In this second episode of The Power of Focus Series, Bill and Chris Murphy share how they increased their firm’s value by half a million dollars in six months. They weren’t desperate to sell, just ready to work reasonable hours with clients they liked. So they did something about it. They fired almost all their individual tax clients and more than doubled their fees.
The result? They gained revenue and clients happily paid for the valuable work they provided. Their firm had the capacity to provide even better service to their remaining clients. . And when they sold their firm with us back in 2022, they closed for $500,000 more than their original listing price.
This is a husband-and-wife team who merged their separate practices, worked themselves into the ground, and then made the hard decisions that transformed everything. They cut unprofitable clients, raised prices dramatically, restructured staff workload through weekly meetings, and learned to trust the process even when it felt uncomfortable.
The conversation covers:
- How Bill stayed too long in the weeds, preventing staff from reaching their potential and making it impossible to scale
- The moment they analyzed time and dollars per client and realized individual tax returns were killing profitability
- Why their biggest obstacle to letting clients go was themselves, not their team or the clients
- The apology that worked: “I’m sorry for undercharging you before. Here’s the value you’re getting.”
- How they more than doubled fees and were shocked by how few clients left
- Why having each other to debate decisions made the hard changes easier than solo practitioners face
- The Monday morning meeting structure that kept workload balanced and morale high: agenda, time limit, reallocation
- Why you need to be driving the bus, not riding in the back seat
Bill and Chris didn’t just sell their firm. They sold a better firm, a more profitable firm, a firm that didn’t depend on them working unreasonable hours. And they did it by firing clients who don’t fit, charging what they’re worth, and trusting that the revenue will come back.
This episode is for firm owners who know there is a better way to build a balanced practice, but haven’t known how to get there. This is a success case study on the power focus!
BOOK RECOMMENDATION
Walk Away Wealthy
TIMESTAMPS
02:21 – Bill’s biggest roadblock: staying in the weeds and not developing staff
03:06 – Chris’s challenge: finding and keeping qualified people
04:18 – The mental, spiritual, and physical toll of holding onto all the work
05:52 – The motivation to change: something had to give
07:12 – The big move: firing almost all individual tax clients
08:35 – How the first APA lesson paid for the entire workshop
09:57 – The biggest obstacle to letting clients go: themselves, not the clients
11:04 – Why having each other made hard decisions easier than solo practitioners face
12:49 – How pruning clients created capacity for everything else
13:21 – Doubling fees and the apology that worked
14:37 – “I’m sorry for undercharging you before”
15:29 – How few clients they actually lost with dramatic price increases
16:02 – You have to put the work in, APA isn’t passive
17:14 – Monday morning meetings: agenda, time limit, workload reallocation
19:16 – Driving the bus vs. riding in the back seat
24:24 – Book recommendation: Walk Away Wealthy by Mark Tepper
TRANSCRIPT
Brannon Poe (00:01): Welcome back to the Accountants Flight Plan podcast. I have the pleasure of introducing you to Bill and Chris Murphy today. They were in our APA program and they did an awesome job with their firm, so I invited them on. Guys, can you introduce yourselves to our audience a little bit?
Bill and Chris Murphy (00:23): Sure. I’m Chris and this is my husband Bill and we sold our firm through Poe Group Advisors in 2022. I think the biggest thing that we can say and one of the things that helped us so much is we took the APA Academy, we went through that process and within probably six months increased the value of our firm by half a million dollars. So when we finally sold, we were able to sell for half a million dollars more than what we had originally listed it for. So it was really a fantastic deal for us and definitely paid for itself. Yes, to say the least.
Brannon Poe (01:13): I love it. I’ll tell you what, it’s really meaningful and wonderful to hear post-alumni stories about what they did in Academy and what it meant for them. And so I’m very excited about sharing some of your wins with our audience because running a CPA firm can be hard or it can be not so hard and it can be profitable or not so profitable. I’ve seen such a variety of results from accounting firms and so I think there’s a lot of room for improvement for a lot of people. So hopefully people will walk away with some real valuable insight from you guys.
I want to start off with this first question: What were some of the biggest roadblocks you were feeling, not just as you’re approaching your exit, but while you’re in public practice? What were the major pain points that you guys experienced on a regular basis?
Bill and Chris Murphy (02:21): I think for me, it was I spent way too much time in the weeds and not allowing employees to reach their full potential and to put them in situations where they could gain experience that would make my life a lot easier years down the road.
