A product ladder is a smart strategic way to grow your bookkeeping practice, and so I would love to show you exactly what it is, and how you can use it in order to thrive. So first off, I am wondering if you have heard of a product ladder before. Even though the concept of a product ladder might be new to you, it's actually not a new marketing strategy, which is awesome because it is simple and it is proven. You can get started using a product ladder in your practice really quickly, which is what I'd like to show you today. So, I would not recommend Googling product ladder because it goes by many different names, including ascending transaction model, ascension model, value ladder, and lots of different things. Plus, what you find on Google is going to be really general, whereas what I'm going to share with you is going to be specifically built for bookkeepers, which I expand on in my book, The Strategic Bookkeeper. A product ladder has four rungs on the ladder and is absolutely ascending – from step one up to step four. Step one is content. And I heard recently from one of the mentors that I follow, he framed up step one as your platforms as well. It's the content that you offer up on various platforms in order to allow people to find out about you online. And it is valuable content, okay? I like to think of step one as your content, but also, think of that first rung on your product ladder as your platforms' as well, a literal platform. Like imagine, somebody gave you a platform and they said, "okay, please get on that platform", and you've got an audience in front of you. What would you talk to the audience about something that you know, that they'll get VALUE from? That is step one. And honestly, you don't know the mountain of value you are standing on. Primarily, bookkeepers just do not. They've got far more skill and confidence, and I promise you, you're standing on a mountain of value. So, step one is your content, put it out there on your platforms! Step two is what I call your welcome line. So, these are low cost or no cost ways for your prospective clients to get a feel for your value and try you before they buy you. All right? An example of some welcome lines that I use in my practice is we have a nice little e-book called the 7 Deadly Cash Flow Sins, which if you join my program, is a done-for-you step two asset that we co-author with you. But basically, it's a little e-book. Right? Somebody can read that and they can improve their cash flow and they think, wow! This girl can really help me. And another one is simply a county file health check. So, that's just a couple of examples. Step three is your product ladder. You've all got that – that's your core products and services. Step three is simply the bookkeeping and the whatever else you have on the menu to solve problems. All right? I could say sell as well, but I like to say solve problems. I definitely believe as bookkeepers, we are solvers more than we are sellers. (But, it's still important to get comfortable with sales and marketing lingo!) So, step three is those core products and services. Maybe if you haven't heard of product ladder before, the step one and the step two, the way that I've framed them up might be new to you and you might think, oh yeah, I'll do a file health check now. Great, you've got a step two welcome line! This is just about educating so you can pull it all together, and maybe use it a bit more strategically. Step four, drum roll please: Succession products. Absolutely love them. Succession, meaning what's next. What's next on the menu that will serve and solve problems for your existing VIP clients – these wonderful people that pay you on a regular basis to help them do better in their business. Because that's what bookkeeping is, to help people do better in business. Succession products are ultimately things that you should really have on the menu for existing clients, and it is really important for when prospective clients come to you as well for you to be able to sell them what they WANT rather than try and sell them what they NEED. That's a concept that I've talked about before, but if you're hearing it for the first time, it can be quite game changing. If you try and constantly sell what people need, you'll lose them. You need to give people what they want. So, when they first come to you, what they want is a bookkeeping done. But then as you start to work with them, you might be able to help them see, or you definitely will be able to help them see that to really get results, they might like to work with you on investigating the numbers, or maybe you've got some other secret skills like recruiting or setting up software, or anything else that's really going to deepen the results that you can get for them. Now, product ladders are all around you. You are moving through them all the time as you browse in shops and as you shop online. Okay? And I'd love you to start noticing them now when I tell you some examples. Here's one: I decided to buy myself a cruiser bike. I wanted a pretty good one. I did my research online, and eventually, I found a reputable bike store. So, that was step one. They're platforms. Right? They're a website, they're social media, that kind of thing. So, I went through step one of their product ladder, I found them online. Now, their content was really useful because I was able to build no lack in trust by seeing their reputation, like their Google reviews. And seeing that they look like an established company, they had a professional online presence, all these kind of things. You can read more on this on the The Strategic