenue—that niche is so narrow, the questions are often, the same or very similar flavors of the same question and the answers are not infinite, the answers are finite and contained. And I wanted to be able to put answers to the most commonly asked questions inside a book that made it really easy to read, really easy to digest, and to write it in a way that that was accessible, not boring, or dry, or stale, or full of fluff. I just wanted to be like, no, listen here, people. Here is why you are working so much, and the answer isn’t what you think it is. The answer is this other thing, or these other things. And to kind of, to help people get started assimilating a different way of thinking. 

Alright. So you said these core problems, the problem isn’t what they think. And so in your book, you really talk about the concept of value beyond hours. So I guess the question is, in the CPA services world, how do you define value? And I guess, why is this so crucial for CPAs to grasp this concept? 

Okay, well, it’s so crucial to grasp the concept because value is where your revenue comes from. So until you grasp it, you will be trying to pin your prices, or your bill, or how you charge clients, to your time and your work and your effort, and you will be leaving piles of potential revenue on the table. 

Important.

So if you want to make more money, get your head around the concept of value, because that’s where your revenue is coming from. If you think that your revenue comes from your time and your work, it’s like thinking that time comes from your watch. I get that that’s how it looks, but time doesn’t come from your watch. So we need to, we need for the CPA to understand that revenue comes from value in the way that you capture the value is through your pricing, and we want your pricing to be effective so that you’re doing a decent job of capturing the value that you’re creating with your prices. 

So then, what is value? And how do I like, what is this nebulous concept of value? I totally get the question, right? It’s the thing that you can’t quite see. You can’t grab it. It’s not tangible. It doesn’t sit on your desk. You can’t pick it up. You don’t know how much it weighs. So like, how do you define it? And there are a couple of key things to understand about value. The first one is that it is your clients who perceive value. It’s like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. It is your clients who will see value or will not see value, and they are not wrong or right about their perception. Their perception is their perception. So you want to find the clients who perceive the value that you know you can create. 

Now, you can also increase your client’s understanding and perception of value, right? So you could think of this like if you’ve ever bought a car and, you know, a car has a bunch of bells and whistles inside that you can’t really get your head around until you’ve been driving the car for a while and you discover all these things. You’ve been, once you’ve had your car for six months or a year, your perceived value of your car increases, because you understand, you appreciate, these new things that it can do for you. And your job as a CPA, as the seller, is to help increase or expand your buyer’s perception of the value that you can help create, right? They may perceive a certain subset of value, and you can expand the value that they perceive by helping them see things they may not have previously known about. 

Another piece is that value changes over time. So a person who’s 25 may not value a CPA to get a tax return done, but a person who’s 55, who just has other things, they’d rather go on their boat, might be more willing to pay. So value changes over time and it’s always contextual. So value changes depending on the context that the person is in. Say a person has a really sick parent, and doesn’t have time, they may want to spend the time with the parent, so in the context of their business and their life, their perception of the value of what you can do changes given the context that they’re in.

So value is this fluctuating thing. So we want to find the buyers who appreciate the value that we can help create at the time that they are in their life, in the context of their life, and who have the most buying power, because somebody who has a lot more money, more buying power, is going to value the same thing higher than the person who doesn’t. So, for example, a person who makes like a billion dollars is going to value, let’s just say, press box tickets for Game 7 of the World Series more highly than a person who doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. That person who doesn’t have two nickels isn’t going to drop ten grand on Game 7 of the World Series tickets. So, we want to find the people who are willing to pay the most for the thing that we are happy to sell.

Once you understand this, and it takes some time to get your head around it—I watch my clients. It takes about 12 to 18 months to really understand that what we are selling is the value, the outcome, the transformation, then we have to figure out the transformation. The primary buckets for CPAs and accountants in terms of transformation typically include transformations around money, time, stress, and clarity. 

Alright, so we know the concept—at least I have an idea now, I thank you for that—of value, and what we need to do with that. But to do this, you know, obviously we need to ditch the hourly billing, we need to ditch hopefully even tracking hours, because if we’re not billing that way, which we shouldn’t be, we shouldn’t even be tracking that way, but that’s probably another story. But: You know, now we need to move away from that. So we want to start installing value based pricing. So what are really the steps or the first step at a minimum, that we can start to take, a CPA can start to take, the transition and not only the steps, but I’m guessing there’s physical, you know, steps that we can take, but there’s probably mindset issues you need to overcome at the same time.

