Why You Should Specialize your Bookkeeping Practice

Hi there, Linda Artisani from the Accountants Law Lab. Today we're gonna discuss specialization, and I'm gonna assume that you've maybe got your first attorney-client and you're excited to work with them. You found out, you really discovered that this is the area that you wanna really direct your firm to, working specifically professional services and with attorneys. I can tell you honestly, it was the best business decision I've made in my career. And it's just, I think that it's one of those decisions that it's a little scary, right? We make a big change, a pivot in our business. It's gonna be scary. You're gonna need some money in the bank to be able to have that cushion because you're gonna have to redirect all of your marketing towards this one area. This one group of individuals, and you're not gonna be just broadly opening the doors to everybody. It's, uh, I've talked to many people who have done this and it's done in many different ways. I'm gonna share how I did this and hopefully it will help you maybe lay down a path to do this. And especially because we're gonna be doing a session on marketing this week at the Law Lab. And I think that this is kind of a topic that flows into it because how do I get from being a generalist, which I was for about 20 years, to working with only attorney clients. And I can tell you one of my freakout things was, am I gonna get bored? Am I gonna be bored doing the same thing, trust accounting over and over again? And actually you don't get bored. Because when you think about it, there's more than one type of attorney. And you can certainly micro-niche down into like only immigration attorneys or only estate planning attorneys or only working with family law. All of these are specializations that you could really fine-tune a specific workflow to. And there's plenty of clients out there. And the best part is, when you start to specialize, you not only elevate your practice, but now you're putting yourself in a place above the generalist bookkeeper. You know the language, which is one of the things that we teach here at the Law Lab. You know the lingo. You know how to speak to these people. You know how to— how each firm works. You're gonna have multiple firms you're gonna look at, and you're gonna be able to see, well, this firm does this better than this firm, and you're gonna be able to help that client.— that doesn't know about a specific thing, whether it's an app, a software, whatever it is, maybe it's a connection to a consulting— another consultant, you're going to be able to give your attorney-client a better service. And isn't that what it's all about? At the end of the day, we want to be able to give our clients the best service ever. Why not specialize and just dive in and learn as much about your client as you can. So making the decision is hard, but know that you can always change your mind. That was one of the things that a dear friend of mine told me, like, you can pick 3, pick 3 types of clients you wanna work with, and maybe attorneys is one of them. And then you just change your mind if you decide it's not the thing that works for you. And I certainly did that. I had startups, I had real estate, and I had attorneys. And I had one attorney client when I started to do this, when I started to dive into this specialization. So you don't need to have 15 clients that are attorneys to do this. You also don't have to give up your legacy clients. And I think that's another area where people are like, do I have to give up my current clients? No, you don't have to. But you'll find you'll be a little bit less interested in their files. You'll be a little disinterested because you're really embracing what you know, and you're gonna be diving into all these different metrics and things that are gonna excite you about helping your client. And you're not gonna have time to look at that e-commerce client or that real estate client, because you're so involved in knowing what you know with the, the legal industry. So that's kind of how it lands. And as they fall away, we just kind of let them go and just keep bringing on more and more attorney clients. And that's basically— now we're laser-focused. Sarah and I are laser-focused on this industry because we do love working with them. We love helping them. And helping them in providing that advisory service. And I know advisory is like a broad term. What the heck does it mean? Advisory is a level where the client calls you up and says, hey, I'm looking for some kind of software to track our paralegals when they're working and time track and know where they are, geo-tracking. And how do I do this? And these are the questions we get asked that are above the the normal questions that you would normally get with a generalist. You kind of sit back and do the work and you don't really have a lot of open conversations because you don't have a lot to give. This is going to make you be at that space where you have more to give. You get excited about working with them. You, you really try really hard to find ways to ease up their schedule, make it so that they can automate pieces and make it so that you work directly with the staff and you interact with them and you know what's happening. You have conversations with the client. It's not just do the work all year and meet them once a year to go over the annual work. Those days are gone, and that's what's gonna get swallowed up by automation. So knowing that, um, over the next few weeks, so this is kind of the why you wanna specialize. And over the next few weeks, I'm gonna talk about the steps to get there. I already mentioned that you wanna have a little cash cushion, because once you start to direct that fan of, uh, here's all the people I wanna work with down to this one narrow industry. It's gonna slow the leads down. So you need to be prepared for that to get over and past that. And maybe you still have to take on those clients that come to you anyway. If you're just starting out, there's no problem with doing that and really just letting the world know that you do this work. It's okay if you still have to, you know, we all have to eat. And if you're just starting, you might have to take on clients you really don't want to get there. And there's no shame in that. So I hope this is helpful and we'll see you all on the next video. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss any. Bye now. Bye.