Bookkeeper, where I talk about attraction and profile. But step one – the content that I found on their various platforms. So from there, I was able to see that this bike store had some really nice cruisers. They look like good quality. They fitted my budget – and that was step two on the ladder. These were actually welcome lines because they were a little lower cost, still really great value like any welcome line. So I thought, you know what? That looks like the bike for me. I'll go into the store and I'll get it. Again, step two on the product ladder. And so I went into the store and I told the assistant about the bike I was looking for, and he showed it to me. Then he told me about a bike that was twice as expensive, but was he assured me 10 times as good. Okay? Step three on the product ladder, he's leading me into more of their core products. After I bought the bike, he made sure I was on the mailing list and that I booked a service. Ta-da! He actually began to engage me in what will be my succession products, going back to the store, getting a service, anything like that, what's next on the menu for someone who's already a client. So, your favorite stores are using product ladders every day to attract and convert you. All right? This is not a bad thing. It's not a sleazy thing. If you're able to find and buy what you want and get value from, it's a great thing. That bike, that upgrade of that bike from that lovely assistant who used the VALUE approach – meaning, if I give you VALUE in order to try and genuinely help you in business, or in this case, life, then you'll probably either buy something off me, or you'll tell everyone how awesome I was. Cue, word of mouth marketing. Right? So, sales and marketing has a bad rep with bookkeepers. They don't like it, and often, they think it's icky, it's yucky, but it doesn't have to be. Sales and marketing, you could give it the meaning. As I say, we are more solvers than we are sellers, and that's exactly what this young man in this bike shop did. He was seeking to SOLVE my problem, which is I don't have a bike and I need a bike. And he quickly, through just listening to me, could see that I wanted a decent bike that was going to allow me to have hours and hours of joy riding next to the beach here on the Gold Coast. So, hopefully from that example, you can see how simply a product ladder works, and that it works in every kind of business. So now, let's look at how to make them work in your bookkeeping practice. If you've got my book or you're picking up my book (because as mentioned, this blog and my podcast is a companion to the book), I start to reference product ladder in the attraction chapter because that's where the benefits of product ladder begin. Good strategic content and welcome lines being steps one and two on the product ladder are designed to help you ATTRACT and convert more clients. So, your content helps them verify you and starts to build the know, like, and trust factor, which is like what I mentioned earlier, exactly what I did with the bike store. The know, like, and trust, three massive keys on anyone deciding to do business with you, and you can build that online easily. All right? So, you've got a profile around your qualifications, your skills and experience, you might be registered with certain professional bodies, et cetera, et cetera. All of this is actually outlined in my book. And, there's a resource within the resource, which is the attraction playbook. It's going to give you a checklist for those items that will allow your market to build know, like and trust with you easily. Right? So, I've done it step by step for you. Now, your welcome lines go one step further. So, someone finds you online. You're up there on your platform saying here's me and here's all about me. The next step is, okay, well, I'll take up one of your welcome lines. All right? So, then your prospective clients can go a bit deeper, get a bit more value. Ideal welcome lines include, as I mentioned earlier, e-books, which ideally would be a how-to guide. So if you do the exercise around your market's problems, then you can come up with ways to create a nice how-to guide, which is ultimately a bit like a long blog turned into just a little electronic book that they can grab online, you could create an audio file with that. The sky's the limit. The other ones are the diagnostic tools – a way to diagnose problems, and file health checks and various forms of consultations. Okay? So, results calls, strategy sessions, free consultations, these are all really great welcome lines that you can attach a small fee to, or you can also give away for free. There's no real wrong or right, there, it does depend on a lot of factors. Okay? So, how busy you are, we're always going to regulate capacity with price and a lot of other factors. It's interesting to know that research shows that your prospective clients will digest, on average, seven hours of your content, including welcome lines... So, that can be step one and step two... Over four platforms in 11 different forms before they actually decide to do business with you. So when I first learned that, I was really surprised. But since then, I've made an effort to observe it. I've observed prospective clients who've told me, they've followed me for a year on social media before reaching out. So now, post-pandemic, more than ever, content is king. Okay? And we say engagement is queen. Now, if you are thinking of joining my transformation program, please know, a lot of this will be done for you. You get the e-book and we do the diagnostic tools and we give you all