101 Why Trust Will Drive Pricing In Your Accounting Firm

Today we're gonna talk about how you can weasel your way into those prospective clients brains to get them to pay 2x5x10x what they would otherwise pay you and build a level of love and trust that no AI robot is ever going to be able to replace. We're talking about parasocial relationships, the good and the bad of that and how you can lean into it in your accounting firm. Come on in, the water's warm. It's Jason D. All right. I am still in the city of Wind Chicago. Last episode was 100th episode, which is a big deal. And I don't know, in classic Jason fashion, I thought it was episode 99. I spent the whole time building it up to the big 1 00, when that was in fact the big 1 00. So we're now on 101. Whoops. But high fives, firm handshakes all around. Imagine starting a podcast and making 100 episodes of it. It's still, I mean, it's ridiculous to me. I think it's ridiculous to most people, but I don't know that's how it is until you just do it. And honestly, a lot of cool stuff has come from it already. A lot of great friendships. I think we're helping people manage firms, I don't know, in a more sustainable way. I love to continue specifically with this podcast, investing in, like, the conversation around these episodes. I think that's so powerful because there's so many people with so much to add and I'm a probably a YouTube guy to Twitter guy first and foremost, which is very much about discussions. But podcasting is not necessarily that way. Right now, about 2/3 of the listeners here tune in on the podcast, not on YouTube, and like, there isn't really commenting through podcasting. Right? So I do want to continue encouraging people to engage in the comments. Depending on the podcast player you use, there will be a link to the YouTube video on each of these episodes in the show Notes. I would encourage you to get involved in the conversation, not only for you to learn from other people with experience, but for those of you with experience to be able to say, man, this was my experience, if it helps anybody, or I disagree with this or yeah, I had a similar experience here. I have had so many of those moments in my life where somebody took the time to share that little nugget of wisdom, and it probably took years off of me pumping effort into the wrong direction. There's just so many examples of that in my life. And that all starts with y'. All being willing to share your input, share your feedback and your lived experiences, which are unique to you. But the more we amplify them, the more they're going to help everybody else. And that's like I shared a few episodes ago, that's the reason that I know anything as people have been willing to share stuff with me, made me such a more confident and fulfilled firm owner just by being able to share those experiences with other people. And so if this podcast can be a hub for that, that is the very, very best version of this podcast. So thank you very much for the people who tune into this. If there's one thing that I want to keep building on over the next hundred episodes, it's just that it's the community around it. And I don't like, I have no interest or plans in like building in a community platform or anything like that. To me, the community around this is what's happening in the comments and in the discussions on social media around these episodes. So thanks for being here. Heart emoji. But today, let's get down to busy biz. Okay. Parasocial relationships. I plan on this kind of being the hundredth episode as, I don't know. Thank you to the people who tune into this on a regular basis. Parasocial relationships are a fascinating thing and something that I think we can lean into in our firms that will drive profitability in a really exciting way and also a huge defense to an age of AI where general tools will continue to get better and better, and we'll have more conversation with cold, heartless apps, avatars of expertise, which will make us long even more for human connection. And this sort of thing isn't as good as you and I sitting down for breakfast and sharing a bowl of oatmeal, but it's the next best thing and it's infinitely scalable. So, like, my brain's been turned on to a level of leverage that the Internet enables, where now I see the world and I value my time in a way that's totally different, where there's just certain things I'm unwilling to do anymore because I can invest time in things that are super high leverage that any number of people can consume. There's very few things in this world, and especially in the work that we do, where if one incremental person comes into it or requires no additional work from you, like, that's a really powerful thing. And what goes into building those parasocial relationships enables just that. The notion that you can build trust with people at scale is super, super powerful. So there's a lot of good and bad connotations around this stuff because as with social media and most things, the mainstream viewpoint on it is that of like mainstream celebrity. So like when people talk about social media, they think about mega influencers and your Kim Kardashians and stuff like that. I can tell you my social media doesn't have a whole lot in common with Kim Kardashian. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, maybe I haven't made the right investments in my person, but it's just, it's not the same for me. And so way down in our itty bitty little version of, of social media, there's a tremendous amount of value there. Like, I launched my accountant community and we launched with about 65 unbelievably talented accounting firm owners. I launched that with like 600 Twitter followers and I've been on Twitter for maybe a year. By any normal metrics, that's that audience is just a pittance, right? But there was so much value exchanged there because there was so much specificity and there were such smart people that were willing to collaborate and share with each other. Like there are so many itty bitty versions of content and trust building and community that are so immensely valuable. So I actually met Duke, as in Duke loves tax on TikTok. He's like the biggest, I think he's like the biggest tax creator on TikTok right now. I met him the other night at the conference here. Here. It is really hard to not get sucked into the vanity metrics of mainstream stuff. Like the allure of building a, you know, 1 million subscriber channel and publishing a video that can get a million views. And that's something personally that I really struggle with. I've built my whole business here around a channel with, you know, not even 10,000 subscribers. And if you consume like general creator content about how to build a creator business, like micro channels are channels under a hundred thousand, 000 subs. And so like it is hard to combat the allure of making mainstream stuff that will get like those big numbers. But ultimately it comes down to what can you build a business around? And it's very hard to build a business around something mainstream. It's much easier to build a business around something very, very specific for a specific type of person. And those are the people that are going to pay you more anyways. So we kind of have to like, I don't know, not get sucked into the vanity metrics of views and subscribers and all that stuff and instead double down to like, what is going to enable my business. 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. 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 gonna get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said, you know what, we're gonna build our own pipeline in the Philippines. 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 like totally red pilled me to like, oh geez. Like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com this episode is sponsored in part by Copilot Gang. I like tech as much as the next guy. I like finding new apps, plugging new stuff into my stack. But you know what I won't stand for is a scattered client experience. Imagine this dream world where a client can log into one thing and get access to all the things. Easier said than done right now, right? Because you got all these different tools with magic links and, and log into this, log into that. To get like all of that stuff out of a single portal is really hard right now. Oh, that was until Copilot. It is an all in one portal platform. It's not like a here's how to do all your workflow sort of thing. It is a, here's a super powerful platform because you know who knows best how to put that together? You, you know what your clients need and you can even customize it down to the client, down to the client group. Got a bunch of great built in functions, but you can also embed other apps straight there into it. So you have one set seamless experience without any seams. Popular apps people are embedding in there calendly. Ever heard of it? Jotform, Airtable, Google Sheets, Power Bi ClickUp, Google, Data Studio, Typeform, Excel. You can embed all that stuff straight into their portal. No more hopping around all those different places. To learn more about this one, check out the link in the show notes or head over to copilot.com so back on the subject of parasocial relationships, just to frame this up a bit, Wikipedia's got a page on parasocial interactions. And this is kind of the. I don't know how this is usually outlined. So it says parasocial interaction refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience such that media audiences interact with Personas as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. So when you watch enough of someone or listen to enough of someone, they feel like your friend. And I've got this with a ton of people. Like, there's a lot of creators that I consume a bunch of stuff with where it feels like you know them. Like, I get that a lot at conferences and stuff like that. And people come up and they're like, nice to meet you. And they do the weird, awkward, like, oh, it feels like I know you sort of thing. And I'm like, yeah, I know. And I have that with. With a bunch of people. I think we all do. Because this is kind of just, in my mind, the future of media. As traditional media goes away, we're consuming more and more nuanced stuff within specific domains that is created just by people. And it's not a Hollywood production. It's how we learn these days. It's podcasts, it's YouTube, it's stuff like that. And along the way, there's certain people that we, for whatever reason, really like, and we keep coming back to them. And over time, you learn more and more about them. And you do, like, you develop this weird relationship. And, like, there's definitely really bad, unhealthy versions of that, right, that are become, like, stalkery and stuff like that. But. And so there's. There are for sure ways to take that too far. But I would be remiss if, like, I didn't acknowledge the value of that. Like, I think just the fact that this is what media is now. I mean, Oprah Winfrey was this for my mom growing up. Like, I don't know that it's a particularly new thing. You just enjoy consuming content from particular people. And the more you do, like, you listen to them and consume more from them than you do almost anybody in your life. For the people, bless your hearts, who tune into this silly show every day, how many other people, like, do you listen to for 30 minutes a day? And I'm the same way. Like, I've got podcasts that I absolutely love, and those people have spent more time in my heads than just about anybody in my life. So you do, like, you build this relationship with them, right or wrong. That is just kind of a byproduct of how we do media these days. And while there are bad versions of that, it's also just a byproduct of being helpful and like, being human and, and stuff like that. So if you're going to create stuff that will help people and put it out there consistently and it's good and people want to tune in every day, I don't know, I think you can hardly. I don't, I don't think you