Yeah. Okay, so a couple things at once. And really what I’m trying to do with my clients is to help them stop overworking—to go from a 60 hour week down to a 40 hour week. There are a lot of ways to do that, and we just need to find ways that are going to work for the client based on where they are in their business, who their clients are, what their client roster looks like, what their current pricing looks like, and so on. So just know that we’re trying to solve multiple problems at once with the aim of getting time down. 

A way to get off of hourly—and I’m not against time tracking to help solve problems—but we don’t want to price our services that way. A way to get off of hourly is to look at your client roster and to ask yourself, okay, what am I selling and who am I selling it to? Most of our listeners are probably selling some kind of annual tax service, and some kind of monthly, ongoing accounting service. So we want to ask, what kind of business do you want to have? Do you want to have a mostly monthly kind of accounting cadence service? Do you want to have a giant tax spike in tax season, or not? Do you want to build a hierarchy and scale, or do you want to stay small and solo, or small staff? 

And the answers to those questions inform the pricing answer, but for simple terms, we want to look at your buyer and say, okay, let’s just say I want to keep a subset of annual clients because I like having annual clients and the cash windfall that comes in first quarter, but mostly I want to have monthly accounting clients. Then we say, okay, what kind of annual tax clients do you want to have? Do you want to have a giant pile of 1040s? Do you want to have only business clients that are pretty straightforward? Do you want to have complicated returns that take 20 hours? What do you want? 

And typically we isolate the highly complex returns that are 20, 40 hours, whatever, 2–3 hour business returns, and the 1040 returns that take 30 minutes. And commonly take, okay, let’s look at the business returns and say, how can we turn this into a bronze, silver, gold service, where it is set at a flat rate, the business return is stripped down version of the McDonald’s hamburger. It’s just a bun and a patty. The silver one is, this is what would be a great service. And the gold one is like, VIP white glove. And we go and offer that to business owning clients with a relatively straightforward return. And we take that approach with each buyer type. 

One place the CPA will get tripped up in terms of tiered pricing is that they will try and create tiered pricing for one set of tiered pricing for all their client types, and that doesn’t work. So you’ve got to put your clients into like, buckets, and then create tiered pricing. And then your annual tax clients are of course different from your monthly clients. We need to figure out what your monthly clients are like, perhaps put them into their own various buckets, and create tiers for them. So you can imagine that this can get complex pretty quickly, which is why it makes so much sense to simplify who you work with, and have clients who look increasingly like each other, so that you don’t have all these giant, you know, tiered pricing tables all over the place that you then have to keep track of.

And that gets to another core within the book of niching down. And so I know that’s something you’re passionate about, that’s something I’m passionate about. So let’s, how does this play, I mean, you kind of explained it already, it helps with the pricing, the three different pricing models, but what is the importance of niching down?

Yeah. And in the book, I go into this in some pretty deep detail because niching is a journey, and there are a lot of decision points and pivots along the way. It’s not a single destination that you get to when you’re done. It’s not one decision. It’s a series of decisions over three months, six months, 12, 18 months, about reshaping and narrowing down who you work with. The reason that niching is so helpful is because when your clients look more and more like each other, it helps you see the patterns of the things that they struggle with. And when you see the patterns, it helps you isolate, oh, this is what they struggle with. How can I solve this problem? What are the outcomes that they tend to be looking for? And focus or orient your service around that. 

And when you help them create outcomes in a way that’s faster, easier, better, you create more value, more readily. When you create more value, your prices have more room to go up. Your prices go up for the same kind of work. You get more efficient. Your margins go up. When your margins go up, you can afford to let go of some clients off the bottom, and you free up more time. When you free up more time, you have more time to think about how to create more value for your clients. So that is how you set yourself on an upward spiral to bringing in more revenue while your hours go down.

