Is your accounting firm caught in a race to the bottom? With major tech players flooding the market with $97 automated tax plans, it’s never been easier to feel like your professional expertise is being commoditized. Many firm owners are responding by lowering their prices to stay competitive, but here is the cold, hard reality: you cannot out-volume the giants, but you can—and must—out-value them.
It is time to stop trading your sanity for high-volume, low-margin work. The era of “cheap tax work” is coming to an end, and it is making room for a new kind of practitioner: the Tax Engineer and Financial Architect. Today, Dominique Molina unpacks why competing on price is a trap that leads to burnout and how you can pivot your firm to focus on depth, trust, and measurable outcomes. If you are ready to stop chasing tire-kickers, command the premium fees your technical skills deserve, and differentiate your firm through strategic advisory, read on to discover how to build a business that prioritizes profit over perspiration.
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The End Of Cheap Tax Work: Win With Value, Not Volume With Dominique Molina
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Welcome to the show. We have a very special guest. Our special guest is the Founder and President of the American Institute of Certified Tax Planners. She’s also the Founder of Think Outside the Tax Box, which is a biweekly e-newsletter on tax planning and tax-saving strategies for tax pros and business owners. She is also the CEO of MidasIQ, which is an online tax reduction education for the general public.
Before we welcome our special guest to the show, if you’ve ever been on a sales call or gotten off a sales call and realized that you gave away some free advice again, or you felt yourself caving in on price, or you felt yourself caving in when it was time to say your price, you’re not alone. Most firm owners have incredible technical skills like you. Maybe it’s tax resolution, planning, CFO advisory, or bookkeeping, but you don’t have any structure around your sales process, and it’s costing you thousands of dollars every month.
Here at the Abundant Accountant, I help you shift from giving away your time to commanding your value without feeling sleazy or aggressive. You know the exact words to say, so you never have to freeze up or feel icky inside. If you would like to explore how that would look in your firm, go to TheAbundantCall.com and book your complimentary free strategy session now with me and my team. We can turn all of those conversations into conversions of high-paying clients and if you’re ready to uncover those hidden obstacles that are hindering your firm’s growth. Now, let’s welcome our very special guest, Dominique Molina, to the show.
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Welcome to the show, Dominique.
Thanks for having me back.
Thanks so much for always being a special guest here on the show. It’s lovely to have you back. I’d love it if you could share a quick 30-second segment of what you do for those readers who maybe don’t know who you are. I always think it’s best to come from you versus me.
The Shift From Volume To Value
I’m happy to. I lead the American Institute of Certified Tax Planners. We’re the largest tax planning association in the country. We work with certified tax planners and strategists to help them use value pricing and make premium fees by delivering high results for their clients through advanced tax reduction. Our whole model here is that you’re not competing on price. You’re competing on the results that you create for your clients. We do that by using the tax law to our advantage to help people pay a lot less in tax.
I know that there are some bigger players entering the market in tax planning. We’re going to talk about how you can’t out-volume them. We have to focus on the value that we provide versus focusing on quantity, which is what other bigger companies focus on. What do you think has been the shift that you’ve seen in the world of tax planning? You’ve been the lead and spearhead of this for quite a while.
We’ve been doing this for many years. We’ve seen a lot of change in that time, back when nobody was talking about tax planning. We’re seeing some bigger players come into the marketplace. What happens is what happens in the mind of the clients as the messaging gets more exposure. There’s a big problem and danger when clients think tax planning means software output. When that’s what their impression is, they expect software pricing.
We’re seeing the commoditization of tax planning. When we see some big players call what they sell tax planning and sell it for $97, for example, then your $10,000 plan is suddenly compared. People don’t understand how we’re different. It’s important that we make differentiation unmistakable, not by lowering prices, but by elevating experiences and outcomes. When people think it’s the same thing, it’s because we’re not showing them the difference.
It’s important to make differentiation unmistakable—not by lowering prices, but by elevating experiences and outcomes. When people see no difference, it’s because we haven’t shown them one. Share on XWhy do you think these bigger players have done that at $97 a month or whatever? What do you think might be influenced by that?
