Episode 178 | Beyond The Numbers: Transforming Your Accounting Practice Into A High-Value Advisory Powerhouse With Michelle Weinstein & Fady Hawatmeh

Many accounting firms feel stuck doing compliance work while leaving significant revenue on the table. In this conversation, Michelle Weinstein joins Fady Hawatmeh of Clockwork AI to explore how firms can evolve beyond bookkeeping and transactional services into high-value advisory practices. They break down why accountants often undercharge, give away free advice, and struggle with sales structure—and how shifting to value-based pricing, clear service tiers, and problem-focused consulting can dramatically increase profitability without adding more hours. Michelle and Fady also discuss overcoming impostor syndrome, packaging advisory services effectively, and using technology to scale insight-driven guidance for clients. The result is a roadmap for transforming an accounting practice into a strategic partner that drives real business growth.

—

Listen to the podcast here

Episode 178 | Beyond The Numbers: Transforming Your Accounting Practice Into A High-Value Advisory Powerhouse With Michelle Weinstein & Fady Hawatmeh

Michelle, in San Diego, you guys have much better weather than we do in Boston, I will tell you that.

It is a beautiful day here.

I know. When is it not a beautiful day in San Diego?

It is overcast in the mornings because it is June gloom, but around 11:00 AM, 12:00, it burns off, and it is bright and sunny and really hot. I actually prefer the little gloomy mornings.

To change the pace. We have a bunch of people in. We will get started. I know we have a lot of really good conversations to have. Thank you, everyone, for joining. We are going to be talking about beyond the numbers, moving into, and really transforming the accounting industry and the accounting practice into high-value powerhouse services. I am super excited. Michelle is going to be joining me. Michelle, I will throw it over to you, give you the floor to introduce yourself, and then I will introduce myself, and we will jump right in.

Beyond The Numbers: Moving Into High-Value Powerhouse Services

I am Michelle, the founder of The Abundant Accountant. I also host a podcast called the Abundant Accountant podcast. My mission is to help firm owners really escape the daily grind who do not have a system or a real plan for the sales process in their firm so they can actually have time freedom, money freedom, and make the shift into true entrepreneurship.

I believe that firm owners should not feel burnt out, and you should be able to get to your revenue goal, no matter what that may be. Here at the Abundant Accountant, I show you how to identify the packages for your services, how to price your services, how to raise your prices without having all of your clients leave you, and so you can work with high-margin clients and improve profitability at the same time. That is what we do here at the Abundant Accountant.

High-Value Advisory Powerhouse: Firm owners should not feel burnt out. You should be able to get to your revenue goal, no matter what that may be.

I am excited about this, Michelle. For everyone who does not know me, I am Faddy, and I am the founder and CEO of Clockwork AI. Former CFO, I call myself a recovering CFO. I started my career at FP&A and strategy at Boeing. After Boeing, I went into oil and gas consulting. After that, I ran an outsourced CFO firm that was formed literally out of demand because there was very little quality happening for the companies that needed it to happen.

My outsourced CFO was started, and then Clockwork was born simply because I could not find a quality FP&A app to do my outsourced CFO work. I just keep getting pulled into different areas. That is where Clockwork came from. I am super excited about this. What we are discussing, really, for everyone in the audience, is very informal. Any questions you guys have, literally just throw them in the chat.

If you guys all want to share where you are calling in from or anything like that, just to get the ball rolling, please do feel free to share that. I am in Boston, and Michelle is in San Diego. Usually, I do not start with weather talk, but whenever anyone has anything to do with San Diego, I am always like it has to be. San Diego is the one city in all of the US that has the perfect weather. We are going to be talking about how top firms break out of compliance and transactional and low-value kinds of things and become true strategic partners for their clients.

Simple pricing and packaging literally can change revenue by 40%, 50% without adding more hours, adding more time, adding more people. We have seen a lot of different use cases, and we have seen a lot of different success stories. Michelle and I are absolutely going to share a lot of that. This is really conversational.

This is not a “We are going to talk at you,” this is a “We are sharing best practices, we are sharing why people have been doing well, why people have suffered, where they suffer.” We are all doing the same thing, just from different angles. Really, that is the beauty of it. Any questions you guys have, throw them in the chat, and we will get started. Michelle, the first question is actually for you. It is always funny, my dad always said, a smart person learns from their own mistakes, a genius learns from other people’s mistakes.

That is very true.

The Profitability Disease: Identifying Common Mistakes In Advisory

Talk to me. What are the most common mistakes that you see accounting firms make when they are trying to move into and monetize advisory services?

I would say the biggest mistake out of the thousands of people I have worked with is that you give away free advice. You are helping clients without getting paid. You undercharge for your services, which means that you are charging lower, maybe to get them on board with you, to engage your firm, and you are like, “I will raise them later.” You are discounting your services. You are like, “I will discount this,” when really you are trying to sell a premium service.

It is almost like, Fady, you are going and saying, “I want to fly private jet planes, but I want to pay Spirit Airline prices.” That is probably the biggest mistake I see firm owners have because those are the ones that we fix at first. If you are having a sales call and then you realize that you gave away free advice, or you realize that you undercharged, or you realize you gave a discount, and you feel like you are always caving in on price, you are not alone.

