083 Why Your Accounting Firm Should Publish A Book

Write a book. Really? Me, you know, I'm an accountant. You know, I'm busy. I have people to serve. I think it's gotten easier though. Let's do a little thought experiment. Explore, like, what is the value of books in 2023, do people still read books or do they just go out and consume Internet, think people's online courses and all that. I think it's still worthwhile. And I shared the other day how I'm working on my own. I will share my process and how I think it's not as big as a lift as it actually feels when you break it down. So come on in, let's write a wee book. I'll show you. Kind of a little breakdown of my process. Listen, buddy, I don't identify with writing a book either. I'm not an author. In fact, I'm quite a bad writer. But I still think there's a tremendous amount of value in writing very specific books. But what we do is we look at James Clear, we look at like the most successful authors there are, and you think, what do I have to say to all of those people? I will never be them. But that's akin to like looking at Kim Kardashian and thinking, well, I couldn't do that. I'm never gonna build that sort of Instagram following. Yeah, no, duh. But you don't need to. Like, reality is people today, what they consume is creator media. We still consume a lot of different things, but. But we consume by scrolling through feeds. And like, the future of media is skewing more towards. Honestly, people like me that do this sort of thing, that create media that is for a specific type of person. And the same holds up with books. Like, what is that super specific book that you can write? Kind of like the whole challenge episode we did, I think it was on Monday around solving a very specific problem for a retail clothing upcycler. When you're the firm for. For that. For the specific regulatory problems that they have, when they see that, they're like, oh, this is so. For me, like, you want something so specific that when they see it on the shelf, hypothetical, they're probably not actually gonna see it on a shelf. So specific that when they see it, they instantly grab it because it is for them and there isn't other stuff like that for them. That's where you wanna live. Because when you get those people into your circle, they value you five times more than any of the other people that you have on your client list right now. And a book will do that. Like what else will make you more one of one than being the person who wrote that book that they love? Like, you want to build this mystique around you and around your brand. If somebody goes out and reads your book and has a positive experience, that is the way to do it. So these days education is definitely trending more towards bite sized like TikToks and YouTube videos. And honestly, like I go to YouTube to learn almost anything these days. So I do have a little bit of like, are books still relevant? A little bit of that may come down to your demographic. If you are trying to get in front of a whole bunch of zoomers, I wouldn't go as far as to say it isn't worthwhile. But on a spectrum of value like that client profile is maybe a little less so valuable than I don't know anybody but zoomers. But I still think across the board, like books have this like staying power, especially if you can frame them in a way that isn't going to be outdated. Dated within 12 months. One thing I think we don't lean into enough as firm runners is building assets that work for you while you sleep, you know, to get one step further away from trading your time for money. How can you create these little things that go out and are always working? And a book is a killer example of that. You go the extra mile and you spin that into, you know, an audiobook and give people different ways to consume it and you've got this really valuable asset that will collect people that you could not have even imagined. Let me put my serendipity hat on. You don't need that talk again. But where I think most of us land as we think about this is, buddy, I got a hundred things on my list to do already. How in the world am I gonna fit this in? And I feel ya. I can relate to that. I have too many things going on. But I shared the other day I'm working on some books and I am following the model of some other books that I have really enjoyed. The Basecamp guys wrote some books that I was super into a while back. Remote rework. It doesn't have to be crazy at work. Derek Sivers has written some books way I think a like the bigger picture here is there's a trend towards books being actually like rolled up, smaller little bits of writing. I don't know, maybe this isn't a new thing, but I've noticed more and more in some books that I've read that they're actually a collection of these kind of Short write ups. And so those write ups could be 300 to 500 words, they're like two to three pages. And the book is just a collection of these two to three page write ups with like, you know, an illustration and a title on a page for to introduce each of these things. And the way I do my content is very suited for something like this. And rather than going off, you know, into a cave and microdosing for nine months until the book is finished, this little like bite sized approach to me feels like a more a better way to get more mileage out of the stuff that you're producing. Because each of these little write ups can be blog posts, they can be repurposed into LinkedIn posts, tweets, all of that along the way. And then when you publish the book, it's a roll up of the most relevant write ups that you've done around kind of the what is the core