Willing To Change

Hi! My name is Shauna Wortinger, And I from Florida, United States of America. I’m actually in the business of my father, Gary Shotton, and am visiting him for the holidays. And I wanted to kind of just get on the video and share a little bit about myself and kind of some things that I’m going through within my own business as you are listening and probably as a business owner, or looking into getting into business. And kind of my background is, I am a CPA that’s an accountant here in the United States where I do business consulting, accounting work, software implementation that kind of variety of things just to help various businesses understand their finances. And today i just want to share about “Being Willing to Change”. In the business that I’m and I do, actually I teach, I teach an accounting program, called QuickBooks. And so, I see a lot of different businesses come through the classes that I teach. I teach well over a thousand or more students per year on the software. The thing that I run into the most is people just not being willing to change, whether it be the business owner, the staff underneath them, it’s just the friction that comes with, “the way we used to do it” ; “we like it” “why are we changing it?” and then getting through that process always taught talk it through like pulling a tree out when you’re rooted and grounded in some way that you’re doing something and you pull up a tree out the roots are dangling you gotta plant it in to some other maybe programmer, or system, or way of doing things that should be more efficient but that whole transition stage isn’t fun. Isn’t pretty. And so I have dealt with clients of mine that, I know the way they’ve been doing it is archaic, whether it be by hand, the way they’re filling out their data just manually where a computer system if they put it properly in place will eliminate their time eliminate a whole staff member from doing all this manual input you know that for me I think it’s a struggle that business owners are owners even staff within an office they either are going to change or be left behind meaning competitors will come in and take over or you know I think of my profession I do accounting work i have just colleagues of mine not open to quickbooks online which is a cloud-based online system to say no I don’t like it I don’t want to use it for my comment back to them is you’re not gonna be here for another 10 years I mean your business is going away because people are moving this way I mean the movie movie industry the music industry if it’s a musician isn’t willing to sell their music on itunes on the internet they’re going away I mean that they’re evaporating those businesses are around and so for me I’ve seen the internet actually play into a huge factor of that change just about myself just sharing where I am changing as a consultant I i sell my time and my time is how people pay me for my work you could have a product you know in your case where you sell a product that somebody buys from you for for me people by my time or my brain and my knowledge and i’m in my practice in my business how I monetize that brain or time is by charging by the hour and that is an old model it’s the way it’s been done for years with lawyers with accountants IT professionals engineers anybody in this profession this is kind of the way it’s been done for hundreds of years actually it’s just track my time and then I charge by the hour well I never liked it i never thought that was a good model and so for me I started learning and so the first thing I encourage you to do is just be learning you may not need to change at the moment but be open to that and for me I started learning and listening to other professionals in my industry i encourage you to do the same competitors other people walk into their business see what they’re doing the open to maybe a different way of doing things think out-of-the-box I just started learning just listening reading books listening to podcast and i started learning about charging what they call value pricing and there’s a whole discussion on that i’m not going to go into that here but basically changing the model of hourly billing to just you know thinking through a project how long will the job take and just having a flat fee just like you go get your car changed you know what it’s going to cost you to get your oil change or your tires rotated and just have a flat fee chargeable fee for that work and so learn encourage that number one the second thing in changing is implementing it i think for me um i was learning and I knew I needed a change i knew there was a need to do that and there came a point though I just had to do it I i could keep on learning keep on learning keep on learning but there comes a point where I didn’t didn’t feel like I was ready I didn’t think I knew all I needed to know but i actually had a project I was working on right at that moment and it was a large project it was him take me probably four to six months to complete and i knew i needed to change my pricing model right then and there and even though I didn’t feel I had all the knowledge I just started implementing I just started doing the the pricing change in my case that I had to implement so just encourage do it and in my case implement and just make it happen and whether or not you might be right or wrong for me i could be wrong but all it was my time I didn’t affect employees other people so you’ve got to think of how it affects other people too and in my case I was able to implement pretty quickly because it’s just me the third thing and in changing i think is adjusting so once you learn number one once you actually implement that change then you have to adjust according to what works for you what works for your business and for me I’m still adjusting at this point my case in this pricing model that I’m a changing too but i encourage whether it be a product or service that you’re making changes to our system perhaps a change of processes that you’re doing always listen and learn and make again those adjustments according to what works for your office and for me my adjustments that I had to make it i actually had to shave clients off i have about a hundred clients that I work for and work with at this moment and because of these changes i’m implementing i’m actually changing my whole business model where I’m going to work with about 30 or 40 primary clients when i get more involved with their business involved with their work and then I’m getting rid of kind of the smaller clients that I don’t use are they not using my services really don’t even need need these consulting services and so for me adjusting was actually shaving off clients in my case and actually streamlining my mindset in my business so those hopefully are some helpful tips that you can apply to your product your service just kind of sharing with my profession in my industry of consulting hopefully find some of that helpful Up next