I would say that is the majority of the industry. As firm owners, you have incredible technical knowledge and technical skills, and there are probably other CFOs here. The problem is you have zero structure around your sales process. You do not have any boundaries. You have a process to get the work done for your clients, but then you have nothing that tells you what to do from the time you meet the client to what to say to the client, how to follow up with the client, and that is all the sales process.

What I found, Fady, is that it has cost most firm owners thousands of dollars on a monthly basis, on an annual basis. As an industry and as a firm owner, if you want to still be owning your firm, we have to shift from giving away our time and actually commanding our value. We can do that without being salesy, without being pushy, without being aggressive.

High-Value Advisory Powerhouse: As an industry and as a firm owner, if you want to still be owning your firm, we have to shift from giving away our time and actually commanding our value.

It is important that we know as firm owners what our sales process is and what words we need to say so we do not freeze up and undercharge, give away our free knowledge and our free advice, and then wonder why we have so much work but so little money in our bank account. We feel like we are working for free.

That is what I am really here to put a stop to because I was talking to one of my colleagues, and she goes, “This is like the overworking and underearning epidemic.” I was like, “It is like a disease that we have to fix and eradicate, and we can do that one firm owner at a time because once all of us stop undercharging,” and us I am saying if I were a firm owner, but I am not, “Once we stop giving away free advice, this is our inventory.”

Our businesses and our firms do not have shelves of goods, we do not have shelves of food, we do not have physical inventory. We actually have inventory that is in our head. Why do we continue to give it away for free? I hope that answers your first question on the biggest mistake that I have seen.

Those are all very good points. In addition to all that, I would say so many firms love to do the one foot in, one foot out approach on advisory. They are like, “We are doing it.” It is like you are doing it for one client, maybe two, and then you are saying that you do advisory, but then you do not actually do advisory, and they are not paying for advisory.

That is legitimately probably the most common mistake that I have come across and continue to make, and it is the perception of doing more, but then they do not have the perception that they can do more and offer more because you have the imposter syndrome especially when it comes to advisory services of like, “Why would someone pay me all that money to give them. I am just the accountant, or I am just the numbers person.”

There is a lot that plays into a factor, but it is always funny when you talk to a firm. If you look at a firm from the outside in, you are like, “They are crushing it. They have tons of clients. They have advisory services. They do outsource CFO.” You talk to them, and they are like, “We have three. Three clients.” I am like, “What? Why?” They always do the one foot in, one foot out. Advisory services, you have to commit or not commit.

Selecting Success: How To Identify Ideal Candidates For Advisory

You have to go all in. It is two feet in, or no feet in, or just continue to do compliance work. Fady, can you share how a firm owner figures out who is an ideal candidate for advisory? What if they are like, “I have been doing what Michelle just said, I have been undercharging, I have been giving away stuff for free. I give discounts. I want to put an end to that,” and I am like, “How do I transition to sell more of those high-value services?” How does a firm owner start identifying who would be a good fit for that?

Every single firm owner knows who the clients are. There are super hard lines in the sand things where I look at from a revenue perspective, like if they make over a million in revenue or if they are growing twenty percent year over year, month over month. There are certain quantitative things that you can tie, but no one knows your clients better than you do. Who is asking you those questions?

Why are they asking you those questions? Are they reaching out to anyone else? One of the biggest things is if they are not coming to you for that stuff, but their business is still going through it, they are probably going to someone else for that. Why are you not entering yourself into those conversations and being like, “Who are you going to for cash flow forecasting? Are you actually planning out scenarios? Are you doing all the different things for your business? You are opening up a new building, or you are buying a new thing, or you are hiring more people. How are you making those decisions?”

Simply asking how they are doing, what they are doing, and then inserting yourself in those. That is a low barrier to even seeing if there is a conversation to be had. On the other side, you know clients who are always reaching out to you. You give them an inch, they take a mile. They want to have a quick chat, and then that quick chat turns into an hour-long free consultation about all the stuff that they are working on.

A lot of the clients, they need it. It is just at the level of what you can provide, and that is when the scaling and the tiers and the pricing, all that leveraging technology obviously makes that easier to be able to have that reach across the board. That is how I did it, and that is how I have seen a lot of the successful firms doing it.

Those are some good next steps for someone who is just doing it for free and wondering, “How do I figure it out?” What if they do not have any clients that are doing a million?

There are different buckets. That just means you cannot charge the true top dollar. When I started my firm, the most I charged was 2,500 a month. All my clients were super small startups, so none of them were making over a million. When I had scaled, and I was properly doing outsource CFO work, they were all making over a million dollars in revenue because I knew that they could afford the $5,000 to $10,000 engagements every month, and it made a lot more sense. You do not need to have the stereotypical outsource CFO $10,000 a month engagement. You can start small and just start with charging $1,500 a month. If a company is making half a million, they could probably afford to pay you $1,500 to $2,500 a month.

That seems too low, but that is for a different conversation.

