My Story: Growing a Million-Dollar Bookkeeping Firm

Let me take you back to when we first started our bookkeeping business — and the journey we’ve been on over the last 11 years.

We launched our firm as a virtual business from day one. My sister had the tech skills to set us up with the right cloud-based tools, and she brought her five existing clients with her. We offered bookkeeping, taxes, QuickBooks training, and business consulting — all at just $18/hour, because that’s what my sister had been charging when she did bookkeeping ‘on the side’.

Things moved fast. We networked, partnered with Intuit to deliver financial literacy seminars, and soon our client base exploded — from 5 to 30 bookkeeping clients, over 100 tax clients, and dozens of consulting engagements. It was time to hire staff. We thought we were set up for success.

But reality hit hard.

Even after raising our rates to $35/hour, we couldn’t cover payroll and expenses. We weren’t getting paid. We were stressed, broke, and questioning everything. That’s when we attended our first QB Thrive Conference (now QB Connect) and discovered value pricing through a session led by Mark Wickersham. It changed everything.

We went home, created fixed-price packages, and our clients loved them. But we quickly realized fixed pricing wasn’t the same as value pricing. We didn’t understand that to truly embrace value pricing we had to work on our mindset and start to understand the value of high quality bookkeeping. We didn’t believe that our services were valuable, and we told ourselves our client would never pay us more than $200 or $300 a month for bookkeeping. So, when we created those fixed priced packages we set the price at $200, $250 and $350 a month. This created an even bigger challenge for us. 

When we hired for first three team members we did everything wrong.  Our staff took way longer to complete work than we did. A small client might take me or my sister 2-3 hours to complete, our team members who were paid hourly were taking 5-10 hours to do the same work. So, these new fixed prices were a disaster! The clients were paying $200-300 a month but we were paying our team hourly. There were times we were paying our staff more than what our clients were paying us. Things got really bad for us, and we were broke and didn’t have any money to invest in training, programs or coaches that might help us. 

So instead, we consumed every free resource Mark Wickersham offered, attended every webinar, and eventually made the bold decision to invest in ourselves. At the same time, we had the pleasure of meeting the team at Pure Bookkeeping. Pure Bookkeeping offers all the systems, check lists workflows and step by step processes to deliver high quality bookkeeping work and the build a bookkeeping business. We took a leap of faith and invested in ourselves. We let our staff go, joined Mark’s mentoring group, adopted his Effective Pricing software and became licensees of the Pure Bookkeeping System. That was the turning point.

Value pricing is a journey — one that requires trial, error, and a deep understanding of your own value. With Mark’s guidance and the Pure Bookkeeping System, we transformed our business. Today, Connie and I both earn a salary, we have 10 amazing team members, and we’re profitable and thriving.

It can be done. It takes time, hard work, and a commitment to growth. We’re still learning every day, and I’m excited to help others do the same.