281 What Work Should be FREE and What Work Should be PAID

The Internet is built on people just giving crap away, like creating valuable stuff, posting it online for people to come and steal it. But professional services historically have been all about paywalling your expertise. So if the way that we find new people, or more accurately, if the way that people find us is discoverability online, how do we as professionals exist in this paradigm of giving things away when there's maybe some risk to. To doing that? And that's just counter to how professional services businesses have been run back, like, to the beginning of time. How do we draw the line between what ought to be free and what needs to be paid? That's what we're talking about today. Come on in. Scooch that chair in for some. Jason. Jason Daly. You probably know where I'm gonna land on this one, because I generally land on the side of just giving a bunch of crap away and that working out in your favor and kind of the greater arc of the universe. But there are some risks to doing this, and there's enough nuance here to where it's worth considering. How far do I go in giving stuff away versus keeping things to myself? Here's the big thing that I want to stress that I don't think most folks have fully taken into account. Is the Internet made information free. It's wild to think back to, like, pre Internet. If you could explain to someone what it is, like what we have now, things like Wikipedia, being able to search anything and get a pretty good answer, having smartphone assistance or tools like ChatGPT, which seem to just be able to magically come up with an answer. Again, not perfect, but a whole lot smarter than any individual has ever been at everything while simultaneously. Simultaneously not being as smart as a domain expert. And that'll change over time and it'll continue to get better. But had you gone back to the early 90s and said people are going to have access to complete, perfect information, people would have said, like, oh, great, like poverty and hate, and all these things would go away. When arguably access to all that information has. Has actually made it worse. But social change aside, if you talk to somebody that ran a professional services business in the early 90s, the initial reaction probably would have been a degree of fear to say, well, we've kind of been the gatekeepers of that information. If people don't need to come to us to ask it anymore, it's not going to replace what we do, but will we lose. Will we lose some value? And the answer, as it turned out, was, was no, due to a number of factors, due to the fact that things keep getting more complex. So while information has gotten more accessible, the answers themselves have gotten increasingly hairy. But it's also shown a light on the nuance of information and how not all information means the same thing for people, given their specific set of circumstances. So these days, information is free, implementation is paid. That's. That's the difference. Doing it, putting it in your context. The. That is what is the paid service now. But information is free now. The way most folks in professional services still operate and the way that they act is the same as they did pre Internet. It's another example of professional services not like, evolving to what the Internet enables. We are still gatekeeping all of the information that we have. When information is cheap, if they're not gonna get it from you, they can probably get it from somebody else. And as we all know, there's not an abundance of wholesome, high quality sources for this stuff online. But I think some of this hesitance to give this away is founded in the way that professional services firms used to make money, which was like not letting anything out. And everybody has to be on the client list even to ask you a question and get any amount of value from you. But these days, that paradigm has, has flipped. So that actually the best, the ideal way to bring a client in is when someone comes in and they've already built a relationship with you by listening to your podcast, or consuming your content on social media, or seeing you talk at a conference. And every single one of those things, the only reason they got there and hung around and appreciate you to begin with is because you gave them value, usually at no cost. And so if we're trying to figure out where to draw the line there of how much value to give away, in my opinion, the answer is almost always give it away. Almost without exception. The one clear place where you got to draw the line is when they need advice that's highly contextual to their situation. Now, a lot of blockers to try to overcome, like, the notion of, like, what do you mean? Like, I'm just gonna give away this expertise that I've built up for decades. It's. It may still just feel wrong. I'm gonna run you through 11, 11 thoughts specific to this to help us overcome this and kind of change our, our perspective from the fear of this to the opportunity of that abundance mindset where you actually have more to gain. But by giving it away, even though it's like, what do you mean? That's the only thing I get paid for right now? How Could I walk away from that thing that does make me money just to give it away and just blindly trust that that will lead to my business still being able to make money. So 11 thoughts here to help you overcome this, because it is a big mental shift. A couple years ago I was speaking at a conference and one of the questions raised in the audience was they had begun tweeting on a regular basis and talking about their services, but were afraid to wade into like, how they actually deliver those services. There was a fear of like, giving away company secrets, you know, that sort of thing. My first thought on all this, that, that