038 Let’s Talk About Accounting Firm Websites

Hey, let's talk about your stinky old accounting firm website. What are some ways that we can make it better, make it feel more personal, make it better for a specific type of person? Should it have pricing on it? And ChatGPT plugins, buddy, they are here. How about a QuickBooks plugin? We're going to talk about what we could do with that and how that could be a really exciting kind of next chapter for what ChatGPT looks like. Oh, let's do it. Come on in. So websites still extremely important. We had that episode the other day talking about SEO and kind of the diminishing value of SEO when Google is using generative AI in their search results. And so now websites are buried under the generative response and then the paid results and then the organic results. And so SEO to rank in Google is getting less valuable. But buddy, at the end of the day, the website is still the thing that's gonna seal the deal or not when it comes to somebody becoming a client. So what are the things I've seen that people are getting right? And what are the things I've seen that people have not gotten right? I will preface all this by saying I'm in no way an expert in this stuff. What I do is kind of try to share what I've learned from other people and kind of my current opinion on the state of all this stuff as it's shifting around people, how people are discovering things and kind of different ways than they have in the past. So, so let's talk about it. What to have on a website, what stuff's kind of trending upwards and what's trending downwards, first and foremost. And this is like in terms of importance, this is 90% of it. And I still don't think most people have nailed this. When you land on a website, it has to be immediately clear who you're for. So not we do tax and accounting, but we do this stuff for a specific type of person. And I get it, I get the age old. Well, what about all the people that come to visit my site that don't fit the bill, that like fall outside of that? I think whether we realize it or not, most of us have some level of specialization and oftentimes that's just geographic. So it could be the, you know, the best tax accountants in Salem, Oregon or in Lamp Valley or like, I mean, it could be some domain and that's better than nothing. But the more specific that is, the better. And when you make that choice, it doesn't mean that you are burying Ever working with all of those people, it's the choice that you're making for your next client. What is the next client that you want to take on? That's who that landing page should speak to. And for all of the grappling and wrestling we do with finding the right niche and the paralyzing fear that I think a lot of us have for years, that never makes us start to go down that path. While we're doing all of that worrying and pontificating and thinking about, like, do I really want to do this or that? That whole time, we're not learning anything about what it means to run a niche firm or how to do niching. Well, it's one of those things that we sit on the sidelines thinking about and worrying about for so long that it costs us from ever actually developing the experience to do it. So if you wait three years to say, okay, we're gonna be a firm for taxidermists, you just blew three years learning what it looks like to build a niche firm for taxidermists. And the reality is, when people niche down, you're usually not gonna get it right on the first try. Like, everything. Because there's a lot of things that you don't know that you only learn by finding greater specificity. But you know what you have to do to learn what it takes to do that is to actually do it. So, like, we spend all this time worrying about is it the right thing to do or not? And as all that time is going by, we are losing the opportunity of what is it? Of learning what does it look like to do that? Well, and the more you do that, you're increasing your odds of finding that perfect niche and doing it really well, because you're probably not gonna get it right on the first try. And you just gotta do it to learn what's on the other side of it. So that landing page, that hero copy, what is at the top of your web page, maybe even the domain and the branding, it's gotta be for a specific type of person. And if you're still waffling on who that should be, great. Have a couple of different websites or a couple of different landing pages or something like that. The one thing it can't be is for everybody. And that's still like 95% of accounting firm webpages is there for everybody. And you think by making that landing page for everybody, that it's not gonna exclude anybody, when what it actually does is exclude just about everybody, because it looks the exact same as all the other ones. Whereas if you are the one page they come to that says, we are the best Xero accounting firm in the Willamette Valley. Like, still not very specific, but if you're like, oh, I like Xero, or if you're like, what is Xero? And you go out and you see the landing page and you're like, this seems less painful than QuickBooks or something like that, that you're ahead of like 98% of other sites for that type of client. Now, now it's, it's. I think it comes back to some of those, like some of those feelings we have about maybe not feeling entitled to decide who is the type of person that I want to work with. Maybe because we're coming from a place of scarcity and we haven't filled that client list yet, maybe it's been hard to build the business and so you don't feel like you have maybe yet the privilege of being selective about who you work with. I'm telling you, if you can think about that profile, which will always be a moving