172 Should Accounting Firms Sell Courses?

Yo dawg, it's Q and A Friday. We're running through various questions from social media and email and the comments of this lovely podcast, I guess the YouTube version of this podcast. Today we're talking about whether accounting firms should be selling online courses. Some consideration around there looks pretty good, right? It's a very scalable like high leverage sort of thing to sell. But is it what we should be focusing on? Balancing change management with growth in a firm? How to overcome the fears of delegating email and a couple questions around finding your niche and best practices on just starting to tippy toe on into a bit of specialization. So come on in. You got some Q's, I got some A's. Is that weird? That was a little weird. When a crowdsource these questions, I don't always know if people want me to share their name. So if you didn't post them publicly, usually I won't call you out directly. But if you hear your question, you know who you are. I've been thinking about putting all my property tax learnings and an online course to sell. I think this person was in New Zealand. I haven't seen people do this. Is this a completely stupid idea or something? That might work. I'll tell you, online courses, they just might work. I feel like peak online course was like nine months into Covid. It was like everybody's sitting on their butts at home, doesn't have anything to do. Everybody's registering for like cohort based courses and buying all these digital products. And I do feel like we have come down from, from kind of the peak of that. That being said that I mean online courses is still a completely legitimate business but the one thing that usually makes that work is scale and building that on top of giving away a tremendous amount of stuff. So if you look at these aren't gonna be accounting firm examples, but if you look at Ms. Excel on TikTok, so she's got a massive following on TikTok. She shares all sorts of Excel tips. And the way that she makes money is by selling these little like one or two hour courses. And that's a obviously a mega. Not obviously it is a mega profitable business. I mean she's had six figure plus days, days and all she's got is a little editor that helps her. You look at people like Justin Welsh on LinkedIn and Twitter, he's running a two to three million dollars a year business now, just selling a couple info products and you look at that stuff and you're like, well that sounds like a Whole lot less work than dealing with Steve all day and these annoying clients and having to hire a big old team. And this doesn't always feel scalable, and it feels that way because it is. But those businesses work because those people are giving away tremendous amounts of value, oftentimes for years before they then go and sell a course. And in my experience, when I'm talking with firm owners who are looking at going out and selling a product, they're not consistently, like, providing value online before they sell that product. And to me, to me, the only interesting version of selling a product is one that anyone can buy. Not one just for your clients. Like, your clients are such a small subset of the universe. If you're going to go through the work of building a course, if, if the purpose of the course is to make money, I don't think it makes sense to build it just for your clients, as opposed to everyone. But in my experience, when I talk with people, usually they're considering this without having, like, built a general following. And so oftentimes it will make sense to, you know, sell an educational course, but probably only if you are building a larger strategy of, of like being an influencer in a, in a. And I know a lot of people don't like that word, whatever, get over it. Being a, let's say, thought leader in a small corner of the Internet, a small, very specific corner of the Internet, and the cornerstone of that business is giving away a whole, whole lot of value, right? So, like, if you look at what I do across my channels and this podcast and all that stuff I have, I think I only. I should know this. I think I only have one thing people can pay me for, and that's my accountant community realize. I honestly, I think that's the only thing I have that people can pay me for. Oh, that's not true. I did a, I did a course about video like two or three years ago that's like, to help you get better at video. But, like, I don't know, anybody bought that, like six months. So I basically, I do all of this stuff and I have one way that people can pay. Pay me. I do have ways that brands can pay me to do sponsored content. And we try to be super transparent about what is sponsored and what is not. And there's a lot of boundaries around that to maintain independence. So you never have to second guess the things that I'm saying, because what I can't stand is thought leadership from people who have partnerships with 10 different software companies. Hot take that ain't that ain't thought leadership, honestly. Like, I don't, I don't know that it is. And I see that as being fundamentally different than like there's a price where a person, a company can come and buy an ad if I agree to advertise for that company and, and you run the ad in the thing and there's music playing and everybody knows how ad works. Ads work. Right. Anyways, I digress. I have one thing that people can pay me for and everything else is just, is just giving away value. So do I think there's a lot of interesting things that accounting firms could sell? Absolutely. And even more specifically than accounting firms, than leaders, than owners, then the thought leaders themselves, whether it's selling directly or selling through an accounting firm, there's a ton of really interesting things that those people could sell. But is it the place to start? Probably not. I am, I am very bullish on putting things behind a paywall. 