210 AI Just Made Accounting Firm Marketing More Accessible

Gang, I have a confession to make. Last week I posted to social media something that was 100% generated by AI. Never done this before. I actually have a lot of internal strife and whether you have, like, a responsibility to disclose that fact. But the more I've thought about it, the more I think it's actually a huge tipping point and how we can think about marketing and how AI can make it easier. So I'm going to show you exactly what I did, why I think it's not at all scummy, and how it makes it way easier to actually either do the marketing yourself or delegate it to your team while maintaining your voice and your insights in the messaging your firm puts out into the world. Buckle up. Let's do it. So I think it was last week on the pod, we talked about imposter syndrome. I'm giving myself permission to do like a woo woo a week. That was my woo woo that week. And so on the pod, we spent, you know, 30, 40 minutes going through, like, that Barbara Corcoran story and just kind of like sharing some insights there from various books and all that on how to overcome imposter syndrome. A couple days later, I posted to social media something that did reasonably well, something that I actually got several DMS and emails about, which are the posts that I'm most proud of. To be totally honest, I'm kind of over, like, trying to do numbers in that game. I want to try and do impact. So on Twitter, for example, I'm more interested in bookmarks than likes. I don't lose sleep too much over something not doing numbers. If. If I ultimately think when it does hit people, it is impactful. And sometimes those two things can be at odds. The things that will do numbers are not necessarily the things that will deeply impact someone. So I'd rather live in that space. I got several kind messages about this one. So I was like, this is a good day. I put something out that helped somebody. It was 14 lessons on the road to overcoming imposter syndrome. And I'll show you how I came up with those 14 things. It's a version of something that I've shared in the past that just got way better. So we recorded that podcast about imposter syndrome. Tons, thousands of words of me talking about that in a relatively unstructured way. I follow like a rough kind of outline when I record these. But I went out, I downloaded the transcript for that YouTube video. It's just the YouTube generated transcript, which is awful and has all sorts of, like, wrong words. And it's really bad. I chucked that into Claude, which is like Chat GPT so you could do this on chatgpt as well. The tool I'm using here is called Claude Claude Claude.A. the reason I'm using Claude is they had a new model come out a few weeks ago that's better than GPT4. The ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot model. It's better than that in pretty much every way. I'm paying 20 bucks a month for like the best of the best, but they also have a free tier that's really darn good. Like way better than the free tier of ChatGPT. So even on the free tier you could give this a try. But I grabbed the transcript, just downloaded the text file that was the transcript from the YouTube video. I pulled it into Cloud, attached that text file to the conversation, and I said pull 20 bullet points that are non obvious points about imposter syndrome to encourage entrepreneurs. From this podcast transcript. It took about 10 seconds for it to do this, going through the entire transcript and it gave me 20 points. I'm going to run through these points with you word for word, verbatim. Number one, set realistic expectations for quote, good enough. The bar is often lower than you think. Don't let perfectionism hold you back. Great. That one made the cut. That was in the social media post that I put out. Number two, if you don't step up to help people in your area of expertise, who will? Somebody has to be the solution, even if imperfect. This one I modified slightly too. If you don't step up to fill a need, who will? Somebody has to be the solution, even if imperfect. So I removed a bit that I thought was confusing there. Number three, you only see your own mistakes and flaws, not everyone else's. This skews your perception of your competence relative to others. Number four, the world is not a meritocracy. Success comes from a mix of capability, effort, visibility, and luck. Don't assume those more successful necessarily have more merit. Dude, these are absolute bangers. So it gave me 20. And what I did basically is I went through the 20 and I threw out six of them. And my, my final post ultimately was it was 14. How did I title it? 14 Lessons on the Road to Overcoming Imposter Syndrome. One sentence each, 14 lessons. But with the exception of that one that I just shared that I shortened a bit, all the others came directly out of here word for word. I think the the spiciest one, it's one that several people actually like quoted in the in the replies on LinkedIn. Yeah, number 16 here, those you admire or envy deal with the same imposter syndrome struggles just, just at a different level. You're not uniquely inadequate. That's not a thing that I said in the podcast transcript. I did not say you are not uniquely