target, it's never going to land on something. And we're like, yep, we niched. Great work, everybody. It's never going to be like that. It's always going to be a moving target. But if you think about what that dream profile client is right now, you can still craft the landing page around who you want that next client to be. And it will speak to the people that come to that website in a different way than that general website that says nothing. So even if you're like, buddy, I just gotta put food on the table for the family right now, I'll take just about anything. Five bucks is five bucks. You can still make a more specific webpage that will convert better. I'm convinced of that. I'm convinced that the one that is for everybody fundamentally won't convert for anybody. Because what's the difference from every other site? And I've heard the, the counter argument and I even used to be in this camp where it's like, yeah, no, doing accounting for a dental clinic is not any different than doing accounting for other things. So why would I need a dental brand? Why do, why do I need to say that, yeah, we know dental accounting better than anybody else. That's usually right. Like, it's usually not really any different. And it is. The client on the other side of it, they have a greater impression of what snowflakes they are than is actually the case. It has largely everything in common with all the other clients that you support. But man, it's still human nature for them to come to the website and get excited when something feels like it's for them and you do the same thing. That's just how we're wired, whether it's right or wrong. So yes, dental accounting may not be any different than virtually any other type of cash basis accounting, but you're not designing that website, that landing page for you. You're designing it for that person who's hopping around different pages, who you want to hit the brakes when they're like, oh, this feels like something that could be for me. And I get it, it's arbitrary. It's a game that sometimes we don't like playing. But when people don't understand what you do, perception is reality. So the thing that will be the differentiator is going to be the stupid stuff like, oh, that waiting room was nicer than the other waiting room. Or oh, that person was a little bit more polite on the phone than the other person. Or boy, they gave me a calendly link that was sure convenient. It's gonna be the little stuff like that. And I think sometimes we can get on our high horse and be like, oh, Jim across the street, that guy doesn't know squat about tax. I've got a, I got a masters in tax. I've been doing this for 20 years. I teach CPE. Blah, blah, blah. Clients don't give a hoot if the guy across the street has a sweet fish tank in his, you know, his waiting room and they're into fish tanks. They, they're gonna get the client. So like, as much as we can kind of try to try to lean into the purity of what we do, which as accountants like that, we like to do that. That landing page, like perception is a reality. Like, like be mindful of who you're trying to speak of. This episode is sponsored in part by liveflow. Let me tell you about Live Flow, okay? Live Flow is a powerful product that puts your advanced reporting on autopilot. You know what that means? Autopilot means you just set it up and it just goes. Software is designed to simplify the process of creating reports by turning your spreadsheet into a scalable and real time FPA platform, buddy. This means that you can spend less time manually updating spreadsheets. That's a win. And more time analyzing the data and advising your clients. One of the key benefits of Live Flow is its ability to automate the process of streamlining reports from QuickBooks. This means you can easily import all your client financial data into Google sheets where it can be transformed into a fully customizable thing that can be tailored to meet any of your needs. You little snowflakes even do like cool consolidations, custom dashboards, all that stuff. Anything that's in that QuickBooks file, you sync it back and forth. Bada Boom, bada bang. LifeFlow's gonna do it for you, bud. Learn more Check out the link in the video description, the show notes. You know, check out the link this episode is brought to you in part by Meester & Co. Who is hiring a CAS manager. You can put job listings on this podcast. Yep. Meester Company's a firm in Northern California. They're hiring a remote cast manager. Teeny bit of travel required, but you can generally be anywhere. Let me tell you why Meester & Co. Is better than the firm that you work for right now. Buddy K Listen up. A few reasons are you Our team is top priority, not revenue. We concentrate on our strengths and aren't afraid to turn down the wrong clients or projects. Our firm success starts with our team members. You sold yet? We believe in work life balance. It probably won't have you running a daily show. No billable hours or timesheets. We focus on results. They specialize in tax accounting and advisory engagements. Steer clear of audit and attest work. Cause who the heck wants to do that? It is a modern day forward looking firm that is building out their cast practice and you just might be the perfect person to help them do that. Let's just zoom out. Of all the firms you could go work for the firm that's advertising on this silly little podcast. How many people listen to this? Oh, not very many. So if you're looking for something new in the cast space, check out this job listing. Put it in the show notes. Never know. This could be could be the job of your dreams. Another thing that's becoming more relevant right now I think is a self awareness about where you land on