102 ⎸ [Q&A] Simplify Your Clients Onboarding Experience

So there are some examples in the lesson on onboarding, which should be under phase three. there's a few lessons surrounding your onboarding experience for clients, and I have some examples Of how our onboarding and our dubs auto is set up. There's screenshots in there, there's some workflows and things like that that we have. So if you want to jump ahead and look at that lesson, that would probably be helpful for you. It's already full. That's crazy.

So I actually was going, I was, I had been planning to go to QuickBooks Connect and I had a ticket and I actually returned it. And I decided not to go. And now I'm starting to get fomo. But, if you listen to last week's podcast episode, you'll understand like, Serena just needed to clear her calendar. But now that I did that, I'm like, I kind of, kind of wish I was going, but whatever the decisions we make in haste. Okay, so here's some questions.

I have a couple advisory calls they say they are on board after sending a proposal they don't respond to my email. Need advice on this. So, are you following up, is my question number one, on the call. What you could do to set this up for, to make sure that there's follow up happening is let them know, like I am going to, after we get off this call, I'm going to put together a proposal for you. this proposal is going to expire in. X, Y, Z timeframe, and I usually do two weeks.

And so Doto actually has the capability of setting an expiration date and it'll send auto reminder emails. you have to make sure you've set that up, behind the proposal in the settings, how often you want the reminders going out and, and all that, but that helps automate the follow up, but letting them know on the call I'm gonna create you a custom proposal that it's going to expire on this date. Let's put a time on the calendar to cover the proposal if you have any questions.

And so you could book a second appointment with them at that time. If they are hesitant to book that follow up appointment, that would indicate that they're not actually that serious. Cuz if you Consider how you act in situations like that. If you've ever been on a sales call and the salesperson is like, let's get you on the calendar to have a follow up conversation, when would be a good time for you?

And you're like, I don't really wanna get on another phone call with you because I'm not planning on buying. Then like, that might be how your, potential client is feeling as well. So you can kind of gauge their body language if you're on Zoom. And kind of like if they're hesitant to get on that second call, you'll know right then that they're not serious and then you can just be like, great, I'll just send you the proposal and set an expiration date and let the automations happen.

if you're not on Dubsado, you could do manual follow ups like every, in a week. You can say, I'm gonna follow up with you in a week if you haven't signed this. and things like that. You can also ask them like, when are you looking to start this service? So then you can have a good idea of when would make sense to have that proposal expire.

If they are like chomping at the bit to get this done quickly, make sure you're sending them the proposal as soon as possible, if not like right after the call. And then, Making sure that the expiration date is shorter.

I have found that if you wait, if you, if you send someone is like, this is urgent, I wanna get this done, you should kind of drop everything and make sure that you're sending them the proposal as quickly as possible because you may not be the only person that they're trying to work with. And if someone else is quicker to the draw of getting them the information that they need, they're gonna win the client.

Again, I'm referring, I'm kind of like, Looking back at my own self, when I am hiring people in my business, the vendors and the consultants that I work with that are quick to get me proposals and quick to show that they want to work with me are the ones that win my business.

If I reach out to someone and I'm like, Hey, I wanna work together with you, And they don't have anything available on their calendar to schedule a call or we do have a call and then it's another, whoever, however long, like maybe they forget to send me a proposal or whatever. I have now moved on and started looking for a different consultant to help me with whatever it was that I needed. if I don't get a proposal quickly, you know what I mean? So, consider that with your clients too.

It's not a desperation move to move quickly. It's like, it's actually a, it shows that you're organized and on top of things. So there could be a couple different factors, leading into. Their decision not to respond. So check with yourself on those, like, are you following up, are you quickly getting them the proposal?

And another thing that you could do is in the proposal, if you're emailing them, the, the proposal record, a loom video of you going over the proposal and the engagement letter and explaining to them what all it entails. These are the expectations. This is the process. This is what happens next. Make sure they understand what the next steps are as well.

And you could even, I don't do this, in my proposal process, but I could see a benefit of it, of also actually giving them the list of documents they're going to need once they sign that engagement letter. So providing it as part of your proposal package of saying, and these are the things I'm gonna ask from you. And so they'll already be able to start, get, gathering those documents. As soon as they sign the engagement letter and proposal.

