RezaHooda

RezaHooda I help Accountancy Business owners grow and get out of the day to day. Follow MAIN FACEBOOK ACCOUNT: Reza Hooda for more

Last week a member called James posted something in the group that made me stop scrolling.He runs an accounting practice...
04/09/2026

Last week a member called James posted something in the group that made me stop scrolling.

He runs an accounting practice in the UK, and another in the UAE.

He'd just used the pricing system for the first time, on a real client, in a country where he had no benchmark for what "normal" even looks like.

He won the client. £834 a month, recurring.

Then he added one line underneath the screenshot.

"I wouldn't have had the gumption to push for this price without the tool."

I read that line and underlined it myself before I'd even finished the post.

Gumption. Not knowledge. Not a formula. Gumption.

That word is the whole story of pricing in this profession.

Most firm owners already know their fees are too low. You don't need me to tell you that. You've done the maths in your head at 11pm more than once.

What you don't have is the nerve to say the new number out loud to a client who's used to the old one.

James didn't win that client because a spreadsheet told him what to charge. He won it because a number appeared in front of him that felt too big to ask for, and something outside his own head gave him permission to ask for it anyway.

That's what a system actually does. It's not there to do your thinking. It's there to stand behind you when your nerve goes.

If you want the same tool James used, comment PRICE and I'll send you the details.

03/09/2026

A bookkeeper asked a group this week what the going rate is for subcontracted work.

Her accountant pays her £23 an hour for bookkeeping.

He pays her £25 an hour for a job he calls "admin" - doing one client's invoicing every week.

Same bookkeeper. Same accountant. Same week. The work he thinks is worth less is the work that pays more.

She noticed it herself and asked the room: is bookkeeping really so undervalued that admin beats it?

Twenty seven replies came back. £20. £25. £30 to £35. One practice pays £25 and charges it straight out at cost. Someone worked out the accountant is billing his client £50 for that same hour.

All of it an argument about the size of the number. None of it about where the number came from.

It came from the words.

One rate was set by the word "bookkeeping" and the other by the word "admin". He was pricing the labels, not the work behind them, and he had them in the wrong order without noticing.

Someone made the same point about payroll. It looks like admin from the outside, so it gets priced like admin. Then getting it wrong means somebody's wages are late and HMRC are involved. Nobody is paying for the button being pressed. They are paying for the month where nothing goes wrong.

And then the line I would frame: the accountant is charging his client at least double your rate, and he will be absolutely fine. Your client isn't.

One of them describes an outcome and prices it. The other describes a task and gets paid for it.

Whoever names the work sets the price of it.

So if you never describe what your work prevents, protects and takes off somebody's plate, someone else will describe it for you.

And they will call it admin.

This is exactly what my Virtual Finance Office training is about. Not selling bookkeeping, payroll and admin under labels somebody else priced. Running one named function with outcomes attached - and naming it yourself.

Comment VFO and I will send you the details.

02/09/2026

A client told their accountant this week that they'd run the tax return through ChatGPT, it came out lower, and they'd confirm next week.

I saw three more like it the same day.

One client asked why he couldn't claim for his solar panels, because the machine said he could. He attached the answer. The answer said he couldn't.

One ran their bank statements through it to split business from personal. Their accountant found thousands in allowable expenses it had missed, and "income" that turned out to be the weekly shop.

The best reply I read: tell them you've asked ChatGPT what you should be charging for your experience, and apparently you need to charge more.

Funny. Also the entire point.

For most of my career, clients had no cheap way to second-guess us. Now they have one that is instant, confident, free, and frequently wrong. They cannot tell when it is wrong. That is the bit that stings.

But I do not think this is an AI story.

If the only thing a client holds from you is a number and a filed return, then a free number is a genuine competitor. There is nothing else in the comparison.

If they have sat across from you and heard what they are actually buying, the thing you spotted before it got expensive, the enquiry that never happened, the fact that someone picks up when they ring in a panic in January, then a free second opinion is not competing at all. It cannot produce any of that.

The people rattled by this are selling the return.

The people who are not are selling the relationship. The return simply sits inside it.

Wrong answers have always been free. Someone's mate was giving them out in the pub long before any of this. The only thing that has changed is that the mate now writes in full sentences and never says "I'm not sure".

Your protection was never being the only one with an answer.

It was being the one who understood the business well enough to know which answer applied.