the productization spectrum. So a super productized solution is like QuickBooks Live bookkeeping. You don't know who you're gonna work with. You may not even get to work with the same person every time. You may like go to a pool of people and that is a solution kind of optimizing for cost and got super cool fancy landing page that a million people see every month. That is a very productized solution. You know other people there are bench and pilot and whole bunch of whole bunch of productized solutions. Now on the other end of the spectrum you got that old crusty accounting Firm that's been there for 50 years and the website hasn't changed since 2006. And it was a WordPress template that you've seen that's actually the exact same as a whole bunch of other old websites. And it has a really nice about page with about seven paragraphs about how the firm was founded around the kitchen table of some person a long time ago when everything was black and white. And I think we've all seen those websites. Maybe there's a, maybe there's a really poor quality picture of the ugly building that the firm is in. To me that's like the opposite end of the spectrum of the productized firms. Cause usually the people will be front and center there, which is good. Like you'll get some really nice like mall photography in front of like the, the velvet looking backdrop in like the suit with the stripy tie, like all the very traditional stuff and all of the people are lined up in a nice grid and it's all very professional. How productized your firm is is a big, big ol spectrum. And more than ever before, like I felt like there was this gap in the past between bench, which in 2011 was really novel, and accounting firms that all had these crappy websites because it was still relatively early days on web stuff. But that gap between the productized solutions, the tools that they had at their disposal and us and the tools that we have at our disposal, that's getting smaller day by day. And people are coming in really at all these different kind of levels of productized versus non productized that like there's more firms than ever that are somewhere in the middle. And ultimately your website should be representative of how you have positioned yourself. I think if you're fully on the bespoke mega human, not productized end of the spectrum, you probably don't have things like pricing, you probably have a huge emphasis on a few of the subject matter experts you have and what exactly their experiences that will be helpful to this client. And you're genuinely putting the face of the person that you're going to work with out there. And that's appealing. People like that. Especially if you, I mean if you ran down a hundred accounting firm websites right now you're gonna have kind of the general like people directories maybe 50% of the time and then half the time you're not gonna see any faces. But a super personalized version of this is like when you hit this button to schedule a call, this is the person that you're going to talk to. This is their background. And this is how they're going to be help you and the specific problems that you have. So that is a very personal end of the spectrum. And when you're living there, I honestly, I think I see people maybe because the productized stuff is kind of trendy in vogue and almost like there's kind of a blurry, blurry line between what is modern and what is a productized firm. And I think a lot of times we will want to be modern because. But you're still not fundamentally a productized firm. So like, does like turnkey transaction based pricing really make sense if you're not like a productized firm ultimately? Like if, if those clients are getting to work with a advisor, like a persistent, the same person every single time they can hop on a call with them and all that stuff like productized offerings do not, do not do this. So in many ways you're setting up that website to compete with a service that is like fundamentally inferior to yours, but you're giving away what can be gained in value pricing by doing a commoditized approach to pricing. So on that spectrum of hyper personal, hyper human and productized, I think you just have to know where you are and design that site accordingly. And me and my firm Journey, we started hyper personalized and then started slowly trending down the spectrum a little bit more towards a productized solution. And in the beginning, the way we got clients in the door was like a traditional firm. It was the partners and it was being able to put your finger on the expertise of the partners, really showing them off and saying, hey, when you want to get started, these are the people that you can work with. Kind of like, you know, a legal firm, you know, the way that you highlight the attorneys. But over time we made the decision to begin really investing in a higher level of staff who were not just the doers for the partners, but were people who could manage their own books of business and all that and transition from just taking in work that would be good for the partners to taking in work that the team could do because the partners were at capacity. And that changed what our website ought to look like. It made it a little harder to put an identity out there and say, here's absolutely who you're going to work with because you don't have the same level of stickiness with staff. Staff come and go. And that was for the, for the clients that wanted like that human connection through the website. That was a harder thing to set up because you couldn't stand up something that felt quite as Personal if they didn't know who they were going to get to work with from day one. But right now I see a lot of people trying to do