171 Ongoing Services Are Costing Your Firm Profit

Of course we want ongoing services. That's the core of a profitable business, right? People coming back every month, every year, repeat buyers. But turns out this may very well be the least profitable way to present your accounting firm when you're trying to attract new business. Okay, come on in, let's talk about it. We're going to explore some alternatives that could drive some big time profit for your firm. We have talked a bit about building your firm around an offer, around a pain, around a problem that you can solve. A, a kind of beginning to end thing, more of a project based problem that you could solve for your clients. We've talked about building a firm or at least your firm's messaging around that. Instead of, we're accountants, we are tax professionals, we do XYZ for a number of reasons. Because you can ultimately take in those people at higher rates when you get them into recurring service. A whole bunch of reasons why this is a good idea, but it's not something that virtually anybody is leaning into right now. Case in point, your website is an accounting firm website. Hot take here, but we make fun of the awful site builders of the past for just how terrible those are. But the only thing that has changed since those awful site builders, what's differentiating your site from the output of those site builders? The only real difference is your site is in an aesthetic that you like. The subject matter, the content, what's there, bookkeeping, advisory, tax services, it's all the same. It's the same that it has always been. The only difference is your site is in an aesthetic that you like, which has absolutely nothing to do with whether it will attract clients or whether it is an aesthetic that aligns with, with your clientele. And I think our websites ought to look completely different. And this is kind of a hot take. So I'm gonna run you through kind of 11 thoughts I have on why we should move away from marketing, or at least on our website, and the way we talk about our firm, why we should move away from the talking points on ongoing work. Okay, hot take. I know, Coming in. Okay, number one reason why clients shouldn't come in the door as ongoing work clients. Because right now, the first thing you do when you're considering a potential new client is you do discovery work that you're probably not getting paid for. Right? So what does your discovery process look like right now? You hop on a call with them, you probably make them give you some sort of access to the accounting file so you can have a poke around. You have them give you a prior year tax return so that you can look around and all of this is work that you are not getting paid for, but is necessary to determine if this is something that you want to tackle. And so let's just keep this super, super simple. Wouldn't it be better if you got paid for that? Right, yes. So let's keep it as simple as that. What if instead of doing all of that work and all the things you take in in your form that call everything, what if, what if it was all paid for? What if they had to pay for you to do that for them? Number two reason why you shouldn't take clients in day one for ongoing work is because you don't know if you actually want to work with them yet. Right? And we get, we try to suss out a little bit of this in our, in our discovery, but the reality is some people are just turds and you don't find that out until they're clients or, I don't know, clients always surprise you with new and innovative, innovative ways to be a pain and irritate you. And the less experience you have with them before taking them on for ongoing work, the greater the risk that they're just going to be a thorn in your side and you don't actually want to work with them on an ongoing basis as opposed to if you did a project with them beforehand before starting the ongoing work, you're going to know a lot more about them. Number three, because the client doesn't know if they want to work with you yet. Like it's a two way street there. So the most expensive type of client you can have in an accounting firm is one where you bring them in for a year or you bring them in for two years and then they bounce because that initial phase with the client, in fact, this is another point I should have added on here. That initial phase with the client will always be the most work, the most expensive, the hardest point to make money on because you're getting them set up in your system. You're doing all this one time work, oftentimes you're going back and fixing old stuff which you can bill for. But the gravy clients, the good ones, are the ones you've had for five years, for 10 years, where you're like, you're into that routine and everybody knows how everybody else works. Those are generally the clients you're gonna make more money on. So if a client ends up deciding they don't want to work with you, I would just as soon not take them in if they're gonna bounce in the short term. Reason number four for why we shouldn't be holding ourselves out as just here's the ongoing things we do is the reality is if you're an accountant, if you're doing things around accounting or compliance or advisory, it's probably kind of a given already that you do this stuff for people on an ongoing basis. So if you're doing, you know, say you stand up on your website instead of the ongoing services, some sort of diagnostic or tax planning or advising on, you know, tech stacks for E comm business or something like that, if you are an accountant, if you're a cpa, if you're an ea, if you hold yourself out as accountants, it's probably a foregone conclusion that yes, you do ongoing accounting work. And so if you think about the surface areas, you have to attract people, be it social media, your website, your little LinkedIn bio statement is the best use of that. Really. We do ongoing accounting