How to Adapt Your Firm During the COVID-19 Crisis

 

So many of us are facing new challenges and a lot of uncertainty right now amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In this bonus episode, sales expert Michael Fisher joins me to talk about how to transition through these uncertain times, what mindset shifts you need to make to not only survive but thrive over the next few months, and how focusing on opportunities to help others will get all of us through this together.

If you’re feeling stuck, stressed or overwhelmed in your firm right now, this episode is for you! And if you know anyone who may benefit from this episode, please share it with them.

Mike Fisher has over 30 years experience in sales, starting out selling books door to door to pay his way through school. As an experienced sales trainer and consultant, working with companies like Abbot Labs, Johnson & Johnson, Coca Cola and Quest. He lives in Tennessee with his wife and two children. In his free time he loves golfing, running, and spending time with his family.

If you’re having a challenging or stressful time in your firm right now, we’re offering complimentary coaching sessions to help you through it! Visit theabundantcall.com to learn more and schedule.

This episode was brought to you by Xero. With Xero’s cloud accounting software, small businesses and accountants can work together and collaborate anytime, anywhere. With real-time financials, bank connections, unlimited users, and online invoicing, it’s beautiful accounting software that’s powered by people.

Xero provides its 2+ million subscribers with connections to a thriving ecosystem of 800+ third-party apps and 200+ connections to banks and financial service providers. Learn more at www.xero.com

 

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How to Adapt Your Firm During the COVID-19 Crisis With Michael Fisher

In this episode, we have a very special guest on the show. Our special guest is Mike Fisher. He has many years of experience in sales. He started out selling educational books door to door in the summertime to pay for his school. He was always consistently a top salesperson among several thousands of students, and he spent most of his career in direct sales and sales management.

What I love so much about Mike is that he’s done a ton of sales training and consulting. He is very similar to me. He speaks the same language, and he’s worked mostly with clients like Abbott Labs, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Enterprise, Comcast, Quest, and others. He lives in Tennessee with his wife and his two kids that go to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. In his free time, he loves golfing, motocross racing with his son, and getting out and about running.

Before we dive into the show, I also want to put this out to you. I’m sure it’s very stressful right now. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety. If you want to chat and you would like some coaching in the sales area, then feel free to book a call. Me and my partner Denise are doing complimentary calls to talk to you and go through your sales process. If you are feeling frustrated and stressed about how to price things and how to make sure you’re profitable, and if you’re willing to get to the truth of your sales conversations, then head on over to TheAbundantCall.com and get your free coaching session with us. My requirement is that you’ve been in business for at least two years, you have your own accounting firm, and you’re offering some higher-value services.

This episode is brought to you by Xero. Xero is the practice manager. You have the flexibility you need to transition from time-focused billing to a job-centric, value-based business model. By connecting to Xero, you are putting your client information in the context of practice information and then the practice manager reduces the time and effort required to manage your practice, giving you more visibility and control, and more time and less stress. For more info, check out Xero.com. Now, let’s welcome Mike Fisher to the show.

Thank you, Michelle. I’m excited to be here.

Thank you so much for being here. I loved our last conversation, but I think I’m going to put this episode up first. It’s because due to the state of the union and the times that we’re in, I thought it’d be great for us to have a discussion about people’s paradigms. Some of the new challenges that a lot of the accountants might be dealing with, or for your clients where they’re frantic. They’re calling you. They want to know what they can do. Their businesses are about to go under. They have no idea what’s going on and what they can do to keep things afloat.

I know a lot of it stems from obviously what happened. I know that’s what we’re going to talk about. If you’re an accountant, you might want to take some notes. We’re going to talk about limiting beliefs and also, ways that we can think about how we’re going to transition through this, and some of this information you might want to even pass it on to your clients. Thank you, Mike, for being here. Before we start, can you share with everyone your background and what you do? Mike and I are very similar, but I feel like he should share it directly from him.

