079 Tips To Build An Accounting Firm Around A Niche

Some practical steps to start building your firm's niche, how to use a stream deck with accounting, whether to build your social media presence with a personal or a business handle, when to hire your first admin and a couple other goodies. Come on in. We're doing a Q and A. It's Jason Daly. Okay, niche stuff. Nathan Sosa. I think this conversation happened in the YouTube comments but referenced that he has a background in it and I was like, have you explored like building the beginnings of a niche and some sort of IT domain? And oftentimes is a good place to start. My background like the first three years for me in undergrad were doing computer science. So obviously I am a tech nerd. I enjoyed the software stuff and if I were to build a firm for myself where like I wanted to manage all those client relationships, I would have done it around software, probably some specific domain within software because I enjoyed that stuff. Like it was the stuff that I geeked with and those were fun people to work with because we were like minded. We were kind of nerding on the same things. But just to use this as a practical example, so say you went through school doing it. How do you get started building a firm around a niche like that? I can tell you what I would do. It is like, that's probably too high level. Ultimately what you pro, what you want to get to is within that domain. Who are the people with very specific problems that you can solve? Like are those, you know, managed service providers for small business? I don't know what other types of businesses are there within the IT domain, but honestly I think the really smart thing to do is take a look at the industry conferences that your dream clients are going to and you're gonna learn a ton about those businesses and the problems that those people have, you're gonna make really good connections. I think oftentimes we don't do this because this can sometimes be a hard thing to make an ROI calculation from. You think that you can't go and take and invest in this trip until you know exactly what the goal is, exactly who you need to come back. When the reality is we waste years not developing a niche or working on the wrong niche. And the reason why that trip is worthwhile is you're gonna accelerate your learning. Like within the context of like a two or three day conference, you're gonna accelerate what you know about that domain by months, if not years. And if the best thing to come out of that conference is realizing, I don't wanna work with these knuckleheads or, or maybe the profile of these businesses isn't the sort of thing that I'm suited to support right now. Man, that's gold. That is roi. Think about the amount of time you could have wasted going down that path if it wasn't the right path. I don't know any better way than like any higher resolution way to make connections and learn about that stuff besides in person conferences. So it's the sort of thing where there's gonna be enough conferences, you could probably do something local, sit in those sessions, like learn, even paying attention to like what are the best attended sessions. Like what are the things, the problems these people are most interested in trying to solve. And no, they're not gonna be accounting or tax. But I'll let you in on a secret. Like a lot of the content I develop, a lot of the ways that like I try to put stuff out to help people. Buddy, it's got absolutely nothing to do with accounting or tax. Like this conversation here. Like, I guess it's connected to your accounting practice, but building a niche, there's some aspects of it that is like accounting firm specific, but not many. So there's a lot of ways that you can support these businesses beyond the scope of accounting and tax. I feel like accounting and tax is how you get them in the door, but then it becomes about everything else. And if you know everything else better than the person they're using now, which probably isn't a high bar, this, those folks will think that you're like one of one. Like you will have power to set your own prices. They will think that you can do that stuff fundamentally better than the person that they have just because you understand their needs. Now you know enough to know that 80% of the time, the way that you're doing a tax return is gonna be largely the same as it would be for any other industry. Not always the case, but most of the time that's gonna be the case. The difference is they're gonna feel like, understood like you are the accounting and tax person for X. And that puts you in like really rarefied error where you can find a very specific type of client, which makes finding any clients easier, but also charge top dollar because you like immediately just separated yourself from all the productized services of the world and like 99% of the other firms out there because you're specifically for what they do. And it's a bit of a misnomer that you need to build a firm and then decide to niche down. I actually think you can do just Fine. Building a firm from scratch into a niche. And oftentimes this firm will grow faster than a generalist firm, I can tell you, the profits will definitely grow faster. We've talked about this before, but when you hang your shingle out and you say I do anything, you're not attracting a specific thing. When you hang your shingle out and you say, I do this for this very specific type of person, even though you just filtered out 99% of potential clients, in most cases it's still gonna be easier to find that 1% than it will be to attract the 100% and the rate at which you can charge for what you do for that 1%. Like if you can charge double the rates and you add a 50% margin, then for every one of those niche clients, you're gonna make as much money as you would have with four of those just vanilla clients. I'm much more opinionated on this than I used to be. Specialization and all that, like, it is just the path to making money. And making money is the path to not working yourself into the ground and having flexibility and all that. 