There’s a different model in mind. For a long time, the race to make more money in the tax industry has been built around volume. If you want to make more money in the tax industry, it’s by taking on more and more clients. As you scale and get to take on high volumes of work, your strategy for making more money is because you’re making money on quantity.
We teach a little bit of a different model. We make money on quality. When you start to compete with these discount franchises, for example, or you’re competing with an algorithm with AI, we cannot out-volume them. We can’t compete on that level because we don’t have the exposure and the infrastructure, but we can outvalue them. Their business model depends on sameness, and ours depends on distinction.
It is doing what matters, too. If you redefine what value is, you’re doing what matters to the client. It’s not an everybody-fits-all methodology. It’s the difference between being seen as software versus being the advisor or the authority.
Redefining The Role Of The Advisor
If you think about what that looks like in a firm, when you use the term advisor, from the client’s perspective, what does that mean? That doesn’t mean automation. That doesn’t mean AI. That doesn’t mean printed out reports. That means depth, trust, judgment, guidance, and coaching. That’s what people are looking for when they look for an advisor. They’re not attracted to this big box model because it simply isn’t offering what they’re looking for.
We don’t try to compete with them on those same factors. We want to win where the giant scalable model can’t win, and that is through relationships and creating real value. We don’t compete on price. We don’t compete by automating procedures. Can we use automation in our business to make things more profitable for us? Yeah, but we don’t want to do it at the expense of the perception of our clients.
Volume breeds burnout. It breeds commoditization, which is what we are talking about. It makes you less special. You’re not the advisor go-to for the client. They don’t see you from that same perspective.
We want to distinguish ourselves and create that differentiation. Your price tells the market how to treat you. If you price like an advisor, you get treated like an advisor. If you price like the big players, we’re folded into that same competitive market, and people will try to compare us on that. It becomes this big race to the bottom. That’s what we’re trying to do. We try to remove ourselves from that perceived parody that we’re all the same.
When you can focus on being that advisor and authority figure, that’s how you can set yourself apart. I call it, in the world of sales, creating that different client experience. When you have the confidence in technical knowledge. You’re not relying on the software, the $97 a month, you can get significantly different client results. Can you speak on that from the technical side of things?
This starts to get into a little more of defining your offering and being intentional behind what your service offer is. If you’re in the game of tax planning, for example. What does that mean? What goes into that tax planning engagement? We want people to experience that difference. It doesn’t mean that you have to have one specific offering. You could offer levels of involvement so that you can demonstrate that you’ve got depth there, and there’s a difference to you.
We want to think about the impact that we’re delivering, not the effort and the hours that are spent. One mistake I see a lot of tax pros make is they’ll get into this explanation of, “This took me so long or I’ve spent two weeks on this or I’ve spent 30 hours on this.” That’s irrelevant. We want to get into those results that we’re creating. It is thinking through that offering itself.
We should focus on the impact we deliver, not the effort or hours spent. Share on XAnybody can print a plan. What we want to do on the strategy side is come in and be able to do modeling. We want to be able to measure the impact of combinations of strategies. What happens if they take path A? What happens if they take path B? What happens if they take path C? We make that differentiation unmistakable, not by lowering prices, but by exercising things that you can’t get in software, for example. Software can calculate, but it can’t interpret context.
Our value comes from our judgment. It’s being able to help a business owner understand what’s applicable, what’s achievable, and what the steps are to executing that and implementing. You can turn on TikTok and get all kinds of ideas for free, but what’s not happening is the interpretation or the application of that idea to somebody’s unique set of circumstances. I want you to question your offering. If your offering is not that different from what somebody can turn on YouTube and get, then it’s going to affect their expectation of what a reasonable price is for that service that they get.
The Danger Of Default Pricing Mindsets
A lot of firm owners have this default where they think, “What’s the going rate?” That’s a dangerous mindset for a firm owner to fall into and follow that thinking.
It ends up being a race to the bottom. We’re trying to compete on whoever is cheapest. I like to say this to clients. I’m not the cheapest. I’m the most profitable. There is a big difference between those two things.
