Being decisive is a powerful force, as even indecision is itself a decision. In this episode, Amy Vetter sits down with Michelle Golden River, a CPA firm growth and profitability strategist. Michelle's story is a testament to the power of being decisive, navigating challenges, and boldly redefining value in the accounting world. She shares her journey from an unconventional upbringing to a 30+ year career, focusing on the shift to worth-based pricing, clear communication, and recognizing one's value. She also stresses the importance of streamlining processes, understanding client needs, and boosting profitability and growth. With this in mind, now is the opportune moment to lead by being decisive!

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Making No Decision Is A Decision: Lead By Being Decisive With Michelle Golden River

Michelle is a CPA firm Growth and Profitability Strategist with specialties in both pricing models and positioning. She began helping CPAs with their pricing models in the early 2000s while she owned a marketing agency, and pricing was one of the many critical growth strategies. Now, pricing is her full-time passion. She has a knack for relating to and energizing people while she shows them how to do new things. She clarifies the complicated, turns theory into practical application, sheds new light, instills confidence, and inspires.

A long-time consultant and former top 100 CPA firm partner, Michelle is recognized across the accounting profession for her original ideas and proven success in implementing various new business, revenue, and growth models. Some honors she has are that she's one of the ten most powerful women in accounting by Accounting Today, one of the 25 most powerful women in accounting by CPA Practice Advisor, one of the top 100 most influential people in accounting by Accounting Today, and one of the top 25 thought leaders in public accounting by CPA Practice Advisor.

In 2004, Michelle was appointed as a Senior Fellow of VeraSage Institute, the think tank focused on advancing knowledge in the profession. In 2008, she earned the International Association of Facilitators' Certified Professional Facilitator designation, which aids her in helping firms gain solid buy-in to propel their change initiatives.

During this interview with Michelle, we discuss her unconventional upbringing and her career journey in the accounting space, the challenges and importance of transitioning from charging by the hour to a more worth-based pricing model, and the need for clear communication and understanding of one's worth.

There were so many great stories that Michelle shared in this, and I think you're going to love this episode coming up while we talk about this. For those of you who want to go on this path of getting into your values, we have a workbook that is free that you can download right from our BusinessBalanceBliss.com/workbook and start your journey now. It's packed with exercises and reflections that not only do I share here on the show and do others share, but it will guide you through making your own. I look forward to seeing how that works out for you and also to hear your insights on this show.

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Michelle Golden's Journey From Hippie Roots To An Accounting Career

I'm so excited to be here with my friend Michelle Golden-River. Michelle, do you want to give a little background on yourself before we get started?

I work in the accounting space. I've been working with CPA firms in public accounting for a lot of years. I want to say about 30 years, but it's a little more than that now. Before that, I had an accounting background working in two public companies in the accounting department. That was cool, interesting, and insightful. They were both in the healthcare sector.

I grew up in Southern California and was raised by parents who were part of the hippie culture. I was raised by a village and had a very modest upbringing. I was an only child, and although I do have siblings, I either didn't have them yet or didn't know about them until adulthood. There's a lot to unpack there. I grew up as an only, and it's interesting that I went into the accounting profession with that very non-traditional boho background. I work with accountants and love them. That's it in a nutshell.

Let's get into that. When you say your parents were hippies, what does that mean? Did they have jobs? What were they doing?

My mom and dad were still pretty nerdy and mostly good, productive citizens. My mom had me very young, she was 18 or 19. My dad was nineteen, and they were only together a short while. They split up when I was a little baby. My dad was always around for the first several years, but then he joined the Peace Corps when I was seven. My dad was always in my life, but my mom remarried, or rather met my stepdad when I was about three.

We lived in a one-bedroom apartment over a garage in downtown Santa Ana, California. We had hanging bead lamps, you name it. Hippie culture was part of the life. Pot was around. I didn't think anything of it because it was just part of the life, but my parents did work. That's good. There were a lot of crazy parties. I won’t go into those details and incriminate anybody. I just ran around. As a kid, I was scruffy and dirty. I probably had greasy hair and went barefoot. I played in the dirt, and dirt was a great toy back in the early ‘70s. Dirt and sticks, they could be anything.

What did you make?

It was a broom. It was a rifle. It was everything. It was a neat way to grow up in that there was a lot of love around. I always felt very loved. Although I didn't have anything, I didn’t notice.

When you say you might've had dirty hair and so forth, were the other kids like that at school, or did you feel different at school?

I did not fit in at school at all. I was definitely a standout, in hand-me-downs. I think probably all through elementary, junior high, and high school, I felt very insecure and inferior about my appearance for a lot of reasons. I knew I was different that way. I had a couple of people in my life, though. My mom's best friend, Linda, she's my godmother, had three kids, and she was a very good mom. Very traditional. Her kids were clean. She sewed clothes for them. She was a mom to me, too. I had some other moms. My mom was pretty focused on her and the fifth generation.