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. Well, listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work a hundred percent 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 gonna 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 about a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines 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 this episode is sponsored in part by Xero because Xero's roadshow is coming your way, buddy. July 27th in Austin, August 3rd in Atlanta. But August 17th Los Angeles in California. At Ballantyne DTLA. Hang on. Googling. Oh, that is nice. Okay, if you've ever been to a zero party at a conference or anything like that, you know these folks know how to put on a real nice event. How's six hours of CPE sound? How's hanging with a bunch of other forward looking accounting practice runners sound? You're even gonna have some people there from like the app ecosystem, you know, the people that make the fun little tools you use. I've done some roadshows before. Pretty solid. I'll put a link in the show notes to register if you're in the Los Angeles area or if you're anywhere by an airport. Cause there's an airport in Los Angeles. Get on down to the Valentine DTL. That must be downtown LA, huh? August 17th. Get some CPE and have some fun. Okay, Stream deck stuff. If you don't know what a stream deck is, it's by a company called Elgato. It is a little thing that sits on your desk and it's got a bunch of buttons. And these buttons are super programmable. They originally came around for streamers, like online streamers. Usually gamers twitch stuff like that. And you use these buttons to like kick off automations, like scene changes and like the video that you are streaming. All sorts of different things. But they're like infinitely customizable so that those buttons can do anything. Now I own a stream deck, but I don't use it much. The people that I know swear by them. I think a good place to start with how to use a stream deck is I think we all log in in the morning and we have like 10 different things that we start up or something like that. Or when you're working within a. Within a QuickBooks file, for example, there's probably 10 screens within QuickBooks that you spend 99% of your time on, right? And so on your stream deck have buttons for those things. If you're working in QuickBooks, have a set of buttons for when you're working in QuickBooks so that you can hit the button to open a tab for this or hit a button to open eight tabs of those things that you commonly use. A lot of people use stream decks for like, you know, like physical button shortcuts for zoom so you don't have to go and find like the end meeting button. It can be useful especially like those batch actions. In my experience oftentimes there is a like a built in like keyboard based way to do the same thing also. So like for example Hector Garcia's got his QuickBooks online extension that, like, lets you set up custom keyboard shortcuts for navigating to anything within QuickBooks. I lean more towards those sort of things. And I'm a big, like, desk clutter guy. Like, more stuff on my desk is kind of irritating. There is an entire Facebook community of, like, finance and accounting folks using stream decks. I'll go find that after this and I'll link it in the. In the show notes. There are some people doing cool stuff. I've shared a lot about stream decks, so I think people just assume I use it. Honestly, I've got one, but, like, I don't use it that much. Question from ryan in a YouTube comment, I have a question about personal usernames versus business usernames when engaging in social media. For example, on Twitter. As a firm owner, I may engage on tax Twitter using my own name, where there's a lot of shop talk. But if I use that same username to engage potential clients, I wonder if it may seem confusing to them since the shop talk is less client focused. At the end of the day, I'm a firm owner who's trying to figure it out. Do we show the client we're still figuring it out with our engagement in the shop talk? In this scenario, I'm providing accounting services to clients in a niche that is not all accounting focused. For me in the process of learning about the YouTube algorithm, which is very similar to all the other discovery algorithms now, there's so much value in understanding how algorithms work these days, because so much. I mean, almost all of discovery is happening via algorithms these days. Like, I said this before, but you got a bunch of people standing in line at a coffee shop. If somebody's not looking down at their phone, like, if they're looking up and looking around the room, that is weird. Like, it's uncomfortable at this stage because everybody head down, they're scrolling something on their phones. That's just