purpose of that book? And it may take a little bit rewriting and thinking through the sequence of those things and maybe some additional writing to kind of glue it all together. But what I love about it is it's like a very step by step way to get to a book. Maybe for some people, the notion of like shutting yourself in a room for a month and writing a book is appealing. And there is actually some part of me that thinks that would be a cool challenge just because that does seem so, like, audacious for how I work. But strictly from an ROI standpoint, publishing those things on the go and then rolling it up into a book, that's gold. Like, the biggest downside of social media is it's all kind of inherently effective. When you post something, is anybody gonna go back and find that thing a month later? Probably not. But books, kind of the opposite. So this methodology is a combination of the two. 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 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 hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, the practice management system. Canape 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 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 Canopy. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. The other really nice thing about posting this stuff to social along the way is the feedback. You have this ongoing feedback loop every time you post that stuff and it can actually be really helpful and may lead you to go back and maybe change a little bit about how that thing was written. Given kind of the additional perspectives that people will share on it. Rather than like doing this huge project with like zero feedback or just the feedback of an editor or something like that and then shipping it, shipping like all these bite sized things as you go to social media and being able to iterate and take that feedback into account as you're Writing, I think improves ultimately like the, the quality of that book when it is eventually done and AI has, you know, there's a huge amount of AI tools out there and even open source tools where you can go out and they will like literally write an entire book down to your outline. And the result is like a tremendous amount of noise and like these kind of space of really low effort books. And I'll be honest with where I'm at on this right now. I haven't used AI for like writing really anything that I do I don't like. I try to write things that have kind of a novel spin on it. And I have a hard time getting anything like that out of AI. But what I'm stuck between right now is on the one hand, a super, super specific book is very valuable to a super specific person. Like we said, you want to write that book where if they walked by it on a shelf, they would instantly grab it and be like, oh my gosh, this is so true to me and the specific pain points that I have. On the one hand you want that and is there a pretty generic version of that that AI could probably write? Like reality is like probably like if you knew the best tools to use and all that. On the other hand, I do not want to be a scum of the earth human being who publishes that. St that's a strong take, but like just publishing like what AI has thrown out, like I don't see a ton of value in that. But I would say right now there's a lot of debate over like, let's say you write a blog post, do you have to disclose whether or not it's AI generated? I think where I've gotten with that and actually put a Twitter poll up to this end and most people agreed. I think where I've gotten with that is if I go out to a website and I want that blog post to solve a problem for me and it solves the problem, do I ultimately care whether AI wrote it or not? Most of the time, no. Like there are situations where the AI that was used to produce that can be producing things in an abusive way, that is stealing things from other people and stuff like that. Like that is a consideration. But those things aside, and that is a extremely nuanced, like sticky conversation. AI fundamental, like the premise of AI is in my opinion like theft. Like I like, I like AI, like I use it a lot. But AI is fundamentally built on top of consuming human things. But the rights to all of the things which they consume, like that's where it gets really sticky. But right now I can say that kind of those, those issues aside, I don't think that I care if I ultimately get value out of it in the end. I don't think I care one way or another. And so what I'm going to show you is like if I were a firm runner, what process I would use to probably kind of outline and put together a book for a non writer, for somebody who's like, I can't just sit down and write a thousand words a day. And I would use AI for part of this process, but I would also lean into the way that I interact with clients and that kind of building the core of the book. So let's run through this. I'll show you the process. Now. A few days ago we talked about kind of how we found that specific problem for retail clothing upcyclers. But I also shared how in practice we had stumbled into a problem that dentists have, which is they have these practice management systems where they manage all of their patients, they have all the health information, they invoice, they take payments and all of that. And me as the accountant, I generally, I don't want access to that for a bunch of reasons. And part of what makes dentists like, you know, great clients at an accounting firm is they kind of have to have this separate accounting system. So it's very easy to have somebody do your accounting in an outsourced way. But all of