Many CPAs think that revenue and time are on opposite sides of the seesaw. If one goes up, the other might [or] must go down. But when you come to appreciate value, you understand that the more your time goes down, the more your revenue goes up. And it’s hard to get your brain around, but it’s sort of like riding a bicycle. It’s not a cerebral thing. It’s a feeling thing. And once you get the feeling, you go, oh, and you start to want more of it. 

We both had a good friend, Josh Lance, that was a master at niching in my mind. And I, you know, he, he concentrated on two niches and he’d often talk about how the value pricing model was so significant in their firm and how profitability was so high because they only concentrated on two different niches and were able to define, I guess, the products. I guess that’s a key thing too, is for you, it’s just defining the products. Now, when we say define the products, are we saying defining those pricing models? That’s different than defining the products. The products are probably what you’re going to be offering the clients? What is the concept of defining your product?

So defining your product is in the same piece as your tiered offering, right? 

Okay, it is. 

Yeah. So you’re thinking about, what outcome is my client really looking for, right? Yes, they want their tax return done. Yes, they want clean financials. But probably, they want to better understand their money, probably they want to be able to make clear decisions, they probably want to be less stressed about money, and they probably want to make more of it. So how then can I apply accounting to that problem for my client and help them improve those metrics and then define your product, scope, your service.

So I love all the concepts, the valuability and the niche. I believe niche is so important. Defining those products and the pricing models that go with the products that you’re now offering to clients. But now we need to get the word out too. So marketing is a big part of this, and I assume, if we get good at that, that also is going to reduce our hours because we have more of these high value clients coming in. But so what, what are some key strategies, maybe the marketing that you work on when people are starting to niche down and get that word out there? 

So a first one is to reframe how we think about marketing. I will freely admit as an engineering student, I looked down my nose at marketing. I thought it was for the students who couldn’t hack it in their real disciplines. Twenty years later as a business owner, I’ve come to appreciate just how wrong I was about that mindset. There are a lot of CPAs who think basically, I’m too busy with my bad clients to market to get good clients, and I don’t like marketing, I don’t understand it. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know how to talk about the value. I don’t know how to communicate it. I don’t know what to say on my website. Therefore, I’m just not going to do it. 

And a key piece is like, it’s okay to not really get marketing, but we need to get on the path of understanding marketing, understanding how to do it, understanding what to say, what not to say, and where to say it, so that it works for us. Because I think of marketing in the same way that I think of water in my kitchen faucet. I have the great pleasure of having 80 pounds of pressure behind my faucet. Anytime I want a drink of water, I turn on the faucet, I get a drink. If I didn’t have 80 pounds of pressure behind my faucet, I would have to go outside, hope that it had rained recently, set up gutters and a downspout into a water barrel, and scoop water so I could drink. That is a risky way to run a business. You are waiting for the gods to send you the rain of referrals. When your marketing is effective, it’s like having 80 of pressure in your pipeline. If you’re full, you turn off the tap, you get your work done, you get your head above water, you breathe again. When you have room for a client, you say, okay, got room for a client. You turn on the spigot, you take whatever you bring, whatever clients you need to have room for in your business. It changes the dynamic in your business from being on your heels, feeling like you’re at the mercy of the gods to send you a good referral, to being in control of your business.

And what my clients in my mastermind say all the time, after three months of being in mastermind, they say, I’m starting to feel like I’m in control of my business now, and it’s the first time I felt this in years. So that’s where marketing becomes valuable is not just the activity of marketing, ’cause in theory, it’s a good idea. It’s because it gives you control in your business. 

Yeah. I think we both have had Brandon Hall on our podcast. I thought you did. I know I did too. And I, I always think of him as an example of that, the, the way he’s marketing, he actually talks, I don’t know if you use the same words as you with the, the spigot, I like that a lot, but because the visual is like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Yes, it’s time to turn on the new client water faucet and fill up the cup and then decide. He’s talked about that concept, [I’ve] talked about that concept with Duke Alexander Moore as well. He’s gone through times where he’s slowed down the spigot because it’s not time to take on new clients. So I know Brandon has specific ways he markets. Is this, I don’t know if you want to talk about what he does or just a summary of, I mean, social media is a big part of it. Education is a big part of it. Videos. Is there a roadmap to marketing or how do you talk about that? 

