155 Put Your Accounting Firm Marketing on Autopilot

I don't have time to market what I'm doing. You should see my inbox. I got, I got stuff to do, man. I got 11 thoughts for you on how to put that marketing on autopilot. How do you have a, a never ending flow of content, ideas, little things you can write a tweet about or blog post or video. Whatever I found before I got started, I really struggled with, well, what am I going to say? I don't have anything to say. And so I consumed a bunch of stuff about like, you know, you know how to just have an ongoing supply of content. And that was a big helpful helper for me. Cause I could produce from a place of abundance. It was almost the opposite of what it used to be, where I had all this stuff and I needed to get it out. And that was actually how this podcast started. Like the notion of it being daily was. I'm just like, there's so many nooks and crannies of accounting firms that nobody's talking about. And I made one and I didn't wanna make a wait a week until I made the next one. And so I was producing from a place of abundance. And that's when it's really easy. Produce flows naturally. It doesn't feel like a big lift. So. 11 thoughts today on how to produce from a place of abundance. Make it super easy to just keep pumping out stuff that is giving people value consistently. Audio only listeners are missing out on a treat of a sweater today. I, I think these are buffalo. It's one of those holiday sweaters that isn't green and red and you're like, can that count as a holiday sweater? What can I say? I'm edgy like that. Okay. How to create from a place of abundance. Put that marketing on autopilot. Tippity top number one. You gotta have a place to capture stuff, capture ideas, to jot stuff down, park it until you are in the frame of mind where you are writing a tweet or something like that. There's so many things that go through our head throughout the day where, where if you don't capture them, they could be really valuable. And like, if you're not capturing them, then they just go now counter argument to this notion of always capturing everything. I've actually heard Neil Gaiman, an author, say this. He says, the only things worth remembering, I will remember. And it is true that, I mean, every day there's just a lot of pointless, fleeting things that go through our head or we, or we think something is a good idea. And then we think about it again the next day, and we're like, no, that's a. That's a terrible idea. Maybe 10pm Tony had you all excited about something, and you write it down, and then you look at it in the morning and you're like, what in the. What in God's green earth is this? And so that's totally the case. You will have bad ideas. But I even find that capturing my bad ideas are helpful because usually there's a seed of something interesting there, and maybe a bad idea isn't worthwhile. But if I can roll up, like, a few different bad ideas or a few things that are maybe so simplistic to where they don't merit, like, you know, a blog post or a tweet or a video or something like that, even if I capture them, they could make sense for like a roundup of, you know, 20 tips for beekeepers or 20 tips about making social media, something like that. And I've shared this before, like, kind of how you like my approach to keeping your. Your brain space as clear as possible. Your brain's not for holding ideas, it's for creating them. And so for me, it became really important that in every context in my life, I had a way to keep capture a thought that comes up, whether I'm sitting at my computer, whether I'm playing with my kids, whether I'm on a treadmill, whether I'm driving. I have a way to capture a thought in the moment. And I would argue when it comes to family stuff, when we are not engaged in family stuff, it's because we're trying to juggle things in our mind. And the solution to that is as soon as it comes up, to get it out of your mind. And that may mean making a quick voice note, it may mean jotting down a note, but for me, that actually makes me more present in the things that I'm doing. And I've talked with my family about that, and they understand that. I went to dinner with my wife a couple nights ago, and two or three times, like, during dinner, like, a thing will come up, like, I don't know why, like, I wasn't really thinking about work, but a thing will come up and I'm like, shoot, I gotta do that. Or shoot, I gotta remember that. And I've got the iPhone 15, the new one. It's got a little shortcut button on it, and I've got that set up so that if I hold that down, it pulls up Apple notes. I can just hold down button on the side of my phone and, and jot down a note and I'm good and I can go on with my life. Like that is me releasing my brain of that thing. And creating content from a place of abundance means having a killer capture process that you jot that stuff down. Doesn't mean you're gonna do anything with it at this moment, but you're at least gonna capture it. And whether you are posting online yet or not, this is something worth starting doing now. Like, there is no reason to not start posting online. Like, stop overthinking it. Stop overanalyzing. Just start. The more you can exercise that muscle, the bigger and the more swole it'll get. But whether you start it or not, definitely have a capture system. Start rounding this stuff up. Second, second tip. Make a list of the questions that you get from clients all week. I mean, we like, like to say we don't have anything to say when literally all we do is tell clients what to do all week long and answer their stupid questions and fix their stupid problems. You got a whole lot to