074 Where Should Accountants Start With Content Creation?

Is Q and A's day. Where to start with content creation.

If you're an accountant, if you're starting.

Out, should you go to, like, do internal firm stuff or go out and get your own clients? Some more questions about firing clients. AI bots. My practice management system tier list. Spoiler alert. I'm not going to give it to you, but we can talk about my.

Framework for how you should decide on yours.

Come on in, the water's warm.

What a weird expression.

It's kind of gross if you think about it, right?

I just made the thumbnail for this episode. It was my best version of duck lips or my understanding of how you're supposed to do duck lips for, like, Instagram, stuff like that.

So let's talk about content. Where to get started with content creation. If you are an accountant, buddy, let me tell you, you are already overthinking it.

Like, that's just how this stuff goes. We plan, especially accountants, and we're like, well, what if this ultimately isn't the niche that I want to pursue? And all these, like, all these 200 IQ things when you still suck at it because you haven't started it. Like, ultimately, what will make you good at social media is doing a bunch of social media. So think. What is the best way to get my first 1000 tweets out of the way?

What's the best way to get my.

First 100 YouTube videos out of the way? My first hundred articles on LinkedIn out of the way? Because ultimately, it's not a huge deal.

What, like, all the specifics of them and who they're for and all of that? Because when you start something new, you're just gonna be really bad at it.

And I've said this before, but it's.

Really hard not to fixate on all.

Of the exceptional people who are in our algorithms that are the best of the best and have been honing their craft for years, and that's the only reason you even see them in their. In your algorithm. And we see the quality of what we produce through that lens, and we're like, oh, geez, I'm really bad at this. When, man, nobody was watching my videos in the beginning. Like, you didn't see any of my stuff when it was really bad, you didn't know who I was. But, you know, the best is, like, one of those things where the best time to start was yesterday and the second best time to start is today. So if you believe in what we've been talking a lot about, and I recently did a main Channel video about that your luck surface area has a huge impact on the progression of your career. Then you need to be online. Like you need to be engaging consistently, not with earth shattering thoughts, just being involved in the conversation that's already there and sort of sharing your own journey along the way. So much to be gained by it. Like it's literally what my entire career stemmed from. Now was a whole bunch of lucky things happening that I could have never foreseen. Like I'm still like, I still feel like an accountant, but I'm doing like podcasts and videos and stuff like that. Three years ago I'd never done any of that stuff. So you never know what silly direction things are going to take you in. But putting yourself out there is step one. Otherwise the world doesn't know that you exist and you're not experimenting to find what you love. So where to start with content?

Just get started. I talked about this a bit on.

That show we did with Hector Garcia publishing under like your name personally or under a brand's name. But I think it is really, really hard to build a brand social presence. Think about the things that you follow and what the percentages of brands versus of people. For me it's like 99 people for every one brand. I don't think you're really stacking the deck in your favor, especially early on if you try to do it through the lens of a brand because ultimately people only care about people and if they are interested in your brand, it's probably because they know that you're behind it and they're interested in you. So just be you like it is okay to be you. I don't think you are anchoring yourself to this like forever commitment. If your goal is to then convert people to be your customer based on your identity, I don't think that necessarily means that like you're going to be the one hand holding them. Like my accountant Community is a great example. We've got over 300 firms in there and like that is not like an access to Jason community. It's like a peer networking community. It's a group of people who this sort of thing resonates with. And so you come in from day one and you have a whole bunch in common with a lot of other people to do what you do. And it doesn't take me like holding everybody's hand through that to, to make it happen. So I think there's plenty of ways to be yourself online and ultimately like long, long term that lead to like a positive business outcome that you don't necessarily have to be at the middle of. But just start. You're gonna be bad at it. Don't overthink it. Just start. Make it as easy as possible for you to do that thing consistently. Okay. Herman chucked this into a YouTube comment when it comes to client firing and we talked about how like my approach is to just have an annual cadence where clients know every year you decide what who you're letting go of and who you're going to re engage with. Depersonalizes firing clients. If you haven't heard that episode, that's like the best hiring advice I'd ever heard. The question from Herman specifically is, do.

