141 How To Get Clients To Stop Calling Your Accounting Firm

You made it. It's Friday. Great job, you talented, capable accountants. Today we're talking about how to get people to stop calling you and interrupting the work you're doing. Maybe you train clients to call you a little more. A little more than you would like. Now, how do you walk that back? Another question. Should we be pushing clients to message us via our client portals? And then a whole bunch of people already sharing really cool ideas around GPTs? The new stuff we talked about on Wednesday just launched from OpenAI. Anybody can build own custom chatbot. We'll cruise through some cool ideas that people are sharing online. Come on in. The water's warm. It's Q and A Friday, So I posted this short. It's actually an old video short that I made that's like, kind of a parody of the guy who always lets everyone call him. In fact, why don't I just play it? It kicked off a great discussion around managing phone calls inside of your accounting firm. I'll play it. All that you need. Here is the audio to get the gist. How am I gonna get this done, Jimmy? I haven't gotten to Inbox Zero since last May. May. May. I don't know what's happening. This. Hang on. Steve, can you close my door? I gotta. I gotta buckle down and get open or closed. You can close it. I gotta. Walter, what's going on? I remember I did say that, didn't I? Let me look into that. I'm gonna get back to you in just a couple of minutes. He got a call while he was on a call. Okay. See you, Bill Judy. They're annoyed. They emailed me two weeks ago. I just haven't had time to respond. What are you gonna do? Hang on. I gotta take this. Glendale. All we can do is tackle them in the order they came in. Okay. I mean, what else are you gonna. Hang on. Yeah, cowboy. Okay, you get the idea. It's. It's. We probably all know one of these people in our lives. The person that's perpetually behind but allows himself to be constantly interrupted. And an accounting firm life. When we have so many competing communication channels these days of folks that want to talk to you over team chat and email and text and all these different things. And then we create, like, work equivalents of the same thing, like a work text and work messaging. And there's just so many different things to manage. How do you. How do you tackle these things in, like, the correct sequence? And one of the things the video called out was like, oh, I'm two weeks behind. On email, but my clients can still call me. And what it creates is this awful loop of okay, I'm behind on this thing. So in order to get up to the front of the queue, clients know that they can call me to get to the front of the queue, but. But then they just stop emailing me. Cause now they know that they can do this thing to get ahead. And for many people, that's texting. Like they know that you'll respond to texts right away, but you won't respond to emails right away. And we reinforce this by responding and picking up the phone and all that stuff. And I get it, it starts at a place of being helpful, but maybe you're at a place where you're ready to dial that back right now. I should say this isn't like wrong. It's not fundamentally wrong. In fact, it's a tremendous like premium service. The trap is when we just do it and we don't acknowledge it as a premium service or we think that this is the only way to do it. If you want to be like mega hands on, like available 24 7, like to help those people, frankly, I think that's a pretty rad service. Just know that you can't do it for that many people and there's going to be some trade offs in like the lifestyle that that requires. Right. But for those of us who are ready to walk that back, how do you, how do you walk that back? Because it is a slippery slope to sadness, the notion of just all of your communication channels increasingly being more and more on fire. And I would argue it starts with delegation and getting help on those channels. Are there better ways to do it? Should you stop taking those calls? Quite probably. But for most of us the biggest problem right now is, is communication still feels like a personal affair rather than pulling somebody in to help with communication. And I'm even looking at you solo practitioners who don't like managing people. And you wanna keep things simple. And I can tell you right now a really bummer downside of keeping things simple is you're the one taking out the trash. You are doing the most basic menial stuff. And that's why I think even for solo practitioners, you ought to be looking at a VA and getting somebody to do to just take out the garbage of stuff that comes up in everyday entrepreneurship. A lot of menial recurring tasks that I would just as soon never have to do myself. So oftentimes the phone calling problem or the texting problem is actually a bigger problem. If you look at all the Communications and all the ways that people can get in touch with you. The problem is probably that the total volume of what you have to manage is just over your capacity or over your oftentimes stamina to like handle that much messaging every single day. Because that stuff's hard. A lot of it's emotionally taxing. So my tippy top tip is get help is stop clinging to your email inbox and texts and all of these things as if having to pull in help is some sort of personal failure. You know, like that you're becoming one of those people that has an assistant or something like that. Like get over that. Because the reality is a huge percentage of your accounting firm if, if you're bringing in clients, if you're a partner, if you own the thing, a huge percentage of your accounting firm production and the actual work getting done is happening in your email inbox. And as long as you're the only one living in your email inbox, you're going