say. You, you just haven't really put it through the lens of like social media yet. And so what are all the questions that you get within your firm? Specifically, what are the questions who. What are the questions you're getting from clients? Who are your ideal client profile? If I don't want to work from farmers, I shouldn't be posting on social media a bunch of questions that I'm getting from farmers. I'm posting the bee stuff. Hey, how do I make sure I have enough cash until next honey harvests season? I hope nobody that listens to this knows anything about beekeeping, because I don't. But you know what I mean. We get all these questions and most of them are like questions that you've answered a hundred times before. And if that's the case within your itty bitty client list and the larger universe, there are a ton of folks in that domain that have that question. And you can like give them a little bit of value by putting that out there. Now for your clients, you are answering that question in the context of their specific situation, their accounting, their tax situation. Like you are answering it in a way that's very specific to them. If you're posting something publicly, it is like general wisdom and maybe even some exceptions to the rule, but it is ultimately not as good as the real deal applying that to someone's situation. And that's why we don't need to be stuck on giving away too much value to be stuck on. Well, what if I just post an answer online for this thing a client just paid me to answer. The reality is the answer you're giving specific to a client is specific to them. The answer you are posting online is not. But for me, like honestly, week over week, like that's would be 20 bits of content. Like that's as easy as writing a little paragraph of what my question and answer is. In fact, you can literally go out to social media and that could be the format question, here's the question answer, here's your answer. Like don't overthink it. It can be as simple as that. Just remember to put it through a very specific lens. And your advice for a beekeeper might be the same advice that you would give to a general small business person. That's fine, but that's not a rationale to not frame it through their language and through the problems that they have. If you put out something general, nobody's going to find it. If you put out something for a very specific person, that is how people find you. Hey Life Flow ad 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 spread 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 liflow IO. This episode is sponsored in part by Copilot. I don't know about you. Whenever I am considering a piece of software, I like skulking the review sites to be like, okay, like what are people actually saying about this? What's the bad stuff? That maybe they're not going to Put on a landing page that might be highlighted there. So I did a bit of skulking for Copilot. I'm looking at captera now. 4.9 stars across 19 reviews. Compares it to Monday.com who has a measly 4.6. Nice try. Stuff that people are highlighting real live human being users what they're saying they love about Copilot Actual quotes the Portal has made it super easy to navigate with clients that aren't the best with tech or have to rely on something like Google Drive to share files. Clients who are bad with tech. Hello. Never had any of those. The entire team over at Portal is absolutely incredible, wonderful to work with and very helpful. Product is very clean and our clients are impressed by the simplicity and experience of working with Portal. I love the feedback about specifically clients reactions because I think that's oftentimes what we get afraid of, especially in the context of that client facing Portal. And is it gonna be too hard for people to use? Are people gonna be annoyed that I'm asking to do it this them to do it this way when in the past maybe it was a human process. The Portal team is very helpful whenever I have a question or need some esoteric support and the product itself works great for everything we need. I'm excited for their new features as well. There you go from actual human beings. You don't need to hear it from me. I mean I'm getting paid for this. Those people, those people, they're just happy customers, you know. That's Copilot. It is a specifically a customer Portal client facing portal. Not trying to do all the workflow stuff. Just wants to squeeze the ever living heck out of building a killer client facing experience. Learn more about that one at the link at the show. Notes Number 3. Make a list of client problems that you solved this week or just jot them down as those things happen. We are fixers of clients doing stupid stuff and they set up that business and then broke something and never told you or they didn't do that payroll registration the right way or oh gosh, you're having to go back and fix historical payroll, you know, bookkeeping errors. That is so much of what we do. Especially before those people are your clients, before you have them on the straight and narrow. Think about all the things that we pick up from clients of others, like when they're coming in as a new client. How many of those things are we doing every single week? Five things. I don't know, 20 things where you could jot those down and your the issues your clients are having, they're absolutely not the first time anybody in the universe has had those prob. Those problems. So again, that's a great seed for some content. Just be sure that you put it through the specific lens of the folks you want to attract, which we get stuck on this sometimes I think don't have to be the same people as those