The higher price is a perceived value and also has a perception of more trust rather than less. The higher the price, the higher it also attracts better clients, because that means that you have the confidence to get that result for the client. It’s not about how long it took you. If it took you twenty hours or for some other planner it took to. It’s about the end result that you get. That’s how you can say, “I’m the most profitable. I’m worth more because I deliver more, and I’m confident in my outcomes. I’m confident in the results I deliver.”
The Risks Of Planning At Scale
You hit an important word, and that is outcome. We don’t sell tax ideas or tax plans. We engineer tax outcomes. Some of this is also in the differentiation, as so many people are using this word plan. Maybe it’s time for us to stop calling what we do a plan. Call it a process, strategy, or system that delivers measurable and defensible results.
The other risk that we face is what the authorities also consider planning and effective work. Let’s be honest about it. The IRS is onto this. The IRS is looking at so-called planning, especially when it’s mass-produced. With planning at scale, what they’re finding is that problems aren’t in overly aggressive strategies, but they’re misleading people, and they’re not properly customizing or implementing plans.
When we look at courts that are backing up the IRS, number one, they’ve already hit taxpayers with $162 million in penalties for social media-style advice. They’re just getting started. The courts are backing them up. In Mississippi, we had a so-called tax planner that was permanently shut down for selling templated so-called tax plans that promised big deductions, but lacked substance.
In Texas, there was a planner where he and his firm were banned from preparing returns and providing tax planning because they were pushing boilerplate schemes using sham companies and bogus write-offs. What’s happening is the authorities are seeing these mass-produced reports, and they’re calling it fraud because they’re not properly implemented.
Shifting From Tax Planning To Tax Engineering
They’re not engineered. An engineered outcome is when you’re certain. It’s almost similar to an architect. You can’t be this commodity and have these boilerplate templates with the person in Mississippi and Texas if you’re going for custom architecture. There’s no custom home that was developed on a template. It doesn’t exist. Maybe don’t call it tax planning, but maybe call it true tax engineering, which is building structures, systems, and having these long-term success and outcomes for your clients.
This moment is not about panic. It’s also not about lowering your prices, either. It’s about positioning. I encourage everybody tuning into this to ask themselves some questions. Are you clearly different from your competitors who are offering planning? The competitor could be Google, TikTok, or ChatGPT. Is your service so different that the moment your client or prospective client experiences it, they realize that they can’t get this anywhere else? We want the experience to be so distinctly different that you don’t have to even explain anything. Are your fees high enough to reflect the real work that you do? You can diminish your value by not charging enough.
Tax Engineering: Ask yourself this: are you truly different from competitors offering similar planning services?
I’m curious. In using the language of tax engineering or financial architecture, being the financial architect or the tax engineer, how do you think changing that language could also change the perception of the value to your prospect?
That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to change the perception. You have to back it up. Actions speak louder than words. I love the verbiage change there. We also have to behave differently. We have to be able to prove our value. That comes with what we do to deliver the results that we’re promising somebody. We have a real opportunity to prove our value and keep delivering it. We can do it with integrity. We can do it without being cheapened.
Even if you may see some signs that the industry is being cheapened, it’s not the end of the world. We have survived through some of the similar things in the past. When TurboTax first came out, and people could prepare their own taxes, and this was the late ‘90s, when you could buy a diskette and put it in your computer, our knees were shaking. We thought, “We’re all displaced. We won’t be able to do this. Nobody will ever pay us.”
There’s a market for that. There’s a market of people who are perfectly fine using TurboTax. In fact, I recommend it to people that I meet who aren’t good candidates for what I do. There’s plenty of business to go around. With the human connection that no machine and no scaled business works like a factory, churning numbers in and out, can never replicate that.
What would you say are 1 or 2 specific ways the firm owner can change the way that they’re delivering? I could talk about language every day, but on the technical side, that’s your expertise. Without adding a ton of more work, without doing anything for free, and without falling into this commoditized trap that they think, “This might be the best route orI’m going to also lower my prices because others are doing that,” but stand their ground, keep the premium price at play, and have the commoditization be a thing of the past.
