102 Why Accountants Shouldn't Paywall Their Content

I think we're all thinking about content one way or another right now. How do we use the Internet to attract a better type of client? And the biggest thing I see people getting wrong is fixating on getting paid for the stuff that they're putting online. I think it's a trap. I've had a few of these conversations with people recently. It's a bit of a paradigm shift, but a honestly, a massive unlock to get you to not just better clients, but like a better state of being. Like a version of work that is more energizing and serendipitous. I know. You know I like that word. Let's talk about it. Pay walls. And I think what we may be getting wrong. So I kicked off this conversation online a bit the other day. I said the old way, build content behind a paywall, bury everything you make 10ft deep and nobody knows about it. The new way, give it all away and trust the fact that being helpful will lead to opportunities you couldn't have imagined. And I try to be really conscious of advice that is good advice for a specific person, but maybe bad general advice. So like, every time I see an article that is Jeff Bezos morning routine, I'm like, buddy, I got nothing in common with you. I don't need to know what Dwayne Johnson's meal plan is because I'm not an 800 pound, just solid meatball individual. And so while this has been what worked for me, I try to be really careful of not generalizing that to say that this is how everybody should go about the things that they do. But it basically boils down to this. I've said this before. As soon as, as soon as Al Gore flipped the switch on the Internet, we all overnight developed basically a distribution problem. Because there are so many people out there in the world with super, super nuanced problems and pain points that we can solve for them. The only problem is we just haven't found them yet. So if we have this list of a hundred clients and the best thing we can do is find the hundred people on this earth for whom the problems you solve are most painful. Because they will pay you the most, they will appreciate you the most. The reality is, if you printed that client list out, why would you do that? There's so many people on that list who you could put your finger on and say, like, yeah, they don't super appreciate what I do. It's actually for most of us, a really big spectrum. You got people who love you, people who fist fight you on every single Bill, because the problems you solve aren't painful enough. All of that is to say the hundred people on that list are not the hundred people in this universe who are ultimately the best for you. But we spend all of our time, heads down, doing the work in the weeds, that we don't invest any time in finding the next person for whom a problem you can solve is more painful. And I don't know ultimately what the right balance there is. And it's probably very firm specific. Are you working on the firm? Are you working in the firm? I don't know what the right balance of time spent on each is, honestly, beyond a certain firm size threshold. The answer is probably 100% of your time and having a sales team who's spending all their time on this. But I can tell you what the right answer isn't is. 0, 0% of the time going into finding that next better client. But as soon as we start thinking through the lens of content and education and courses and all this stuff, I tell you what most accountants say is, yeah, I'll make this thing, but I'm only gonna give it to the people on my client list or I'm gonna make this thing and I'm gonna sell it. And so you put all this time and work into making this thing that could be really good and could be really helpful, and then you put it out and you put a price tag on it and you know what happens? Nobody ever sees it. Nobody. You just invested all that time in this thing that could be honestly super, super cool. But you still have a distribution problem. And oftentimes when we think about creating things and courses and all of that, the course and the thing that we're creating becomes this massive project because we feel the need to prove its value by sheer, like volume. And oftentimes that's like the very worst thing that you can do for a digital product is think, well, if I want to sell this thing for 2,500 bucks, then it's got be like a week long course. When in reality what people want to buy is something that will enable a quick transformation. So the folks online that just sell digital products, like best practice right now generally is that thing, at least the first thing somebody buys from you needs to be less than 90 minutes. So that that call to action is, I can take you from A to B in under 90 minutes. That is a wildly different value proposition than to say, I'm going to take you from A to B in a week or, or with this eight hour course, how many people can do an eight hour course versus a 90 minute course, you're losing a bunch of people the longer you go. And the pricing does not scale linearly. How many times does 90 minutes go into 8 hours? It goes into 8 hours less times than by which the price would have to be divided. Do you know what I mean? So like, if you make a course six times longer, you're not gonna be able to charge six times as much for the course. But where we usually go, especially in the beginning, is we're gonna put this hu into this thing that we're going to put behind a paywall and nobody's ever going to see it. And your distribution problem didn't get any better. And so the question becomes, well, when is the right time to put something behind a payroll versus when is the right time to just put something out there? And for me, it's ultimately a question of have you reached like your maximum level of reach yet? And