There are levels to it. The net-net is every client needs it. There is not one client in the world that does not need advisory services. How you package it, how you price it does depend on their revenue, their growth, their targets, their goals, all that kind of stuff. That usually drives where you can build your firm. If you are a low-volume, high-value firm, your fees have to be higher. If you are a high volume, low value, that is not bad, you just have to be able to leverage technology to make sure you are not turning yourself from having 10 bosses to 50 bosses because every one of your clients is going to have demands.

That is for sure. That is very helpful. That is probably one of the biggest questions. “How do I get these clients, and how do I identify who would be a good fit who is already on my roster?” It is like, “Now, how do I sell premium advisory services? How is someone going to pay me when they have been paying me $300 a month, now you are telling me to go $1,500, $2,500 a month? It is a shock for the firm owner too.”

The Surgeon Vs. The Checkup: Pricing For Life-Changing Results

With that transition, how are you seeing those common mistakes and solutions for the people that are actually going through that transition, with how they price, how they sell those services?

There is so much behind it. I would say the first thing that you have to do is you have to stop procrastinating and actually get into action. To stop procrastinating, you have to do what you said and identify “Who am I going to reach out to and who am I going to call?” Until you have that, you are going to just continue doing what you have been doing for a very long time because people do not want change. Human beings actually do not like to make a change.

How many of us say, “I have got a New Year’s resolution,” and then we never do it? The first mistake that we need to really identify is looking at yourself and saying, “Which clients am I going to commit to having a conversation with?” As far as how to price and sell advisory services, one of the most important things is that if they are a current client, you want to prepare at least one hour before a sales meeting.

You want to look at their financials, you want to look at their books, you want to look at their accounting. You want to identify that if you were going to work with them at a greater capacity, what other things could you help solve for them, and what problems could you help them solve in the future? Faddy, when an accounting firm is looking at its client roster, they are typically just doing monthly accounting or bookkeeping, right?

You are looking at just the general stuff. You are not looking at preventative stuff, future planning, all the things. You are looking at it from maybe 90 degrees of a pizza pie, and then we are looking at if you are doing advisory, you are looking at a full 360. One of the ways to think about that is pricing. You have to think about it like doing surgery if you were a doctor.

If you were to perform surgery and you are removing tumors from somebody, what are you going to charge if it changes their life? If they can have a full, healthy life if this were removed, and if this surgery could solve that problem. If your advisory services, CFO services, whatever you are going to call it, is that same thing as surgery for your client, versus right now you are just doing the bookkeeping.

Just doing the stuff to get by, but you are not helping with growth, you are not helping with minimizing other expenses, or all the other technical stuff that you guys do when you are doing advisory services, then we are not looking at the whole thing, so our price would be lower. What I like to think of it is, how would you like to get paid if you were the advisory surgeon doing surgery on your patient, versus having them just come for general checkups once a month? It is very different.

I will actually add to that analogy because one of the things that changed my entire outsource CFO firm in general was I would go and talk to a company, a client, and I am like, “I will be your outsource CFO,” and they are like, “I know I need one, but what are you going to actually do?”

I do not get it. What the hell does that mean? If you tell me that I am, I do not understand what you mean.

That is like going to a doctor and being like, “I know I need my stomach checked,” but you are going to the wrong doctor, or they do not actually tell you what they do. I actually like that analogy.

Closing The Gap: Moving Beyond Passive Quotes And Proposals

It is one of the biggest things when you are thinking about the pricing, but then, how to sell it. The other biggest mistake that I have seen is that firm owners send quotes and proposals. You meet with somebody, I do not even know what you say to them in that hour, but you do whatever you do, and then you give them some price, and then they say, “Great, can you send over the stuff for me to review?”

High-Value Advisory Powerhouse: The other biggest mistake is that firm owners send quotes and proposals.

You comply with the client’s request, so you are not in control of the conversation. You send a quote or proposal, and then you keep checking your computer, wondering, “Why did they not sign it? They said they wanted to move forward and review everything,” and you are never asking for the sale. You are never getting a full-on commitment. You are never going to grow your revenue that way.

You are never going to have people. It is like taking a passive approach versus a proactive approach to being able to handle objections, see what questions they have, maybe some concerns, maybe they do not understand, like you just said. “I know I need a CFO, but I do not know what that means.” Maybe they are sitting there the whole sales meeting and listening and being like, “Uh-huh,” pretending that they think they know what you are talking about or they understand you, and then you send them the quote or proposal, and you get ghosted.

You hear crickets, and you wonder why you keep meeting with people, but none of them are converting and engaging your firm as a new client or as an upgraded client. If you are doing monthly accounting or bookkeeping and you are having these meetings with your current clients, you are wondering why none of them are moving forward. This is probably why.

I was going to say it is what we talked about at the beginning. It is the half-in, half-out. It is very easy to be like, “Fine, just stay on your existing thing, we are not going to completely change it.” The path of least resistance. People are afraid of change. That is legitimately the evolution.

People are afraid of change, but here is the real thing: like the clients that I work with, you have to be sick and tired of how much money you are leaving on the table. You have to be sick and tired of how much you are undercharging for your services. You will finally make a change because then you will not have to sacrifice weekends with your family anymore.

