156 How to Brand An Accounting Firm in 2024

Welcome in. We're in Vegas today at AICPA Digital at the Aria because nobody can think of anywhere else to have an accounting conference. One of the things I'm talking about while I'm here is branding. And in doing preparation for that talk, a few things that I thought would be interesting to drill a little deeper on stuff that's changed recently around maybe the best way to brand your accounting firm. How does AI impact that at all? And if you were to throw out your branding and start from scratch, because honestly, I think we're all thinking about some version of this. I don't know that most of us are super jazzed about our branding. How would we approach this if we did rethink it? So come on in. Today we're talking branding. Branding right now, I would say is kind of like your website, where I don't know that people will buy from you just because you have cool branding. But getting it wrong, people will absolutely go away. I think you can spook people if it is so bad or if it's kind of violating some rules. So a few things I wanted to touch on in light of all the things you talk about in firm running. Where does branding fit in? How do you make that useful? What are some traps right now? What are the aspects of branding that are actively pushing people away to where if you have this, you may want to accelerate a plan to change it. Thoughts on domains in 2023? Like picking your domain for your firm, where this fits into your messaging, your firm's voice and where does AI fit into this? Does AI impact any of that? So up first, branding kind of the like big over the top golden rules, like what do you need to be thinking about with branding and how it fits into the all the other aspects we talk about with firm running. My big three things is will the person remember it if they hear it, Will they remember it? For us, maybe where we see this most is in branding, around the software tools that we use. And there are certain names where it's really hard to remember certain names where it sticks with you. I would say an example of something that's going to be hard to remember is almost always a name. Like firms are moving away from the people's name stuff, as they should, as much as they can. Obviously in the US we have state societies where in accounting firms doubly so sometimes in CPA firms you have restrictions around how you can be named. I think that is so dumb and so outdated, but that's the reality of what some of us are dealing with. So assuming you have agency and how you can name your firm, number one for me is can I remember it? Number two is can I spell it? And this has become a bigger problem as we want to pretend that we are tech companies and come up with like this cool little, little hip, trendy name for this thing that we're doing that's actually just accounting. But we've gotten so creative and how those things get named because it's just all the naming and the domains have gotten so much so oversaturated that now we come up with weird spellings for things. But the problem is if somebody can't spell the name of your thing, it's actually a big problem with people's names too. If they can't spell that thing, they're never going to be able to go back and find it later on because you're not like a massive company where Google's going to suggest some nearby adjacent name. Like the reality is if your name is spookinmonger, there's a hundred different ways that could be spelled and folks are gonna have a hard time finding it. Third, can I get a good domain for it? And this. And the problem of number three is probably what makes number two really bad is folks are looking for names where they can get a solid domain for it. And so you're limited to weird spellings, like modifications of existing words, that sort of thing. Let me actually jump ahead to the discussion on domains and URLs. Now. The talk I did today was with some of the folks behind the CPA domain and they've added some stuff to that, like a super simple site builder so that when you buy your CPA domain, they're going to try to make it as easy as possible for you to stand up a quick little website. Not a massive, hugely like full, you know, suite of like making a big complex website, but better than nothing and something to get you started. Now, I made a video a couple years ago now about the CPA top level domain and my thoughts on it, which are still largely the same for getting, you know, a short, memorable domain name. Like when I made that video, QuickBooks CPA was available, 0 CPA was available. Dentist.cpa had just gotten swiped and I knew the guy on Twitter who swiped it. And I totally would have pounced on that. Cause that would have been so great for our practice. And so that's the biggest upside is there are restrictions around who can buy it. Obviously you have to be a cpa. I don't know if you have to be a AICPA member or not, but obviously this is a CPA specific thing. The biggest downside to that top level domain for me, and this is something that is not just a CPA top level domain thing, but other, you know, dot limo, dot diamond, other weird top level domain things is when people see it in the wild, they have to realize that that's a URL, otherwise it defeats the purpose, right? So I've got the domain JSON cpa. If I'm putting that out somewhere where non accountants are going to see that and I'm putting that up with the goal that they go to that site. Step one, they have to know that it's a website. And if your accounting firm's name is Toadstool CPA and you put that on a billboard or on a business card or something like that, with no other context, I don't know that they actually know that that is a website. Accountants, I would argue, do so I don't think this is an issue for me so much as my audience is accountants as it is firms who are putting the URL in front of normies and wanting them to go there. Now, easy fixes for that. Put WWW in front of it. Put like, you know, a little icon of World Wide Web or like some sort of iconography that would indicate that that is a domain. But that's the big thing to look out for if you're using cpa. If you're using any non standard top level domain, be sure that you're using that domain in a context where it's going to make it painfully obvious to your grandma that that's a website. 