There was this one time, Amy, when I was about 4, I might've been 5. My parents liked to sleep in, my mom and stepdad. I had the bedroom, and they slept in the living room. I had snuck out of the house in my footie jammies or my sleeper. I had gone 3 or 4 blocks away to the junior high school nearby. Some students from the junior high school brought me home and knocked on the door. My mom opened the door, half-asleep, and she was like, "Why did you leave?" They put a hook lock on the outside of my bedroom door so they could sleep in and I wouldn't escape.

What made you do that? Why did you leave?

Probably I was lonely or bored. I don't remember why. I just remember the event.

That was nice. They brought you back.

It was nice that they brought me back.

I always think that's interesting. You referenced Linda. What examples did you have from other people outside of your family that stuck with you to model after?

I had probably three mom types, Linda being one, two others, my best friend's mom, Phyllis. She was super traditional. We lived across the street from them, and we moved to Orange, California when I was seven when my dad joined the Peace Corps. We moved in with my great-grandma, who was aging, and she didn’t want to go into a nursing home. She was from Denmark, super interesting. All the neighborhood kids were afraid of this old lady, but she was just a sweet person and super interesting.

I got to live with her and learn her stories for a few years. There was a little girl across the street from me, and her mom, Phyllis, was from Tennessee and very traditional. She cooked dinner every day. That wasn't something that I was used to. Back to Linda, she would cut my hair and make me clothes and stuff. My mom made me some clothes too. Phyllis was a good role model. She was the closest thing to a Brady mom that I saw in real life.

For those of you who are not old enough, that means Brady Bunch. It was a TV show in the ‘70s

It's like Zoom. They had nine squares in a window. Another family member, a long, convoluted story I won't go into, but my stepdad's brother's wife, Sandy, took me in. The thing in common with all these women is that they were more nurturing in a motherly way, I think, than what I felt like my mom was. They listened to me and were there for me. They were good examples.

Linda, in particular, twin boys, exact same age as me, and then a younger one. She went to UCI, had multiple jobs, sewed costumes for the theater department on the side for money. She was very industrious, entrepreneurial, and started her own interior design business. I watched her be like a super mom. Even though she was part of the hippie culture, she was a hard worker with an incredible work ethic. I valued that.

One last influence, to your question, was my uncle Ron. My mom has one sister, and her husband was an accountant. He was probably one of the very few white-collar people I had in my life. I looked to him, he was so funny, just a dry sense of humor. He just passed away years ago, right around COVID. Great sense of humor, wonderful guy. He ended up being the mayor of Tustin, California, and mayor pro tem, a neat guy. Anyway, I admired him, and he was an accountant. I wanted to be an accountant. I had no idea.

Did you want to be because of his lifestyle? Did he ever take you to what the work was like?

Not lifestyle so much. I always had a fascination with office supplies. You could take me into an office supply store, and I'd walk around for two hours. It's awesome.

Nothing better than getting new pencils and all that.

Lined paper. I think something drew me about the organization of forms and green bars. This is something else that young people in your audience won’t know what I'm talking about. He had a ten-key, I thought that was pretty awesome. It wasn't lifestyle. He worked in industry, and he wasn't in a CPA firm, but I'm not even sure he was a CPA. He was an accountant for companies.

Did you have any hobbies or things that you did as a child or liked to do?

I played, I rode my bike, and I drew. I drew a lot, but that was about it. I didn't have hobbies as a kid.

Transitioning From High School To College: Overcoming Challenges

How did you make that transition from high school to college if you didn't have examples of that?

My parents went to community college. Even when I was a little kid, my stepdad, when I was five, would ride his bike to Santa Ana College. My elementary school was closer to that than it was to our house. He would put a pillow on the bar on his bike, and I would sit on the pillow at five years old. He would ride me, drop me off at kindergarten, and go to class. Both my mom and Linda took a lot of classes at Santa Ana College. I spent a lot of time on campus, playing and running around. I had no business there but I just grew up on the campus a fair bit.

I think I always appreciated school, but I didn't know the difference between a community college and a four-year college. I never had a sense that a college path was something that I could do because of money. I became a mom young. I’ll go backwards for a second. When I was sixteen, I had challenges in high school. Basically, I was a good student. I was very nerdy and a good little student, I think, but the teachers in my high school would get mad at some of the disruptive kids, mostly boys, in the class.

I remember in high school, in a particular math class, that some boys were in trouble. Basically, the whole class got punished because the boys were in trouble. I felt this strong sense of injustice in that. I went to the counselor and said, "I don't want to be in that class. Can you transfer me? It is because I'm being punished unfairly. I'm not disruptive. I'm doing my work." They said, "No, suck it up."

I didn’t feel like that was a sufficient answer. I left the normal high school at sixteen and finished coursework. I took the test, the California High School Proficiency Exam, when I was fifteen and a half. Legally, you have to stay in school until you're sixteen. After that, you can do whatever you want. I went to community college at sixteen but I finished out that year using the continuation school that all the bad kids went to. I took independent study from that school. That's how I finished high school at fifteen and then started college.

