090 Should Your Accounting Firm Start A Podcast?

I'm an accountant. Should I start a podcast for my firm? Let's talk about it. There's good reasons to do it and bad reasons to do it. If you want to build your firm around paid intakes, this sort of offer that attracts clients in. If somebody makes a killer referral, do you kind of, do you let them in the side door? And I recently put out a list of practice management systems that I think everybody should be choosing off of. How did I come to that list? Like, what is my criteria for the ones that are worthwhile? Come on in. It's Q and A. Whatever. Today is Wednesday on Jason Daly. I don't think I've said this. Thank you for the questions that come in. Questions are my sort of grounding reality of like, what do people actually care about and want to talk more about? And as opposed to me just sitting here in a cave and pontificating. Right. The better version of this is, is the one that's more informed by like, what are the meaningful problems you're having right now and the discussions that we should focus on. So thank you for the questions Mo asked in a YouTube comment. It was on the video about how to get people to promote your firm for you. He said, this is actually on my mind lately, how to reach out to people in the same niche that can help promote what I do. For example, I work with nursing homes. Perhaps I should do a podcast with an owner. What do you think? Some thoughts specifically on podcasting. Podcasts are really. They're great and they're awful in many ways. They're great because the production is as simple as just about anything. Way simpler to produce than video. So unless you've already got kind of the infrastructure for managing video, I generally don't recommend doing video podcasts like I do if you just so much easier when it's audio only. But the weird thing about podcasts is there's no real element of discovery or algorithm based discovery in the same way that there is with your tweets and your LinkedIn posts and your YouTube video podcast. Discovery is really almost entirely word of mouth. And that's good in some ways, bad in other ways. It's definitely a challenge for me when everybody's working in the same algorithm. You can win out immediately on the first thing that you publish on merit. If that thing that you made is better than, you know, know anybody, anything anybody else makes, if people stick around, they watch that thing to the end. They love it, they click on it. It's going to get chucked like straight to the top of the algorithm. Your very first post. With podcasting, that's not really possible. So I would say if you're going to do a podcast, prepare for it to be a really slow burn. Like, the only reason anybody listens to this podcast, I think, is I had an existing audience. But to be clear, even, you know, building that audience on Twitter and YouTube, I was publishing two videos a week for a year and didn't even have 500 subscribers on YouTube. So the people that hop on the bandwagon now and like, oh, wow, the production value is so impressive and this and that, they don't see the fact that you got here is because you put in years, like investing more into it than anybody else. So if you're ready to do something like that, that is a grind. Just know that that's what it's going to be. And there's a whole bunch of different forms of podcasts you could do. But one really kind of under appreciated upside of interview based podcasts is it's literally you sitting down and having conversations with the people that you most want to talk to. Really smart people. And even if there aren't any mics recording, man, oftentimes that's enough for it to be worthwhile. Think about the category that you're in and look around out there. The place to start is to just be doing interviews on all the podcasts that are already out there having these discussions. And some spaces are going to be noisier than others. So a few days back when we generated some niches with ChatGPT, one of them was like, people, you know, selling craft stuff that they make at home on Etsy. That's a really noisy space. Nursing home podcasts, I don't know, maybe that's a little more quiet. Maybe that would be easier. Like, my threshold here is the same as it is when we talked about writing a book. Somebody needs to see the title, and it feels so specific to them that they will stop what they're doing and instantly subscribe. That's the level of specificity that you have to find with this stuff. So just podcasts about nursing homes, like, that's probably not specific enough until you've gotten to the point where the person who would be your perfect client just sees the title and sees maybe the titles for the most recent podcast and thinks, oh man, like, I just have to listen to this simply because it's so specific to me, that's where you want to be now of all of the different places that you could publish, I think honestly LinkedIn may be best bang for the buck right now if you're going to invest in a single platform. That being said, there's an interesting thing with podcasts, and it's the reason that people make, you know, top hundred influential lists and all that stuff. There's a certain amount of power that is granted to you when you are the maker or the decider of who is allowed into a platform. You know, if you are the maker of the list, there is value in simply being the maker of the list. And to a degree, the same thing holds up on a podcast where you choose who you're going to interview. It's flattering for the individual who's invited to come on, especially if you're in a space where there aren't many opportunities to have these conversations. How many nursing homeowners