Episodes: Listen Now to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast — The Successful Bookkeeper

EP11: Ron Baker - Stop Selling Your Time For Money

Written by Michael Palmer | Nov 22, 2016 4:11:32 PM

It's time to investigate value pricing.

Ron Baker has devoted his life to eliminating the billable hour and time sheets.If you're a bookkeeper that depends on those things, you might be concerned.

But, Baker has an alternative.

He is an expert on Value Pricing where he believes set prices for services should be presented upfront to customers.

His movement is catching fire and may be something that could help you.

During this episode, you'll learn...

  • How to implement value pricing in your bookkeeping business

  • How to have a value conversation with your new and old customers

  • The importance of offering 3 different price packages

To find out more about Ron, visit http://verasage.com/ronald-j-baker/.

To listen to his podcast, click here - https://www.thesoulofenterprise.com/.

To check out his Intuit webinar series, watch https://quickbooks.intuit.com/accountants/resources/value-pricing/.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

Michael Palmer: 01:05 Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and I am super excited about today's guest. Ron Baker needs very little introduction to the accounting and bookkeeping community. He is a highly sought after speaker for industry conferences around the world where he is spreading his message of value pricing to over 120,000 professionals. To date. This bestselling author is also the founder of the Verus Age Institute, the leading think tank dedicated to educating professionals internationally. And he's a host on the online radio talk show, the soul of the enterprise business in the knowledge economy. It is my great pleasure to welcome Ron Baker to the podcast. Thanks for being on the show. 

Ron Baker: 01:30 Oh, thank you, Michael. Glad to be here. 

MP: 01:40  You Bet. And you know, Ron, you're one of the first people I thought of when we decided to, to launch a podcast for bookkeepers, eh, because it seems like I get a question about value pricing if not on a weekly basis, a daily basis. So it's great to have you. 

RB: 02:05 Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. 

MP: 02: 10 Yeah. So let's start off with a little bit of a backstory for those that don't already know you at. Share a little bit about how you got into this. 

RB: 02:22 I knew I wanted to be a CPA at the age of 15, I had a really good high school teacher. He used to bring in a CPAs and a good two-year accounting program. My Dad was a barber. My Dad had lots of CPAs as clients. So when they sat in their chair and got a haircut, I had a captive audience for an hour with pepper them with questions about how they work, what they did, their schooling, how they pass the test, all of that. So suffice it to say God went to college, became a CPA, joined a big eight accounting firm and I've been doing timesheets my whole career because, uh, I had a bookkeeping firm at the age of 15 I did my dad's books, I did many of his friends books. I even defended IRS audits, Michael at the age of 15 and I billed by the hour and I kept timesheets because I knew that's what the CPAs did that I talked to. 

RB: 03:09 And then I left Pete Mark after two and a half years and started my own firm. And that's when I had the burning bush moment and realized, you know what, the billable hour is a lousy and I mean lousy customer experience because they never know the price in advance. Now, I can't think of anything that you and I buy as a consumer where we don't know the price in advance and our profession violates that law if it's peril. Because I rather find out before I do something for my customers that they don't like to price because then there's maybe some other things we can do. There are alternative ways to get the same thing done or different strategies. Maybe they do more of the work or maybe I withdraw from the engagement, but if I've already done the work, there's not much I can do other than write down or have a very unhappy customer. 

RB: 03:58 And I got tired of both of those scenarios. So I started offering fixed prices in my firm in 1989 wow. And that's what got me to here. Excellent. Well that, that is a great introduction to what, what we're, what we're talking about here today. And so, I mean you've been at this for a while. When did it actually start to be something you were teaching others to do? Man, my partners adopted this in 1989 and we made every air in the book. Don't get me wrong. I mean we almost got so frustrated. We almost went back to hourly billing because there was nobody out there talking about this. Nobody on the circuit, no books, nothing, not a soul, was talking to our profession about offering fixed prices. Uh, but we just knew it was the right thing to do and we stuck with it. And I'm so glad we did because it became very profitable, not only for us but for our customers. 

