I think the biggest learning point we’ve taken so far is really don’t pre-judge your clients, believe in yourself, believe in your product, your service, believe in your value, and believe that if you can offer valuable support to your clients it won't offend them - they will actually love it!

I think the biggest learning point for ourselves has been that to grow, we need to develop our team, we cannot do everything ourselves. We’ve come from a small practice that’s been growing year-on-year, but since we have started the Accountants Growth Academy we’ve realised we need to get good team members in, get them trained, get them empowered to do the job and that’s the only way we can grow and we can keep moving the firm on. We are now doing this and it's been better for everybody, including ourselves.

I would say it is to identify areas of your business that you just need to focus on and then really focus on them. The success of staying on track and maintaining this focus ties in very nicely with the accountability visits. In other words just make sure you’re clear on what you’re focus is and just do that single mindedly and then move on to the next area.

The biggest impact for us so far has been the support we've had for implementation of three tier pricing. Before the AGA it had taken us ages to put our pricing strategy properly in place. We had started off with two tiers at the beginning because I wanted to try it but I was a bit scared of doing it the whole way. So really we only half did it but now we’ve got it and we do it for all new clients. So this is really really big news for us and we've found everyone pays more than we expected they would want to.

I think it is about having boldness on pricing. I’m quite a young partner and it's very easy for me to slip into taking a client no matter what for a lower price just to get the client but the downside is you end up completely under-pricing your services and then struggling for years to come. Listening to Pauls approach on pricing makes it so clear that being bold, having the right clients at the right prices means that not only are you giving a better service, but you’ve got that profitability across all the parts of the business.