August 12, 2026
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It is the last week of January. You are in the office at half past nine at night, chasing the final self-assessment returns, and you have not looked at your own numbers since October. Your firm has grown every year for six years. Your income has not. Every new client means another late night, and the only lever you have left is to work more hours. That is the point most accountancy practice owners start looking for a business coach for accountants, and it is rarely about the accounting.
A business coach for accountants works with the owner of the practice, not with the accounting. The work covers pricing, capacity, systems, team and growth. The coach helps the owner decide what the firm charges, who it serves, what it stops doing, and how it runs a week without the owner sitting in every meeting.
Nobody is reviewing your journals or checking your file notes. That is not the job, and any coach who offers it is quietly selling you a consultant.
A coaching engagement is a series of conversations with homework attached. One session might be spent rebuilding the fee schedule for your three most common client types. The next might be spent working out which twelve clients are eating forty per cent of your week for eight per cent of your revenue.
Between sessions you go and do it. You send the fee letters. You have the awkward conversation. Robin's line on this has not changed in nine years of coaching: he shows you the exercises and explains the nutrition, but he is not putting your trainers on and going for the run.
A coach will not build your systems, write your marketing, or sit in front of your clients. A coach also will not hand you the answer, which is the honest difference between coaching and consulting. If you want somebody to design your practice management workflow, hire a consultant. If you want somebody to work out why you have avoided repricing for four years, hire a coach.
Almost nobody arrives saying their pricing model is broken. They arrive saying they are tired.
Every review meeting goes through you. Every fee quote goes through you. Every difficult client email lands in your inbox because your team has learned that you will handle it. The firm has grown, and all of that growth has been absorbed by your calendar.
Robin hit this himself in October 2018, driving through sheeting rain to a client in Cheltenham with more than twenty one to one clients on the books and running late for all of them. He fired clients one by one until he was down to twelve, then agreed fee increases with everyone who stayed. Capacity-based pricing saved his practice.
This is the point where most owners reach for more clients. Robin uses a Fiat 500 to explain why that fails. You want to go faster, so you pour in rocket fuel. The intuitive answer is that the car accelerates. The real answer is that it blows up.
The engine is your pricing, your systems, your processes and your people. More clients is the rocket fuel. Fix the engine first, or the extra work simply makes the same problem louder.
Every coach in this market lists pricing as a benefit and then declines to say how. Here is how.
An accountancy practice is the purest example of the billable hour trap in professional services. You spent years qualifying. You got faster. And the faster you got, the less you earned for the same piece of work, because the unit you sell is time.
Robin tells the story of a marine engineer called out to a faltering ship's engine. She walks around it, listens, taps gently, then hits one spot with a hammer. The engine fires back into life. The invoice arrives for one hundred thousand pounds. Line one: hitting the engine with a hammer, one hundred pounds. Line two: knowing where to hit it, ninety nine thousand nine hundred.
Clients rarely remember how many hours the accountants working on their file actually spent. They remember whether the answer was right, and whether it arrived before the deadline. That is what they are buying, and Robin has written at length on why hourly rates cap what a service business can earn.
Value-based pricing sounds abstract until you put a real accountancy job through it. Robin's working rule is that a client who spends five thousand pounds with you should get fifty thousand pounds of value back. Invert it and you have a usable fee: charge around ten per cent of the value you create.
Take a profit extraction and remuneration review for an owner-managed company. Billed by the hour it is perhaps twelve hours at one hundred and fifty pounds, so eighteen hundred pounds. Now price the outcome instead. If the restructure saves that client forty thousand pounds of tax across three years, ten per cent of the value created is four thousand pounds.
Same work. Same expertise. More than double the fee, and the client still keeps ninety per cent of the benefit. That is the whole case for pricing on the outcome rather than the input, and accountants are better equipped to have that conversation than anyone, because you can already calculate the number.
The objection Robin hears constantly is that every client is different. His answer: every client is different only because you are enrolling lots of different types of client. Narrow the client type and the work becomes predictable. Predictable work can be packaged, priced, and delivered by somebody other than you.