I can tell you for just about every human being on the planet, the answer to that question is most probably no. I think the fact that we work in service businesses like we're, our brains have kind of been trained to think in terms of how much can I price this thing? And because there's inherent volume limitations within service businesses, our brains don't really work so much in terms of scale because like, if I add another hundred clients and it's like, okay, I have to add more staff, what is my effective like margins in that business? Like it's not as lucrative as opposed to selling stuff and products that are, you know, asynchronous, where you sell it one more time and it doesn't require any more input from you. When you're living in that paradigm and you're selling a thing that can be sold a million times, then your goal needs to be to get to 2 million people. And just because we've, I've been working in service business businesses, I think we lose sight of that. So what is the right balance there when you put things behind a paywall? And not honestly, I think it makes sense to put virtually nothing behind paywalls these days. Like, if I'm honest, that's not to say that there isn't anything in this world worth paying for, but so many of the things that we do. And so of where life takes you is about who you meet and how painful of problems you can solve and being visible and being exposed to stuff that you could have never otherwise, you know, been expected to expect to be able to be exposed to. So when you come out of school and you know, nobody. Like, you're just begging for a job, right? But you want to get to a point in your career where you know so many people and those people so intimately know what you do and what you do well, that there is always an abundance of opportunity out there. Hey, I wanted to tell you. This episode is sponsored in part by the lovely folks at Copilot. Oh, you know what keeps me up at night? This is probably going to trigger some of y'. All. What if you move your whole firm to a practice management system, you train the whole team, you move all your organizational data in there, you train all of your clients on how to work with you in the client portal, and then you don't like it or they stop developing it or something like, you know how sticky these things are and what a mountain it will be. To retrain your whole staff, that's one thing. But to retrain all of your clients and say, hey, just kidding, we actually want you to come use this system over here now. Yes. Sorry about that. Let me tell you, you know, a solution to that is to separate your client experience from all the systems that you use to manage your firm. Right? Think about it. So, Copilot, one of the things they do really well is they are just laser focused on the client experience. They just want to be the client communication layer. And why I can appreciate that. The value of that is it gives me the power to change all the paper clips and bubble gum and strings behind the scenes that are holding everything else together. So if there's a super cool new AI this or that, that's going to do my work better for me, I can pull that in without having to change the client experience. Pretty darn good argument for the apps that are just that client communications layer, right, Copilot? You've probably heard me talk about it before. A super flexible client portal layer where you can, like customize what each of the clients see and even embed stuff from other apps into that portal experience. To learn more about Copilot, check out the link in the show notes. Hey. This episode, it's sponsored in part by the fine folks at Client Hub. Thank you, Client Hub. Hey. Last week on Tales from the Hub, super smart accounting firm was super pumped about Client Hub's 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 on a bunch of cool AI stuff. You wanna be part of that pilot program? Taste the rainbow. Get on board. Check out the link to Client Hub in the show notes. So if you look at like your Internet celebrity types out there, if you look at me, because that's something we all have in common, you know who I am, you see what I post online, that sort of thing. When people know what you do and you're visible and you share that stuff a lot. Like there's a hundred things, a hundred opportunities that you would not have ever imagined being exposed to when you weren't living out that stuff in a public way. And so where I'm at right now, and I feel extremely grateful for this, like I feel like my job is just to be helpful. Like, I feel like I've backed into this career of my job is generally to be helpful online. I've got some anti goals around not overextending myself and not really wanting to build another big team again and not really wanting to have something to sell so much to the folks that I'm talking to online because we've all seen the bad version of that where everything is about converting to the newsletter or getting that to buy this product or something like that. So I try to be very careful about that. Like ultimately when I do have things to sell, like the folks, like the people who are super engaged and into it, like they'll find that stuff. I don't have to cram that down people's throats, but by focusing just on being helpful and consistently doing that on social media every single day, like you find a lot more people and you get exposed to opportunities that you could have never imagined. So like right now I probably get two or three speaking requests a week. You get a lot of people asking you to help, like come in and do consulting with them. You get stuff from software companies that want your feedback and your input, people that want to do like product partnerships. There's such a, I think