125 Create A Podcast in your Accounting Firm From Scratch

I'm convinced the easiest content that you can start producing on a regular basis to attract a more specific type of client and build a bunch of trust. I'm convinced the easiest way to do this right now is a podcast. We're going to talk about why. And as we turn the corner on a big old tax deadline, if you're here in the US we ought to be thinking about how do we start attracting the person who will pay you more for the stuff that you already do, Right? And of all the things you can do, social media, making videos, newsletters, stuff like that, podcasting lesson I've learned, having done a podcast now, it's actually much more accessible than you think. So I'm going to run you through how to do, like, the most valuable version of this, if that makes sense, because not all versions are the same, but also just walk you through the very nuts and bolts practical aspects of how you do this. And I think you'll see it's easier than you realize. Come on in. Happy Monday. It's a deadline day. Let's do it. Okay, I'm gonna run you through why I think podcasting is the easiest thing you can do right now, what that podcast looks like. So giving you some ideas for how to build rituals to make it as easy as possible to sit down and record, you know, every week. The what of what you're going to talk about, I think is a blocker for a lot of folks. And then we'll pretty quickly, honestly talk about the how if you haven't done it before. I know that can be daunting to, like, learn that thing from scratch, but it's actually pretty easy. So first, the why. The why is what we always talk about on this podcast. What is your methodology for attracting a more specific type of person with a very specific pain point? And in the past, that was, I don't know, maybe blog posts or something like that. But these days, the reality is it's finding people where they consume stuff that could be social media, that could be podcasts, that could be YouTube. And the Internet today enables attraction. So in the past, it all had to be proactive, like finding those people. And what we're talking about here is attracting those people. Because if our goal is to kind of extend this web of awareness of what we do to get people more excited to work with you, to then pay you more to do the same work on the day they come in, I think attraction makes more sense than going out and tracking that person down. If you track that person down, you for sure can still tell them, hey, I do this work with, you know, very specific type of person like you. But to me that is not the same as somebody listening to 10 episodes of your podcast, building trust with you and then coming to buy from you. And that's the power of attraction these days. And why, why podcasting specifically? If you're gonna do podcasts, don't do what I do and publish a video version. Also just publish the audio version. And we actually have about five times as many folks that tune into this in the audio only format as the video format. The video format creates just massively complicates the production. So don't do that. But the beauty of podcasting is you can sit down in any state and record much lower barrier of entry than anything video related. Just editing audio is a totally different prospect than editing video. But also podcasting is like the final frontier of long form. I feel like everything we do has gotten faster and is suited for a shorter attention. Spanish and YouTube editing, not all YouTube but you know, the meta. The last decade has been even faster, more cracked out kind of editing and now the like. The whole that taken to the extreme is, is short form with, you know, TikTok and reels and YouTube shorts. But as we've continued down that spectrum of things getting shorter and faster, what's actually lost in that process is the personal connection with the one who's created that content. So for example, you've got a lot of massive TikTok celebrities out there who can, you know, pull millions and millions of views with every TikTok, but people still don't know their name. People couldn't tell you what that person's handle is. They're not like building trust. And it's actually a fairly difficult prospect for a lot of TikTok influencers with big audiences to build a business around that audience. And it depends heavily on what they do. If it's like, you know, Ms. Excel, where there's some something that obviously her entire audience has in common, where they're all Excel users, then yes, there's a very organic path to like Excel courses, right? But especially when it comes to, you know, comedy type content entertainment, where there isn't a direct handoff to something that's a business. Short form can be really hard to build a business around. And a lot of those folks are trying to ultimately move to YouTube where there's longer form and you have a path towards building trust with, with people. But what is a step beyond this? Like that goes even further than video does. I Don't know why it's this way, but it's podcasting. Like, people will. Will stick a headphone in their ear for an hour and just be with that person. And there's something about that duration of time that builds a relationship with that person in a very different way. And obviously it's because, you know, podcasting is something that can be a little more passive than having to sit down and watch a video. If you're