the patient payments get posted to that practice management system, which fundamentally does not talk to the accounting system. And cash payments in a dental firm are like the leading cause of theft because what these patients pay is written down so frequently somebody can just write something down and then pocket the difference without like adequate internal controls. Right. So how does a dentist, and most of these are like small million dollar solo doc practices, how does that dentist reconcile the cash payments that are going into the practice management system to what is landing in the bank? It's a pain in the butt for all the reasons you would expect. Most deposits are like aggregations of a whole bunch of patient payments. There are definitely some best practices around that, like taking cash payments in an envelope and like the client signing off on the amount that they gave and stuff like that. But ultimately when the payment goes into the practice management system, how does it get reconciled to the bank? It is a lot of addition work that some bookkeepers will do, but most do not because it requires getting all of the patient payment detail out of the practice management system. The doctor, the dentist doesn't want to give the admin access to their banking right to be able to do this. They're not going to give them full banking access. And this is such a tedious thing. They don't want to waste all their time doing it. Some of them have like their spouse do it, but like that's where marriages go to die. And what we were able to do was be like this independent third party that didn't have the capacity to take cash. Like we were this third party where you could build and turn internal controls around how we could solve that problem for them, eliminate their biggest source of theft. So we rolled this out a super successful people loved it and it positioned us as a firm that could solve unique problems just for these people. So that when that dentist was talking with their other dentist buddy and they're like, man, this is such a pain in the butt. I don't know what to do with this. They're like, oh yeah, my accountant does that for them. And they're like, wait, what? Like give me their information. Right? So let's say I'm writing a book to position myself as like a back office or a tax and accounting some sort of expert for dentist to like, you know, build this book out around. What are the pain points that just dentists have? Because I want to establish myself as an expert that understands the problems that they have and how we help people to solve them. And so here's the process that we're gonna go through. It's hard for most of us to write, but it's easier for many of us to talk. And I will tell you, it was Donna Bordeaux, super smart lady, who first turned me on to this methodology. She has written books for like different types of clients and those books go out and they like, they attract people. But what she does is records voice memos and then uses those transcriptions as a start starting point for writing. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm going to record a 1 min ish voice memo talking through this problem and like why it's a pain. That's step one. Step two, I'm gonna put that transcript into ChatGPT, specifically GPT4 and say outline this in a more logical way for me into three bullet points and then I will record a voice memo addressing each of those bullet points individually. So the first step is just like blah, just like brain dump. And then you have GPT4 outline it for you and then I speak a bit to each of those bullet points. And then fourth step, we're going to put that full transcript into Claude. It is another chat service like ChatGPT or GPT4 but they just released Claude 2 and right now it is my favorite chat experience for like writing. GPT4 is like very over the top and like doesn't really sound true to how a person speaks. But what CLAUDE will do is it will take this transcript of my voice memo and I'll just say like kind of rearrange things and rewrite this in my own voice. Like feel free to use words verbatim but just like rewrite it in a more structured way. And that right there, like I'm 80% percent of the way there to like a chapter in my book at that point. I will still go in and I'll tinker with things, move things around. But for me as a non writer it's going to do a bunch of the heavy lifting for me. So step one is just like a brain dump of what is hard about this problem. I'm using Otter AI. Unfortunately it's 30 bucks a month. But there are a bunch of different ways you can do the voice transcription thing. This just has a really handle like handy mobile app recorder. Okay, so I'm going to do this first little brain dump of what this is. Dentists share a common problem of not having a good way to reconcile the cash payments they take in with the cash payments that go through the bank. And it's generally because they don't want to give their admins banking access for obvious security reasons. And it takes a huge amount of time to reconcile the individual patient payments that go into the practice management system with the batch deposits that go into the bank like once a week. Now the dentist could take a ton of time on this, but it's probably not a good use of their time. Sometimes they'll task their spouse with it, but that creates some friction. And it's a good example of the internal control problems that are really hard to manage in a small business. This is where we as an accounting firm started providing this service to our clients because we didn't have access to post payments but we could ensure that