087 How To Get People To Promote Your Accounting Firm

Okay. I've been telling you how to get others to promote your accounting firm. Well, today is a challenge episode where we are going to do just that. We're gonna generate three random small business niches. We're gonna come up with a couple painful pains you can solve for people and then look out online at where are the places for each of these niches that we could get people to.

Promote what we do.

How do you offer some sort of value to them in a cold DM with the goal of ultimately getting in front of their audience so that they send you more of your perfect customers?

Client.

Let's do it. Come on in. Okay, so I popped a prompt into ChatGPT. I run a tax and accounting firm. What are three very specific small business.

Niches I could serve? These are actually pretty darn good.

We get some weird ones sometimes, but.

These are good ones. Food truck owners. As a more unique sector of the restaurant industry, food truck owners face distinctive.

Challenges that just too much. Two freelance creatives.

Eh.

Three home based e commerce crafts makers.

Individuals who craft and sell goods from.

Home, often through platforms like Etsy. Okay, so for all three of these, we're gonna go find some people and places online where all these people congregate and then think through like what is some kind of value I can provide.

To that person or platform so that they'll talk about what I.

Okay, first up, food truck owners. Food truck freaks on YouTube. Of course this is a thing all about food truck entrepreneurship. It's got 5,000 subs. But don't let that scare you. Like my main YouTube channel has 7,000 subs. And in my channel, like if somebody is doing something compelling like software companies, like they can get in front of thousands of accounting firms by being on my channel. Don't let a small channel spook you away.

I actually love micro influencers because there's usually more trust. There's.

But looking through their recent videos, best practices for food truck branding. Sourcing local food for your food truck. Can I prep food on my food truck in Colorado?

What?

Prep food on my food truck.

Can I park my food truck anywhere in New York? Let me just search the channel for anything accounting or tax related. There you go.

One year ago they had a video.

Filing food truck taxes 20 plus tax deductions. What taxes do food trucks pay? That's just for tax. Let's search for accounting. Got a couple of videos where they mention accounting in the transcript, but nothing with like an accounting title.

So somebody like this, what I'm gonna do, I go to the about tab on their YouTube channel and you can.

View their email address.

I'm gonna do like a one line intro.

Hey, I run a tax practice. I support X hundred businesses. Like some sort of proof of my expertise. 2 I'm looking to get into supporting food truck businesses. Really specializing in this, knowing their pains in and out. Would love to work with you.

Happy to do your work.

Honestly, I would do it for free if I'm trying to get into a new niche.

And then four, some ideas for how to add value to their channel.

And then like give them some title ideas or something.

Food truck tax saving ideas from a tax pro. Most missed tax deductions for food truck owners.

Stuff like that.

You send a cold email like that. Remember, you gotta keep it concise and you can at least get this person.

On a call and start that relationship.

Now ultimately, what does it look like.

For them to get you in front of their audience? Well, if you can actually like the.

Holy grail is actually a video that.

You do with them because you're providing value to that person.

You are helping them put together a.

Video like writing and producing a video.

That is work.

If you can help them to write it, that might be enough. They may be happy to do that.

Look for opportunities like that. I think those are usually a little better than paid sponsorships. But also a paid sponsorship on a.

Channel like this, like that's gold and that will have value and like bring you good leads for years. It is worth thinking about because in a channel like this you'll get people at every stage. Probably 75% of the people watching this stuff don't yet own a food truck. Think about where you want people in that stage. Do you want them when they go.

Buy their very first food truck?

Do you want successful ones that have five plus food trucks or over some revenue threshold? Think about who your best client is there.

But also don't neglect developing some sort of content for the entry level person. Sometimes the best way to get people.

Into your pipeline long term is like a free guide that will be valuable to them when they aren't quite to the level where you want them to be a client. So don't also forget about those people. Man, that was almost too easy.

I see a food truck association in.

Los Angeles and that's just because I'm googling it from la. So you've got some associations you could.

Try to add value to.

Normally that's like coming in and doing a talk, maybe guest writing a blog post or a newsletter. This one was almost too Easy. Let's go to the next one. I think you get the idea.