You will not have to work from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. You will not have to check anything on the weekends in your inbox. You can pay off all your debt if you have it, you can go on dream vacations, you will be cash flow positive, and never have to worry about money or borrowing from a line of credit. Until someone feels and wants that and is sick and tired of the way things are going, no one is ever going to change.

The 2025 Evolution: The Reality Of Automated Bookkeeping

That is absolutely right. Last year, a lot of it was, “Do I need to move to advisory? Can I stay on the bookkeeping? Can I stay on the transactional?” What 2025 has shown everyone is that either you literally evolve into advisory or you will not have a firm. That is, the evolution is happening so fast. You have Intuit literally every day on a mission. They have a metric boatload of money that they are investing in completely making bookkeeping just built into the product.

Last year, they got a lot of flak when the whole bookkeeping, Bookkeeper Live, or whatever, and then they just rolled out the brand new bookkeeping AI. You are not going to go against Intuit. Intuit will solve the bookkeeping solution. Same with Xero. Xero has JAX, they call it. Everyone has an AI bookkeeping solution. This year is the year that is like, “If we do not evolve, we do not have five years to figure it out.” I have met with so many firms that think they have 3 to 5 years, and they are like, “I will retire by then.” Your timeframe is like a one to two-year timeframe.

You become premium and I think it goes back to, “Do you still want to be like Spirit Airlines or these higher volume, low fee, low cost firm?” or “Do you want to be like flying a private jet with 8 to 10, 20 maybe tops clients paying you top dollar so you can enjoy your life and freedom and do all the stuff that you want to do, not care about what Intuit is doing or not care about what the other company said was doing?”

That is really what is possible for every single person here. You can make that shift. You can boost your revenue without working more hours. You do not have to negotiate your prices, you do not have to discount your worth, and you continue to be like a discounted airline. You can actually be in premium jet or business class seats in your firm, and that was something that would probably be more fun for the work that you are doing and everything else.

Fady, for you, do you have a case study of a firm that actually made this transition? I know you are a case study, but maybe someone else who actually had an advisory model that worked and they transitioned current clients into advisory, and what happened with their firm, how did their revenue change, how did their personal life change?

The All-In Strategy: A Case Study In Rapid Transformation

For us, it was an absolute revolution, and how people were leveraging Clockwork. We had a firm that came on, and they signed up for Clockwork literally on December 31st. It was a bookkeeping-only shop. They had very few advisory clients, and they were like, “We need to prioritize advisory, we need AI to do it, and we do not have a team that does the modeling and all this kind of stuff, we need software.”

She signed up literally on December 31st. By the end of January, she had over 400 clients signed up on Clockwork. Her strategy was, “Give them the value. Who cares whether they are paying advisory or not? Software can do it for pennies on the dollar in comparison to paying for someone to do it and spend the time.” What she did was she created a demand where she gave the value to the clients, and then the clients were coming to her and being like, “Where did this come from? What is this? Can I get more of this? I have questions about this and this and this.”

She is like, “Great. These are my three advisory tiers. Sign up for gold, bronze, or silver, whichever one you want, and then I will have the conversation with you.” Overnight, she seemingly turned her entire bookkeeping practice into an advisory firm where now all those clients who wanted more got more, and then the clients who did not even need it. They did not know they needed more. They got more, and then they came and asked for more. That was revolutionary.

When you think about this example, what would you share with a firm owner who is tuning right now and wants to have a revolutionary experience just like that and make this transition?

The biggest thing is, especially this one person, she was all in on the future. She is like, “I am done. The mind is made up. We are going all in.” You either go all in or you do not.

You have to put the history in the past and go all in on the future. It is what it is.

You have to commit. No firm is doing a little bit and a little bit that we have seen really completely change the trajectory of their clients. As I said, every client needs advice. It is really your job, our job as professionals, to be able to deliver what they need, what they are asking for. Michelle, I am curious. I saw this question from Josh come in while you were talking about the pricing and packaging.

Josh said, “We have a handful of accounts between $2500 and $10,000 a month. I feel good about selling a fractional CFO to those accounts. The bulk of my clients are paying $1,000 to $2,500 for CAS.” I have my own opinion on that, but I will reserve it. “How would you package a service or a deliverable that would be appealing to them from a price perspective and not overcommit us to wide open scope advisory?” I have an opinion on that, but I will let you tackle it first, and then I will jump in.

I am not even going to tackle it from what you are selling services, Josh. I am going to tackle it based on what I was talking to you about earlier. It is not about the service or your package name that people buy. People buy a solution to a problem. If you can identify 5 to 10 problems where you are like, “This really solves this person’s problem, it eliminates the money tumors in their business, the future tumors, whatever.”

High-Value Advisory Powerhouse: People buy a solution to a problem.

Tell me if I am wrong, Fady, but if you are doing client advisory service and then you are going to be a fractional CFO, client advisory is maybe doing like a 90-degree piece of a pizza, whereas a fractional CFO, you are going to be looking at everything in total, so 100% of a pizza. You are doing a full 360 holistic view, is that correct?

Correct.

