We just got another member question about the program! And that question is: "Is the program suitable for newbies, or is it suitable for more advanced bookkeepers?" – this question relates to being a bookkeeper STARTING OUT IN PRACTICE with no clients yet.
So, I'm going to answer that question today, along with the exploration of the CUSTOMER JOURNEY. This is to help you understand all the different things you need to have in place to find, onboard, and retain our clients without price as a priority.
Just a quick & very special announcement: the doors to The Strategic Bookkeeper Transformation Program will open AUGUST 1! So I want to ask you: Are you ready to move from being busy to thriving? Are you ready to come into a community that will support you and lift you up, to build the business and life of your dreams? Because, I am ready to hold your hand every step of the way and help you go from strength to strength.
And I tell you, there is no better time than right NOW.
To celebrate the launch of the transformation program, there are foundation member bonuses. And, I have even priced the program to suit every bookkeeper, topped off with a money-back guarantee! Just join the waitlist, and you'll get all the details. You can also check out the podcast dedicated to this. I want to help you build a thriving practice, delight your clients, and, ultimately, live your dream on your terms. This is exactly what I've done in my practice, and now it's my heart's desire to help you do exactly the same things.
So, back to the member question: will your program be good for those just starting out without clients, or is it more advanced? – The short answer to that question is yes, the program is suitable for you, but let me elaborate a little bit more.
So thinking back to the beginning of my journey, I was pregnant, and I was making the decision on where I would send my career because I had decided that I did not want to go back into the workforce, and I felt like I had a couple of options. So I was actually considering at the time, to go into recruitment and buy a recruitment franchise. (And actually, that's a service that I now offer up to my VIP clients in my bookkeeping practice, which is a succession service.) But then I thought, that's going to be really hard around baby. I'm simply going to be on the phone all the time. But the other skill that I really had was around accounts, and admin, and bookkeeping.
So long story short, I decided to do bookkeeping way back, well over 14 years ago. I knew that as a mom, it would be flexible in terms of working around my child, and that I wouldn't be at the mercy of having people in front of me if my child was crying and all those wonderful things for a mom. But, boy, do I wish I had The Strategic Bookkeeper Transformation Program when I started out. Because, if you've read my book, I had to get cracking and muddle my way through and make all the MISTAKES in my first five years, which I call the f*ck-up years. So if you're a bookkeeper at the beginning of your journey, just like I once was, let me talk to you about
why the program is suitable,
what the primary benefits are, and,
most importantly, how to get a return on investment out of it.
Because that's important, right? I give you a MONEY-BACK guarantee that you are going to be able to make more than the program fee structure.
When I talk about the benefits of the program and the features... I like to think about everything that happens in our business – from generating some DEMAND for what we do, right through to the delivery of the SERVICES and all the other backend things that have got to happen. So, let's think about the customer journey and the BENEFITS to the new bookkeeper – because that's what this question is. If I'm at the beginning of my journey, no clients at all, is this the right course for me? It. absolutely. is. And, it is also ideal for a bookkeeper in practice! Allow me explain and all these will be more apparent.
So the customer journey... we've got a market out there. Let's say they're business owners and they're running their businesses, and therefore, they need to do their bookkeeping and compliance. Bookkeeping is a profession driven by an actual compliance need, and those business owners, they have a couple of options to go about it. They can either try and do it themselves, or they're going to have to get someone to do it for them. And if they're a small business, which is generally what bookkeepers serve, they're not going to hire in-house help because they only need an hour or two, sometimes even half an hour a week. Or, they're not sure what they need, but they don't need enough that they could go and get an employee. Therefore, their options are to DIY, or get it done for me.
So when a business owner is ready to make a decision to look for help for bookkeeping, how does that happen?
Well, one of the ways is they are doing their own bookkeeping and they hate it, or they're just leaving it and they're not doing it, and things pile up. Thinking about the problems they're going through, they finally decide, "Oh, my goodness. I'm never going to get this bookkeeping up to date. I'm just going to reach out and try and find someone who can do it for me."
