A Fireside Chat on Structure, Pricing, and Advisory
Most firms are already doing advisory work. A client calls asking about an entity change. Someone asks what to do with a windfall before year end. A long-term client’s business has grown, and the return that used to take two hours now takes eight. None of that gets billed as advisory. It gets absorbed into the relationship, treated as part of “just being helpful,” and the firm ends up doing more complex, higher-value work for the exact same fee it charged five years ago.
This fireside chat is built around that specific pattern. Will Hamilton and Jonathan Young walk through how firms are fixing it in practice: how to reprice a client who has been with the firm for years without it feeling like a punishment, what it actually takes to document an advisory process so it does not live entirely in one person’s head, and how a solo practitioner with no team can build this without hiring anyone new.
This isn’t a product demo and there’s no pitch built into the structure. It’s a working conversation, grounded in the questions firm owners are actually asking right now, with Q&A built in at the end.
What you'll learn:
- A framework for repricing long-term clients without damaging the relationship or triggering pushback
- A simple way to get advisory work out of your head and into something documented, so it does not depend on one person remembering how it's done
- What to say when a compliance-only client keeps asking advisory questions for free, and how to turn that into a paid conversation
- How often pricing should actually be revisited, and what signals mean it's time
- Whether this is realistic for a solo practitioner with no team to hand work off to, or whether it requires more infrastructure than that
About Your Host
William Hamilton
Founder
SmartPath.co
William Hamilton is the founder of SmartPath and a recognized speaker with NATP, AICPA, and CPA Academy. He has spent the last 17+ years working directly with tax and accounting firms across all 50 states, helping them increase margins, fix their pricing structure, and build practices that generate stable, predictable revenue. Everything he teaches is grounded in real-world results from real firms.