That is the case, it is the same thing as someone who is going for a regular checkup to the doctor every single month versus someone who is like, “I want to be good forever, I am willing to go and do this surgery with the top doctor, maybe you flew to the special doctor in some other state because it is going to get the result.” When you think about sales, and this is for everybody, sales is about a problem.

For example, let us say one of you wants to come to me because you want to work less and earn more money. You want to stop trading your time for dollars. Josh, you are not doing that, but there are a lot of people here who are charging hourly or charging really low rates. They are having scope creep, Josh, as you talked about in your question. We say, “We want to start commanding premium fees without the burnout.”

“How do I do that?” That is a problem, and that is a problem that I help solve because I help you solve it, so you are not getting documents late, you are not having people haggle over price, and you are not having people ask you for discounts. You can boost your revenue without working more hours, not discounting, not negotiating your price, and never discounting your worth. Many firm owners, Josh, come to me and say, “How do you do that?”

“I perform surgery. We will have a surgical experience together, per se.” When you think about your fractional CFO services, how are you having a surgical experience with your current client or a new prospect? What does that look like? You have to think about it and write it out. You should have a list of at least 10 to 20 things on how to solve problems for people. That is how you can command a higher value, charge premiums, and it is the thing that will set you apart from any other firm owner here. That is the same way that you can gain financial freedom. The freedom each of you deserves and time freedom, so you can get your time back.

Very few companies in the world actually need fractional CFOs. This is a soapbox that I will absolutely get on.

I cannot speak to that, so go for it.

The Mechanics Of True CAS: Standardizing The Deliverable

Maybe for another time. If you have CAS clients and you are actually doing client advisory services, you have to have a deliverable. Every company needs metrics, every company needs dashboards, every company needs a cash flow forecast. I do not care how good or bad, those three things are what every company needs. If you do not have an out-of-the-box solution to provide those for all your clients, you are not doing CAS.

If you are classifying and calling your clients who are paying you $1,000 a month, and you are saying that is CAS, that is not CAS. There is no chance you are doing actual client advisory services, and you are spending maybe three to four hours on them a month, unless your hourly rate is the hourly rate of a bookkeeping firm. There is no chance. Standardizing those offerings, standardizing the delivery.

Having a three-tiered pricing model of bronze, silver, and gold in whatever nomenclature you want. Just having a three-tiered approach that says the bottom tier is this bucket and that is the range, the middle tier is this bucket, and that is the range, top tier same thing, but with very clear deliverables. You are getting insights, you are getting an actual update on scenario planning, you are getting industry benchmarking, you are getting certain things.

However, you want to deliver to your firm, but if you have a range literally from $1,000 to $10,000 for clients, there is nothing standardized about that entire thing. How are you supposed to manage your own workforce? How are you supposed to manage when you can upsell a client? How are you supposed to manage the deliverables of those clients?

There are so many different things that are packed into that question. CAS is absolutely the minimum that I would ever charge anyone for. CAS is 2,500 a month, and then it just scales up from there to north of $10,000 to $15,000 a month. CAS, outsource CFO, fractional CFO, advisory, it is all the same thing. There should be no segregation between the nomenclature of that, but standardizing that offering is how you turn all those $1,000 a month clients, because I promise you, those clients are misguided on what CAS actually is if they think that they are paying 1,000 bucks for CAS and they are not getting the value or two, the firm itself is misguided.

One of those two things, but being able to actually provide that value for the clients is what is going to be able to allow them to grow, and even if a client is not making that million-dollar revenue, like, “It is your job as the money person to identify how they can.” If that is a goal for them, if they want to increase revenue, why are we here? We are here to be growth levers, not cost centers, for all of our clients.

Josh, I do not know if that answered your question, but it is important to think about when you guys hear the word value and charging high premiums for the value you provide, just equate value to the problems you solve. The bigger the problem you solve, the more you can charge. Why do you think top surgeons who are saving people’s lives are getting paid top dollar? If you look at nurses, an anesthesiologist nurse is a top paid nurse out of any kind because they are keeping people alive all the time.

Michelle, I have got to know: what is your tie to the medical field? Where is the analogy from the medical field?

I do not have a tie to it.

I love it, by the way.

It is just that I believe everyone here should be paid like a top surgeon and a top doctor, and you are not. You solve some of the biggest issues for people from a financial standpoint if you own a tax firm, from a tax standpoint, or in tax planning or resolution cases. You get people out of deep messes from their financial or poor health, or improve their health. You get paid like teachers.

Nothing against teachers, but it is like I talk to people who want to make a lot of money every day, and firm owners like, “I started my own firm, but I am not making a lot of money, and I get all these people that are haggling over price, and it is just not fun anymore. I am not profitable. I want the life that I want, or maybe I should just go get a corporate job. I started this firm, and I feel like I am just stuck in a job.” No top surgeon says any of those things. That is why. I have no tie to it. Maybe back when I was in college, I wanted to be a doctor, I do not know.

Value Vs. Time: Poking Holes In The Hourly Model

I am here for it 100%. I have a really good question for you, but I am going to actually jump into the chat. He said, “I would love for you to poke holes.” Be careful what you ask for when you ask me to poke holes. His question was, “I bill a monthly retainer based on an hourly estimate. $200 a month for retainer, overage hours are 350 an hour. If someone wants strict hourly, we bill them $700 an hour. I have a small team, five FTEs plus me. The retainer is typically $1,500 to 50 hours a month.