99% of the time being the wrong answer because you're not optimizing for your reach. We are all distribution limited. The world is so, so, so, so, so big. And there are so many people out there who will happily buy things from you to where every time you go through the work of making a thing, if you put that thing in a box, if you hide it under a bushel basket so that that next person can't find you, then you are limiting the compounding benefits of growth. That one video, that one tweet, whatever that could have been, you could have poured that energy into something that one more person could have found and then they could have shared it and the like. To me, the compounding benefits of putting everything out publicly long term and, and the distribution that will enable 99% of the time like wildly outweigh the benefits of putting that stuff behind a paywall too fast. And it's why I actually like what I have settled into where the community is like this, this peer networking space, which is fundamentally a totally different thing than the content that I do. If I was ultimately, there was actually one point in time where I was thinking about doing like a paid video platform where it's like deeper dives on different things and people could, could get access to that content if they pay for it. Ultimately it would require me to either make more content, which the greatest bottleneck in my business is me and me ultimately like facing burnout and making content like that's the biggest risk to my business. And so the only way I could, I could create a video platform was to either make more content somehow or to reduce the content I could put out that was free for everyone and thus reduce my distribution because there's less stuff going out and finding people. And so I cooled on that idea. I'm like, eh, that actually doesn't make a lot of sense. And it's why I kind of love what I've settled into now with the community, which was a totally different thing. And then all the content just goes out in the wild for free. And I did it for two years without ever having a sponsor on it. Now most stuff is sponsored, but it doesn't necessarily need to be sponsored to go out. In fact, the video going out next Sunday doesn't have a sponsor because I wanted it to just be a more personal sort of thing. So while I get really excited about people talking about selling courses and digital products, I think what I'm actually excited about is they're at least thinking about leaning into higher leverage ways of getting their expertise out there that I'm a fan of. But the first step is probably not building something and putting it behind a paywall. Always be thinking about what did I make this week that will work while I sleep, right? What's working while you sleep? Right now the answer for most accountants is absolutely nothing. And I know I just kicked you in the nuts on Monday with the whole shut up and make something podcast and that was aggressive, but you know what I mean, like it's a fundamentally different way to approach getting your expertise out into the world that is enabled by the Internet and not stuck in what accounting firms and professional services have been for the last century. So I love the thinking, like keep exploring this stuff, become a celebrity and in this weird little beekeeper corner of the Internet, right? But also like, don't worry too much about like planning out every step along the way. Because when you have the reach and you have the trust, what you sell, how you make money, the opportunities you're exposed to, like all that stuff genuinely just takes care of itself when you have the trust. So the goal should really be like the distribution and the trust and being helpful, not so much. What can I get from that? Because all that stuff just happens once you're there, right? I don't. When I was, when I was leaving a firm and telling, trying to explain to my family what it is that I do now. Not my immediate family, cuz they get it. Well, my wife gets it. My kids, they don't know anything but like my, like my parents or my siblings, that sort of thing, they're like, well, what if what if this feels like a pretty big risk? What if it doesn't work out? I'm like, man, I'm going to be fine. Like when, when, when you are like perceived as an expert in this thing, like you're just always, you always have opportunities and it is such a amazingly privileged way to go through life because you have so much optionality to do. Cool, different stuff, right? So the goal should be to get to that position of trust and be helpful, not how do I sell a million courses? You know, people often ask me, jason, who is this episode sponsored in part by? Well, today this episode is sponsored in part by LiveFlow. Did you hear the news? LiveFlow just launched a consolidation product. 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And thanks to Liflow for sponsoring the pod. This episode is sponsored in part by cloud Cloud accountant staffing. You 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 U.S. 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. This 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 with other practitioners, I talked to some of the vendors that would like help you to 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. Next question from Justin Hubbard. How do you prioritize change management versus growth? Or is it managing change management and growth but with limited clock capital time? If I know Derek, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to bleep that. How do you prioritize change management versus growth? Every, every team's gonna look a little bit different here. But I found through trial and error what, what a healthy, healthy rate of growth was versus what a unhealthy rate of growth was. And the rate that I could sustain actually changed over time. I would argue when we really leaned into offshore hiring, the rate of change that we