I appreciate it, Michelle. Mike Fisher is my name, and I work with a group called Sales Bullpen, but I’ve been with a company called Integrity Solutions for many years and do sales training and leadership coaching programs. We do customer service training and whatnot. I have been in that space for a long time. It’s all been in the sales space and direct selling space. I started out my career selling books for a company called Southwestern, where you go out and sell books door to door in my college days to help pay for schools. That’s a little background there.

I do remember that. Mike does come from a sales background, and as you know here on the show, it is to help you think a little bit outside the box what I want you to think about now, and think about the opportunities that are going to come from this. If there’s anything that’s possible, it’s to increase your revenues by helping and serving more people, especially right now who need you.

I even asked my mom, “Who is the first person you called when this all hit the fan?” She’s like, “My CPA.” For all of you tax preparers, accountants, bookkeepers, and CPAs, you are the most trusted advisor. This is an opportunity for you to help more people, grow your revenue and think about what we’re going to talk about the transition out of this in the future to plant some seeds there.

Mike, what do we do with all these new challenges that happen in our mindset, especially for the accountants tuning in? They’re inundated with work. I think the deadline for filing individual taxes is now in July or something like that. I don’t even know what’s true and what’s not true anymore. With so much change thrown at you in the last 7 to 14 days, how do you deal with these paradigm shifts and the challenges that you have seen at different times in the history of your career?

First things first, breathe. You have to remember to breathe. You have to step back and go, “Let me breathe and understand what are these things that are happening.” Let me process some of that. One of the things that a natural reaction that human nature is, is to back up a little bit and get into our comfort zone.

You have to step back, breathe, and understand what are these things that are happening and process some of that. Click To Tweet

I’ll share with you a model that helps describe that. We talk a lot about this. We call it The Three Dimensions of Human Behavior. It talks a lot about why we make decisions the way we make decisions, and how that happens. The background on this is Ron Willingham, who is the author of several bestselling books, one called Integrity Selling. He’s got one called The People Principle.

In those books, he was doing some research with a guy named Dr. Maxwell Maltz. This was in the late 1950s. Dr. Maxwell Maltz is a plastic surgeon. He wrote a book called Psycho-Cybernetics. He was a plastic surgeon and he would work on a patient. He would fix blemishes or change things from a plastic surgeon’s perspective. When he took off the bandages, oftentimes, the patient still saw the blemish. It’s because that’s how they saw themselves.

It may have been corrected externally, but internally, that’s how they saw themselves. Ron thought, “Isn’t that funny that as human nature is, we can go do 10 items. Nine of them are well, and the one that we focus on is the one that we messed up?” Oftentimes, that’ll hold us back from being able to perform at a higher level. If you can picture a snowman, think of the head of the snowman. The smallest circle on the snowman, and that’s our intellectual dimension. That’s 1 of 3 three dimensions.

The intellectual dimension, we call it the I intellectual or I think dimension. It’s where all your logical thinking goes. Our education system is built off this. It says that if you take this information, you take it from the book, put it then on a test, and show that you know it. You should be able to go do it. I have two college students and I know that that’s not necessarily true. I coined a phrase called they rememmorized it because they take the information and remember it long enough to get it on a test. If they don’t use it, we know what happens. It goes away. It’s the smallest dimension because our logical dimension says, “Let me put that into our terms. We know we’ll be successful if we have this many customers and this many clients that we work with, we will make this much money and whatnot.”

There’s a larger dimension, and this is what we’re talking about now. It overrides our intellectual dimension, which is our emotional dimension. We call it the “I feel” dimension. It’s the middle of the snowman and is larger than the intellectual dimension because it overrides the intellectual dimension. What I mean by that is Dr. William James, a Harvard psychologist 100 years ago said, “When intellect and emotion are in conflict, emotion rules a day.” In other words, I know what’s going on always. I know what’s going on intellectually, but when emotions get involved, they cloud our thinking and judgment. I’ll give you an example. Have you ever been on a diet?

I have. I wouldn’t call it a diet, Mike. I call it a new way of eating. I track my food and ate by certain macros for 365 days. It instilled new habits where I got used to how many carbs, fats, and proteins I was eating on a daily basis.