can really see that as a bad or unhealthy thing, an unhealthy byproduct. Now. It's, you don't want to abuse it. You don't want to take advantage of people, for sure. And there's plenty of examples of that happening of putting, you know, shilling things to super fans who will buy anything from that person because they're so into it. So, like, there's absolutely wrong ways to do that. But it's worth acknowledging what a powerful force that is because I think it changes your strategy and how you attract clients, particularly as we are moving toward an era where how the work gets done is more and more automated and we're going to be spending an increasing amount of our time interacting with artificial intelligence. We already do that now with ChatGPT. If you think about the way that email is going, the biggest developments and that stuff over the next 12 months will be really intelligent AI generative replies generating really solid, like new emails from scratch with a single prompt. That stuff is getting simplified by AI. But then if you think about the other side of it, okay, that person just got my AI generated email and now their AI is going to generate a reply for that person to approve. It's all getting more and more impersonal. And we saw this actually during COVID as people were stuck at home. A huge boom for the quote unquote creator economy and the consumption of content online and, and all of that stuff as it all gets more impersonal there we have this human desire to connect with people and we're going to go somewhere to get that. And so consuming like creator content, all that stuff, I think it's going to be on the rise because people are going to put a premium on the human alternative to AI. And it's why ultimately, I think as an advisor, there's absolutely lutely going to be a place for you even alongside really good AI advisors. Because so much of what we do is, goes beyond the scope of tax and accounting. It gets into mental well being and having hard conversations, conversations with employees and marriage counseling. Like we end up doing all these different things that AI ultimately isn't going to do. But AI will also never scratch the itch of that desire for a human relationship or a human advisor. So then if you think through the lens of what that sort of new paradigm of media looks like, where people consume a lot of content from podcasts and YouTube and stuff like that, I think the people who are able to build trust at first scale have a massive advantage over the people who don't. So example of a firm owner who's done this really well, Brandon hall, he's run a real estate podcast for several years. A lot of people that absolutely love that podcast, pretty good sized podcast. But then he runs an accounting practice and tax practice for folks within particular domains in the real estate space. And if you're a person that has listened to that for years, Brandon for you is one of one. Not because he knows anything that maybe other professionals don't know, but because you haven't spent that amount of time with anybody else like you have Brandon. So you can absolutely become one. Like if you think about the ways that we pump our efforts into making our firms unique, you could go out there and develop this unique expertise that only you have. And this is like, this is, I think where accountants probably go more naturally is on the technical end of the spectrum. I'm going to learn this thing, this combination of things that nobody else knows and that's valuable. And it will ensure that you're taking really good care of the clients that you already have. But nobody outside of your client base is going to know about that. Right? Like that's something that is limited to you. So it's limited to that kind of one to one leverage. It may increase the likelihood that the clients you have refer more people. But it is a far call from a podcast that a hundred thousand people will subscribe to to be able to build that trust at like that huge scale. So when somebody comes into Brandon's firm, let's, let's say you have Two different clients. You have a client that just stumb into his website and they're like, okay, this is speaking well to like a specific type of real estate person. This is me. Cool. Like I'm excited about this because it is specific to me and I'm going to be ready to pay much more than the person with the generic firm website that you know, doesn't cater to specifically what I do. So that's great. But if you compare that to another client who's been listening to the podcast for years and feels like they know them and when they first talk with Brandon, they'll have that awkward sort of haha, feels like I know you already sort of encounter. Those people are going to be willing to pay much more because they have a entirely different level, level of trust in that individual and the value that they assign to that person's expertise is much, much higher than those other prospective clients. Now is that wrong? I don't think so. Maybe it goes back to the conversation of is value pricing wrong? I don't think it is. Because ultimately they're willing to pay more because they assign a different value to that person's expertise and they assign a much higher value to that because they've spent so much time with that person consuming content. And in an age of, you know, a new headline every month around this new AI tech that's going to replace advisors and stu like that, ultimately one thing that is this really valuable asset is trust that you can build with people and relationships. And that's why above all else, in, like, in what I do and in my quote unquote, what my business is now is more important than anything else. Any of the behind the scenes projects or something that you're going to build to sell someday or anything like that. Above all else is attracting people, being helpful and building trust with folks. And that takes years to do and to scale and all of that. And I'm, I'm, it's why I stopped. Like this podcast is a worthwhile investment