are doing interviews about the business of running nursing homes? Like, probably not many. So just something that specific may feel novel to them and you're actually in the process of calling them out and bringing them in like you were going to earn some goodwill from the people involved who are presumably smart, well connected people just by having them on the pod. So there's actually a lot of like, sort of positive externalities around just the strict ROI calculation of how many new clients are gonna find me if I do this podcast. So. So I do think you're headed down the right path thinking about interviewing folks in this space. Cause you're gonna learn a ton just from sitting down with them. You're gonna build that network just from the goodwill that comes from pulling them into a podcast. But the other thing to consider here is, are you any good at it? Which is, you know, is kind of an oof sort of realization. Reality is like, there's certain people that it's just, it doesn't come supernaturally for them to like talk about this stuff in a super engaging way. And that's totally fine. Like, it's better to know yourself because that may mean that you may get like a better return for your time writing or kind of doing different mediums. Like me, I super enjoy comedy. Like, I can kind of make up silly things on my feet. And that's why, you know, like YouTube was a fun outlet for me and you can definitely develop all those things and get better at them over time. But there's probably a level of self awareness there too, that ought to inform what the right answer is. Question from romeo in the YouTube comments just on the recent videos we've been doing about building an offer, attracting clients to that offer Rather than just attracting them to I do bookkeeping or I do tax work. Romeo said, I know it's better to always have a sales funnel. I think he's alluding to the more the offer approach, since you can always have better clients. But down the line, do the majority of new clients still come from referrals rather than new leads? I would say the mix of referrals versus new people probably ought to be a product of how much you want to keep doing the same thing versus how much you want to get to a new, different type of client. If you really got things humming and you've got a client that pays you really well, even if, you know, maybe that's Only the top 10 percentile of your client base and all you needed to do is just find more of that 10%, then great, like, go all in on referrals, but just with that type of client, not referrals for your whole client base. You don't want referrals from the rest of them. You want referrals from the ones up there. For me, I think if you're always focused on referrals, you kind of. You miss that element of the even better thing that's out there that maybe you couldn't even, you know, imagine. But I would say it's just probably a question of where you're investing. Do you feel like you're in a good spot and you want to go deeper with the kind of ideal client that you already have, or are you looking to get into something new? Now, just because they are a referral doesn't necessarily mean that they're like, sidestepping the funnel in any way. Oftentimes it just means they're coming in at maybe a different point in that funnel where they're kind of skipping past some of the screening that you would do with just like a random person that calls your office number as much as possible. I try to keep that process the exact same for everybody so that when that client comes in the door, you have all of the same information about them that you would have about any other client, I think there's a way to craft that experience that makes it feel maybe a little more personal because they're buddies with Craig or something like that. But at the end of the day, I think you pretty much want them running through the machine the same way, whether they're a cold call or whether they're somebody that got referred from another client. Like the main counter argument, I would have to. That is, I do, like, sometimes there's this impression that oh, this really, really good client sent us this other client that may be really good. So. So we got a white glove kind of give them that white glove level service as soon as they hit the front door. And I probably used to think this way, but if that really good client that we already have is really good, like we ought to be showing them white glove level service. So I don't know that there's really any special treatment necessary. If they are a really good client, then set the bar when they come in at the level that it's gonna be maintained as you continue to service the client. I don't know, I've just seen some goofy situations where like everybody bends over backwards and goes to the end of the earth for this, like potential referral because their other good clients sent them in. 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, 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. 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. 