how people discover stuff. That's how they find new information, right or wrong. So the key to getting in front of people in that context is understanding how algorithms work. And people like to, like, play the victim card and be like, oh, the algorithm hates me this and that. Like, it is a cold, heartless computer that is working according to a set of the rules. But the better you understand those rules, the greater the likelihood that, like, your stuff will get surfaced in front of people. Because if you're on Twitter or something like that and somebody tweets something or you tweet something, 90% of the people that follow. You will never see that in their timeline. Like, I think many of us have this kind of old, very basic kind of understanding of what these platforms used to be. It used to be a feed. Like, back in the day, Facebook was just a feed of chronologically all the stuff that the people that I follow post. And most of the platforms we use now are so far removed from that. And that's part of why people really like threads right now, as it's this sort of simplistic version of this right now. But your Twitter feed, you know, TikTok, YouTube, all that, what that shows is the stuff that it thinks you're most likely to engage with. So it looks at other people who are similar to you. What do they engage with? If they like this thing, it's gonna increase the likelihood that it puts it in front of you. That is how stuff gets presented to you. And on the other side of that, when you are creating content and posting things, you need to be mindful of that. Because if I post something about running a firm, the people who are most likely to engage with that are the people who are also running a firm. And if 100% of my following, this is important. If 100% of my following is people who are firm runners, then a high percentage of the people who follow me will engage with that tweet. But if, for example, I haven't refined my online identity and it's a scattered kind of following, let's say for me, it's like no code people and AI generalists and accountants. If I then post something very nuanced about running an accounting firm that's not relevant to a huge percentage of the people who follow me, which by default is gonna mean that a very small percentage of people will engage with it, which will decrease the likelihood that it's put in front of more people. Now, I've gone back and forth on this a ton as I have grappled with, do I keep my online following super, super niche, or do I open it up? Because I can look around at all these other people that are making more generalist, mainstream content, and I'm like, oh, man, I can do better than that. But as soon as I open that up, when I talk about the stuff I most enjoy talking about, running accounting firms, the level of engagement will go down because the relevance to my following gets worse. So algorithms will have an expectation for, like, they're doing their best to get your information in front of the most relevant audience. If you're really going all in on content Creation, it has to be focused for a specific audience. The moment you kind of jump into different domains, all of your content is penalized by the algorithm because it's not for any specific person. If half my audience is AI generalists and half my audience is accounting firm people, when I talk accounting firm stuff, none of the AI people care. And so the algorithm sees everybody scrolling past this post and they're like, oh, this post stinks. I'm just not going to put it in front of people. So, Ryan, in your case, the way to manage this is. And like, it's annoying, but the way to manage this is with separate accounts. Your potential client doesn't give a hoot about all this stuff you're talking with other accountants about. And the algorithm is then going to punish you when it comes to putting stuff in front of your clients. When you make a post about craft breweries and none of your accounting friends care, they're all scrolling right past that post, not engaging with it. So the algorithm thinks it's a bad post, it's not going to put it in front of anybody. So in your case, maybe it does make sense to have a personal handle that is where the shop talk happens and then to have a business handle where the shop talk happens. Honestly, what I would probably do, because I think people have a hard time engaging with brands, I would rather my personal brand be the client facing one. And then for my internal, like, shop talk sort of stuff, I would either have an anon handle or just like an alternate identity sort of handle where I do that shop talk. Again, if you're doing it for fun, it's not a big deal. But if your goal ultimately is to attract people who could eventually be clients, you do have to get focused about what are the sort of things that you talk about so that your audience is a concentration of the people who will engage with it. When you have a very, very focused audience so that anytime you post things, a huge percentage of that audience will engage with it, then it's much, much more likely that it will put it in front of more people, just like that. And what you're trying to do in building this potential client base is create super, super specific stuff for that super specific type of client that you want. And when all of that type of people will engage with it, it's absolutely going to put that information in front of other people who don't follow you, who have very