inadequate. But that's so good. It's so, so good. And so like just thinking very small, very, very micro. So I had a 30 minute recording of me talking about this thing. I can chuck the transcript in machine, go brrr. And it give me like a fun little summary out of there that I didn't have to write myself. Great, that's really nice, Jay. So why is this a bigger deal than that? I can't understate what, how big of a deal it is to have computers that are good enough at writing stuff, the power to take unstructured garbage with typos, all sorts of issues in it. This is totally meandering. I mean, there's ad reads in that transcript. And to make it into something useful and very ro. Like, very well written. And if you think about all of the conversations that we have every day and how we're starting to capture more of these conversations and this man, I've been, I've been hammering on this. It was one of the reasons why I started this podcast to begin with. There's so much value in being documented now and your expertise being documented. That is going to be the bottleneck to AI being able to do useful things with it. Because if we zoom out and somebody says, I used AI to generate an amazing social media post and you just turn up to chat GPT and say, give me, give me 14 novel points about how to manage imposter syndrome and it generates something that's not me, that's not you, that's chatgpt. On the other hand, if I have a transcript of me talking about imposter syndrome and I chuck that into the machine and say, give me 20 insights. That's me. As far as I'm concerned, that is me. Is it a little bit different? Yes, it is. But in my mind, no more different than people hiring a ghostwriter to write a book or something like that, you know, and so in this case, it was a social media post. But what else can you do with this? Like, once you've captured your expertise on this thing, what are all the other ways you can use it? I mean, you could put a follow up prompt in there to say, you know, build it into a video script outline. I've already thought through all these Things I've already delivered it in one format. Maybe this was a conversation with a person in of front. In my case it was recording a podcast, but have AI structure that into an outline where you can then sit down on loom or in front of a camera in front of your phone or something like that and record a quick little video going through the exact same thing. We're not reinventing the wheel here. It's all things that you've already said. And one thing we generally don't do enough of is repurpose what we already have. I know in the past we did a roast my post where a person had made a video going through like, you know, Oregon tax legislative updates and it was a five minute video and it got parked on YouTube and then linked to YouTube from other social media platforms. And it's like there's probably 10 insights within that one video that could get spun out into different things. Maybe you've got clients that are, you know, into podcasts. When you've done the work of building it in one place, it's way easier to then like repurpose it. The other places have it built it into a slide deck. Maybe you gotta do a talk. Maybe you've got a big presentation that you are spooked about and you don't wanna sit down and write it. And. And the way better version of that is you just yammering into a voice memo for 20 minutes and then having it outline that for you. Having it build a slide deck. There actually are AI slide deck builders. Now, I don't know if they're all that good, but you could very least have like the AI tool outline it and give you ideas for the bullet points to put into the slide deck. I mean, if we're looking just at this imposter syndrome episode, like those bullet points are every bit like kind of completely good enough to go on slides. Like my slide deck could just be like 14 quote slides. This episode is sponsored in part by Interval. Interval helps accounting firms unlock opportunities and optimize results for your SMB clients. This one's pretty cool. It's basically like a connector that will then surface automated insights based on the ledger connection. So with more business owners to serve and less time to serve them, Interval is the conduit to information and insights that put your advisory practice ahead of the curve. Here's the curve. How do you get ahead of a curve just from a. Just from a geometric standpoint? Is that like another curve with a bigger radius through a quick connection to your client's financial data. You get access to automated data discovery and advanced analytics. Interval delivers actionable insights on valuation, industry benchmarking, excess working capital, tax advisory opportunities, and more. Filtering out the noise and highlighting only what you need to spark advisory opportunities, Interval provides foresight into financial forecasts and overall business health while protecting and growing smart bees. Creating a shared understanding because when businesses grow, so do you. Man, I wish I had stuff like this when I was running my firm. If you've got access to the ledger, like that is a treasure trove of opportunity and good advice that you can give people. I was always like