149 Accountants: Here’s How To Find Your Perfect Client

What's standing between you and your perfect client? The Internet. Spoiler alert, the Internet. Let's talk about how to go out there in the big, wide, scary world and find a very, very specific person who's gonna pay you twice as much as anybody else on your client list to do what you already do. Something we've been harping on a lot lately, but there's a lot of blockers that keep us from going out and doing that when reality is we probably know exactly what we need to do. We're just not doing it yet. So let's bust through some blockers. Today. I'm going to run through five of them. Because on the other side of those blockers, there's better clients waiting for you. Did you notice the intro there? Nice touch, right? Happy Monday. It is a great week to be an accountant. Hope everybody is is feeling packed with thankfulness coming off the holiday weekend. Unless you're Canadian, in which case your thankfulness has probably already worn off. Okay, so we talk a lot about content and social media and the Internet and all that. The Cliff Notes version here is accountants have a distribution problem. If you think about how big the world is and how many people we have access to through the Internet. And the reality is that there are people out there that feel the pains that you solve for so much more acutely than many of the folks on your client list. It's why if you put those hundred clients up on a list right now, you can see that some of them really don't value you that much. They complain about their bill, while others would, like, honestly, probably happily pay you 3x as much because they love you so much. Reality is there's a bunch more people like that out there. And if your entire client list was just them and you were charging twice as month, twice as much, man, that solves virtually all the pains of running an accounting firm. Capacity issues, profitability. And so what then is the solution to workflow, to hiring, to capacity and all that? It is finding people who will pay you more. Your processes look really bad when they're over capacity. Your workflow looks really good. If you're running at half capacity, you double your prices. You can actually run less than half capacity. So as uncomfortable as it is, because we are accountants and we like the fiddly things, and we like thinking about tech and workflows and talking to computers about how to make better computers rather than talking to clients about how maybe they're not the right client, as much as we'd rather focus on the technical stuff. The reality is, the path to making your business better is just finding a client who will pay you more to do what you already do. And the way to do that these days is not a big, fancy website, is probably not, I don't know, writing a book, probably not giving out your business card or turning up at chamber meetings. People find people these days via social media. That's just how it is. And you know this because everybody spends, almost everybody spends their downtime scrolling algorithms. That's just where society has ended up. Right or wrong. That's where we're at right now. And I've used the analogy of, you know, people standing in line at a coffee shop. Everybody has their headphone, their head down, looking at their phone, either messaging somebody, or they are scrolling a feed. And it's to the point where if somebody's looking up and they're not doing that, it's weird. You're like, is something wrong? And, like, you look over to where they look, and they're like, what's. What's happening? They're not looking at their phone. And in a society where everybody is scrolling those algorithms, you got two choices. You can either sit back and do nothing and combat everything that your clients will see in those algorithms. That is TikTok tax advice. That is the advisors who are out there giving good, maybe bad advice that your clients are then going to bring back to you. You can either fight that fight. There's no avoiding it at this point, or you can turn up on the platforms where your clients and prospective clients consume. And that, to me, is a much more obviously proactive, but a much more constructive way of taming the beast. Taming the social media beast is when somebody sends you this thing about the Augusta Rule, you're like, no. Like, here's how it actually works and how it applies to you. You could just point them to the stuff that you already have out there. Or even better, your client just doesn't even pose you the question because you already addressed it in your own content. Augusta Rule. If you're not a tax person, it's just like this real sort of hot button thing in US Tax law and the sort of thing that you get a lot of misinformation about online. And most of us know this. Like, when you are at your best frame of mind, you are. You're working out right now. Listen to this podcast blasting back and lats. Lats and buys, hams and traps, whatever it is, when you are in that most sort of clear state of thought, you're like, yep, I need to do that thing. I understand. Of all of the things that I spend my time on, be it marketing and finding a better client versus just head down doing all of the work for the same clients until the end of time, we probably aren't spending enough time on finding the perfect client, right? Like, I think we can all agree we're probably not spending enough time on that. And if, if you shouldn't be spending any time on that, like, if, if you don't really think you should be doing that, like, ask yourself, of all of the clients you have on the client list, are those the hundred people? Or pick a number. The hundred people out there in the world who will value you most of everyone in the entire world, or are they a product of your relationships and your local connections and like this infinitesimally small like bubble of the universe that you exist within? I would challenge that. I would say the people on your client list today are probably not the hundred people that most value