RB: 04:53 We started to add more value and allow, it allowed us to shrink our customer base. So we were able to get rid of low-value customers. Our team loved it. So it became a lightning rod to attract talent. And I started teaching it in 1994 for the California CPA education foundation. And it was very controversial back then to talk about getting rid of hourly billing, but also the timesheet. We had dumped time sheets about a year after we implemented six months to a year. It took my partner a little bit longer and I knew it worked. And so we started teaching at 94 and then I wrote a book about it in 1998 that book was published in July of 98. It was read by Paul Dunn and Rick Pain of results accountant systems. And they started waving that book around worldwide. That book was $150, sold 40,000 copies worldwide. And it kind of put me on the map. And in 2000 I sold my firm, my interest in the firm to my partner. And I've been doing this ever since. And that's when various age was founded. I've since written six books and do the radio show, but my whole life is dedicated to one single solitary quest and that is we will bury the billable hour and the timesheet in professions around the world. 

MP: 06:19 Fascinating. And I have to say when I went to buy your book and noticed the price of that get the, you know, you definitely are, uh, uh, eating your own cornflakes because you know, the books are not 1999, you know, 1995 are, you know, significantly, uh, costly. And you got to think to yourself, hey, why, why is this so expensive? Well, it must be valuable. Right? Um, so I kinda like that as well. It was very interesting. Now, this getting rid of the timesheet comes up because we, you know, it's, it's, there's, I totally get it for the side of the, the customer because quite frankly the, you know, at the end of the day, people want outcomes. They want to be paid, you know, they want to reach an outcome and a bit small business owners and thinking about, you know, uh, penny by penny what people are doing. He wants something done. But then on the, on the side of a bookkeeper and being able to, to estimate what it is that they've done or what their costs were, how do you, how do you do that? How do you start going about that? 

RB: 07:27 Well, you know, you gotta first off, it's a mind shift change more than anything. And that's tough for us, accountants, and I'm a former cost accountant, so this was very difficult for me. Sometimes I think unlearning is far more difficult than learning something new. But you have to understand that we know time isn't value, which is why we don't use it for cost. Because like you say, customers buy an outcome. They don't buy time. But time is also not a cost because you don't pay for your employees time any more than your customers pay for your time, right? You're buying an outcome from your employees. They're producing an outcome for you, the business owner in that they're producing great. Work it to the delight of the customers that you serve. So time is actually a constraint. It's a constant constraint. We can't store it, we can't save it, we can't hoard it. 

RB: 08:19 All businesses and indeed all living things are subject to that same constraint, which is why by the way, no other business on the planet except firms that bill by the hour keep time sheets. Why does Napal keep a timesheet or Microsoft? Well, because they don't have a business model that says what we sell is time. So you know the time that it takes you to do something doesn't shed any light into your costs or even how to improve future performance. And to me these are glaring errors of the timesheet because we spend a lot of resources, we spend a lot of time filling out time. And the question is what's the ROI from that investment? I don't think it's very high. It doesn't make us better prices and timesheets don't help us improve future performance. I can, I can scold an employee for spending 40 hours when we budgeted eight. But how's that help them improve future performance? Well, that's why we suggest one of the replacements for timesheets are after action reviews because that can actually help knowledge workers improve future performance. So there's a lot that goes into that answer, Michael, but, but just essentially it's really understanding that time is a constraint. Therefore measuring it is kind of a useless data point. 

MP: 09:31 Absolutely. And I mean I think your comment of there's a lot that goes into it is, is part of the challenge and understanding it. But I totally get where you're coming from and I think it's going to lead us down to actually getting that shift made in the industry, which, which is exciting because I think we all want to put resources and energy into areas that are going to produce exponential results. And this is sounding like, you know, this is a great opportunity for the industry overall. 