I want you to hopefully process to make those fears go away, is the fact that none of your clients are a tweet or a PDF or any sort of resource away from being able to do your job. If what you do can truly be explained in a tweet, then you're already living on borrowed time. But that's not the case for any of us. What we do is much more complex than that and no like collection of giving things away. If you wrote a book about how you do your entire job and a client read it, would that client be able to do your job? Of course not. The fear of giving away company secrets generally going to be misfounded because even if they have that information, they're not able to do what you do. Steps are sponsored in part by a live flow. You ever look at the reporting apps and think, man, I don't need another PhD in learning this new hard thing just to tell my clients what they need to do or to give them a fancy report that they're not even gonna look at. Sometimes, sometimes the old ways are the best. The best. Just plug it into a spreadsheet. That's what liveflow does. Takes all of your accounting data, the QBO stuff, and you now have a plugin in your Excel or in your Google sheets that with just a. Just a whippity click, a couple clicks and you've got all of your client data. For any QBO clients you've got access to, you've got that stuff in a spreadsheet. Pull it in like one time. Do a live sync that never stops. All your favorite reports from QuickBooks, pull it in. Just use those reports, create your own sheets that reference those reports. And so it's like live updating information. Man, if you are a spreadsheet enthusiastic, it is like, it's like the upgrade your spreadsheets have always needed. Like putting a jetpack on something old that hasn't changed that much. On Jim Belushi. If that resonates with you, check out Live Flow link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant staffing man. People have strong opinions on offshoring. How dare you send accounting work, accounting work overseas? I've shared before. Starting to hire people offshore was probably top three top five biggest unlocks I had in my firm running days because we're perfect, perpetually people constrained. And when we started hiring folks in the Philippines and they just became a part of our distributed team, I ran a distributed team and there were just one more team member. We went four for four. Every single one of them were awesome. I had never hired four people in a row onshore and all of them worked out. They were going through trainings alongside my onshore team. So stinking good. And the amazing thing was just the supply of accountants in the Philippines was completely different than it was here in the States. So we can actually plan and know, okay, we will be able to go out and find this type of person and that type of person before we get there. Like, here's what we want things to look like in nine months, here's where we might make a hire. There's where we make a hire. I had been blocked for four years on any sort of planning like this. Just because we have such a hard time finding the right people onshore. This completely changed how we ran our firm. It did change the makeup of what roles were client facing and what roles weren't client facing. It shuffled that up a bit. But there is a certain inevitability to the globalization of work. I'd encourage you to learn more about it. I'll put a link to cloud account staffing in the show notes. You can hop on a call with them, ask all the embarrassing, the ignorant questions. It's just one of those things where a lot of people have strong opinions on it, but most people still just haven't done it, haven't even touched it. And I think until you work with offshore people, until you have integrated them into your business and seen the pros and the cons of it, I think it's a big blind spot, big old blind spot. Particularly in the context where we are usually going to be staffing constrained people. Blocked, right? Want to learn more about that one? Check out the link in the show notes now. Second thought here. Number two, the best content out there, the best stuff online is actionable. It is meat and potatoes. It's stuff that people can actually make use of. There's enough just like conversation and noise Content for the sake of content to sell sponsorships, you, you know, writing news stories and blog posts and all that, just because they have to drive views and create a surface that they can then sell ads on. The world has enough of that. We don't need more of it. AI is making that problem even worse. The good stuff that floats to the top is the real stuff, is the stuff that is actually valuable that you are giving away. That's how you attract people to you. So talking about what you do in an age where algorithms decide what is the highest performing content based on who's engaging with it, in the current age where consumption happens via an algorithm, talking about what you do is never going to get in front of anybody. You can post that stuff, but nobody's ever going to see it because the algorithm's not going to serve it up. It's not helpful. Nobody cares what you do. They only care what that post can do for them. So the stuff you put out into the world has to be valuable for those folks for it to ever even show up in the algorithm. The algorithm is not out to get you, it's just not useful enough. That post that you're putting out there, third thought here tied to that is that valuable content ultimately these days is what drives discoverability. It's how people find you, not only when you're getting started, but when you are midstream and you've got a big mature firm. But you're thinking, how can I get somebody that's even better than the folks that I have right now? Or how can I get more folks like my A and B clients today you