The KORE Financial Health Assessment

There is peace of mind that comes when your law firm has the right team, tools, and systems in place – you and your staff feel empowered to focus on the core functions of your jobs rather than on administrative tasks, you are able to be proactive with invoicing and collecting from your clients, you always have a pulse on how your business is performing, and you never worry about getting the dreaded audit letter from the Bar.

While this is the ideal most business owners aspire to, unfortunately, we know that the reality often looks different. What’s more, while some of our prospective customers acknowledge that their books and systems likely have room for improvement, we’ve worked with many firms that genuinely thought their books were in good shape and/or that they were in compliance, when they were actually far from it.

In 2016, KORE Accounting Solutions was recognized by Intuit as one of our country’s five “Firms of the Future”. The prize for us and the other four honored firms was a 6-month coaching program with the Godfather of value pricing, Ron Baker, where we reframed the way we think about pricing and how the way we price impacts the relationships we strive to have with our customers.

In the present day, with more and more modern service providers, including attorneys, embracing fixed pricing, it may not seem like a big deal, but in 2016, when we transitioned all of our customers from hourly to fixed prices and were among the first of our colleagues to make that change, the outcome seemed far from certain.

One of the reasons it’s scary for service providers to move away from billing by the hour is because when you charge hourly, your client assumes the risk; whereas, when your client pays a set price regardless of how long it takes you, you assume the risk. For our business, this meant that inaccurately gauging the scope of work ahead of time could have significant consequences.

So, in an effort to provide fair and accurate pricing, we expanded our discovery process and began to take a deeper dive into prospective customer’s books prior to providing them with our proposal.

Very quickly, it became clear that many of the business owners we were speaking with had genuinely different beliefs of how their businesses were performing than how they actually were. Even more concerningly, we were regularly encountering attorneys who believed they were in compliance with their client trust accounting obligations, when that turned out to not actually be the case.

After seeing the clarity and value that our discovery investigations were providing, including to people who didn’t ultimately move forward with us, we decided to formalize the process, and the KORE Financial Health Assessment was born.

Ultimately, whether or not you engage with us for additional services, our goal is that once your Financial Health Assessment is complete, you are either validated in your belief that your accounting is in great shape or you have an understanding of what actions you need to take to get there.

When it comes to your physical health, studies make a strong case for getting a second opinion, and we would suggest that the same logic holds true for your business’s health – Ronald Regan said it best, “Trust, but verify.”