RB: 10:02 Yeah, I think the industry is finally picking up on it. I mean I know you've talked to Louis, the president of the IPBC and I'd been running a Black Swan program for his organization and we've put five groups of roughly five per group, a, sometimes six. So we've over 30 bookkeepers through this program. Every single one of them has gotten rid of timesheets and prices 100% upfront. So no, no mention of hourly rates, no timesheets for their teams if they have employees, some of them don't. Some of them are sole solos. And we've got a program down here in the USA, uh, same thing. And they are also eliminating their timesheets. And we've helped hundreds, literally hundreds, if not thousands of firms around the world do this. So we know it can be done. The evidence is on our side. This is not just a theory, this works, but I think what makes it difficult is it's a business model change and that's difficult. It's not just a pricing change. It's a business model change because it does require you to look at every system and process in your business and re-engineer it from the ground up. 

MP: 11:11 Yeah, I can, I can see that. And I've definitely heard about the black swans and spoken to a few of them and uh, it's exciting. The concept is exciting. So let's, let's think about the listeners right now. Let's pick a bookkeeper that has a couple of staff. They've been at it for a while and then they say, you know, I like the idea of this. I like the sound of it. I mean, how could they not? I think it sounds, you know, the outcomes for them is they're going to have better margins. They're going to have more of an ROI on the investment of resources that they already have. Sounds exciting. Where do they get started? 

RB: 11:48 It's, you know, and I want to give the bookkeepers out there permission to fail. The fact of the matter is you're going to make some mistakes moving to this method. And that's okay because look, you're making a ton of mistakes now with the billable hour. And the problem is we're not learning anything from them. We make the same mistakes over and over and over, which is why by the way, the profession as a whole writes down and writes off more than it writes up. So I want to give you permission to make mistakes. You're going to make pricing mistakes. The important differences you're going to learn from them is that you know, there's no education and the third kick of the mule, and that's what the billable hour does to us. But when you make a mistake with value pricing, you learn from it and you improve next time. 

RB: 12:30 And so for bookkeepers that are thinking about doing this, please keep in mind this has done one customer at a time, one customer at a time. I'm not suggesting you cannonball in the pool and do this all at once. You do it one customer at a time, offer a fixed price agreement to an existing customer or indeed a new customer. Give them three options. We were really big believers in packages of options and maybe we can talk about that next, but just realize that you move at a pace that's comfortable for you and your customers and you just do it one at a time. It may take you three months, six months, a year to make this transition, but you can do it one customer at a time. 

MP: 13:13 Okay, that's, well, that's great advice and I like that it's compartmentalizing this to one customer. I think it's great. Let's move on to those three pricing options and how does that work? Give a bit of background around that. 

RB: 13:27 If you think about any other business on the planet, I bet you even where you get your car washed, you're offered three options, right? You go into Tim Horton's for coffee and you get three options, you know, small, medium, large, whatever. Uh, you fly in an airplane, first class, business class coach. Why are car wash establishments more sophisticated with respect to pricing than professional firms? We need to offer our customers options. It's one of the most powerful things you can do. And in fact, it's convinced me, Michael, that it's, I think, and this is gonna sound very counterintuitive, especially for a numbers profession, but it's more important how you price rather than what you price. And what I mean by that is by offering options, you're letting the customer put ego investment into the decision. They're getting to decide their value price straight off. And so by offering them three options, like a green card, gold card, platinum card, like American Express, you're letting them pick the value, price tradeoff that's appropriate for them at this point in time. And that's important because we human beings likes choice. We like choices. I don't like one size take it or leave it, you know, one size fits all. It doesn't, we like choices. Now you can give a customer too many choices and paralyze them so they don't make a decision. Three seems to be the optimal number, which is why it's called goldilocks pricing. So we're big advocates of offering three different options to every customer. 

MP: 14:55 Okay. I like that. And I'm a subscriber to it as well. I often, you know, when I'm buying something I'm, I like when I have options, you know, and then I can decide what is it that I exactly want for, for our bookkeepers that are listening. It really provides a way to communicate the different services that they do offer and bring to light some of those offerings. So I really do like that. Now we've kind of got, uh, you know, the bare bones of what they could do to get started. We've, you know, pick one customer, have three different options. How do you go about making those decisions? 