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 sort of, 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. Seth Norris on the same subject, I'm in the process of building this out and testing it on a small scale for a first launch. Building kind of attracting new clients around the concept of an offer. I love the idea of this becoming the main channel for new clients and replacing the free discovery call. But what would you do if a prospective client reaches out from a referral or other source and inquires about your ongoing services? So you've got this offer and you're attracting people to this offer. Well, what if somebody just reaches out and they're like, can you just do my tax stuff? Can you just do my accounting stuff? I'll be honest. I think the offers that you put out there around the year to attract people to your firm need to be seasonal. They need to be built around what are the pain points that that person is feeling at that given point in the year. Is there an estimated tax payment coming up? Is the end of the calendar year coming up? And so the, the offer that you're putting out there to attract people is changing. And you probably have multiple flavors of this offer kind of sitting on the shelf. But behind the scenes they're, you know, what goes into fulfilling them is probably more or less the same. And when you get a referral or you get somebody that comes in just wanting the kind of the ongoing service, a more traditional way of bringing somebody in, I think you still have that offer there. You probably just call it something else. So if your way of attracting in new dog groomers is tax pre summer tune up, or I don't know, like if they have some sort of peak season, maybe you do something before that. That's targeted specifically at them. But behind the scenes, what you're doing is like, does their year to date accounting look correct? Like, we're going to run this tax projection kind of a diagnostic of like, what are the state of things behind the scenes here? And if somebody at that same time comes in, they just want to be a tax client or an accounting client, I'm probably going to do more or less the same thing for them. But I may have, I may call it a different thing and that deliverable might look a little bit different. And so that's probably like some sort of paid diagnostic. And so you could call that, you know, discovery or whatever that looks like. But even for those new clients coming in by way of referral, you can still tell them, you know, we need to, like all of our client relationships start with this sort of diagnostic for us to get an understanding of where you're at and ensure that we're actually going to be able to help you. And this is, you know, paid discovery, whatever you want to call it. I think for me, this needs to go way beyond hopping on a call or just having a calendar link where they pay you money and then you have a conversation and then you make a decision or ultimately no amount of sitting down and talking with that person is going to reveal all of the dirty deeds that you can find in the general ledger or in past tax filings, or in past unfiled tax filings. And you need to cover your own hide and do that due diligence beforehand before you commit to them becoming an ongoing client. But then you get the big side benefit of when you get through that they should be impressed. And oftentimes you will uncover things that are valuable or found money to them, and that has them in a different state of mind when you then do ultimately engage them on an ongoing basis. So if somebody was a referral and they're just coming in wanting ongoing services, I think you, you probably think about those deals that you hold out and what those look like or, sorry, those offers. And you probably just have a version of that offer that is this, maybe even like a friends and family framing of, you know, whatever this mandatory upfront, you know, diagnostic is. And you're not, you're not framing it as like gatekeeping as much as like, hey, we want to learn about. You want to learn about your business and we need to do a bit of like due diligence to see what we're working with here. So it's probably more or less a version of the same thing you're just going to present it differently. It's probably got a different landing page. And even if it feels a little more personal, because it is, you know, a referral from a respected client like that probably goes a long ways for everyone involved. Hopefully that answers the question. I got a bunch of questions about last week. I put out a list, it was like 17 apps or something like that. And I basically said a lot of our tech decisions stem from not having the right core system in place. So when you don't have the right core system that your firm is running on, you end up with all of these like duct taped bubble gum, paperclip additional things onto your tech stack because the core of tool doesn't do what you need it to do. I've seen a bunch of firms that are on the wrong core systems, and I'm talking really about firms 100 employees and less who are on Excel or who are on the practice management system of their tax suite, that sort of thing where the functionality that those tools offer are super, super limited relative to a modern cloud practice management system. And sometimes they realize this, sometimes they haven't seen, seen anything else, they just don't know the difference. But I mean the, the hundreds of firm owners I've talked to who have gone off of these systems to cloud practice management systems and say they will never ever look back. There's just like certain things that today at least, and I can be convinced otherwise down the road, like there are certain hard lines that can be drawn and it's actually very rare that I go as far as to really exclude anybody from anything. But I came to this list of, you know, basically, unless you're using one of these 17 sort of core tools for small accounting firms, I don't really have any tech advice for you because the platform that is at the core of your firm is not really like good enough to build around. And no amount of cobbling together a bunch of additional extra stuff to make it good enough is gonna get you to a really good place. Because even then you get all those things working together. Well, if