Yeah. So a couple of things. The first one is it goes back to your business strategy: It depends. Do you want to grow a big thing with lots of clients and lots of staff? If so, you’re going to have a certain kind of marketing strategy. If you want to stay small, you may be more likely to do word of mouth, networking, going to events, and you kind of have a brush fire of just people who talk to you and that brings in enough. But if you need lots of volume, you’re going to have to go to where there’s higher volume concentrations. So it depends on the kind of business. So your marketing strategy is informed by the kind of business that you want to have. 

The other piece our listeners might be wondering is, well, what do I say? A lot of accountants want to sell accounting, but most people don’t want to buy accounting, any more than they want to buy math or coaching. Nobody signs up to work with me for the coaching. They sign up for the transformation: I want to go from a 60 hour week down to a 40 hour week. When I was in school, on the way to the engineering quad, I would pass a building called the Thurston Center for Applied Mathematics. And I was 18, and I was like, what is “applied mathematics?” Isn’t math just something you do? And then fast forward ten years and Wall Street collapsed, and I was talking to friends about what it is they actually did. What’s the math that you guys did in that building? And they would talk to me about these complex equations and modeling, and I was like, oh, you did high level math to help people make a lot of money. Now I understand the application of mathematics and its value. But people don’t pay you just to do math. 

Similarly, your clients don’t pay you just to do accounting. So you need to figure out, what is the application of accounting that people value and put it in the frame of here’s the problem that your buyer has, before they start working with you, and here’s the outcome that they have after they start working with you. And those words are really simple. It is not fancy, polished, corporate-y sounding gobbledygook that means nothing. So we need to just listen to our clients about the struggles they have and what they want instead. And those are the words that we use to put on our website or in our marketing materials or whatever. It’s so much simpler than we make it out to be. We think we have to be fancy writers, but that isn’t it. We have to be really good listeners to what our clients are saying to us. 

That makes sense. That makes sense a lot, because we do, I mean, honestly, if I’m a niche and I’m an expert at it, I’m going to be better at working with—let’s go back to Josh, a craft brewery. And anybody listening to this knows Josh passed away last year, but I still love the guy and everything he did. And so for him, the niche in general, if I’m an accountant, I mean, I’m not going to be, honestly, any better than the next accountant, because we all have similar skills. But if I’m an accountant that’s dealing with craft breweries and that niche, I can now show that I am better than this generalist over here, because they’re trying to help everybody and they’re probably doing okay, but they’re not an expert in anything. And so just being able to communicate that in marketing, I guess, is a key aspect. 

Yeah, because you understand that craft brewers deal with all these special things that are related to the kegs and are they equipment or are they supplies, and the pipelines, and the what happens, and all the liquor laws, and how should I price my pints versus how should I price my cans and how much are you spending on distribution and should I have a like how should I open up a new bar/brewery branch? Or should I up the volume in cans and grocery stores? What do the numbers look like? And getting into the deeper layers of understanding what drives profitability or the impacts of certain decisions in a very specific industry is enormously valuable. And there are so few accountants who have specific niches, that those people who are specifically niched, can effectively command the marketplace and just establish the price and say, hey, we’re awesome. Here’s our price. If you don’t want to work with us, that’s cool. Go find somebody else. But there isn’t somebody else. They’re the only one. So it also gives you a lot of pricing power, which of course has obvious advantages. 

Yep. Sticking on the Josh theme here: I know Josh at some point, when we had a conversation, he talked about his pricing was probably three to four times what someone else would have been. And it’s because he can communicate that value is key. Okay. 

And his costs were lower. And for listeners, I’ve had him on my podcast as well, and we get into some specific numbers—maybe a year and a half ago, so you’d have to go back in the back catalog—but his prices were higher and his costs to deliver were lower. So you can just imagine. Pushing those curves out into the future and you could picture the gap. 

The gap. Not Bridging the Gap, but just that gap. Alright. 

Profitability gap. 

Alright. So obviously we’ve shown the importance of this, shown the value of filling the niching, how important niching is in the marketing aspect and defining your, your packages and your products and all that. I mean, it can sound overwhelming because people are resistant to change. It’s, we are very much an industry of SALY, you know, same as last year, it seems like. And so let’s talk a little about implementation strategies and how, you know, someone, hey, okay, yeah, this looks good. Can I do this? Well, how do they get started? What other ideas do you have on that? 