They’re not a part of it, but see themselves as the firm owner who is focusing on client experience, focusing on being that tax engineer and financial architect, and doing the work that most people wouldn’t do. What would you say are 1 or 2 specific ways the firm owner can change their dynamic if they’ve been brought down a little bit? They’re finding themselves lowering their prices because they think that that’s all the market can bear, or that’s all people are saying is possible to charge for a tax plan. What would you share with those firm owners as 1 or 2 things they can shift?
The Strategic Importance Of Saying No To Non-Ideal Clients
The first thing is to realize you don’t need every client out there. There are people who are ideal candidates for this type of work, where you’re delivering this advisory experience. The problem is that not everybody is a candidate for it. You first have to be okay with letting go of the people who aren’t a good fit for it. When we cheapen our prices, it’s because we’re trying to attract that client. We can’t stand the idea of rejection. Yet, there is this market where price is not the primary driving factor for that particular business owner, and we are looking to connect with them.
Tax Engineering: You don’t need every client out there. There are ideal clients for this kind of work—those who value a true advisory experience.
That’s who we want as our client, where price isn’t the primary driving factor. The first thing is to get over yourself and be okay. If you are not saying no to people, then something’s wrong. High fees don’t scare the right clients. They repel the wrong clients. We want to repel the wrong clients. We don’t want to contort ourselves to try to get a yes from the wrong client. The first thing is to be okay with saying no or them saying no and moving on so that you’re freed up to find the right one.
The wrong clients are looking for a good deal. They’re looking for a bargain there.
They’ll always be looking for a good deal.
They’re always comparing you to a few other firms, or they’re looking for the cheapest way to make it happen. It’s like you said, the people who were getting TurboTax back in the ‘90s. The right clients are looking for certainty. They’re looking for expertise. They’re looking for that confidence that you can get the results for them. They want someone who can think strategically, not be software, fill out boxes, upload maybe tax returns or financials, and let the computer do all the work.
The other thing to think through is your service offering. What are you including in your tax engineering service? If you’re not including it or adding on quarterly implementation, audit defense, strategic reviews, and full implementation, then you’re not any different from some of the cheaper options that are available out there.
Remember, we want them to experience the difference, so there’s no question. When the offer is, “You work with me. You pay me $3,000 or $4,000, and you get this nice fancy report out of it.” That’s different from somebody that says, “Tax planning is serious work. We’re dealing with the law here.” That means this is going to take some implementation. That’s going to take months to put into place. That’s why our engagements include twelve months of working together to get you onboarded with this because simply being aware of the ideas that are out there is not enough.
Also, on a pricing note, when you price high, you’re subconsciously sending that signal, saying, “I solve big problems, and I’m confident in the results that I deliver,” or the value that you deliver. It automatically gets rid of people who are not ready to invest in real outcomes. I’m sure many people tuning in have had those tire-kicker-type clients or prospects. It gets rid of those automatically.
Price isn’t just math. It’s a magnet. The higher your price, the more your clients show up ready to act, ready to respect your expertise and your advice, implement, and follow through. Think about it this way, too. We also have a risk for every project that we take on. There’s a risk that somebody doesn’t follow through, that they don’t take our advice, and that they don’t properly implement.
We need to get compensated for the risk that we take. Part of our process needs to be weeding out the people that aren’t going to act in the right way. Price helps be that screening filter so that we can be working with the right people. I don’t mind representing them because I know I can go in and present a good case. There’s integrity behind it.
Earlier in our conversation, you were saying that firm owners are scared of rejection or people not engaging in their firm. How would you reframe this conversation for them to have different conversations with themselves about the rejection? If someone were to reject you or say no, it has nothing to do with you personally.
Also, it’s not proof of the positioning of what you’re offering. It’s a personal, “I’m curious to see what you have to say,” on how to reframe the rejection from the firm owner’s perspective. I know you don’t like the confrontation either. You don’t like that piece. Not me, but a lot of firm owners are pricing lower. Possibly to eliminate that piece that they have to deal with, which is the rejection.