There you go. For everybody that’s reading this right now is saying, “How many of you been on a diet?” It’s a lot of us. In a diet, we know intellectually what we’re supposed to do. I’ll give you an example of how emotion overrides intellect. Intellectually, I know what to do but then I go to a meeting or I go where there is some breakfast or donuts, and whatever is going to be there.

They’re sitting there and I know I shouldn’t intellectually, but now, I’ll have these three. I know that it’s not in the plan. It’s not what it’s supposed to be doing but when motion and intellect are in conflict, emotion rules the day. That’s an easy example of how quickly we can move from what we know should be happening and what is happening.

Now, the larger dimension or the base of the snowman, we call that the “I am” dimension. That’s who we are, or it’s our creative unconscious. What is going on here is this is the largest dimension because it’s basically you self-talk. It’s what you’ve said to yourself over time. It’s been created throughout your whole life. Maybe it’s what you heard a parent, a teacher or somebody say about you like, “You’re good at math. You should get into accounting. You should pursue this.”

You think to yourself, “I am good at it. It feels very easy to me.” My daughter is an Accounting major as a matter of fact and she’s like, “It just comes easy to me.” She knows that. She believes that and she feels good about it. She then goes and takes a test in school and proves it and says, “I am good at this.” When she starts to study now for Math classes or Accounting and whatnot, she feels very comfortable about it.

Her “I am” dimension says, “I am good at this,” and her confidence is high. Let me go the opposite. I’m not an accountant and I can remember having my mom in the parent-teacher conference and stuff, and they would say, “Mike’s struggling with Math.” My mom would say, “Yeah. He’s not very good at Math. It’s tough for him.: She would reiterate that by telling neighbors and friends, “He struggles with Math.” I’m hearing this consistently now. I sit down to study and I’m going, “This is hard.” I go and don’t do well on a test, and I prove it, “You’re not good at this.”

I start to believe, “I’m not good at this.” My self-talk is very negative and what happens is when I start to look at Math equations or study for a test before I even look at the information, I’ll say, “This is going to be hard,” and that’s how I start to believe. What’s going on is if you could picture an X and that’s you or I put circles or little dots all around that X and I had all these dots, all these dots are decisions that we make on a daily basis like cars we drive and the neighborhood I should live in. Where my kids should go to school, how much schooling I have, how much money I think I should make, and the level of the person that I can communicate with within an organization.

All these things, thousands and thousands of decisions that we unconsciously make every single day become what we call your area of the possible. If I connected those dots and drew a circle around that X, that’s your area of the possible. It’s also known as your comfort zone. This is where we feel comfortable. If we’re asked to step out of that comfort zone, what happens is we naturally resist. Human nature as you resist. “You need to take on this many more clients that you work with.” “I’m full as that is.” You start to push back and we start to form excuses as to why we can’t do it.

AA | COVID-19 Crisis

COVID-19 Crisis: Thousands and thousands of decisions that we unconsciously make every single day become what we call your area of the possible, also known as your comfort zone.

 

Let’s relate it to what’s going on. We got the top of the snowman, the middle of the snowman, and the bottom of the snowman as the base. What would be fascinating is for you guys reading, you’ve got your different levels of the snowman that represent the different things. The top of your snowman is the “I think” part, the logical thinking. It’s the smaller dimension. We then got the middle part and the middle part is the diet part.

That’s the emotional.

You’ve got your base and the base is the “I am” dimension that you’re talking about where you’ve got all this stuff from your past that’s created through your whole life. How do we alter these different parts of the snowman? In California, the snowman wouldn’t even stay alive right now. It would probably melt because it’s so warm but I think for everyone in Minnesota and New York, the snowman might stick around right now. How does it relate to now? We’ve got this new paradigm shift, chaos, fear, scarcity, and anxiety going. We’ve got all these things going, but how can we shift that in order to still stay true and focused on our sales and create that abundance for our clients and in our firms?