were capable of changed when we started leaning more into services that did not need to be staffed by our most constrained services. So, like, finding tax people was the hardest thing for us. But, but if I could go out and get another dental clinic who wanted to pay us for bill pay and for deposit reconciliation and all these things that I could staff with either non accountant ops folks who are onshore or offshore team members. If I could pull in engagements where we did a lot of that stuff and the tax was honestly just a really small part, I could add a lot of that work by, you know, by revenue kind of metrics because the tax was only a small part of that, I, I could add a lot of that work. Cause I could staff it up really quickly because it was easier to automate. I'd also say across different firms, the appetite for change management's also wildly different. And so my background was I bought an 80 year old tax practice. And it was as change averse as you would expect that environment to be. Both from partners, a couple of whom I ultimately bought out to the entire team or much of that team who had been hired by those partners who were no longer around. And that's, that's tricky and scary for those folks. And then I went out and I built the cast team and those were all like Jason's people that he had went out and hired himself. And that was a distributed team and those folks totally good with change. And that was something I was really mindful of when I was hiring people was, are they energized by change all or will it stress them out? So if you got a team that can like scrap in times of change, that's going to be easier for you as opposed to a lot of, I mean, honestly, many career accountants, that's not them and that's not why they went into accounting to be thrust into like all these different kind of workflows and having to learn new tools and stuff like that. So it's going to look different for each firm. I'm not a big growth guy. I mean everybody has different goals and, and I honestly think oftentimes our goals, even though we frame them through the lenses of our, the lens of our businesses, for me at least they've really been driven by what is everything else in my life about outside the business. And that ultimately dictates how I set my goals in the business. So biggest, you know, tipping points in my life of how my professional goals changed were, you know, graduating from college. Crap, I just got to go work all day every day now. This sounds terrible. Uh, buying a house was a big, big kind of mental shift for me. Getting married was another one. Having kids was, was the biggest one for me. And all of these, all of these life changes cause you to like assign a different value to your time and change how you prioritize the experiences that you have and, and being able to choose the people that you, you work for and how willing you are to be the hero for the folks that you work with as opposed to doing what's best for you and what's best for your family. So you've got all these things happening in life that ultimately impact your business goals. There was a time in my life where I was super into growth and I was willing to really ruffle some feathers on the change management side and be a little more bull in the china shop for the sake of growing. And then there were times where I did, I did not want to do that, I actually did the opposite. We basically shrunk profit, didn't shrink, but we shrunk headcounts of employees and clients and all that stuff. And that was, I've shared before, that was my most fun time. So it totally depends on what you're trying to do. One thing I really stress for people on the subject of growth, and I don't know if this is more a dude thing, more a sweaty work culture thing, in hindsight, I think the reason that I was so infatuated with growth, growth and impressed by it was the environment that I was in. So within this firm, there were other partners who I, you know, grew up working with and, and looking up to because they were in that universe. They were success, right? They were the destination, they were the partner or the, the default path to what success was in that universe I was living within. And so right or wrong, you, like, you look up to those people and if you are trying to get to that level, there's reality is like, there's an element of, like, I don't want to say asserting dominance, but there's an element of, well, I want to be able to show that I can do all the things that these people can do, right? And I think that's a totally normal human thing to do that I didn't really see in the moment. Man, I was just trying to be successful. I was just trying to not be a staff accountant. And this was. This was not that long ago. And so I was playing the game as best as I could play the game. And to that crowd, playing the game meant growing and attracting clients and being able to prove that I could do everything that those people could do but better, right? And faster and bigger clients and more impressive this and that. And so who I was trying to impress at that stage were honestly the people who were in control of my destiny, my ability to, like, you know, buy into firm and all that stuff. And so, like, I think that's probably going to be relatable to a lot of folks who are in firms and are kind of on that default path where they thought, like, okay, I'm just going to, I'm going to try to get to manager and then I'm going to try to get to this. And then ultimately I want to be partner, right? And some people at some point in that journey decide, like, I see that partner life, that doesn't look fun, so I'm going to go do my own thing or I'm going to go to a different firm. But the reason in hindsight, why I was infatuated with growth, I don't know that I had anything to do with me. I think it actually had everything to do with impressing other people. And that's just where life goes to die. When you are