the consultations you should and could be using, and more really robust intellectual property around your health checks. So rather than race off and do it yourself, if you are thinking of joining, just make sure that you check the program out thoroughly rather than invest the time, energy, money in doing it yourself, if you're just going to end up with it all done beautifully for you. So now, let's move on to how you can take action. I do recommend that you use a pen and paper to sketch up your product ladder. If today's read is the first time you've ever heard of product ladder, more important than ever that you go through a process of really just wrapping your head around this. Use a pen and paper, and you can literally draw a ladder so that the concept sinks in. All right? So next, absolutely use my book. Use it as the how-to guide, because that's going to take this subject deeper and walk you through all of it. Now in terms of quick wins, let's start with welcome lines. So, the easiest one for all bookkeepers is a file health check. I think of welcome lines as me saying, "Rebecca, would you like to come through the door?", welcoming them through the door for some cheese and crackers. And then step three is the main course. Right? I think of the product ladder like that. The great thing about a health check is it's completely in line with what you do as a bookkeeper, with your core services. So when people first come to you or they're online and they're looking for you, think about the problems that they're having. They're either doing their own bookkeeping and they hate it, or they're making mistakes they probably don't even know about, or somebody else has let them down. They're feeling like they're behind on the bookkeeping, they're in the dark about their numbers, they're struggling to understand it all. Their gut feel is they should really be across all this stuff, and they're not. They're starting to get a really good correct gut feel that if they're across their numbers and they were actually strategic about their numbers, they would be able to do better in business. So all of these things that they're thinking, and they're thinking, I think maybe I need one of these professional bookkeepers to help me out. Well, a file health check is the first logical place to start, and it's actually tapping into those problems because you're saying, well, you're feeling in the dark, I'm going to give you CLARITY. A file health check is definitely one of the most powerful welcome lines that you could ever offer up. If you're not offering that now, you need to do it. You can price it anywhere between zero and a $100. I would recommend that you always have it. Ours, at the time of writing, is $99 plus GST. Now, the other thing about a welcome line is you're not going to make any profit out of that. I don't care if it takes you an hour and you're telling me, well, my rate is whatever – a profitable VIP client is paying you monthly over the year. Anything is a one-off. Even if you charge a $1,000 for 10 hours of catch up, if they never do anything else with you, really, how much did you make out of that? Your core products are about serving clients over the long term, anything else is more of a welcome line. I actually even think of my primary catch up services as welcome lines because I'm still welcoming them in. When they become a progress bookkeeping client, an ongoing bookkeeping client, then, hey, we're into core products. This is all just education and food for thought for you. All right? So you start to get more strategic about exactly what you're doing and how you're serving people. So in terms of action, that's definitely where I'd recommend you start: the file health check. But I just want to give you a couple more tips. My hot tip here is that to take your bookkeeper hat off a bit and try and put your sales and marketing hat on, somewhat. And the reason for that is that the gap that exists between the client and you in terms of knowledge is so big. And I've seen bookkeepers go into too much detail in it when they do a health check, and they start going all through the file and the issues. I recommend that you keep the detail brief and that you really keep it more high level, and that way, you can tailor it. So, let's say, I said, "okay, on a scale of one to 10, one being a perfect file, 10 being, oh my goodness! Brace yourself, your file is a three, and the main areas are that there's some items that sit unreconciled on the bank statement, et cetera, et cetera." And that way, you can ask, do you have any other questions about that section of your file? What you'll find is that business owners on the whole are more... They're not so detail orientated, you are detail orientated. Start with the end in mind. The end game with a file health check is to allow them to feel your VALUE, so that they say, "you know what? I'd like you to actually help me". Because the file health check is not where you'll help them the most – it's the best starting place. We start with a file health check every single time. In fact, when we finish a catch up, we internally do a file health check. They're critical, they're so important and they're very high value, but it's not where you'll get the biggest results. So, start with the end in mind. And the end game is, "okay, we've assessed your file. Do you want us to help you?" That's just about it. Please don't spend more than 10 minutes maximum on the bookkeeping detail, keep it very high level, very summary, and then answer detail for the detail orientated people. Very occasionally, I've had clients with the health