what you do. Reality is you're never gonna find all hundred of those people. But you need to constantly be on that pilgrimage because that is the solution to everything that ails an accounting firm. And so the place to start here, and this is not, this is not breaking news for anyone that turns in tunes in here regularly. The place to start here is social media. But we all have a lot of blockers that either prevent us from stopping posting on social media altogether, or maybe you prevent you from like fully committing to it and being consistent. Because while the ultimate long term recipe for success on social media is to be consistent, most of us honestly just haven't even started. We haven't even dipped a toe in, 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 Live Flow 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 lifflow IO. This episode is sponsored in part by the lovely folks at Copilot who knows that the way that we present ourselves online is, is truly, truly a reflection of our essence as super cool, modern, forward looking accountants. And I can tell you most of the tools that we use and the ways that e.g. tax software vendors want us to present ourselves to our clients. It is, it is nothing remotely cool, nothing remotely modern. And this is where Copilot comes in. It is everything you need from a client portal all in one place. Supes Modern, super impressive. They got a lot of cool little things like what if your client doesn't want to message you in the portal? Well, you send them a message in the portal. Clients getting an email, they can literally just reply to that email and that message will come back up. Show up in the portal just from them sending an email and they're not going to tell you what that ought to look like. Like the name of the game here, Copilot is customization. The notion that you can actually customize what your clients see. All the little nav options on the left, fully customizable, what shows up on the right. They got some cool built in stuff but you can also extend it with external like third party things like Airtable or notion. Embed the stuff that you want to directly into there. Even on a client, by client or client group basis, you can change what people see because your needs today, buddy, listen, they may not be the same as your needs tomorrow. Now do you want to be locked into a super rigid system that isn't going to adapt and nicely fit around the contours of your accounting firm? No, we want flexibility, right? Is that too much to ask for? If you're into that kind of thing, check out the link to Copilot in the show notes. So here's five reasons why I think most accountants are not engaging in social media and how to think through them, kind of overcome them. 1. You plan. You plan so hard you are a mega planner. That's just how accountants are. We're very ROI based. And of all the things that can take up our time, how do you put a number on? Is this worthwhile or not? And even if you've gotten to the point where you know that it is worthwhile. You are just thinking about every little nuance and every little thing and this and that. Oh, well, when I, when I move my office around and when we get to the new office and when I get that, when I, when I decide on what webcam and when I, when I decide what microphone that I, then I will do it. No, stop planning, just start. And for me, what made it easy for me to get over this was accepting the fact that it was going to suck no matter what I did, no matter how much planning I did. The reality is you have absolutely no idea what the good version of this is going to look like when you haven't even done it yet. Like, there's so many things that are going to ultimately be a moving target, yet we don't do the most important thing, which is to just start. I was on a panel recently and somebody said that you need to be thinking ahead on your social media and ensure that you have a way to capture people. And you've got, you know, everything's handing off to a web form. And you really gotta be thinking about this because it can take, you know, six months to get that whole pipeline set up for how to even handle that stuff. And I'm like, excuse me, I've got my phone in my pocket right now and in 15 seconds I could post something to the Internet that millions of people could see or that my next dream client can see. Yet we're fixated on like intake forms and stuff like that. And this is an example, I think, of where like mainstream big scale social media advice gets conflated with what we do, which ain't that I'm never going to be Kim Kardashian. Who's to say I don't, I'm still young. I'm probably never going to be Kim Kardashian. But for us, in the realm of hyper niche influence or hyper niche social media, which I still fall into, obviously a lot of people listen to this podcast. I'm very active in, at like conferences and online and stuff like that. And a lot of people consume the content and that's great. In the grand scheme of things, I am still a micro niche influencer. And hopefully that puts into perspective for you, like maybe how big of a difference you can make for people on a really itty bitty scale. The fact that my largest YouTube channel just hit 10,000 subscribers, that is tiny. And so your goal is not to be a mega influencer and get these big vanity metrics. You, your goal is to be helpful and to be consistent. And if you're going to get, you know, a million engagements on a tweet or something like that, sure, like, maybe you need a lead form to like handle that stuff at scale. But that's not how we work. We're not like, ultimately we're, we're really not thinking about lead forms. We're thinking about building connections with other human beings. Because ultimately, how many, how many clients do you really need in your practice to build a awesome, profitable practice? Not that much. And so your goal is to, to show up where the people you want to work with are showing up and being helpful every single day and actually building human relationships. Like