Across nine years and roughly 250 coaching clients, Robin has found that owners who productise typically end up charging around 2.4 times their previous hourly rate for the same piece of work. A package with a named outcome, a defined period and a fixed fee removes the variables. It also ends the timesheet argument at the point of sale, because there is no longer an hour to argue about. His guide to turning custom work into repeatable packages walks through the four steps.
Practices that sell compliance alongside advisory work, or that bring in specialist auditors for their larger clients, have far more pricing bandwidth than they think. Service lines carry very different margins, and the packaged advisory work is almost always where the profit is hiding.
| What you are comparing | Billable hour model | Productised fixed fee model |
|---|---|---|
| Income ceiling | Capped by the hours in your week | Capped by the value you create and how many packages you sell |
| Effect of getting faster | Efficiency reduces the fee | Efficiency increases the margin |
| The client conversation | About the timesheet, the write off and the scope creep | About the outcome and the deadline |
| Profitability over time | Falls as seniority and salary costs rise | Rises as the process is refined and repeated |
| Cash flow | Billed in arrears, chased in January | Fixed fee, paid in advance or by monthly instalment |
| To grow revenue you need | More people and more hours | A better package and a narrower client type |
Here is the uncomfortable part. The profession that advises everybody else on money is one of the worst in the country at charging properly for its own time.
Robin calls this a money story, the set of beliefs about money you picked up long before you qualified. He once sat in a salon where the owner charged twenty five pounds for a cut and colour while a customer told her it was easily worth over a hundred. Her reply was the classic trap: but that is what I would pay for it. Your fees end up capped by your own personal budget rather than by your client's.
The fix he uses is the Pricing Auction. Write down your current fee for a job. Increase it in rounded steps. Keep going until you feel the knot in your stomach. That number, the one sitting just outside your comfort zone, is usually what your subconscious already believes the work is worth. Then practise saying it out loud until it stops feeling dangerous.
Pricing buys you room. Systems decide what you do with it.
Robin learned this expensively. He handed his podcast process to a virtual assistant with eight steps and no defined scope. She expanded it to fifty three steps without telling him, the bills crept up, and tasks kept bouncing back to his desk. The lesson cost roughly ten thousand pounds. In his words, he lost control because he abdicated responsibility to somebody else.
Delegation is giving somebody a task with a defined scope and a defined outcome. Abdication is handing over an entire area and hoping. In a practice that is the difference between owning a client group's year end process to a named checklist and deadline, and simply being asked to look after the year ends.
Robin's rule for building capability is mastery before graduation. One task learned completely before a second is added. It feels slow in February, and it is the reason you get August back.
Robin's name for the trap is the Sales Cycle of Doom: sell, deliver, sell, deliver, with no gap in which anything ever improves. Accountancy has a brutal version of it, because the delivery peak and the selling season collide every January.
The way out is not a bigger team in November. It is fewer, better paid clients and a genuine cap on how many the practice takes on. Robin's mission statement for this is deliberately blunt: double the income with half the clients. For a practice already at capacity, that is a far sharper answer than hiring.
Most practices grow on referrals until they stop. Referrals are wonderful and they are also a ceiling, because the flow is set by other people's networks rather than by anything you control.
Robin's answer is partnerships rather than more content. He spent 25 to 30 hours a week on social media, burned out, hired somebody full time for a year at £24,000 who generated no clients at all, and quit social entirely at the end of 2022. He then wrote a list of ten people he wanted to partner with. One podcast conversation with Ali Abdaal produced 3,000 leads and more than £250,000 in revenue.
For a practice, the equivalent partners are obvious once you look for them: the solicitors, financial advisers, insolvency specialists and business brokers already sitting in front of your ideal client. Robin's rule for approaching them is give without take, not give and take. Arrive with something useful before you ask for anything.
The second lever is your message. At a networking meeting Robin stopped introducing himself and instead described the room's problem back to them, and half the hands went up. Firms staffed by certified accountants mostly say the same three things on their websites, so the practice that names the client's actual problem wins the meeting before the fee is ever discussed.