Or, somebody is doing it, but they're missing deadlines, they're breaking promises. One way or another, the business owner is not happy with their current solution – whether that's the fact that they're DIY-ing it badly, or their current bookkeeper is dropping the ball and breaking promises, or they took their bookkeeping to their accountant who said, "Goodness gracious, this is a dog's breakfast. You need to seek some help."
So in the customer journey, the DESIRE and the NEED comes up.
Now, what does that person do? What does that prospective client, that person in the market, do when that happens? Well, they either go onto Google, they Google bookkeeper, or more often than not, seek a REFERRAL. They can then ask the accountant, or their friends, family, and business buddies. Or, more often than not, they go on social media and ask all their social media friends, "Does anyone know a good bookkeeper?"
There are so many ways that when they have a need, they can find you.
An example of a really cool one we've been using lately is our Better in Business podcast. I was speaking to a prospective client the other day and I asked, "How did you hear about us?" And I already knew from my assistant that they'd come through the podcast, but this prospective client said, "Do you know what, Jeannie? I'm not quite sure. I know that you came up in my feed, and I've been listening to your podcast." That is just another example of how we're always investing for the tribe, and Better In Business is actually being built for the long-term purpose of driving business to our strategic bookkeepers.
So basically, when somebody in the market has a need, you need them to be able to FIND you. And if you're a bookkeeper at the beginning of your journey, you need a way to ATTRACT new clients – you are going to need to create an online ecosystem which conveys your BRAND.
Let's say that the accountant says to the business owner, "Well, Sally Smith is a bookkeeper we know and we find her work very good. We would recommend that you consider Sally Smith." I can tell you right now that the customer journey in this current tech and economic landscape is they don't tend to ring Sally directly. They go ONLINE to check Sally out. Before the pandemic, there was a lot more direct action, but the pandemic changed everything.
The customer journey is such that no matter how they find you,
even if it's through personal referral,
they're going to want to go online and check you out.
In terms of The Strategic Bookkeeper Transformation Program, how does it help with that? When I built this program, I imagined this bookkeeper at the beginning of their journey with no website, no social media, and no clients – and I thought, "What could I do that would give them something immediately to make all of this easier?"
So what I've done is I've developed a brochure that is a really powerful digital ASSET that you can use immediately for CLIENT ATTRACTION. But if you are thinking, "Jeannie, you were just talking about online – what's the brochure going to do there?" Well, if I give you a really good brochure and explain how you just pop your BRANDING into it, update a few things, and run with it, that brochure – along with a whole lot of other collateral and assets I give you – will help you TAKE ACTION quickly. So that brochure is a brief for a website designer. So if you do or don't have a website, it will work for you. So if you have a website, you might need to renovate it a bit, right? The brochure serves to help you with that. If you don't have a website, the brochure is going to serve as a brief for the web developer. I have tested this in the market. I have gone and developed our social media before renovating our website, and it worked brilliantly.
Bottom-line, The Strategic Bookkeeper Transformation Program is going to save you a lot of money, and save you a lot of time in terms of making sure that you've got the ONLINE PRESENCE. And, we give you a library of social media templates and then show you how to build and manage your social media presence in a way that doesn't take you... hardly no time at all. Because social media is a part of the know, like, and trust. It's not a part of direct sales, okay? So as a new bookkeeper, we're going to help you make sure that you've got that part of the customer journey nailed, because that's what will help to create a pipeline of LEADS.
And then the next part of the customer journey is that, once they check you out online and verify you and your CREDIBILITY and get to know, like, and TRUST you, they're going to reach out to you and say, "I'd like some help," and, they'll need you to do the needs analysis. We've got that absolutely all done for you in the program, and we train you.
Then, you're going to need to do a proposal for services. Now, if you're a new bookkeeper without the right support, then you're going to need to make sure that you've got all the productised services and a killer PRICING STRATEGY. That means, when you onboard that new client, and it means you actually do onboard that new client with price being secondary, there is the potential that you would make two, three, four times the profit or more, by using the Strategic Bookkeeper's Way that we give you in the Transformation Program.