the human firm thing, but also like trying to stand up a page. Like it's a productized solution, which I think there's some conflicts there in like understanding who you are and what type of firm you want to run. You could absolutely run a productized firm. Just don't try to do the same thing that the way bigger players with the huge engineering budgets are doing. But like, you could absolutely be like, you know, the pilot for Seattle, Washington, like pilot, but you can actually sit down and have coffee with somebody too. That's really cool. I think there's a bunch of fun spins you could do on that. Just don't try to be both. I see a lot of that. So we've talked a bit about pricing. Let's talk about pricing on your page. I see a lot of discussion about having a minimum. And in my experience, it is really helpful to weed out the tire kickers especially. It depends on what stage your firm is at. But if your firm, if you're running a more mature firm where the price of entry is going to be, you know, several thousand dollars a year at a minimum, then 90% of the people coming and inquiring probably haven't worked with somebody at that cost level before. And you want to avoid having a bunch of conversations that aren't worthwhile. I do think putting a minimum out there can have the effect of like anchoring the price for all the new clients that you come in. I almost think that like a median pricing approach could be better. Like to say, like, hey, our general, our clients generally are paying like within this range. And you really define the range of what you expect your new clients to be paying on the packages that you actually want to be selling at that time. I think that's maybe a more realistic framing when clients come in, because what I don't want is to pick up a hundred clients at my minimum. Like, that's not the goal. Especially with as quickly as prices have been increasing lately. You're just gonna end up with a bunch of ticked off people when you increase their price, you know, 20% the next two years in a row or something like that. Now, I don't go as far as to say everybody ought to have pricing or ought to have packages on their website. I do know the annoyance of that being a total black box when you are shopping for different solutions. So like maybe in an FAQ section or Something like that. I think it's probably worth having a range of annual fees that they could expect to pay going with a firm like you. But in my opinion, everybody doesn't need, like the packages on their website. And I know there's a lot of people that, like, don't say that and say that everybody ought to have those like gold, silver, bronze, and, you know, whatever that looks like for you. I see upsides and downsides to that. One of the upsides is to build a more productized solution. So when the deliverable is a little more defined and boilerplate, it's easier behind that to build systems that will support it and get that work done. If every single thing that you do is custom for a client, like, there's no way for your team to support you. You're just doing all of that stuff from scratch. And a lot of that filters down from what is the service that you just sold. And so one of the upsides of having those solutions on your landing page is you can maybe get a little more explicit about exactly what you're delivering up front. And so every time somebody signs up for silver, you know, whatever you want to call it, there is a very clear expectation for the team of what happens behind the scenes with those different package levels. I think I got there without doing the packages. So we productized around the various service lines that we did for people, and ultimately the packages, like three packages, were not specific enough to make it really clear for my team what were the things that were expected to be done. So we had, you know, we had a bunch of different services that all had different service levels and nailed down, if somebody signs up for Bookkeeping 2 quarterly, here's exactly what that means behind the scenes. Here's the task template that gets generated when they sign up, and that sort of thing. So within your firm, we ought to do an episode on productization at some point. Within a firm, it is helpful to have, like, nomenclature around the things that you will do for people so that the rest of your team can support and you can build systems around that. But how you present that to the public is totally up to you. Like if you have this kind of quasi internal menu of, like, here are our systems for all of the things that we do that doesn't need to be presented to the client or prospective clients as like a menu of services. In our case, we had like different service levels for bookkeeping, and there was a service level at which it was pretty much just like bespoke for the client. And so at level X, it was like we're using their proprietary like accounting system and stuff like that. But at the lower levels it was maybe outsourced bench or we did it on Xero or QBO or something like that. You should have that nomenclature for yourself to build systems around the different types of work that you're willing to do. But you don't necessarily have to put up, put that on the website. And so we avoided putting those packages on the website. Ultimately we would develop those for clients after kind of going through a needs assessment. And then when we put together a proposal, we did propose like three different packages basically that were collections of services. And we would price those kind of three options to lead them to the very obvious option that we wanted them to select that we thought was gonna be best for them. But in my opinion, my firm was not far enough down