if only we could like wire up all these ledgers to specific service packages that we have where anytime this triggers, we propose this package and we can set it up in a way where it's like a no brainer. We're like hey, we see this thing, you should totally have us do this this. And they'd be like yeah, but where did that fall on its face? Like monitoring the ledger data to actually make that connection? I got cool tools like Interval to do that for you. We're still in an ad read. Learn more about Interval in the show notes below. This episode is brought to you in part by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Team up and all the other offshoring options is a 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 upsource accountants with experience or 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 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 going to 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, have the AI build it into a book. I outline how do you organize that into parts and into chapters and then where can you elaborate further? Maybe you do like a follow on recording that is going deeper onto this specific chapter and before you know it you've built out like all of the parts of a larger piece of work. You combine that recording with another recording to build it into like a more complete framework. You can take a cross section of it and combine it with something else to make something new, something unique. Combining several concepts, maybe everything that s corp owners need to know or everything the beekeepers need to know. And you combine part of this conversation you had over here and part over here and part over there and you roll that up into something unique. That's really exciting because not only can you do that, but other people can now do that in your voice. We'll talk about that in a minute, but I want to run through another example of this with a different podcast recording. I haven't posted this to social or anything like that and see what we think of the output. So another podcast we've done here recently, the discussion we did with Karen Rayburn about her book. I've grabbed the transcript for that podcast we did last Thursday. I prompted the AI pull 20 bullet points that are non obvious points about why it's worthwhile and more accessible than you think to write a book from this podcast transcript even if you're a busy entrepreneur. So just like we did previously, it gives me 20 points from this podcast. Number one, writing a book allows you to summarize and share principles and knowledge you find yourself repeating to clients, making it more widely accessible. That's a huge point. That was like point number one for Karen. Number two, a book can act as a little salesperson, educating potential clients before sales calls and enabling higher level conversations from the start. Killer. Number three, having written a book speeds up the buyer journey and client conversion process significantly. That one's so so that one's okay. It's a little bit redundant. Number four, a book improves the quality of client relationships and project experiences by fostering better communication and alignment. 5. Writing a book is a way to help as many people as possible with your knowledge, even those you can't reach directly through your business. 6. A book ties into other offerings like courses, coaching, services, providing multiple access points for people to engage with. 7. The process of writing a book helps clarify your thinking and distill your most important messages. 8. Much of a book's content can come from repurposing and compiling content you've already created, like blog posts and emails. These are pretty good. What blew me away about that imposter syndrome 1 was just the volume of really good ones that had generated. I'd comb through this list of 20 and I'd pull out like maybe the six or seven most impactful ones here. And that's a great start for any other piece of media, be it a social media post, be it like an in person talk that I'm giving the beauty being here, that I'm now like a week removed from having this conversation with Karen. And that may have been something that you could have done while you were in the moment. You still had the conversation fresh in your head, although the conversation was like 30, 40 minutes. So by the end you've already forgotten a lot of it. And so here, in less than 10 seconds, it has gone through the entire body of this transcript and pulled out the most relevant things that you're asking for. Now a really cool application of this is for it to enable getting help with marketing. A lot of marketing agencies for accounting firms come in and they say they're going to do your marketing for you. And I'll be honest, I have a hard time seeing that working. I see marketing agencies coming in and like helping you with positioning in your messaging and copy and all that. But for somebody to come out and like do all my social media posts and all of that, honestly, whenever I've seen this, it's generally been really, really bad. The people who are posting on Twitter with like hashtags like you see, you know, and it's usually companies, there's like a paragraph and then like three hashtags. It's