getting somebody to watch a video, you're. You're actually competing with every other video platform out there. And you go to YouTube and there's, you know, 20 different video thumbnails within the frame, trying to pull them away. And so you're constantly on this kind of hamster wheel of battling for those people's attention. Whereas podcasting, what it lacks in discoverability because there is no algorithm like surfacing new podcasts to people. It makes up for in focus, I guess the fact that, like, you're just with that person and you're not being inundated with other options of things to listen to. And the ultimate goal here is to build. Build trust with people, to build trust. And podcasting achieves that better than anything else right now due to the duration of time that they will spend with you. So that is my why. That is why I think podcasting is the easiest first thing to do because it's audio only. You don't have the fluff of video because it's a great way to build trust. And also because you already know how to shoot the crap on this stuff. You talk about it all day long with clients. Right? So this isn't necessarily a hard thing for you to do. Sitting down on video and like, being animated, stuff like that, that's hard. But you already know how to talk about this stuff. Okay, the what? I'm sick. If you can't tell I'm sick. Oh, oh, what am I going to talk about? Who am I to make a podcast? Like, what are people actually going to listen to me talk about? You'd be surprised. Like, you have a very specific lens of expertise that most folks don't. Getting to see the dirty details behind hundreds of companies, especially if those are very, very specific types of companies. Generally people don't know the questions to ask. Like, they don't know what they don't know. But to be able to plug into hearing from their trusted advisor on stuff that's very, very relevant to them, people are gonna love that. You think your software vendors are leaning into AI stuff? Like, real talk, let's level on this one. Do you think the people you're working with today are really like staying up at night going, ugh, how can large language models make my users experience better? Well, if they're not, Gotta take a look at this episode's sponsor, Client Hub. Because at Client Hub. Hang on, I can't remember what the line is. I found it. Because at Client Hub, AI is not the future. It is the present. It's the now. It's here. In fact, they've already shipped some pretty cool AI stuff, but they got a whole like manifesto on their landing page, your firm on AI about their entire vision for how they are building AI into their platform. And you know what? Gosh darn it, good for them. Because what I'm afraid of is a bunch of people have these big systems already and they're not going to make the necessary like infrastructure changes to lean into AI in a meaningful way. But tell you who, you don't have to worry about that with Client Hub buddy. To learn more about the cool stuff they're doing with AI and what their roadmap looks like, check out the link in the show notes gang. I get it. Choosing a practice management system that is big, that is high stakes, that is quite possibly the sweatiest decision you will ever make around software in your accounting firm. And I know that because I've got it wrong. And the reason is because these tools want to do anything and everything all inside of one tool, right? But what if I don't like this part of it? Or that part of it? Hey, could be a great reason to carve out that client portal, huh? Like today's sponsor Copilot lets you do. It is a client portal only solution which is not going to tell you how to do your work. It's not going to start mucking around in all aspects of your firm. All it's going to do is give you a super flexible platform for managing the client facing aspects of what you do. You can still roll your own tools for workflow. Everything else you just can use Copilot for the client facing bit. Recently they sponsored a video on my channel where we did a deep dive like a hands on demo of copilot on the YouTube channel. Let me show you some comments on that video. These are real live from human being comments on this YouTube video. Wow. I love they opted for flexibility essentially allowing us to embed other tools like calendly forms, etc. Rather than trying to create their own subpar version. Truff. Thanks. I was looking for a portal that linked to other places and is more flexible than your out of the box portal. Very interesting. I'll have to take a deeper dive into this tool. Okay. I love this. Those are all actual humans. Actual humans said those things. Want to learn more about it? Check out the link to Copilot in the show notes. So two different paths you could go with the what first path. This is what a lot of people do is like an interview style podcast. Because there's kind of a bottomless source of content here. You can always interview one more person. Right. And I will say, I think the biggest upside of, of running an interview based podcast is you meet a ton of really cool, really smart people and you kind of build a. It's like recording that podcast is actually an excuse to build a relationship with really talented people. And that is powerful. You're kind of, you're enabling their network, which is valuable and they kind of give you some social currency because of that. But it's a great way to build relationships