debrief that are more savvy, say, oh, can you tell me about this, that, and the other thing? Can you explain the out of balance in the payroll? And I'm like, hell yeah, I love this stuff. But on the whole, people want to know how... On a scale of one to 10, how good or bad is my file? And then what exactly do I need to do to get it in shape? They want to see your menu so they understand the journey. They want to understand the customer journey and how you're going to move them from pain to prize, more than they want to know about the transactional stuff. It's an art, practice, practice, practice, but you really need to learn to speak client. All right? And you do need to have your sales and marketing hat on in this process, which as I've mentioned before, is not icky. This is about solving problems and about helping people choose you over your competitors because if they don't choose you, they're going to go somewhere else.

As a bookkeeper, building a thriving practice is a dream that can be challenging to achieve. It requires strategic planning, execution, and a secret sauce recipe that works for you and your bookkeeping business. After many years of building and growing my own bookkeeping practice, I have discovered seven key ingredients that have helped me achieve my dream on my terms, and become The Strategic Bookkeeper. Let me share them with you. 1. Brand The first ingredient in my secret sauce recipe to a thriving bookkeeping practice is your organisation's personality. It's your vibe. Your vibe which attracts your tribe. Your brand is not a brand asset – a brand asset is a logo, a brochure or a website. Your brand is your "why". Why do you exist, which is the ultimate outcome you want for a client. Your brand is why you exist, and it's backed up by how and what. So, how do you achieve your "why" for your clients and what you do (which is your services)? I dig deep into this through my book – The Strategic Bookkeeper, but for now, let me give you the three key benefits to brand, which are: client attraction connection competitive advantage You absolutely need to attract clients to your bookkeeping practice. When you are in buying mode or in research mode, you want to connect with the person or the brand, and brand is about competitive advantage. I know you don't want to compete on price. You want to compete on value, and outcomes, and more, and so brand is absolutely about competitive advantage. This is about your organisation's vibe attracting your ideal tribe. It's about connection. 2. Menu It may sound a bit strange – menu in a bookkeeping practice – but please do not think about a restaurant menu. Think of a day spa menu with beautiful images, which quickly relaxes you and connects you to why you're in the day spa. Your menu is actually a key digital brand asset, like a multipurpose brochure. Your menu is how you start with "why" when you're talking to prospective clients about what they need and want. Bookkeepers naturally lead with "what" – they talk about the features, the functions, and the tasks, "I do bookkeeping. I can catch you up on your books". I'm a bookkeeper, but I have a powerful menu that I use in my process to prevent me from starting with "what" and to help me start with "why" every single time. People don't actually buy what you do, and they certainly don't want to pay a premium for the what. They buy why you do it, why you exist. Meaning, they buy benefits, not features. So to give you an example, here are three possible benefits that can come from bookkeeping: clarity peace of mind a thriving business Your menu should be built to talk to your prospective clients and your clients in this language. If I was to summarise the benefits of the menu in one short sentence, it would be to improve conversion without a focus on price, conversion of prospects into clients, and conversion of basic bookkeeping clients into strategic bookkeeping clients with outcomes, and value, and benefits as priority rather than price. 3. Attraction As I mention in my book, I could write an entire separate book on client attraction alone. But to keep it digestible, you can absolutely find tons of information in the Attraction chapter of my book, and then you'll find a playbook to further help you with that information. Bookkeepers need to understand that simply finding new clients or generating leads on its own does not build a thriving practice. The ability to convert more leads into high-paying clients and turn those clients into raving fans, sell succession services, and retain them forever is where the transformation happens – not when you find a new client. If you are struggling to make client attraction strategies work for you when they seem to be working for other bookkeepers, I would suggest that it is definitely because you don't have all the other pieces of the puzzle in place. Being great at what you do doesn't necessarily mean you have the skills and experience to run a successful business, which is why getting all the pieces of the puzzle in place is what makes everything work. So start with brand and get that right, then get your menu in place that it is just so incredibly powerful, and then that will lead to your client attraction strategies working so much better, which is why it's the third step. I call these steps and ingredients, because they do work in order. You need your brand in place, and you need your menu in place, then client attraction is going to work better, but they're also a recipe because when you combine all the seven ingredients in harmony, they work. Back to client attraction – the key strategies that work for