You are probably wondering, “what this ‘99’ is about?” Well, I could be talking about gasoline prices, as in $2.99 per gallon of unleaded gasoline. I wonder how many of you can remember when gasoline was only 99-cents per gallon? Or when it got perhaps as high as $4.99 per gallon in some parts of the country? There are a lot of places in the world where $4.99 per gallon of gasoline is considered ‘cheap’. The price of gasoline is relative to the value of either having gasoline to put in your car or truck or not having any gasoline for your car or truck.
I remember a few years back standing at the gas pump and a woman was complaining about the fact that gasoline was $3.99 per gallon. Now a gallon is equal to 3785.41 milliliters, so each ml of gas was then worth .001054 cents, that’s just slightly more than 1/10th of a cent. The funny thing is the woman had first stopped at Starbucks across the street and bought a ‘tall’ Latte which has only 350 milliliters and which cost $4.75 (plus tax) at the time. Not including tax, her Latte cost .0136 cents per ml. That’s more than 10 times the price of gasoline per ml. Her ‘designer coffee’ was costing her 10 times the gasoline she was complaining about to drive her car to work to earn the money to buy her coffee, and she had no complaints at all about the cost of her Starbucks.
So, if you wonder where I am going with all of this ‘99’ business… it’s simple. In what did the woman place her ‘value’? The answer is easy… in her Starbucks Latte… she was willing to pay for her Starbucks Latte without complaint! Now you know why they call it Star‘bucks’.
Why did the woman complain about the price of gasoline? Because she ‘under-valued’ its importance. It seems only when there is a ‘major shortage’ do we here in American ‘value’ the importance of gasoline and therefore stop complaining about the cost, rather we complain about having to wait in lines as long as those at the Starbucks drive-thru to get to the gas pumps.
Which of the two… a Starbucks Latte, or Gasoline, is most like an accountant’s services? Based on the way most accountants charge their clients, you would think accountants are selling gasoline, dispensing services at the pump. (Remember the old-timey pumps that went ‘ding’ every time they turned over a dollar?)
When really, the services that most accountants provide are like a Latte made on a Victoria Arduino Espresso Maker rather than at a Starbucks. The value is incomparable.
The problem… accountants don’t ‘price’ their services based on their ‘value’.
So, what really is the ‘99’ about? In the old 'accounting' way of thinking it’s about $1.10 per minute, the price of another 90-minute CPE webinar. In reality, that $99 will be ‘the best value’ you will ever experience when Mark Wickersham, FCA lays out The Foundations of Value Pricing: How to get better prices on Thursday, April 1, 2021, at 12 Noon Eastern (11:00 AM Central).
I told you in the description for this article that "only one thing could be more important than for you to read this article"... that one thing is for you to attend the webinar. Nowhere else will you learn what Mark will teach you in this new webinar that he has developed for Insightful Accountant. Mark is going to change your ‘sense of value’, your sense of ‘self-worth’, and with that, he is going to teach you how to value what you and your services are truly worth.
"I honestly believe, when you put Mark's webinar into practice, Starbucks won’t be the only thing on your block with ‘bucks’ behind the pricing logic." (Murph)
The Foundations of Value Pricing: How to get better prices
Thursday, April 1, 2021 – 12 Noon Eastern (11:00 AM Central)
Webinar length: 90-minutes (1.5 hours)
CPE Credits: 1.5 CPE
Cost: $99.00
See this article for information regarding refunds, cancellations, and comments.