this other tool will do the same thing in a centralized place and that system can talk with all aspects of what's happening there, that's just a fundamentally better setup. Now my business is admittedly complex because I have advertisers. I mean, you'll see, you know, ads on this show. At the end of the day, I have to, you know, kind of come to the decision of what makes the most sense for me. And I do give people a lot of Grace and I even say like, this is just where I see things at today and I'm going to have blind spots and I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but I have to kind of come to that conclusion myself and put it out there. And then you leave it up to the advertisers to see like, do they like that or not. I don't feel like I can like completely hide under a rock and be like, no, everything's good, everybody's great. Otherwise I become like the thing that I most despise, which is like somebody who's just kind of willing to be a shill for anybody, right. And like when I set out like what I feel super fortunate about just in like what's enabled me to do more content creation and build this business was I had realized I had my paid account community from the beginning that was like the financial driver for being able to produce a bunch of this content. So I wasn't reliant upon partnerships. Like honestly, almost every other person in our space is who creates any kind of content because it's those partnerships that pay the bills. So like you can hardly, I don't know, you can hardly blame them. But I was super fortunate that I had this independent community that people would pay to be a part of and that was able to fund everything from day one so that you didn't have to do these official tie ups. And like I don't make my money by selling QBO affiliate or you know, affiliate with anybody else in the space or having official, you know, partnerships with brands. The only thing I do is I sell ads which are like very obvious, very blatant, you know, silly ad music playing, sponsorships because everybody knows how those work and everybody knows that, you know, kind of the, the ad read is kind of this encapsulated thing and that's the game. And I do genuinely love like the fact that I have a platform that can enable cool companies to be successful. And you know, I talk about companies without them giving me money. And this, you know, this list I put out on social media of kind of these 17 tools to start with. Like I'm actually doing a main channel YouTube video on all those tools. When did that publish? That published last Sunday. So I love having the opportunity to highlight companies doing cool stuff Like I was highlighting uncat super early days when hardly anybody was using them saying like, oh my gosh, this is such a novel way to handle uncategorized expenses. Did some stuff with keeper, did some stuff recently with digits because I like that they're investing in AI for us. So it is admittedly, like, it's a little sticky in some ways, just in the nature of what my business is. But I just, you gotta be careful to like, never set yourself up in a situation where you don't feel like you can't be honest. All of my, like, the ads that we do with brands, like, they all say none of this is, is going to increase the likelihood that, like, we will say nice things about you on the channel. But that isn't generally a problem for me because, like, I don't, I don't highlight. I don't know, I don't really go out of my way to highlight the bad things that are happening. I think, honestly, there's enough, there's enough like, negative conversation in our profession about all the. All the wrong ways to do things when what was always most helpful for me is like, it's really easy to put your finger on, like, oh, this firm or this company or whatever should not do it this way. It's much harder to put your finger on the alternative to say, here's the right way to do it, you know. And so what I draw energy from is meeting other rad people who are running firms. A lot of that stuff happens in the accounting community and just being super inspired by where they're finding success, the new stuff that they're trying. And then I have the opportunity to share that, to kind of be the mouthpiece for like, hey, here's a better way to go about doing this stuff. And I think as long as you lean into that positivity, you honestly don't get tangled up in like, the controversy of, I don't know, making people mad. At least it hasn't been a problem for me thus far. I did say in all of those things that none of the practice management systems from tax platforms right now are worth using. So I probably did. I don't know, maybe I just shut the door on a bunch of those folks. But I would absolutely love to be proved wrong. If you run one of those. If you're working on cool stuff, awesome. But to be totally honest with you, I don't think that any of those people are even watching the stuff I make or listening. I think they're honestly serving a larger firm and I just don't think that they're that plugged into, like, new media and kind of the way that things are progressing. I'll tell you what, though, the whole, like, tech decision and just the whole sales process with apps right now is hard. It's super overwhelming. I annoyed people by putting out this list of like, you know, 17 apps to start with and that was like some people thought that was too exclusive. When it's like this is still 17 apps. Do you realize the reality of running a firm and having to go down the list and say like, oh great, thank you for paring this down to 17 or however many it was apps to start with. But I really don't want to go do sales calls with all 17 of these