The wrong question is who specialises in accountancy. The right question is what is actually broken in your firm.
A specialist who has run a practice knows your software, your seasonality, your regulator and your staffing model. That is real value and it shortens the ramp up considerably, particularly if your problem is operational.
A generalist who has worked across hundreds of service businesses brings the thing a specialist often cannot: the outside view. If the problem is pricing, positioning, or the fact that you have built a job rather than a business, sector knowledge matters far less than pattern recognition. Most practice owners do not have a compliance problem. They have a pricing problem wearing a compliance costume.
Ask any prospective coach how many businesses they have worked with and what happened to fees afterwards. Robin has coached roughly 250 clients across nine years through his coaching practice, ran a design and advertising agency serving over 250 clients in the decade before that, and close to 200 members and alumni have come through the Fearless Business Accelerator.
The three labels get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. A consultant does the work for you. A mentor has done what you are doing and tells you what they did. A coach asks the questions that force you to decide, then holds you to the decision. Robin has set out how coaching, mentoring and consulting differ in detail.
Cost varies enormously. Group programmes cost a fraction of one to one work, and serious engagements usually run for a fixed term with a defined outcome rather than an open ended monthly retainer. The number worth calculating is not the fee. It is the fee measured against the increase in your average client value over the following twelve months. Robin's breakdown of what business coaching actually costs covers the ranges.
Three practical checks before you commit. Ask what happens in month one. Ask for a client whose fees went up and stayed up. Ask what the coach will refuse to do.
Robin worked with a law firm in Gloucestershire that was losing solicitors after four to six years. He asked the leadership team a simple question: what does it cost you to replace one? Nobody in the room knew.
So they calculated it together, factoring in recruitment, training, and the partner hours swallowed by onboarding. The figure was £225,000 per solicitor. Forty solicitors had left in the previous year. Six million pounds, sitting in a cost the firm had never once put on a page.
That exercise is a cost of inaction calculation, and it transfers straight into an accountancy practice. What does it cost you every year to carry a client group whose fees have not moved since 2019? What does it cost to lose a qualified senior every eighteen months? Owners obsess over winning the next fee and almost never price the bleeding.
The pricing finding is just as consistent. Owners who productise end up charging around 2.4 times their old hourly rate for the same work, and the clients who walk over the increase are almost always the ones who were consuming the most time for the least money.
You do not need a coach to run the first exercise. Take your three most common jobs. For each one, write down the outcome the client actually buys, then write down what that outcome is worth to them in money. Now put your current fee next to it.
If the gap makes you uncomfortable, that is the diagnosis. Pick the job with the widest gap, rebuild it as a fixed scope package with a named outcome and a fixed fee, and quote it to the next ten prospects at the number that sits just outside your comfort zone.
Ten quotes is enough data to know whether it works. Robin's phrase for the moment before you say it out loud is worth borrowing: get comfortable saying the big number. Then take your shot.
A business coach for accountants works with the owner of the practice rather than on the accounting itself. The work covers pricing, capacity, systems, team and growth, so the firm earns more without the owner absorbing every extra hour of it.
Fees vary widely. Group programmes cost a fraction of one to one coaching, and serious engagements usually run for a fixed term with a defined outcome rather than an open ended retainer. Judge the fee against the increase in your average client value over the following twelve months.
A specialist understands your software, your seasonality and your regulator, which shortens the ramp up. A generalist brings pattern recognition from hundreds of service businesses. If the problem is pricing, positioning or capacity rather than compliance, the outside view usually does more.
Yes, and expect to lose a few. Owners who productise their services typically charge around 2.4 times their previous hourly rate for the same work. The clients who leave over a fee increase are usually the ones consuming the most time for the least money.
Most productive engagements run for a fixed term of three to twelve months with a defined outcome, not an indefinite monthly retainer. Pricing changes show up within weeks. Systems, delegation and the shift away from referral dependency take longer.