So I’m an advocate for one small step at a time. I mean, if you’re working 80 or more hours a week, then we have a, like, I would advocate for taking larger steps at once, because the risks of burnout are so great. But for the CPA who’s working 55 hours a week, the first place to look is in your client roster. Surely there are clients in there who, if you said, you know what, we’ve enjoyed working with you, but come, you know, this date, three months in the future, we’re no longer going to be able to serve you, here’s how we can off board you. Thank you so much. We love you. To find 10 or 15 percent of those people who you can let go of, who I can all but guarantee you will be a blip in your top line revenue, and start letting those people go, because the thing that we need for the CPA, the owner, is to have more time to think more clearly. And when the business owner is just spinning in circles all day, putting out fires, fire drills, there’s no time to think effectively. And as the business owner, your single largest asset is your ability to think clearly. So we need to get your hours down, so that you have time to think clearly about, okay, where do I want to take my business? 

And commonly, if you put your clients—if you download an income by customer summary report and you put them on a graph and you, you know, sort them by highest revenue or highest, you know, sort them high to low, commonly the best clients are oftentimes your B clients, because you have a lot of them, they look like each other, they’re easy to systematize. Sometimes your A clients, the ones who pay you the most, pull you off and they think that they own you. Not always, but commonly, look at your B clients and you may want to consider building out more of those clients, letting your D clients off, then in like in the next phase, letting your C clients off, and thinking about how to repackage and price your B clients, who you’d be psyched to have more of and you enjoy working with. 

Alright. But baby steps are probably the—because it’s so easy to get overwhelmed and we don’t want people to shut down because once they do this, we have such a fear of that short term pain that people look at this, whether it is or not, they look at it as change is pain. It’s just a mindset we have, but that our brains, I think are just wired to, like avoid this short term pain so much that we don’t see the long term gain. So the baby steps and seeing that gain coming in these small increments, is probably just going to snowball to the point where it’s boom, we start implementing faster and faster and faster as we see the positive outcomes of this. So I like the start small and see the benefits. 

Change is uncomfortable, but remember that it’s likely that you already have a lot of discomfort in the form of a 55 hour week. 

Yes. 

In the form of not seeing friends and family as much as you want. In the form of probably not exercising or getting out as much as you want. You’re already experiencing a fair amount of discomfort, so we’re just thinking about which is the discomfort that you would rather have. If you’re willing to take small steps, you can transform or reshape your accounting practice in—in my program, anyways—six, eight, 12 months. It doesn’t take forever and it’s not rocket science. I went to school with the rocket scientists. I promise you this is not that. 

And also, remember that no single decision is going to tank your business. Your business is much more resilient than any single decision. I get that it feels like any change, and you’re just going to die if you screw up, but make a small change, see what happens, learn from what happened, and then keep going. 

So I think just to kind of start wrapping this up, but one thing is, you know, we just talked about fear that people have, fear of change, fear of this, but, but the fear is, and you mentioned letting go some clients. But people are going to fear that. They’re going to fear—I need revenue, I need revenue. And so somebody who’s struggling with that, alright, this client doesn’t fit into this new packaging and niching that I’m doing, but, maybe I can’t do the niching because I can’t lose this revenue. How do you get them past that mindset? 

Yeah. To help remind them that revenue doesn’t come from clients. It appears as if I let go of this client, I’m going to lose revenue, but when you let go of the client or the ten clients, you now have time to think about how to create value for the clients who you do want to be working with. You now have time to think about, how can I price this in a way that is more profitable, more effective, easier to sell? You now have time to think about, how can I standardize some of these processes so that the work gets done the same time every time, it’s easier for me, all the people on my staff do the same process the same way. You now have time to answer the great questions that come from your clients that are enormously valuable if you answer them, but previously you’d been thinking, god, I would love to answer that, but I don’t have time. So I’m just going to hook up my autoresponder. 

When you let go of clients, what you free up is time. And in that time you create more value and more value is where more revenue comes from. So in fact, even though it looks like letting go of revenue, when you let go of clients, what happens is that when you let go of clients, you create more revenue. But I get that it’s hard to assimilate that concept. That’s why I say it takes 12 to 18 months to get used to thinking that way. So make these small steps as you get used to thinking in this new way. 