you have today. Like, they just don't. If you got only a few of those clients but you want to add more of them, then like outwardly on social media, that can be the only thing you ever talk about. That's totally fine. And you'll actually find that you benefit a ton from putting that stuff out there and then other people engaging and speaking into it. Like, that's why like, I feel like my thinking on accounting firm running has been super refined by the fact that I'm very consistently going out and sharing like kind of here's where I'm at today. But then people will reply and be like, I had this and this happen. And it's why my framing is a little bit different. You know what? Like that just made me smarter. Like that just expanded my worldview into something that I wouldn't have otherwise thought about. So by sharing that stuff, you're giving away value. But I would argue that you actually collect more value than anybody else because you are the one that ought to be reading all those replies and having those meaningful discussions. Number four, what's a mistake you saw this week? I guess it's kind of similar to client problems that you solved. But what are like traps, the most common traps you're seeing your clients fall into? Maybe like, maybe it stems from non obvious things that are specific to what they do. Those are the best, those are the best tidbits are, is when the right answer for the folks you want to serve may be different from the general wisdom. And until they stumble into that and make that mistake, they just don't know. And those are some of the really good opportunities are what are the things that your clients just like don't know and they can't be blamed for not knowing. So maybe that's specific regulatory stuff, maybe that's deadlines they need to be aware of that aren't even on their radar yet. But we see, I mean, goes without saying, we see our clients make a lot of mistakes. How can you use your megaphone to communicate? Like, think about how you can communicate something that will keep other people from making those same mistakes. If that helps them dodge a bullet, they assign that value back to you, right? That was something meaningful that you did for them. Number five, post about something that people ought to be doing this time of year. So we all have kind of an annual cadence of how we advise our clients and the things that they need to be doing in the US Right now. Man, you gotta be rounding up like W nines. You got to be making sure your accounting is more or less up to date so that when the new year ticks over, you're not going to waste a bunch of time closing out the books for tax purposes. If you do income tax stuff, people need to be doing year end tax planning, they need to be getting paid in. And the more you can push people to do this, the more pressure it takes off your actual busy tax season. But even beyond that, I think sometimes we can fixate on just like the work that we do and how we support clients. What are other deadlines that may not even be accounting or tax related that are very important to the people that you serve. Maybe they have some sort of other regulatory reporting requirements or deadline for this or that and you can be the one to put that in front of somebody where they may not have otherwise been aware of it. This is something where you can actually build a lot of helpful sort of perpetual marketing ideas for the various different seasons of the year. What am I going to talk about in December and January and February and March? And you talk about those same things every year. Keep coming back to the same old topics folks aren't going to remember. Don't worry about sounding like a broken record. Seasonal based things like those are ideas that you can maintain going forward and keep building on so you're not perpetually like recreating the wheel and the talking points every single time. Number, number six, how a current event impacts them. Specifically, how do, how does interest rates going down impact beekeepers? And honestly a lot of us, where we get stuck on, where we get stuck here is we think that we have to have some big novel, groundbreaking thing to say. When you know the old expression what's trivial to you is probably groundbreaking to somebody that doesn't have your expertise. But like additionally being able to put that through a very specific lens like that is what people need to hear. So interest rates, changes in tax law, like legislation, that's being considered, being the only one to talk about. How does this impact specific people group? Like that's going to get you a lot of traffic. It's going to pull that type of person to your content. You just gotta make sure it's specific. Now five Other things that are more kind of like evergreen content ideas. By the way, as I'm going through this things, these ideas, you're probably thinking of a lot of things. Like you've probably just cruised through a ton of ideas in your head. This is the time for capture. Like as you think of these things, jot all that stuff down. The next time you go to make a post for your business, you want to have a list of like 50 pretty good ideas. Better yet, spend a half day scheduling out, you know, future posts for the next week or two. So as you're thinking of stuff, drop it in your capture system or at the very least bookmark this episode, circle back to it when you're in kind of a writing frame of mind and you can jot that stuff down. Okay, five ideas that are more like evergreen style content that you could post anytime but could also be more framed as more long term assets. So maybe it's a PDF that you give away. Maybe it's an incentive to get