Managing your client meetings and strategy calls can be a juggling act. Coordinating schedules, sending emails back and forth, and playing phone tag can be time-consuming and frustrating.

Calendly simplifies scheduling. It sets your availability and syncs with your calendar to ensure you’re never double-booked. 👍

Have a listen to the struggles Ben Walker faced as an Accounting Firm Owner when he first started Inspire in 2013, all the way to 2022 – 9 years later.  

Here’s what he said – 

I’ve broken Inspire into 3 different stages: 

• Inspire 1.0 ($0-500k) 
• Inspire 2.0 ($500k-1.5m)
• Inspire 3.0 ($1.5m-3m) 

Inspire 1.0 ($0-500k)

• There was way too much to do
• I was wearing heaps of hats
• I wasn’t taught how to run a business at university – My dad was in business, my grandfather, but you don’t get taught that stuff. Some of them are hard lessons
• I had conflicting information from coaches or mentors
• I was pretty unclear about what to focus on for me at the time.

Inspire 2.0 ($500k-1.5m)

• I was really bogged down in delivery sales
• We were making losses as well for a lot of that
• My business partner and I are having different perspectives towards the end of our journey together in terms of vision for ourselves and our firm
• The other thing that took me a while to crack is, I was really unclear on how to grow out of a flat structure. And what I mean by that is, I had about seven or eight people reporting to me and asking me questions a lot. I was responsible for reviewing stuff and getting back to so many people, including my own clients, my life,  my wife and all that sort of stuff. So, it was a very flat structure that I struggled with.

Inspire 3.0 ($1.5m-3m) 

The thing that I’ve had to work through is sometimes not knowing what my role is. There are literally days I’d go to work and I’d have nothing to do. I would question myself, “How do I get to the next stage? What problem is going to be coming in the next day, or week, or month that I’m not seeing yet?” And also, “Where do I add the most value to the team? What are my day-to-day responsibilities?”

I’ve found out that if I’m doing things, it’s stopping someone else from learning that role as well. Let’s say marketing for instance. One of the things I’ve actively had to do is step back from speaking engagements to let those 3 future managing partners come in and take that place as well.

Your terms and conditions should support the “out of scope” work. We’ve had this wrong for a while, and it’s crucial to clearly define what’s included or not in the package, as well as how we handle price increases.

So, we’ve taken note of the minimum CPI increase. We’ve even included clauses in our terms and conditions that essentially allow us to adjust their price without needing their approval by up to 10% each year. We can just inform them and simply say, “Hey, your price will be increasing from this point. If you want to cancel, let us know by that date.”

To address this, we had a lawyer create an extensive list of terms and conditions. These terms also stand alongside our CAANZ engagement letter.

Everything is automated through Practice Ignition. As a result, no client can start any work until they’ve accepted all of these terms and conditions.

B1G1 is a global giving initiative by Paul Dunn. There’s a way in ignition that allows us to incorporate various actions into our business operations.

For example, when a client accepts a proposal through Ignition, we can use Zapier to connect and integrate different giving impacts. We have decided that each time an Ignition proposal is accepted, we contribute a day’s worth of access to education, shelter, and a school meal for a child in need in Kenya. The cost for this impactful  is just 0.95 USD.

The best part is that the automation takes care of all the calculations and tallying for us, thanks to the Zapier integration.  It’s a cool addition to our giving process, making it effortless and meaningful at the same time.

We’ve heard a lot of people who’ve used Ignition or are considering it, have concerns with the merchant fees. We’ve been told within the next four months, ignition will be introducing a convenient button that allows you to pass on those merchant fees with just a simple click.

Ignition is also scalable with the team. It takes them a couple of minutes to set up and send a proposal. You could actually send the proposal in less than 60 seconds if you’re logged in. 

If we’ve got a fixed price for a service, you can set up your library. For example, we have a “Look Under The Hood Service”, which is the second opinion on their tax. We just select that service, pop the email, the client name, hit send and it’s done and out. Off the back of that, it does all the engagement letters. If they accept it, it takes payment and raises the invoice. Even in our Xero file, it marks that Xero invoice as paid once the payment clears. 

From the moment you provide that initial 60-second input, Ignition does a lot of the admin and heavy lifting. While bigger proposals may take a little longer, the overall experience of having Ignition as part of your business is fantastic. It’s an awesome feature and platform that effortlessly streamlines your workflow. 

In 2022, Inspire has achieved some incredible milestones worth celebrating:

• Inspire has been recognized as one of The Great Places to Work, securing the impressive #9 spot in our category for Australia.
• In September, our very own Ben published his book “Wealth for Life”

Ben’s vision is to focus exclusively on VIP clients, whilst empowering our team to take the lead on every single client. He has also devoted a few hours per week to mentoring other high-performance accounting firms, aiming to inspire and guide them towards success.

Furthermore, Ben has set ambitious goals for Inspires. He aims to elevate Inspire revenue from approximately $3,000,000 million to $4,500,000 million. Additionally, he plans to expand the client base from 265 to 450.

One of the big lessons Ben learned was after 9 months of running Inspire. 

He made the decision to sign a lease on a massive space in Newstead.  

Because it was a big cafe space, Ben ended up getting a liquor licence and even having a bar. 

Although it was initially enjoyable, the upfront capital costs were overwhelming…

The motivation behind Ben’s decision was because of the remarkable growth he experienced in the first 8 to 9 months of running Inspire. 

However, he didn’t realise that the growth would stop.

Ben found that he extinguished his network.

And before he had realised that,  he had signed a big lease. 

In that process, he tried to find some more team members to help with the growth. 

It was a rude awakening.