If you wanted to write a few things in that base dimension, that’s where all your actions, feelings, behaviors, and abilities are housed. In other words, your self-talk is in there. That’s what we say to ourselves about ourselves. What happens is we get caught in these areas where we start to have what we call limiting beliefs and they start holding us back.

In other words, “I can’t do that. I could never do this. We tried that about two years ago and it didn’t work.” Rather than looking at, “What are the possibilities,” and having possibility thinking, we have fear and anxiety about, “I could never.” It’s because that’s a natural reaction when we start getting pushed out of our comfort zone. Do you know the name Roger Bannister? Do you know who that is?

I do not.

Roger Bannister is a guy that, in 1954, ran the first sub-four-minute mile. Nobody had ever done it. Nobody thought you could do it. He was a physician and his friends who were doctors said, “Don’t do this. You could die. Nobody has ever done this.” He ran a sub-four-minute mile and he did not die. After that, it’s interesting because, in the first six months, you had lots of people that ran sub-four-minute miles.

The reason is that the area of possible had expanded. To answer your question, we have to think about what are some things that are being thrown at us that cause us to have limiting beliefs. How do we transition our thinking to say, “Maybe there’s some opportunity here? What’s this look like? Is there some opportunity here?” Rather than it being negative, how do I respond to this versus react to it?

I think our natural human nature is to react. We have to step back and go, “I don’t think I could ever do that. I think you have to reprogram your thinking to say, ‘that’s how I used to believe in the past but maybe there’s some opportunity here. What if I did? How could I adjust that?’” It’s been a while since I’ve remembered this one, but it came to mind.

There’s a good story about someone who was supposed to have all this work to do this week and they had it all planned out. Instead of being able to go get the work done, the pipes burst in their house. They had to stop what they were doing, go meet with the plumber, and waste about seven hours working with the plumber to get all the things done to be at the house and do this. Yet the deadline was coming up closer and closer and they had to put in extra time and do some things at night that they didn’t plan to do, but they ended up finishing and getting those things done.

The analogy or the step back and look at from that was, “I didn’t think I could get it done at all, but then this new thing came in and blew up my whole plan. Yet I still was able to do it. If you’d have told me that the week before, I never would’ve thought I could have done it, but I did.” Sometimes we have to look at these situations and say, “This is unexpected. Let’s be human about this. This is not what I expected. It is something that we can’t control that’s going on right now.

How can we make the most of it? What possibilities here? How could we maybe adjust some things to work different schedules or help people out in our teams that are working together and we could do this together and do things.” You have to look through a different lens, the possibility, and the options, and say, “What are the negatives? Here they are. Let’s own them. What are the positives and how can we turn this into something that could be an opportunity for us and our clients? How can we help our clients out?”

You just have to look through a different lens and look at the possibility and the options and say, “what are the negatives here? Let's own them. What are the positives and how can we turn this into something that could be an… Click To Tweet

I think that’s what it’s about. Some of the ideas that I had is that I personally called every client. Some of you reading, probably got a call from me if you’ve worked with me. I’ve emailed everybody but some of the opportunities are there. Mike, maybe you have a few so we can help think outside the box for some of the readers. I called my mortgage companies. That was the first thing I did.

I called my car company for my lease, which was Tesla. Pretty much, I didn’t have to make a payment at all for the next month. There are so many loan modifications and requests from mortgage assistance that you could be helping your clients with right now to reduce their expenses, make sure they can keep affording to pay you and be able to capitalize on it.

Back in 2008 and 2009, there was something that Obama put into place when the real estate market crashed, which is going to be coming here shortly, and it was great. I saved so much money for the last however many years. As you said, there are opportunities within your business, but there are also opportunities to think outside the box. I have a lot of CPAs I’ve worked with. They work with dentists and if you’ve got a dental office, pretty much you’re shut down right now depending on where you live and they have a lot of student debt. You can renegotiate all those debts. There are other ways that you can help your clients. Mike, what ideas do you have that maybe I haven’t thought of yet?