you'd be shocked what a huge volume of that stuff there is once you start being visible online and it's not like a la de da isn't that impressive kind of thing. It's more just like a cool then how do you position yourself to be at the center of all these opportunities? That's like, that's super cool, right? Because for one, you never feel like you're short of things to do, but you also get exposed to just like cooler stuff than you would otherwise. And you have this amazingly fortunate position of being able to hand pick like, this sounds fun for the next six months, like, I'm going to go do this or I'm going to go do that. And we run accounting firms and all that stuff. And I can see how like, this may feel like maybe a distraction, but whether your goal is to go do some other thing or build a more profitable accounting firm, the thing that you're going to do to take you to both of those things is the same. You're going to be visible and you're going to establish yourself as a subject matter expert. And as a result of doing that stuff consistently and putting that stuff out online, you're going to attract a huge audience, a huge number of impressions every single month. People being exposed to that expertise. But what most of us do and what's kind of inherently low leverage about service businesses is we dazzle people one at a time, day to day. And we oftentimes do like super cool, super novel stuff that we're really proud of. But you know what? Nobody else is ever going to see it. Part of this is us struggling to self promote. And that's hard. It's a hard thing to get over. I do think there can be a degree of like virtue signaling that really gets in the way here where you kind of become the victim of your own virtue. It's definitely an issue for me, but at the end of the day, just be helpful. Like that's been the hope, most constructive lens for me to frame. All this stuff that I do through is like, who can I help today? What did I need to hear five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago? What's the thing that's not being said? That would be helpful if it was said and if you do that consistently, you know, it's one of those things where we're super fixated on roi. So you're like, really? Where's the money to be made? And being helpful. And I've had a number of these conversations lately and this is kind of what they've all come back to is, well, I'd kind of like to make money doing this stuff. I don't know. There's a time to cash in and there's a time to not cash in. And honestly, most people are like so short of optimizing how they put themselves out there online that I could tell you it's 1000% not the time to cash in on your audience and, and all that stuff. And one area where I've always really struggled with this is like paid speaking engagements. Obviously I've invested a ton of time in YouTube and building up that library. Really cool thing about YouTube is that's a video library that people will go back and watch for years and years. And so every time I publish something, there's somebody five years ago that's still going to get value from that. And that ultimately is building my audience and my network and the people out there that see me as an expert. But if somebody comes and offers me, you know, x thousands of dollars to come do a talk, why I do that, when in the same time I could probably write and produce like five videos that would go on my YouTube channel. Now to me, that is a great example of like the nearsightedness that comes from like doing paid gigs or putting content behind a paywall. If those five things I can otherwise make are going to attract another 50 people, 50,000 people, whatever it is, I'm investing in an asset that works while I sleep, that anybody can consume that'll get re shared. That's establishing my expertise online. Now, when it comes to speaking, that is oftentimes worthwhile. And speaking especially can get you into really high context rooms where you have like a really valuable collection of people where it's. You can't really replicate that online. So that will be worthwhile sometimes. And honestly, that's what I've paired my speaking engagements back to. Is, is it a room that I want to be in? Like, I'm not super worried about the fees. I just want to make sure that it's a room that I want to be in. Because you may meet some interesting people. Otherwise, like that same time can be spent tweeting, posting to LinkedIn, producing videos, stuff like that where people will find you and you increase your distribution. And these days, people my age and especially younger, the way that they learn is on YouTube. Honestly that's just how it is. Right or wrong, the way that people learn is on YouTube. When I look at stuff like CPE, that stuff has been commoditized like a 20 year old right now asking them to pay $400 for an hour of CPE. Good freaking luck. That is never going to happen in a million years. What they will pay 400 hours to do is to learn for an hour from a thought leader that they, that they respect and have trust in. They'll absolutely do that. But paying just to sit down and be taught something like that is something that now the next generation of folks like they're just not going to do. And we've got a growing number of pretty much free CPE services where you can go out and get get an abundance of cpe, no problem. And that's just becoming the norm. So that's not to say that there aren't ways to make money around cpe, but it's an example of something where, like putting it behind a paywall. I don't know that that makes sense anymore. Rather than taking that same content, repurposing it, sharing it on social and that organization becoming a hub for thought leadership, using that content that's also CPE content, you know, and just figuring out a different way to monetize that business, whether it's partnerships or sponsorships or whatever that looks like. 