081 Finding BETTER Clients For Your Accounting Firm

I think I wasted five years of accounting firm running, not upgrading my client list because I was too busy. Once you're past that threshold of being new, of filling up the client list, I think most of us live in that place in perpetuity. Buddy, I don't need more clients. Why would I market? I'm getting referrals like crazy. I'm turning people away every single day. What am I going to do going out there and marketing? Let me tell you the issue with that. Where it gets complex and what I think I got wrong. Firm running. Come on in. Let's do it. Strong vibes today. If you are an audio only listener, you've been missing out the past week, if I do say so myself. Funny trend I've noticed myself. I'm watching more video podcasts as I do things. I don't know why YouTube's going big on video podcasts right now, but I also do a lot of audio only. So if you're that audio only listener, for me that's when I work out. So if you're blasting backs and bys today, good for you. Happy to be here with you. Hey, have you and I met before? There's a stupid number of people that listen to this show. As far as I can figure, like 1200 people a day are tuning in. I've probably met maybe a quarter of you. You think somebody that runs a show every day must be self absorbed. Let me tell you how much shilling I do at conferences. I go to a lot of conferences. I. But it's because I like meeting people like you. As you are listening to this, I'm speaking at a conference in San Diego. Pronto Tax conference. If you're in the area and you're not there, I will not forgive you. But let me just remind you again how cool conferences are. How many cool people you will meet. I would love to meet you. I'm going to be at 0con in Sydney next month. I'm going to be at Bridging the Gap in Chicago. And what is that? End of August. In fact, if you're in the Chicago area, use this code, SPKRBTG23. Let me just put it in the show notes. It will get you in for free. All the people that already paid. I'm sorry, I don't know how these things work. So that one's in Chicago. Quickbooks Connect is going to be in Vegas in November right before the F1 race. You like either of those things? Let's hang. You want to get me a ticket to the F1 race, best friend alert and then digital CPA. That's the AICPA is like tech focused conference that's going to be in Vegas in December. I'll be there too. And it's just lovely meeting you all. Okay, Please come out. It's a lot of fun. Okay, so I think most of us go through like most of our firm running career at the limit. We are maximum like all of the clients we could possibly handle. And so we never make time for marketing because why would you, like, I don't need clients. And to be totally honest, this is how I went through pretty much like my whole firm running career background on me. I ran a firm until the end of last year. We had a team of about 40. I owned part of it for the last few years. There was. But even before that I was doing like biz dev and managing clients and all that. And the whole notion of marketing within my firm was like, why is that something we would ever invest in? We are up to our eyeballs completely burnt out. Why is that a thing I would do? And I have since come full circle on this. But I see this dialogue everywhere. We don't actually need the work. Like, why would we be interested in marketing? Here's where my thinking has changed, is almost nobody wants more clients. I say almost nobody. There's a lot of folks getting, getting started still, still building that client list. Many, many people don't want more clients, but better clients. That's interesting, right? Everybody wants better clients. You can get behind that. And it kind of dawned on me recently that the notion of stopping marketing and stopping intake altogether is kind of founded on the notion that that client list you have is like the hundred people out there in the world who most value what you do. If you've somehow arrived at this perfect, complete list of the people for whom, like, their problems that you solve are more painful than anybody else. Right? It's like building a basketball team and saying, okay, we're recruiting new members to the basketball team. Okay, we got George, we got Tina, we got Jeff, we got Steve, we got Martha. Okay, we're now we're going to go into the competitive season. We got five people. That's it. That's. We're not taking anyone else and we're just going to play with these five people till the end of time. You wouldn't do that. Like, I've said this a number of times, but your job as the person that is running that firm and ultimately deciding what's coming in and what's going out Your job is to curate that client list like, you are the curator of the list of folks who most value you, who are aligned with the really painful problems that you solve for people. And that is something that never stops. Like, the world is so big, there are so many people out there, so many new, more nuanced, more painful problems to find, like we've been talking about lately, that you always need to be on the hunt for those. Because you find the right problem, you find the right person, they'll pay you 2x what anybody else will pay you. So as soon as we stop, like, putting ourselves out there and at least thinking marketing