with really interesting people. That being said, it's work. It's a whole lot more work than just sitting and talking into a microphone. So for example, you take this daily pod. What if this were an interview podcast where every single day I had to interview somebody? Obviously that would be an astronomical amount of work. Coordinating that with so many people doing the outreach, telling them, hey, I do this podcast, do you want to come on it? It's work. Now there's upsides to it, the fact that you get to spend time with those people, but it's not as easy as the second option, which is just you sitting down and talking into a mic. And so you'll want to think about what your format is for that podcast. But most of us have so many things to say about the stuff that we do and we see a client get something wrong and it kind of sends you down this tangent of, oh, this would be helpful for somebody. But honestly, there's so many talking points around this stuff. From all the normal things, entity selection, picking your accounting, software integrations. There's just like most of us are not going to be lacking for things to say. And so a format that I would probably lean into is maybe 10 or 20 minutes on a specific talking point. And that's like the title of your episode. And always be really intentional in thinking about, why should anybody care that I'm posting this? I don't know. There can be a very like self aggrandizing version of this where you're like, well, here's the thing that I Think is interesting. You have to be absolutely ruthless when you're putting stuff out there in front of other people. And I tell this to brands a lot who are constantly fighting for accountants attention. Why should anybody care? And so if you're thinking about what that main talking point for that episode will be, think about what the title would be. Why would anybody ever click on that? Be really ruthless with yourself about, like, is this actually valuable or not? That being said, there are so many things that we have seen people get wrong that we've told the same people over and over again. That you have a ton of that stuff in your head already. Really valuable things that are going to save people some headaches. So each episode is probably how I would approach it. Would have like a 10 or 20 minute main talking point. That's going to be the title of the, the podcast. And then after that, I'm going to do a Q and A, like pull three questions. And these can be questions that you get within your firm. You know, we get so many questions every single week. It shouldn't be hard to pull like, you know, the three top questions that you got within the firm that week. But you can also see this with the questions that you want to answer, right? Like, what are the things that you think people need to hear that may not be meaty enough to justify doing an entire episode around, but is something that maybe like, tied to current events or just something that you want people to hear? Now the, the meat of this stuff has got to be through the lens of a very specific person. This is, this is ultimately the goal. The world doesn't need another podcast, for goodness sakes. One of my favorite tweets ever was somebody said that they heard that someone in Austin got arrested the other day for not having a podcast. Because, goodness sakes, are there a lot of podcasts these days? But we're doing the bookshelf test here where you're in a bookstore, you're walking by, see the title of that book, and you're like, oh my gosh, that is specific to me. I have to stop and buy this right now. That's how specific your podcast has to be. Shouldn't be anything small business tax, not like, nothing generic like that in the name of your podcast. This is for Millennial Beekeepers Weekly. This, like, get like real specific here. The food truck entrepreneur that, like, get really specific so that as soon as somebody hears that, they're like, oh my gosh, somebody made a podcast for me, right? And honestly, in our space and what we do and the content that I make, I could probably get more specific and like who I target. But even in our space, I will make things and people are like, oh my gosh, AI stuff for accountants. Thank you so much. This doesn't exist anywhere else and this is a pretty darn big space, right? So even though there's a kajillion podcasts out there in the world, there's still a lot of little nooks and crannies of entrepreneurship where when they find that somebody made something just for them, they're going to be super pumped. And that's what you want to look for, is that specificity. Because the more specific it is let you know a secret, the less good it has to be, the lower the bar is. If I'm going to make a gen, like if I do make Jason Daly about anything and everything entrepreneurship, that bar has to be super, super, super high for anybody to listen to this because why would they listen to me over I know Lex Friedman or you know, the big kind of mainstream think people your James clears. So you got to make it hyper specific for it to actually be useful and attract a certain type of person. So as you're deciding what are the questions you're going to answer? What are the main talking points for each episode? They may be very issues that all entrepreneurs have, but be sure that you're speaking through the lens of the vernacular of that type of entrepreneur and any specific to them problems that they