Time's Up! The Subscription Business Model for Professional Firms

Put values—and value—over volume with a professional services subscription model

Professional firms are built on relationships. But you wouldn't know it by observing their predominant business model — a model centered on selling transactions and inputs, not outcomes that deepen and strengthen relationships.

Time’s Up! offers you a guide to building a more valuable firm, one where relationships and lifetime customer value are at the center of how you create and capture value. You’ll learn how to:

• Create customer lifetime values that far exceed acquisition and retention costs
• Move customer relationships to the center of your firm
• Leverage the collective knowledge of your customers
• Elevate customers from where they are to their desired future by providing transformations, where the customer is the product.

Only uncommon offerings command uncommon prices. Time’s Up! introduces you to a revolutionary new business model that transforms your firm, your teams and your results with the customer right at the center of the process.

PAUL DUNN is the Co-founder and Chairman of the global giving initiative, B1G1. He holds a Lifetime Service Award to the Accounting Profession in the United Kingdom and is a Social Innovation Fellow in his home of Singapore. He is the creator of the Accountants’ Boot Camp process and he is the inaugural recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to the Profession award given by AccountingWeb in the United Kingdom. He remains the only non-accountant to be honored in this way.

RONALD BAKER is the Founder of VeraSage Institute, author of seven bestsellingbooks, and co-host, with Ed Kless, of the VoiceAmerica.com radio show, The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy (Thesoulofenterprise.com). He is also a faculty member of the Professional Pricing Society.

Foreword xi

Preface xv

Acknowledgments xxiii

About the Authors xxix

The Keynote and the Workshop: How to Read This Book xxxiii

I The Keynote 1

1 What Got You Here Won’t Get You There . . . Thank Goodness! 3

2 We All Have a Story—Here’s a New One for You 11

3 Time-Driven Sucks . . . Impact-Driven Matters 27

4 How Aretha Got It Right 41

5 This Could Be the Most Important Business Question Ever 47

6 Thank Goodness—A New Definition for ESG That Really Does Make a Difference 79

7 The Ongoing Upward Spiral—Perhaps a Different Kind of Legacy 87

II The Workshop 97

8 A Renaissance: The Subscription Economy 99

9 The Direct Primary Care Disrupters 107

10 Business Model Evolution 119

11 Purpose, Strategy, and Positioning 137

12 Marketing, Innovation, and Risk 151

13 Customer Transformations 167

14 Two Timeless Truths and Two Theories 179

15 Pricing the Relationship 189

16 Customer Segmentation and Pricing Tiers 205

17 Pricing the Portfolio 217

18 Measurements and Moral Hazards 239

19 Subscription Business Income Statement and KPIs 257

20 Knowledge Worker KPIs and the After-Action Review (AAR) 279

21 From Zero Defects to Zero Defections 297

22 Adoption Models 311

23 What’s Next? 327

References 335

Index 349

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