similar habits to the ones who do follow you and are engaging. Herman asked, have I ever thought about doing a video on this Like a firm owner's survival guide, you know, practical advice for us business warriors at different stages of our firm running journey. I don't know. I don't know a concise way to do that because different people struggle with different things. I was posting on Social Today about how I think many of our struggles, for many of us, our struggles with increasing our prices is actually an issue of, like, self worth. Like, in order to be able to sell some, sell somebody on something, you have to have this intense belief in what you're selling. Like, otherwise, like, you're a charlatan, you're like, shilling something you don't believe in. So, like, being good at sales is founded in truly believing that this is the best thing for that person and being able to show that you have, like, their best interest in mind and that is why you're so convinced they need to buy this thing. But when we go out there and we increase our prices and we don't believe that we are worth that, you can't be a compelling salesperson. Right? So many of our. And this isn't the case for everybody, but the more I've thought about it, the more I think that many of our issues around pricing and how we limit ourselves and why people are so across the spectrum and how they price the same thing. I think a lot of it stems from our self worth. And that's like, one little example of, like, what do people need to hear these days? Like, there probably are things that are, like, good general bits of advice, but, like, we're all very different humans. And so I struggle with, like, I don't know, what's the most concise, helpful, like, version of this for people. What I enjoy about this and the podcast is that we get to explore a whole bunch of those different rabbit holes. And that's, I mean, it's kind of wild, like, how much there is to talk about the fact that we can turn up on this show pretty much every day and more or less talk about something that we haven't talked about all that much. I think it just goes to show you, like, how much nuance there is in what we do. How different people struggle with different things. And for me personally, I don't know that there's been situations in my life where I was able to, like, sit down and consume this thing that was like, okay, here's everything I need, right? Like, there's a version that like, maybe gives you the 50% that most people need, but then there's a lot of detail, like, how do you Fill in kind of around the gaps. And what if I don't want to run a firm like that? What if I actually want to run a firm like this in many ways as like, you know, my business as a, I don't know, content creator, somebody just trying to be helpful online? My business would be a lot more simple if I centered it on like one thing. Like, that's how you build a business like this these days is I have like a one sentence statement of I help people do this. And if you look at other people in the industry who are smarter than I am, like, that is how they have set up their businesses. But I feel like I'm kind of the opposite. Like, I enjoy, like when I was running a firm, there were just so many nuanced aspects of things that we struggled with and what the right answer was during different periods of developing the firm and when we were limited on hiring versus when we were trying to grow that. At the time what I wanted to hear was more of the nuance. And so I don't know, I feel like I am kind of the opposite of that. And there's probably other people in the profession that could give you a better, more concise survival guide than me. What I enjoy is like being able to explore the nuance with people at some point. The stuff we talk about here, I'm kind of putting together a content team of, you know, having a like a 500 word, kind of like a mini blog post on most of these daily pods. And some of the books that I've really enjoyed reading out there are like collections of these kind of mini blog posts that are like 500 words or so. My longer term plan is roll all this stuff up into like, so that we're posting, you know, three of these little mini blog posts a week or something like that. And eventually they get rolled up into books down the road around certain topics. So there's a point at which down the road where I will have like maybe a collection of like, here's the most important stuff for this type of person and roll that up into a book and then do like an audiobook for it or something like that. But I don't know, I think there's other people that do that. And what I enjoy is more like digging into the messy stuff, you know. 