This is scaling well. I would love for you to poke holes. What should I think about differently?” My response is super simple. If you are coming back, and I know this because I did this same mistake. When I came up with my retainers, I was like, “I will start doing this work, which will probably be ten hours a month, and I am going to bill out $200 an hour, so that means my retainer is going to be $2,000 a month, and that is what you are going to be at.”

At the end of the day, it is no better than hourly billing because you are still selling your time for the retainer. What I started doing, and what was the groundbreaking thing for my outsource CFO firm, I am like, “How valuable is this for this client? If this client goes and raises $5 million because of the work that we did on their model and their pitch deck, that is worth $10, 000 a month, whether I work 2 hours or 20 hours, that is worth $10,000.”

Value-based pricing has nothing to do with the number of hours that you spend. If I go look at a P&L, because I have been in finance for twenty years, I can look at a P&L, dissect it, and identify all the growth levers, all the red flags, all the yellow flags within probably 10 to 15 minutes. It may take someone new to the field, new to the industry, it may take them ten hours.

Why should I charge any less than the person who is going to take ten hours? Provide the value because you come with tremendous experience. If you are billing $700 an hour, you obviously have something very valuable to provide. Make sure you are charging for the value, not the time it takes you to provide the value.

I’ll just say something to that, and Josh will answer your question about problems to solve. Just to add on to what Fady was saying, I am sure you guys have seen it all over the internet and Facebook and stuff, but I have had a lot of problems at my house, and I bought a really expensive fixer-upper. From the outside, and I will use the medical term, Fady, because that is just where we are going to go with it. My house looked like it had the best facelift and plastic surgeon on earth. Underneath it, I am like a cancer patient. My house has tumors growing inside and out of it.

Very Southern California thing.

They just did the outer, but the inner. You have high blood pressure, and I have got my house has cholesterol. It is on the verge of needing an ER room, even though from the outside, it looks great. I have had a lot of people come to the house. To speak to your hourly thing, look at the plumbers. I cannot remember what they say, but you have a problem, and you have a person come over.

They are like, “I will try to figure it out,” and they are charging you by the hour, and you are like, “When the hell are you going to figure it out? This is leaking over here. Come on, let us do it.” Cannot figure it out. It charges you for ten hours. The next guy comes over, a plumber, says he knows exactly how to fix this, and “Just so you know, it is going to be $2,500.” I just paid someone else, like whatever, 100 an hour or whatever it was.

I am like, because of what I do for work, I really do not care. I am like, “How fast can you fix this and get the hell out of here? I do not really care what it is going to charge what you are going to charge,” because this goes into Josh, the next thing. My problem will cost me more than the $2,500 I am going to pay him to fix this problem, because more water damage equals more problems, which are actually a bigger problem than the plumbing problem.

You pay the person $2,500, they are here ten minutes, and you are like, “Okay.” You cannot interview for a trade worker’s knowledge. You just have to figure it out by referrals because it is like, “How good are they, and if they are the most expensive, they are typically really good because they are going to fix shit fast and move on.” They know that they can get ahead of everybody else because they are a specialist. Just like a surgeon, they are a specialist.

I had a case of vertigo this year. I have not had it in years. I could not knock it out of bed. I was lying in bed, and it felt like my bed. Do you know when you are on an airplane, and it hits a pocket of air, and then you go, “Whoa?” I felt like that. I could not walk. I was like, “What the hell is happening to me?” I crawled to the kitchen, got electrolytes, coconut water, and water. I just do not know what is happening.

I went to the doctor, she goes, “You need to go see the dizzy doctor. This has happened now more than once. Let us see if he can find the problem.” He is a neurologist but only specializes in vertigo. Go get an MRI, go get a hearing test, and go get blood work. They are looking at all these markers that no other general doctor will look at. It took me like one appointment, even though with vertigo, it is weird because it just comes and goes.

They can put you in this space chair-looking thing and try to fix the crystals in your ears, and it sometimes solves itself. In my case, it solved itself. The way they executed the problem, they went strategically to a few different tests and said, “Until you get these tests, get them done in the next week, and then we will figure it out.” They do not even waste their time.

How many of you guys waste your time without people getting you specific documents that you need or other stuff that you need? That is my two cents to add to what you said about Jeremy. For Josh, when it comes to the problems that you solve, you put cash flow, twenty percent year-over-year growth, all that. That is actually not a problem. Those are actually things that they will get if you can solve the problem. Let me explain to you guys what problems are.

This is probably the hardest thing for any firm owner to wrap their head around. If you all want, you can go to TheAbundantCall.com, and you can book a free strategy call with me and my team, which I think Erin is going to put in the chat, because then we can talk about your biggest revenue blockers, lay out a roadmap to exactly the problems you solve, and how much you should be charging. I recommend you go and schedule a phone call with my team and me.

