Why Attorneys Could Be Your Next Niche

This week is all about specialization and why you may want to consider having attorneys be your next, next niche, and really walking away or stepping away from a generalist practice and moving towards a specialized or niched practice. So as a generalist bookkeeper, maybe you've considered or thought about, what can I do to stay relevant in the future? Maybe not just that reason, but maybe you want to know a way to be able to assist your clients in a more profound way. And this is where you can really step into your role and dive in deep with one, maybe industry or vertical, and look at a way that you can help your clients at a deeper level and create processes for yourself and your staff so that you have repetitive practice. You have a practice that you can fine-tune and finesse, but also have repeatable practices that you can hone in on and really take the time to create a system for yourself that is more efficient. So one of the great things about working with attorneys, and there's many, many reasons why, and I'm just gonna list a few of them. There's, uh, I think the biggest reason is a very stable work, uh, workforce. So they're not affected by the economy. That was one of the biggest reasons why I selected them over maybe a contractor or restaurants or something of that nature. I wanted something with a very steady stream of work. It's not a seasonal business for the most part, although I have run into one attorney that was. Um, but you can find that within that special specialization or niche that you're able to really dive in deeply into that industry. And you can even like micro niche down into one practice area. But think about it, attorneys have all different practice areas. So no business is the same. They're all different. They could be different by size. It can be different by practice area. Obviously they're different by the people that run it. They're very high value clients. So They tend to have a lot of capital in their firm. They are clients that command premium rates, and you can command the premium rates right back because you're offering them a higher level of expertise. You're able to handle trust accounts. You're handling compliance aspect. You're handling their client costs. These bigger pain points that you will see with some law firms. And I think that having that ability to talk the talk with them and know their lingo and their language, they're going to get very impressed. And I see this day after day when we meet with attorneys, that they're very much impressed with the fact that we're able to understand their pains in their business and the things that keep them up at night, and we're able to help them move past all that and move towards a very profitable future. There, there's definitely a reduced hassle with working with attorneys because they value time. They don't tend to like take their meetings over the top and, and stretch them out as a general rule. Not always. They are very good about paying their bill. They're good about giving you the paperwork back when you ask for it, or any information back that you need, answering questions. They're very good about that because they know what it feels like on their side to do those things. I think that also the fact that you're gonna have a specialized skill set that is more valuable to them than just a general bookkeeper. Right there, you know the IOLTA account, you understand the IOLTA, which is the interest on lawyers' trust accounts. You know that you have a way to fix it if it's broken, which most of the time that's one of the things that they come to you is that they have a pain point of, their trust is out of balance and they have to do this for their part of their compliance for their work. It's very important. So the fact that you can help them with that is critical. They often value long-term relationships. So they build long-term relationships with their clients and they also will be appreciative of building a long-term relationship with you if you provide them good service. So that's really important as you start to build out your firm. Mm-hmm. And really keep it safe for the future. So you're trying to build out a very sturdy and stable firm. That's one of the things about attorneys, that you have that ability to create, create the relationship, which also can be fruitful because then they can refer you to others. You can work to a space which I think is going to be so important with artificial intelligence and things that are added to a lot of the software and the tools that we use. You can work beyond the bookkeeping. You're gonna have the door open with the IOLTA account to add additional services that your client maybe has to process or do on their side, and you can offer to help them with that. You can offer to help them with their software. Know the software, kind of select a couple that you really want to specialize in, learn them, nail them down, and know what it's like from their attorney's perspective of using the software. Where, what are they— where are their steps that they have to do to enter billable time or any of those things and their rates? Maybe they have a rate structure. know the software in and out, that you can help them know how to work in their own software. I have helped a lot of clients learn software and their ability to, to really fine-tune it for their firm, use templates and shortcuts and snippets and all the things that save them time. And it really makes you stand out as that accounting rock star. You will stand out in a crowd. So if they're interviewing multiple accountants or bookkeepers, you're gonna find that you're gonna be leaving You're really going to differentiate yourself from other bookkeepers, and that gives you that huge advantage of being that expert for the client. And that— just the conversations I've had with other attorneys, they may have reached out to multiple, and some of them, they could tell by the conversation that we have in the consultation call that we know our stuff, which is important. So you have to be the right type of person to work with attorneys. You have to be able to stand in your own confidence. You need to know the IOLTA rules of every state, and it's very simple to do, but you have to do that homework as you start to collect clients all over the country. You have to really be that type of accountant that likes to work with detail-oriented data. It's very critical in the work that we do, especially when it comes to trust accounting. And you really have to sit back and be that expert, and it takes some time. You can start to build it, start to build it one client at a time, and really learn the industry, and I guarantee you, you're gonna love it. It's really was the best decision I've ever made as a business owner, taking that shift to working with attorneys. So the fact that you landed here in this blog and you're, you're listening to my video, I hope this helps you make that decision. And if it's not attorneys, it's still a good idea to niche down with somebody else or some other industry, either vertical or another way of kind of specializing, just to be able to— protect you in the future and stay with this work and be relevant in the future, which technology is really right there nipping at our heels and we wanna stay ahead of it. So hope that helps and we'll see you all next week. Bye now. Bye.