073 Using AI To Build Your Accounting Firm Niche

Okay, buckle up. First of its kind show today, we are doubling up on two formats. This is ye old daily. We're gonna talk about the struggles with. AI is not ready. And it's. It's not time yet. No, it is like. And there's ways that you can use it and the whole AI narrative today, but we're gonna combine it with the challenge format. So we're gonna try to do. We're gonna basically try to put together an AI marketing plan for a specific niche, because there is no bigger marketing way right now than AI and you can either fight it or you can lean into it in a not scummy way. That's what we're gonna talk about. Then we're gonna generate some niches and come up with a marketing plan for those niches. Oh, hang on. Come on in. Let. Okay, so the old timey ism is that AI is not ready, so we don't need to worry about it when it's like, arguably the most significant part of AI right now is the AI conversation. And in many ways, I understand why that is frustrating and why that kind of makes it like, well, then why is this something we should even be talking about if it's not a. If it's not practical and usable? And there are practical ways to put it to work now, But AI is a wave. It is a tsunami that is bigger than any of us. It will be the biggest thing in people's news feeds all year. And time will tell whether a lot of that is hype or not. But the reality is people are clicking on this stuff, and there becomes a certain point where you just kind of got to lean into what is the bigger wave than you. Because if you don't, you'll instead just be like fist fighting the tide coming in. Your clients are gonna have questions about it, and they're gonna go out and get information about it. So if they are, wouldn't you rather it came from you? Wouldn't you rather it come through your lens? And the. Under the rockers, the people who are hiding from AI and just saying, oh, it's at. Someday, someday, we'll. We'll talk about it more. They're missing an opportunity right now to ride a wave. When I go to conferences, the webinars I'm on right now, inside the accounting profession, there is nothing more well attended than AI stuff. Just straight, like, flat out like that is. Some of the webinars I've been on have been the highest attended that group has ever done. The talks for AI are the Most visited talks at conferences right now. And maybe that's right, maybe that's wrong. But what it really is is a signal. It's a signal that people care about this stuff, and it is an opportunity to get people's attention where maybe you couldn't otherwise. So if you have a niche that you work with, if you want to get into a new niche AI right now, great way to do it, because people are looking for content around what they do as it applies to AI. And if you're like me, your mind will immediately go to like, oh, surely there's smarter people out there than I putting out AI stuff. And like, who am I to talk about it? But, like, look around the accounting space right now. How many people are having meaningful conversations around AI? There's a lot of, like, blog posts that are generic and not really giving you anything useful or practical about AI. But where else are the, like, practical conversations about AI happening? In our space, which is a huge space, not many places, right? So if you work with a niche type of client, there's a great opportunity to come swooping in with some thoughts on AI to make you look super smart and ensure clients that, you know, if they did come and work with you, their advisor would be leaning into what's possible rather than the perception of the. The more stodgy accountant that is not doing that. So how can we lean into this wave and put together a marketing strategy that talks AI in helpful, practical ways? Two things that I think are easy wins, you know, the traditional, like, X ways that AI impacts that profession. But the more practical that you can make it, the better. Like, make it something that you can do today. Because the one common thread that we definitely have in the talks about accounting right now is I'll be on a panel with, like, AI experts. And I can always come out of those talks as the hero, because the AI experts are talking up here and are talking about, ooh, what's going to happen? And I'm like, yeah, here's what you can do today. Like, here's the practical ways that it can make your life easier right now. And if you can be the person to give people practical ways to use AI today, that's awesome. They're going to engage with that. So for you, that could be a blog post that could be offering to go on industry podcasts to talk AI applications. And again, like, you're going to be your own worst enemy here and say, well, I'm not an AI expert. Neither am I. I just play one on the Internet. But we still get some really useful stuff here, right? And if you were ever looking for an in to get on a podcast or something like that, man, like people are just foaming at the mouth for AI stuff right now. So we'll generate kind of some ideas for what that article or even just an outline of your talking points could look like. But then second, y' all know I am hot on AI chatbots or chat assistants, whatever you want to call them. Basically