04/21/2026
I had a member tell me he spent two hours reviewing a cannabis client's tax position and found $100,000 in savings. Two hours. He charged $700 because his rate is $350 an hour and he couldn't justify billing more than the time he spent.
That math makes sense if you're selling hours. It makes no sense if you understand what actually happened. He didn't spend two hours finding that savings. He spent decades building the expertise that let him find it in two hours. A general accountant could have stared at the same returns for two weeks and missed it entirely. The $700 wasn't payment for the work. It was a fraction of a fraction of the value he delivered.
Pricing per hour is the biggest killer of actually making money in this business, and I tell our members that constantly. There's a concept I come back to called the impossible triangle: you can be cheap, fast, or excellent, but you only get to pick two. The Walmart model of accounting picks cheap and fast: lots of clients, low fees, minimal service. You end up with 40 clients paying you $500 a month and you're working 70 hours a week just to keep up. Our model picks fast and excellent. Fewer clients, higher fees, real advisory work that changes how they run their companies.
And hey, we’re not charging more because we want to abuse our position of trust, we’re charging more because it allows us to focus on a few clients completely. Would you rather pay $10,000 a month to a CFO who can save you a million dollars a year or $5000 a month to a bookkeeper who can’t tell if you’ve just overpaid that million?
The part that unlocks this is understanding where you sit on the value chain. When you walk into a discovery call and lead with "I do bookkeeping and bank reconciliations," you've described a cost. The business owner mentally files you next to their insurance bill. But when you lead with "I put more money in your pocket, I lower your tax bill, and I make sure your business is protected and running on accurate data," that's a completely different conversation even though the underlying work overlaps.
Then there's the risk multiplier. When a client is facing compliance issues, potential penalties, a complex multi-entity structure with cash controls that don't exist yet, the stakes go up and so does the value of getting it right. Criminal lawyers don't charge by the hour because they're keeping you out of jail. When you're the person standing between a cannabis operator and a catastrophic audit, you're providing that same kind of protection.
The real issue is almost never price. It's that the value hasn't been made visible yet. If you're helping a client save $100,000 with two hours of work, you can charge $5,000 for that engagement and the client will thank you. You saved them $95,000 they wouldn't have found on their own.
That's why Holl Bookkeeping and Tax Services Inc are here for you!