I recommend firing clients before you reprice all of your clients or do that?

Like kind of, I guess after you reprice all of your clients and figure out what you're doing going forward?

Um, I fire the.

I fire clients before any repricing. I think a trap there is. And we've probably a lot of us have seen this happen in the wild where you keep a client because they're willing to pay X. But at the end of the day, like, there's just like, that's a slippery slope. I don't know that there's any. Any price. Clients shouldn't be able to buy their way out of being an asshole. And that can go especially sideways when they know that they're paying top dollar and it actually fuels that a hole fire even more. It actually enables them. It's one reason why I'm not a huge fan of like rush fees for getting a tax return done quickly. Because if they pay extra, they're like doubly entitled. Like now you need to get it done because I gave you extra money to get it done. I think it was Adam Shea that told me about this and their experience trying that and it kind of backfired. But no, like there is no price for ultimately your team's patience and your own kind of longevity and all that. So I make those firing decisions generally repricing aside. Now I shared in that YouTube, like pricing like that. It is a factor in the formula of how I make those decisions, but it's not a very big one. And I actually want to avoid the. I generally want to avoid the profitability factor impacting who I'm going to let go and not let go. It is really easy to get lulled into like, oh, that's going to be this much money or this much profit when all of the reasons that you want to get rid of them are not profit motivated. So I try to separate those two things. Other question was, do I have a list of like set criteria or do I go more by gut? So I think in that video I.

Outlined phone pickup ability for me, that.

Is, am I excited to talk to them or not if they call me? Phone pickup ability for my team because if I get on with somebody but then they're a pain in the butt to my team, that's just as important, if not more important, like profitability. And then does this client ultimately align with the direction that we're going to? In a perfect world, I would get explicit about those four things and we would have like a, a actual yardstick for each of those and then weight them all. I never got as far as like doing that in a super explicit way. That's probably something I would have tried to tackle in the next couple of years because there's value in actually having that measurement year over year also. So somewhere in the middle, it's not just a gut feeling. We try to get more explicit than that. But we never went as far as like doing this like formalized census and actually putting all that stuff in one place. But that's just my recommendation for some version of how to approach that. The factors you want to take into account.

Hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, the practice management system. Canopy unlocks the firm that you always wanted.

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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 a double down on the midnight oil thing, you know, maybe like, I know, give away a.

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.

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What?

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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.

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Because partnerships, 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.

Accounting newbie Asked if they're getting into the profession, should they do stuff for.

Firms first or just go straight into doing client work?

I would say the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

There's a lot of you're going to learn a different set of things doing each.

The risk of just going into working.

For other people's firms is you don't learn anything about like, you know, entrepreneurship and doing your own thing and managing clients if that's something you ultimately want to do. There's a lot of folks who go to work for a firm and then they start exploring like, is this something that I would want to do for myself? And they find that they don't enjoy that. And that's a really hard thing to manage because it has a different set of challenges. I don't know that I'd say a.

Ton of people have that experience, but.

There'S definitely a chance of that. There's a lot of upsides to doing your own thing too, but ultimately you don't know what you enjoy and don't enjoy about that until you get a taste of it. The risk of going straight out and doing your own thing from day one is for all of the negative trappings that you can learn from accounting firms and how they work, there's also a lot of positive things you can learn from accounting firms and how they work. So if you're thinking about going to a very traditional like old timey firm or you know, or if you're looking at going to a regional or big four to do audit when ultimately you want to support SMBs, that's probably not super relevant experience. If your goal is to ultimately taste the waters of running your own firm. If you're going to a more progressive firm that's like got systems and like takes care of their people and all that, that's probably phenomenal experience. And there's a ton of progressive firms that listen to this podcast and admittedly right now I don't think I'm doing enough to connect those folks with the progressive people like that are looking for new roles listening to this podcast. If you got a firm that's hiring a role, chuck it in the comments. That's totally inbounds. So I would say the two aren't mutually exclusive. You could go part time for a firm, you could do some client work on the side while going full time for a firm. The bigger thing I would say is make sure it is a progressive firm. You're going to learn the most from that rather than just being like plugged into a machine as kind of a cog in this bigger thing where I don't know that that experience is going to be super helpful for you.

