264 How To Communicate What Sets Your Firm Apart

So you're talking with that potential client, the one you really want to land. You think they're going to be a great fit. You've been looking all over for clients like this. You're pumped. You send them the proposal. They come back and say, would a guy across the street only charging me xyz? Do you have the tools you need, and does your team have the tools they need to confidently explain why I'm not the guy across the street? Are you kidding? Do you know who I am? I am the only solution for you. I found when I was running my firm, that was something that I could very confidently convey, that my team didn't have the same confidence in communicating. And it was really just like an education thing. It was that I knew more about the ecosystem as a whole than my team did. So let's put together some tools that you could use, your team could use to more confidently handle these conversations so that we're not getting benchmarked against every other gig doing this type of work. So come on in. Let's build some pricing confidence. Foreign. It's true. If somebody has to ask why your price is more or less than somebody else's to degree, you've already lost the battle. And this battle is won by making investments in the way in which you bring in new clients. In a perfect world, they're already familiar with you and your expertise and what makes you different. But what we do instead, most of us is we're afraid to go down a path of being really good for a specific person because we're. We're afraid of all of the doors that that could potentially close, not being mindful of the fact when we walk through that door, there's actually a whole bunch more doors that you just can't see until you go through it. And as a result, we're like this homogenized oatmeal of an accounting firm. And your landing page says things like, we will. We will give you peace of mind, and we prepare taxes and we do accounting. Or maybe even worse, those service pages. Oh, man. Back in the template builder days, all the firms like you had the nav options across the top, and you hover over them and they drop down the services that you provide. And it's every type of tax service imaginable. It's stuff like reviews agreed upon, procedure, engagements, the sort of stuff where you're like, have we. When is. Did we last do that? Like, six. Six years ago? Litigation, forensic. I don't. What is all of this stuff? And as long as you're playing that game. When the person asks, why are you charging me more than the guy across the street? You won't have a good answer for that because you won't be able to clearly differentiate, like, what makes you great specifically for this person that you're talking with or any different than anybody else. And the most general version of this that we encounter most commonly is why would I do this when I could go to Bench, I could go to TurboTax, I can go to H and R Block, whatever all like the productized solutions are, there's still a lot of firms that are living just off the bottom of the market. They're not differentiated at all. So they are price takers because they can't differentiate themselves from those other services. They kind of have to operate within that same pricing domain. I'm going to give you some examples of how to, how to climb out of that. But regardless of where you are in the food chain of accounting firms, because we're all kind of on the same spectrum, somewhere there's a firm upstream of you that's charging rates that you just cannot imagine, while there's simultaneously firms below you that are seemingly giving away work. This is the case for every single firm. You're somewhere on that, like in that food chain. So wherever you are there, you just need to be able to speak confidently to the most common comparisons that are made of your firm. How do we do things differently and how do we clearly communicate why we're better? And if we can't get there, then we have at least shone a light on, okay, maybe here's all the ways that we aren't better and what we could change to be better. And so the most simple framing of this comparison that I can come up with, that something that we've all bumped into in the wild, is how software companies like to do these feature comparison tables. So, for example, I'm going to Google search ClickUp. It's a task management app. And I'd be willing to bet you the top four Google search results will be other tools saying how they're better. I was wrong. ClickUp has spent more money than anybody else to be the top advertiser when someone literally searches for them. So instead, I'm going to search for ClickUp alternatives. Here we go. 1st AD Monday.com is so much better. 2nd AD there's no competition to write. Skip the alternatives. 3rd AD HubSpot. Free CRM platform. Say goodbye to spreadsheets. 4th AD Switch to Asana. Compare side by side. And when you drill into These, it puts these tools like side by side of what they do and what they don't do. And they always present themselves in the most glowing light. Right. So here's, here's the right comparison to ClickUp. They have a little table here. First row says cross functional visibility. You better believe Reich's got that. But ClickUp doesn't. I don't even know what that means. Custom request forms. ClickUp doesn't do that. Gantt charts. No way. I thought, I thought ClickUp does that. Kanban board. ClickUp for sure does. Kanban boards. What is this? Project budgeting. You get the idea. There's like the side by side comparison of all of the features. If you think about who you're most commonly compared to, what would it look like to build out a table comparison like this? Not that you would necessarily put it on your website, but as you are having conversations with your team, having these things front of mind about why your service is different, that's very important. The ultimate goal is to be one of one, to be like the perceived as the leader in that space. So that when somebody comes to you, they're like, well, no, I wouldn't imagine working with anybody else. But even in the case of that person in their head, everyone is still doing the math on substitutes. They're like, if I gotta pay 2x for like the peak person in this space, what's the next option? Are they half as good or are they still 90% as good? Where maybe it doesn't make sense to pay 2x for that, you know, next person. The reality is we live in a world of substitutes and everybody's doing this math to some degree. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow, the company that puts a wee little button in your Excel in your Google sheets that lets you connect any old QuickBooks file to your spreadsheets. How would you use this having all that QuickBooks data at hand anytime you're in a spreadsheet, one way, buddy. Month end, closes. Hear me out. You can build out a template that is any number of sheets in a workbook. If this workbook is your month end close, that could be a collection of, you know, 30 different worksheets that are all pointing to different reports inside of a QuickBooks file. You build this thing out over time and to set that up for the next month end close, the click of a button, all that stuff loads in immediately for the next month. Think about how much work it is to run those work papers manually. But you set up that template month over month. You pull it in immediately. You got a ton of information all in a single place. Right? I bumped into a few folks in the wild now that have switched to using Live Flow for managing month end closes. Super interesting use case. They do a bunch of other things but it just goes to show you having all that data handy in a spreadsheet. That's really nice. Right? That is Live Flow. Put a link in the show notes if you want to learn more. This episode is brought to you in part by Tima, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Team up and all the other offshoring options. The 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 Xeroqbo 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 gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this podcast? 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. I actually bumped into in the wild. Xero has a Xero vs QuickBooks page Interestingly, QuickBooks doesn't seem to have a QuickBooks vs Xero page, which is probably just more a signal of like how they don't care more than anything else. Not that they're real swell people or more swell than zero people. Zero's got a whole dedicated page. What sets us apart compared to QuickBooks? Little comparison table. With Xero you get unlimited users on all plans. Plus plans start at only 15 bucks a month. Bank reconciliations anytime. What does that mean like QuickBooks, bankruptcy, closed after hours, thousand plus third party integrations, support tailored to your needs, you know what this looks like. So for your firm, what are the things that you are most frequently compared with? And I've put together a table for what probably the most common sources of comparison are here. Some of them lean more to the bottom of the market, so they may not apply to you if your firm is up market. But everybody has kind of alternatives that they're compared against. So we need to be able to speak confidently to how is our service different and either a better fit for this potential client we're talking with or not. And actually going through the process of building this table, especially if you have a team that manages these conversations, is super valuable, ensures everybody's saying the same things and that everyone can deliver that stuff confidently when a client asks. So I put together a little table here you could use as a starting point. I'll walk you through it, I'll link it in the show notes for your columns. You've got you, what you do, how you deliver your service and then everybody else. And then for the rows we've got basically like features. And I think these are probably best presented if they are grouped somehow. So I'll run you through the groups and all of the features I've got listed out here and I'll list out where my firm slots in for each of these features. So first group I've got here is cost. Under that group I've got starts at what is my minimum? I don't know, thousand bucks. The next line I have here is price for you because that starting price with a bunch of other solutions, it's a trap. Nobody ever actually pays the starting price. The starting price for TurboTax is free. That's the little bump they give you in the back alley that keeps you coming back for more. That was a, maybe a bad analogy. So my first two like features, my rows here are starts at whatever the starting price is, but then the actual price for you, I'm just going to say, you know, 2K in the context of this conversation with a client. My next group is the people. First line here is expertise level. You will often find that your firm's expertise is benchmarked against that of some other service where the type of people that they employ or the type of folks that the client's going to be talking with from day to day is a wildly different level of expertise. And so for me and my firm, that was boy, we had hundreds of years of collective experience. 