to be a big fat bottleneck to everything. To work, coming in, to delivery, to getting questions answered, to asking clients questions. You gotta get help. And there's absolutely wrong ways to do that. You shouldn't have people pretending to be you. There's ways to get this wrong, but there's absolutely ways to get this right. Because it's such an important part of your business. You gotta get help. And if you needed somebody to tell you that it was okay to ask for help, take my blessing. Get help. Cause what do you have to lose ultimately at the end of the day, like we want to do everything we can to ensure the clients have a positive experience working with us and waiting on your slow butt. Like that's not gonna make anybody happy. I've done, I did a past podcast on this. What my routine was, basically I would open email once a day. I would never work out of the inbox. My assistant was like, first line of defense of all that stuff. And maybe 10% of those emails actually came through to me and they went to a folder that I managed email out of, which meant that I wasn't constantly running in quicksand. I wasn't, I wasn't responding to emails at a slower rate than new emails were coming in. Right. You know, that whole, that whole soul sucking issue. And it also, that assistant was able to serve for me and like a, in a 40 person firm as a, a second set of eyes to help me with delegation. Ultimately I got myself totally out of client work and it was through like really aggressive delegation. I have 40 people in this firm, if you're coming to me and you think that I'm the only one who can do this, like what am I paying 40 other people to work for this firm for? Right? Like that. The reasons things were coming to me was usually it was uncomfortable. It was maybe an area where we hadn't identified a clear subject matter expert either on a technical thing, on a software thing. And so that came to me, that was like, okay, we don't have a good enough system for this yet. Who should this go to? And so usually it was a process of redirecting it to somebody else. And my assistant was actually really good at helping with this too. So that beat down my biggest communication channel, which was email. Now taking phone calls, responding to texts, right away you just have to be mindful of the fact that every time you do it, you are reinforcing a behavior. And that behavior sets expectations that are then hard to untrain. A like I learned this sort of analogy rearing children. Kids are great because they're just so dumb, they don't know anything. Like they don't have any expectations for how something ought to be. And as a result they're just like this little like milk fueled, diaper wrapped, like bundles of enthusiasm with this zest for life that you're like, boy, how do I recapture that? Who can find joy in, in anything? And like who don't have these, they're so easily impressed. Like they don't have these problems that we have as we grow into callous old people. And it's because they don't have any expectation of how things are supposed to be. And every time you add a new client, this new client, it is like a milk fueled diaper wrapped baby client where they have no expectations for how that relationship's going to be. Now if you first meet with that client and give them your cell phone number, you may not be setting a great precedent there. They may then expect you to be on 24 7. And if you wanna run your firm that way, great. Just know there's gonna be some trade offs there. But like for me, what was always helpful is as I'm feeling trapped with the clients that I have today and the expectations that I've set now I don't have to let another client in the door with this understanding again. So it can only get better from here. And that was always kind of my like anytime I was in a situation that felt impossible and I'm like, how am I ever going to dig myself out from under this rule one, don't Let another person in the door under that, like, operating expectation, 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 LifeLow IO and a lot of people will say like, oh, you gotta run all your clients the exact same way and have the exact same expectation for all of them. For me, that never worked in practice. And I mean, you can do it and you can say like, here's the rule for everybody now that's, you know, you have complete control over that and you can complete. You can totally do that. Where I got stuck was that was really high stakes. What if I made a bad decision and then forced it on everybody? So we weren't quite that extreme when we were rolling stuff out. But just be aware of the expectations that you're setting. I don't know. This is a couple of weeks ago, I think I said this. But if you're, if you have a cell phone number, that's an absolute dumpster fire. The move is go get a business line from a modern VoIP provider. Like, open Phone's probably my favorite. It does both calls and texts. You can put the app on your phone for that phone number and then control the notification settings. So it only goes off when you want to go off. But then you can have team members log in on desktop and like manage calls. They see you took three calls today. Hey, do I need to jot down any notes from this? Hey, you got 10 unread text messages. Can I Help with these. Can I fetch you the information you need to respond? You've now delegated some management of that number. And then when you get that new number, all of your business contacts in your phone, you send them a text message. This is my new number. Contact me here. And then if anybody ever contacts you at your old phone, phone number that is a business contact, you ghost them. Like, don't reinforce that. You say, this is Bill. I don't know who. I don't know who this is. And that's like, now your personal number. You