Brannon Poe (02:47): Just that “I can get it done faster, better if I just keep it myself.” And then before you know it, the firm is just all about you and it’s hard to scale.
Bill and Chris Murphy (02:58): Exactly.
Brannon Poe (02:59): Yep. Chris, your thoughts?
Bill and Chris Murphy (03:06): I think the biggest thing that I felt was just finding qualified staff. A lot of times you have to go through four, five, six people before you found that right person. And it’s difficult to do that because obviously those people are talking to clients and you’re taking time to train them. Sometimes you can hire somebody and you think they’re going to be great and within a week you realize they’re not. Don’t hang on to them. Stop, cut the bleeding before it really starts, get rid of them and do something different. But I just think that accounting as a whole, just not as many people want to get into public accounting anymore. So especially towards the end, it was really challenging to find good people. And the only advice I’d give at that point is when you find somebody good, keep them, whatever it takes.
Brannon Poe (03:58): Yeah, treat them well, keep them. Well, so Bill, what was the result of holding on to that work? Was it just long hours? Was it a bucket of issues that you encountered because of that?
Bill and Chris Murphy (04:18): I think it affected me mentally, spiritually, and physically. All of the things that you mentioned—working longer hours, mentally just being tired, spiritually just me, me, me, me, not what’s good for the whole. That’s how I’d answer that.
Brannon Poe (04:45): Yeah. Well, I remember when we first spoke, I remember you were pretty tired and you were on the fence if you wanted to try to get the firm to where you could live with it a little bit better or if it was time to exit. You were kind of on the fence and then you decided, okay, we’ll take Academy and we’ll see what we can do to fix the firm.
What was interesting about you guys is I felt like you were at that point where something had to change. And my observation was that because you were at that point, you were very motivated to make change in your practice one way or another. And so when you got into the workshop, when you caught onto ideas, you were implementing and making things happen. Do you think that is an accurate depiction of your motivation—that something had to change?
Bill and Chris Murphy (05:52): Oh, most definitely. And probably at the end, I don’t know if I was driving you crazy by going, “Oh, I see something through the APA Academy. We need to implement this now. I mean like 10 minutes ago, we needed to have all staff on board, everything.” So I had to have Chris tell me mainly, “You know, relax. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do. We’re not going to fix this overnight.” And really the fixes weren’t that bad. And I don’t think that we were so much broken necessarily. I think we had a really good firm as it was. We just took it to the next level.
Brannon Poe (06:46): Yeah, because you guys had a good team at that point. You had a pretty good team. So you were able to put these things into practice quickly because you had a good team, I would say. What were some of the major things you did that really strengthened your firm and helped position it the way you did? What were the biggest changes, is what I’m getting at, that you made?
Bill and Chris Murphy (07:12): Well, I can say, yeah, absolutely without a doubt. We went through and basically got rid of almost all of our individual tax returns. So the standalone tax returns. We continued to do the ones that were tied to businesses. So we had several clients that had however many businesses they had, obviously we would do their personal return. But anybody that just had a personal return, nothing else attached to it, we said no, we’re not doing them anymore. They were just a low fee, even though our fees weren’t terrible, they were still a low fee. It required a lot of attention and it just wasn’t profitable. I mean, you looked at the numbers and the amount of time you spent on it, it just wasn’t profitable.
And so by getting rid of those clients, I think it made a huge impact not only on profitability—because you’re thinking, “Oh gosh, I’m getting rid of $50,000 in revenue. Oh my gosh, what is that going to do?”—but we were just able to take the time that we had spent on those clients, turn it into spending more time with the corporate clients. And within no time, I mean, it was definitely worth it.
Brannon Poe (08:34): The revenue just came back in another fashion.
Bill and Chris Murphy (08:35): It did. Like that. I mean, it was. Brannon, the first lesson, the big picture lesson that you had us do, paid for the class for us because we immediately made changes. I mean, just looking at time, dollars, and taking enough time to look at that by client was the best exercise that I personally did with APA.
Brannon Poe (09:10): Yeah, it’s none of it’s really rocket science, right? It’s just taking the time, having the place and the structure to like, “Okay, we’re going to do this. We’re going to step back and look at it.” Of course, you had your cohort to talk to, but still people don’t always act on that information. It still takes a leap of faith. And I guess what were some of the things… before you terminated clients, was there a lot of struggle with the team over that decision? Was there struggle with you with that decision? Or was it just like, “Hey, let’s go”? What was that like, if you recall?