a custom version of ChatGPT for a certain type of person. So what we're going to do, we're going to generate a few weird niches and outline some talking points for that industry and think about how you could build custom chatgpt for beekeepers, right? Like some weird, like very domain specific thing. And we will do our best not to overthink it. Like something that can deliver some value. Like that's cool, that's novel. It doesn't have to change the world to be something that will, like, people will get excited about. They're like, wow, this is a version of this thing that's just for me. And it came from an accountant. You hecking kidding me? My accountant. I can't even get them to return my calls or my emails and they're 87 years old. That was me. That doesn't matter. But it'll make you look smart and forward looking. Okay, let's generate some niches. Last time we did this, I got some. Just some terrible things to work with. Okay, generate three very specific niches that I could target in my accounting firm. Okay? Freelance creative professionals, writers, designers, artists, musicians, e commerce sellers, and sustainable and green businesses. Those aren't specific enough for me. I. I'm going to rewrite the prompt. Okay, I said create. Generate three very specific unique and interesting niches that I could target my accounting firm. First, crypto asset accounting. Oh, kill me. Okay, so let's see the notes from ChatGPT. As cryptocurrency and other digital assets continue to rise in popularity, there's an increasing need for specialized accounting services. This niche could include providing tax planning and compliance support for crypto traders, advising on ICOs, preparing financial statements involving crypto, involving crypto assets, and helping businesses implement and manage blockchain tech. Okay, so let's use ChatGPT as a sounding board here. Now we want to outline, just like maybe an eight bullet point outline of how AI can impact the folks that I want to work with in this space. Now I'm going to use ChatGPT as like an initial source of generating this outline but thing to remember, with GPT4, it's trained on data through September of 2021. And the narrative preceding September of 2021 is very different than the narrative is now. Like we did not have chat GPT at that point. People weren't talking generative AI and language models. So instead of the vanilla chatgpt, I'm going to use the version that has browsing. So I'm going to use GPT4 with browsing because then it will pull in like more recent articles and kind of merge that into a more hybrid result. Hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, the practice management system. Canopy unlocks the firm that you always wanted. Think about it. Close your eyes, lean back in that chair. What is the firm that you always wanted? Oh wait, Canopy unlocks it. And they do this by unclunking accounting firms with an end to end solution that makes your tech stack feel a little less stacky. Cause it's end to end. Putting our customers first with world class user experience, support, education and innovation rooted in customer feedback. Working and working well anywhere and for any size or type of firm, wherever you are now and wherever you're going, multiplying your efforts so your practice requires less proverbial midnight oil. You know, Sidebar if you go to the conferences, Kanopy's got like they always do some like really good little like sorta, you know, the stuff that they use to like trick you into coming to the booth. Well this year they've had like Legos out there. Maybe, maybe, maybe you double down on the midnight oil thing. You know, maybe like, I don't know, give away a little, little, you know, little actual midnight oil. I guess it would need to burn too, but that one's free. I think it's a good idea delighting your clients with a modern, easy to use portal that helps you get the info you need when you need it. That is Kanopy. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. This week on Tales from the Hub. Let's talk about. Let's talk about partnership. Okay. Last week, super smart accounting firm. They were at scaling new heights. And while they were there they got to meet Judy and Sarah from the Klein Hub team. They had a booth and let me tell you how good it was to connect. Learned that there's a real team behind the tech that you use, actual squishy human beings. And you know what else? They felt that there was a real partnership there, a real bond between their firm and the folks at Client Hub, they realized Client Hub was about three things. Being great listeners, being forward thinkers, and third, being community builders. By listening, they could be genuinely interested in what the firm told them about their clients needs. By being forward thinkers, they were blown away with their vision of your firm on GPT. What? And all the magic features Client Hub is working on. Okay, what a teaser. And finally, by being community Builders, Client Hub could connect them. Who other with others who were happy Client Hub users. They had a great time at the conference hanging with the Client Hub folks and told everybody about it. Told everybody to get on Client Hub because partnership's what it's all about. The