Reframing Rejection As Data
First of all, if somebody doesn’t believe in your value, a discount is not going to fix that. The price isn’t the problem. We have to stop telling ourselves that. What happens sometimes is you’re looking for a reason. You’re like, “Why did they reject me?” It doesn’t feel good personally. Nobody likes to be rejected. If they don’t believe in your value, it’s not because the price was an issue. If you’re delivering enough value, that’s a great value proposition. If I charge somebody $20,000, but I’m reducing their tax by $160,000 a year, you can’t get a better discount than that.
That’s significant.
Rejection is data. It’s good data to collect, but it’s not a judgment on you. Reframing that perspective is important. It goes back to it doesn’t mean that you’re overpriced. It means that maybe the value wasn’t clear to them. Value is subjective. We’re encountering transactional clients where price is the most important factor. That’s not an ideal fit for this type of advisory work. If they’re rejecting you, it means that the value wasn’t clear to them. To include, that’s not what they’re looking for.
You can attempt to clarify the value proposition. For example, somebody says, “That’s a lot of money.” First of all, see if you can empathize with them. If I’m charging somebody six figures for the work that I’m about to do, I can certainly empathize when somebody says that’s a lot of money. It is a lot of money. It is affirming that. I completely understand that.
A lot of people say that at first because they’re comparing this to maybe what they’ve paid their tax pro in the past, not tax strategy. You’re like, “Let me help you understand how this is different.” The other thing is, it also depends on what the cost is of not fixing that issue. In my example of saving somebody $160,000, you’re right. $160,000 is a lot of money. It is reframing, “What is the actual expense here?” The actual expense is that they don’t take action, and they keep doing the same thing.
It’s similar to an architect. When you make an investment in an architect, you’re going to have a better home. It’ll probably be more energy efficient. You’ll save in all these other areas by making a significant investment upfront. If you’re doing financial engineering or financial architecture, which, aka, we’re talking about tax planning. The cost of them doing nothing and staying in their current situation is going to be much greater than the investment that they pay for you.
They can certainly go with a cheaper plan. That’s an option, but it’s going to cost them more in the long run because they overpay. You want to check in a little bit to make sure that the understanding is clear. That’s almost an opportunity for you to re-educate a little bit. You’re like, “I want to make sure that I was clear in my explanation.” Sometimes, I wasn’t very clear. They didn’t fully understand what I was proposing. It is doing that little check-in. They’re anchoring my price to the wrong thing. They’re comparing it to what they’ve paid in the past, for example, versus what the results we are going to get.
As I am emphasizing the result that I’m creating for them, then they can go, “I didn’t realize that was going to be this year. I thought you meant sometime in the future. I get it.” I’m like, “What you’ve seen before is high. This is different. What I’m describing here is you can skip your next tax payment altogether, or that big check you’re supposed to write in April, you’re not going to have to do that.”
That’s truly understanding the difference between cost and investment, and being able to communicate that. I’m curious, as we wrap up on this topic. If every firm owner shifted or reframed their mindset this way, how do you think it would change the industry as a whole?
From the client’s perspective, or when we talk about taxpayers, they’re going to get in line. At the end of the day, if we’re doing this well, we are offering something that they want. They want to know that they have more cash available for the things that they want to spend money on in their life. Whether that’s growing their business, or it’s business-related or not. It could be for shoes, for all we know. At the end of the day, most people want what we’re offering. If we were all to do business this way, people would follow the process.
They end up following the process. What happens is we get people who are in a rut. They’re doing things the same as they’ve always done them. It’s hard to create that change, but possible. There are thousands of tax pros doing this every day across the country. It depends on what you’re anchoring to. What are you comparing your price to? Are you comparing your price to somebody that’s doing this level of work, or are you comparing yourself to the tech world, which is meant to scale in a big way and offer cheaper and less, replacing human beings with machines?