20 plus CPAs and easy. So I'll just say CPAs and EAs. That was our expertise level, availability, account manager, call anytime, me, schedule a few days out. Particularly when clients want to compare you against productized services. This is a very big differentiator. The fact that they actually can't get on the phone with anybody even if they wanted to. Even the fact that they next time they come back to the support queue, they're talking with an entirely different person with no context. There's no element of, of building a relationship over time, year over year. And most people in a business like want that consistency. That's, that's something that the productized services just haven't. Like, I don't know how you even capture that in a service like bench or QuickBooks live bookkeeping or something like that. Okay, so the next line I have here is access to a consistent person. That's a resounding yes for my firm. The next line I have here is, is it your spouse? In the case of my firm, no, that's not your spouse. And, and the last line in the people group is, do you have to manage them? No. Last group I have here of line items is a section called scope. First item I have is tax types supported. I'm going to say most accounting types supported most. And advisory level, big. We can do big brain advisory stuff if you want to, like if, if that's scoped into the agreement. So that is what the first option, which is me, my firm. That's what I have to provide on all of those different sort of, you know, features. Next column over. The next alternative, your spouse. The biggest enemy to bookkeeping firms for small businesses, arguably especially micro businesses, the cost of the spouse, the partner doing the bookkeeping. Okay, so to cruise through this feature comparison for your spouse starts at just ask. I gotta do, hey, you wanna do this bookkeeping? Honestly, they'll probably be flattered to involve you, but the price for you is your relationship is what I have down here. It can be, it can be costly. Next section, the people expertise level. We're still talking about our spouse here. Not our spouse, the client's spouse. Expertise level. I just put abstain there. Availability full around the clock. Kick them in bed. Did you upload that receipt? Access to a consistent person, arguably too much. That's a yes. Is it your spouse also a yes. Do you have to manage them? I said abstain. Again, last section here. Scope of work that they support. Tax types supported. Few accounting types supported even less. Advisory level. I just put spousal because that's kind of a different level of advising or on kind of a different spectrum. Okay, next alternative to you. First alternative was their spouse. Next, is their team member hiring somebody or not hiring somebody? Having somebody on their team do it in dental clinics. This was very commonly, hey, you're the office manager, you could do this. What, what's the connection there? What makes them qualified to do that? Exactly. So next, comparing what we do to somebody on your team doing it. Cost starts at the fully loaded cost of an employee. The price for you is that cost plus training them, them actually learning how to do that thing and then paying them to sit there and learn all of that stuff. Oftentimes the same client who comes to you and is like, well, I'm not going to pay you to go learn that thing that you should already know to figure it out for me. That same cheapskate client will then pay a their team to sit there and use QuickBooks for the first time. Okay, expertise level. This person has only ever worked for you. So it's not going to be high availability. Full, great availability, access to a consistent person until they leave. You got full access to them. Is it your spouse? No, that's a bonus. Do you have to manage them? You sure do. That's one thing that's often overlooked when we're especially in a cast practice. If you're taking over accounting or bill pay work or something like that, when it was a role that was previously in house, accountants usually won't even come in and like price what they're doing to even be as much as what it costs somebody in house to do it. And like you'll justify like, oh, economies of scale. We're really good and efficient at this stuff. Phooey. The value to that client is what they just had to pay that person to do the work. In fact, it's even more because they had to manage that person. And if you manage people, you know just how much you would love to manage one less person. You don't want the byproducts of that, you want the output of that person. But if you had to manage one last person, you'd be like, yes, please and thank you. So this is a downside for this solution, using your team member for it, having to manage them. This episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing. I got another resume for you. An example of the super talented accountants in the Philippines that cloud account staffing will find for you bring to you to become valuable, valuable members of your team. How about a tax hire? Let's do a tax person today. This one's a CPA and a certified tax technician. That's a, that's actually a Philippines thing. Got their start in audit and you went to tax. Good for you as you should have two years of experience doing tax work for US individuals and companies. Prepared 1040s, 1065, 1120s, 1120s, fixed assets. Communicated directly with clients to gather information. Conducted independent research on applications, applicable tax stuff as needed. Experience with ProConnect tax RC reports Corvi tax Planning Just a few years removed from school. Man, this is the type of person where I would try to sink my teeth into them super early. The hires we made in the Philippines were so, so good, like so capable. We had great luck with it. The way cloud accountant staffing works, they have a call with you, talk about your needs and then their recruiters on the ground in the Philippines will go find great applicants for your role. You decide if you want to interview them and you only pay anything. When you actually hire somebody it is like win, win. You kind of don't have anything to lose cause you're only gonna cut a check when you've found somebody that you fall in love with that you wanna be part of your team. To learn more about cloud account staffing and get some like real life resumes like this, check out the link in the show notes. This week's episode is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub. Maker's Hub is one of the coolest examples I've seen so far of awesome new