end of the day, you know, you know, just bringing people together. That's it for this week of Tales from the Hub. Check out Client Hub at ClientHub app or the link in the show Notes. Okay, So I prompted ChatGPT with web browsing. I'm an accountant that is specialized in the crypto accounting space. Write an eight point outline of generative AI and large language model changes that will impact Web3 and crypto businesses in my niche. Now not all these are going to be good, but this is a great way to like build a sounding board of like maybe. Here are the four main points that you really try to hammer on. One, it says automated accounting and record keeping probably at some point, but that doesn't feel practical to me today. Or risk assessment and fraud detection. Same sort of thing, like more of a long term thing. Tax compliance and reporting. 4. Smart contract auditing. Now this is something where you could build something useful today just with like chatgpt prompts. So let's say you're an expert on smart contracts and you know, you know, whether it is tax regulations or just like common best practices for how smart contracts could be set up. You could write, and you've probably seen me do this, you could write a prompt that you can give away that people can swipe and use in ChatGPT that says analyze this contract and make sure it has the following, you know, seven things and then they copy and paste the text of the transcript in there. And in that prompt you can have it structure the response in a certain way to give really helpful feedback about that smart contract. That is something that you can give away to people today that could be really valuable if they're thinking about using smart contracts, but maybe not thinking about the tax implement like the tax implications. Common things that people get wrong with smart contracts. Think about like a few sort of like cornerstone AI enabled things that you can help this niche do today. So for this, for this niche, let's say smart contract auditing, that can be one. We can give them like a prompt to swipe ChatGPT suggested financial forecasting and analysis. That seems a little hard. Still, you can do some things with like giving it a balance sheet and then prompting it to say, always look for this type of thing on the balance sheet. That's a tricky one. Customer service and support. How about this? One of the things we talked about a few weeks back around building custom chatbots is to put a chatbot on top of your own context. So we've talked about a service like chat thing where you can connect it to a body of context. It could be a book, it could be all of your blog articles, whatever it is. And that chatbot will only refer to things in that underlying context. It won't go into its general knowledge. How about this? How about a chatbot that this company's team could use that points to kind of your current thoughts on crypto tax policies or best practices for, you know, if these people are managing crypto stuff in their accounting ledger and they have common questions, you could create this chatbot that the folks on this company's team could interact with, saying, like, do I post it this way or that way in QuickBooks? Like, think about the questions that they usually have and build a chatbot on top of your own body of context that will answer those questions for them. Like, and that context could be the transcript from a voice memo, it could be some blog posts. It could be all of those things combined so that you then have this chatbot that their internal team can use for reference. How cool would that be? And man, that's something that you could build once and either just give people access to and it would be really useful, or you could license access to it. Imagine if you, if that thing was like truly helpful for the people in that client's business. Like those people would tell other people who ran similar businesses like that. And just think of how much you just elevated yourself above every other accounting firm. Like that is wild. Now, ultimately, if you're putting a chatbot in front of a client right now, you gotta put some real big disclaimers on it. To say, this is not a replacement for talking with an advisor. But think about it. All this chatbot is, is a communication layer on top of the stuff that you already have, usually parked out online. So if you're connecting this to your blog posts or the transcripts from YouTube videos, you've done something like that. The chatbot ultimately will not tell it anything that is not in that material. And the best chatbots will actually cite the source. So they will point you to the blog Post or the YouTube video where you already put that information out there. So all this is, is like giving them a more streamlined way to access the information that you have already put out on the web. The next one ChatGPT suggested training and education. There could totally be a chat bot like thing to use there too. I don't know enough crypto. Let's what were some of the other niches that it suggested? Okay. Sustainability accounting. So this is probably esg. Okay, I updated my outline prompt here. I said I'm an accountant that specializes in supporting sustainability teams issuing ESG