like that is a surefire way to know that it is an agency doing it. Which is ironic because hashtags on Twitter are absolutely pointless. And if you're engaging an agency to make the most of this for you, shouldn't they be best educated about like the right ways to do this for engagement? Yet the bar for them is somehow lower than it is for somebody who like even moderately knows how to engage with folks on social media. So I've always kind of had an issue with the notion that an agency could really come in and like put my voice out there on blast and say, here is some really meaningful content that aligns with my firm. Because normally the stuff they're putting out is boilerplate, right? Like the Same stuff that a whole bunch of people are putting out. And I don't know that that does anything to push me and my identity and my voice out there. But when I am documented, let's just think about me, because we got a whole bunch of podcasts on all sorts of topics. Think about how much better someone could support me having access to all of those transcripts. And for, for me, it could be a message of let's do a social media post on imposter syndrome, let's do this or that. And the information that they're pulling together is not like general stuff. It is insights specific to me. Like, it is my words, the stuff that I've shared before in a new format. And we talk about that a lot. The notion that we're like, I'm not an author, I can't write a book, I can't do this or that, I'm not a podcaster. And it's like, well, nobody is until you do that thing. The reality is you already have all the information that you need to do that stuff. You know, everything that you need to write a book. It's all up there in your noggin. You talk about this stuff all day long. That information, just not in the right format yet. It's bouncing around in your head. It's not in the form of a book. And, and boy, is there a lot of friction between all these loose ends and concepts and ideas in your head. And like a well thought out, structured, organized book. Right? There's a whole lot of friction between A and B there. But boy, does it feel like it's getting better, it's getting more accessible. And so if I've got a person who works with me who's interested in social media stuff, if I want to hire a third party agency, even if I want to like hire an offshore, you know, social media manager, this is how you build content. Oh my gosh. Now you need like a well of expertise, of insights, of transcripts. Like, what is your equivalent? Where are you going to build those transcripts? If you use AI meeting recorders for your client meetings, which I cannot recommend enough, every day that you're not using an AI meeting recorder is a day that you will go on to regret. Yes, meeting recorders are still in the process of being normalized, but if a client pushes back, what are they going to push back with? I don't know that I'm comfortable with this conversation being recorded. Buddy, if you're not comfortable with me recording this conversation, that's probably not a conversation that I want to have in the first place. Like, if you have to tell me to use my burner phone to have this conversation, I just, I probably don't want to have it. So like, what is the rational pushing back against AI meeting recorders, security around the managing of the transcripts and all that? Like, yes, that the due diligence on that app, whatever is whatever your meeting recorder is. Like, you still have to do that just like you do any other cloud app, because clients are going to discuss sensitive things, so that still matters. But AI meeting recorders are a huge unlock for you, for your team. Just imagine being able to go back the last decade and have searchable transcripts for every client meeting you've had. You're going to be saying that. If you're not saying that today, a year from now you're going to be saying that, or three years from now, you're going to be saying that. You're going to be wishing you had those transcripts today. This episode, it is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. Tell me if you ever had this situation before. Somebody needs some information from the QuickBooks file. Maybe it's an advisor, maybe it's like the financial advisor, some other stakeholder, a board member, maybe even the client, but you don't want that person to have access to the actual QuickBooks file itself. Or maybe you're at like number of user limits for your QuickBooks license. Man, I had this all the time where I wanted to give them like a second subset of information but oh lord knows I do not want them to have full access to the books. Gang is actually a really good use case for Live Flow because you can selectively sync any little detail out of the QuickBooks file to Google Sheets situation where we actually had this a lot. You've got somebody within the company that like manages ad spend, but I need them to tell me like what events certain ads are associated with and they need that data for their own analysis. But you can't give them the full panel. Live Flow can be a really great solution here to just get the information out of there that they need to see without getting them everything else. Now Liffel does a whole