186 Why Regulatory Change Is An Opportunity for Accounting Firms

In the US we got a big juicy tax bill that has passed the House at the time. This recording hasn't actually been signed into law yet. But whether for you it's a tax bill or something else, regulatory change, headaches with compliance, stuff that is shifting, that stuff is an opportunity for firms where normally we're fighting for attention, actually very briefly for a, for a window in time puts the spotlight on us. And most accountants and most accounting firms aren't proactively putting information out about this. We're saying we gotta wait. It's not lie yet. We can't say it's too soon when we should be doing the opposite, because this is when people are most interested in hearing from us. So let's talk about capturing that opportunity, putting information out there for people, because the current person probably isn't. So I'm gonna run you through six different ways to do this. Not hard things to do, quick things that'll raise you above your peers and maybe introduce you to a few new cl. I think many of us took this lesson out of COVID in the midst of a whole bunch of COVID regulation that came together really fast, that people really needed, that we had to stay on top of and was ambiguous and challenging for non professionals to navigate. But in the process of that, for the first time, many of us experienced being the cute girl at the dance for the first time where you're used to just fighting for attention. But all of a sudden overnight, everybody wanted your attention and your time. And this ripped off a bunch of band aids and pushed many of us to do things that we had never explored doing before, like having a newsletter or making little videos, like having more efficient ways to get information out to your clients, like out of necessity. We pushed through some of those things that maybe we would have never done before because we had to disseminate information in a much more efficient way. And those little windows of time where your clients are hungry for information, we gotta be there for that. Otherwise they will find someone who, someone else who will give them that information. And oftentimes it means dealing with incomplete information or with information that can change because maybe those rules haven't been finalized yet. And that's fine as long as we're clear that, hey, this is subject to change. But this is what I can tell you about where things are at today. And some of us struggle to do this in like a, in like a public forum like that. We're, we're putting out incorrect information or something like that. But like, we just have to keep bringing it back to how, how it isn't final. But here is what we know today and it's the same thing that we do in one on one context when we're talking with clients, when they call you to say how does this impact me? We'll walk them through that stuff. So we're just looking to do this in a higher leverage way where more people can get this information. Because most accountants won't be doing this and will be the people who are just saying just wait, just wait, just wait. I think it makes this a even greater opportunity if instead of saying just wait, you can be the one that says it's not final yet, but here's what we know today and how it would impact you if it went through the way it is right now in the US Right now. Like that's we're talking through the lens of tax law. But this can be changes in tax law where you're at could be sales tax, could be any sort of compliance hurdle, tax or not. Ultimately we want to be speaking through the lens of a very, very specific type of person. How does this impact beekeepers? With the goal being that we're the only person putting this through the lens of that very specific person. That's what makes you valuable. If we are going out and talking about the general impact on small business, you're doing the same thing as everybody else. There's a huge number of people having that conversation out there and you're not going to rise above all that. Like the reality is the more specific we can get, the lower the bar is for how easily you can find people as opposed to being up against everyone else. Like putting out general information on this stuff when normally we have to like fight and scrap for that attention and hack engagement and hook people for something that they may not have otherwise been expecting. This is one of the few opportunities where these people are seeking out information and you want to be the one that they find. So six ideas here. Easy things you can do, not time consuming things to get out in front of people to maybe capitalize on this opportunity and give that person information where their current professional help may not be as proactive as you about it. Number one, and this is what kind of all the other things are built around something I always did was develop a standalone project to assess the direct to that client impact of this change. And if that's a change in tax law, that probably looks like the before and after the what would that look like under the current rules versus what would their outcome look like under the proposed Rules and, and too often I think we sit back and we're like, well, this is a big super complicated thing and we have to wait for our tax offer to implement it and that's gonna take nine months. And then when they do, it's like it changes the tax table calculation or it changes two or three things for this person. Obviously it's never going to be as simple as just multiply this thing by x percent because there's all sorts of different, you know, other thresholds and cutoffs that are potentially impacted by that change. But I think our clients can understand that. And a back of the napkin bit of advising, like that's good enough for clients, especially if you're in a state where the rules haven't been finalized yet. So what we would do is it's dead simple. Like we would put together a little kind of spreadsheet calculation template incorporating that like the main drivers of the change and then some sort of output report that would, in a visual way that was easy for the client to understand, show them how this impacts them, if at all. And these things were quick to run. We could systematize this thing so that anybody in the firm could run it for them. They knew the information they needed to pull from the prior year return or the questions that needed to be asked to be able to plug all the inputs in to run this. And again, the blocker here