everything was coming through correctly, eliminating the largest source of theft in dental clinics. Okay, so Otter's got a little like voice transcript. Now I can copy paste that into chat GPT. So I'm using GPT for this because it's better at logical things like breaking stuff up. So here's what I did. I put in a GPT4. This is just in ChatGPT. Here's a voice memo. Break it into a three bullet point outline. I can elaborate on further. I copied and pasted the transcript we just recorded in. Here's the outline it gives. One, identifying the problem dentists struggle with, you know, reconciling cash deposits, blah blah, blah. One is identify the problem. Two is explore the solution. This problem can be mitigated by introducing a third party that assumes, says, assumes responsibility for internal controls. That's not quite what it is. But two, basically acknowledging the internal control problem and then three, our role, how we solve it for them. So I'm going to record maybe 30 seconds on each of these subjects to kind of refine this further, flesh it out a little bit and then we're going to take the full transcript, put it in Claude, have it rewrite it in a better way. Okay. So going through each of these three bullet points, recording this into otter. Now, dentists have a hard time reconciling cash deposits that go into their practice management system because they can't give admins banking access to match the patient payments with what comes through the bank. The result is either the dentist wastes a bunch of time trying to do this themselves or they pull their spouse in. It creates a bunch of friction. There isn't an easy way to solve this problem. The bigger issue here is internal controls inside of a small business are hard. And it's not just a problem that dentists have. The fewer people you have, the harder it becomes to split responsibilities between various people so that ultimately theft becomes impossible. The fewer people you have, the more concentrated that decision making authority is. What my firm provides is that external third party that can help with the hard aspects of managing internal controls within a dental clinic. Because we don't have access to be able to post payments to the practice management system to adjust what a customer owes because we're not the ones receiving the cash. The responsibility of being the one with access to the bank detail is no longer problematic. We've also got a bunch of really talented accountants who can do that reconciliation the right way and then issue a report at the end so that you know, everything is been tied out. Okay, so that was just over a minute, was way more complete than the first version of that that I did unpacked why it was problematic. Unpacked how? Like this is actually a problem that like a lot of business owners have. Like it's a small business problem and went into a little more detail and specifically how we can help. If you compare the very first thing I recorded to that, like that is much more clear. This week's episode it is sponsored in part by Copilot, the uber flexible client portal. Copilot lets you provide clients a one stop shop experience. Not a strip mall. This ain't no strip mall. You go straight in everything you need. One stop shop with a client portal that streamlines messaging, payments, file sharing, help centers, custom app access and more. Copilot Automations is a set of pre built workflows available on Zapier and our API. It helps you save time, reduce human error and run more streamline business. You can set up automations that streamline sign up like new client sign up, onboarding, intake forms and more. Check out some of the automations you can set up with our API or with Zapier. Assign forms to newly activated Copilot clients. Okay. Update clients from new Copilot form submissions. Change of address maybe you know the holy grail? Upload files to Google Drive when new files are uploaded to Copilot like that. Check out copilot.com to learn more and start a 14 day free trial. What have you got to lose? This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. 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. Your firm on GPT. Tell me more. That vision means three big areas of investment for or 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 interaction. Are you for real? Sound amazing. Be part of making it happen by becoming a firm that runs on Client Hub. ClientHub's 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. So now next step, last step is we are going to hop into Otter, grab the full transcript for that thing that I just said and then use Claude to write it in a professional tone. The prompt that I'm giving Claude is just this is a voice memo that I just recorded. Please rewrite it for publishing as a chapter of a book and a concise, professional, logical tone. Feel free to rearrange sections in a way that makes more sense. And I copy that whole transcript in now. Again, I'm not going to take this like verbatim out of Claude and use it as it is, but it's pretty darn good and gets me 80% of the way. There's Now I've actually found for reviewing your writing like I'm a big audiobook guy and sometimes hearing my writing back to me is a good sort of litmus test for is this like easy to follow? Am I too in my own head? I'm gonna drop this into 11 labs and we'll play back like a voice narration of the final product. Now this is about 200 words. That's maybe like half of one of these little like bite sized chapters and kind of the book concept that we've talked about. And you'll see this is like maybe a five minute process. All right, here's the output.