reporting. Write an 8 point outline of generative AI and large language of how those things will impact ESG reporting teams. So this is like within a mid sized or up company probably you're gonna have sustainability teams, maybe they issue an annual ESG report. How can I be more useful to these folks? We wanna land on like what are three or four kind of cornerstone talking points you can develop that are practical ways that these people can use this stuff today. Okay. Data gathering and analysis. I don't know, that feels like something that has to be connected to a bunch of apps and seems hard. Second suggestion, quality assurance models can be used to cross check data and information for discrepancies or errors that might be missed by human analysts. That's a pretty good one. So this is another situation where maybe you could provide a swipeable prompt or something like that for AI to serve as like a second layer of review or even a critic to what you've written up. Critic, critic to what you've written up in your ESG report. So for example, you could create a swipeable prompt where maybe it takes, I don't know, the summary or some like written report. In the ESG report you give that client a prompt where they can chuck that writing in that prompt also says here's all the like supplementary information you have to give the prompt and then you instruct it to basically be a critic and say well, where is their data that conflicts with the summary that you wrote up? Like kind of like critically assess this write up and any gaps in the logic. And so for the client, what would be the deliverable to them? The deliverable to them would be here's a prompt that you could swipe and how to use it. Maybe there's like a little companion video that goes with it or something like That I don't know enough about ESG reporting to like know what fiddly little applications this would have. But I gotta think in different components of that report, you can provide the structure of a prompt to say, put this in here, put this in there, and then instruct it on how exactly to give that feedback in a similar way to how you would like structure the response to kind of be a critic and give helpful input on what it gives back. You may be seeing like a lot of this is the stuff that I've done, right? Like I've given away a bunch of prompts that are really helpful for stuff that we do. And, and this is something we can do with our clients too. So the giveaway here, like what you would talk about if you're on a podcast or in a blog post, is this is a second layer of quality assurance. It's not a replacement for a human to come on, come along and validate it. It's not a replacement for that validation, but it is a kind of a different review level that ought to improve the quality of the output. Cause it can kind of be a critic. Next suggestion from ChatGPT here. Real Time monitoring and alerts. And that requires like connecting the systems, which is different for everybody. Risk prediction, the report generation. It says large language models can be used to generate sections of ESG reports, providing initial drafts that can then be edited and refined by human teams. It's kind of similar to the last thing that we were talking about, but depending on how boilerplate those reports generally are, this is absolutely something where you could also provide a prompt. So right now chat GPT's context limits is about about 3,000 words or about six pages of text. So within those context limits, could you give Chat GPT an example of a, a really good example of that type of report and then ask the user for all the information it needs to like create its own version of that report and use that as like a first draft, right? If you wanted to get really technical, there are ways around those context limits. So ChatGPT, right now you're limited to about, it's about 3,000 words effectively. But if you use the API or OpenAI playground, which is just a different UI, I showed that in a video at one point, you basically get two times the context limits and technically you can get up to like 25,000 words on their API. So if you wanted to like get a developer and do something more impressive, you could like make a much longer version of a report generator that doesn't like, you know, this doesn't have to, at the end of the day, is not like this amazing software application. You're just trying to solve a small problem that the client has that's very specific to them, to where they will see this and be like, oh, wow. Like this accounting firm has a fundamentally different level of understanding of what I do than anybody that I've worked with before. The other one stands out to me here. Training and education. I actually really like that chatbot idea we had on the last one. How to build, like build a little chat bot for kind of the state of tax and accounting around crypto. Like built on your own context. Same thing here with esg. You could build a chatbot built on top of actual ESG regulations and as well as your own commentary on those regulations and give your clients access to it. Give potential clients access to it. Again with a disclaimer that this is not a replacement for professional advice. This is the thing that people are already using