that spectrum towards productization for us to get that turnkey about pricing. Now the bigger your firm gets, the harder it is to do that bespoke pricing and value pricing and all of that. Like there's a reason that bigger orgs, the more you sell off something, the more likely it is to be productized. Like, because in my opinion that's just a really hard thing to do at scale. And so if you look at a larger firm like I think there's a greater likelihood there that they either just rely on hourly billing or a fixed package price that is driven by number of transactions, number of bank accounts, that sort of thing. If I'm running 150 employee firm and I need to delegate the sales process to a team, a turnkey version of that is a lot easier than a value based pricing methodology. And it doesn't mean you couldn't do it still. But I have a hard time, I guess I just haven't seen that done well on a large scale because you end up having a whole bunch of different humans doing this pricing and like getting them to all do that in a consistent way when there is that level of ambiguity. I guess I just haven't seen it done well yet. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. This week on Tales from the Hub. Yeah, that's a thing. Let's talk about a firm. This firm is called Super Smart Accounting Solutions. They realized profitability of their firm comes down to how efficiently they can get responses from clients. You know that old chestnut. So they prioritized a practice management platform that would make their client experience so good that the clients would just be foaming at the mouth to get them answers as quickly as possible. Client Hub hey buddy. It was the obvious choice. Practice management with an amazing client portal at its core. The fine people at Super Smart Accounting Solutions. This isn't fictional. They love the idea of a system that is boundaryless. Clients are users just like the staff are users and the client portal's like the core of the product. It's not just this afterthought sort of bolt on thing, right? Client Hub, let me tell you, blew their minds. They loved it. They adopt it super easy. They had that sucker going in a week. A week. When's the last time you changed practice management systems in a week? That's Tales from the Hub. We'll be back with more tales next week. Check out Client Hub at the link in the Show Notes video Description One of those so big firms, I think we're seeing a trend toward big cloud accounting firms getting more product dies and putting more of that pricing information on the website. But you, you little snowflake, you get to choose. Does that make sense for your situation or not? There are some downsides to having nothing on there because I think that can be annoying for a specific type of buyer. But many types of buyers, specifically the higher ticket ones, I don't think that's a turn off for. So think about like who is that person that you actually want to draw? How you set up that page may be irritating for a certain type of person, but is that a person that you even want in the first place? If the people who are going out and looking and jumping straight to the pricing page are the cheapskates, then don't optimize your website for the cheapskates. Right. Another thing that I think most sites are missing these days is some aspect of social proof. So as you're finding who that person is that you want to target, it's really valuable to have people within those, those kind of social groups who will vouch for you. So if it's a podcast host, if it's a thought leader, if it's somebody that those people will recognize, having a five star, having a testimonial from that person that does what they do, or you know, person is very obviously a dentist, that's really valuable. That's a big differentiator. And I think a lot of people don't do that because it can be awkward to ask for those, but do it. It makes a big difference on your landing page. And last, kind of a guiding light here, as this should be the case for things we post on social and everywhere we talk about our business, a good guiding light is to just Be helpful, right? Like so much of this and I try to always come back to that. And the things that I post on social and the things that I talk about is just be helpful and like things will work out for you ultimately. So what are the problems that you're seeing a lot of your clients having? Is there a resource that you could put on your landing page or on your website somewhere that would just solve that problem for people and don't get caught up on. I see people getting caught up on like, oh, what's the ultimate system for this? And how do I capture and squeeze the ever living crap out of every potential revenue opportunity from this thing? And they, they overthink it and it gets in the way of just doing that thing. Like just be helpful to people even if it means they didn't. You didn't get your email address, they didn't get an email address from them. Like, fine, were you helpful for those people? Like that's the stuff that ultimately differentiates you from the productized solutions. And you do that enough times and people are just going to want to work with you. Right. Like I don't have a sign up link on my newsletter. Every single tweet I send that is helpful to people because that stuff takes care of itself at a certain point. So how can your website be helpful to that specific type of person? Maybe like what that website is built around is really around that helpful tool. Like right now we're seeing kind of ChatGPT CPA solutions where the more traditional firm services are secondary to that core chat solution. So like, could that landing page even just be built around solving that problem