So way back when I was a brand new bookkeeper, I didn't understand all this. And if I had all of this collateral and the ability to find onboard and retain a client without price as a priority, then the way I went about it and the PROFITABILITY would've been just completely different. It would've been like not having to do those first five f*ck-up years.
So, pivoting to return on investment for a minute: let's say you've used the Transformation Program for those parts of the customer journey, then now, I want you to assess what the VALUE of that would be as you onboard that client. I would suggest that if you were onboarding a new client, you're going to be able to onboard them as a regular monthly client, and you're going to be able to charge out somewhere between $4,000 and $15,000 for your services, depending on what they need – and using all the strategic systems and processes that I give and teach you in order to make sure that you are giving them a productised service, and, once again, onboarding and retaining them without price as a priority.
So if you are a bookkeeper at the beginning of your journey, just like I once was, I know that
the mistakes that you can make without the right support,
processes, and collateral are so COSTLY.
And yet, if you've got the support... I imagined myself at the beginning of my journey when I was creating the program, and I thought, "What would you have needed?" And that's actually where I came up with education, assets, implementation, team, and support. Because I remember once getting some collateral, but there was no handholding. And I thought, "Yeah, I got some value. But, really, what would've been helpful is somebody holding my hand for the first 12 months to help me implement and practice." I thought to myself, "Yeah, some of it was good, but why weren't we able to leverage group marketing collateral?"
And that's exactly what I've done – I reflected on what would've been impactful for me at the beginning of my journey. I truly believe that you are far better subscribing to The Strategic Bookkeeper Transformation Program right at the beginning, right now, because then you are not going to have to try and undo any mistakes you do. The doors open August 1, and if you are a foundation member, you're going to get a STANDALONE COURSE included in the program called Hourly to Outcome Billing.
Now, there are going to be a lot of bookkeepers come into the program, and they have told me this that they're going to grab that course and they're going to use that first with all the clients that they've had for a year or two, or three, or four years that is still on hourly billing. The opportunity over time to do what I did... in the span of a year, I doubled my net profits through moving from hourly to outcome billing, and that's without increases in revenue. I just focused on profitability, and I doubled my net profits. And so, bookkeepers who have been in the game a long time – I absolutely built this program for them. But if you are a bookkeeper at the beginning of your journey, you don't have to make any of the mistakes we did. I can show you how to build a Ferrari.
Continuing on the customer journey... So assuming that that client onboards. Let's say it's a fairly small client that doesn't need a lot and they're signing up to pay you about... let's say $5,000 annually, and you're just doing a little bit of bookkeeping. So that part of the customer journey is taught to you and done for you in the program. And I can tell you from my years of experience, we know how to onboard a client in a five star way. Over the years, we've got feedback from clients about what they liked and what they didn't like about the onboarding. Early on, there were lots of mistakes that I just didn't even conceive of until I really understood what a prospective client needs to KNOW as they onboard with us, in order to really understand what's going on with their job and more.
Even though that might sound simple, onboarding for bookkeepers is a process that requires lots of steps, and we have all those steps sewn up for you. So then, they become a client and you have to deliver the work. You also have to manage your CAPACITY. We have all the education, assets, implementation, team, and support there for you to be able to make sure that you take that client, and treat them like a seed that needs to be watered and nurtured into an oak tree. We want to make sure that you retain them for the FOREVER CLIENT. We've got some clients that have been with us almost our whole journey, and so we really want to help – because we see lots of bookkeepers with high churn rate and they don't understand why.
So absolutely, we've got done-for-you standard operating procedures end-to-end systems that is going to give you everything you need to deliver a platinum level of service (and more!) in The Strategic Bookkeeper Transformation Program. I'm only giving you a snippet, but I think it's really cool to understand the customer journey, including what's next on the menu, and making sure that we are continuing to offer up succession services and more.
PS. Looove the questions coming through the Facebook group and the email, so full of gratitude!! I just love hearing from my community. The more I understand about you, the more I can help you.
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