Editor’s Note: Professor Dawn Fotopulos will be presenting “Guarantee Profitability: for Your Clients, for Your Practice” on Wednesday, June 7, at 4:10 p.m. Her session will cover the basic components of a business that affect profitability – from product/service line, to pricing, to profitability by client – and how to analyze each to create an action plan to increase profitability across the board.
The "Scaling New Heights®" conference always feels like a homecoming for me. It’s after the crush of tax season when we get to celebrate each other’s accomplishments and share ways to better serve our clients in the process.
If our real mission is to transform small business through accounting professional relationships, then improving profitability dramatically for our clients can be an important strategic effort toward this end.
This year, I’ll have the opportunity to take participants through an analytic framework I’ve used for more than 20 years to identify and realize additional profitability for clients’ businesses, whether they offer tangible products or services.
The three key areas we’ll examine are: the "Product and Service Line Review," "Pricing Strategy" and "Client Base Management." We’ll do an overview on how to conduct these reviews, what to look for, and how to have the conversation with the client to provide new insights for the action plan to get results.
It’s one thing to discuss strategy in theory, but my breakout session this year at Scaling New Heights will include case studies illustrating how simple, small changes can have tremendous end-benefits for your clients’ profitability.
The "Product and Service Line Review" will reveal some fascinating and significant profit opportunities for business owners to align gross margin potential with their sales efforts. Most cannot see this so they’re working twice as hard as they should be for the profitability their businesses are generating.
The "Power of Pricing" will lean on Harvard Business School’s three benchmark pricing strategy model and show you clearly how to price higher than your competition and gain profitability. Joe Woodard speaks often of value-based pricing, but did you know that value has an equation? It does, and our session will take some of the mystery out of setting prices for your clients and your practice.
The "Client Base Review" is fascinating because if the Harvard Business Review article Pricing It Right is true, a full two-thirds of your client base is losing you money. The challenge is, no one knows which clients are truly profitable. They think they know.
This section of the presentation will show attendees how to conduct a Client Base Review to surface those clients who are not only profitable but those that have the most potential to generate profitability in the future.
ProAdvisors ideally are positioned to learn the methodology I will be sharing in this breakout session and apply it to their practices and to their clients’ businesses right away. This session will show you what data you’ll need to review and how to convert the data into actionable intelligence for the client.
One of my goals every time I have the privilege of meeting ProAdvisors is to take them one step further in becoming Business Therapists, not number crunchers.
The true value of every accounting professional I’ve met is in interpreting the data for better management decision making. What if we could improve profitability in a matter of months not years? What if we could add a new service to your practice with the potential for you to get compensated based on how your clients’ businesses perform? This breakout session will spark your creativity to do exactly that. Bring your questions and curiosity.
I look forward to meeting you at Scaling New Heights and conquering the profit Yeti together.
Dawn Fotoulos
Dawn Fotopulos is the associate professor of business at The King’s College and the founder of www.hiddenprofitprophet.com dedicated to helping fast growth businesses double and triple profitability and cash flow in record time.
As an experienced entrepreneur and small-business turnaround expert she has rescued hundreds of small business and helped thousands of others reach their full potential. Dawn has led an accomplished 20-year career in business, working as a serial entrepreneur, vice-president at Citigroup, real estate investor, and hedge fund partner.
Dawn is a certified facilitator in the Kauffman FastTrac Program, a CEO leader for the Job Creators Network and award-winning author of “Accounting for the Numberphobic: A Survival Guide for Small Business Owners,” which was just named one of the top business books by Small Business Trends. An expert in her field, she has been featured on MSNBC’s “Your Business,” at The New York Times "Small Business Summit "and in Forbes.
For more information visit www.hiddenprofitprophet.com.