this is no big secret. The secret lies in how you make them work. So the ones that work really, really well are business networking. Getting out there, meeting people and building relationships. And then, nurturing your database. Once you are in practice and you start to meet people and build relationships, you are building a database. So investing in that database, and segmenting it, and keeping in touch with everyone is one of the very powerful strategies. Definitely, relationships, referrals, and partnerships is where it's at, but getting everything into your database and nurturing that database, keeping in touch with everyone is really important too. In my book, I go into all the different strategies and I also go into the paid strategies like SEO and Google AdWords, and I help you with how to make them work. 4. Conversion If the word "conversion" sounds salesy, well, I did it on purpose because I know bookkeepers hate sales. If you're feeling that way, I want you to pause, and take a breath, and know that I'm not going anywhere in terms of your limiting beliefs. I want to help make your current ceiling your new floor. When I say conversion, I really mean a way to help prospective clients self-assess their need – their desire to work with you. I've seen extraordinary bookkeepers that can't convert prospective clients not because they're not amazing, but because they don't have a way to help that prospective client. I also call them PCs just because they don't have a way to convey their value. This is about conveying your value, but the word "conversion" is there to also help you step up, step out of your comfort zone, and get a little bit comfortable with some sales and marketing terminology. Conversion is a process, it is most certainly not going from needs analysis to your proposed solution. That is a recipe for a cost-focused client. So if you are doing that, going from doing the needs analysis to presenting your services and their attached fee, then there is a lot of room for improvement, room to learn how to use a strategic end-to-end conversion process that conveys your value and removes price as an objection. The resources in my book will walk you through all of that. 5. Succession Now, when I say succession, I mean what's next. So what's next on the journey? What else is on the menu for your existing VIP clients? I call all your clients, your regular clients that are paying you on a monthly basis and trusting you, VIPs – Very Important People. Succession is where you go beyond basic bookkeeping and solve problems for your clients, not just your prospective clients. When you bring on a new client, it doesn't stop there. We start by selling them what they want, and then we eventually give them what they need. Succession products can be anything from investigating the numbers to any number of your secret skills productised to benefit your clients. Succession alone has the power to transform your business and your life. The clients in my practice who have opted into succession services where we have either been investigating the numbers alone as a service or offered business strategy service, have turned out to be the happiest raving fan clients who saw their cost become an investment that, in their own words, they couldn't do without. Succession products are absolutely the future of our bookkeeping industry. They are how you future-proof, adapt to automation, AI and robotics, and avoid having to compete with cheap overseas labor, up your value, and have more fun. Just like every element of the seven-ingredient secret sauce, start slow, and I promise to be there to keep educating you along the way. 6. Systems I tend to think of the last two ingredients – systems and team – as almost like one ingredient, but I'll break them down a little right now. You're a bookkeeper, you get systems, what and why they're important. What I'd like to remind you of right now is the primary reason they exist: They exist so you can keep your promises to your clients, and there is nothing more important than keeping your promises to your clients. People are polite. They will say it's okay. If you break promises, if you're less than professional, they'll say, "It's okay." Behind the scenes, they will not find it okay, and they will probably look elsewhere. And so, I'm going to give you great sales, marketing, systems, and strategies, and we can put them into your systems. We have done-for-you systems in our program, but it is so critically important to understand this concept of promises kept, and there is so much data out there on organisations that focused on that and how they saw a doubling and a tripling of their revenues and their profits from focusing solely on promises kept. If you cannot keep your promises to your clients, everything else will not have the impact that it should have, so please focus on that one and understand it's the primary reason why systems are important. 