have no bigger mouthpiece than the one that exists online. Yes, there are benefits to doing stuff in person and there's nothing quite like in real life sort of connection building. But the power of being able to post something to social media that millions of people can consume and can also attract a very specific type of person where you can post something in your jammies from your phone on the toilet just to find a specific type of beekeeper, business owner like only the Internet enables that good content drives discoverability. And thought number four here, are we on four? I might have messed up my numbers already. Thought number four is everyone has a distribution problem. From the moment the Internet and social media came around, we became distribution limited. There are so many people out there that could benefit from you serving them that don't know anything about you. If you're starting to think about a niche like there are so many people that feel so intensely pains that you can solve for them that will happily pay more than any other clients that you have on your client list. Your problem is you just haven't found them yet. So we all have a discoverability problem. There's always a better person, a better client out there for you. If you got a hundred clients on your client list, the hundred people who most acutely feel the pains you solve are not those same hundred people that are on your client list. They're out there like struggling. They've got some other practitioner, that's no good. They're trying to do it themselves. Those people will pay an order of magnitude more than anybody else on your client list, but you haven't found them yet. And pre Internet, when we were just doing business with local people that we would bump into through word of mouth and all of that, this level of reach was not possible. Now the fact that we have global reach and even like domestic reach on an entirely new level to get in front of millions of entrepreneurs, the top of that funnel is just way, way, way bigger, which we can solve more specific problems and find people who feel those pains more than any other clients we've ever had on our client list. And because you have a distribution problem, it has never been more beneficial than today to give away the farm, to put out your most valuable stuff, because that's what's ultimately gonna enable distribution. Now, thought number five, I've got here given two practitioners who are largely the same in the way that they deliver their services and all that, the one who gives more value, who gives that stuff away upfront for free, that practitioner wins. They win because more people are finding them because they're putting valuable stuff out into the world. But they're also winning because when folks do come in and they've already gotten value from that person and from that firm, they've already built some trust with them. And so those clients are more likely to get out of the advisor's way and take the recommendation. They're also probably more likely to pay that person more because they have proven their expertise, because they've built a bit of a relationship there. There are not substitutes. They're not getting a quote back and saying, what would the guy across the street do for me? Because there is no one else like you. If they've already gotten value from you, you already have that, that appreciation and a built a bit of a relationship there. So all else being equal, the practitioner who is giving away that value, they're going to come out ahead. Number six, Oftentimes we get stuck on like, I Can't give tax advice or this or that to a non client. Like, you're stuck on the exposure side of this. We can boil this back down to what we started talking about. Information versus application. Information is free. That's what we're doing on social media is we're giving extremely valuable information away. Not just social media, your email newsletter, going to a conference, any way that you can give this stuff away to folks is worth doing. Information is free. Application is paid. Like, that's where we draw the line between what we'll give away to anybody and what you got to be on the client list for. If somebody's posting their tax return on social media and spilling all the beans and you're like really getting deep into kind of their setup and all that, like, that's getting closer to giving tax advice. That's something that we don't want to do. So we can't wade too far into that. Like helping those people in their specific contexts. That's where they got to be on the client list. But putting together resources and explaining how things work, explaining maybe your proprietary formula for how you optimize Qubid or build a tech stack for an e commerce company, you have so much more to gain than to lose by giving that stuff away. Next one is just like, as an exercise, building the habit of creating rather than just doing the work for the clients you have and consuming. And that just kind of being the hamster wheel of solving the problems of the people that you have on the client list. Building that muscle of creating and putting stuff in front of people and then learning what will get engagement and what won't get engagement, like, that is such an incredibly valuable skill right now that will aid you the rest of your life. Everybody is attention limited. Like, all brands are just fighting for the same finite amount of attention and being able to get the attention of people like it is a real skill. And the way we talk about doing it on this podcast is getting super, super, super specific. Having conversations that are the equivalent of somebody walking by that book on a bookshelf in a bookstore, where they're like, oh my gosh. Millennial pottery studio owners, entrepreneurs. I've never seen a book for a person like