This is so you.

Why did you say that?

It’s just that, fighting for justice.

Do you mean taking a different course? I had this amazing head start. I got pregnant when I was seventeen. I had this head start and screwed it up.

How'd you meet the father?

A guy that I met at a party. It was random. I didn't have a steady boyfriend or anything like that. I thought, “I'll just keep going to school and have this baby,” because the school had daycare. I didn't even make good plans or investigate. I found out they don't take your child until they're potty trained. That's two years. I immediately started working and got jobs in clerical positions through a temp agency, and a temp agency placed me into Steelcase, which is a company that manufactures office equipment.

Another company that I ended up going in-house with, I was a telemarketer for them. They made contact lenses, but they also had a product of tattooed eyeliner. I used to call people who responded with a postcard in a magazine to talk to them about this tattooed eyeliner that was done by actual eye doctors back in the day. It was called Natural Eyes.

They had an ad, a posted position, in their lunchroom, when I was a temp, so I was about eighteen. They had this posted thing for an accounts receivable clerk. Their HR department vetted me and rejected me. I wandered the halls and found the supervisor. I don't know where I got this courage, but I knocked on his door and said, "I don't have any skills, but I would love to learn." He kindly hired me. I credit him to this day. His name was Keith K. He's passed away now, but he gave me a break. If he didn't give me that break, I wouldn't be here.

I often think, because just even so far in your story, when you said like, "I don't know where I got it from," but how did you have the initiative to do that? You, at four years old, did the same thing.

You're right.

It's almost like you're born with this soul, it's not in your arm, your nails, or you can't see it, but it's definitely you.

That’s funny, I never saw that before. I don't know.

It's amazing to have that inner strength to survive in the way that you needed to.

That's neat. Thank you for saying that. When I got pregnant very young, I had a turning point. It just never even crossed my mind to not go through with the pregnancy. I was going to have this child. I think I always wanted brothers and sisters. I always wanted a large family because I had no siblings that I knew of. I was like, “This is my path. I can do this,” but I was terrified. I'm not going to lie. I had absolutely no idea what I was in for. The reality is someday, I want to write a book for pregnant teen moms. This is what you're thinking. This is what is out there for you, etc.

I faced all that. A lot of people told me, "You can't do this." I remember somebody saying, "You're going to have an unruly, undisciplined child," because I'd not been around children that much. I babysat a couple of kids, but that was about it. I felt something well up inside of me that was like, “I'm going to have the best kid.” It wasn't, “I'm going to be the best mom.” It was a challenge. They were challenging me that I was going to be a terrible mom. I was like, “I'm going to have the best kid.”

Ironically, that person who was telling me I was going to not be a successful parent, their kid was jumping all over the person's couch. I'm like, “I'm not going to have that kind of kid.” It was juvenile but I think it's where I grew a sense of courage and determination to be successful at this thing. I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't know what I didn't know. Out of that came this fighting spirit that I didn't know I had. That has stayed with me both as a parent and as a professional. It's like, “You can do this. Somebody can't tell you that you can't do something.”

I think it's interesting because you're saying how insecure you were in high school. Something that from the outside world, people can feel bad for you about, like that you are a single mom, it was a turning point for you.

It was. It changed my life. For most people, I think, that can be a setback. Story after story about how it ruins your life. I had people tell me, "You're ruining your life." I was like, “Really?” I didn't know what not ruining my life would look like but I was just determined to love this child and raise this kid. I feel bad for him in a way. He's 40 now. He's amazing. He's an amazing person. We were children together. We fought side by side together. I always looked at it as him and me against the world or whatever.

Building An Accounting Marketing Career: From Corporate Inauthenticity To Entrepreneurship

You get this chance as this AR clerk. What did you do? I’m just curious.

I loved it. I enjoyed it. I was there for a few years. I became a staff accountant at a different public company. Keith had left that company. I didn't have his protection, guidance and leadership. I didn't find that I enjoyed it as much. I loved the work. I was probably a terrible corporate employee. This was the ‘80s when women were wearing IBM suits and ties. It was bizarre. I just felt like the corporate world had an element of inauthenticity to it.

I didn't realize that until later, when I joined a CPA firm, and I felt the difference between a corporate accounting department versus a CPA firm, ut just had this welcoming authenticity to it. I didn't work in Big Four. I worked in an 80-person, 3-office firm in central Missouri first. Being in a large corporation in Southern California felt like high school. Not in the social way, but like high school, with the HR department and the rules and the expected norms. It was just more like high school and less like college or less like a friendly, entrepreneurial environment. I think because I'm an entrepreneur in my spirit, I didn't love the corporate style.

How long were you doing that?

I started that work probably in 1985. I didn't join a CPA firm until 1995, about ten years in accounting departments.

How did you make that transition?

I had worked with a second job. The second job I took, Comprehensive Care Corporation, was in Irvine, California. It was during the pink slip era. Everybody was being let go. They were moving their corporate headquarters from expensive Irvine, California, to a rural outlying county outside of St. Louis City. My son was five. I was a single mom. It was very expensive to live in Southern California. I was barely making it, and I had an opportunity to relocate with the company. Recognizing my income, they said, "You could transfer from California to Missouri on your same salary."