somebody to sign up to a newsletter as you're going to send this little asset to them. Five ideas here. Why Balance Sheets look different for Beekeepers People are going to start unsubscribing to this podcast because they think it's a beekeeping podcast. Why balance sheets are different for whatever your specific type of person is, be it farmers, taxidermists, dentists. Again, don't like reinvent the wheel and think that you need to have something super, super novel here. But why is the default chart of accounts not enough? How does the balance sheet of an average company of this type different, like differ from other balance sheets? Maybe there's, you know, high capex. Maybe your AR and your AP like turnover rates are super, super important. Maybe they need to really be focused on those in certain industries. Maybe you need to maintain big cash balances because you've got large windows between like getting paid on big projects. These are all things that impact how somebody ought to interpret a balance sheet. And you know this because you've done a ton of these but your clients don't. And this is that Venn diagram of helpful advice. And helpful advice that's specific to a very specific like a particular person. That's what we're going for. That's how we attract a particular person. This episode is sponsored in part by Fin Daily. Did you know few years ago I actually developed a SaaS app and eventually sold it. And this is that app. Fin Daily, we are fully jumping the Internet Think boy shark today. Build app, sell app, App Then buys ads on your content. That's weird. So why did I build this thing? What is it? Basically it is like an email template builder that will send automated emails out to your clients and inject those emails with important financial and banking information. So for example, I'm going to build out a template that gives them like a weekly rundown of maybe their bank balances and outstanding bills, stuff like that. You build out these email templates with placeholders and then schedule them to go out on a certain, you know, whatever, every day, once a week, whatever. And those placeholders can be things from QuickBooks, things from Xero, things from Plaid, like bank balances. You can even do mathy things to like generate, you know, like roll ups of sets of data, even use Zapier to pull in any other figures from third party systems. Super cool, super flexible tool. The way that I used it was we did cash reporting for clients who had like kind of short term cash planning issues. And this was a way to automate that process by pulling the bills in from the accounting system and pulling live banking balances. They have built on this tool further to do some cool new stuff like having multiple accounting file connections. For example, you've got a group of companies being able to send out, you know, say to a client who owns multiple businesses, send out information about all those different businesses in a single email, all on an automated basis because it fetches stuff from the API right before the email sends. Pretty cool. It's called Fin Daily. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Do you hire accountants? Bless your little heart. Not the best part of the job in my opinion. Not something I ever enjoyed. Well, listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work 100% full time for your firm. Their accountants aren't freelancing or contracting for multiple firms. They're all yours. They work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not going to get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said, you know what, we're going to build our own pipeline in the Philippines, gonna pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the story. I've been talking about a lot about staffing, building more resilient Staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines, like totally red pilled me to like, oh geez, like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out. Link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com Second, more kind of like long form idea. Not long form necessarily, but evergreen. Similarly, how are P and LS different? What's the normal like staff overhead for a dental clinic? What should your cogs be for a beekeeping business? And it's hard to get to like absolutes there. And that's. I've always kind of, I've never been a big benchmarking guy because people run their businesses so differently. It's almost like benchmarking is just trying to get you to do the same thing as everybody else, just ever so slightly better. But you, if you do a lot of work with a certain type of client, that can also extend to why is a chart of accounts for your beekeeping client not the default chart of accounts? Why did you change it? Like, why should that look different? This is all really helpful stuff for folks that you know. But the people without professional help or the people who don't have professional help who are actively educating them, which is like most accountants are not going out of their way to help educate their clients. Those folks are going to be like, oh, that's a really useful tidbit that I just picked up. And they're going to attribute that value to you. Third idea here. Why does tax look, look different for your type of client? For beekeepers, for farmers? What is unique about their businesses that impacts how they are taxed? Maybe how they ought to save for tax, how you recommend them paying in their taxes throughout the year. Even if you're not a tax person, you can probably speak to this in a pretty educated way. And it's not even necessarily about the mechanics of the tax as much as it is as a business. How