So there's different things that you can do to show them like, you're super organized and you should work with me type of situation. I hope that helps. Let's see.

Another question. If you already have a business with lots of clients and are trying to get things more streamlined and organized, how do you decide what to do first? This business kind of exploded with no workflows or processes. Invoicing is hourly. Need to hire, need to invoice, need to write processes and procedures, need to start implementing new software. Where should you start? Okay. I would say this is a tricky thing, but I would.

You've kind of already done this in the question, but brain dump everything that you know you need to do and then sit back and look at your list and, and evaluate like, okay, what is top priority? In my mind, my top priority is always going to be taking care of the clients that I've already onboarded. And so I would look to see basically like sit down with yourself and kind of like take. Stock of where everything is with each client.

I'm not sure how, like maybe you don't have any processes in place or any checklists. That would be a good place to start is to like, as you're working through these current clients that you're working on, start creating a checklist of what you're doing for each of those clients each month. And and then you at least have kind of like a baseline. And then you have a checklist of things that you can go and create a job description from. Because that would probably be a secondary primary priority.

because you need to, stay on top of your current clients, obviously, but you also need to start recruiting. So that would be, and recruiting always takes longer than you think it will, especially if you're trying to find the right person, which I would recommend. Doing things the correct way and trying to find the right person instead of just a body to fill the need because that never really ends well. And you'll just be set further back.

So take the time to actually create the time to actually sit down and think about what type of person you want and the culture you wanna create. If you're in dire need of just getting work done, you can post in our group to see if anyone wants to contract with you. Because most of the people in this group, I think have high integrity and also are knowledgeable and are building a business as well, so they understand like how to problem solve and how to dig into things without a process in place.

So, that would be my recommendation if you are like really, really struggling to keep up with the current client load. I would then start slowly switching over each of your clients to a flat rate or a package price. That way you can streamline your billing process and just automate that and have it go out automatically every month. You could do it a couple different ways. Like you could look at the average of what you've been charging these people and just take a flat rate and do that.

which probably is in your case because you're so busy, is probably the one of the better approaches. Because at this point you may be a little too stressed to sit down and think about what additional value you could add to increase the price, but you may also need to be thinking like about doing a price increase in the future. So the conversation I might have with your clients is, Hey, I'm gonna switch you to a flat rate.

I'm gonna take the average of the last three months, and that's gonna be your monthly price for now until. Whatever deadline you wanna give yourself of when you do do a price increase. So you could say, from now for the next six months, and then I'm going to be redesigning my packages and there may be another adjustment to our pricing. That way they're. Prepped for it, and they're not blindsided by it.

But, you can just explain to them like, I'm a business owner, I spend a lot of time tracking my time and then billing you, and it's going to streamline the process. you're gonna know what fee to expect every month, and it's gonna automate things on my end too. So those are the first three things that I would work on. Create yourself a checklist for what you're doing for your current clients. just a very simple checklist. Nothing extreme. Okay. Like, just get this stuff out of your head.

Like So for instance, you can even take what I have inside of BBA in the template vault. There is a monthly workflow. You can take that and tweak it. Those are the things that we do for all of our clients. There may be things in there that you're not doing for clients, so you can just remove 'em. But it's a very simple, like monthly checklist. Start with that. Implement that for all of your clients. Use a system that's ideal, obviously, but you can also create that in Excel if you wanted to.

But if you're going to hire, I would recommend putting it in a, an online system like Asana. There's also a bonus in BBA for you. Alyssa Lang Workflow Queen has created a bonus for you on how to get those workflows out of your head and onto paper, and then you can put those in, Asana or click up or whatever system you want to use. So that would be number one. Get the stuff out of your head and onto paper or a system and. Then using that, create a job, description post in this group.

If you just need a quick hand, if, I'm sure there's people in here that are wanting to, get their feet more wet before they go out and get their own clients, but they're very knowledgeable and they can problem solve and help you probably build out a process as as you go. And so those are the first two things. And then the third thing is, Switch all of your clients to flat rate billing.