Recognizing my income would go so much further, I moved there with my little boy, all alone. I was 23. I worked for that same company, but they were spinning off an arm and doing an IPO. I got to work on that for the COO of the company and the vice president of finance. I got to do some of that work. That was exciting for me. It felt very different. I had remarried. I married my son's dad for five minutes. We were married for a few months. I dabbled in marriage and remarried, and my husband's job transferred him to Columbia, Missouri.

When I moved to Columbia and I had my second and third child, it was hard to juggle work and being a mom now with three kids. I found this job in an accounting firm. It was because I had an accounting background but no Accounting degree. I tried to take college classes, but I never fully finished. They could hire an accounting grad from Mizzou for, this is going way back, $19,000 out of school.

I already made more than that. Bringing me in as an accountant didn't make sense. They brought me in on the administrative side. I could speak accounting. I ended up working for an audit partner who was also in charge of marketing. I had a natural affinity for that because positioning is something near and dear to my heart. It's always been near and dear to my heart. I loved this ability to bridge that gap. Accounting, for me, is like comfort food. It's organized, it's methodical, it lacks chaos. You can take chaos and fix it. I love that. For me, it's a calming thing.

I've always been inclined to that. Anyway, I just enjoyed it. That was my transition. I enjoyed that firm. Accounting marketing was not a career that had been around very long. Accounting marketing as a career began in 1989 with Bates vs. State Bar of Arizona, when the laws changed that accounting firms could begin marketing at all. They could not market prior to that.

With that change came this new career path for accounting firms to do marketing. Accounting firms had no idea what that looked like. Let's just say the bar was low. When somebody came in and had ideas and could show a path to planned growth and marketing through positioning and stuff, it opened doors for accounting firms to grow. It also opened doors as a career path. I started learning new things and creating that path for myself.

How did you learn it, having no background in it?

I joined the Association for Accounting Marketing and under the mentorship and tutelage of several people who had been around the profession for a long time and had maybe done marketing before marketing was allowed. One man named Bruce Marcus was preeminent in this space. He passed away several years ago, but he was an incredible thought leader. He had worked for, I think, Arthur Andersen in the ‘70s. Bruce Marcus had laid some incredible groundwork, along with several other people who were still around. I soaked it up like a sponge and brought ideas back to my firm and helped them pave their first formal marketing path.

Knowing typically how accountants think, and having no experience in this before, how did you bring them on that journey?

How did I convince them to let me do it? That's a good question. I went to the managing partner, David, at the time, and I said, "You could either buy a marketer or grow one, and I want you to grow one, and I want that to be me." He said, "Okay."

You did it again.

I'm picturing myself walking out the door in my jammies. That's hilarious. You're connecting dots for me.

Yougo after what you want.

He was neat. That firm, Williams Keepers, in Columbia, Missouri, is super special. This was around 1994 when I joined the firm, and that firm was doing something that very few firms were doing yet. That was specializing. They didn't call it specializing yet. They called it being famous in an industry, being famous in a niche. Williams Keepers was an early adopter of that.

They were also an early adopter of some non-traditional services like valuations and litigation support and stuff like that when other firms weren't doing it. I got lucky. Being in this little college town and not in a big city, and having the opportunity to be in a firm that was innovative and forward-thinking, was a pretty neat coincidence, or opportunity, for me.

What did you implement there? What did you change?

Not much. I helped them with marketing plans. I was building their first website. I was trying to build their first website. I redid their logo. They still have the same logo. I told them, I'm like, "You guys could look at a refresher. I won't be offended." They're like, "We love it." I was working on their first website. This is when websites were brand new. We didn't even know what to do on websites.

Basically, most people were doing a brochure online, which was about the best thinking at the time. I didn't finish that project, much to my regret. My husband and I split up, and we both had to move back to St. Louis as a result of that. I had to leave the firm after about four years. It was hard for me because I loved the firm. I went into a law firm for a year, and that was an experience. I came running back to my accounting friends, and they welcomed me back with open arms. That's when I started consulting.

To the same firm?

No, I decided when I left the law firm, I was going to be the marketing department for several small firms instead of a marketer for one firm. It is because if a marketer does their job right, it would be like drinking from a firehose of leads for a firm. I felt like they could get more for their money if I did the job for several smaller firms that paid me a piece of, you would call it a fractional CFO in the accounting space, accounting services provision. We didn't call it fractional then. I don't like that term, to be honest. I feel like it means a portion of getting the whole enchilada. I was an outsourced marketer for several years and loved it.

That's when I honed specialties of positioning. That grew into honing the specialty of pricing, which is what I help CPA firms do now. I help them not charge by the hour, I help them price based on worth. You can't do that unless you can define worth. You can't define worth unless you view yourself differently, which is a big part of, I think, a driver of who I am, having a curiosity and trying to look at things from lots of different angles to see them in a new way. It’s like taking something familiar and looking at it in a new way, if that makes sense. That's my personal why.