the notion that you're going to put a thing out and then get a bunch of people to go through this web form and all that, like, that's incredibly impersonal. And, and like in volume models. If I'm selling cosmetics, because I'm this massive influencer, like, yes, obviously I'm not going to take all those orders myself. You're going to hand them off to this E. Comm. Platform, whatever. But that's not what we do. The people who will make buying decisions and choose to buy trust through your firm, they're going to do it because they've built a relationship with you online, not because you posted something that went viral and it blew their mind and they went to an intake form. Like, that's not how this stuff works. So stop fixating on how you capture those people. Start fixating on being helpful and being consistent. Number two, blocker. You don't know who your audience is yet. Oh, who am I posting for? Gary Vee had some good content on this this week. He said the first five years all he ever did was post about wine stuff. Like he had his family operated like a wine store in New York and obviously, like, nobody knows Gary Vee for that now. Like, he moved on to posting about different stuff. We think about this stuff in very short time horizons when the reality is it's not as much about who you're hitting today as it is about building the muscle of being able to do it well. And you are not starting to develop that muscle until you are actually doing it. No amount of thinking about it and planning is making you better. I told everybody at this talk I was at recently, like, you're all here listening to a talk about social media and like, this is all procrastination. You could be sitting in a coffee shop right now writing up the next week of posts in 30 minutes, actually being helpful and saving people time. But we're worried about posting for the right people. And this matters like when you are fully committing to this. But it really doesn't matter when you haven't even posted consistently yet. So I would give you this advice if you're on a platform right now where you're already speaking to a specific group of people, like maybe it's accountants or something like that, and it is never too late to change. Like there are multi million subscriber YouTube channels that have done hard left turns like into something completely different. If they can do that, you can do that. And there's going to be some people that drop off from what you were talking about before. But that really doesn't matter because it's taking you to where you really need to be or where you want to be. So if you post something tomorrow that is for a different type of person, that's fine. It's absolutely fine. Now this ties in with number three. You haven't decided on your platform. In general, I tell people to go to the platform they're most comfortable with. Where's the place that you already hang out? And for many people you may already have an account there that's not serving the ultimate purpose of what like your business purposes will be for posting there. And sometimes it may make sense to create a second account for business stuff. Oftentimes though like not like don't overthink it. Like just start posting meaningful stuff that is taking you in the direction that you want to go. If it's, you know, Twitter or something like that, like it's not hard to spin up another account that is then your client facing account. LinkedIn, stuff like that, it's a little more tricky cause that's more tied to your identity. But again, don't get too fixated on what you've posted on to date because we're now seeing social media through a different lens where we're doing it to grow our business and to get home in time for dinner. Now there is no platform that is like the right answer. And I'll hear people say stuff like well Twitter has, or LinkedIn has X number more users than Twitter or Instagram has X number more users. Pick a platform. Twitter's got like hundreds of millions of users. Any of these platforms are plenty big enough for you to build a killer practice around. In fact, I, I, it's even worth considering like going more niche. Like there's an increasing number of like you know, fringe social media platforms built around like specific interests or beliefs. Private communities are a goldmine for this sort of thing. Like if, if you have a, or somebody has a private community of certain type of entrepreneur or business owner or something like that, and you can consistently provide value in that community, that's really valuable too. So I wouldn't worry about getting fixated on the platform. I would say start where it's easiest for you and just, just commit there because there is plenty there to keep you busy and to uplevel your existing clients. Now, if you do this for a year, for three years, the answer might change and it might be worth doing a second, you know, platform then. So, for example, this year I started doing LinkedIn instead of Twitter for the first time. And frankly, it's been awesome. It's been really good. LinkedIn's grown super fast, gotten a ton of value from it. But I've got like a support team for doing all this stuff and I've got a system that I've developed over years of doing it. So that advice for me is not good advice for you. If you don't have a platform that you're comfortable with at all right now, the default for this I think is probably LinkedIn. I think that's probably where you go if you don't have a place that you're already comfortable and if you previously had a place that you were comfortable with LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever, and now you're thinking, well, I better go LinkedIn then just stop it, okay? This is you overanalyzing. Just go where you're comfortable. The fact that I said LinkedIn doesn't mean that you should now go do LinkedIn gang. This episode sponsored in part by Teamup who helps you recruit top Filipino accountants without any 0 ongoing monthly page fees. They can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms, people