RB: 15:32 You pick a customer that you're comfortable with. When I made this change, you know, there's a big debate about, you talked to some firms and they'll tell you all, you got to start with new customers, you know, start with all new customers. They'll really like it, they'll appreciate it. It'll be a point of differentiation for your firm compared to other bookkeepers. Other black swans will tell you no, no. Start with your existing customers. You already have a relationship with them. They already know you. You're comfortable with them. You can have more candid conversations. When I did this, I started my existing customers cause I felt I could talk to them easier. But here's the thing, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can do both. Pick a couple of new customers or pick a new customer that you know that you have an option for a proposal for and give them three options and then pick one customer who you're completely comfortable talking to and go talk to them at their place of business or in a bar. I did my first fixed-price agreement discussion in a bar and a golf course and my customers loved it. The number one feedback I got from my existing customers was about time. Baker, you know that you gave us a fixed price. We customers like certainty and price. So you can do both, but it's one customer at a time. And I don't care if you start with new world customers first. I've seen it work both ways, but I think we can do both. 

MP: 17:00 Now I've spoken to quite a few bookkeepers that have, you know, they haven't done any training around, they haven't, they're not black swans, but they liked the idea. They tried to do it and they've given the F. I said, well, okay, well how's that working and, and what are you charging? And they'll give me a number. Let's say it's $200 so then I said, well how much time is it taking you to fulfill on that? And, and it's they're coming back and saying, well they're there total return life hours into what they're getting paid for those life hours. If we say every hour they work as one of their life hours and it's, it's very low, 2025 I've heard as low as that. So they're making a mistake somewhere because they're working a lot for just a little. What would you say to someone that's made that mistake? 

RB: 17:45 Yeah. You know, this is why this is a very good question and really point our first sales to ourselves. So we have to believe that we're worth more than we're charging. And I think a lot of bookkeepers and accountants and lawyers, by the way, this isn't just bookkeepers. We have a distorted perception of our worth. We love to say, oh the market views us as a commodity. Or you know, people don't value bookkeeping or whatever. None of that's true. By the way. That's our own belief that we're projecting onto the customer. Customers love the fact that bookkeepers remove headaches from them, free up their time so they can go do their business. And we have to understand that first because the fact of the matter is we'll never get paid more than we think we're worth. And that beliefs got to come from the bookkeeper first. 

RB: 18:35 They've got to believe it. And then because it will come across, if you don't think you're worth it, the customer will pick up on that. They will when you're talking to them and in how you present and price and just carry yourself. And if you can't project an aura of value and outcomes, then why should a customer pay you? Maybe you are a commodity. So I think that it needs to be internalized first from us and then work outwards. Yeah. Nailed that. I think that's great. And that's the question then, right? Is what, what is a bookkeeper worth? Yeah. What's anything worth? I mean if you think about it, value is, is is an interesting word right now to the economics profession. Value has a very technical specific definition. It's the maximum amount a consumer will pay for an item. But think about it. 

RB: 19:26 Think about a bottle of water. I don't want you to think about the costs. Coke knows how much it costs to produce a bottle of water that's not, you know, rocket surgery. We can figure that out. The price we pay for bottled water, you know, in some areas and maybe more than gasoline, but think about the value for a minute. That's a different concept than cost or price. The value of that bottle of water. If I'm in the desert and haven't had water in four or five days is priceless, right? It's going to be worth quite a lot to me cause it's going to save my life. If I'm home washing the dog with the same quantity of water, now it's worth a lot less and if I'm flooded my basement with water now it's got a negative value, I'm going to have to pay somebody to come out and pump it out. 