Bill and Chris Murphy (09:57): I can tell you, the biggest struggle was with us getting past, “Are we gonna let that client go? Well, they’ve been with us for so long” or “Oh, they’re 80-something years old” or “Their husband just died.” I mean, we could come up with any excuse in the book that we had just to justify why should we hang on to them. And I think that the biggest obstacle was us. And then I think the way that we got through it was us talking about it and saying, “Hey, are we going to trust the process?” Because that’s what it is. It’s a process that builds upon itself. And once you make one hard decision, the next one seemed to be a little easier to make, didn’t take quite as much time and drama.
Brannon Poe (10:52): Because then you’re kind of committed. It’s like you had to demonstrate the commitment to yourself and get that feedback loop like, “This works.” And then you can keep going. Is that right?
Bill and Chris Murphy (10:55): Yeah. Exactly. And I will say it was really helpful for us to both be involved. The fact that it was two of us helped because we were able to bounce things off each other. We were able to debate, for lack of a better word, the changes that we made. If you were a single practitioner, I think it would have been a lot harder because you don’t have somebody to bounce those ideas off of. You don’t have somebody to play devil’s advocate or play the other side of the argument. And so I can see how it’d be much more difficult to make that decision. We were fortunate that we had each other to talk through the whole process.
And I think we relied on the group. We were transparent. “Yeah, this is what we’re doing. Yeah, we’re going to try this. We don’t necessarily know what’s gonna happen,” and someone in the group would throw something out. So I would say working with our peers that weren’t necessarily in the same market that we were in was a tremendous plus, having people that had years of experience behind them and they were having some of the same issues or either had had those issues and had resolved them. We were able to let them help us through it, save us time, I think, and add our confidence.
Brannon Poe (12:44): Gave you the confidence and the courage to take the leap.
Bill and Chris Murphy (12:48): Exactly.
Brannon Poe (12:49): Yeah. Well, so that was one major thing that kind of gave you capacity, right? Because then you realized not only do you have more capacity, your team has more capacity. And then that gives you the space to focus on some of the other changes you want to make, which I know you guys did quite a bit of an overhaul with your pricing model. Tell us a little bit about that.
Bill and Chris Murphy (13:21): Some of the fees more than doubled, didn’t they, if I remember correctly? And we were like, “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do this.” And I can remember one client in particular that I met with. He was so taken aback by it that I had to explain to him what—I apologized for undercharging him.
Brannon Poe (13:52): I like that.
Bill and Chris Murphy (13:55): Here’s the value. Here’s what you’re paying for. This is what you’re going to get. You already know what you’re getting at a reduced fee. And I actually did business with the client. And I told him, I said, “You know, I do business with you because of the value that I get. You’re not the cheapest guy on the block, but I know that I can trust your service. I know you’re going to stand behind it. And you’ve been in business for over 30-something years. You’re not going anywhere.” And he was very happy to pay his bill.
Brannon Poe (14:37): I like the way you positioned it. “I’m sorry for undercharging you before.” Because they kind of know they’re being undercharged if they think about it.
Bill and Chris Murphy (14:42): Yes. Yeah. But do they step up and say, “Hey, I think you need to double your fee”? I don’t think so.
Brannon Poe (14:53): Well, most of the people that I’ve talked to who have ever done a price increase are always pleasantly surprised by how few clients they lose. And sometimes people go, “Well, I thought I would lose more. I was wanting to lose more with the price increase,” and they don’t lose clients with the price increase and then they’re still overcommitted. Was that your experience too? You thought you would lose more than you did?
Bill and Chris Murphy (15:29): Yeah, we did. Most of them stuck around. And they were really amazed. If you’ve never done it before, how much more money you can make without doing any more work, really, is what it comes down to. But what we did is the revenue we lost with firing the individual clients, we more than made up with the price increase. We had more time to breathe and more money, too.
Brannon Poe (15:55): Yeah, awesome. Just such a simple strategy, but it works, right?
Bill and Chris Murphy (16:02): But you gotta put the time in. Let me just say that. AP Academy is not you just show up and you’re at meetings and that’s all you do. You’ve got to put the work in and you’ve got to put the time in. There are people in our group who didn’t and they didn’t get anything out of it. And that’s not your fault. That’s their fault. We, I will say that you’ve gotta be prepared to do what is asked and whatever the particular module is that you work on, do it, go through the exercise because it’s going to pay off.