Alright. So let me try to summarize what we went through, and then you can correct me where I went wrong. The problem is we’re working too much. I mean, and we’re working not correctly. I mean, we’re overworked. We’re putting in hours. Hours are a big problem. We need to start understanding value. And you just mentioned, freeing up time actually increases value and increases revenue, even though it sounds to most people that’s going to be counterintuitive, but that’s what happens.

Part of that then, is finding our niche because there’s value in the niche. There’s pricing and defining our products, so defining our products, pricing them accurately, correctly, giving options within what our clients need, not what we want to give them, I guess. Pricing that effectively, marketing this new strategy, this new way that we’re going to the business, and then just seeing the success, the bills of it. And realize when we do all this, that mythical, this what we think is mythical work-life balance is not a mythical thing. We can actually do it. Did I do okay? 

Yeah. Yeah. 

You want to add to that? 

I would say that same thing this way: As a business owner, your job is to create value for clients. Being in a niche makes it easier to create value for clients. Being in a niche makes it easier to price. Being in a niche makes it easier to standardize your processes, which means you get more efficient. Being in a niche makes it easier to market your message so that you get the high paying clients that you’re looking for. So you put it all together, being in a niche, creating value, pricing effectively, and being efficient is how you get your revenue to go up while your hours go down. It is imminently doable, it is not rocket science, it just takes a commitment to moving down that path and making decisions, learning from what happens and keeping going, and that is all.

Nice. I think that’s something we all should aspire to in this book and you will help us get there. So I appreciate it.

Before we wrap up, and that was great, you reworded what I said much better than I said it. So I appreciate that. I’m going to record that. I’m going to start using it in my presentations now and give you credit. “This is what Geraldine said, and so you have to listen to this.” And you probably remember, but we’re going to go through this again, you know, we wrap up with two questions. The first being, yes, we just talked about everything you do and how much you can help the profession and, and create work-life balance, and have people enjoy the business that they’ve built. But when you’re not doing that, what are your outside of work passions?

Skiing in the winter. 

I thought that was going to be the one, or one of them. 

Running forested trails in the summer. 

Nice. 

And I’m on a mission to get both of my kids being native speakers of French. 

Ooh!

Because half my family lives over there. 

Oh, really? Alright. And are you in the middle of that? Are they, are they starting with this new language?

So you know, speaking of the 15 hours getting down, getting your hours down, I took my daughter who’s 8 to Paris last year for a month and worked from there. And by the end, she was speaking in French, in words that I had never taught her. 

Wow. 

It was amazing to see how fast she picked it up. So one kid down, one to go.

Alright, nice. I have been doing Duolingo for Spanish, for, I just looked on my app, I’m 144 straight days in right now. 

Wow, that’s a streak! 

It’s a streak. It’s not, you know, I’ve seen a lot longer streaks than that, but I’m at the point where I, like, hear a sentence—at the beginning, I hear a sentence, I have no idea what’s happened. I hear a sentence now, it’s like, okay, yeah, I understand what that sentence, I’d be like, probably not verbatim back to it, but I understand the gist of what was just said there. So getting in that situation, I would, so the point is what you did with your daughter and being there and hearing the language—I’m going to be in Mexico later this year. Not for a, you know, maybe a week, but I really think that that is going to like, fast forward where I’m at with this. So I’m excited about that. 

That’ll be awesome. 

Alright. And then last question: obviously, if people want to get the book, where do we go and find that?

Sure, so the easiest place is to go to Amazon, or you can go to my website, GeraldineCarter.com/Book. 

And then obviously at GeraldineCarter.com, they can find more information about you and ways to get a hold of you as well, correct? 

Yes. And I’m all over LinkedIn if people want to find me there and connect. 

I figured the LinkedIn as well. Alright, Geraldine. Well, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. I’m super excited to dig deeper into this book. And by the next time you and I talk, I will have completed reading the entire book, and you gave me a nice jumpstart on the knowledge here today too. So thank you so much for being on the show today. 

Thanks, Randy. Thanks so much for having me.