ChatGPT for and having mixed success. Because vanilla ChatGPT was only trained up to September 2021, as opposed to your version of this. Your chatbot here is just successful sitting on top of your custom context. So it's only going to reference the stuff that you point it to. So that could be actual technical guidance of like how ESG works, but it can also be combined with your own commentary of how to do it the right way. And right now, like for an ESG may be big enough to where this sort of thing already exists, but if your niche is beekeepers or taxidermists or like, like show me taxidermy GPT, like this stuff doesn't exist in those spaces yet. And you don't have to overthink it and make this amazing version of it. Just make something that's like pretty cool. And as we've shown with Chat Thing, I'll put a link to Chat Thing in the show notes because we've been talking about it a lot. But as we've shown with Chat thing, this is like a. If you already have the underlying context, the blog articles and all that, it's like a 10 minute process to set this up. Like, it is not hard to get that chat bot set up. This episode is sponsored in part by Zero because you know what? The Road Show, Gosh darn, the Zero Roadshow Excel. Did I do that? Zero Roadshow Accelerate 2023. That is a freight train that is barreling right into your town. Specifically if your town is Atlanta, Georgia. So they did. Austin July 27, Atlanta August 3 Los Angeles, August 17 the Atlanta one is at the Georgia Aquarium. Whoa. Like fish stuff. If you've never been to a Zero party, folks from Zero, they know how to throw a party. Roadshow is a great chance to meet other forward thinking accounting practice runners, other folks running using Xero. Learn more about recent Xero product updates, even meet some folks from the app ecosystem. But if you've ever been to a Zero party, you know these people know how to put on an event. Okay, case in point. How many accounting things have you been at at an aquarium? Sounds promising. I'll put a link in the show Notes to go out and register August 3, Atlanta, Georgia at the Georgia Aquarium. Be there or be square. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Do you hire accountants? Bless your little heart. Not the best part of the job in my opinion. Not something I ever enjoyed. I well listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work 100% full time for your firm. Their accountants aren't freelancing or contracting for multiple firms. They're all yours. They work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not going to get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said, you know what, we're gonna build our own pipeline in the Philippines, gonna pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the story. I've been talking a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines like totally red pilled me to like oh geez. Like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing. Com okay, one last let's look at the other niche that we had here. What was it? Digital Nomad Accounting. Okay, let's hop back to our outline prompt, generate some ideas for how we could get this out in front of Digital Nomads. Okay. I'm an accountant that is specialized in supporting Digital nomads and their accounting and tax obligations. Write an 8 point outline of generative AI and large language models how they will impact these clients. This is one of those domains where if you work with Digital Nomads, you probably have content out there already. Like blog posts, YouTube videos, where it's really connect, really easy to connect a chatbot to all the stuff that you've already put out there. And that may be an easy step. One, basically this sort of, sort of like advisor in a box that again needs to have a disclaimer that like this isn't a replacement for professional advice and somebody that takes into account your specific context, but kind of similar to crypto. Like this nomad stuff is one of those super nuanced things where like Nexus and where you're working out of, and all of these things have like very technical specific guidance. And building a body of that in one place that a chatbot could be connected to could be really interesting. And so the first suggestion here from ChatGPT, understanding tax obligations globally, we're gonna, we're going to overthink this. We absolutely will, because we know how complex this all is and how much nuance there is. But you don't have to go that deep. I mean, this could literally be what are the 20 most common questions you get from digital nomads? Answer those questions in a voice memo or something with a transcript and put that behind a chatbot and you're gonna have a lot of people coming to your webpage that can get useful, like helpful information from that chatbot. Because if you work with a niche, you know, like, what are the common struggles these people have? It's the kind of things you're probably already writing blog posts about that digital nomad GPT, you know that chat bot, like that would be a really cool thing to stand up on a landing page, to be a signal to say like, hey, we understand what you do and we are forward thinking and how we approach this stuff. Second Suggestion here from ChatGPT. Real