a little bit, the team doesn't get any better. You're stuck with those stodgy old players that you got. And where most firms are at today, and I was the exact same way, is we get a lot of referrals, and, like, that's plenty to keep the pipeline full. And so, like, you know, we would probably go as far as to say we're pretty much referral only, but it's because we weren't putting ourselves out there to attract, like, the better client that we wanted. And referrals can be good, referrals can be bad. It's important to keep in mind that referrals are fundamentally like lateral client additions. They're going to follow kind of the demographics of the people that you already have, which in some cases is good, in some cases is bad. Many of us are at this point where we're like, I'm working so much. I don't feel like I'm making as much money as I should. I'm not enjoying what I'm doing. I. If you're in that spot and you can't even get the work that you have done, arguably referrals are only entrenching you further into that state of affairs that you really don't want to be in. Now, let's say you got a hundred client list. Not all clients, you know, the ones at the bottom are like, they don't value what you do. The ones at the top absolutely love you would happily pay more. Like, you're solving really painful problems for them. Those ones you absolutely probably want referrals from. But when you're stuck in a spot, when you're feeling kind of stuck, oftentimes the solution needs to be getting into a new type of CL where the problems you're solving there are more painful than the problems you're solving for the clients you have now. And if you think back on kind of new client conversations, You've had, we've all had those moments where you talk with that client, and it's like they're absolutely thrilled at what you do. And you're, like, looking in the mirror, like, why does this person like me so much? And it's oftentimes a combination of past experience. Maybe they got totally burned by trying to do stuff themselves that they shouldn't have in the past, and now they assign more of a value to what you do. Maybe they're coming from a bigger firm where the fees were astronomical and oftentimes the service wasn't quite as good. It's funny, in the small firm space, we're very fixated on small firm realities and small firm fees. And, you know, on Facebook, the tax pros say this fee range is normal. On Reddit, the tax pros say this fee range is normal. Got to Twitter and, you know, it's, I think, a bigger number than those other two camps. But the reality is, and we've all seen this from clients that we have inherited, firms out there charge absolutely outrageous amounts for doing nothing more than what you're doing. And it's easy for us to, like, look down our nose at that bigger firm that's like, they just charged, what, for this crappy work that missed this really obvious thing. And I used to, like, get on my high horse and be like, yeah, man, we're so much better than them. And if everybody only knew. And on the other side, you know, I kind of feel like the dummy because I could have gotten paid twice as much for doing half the quality of work. Yet here I was doing this work for significantly less at a much higher level. And I had a lot of pride in that. And you should, like, you should be proud. You should not do work work that is not of a level where he can't be proud of it. The problem is, like, sometimes we get so stuck in our small firm domain, and honestly, this is happening at every single firm level, the firm level, the firms that are bigger than us, it happens the same with them. The firms that are larger than them charging outrageous fees are like, you gotta be kidding me. Like, this whole thing is just a food chain. And there's sometimes a resistance to climbing up that food chain because you don't want to be the guy that gets too big for his britches or is too cool or too important to work with the people that you first started working with. And I don't know, I think sometimes that's valid. I think oftentimes we outgrow those clients and that is okay, because when we let those early clients go, they become killer clients for somebody else who's just getting started. This episode is sponsored in part by Xero because Zero's roadshow is coming your way, buddy. July 27th in Austin. August 3rd in Atlanta. But August 17th, Los Angeles in California at Valentine 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 our 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, because 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. 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. Because 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, I 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 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. Kanape. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. And when we get busy. There's a lot of things that, you know, we stop doing. And first and foremost is, you know, it's probably just like kind of the more networking kind of things that we do and looking around and actually being mindful, what are the clients that we actually want and don't want right now? Like, if you could go out and maybe this is a helpful, like, thought experiment, if you go out and add 10 clients of a specific profile, what would they be? Is there somebody in your firm right now where they are a good model of, like, what you would want that client to be? If so, man, ask that person for referrals, which you can do in a way that doesn't feel scummy. Like, there are ways to do that. It's not something to be afraid of. But the act of proactively, even in the case of referrals, the act of proactively going after the referrals that you want, that's important. And even if they say at the moment, like, yeah, no, nothing comes to mind, as soon as a friend does say something, they're five times as likely to be like, oh, yeah, go talk to Gerald. But the act of doing nothing, it doesn't take you any closer to, like, that ideal profile, right? Like, it's not helping you. Like, I was into the notion of kind of climbing that food chain. The reality was we were doing quality of work at a level of firms who are larger than us. So, man, I, like, I wanted to normalize working with those people that really appreciated our technical capabilities and would pay for them. And one of the realizations I've made here is different people do different things when they get busy. And even over time, the things that I would do and, like, where I would draw the line when I got busy has changed. Earlier in my career, there's probably some people that disagree with this, and that's fine. Earlier in my career, when we got super busy, I was always the guy that came in and filled all the gaps and plugged all the holes. And you could probably relate to that in a really big way if you have built your own thing from scratch. And it was a pride thing, not wanting to let people down, not wanting, like, our reputation to take a hit if something goes sideways. It was a fear thing. It was, what are these people going to think of me if this happens or if we don't come through? And it was a lot of sort of, like, external factors to a degree, like, we need to fundamentally take care of people. But ultimately, I always ended up paying the price for a whole lot of things for, you know, issues with staff, but even things completely outside of our control where we like happily jumped on the sword and we're like, oh, there's this new piece of regulation that's actually absolutely going to crush you. We don't really have a plan exactly for like how we're ever going to get paid for all this time and work that we're doing. We're just going to do it. And over time, I, you could argue this is, this is me getting too big for my britches, but over time I've gotten to the point where I let more slide than I used to. And maybe this is not having that sweaty 20 something boy energy anymore. But you do have to draw the line somewhere and your team sees this. If you run a team, if a certain level of person has a set of responsibilities, the line has to be drawn somewhere. So Mark Zuckerberg, if somebody walks out one afternoon and says they quit their job in the mailroom, does Facebook have a mailroom? Is Mark Zuckerberg going to step in and fill the gap? I don't know. There's definitely that pitch in and do anything sort of mentality, which is valuable but can also be like virtue signaling to a negative degree. Because if you're always the one that is stepping in to put out all of the fires, and these could be fires within your team, could even just be your client's fires and them projecting on you unreasonable expectations of how you're going to jump in to save the day if all you do is put out all of these other fires. I do think you run the risk of devaluing what it is your role is. And so that's kind of the flip side I see of this change in mindset that I've had from in the past, I would have seen it as like, oh, look at you. You're too big and big and important to do this stuff anymore. And these days, I would say, honestly, yes, like I would, I would say these things that I have to do, like they are imperative to the business. And I know that this thing today feels super, super important. But if you're not taking the time to invest in these things, which are like 10 year things, who will? And before you know it, you're gonna feel like you're like stuck in quicksand and not going anywhere. If you've ever been busy, you know just how fast time can go when you're busy. And before you know it, five years have gone by. Ten years of your life have probably gone by in terms of 10 years, you've just taken off of the end of your life. It can kind of become the new normal. But if you look at the firm, the firm isn't really going anywhere. And it's a, it is a, admittedly a hard line to walk. The selfishness of you doing the really high level, important things that the firm needs to ensure that it stays on the right track versus that payroll adjustment or payroll is hard, man. That last minute tax notice that the person gives you where the deadline date is, you know, tomorrow or something like that. I will say over time maybe this makes me a bad person. I have gotten more selfish about the things that I think are important and drawing the line around where I'm willing to step in and where I'm not willing to step in. And that actually had some really positive effects on the team. Because if the team sees you step in every time something needs to happen, you know what's going to happen. They're going to leave that door wide open for you more than you'd