Why don't we like, we just don't.

Do enough of this.

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Okay. Second one was freelance creatives. Honestly, that's probably not specific enough. Maybe like creative agencies beyond, I don't know, a million revenue or 5 million in revenue. If you're going to go down to like just solo freelancers, you probably want it to be specific and like photography or illustration or animation or video editing or something like that. But just googling freelance creative YouTube channels. I get Creative Freelance Life.

They've got 3,000 subs. Publish videos on a regular basis just.

Around the nuts and bolts of managing the business. This one has one video that kind.

Of touches on tax.

But you could pitch them on something that would be particularly relevant for freelancers. Honestly, there are tons and tons like content creators around all of this stuff. I mean from your Peter McKinnon's who have gone more mainstream, who got their start in just creating content for freelance photographers. So this is a pretty easy one to find like online influencers for.

Oh, you know what I forgot to.

Do on the food truck one? I wanted to find a podcast food trucker school. How to start, run and grow a successful food truck business. Love stuff like this.

If you search creative agency podcasts, there.

Are tons of people just talking about the business of running creative agencies. Again, you probably wanna get more specific. The more specific the influencer. Like you can always assume their audience will be a much larger bubble around that. Like a Peter McKinnon type where they've got 10 million subscribers. Talking about photography, that's probably not your jam. You probably want to find a micro influencer who's really good specifically talking to the type of person that you want as a client particularly. I think like associations are a great opportunity here. And obviously around all things creative there's a massive, massive number of associations. That is a awesome collection of a very specific type of people who are actively doing it. If there's a downside with influencers where I think you get really roi, good ROI working with them, there's probably a big percentage of their audience that are just kind of exploring that thing and may not be the type of person you want to work with yet. Associations like they are the people who are doing it. And then the holy grail to me I think is actually like live conferences. I couldn't find any around the food trucks. There were a lot of Food service conferences. I couldn't find anything specific to food trucks, but there's tons for all things creative. The upside to me, and this applies to accounting too, you know that I love accounting conferences.

The upside of in person conferences to.

Me are it's people who are actually doing it, but it's also people who are investing in themselves being there. And so you, you cut through all of the online noise and you have a real person standing across from you. And so you immediately are ahead of, you know, 99% of the people in their network who they've never met. But you yourself are going to learn a ton about the business and the problems and the headaches that those people have just by being there. And there's actually a lot of social proof to be gained by the fact that you were there also. So most of the people you could potentially work with will not be at that conference, but if they know that you were there, that's impressive, you know, especially if you're an accountant. How many accountants were at this conference for this specific thing when they know that about you? Maybe it comes up in a podcast interview or something like that. They're gonna be like, there is nobody else that understands me and what I do like this person because they were there. So I kind of think in person conferences are like the holy grail. But my second favorite is probably influencer stuff because that's just like so high ROI. And that stuff on YouTube, for example, will live out there for years, finding new people.

Okay, what was the last one?

Home based e commerce crafts makers.

Let's just go out to Etsy.

Is there like a trending shop thing on Etsy? What does this podcast come to? You know, there are a hundred podcasts out there about running Etsy shops, Handmade and beyond.

Podcast to Etsy and beyond Etsy Conversations Etsy success Podcast the jam with Marmalead.

Beginner Mom Boss Squeak and shout show the Merryweather Council Wolf moves only simplify your sales Podcast man, I love this. Like at home creative types like this. There's so much content for these types of people. Maybe what would be useful here is like if there is an abundance of content, what is the best way one for you right now? I would say if you're a small firm and ultimately you're not serving a huge number of like users or clients, I would say yourself, plug into these influencers to find one that you enjoy and like find the person who's actually publishing consistently feels like they have like meaningful things to say rather than just kind of regurgitating the normal stuff.

And if that's somebody that you would.