face. And if you make it specific enough, people are going to love it like they really will. There's so many things in your head that you take for granted because you've said it a hundred times that people really need to hear now last the how and there's a ton of. There's, there's so many blockers here for us on. There's so many decisions to be made and this is where we get stuck. You know, what's the title going to be like, what software am I going to use? What micro hardware am I going to use? And man, these are all just like things that honestly really don't matter. I can say since COVID and kind of the explosion of online content during COVID this stuff has gotten so much better and so much easier. So what's the stuff that you need? You need a dedicated mic. Don't use your webcam mic, that's just not good enough. Even with AI cleanup stuff that'll make the audio sound better, you cannot use your webcam, Use a USB mic that's come out in the last three years because frankly, they're 1000% good enough. Like the setup I have is overkill. USB mics have gotten so good. Plan on dropping 200 bucks on a decent USB mic. Keep it relatively close to your face. As long as you're not in like a cave or some super vast echoey space, you should be totally fine just recording that stuff in your office and it'll sound good enough. So in terms of audio quality, that'll totally get you there, Gang. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Live Flow is the easiest way to sync that QuickBooks data back and forth to your spreadsheets. You may have seen this actually had a big announcement lately. So this fall G2 gave them the top spot in their fall 2023 report as the leader in the financial analysis category. That's right, they won number one. Nice work. If you've been around my channels for a while, you've seen life float kindly. They have sponsored quite a bit of stuff. And I'm not. I mean, I'm not saying I'm taking credit for it, but that was probably why I'm not familiar with Live Flow. Super easy way to sync that stuff. Sync your QuickBooks data back and forth with Google Sheets. They got a whole pile of templates too to make the process of building that stuff for the first time as easy as possible for you. Stuff for managing cache, AP KPIs, like everything you can imagine. Sync that data into your existing sheets to make them smarter. Get it to auto sync or build your like custom new sheets that talk with QuickBooks totally from scratch. Pretty cool tool. Check that one out at liflow IO. 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, 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 Second production, how you pull this stuff together. There's very expensive ways to do production and there's very cheap ways to do production. So you can hire like a domestic podcast production agency and pay anywhere from $500 to $4,000 for them to produce an episode for you. Or you can do what I do. You go out to Fiverr, you go out to like a Filipino job board. Find somebody that's got experience editing podcasts, and I'll pay them two to eight dollars an hour to edit my podcast for me. It's a little bit more work to like make that connection with the contractor, but it's totally worthwhile. You can find some super talented people and frankly, you can pay them super well. Like, you can like give them a fantastic opportunity to do this work for you. At the end of the day, you will always have better things to do than edit your podcast. So don't even start down that path. Same thing for like, if you have an admin and you're like, oh, I'll just pull this junior person in to do that. That's not what they're there to do. Give them work that's ultimately going to like lead them to doing meaningful stuff within your practice, which is not editing a podcast. So just go out from day one, like find that person. Maybe you've got a friend that runs a podcast, you can ask them who they're using. But there's totally like super cost effective ways to get this stuff done. If you just couldn't, like nowhere to look. Now, my goal for you would be how do you, how do you build this into a habit when it comes to production? You can certainly batch produce stuff. So you could literally spend two days and record 10 of these things and then not have to do it for a couple of months. What works better for me is building it into routine and actually making it a habit. So maybe that's going to be every Friday afternoon, maybe it's every Wednesday morning. You're going to sit down, you're going to carve out an hour to decide what's that talking point going to be to round up some questions. Don't spend any more than 30 or 40 minutes doing the actual recording, and then get the pipeline figured out so that all you got to do is just send that file down the line, and the person who's going to help you with production will get that knocked out. In the beginning, you'll probably want to review the output to ensure that it's like actually what you're thinking. But ultimately, you'll get to the point where you don't even have to review the output. You can send that file down the line, they're going to get it published to the feed, and you've got nothing more to worry about. In terms of the mechanics of how podcast publishing works, basically, the episodes get published to an RSS feed, and everybody who is subscribed to your podcast through their podcast app of choice, anytime there's something new in that