for me because I'm, I'm able to go really deep with people, they're able to spend time with you and you build that trust with them that is the ultimate moat for anything. So if I went out and I bought a practice management platform tomorrow, or if I shipped a bit of software and I thought the industry genuinely needs this and this is really good and this is better than anything else that's out there, I'm going to have a big leg up, right? Because there's people that will trust my take on that and trust the fact that I wouldn't ship that thing unless I truly, truly believed in it. So in any of your endeavors, having that trust is really powerful. It's for sure a big responsibility. You don't want to abuse that, but it is really powerful. So hey, this episode, it's sponsored in part by the fine folks at Client Hub. Thank you, Klein Hub Hey. Last week on Tales from the Hub super smart accounting firm was super pumped about Client Hub new vision for how AI gets pulled into the product. They're calling it your firm on GPT and let me tell you, super smart accounting firm. They just joined the beta program for the new email functionality. In a word, they're blown away. Client Hub now connects to email. Platforms like Microsoft and Gmail will pull those emails into the system. They'll take long email threads and summarize them in one click and even take a reply and change the tone of that reply to make it just right before you hit send. Pretty cool. And that is just the email integration feature. Client Hub's working out a bunch of cool AI stuff. You want to be part of that pilot program? Taste the rainbow. Get on board. Check out the link to Client Hub in the show notes. When you're thinking about strategically how to set up your firm long term, think of it in terms of within a specific domain. How can you start building trust at scale? It's one thing to build trust within a firm and for your clients to love you. And that's all important and you should have that. But is there anything in your life that you're doing right now and investing in in that works while you sleep where the next person can come along and consume that thing and it doesn't take any additional effort from you. For most of us the answer to that question is no. And it's why is what makes a service business like an accounting firm honestly hard to run and hard to scale as each incremental client that comes in requires an incremental amount of effort. And that's not to say that all those firms are the same. Some can do that wildly profitably and others can't. But it's why I'm a big fan of one to many services that are higher leverage than just your one to one service and an accounting firm. There's certain ones services you need to do like Attack Return, stuff like that that's specific to the individual, but it doesn't mean that you can't also sell them one to many services like a course or a mastermind group with you know Other like minded people that you run, that sort of stuff can be really profitable. But in an age where like human to human trust is going to have an increasing kind of premium assigned to it, I absolutely think that's something worth investing in. So much of what we do boils down to pricing, the ability to charge more for the same work that you already do. Like that is the path towards profit, the path to freedom. And the pricing that you can command when you are one of one for someone because they just spent the last month binging your podcast or whatever it is, that price is wildly different than somebody that just stumbles into your website. And there's a lot of things where the solution comes back to create content. I know there's a lot of people that know that that's a good idea and don't know where to start or have dabbled here and there and it can feel like it's hard to get traction. A few bits of advice from me on content and how to get started with this because ultimately that's how you build trust. People at scale is social media, it's videos, it's podcasting, stuff like that. Biggest blockers I see for people, obviously, I mean there's, it's a massive conversation, how do you do this? Well, but the biggest things I see people struggle with, you haven't started. You're planning and strategizing and doing all of this technical stuff because that's what you do when all you gotta do is start. You just gotta start and it's gonna suck. There's no, there's no way around that. A helpful framing for me from YouTuber Ali Abdaal around creating videos specifically is kind of the get started, get going, get good framework. He basically says your first hundred videos are going to suck. So figure out the fastest way to get those hundred videos out of the way so that you can get to the ones that are actually good. That's a helpful framing for me. That applies to everything. You know, tweets, it's probably more blog posts, stuff like that. It's more important to build a habit and to do it consistently than to overanalyze it until the end of time. Because then you never actually do it. So just get started. That is my first bit of advice. When you're thinking about what platforms do, I work across stuff like that. Just start with a single platform. Every platform has their own nuances and certain things do well on some platforms, different things do well on others. Keep it simple, just start in one place. For most people, unfortunately, the Right answer is going to be LinkedIn. But just start investing in that one platform. Ensure that what you're saying is going to be specific and relevant to a very specific type of person. Again, my lit this test for, for anything that I put out is I want it to be so specific to where, like, if you're in a bookstore and somebody walked by and saw the title to that book, they would like, stop dead in their tracks and be like, I am buying this immediately because it is so relevant to me. That's the level of specificity that you want in your content. And most of the time when I see content that isn't doing anything, isn't doing well for people