Value Pricing: Key Strategies For Successful Implementation

I was at a workshop, or doing a workshop, and this topic was coming up, and the whole timesheet discussion. This is exactly where we're going. You have to know who you are, your processes, your clients, and the repeatability of work in order to make value pricing work. What are some of the key things that you try to implement so that it can work and they get the result?

Looking at that from a breaking beliefs angle first is breaking the belief that we sell time. We sell how the client is different at the end of the work. We don't sell our time to make that change. Similar to you and me, when I go out and I teach, because I consider myself more of a teacher and a Sherpa, a guide, than anything else these days, I am not the product. The time they spend face-to-face with me is not the product. The product is them after that time. The product is how they're different or transformed.

Results.

That's the product. That's something that accountants don't think about. That's a perfect example of looking at something familiar in a new way. I believe when I first set foot in Williams Keepers and I started helping them, I saw this low level of confidence in their worth. The way I saw that exhibited was because I worked on their proposals and I would talk to them about it and I would see them come up with a price and figure it out.

I was like, “They undervalue themselves. They are changing lives. They're changing businesses. They're helping an entrepreneur be something, live a dream, all this stuff. I was like, you so devalue yourself.” I was thinking, “How can I get them to see themselves differently?” This applies to much more than just accountants, but how can I get them to see themselves differently? Something I learned, and I didn't learn this early enough.

I wish I'd learned this twenty years earlier, the ability to do that doesn't come from telling somebody, “You're worth more.” That helps, but it's not the telling. It's not the assertion, “You are worth more.” It's helping them, showing them the path so that they come to the conclusion that they're worth more. It's opening the pathway and facilitating that. I started taking classes to learn how to be a facilitator in the early 2000s.

We call it the aughts or something. That's when I started to change myself from being a person who's, I call it mommy-like, telling people what to do and how to do it, to trying to extract. The facilitators would say, "Extract the wisdom in the room." The wisdom is in the room. It's your job to unlock it and help them come to their conclusions. Moving from charging by the hour, and getting rid of timesheets, to a form of pricing that's based more on worth is contextual. The worth is contextual with the client.

Understanding Profitability: Knowing When You're Making Money

I think, at least with a lot of consulting clients I work with or coaching, you can get them to that point. Sometimes the breaking point is, how would I know if we're making money?

The second belief that you'd want to break there is that your profitability is best viewed by moment-by-moment increments in time. If you're an accounting person, your profitability is your total, and total is your net. It's, you look at a financial statement, and a former managing partner at my second CPA firm, now called Pinion, but it was Kennedy & Co when I joined, and then K Coisson, managing partner Kurt Siemers at the time, he said, "You have this report, and it's got all these lines on it. Line, line, line, line, line. A total, it says income. Some more lines. Line, line, line, line, expense. You want the income to be bigger than the expense. That's how you know if you're profitable."

At the macro level, taking it down to this micro level, where you have to study this implementation versus that implementation, or this tax return versus that tax return, taking it down to this micro level is unhelpful on a perpetual basis. What I'll say is, do a study. Do a certain type of project of a certain size. I'm going to use a tax return, for an example.

You might do a tax return for a simple, medium, and complex level. Let's just put three buckets and do a study of the simple ones. Do it 10 times, do it 20 times if you want, and look at you need to plan your capacity. Looking at your project and realizing you can be profitable by coming up with averages and ranges, minimum to maximum amount of time, or the difference in time between when a seasoned person does it and when a newbie does it. Looking at that spread and then saying, “On average, how many of those can we do in X period of time with X number of people? What price point is it worth it to do it for us?”

That's not worth-based pricing. That is just figuring out what's needed to keep us viable. Worth-based pricing is setting all of that aside, talking to the client about the worth to them of a transformation from point A to point B. Tax returns? Not an exciting transformation. You're non-compliant, and now you're compliant. That's not a big transformation. Transformation is moving your accounting system to the cloud, having real-time data, etc.

Different services have different potential outcomes. When I said it's contextual, what I mean is, what does moving it to the cloud mean for this client versus that client? It is because it's not the same. For one client, it's "I get my life back." For another client, it's "Now I can have three people working on it instead of one." There are different reasons and rationales behind why we do things. That's where the key of worth is. Once you figure out what the transformation is, then you can figure out what it might be worth to that individual, which is not the same across two people.

This is hard, Amy. This is time-consuming. It's not canned. You go back and you go, "If it's going to take me this many people and this long to do it, and I can only do five in a year or five in a month, is it worth it to me to do it at a value point that's worth it to the client?" That's where the two things that are very different connect, worth it to the firm and worth it to the customer. This takes practice, training, a total mindset change, and some new processes and systems. It is because the accounting profession was taught five generations ago, you sell time. That's a belief they have to break.

It's also in how you manage. One of the discussions that I got into with them was that the timesheet is not a management tool.