Dentists often face challenges reconciling patient payments that are deposited into their practice management system with actual bank deposits. Without granting accounting staff direct access to bank accounts, it is difficult to match payments received to bank transactions. Dentists can waste significant time attempting to reconcile accounts themselves or inappropriately delegate this responsibility to a spouse, creating unnecessary friction. More broadly, small businesses struggle to implement property.

Two things I've heard so far I would I would change. I wouldn't say inappropriately delegate to spouse. I also wouldn't say delegate it to accounting staff. Dentists don't think of themselves as having accounting staff. They have admin staff. So I would change that vernacular to be a little more like what they're.

Used to internal controls and separation of duties. With limited staff, concentrating both access and authority in one or two individuals enables fraud and error.

This is super good.

External accounting firms can provide a solution to manage internal controls for dental clinics and other small businesses. Without access to directly post payments in practice management software, fraud becomes far more difficult. Specialized accountants can properly reconcile bank deposits to patient payments and issue reports to verify accuracy. Segregating access, authority, and reconciliation processes enhances oversight and controls while saving dentists time and frustration. Ultimately, small businesses need appropriate checks and balances between cash receipting, accounting records, and bank accounts. Utilizing external firms to handle key reconciliations improves internal controls in small business environments with limited staff.

What I often find with AI writing is I come in and I chop it down to maybe the most useful 60 to 70% of it. So that output honestly was very good. It was A little bit more detailed and wordy than it needed to be. So I would probably just change the language to be a little bit more aligned with how my clients talk. And then I would chop out maybe 25% of it just so it's a little bit more concise. And you could even ask Claude to rewrite it in a more concise tone. But the takeaway here, I think is for many of us, it's much easier to speak verbally in an unstructured way because we do it all day long with clients on the phone. Right? But sitting down and staring at a blank page and figuring out how am I going to write this? That's extremely daunting. This process I like for taking a very unstructured kind of like brain dump approach where Instead of like 60 seconds, like I first did, I take maybe two or three minutes and do that brain dump dump, and then like throw that at chat GPT and say, like, is there a more logical way to outline us? And there was like, you need to first acknowledge the problem. You need to acknowledge kind of like the more of the workings of that problem. In this case, it was like, it's an internal controls problem that all small businesses have. And then last, like, the solution, like, what is the best way to solve this problem? So for me, that outline was helpful to then like, break that problem down and ensure I was like paying enough heed to each of those things and the result was really good. Had I done something that was like maybe twice as long or I elaborate on those a little more, like, that would be plenty big enough for like a little sort of micro chapter in a book. Because traditional writing, like, honestly, that still feels too hard for me. But what you do every day is you take emails, you take phone calls from all of these people, and you understand these problems better than almost anyone else. And so oftentimes the best time to record these sort of things are like right after a client conversation. You know, do you have five minutes? Just do the voice memo. That's all you gotta do right now. Like, that's honestly the biggest lift is just like capturing that when it's hot. Before you know it, a month down the line, you're gonna have a lot of this stuff organized in one place. You can go through the next steps of refining it. You could pull in a ghostwriter, somebody to help you, like with the organization of it all. But books, I still think books are a great opportunity as we're talking about getting in front of people that saw, like, for whom you can solve very specific problems and then ultimately charge, you know, 4x what you're charging now. I do still think books have their value, even though we're trending towards, like, online education and that sort of thing. That's why I'm working on it myself. If you have explored this, I would love to hear about it. Like, what has your process been, like, trying to write that book? Drop that comment below and you'll give everybody a little bit more confidence trying to tackle the same thing themselves. What are you guys doing in here? I'm recording a podcast. Can you say see you later? See you later. You say, bye, June. Bye. Okay.