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 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 Another pretty hot take on stuff that maybe doesn't merit a paywall anymore. Honestly, I think many forms of coaching or many of the things that were previously reserved for coaching put that stuff on YouTube. There's a lot of like, I don't know, in the past. It's like you have this sort of secret formula and in order to plug this secret formula into your firm, you have to, you know, pay a big sum to get that coach to come in and work with you. Why not build your online messaging around that secret sauce? Like if that thing actually is the most compelling thing in the universe and it actually is good. And oftentimes this is the issue is if you put it out in public, you actually see, oh, you know, that's actually maybe not as special as it was framed to be. Also, sidebar. Honestly, a big upside of putting it out there for public consumption is for it to be able to survive the rigors of like, public feedback. If you make something in private and you never put it in front of anybody else, it's going to be really limited, as opposed to an idea that other people can speak into, share their lived experiences, and that idea gets much better, much more more refined. But when it comes to coaching, honestly, I don't see almost any aspect of coaching and the your approach to coaching that you should not be sharing in social media. So then how do I make money? You make money by getting access to you one on one. Coaching to me is just like, you know, tax planning. I could run a webinar in my firm showing my clients how to do tax planning, a very simplistic version of it. And when you get to the end of it, I'm going to have a call to action to say, I'll go do your tax planning for a pretty penny. And 98% of those people will take you up on it because they're not going to do it themselves. You can tell them how to do it. Doesn't mean that they're going to do the work of doing it themselves. And so through the lens of coaching, like, coaches have a huge distribution problem too. How does anybody know about you? What would your coaching business look like? If you had 10 times the audience, you wouldn't be doing the same stuff that you did now. Maybe you'd be doing the same stuff at an astronomically higher price. But I think because we're programmed as service providers, we aren't taught to lean into scale. Because scaling a service business, that's really hard and it's really not fun in many ways and you're limited by people and all that. But that's not the case with everything else. Like our brains have been formatted in a way that doesn't work very well on the Internet. When you're selling a course, selling a product, something like that, man, that does scale. So that's a whole bunch of things you know obviously that I don't think ought to be paywalled. What are the things you do paywall then if anything? I don't know. Like one of the most successful Internet think boys on on Twitter is a guy named Justin Welsh. He's got this content os course, it's 90 minutes and it's his approach towards building content. This is all this guy does. He has a single 90 minute course and then he's helpful online and just posts online a bunch like it's all systematized. He posts a certain number of times per day on X. He posts every Single day at 7am on LinkedIn. Doesn't post anything on the weekends I think and then once a week he has a newsletter that goes out. So it's all been nailed down to a system. But the only thing that he has to sell you is a 90 minute course. Anytime somebody buys it, it doesn't require extra work from him. It's all built around a compelling offer like we talked about, I don't know, maybe a month or so ago. Now it's built around an offer that is a really painful thing for a lot of people. And so it attracts folks to that offer. You've got stuff like a money back guarantee, like a lot of the things that we've been talking about recently on the channel, but that's it. That's the only thing he has made for people and the only way that people buy things from him. And that's a several million dollar a year business business. Now just by making that one thing now if you think about, you know, it makes what we do running firms feel shockingly low leverage when you hear stuff like that. Because every single thing that we do, if 100% of the work we do is just traditional service, business, accounting work, all that stuff is one on one. Nobody's ever going to learn about it. It's never going to impress anybody but that client. And you're always subject to the limitations of what like you're just going to charge that one client. And that can be a lot. And we talk about there's a lot of things you can do to get clients to pay you more for the work that you already do. But it is still, still not a product, it's still not a thing that you can sell one more of without any incremental amount of effort from you. I'm a big fan of, you know, one to many services within a firm. Like a monthly mastermind where 10 people within a domain pay to be there every single month. I think that's great. It's higher leverage than just one on one client work. But I'll tell you what, a lot of us are also burnt out on the service business hustle. There's a killer product business to be set up up alongside that as well. So if you are going to put something behind a paywall, here's the right version of that and the wrong version of that. I think the right version of that is one thing that is less than 90 minutes. Maybe there's another thing that is like, you know, the people that want to go even