RB: 20:07 Notice Michael that we didn't change the water. It's still h two o in all three situations. So how does it go from practically infinite value to negative value? Accounting? Can't explain that cost accounting can't explain that. The only thing that explains it is to have a theory of value and that dairy is that value is completely subjective. It's in the hearts, minds, and souls of your customer. And just let me say one more thing, that it's going to be very counterintuitive to a financial profession. Value's not a number, it's a feeling and math is not going to help you with it. Math doesn't help you get to value courage and understanding the context that your customers in, like the water example and the job they're trying to perform helps you understand value. So we always like to say that, you know, the billable hour takes a calculator, but value pricing takes courage. 

MP: 21:00 I love that. I love that answer. And this, this conversation of values is so interesting and brings up, uh, an example. I have a very good friend. Her name's Janet. She owns several number of restaurants in the city of Toronto. And just a beautiful story. She's self-made. She, she's very, very successful. But in the beginning days of her business, she hired a bookkeeper who came to her one day and showed her all of these, um, situations in her business where she was paying too much for one thing, you know, compare comparables against the industry. And she helped to create a dashboard to know if this was going on in her finances, that she, she needed to take care of them and do something which gave her the ability to have a lot of view into the health, financial health of her business, which changed the way she managed her business and gave her a lot of freedom and, and power. Well, Janet has become very, very, very successful multimillionaire restaurant tour. And when I asked her after getting involved and working with a lot of different bookkeepers, I love the story I asked her, I said, well, it was that bookkeeper really that valuable to you. And she said, if, if it wasn't for that bookkeeper, I would have never been successful. That one person, that one bookkeeper, you know what you paid for that bookkeeper $35 an hour. 

RB: 22:18 Yeah. And multiply that by so many businesses out there that feel the same way about their bookkeeper and their accountant and even their lawyer. And it's just, it's shocking how much money our professions leave on the table. And, and I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm not saying that just because, oh, you know, value pricing lets you gain, your customer also gains, you're adding more value to the customer, taking better care of them, always searching for new opportunities to serve them and add more value. So you end up with a happier customer rather than just when you slave over the billable hour. 

MP: 22:53 Absolutely. So let's get into this little bit of the feeling that value is more a feeling than it is a number. What advice can you give to bookkeepers to start to put their mind around that a little bit and to think about, well how do you start to look to your customers and determine how do I make them feel like I'm more valuable? 

RB: 23:12 Well, let me just give you a few ideas and we have an eight-step process or I lay out an eight-step process in my book implementing value pricing to kind of walks you through this. But the first step in that process is having the value conversation. So before you do anything for the customer, you sit down with them and you really try and get a feel for what it is they're trying to accomplish, not what they need, not a list of tasks, not a scope of work, but a scope of value, whether they trying to accomplish. And I think the best way to analogize this is to give you the story of, I'm looking for a landscaper, so you know I Google landscapers and my zip code and I come up with three. The first one comes out, walks around my property, says Yep, we can do all this wrong. 

RB: 23:53 We're 40 bucks an hour. Okay. So he's charging based on inputs. So I'm left there as a customer trying to figure out as he can ascend is, you know, young kids out here and it's going to take them twice as long as it should to do all my stuff. And so there's a lot of uncertainty there. The second landscaper comes out, walks around my yard, looks at everything, says Yep, we can do all this. We're a hundred bucks a month. Okay, a little bit better. He's not pricing based on inputs. He's pricing based on outputs, but the third guy comes out and says, Ron, tell me what do you do for a living? Oh, I'm a speaker. I'm an author. I’m a consultant. I speak a lot. I travel a lot so I'm not home a lot. Oh, so I take it you're not Martha Stewart. You don't like doing yard work? 

RB: 24:29 No. I hate yard work. I hate it. I only want to think about my yard all the while, of course he scoping out my yard and, but he's having a conversation with me and he says, look, I'll tell you what, you're not going to have to worry about. You're in your yard. You're not going to have to think about it. We'll take care of everything. In fact, we'll even turn the soil beds. We'll plant different shrubberies for the different seasons. I'll treat chemically treat your tree a couple times a year. Keep it robust and healthy. He said, we're going to give you the best curbside appeal in the neighborhood. I'm 200 bucks a month. Who Do I hire now? I hire the second guy because you know what, I can't find the third guy. I've never had a landscaper come out and take that approach with me. 