for a client with a calculator or something like that? And you're like, hey, did you like this? We actually are an accounting firm, we'll do this stuff for you too. A lot of firms have built their practices around R and D credits in this way. Like, hey, here's some found money. We're going to run you through this process and we think you're going to be so impressed by what, what we do that you'll want us to do tax and accounting also. So, like kind of helpful. Guiding light there for me is, is try to be as helpful as possible. Is there a way to make this website super helpful? What do you think about websites? That's kind of all I got on websites. I'm not a marketing website guru guy, but like those have been the biggest things that I know I've gotten wrong in my experience. Shower thought, oh, this is a, this may be a Big brain shower. Thought so. Chat GPT plugins went live for everybody this week. I've got access. There's now over 70 plugins for Chat GPT. It is pushing the limits of what Chat GPT is. You mean this is a thing that can talk with the other apps that I use? What does that mean? Like, is ChatGPT ultimately becoming an interface for a bunch of the things that I use? And if so, what about all the other interfaces for those things? Like, we're at this weird kind of inflection point of will chat do away with a bunch of these other interfaces? Like, kind of like Early Days, QuickBooks Online, it ultimately became a, an ecosystem, like, and QBO was the platform. ChatGPT is now becoming a platform. And that's interesting. The most interesting plugin to me right now, Zapier, because Zapier is like a connector. Zapier has, you know, three or four thousand plus integrations. And Zapier could kind of serve as the bridge to all those other apps that Chat GPT doesn't have a direct plugin for. So I've been playing with that Zapier plugin. That will be an interesting thing to explore ultimately. Like plugins like QuickBooks I think are going to be really interesting to me. And an analogy I was thinking about today, I was literally, when I was in the shower today, this was an actual shower thought on my channel, on the video, on the main channel. This week I was shining a light on my lack of Excel skills and the comment section went wild as well. And there's some discussion about Power Query because I was doing some Data transformations with ChatGPT where you just semantically explain like, okay, change this table to be like this and that. And some people are like, oh, you can do this with, with Power Query. And I have used Power Query a little bit. But the value of ChatGPT is that you can just explain like a squishy human being what you want done and it will just do it like that is the secret sauce of ChatGPT. You don't have to learn Power Query, don't have to learn those complex things. And it gets me thinking about the complexities of accounting software and how powerful a QuickBooks plugin could be due to the simplicity and shareability of the stuff that we could use ChatGPT for. So imagine this. We've seen some like big brain prompt engineering examples with ChatGPT, like, you know, the, the uncategorized transaction thing that I built, where it's a big long prompt that you can Copy paste in and it will go research, you know, any bank statement transactions where you don't know who the merchant is, and it will return this helpful table of information about those things. That's a prompt that I can make once and anybody can use it. And so I've shared that across Twitter, across YouTube. Bunch of people use that prompt now. And it's really helpful when you're doing bookkeeping. And that's a really Cool thing about ChatGPT is the shareability of those prompts. Well, imagine if you got something like a QuickBooks plugin and you can use ChatGPT for like invoicing, you know, in a semantic way. Like, you know, invoice Tom's burgers for 10 cases of lemonade and send that off tomorrow, and that'll generate an invoice and send it off. Great. That's super helpful for accountants, though. Imagine like quality assurance stuff. Imagine building a prompt that will do QA and say, go look into these hundred things on this accounting file and then we can share that prompt. Like, cool. Like there's QA apps out there and you can plug QuickBooks files in and they'll do quality assurance and run all these cool analyses. But the interesting thing to me about ChatGPT is the shareability of all the things that we can do with ChatGPT. So imagine building cool. Imagine. I guess basically the idea is prompt engineering for QuickBooks and what all that could entail. That could entail work paper generation, generating a whole pile of work papers for a month, end close with a single reusable prompt. That could entail quality assurance. Could be a bunch of things could, could be like, you know, like financial statement analysis. All that stuff could potentially be done with prompts that we can reuse and share and build upon. Kind of wild, right? Kind of interesting. I'm. I'm going to be fascinated to see how plugins develop with Chat GPT, just how good those plugins are. Like, can they actually do all the stuff that I want to do or is it going to be very limited? Is it like, oh, no, you can only manage your contacts and that's it. Like, and we've seen zapier integrations where they kind of suck like that, right? They don't actually let you get to the stuff that you want to get to. They make you still go to the app. So to be determined, and it will depend on how good those plugins are. But oh, mama, the idea of prompt engineering around ChatGPT plugins, I'm into that. I'm excited for that. Hey, thanks for coming and hanging. That's all I got for today. I'll see you tomorrow.