is always going to be overthinking when we need to be thinking about like what's actually the level of thinking the client is putting into this. There's a massive gap there between like the 200 IQ stuff that you are thinking through and where the client is at. The best solution here is probably somewhere in the middle. You're not gonna rebuild an entire tax suite of software to cover every single eventuality of what this could impact. But I would argue in this case you don't need to. This is a back of the napkin sort of thing. So develop a little standalone service where you will run this analysis for your clients. Maybe it makes sense to charge them a one off. If you're doing this for non clients, definitely makes sense. Non clients changes your approach to probably the engagement letter. You need that person to sign as well. If you got clients on, you know, sort of a premium retainer kind of thing, maybe it makes sense just to do this for them. My goal as a firm runner here is to be proactive, is to like fill that void where they are looking for information and they're going to find it somewhere and I want them to come and get it for me. And for current clients, that's going to sort of like satiate that need for information and may lead to them having conversations with their friends who also want that information. And, and they'll be like, oh, well, well, my firm already knocked this out for me and we, we know how this will impact me. That could bring folks to you or if you're looking to do kind of like attract more folks via social media or something like that. This is a good sort of trial project, a first way of working with someone to see how that goes and to give them a taste of what it looks like to work with you. So first up, build a little standalone project to give someone an actual deliverable of an analysis of how it looks like this could impact them. Again, the enemy here is always going to be overthinking this. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud accountant staffing. You'll 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 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 with other practitioners, I talked with 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 start heading down that path. Consider Cloud accountant staffing. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow gang tale as old as time. You've got these clients, you're trying to get them on the same like chart of accounts. You want to do like this roll up reporting for all these different companies within a group or for benchmarking across a bunch of companies in the same industry, but getting all these people to agree to the same chart of accounts. You know how it goes. Check this out. Talked a bit about LifeFlow's new consolidation functionality. Rolls up QBO files with like wildly different chart of accounts. They don't need to be all matchy matchy. We did a video on it on the main channel a couple months back. Now, probably the quickest way I've seen to like do these roll ups, super easy. Just click through the accounts to associate them back to groups. And because it's Live Flow, all that stuff will keep updating automatically as the P and L changes month over month. You don't have to then like go redo this consolidation. Every single time I was in, you know, I was in New York a couple weeks ago, went to the Live Flow offices there, chatted with them. The consolidations release greatly exceeded their expectations. It actually took them by surprise how excited people are about it because you know, how long like a good way to do consolidations has been an issue and like somehow this is still such a headache and requires so much manual work. Anyways, if you're looking for an easier way to do rollups, I'll put a link down in the show. Notes. Live Flow's got a pretty cool solution for that stuff. Now number two, find some podcasts in the space and go and discuss how this impacts folks within that domain. So this is a, this is a good opportunity to practice that skill of sending cold dms, which is absolutely a learned skill. How do you get the attention of, of busy people with followings and in a really concise way, show them how you can provide value to what they do. And so that cold DM probably provides a couple of examples of how your domain expertise will shine through. You know, a few examples of how this impacts the specific type of person that they talk to. So if this is a, if this is a podcast for beekeepers, I'm going to reach out with like a, you know, we're looking For a paragraph or less here I'm going to say, hey, I'm a, I'm a tax pro, I'm an accounting pro. I'm a CFO for beekeeping businesses. I know a lot of folks are thinking about this regulatory change. We're on top of this stuff, intimately aware of how it impacts folks, beekeepers in scenarios like A, B and C. We'll be happy to come on the POD to talk through this if you think it would be valuable for your audience. If that gives you a little tummy tingle, if that's intimidating, good, that's a good thing. That tummy tingle is growth. The thing that most of us are lacking in our sort of professional routines are as doing new things that'll drive growth like that, but also doing higher leverage things like distributing value in a higher leverage way. Podcasts with followings like that is such a good way to do that. It's a wildly efficient way of disseminating information. And obviously as part of that, podcast folks are going to find you and you're going to have to give them some sort of specific call to action. And so if you think about what are all the different calls to action that you could give somebody if they just listened to this podcast interview with you and they're impressed and they want to learn more, they may want to work with you. What are all the different ways you could point them to you? Maybe that is pointing them to your firm's website, maybe your social media, maybe a newsletter. Maybe it's, go buy this service from me and I'll do this analysis for you. I think the mistake to make here is probably overestimating their intent and trying to get them to jump like straight to the bottom of the funnel and go buy a service from you, or go start becoming an ongoing client, as we've talked about quite a bit, give them an easy way to work with you or to get more information from you. Like, that's going to be the highest converting call to action. If I give them a call to action that is like, okay, go to my website to learn more about becoming