PAC Annual Event | Members only | Recorded live
The fundamentals still win. AI just changes how fast.
The full 65-minute keynote from our members-only annual event. Why bolting AI onto a broken firm gives you nothing but faster chaos, and the three systems to fix before you touch another tool.
The room was closed. The recording isn't.
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The full talk with the slides on screen, exactly as the room saw it.
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So why am I giving you this?
Once a year we get firm owners into a room together. No clients, no team, no inbox. Just time to think about where you're going and how you're going to get there. That day is for members of the Profitable Accountants Community, and it stays that way.
The recording is a different matter. I spend a good chunk of the talk arguing that the way to get the right clients to find you is to lead with value first, to give something genuinely useful away before anyone pays you a penny. It would be a bit rich to say that on stage and then lock the tape in a drawer.
So here it is. The full session, slides and all, as if you'd been sat in the room.
What's in the 65 minutes
Six ideas, one map, and a decision to make at the end of it.
AI is an amplifier, not a strategy
Bolt AI onto strong foundations and it makes you extraordinary. Bolt it onto a broken model and all you get is chaos, faster. The question was never whether to use AI. It's what you're amplifying.
The one filter question
Run every AI tool you're tempted by through a single question before you touch it. If the answer comes back no, it's a distraction. That one question will save you a lot of time and money.
The Growth Map
The three systems standing between you and a predictable pipeline that doesn't depend on referrals or luck. Your weakest one sets your ceiling. Everything else is noise until it's fixed.
Prolific and invisible, or the only obvious choice
AI has just handed every accountant in the country content production. The sea of sameness is about to get a great deal bigger. Vague positioning plus AI is prolific invisibility. Sharp positioning plus AI is something else entirely.
The fastest cash on your bottom line
It isn't new clients. It's the thing you've been putting off for years, with people who already trust you, where you're the incumbent and it's far easier than it feels.
They're not really deciding on your price
The anchoring principle behind every fee conversation you've ever lost, why a keyboard and a social security number explain it, and what to put in front of a prospect before you say a number.
The bill that cost me a client I'd have walked through fire for
Ten years ago my model was broken. Plenty of clients, staff, a practice that looked great from the outside. But nothing happened without me. I wasn't running a business. I had a glorified job.
Then we did a piece of work I was proud of. A client's cash flow was about to go. We went round the finance houses, found them an invoice discounting facility, fixed the gap, and the business survived. Without those conversations they'd have gone under. They were over the moon.
So I did what I always did back then. Had the meeting, took the praise, and slid the bill across the table. Somewhere around nine or ten thousand pounds.
The blood drained out of his face.
A few weeks later, professional clearance. He wrote to say the work had been great, but that surprise bill had left such a bad taste he couldn't trust how we did business any more. It was never about the money. It was that he didn't know it was coming.
That was the day I found out my pricing model was broken. And shortly after, that my whole business was.
This isn't theory. It's the room.
Ordinary firm owners in the same shoes as you, facing the same challenges, who put the process in place.
£15k a month
Suzanne moved away from timesheet billing. Around £5,500 became a £15,000 per month retainer. That's £180,000 a year from one client. Four or five people, up in Lancashire.
£50k client
Mel had been trying to crack this for years. Chose construction business owners, started talking to them on LinkedIn, and the enquiries followed. Right profile, right fee, because they saw her as the expert.
£800 to £2,200
Tom repriced a monthly bookkeeping client he already had. Same client, same work, nearly three times the fee.
£2.2k to £4k a month
Ahmed used the brochure to have the value conversation instead of the price conversation. No hesitation from the client, which is the best part.
£52,000
Kushal, from the first accelerator cohort. One fee.
£59,000 a year
Darren, by landing the anchor before the number. These might look out of reach. They really aren't.
None of them had a natural born talent for this. It wasn't luck and it wasn't the right AI tool. The only thing separating where you are from where they are is time and a decision.
Two pages from the deck
The recording has the slides on screen throughout, so you can follow the whole thing properly rather than guessing what I was pointing at.
Who this is for
You'll get a lot out of this if
- You own an accounting firm and you're the bottleneck in it
- You grow by referral, so you can't plan, because you never know when the next one is coming
- You know you should be posting on LinkedIn, and you keep not doing it
- You're very good at the craft and you'd like to get good at the business
- You suspect you're leaving money on the table with clients you already have
Give it a miss if
- You want a list of AI tools. This is more or less the opposite of that
- You're happy billing by the hour and you'd rather that wasn't questioned
- You're after inspiration rather than a decision. The talk ends by asking you to write one down
Who's talking
I'm Reza Hooda. I run a UK accounting firm from the other side of the world, not because I got lucky, but because I eventually built the right foundations in the right order. It took me a long time and one very expensive lesson to work out what those were.
I host The Profitable Accountant podcast, I've written a book on the four pillars of a profitable firm, and these days I spend most of my time working with firm owners who are roughly where I was ten years ago.
We overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in ten.
The fundamentals still win. AI just changes how fast. Here's the whole talk.
No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you like.