Vibe with, that would make for a great person to pull in as a client, learn more about and then kind of find more ways to work together with them. And for me that usually is, that usually looks like more of a micro influencer than like the big larger scale. Like I'm sure there are, there are people with millions of subscribers where all they do is they talk about how do you run a business from home, doing this crafts makery type of stuff. But that's probably not the channel for you. It might be. I don't know. The thing with a big channel like that is it's going to be a huge amount of volume and it's going to be a huge amount of people just kind of like getting a sniff.

Of it for the first time.

And so, you know, the best thing to go on a channel like that is like if you have some sort of product or resource that you give away or maybe like a one time hundred dollars buy, you know, here's kind of best practices for setting up, getting yourself set up for the most streamlined kind of accounting and tax experience.

But what I would get most excited.

About would probably be the more micro influencers that are building content around the folks who have a little bit of experience doing this successfully and as digging into the more nuanced problems. So not the channels that will feel like a get rich quick sort of thing, rather the channels that are like, hey, here's how to manage like these awful. Like there's some tips for managing awful nexus rules and integration issues. And like the things that are the real big headaches when you're actually trying to grow a profitable business like this. Those are the ones that I would get more excited about and that would start with me reaching out and saying here's what I do and I do it specifically for people like you and would love to do it for you, bar none, no questions asked.

Let's work together because I want to.

Work with a lot more people like you.

And then secondarily, here's a few ways.

That I may be able to add value for you. I see you have a weekly newsletter. Would it be cool if I guest wrote one on, you know, the most commonly missed tax deductions?

I see you have a podcast where you interview people.

Would you be interested in talking about kind of the accounting and tax headaches that come with running this type of business when you're not a content creator? I don't think you quite see on the other side how much work it is for those people to consistently produce content and have fresh ideas and fresh voices every single week, or whatever that cadence is. You have to have something that you feel like is meaningful that you can put in there. And when somebody comes to you with.

Something that is good, like the advantage we have is there's not that many.

People talking about what we do through their very specific lens. So when you have somebody that could come in and really add something valuable to their audience, that's exciting for them and more than likely they're going to take you up on that and that's going to be a great opportunity for you to then get in front of their audience.

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Put a link in the show notes below.

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I tell you what, that was actually.

Way easier than I thought it was going to be. But how many of you out there have actually, like, gone down this rabbit hole of thinking like, could I build a relationship with, you know, an influential person in this space or with an association? I think there's some very obvious ones, like the big associations where they have, you know, the ada, the American Dental association at all of their big events, they have like big firms that are sponsoring stuff. And that all kind of feels sort of big and obvious in corporate to me. But the cooler, like, smaller firm, more nuanced angle of that is a little more grassroots, I think.

And you find some really smart people that way too. And so that's a great way to get in front of all of those people. But as we've been talking about over.

The last week, week and a half.

What is the killer offer that you.

Can put out there that will get people to convert on this initial project with you?

If you go out and you talk.

About what you do and all you have is all you do is accounting and tax or one or the other, yes, you will probably get clients who will just come and be like, I have to have an accountant, I have to have a tax person. So I guess I'll work with this one. So it is better than nothing. But the better version of that, the better version than that that we've been talking about, I think, is when you have an offer that is an initial project you do together, so that then.

They are totally dazzled by you, you will also learn if you want to.

Keep working with them in the course of doing that limited SC kind of project. And then if you do want to.

Work with them when it comes time to become an ongoing client, they are jacked. Like, they are so excited. They're probably willing to pay 2x because.

They have this great experience in this initial project together.

So what is an offer that you.

Could build for each of these three different types of niches? The first one Food truck owners.

I'll tell you what, I was just.

In a book club thing in my accountant community and we were talking through like what are kind of some bonuses and offers and that sort of thing that you could build around an accounting practice. One that actually Logan came up with, that I just love is like just.

A video walking them through their past couple of years tax returns. Like oftentimes we just kind of give.

This away, this kind of video delivery with a tax return or something like that. And if you're going to take a client in here and want to see their prior tax returns anyways and kind of review them, and within the scope.

Of this video, I don't think you.

Need to go as far as to say this is wrong or anything like.

That, but it can literally be.

I will help you make sense of your last year's tax return in 90 seconds. Like you will walk through it, you.

Will say here what all of these.

