Episode 184 | The End Of Cheap Tax Work: Win With Value, Not Volume With Dominique Molina

The Abundant Accountant: Leads, Sales & Business Growth for Accounting, Tax and Bookkeeping Professionals - Michelle Weinstein - The Pitch Queen, Sales Strategist

Dominique Molina discusses how accounting and tax professionals must shift from competing on volume to winning with value. She emphasizes differentiating through expertise, outcomes, and client experience rather than pri

Key takeaways

• Shift from price competition to outcome-based value

Transcript preview

Welcome to the abundant accountant podcast where accounting, tax, and bookkeeping firm owners learn to scale with confidence, charge premium fees, and reclaim their time. Hosted by yours truly, Michelle Weinstein, this podcast gives you the proven frameworks, the mindset shifts, and success stories you need to transform your firm from overworked and undervalued to confident and profitable. If you're ready to master the art of enrollment and build a firm that supports your life instead of consuming it, you're in the right place. It's time to get them on a system that actually supports the way you work. Intuit QuickBooks bill pay automates accounts payable in QuickBooks keeping bills, vendor records, 1099s, and reporting in one place and giving you cleaner data, fewer errors, and far less chasing. With QuickBooks bill pay, you can use AI-powered Bill Pay to upload bills in seconds. With Bill Pay Elite, customize your approval workflows to eliminate. bottlenecks and even assign approvals to groups. Plus, QuickBooks Bill Pay offers real-time AP aging and cash flow insights so you can advise your clients more strategically and help them scale safely with strong permissions and safety controls. Learn more at QuickBooks.com, forward-books. Again, that's QuickBooks.com forward slash Accountant Bill Pay. Terms apply. Money movement services are provided by Intuit Pay. Inc. licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Welcome to the Abundant Accountant and Podcast. Today we have a very special guest. Our special guest is the founder and president of the American Institute of Certified Tax Planters. She's also the founder of Think Outside the Tax Box, which is a bi-weekly e-newsletter on tax planning and tax saving strategies for tax pros and business owners. And she is the CEO. of Midas IQ, which is an online tax reduction education for the general public. But before we welcome our special guest to the show, if you've ever been on a sales call or gotten off a sales call and realize that you just gave away some free advice again, or you felt yourself caving in on price, or you felt yourself caving in when it was time to say your price, you're not alone. Most firm owners have incredible technical skills. Just like you're, maybe it's tax resolution. planning, CFO advisory, bookkeeping, but you don't have any structure around your sales process. And it's costing you thousands of dollars every month. Here at the abundant accountant, I help you shift from giving away your time to commanding your value without feeling sleazy or aggressive. You know the exact words to say so you never have to freeze up or feel icky inside. If you would like to explore how that would look in your firm, go to the abundant call.com and book your complimentary. free strategy session right now with me and my team and we can turn all of those conversations into conversions of high paying clients. Once again head on over to the abundant call.com if you're ready to uncover those hidden obstacles that are really hindering your firm's growth. The abundant call.com and now let's welcome our very special guest, Dominique Molina to the show. Welcome to the show, Dominique. Yeah, thanks so much for always being a special guest here on the Abundant Account and Podcast. It's lovely to have you back and for those that don't know who you are, I'd love it if you could share a quick 30 seconds to a minute of what you do for those listeners that maybe don't know who you are and I always think it's best to come from you versus me. Yeah, sure, happy to. So I lead the American Institute of Certified Tax Planers, where the largest... Tax Planning Association in the country. And we work with certified tax planners and strategists to help them use value pricing, make premium fees by delivering high, high results for their clients through advanced tax reduction. And so our whole model here is that you're not competing on price, you're competing on results. You're competing on results. You're competing on the results that you create for your clients and we do that by using the tax law to our advantage to help people pay a lot less in tax. Yes, love that. And I know that there are you know some bigger players entering the market on tax planning. We're going to talk about how you can't out volume them and we have to really focus on the value that we provide versus focusing on quantity which is what other bigger companies focus on. So what do you think Dominique has been the shift that you've seen in the world of tax planning since you've been the lead and spearhead of this for quite a while now? Yeah, we've been doing this for 17 years, Michelle, and we've seen a lot of change in that time back when nobody was talking about tax planning and of course we're seeing some bigger players come into the marketplace, but what happens is really what happens is really what happens is really what happens in the mind of the clients as the messaging gets more exposure, right? There's a big problem and a danger when clients think tax planning means software output. When that's what their impression is, they expect software pricing. And so we're seeing the commoditization of tax planning, right? when we see some big players call what they sell tax planning and sell it for $97 for example, then your $10,000 plan is suddenly compared and people don't really understand how we're different. And so it's really important that we make differentiation unmistakable, not by lowering prices, but by elevating. experiences and outcomes because when people think it's the same thing it's because we're not really showing them the difference. Mm-hmm and why do you think these bigger players have done that at 97 a month or whatever what do you think that might be influenced by? Well I think there's a different model in mind right and and for a long time the race to make more money in the tax industry has been built around volume, right? And so if you want to make more money in the tax industry, it's by taking on more and more clients. And so as you scale and you get to take on high volumes of work, your strategy in making more money is because you're making money on quantity. bit different model. We make money on quality because when you start to compete with these discount franchises for example or you're competing with an algorithm with AI right we cannot out volume there we can't compete on that level because we don't have the exposure we don't have the infrastructure but we can't outvalue them their business model depends on sameness and ours really depends on distinction. Yeah and doing what matters too, right? If you redefine like what value really is you're doing what matters to the client. It's not everybody fits all methodology, right? So it's almost like you're the it's the difference between being seen as like you said a software versus being being the advisor, authority. Yes. And if you think about what that looks like in a firm, when you use the term advisor, Michelle, from the client's perspective, what does that mean? Well, that doesn't mean automation. That doesn't mean AI. That doesn't mean, you know, printed out reports. That means depth, trust, judgment, guidance, coaching, right? That's what people are really looking for when they look for an advisor. And so they're actually not attracted to this big box model because it simply isn't offering what they're actually looking for. And so we don't try to compete then with them on those same factors. We want to win where the giant scalable model can't win. And so, we don't try to compete then with them on those same factors. We want to win where the giant scalable model can't win. And that is through relationship through creating real value. And so we don't compete on price. We don't compete on by automating procedures. Now, can we use automation in our business to make things more profitable for us? Yeah. But we don't want to do it at the expense of the perception of our clients, right? Right. Well, and volume just breeds, burnout. breeds commoditization, which is what we're talking about right now, and it just makes you really less special. So you're not that advisor go to to the client. Yes. You don't see you from that same perspective. Yes. And so we really want to distinguish ourselves and create that differentiation. And if we don't differentiate ourselves on our price, listen, the price, your price tells you, the market how to treat you. So you price like an advisor, you get treated like an advisor, but if you price like the big players, again, now we're just kind of folded into that same competitive market and people will try to compare us on that and it becomes this big race to the bottom, right? And that's what we're trying to do is just remove ourselves from that. that perceived parity that were all the same. Yeah and I think when you can focus on being that advisor and that authority figure that's how you can really set yourself apart and I call it in the world of sales like creating that different client experience and I think when you have the confidence on the technical knowledge you're not relying