bunch of stuff, syncs data out of your QuickBooks file to Google Sheets, can be a one time sync or can keep updating that stuff on an automated basis. They've got a killer consolidations product now. We can roll up theoretically an unlimited number of companies with different sets of chart of accounts all in the same like really simple, easy to Use Liffel interface. People are using this for like LifeFlow, for everything from like managing month end closes, even internally. Like they set up all their work papers in Google sheets. Kinda wild. That is lifelong. More about that one in the link in the show notes. So in the course of running an accounting firm, if you think about what are all the times when I'm having these conversations that valuable insights could be extracted from. These things are coming up pretty much in every single client conversation. Because client conversations are real people with real problems that you are helping them through through. And the age old problem of professional services firms is everything happens in private. Everything happens one on one. The lowest leverage possible way that you could put your expertise out there into the world compared to, you know, Q and A Fridays that we do on this podcast. I don't do consulting, I don't consult with anybody. But I tell everyone, send me your questions and I'll generally respond. But if they're relevant to other people too, I'll put them on the podcast and then other people can benefit from hearing me answer those questions too. And that's a hard thing to mimic in an accounting firm, right? Because there's, there's so much like personal information and all that tied up into these questions. But on the flip side of that, oh, tell me how many times you've had a conversation about when's the right time to go S Corp about what's the right way to email me your documents or what's the right or wrong way to do this thing in QuickBooks, whether it's your team internally, whether it's clients externally, you know, there's a whole lot of common threads of things that you are just like a broken record. And so if you have an AI meeting recorder and you come out of say this client meeting where you just ran them through this thing and it's a very common thing that you run them through. You've now got a transcript where you can spin out of that all of your years of wisdom as they came up like within that conversation. So that prompt is going to look something like, let's say that you're meeting with a client to talk about why you want to transition them to apply B. They're using, they're using app A. You want them to move to app B. I'm going to prompt that with something like give me 20 non obvious bullet points for why it's worthwhile for folks to switch from app A to app B from this conversation. I mean, that could be now a blog post that can be A social media post that can be you sitting down and doing a 90 second loom. Could be a YouTube video, could be a TikTok video, could be a podcast episode. And these tools are now taking the legwork out of the reformatting part. So could you do that? Absolutely, yes. And maybe that's the place to start to kind of like learn to get to grips with. Okay, when I have this conversation, here's the format that I actually want it outputted in. But once you've done that, oh, baby, this stuff just got more delegate able than ever before. Be it to an internal person, to an external agency, to a new hire. Now we have these meeting transcripts and you can say, hey, draft a blog post using this transcript or these five transcripts for reference. And these transcripts are like the sawdust of your day to day. Like they're just a byproduct of going through the motions of advising people and all that. But now we have a way to like capture that expertise and make it into something more general that other people can benefit from. Isn't that cool? Isn't that really exciting? And the notion that it can even help us overcome the bottleneck of just. I get it, bud, sounds cool. But there's not enough hours in the day for me. So that rather than pulling in an agency and getting all these boilerplate articles that are the same for everybody, you can be like, hey, let's do a blog post for, for X, Y and Z. Or you're thinking about doing a podcast. Maybe it's 20 minutes once a week. You've got an admin or a VA or something like that, and you're like, I want to cover topic A, B and C for this podcast. Here's four past transcripts where I kind of sort of covered that. Build an outline. I mean, you don't even really need a VA for that. You could just chuck that into the, into ChatGPT or Claude. Claude is better than this, better at this, than ChatGPT right now. But then you've got an outline to go sit down and go through like a podcast recording. And that outline is entirely built upon your expertise. And so when you see that outline, it's going to feel very familiar. You're going to be like, oh yeah, I've, I've talked about this before, I just did last week. And you're going to be able to breeze through that super easily. Super cool. Obviously, I'm really excited about this. The tools that we have will continue to get better here. I would say it's probably not until this new cloud model that