can keep using the family and all that, but now you've got a business number that you can get delegation help with from your team. That trap is real. The notion that people just call you all day and you're constantly running a treadmill, like on this sort of like, quicksand sort of thing, where you can never focus long enough to actually get something done. And some of us just accept that as our jobs as the big boss and the ones making all the clients happy. Doesn't have to be that way, man. Question from the original Sarah. This was on a. On a YouTube comment back when we did the practice management reports. I'm seeing that some platforms, some like practice management systems, have chat in their portals. What if we migrated clients to the portal and didn't rely on email at all? There's firms who have done this. So Lisio, back when Lisio launched, it was in like a kind of a more opinionated way where they're like, you know, treat this like going to the doctor, where the only way you can communicate with your doctor is like messaging through this secure portal. You absolutely can do that. And so, like, if you're going to do that, I think in order for it to be useful, you have to fully commit and genuinely tell people. This is literally the only way that you're allowed to communicate with me. Because ultimately getting 90% of the way there, I don't know, is any better, Right? So if you make it optional to me, it kind of feels like one more thing to manage. I don't know, maybe there is value and it's easier for your team to, like, have all that communication in that one place, but you also have a lot of systems that will, like, pull email into that system in the same way. In fact, I think like Copilot, you can message clients from the portal, they'll get an email notification and your client, your client could literally just reply to that email and it will pull it into the platform as a message. So, like, people are navigating this different ways. Sort of unifying all of your messaging. Like, there's for sure a solid argument to be made for what if we just hyper lock this stuff down so people can only talk with us through one channel? Doesn't that sound really nice? And so you could do that, and you'd have to be really rigid about it. You'd have to police it and not let people, like, skirt around. Otherwise you've just added yet another communication channel. So my answer would be, yes, you could. It's just. It can be hard. It's one of those things. If I was starting a firm tomorrow and you just set that expectation from day one. Probably not that bad if you got a whole bunch of clients that have their own preferred way of working with you. A little bit more of a pain, maybe more on the white glove end of the spectrum. People aren't quite as happy to do that because they want you to meet them wherever they're working. So depending on your client base. But I don't know, that's kind of the beauty of. Of running an accounting firm too, is you get to make up the rules, right? So at the end of the day, like, you're the one that's writing the hours on the open close sign that you hang up in the front window. Like, you have total control over everything. So if that makes sense for you, you can. I've just seen people try to go down that path and get halfway there. And if you're halfway there, like, I don't know. I don't know if I feel like you lose a lot of the upside. Okay. A lot of the discussion online has been around the super exciting stuff that OpenAI announced. We talked about this on the podcast Wednesday. If you haven't heard that yet. Super exciting. A lot of really practical stuff for accountants for our clients to be able to spin up these, like, custom ChatGPT experiences really quickly. OpenAI calls them GPTs. And just through having a conversation with a chatbot, it develops this, like, custom chatbot for you. You can upload documents to it, like, build knowledge into it, and then you can share this either privately or. Or externally. So you can create a public link to this thing, or you can create a private link to this thing. Like maybe just share it with one client. Share it with your loved one. Hang on, let me write that idea down. So a few questions on this stuff and then some ideas that people have been sharing. I also just today got access to it. Teehee. Ha ha. I'm gonna show you something that I Built and by show I mean show you through your ears. But some good discussion points from online. Derek Foote do you think this is the most accessible method to set up a bot that's only looking at the things you tell it to? And what are the other tools out there that can do that? There's like a bunch of tools that will do this now and like a productized way, one we've talked about quite a bit is chat thing where you can upload documents and then it will only discuss the contact con, the contents of the documents. This is pretty easy to build with GPT 4 the old GPT model would not do it. It would not stick to context. So honestly it's kind of hard to. It's kind of easy to build and as table stakes and there's a bunch of versions of this, but because it's OpenAI's version and it's built right into Chat GPT also, because they're making these things super shareable, this will I think, be like ultimately the solution that most people use. Now they're creating what they're calling a GPT store, which is like a marketplace for GPTs. That being said, the vast majority of the GPTs people make I don't think will be the types of things that you put in the store. It's going to be like, hey, here's this new legislation. You can chat with this chat bot and it'll tell you the stuff that's in the legislation and you send that to your clients or something like that. That's not something you would put on the store. It's just a handy thing that you would