Brannon Poe (16:37): Yeah. And one of the things that I want to talk about is delegation a little bit, because you did have a good team, which definitely helps you implement these ideas quickly. But one of the things that you guys discovered when you were doing your client analysis was you didn’t always have the optimal staffing assignments with the right clients. Tell us more about that because I feel like that was a fairly big aha for you guys.
Bill and Chris Murphy (17:14): Chris, I’m gonna let her handle this because she pretty much handled the delegation. Yeah, every Monday morning we had a meeting and we would go through and find out who was working on what, where you were at. As most people know, sometimes through no fault of your own you fall behind because clients don’t send you the information that you need.
And then we would redelegate or reallocate. If one person was really bogged down, the other person had nothing to do, we would move the work over. And so I really think that, I don’t know that we necessarily had the wrong people with the wrong staff or the wrong staff with the wrong clients. I just think that paying attention to your staff’s workload and reallocating weekly—I mean, that’s how we did it, literally it was weekly—reallocating as necessary so that one person isn’t working a bunch of overtime and somebody else is sitting there twiddling their thumbs.
Bill and Chris Murphy (18:15): And one thing I’d like to add here is when I hear the word “meeting,” “we have a Monday morning meeting,” I cringe because of time. You already feel under the pressure of time. The one thing I think that Chris did very well with the Monday morning meetings is we had an agenda, we had a time limit. And we went through that and if we were over the time limit, meetings started and then we would get with that staff member because evidently they were having more issues with the client than what needed to be taken care of in a firm-wide meeting. The Monday morning meetings were good for us.
Brannon Poe (19:13): You needed that structure and that meeting cadence.
Bill and Chris Murphy (19:16): To the point that I use it in my current business too. Every Monday morning we have a meeting so everybody knows what’s going on and it doesn’t have to be a long meeting. Sometimes we’re in there a half hour, sometimes it’s less, sometimes it’s a little more. But it’s important, I think, to have everybody included. It’s important to have an agenda and to make sure that the work is allocated appropriately because that really provides a lot of good morale in the firm if somebody’s overloaded to say, “You know, we’re going to help you.” And sometimes Bill and I stepped in and said, “Hey, give that to us. We’ll take care of it.” Not that we wanted to do the work itself, but sometimes that’s what had to be done that way.
It was definitely a good thing. And one thing I’ll say is that as owners of a firm, we used to say this a lot: You need to be driving the bus. You can’t just be riding along in the back seat. You’re the ones that are driving that bus. You need to drive it. You need to be in charge. You need to dictate when people get on and off. You need to be 100% into it and making sure that things are running appropriately. Because if you’re not, they’re going to run themselves, but you’re not going to like how they do it. You can definitely be very inefficient if you’re not driving that bus.
Brannon Poe (20:39): Yeah. I feel like the meeting cadence and having the agenda and starting on time and stopping on time, it’s such a—we do that too. We have a Monday morning meeting every Monday and not only does it just help kind of bring people in on what’s going on in the firm, what’s happening that might affect them if it’s a new hire or if it’s a new big client or whatever it is. They understand what’s going on and it keeps everyone cohesive. That’s great.
Brannon Poe (24:03): So lastly, I always like to get a book recommendation. What’s a good suggestion for our audience on a book to read?
Bill and Chris Murphy (24:24): I personally like the book called Walk Away Wealthy.
Brannon Poe (24:30): I’ve not heard of that one before.
Bill and Chris Murphy (24:32): It’s by Mark Tepper, CFP.
Brannon Poe (24:39): Yeah, there it is, Walk Away Wealthy. Okay.
Bill and Chris Murphy (24:43): I picked this—I was waiting for an airplane and needed something to do. So this book just happened to be out front and I picked it up and read a couple of pages. I said, “Okay, this will entertain me for a little bit.” So I got it and read straight through the book. I liked it so much I bought a case of them and when I would pick up a new client I would give them the book.
Brannon Poe (25:19): Wow. Okay. Walk Away Wealthy.
Bill and Chris Murphy (25:23): Yes, it is the Entrepreneur’s Exit Planning Playbook. How do you get out of the success that you created? And let me just say he made me read it too like about a year ago. He made me read it again.
Brannon Poe (25:43): Because you’re starting a new business. All right. Now I’m going to have to read that book. It sounds like an interesting one. So, well, Bill and Chris, thanks so much for coming on to our podcast today. And I think you’ve given people a lot to consider and you’ve shared your experience. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Bill and Chris Murphy (26:08): Well, thanks for asking us. We had a good time. Yes. Thank you.