Okay, AI stuff, Here's a question. Been pondering this idea.

I think I got it via dm, so I think I'm not supposed to.

See who it is with the tech we have today.

Wouldn't it be possible to create a personalized chatbot for each client?

The chatbot would only use the client's.

Data files, communications, jobs, et cetera as context, but can also include practice wide info like hey, don't forget the deadline to file extra turn is coming up.

Yes you could.

Like the the so like we've talked about chat thing and all that. I'm actually I think going to do a YouTube main channel video about use cases for AI chat bots right now because they're just so easy to build. You use them for marketing purposes for like, I don't know, just having like a different, more interesting client experience around that chat bottom. But yes, you absolutely could build a chatbot that's tailored specifically to a client's experience. The problem right now is you literally have to do like. The only way I'm aware of how to do that is like, one by one by one, making those bots individually. So, like, you create a bot. This is client123's bot. Here's all the context, you create the next client. Here's all the context. And that's a lot of work. Obviously. I also don't know how to. How to sync the context of each bot individually to a client set of files which will be changing over time and like, get those things to update automatically. So you could. And that could even be an interesting to try thing to trial. Like, you could go out and do that with five clients and be like, hey, what do you all think of this? Ultimately, I think who will nail this is probably the practice management systems that hold those documents and already have a client portal.

You know what, what that client portal looks like over time may skew more towards chat.

Like, some people are kind of working through that right now, like, you know, digits and their rollout of their chat with the ledger sort of tool. Like their app is beginning to now start maybe looking a little bit more like chat. They've got a side panel that's there like anytime you're doing stuff within the app on the, on their mobile app. They're working on mobile app support for chat with the Ledger. Like, will that be the default screen that you see now Chat? I think ultimately it'll be the project. The practice management systems where clients are already working with those apps will have like a chat interface within that portal experience. Or the underlying context is limited to just their files and their projects, maybe past communications and all that. And they're the logical people to build that because they can update the context when the files change and the projects change and all that stuff. So yes, you could go out and build that stuff manually today. It's just gonna be. To my knowledge, I haven't seen a system that will let you like, automate the updating of all the underlying context. So it would be a bunch of work to manage.

If you were to create a tier list of practice management solutions based on the client experience, how would you go about it? Would it be like ranking pizzas based.

On the amount of cheese or like judging a beauty pageant for robots?

The reason I like, never give practice.

Management system advice is I've tried to in the past. And then people load one up and they're like, what the heck is this? This is like the opposite of how I work. Accounting firms work in very, very different ways, more so than I think we realize. We just kind of like stumble into certain workflows and some of them lend themselves well to certain types of apps and some of them just don't. So it's really hard to give general practice management system advice. And I tell people, like, number one, if you're a firm 100 people or under, go to a cloud practice management system. Beyond that, it's really hard to find tools in the cloud practice management space yet that will support you well. So do that first. Make it a cloud practice management system. Beyond that, like, you gotta do your due diligence, like find out the differences between them all and what's going to work best for you. Get a huge spectrum of cost these days. A huge spectrum of like some early stage companies that are gonna be much more receptive of feedback and turning around those changes quicker. But then larger platforms are gonna be more suited for like a growing team. Probably a little more feature rich too, but features are so firm specific at the same time that it's like, it's like I don't have a way to give that advice. That being said, more abstractly, like, what would a tier list based on the customer experience look like? You know, one that we've talked about a lot, that's a really big deal to me is requests and how you request information from clients. It's to me the number one, like productivity hack in an accounting firm that not enough people are leaning into yet is using machines to automate your requests for things and using your humans for all the other stuff. So if you have a set of things that you have to gather each month for month end close stage that request in your practice management system so that it automatically goes out on the first and they automatically get reminded until they submit all that stuff and resolve those requests. And there's a lot of platforms now that will do that for you. Requests have gotten a lot of investment from PMs in the last two years, which is great. And even on the tax side, if you think about the mountain of things that you need to request for tax returns, imagine that little army of robots.