like. And where we can often get stuck like spending an outrageous amount of time, you know, being the backstop and helping the team and like never getting to do your own work. Like oftentimes that is because you have a willingness to be the hero. Where sometimes they can jump out of the way or they're in situations where they're even afraid to come to their own decision. They will happily step out of the way because it is less risky for you to make that decision for them. But you're reinforcing something that gets more problematic over time by doing that. So the big shift for me here is acknowledging that quite possibly the most valuable thing that I can do for my practice is staying on that biz dev grind, whatever that looks like for you, like developing that vision of what is the problem that's twice as painful as the problem that we're solving today that I could build a practice around. And who feels that problem, that pain point to a huge degree. Because if you can't. We've talked about this before. If you're running a firm with a 50% margin and you can find clients who will pay you two times as much, you can generate the same profit doing less than half as much work. And honestly, I know like we, we big brain, all this stuff and firm running but like so much of it and the profitability of a firm is like, it is just as dead simple as this. How can you get people to pay you more? Yes, there's operational Improvements that you can make, yes, you can reduce costs and, you know, lean into offshoring and stuff like that. But so much of this just simply boils down to the fact that you can either prepare a 1065 partnership return for some random person in the context of general tax prep for $400, or you can prepare 1065 for some hyper, hyper specific niche where they have a very specific problem for $10,000. And you have seen these invoices come through from other firms and you're like, I don't understand it. It's just because they can speak to a very specific pain point. And so much about making this sustainable and profitable for you is just about finding those very specific problems. Like what I ran into. And the reality of the day to day is, and where most people find themselves is, I'm so gosh darn busy, I don't have time to even think about this. It's always the last thing on the list. So you just never get to it. Before you know it, years have passed and you haven't made any progress on this, the whole too busy thing. I heard the analogy the other day. You get hurt and you go to the hospital. But saying you're too busy is like waiting until you're healed to go to the hospital. Gosh, that was a really good analogy and I just totally butchered it. You have to go to the hospital to get healed. So an injury happens. The thing's not going to get fixed until you go to the place that will fix the thing. So the firm, your lifestyle, your flexibility, like all that stuff does not get fixed until you solve the bigger picture problems. And I really love the notion of, like, curating that client list and that just getting better and better, like, and more enriched year over year. It gives the firm more money to play with. Like, you can turn that back into, like hiring higher level people, having more flexibility around how much you have to work. That's the key to everything. So to me, so what marketing is like, looks a little different to everybody. And it's probably beyond the scope of today. For me, it's content. It's putting out content that attracts people with specific types of problems. For you, it could be turning up conferences, going on podcasts. I do think we overcomplicate this stuff. We're like, oh, now we got to learn about social media and how algorithms work and video production and all that stuff. The one thing that most people don't have that makes all of this a lot harder is that one sort of one cornerstone thing that you're just going to talk about till the end of time and you're going to sound like a broken record. And that is why you'll shy away from it as you'll think, haven't people heard me say this before? And this people do this with things as simple as, like, sending tweets. You send a tweet and you're like, well, I can't talk about that sort of thing again because I already tweeted about it. Buddy, the whole world isn't watching you. Nobody gives a hoot. Like, you can say the same thing until the end of time. Because the people who you want haven't found you yet. And when they find you, you want that to be a meaningful, impactful people who are professional public speakers, they don't go around to all these different rooms all around the country and talk about a different thing every single time and make a. Make a new talk for each of these things. No, they get one talk and they nail it. And they do the heck out of it. And the Internet, social media, that is so much bigger than going around on the speaking circuit, you know, like, it is just like, so much bigger than we can comprehend how many impressions a Tweet gets, a YouTube video gets from people who have no idea who you are. And once you develop that cornerstone thing that you talk about, we talked about this, was it last episode, that pain point that you solve for, like, that is the cornerstone thing that you need to be talking about is what's the thing that is super, super painful