It could have been if they used it.

A lot of that time isn't even true that's being put on there, and that's been through the generations. It's not just one generation that makes up time since the beginning. They feel pressure, they feel they'll lose their job, whatever that is.

The fib is in both directions, underreporting, and overreporting.

Leadership And Management: Balancing Delegation And Staff Performance

The other piece of this is learning leadership and management. That means you have to delegate more to create space to manage your staff. You will know if someone isn't keeping up with their project, isn't meeting deadlines, or is doing it incorrectly when you are taking the people time and not just looking at a report.

Breaking down your process is key. There are three gaps to bridge. One is the way we think about worth to the client. Instead of all the focus being on worth to us, thinking about worth to the client is new. How that connects to worth it to us, which I just tried to describe. The second one is breaking down your project into scope parameters. We don't do that. When we have timesheets, we don't have a reason to do that. We just go forth and conquer. We go back and look at our time.

We haven't been diligent about planning any particular projects, executing the projects, and then managing to the scope. It's interesting if you think about what were the first kinds of projects that accountants were comfortable pricing upfront. I think, the best I can see, the very first projects that CPAs were comfortable giving a number for were audits.

What did they have in their toolbox to make them comfortable with pricing an audit up front? Back in the day, when everything was still on green bar paper, we had PPC guides in our libraries with all these pages, a process, a very thought-through, detailed process. Once they had the process detailed, they were like, "I'm comfortable saying it's worth it to me to do this project at that price because the process is defined."

Where they failed, unfortunately, where we fail, is that we deviate from the process, which I think is great. It's what distinguishes a CPA firm from, say, Pilot.com. We deviate from the process because we love to be service-oriented and flexible and give customers what they want, but we don't charge for it. That's the mistake. We don't say, "We're happy to tailor this for you. What that would look like would be X dollars. Is that something you're interested in?"

We just say, "We have to do all this tailoring for free." Why do we do that? It is because accountants are wonderful, altruistic people with huge hearts who love to be service-oriented, and they do it to their detriment. Accountants, as a profession, write off 20% of the work they do. That is a day a week. We write off Friday, and we've normalized that.

What's the third thing? Worth to the client, breaking down?

It was defining the project and then managing the project. I didn't give you the number, thank you for circling me back.

The Importance Of Knowing Your Worth In Pricing And Client Relationships

I know we could just keep on talking. Unfortunately, we've got to bring it to a close. I think when someone says, "Send Michelle, she'll help you with pricing," it just sounds like it's pricing, but it's a lot more. There's a lot more thought process that goes into it and how you're going to run your business to make sure that you can be successful and bring people along with you. You do such a great job of doing that, and you can see how passionate you are. Michelle doesn't do anything she doesn't think is worth it, as her story shows.

That's true. I do try and live it. The funniest thing about being a consultant in the pricing space is that I cannot give a savvy person and managing partner a proposal without them challenging my price, specifically to see how I will field that. They do it. I just expect it because they do it. I could name a few managing partners who are good at it. At first, I would get so insulted and whatever. I'm like, “They have to,” because if I can't handle it when they challenge my price, I have no business teaching it.

That's part of the teaching. Even when you have to walk away, "This is my worth, and it's worth it to me to do this."

I love that you said that. How often do people walk away? It's very rare.

It's a hard thing to do. I think if you do not know who you are, what your worth is, you run a business based on scarcity and fear, that another client won't walk in the door or that a client might leave if I raise their price. What you find is that those people are business people, too. They know what they're worth, they know what they charge, and they expect to be having that business discussion with you.

I think a key belief change in that is if you don't respect your worth, the client’s not going to respect your worth.

They'll keep pushing when they see that you will write things off.

They will.

You're disciplining it.

We train them. I have a blog post from many years ago, it's called Retraining Clients When You've Taught Them to Abuse You. It is because we do, we write it off. For instance, a client doesn't have their work prepared for you. PBC list profession, we call it. We'll just start doing the things that they didn't finish. That's what we end up writing off or billing. I call it billing and ducking, when you bill and you go like this, "Please pay it." We'll write it off. Next year, we're surprised when they're not ready. We taught them they don't have to do the prep work that they've agreed to do. We won't even charge them for it.

It's also the fear of the conversation. I feel like so many of the issues, and these aren't just in accounting, they happen anywhere, are because we're afraid to communicate. To stop and say, "This is our scope. If you want us to do this, it's going to cost this much more. Do you want to do it?" Having that very upfront and clear conversation and saying, "If you don't do it, this is the price." Not ducking, sending the bill after you've already had that proactive conversation. It takes, again, confidence in yourself, worth in yourself, to do that.

It does. I have a theory on why we just write it off or whatever and avoid that conversation like the plague. My theory is this, if we don't, and usually we don't in this profession, talk to the client first about what the scope is, about what's included and what's not included, if we don't have that conversation upfront when they come in the door, when we start to have overages, we know we were unclear. We feel like we're changing the rules in the middle of the game if we then go, "That wasn't part of the deal," when we never outlined the deal. That's why I say we have this giant skill gap of outlining for the client what is and what isn't part of the deal.