deeper and it costs more money. But absolutely don't start there. Spend years on that one thing, that one problem that you can solve for people and it doesn't need to be any more complex than that. That could be a 50 thing, could be a $2,500 thing depending on the specificity of that problem that you're solving. But start there and then talk about what you do and be helpful to people and talk about things that will attract the people that have that pain point. Don't shill like the people who are super into what you do will find that stuff. You don't have to talk about what you do, just focus on being helpful. That's a really cool thing that you can build alongside having a firm. And I know there's a hundred things to do in a day and we always feel too busy and all of that. This is what I was doing when I was running a 40 person firm. You can do it. It's just a matter of, of priorities. And I think where we usually get blocked in the beginning is it's hard to see the ROI or oh my gosh, how many years am I going to have to invest for this to be worthwhile? But we also don't acknowledge the alternative. For many of us, the status quo isn't super fun and isn't super exciting. Can you see yourself doing what you're doing now in five years time, in 10 years time? And it's fine. If you can, that's totally fine. If not, what are you doing today to set the foundation for that better thing? And I would argue even if you are perfectly happy doing what you're doing a decade from now, what are you doing right now to lay the foundation to be able to do an even better version of that same thing? You know, it's gotta be more than turning up for CPEs and learning more technical stuff. That's the value to me of putting stuff out there for the world to consume and not worrying about the Paywall. Because you know what? There's actually a whole bunch of other ways to make money besides selling that thing or selling a product even. Like, you don't even need to sell a product. Somebody replied on that tweet, they said, well, then, how does your accountant community work? I went through a bunch of versions in my head of what my accounting community was like, the paid community that I have. And ultimately, where that ended was the best version of that community is everybody learning from it, everybody else. If I'm going to hold that out and say, you will now pay this to get access to me, there's this sort of implication that I ultimately know better than anybody else. And as you've learned, especially these last few episodes, as I've shared, where it was like, five years ago, buddy, that ain't the case. There's a whole lot of people out there smarter than I am. But if I can be the one to attract a bunch of super smart people, and then you can learn from all of them and the collective experience of what all of those people have done and tried and what worked and what didn't work, buddy, that is a hundred times better than me coaching you or something like that. So what my accountant community is, is a hub for smart people. It's just a peer networking community. Like, it's not paywalled access to me. But if instead I would have gone a different direction, which I very nearly did in the very beginning, because it's what some others have done. I very nearly took that in a direction of like, maybe I'll post one video a week to YouTube and another video a week to this. This private thing. Basically have, you know, Jason tv. And it was something that we'd actually built out pretty far, and we've got the platform all sorted out and we'd figured out pricing and all that. And what I got stuck on was I'm going to invest so much effort and so much stuff that will never see the light of day, as opposed to putting it out there for anyone to consume. And it's going to attract way more people and build a deeper level of trust with the folks that you already have out there. And so in the end, I didn't put anything behind it but paywall. And it takes a level of trusting that just being helpful will be enough for your career. So I could tell you it absolutely will be. But if you can't put your finger exactly on how that means you make money, on what opportunities that could open the door for, then I get it. That's a hard thing to just blindly trust. But I can tell you on the other side of that, and this is where I try to be careful. Not like giving people advice based on, you know, me getting lucky or something like that. I can tell you on the other side of that is way more cold emails and DMs and all of that stuff than you can ever imagine. Accessing to really high quality opportunities just because you're out there and you're visible and finding success and having fun and being able to do something different when you're not having fun. Like, all that is a product of like, what is your surface area for serendipity, for finding new people, for getting exposed to cool opportunities. That stuff all starts with like, being out there and being visible and putting stuff behind a paywall. It's not the way to do that. What do you think? Agree Disagree. Please share in the comments. You know, this isn't like a particularly novel take, I don't think, but I still just see a lot of stuff going behind paywalls. That's really great stuff, stuff that could help a lot of people. And I think putting that stuff out there for general consumption like that is playing a much more compelling long game than putting a paywall up. And nobody ever seeing that really cool thing or that really talented person. Would love to hear your thoughts though. Feel free to share in the comments. Going on a little family trip to the lakes. I'm not sure if we'll be back tomorrow, but either way, thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you in the next one.