Time Financial advice? Nah. Automated bookkeeping? Not yet. Customized financial reports? Not really. I'm not wild about the rest of these. Another framing of how to think of this is like how to make AI helpful in like just how digital nomads make decisions like going out and deciding where they're going to go next. So not even necessarily something that's specific to their accounting or tax obligations, but like, hey, here's a swipeable prompt that all you have to do is plug in, you know, the location you're going to or thinking about going to, and pick, you know, three areas of interest from a list of 20 or something like that. And then within that prompt that you give them, there's instructions for how the model is to reply in a structured way that's really helpful and like, pulls from like current results from the web and that sort of thing. You can absolutely give them stuff that's through like a tax or an accounting lens, but you could also give them something that's just useful for them and the way that they think and the stuff they do every day. And so if they're digital nomads, they're thinking about, where am I gonna go next, where am I gonna stay? What are the can't miss things in that space? GPT is actually really good at that stuff right now, especially if you pair it with browsing. And so a really easy thing to give away right now is a swipeable prompt. You probably maybe put that behind, you know, an email newsletter signup or something like that. So they have to give you their email to get this swipeable prompt, but they can use that copy, paste it into ChatGPT, probably the browsing model. And the result, the response after they change a couple placeholders in the prompt is like this really detailed, like, hey, here's all the things you ought to do when you're in this place. And some of the coolest marketing things, in my opinion, like, they're adjacent to the thing that you actually do, but they're a signal to how you understand what they do and how you're different. Because it's the kind of thing nobody's going to expect from an accounting firm. Right. And, like, the really technical aspects of what we do are admittedly hard to. Like is hard to build marketing around. Like, it's hard to build marketing around doing tax work that isn't scummy because there's so few, like one size fits all bits of advice. So is there a different dimension on which you can differentiate and be helpful? And usually the answer is, is yes. So don't get just fixated on your own domain expertise. Like, you know these people really well. You know how they think, you know the problems that they have. And oftentimes that goes well beyond tax and accounting. Right. With all the conversations that we have, think about if there's a spin on this that could just be helpful whether it's around accounting and tax or not. And I get that it feels scummy and it feels like AI shilling. Um, but like, the reality is this is a wave that is bigger than any of us. So you can either be like, hey, let's cut through the fluff, boom, here's three practical use cases, which is great. Like, that is not scummy at all. That's what we need more of right now. Right? Not talking about it, but how can we use it today? You can be the one to do that for them. You develop kind of those cornerstone ways that that stuff impacts what they do and then just put that stuff on blast, get on podcast, interviews, all that stuff. You don't need to go on every podcast and have something new to say. We've talked about this before. You're going to think that people have heard those points before, they haven't. Keep hammering on the same things over and over again and just try to get it in front of as many people as possible. The bar is not high to sound like a differentiated accounting firm, right? If you think about how 95% of accounting firms have the same landing page saying the same thing, telling you the story that you genuinely don't care about. If you come out with a few like really cool AI use cases for what they do from an accounting firm, like you're gonna blow the socks off people. Like, that's just like, I just think that's a really cool opportunity right now. Have you got a niche that you're thinking about this with? Maybe post it in the comments. We could like jam on some ideas there. It's kind of like if you did tax in the in the us it's kind of like ERC where their ERC was like a once in a generation opportunity where you go out and do really meaningful, helpful things and get a bunch of money in people's pockets responsibly. And a bunch of people drove client acquisition off ERCs in a totally not scummy way. Like R and D credits have been this way for the last decade. Domestic production activity deduction was that way before. Like with manufacturing companies and all that. This is just one of those opportunities where it's AI, so it'll probably be around for a while. But the news cycle is just so hyped right now that there's probably something cool to do here that could pull in some really interesting clients to work with. What do you think? Any other ideas around how you could use AI for marketing or stuff you've even done already? Would love to hear about it. That's it for today. Thanks for coming and hanging.