RB: 25:10 I have to second type of landscaper. He gives me a fixed price, which I appreciate, but I still have to go out and point things out to him and I'm thinking he's the professional. He's out here more than I am. Why can't he do these things? Because this goes back to your first comment, Michael, about people buy outcomes. I want the best curbside appeal. I do not care how he gets there. I don't care how long it takes. I don't care about the scope. I would pay three times more than what I pay now for a landscaper that gave me the best curbside appeal in the neighborhood and I can't find that person. Now. If bookkeepers take the same approaches, that mythical third landscaper, they'll be able to communicate value better and they'll be able to better capture a better price for it as well. And you know what? They'll have a happier customer. Priceless. 

MP: 26:02 I liked. I liked that and I think it gives a little bit of a framework and some thinking to be done and it also speaks to, and I want to hear more from you about this is knowing your customer, because I think bookkeepers, traditionally, their technicians are good at bookkeeping, but we're starting to talk about things that have nothing to do with bookkeeping. It's about psychology and their emotions and marketing. You know, how does a bookkeeper really get to understand who they're really dealing with and what's important to them? 

RB: 26:30 I think it's a couple things. One, obviously I believe that all professions need to be better with diagnosis. We need to go in. I can't tell you how many bookkeepers say to me, how can I give a fixed price and I get in there and their books a mess. We know what, I hate to say it, but a little tough love here. That's your fault. Because if I go to a doctor and say, Hey doc, I want heart surgery, or I want this prescription, it would be malpractice for him as a professional to give me a prescription without first diagnosing. So I want you to go in and diagnose that customer. I want you to check their QuickBooks file. I want you to look at their books. I want you to, to get your arms around everything. Because don't take their word that their books are clean. 

RB: 27:13 Go in there and look and that they won't let you. That's it's, it's a good sign that they're not the right fit. They're not the right customer. So I think we need to spend more time with diagnosis. And whether you charge for that, like some of the black swans do, or whether you just do it as part of your acquisition costs, I don't care. I want you to spend more time with diagnosis. And second is I want you to spend more time on the value conversation talking to the customer about what it is or trying to achieve. You know, if we, if you could wave a magic wand, what would you want your business to provide you? Are you happy with where you are in your business? What are your, what are your goals? You have all these types of open ended questions. We'll let you really understand what it is that the customer's trying to achieve. Because what separates a professional from a day labor is a professional, as someone who takes responsibility for creating an outcome, not delivering a series of tasks. And one of the things I absolutely despise about both yet the billable hour and the time sheet is it takes everything and turns it into a task and we need to focus on the outcome. We need to get back to that best curbside appeal because that's what the customer's buying. 

MP: 28:26 Yeah, yeah. Lots to, lots to learn. And there are many different arms we could be going down right now in this conversation, but we, uh, we obviously don't have time on this call today, but there's been absolutely gold to cure. Ron, let's break it down into three steps in terms of what you would recommend. They've just listened to this. You've given a whole bunch of concepts here. What are three steps they could take after listening to this and please include your own resources or things that you think they should, should do? 

RB: 28:58 Well, I mean, I, I, I don't want to sound self serving, but I mean some education in this and there's a lot of resources out there that you can get. I mean, I, you know, listen to Mark Wickersham. He's out, he's a consultant out of the UK. He's got a lot of youtube videos. Uh, you can get a four-part series of webinars that I did for Intuit for free on the Intuit website. And these are detailed hour and a half webinars that walk through the eight-step process to four-part series. And I even include a bunch of other resources on my radio show, the soul of enterprise. I've interviewed black swans and you can listen to their story, try and get some education on this. And then I would say take one customer a new one or an old, doesn't matter to me. Have a value conversation about some of the things they want to achieve in the upcoming year and then try and devise three options for them. 