RSS feed, it shows up on their app. But there's tools like transistor is what I use that make this super, super simple, where once you've got it set up like, it's pretty much like YouTube, where you just upload a new episode, pop the title in there, and when you hit publish, it'll. It'll hit everybody's podcast apps. Now, I know as we consider doing this type of thing, we're doing this ROI thing in our head, right? Like, of all the things I could do, like, how is this ultimately going to make me money? And this and that. But we've also been talking about how do you start investing in higher leverage skill sets that you will take with you forever. And I would argue that this is worth doing just so that you have this skill. I mean, if. If you are, who knows, maybe you're on death's doorstep and you're going to get hit by a bus tomorrow. But for most of us, we got some years left in doing this stuff and, like, having the skill to be able to understand how to do a podcast, to get more comfortable with the notion of, like, recording podcasts, even if you're, you know, going on as a guest on other people's podcasts, that is a skill that will always serve you until the day you get hit by that bus. So I'd encourage you not to fixate too much on, like, what the immediate ROI here is. I would instead accept this is a good investment for me no matter what. And so I'm gonna commit to it for, you know, doing it every week for six months or something like that. And podcasts take time to get momentum, and the way that they're spread is generally going to be word of mouth. But Commit to doing it consistently. Like, there isn't any version of, like there is nothing that attracts people that does not take a commitment of time to do consistently. You don't just put one post out there, one blog post, and then attract all these people to you. Like, it's more product of being consistent than it is a product of being novel or like phenomenally good at this stuff. It's. It is about being consistent and turning up each time. Now, a really nice aspect of podcasts is when you have these recordings, you now have kind of your own documented thought. And so oftentimes what I'll do is if I'm wanting to post something on social media and I'm like, what do I want to talk about today? I'll go back and grab a podcast episode that I really liked. I will grab the transcript for it and chuck it into ChatGPT or Cloud or something like that and say, give me the 10 most impactful concepts and some quotes from the transcript that I can post to social media. And you now have this like 30 minute recording of what of, you know, basically your own documented thought. And that's a really helpful starting point for writing a post on social media or blog post or something like that. And if I'm coming into my day where I need to post something on social and I don't really have anything I'm that jazzed about, I will find that almost every time if I ask that chat assistant to give me like a top 10 list of impactful things from that episode, it immediately pulls me back to those most pumped to, like, the frame of mind I had when I was recording that pod where I was most pumped about. The thing that I was saying actually does a pretty good job of like, what are the kind of most high impact concepts from that podcast? It'll, it'll put them in front of you and kind of take you back to that state of mind where you're really excited to share something about that. So that podcast can also be a kind of jumping off point for social media posts and for other things. But you got to start somewhere, right? So don't try to plan this thing out. What does it look like, you know, three years from now? Start somewhere. Decide who that super specific type of person you're going to attract is. Build the messaging of the podcast around that very specific type of person. Get started. Keep lowering the bar for yourself. What keeps us from doing this is just having too high of a bar. The first ones are going to stink. That's okay. Think of it as I need to do this consistently in order to get the bad ones out of the way so that some days they're good so that, like, someday in the future they will then be good. Right. And the reality is, and I can definitely attest to this, as people will find you three years later. And they're like, wow, this stuff is incredible. You're so good at this stuff. I could never do this. And you're like, no, it's just because you were never listening. You were never watching when it was really, really bad. Of all the ways that you could spend an hour a week, this is a pretty high leverage hour a week of your time investing in this. And like I said, it's a skill set that you will always be able to with you that's always going to have value. So happy deadline day to those who practice. Oh my gosh, you made it. And how about this? Why don't I make this offer? If you're going to make the jump here, post a comment of who's the type of person that you're thinking about building a podcast for. And in the Q and A episode, we will, Maybe we'll use ChatGPT to like generate some podcast title ideas for you or something like that. Right? So if you're thinking about doing this, drop, even if it's very high level, drop what you're thinking in the comments. And maybe in this Friday's Q and A episode, we can, we can develop those ideas a little further. All right. Okay, that's it for today. I'll see you in the next one.