AI tech like making your life way easier. Which we're all ready for, right? Stop telling me about AI stuff, tell me how it can save me a pile of time. So they're a bill pay platform that is using AI vision models to take ocr like so much further than traditional OCR ever took us. It feels like for about the last decade we've been being told fully automated bill extraction. So it's removing human manual entry. Hasn't people been saying that like forever? Makers have set out literally to be like could we actually do this now with vision models? Now I did a demo day video on the main channel a week or two ago demoing like some crazy complex use cases super hairy invoices that Makers Hub just gobbled up and spit out without breaking a sweat. Now they're exceptionally good at big ugly invoices. So like I used to work with some retail flooring stores. We'd have these super hairy detailed invoices and you had to do the receiving just right to make sure you had the right quantities of all the items going into inventory. Maker's Hub can process this stuff to like every little like granular level of detail that you need, not just the invoice amount, like all of the detail in that video. Actually we chucked 68 pages of like 64 Home Depot invoices, all with like multiple line item, detailed all these various different inventory items. It processed that thing in like less than 30 seconds. It is the sort of thing that my clients would have. Like people just sat in a chair doing all day long and right now like we could come in and be like, we're going to take that off your hands. We'll actually do the receiving part now. I just helped him with the bill payment part. We never got into the ugly receiving stuff. These days I would grab a tool like makershub, come in and offer that service and honestly like automate 85% of it. Super cool. You want to learn more about Maker Sub, check out the link in the show notes or head over to my YouTube main channel or just search Jason Stats Makers Hub. Super cool. One of the best new AI things that I've seen. Our last scope that they support tax type supported very few accounting types supported not many. Advisory level not found. Now a couple services to compare your bookkeeping services Against. Bench and QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping. Bench starts at $300 a month. QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping starts at $200 a month. But virtually everyone that uses those services pay more. But boy could I point to a whole lot of accounting firms that have monthly bookkeeping prices starting at 200 or $300 or bookkeeping and tax annual services that 300 to $500 a month where you're literally no cheaper than these services. Wait until we get to the rest of the feature comparison for these services until you realize, wow, that's how these companies still make money. Because this is not a premium service like I'm delivering. Expertise level Bench. New college grad. They're paying fresh cheek kids out of school, not much money and those kids churn fast because it is a mill. So expertise level, there's not a whole lot going on there. Availability with Bench, I'm pretty sure at least it used to be. This way you could schedule a phone call with them. QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping. I don't think you can do that. I think you can only do in app chat. But feel free to correct me in the comments if I'm wrong. There next, access to a consistent person. Bench. Yes, you have a Bench bookkeeper, but the rate at which they churn, last I heard, was over once a year. So on average you're not going to have access for them even over a year. I said yes, but even that's being generous because I don't turn people that fast in my accounting firm, in all likelihood the client's not going to be working with a different person every year. QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping I believe you are part of a pool so you don't even come back to the same person each time. If you're chatting with them again. If that's not right or out of date, I'm super curious about that, please let me know. In both cases it's not your spouse. You got that going for you last. Do you have to manage them kind of sort of because there's such a maybe a lack of expertise there. They're probably paying pretty close attention to the outputs to make sure that everything looks right. Not that that doesn't happen in our own firms. Right. Like people make mistakes. But particularly as you have a service that is less premium, you got to pay a little closer attention the scope of what they do. Tax types supported Bench actually does tax filings now, but from what I've heard It's not great. QuickBooks Life Bookkeeping does not. But I'm sure they could happily Refer you to TurboTax accounting types supported for both. They just do cash basis. That's it. Advisory level offered none. So they are just getting the bookkeeping work done. And honestly that one, if a client is only in the market for churn out my books and I don't want to talk about it, that's just going to be a hard client to support anyways. In fact that is the type of our work that's increasingly being automated and hopefully five or ten years down the road isn't. Isn't really a thing anymore. So it's not a great place to set up camp right now. On the tax side, I've got four solutions in this table. I won't run you through all of them. TurboTax Turbo TurboTax Live assisted TurboTax Live full service and good old Jackson Hewitt. Get on down to the Walmart. Get your tax turn done. By the way, I don't look down my nose at any of these services. There is a massive need for every single one of these because do you want to go down market and do full service tax prep for $129? Do you want to do bookkeeping for people for $200 a month? I sure don't. I Could, but I don't know how I would make any money doing it. As much as we like to look down our noses