Getting cut loose on February 1st or.

Something like that, and then automatically following up for every single detail until you have it all, so you don't have to touch it until the client has acknowledged they've gotten you all of those things. We just spend so much time figuring out what we have and what we don't have and then sending the questions and then following up on the questions and then you come back to it two months later and you do the whole thing again from scratch. The biggest driver for me of what would like make a practice management system S tier would be how well does that request system work? And there's a lot of other things that practice management systems do, but that is so key to the productive output of my accounting firm that that one is like, that's for me probably the biggest feature that impacts the client experience when it comes to practice management systems.

This episode is sponsored in part by Xero because you know what? The roadshow, Gosh darn it. The Zero Roadshow accelerate. 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.

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Party, folks from Xero, they know how to throw a party.

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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, GA at the Georgia Aquarium.

Be there or be square.

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Okay, a bunch of people have asked my take on the controversy on on Twitter the last couple of weeks around some of the Scaling New Heights speakers and a lack of representation and some of the books they provided. I don't really want to like go out and attack anybody, but also acknowledge that not saying anything about it isn't particularly helpful because it wasn't great. To me, the offense wasn't ignorance on.

The part of the people involved.

The offense was like the unwillingness to be open minded to that ignorance. Like we are all ignorant in our own ways and have blind spots like fundamentally as humans. Like we just all do because we do not have like this complete sort of like lived experience of everyone. So like, I can give people grace for ignorance because goodness knows I have got a lot. The problem with that whole situation was, you know, if the person is unwilling to acknowledge that ignorance and just really give you even any sort of level of interest in acknowledging it and doing something about it, that whole thing was pretty unfortunate. It's funny, you hear like, so I'm mindful of this and like, what is now my business, like, and I really don't enjoy the label of like being an influencer, but I don't know what else to assign to it. Thought leader. Maybe you see a lot of like thought leader Y types. Maybe not a lot, but there's still a good number that are like, oh, it's such a risky business. And their biggest fear is being quote, unquote, canceled. And you know, the only thing that is like, what is the existential risk to the business of a thought leader? It is somehow being canceled overnight. And that used to be a spooky thing to me. Just the notion that something like that could kick off and happen so quickly.

But anymore when I see stuff like this happening, I'm like, no. Like, these things are usually happening for a reason.

And there are situations that I could never imagine myself being in. I say that there's like, you know, all this Joe Rogan stuff going on and it's like there are some people that seem kind of uncancellable. But like, who was it? Like, was it Logan Paul or Joe Paul, sorry, Jake Paul. A few years back, they just did this like unbelievably stupid thing in a YouTube video. And it was like his like 80% of his business goes away overnight. I've come around to like, it kind of just comes down to like being open minded and willing to learn and willing to acknowledge your blind spots. We're all going to say stupid things in our days, and I try not to put people on the chopping block right when they say a stupid thing because I know that I'm going to be ignorant of things also. But all it takes is like trying to be a good human and understand where other people are coming from and have that conversation in a tactful way. I honestly think that's all it takes to stave off cancellation. And so that used to be a scary thing to me. Like anymore, like it really isn't. Like it's not a super high bar. Like you just have to be open minded and understand where people are coming from. And that I think is where that whole situation went sideways. It just didn't turn into a constructive dialog and the frustration stemmed from this sort of unwillingness to even have that dialogue. Too bad. It's very unfortunate.

Okay, thoughts on charging clients based on.

A percentage of income Any of you all do this?

I would love to hear in the.

Comments your experience, good or bad if you have experimented with charging clients based on percentage of income. I did it for a while on dental clinics right before COVID and they all got shut down. That was, that wasn't on my radar from a planning standpoint. I don't know.

The one nice thing about charging based.