That is no harder to do than it was last year. It is just harder to leave unsaid.

I've got a walkthrough of how I build a price in front of a client, so the number lands attached to what they are getting rather than sitting there on its own. Comment NUMBER and I'll send it over.

The best money I ever spent on my firm didn't go on software.Or marketing.Or a new hire.It went on getting into a room w...
01/09/2026

The best money I ever spent on my firm didn't go on software.

Or marketing.
Or a new hire.

It went on getting into a room with people a few steps ahead of me.

For years I tried to work everything out alone.

Every pricing decision. Every wrong hire. A private puzzle to solve by myself.

It was slow. It was lonely.

And most of my hardest lessons cost me money I didn't need to lose.

Then I sat in a room of other firm owners for the first time.

Something shifted.

The problem I'd been chewing on for six months?

Someone in that room had solved it eighteen months ago. They just told me how.

You cannot buy that with a subscription.

The fastest way to grow a firm isn't a tool.

It's proximity to people who have already done the thing you're trying to do.

If you want to know how our community of firm owners works, comment PAC and I'll tell you about it.

I got back from South Africa and sat down with my team leaders.Ten minutes in, it had turned into a moan session.So and ...
31/08/2026

I got back from South Africa and sat down with my team leaders.

Ten minutes in, it had turned into a moan session.

So and so hasn't done what they were supposed to do.
I'm still having to step in and finish it myself.

I've been hearing versions of this for years.

Every January we set the same internal target. 80% of tax returns done by Christmas.

April we're meant to be at 10%. We hit 6.
May we're meant to be at 20%. We hit 14.

Nobody misses a VAT deadline. Nobody misses Companies House.

But our own targets slip every single year and nothing happens.

So I stopped the moaning and asked my team leaders four questions.

Did you tell them what you wanted?
Did you show them how to do it?
Did you tell them exactly when you needed it by?
Did you tell them why it mattered?

The what is nearly always there. The rest nearly never is.

If you never said "these returns, on my desk by Friday at 5", you don't get to be annoyed at 5pm on Friday.

Most of the time your team hasn't let you down.

The instruction did.

And that's not really their fault or yours. Nobody trained us to manage people. We got trained in tax and accounts, then one day we had staff and were expected to work the rest out.

This week's podcast is all about people. Comment PEOPLE and I'll send you the episode, plus the list of questions I send candidates before I'll even take an interview call with them.

28/08/2026

Last month I opened a client meeting and shared my screen.

Then I built the thing they'd been paying another firm to produce. While they watched.

A live cash-flow forecast, pulling their real Xero figures. Updating as we changed the assumptions in front of them.

Two years ago that would have meant a paid app, a template and a lost afternoon.

This time it took about ten minutes.

And it was built around their business, not dropped into a generic format.

The client's reaction wasn't "clever software".

It was "why has no one ever shown me my own numbers like this before?"

That question is the whole opportunity.

Your clients don't want a prettier PDF.

They want to understand their business well enough to make the next decision with some confidence.

The firms learning to build that live, in the room, are about to look very different from the ones still emailing a report a month later.

You don't need to be technical. I wasn't when I started.

You need someone to show you the workflow.

Comment CLAUDE and I'll send you the recording where I build these tools from scratch.

I'm terrible at timekeeping.It drives my wife mad.We're in South Africa at the moment, and every time we've had to be so...
27/08/2026

I'm terrible at timekeeping.

It drives my wife mad.

We're in South Africa at the moment, and every time we've had to be somewhere, the same thing plays out.

I aim to arrive at exactly the time we agreed. On the dot. Every so often I misjudge it and we're a couple of minutes late.

For her, being on time means being fifteen minutes early.

We are never going to agree on this one.

But there's something underneath it that took me years to work out.

I don't treat time as a resource I'm spending. I treat it as a box I have to fit things into.

Because time isn't a resource. It's a constraint.

You'll know Parkinson's law. Work expands to fill the time you give it.

Give yourself an hour to do a set of accounts and it takes an hour. Give yourself a day and somehow it takes the whole day.

We're all shocking at estimating how long a job really takes, so we hand ourselves loads of room, and the work quietly grows to fill it.

Have a look at your WIP.

How much of it is sitting there because the job is hard, and how much because the deadline is still three weeks away?

If you want more out of your week, stop hunting for more hours. Shrink the box.