work. When you're an accountant, that's probably already what people can assume that you do. So don't use that very limited real estate to just talk about the destination, which I'm arguing is not step one. I don't think step one should be ongoing work with a client. For these reasons we're going through reason number five. Because this approach makes your landing page look like everybody else's. It really does. People have been sharing their websites online. And consistently the websites that people say and other accountants say that they like best are genuinely sites that have a cool visual esthetic. It's not usually about the messaging, it's about how well the esthetic aligns with your tastes. Which gang has absolutely nothing to do with running a business, with bringing in better clients or anything like that. And so this notion of making your landing page stand out is like, does it look more modern than other people's landing pages? Does it have some sort of like novel way of navigating things? Not is it speaking to a more specific type of pain that people have or optimized for solving a specific problem? I mean, think about all the accounting websites you've seen recently and if you just did a giant copy paste of all of the text on all of those websites, it is so samey. It really is. It's the same things like regurgitated in different aesthetics. And the only scenario in which you're going to win a client on aesthetics is when they are window shopping accounting firm to accounting firm and your aesthetic just happens to line up with the theirs like, and that is in no way. An indicator that they're going to be a good client, that they have money to pay you for what you do. That's just not a way to win clients. Right. You know, people often ask me, jason, who is this episode sponsored in part by? Well today this episode sponsored in part by Live Flow. Did you hear the news? Live Flow just launched a consolidation product. You actually might have seen it on the main channel recently. We did a whole demo day of it. LifeFlow's automated multi entity consolidations. It's beyond simple to use. You can easily map multiple unmatching chart of accounts from multiple QuickBooks Online companies into one standardized report. And once it's set up, Lightflow is going to get to work updating the consolidations automatically in real time, the realest of time. So you can focus on analysis. Using instantly updating data across entities. LifeFlow can even consolidate financials that are in different currencies. That sounds disgusting. Yikes. And it doesn't stop there. Liveflow offers flexible, powerful reporting tools. Create customized dashboards that meet your specific needs. You little snowflake. Build executive presentations, cash flow forecasts and more with just a few clicks. The consolidation thing is actually super cool. If you haven't seen that yet, check it out on the main YouTube channel. And thanks to Lifflow for sponsoring the pod. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant staffing. You all know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to 100% distributed US and then 100% distributed globally hiring and honestly is the best thing we did. It virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on. Because you know what, the folks we hired offshore really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore. Because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms. You know, offshore outside the US you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself. Figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start. Cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple. At accounting firm in the US hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like, I'm going to stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked to the other practitioners, I talked to some of the vendors that would like, help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and you start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant staffing number six. Because if all you market is the fact that you do ongoing services for people, then what those clients are going to benchmark you against is everybody else's ongoing services. Not can this firm solve this problem in a more meaningful way than those other firms? If all you're doing is saying you do bookkeeping and tax and all these other things, then you're immediately setting yourself up to be benchmarked against every other accounting firm that says they do the exact same things. And the first thing you want to hit them in the face with is how are you different? So what is the specificity and the expertise that you have that they don't have? The way to communicate that is not by presenting your ongoing services that you do for people, but by giving them a bite sized, more project based way to learn about you and have a killer experience. And that project should speak to a specific problem that that person has. And everybody has accounting needs, everybody has tax needs. But if you market around the accounting and the tax needs that everybody has, you're now lumped in with every single other accounting firm out there, right? Which means you're taking prices rather than setting your prices. After this list of 11, I'll run you through some ideas for like, what are some bite sized projects. We've talked about it in the past, but we'll do a refresher on a few of those. Number seven. Because the general talking points around accounting and tax are noisy and expensive. So what is everybody talking about? Like the general topics around accounting and tax and all of that stuff, there's a whole lot of people out there having these conversations on these subjects. And in order for you to somehow rise above all of those voices, whether you're doing, you know, paid acquisition, anything on an algorithm, you know, social media, YouTube, anything like that, how are