On percentage of income is resetting fees is kind of built in. But.

And so it's like, oh cool, maybe we don't have to like do this whole hokey pokey song and dance every year. But the reality is even if you.

Set your fees to a percentage of income, you do still need to have a bigger picture like meta conversation with the client once a year because a lot changes in a year from especially if you're doing back office stuff for clients from like the scope of what is being asked of you to like, you know, staffing changes within their business that maybe led to your firm picking up work. There's just a lot that changes over a year. So if the goal of of charging a percentage of income is to avoid those conversations, that's probably not good because you probably still need to have those conversations. One really nice thing about it is we do not do enough to keep up with the growth of a company when it comes to our fees. You'll get a business in that is, you know, a half million dollar a year small business. And three years from now maybe that's a $5 million business. And your fees are maybe 2x of what they were before. Like we chronically do not keep up the growth of our fees with the growth of a company's like top line. Not to say that that ought to be a one to one kind of linear relationship between those two things, but I don't think we pay attention to it very much. And that is a big driver of the value that we can provide for somebody, someone that's paying a half million dollars in tax a year versus $10,000 in tax a year. The value you can provide to those people is very, very different. So we should be charging them differently. Charging a business based on its percentage of income. Some of that happens naturally, like when that is built in. So. So I don't know that I have any problems with it. As long as you're doing the, the normal cadence of like reviewing their needs as we should be doing. Sometimes it's easier to frame like, especially if you're think, if you're saying like we're gonna be your entire accounting department. And this framing worked really well for me when we were doing work with DSOs like dental groups that were all rolling up and they have these kind of percentage overhead targets and we could say we're gonna come in and we're gonna manage all this stuff for X percent. And within the framework that they learned as they understood what that like kind of mothership operation, how it ought to be operating to manage all the other businesses, that was a very fair and reasonable percentage for what they needed. And so it worked in a situation like that. So sometimes that percentage framing is helpful in certain situations.

But I don't know, I'm not super.

Opinionated one way or another. Besides the fact that it's not a replacement for the due diligence of like annual, sort of at least annual check ins on, on their needs. Last how did I not know who Peter Alento was? Romeo, thanks for bringing this back up on Twitter. I did a PBC season one reaction video on my YouTube channel over a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, and.

They were talking about Peter Alento. Didn't know Peter Alento was.

And let me tell you, I still get comments on that video every month with people who are just enraged that I didn't know Sugar Bear.

And you know what, I'm sorry that.

I didn't know who Peter Alento was.

The reason I didn't know who Peter Alento was was because my test prep.

For the CPA exam was buying.

I joked on Twitter second hand PDFs.

On Twitter of Becker textbooks and that's.

Kind of a joke, but it's actually not. I think I paid $90 for a.

PDF of two year old versions of all the Becker textbooks. And that almost certainly was not okay.

Because it wasn't.

It wasn't Becker selling them. But at the time I was, what would I have been? 21, something like that. I was going out to work for a small firm who would not pay for my CPA test prep.

And I thought, well, if I know.

Everything that's in the two year old book, I've got like that 25 point margin, maybe I'll get a few questions. That's new stuff, but I'll just have to plan on getting a higher score. So if there's new stuff, that'll just bring my score down a bit.

Right?

That was all I did. I did that and then I got like a $400 Wiley test bank. And so I think I was like less than 500 bucks into my test prep stuff.

And so that is why I didn't.

Know who Peter Alento was.

Okay, I can hear your test prep privilege coming through.

I just that evidently Peter Alento was like the Becker guy that did all of the CPA test prep things. So I'm sorry, I'll do better. Oh my gosh. Did the YouTube comments on that video set me straight?

Anybody else who didn't know Peter Alento here would love to hear from you. There's gotta be a lot of us, right? Okay, that's it.

That's all in jest. It's fun.

Thanks for coming and hanging for Q and A Wednesday. Keep the questions coming. I'm getting behind.

So like these are kind of like couple week old questions at this point.

But keep those questions coming. I'll see you tomorrow.