7. Team The very last ingredient is team. What I would like to tell you is about the two hats that you must wear, and must wear well. They are the leader and manager. You can do all the other stuff required to make a thriving team, but if you can't step up as a leader and a manager, you'll find yourself and your clients in a world of pain. You'll hear other short thought leadership around team, around building a culture, and all of these other things. But please don't get caught up in trying to be like a corporate when you've got one, or two, or three on your team. You're a very small business, you shouldn't need layers and layers of management, and you shouldn't have anyone on the team winging or breaking their promises. The key to all of this is really clear leadership, really clear management, and of course, systems. A manager has five key areas of focus: to plan, organize, staff, direct, and control. When you put your manager hat on, you need to be prepared to do those five things and to have those five key areas of focus in an uncompromising way. Those key five areas are to ensure that your team delivers on your promise to your clients, and that it’s done in a productive, profitable way. I know all this because I've learned the hard way. I've been a people-pleasing manager. I've expected team members to just do their job without the need for tight controls or for control generally, and what I've learned is that there is no avoiding managing, true managing. As for the leader hat: A leader sets and shares the organisation's vision. That's your why – your brand – and then provides high-level direction. You need to invest in being a great leader and manager. These skills do not fall ass-first out of the sky. They're built like everything else, and you'll find more about that in my book. So there you have it, the seven key ingredients to a thriving bookkeeping practice.

With every blog post that I write, every podcast episode that I record, there is always an outcome that I want for you – and today that outcome is to help you to ASSESS whether from time to time, or at times, you may be holding yourself back from building your thriving practice. To start, let's begin with a riddle: Who am I? I am your constant companion, so I am your greatest help or heaviest burden. I will push you onward, or drag you down to failure. I am completely at your command. Half of the things you do, you might as well just turn over to me and I will do them quickly and correctly. I am easily managed – you must merely be firm with me. Show me exactly how you want something done, and after a few lessons, I will do it automatically. I am the servant of all great men and women, and alas, of all failures as well. Those who are great, I have made great. Those who are failures, I have made failures. I am not a machine, though I work with the precision of a machine and repetition of a machine, plus the intelligence of a human. You may run me for profit or run me for ruin – it makes no difference to me. Take me, train me, be firm with me, and I will place the world at your feet. Be easy with me and I will destroy you. Who am I? I want you to think and pause for a second before you continue reading. So, who am I? I am habit. Whether you've heard that riddle or not, I'm sure that, just like me, you love it or you loved it. A great habit will make us and a bad habit will break us. Good habits must be formed; bad habits, when they're formed, are hard to break. We all have good and bad habits, and this is linked to CHANGE. And change is really what I want to talk about today because when we resist change, when we resist breaking bad habits, when we resist forming new habits, we are holding. ourselves. back. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This is also about the victor or victim mentality: it's either you're a VICTOR, or you're the VICTIM. The victim is complaining about their circumstances, and I get that sometimes we are all there, but the victor very quickly finds a way to change their circumstances. When we take responsibility for what's happening in our business, then we have all the POWER to change. If we externalise the problems, if we blame our clients or the economy or whatever it is (even if there's a valid reason to blame an external force) – if we do blame an external force, we give away our power to change and we can't change anyone except for ourselves. I remember when I first learned that, I was told, "Jeannie, when you take accountability for anything, something, you have all the power. When you blame, you give all your power away." And so, now, even when something might not technically be my fault, I say, "Hey, I'm accountable. This is my business. I'm 100% accountable," and now I have the power to influence change – small change, big change, whatever it is. In terms of victor and victim, each has a BED and OAR. So with the victor, we say she uses her "oar" to row herself to success. OAR stands stands for Ownership, Accountability, and Responsibility. With the victim, we say they're lying in their "bed", and B-E-D stands for Blame, Excuses, and Denial. And in terms of making change in your business, I want to tell you that there's three A's to change. First is Awareness. You need to become aware that change is required, right? Then there's Acceptance – you need to accept that change is required. So, you might become aware of the problem, but you need to accept that change is required. And then there's Action. I was working with a business owner a while ago in the succession product area of what I do, and I introduced him to the three A's really early on. He identified immediately that he was always sitting in awareness, but never really moving to acceptance. Through really understanding those three A's, he was able to realise, "Okay, I'm aware and sometimes I even accept it, but then I don't take action." And so, I held him accountable to taking action. He actually said that the most impactful thing of the succession services that I delivered to him was the accountability piece. That is just showing up, jumping on the Zoom with him and saying, "Right, you said that you were going to do this. These are your goals, and you said you were going to, did you do it?" over and over and over, and just keeping him focused on