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. The 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, if you're 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 LifeFlow 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 gonna put on a landing page that might be highlighted there? So I did a bit of skulking for Copilot. I'm looking at Capterra 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. Is it going to be too hard for people to use? Are people going to 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 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. Now I would say this is changing not just with the CPA domain but with other non standard domains. Everybody has this problem so folks are getting more comfortable and more familiar with things besides dot coms. That being said, most of the mainstream tools that like normies use all day, every day. They are very large, very mature companies who have ponied up to buy a big expensive.com domain. Most people I would argue aren't actually using like the startups and the early stage apps that many of us are using in practice where they're using a dot app domain or you know, some top level domain that's not dot com. So our familiarity with it is probably ahead of that of that of our clients. That being said, it is an issue that is getting better. And so if I'm going to rebrand my firm and try to elbow my way into a a good domain that people can remember, you either gotta go down the path of using a non standard top level domain and to me that is not the end of the world or pairing your name with some sort of modifier that is not hard to remember. So if you are a CPA, you know, toadstoolcpa.com, toastool. CPA being able to add that CPA tag to the end of whatever that name is like that's a pretty easy one. Not everybody's CPA firms though. And there aren't a lot of great like short things that you can append to your domain. Stuff like accounting, accountants, like that's just, that's getting your domain to be out there way too long. And so you may be looking at then a different top level domain but the biggest thing is to ensure that it is something that's memorable. So like one thing that folks have done over the last five years is now actually unique pairings of two memorable words. Two easy to remember words, you know, panda doc, like okay, you're going to do E signatures, chuck a random animal on there. Like pairings of two things I feel like have become popular because as long as you can find a unique pairing of things then you're good. If you are stuck in a situation where you have to use your name, man, that kind of stinks. I would push back and like see if there's any way to use, you know, a DBA or like any other aspect of your branding that could not be your name to and how you hold yourself out there, especially if you got a tricky name that's pretty brutal. Now in terms of branding in general, there's definitely some things you got to avoid and things that are actively pushing folks away. But I don't think like in my opinion there isn't really such thing as like at least in the accounting firm space something that is like universally Great branding as much as how well does your branding align with the people you're trying to attract? Right. And so all of this comes back to what I always hammer on is who are the very specific people who are solving very specific pains for what are they going to say about that branding? And a trap here is branding that you like or branding that you think is cool. And when we look at other sites and we're poking around on the website, on other firms websites, we're like, oh I love this one, I like that one. That's honestly that's personal taste. And that usually has nothing to do with how well does it align with the people they're trying to attract. So resist the urge of trying to get to something that you love because it doesn't really matter. I mean in some ways it does matter. Like it needs to be something that you're proud of as it's, you know, especially in small firm world. And in some ways that is a reflection of you. But more important is what is it going to say to the ideal next client that you can attract now? Things that are actively pushing people away from you right now. So if you got old timey branding, what are the things that you need to look out for that I think are literally costing folks money? I don't think phenomenal branding is going to win you a client on its own, but really, really bad branding, it is pushing people away. So a few things that I had jotted down they can't google to find you, maybe that's a name that's really hard to spell. Maybe that's just not having a clear handle for what you do. If you can't have like a elevator pitch conversation with somebody and then them go out and google you later to find you, that's a branding problem. That's act that's literally costing you clients if they can't get to what you do from social media. If we are beginning to have conversations on social media, that ought to attract the folks who feel the pains that I solve for. How do they get from Jason Stats social media to the webpage for what I do and for some of us that's as simple as putting a link in the bio out to your firm. But a lot of us have a whole ton of stuff going on and it can be hard for somebody to like make sense of what are all these different things. If you've got like a link tree or something like that on your social media that's got 20 different things on it, that's just too much and I'm talking to myself here. If somebody first finds you and they're like, oh man, they're saying some meaningful problems, I'm pretty sure they run an accounting firm. I just wanna get to their accounting firm. You gotta make that as easy as possible for them to get to that place. If they are consuming stuff from you online and they're unable to connect like you back to your firm, that's a problem. So on your firm website, you wanna make sure that your name is out there. If you are the main person driving people to that site, your name needs to show up on the site a bunch so that if somebody searches your name, they're going to get your accounting firm website. The, you know, the biggest source of Google traffic reaching my website for my practice was, you know, my name, cpa. And so if you are building an audience or even just beginning to have conversations on social media, be sure that via your name and your social media profiles, but also via Google, they can get back to the website. The strategy there may look a little different depending on whether you got a super common name or not. Another thing that's pushing people away, just a super, super old timey logo. This impacts me. Maybe there's certain generations of buyers where this impacts and certain generations where it doesn't. But I will get to and the last thing is your site design. I will get to a website and I'll either see the branding or I'll see the site design. And if it is of a level where I'm like, I would never be caught dead having branding like this or having a site like this, that's enough for me to bounce. So there is a certain threshold there