That way you're at least getting your money in the door, but warn them that you're going to be reevaluating your packages and your pricing over the next however long, six months, three months, whatever you decide. If you say three months and you're gonna be up against year end. So I don't know if I would recommend doing that. I would say maybe. This, this next summer. If there's a client that you go in and you do their, average and

you're like, I'm undercharging them anyways, maybe just increase that one. You don't have to go across the board and increase everybody, but if there is one or two clients that you're like, I'm way undercharging them, I need to adjust, do that. They may leave, they may stay. There may be one that leaves and one that stays out of two. And so if one leaves, now you've freed up time and you've also like probably covered part of their cost by increasing the other one. So, , I hope that is helpful.

Let me know. thank you. Thank you. Yes. Okay, question, question about how you charge your d i y quarterly clients? I've watched a few videos that show your pricing, like the dza setup videos, but I can't tell if it's a monthly charge or a quarterly charge. 4 25 a month per quarter. I'm struggling to price these clients. Okay. Bailey, So we did away with DIY bookkeeping for a long time because I needed, it was kind of a struggle when I wasn't niched or niched.

Still not deci, I'm undecided on how I wanna say that word, obviously. So once we really did dial in an A niche, I was able to figure out like, who is a great fit for DIY and who isn't. And so, we have recently, created a new offer. And I'm gonna run it more like a membership.

But, the DIY clients I was charging 4 25 per quarter, which, If you're doing, basically, if you're doing a diagnostic every quarter, you want that price, that quarterly price to be at least what you would charge for a diagnostic, because that's how much work you put into it, like when you go in and check on their books and things like that. If that's included in your D I Y service, make sure that pricing is aligned with the price of a diagnostic fee.

if you're doing diagnostics for free, obviously that advice doesn't, doesn't fly. But , I, I think the 4 25 is going to be a quarterly price in that instance, but they're also paying for access to you, so whatever your access level is, it kind of depends on like, are you going to be available to them only once a quarter? Are you going to be available to them once a month or ongoing like, If there's more access to you for questions and support, that needs to be a higher price.

However, depending on, a bunch of factors like You also don't want it to be priced higher than your done-for-you service because then there's like a disconnect. Someone would look at it and be like, why is your done-for-you service cheaper? Unless that's what you're trying to get them to just use your done-for-you service. And that's okay too. But you may need to also reevaluate your done-for-you service. Service if the pricing doesn't align, if that makes sense. So, 4 25 a quarter.

Let's go, let's just round up to 500. So that's like 1 67 a month. I think that's what we have our new offer at. Or maybe 1 97 a month for, DIY with a quarterly check-in, but they're also getting access to a group with a monthly, coworking session. So. I would your monthly price, your base price of your monthly done for you bookkeeping would need to be a lot higher than 1 67 for it to be worth it for someone in their mind, if that makes sense.

So , to answer your question though, that was a quarterly price. Uh, but just make sure that everything else is kind of in alignment, like how much access are you giving them and, and all those things. Or are you even doing a quarterly diagnostic? If you're just answering questions, then maybe you go lower than that. It's really up to you and also the pricing and the rest of your services. So , you're

All righty. Okay, so another question. Do you have your employees sign a non-disclosure agreement and do you have a template you're willing to share? So our I could probably dig up a non-disclosure agreement. However, it's in our offer letter, as well. So for our actual employees and then our contractors. It's also built into the contractor, agreement as well. So I can dig, I don't know if that's in the template vault. I don't know if you checked that or not.

There may be a contract subcontractor agreement in there. But if not, I can add a template in there. I will just say that like, Those are legal documents and you should still have an attorney look at them to make sure that they're kosher in your own state. because different states have different rules about certain things. So you always wanna have, an attorney in your state look at them or purchase a template from an actual attorney. there's lots of places. that you can do that.

we use Gusto for payroll and so we use the offer letter that's in there and it does, have like a privacy component and then our employee handbook also covers this stuff. So, And we do background checks. So I would recommend doing all of the above, like making sure that it's in your independent contractor agreement, making sure it's in your employment offer letters and in your employee handbook. And the, level of gusto is entirely worth it because of the HR support that you get.

So whether you're using Gusto or any other, payroll software, I highly recommend using the option that has the payroll or the HR support and like an employee handbook builder and all that kind of stuff. It is worth every penny.