Things are now in the course of them watching that, they may be more confused and be like, well, that's this. And that doesn't seem right. Like, great, like we can do a diagnostic, like an actual more technical review of the past years if we decide to start working together. But that initial offer could be like, demystify your food truck tax return in 14 days or something like that. And they provide that information. You put together kind of a 90 second video that's like, hey, here's what I'm seeing on your tax return. This isn't really tax advice, but I'll help you understand what these numbers on these forms mean.

And you can put it specifically through.

The lens of food truck owners and.

What'S normal for food truck owners and.

What'S not normal for them.

And like, I think a lot of people would probably take you up on that and on the other side of.

That project, they will be like, well.

Shoot, I've never gotten a video from any accountant ever.

And I probably haven't even gotten an accountant who understands the food truck business. This person is just fundamentally better. And now when you start that ongoing engagement, it's like at a totally, totally different level. But I do think like to, to.

Make the most of these appearances, the.

Stuff you're going to do with other people. I think it's helpful if you have an offer that you can drive them back to the second example, freelance creatives. I mean, you can use the one that we just talked about. But one thing that I know a lot of early stage creatives are kind of straddling is like, should I be.

A schedule C or should I be an S Corp?

You could run like, like a sort of scenario analysis of what it would look like for them to be either one probably gotta be some consideration for like here's how reasonable compensation works but like don't overthink this. Like this isn't a recommendation. Like this is purely here's kind of a one pager and how we approach these things specifically as it pertains to, you know, your needs if you are growing beyond being A Schedule C. 3rd.

1 Home Based E commerce crafts makers. One I really like that I've shared.

Before is like kind of roasting their tech stack. So if you work with other people that do the Etsy stuff, you know the right and the wrong ways to get that stuff back to an accounting file. And so you just have a little one page report of like here's what you're doing right?

Here's what you can do better. It may not even go as far as making recommendations, in fact it probably shouldn't.

I don't know, it depends on like.

How far you want to go with that.

But if the offer is like, you know, on average people will save X number of hours per week by being on the right accounting stack and they can come in and I don't know, put a slap a price on it for a few hundred bucks. You will kind of review their app stack and how well those systems talk to each other and offer some sort of insight in return. That's a pretty compelling offer where it's like everybody is like, oh I could save some time, yeah, why not do that? And they're probably a little bit interested in learning a little more about you. Also I think if we just sit.

Back and we just wait for those.

People to come and be tax and accounting clients, that's a big commitment that requires them severing ties with their past.

Provider, which is awkward and they're going.

To be slow to do that for a lot of reasons.

A standalone offer is just a single.

Project that they can do without having to dump anybody.

That's also great for you too because in the same way it's a big commitment for them, it's a big commitment.

For you and you don't know anything about working with them. And if they would actually be like a good client to work with somebody you actually want to add to the list.

Now if you don't have a super.

Super specific like avatar profile niche type of person that you are already working.

With, don't let that like preclude you from doing this in a specific domain. Like, who would be fun, somebody that would be fun to work with? Maybe it's someone where you already listen to that podcast. You're already interested in that industry. That's probably a great place to start.

If you don't already have your finger on one.

Remember, when you start doing this, none of these things are forever decisions. Most of the time there are exceptions, but for Most small businesses, 90% of.

The work, the fulfillment, the tax and the accounting work, it's not going to be all that much different to how you support your other clients. Again, there's a few exceptions to that.

But if you don't have that super specific person in mind yet, man, make one up and go out there and start. Have a landing page that has copy specific to that type of person. What is the worst that could happen? Even if it doesn't work out, man, you're going to learn a ton in.

The process about why it didn't work.

That will better inform the group that you next try to go after. The only way you lose in this setup is if you just, just don't.

Go after anybody and you don't learn anything. Right?

I'll tell you, that is one great.

Thing the web has enabled is better visibility into the circles where these people are kind of connecting around influential individuals.

Around associations, around events.

It's never been easier to learn about that stuff and find those things online.

So I would love to hear if.

You give this a try how it.

Goes and I'll see you next time.