Set a deadline that feels slightly uncomfortable and watch what happens.

Chapter one of my book, The Four Pillars, is all about banishing the myths we've been sold around time and pricing. Comment BOOK and I'll send it over.

PS: my wife will tell you that none of this excuses being two minutes late. She's right.

PPS: which one are you? The person who turns up exactly on time, or the one who rocks up fifteen minutes early because in your head that is on time? Tell me in the comments.

26/08/2026

A member of ours spent years saying no to niching.

His worry was the one I hear most often.

Pick a niche and you turn away everyone who isn't in it.

Eighteen months ago he finally committed.

He pointed the whole firm at one industry he already knew well. Then rebuilt his website around it.

He didn't lose the clients outside the niche. They stayed.

What changed was the quality of the enquiries coming in.

Instead of "how much for a tax return", he started getting "you work with people exactly like me, I've been meaning to call you".

Same accountant. A completely different conversation.

Because the prospect had decided he was the right fit before they'd even spoken.

That's what niching actually buys you.

Not a smaller business. A sharper one, where the right people find you and turn up half-sold.

If you've been circling the idea of niching but keep talking yourself out of it, I've put together a free training on how to position your firm so the right clients come to you.

Comment CLIENTS and I'll send it over.

Yesterday I was halfway up Table Mountain in Cape Town, legs burning, quietly questioning my life choices.We'd already d...
25/08/2026

Yesterday I was halfway up Table Mountain in Cape Town, legs burning, quietly questioning my life choices.

We'd already done Lion's Head.

And the thing that struck me on the way up was this.

I never once had to work out how to reach the top.

The route was already there. Steps cut into the rock, chains bolted into the face on the steep bits, every awkward section solved by someone who had been up before me.

I could have ignored all of it and picked my own way up the mountain instead.

I'd probably still have got there eventually, assuming nothing went wrong.

That's how I ran my practice for years.

I bought the firm off my father-in-law in December 2007 and the financial crisis hit almost straight after. Then came the 60 hour weeks, the clients who couldn't pay properly, and me trying to figure it all out on my own.

I wasn't lazy. I was just making my own route up a mountain plenty of people had already climbed.

In 2014 I joined a mentoring programme and started following a process that was already proven.

The firm grew to £1m with seven people. These days I work less than three hours a week in it.

Same me. Different route.

So if you're grinding away and not getting far, it might not be your effort that's the problem. You could be hunting for your own handholds when someone has already put the chains in.

Comment PAC and I'll send you the details of the community where firm owners follow a path that's already been walked.

PS: nobody hands out medals for taking the hard way up.

I visited Nelson Mandela's prison cell on Robben Island.Here's what came to mind of relevance to accounting firm owners....
24/08/2026

I visited Nelson Mandela's prison cell on Robben Island.

Here's what came to mind of relevance to accounting firm owners. Sorry, not sorry 🤭.

The cell is about 7 feet by 8 feet.

He was in there for 18 years.

For most of them he slept on a mat on the concrete floor.

I stood in the doorway longer than I meant to. You can read the number 18 a hundred times. Standing in the space where it was served is a different thing entirely.

His sentence was measured in one thing only.

Time.

It didn't matter what he did with that time, or who he became while he was in there. The number was the number.

Which makes sense. Time was the punishment, so time was the unit.

Then I thought about how most accountants still bill.

By the hour.

Time as the unit.

So the client isn't buying your thinking, or the years it took you to know exactly where to look. They're buying your clock.

And it gets worse, because the better you get, the faster you work, and the less you earn for the same job.

You get penalised for being good at what you do.

Firm owners defend the timesheet because they think it tells them what a job cost. It doesn't. Your costs move, your income moves, and nobody carves one up to match the other.

And the rate you multiply those minutes by? That came from what the firm down the road charges, or what felt about right at the time. Nothing to do with your cost base.

So it's a number you made up, times minutes you'll never get back.

Meanwhile your client doesn't care that the return took you 40 minutes. They care that it's right, and that they're not paying more tax than they need to.

Charge for that instead.

The only place time spent matters is prison.

The first chapter of my book is about banishing the myths around time. If you want the link to get a free copy, comment BOOK below.

PS: 18 years in that cell, and not one of them is what he's remembered for. Time is a poor measure of anything that matters.

PPS: What an awesome country South Africa 🇿🇦 is 😎.

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