I’ll give you a couple of things. Everything is happening so fast right now. I’ll pull from my own experience and how some calls that I’ve gotten from people. The first thing I have to think about with you, if I’m an accountant, is you’re a resource. You are a resource for your customers. I think the examples that you gave Michelle are great examples of, “I’ve done some research for you and I’ve pulled a couple of different ideas out of some things. Have you thought about this? What are you thinking about your car payment? What are you thinking about your student loan? Have you thought about this?”

These are some resources and some areas of things and this is where I come in of having knowledge and being able to give my customers peace of mind because they’re worried about their business and how are they going to continue to meet payroll. There are so many things that they’ve got going on. How can I help take things off the plate and help them to maybe see that there are some opportunities through my knowledge?

Truth be told, the reason they have you is your knowledge and you’re a resource for things that they are not good at. If they’re not good at that, you’re going to be able to bring some things to the table that become a problem solver for them, but a resource for them and it gives them peace of mind. We were talking before we started about the fact that in a lot of businesses, there’s going to be some issues and challenges that maybe you’re going to be happening. I think that we’re going to be judged by the way we handle these turbulent waters.

If we can handle these in a way that we are a resource and we bring peace of mind and we listen, one of the things I want to say is you need to listen. I don’t have to go in there and tell them everything yet. Slow down and ask, “How are you doing?” There’s a human element to this. “What are some things that are burdening you right now? What are some things I can help you with? Let me give you some thoughts and a couple of things that I’ve been able to help others who had the same challenges you’re having, were this and this. How are you handling that? Maybe there’s an opportunity there. What can I help you with?”

Those are the way you say things. I’ll say this because you’re preparing before you make that phone call and maybe making a list of 3 or 4 and 5 items of things that these are things that I know we’ve been able to help several customers with. If I know that we can help them, I need to step back and say, “How can I ask a question to get them to discover that I need to know a couple of things? How are your student loans going? I know you have these with you’re a doctor. How are we doing with that? Have you done anything?” “No.”

“Let’s take a look at that. There may be some options for you.” When you give them some peace of mind and some options, they will hang up the phone, just like you talked about when you call Tesla, feeling better about, “I can breathe a little bit right now.” That moves you up to the advisor status and that’s where you want to be.

I think not only getting moved up to the advisor status but how are you going to be judged during these turbulent waters because these clients are looking to you as the most trusted advisor they have on their team. You, being the leader in it, even amongst the chaos and unknowns and the changes by the hour for some of the laws in the different states.

One other idea, Mike, that I had and shared that I’m doing with a few of the clients that I’ve personally worked with, you can Google how to do it or contact me at Hello@ThePitchQueen.com. You’re going to touch on it because we need to talk about how you’re going to transition out of this but a lot of you have a hundred business clients or a couple of hundred individual clients.

To get this information to everybody quickly, you could get online and buy a Zoom account and start doing webinars and online meetings for your clients. You just have to give this information once versus having the phones and emails coming into you so fast that you can’t even keep up. I’m personally doing this with a few people. There are so many opportunities to offer new services that maybe you’re offering to help people to reduce their liabilities and also reduce their principal balances on mortgages.

Now is the time to negotiate with your credit card companies. People will start deleting debt from your accounts and it doesn’t even affect your credit. I did this way back in 2008-ish and it was amazing. It literally saved me tons on a monthly basis over time year after year. If you’re doing tax planning or tax resolution work, this all falls under that category.

I know that we were going to talk about how you transition out of this in the future and how you show that you kept calm in these tough, turbulent waters and that your clients looked up to you and they got all the information from one place. Mike, how do you see accounting professionals capitalizing on when this dust decides to start settling a little bit?

How you handle these turbulent waters is going to be how you’re judged. Knowledge is power. Get your hands on all the knowledge you can and do your research. Try to find out areas of things that you can help your customers with and then have your list of those items that differentiate you possibly from your competition.

What is it that I bring to the table that they don’t? I bring solutions. If you can bring solutions to the table and ideas that help them to put them at ease in running their business, they’re going to spread that word when this goes beyond. What’s going to happen is some people, unfortunately, are going to want to fire their accountant if they didn’t do those things. It’s like they didn’t do a good job of this.