is because it is absolutely not specific enough most of the time. It's frankly like nowhere near specific enough, enough. Another tidbit especially, and I think the kind of the AI stuff changes this calculation a bit. I don't know how to build corporate content content through a brand. Maybe there's a way to do like helpful education and stuff like that. But I think a big reason that people engage with stuff on social media is because it's a person on the other side and they like that. And you could run the exact same content through a person and through a brand channel. And the person, I, I swear is just, they're going to get better engagement. And I understand how that complicates some aspect of scalability and they're building the relationship with you and like, well, what if I'm going to do services for them? I can't do all of those services. There are ways to manage that. But if you're trying to just produce content through the lens of a brand, honestly, I think in most people's experience, they never even get it off the ground and they don't do enough of it or stick with it long enough for it to even be particularly valuable. It's okay to be a human. People want to connect with other humans. Like, like just do that. Like be a human. And some of The Q&As, in the past, people have asked like, corporate account, personal account. What if I want to talk shop about firm running, for example? I think where I'm at on that today is you can be human through multiple accounts. So if you really want to do both, like, if you want to publish content for your clients to consume, don't put out content both for your clients to consume and for other pros to consume. It makes half of your stuff irrelevant to those people. You really need to focus an account on a specific type of person. If you want to do both on a single platform, just have another account. Have an account where you talk shop with other accountants, could be anonymous, could still identify you. But for the account where you want to attract people, I'm pretty convinced you need to be a person. Like, you can absolutely do it through the brand lens. I think it's just way harder. I think the better path is to be a person because people want to connect with other people. And that's just going to get worse as we're talking with more things that are not people. Now don't swipe my formula. Like, what I do today is the product of all the iterations over the past few years and specifically who my audience is, which is going to be different than yours. And there's a ton of great content on YouTube around how to make this stuff as easy as possible. And AI. AI tools are actually making stuff like podcasting, you know, easier than ever. All of the audio files that I record here go through an AI tool, AI mastering tool that make the audio sound really good. And there's a lot of manual stuff we had to do in the past that we no longer have to do because it just doesn't it. So there are tools that are making content creation easier than ever. But you got to find your own formula. Like, you got to start and just get going and then over time you find what works for your audience, because what works for an audience of accounting firm owners, for example, it's going to be very different than what works for an audience of stock brokers and that sort of thing. So while it's good to like see what other people do just to kind of season your decision making with that lived experience of those other people, like, there is no out of the box canned way to do it. Like, like you've just gotta kind of start that journey for yourself and make that investment of time and attention. If you want to be better than anybody else at something, do it more than anybody else. I shared the other day, like, that's why I think my videos are like as good as anything there is in this in the space. It's not because I'm like a unicorn. It's because I've spent more time and money than I think anybody else on it. But for me that was totally worth it. It's an awesome competitive advantage, right, like to get the word out about all these things. And now you have advertisers that like pay really well to advertise on that platform. I'm all about investing in skills that super High leverage that will aid me for the rest of my life. I know how to do video stuff now. I'm going to be able to do that stuff for like that's a skill I will carry for me for the rest of my life no matter what I'm doing. If I give up the accounting life and go be a taxidermist, like this video skill and the ability to present confidently on video and all that like that will always aid me. Even my ability to like do social media and get people to engage with all of that. Like these are all valuable skills that will aid you in anything that you do and absolutely worth making the investment. I think so. A lot of things we talk about are ultimately for your accounting firm boil down to how to get people to pay me more for the work I'm already doing. And building trust at scale is another great way to do that. We've talked in the last few weeks about building a compelling offer, finding more painful pain for people. These are all ways to get people to pay you more for what you do. So this is kind of the thing that solves all problems is will somebody pay me 2x what anyone else is paying me right now? I think it was Tim Ferriss that phrased this as asymmetric intimacy. The idea that you can have people on the other side of this content that are like building a relationship with you and that for you is infinitely scalable. And it, it is weird. Like I'll just, I'll just say that it, it is weird and it can be abused. But in an age where people are going to be longing for more human driven content, I think building that trust is a great way to get people to value your expertise more. More. I think that's what it boils down to. That's it for today. Thanks for coming and hanging. I think this is our last one from Chicago. Congrats everyone on making it to 100 and I'll see you in the next one.