for the person that is your perfect client. You can talk about that thing in your sleep because you've done it so much. But you need to be going out on podcasts in this domain, writing up blog posts, newsletter takeovers for the newsletters in this space, writing articles that go in journals, like whatever, whatever the. Wherever the places are where these people live, you need to be talking about that kind of cornerstone thing in those places. And that ought to be the core of your marketing. You don't need to be an influencer. You don't need to, like, get a whole, like, stupid production company put together. Like, I have, like, you just need to have that one thing that you talk about that is really specific, really smart. And then when that person hears it, they're like, oh, geez, how do I get more information from this person? Oh, they're an accountant. I also have accounting problems. I also have tax problems. I ought to work with them. And then when that person comes in the door, they value you so much. More than that rando that just walked through. When you're doing like totally generic stuff, right? So hear this. I know you're busy. Almost all of us are busy. But as long as you're investing in like figuring out who that next better client is, your firm is like growing that client list, is iterating through potential people. It's refining that client list. Right? That's what we can never stop doing. And it probably starts with putting up some boundaries. When things slip through the cracks, are you going to be the hero? Giving yourself a little bit of slack and honestly, probably assigning a higher value to the big brain, big picture stuff that you got to do to make sure that ship's still on its course. It's very hard to get out of being the technician and doing all of the work. And I know a lot of us say, I want to work on the business more, not in the business. And for me, the hardest part about that was when I had to make that hard decision. The trade off of letting something slip through the cracks or doing the thing that I thought ultimately would have the bigger, big picture impact on the business. Like if you're too busy and that stuff's not happening, something has to give. And oftentimes we're at this point of friction between wanting this alternate reality but being unwilling to give up any of the kind of framework that we use to operate our lives and the assumptions that are baked into all the things that we do about, you know, what you should be doing every single day. You're unhappy, but also unwilling to change. Right? Like something's got to give there. And for all the things that you could do from find a better practice management system to make an automation hire to, you know, this and that. Ultimately, like your firm being profitable is going to come down to finding people who will pay really, really well for what you do. So if you haven't started this journey yet, think about who the best people you got right now are. If there's another type of problem out there that you know that you can solve that people will pay even more for, great. Start talking about that problem that you solve. And the more you talk about it, the more it's gonna attract people who are pained by that problem that you can solve for them. This episode is sponsored in part by ClientHub. This week on Tales from the Hub. We are back. Last time we discussed how super smart accounting firm went to scaling new heights. And there they learned about Client Hub's new vision. You're firm on GPT. Tell me more that vision means three big areas of investment for client hub. 1. Generate it Use AI to generate job tasks and task details. Generate intelligent email replies automatically. Ask clients for missing information. What? 2. Answer it. Don't just search by keyword, just ask a question and intelligently look across emails, meeting transcripts, internal notes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even within files to bring you the answer. Oh mama. 3 up level it AI summarizes meeting notes and action items. It tells you what's in a file without opening it gives you a sentiment of each client based on their interact Are you for real? Sound amazing. Be part of Making it happen by becoming a firm that runs on Client Hub. Client Hub is working with users to co develop, test, iterate and fully optimize these capabilities. That's it for this week's episode of Tales from the Hub. Learn more about Client Hub at ClientHub app or the link in the show Notes 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 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 going to build our own pipeline in the Philippines, going to 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 Easy as that, right? Bada bing, bada boom. You're gonna have a killer basketball team put together in no time. Hey, thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll put links to all those conferences I referenced in the show notes. Absolutely do it. You will meet super cool people when you do this stuff. And meeting cool people is like what made this whole profession sustainable for me. Like being able to make a few friends that did what I did. The accounting firm running stuff. Highly recommend you check that stuff out. Hey, thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you tomorrow.