building your life around doing something to impress somebody that couldn't give a about you. You're gonna have to bleep that one too, Derek. I mean there's people who have built their entire lives around this. I'm going to prove this to my dad. I'm going to prove this to my past employer or to the person that wouldn't make me partner to the person that did this or that. You know what? That person doesn't think about you anymore. So like why are you killing yourself on the hamster wheel just to, to prove this point? Like, like you're Michael freaking Jordan or something? Like, chill bro. Like none of that stuff ultimately doesn't matter. We can't build our lives around proving things to other people. So I really struggle with like ultimately what is the value of growth. It's why I really encourage people, if they're going out on their own, to decide what is enough. Because it's, it's always a moving target, right? And that's human nature. But when you get a year into it and then two years and then five years into it, if you're not really careful, you'll just keep doing more and more and more and squeezing more and more out of yourself for no particular reason because it doesn't make you any more happy. I have learned that as I find professional success, it's really easy for me at least because I enjoy playing the game of business and all that stuff. And it's fun I, that I like. That comes very naturally to me. And so I always will naturally push to like, oh, what's the next business thing here or there that I can do? But when I really think about that, if I'm pushing myself harder, is that really going to make me more happy or benefit my family more? Probably not. Like for me, what I've realized is what's actually going to make me happy is actually be a more well rounded person. Which does not mean going deeper and spending more time as a think boy and getting better at business and all these things. It's being a more well rounded person, it's developing relationships and being in service of others and like spirituality. All the other things that like actually make you into a more well rounded person. I find for me that those are the things that, that often get neglected when you're super business focused. Those are the things, at least for me at this stage in my life where rounding those things out is actually what's going to bring happiness. Not like just pushing harder into this, like arbitrary, I don't know, model of success. This episode is brought to you in part by by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between teamup and all the other offshoring options. 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 can 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. Okay, lots of conversation about email delegation still Gang. I'm hot on this. So I did a main channel video a couple weeks back on how to get help with your email inbox. If I may be so bold. I think I I really pushed the starting a few years back. The whole notion of delivering stuff over video. I think we we got that into the wild and it's kind of been normalized. A lot of people do that now and I think that is great for getting people comfortable on video, for building more human connections with your clients and all that. Love it for getting accountants plugged into no code stuff. And I didn't start this. I was initially inspired by Heather Satterley by getting people into stuff like Zapier and make and Air table. All these different things. Like, I feel like we've, we've really helped people when it comes to automating stuff in their accounting firms. Email is a biggie for me. I want people to get behind this. The notion that email can be delegated just like everything else in our firms. Is it going to be hard Sometimes, yes. Like, you want to talk about complex things to delegate, like VCFO discussions, preparing a tax. Like the things that we do are complex and the email is not necessarily going to be an exception to this. But I will tell you what our mind does is whenever we're thinking about delegating something, it immediately jumps to the most complex, most difficult possible thing to delegate that you do. Right. You know, it does, it does. You think about, oh, if I have a staff person start managing these client conversations or this or that or, oh, here's a great example, they roll out ChatGPT. First thing. Everybody does. Well, let me just give it the most complex, nuanced thing that I just learned and I'm really impressed with myself for figuring out, Let me see if ChatGPT knows to do this. This is human nature. This is what we do. When we are thinking about like pulling something or someone else into help with a task or something like that is we immediately jump to the most complex scenario possible. When. Buddy, your email inbox, ain't that like the percentage of the time that you are truly pushing that noodle to the limit and doing the most complex things that you're capable of? It is not a big percentage of the time. And all I'm doing is trying to get you focused on the hard stuff, the stuff that's gonna help you grow and not the stuff that is, that is menial, that is filling up your inbox that other people can help with. Now, will there be speed bumps along the way of getting help with your inbox? Absolutely, there totally will be. Your solution's probably gonna look different than mine, but there's this whole like misplaced propriety over. Well, it's my email inbox. What do you mean I'm gonna get help. I'm gonna be the type of person that has a quote, unquote, you know, assistant. What am I going to get a driver to drive me to the office and somebody to mow my lawn for me? Please. What about my roots? Anyways, a lot of, honestly, a lot of good conversation about email management happening online and I would just push folks, you know, just. Jeff Bezos has the framing of one way doors and two way doors. When you are Considering change and trying new