make to share with people. So I think most applications will be stuff like that. The way this works in terms of like the biggest thing here to me is like ease of building and ease of shareability, but also building in external knowledge, the fact that you can upload big documents and it will talk with you according to the things that are in the documents. That's. That's the headliner to me because ultimately we don't want to rely on the general knowledge of the language model, like, because it will make stuff up no matter how good it gets. It's not authoritative. So like we can't trust it for creative stuff. That's actually what makes it really good. Hallucination is the same thing as creativity. But if I'm doing something technical, I want to give it the authoritative source documentation and then chat with it only about what's in that documentation. So that's the big headliner. Here of what I think makes this really helpful. Now, behind the scenes, the way these things work is when I ask it a question, it will go and pull the most relevant things in those documents with which to answer the question. But there's actually a bunch of different ways to fetch things from those documents. So for example, let's say I upload a hundred pages of legislation to this bott and I ask it, is there anything in this legislation talking about 1099? And maybe at 10 points in the legislation it references 1099. Well, how many chunks? And this is actually the technical term they refer to it as how many chunks will be pulled out of that document to answer the question? Because generally it won't use the whole thing. How many chunks will be pulled out? Will just one chunk be pulled out? If so, obviously in this case, we're missing the nine other 1099 chunks. Will 100 chunks be pulled out? How big are each of the chunks? Are they one sentence? Are they five paragraphs? When it comes to things like tax research, where you can go and like read through 10 pages of stuff and then five pages later there's an exception to that rule. Do you need humongous chunks then to potentially cover like all those exceptions? The way these GPTs are working is it's kind of managing that stuff in the background in a more generic way that generally works best. There are going to be other versions besides these GPTs that are custom tailored for specific use cases where that stuff's gonna be dialed in a little better. So the devil's gonna be in the details here of how performant it is for specific use cases. And I don't think it's gonna be as customizable as custom stuff. But by and large, I suspect people will be using these just cause anybody can create them. They're super accessible. But I don't think they'll quite get to the ceiling of how high quality that experience could be. 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 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 going to 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. We talked 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 Ryan Elb is elbling I've known Ryan for a while and I'm sorry, I don't know the right way to say it. It's one of those situations where you've known somebody long enough and you should know how that thing is or how to say that thing. You've gone too far to ask. It's one of those situations. Sorry Ryan. He's thinking through would a potential use case of this be adding a chatbot to your website that would ask different questions? For example, prospects would get questions similar to a new client intake form. And I've been thinking about this. I think with GPTs, specifically these GPTs, what they're going to be is useful in situations where people are coming to you with a set of questions. I don't think they're really going to be useful for info gathering. That being said, a couple weeks back I shared a tool called Formless. It's developed by Type form, the web form builder. A tool called Formless that is built exactly for this. It's like a chatbot form builder basically where all the user does is chat with it in plain English but on the back end you give it a set of questions that you want it to ask the info that, that you want it to collect. Super quick and easy to do. And it's actually I think a really cool, really novel way of doing client intake because it's like kind of funny and it's completely conversational and does a really good job of getting the information that you want. So like for example, I had it to to where it needed to get, you know, the revenue of the business and I would give give kind of a half answer and it would follow up and like prompt them more specifically like no, give me this. If it feels like it hasn't gotten a super specific answer and it's just cool that it's completely conversational, it's not a web like a static web form. So I don't think GPTs like this new thing from OpenAI will be great for that. But there are other solutions for getting that job done. I got access to GPT today. Huzzah. It's actually API access, not access to like the version where you can share it publicly and all that stuff, but like the developer level version of Access. And I've been playing around with it and I built a little something. It's called Legacy Accountant. It is the essence of old timey accounting firm thinking. And I've been positively chuffed with the quality of the output. Let's in fact, let's have a quick little conversation. Why don't I chuck a voice on this since I know right now you're like bobbing in your backyard pool on like a floaty and we just need to make this like as atmospheric and dramatic of an experience as this can as as this can be. So I'm chatting with this GPT the same way you would with chat GPT so I can say hello. The tool I'm using to generate the voice responses tool called 11 labs. Same tool we used with Nervous Net a couple of times now.