If we fix that skill gap, if we get better at doing that and saying, "You've picked the middle option of implementation" or "the middle option of whatever service, it looks like this," they can see in black and white what was in the big option that they didn't pick. They now at least have some clarity about some things that are not included. We have more of a leg to stand on when we spend the energy to show the client what is and isn't part of the thing. It is because if I come to you and I say, "Will you do my taxes?" you go, "Sure," what do I think is included?

Anything and everything.

Everything. It is because if we don't say what's not included, the client is always going to assume that includes everything. Where do you draw the line? We feel scummy going back after the fact and going, "Time out, that wasn't part of the deal." You're like, "You didn't tell me that."

They also continue to do it year after year. If you catch it, then even if you do it the first year, the next year, re-engaging is like, "This is where we messed up last year. We should have told you. It was on us. Going forward, we want to be much clearer on what's included in this engagement." You can fix it. It still takes communication to fix it.

It does. I think with some of the changes in capacity constraints and extremely high client volume that we have, for a variety of reasons I won't unpack, but because of those things, I think we're getting a lot bolder about those conversations than maybe we were 3, 4, or 5 years ago. I think we're willing to stand up for ourselves a little better and bring those things to light. Practitioner by practitioner, some people are good at it, and other people are just terrified of it. It has to do with who you grow up under, as far as role modeling, and their comfort with their worth.

Rapid-Fire Questions: Family Category

I'm just going to ask you some rapid-fire questions to close out. I want you to pick a category, family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.

That's hard. Let's do family.

Things or actions I don't have that I want to have.

More time and less distance with friends. I would love to have more time. I wish I had an Ethel Mertz neighbor. If anybody watched I Love Lucy, Ethel would just come in the back door and sit down and have a cup of coffee. I wish I had an Ethel Mertz.

I get you. Things or actions I do have that I want to keep.

People to love and who love me despite my flaws, and vice versa.

Things or actions I don't have that I don't want to have.

People, friends, family who are disingenuous. I don't love being around people who are inauthentic. It's hard for me.

Last one. Things or actions that I do have that I don't want but want to get rid of.

Sometimes I wear my feelings on my sleeve, maybe a little too much. Maybe I could hold back a little.

Would that be you?

I know it. That's not an excuse to be obnoxious.

Key Takeaways: Overcoming Limitations And Embracing Change

Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. Is there anything that you want to emphasize, or do you want to make sure people take away from this conversation? Something we didn't say that you want to conclude with?

I would say no one's view of you, or societal expectations, are real limitations. The power is in us to change or redirect at any time. See things in a new way, try and look at things in a new way, and it can open as many doors as possible. I would say there are two song lyrics, we’ll see if you can name the bands, Amy.

I’m bad at trivia.

You'll know both of these. Maybe, maybe. When I was pregnant with my son, when I was seventeen, there were two song lyrics that just resonated with me. When I found that new determination, I wrote these down and hung them up on my wall as posters for myself. One was, "There's still time to change the road you're on."

I don't know.

No problem. That was Led Zeppelin. That’s my favorite band, but not my favorite song, but it's from Stairway to Heaven. "There's still time to change the road you're on." The other one is a Rush song. That lyric is, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Indecision is a decision. Being indecisive is unhelpful in every way. It sets a course of sameness. I think that those thoughts can create movement.

Especially, I don't think people talk about that enough, like the indecisiveness and what that creates. It is a decision to not make a decision.

The decision can be the tiniest little baby steps. It can just be like, “I'm going to have something different for lunch today than I usually have.”

Thank you so much. I appreciate you sharing your story. There are so many takeaways for the people.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's always good to spend time with you, Amy.

---

For my Mindful Moments with my interview with Michelle, which had so many interesting stories and turns in her story that I think all of us could appreciate, it's always good to step back and think about the things that impacted you, and you could go back and compare it to your own story of the pivots that you have made. When we started talking, she referenced her upbringing by parents who were part of what she called a hippie culture and how that changed her upbringing, that she was very much on her own many times.

She credits the community in contributing to her upbringing and different people in her life, such as her godmother, Linda, her best friend's mom, Phyllis, her great-grandmother from Denmark, and her stepdad's brother's wife, Sandy. All these women provided different things that she needed over time, whether it be nurturing or guidance, but it was giving her examples of the pivots to make in her life to not necessarily repeat the same life as her parents.

I think that's so important that we go back and step back and think about where people have made an impact in our lives, that often we just keep moving through our life without reflecting back and giving gratitude to those people that did take an interest, that might have given us tidbits of information that made that impact on us. The other thing that was interesting about Michelle was that she left high school at sixteen, mainly because she felt there were some unfair things that were happening, and decided to finish her coursework at a continuation school.