an ongoing client. Think of all the points of friction that that creates for them. That means divorcing their current client. It means totally rolling the dice on whether you actually know what you're doing and like having to make that commitment as opposed to something less high stakes. That will at least get them like within your circle to keep learning from you and keep getting value from you. That might be social media. The better thing to do, I think is probably going to be getting them on your email list. If social media is like the very top of the funnel these days, the email list, that's like the sweet spot where you're trying to get folks ultimately from social media to the next step of an email list. An email list is something you have complete control over. You're not impacted by the algorithms. You've got a direct kind of through line to that person once you're on. Once they're on your email newsletter. And the framing in the context of this podcast interview is, hey, we've got a weekly newsletter. It's totally free. It's just for beekeepers like you. And each week we're sharing updates on this. Cause this stuff, because obviously it's. It's still changing or still could change. And that is the place to find out how it can impact you. And then obviously in that newsletter, there's. The newsletter is going to have its own call to action, and that's probably doing this standalone project or whatever the next step is. But as much as it may feel like jumping straight to that most viable call to action is what's going to drive roi, like, as much as you're like, well, if I'm really going to take an hour out of my week to go do this podcast, then somebody needs to pay me for this. So I'm just going to talk about this paid service. You're missing probably 90% of the people who would have gotten on a newsletter but may not have been willing to come and pay you for a service. And if half of those people warm to pay you for the service, or even, you know, another 10% of those people eventually warms to pay you for the service, that's a fundamentally better roi because you didn't just lose all those people. We did a main channel video on this recently. But there's actually a lot of value in having folks in that funnel, like, in your orbit for a longer period of time, because as long as they're in your orbit, they're building trust with you and the perceived expertise and how much trust they have in you. Saying that you know what you're doing, like, that goes up over time. So having somebody reading your newsletter for a year before they buy something from you, that's not a bad thing. Many ways that's a great thing because when they come to you a year down the line, they're like, I already know you. I already trust you. I'm going to get out of the way. I'm going to. I'm going to let you do Your thing because I know that you know this stuff for beekeepers better than anybody else. So don't like just jump straight into marriage. Like the biggest, highest stakes, hardest, maybe highest roi. Call to action. Start with something smaller and start developing those relationships before that person ultimately becomes a client. Also resist the urge to give multiple calls to action. That just generally doesn't work. And you hear this at the end of podcasts and where can people find you? I'm on this place, I'm on this thing. I'm on that thing. I'm in that thing. Give one thing. If you want that listener to actually stop and take an action, give them one very specific action that is as easy as possible. That's it makes a, makes a really big difference. As opposed to like here's all these different things you could do. Third idea here. Third, third suggestion. This may be the tipping point. You were what you're waiting for to kick off your own little newsletter. And you don't need to overthink it. Newsletter can be set up really quickly and easily. All we're doing is we are disseminating information in a, a more efficient way so that you're not having to have one on one calls with a whole bunch of different people. Most firms start this with a client newsletter and some folks even kind of like gate it for like, oh, you only get this if you are a paying client and I think you miss an opportunity there because the newsletter is the most efficient way to like expand just slightly beyond those client walls like of the folks who are on the client list. And if you don't have anything that's finding people before they become a client, then it usually means prospective leads aren't really, they don't have a way to build trust with you before becoming a client. So when you do the discovery process and when a person becomes a client, it means they don't know anything about you and they don't really have any trust in you. And they're just kind of like hoping that you know more than their last person did. As opposed to having content outside the walls of, of client dom where people can consume that stuff and get value from you. When they're not yet a client. At that point they've built a relationship with you. At that point they'll come in, say I already know you, I already trust that you actually know what you're doing. They're willing to pay more. They're going to get out of your way and trust your expertise. And a newsletter is probably the easiest way to foster those Relationships over time. Social media is probably like the band outside of that. And then when people want to go deeper, they get on the newsletter. And then eventually, if it makes sense, they can become ongoing clients. I know for me, my firm, we had never touched any of this stuff, video newsletters, anything like that until Covid when we were like, everybody needs to hear this thing. Right now. We have no way of notifying all of all, like getting on the phone with all of our clients. We need to actually be heads down and doing the work. So we had this newsletter that went out that grew super, super fast. In the beginning, it was just our clients. We literally just like swiped from our CRM all of our client emails and said, okay, we're going to start sending this thing out. At the end of the, at the end of the email, we gave them an easy link that they could send to friends or colleagues to get on the email list. And by the end, I think two thirds of that email list was actually non clients. And I experienced during COVID like getting on a call with a lead who is interested in working with us. And they're like, we've been reading your newsletter for six months. I've seen you on video a