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. Canape 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, Canopy'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 a double down on the midnight oil thing, you know, maybe like I 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 clienthub. Come on in. Recently on Tails from the Hub, the team at super smart accounting firm adopted Client Hub. And recently I talked about the trade offs of optimizing for the firm experience versus the client experience. You may have seen some discussion on that super smart accounting firm. They were thinking along the same lines. What they ultimately decided they needed an option that optimized the client experience, that exchange of information. They chose Client Hub because it was designed for an amazing client experience and their clients love it. They love the mobile app. They love the intuitive interface. Even better, client communications no longer scattered all around and siloed email inbox. It's installed all in one place. Everyone describes Client Hub as simple, intuitive and efficient. Everyone. Ask anyone. That's what they say. That's the magic of Client Hub and it transformed this firm, buddy. This year they are raising prices because that client experience is off the charts and everybody's tickled about it. They. They love it. They just. They're having so much fun. Sounds good, right? Right? Hey, that's it for this week's tales from the hub. Check out ClientHub at ClientHub app or the link in the Show Notes. When do you hire your first admin? Isn't that a million dollar question? I think you get very different answers from different people on this one. I really struggle with and this is Me personally, I don't think that I would ever enjoy truly being the only person in my firm because there is so much like grunt work that comes with just like operating a business. And if you're responsible for everything, it means that you're doing a lot of low value stuff that is honestly like hard to not do within a business. Like there's certain things that just have to happen. And I have recognized about myself like I think I am maybe quicker than most to delegate and that's why I'm able to do so many things is I'm always thinking about, okay, I just did this thing. How can I, how can I enable another person to do this thing? How can I find somebody who's at like a point in their career where this would be a great thing for them to do? So the answer of when to hire your first admin depending on where you want to be long term, do you want to build a solo business where you can kind of aren't tied down to having a big team? I would argue the downside of that is in many ways you're then the only one like tied down to your clients and all of the things that go into your business. Some people's mindset I think is they are freed by having a team to do something. Others people mindset is kind of the opposite. Like they are tied down to that team. In my opinion, if I went out like what I would do if I went out and started a firm tomorrow, I would have an admin on day one and it would ultimately let me focus on what the most important problems for the business were. And oftentimes the people who I think are asking this question when to hire the first admin probably don't yet have experience working with an admin and making an admin useful to you is a learned skill. And the longer that you wait to start developing that muscle, like the longer you have to wait until they can actually make a meaningful impact for your business. So for example, I'm still in the grand scheme of things new to video production stuff. And the first time I went out and tried to hire an editor I was terrible at it because I didn't, I wasn't able to communicate what exactly it was that I wanted and what success would look like and what a bad fit like would look like now like thoughts and prayers Martini, Our editor guy just busted his collarbone and it is gross. He's. He sent me a picture thoughts and prayers in the chat. So he's got a little T Rex arm. His capacity has Definitely been limited. I've been needing to pull in another editor for quite a while, but, like, it kind of, like, kicked me into gear. I'm like, okay, we gotta go, like, pull in another person for managing this stuff. And I wanna do some more stuff with, like, shorts online and stuff like that. But this process, now that I've hired a number of editors before, so much tighter, so much clearer, much greater likelihood that I will get exactly from this person what I am needing than the very first time that I hired an editor. So I think that really all of us should be thinking about how can I use another human being to effectively extend what I'm capable of? Like, that is a learned skill that I think all of us should be investing in. So I don't know, maybe I'm biased. To me, the answer of when do I hire my first admin? It's like, as soon as possible. And it's not gonna go well at first, and you're probably gonna be a crappy boss and you're not gonna communicate things very well. And they may not do just what you want them to do because you stink at, like, setting up those processes for now. But the only solution to that is to do it, like, to just start flexing that muscle until you're good at it. We all get different things out of entrepreneurship, but, like, one of the most valuable things to me is how rewarding it is to create cool opportunities for other people. Opportunities where they're like, man, this is an awesome thing for me right now. And it's not an awesome thing for me, but I can enable that for them. That's probably, like, that's one of my favorite aspects of entrepreneurship, man. We got a bunch of we got a question backlog going. Keep them coming. Question I haven't acknowledged. Where the heck are you, Jason? I'm in Pasadena for a month doing a little family trip. Think about doing like a little impromptu hang too. Like, if you're. If you're in the LA area, drop a comment. Maybe we'll put together a little event while I'm here. Pretty cool place staying at. I think I'll be back tomorrow, see if we can get that new editor sorted out. Otherwise, thanks for coming hanging today and I'll see you when I see you.