on these services. TurboTax, great example. Imagine what the state of the US tax filing system would be if we did not have TurboTax. Now do all of these things screw stuff up and make problems that oftentimes we have to be the ones to fix? They absolutely do. But TurboTax filed something like, I can't remember this, over 100 million tax returns last year. Who's going to do those? Goodness sakes. Also, many awesome professionals come out of these and arguably like the big hiring funnel that they have pulls people into the profession. Think about career changers and the actually great flexibility that you can have working in these roles. If it brings more people into the profession and those folks go on to run their own firm or you know, go work for another firm, that's great. Like in my book, in fact, these services are going to come up market because we are all having to go up market. It's getting increasingly harder to serve people down below a certain threshold. And unless these product services come up that gap of the difference between the cost of a good professional and a productized service where you get no hands on help, that gap will just keep getting bigger. Unless these product services get better and come up market. I frankly have no qualms with intuit stealing our clients. In fact, maybe this is a hot take. I don't know. I think intuit coming up market is almost a necessity if we look at the state of tax filings, how increasingly cost prohibitive it is to engage a professional and how we're losing professionals every single year. Right. I don't really know another solution than that. But with all of these tax services, there is no element of personal support. Even in assisted, even in full service, you're getting very junior level people and not a consistent relationship with a person on an ongoing basis. So stop comparing my firm to these other services. Right? But if we don't take the time to think through what makes these different and how they, how they make money with this lower level of service, then we're not going to confidently call out and educate the client on what's different about us. Because our client doesn't know this stuff either. All they see is a Super bowl ad that says, oh, do your accounting and it'll be awesome. For this amazingly low price. That's all the information that they have. You have way more information that they do. So whether you're hanging out towards the bottom of the market or whether you are way up market, the reality is everybody is considering substitutes. And as much as you'd like to be like the jazz cigarette smoking, you know, apple of the world who just pretends that nothing else exists, as much as we like to do that, the reality is clients are going to bring up substitutes. Whether they do explicitly or they're, they're just in their heads. If we can speak confidently to what we do differently, if we can strategically decide how we deliver our services in a way that makes the most of the, the most valuable part of the service delivery for this type of client, we can minimize the stuff that the clients don't really care that much about. But if, for example, beekeepers have a ton of pain around this one aspect of compliance, if we can deliver incredible service around that because it is a small amount of input to provide a large increase in perceived value, let's do that. Because that's the version of the service delivery that type of person is going to be most excited about. The reason I mandated sending financial statement videos, like explainer videos, with every single financial statement delivery in my firm was that my team could, and these videos had to be three minutes or less. My team could in under five minutes, shoot a quick video that got their face on screen so the client, remember they're a person, walked the client through stuff that they would not have otherwise understood and was a super personal touch point every single month. Now, the clients that never opened that email and didn't read those financials before, they didn't look at the video either. But the 75% of people who did, they loved it. They raved about it like almost without exception. And it's such a cool opportunity when you stumble into those little things where you're like, really? You love that? I was like, like five minutes. That wasn't even hard. But nobody had like gone through the effort of making something like that for them before. If you can build a, a set of services around those things that are novel to a specific type of person and then be able to clearly communicate how the way you deliver that service is different to alternatives, then you've gone a long ways toward delivering something that really doesn't have any substitutes, right? Where if that conversation does come up, you can very clearly say, listen, we're really good at what we do. We charge top dollar for what we do because we're different in XYZ ways. That's what we're trying to get to. In a perfect world. Pick a, pick a thought leader. Tony Robbins. You would be like that incredibly in demand person that can just kind of command any fees that you want and it's not to say that we shouldn't work in that direction so that the perceived value of what we do is always going up. But we're all at a different spot on that journey. And I think honestly even for the people working with the grant cardone of the world, those folks are still calculating the price of substitutes and whether or not you're the best thing for them. Go swipe this table that I made. It's down in the show notes. If you have a team run through this with your team, it's actually very important that they too can speak confidently as to how the nature of what you do is very different than what other services do and hopefully the next time that conversation comes up can knock that, knock that client right off their socks. Thanks for coming to Hanging today. We'll see you in the next one.