do you plan around tax? What does that money come out of? Are there certain times of the year when you really need to be setting money aside? Fourth evergreen idea. Why is banking different for your specific industry? Are there any considerations there? I know I was always very opinionated about where my clients banked because we all know how painful it is when they go somewhere that's just an absolute pain to work with. Maybe they don't have the tools you need. Maybe it's super difficult to, you know, set up other accounts or schedule recurring transactions or send payments out of the bank, manage transfers, set up alerts. Like there's stuff like that where in specific industries those details become very important. But nobody getting into that thing's going to know that until they get into it and do it wrong. And so if you can get out ahead of that, that's going to be really helpful. Next one. Why is lending different? What does lending look like for beekeepers, for farmers, for taxidermists? Should you be leaning into it? What are the benefits that you've seen? What are the downsides that you've seen? Long term lending, line of credits, putting stuff on credit cards like this is all stuff that people don't just know. And sometimes we don't put this information out ourselves because we don't necessarily consider ourselves an expert in that specific thing. But I don't think you have to frame yourself as an expert. In fact, oftentimes, I mean there's things you're going to be an expert in from accounting and tax, but the more outside of that you go, the more I actually think it's valuable to just focus on sharing your journey rather than saying here's the absolute right answer for this or that because you're opening the door to still learning more. But we underestimate the value of our journey. The fact that we see the nitty gritty and what all these people get wrong like across hundreds of clients and, and our clients don't have visibility into that stuff like we do. So even if you don't necessarily hold yourself out as an expert in that thing, there is still value in you sharing common traps, common things that you've seen get people get right and wrong. Last one here, touched on this a bit earlier. Common wisdom that doesn't apply to what they do. So who are the sources of common wisdom out there? You've got like your big kind of businessy tropes from your rich dad, poor dad and buying real estate and Alex Hermosi and like where are the areas in which that stuff is in conflict with how you would run this type of business? Disagreeing with something like that, I mean obviously that's, that can get really clickbaity when it comes to content, but it's absolutely something that people engage with. And the reality is there's very few things that are like universal truths when it comes to business advice. And so can you put your finger on maybe there's clients where they, they follow this person and they gave them that advice and you're like, no, that was actually a really bad move for this type of business. Here's why you're putting that stuff out there for a very specific type of person and genuinely saving them headaches where they then attribute that value back to you. That's how you build trust with them. That's how they become much more willing to, to buy from you. And they build a relationship with you because you're genuinely helping people. But as we talked about yesterday, most of us have like a whole cast of characters in our heads that are keeping us putting that stuff out there and like sharing wisdom in the same way that you would if your client just gave you a call. And the closer we can get to our external Personas looking like the same sort of decision making framework that we share when we have those conversations with clients. Like if we can extend that stuff beyond our client list and put it out there for other people to benefit from, they are going to benefit. But at the end of the day, you are always going to be the biggest beneficiary because they are assigning value to you, they're building relationships with you, you're attracting a bigger audience and raising your sort of perceived expertise in this domain. And it's gonna benefit you in a bunch of ways. Opening the doors to new opportunities. People just generally willing to be paying to pay you more for what you do and establish your firm as like the best of the best for beekeepers. So if you're struggling with what to say, what do I even have to say? Hopefully that is a helpful starting point. And you came out of this with a whole bunch of talking points that you could be putting in front of potential clients online. I love to see what you are doing in a client facing context because my social media is accountant facing. I just see the inside baseball accounting conversations. If you're doing some cool client facing stuff, drop it in the comments. I love to see that stuff, but also the more that other people see it, the more it demystifies the notion of them doing that as well. They'll pick up a few ideas and then just kind of makes it feel more accessible when you, when you see other folks doing it. And you can help a lot of people. There are like a thousand people tuning into this silly thing every single day. Can you believe that? Think of how many brain cells we collectively lost with yesterday's episode. But if you're doing something cool, share it like this is a community, the people who listen to this show. And it's really helpful to see that stuff and what other people are experimenting with. That's all I got today. I think tomorrow we're coming to you from Las Vegas. That'll be a fun one. And I'll see you there, Sam.