Hi there. In my day, hellos were handshakes that you heard with your ears.

Okay. Pretty weird thing to say. Okay, interesting. I just launched an accounting firm. You have any tips?

Never hire anyone who can do a job faster than you can bill for it.

Never, never hire anyone who can do a job faster than you can bill for it. What does that even mean?

It means efficiency is a thief that sneaks into your business and steals your billable hours.

Oh, so that was commentary on value billing versus billable hours. Never hire anyone who can do a job faster than you can. Okay, so don't hire people who are too fast because that's going to reduce your hourly billings. Okay, so I think that's what he getting at. So value billing isn't your thing then?

Value billing is like a unicorn. It's a beautiful idea, but it doesn't do much accounting.

Okay, tell me, what does your accounting firm look like these days? I'm excited for this, to actually to be able to share this publicly and then people can go wild with it.

It's a fortress of solitude with calculators for soldiers and spreadsheets for walls. We're impervious to change and innovation.

Okay, that's not. No, I meant more like size makeup of your team, etc.

We're a lean team where everyone doubles as a coffee machine. And the office size perfectly fits our collective suspicion of remote work.

Remote worker. Okay. Suspicious of remote work. I mean, he's ticking the boxes, right? So everyone's in the office. I think we might have found our new co host here.

Absolutely. We're all in the office. Can't trust work that I can't see being done with my own eyes.

Oh, Mama. Okay, 10 out of 10. I'll ask the obvious question. How do you keep your eyes on everyone in the office?

I have a state of the art system called walking around. It's like surveillance, but with more lurking.