AA | COVID-19 Crisis

COVID-19 Crisis: If you can bring solutions to the table and ideas that really help put them at ease in running their business, they’re going to spread that word.

 

If that’s the case, there are going to be some accountant opportunities that are out there. If someone by word of mouth hears that you’ve done a great job with this, and to your point, “My accountant is doing a webinar right now that’s for all of us. All the customers they work with are inviting others.” Those types of little things that you can do are things that differentiate you. You’ve got to get creative. Here’s what you’re thinking. Let me give you a limited belief that might be going through your mind right now. “I can never do that. I’m not comfortable doing that.”

That is some of my clients. They’re like, I’ve never done video, Michelle. This is outside of my comfort zone. I don’t know what people are going to think of me.” I’m like, “I’m even going to help my acupuncturists do this because she has so much knowledge.” You have to adapt to the new times. If this goes on for a couple of months, this might be the best thing that’s ever happened for you and your clients.

Talk about becoming more efficient with your time. If you can share your message with 100 or 200 people all in one time versus dealing with emails and having your admins sift emails and booking appointments with people that keep asking you the same questions, you just killed 100 birds with one stone.

We used the term last time to get comfortable being uncomfortable and that applies here. Sometimes we have to step out of that comfort zone. If you’re having those limiting beliefs that say, “I could never do that,” you need to step back and go, “It’s not that difficult.” You’ll find the only way to get better at certain things is by doing them but you also get a lot of confidence when you say, “I’m going to try this.”

Maybe you start on a small scale, but once you start doing it, you’ll find you’ll gain confidence. I know you’ve done this over and over where you start to gain the confidence to go, “Now, I have the confidence to do these things for my customers.” Those are differentiators. As you said, if you’ll look back, that’ll be the new normal. That’s what I do now. That’s one of the things that we offer to our customers.

Anything that you can do that differentiates you, that’s a positive. Think in terms of how I differentiate myself. How do I bring value to my customers? That’s another piece and that’s through knowledge. Knowledge is power. Having that knowledge to do those things and to do your research and your homework and then say, “I’ve got a list of 3, 4, or 5 things that I now am able to bring to my customers and give them peace of mind.”

One of the mentalities is how can I help. What are some things I can do to help you right now? If you have that servant mentality, it goes a long way towards uncovering some things that you might not have known that they were struggling with to now, “Let me put your mind at ease.” Here’s a good question. “Give me some homework. Give me some things you want me to look at for you. What is something that you’re worried about?” Maybe I can help you with it.”  Maybe there’s a solution that you can say, “Here are a couple of ideas that I think might help you.” We’ve been able to help others who had those same concerns and now we’ve eliminated that concern for them.

Also, to touch on the transition part. I know we were talking about it earlier, but I definitely want to share it here. If we can start planting the seed now and thinking about the opportunities instead of, “Some of you might have a slow tax season or be inundated with work. It could be the busiest you’ve ever been and you feel overwhelmed. You feel stressed out.”

I was talking to one of my clients, and she’s like, “Michelle, I’m lucky if I eat before 2:00 in the afternoon.” I’m like, “That’s not good.” As we start to adapt to this change, I know you had a nice three-phase way to think about it. For myself and the accountants reading, we love steps and phases and keeping it very analytical for us. Mike, can you share a little bit about that?

I had a couple and I was writing some things down. This is your new normal. The first thing is you’ve got to realize that we might have to change the way we’re doing things. Number two, we’re going to have to adapt to this new reality. What are some things that I’m going to have to do to adapt to this new reality? I’ll give you an example.

There are a lot of restaurants around the country that weren’t set up for delivery only or pickup only. I’ve seen a few locals that have closed down for a day. They got retooled, and now they’re reopened and ready to go. That wasn’t what they planned. They had to adapt, but I’ll bet going forward a large part of their revenue was going to come from delivery and they weren’t prepared to do that before.