Solving For Stress: Identifying The Emotional Problem

The real problem is not what you think it is. It is not cash flow. The question becomes, “If I can solve cash flow, what would they be able to do?” I solved cash flow, actually, for one of my lovely clients, we will just call her Barb. She had to go get a line of credit every single year in January and February just to make payroll because her cash flow sucked.

The problem was actually the amount of money she was wasting on interest on the line of credit and the stress of not having enough cash to be able to pay payroll. It was not that I was fixing cash flow. I was actually solving her problem of stress, anxiety, and anger. She was very angry in the beginning when I first met her. How much money she wasted because she had to keep dipping into this line of credit and felt like she could never get herself out of it. That is the problem.

How did you charge Barb?

Barb went through my eight-week sales mastery course. I do not charge like you guys do in a firm, it is a little different because I do a coaching program here at the Abundant Accountant so you can understand and get to the real problems but really think about a full sales process for your firm and it is the exact system that I have helped hundreds of firm owners use to double your revenue if you have AR, never have AR.

The problems are when Josh is asking about the twenty percent year over year. When you look at your client base as a whole across the board, if there are common themes, absolutely drill into them. If you guys have chosen niching, Josh, I do not know if your CAS clients are, but a huge nitpick, I would never call bookkeeping clients CAS clients. If you are niche, then every single one of the companies is probably going through the same stuff.

If they have issues with AR/AP, accounts receivable/accounts payable, that is a massive, massive thing. This is where things like Clockwork, if you have some sort of software that identifies this stuff for you, that is phenomenal. It is the thing that is like, “You have a collection issue. You have a ton of revenue, but you are not actually collecting the cash on that.” Taking your clients and saying, “Did you guys know that these bills are overdue? Are these invoices overdue?

You’re aging.” Even if you do not use Clockwork, I do not care. Go into QBO, go into their QBO account or Xero account, pull an AR aging report. Go through that. It’s very simple stuff. Delivering that, being top of mind, being front and center for your clients on what matters to them, like revenue, keeping expenses down, and headcount, is always a massive thing. Every single one of the clients, their number one expense is salaries. How are they paying?

They always have people that they are struggling with, “Should I be paying them? They are so expensive, they are not doing their job, they are not doing this. If this person leaves, I am going to be screwed. How do I hedge this?” Letting your clients have those conversations with you or even going to your clients and being like, “Guys, Clockwork integrates with the payroll. If you do not have access to their payroll provider, ask them. Let us get full access, let us get a headcount plan, let us look at your headcount, can you forecast out new hires? Do you want to forecast new hires?”

Having those kinds of things, every company needs cash, every company has stuff on the people side. You hit those two things, you are talking to 5 to 10,000 clients all day, every day, because if you save them $50,000 on a bad hire, that you literally just paid for yourself. If you include all the revenue opportunities for making sure that resources are allocated correctly, then you are an irreplaceable advisor. There are levels to it as you climb, and as you go up, with the common problems for your clients, but that really just depends on how you want to add that value for the clients and at what stage they are at. That is how I did it, and that is how I have seen a lot of the successful firms doing it.

High-Value Advisory Powerhouse: If you include all the revenue opportunities for making sure that resources are allocated correctly, then you are an irreplaceable advisor.

Fady, with that, like those firm owners who have impostor syndrome. What do they do to move past the point? What kind of skills and knowledge are truly the essential things that they need before they launch these services?

The biggest thing is to start with the pricing and packaging that you think will work. That’s really number one, a lot of times people have seen so many firms that spot around the axis simply because they’ll say, “I just do not know what to charge. I’ll figure out what to charge them after I have all these conversations. I have to put up a website. I have to make my marketing material. I have to pay all these people. I have to hire someone.”

Stop doing that. Just stop making excuses. Literally come up with three tiers. Come up with the pricing. I do not care if it’s $200 a month or $10,000 a month. Have very standardized deliverables on those three, and go and start selling them. That is impostor syndrome. Stop making excuses to delay this. It’s a very easy thing to be like, “I’ll just do it after I do this.” Taxi season comes, and all of a sudden, everyone falls off the face of the earth.

It’s like, “Why do you think that happened?” “All because 95% your books or 95% book of business are tax clients. They’re not advisory or CAS.” If you probably say yourself up next year to not have that much of a pain, or that of a scramble, where you’re literally dead to the world from January until May while you’re trying to do the taxes. That’s how I would think. When you look at Michelle, what’s your recommendation for structuring the advisory services, doing the pricing, doing all that stuff for those clients?

It comes down to surgery again. We have to identify the problems, and we have to identify how big the surgery is going to be. If you’re doing, like you said, you’re going in and you’re performing surgery on all this, like, the money that’s not in their accounts from clients and you’re able to get that money in the bank and they’re actually not being a free bank to their customers, that’s a pretty big performance of surgery for that type of client.

You have to identify and it’s like there’s not a one size probably fits all for what you guys do with advisory. It’s just not like that. You’ll start to see consistencies and differences depending on, maybe, how complex or how big the company is. I think it’s really about identifying. We’re just going to keep it simple. What is the real problem?

