How Value Pricing Built a Practice & Saved a Father-Son Relationship

Sometimes, things need mixing up. Chris Farmand, who grew up in a Florida family centered around the accounting practice led by his father and two uncles, was destined for a career in accounting. His parents knew it, the rest of his family knew it, and his teachers knew it. But even though he’d been in college and majoring in business finance for a couple of years, he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to admit it to himself.

A Productivity in Practice Feature

From the July 2011 Issue

After all, having lived most of his early life in the midst of spreadsheets, 10 keys and timesheets, it just didn’t seem all that exciting, and he had a few other ideas he wanted to try out. Surely there was something more entertaining, more interesting and, perhaps, further away from home.

Enter stage left.

Chris had been involved with acting and an improv comedy troupe, and emceed at a local comedy club while away at college in Gainesville, Fla., Realizing a degree in food and resource economics was going to land him on a farm in Ocala, he decided to take his show on the road, and headed to New York.

Ahh, the good life. The improv life with no script. He attended acting classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade and worked occasional gigs way off Broadway. To perfect the stereotype of an actor in New York City, he also worked as a waiter in a few notable Manhattan restaurants, including Molyvous and at RM, one of Rick Moonen’s establishments.

Exit stage right.

Well, it was the good life when there were gigs, during the right spending season and when he could hold a waiting position. Unfortunately, those three variables would conspire to motivate Chris to move back to Florida to finish his degree, to which he added an additional BA in accounting and an MBA. He soon added the CPA and CITP credentials to his accomplishments.

“It didn’t take very long for me to realize that I couldn’t help but be a better accountant than I was a waiter/actor,” Chris notes.

So it was back to the family firm. But while Chris had finally accepted his fate as an accountant, he hadn’t completely shaken that creativity bug. After seven years, he decided to hit the road again, but this time to start his own practice. Chris saw an opportunity with the changing business world to start a firm that would welcome new technology and workflow ideas, so in October 2010, he started Chris Farmand + Company PLLC in Jacksonville (www.cfarmand.com), with his father as a partner.

“After 35 years in the profession, I think my dad was really looking for an exit strategy, and also so he could spend more time being a grandpa,” said Chris. But things weren’t always smooth, either before or immediately after the move. He says that one of the areas of the traditional firm he never understood was relying on the billable hour.

“Every Monday morning, I called it ‘Bloody Monday,’ because my dad and I would take between 9 a.m. and noon to go through the WIP report, and that set the tone for a disastrous week.” This became one of the driving factors in him implementing a “value billing” model, which uses fixed fees for services instead of hourly rates that can vary and confuse clients.

They spent several months establishing their pricing structure, he says, including interviewing clients and gauging their interest and reaction to the change. He found inspiration in “The Firm of the Future,” and other books by Ron Baker, founder of the VeraSage Institute (www.verasage.com), a think tank that promotes value pricing structures. Since changing many of these business processes, especially the pricing paradigm, Chris says that not only has business been better, but his relationship with father has improved.