Thank you so much for being here. The premise is we need to make sure we don’t outvolume them, but we figure out, as an industry or as the elite group of tax engineers that you all are, how to outvalue. That’s the biggest takeaway. If you can solve a problem in a shorter amount of time, it’s about the outcome that you deliver with precision based on your knowledge and technical abilities.
If you can clearly show and communicate that value on how you engineer results or financially architect those results, that’s where the change starts to begin. You can make that shift. Do you have any other last words of wisdom for a firm owner who might be stuck in that rut? They’re seeing themselves reduce prices because they’re saying, “That’s what the market can bear,” or, “That’s what other people are pricing.” Is there anything else that you want to share that maybe we haven’t talked about yet?
The Power Of The “Magnet” Pricing Strategy
Yeah. You have to ask yourself what you want and what your end goal is. It’s not about what other people are doing. It’s about what you want to get out of this effort. What do you want to get by running this business? You don’t win a race to the bottom by getting there first. Start with where you are and get out of your own way. Do it. Nike’s logo works. It’s very simple. I didn’t say easy, but it’s simple. Try it. Every no frees space for the right yes. If you’re not hearing no, you need to keep raising your price until you hear them.
You have to ask yourself what you truly want and what your end goal is. It’s not about what others are doing—it’s about what you want to get out of your effort. Share on XThank you so much for being here with us on the show. It’s always an honor to have you. This is important because your value and the price that you choose have nothing to do with going right. It’s what you determine and what you put on yourself. Go and be the tax engineer you are. Differentiate yourself and be that financial architect who only has a couple of clients because you can’t take on any more. Think about what you want, like the type of firm you want, how much you want to work, how much revenue, and how many free hours you want. That’s what will drive this.
We’ll all be better for it. As we take on this mission together to create real change, that’s what’s going to make things better. We’re all helping each other through this. Together, as a community, we can create that ripple effect to elevate us as a profession and tune out the noise.
Thank you again for being here. We can’t out-volume them, but we can out-value them. That’s what we’ll focus on. Thanks again for being here with us.
Well said. My pleasure. Thanks.
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What an amazing episode with Dominique on ending the cheap tax work because you can win with value and not volume. I truly do believe that. For any firm owner here that is an accounting, tax, or bookkeeping firm owner, and you find yourself caving in on price, or you find yourself reducing your prices based on what you feel the market can bear. That is the telling that you’ve got to make a change and stop wondering how the heck you’re going to grow your firm without sacrificing more time, energy, or sanity.
I want you to know you’re not alone, and it’s not your fault. You were taught how to do great technical work, as Dominique had talked about, but you were never taught how to confidently sell your services and your value. Here at the Abundant Accountant, I show you how to sell value, how to double your revenue, how to get paid upfront, and how to finally stop trading time for dollars, even if the sales call that you have with clients makes you freeze up or feel a little too pushy.
If you want to find out what’s blocking your firm’s revenue growth and how to fix that, head on over to TheAbundantCall.com and book your free, complimentary strategy session with me and my team. Remember that you can outvalue anybody, not just outvolume them. Thank you so much for tuning in. It’s been an honor being here with you. Remember, you are the engineer of tax. You are the financial architect. You can do and charge whatever you want.
Thanks for tuning into the show. If you want to talk about your firm and see how you can stop trading time for dollars, even if these sales calls make you freeze or feel very pushy and annoying, we can find out what’s in the way or what’s blocking you from getting to your firm’s growth. Head on over to TheAbundantCall.com. Thanks so much. I’ll see you in the next episode.
Important Links
- Dominique Molina on LinkedIn
- American Institute of Certified Tax Planners
- Think Outside the Tax Box
- MidasIQ
- Intuit QuickBooks
- Book a Call to Grow Your Firm’s Revenue at The Abundant Accountant
About Dominique Molina
Dominique Molina is the co-founder and President of the American Institute of Certified Tax Planners (AICTP). She is also the founder of Think Outside The Tax Box, a bi-weekly e-newsletter on tax planning and tax-saving strategies for tax pros and business owners, and CEO of MidasIQ, online tax reduction education for the general public.