that. But, moving from awareness to acceptance to action revolutionized his business, and it can yours as well. Now, this might all be sounding a bit ethereal, so let's put it into practice. I want to give you an example. So we're going to have a bookkeeper, and I'm going to call her Sarah, okay? So, Sarah is a great bookkeeper and she has a chapter of clients, like a list of clients, and she works very diligently, but she's not really pulling the INCOME and the LIFESTYLE that she really wants out of her bookkeeping practice. Her bug bears are that she often doesn't FEEL VALUED, and in fact, she has one particular client who she goes onsite with. This client insists she goes onsite when she doesn't really need and want to do onsite work, but he said, "I want you to come onsite." So, she goes onsite and she's frustrated and complaining that she doesn't want to go onsite, and she also tells me that this client watches the clock and questions her bill, and she goes, "He doesn't value me. He questions my bill, rather than appreciating all the hard work I do, and he doesn't even know that after hours I do some things as well, and I don't bill him for the phone calls that he makes, but all he sees is the clock." If I was to say to Sarah that she has found herself working onsite because she's failed to TAKE CONTROL, and that the client doesn't value her because she's failed to CONVEY VALUE – then I'm making her very much aware of the problems, okay? It might be a bitter pill to swallow, but the problems are the problems. It's not offensive to make a mistake or to get something wrong. Like I've said before, it's a win or a learn. So, if I'm to make Sarah aware of those two things, then the awareness piece is there. Now she's at a fork in the road, which is the acceptance piece. Her choices are she can sit in the problem and refuse to accept the truth of the situation, or swallow the bitter pill. She can blame the client for those things. She can use blame, excuses, denial, but if she does that, she won't be able to change. Or, she can simply take ownership, accountability, and responsibility and say, "Oh, okay, so I'm working onsite because I didn't take control. I don't quite understand that yet, but that seems to make sense." If she's someone who wants to just take responsibility and take all the power and says, "Oh, I'm not conveying my value. Well, how do I do that?" – she's already taking back her power. So, if we pull back on that blame piece and we say, "I'm going to take accountability for anything and everything that's going wrong in my business," you've just given yourself all the power to change and build your thriving practice. From there, Sarah can sit down and do the work around knowing her own TERMS. I have made a separate podcast around setting your terms and it's called Know Your Terms, Back Yourself, and then Value the Heck Out of Your VIP Client – do listen to that. And then in terms of Sarah going down a road where she learns to convey her value, I'll point you to a resource now. I would recommend that you read my book for that, okay? A lot of my podcasts deal with that subject as well, so absolutely listen to the podcast. To rinse and repeat, that story was about the fork in the road, right? So, the three A's to change: Awareness, Acceptance, Action. You cannot make change if you're just aware but you don't take action, or you're aware and you accept it, but you don't take action. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, that's not change. This is about taking back the power. If you've heard yourself complaining about a problem multiple times and you're not doing what you need to fix that problem, take back your power. Take ownership, accountability, and responsibility of everything in your business, the wins, the losses, the successes, the failures, or as I like to say, the win or the lesson. The triumphs are yours to celebrate, but the losses are yours to take on board as well – and when you do that, you take all the POWER to build your dream business and life. Change starts with mindset. So, take some time to just digest this concept of the three A's to change. If this blog spoke to you and you think, "That was a hard read, I feel like I might be struggling with that", then I suggest you re-read this 10 times. Keep absorbing it. Everything starts with a mindset. Everything starts with the right way of thinking and education. For example, in The Strategic Bookkeeper Transformation Program, I'm so passionate about the formula we use – starting with EDUCATION. We need to teach you what you need to know, and then we need to give you the assets and help you implement everything you've learnt and everything that you've been given, and then we need to help you practice all of that and continually support you. This is no different. If you need to improve in these areas of the three A's to change the victim into victor, then you need to educate yourself and improve your mindset, and then you need to implement what you've learned, and keep practicing what you've learned. If this is a big change for you, make it a lap around the sun. You may have heard me say that before. I believe major changes take a year – a lap around the sun. It's how I approach major changes with my clients who are engaged in succession products, because it really takes the pressure off and allows you to really consider how change can be TRANSFORMATIONAL. We don't make a transformation in a week. Any big change in your business or life, give yourself a year. But, start with education. Start with mindset. Just digest what you've read today, and then practice.