bunch of times. Like, we already know you. In fact, it's kind of weird to like see you and actually have a live call with you. Totally trust your expertise. We just want to work with you. And the first time you have a conversation like that with somebody who has built trust with you before becoming a client, it totally red pills you to, holy smokes. How can I never take in another client cold again? Because the people that already have a relationship with you are perfectly happy to pay you more. You're one of one to them. Like, there are no substitutes. A lot of the friction we have with clients is when they feel like they have other options or they don't know how you're different to anybody else. They're like, the guy across the street is charging 20% less than you. Why would I work with you? And you're like, well, because I know what I'm doing better because I know beekeepers. And so a lot of this just comes down to how can we eliminate substitutes and be one of one? And that was a big time eye opening thing for me during COVID as we waded into that for the first time. And we're putting out information in a much, much more helpful way than other firms in our space. 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. T mob consorts accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, 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 old 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 employee, 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, idea number four here. Guest Write a newsletter. If you've never done a newsletter yourself, you may lose perspective of the fact that sometimes, you know that development of the newsletter every single week, or however frequent it is, it is like a hamster wheel. The content hamster wheel you're always looking for. How can I help people this week or this day or something like that. And if somebody can come in and offer support and be like, hey, here's a really compelling thing we can do this week. Usually that person that runs the publication, they're going to be tickled to death. They'll happily take you up on that because they're building that habit with their readership of you're going to expect something valuable from me every single week. And some weeks that comes really easily. Other weeks it doesn't. But if there's something like, you know, a big regulatory change in the space that is impactful to those people, they absolutely want to have that information in their newsletter as the person that is putting the newsletter out. Like if they get value from the information that you put in there that value is ultimately associated back with them and their newsletter. Like that's good for everybody, it's good for you getting into there and more folks discovering you. But it's also good for the person that puts together that newsletter. So this is exercising that cold DM muscle. So you absolutely want to be plugged into the newsletters that are in the space that you're working. Shoot that person a reply maybe to their last newsletter or, or a DM on social or something like that, or an email. Again, keep it super, super short. Say hey, I'd be happy to guess right, you know your newsletter. Or maybe there's even a recurring snippet in a section of the newsletter. If, if this is the sort of thing where it's like changing every single week and people are going to keep wanting updates, just offer to help. Give a little bit of context about your expertise. Say I run a firm that does this and that for a specific person that aligns with that newsletter's readership and say happy to provide this for you. Number five. I'd be remiss if we didn't touch on something social media LinkedIn is the most logical place if you're starting on social media these days. LinkedIn is the most logical place to start. It is the, I think it is the, the largest social media platform for the type of folks you're generally going to be going after for entrepreneurs. And it is also of most of the, of the big social media platforms. It is also currently the platform that is most imbalanced between good supply and demand. One of the reasons I've Never really liked LinkedIn was there wasn't anything there that I particularly enjoyed consuming. And still when I go to LinkedIn and I'm scrolling through that feed, every three or four items I get in the feed are promoted items and almost all of the other items in the feed are people posting self promotional things or patting themselves on the back for something or making an announcement of something for themselves. That's still a lot of LinkedIn when ultimately to like win on an algorithm it's, it's about providing value to other people. So if I'm going to post a thing, it has to like cross that threshold of being actually helpful to the folks that I'm trying to attract to my social media. So we're going to make a social media post here. If, if you're going to do it in one place, probably makes sense to do it on LinkedIn. Focus on financial impact, anything monetary, financial, that always is kind of the ultimate hook on social media, whether you like it or not, and focus on storytelling. So I think our minds oftentimes first go to the technical stuff. We're like, oh, it changes this and that aspect of these technical tax things. The reality is the people that work with us don't understand how those technical things work the way that we do. And so if all we do is communicate how that thing changed and may not really get them any closer to understanding, so what is more of a storytelling angle on. On how that impacts them. So let's say there's a change to, I guess this is US specific, but 1099 reporting or the calculation of the tax, give a few examples. So for me, like 20% of that explanation is going to be the technical. 