we've really crossed the threshold to where it does it good enough. I don't know that ChatGPT quite does this good enough. Yet I can check this Same transcript into ChatGPT and the points that it gives me just are not as compelling. But having done this with Claude, I mean, like, honestly, these are probably better than what I would come up with from my own transcript. Those you admire or envy deal with the same imposter syndrome struggles, just at a different level. You're not uniquely inadequate, I can tell you that's better than anything I would have come up with from my own podcast. And this is the worst that it will ever be. And if you think down the road, ultimately, when this can write better than me, like, what is the utility of me writing? How do I take control over this? Doesn't it all just end up sounding the same? How do I stand out in an age where social media and all that is just flooded with AI generated stuff at the end? The difference is your expertise is what's behind it. Because we didn't just roll up to cloud here and say, Write 20 points about imposter syndrome. We rolled up to it with my transcript, me talking about that for 30, 40 minutes. And those are the insights it pulled specifically from what I said. So how do you differentiate yourself? All else being the same, it's your expertise. And you know what we're talking about this for a podcast recording and how you turn it into a social media post. But the exact same is true for everything else that we do. If AI takes over accounting, like bookkeeping work, let's say somehow, magically, AI can just do that. What's going to be the differentiator? It's going to be your expertise. It's going to be how well documented you are and how you can overlay that expertise into the accounting. If AI comes in and somehow wipes out tax, seems unlikely, but let's just say it does. What's the difference maker going to be? All tools being equal, Everybody's got the same thing. It's going to be your expertise. Start documenting that expertise and let's figure out how to apply that through a very specific lens, right? To attract a specific person with specific pains. We've talked before about like tipping points that feel like impactful tipping points. One that one that I've brought up a number of times is, you know, we're getting AI agents now that work autonomously, where you give them a task to do and they will just go do it. And like with most things AI, they're incredible when they work and then they suck when they don't. But a huge tipping point that we've talked about quite a bit is, ooh, as soon as an AI agent is good enough to do, say a bank reconciliation in QuickBooks Online, that's going to feel like a big, big tipping point. Not because it's particularly hard for me to do or isn't something that I can't train someone to do more. Because think about how many millions of times that happens every single month. The notion that an agent can now do that overnight. Like when a language model is just good enough to where it can do that. How's that changed my workflow? What do I then, like ask of my staff? Obviously that's not doing the entire month on close, but like, what does that look like? Am I now assigning tasks from my practice management system to both humans and agents? Because my team shouldn't be wasting time on things that an AI agent could do. Right? That's going to be a big tipping point. And honestly, that's probably that could be a this year thing. There's a lot of investment going into agents right now. But you want to talk about a big tipping point when you can hand AI a 30 minute transcript of you and it can write something better from that transcript than you can. We might have just crossed that threshold, but interesting that this is not replacing my expertise, it's leveraging my expertise and that's what makes it not feel homogenized and the same as everybody else's. Right? Is this drawing on the transcript itself? Pretty wild time? I mean, the actionable thing to take from this, definitely. If you, you know, if you have to do speaking stuff, if you're writing blog posts, if you're doing social media posts, consider what you're capturing that you can repurpose. It'll save you, genuinely save you a pile of time. But then, bigger picture. Think if this opens the door to new marketing efforts for you, maybe it makes it a little easier to write that weekly newsletter or a little easier to record that podcast each week if. Well, I know I'm going to have meetings A, B and C this week and I could probably pull the transcripts from A to B and have a generate an outline for the podcast I got to record on Friday. Like that feels much more accessible, right? Because we're not building this stuff from scratch anymore. Pretty darn cool. Put a link to Cloud down in the show notes again. I'm using the pro version which is 20 bucks a month. It gets you the very best model. Their free version is pretty darn good, but also we're talking about 20 bucks a month. And if this saves you anytime, it's already paid for that. That's all we got today. Any cool AI stuff you're doing, any ways that you are using it to level up your content, your marketing game. Love to hear about the comments. I'll see you in the next.