How is your client drowning in work or drowning in whatever they’re drowning in? Some of you, if you do like tax or bookkeeping and you’re dealing with all the deadlines, you’re drowning in long nights. You’re drowning in endless emails. You’re drowning from barely having enough time for your family. You have to think about that for your clients.

How are they feeling? I know a lot of firm owners that I work with, like Barb. When we first met, she was stressed, angry, exhausted, wondering if this is just how it’s going to be, and then she’s like, “Michelle, and I should really hire someone just to do all my sales, because I hate that too.” She wanted to sell most of her business and just go spend time with her husband.

Now she’s like, “I actually like this. I need to find someone to actually do some of the client work. I just want to keep meeting with clients, make the money, and then work part-time.” I was like, “You do not want to retire anymore and just get rid of the business?” “No, I like this now.” You have to really understand what the problems are, and that’s how you’re going to package. That’s how you’re going to price because you have to have a system to convert these people into these advisory packages.

High-Value Advisory Powerhouse: You have to really understand what the problems are, and that’s how you’re going to package.

That’s the only way you can maximize revenue. It’s the only way you can get rid of the problems you all put in there with charging the retainers. You’re not lawyers. Lawyers sometimes don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, right? We, as firm owners, and if you’re doing this advisory work, you know what to expect. Once you perform enough surgeries, once you do this with enough clients, you’re going to start to see repetition, and that’s where maybe you can standardize, maybe some of the packages.

The Diagnostic Gate: Protecting Your Strategy Time

I’ll say there, there is always a CYA on new clients. They cover your ass on new clients.

I always talk about it, Fady, like a house.

I would never sign on a client until they sent me all three financial statements, gave me access to the credit cards, and gave me access to their bank accounts. Literally, I wouldn’t even take it. I would have one strategy meeting with them and have a conversation. If they didn’t send me all that stuff before I get them an actual, I will charge you this much. You have until literally today to tell me you want to go or you don’t want to go. I wouldn’t even have that conversation because you can.

I’ll take it one step further, Fady. I wouldn’t even have a strategy meeting with them until you had it. My boyfriend has had one surgery and may have to have another one on his back. His orthopedic surgeon does not even meet with you unless you have an MRI, an X-ray, blood work, and something from the cardiologist saying you’re cool for surgery. You’re done with pain management, and you’ve attempted all the PT. Once you do all that, then you can go see the surgeon.

You get an honorary MD for how many medical uh metaphors.

I’m just keeping going because it makes sense.

Just throw them, I love them.

Are you guys resonating with this? Is this helping you understand how to solve problems and how to firm differently? That’s what you have to do. I would take it one step further, Fady. You don’t even have that strategic first initial meeting until you’ve reviewed all that stuff. That’s what I teach in my program, too.

Again, there are levels to it. The reason I like doing the strategy meeting first is that I identify the pain within the first five minutes, and then I poke at that pain for the next 55 minutes. By the end of the meeting, they’re like, “Please help us,” because they’re crying because I make them relive the pain over and over again.

That’s is exactly how it should be done.

By the end of the call, they’re like, “I s***. Please come and help me.” We have literally two and a half minutes. This has been awesome. This was a very quick hour. I don’t know, Erin, do you want to throw up how people can stay in touch? You guys know me, Clockwork AI, go to Clockwork.AI and literally create a free account. It’ll literally build.

It’s a little different. You’re wondering and wanting to know more about problems, doctors, and all that stuff we talked about. You can go to TheAbundantCall.com and schedule a complimentary chat with my team and me. It’s a no-obligation strategy session. Basically, what we do is we analyze what you’re doing in your current practice. We identify your revenue blockers, and then you will leave with a personalized roadmap. You can increase revenue. You can convert some of your bookkeeping accounting clients into advisory without the need to chase any new clients.

Michelle, how long is the complimentary 101?

It’s an hour call. Should you find our discussion valuable and you want to collaborate further, we can outline what that would look like. Otherwise, there is no obligation unless we feel we can help you. We’ll let you know. There’s a short application you have to fill out after you’ve done it all.

Check out TheAbundantCall.com, grab that complimentary Clockwork. Obviously, you guys know we have a ton of resources out there for all the advisory. We will literally give you the bronze, silver, gold packages, the services, the office, like you literally just email us, we’ll give it to you. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Thank you so much, Michelle, for doing this. This was a lot of fun. Next time we’ll do it, maybe in San Diego, sitting on the beach or something.

That’d be fun.

Thank you, everyone. We’ll give you guys the rest of the day, and then we’ll talk soon.

Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

Thanks.

Important Links

• Fady Hawatmeh on LinkedIn
• Clockwork AI
• Michelle Weinstein on LinkedIn
• Michelle Weinstein on Instagram
• The Abundant Call

About Fady Hawatmeh

Fady is the Founder and CEO of Clockwork, the first AI-powered Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) platform. A lifelong entrepreneur and Jordanian immigrant, Fady honed his skills at Boeing, building billion-dollar financial models for commercial and defense programs, before venturing into the world of consulting as an outsourced CFO.

Frustrated by the limitations of traditional FP&A tools, he envisioned and built Clockwork—a platform now leading the industry with cutting-edge features like consolidated forecasting and payroll-integrated headcount planning.