In this Lunch & Earn episode, Evan Carmichael relays a question from Agbola, an accountant offering accounting, auditing, taxation, and management consultancy services, asking how to market these professionally. SKELLYCEO responds with a multi‑step strategy: first, tap into the Sage Accountants Network, a referral platform of 100,000 accountants that connects entrepreneurs to local specialists via a Google‑Maps‑enabled directory. He emphasizes that trust and competence are the core of the brand, and that early client referrals can trigger exponential growth. To sustain quality as the client base scales, he suggests adopting real‑time accounting, integrated payments, and automation, allowing accountants to evolve into virtual finance directors or CFOs who provide cash‑flow forecasting, financing advice, and international expansion support. Both speakers stress the importance of building a strong content engine—educational articles, tools, and a robust website—to attract and retain clients, and to cultivate a social media presence that showcases expertise. Evan adds a branding layer, urging accountants to articulate a clear vision and differentiate themselves, for example by positioning as “entrepreneur‑friendly” accountants, mirroring a lawyer’s successful niche branding. The conversation blends practical acquisition tactics with higher‑level brand storytelling, aiming to help accountants stand out, deliver higher‑value services, and maintain service quality while scaling.
So this one was asked by Agbola, who wrote in to say, the services I render are accounting, auditing, taxation, management consultancy. My question is, how can I market these services professionally well? So I mean, you deal with accountants all the time. You see tons of different entrepreneurs. How can, how can they market themselves?
Yeah, I think you have a really good question. So first thing, simple things, if you want to connect with us, you've got my email address, connect with us. I'll link you up to something called the Accountants Sage Accountants Network. We've got 100,000 accountants as part of that. Part of what we do as part of the service is any entrepreneur who wants to have a local accountant comes through the Sage Accountants Network, all kind of obviously Google Maps enabled, and you can find an accountant with the skills and relevancy, whether you're in construction or whatever, hospitality or whatever industry. Then I think the other thing is, this is so important because what you have as the brand is trust and competence. And I think with, with all these things, it's always going to be a referral business. So you get your first few clients and then it does go, it goes, it goes completely seismic in terms of how you can serve more clients. And I think the challenge you have is once you're successful is how you keep the quality of service maintain that quality of service. You know, it's easy to do for your first 20 clients, but when you get up to 200, 300, 400 clients, then how do you actually maintain an exceptional— exceptional— now I think on this there's some really good ways both us and other companies are doing some awesome work of what we call real-time accounting, integrated payments from your website, your shop window on the world, right through to inventory management, all these sort of things. So the manual handoffs and where you need a lot of sort of people, bookkeepers and stuff is changing and the roles that you could play is almost you can— because a lot of stuff is what we call frictionless. So it kind of goes straight through. It's all automated. You run your business from the palm of your hand on your smartphone and the role of the accountants like yourself can be tremendous in terms of almost virtual finance directors, CFOs of all your clients. And you could say, you know, your cash flow forecast, how do you raise finance, how do you go overseas, how do you get contracts that work out in Europe and places like that. So you can play a much bigger role, I think, and actually drive up your revenues and your value to your clients because you're offering much higher value service. So kind of point number 1, there's a lot of channels that can help you. Sage is one of them. Point number 2 is your business is all about obviously building the first network of clients and they'll recommend, as all entrepreneurs do, whether they go down the Chamber of Commerce, whether they go to the gym or wherever they go. They'll recommend you to other people. And then I think you could build up a huge social presence around that. The other thing I'd love you to do if you want to is build really good content. So when it comes up to the tax year, easy stuff, how to help your clients move much more quickly. A lot of it's automated and you could build a really good kind of website shop presence where they not only can get a hold of really useful information, but some tools to actually help them be more efficient. Business. So I think a lot of stuff going on and a lot of disruption in technology that you can take advantage of.
For me, I would come back to— we're talking about visionary marketing. What's your vision? I mean, you tell me what you do, but what's the vision? Like, how are you different? What do you stand for as an accountant? Because if I need— what'd you— accounting, auditing, taxation, management consulting— there's a thousand people, more, like hundreds of thousands of people I could go to for this service. Why am I gonna pick you, Agbola? What's so special about you? What's the better world that you want to create? How do you stand out versus everybody else? That's what I would lead with. And then when you're creating content, when you're talking to people, that's what flows through. As an example, there was a lawyer friend of mine here in Toronto who was trying to stand out when he started his legal practice. And he, this guy loves entrepreneurs, like really like has a soft spot in his heart for entrepreneurs. Somebody that obviously I would be able to connect with easily, and he changed his branding to be the entrepreneur-friendly lawyer, because a lot of lawyers aren't seen as being friends of entrepreneurs. We don't like going to lawyers. It's like, it's a worst-case scenario kind of thing. And so that, just that one switch of being entrepreneur-friendly made a huge difference in him being able to get his message out and people being able to relate to him, and him standing out from a sea of lawyers. 'Cause there's tons of them. So the same thing for you, you know, all of the practical stuff we've been talking about, the content, the application, amazing, but what do you stand for? Like right now we could be helping you with some high-level stuff about your vision and how to have a major impact in the world, but I don't know enough about you. How you introduce yourself matters, right? So it's great, I wanna know what you do, but more importantly, I wanna connect with who you are as a person, what you stand for as an individual, and the better world that you're trying to create. Make me feel something. I'm getting excited already for you 'cause I feel it's in there. Put that out in every communication and that's gonna make people talk about you, connect with you, wanna buy your services, wanna refer you on and on.
[Speaker] Yeah, on that as well, it's amazing. If I go onto nearly all accountants' kind of websites, one thing I think they could, a lot of people do is talk to their customers, so their clients. So, you know, why don't we have kind of YouTube clips about your clients out there? How you change their business, how you created millionaires. How you allow people to live their dreams and allow them to focus on their business. And you took care of all the back office and just made that absolutely sick. How you help them export, how you help them set up, you know, maybe set up finance and allow them to accelerate their growth. And it would be great to, you know, you just take your iPhone along. Everybody wants to do it because you're giving them free kind of marketing. You talk about marketing. If I'm a client of yours and I'm growing my business at 300% a year, I'd love it if I appear on your website and there's a 30-second download video of me talking about how fantastic services are and how it's allowed me to export to Canada, back to the UK, over to Brazil and stuff like that. And so the story again, connecting the emotion and connecting and making it just— it's all about people. It's all about connecting the heart. And I think to Evan's point, just a simple thing today would be go and do kind of videos of your customers at the end of the tax year and how you assure them they sleep well at night.