RB: 29:51 Try and give them a green card, gold card, platinum card offerings. And I would say offer a value guarantee. Put a value guarantee on all your work that says Mr or Mrs. Customer, if you're not satisfied for whatever reason, only pay us for the value that you received that will increase the value in the minds of your customer. I will also bundle in unlimited access. Let them call you or meet with you anytime, anywhere, any link to discuss anything they want. Build that into your price. I'm not saying give it away. And with those two strategies, you'll differentiate yourself from other bookkeepers and justify a higher price. And if you just did those three things, get some education, pick a customer and then offer options. You'll be on your way to start immersing yourself into this and you'll get better at it. It's like golf or tennis. 

RB: 30:38 The more you do it, it's a skill, it's an art, but it's also a skill. The more you do it, the better you get. And by the time you do about six or seven fixed price agreements with three options, this will start to become a core competency and you'll realize this is really fun to put together these options. It allows for a lot of creativity in the customers, really appreciate it and ultimately that's why it works and that's why we do it. 

MP: 31:00 That's fantastic. Ron, we're going to have all of your steps that you just mentioned as well as links to some of the resources that you've spoken about on our website, Thesuccessfulbookkeeper.com just go to episodes and find this episode, so that's, that's great. But as well, Ron, what other resources, how can people get in touch with you? What are some of your old things that you're working on, uh, that you'd like to bring people's attention to a that we can also post those? 

RB: 31:32 Well, I would suggest people go visit Verasage.com which is the think tank I founded about 16 years ago to help all professionals make this change. There are tons of free resources up there. There are white papers, there are trailblazer case studies you'll learn from firms that have actually made this transition in their own words about getting rid of time sheets and the billable hour because that's the only way you can be a trailblazer is you have to do both and so go to Verasage.com can also check out Thesoulofenterprise.com which is my radio show that I do with Ed class. He's another fellow agent and he's an employee at sage as well so he kind of specializes in project management and pricing and we spend a lot of time on our radio show talking about pricing, interviewing accountants and bookkeepers and other professionals and we talk about the knowledge economy. 

Speaker 1: 32:21 So that's a great resource because like you might go, we have full show notes and other resources up there at Thesoulofenterprise.com people can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm one of the influencer bloggers and I've got a hundred some odd posts up there. It does also deal with pricing and some of these issues as well. And also you can find me on twitter, @Ronaldbaker and you can email me at Ron@verasage.com which is v as in Victor, e r a s a g e.com and I'm always happy to have dialogues with fellow my colleagues on further resources or point them to additional things. I'll also send you, Michael, I'll email you the Intuit webinars with all the links. I think they're up on Youtube as well as, as well as the intuit website, but there's additional links to additional resources that I mentioned in the webinars. Also, the other great thing about those webinars is there are a robust Q&A at the end. In fact, every webinar ran over by 15 or 20 minutes because there were so many Q&A and we just kept on the line and most people stayed. Those webinars were viewed over live, attended by over 2100 professionals around the world, so they were really well received. So I'll send you those as well. 

MP: 33:35 That's fantastic. Listeners, if you, if you don't have Ron Baker on your speed dial in terms of, uh, paying complete attention to what he's up to, it is a view into the future as to where, uh, we all need to go as professionals terms of pricing based on the outcomes and the values that we produce for our customers. Yeah, this is, this is a man that you want to pay attention to in a, in a movement that, uh, that he's leading. Thank you so much, Ron. This has been extremely valuable. I've learned a lot and I'm, I'm, I'm, I know I'm going to have to have you come back on the show and share more, uh, because there's just so many questions I have even after just this short interview 

RB: 34:15 Anytime. Michael, happy to do it. 

MP: 34:17 That's right. So we'll see you in the future Ron. And uh, that's it. Uh, thank you everyone for listening. This is The Successful Bookkeeper. You can find us at Thesuccessfulbookkeeper.com and you can get all the resources that we spoke about in the show notes today. Have a great one. Bye Bye.