80% is going to be the storytelling and identifying circumstances where that will impact people. The beauty of social media posts. That stuff's really easy to share, especially on LinkedIn. For some reason, a lot of people will comment on the post and tag another person and back to calls to action. Like a social media follow is the lowest stakes call to action there is, right? Like all they got to do is they got to go over to your profile and hit follow. Doesn't mean they're divorcing their current advisor or anything like that. It's the lowest stakes way to get somebody into your orbit. It's a long way from buying intent, but everybody's got to start somewhere. And if you are the only person talking about how this thing impacts a very specific group of people, the type of folks that you want to work with, great. Don't get caught up on likes and comments and vanity metrics. The best social media followings are built on depth, not on reach. So even if you do a more general version of this, that's for small business and it gets 10x the engagement. That doesn't mean that that post is 10x as valuable to your business. In fact, if it's totally general, it probably has no value to your business. And if you're struggling with that, if you're struggling with getting more specific, it is worth digging into. Why do you struggle with that? Is it that you don't yet believe that there's a compelling business to be made in that specific of a space. Is it that you don't like how it feels to post something that will only get 3 likes? It's worth dissecting, like why that is hard because there generally isn't a path towards like building a better accounting firm just by posting general small business content. It can be helpful for People, but the reality is general folks, that's not as high paying of a project. You can't, you fundamentally can't be as helpful to them because they have much more varied problems as opposed to really getting deep into a specific space where ideally it's a, it's a type of business that has money and because you're for that very specific type of person, you can command much higher rates. You can actually find those people because you're speaking about a very specific thing rather than just the general stuff. Last number six. This is a really big one in certain spaces, but develop partner content for a software platform. There are certain spaces that all run through a single software platform or through a few different software platforms. And we're looking for the hubs of where your ideal client, like where those people congregate. One of the examples we went through a couple weeks ago was personal trainers selling coaching through online platforms. And there's only really a few of them that most people use. There's other general ones that are not for athletic training, but there's a few that like all they do is they go after professional athletic trainers who are looking to transition more their business to like a virtual sort of coaching thing. And if you can be getting in on those webinars, if you can develop partner content for them, these software platforms usually have huge email lists and getting your name out in front of a bunch of people, while it may not be a super, super high intent, like I don't know, it's bigger, it's broader, so you're gonna get a broader group of people, but it's a whole lot better than general social media, right, where it's anyone and everyone. We're sort of hijacking the attention that that platform already has to get in front of a really concentrated group of people. And that's a good opportunity, increase that visibility within the space. I mean so many we when we're thinking about do I, am I really can take 20 minutes to do this thing or not right now, or an hour or four hours or whatever it is. Don't overthink it. Like keep it simple. So the shorter the better. But when we're thinking about am I really going to take the time to do this? You always got to keep in mind that ROI calculation is so finite and so it is prone to under biased to understate the impact that you can have because of how big the Internet is and how doing thing A leads to doing thing B leads to doing thing C. You know, writing that partner post on the Software platform could open the eyes of somebody at that software company and they're like, hey, next time we have a conference, we ought to have this person out to it or somebody who's a reader of that newsletter, who's maybe a consultant for this type of person and has a podcast. And they're like, oh man, I should get that person on the podcast and talk about this thing too. But because we can't really get our brains around how big and how connected the world is even in these itty bitty spaces. In fact, I would argue more so in these itty bitty spaces because they are smaller networks. Because we can't get our heads around that thing, we are biased to undervalue putting that stuff out there. And it's, it's why it's maybe the, the hardest thing for me to communicate in the value of this stuff is, well, how do you assign an ROI to that? It's really hard. And so I try to push people just as a way of being a professional in the Internet age, Lean into visibility, into self promotion, going on to other people's podcasts, that sort of thing done in a specific way for a specific type of person that aligns with the client you want to attract. It's super valuable. And obviously for me, like, unlocked things I could have never imagined doing. Because five years ago I'd never done podcasts, never done a newsletter, never done a video, hadn't any of that stuff. It would blow your mind how quickly it can change your thinking to how you run an accounting firm, to how you stack your deck of skills in your favor. And once you get a few of those things under your belt where you're like, I never could have imagined it would have opened this door. Each time you, you get one of those wins, it makes it easier to lean into, like, the unknown and trusting that visibility and reach will lead to great opportunities, even if it's a hard thing to like, plan out in a really, really explicit way. So as much as it may be hard to give a client a super specific, super clear answer as to something that's maybe still changing or maybe still up in the air, know that whether you're going to be the person to give that information or not, they're looking for it, they're going to get it somewhere. And I would rather they get a half answer from me than a wrong answer from somebody else, even if I have to put asterisks all over it and say, this could still change. It depends on xyz. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there and encourage those conversations, because in a period of change, it's a very rare opportunity that they're actually seeking us out and wanting to get this information rather than how it normally is, where we're shouting from the mountaintops like, hey, here's why you should care about this thing that I care about that maybe you don't care about. Like, that's how it usually feels. This is an opportunity when that's not the case, and we can be helpful at a time when they most want it. That's all we got today. Up next, we're doing another Q and A. Got any questions? Drop them in the comments and I'll see you there. Sam.