who are familiar with stuff like Xero, qbo, Dex. They can find them for you. They can also recruit specialist roles like a team lead. People with leadership experience. Even US tax specialists. Wowee. The most talented and ambitious accountants in the Philippines want to work with you directly, not through an outsourcing company for two main reasons. One, they don't want to give a big chunk of their salary to a middleman, oftentimes upwards of of 50%. And they want to build a long lasting relationship with their employer. Aww. These are the people team up can recruit for you for a flat one time fee and then connect you with an affordable employer of record as well. If you need help with payroll and compliance, learn more at their site hireteamup.com and get on Their newsletter for quick tips on managing overseas teams. Stuff like cultural miscommunications, best practices, everything you need to know to get started hiring offshore. You already know I'm down with offshore hiring. Learn more@hireteamup.com 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 gonna build our own pipeline in the Philippines, going to pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the story. I've been talking about a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines like totally red pilled me to like oh geez, like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out link the show description Cloud accountantstaffing. Com Number 4 and this is an issue for a surprising number of people. You don't want to get canceled. You don't want to put yourself out there in a way that may be, I don't know, inflammatory. I hear from a lot of people they have like a complex relationship with social media. I would encourage you. Social media platforms these days give you really fine grain controls over what you want to consume. So that feed is totally up to you. Like you can really lock that down now. And so if that's the issue, it just means you got to figure out how that platform works and lock it down more so you're not seeing the stuff that maybe you don't want to see or is upsetting or something on the posting side. The issue of like getting canceled or being afraid of leading, leaving like this breadcrumb trail of your thoughts in the past and that sort of thing. Honestly, this usually just looks like not being a jerk and there will be people that can be trolls and go to you and that sort of thing and I will like, I mean I'M a very, very white man. So trolling for me is not the same as what trolling looks like for other people. So I will absolutely acknowledge that. But the reality is if you are posting on social media reliably, there are going to be things that you're ignorant of. We all are. And some people will hop in and check you on that. It does not always mean that you will agree with what they hop in and check you on, but it gives you a better, more well rounded worldview when you put yourself out there and then got that feedback. And that is, that has been my experience is actually I am much more aware of things that I could say that could be blind to like a specific people group. And I'm more aware of that now because I have been posting on social media. So like in some ways, like having this fear and not posting on social media is choosing ignorance. And again, it doesn't mean that you're going to agree with the stuff that you put out there, the stuff that other people will put out there, but it doesn't hurt to have it like in that mental model of what you put out. Now there are issues around social media for sure being, you know, addictive and that sort of thing. That's more on the consumption side. I would encourage you to learn more about like your preferred platform and how you can lock that down. Devices like give you more options than ever now around limiting how much time you can be in a specific app each day, that sort of thing. Number five, I think we're on number five now. You're afraid about, you're afraid of giving it away, of just giving that advice away when in the past it's something that people have paid you for. Or what if you just did a project or gave advice to somebody, sent them a bill and then you just chuck that advice online. Isn't that, isn't that wrong or backwards or something like that? I think we worry about this way too much. I think the reality is people are not a tweet or a social media post or an Instagram picture away from being able to do a month end close themselves or to being able to DIY their tax return. Like there is more than a couple of tweets between them and doing what you do. And bad social media is promotional. Social media is here's this event or even like I'm going to speak at this thing, like there's a lot of. Or teaser social media. Maybe that's more what I'm getting at. I don't really like I've tried to be really careful about ensuring that every single thing that I post has value to someone. And that value is like self contained within a post. So if I'm going to post about a podcast, like a daily pod, I'm not going to go out and post and say, we talked about this, go check out the daily pod. To me, the right version of that is to say, here's five lessons that may be useful to you and those lessons themselves have value. And then I may say at the end, we went deeper on these. In today's daily podcast, that post itself needs to have value because ultimately, like, winning this game and getting your thing to even show up in the algorithm is just about being useful. And like my entire business now is not built around selling people specific things or digital products or anything like that, even though that's what everybody does talks about. And when you look at social media, people like your Justin Welsh's of the world, they're like, oh, they're selling, you know, 2 million a year in digital products and stuff like that. He sells all that stuff because he puts out a prodigious amount of really helpful content. And when people are really appreciative of that or they want to go deeper, they figure it out. They're