you ultimately going to stand out above everyone else having the same talking points on the same subjects, as opposed to here's a very specific pain that's felt very acutely by a group of people. And this is also like the project that people do with us before they come into ongoing work in our accounting firm. Let's talk about this pain, this very specific thing that we have, like a solution that we can get in front of clients before pulling them into ongoing work. If that pain is much more specific and something that people are much more fired up about, then when you're talking about that online, when you are testing out different copy on your website, it's cutting through the noise of all the general talking points that tons and tons and tons of people are putting out content around. Ultimately, you want to get away from that because that's a really expensive game to play and you're probably not going to win it. It's funny. People who have not found their specialization yet and don't know the specific type of person they're serving and the specific problems they're solving, they will go out and like do the general stuff on social media and on interviews and stuff like that, when that is literally the very hardest place to win. You're not going to go out and do general business and accounting and tax topics better than anybody else. Like, that's just. That's not realistic. Oftentimes you're starting out in social media, you're learning how to do all this stuff well and you're coming into the loudest, like most expensive places to have very generalized conversations that aren't super valuable, where you're then again getting benchmarked against everybody else doing that sort of content in the same way that there's been, you know, site builders for the longest time. And then the next version of that is like professional services, business templates and all of your website builders, like all that is is kind of the next version of the old site builders that we make fun of in the same way that we have that social media and we're really getting to the same point there. So you see, like, you look at services like, you know, Canva, that will help you put together a design and people go and post that stuff on Instagram. That whole aesthetic, like, all looks the same for people. Now when you start looking at marketing agencies that will come in and support any industry, be it, you know, accounting firms or dentists or anything else, the talking points, all those things start looking the same, right? And as soon as it becomes the norm, you're never gonna find people with it because it's gonna get drowned out by everybody else talking about the same things. Reason number eight, because jumping straight into that ongoing work that everybody else does takes away from opportunities to lean into ROI based pricing. So again, we are talking about the difference between taking prices that are set by the market and setting your own prices. And if instead of saying, I do accounting services just like the guy across the street, you can say, I solve this very specific problem for beekeepers that's costing you $20,000 a year, I'm only going to charge you 5. And that problem behind the scenes is probably like a bookkeeping review or tax planning or something like that. The difference is I'm not walking and talking like an accounting firm on my website where it's like the exact same as everybody else. It's instead focused on the problems, the very specific problems that those people have. And if I can dare poke at the charging for the relationship dogma. How many people out there these days are shopping for a relationship versus have problems that they will happily pay somebody to solve? I would argue, and there are some of those people. So there are people who are like, I need an accountant. And so they go out and they shop for an accountant. But I would argue for every one person that's out there shopping for an accountant, there's five people out there who feel specific pains. And as they're scrolling or something like that, or they hear from a friend, this person has a solution for a pain, they're gonna be like, please, like score, like, solve this for me. Because most people already have. Accountants aren't thinking about you and their day to day. Right. People don't like, people are not going out there thinking, hmm, how can I find a better accountant today? Like, that's not a thing that people are thinking about. I would argue that a relationship is a product of working together over time and finding mutual success. That is ultimately where a relationship comes in. But most people, they got problems and they'll happily pay you to solve those problems if you can. If you can convince them that you have a solution you can provide and that there's little risk to them in going through with that project. This episode is brought to you in part by Teamup, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between team up and all the other offshoring options is that team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to Hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. Team up could source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Zero, QBO and DeX. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky ol inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Team Up Number nine. This might be the biggest reason there's this. There's one voice that tells you, well, if I don't market ongoing services, I'm gonna lose all those people who are in the market for ongoing services. Right? But the reality is for somebody to pick you up for ongoing services, and in many cases, most cases it means they're divorcing a current relationship for whoever is doing that work for them now. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of pain and stress that goes into considering like severing that relationship, whether that is a spouse that's doing the bookkeeping or whether that is another accountant. I will argue if you instead offer a bite sized solution to solve a problem, you're actually going to get many times the leads of people who will have you come in and help them solve that problem without necessarily committing to separating themselves from their current provider. And so we're comparing it to people who are shopping for new providers and there is a lot of them versus people who feel this problem, which is not only everyone shopping for providers, but also everyone who has a provider and has this problem. So if you're not pushing ongoing services, will that somehow reduce your inflow of people in the market for ongoing services? Maybe, I don't know, maybe, maybe not. But what it's absolutely doing is it's attracting everyone whether they have a provider now or not. Brandon hall is a good example. He does. They do a bunch of tax planning projects for people who have other accountants. And a lot of their website copy is around. Like, your accountant isn't doing this. Well, we'll do this for you. And they just do that. They don't even do the ongoing work. So this will actually attract you more clients, in my opinion, because it doesn't require them to divorce their current accountant number 10. Because that little standalone project is a lower bar to at least get them into your network, get them into your fold. So if you're having conversations on social media about how to solve this problem, you can get that person into your circle, your extended circle, whether they're buying anything from you or not, in a way that you wouldn't otherwise get, right? So now we have this person at least somewhat in our orbit, as opposed to if all we do is market ongoing services and talk about general accounting and tax topics and they never even see you. And then last, number 11, if I have two favorites here, nines, nine's probably my number two, and then 11 is probably my number one. Because if you do a successful project with them and they are dazzled and they're impressed by your expertise, they will come in at a higher rate than they would otherwise. So somebody comes in from the street, they need ongoing accounting services. They are benchmarking you against everybody else. Somebody comes in for you to solve a very painful problem for them. You blow them away in the process, you do a great job, and they're like, oh my gosh, this is such a better experience than I have with my current provider. Compare the rate at which those two people will come in the door and what they will happily pay you. The latter is paying you much more. And at a 50% margin firm, if you would have charged them $1,000 a month, and now they're willing to pay 1,500amonth, you just doubled your profit, right? You're making twice the money or you're making the same money doing half the work now. So stack all these things up. The fact that people will pay you more money, the fact that you will actually get more leads, the fact that you'll now get paid for that discovery project, or whatever you want to call it, the fact that you'll stand out better because you're rising above the general accounting and tax messaging, stack all these things up. I think it's a really compelling argument for building your website, your social media, all that around a specific problem for a specific person that is Priced as a standalone project, could be 500 bucks, could be 5,000 bucks, doesn't matter. And in the process there you're going to do everything you would otherwise do in the discovery process traditionally that you don't get paid for. But you'll also beginning to end give somebody a solution to a pain while dazzling them in the process so that they then come into your firm for ongoing work pre dazzled because at this point they can't imagine working with anybody else. Pretty convincing, right? So I've done some content on the main channel in the past around this, you know, a tech stack review. It could be giving them some insights from their financial statements that may not be explicitly enough tied to a pain that people have. Could be going back and reviewing their last three years tax return and seeing did they miss anything. Could be reviewing you know, what's their retirement plan set up and is it the best thing for their business now? Could be reviewing their entity structure and see if they're wasting any money on tax as a result of that. What is, you know, for your best clients right now that you most enjoy working with? What are the biggest headaches those people have? If we go back to the problems database we talked about the other day, what are the biggest headaches those people have and can you solve that problem in a bite sized way within the scope of a one time project? Now it doesn't mean if they become like, if they become ongoing clients, it's probably something you would still do for them, you know, every year. But we're usually so fixated now and just taking on ongoing work that we don't think about how we could package the same thing into a turnkey standalone project that you don't have to do that can be done by not like the most skilled people on your team, but can serve to then get those people in the door at much better rates. I'm telling you. Think about it, think about it. Because all of our websites look the same, they just have different aesthetics and so how are we standing out? And isn't this just a fundamentally like more profitable way to run an accounting firm when you bring them in like that? I think many of us like agree with each of these steps along the way. But if you look at your website, reality is we're still holding ourselves out just like every single other accounting firm. Is that a hot take? It doesn't feel like a hot take, but like nobody actually holds themself out that way, right? I don't know. Agree or disagree. Let me know in the comments. And thanks for coming and hanging today.