where that matters. I imagine that that is a generational thing. So I imagine there's, there's folks for whom that is not a big deal. It is a big deal for me. So if you are especially trying to attract folks from younger generations, I think that's increasingly becoming a big deal. It's not a massive bar. Like if you're the guy like, okay, middle of the road branding, like, fine, you are an accounting firm. I don't know that anybody's expecting you to set the world on fire with your branding. It's just when it is really, really bad, like you need to be thinking about that. My relationship to all this has changed a lot. When I was in firm running and doing the work and working in the firm, this is the last thing in the world I wanted to think about. And I think that's where most of us still are you're like, man, I got enough things to do in the day. I have like actual work and actual problems to solve for people. I really don't want to go play house and like just work on this stuff where it's like, this isn't going to change or affect the quality of the work that we do. And that was me like for a decade. And interestingly, I've been thinking about this more and more. It wasn't so much of my thinking changed when I truly just began working on the firm and not in the firm. And that was in the last couple years of firm running for me. I was able to get completely out of client work. And that disassociated me from a lot of stuff in a way that I think was really helpful. And so, you know, if there's a counter argument to working on the firm and not in the firm or being an advisor or being somebody like me who tells people what to do but doesn't run a firm anymore, the argument there is, well, like, well, you're not actually in the wheeze. You don't really know what's going on and you don't have that personal connection and all that. And I think the best perspective is probably a marriage of those two things because that is true. I don't run a firm, somebody who is above the day to day and who is working on the business, they don't talk to those clients every single day. They don't have those relationships. And if you're cavalier and you just blow past those things like they don't exist, can you make progress and make change? Sure. But one thing you super overlook is the impact on all of the people in your own team who are affected by that change, who do have those relationships and have to be the ones to go back to clients and be like, listen, I love you but sorry we're making this really hard change. This episode is sponsored in part by Fin Daily. Did you know a few years ago I actually developed a SaaS app and eventually sold it. And this is that app, findaily. 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, 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. Sounds 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, exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not gonna get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100, dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said, you know what, we're gonna build our own pipeline in the Philippines, gonna pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the same 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 the flip side of that, when you are the person with your head in the weeds and you are intimately connected with that client, you can Also be blinded to the bigger picture problems of the business of like the big strategic things, because you're really fixated on those clients that we have today and the specific problems that they have. Those things matter, but both ends of the spectrum matter. I think the right answer is something in the middle. Now, when I was in the weeds in the firm, branding was the last thing that I was thinking about. When I was out of the weeds of the firm, I got super fixated on attracting a better type of client because I looked across the, you know, 1600 clients that I think we had at the time and I could see we've got like a new crop of client that is wildly more profitable than the old crop of client. And if I could just attract another a hundred or two hundred of these, we would basically be making the same money on this new crop of 200 clients that we made on the entire legacy business. And so a lot of what I then began working towards was how do I start building this kind of new practice in parallel? There's a lot of hard things about that from like every time you're gonna make a change that's great for a new client, what about the old clients that maybe it's bad for? And you run into all those issues, right? And then the struggles of the people who work for you, having to enforce these hard changes on people, clients that they may have worked with for the past decade. And is that wrong to do that, to like, I don't know, not value those relationships enough to not be willing to do the old stuff in perpetuity forever? For those folks, especially for me, like as a snot nosed young guy coming into ownership of an 80 year old practice, there's also an element of, there's a lot of great people that have been here for decades and clients that have worked with us for decades, like, who am I to come in and blow that up, right? Like there's also an element of the legacy of the firm and not being the one to run that into the ground or change it into something that's unrecognizable or that people didn't like anymore. So my, like my personal relationship with branding changed a lot. And it's actually got me thinking as I think a lot of the things that I talk about are the working on the firm, things that may feel out of touch and maybe unattainable for folks who are still working in the firm where they're like, I love all these big brain ideas, great, makes sense. But my, my reality is much more humble Much more like in the trenches, day to day with folks and you have to have people that wear all those different hats. And if you are an owner of a firm, you know, I would really encourage you start leaning into what is the path to me working on the practice. Because a lot of the problems that ail you when you're doing the work are going to be really hard to solve until you can get into the frame of mind of how do I think of the business as a whole more strategically? That was just like such a big tipping point for me. And there's not a size threshold where you can make that make sense. I mean, we talked with Jad Davis on this podcast before. He and his co founder, that was them from day one. They were not opening a firm to do the work. So even if you are really small, there's a path to doing this, to working on the business really, really early. It's not like you get to a certain size threshold and then it's okay. Now one thing that goes hand