like, oh, shoot, he's got a course here. I love Justin Welsh. I'm going to go buy that course and learn more from him. Now, ultimately, when people come to you to actually do work, like, you're giving them advice through their specific lens and their specific context, you're doing their work, their tax return, and that's very different. But the reality is people are not, they're not a tweet or a PDF guide away from doing your job. They're just not there yet. And people kind of get stuck. Maybe this is a number six, I had it under this one. But I guess it's a little different. People also get stuck on, do we really need more social media? There's already people out there talking accounting. There's already people out there talking tax. And when you think this, when you feel this, it is a signal that you're not thinking specific enough yet. So take the Augusta rule. If you do tax, I mean, swap this in with any kind of controversial thing in what you do, kind of a hot button thing. And there's a ton of people going out there and making content about it as if it's like this sort of super tricky thing or super gray area thing. And what the world does not need is another social media post about the Augusta rule. It doesn't. What the world needs is a post about the Augusta rule for beekeepers for creative agencies over a million dollars. It needs a more specific version of that thing that's useful as long as it's useful. And the funny thing about social media is you can win social media with really low fi, low effort stuff. The more specific you get. And so the like, the bottom of like the rung, the bottom of the ladder in terms of specificity and just how low that production value needs to be is if you've ever sent your client a loom video of you on your laptop, webcam, whatever your, your, your webcam sitting in your office looks like a hostage video. This is not an impressive production. But you send that loom to your client and they're like what? I'm blown away about 50% of the time. I think this, like this has been my clients reactions was oh my. I'm so appreciative that you went through this level of effort to send this thing to me. And this is something that you made for one person. On the other end of the spectrum you've got mega influencers, you've got the rock, you've got the Kardashians, you've got this super, super high production level that's going out mainstream. Which end of the spectrum do you want to live in? I can tell you the bar for how good something has to be comes down to the more specific you get. And that's a nice place to like make hay. Very specific low bar. Those beekeepers are going to be jacked that anybody made anything for them. And so if you're just putting out general accounting advice or general tax advice, I'll just tell you right now, nobody's ever going to see it because you're not going to get it to the bar where it needs to be better than Tim Ferriss's advice. And like all these just kind of general mainstream folks, right? So get specific, don't worry about. And we're going to do another episode on just some ideas for posting on what you need to be doing after posting because it's actually like the replies and how you build relationships there that's most important here. That's how you convert. But speak to a very specific type of person and this tweet may get no likes. This post may get no engagement. I mean Mr. Beast always says nobody was watching me obviously when I was publishing videos that would literally get zero views. Like except this, we don't see these people on social media. But 99.9% of people are still in that zero view category. And when you start, you're going to be there. But you have to start there to find your audience and to get better at this stuff. And by doing that, you're putting yourself in the 0.1% of people who are willing to put themselves out there and do so consistently. How many more years are you going to be working, doing whatever? How many more years? I don't care if it's five years, I don't care if it's 50 years. Think of all of the skills that you can develop and what ultimately will drive the success of your accounting firm. Finding a more specific type of person who will pay you more. Of all the skills that you could develop. Developing the skill of being able to get somebody's attention and be able to find a specific type of person who feels the pains you solve really acutely. What is a more valuable skill than that? And it's work. And it's gonna take time out of your day and you're stuck on all these kind of big, big brain hard questions. I'm sure coming out of this. You got a ton of questions. Chuck em in the comments, we'll cover em in the Q and A on Friday. But those things all get in the way of you just starting. And I've talked about, you know, Ali Abdaal's framework for getting started in video. He's like, all you gotta do is figure out like how to get the first hundred videos out of the way because they're gonna suck. If you could focus on that instead of making your piece de resistance like thing that people will be talking about for decades, you're not gonna do that. Focus on the process and doing it consistently. That's going to yield to you getting better. But you'll also be surprised when you are really, really specific how much the bad stuff and the non optimized stuff can really help people. Because again, we're focused on like putting really helpful stuff out there that people need to hear. Like I said, if you got questions and you are consuming this on YouTube, drop them in the comments. If you consume this in the podcast feed, which like 80% of people do, most podcast players will have a link to the video on YouTube for this. And so if you ever want to chuck a question in, just click through that video, drop a comment and we'll cover that in the weekly Q and A. Hopefully I helped you get over a hump on this stuff. It's really important how you're going to find that next client that will pay you more for what you do. That's all I got for today. I'll see you tomorrow.