How, like, how true to life is that? I mean that was like pretty much hit the nail on the head in terms of like legacy accounting isms. So that's something that I whipped together with some prompting of like here are the various things that this person believes. But it actually did a lot of reading between the lines there of sort of adjacent things that I didn't necessarily define to like more wholly paint the picture of how this sort of person would think. I'm pretty excited for this. I'm excited for the fact that literally anybody can spin up GPT, whether they're useful things or silly things. On the subject of useful things, I'll call out a tweet from Ashley Francis, Seattle Tax. On Twitter, she shared some ideas for various things you could build with it. She said, one, how about a GPT that walks clients through how to set up their particular email account to always favorite my emails to a GPT that screens prospective clients and gives them a walkthrough of your onboarding process. That's actually I like that. I'm not sure if GPTs make more sense for that or like the formless thing that we were talking about. But like a self service onboarding probably depends on the nature of your clients, the type of people. Like, are they going to appreciate that self service or not? I like that. A GPT that is preloaded with all the anti TikTok discussion basically train on Laurel and Wilson's work. I mean I actually we could totally crowdsource something like that, like commentary around the Augusta rule and stuff like that and then just build it into this super sassy GPT. And then she said a GPT that helps train staff on your processes or your workflow. Yo, I am super bullish on internal chatbot use cases. One thing we've talked about in the past is building all of your internal documentation into a chat experience. If you think about your employee manual, if you think about, you know, like meeting transcripts when you had internal meetings about like, kind of those fringe things where all of the sources of truth for those things are for very nuanced questions, like, do I accrue time off for like holiday hours, paid, I don't know, like weird, fiddly stuff like that, right? You think of all the places that a person has to go to find that information right now, as opposed to if you had a chat bot inside of your teams or your Slack or whatever, they could just ping and ask the question. I've heard some applications of this already from top 100 firms who have HR teams and it's saved over 50% of like Q and A time from their staff, like massive time savings. But let's go a step further than that. Like your SOPs, your internal, like, sort of procedures for how you do the stuff that you do. We talked about this a bit when we were talking about AI agents. AI agents being autonomous agents that can go out and complete tasks for you in the near term when we have these agents that can do these things. Kind of like we have now with ChatGPT, where it's only going to be as good as you can. Instruct it to do something if you want it to create a forecast, don't tell it to create a forecast. Give it a detailed methodology of how's the best way to do it and then ask it to do it. Having these SOPs and a well documented firm for how you do things, you could totally build cool chat experiences around this. And those same SOPs are going to be the things that are informing the AI agents that we use in the next few years to actually complete tasks for us. So I just, I don't know. There's, there's situations where chat is a frustrating experience. Chat is like, this feels like a, I don't know, too hard of a way to get this information. But there's other times where we have all this like big abstract information that lives in a bunch of different places where this seems so much easier. And then you start thinking about other stuff like AI chat as a reviewer or as a second set of eyes where maybe you create a work paper file and that's a set of folders in Google Drive. And the, the AI chat bot can see the SOPs for how that stuff's supposed to be and then like give you like ping you and say like, hey, you forgot to do this or that, or like, hey, this document isn't in alignment with this policy, man. Having like a little buddy that can do that stuff automatically or I guess just do it for you would be great, but also ping you when it's maybe not up to a certain standard. Oh, this stuff's going to be really cool. I'm very excited for practice management systems and file management systems that have all this stuff kind of embedded within it. I can, I can totally see chat assistant fatigue and how it's not going to be fun to have a chat assistant built into every little app that we use. But if I even just think about file management, to have a file management clippy that can be like, hey, looks like you just closed this month and set of books, but you're missing this one thing that you need. Or, hey, I see that you're reviewing this. Here's 12 things that we found that are wrong already to get you started. No, that sucks. Tell that to the preparer before they send it to review. I love that stuff. I'm super excited for that. And I think the more well documented those SOPs are, and you actually have gone through the work of saying, here's the proper procedure for doing all those things, the more helpful your AI is going to be because it can use the that information when it does its work. What an exciting time. I've said this before. Of all the times to be a tech content creation dweeb. Of all the times to go all in on that. Whew. 2023. Like, that was the year, man. That's it for today. Thanks for coming and hanging. I am in D.C. next Monday at the National Tax Conference. I'm doing the opening AI keynote on a panel with somebody from like, the Senate Tax Committee and some other person. The IRS commissioner is going to be there speaking that day. If you're there, please come hang at that session and rush the stage at the end. There's also gonna be a live Q and A, so feel free to put hair product questions in there. And then Tuesday through, I guess, Tuesday and Wednesday I'm gonna be at QuickBooks Connect in Vegas. I know a lot of y' all are gonna be there. Please don't be a stranger. Please don't be weird. I don't bite. Come say hello. It'd be great to see some of your actual faces. That's it. See you next week, Sam.