Now, it’s opened up a door for them that when we come out of this, they’ve got an avenue that they didn’t have before. The third thing or the last piece is we have to prepare for this when it’s over. You have to think in terms of, “When this is over, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity here.” I mentioned it a minute ago, but there might be some accounts that are open now that weren’t in the past. “How am I going to be prepared for it?” You gave a great example.

Now that I’m doing webinars and some different things, I’m able to reach a bigger audience that’s turned into something that’s generating business for me. Word of mouth, social media and things like that that I never would’ve done before. Now, they’ve created that. Do you look at that opportunity? Oftentimes, in the most turbulence is where you see the most opportunities. You have to get out of that comfort zone a little bit to say, “Am I going to be ready for that when we come out of this that I’m able to differentiate and take on new customers that way?”

In turbulence is where you see the most opportunities. Click To Tweet

These are the most important things because number one, as you said, it’s to accept what’s going on. Also, being able to transition just like the restaurants and some others, adapt to the new reality and be prepared to sift our way out of this into whatever that new normal looks like. A few days ago, I didn’t think this was ever going to happen and now I’m, “Wow. Okay.” Mike, is there anything else that maybe we didn’t cover that you want to share before we depart?

This is the last thing I’ll say. I was talking to one of the medical clients that I work with, and these are talks about the new normal. They cannot go in and see doctors right now. They’re trying to call on physicians and they can’t. When he reached out and he had a telephone call with a guy, he said, “I was not thinking this way, but the physician was saying, ‘This is freeing up a little bit of time for me. I need to get into the lab and start working on a couple of new procedures. Can you set that up for me?’”

Reaching out and taking a risk to call him opened up another opportunity for him. What I’ll say to you is, if your gut’s telling you, “I need to do this. I think I’m going to try something new.” You then start to try to talk to yourself or that limiting belief starts to talk to yourself out of it, “I’m not going to call them.” Make the call. Just do it because it’s telling you that there might be some good opportunities ahead of you in doing these things.

Step out of that comfort zone and try it. The worst thing that can happen is they say, “We’re not open to that. We can’t do it.” It’s not a personal rejection. It’s just they’re not open to the opportunity, but they might be. You’ll be surprised how good you’ll feel if you step out of your comfort zone and something good happened. Think in terms of opportunity.

It can’t get worse than it is and you got nothing to lose. You had nothing anyway. If you do a webinar for a few hundred people, the worst thing that’s going to happen is maybe you think you don’t look that great on camera. Most people are having this anxiety about what they are on camera. I’m like, “You’ll be fine. Pretend you’re talking to me. That’s all.”

Thank you and I appreciate you having me on it for this. Hopefully, as we get through this, everybody has some new opportunities and grows a new level of confidence. You’d start to differentiate and see things as an opportunity, not as a problem.

It was an honor to have you here. I am looking forward to doing this again, talking all things about sales, revenue and abundance. Maybe we’ll talk about objection handling and all that other fun stuff that I know you’ve got up your sleeve in the near future. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you all so much for joining me here on another episode of the show. I also want to say thank you as well for writing your reviews on Apple Podcasts or Google Play. I appreciate the feedback. I do read all the reviews and if you have not left one yet, I invite each of you to take ten seconds to leave a written review. How has this helped you? What have you enjoyed so I can base my future episodes based on your feedback?

Again, if you’re not truly where you want to be with your accounting practice as it relates to your sales conversations, I get it. A lot of accounting clients come to us feeling frustrated, stuck, and not getting paid totally what they’re worth. I was talking to one of our students, Ana Barbara, and how she doubled her revenue just in the last nine months that we’ve been working together from where she was in 2022.

If you don’t feel like you’re charging your worth, you don’t have a solid system in place, you feel like you’re winging the whole process, especially with what’s going on and getting inundated with emails and calls from clients that you’re not getting paid for, head on over to TheAbundantCall.com. Let’s talk about it. My only requirement is that you’ve been in business for at least two years and you have higher value services that you offer to your clients. Once again, head on over to the website, take notes on this episode, leave a written review, and we are here to support you. If you need any other support, send an email to Hello@ThePitchQueen.com. Have a great day.

 

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