things. One way doors you can't go back through. Two way doors you can go back through. You pull somebody else into work, help with your email. Like this is not a big thing. Like it's something where you just gotta start and learn and work through it and trust that the person that you're pulling in is also smart and will have good ideas and be helpful in ways that you don't have to like delineate, you know, every little detail about how they do it. And if it doesn't work, you've won like you know more about it than you did before. And if you're gonna try it again down the road, you're gonna do it in a more informed way. So what do you have to lose? Like the, the worst thing we can do is, is inaction, right? So I'd encourage you to be thinking about email delegation if you haven't yet. We did a, a video on the main channel about it a couple weeks ago. Niches. I don't really like the framing of like niches because it makes everybody's mind go to industry niches. I think I like a specialization more. Smith johnny454 Would you recommend niching down into one area, aka beekeepers, or could you do two areas, aka beekeepers and ant farmers? I like it. I think the reality is when people are specializing for the first time, it's an absolute YOLO move to put all your eggs into one proverbial basket. You just won't get it right on the first try, but you will learn a lot by doing it again. The worst thing you can do is nothing we don't want in action here. The process of finding a specialization is a skill that is learned. So just start. But to totally go all in on one area, like to me does feel risky. In a perfect world you would go into like maybe trying to target a few different specialized folks within a space like within real estate or within E Comm. Like what are a few kind of corners of that same space that you could try to target with a super compelling offer and see which one hits the best and which folks you best align with. So if possible, in fact, I don't know how related beekeeping and ant farmers are, but maybe they're kind of sort of related. I would, I'd probably do, if I was going down the beekeeping path is there's probably a whole bunch of industries serving beekeepers. And you know, we've talked about how when you go through one door is actually a bunch more doors but you're so afraid of going through that door that you don't know about all those other doors until you go through. So I'd probably like stick down say the beekeeper path. And I don't know anything about beekeeping, but like, what are all the various groups that are serving that industry? I would probably look at who are the different people in that space and test out like, which of those people I can serve best. We talked about this a while back with dentists, where you go to work with dentists and you realize like, oh, there's dental labs, there's, you know, dental supply companies, there's people who are equipment suppliers, there's marketing agencies for dentists. Right? Like, so there's an entire ecosystem around that quote, unquote niche. And so what I would do is probably try to poke a few different people within that space because every level of depth of understanding you get is more valuable. Working with dental agencies, you will be more helpful than if you just work with general marketing agencies. Right? So like each level of depth we can go, the better. It also ultimately conceals you from risk within a niche. Like if a niche disappears overnight or something. When you are familiar with like all the different nooks and crannies of what's happening in that space, I really don't see much risk of a space going away because you're actually finding more nuance the deeper you go. One more on niches. Can you provide some examples of areas where people have niched down? I agree with what you're saying. Just trying to make the rubber meet the road. Yes. In fact in some past episode I went back and found it. I developed a ChatGPT prompt to just give you a bunch of ideas and I will actually I can, I will share a link to this prompt down below. If you have chatgpt all you gotta do in the show notes, click through this link. It's gonna generate a bunch of niche ideas for you. You can even point it in a specific direction. Like give me niche ideas around this specific domain. I'll do a fresh generation here just to give you an idea of what it does. Organic skincare, E commerce brands. Target Business Size 1 to 10 million Key Pain Point Managing complex inventory costs and tracking the overheads of sourcing ethically produced organic ingredients. Love it. Second one Independent craft breweries. Love it. Third one High end custom jewelry designers. Fourth Specialty pet food and supplies E Comm. Fifth Boutique fitness studios. Six mobile app developers for educational platforms. Sustainable packaging manufacturers for cosmetics. Independent film production companies. Niche ag tech. These are so good. Luxury yacht charter services. Dude, I love this. I'll put a link to this chat CBT conversation. It'll pull you straight into the conversation and you can regenerate more. You can ask it for give me stuff around farmers or you know, anything specific. This is the level of specificity I love though. Real estate, dental, like the big, like the big category. That's not enough to me you want to find that next step in but most of us are afraid to even take that first step when like the depth there that is what is super valuable. Organic skincare, ecom brands like that like that's so specific. If you're an expert in that space and you know the influencers in that space and the conversations they're having, you are going to be so much better of an advisor than if you just keep things general. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Check that out. Thanks for coming and hanging for Q and A Friday. Got any questions, drop them in the comments. We'll cover them next week. Have a killer weekend.