apps. So is there a way that you can fast track the learning here for me? Faster? Like that's the reality of running a firm right now. It requires so much work, so much due diligence. You do not want to sit on a sales call with every single one of these companies who will gatekeep the information that you actually want that you need to make that decision. We're actually working on some stuff to create better transparency around different software platforms to hopefully shortcut some of this learning for you. I know I always say talk with your peers. Like that's a great way to shortcut a lot of it. Crowdsource some of that research. But there's like, I think there's a better way to like, like promote transparency in a way that users can get behind and software companies can get behind. Gang this episode is sponsored in part by firm 360360 degrees let me tell you about Joy. Joy has been using Firm360 since September and 2020 because she was looking for a project management solution that would help her gain better visibility into her projects. We all know how important that is. Specifically, she wanted something that would handle recurring projects so that stuff just automatically populated. Unlike that stinky old spreadsheet you're using. Am I right? She liked the ability to automatically pull her clients bank statements into the system. What? No, really? Quote My productivity has greatly increased with firm360. I have better overall visibility to what tasks my team is working on. Hey, be more like Joy. Do you have a 360 degree view of everything that's going on in your firm right now? Be honest with yourself. Look in the mirror. If you don't check out firm360, put a link in the show notes below. Gang this episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. Listen. This week on Tales from the Hub we've been talking about the importance of a platform that automates your firm's client requests. And recently we heard about how super smart accounting firm adopt a Client hub. And their biggest productivity improvement has come from utilizing the Client Tasks feature. Client Hub has taken a novel approach to the client task feature. It's built right into the firm's workflow. In a job and Client Hub, you can add two type of tasks, Client tasks and internal firm tasks. For example, got a monthly bookkeeping job. The firm creates a client task in that job that requests the bank statement from the client and that task automagically gets sent to the client when the job is supposed to start. You don't have to wait for Tina to send that thing over and then realize why is this month end close not done on the 15th? Oh Tina, did you ever email them about? Nope. Thanks for nothing, Tina. And of course with the web and mobile apps, Client Hub is so simple for clients to use. It's easy for them to get you the answers that you need. And if they forget, it's gonna pester them with those auto reminders. With Client Hub, super smart firm always has the client docs before they need to even start the work period. Wow, exclamation mark. That is this week's episode from Tales from the Hub. Check out Client Hub at ClientHub app or the link in the show notes. Man, there's a lot of spicy stuff in the works right now. I've learned my lesson to not talk about anything until it's ready to ship or you at least have a scheduled ship date. But I will say the amazing privilege of like the podcast being successful and the YouTube channel, all that, being able to sell ads through those channels, the accountant community, it has put me in this, what I feel is a super fortunate place where we can pump some of that money back into the profession in a meaningful way to kind of raise all tides because there is so little shared infrastructure within our profession. If you think about open source software, and I've talked about this before, like there's so much investment going into like the language models that Facebook just released and like there's so much investment that goes into open source and other domains or where is any of that in our profession? Where are the transaction data sets or the tax data sets or anything that can be used to train models that will help us to develop these models that then the software companies can leverage to make better products. Like where is any of this shared infrastructure? It just doesn't exist. And until it does, it's going to be really hard to like build meaningful AI enabled applications around getting bookkeeping done more efficiently, getting tax stuff done more efficiently. And right now you have all these companies pouring their own cash into making their own version of it that will have limitations, but no aspect of that will ever be shared. So it's only ever going to be so good. So you have all these siloed companies pouring AI research money into, like, the exact same things, but nobody is sharing any of that. As opposed to building more shared, really good resources within this profession that software companies can then build on and invest in and all that stuff, it's just like, it's all way too proprietary. And it's because especially in the tax base, like, it's all controlled by old money. But I think there's a lot more that can be done to enable more shared investment, shared infrastructure to make all the tools that we use better. I know, very abstract, but I'm excited for some stuff that we've got coming this year. Okay, that's enough teasing for today. You got more cues, Drop them in the comments. What did you enjoy this week? What's been the best episode of the past couple weeks? What do you think of the Jason Daly house band? That was weird, right? Love to hear it all and I'll see you tomorrow.