Right. If you don't use Dubsado yet, what would be the best format for a proposal? Do you just type an email with the offer, create like a document on letterhead? Every past client was just very casual type of agreement where they told me, I can do your bookkeeping for x per hour now that I want to implement proposals. Not sure how to do that.

You can use HoneyBook is a lot simpler to set up than Dubsado so that might be a good option for you if you've looked at Dubsado and you're like overwhelmed with it. here's how I would decide what to use, because this is how I have decided what to use. Are you going to onboard or send out more than one proposal per month? If yes, use a software. Just, just use a software and get it built in, to do the follow-ups and the reminders and the automations and stuff.

If you are not planning on sending out that many proposals, you can absolutely do it in a Word document or create a template in like, hello, sign. that is pretty templated. So it has your engagement letter and then at the top of your engagement letter, it's the services that you're offering. You don't have to give people options if you've already talked about what is the best option for them on the call, and they're like, yes, that is what I want. You don't have to do a whole proposal situation.

You can just create the engagement letter and have the scope of work in the engagement letter of what you guys talked about, to simplify things. So that's kind of how I would decide if you want to be able to give people options and show them, like for instance, one of the reasons I like giving options, is even though we've generally discussed what the best option is for them on the phone call, I also like to show them what to look forward to.

Which is like maybe the next level up based on where their business is at and if it's growing, they're gonna need the, the CFO services eventually or whatever, right? So I wanna show them what the price for that is and what all is included in that as well. Even if I know they're not going to choose it, because I want them to be aware that that is always an option. And I also tell them like, I'm putting this on here.

I know you're not ready for it yet, but I want you to see that this is also what we can help you with. And things like that. So that's the benefit of offering options. But like if you are not planning on doing a lot of proposals or onboarding a lot of clients, you can absolutely just create a proposal in an email. Like, here's what we talked about. I'm attaching the engagement letter.

And then in the engagement letter, it also has, here's what we talked about, this is the scope, this is what you're responsible for, this is what I'm responsible for, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, yes.

All righty, guys. Has been 30 minutes almost. Exactly. So I am going to. Slowly hop off in case there's any more questions. It's always really awkward. I'm happy to stay on longer if you have more questions. But if not, there's always the group to ask your questions. There's also always cajabi inside the course portal. You can ask questions right below a video if you have questions or need clarity around something. It's really helpful when we get those submitted through.

The actual course platform because then we know exactly where people are getting stuck. And, and we can make a future version better. And then just a reminder, if you are in BBA self-paced, you can upgrade any time to VIP. So if you want to be able to hop on our hot seat calls and get one-on-one coaching in a direct or in a group setting, so like you get to hop on a hot seat, ask your question, we get to go back and forth.

It's highly, highly valuable, even if you're not the one, and maybe even more valuable if you're not the one on the hot seat. Just watching and listening to other people's questions, and realizing like, oh, I never realized that could be an issue. And then we also hold you accountable. So each hot seat. We start off with wins, we share wins, and then at the end of the hot seat we talk about like what we're committing to for the next month.

And so I will hold you accountable when you show up to those hot seats. And then the coworking sessions are an hour and a half. I think originally, when we. Opened up. VIP I had said there, we had said they're an hour, but they, it just works better when they're an hour and a half because we do three 20 minute sprints of, heads down working. But it's really awesome to be able to work alongside your peers. And then I'm there for support in the chat.

And then we, you know, take a break every 20 minutes and chit chat, talk about what we're working on. And you can also, like, if it's something where we need to have like a back and forth, we can go into a breakout room. On the co-working session while everyone else is still working. And, we can work through whatever it is that you're working on, like tactical wise.

So if it's like, I have this client file, I'm doing the cleanup and I don't like, I'm kind of stuck here, we can, you can screen share with just me in a breakout room and that way everything is private and it's not, You know, no risk to your client information getting out there. So those are the two major benefits of the VIP version of bba. If you're not in there, highly recommend and you can upgrade any time. So just shoot an email over to [email protected] if you're interested.

Mariah or Hannah will get you the link to upgrade. All righty, everyone. I hope you all have a beautiful weekend, and the rest of your week, and we'll talk to you soon.