Life threw a curveball at her when she got pregnant at seventeen, and she found the courage and determination to overcome that challenge and overcoming just the fear of being a single mother and how others would basically talk negatively to her about becoming a mother, where she, in her head, believed that she was going to do the right thing and make sure that this baby and her were safe. When you step back and listen to the journey, how much her getting pregnant shifted her course and the decisions that she was making and led to who she is now.

She got these experiences starting out in accounting, and one of her first supervisors gave her a break in her career. I think this was so important, that that person opened the door for her, that she was able to do this work that maybe people didn't think she could do because she was a single mom or any outside perception of her life, and because of that, that conversation and that person giving her that opportunity changed her life forever and gave her strength to believe in herself and believe in her skills.

When she talks about that career journey of being an AR clerk and the different paths that she went in order to gain more experience in accounting over time and making sure that she got the opportunities that she wanted, one of the things that was so interesting about listening to her story was her self-confidence to speak up for herself and also make sure she got what she wanted. Especially in a time when women didn't speak up for themselves as much as they probably do now, this is particularly inspiring just to look at how far she came.

With everything going on, and maybe it was the need to make sure she had the career that she needed to have, that she was not wavering in what she could do and what she could provide. Later, what we talk about with value pricing, what her worth is. I'd like all of you to kind of step back and think about what is your worth. Do you value it enough? Are you valuing it in old ways or unconventional ways that might be new, that you're not giving yourself credit for all that you offer and what your unique gifts are that you can provide not only your employer but the people around you?

When we shift that mindset from thinking about ourselves negatively or thinking about our life circumstances negatively, which Michelle could have done many times, but instead kept powering forward. Instead, because she kept gaining each time, each time that she proved that she could do it, then it gave her more confidence the next time to go ask for what she wanted, which leads into what she does. What she does is helping people value who they are and what services that they provide and not undervalue that.

Part of that is transforming those belief systems that maybe that we haven't uncovered over time, that are holding us back because this is the way that it's always been. We don't question it. We value ourselves maybe based on time that we worked versus the actual output or product of the work and the value of what it creates for somebody else. We discuss the importance of self-worth and also being over-communicative in business.

Based on that, making sure that you are standing up for your own worth and not afraid to have these difficult conversations with clients, or even build up that it is a difficult conversation with a client. I can tell you so many times that when I work with clients myself and coach professionals on how to do this, that many times it's getting past their own fear of doing it. When they ask for what they're worth, the client doesn't fight back, they believe they're worth that.

The thing is, most people are going to take advantage of whatever you have to offer. If you are not valuing your worth enough, then someone else is not going to volunteer it for you. Part of making sure that you can deliver on the value that you put there is making sure that you've got clear communication on what it is that you're delivering, what are the timelines, and what is the scope. It is because one of the things that gets out of alignment when we talk about value is expectation. If we don't make the expectation clear on both sides, then we can fall flat and feel like that person didn't appreciate us, or vice versa.

It is important to think about, when we think about these complex issues of pricing and sales in our businesses, that a lot of times we have to get back to ourselves first and be able to understand what is driving us, what is holding us back, and are there things that we need to get over in order to show up in the way that we want to show up. Do not let outside influences affect what you think you're worth. Making sure that you stay aware of your value, of your unique gifts that you give. The important thing is, at the end of the day, making a decision, and sticking to it, so that you become a leader in this, and people are able to follow your example because of the work you did. When you do that transformation, then everything else falls in line.

I want to thank you so much for attending this session. I said at the beginning, there is a workbook that you can download that's free on BusinessBalanceBliss.com/workbook. We also have coaching programs to help you get into that authentic self and find those unique gifts. If you go to BusinessBalanceBliss.com, you will see our upcoming coaching courses on these topics of work-life harmony, intentional time management, breaking through with your health, your finances, your brand, your joy, whatever it may be, because we want to be able to help you wherever you are at. Please share with anyone that you think that this podcast would be helpful, and I look forward to having you participate in our next episode.

Important Links

• Michelle Golden Rivers on LinkedIn

• Business Balance Bliss Workbook

• Fore Advantage

• Pilot

• Retraining Clients When You've Taught Them to Abuse You

About Michelle Golden River

Michelle Golden, CPF, is a growth and profitability strategist, an innovator, and a value-pricing methods expert. With a strong background in CPA-firm marketing, she deeply honed subspecialties in pricing and positioning. Today, she focuses on teaching CPAs how to implement a new pricing model based upon outcomes they affect, rather than the time they spend doing their work. Michelle is recognized industry-wide for her original ideas and success with practical implementation. Some honors:

• Ten Most Powerful Women in Accounting by Accounting Today

• 25 Most Powerful Women in Accounting by CPA Practice Advisor

• Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting by Accounting Today

• Top 25 Accounting Thought Leaders by CPA Practice Advisor

• Association for Accounting Marketing Hall of Fame

Michelle holds the International Association of Facilitators’ Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF) designation. She guides firm owners and their teams toward strategic growth, profitability, niche development, improved customer experiences, smoother operations, and stronger cultures. Since 1994, she’s helped more than 130 CPA firms prosper.