in hand with branding is nailing down exactly what your messaging is. The, the voice of your firm. What does it look like in blog posts, what does it look like on social media. And when you're an itty bitty firm, at least initially, that just mirrors your voice, right? And it is as simple as that. Now if your voice is as brash, if you swear, if it's off the like, think about how your branding ties into that voice. Because there's definitely brands that can come off super corporate, other brands that can come off like super punk rock. And I love a brand that similarly to how it aligns with the type of person you want to attract is also a reflection of the people behind that. And if you are punk rock and you got that neck tat, then you're going to like attract a different type of person in your brand can be a reflection of that also. So like if those three things I know earlier I said make a brand for your customer, not for you, in a perfect world, those three things work together really nicely, right? Because in the same way that like if you turn up at a party and you hit it off with a certain type of person, your brand, like if your brand is a great fit for that crowd in the party, like that's the perfect fit, is when you've got that whole thing working together, when you get bigger and your firm grows beyond you and you're now taking on clients that work for your team rather than clients that just work for, for you, I think that brand probably gets. It should still be punk rock and it can still be specific, but it does get a little bit harder the more folks you have involved there. And if you're not careful, you get to what you see from big firms and from regional firms where it's just like blah, nothing brand, safe brand. And that's not interesting to any of us. I don't think. Couple things around voice, you know, if you think about big companies, they have very strict parameters around what their corporate voice is and a basic version of that you can still have. And so like a every everything you post like be thinking of a high level filter for me that is, is this useful for a small firm owner? So every single thing that I post is like is this useful or is this like self aggrandizing for me or do I just think this is cool or funny? 95% of the time it's gotta be useful for them. Not something that I think is important. It has to like genuinely be useful for them. The other 5% is, you know, me posting up chin shots when I'm at conferences or like silly AI videos or something like that. Last thing, does AI impact any of this? I think it totally does. I think we've already been on a path to media being more personal. So people wanting to go to people to consume media. You look at, there's a story this week about Sports Illustrated and how they were using fake AI writers to write stuff and they got caught. Sports Illustrated is not what Sports Illustrated was in the 90s. Like that is a zombie publication now when you can get by by publishing stuff from fake people that was written by AI, you are no longer a compelling publication. You are living off of like that legacy business and the people who are just still around. This all accelerated big time during COVID as like content creators like kind of 5x'd in that window of time, I feel like. But people more and more wanna consume from people and AI is pushing us down that path even faster as the ability to create information is now like astronomical. And so ultimately like Sports Illustrated for an example, people are not going to go to Sports Illustrated to see this, you know, private equity backed publication pumping out AI articles when they can instead go to a content creator who has similar interests to them and get it directly from them. Right? Like that's just, that's. That is the future of media misinformation. Another note I had here accelerates this as well. When you don't know what's real, you're gonna go to the person that you trust to get what's real from that's just the direction that we're going. And when it comes to accounting information and tax information, all that applies there too. You don't identify as an influencer necessarily, but you need to still give people a channel through which to build that trust with you as their advisor. And sitting down and meeting with them once a year, once a quarter, I don't think that's good enough. You can still do all that, but if you are showing up in their timeline and if you're putting out stuff on a regular basis, you're giving them the opportunity to build a relationship with you and have a trusted source for all of that information. So, bigger trends. What is happening with AI, I do think that impacts the ways that we put our brand out there. I would also say there's. There's always the debate around, like, do I do social media through the lens of a brand or through the lens of a person? I think AI pushes the value back on the person even more. People go to social media to connect with people. There's very few examples of brands that have successfully done social media. We want to follow people. And that's the best part of running a small firm, is the identities and the people behind it and how it can be very true to you. And through that lens, your branding ought to be that as well. Last you know, AI, I think can be helpful for creation and ideation. I use it for stuff like coming up with better names, for repurposing different concepts, for applying frameworks to maybe new ideas, for example, like a storytelling framework to a specific thing. I want to teach somebody. I use AI for a lot of ideation around there. I don't use it for writing at all because at least today I feel like the stuff that comes out of it, I can tell it's AI. It's just too blase. It doesn't feel like my voice. But I do use it a lot for ideation and like pulling together different concepts. So branding today, I would argue while it's not going to necessarily win you a client on its own, it can cost you clients and it continues to put a greater level of attention on the individuals, on the people. That's who folks want to connect with, is people. And so the right way to do branding these days is something that is going to feel personal and connect with a very specific type of person. Right? That person who's going to pay you more for the stuff that you already do. Thanks for coming and hanging today. Obviously, if you are here, say hello when does this one go out Wednesday? I do a lot of conferences like this. This is like when I get to rub shoulders with all of you lovely people that engage with the podcast and all of that. And this is always a ton of fun, super energizing time for me to hang with folks. So if you're here, don't be a stranger and I will see you tomor.