this. That's me. I have to buy that. When you get that specific, the bar for how good the content has to be is very, very low. And so when you're starting out, like, that's where we need to begin, is a very specific corner of the Internet. We can always zoom out. But when you go out and you Put out general small business advice. You're up against everyone else who's been doing it for decades that are way better than you at that. But the act of giving stuff away like it is just exercising that content development muscle that is rewarded in a really big way. Right now, the future of media and what people consume is much more distributed than it is right now. It used to be people would go and get their news from like a very small number of news sources. Now everyone has influencers that they follow and people that they are fans of and podcasts that they listen to and niche websites and newsletters that they read. Media is increasingly becoming more and more distributed and you have to decide whether you're just going to live on the consumer side of that or the creator side of it. It's a paradigm that is like set up for creators to be the winners. And nobody rolls out of bed one day and they're like, yeah, man, I'm a creator. I was born for this. And it's just something that you start doing one day usually comes from a place of, of conviction and the value of doing this. Like, that is why I invested so much time and effort and money into getting a YouTube channel going for small accounting firm owners. When for the first, I don't know what it was, year, 18 months or something like that, I had less than 500 subscribers. Like why, why keep putting in that amount of effort, like posting two videos a week for that long for like no return? It was because of the level of conviction that I had and the value of what I was doing in the way that sort of media and consumption is trending. I was super convicted that this was a great long term thing for me, that it was a very high leverage business that would ultimately pay off. But also along the way, I was building super valuable skills that would aid me for the rest of my life no matter what I did. The ability to like sit down and speak to a camera and write things and do this stuff, that's a skill that I did not have three years ago. Now that I have it, it's something that's going to be invaluable for me and I'll probably use in some capacity, like for as long as I work, another six months or so. Today's episode sponsored in part by the folks at Team up who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines. Today we're learning more. What's an employer of record? Do I have to hire people in the Philippines through an employer of record? Basically, you got two options. You can hire them as a contractor, just pay them directly on contract or hire them as an employee via an employer of record. Now employer of records, usually you're running like 4 to 500 bucks per month per employee if you do want to hire that individual as an employee. Got some other stuff there around like benefit requirements from the Philippines, but the employer record, they'll help you handle most of that. The majority of firms I talk to who hire folks directly hire them on contract, but it could make sense to go either way. We mentioned BPOs. Talked about BPOs recently. A BPO is like a company that not only employs them, serves as the employer of record, but it's usually giving those people a place to work, like managing it, managing more of the infrastructure. An employer of record, all they do is the person that works for you is an employee of the employer of record and you pay the employer of record for them to work for you. So it's a bit more direct than a bpo, but maybe not quite as direct as bringing them on board as contractors. So there you go. Good stuff to know that you're probably too embarrassed to ask. Actually wasn't super clear on that until I went through this ad read right now. If you want somebody to help you through the process that's done this with a bunch of other firms, team up will go out and find you some awesome hires. You pay a one time recruiting fee, but because they're neither a BPO or an employer of record, you don't pay them anything ongoing after that. Learn more about Team Up. Check out the link in the show notes. This episode of the podcast is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub. Hey, the age of AI, Just like the cloud accounting transition is going to create lean in arbitrage opportunities. Arbitrage, it's the word of the day. Opportunities where tech gives us a wildly better way to do something overnight. We stumble into these things still with our clients that have awful back office procedures and we just get them on a better tech stack and it like cuts the necessary headcount to do all that work in half. That's why I loved doing our managed accounting service where we just come in, find super unoptimized back offices and be like, hey, we'll come in and do this for more or less what it was costing them to hire a team to do it and then we just automate the heck out of it. As we're in this very transitional period with AI, I think the first example of a AI driven arbitrage opportunity is frankly going to be accounts Payable Makers Hub is one of the providers now using AI vision models to take extraction, like automated extraction to a wildly different level than has ever been possible before. You know that old chestnut, the whole notion that your tool is going to do bill extraction so well that it'll completely eliminate manual entry, which people have been saying for over 10 years. But I don't know if you're like me. You do an AP for a client, all it takes is an extra digit somewhere and you just, you just burn a whole lot of the client's cash and that's going to be an uncomfortable phone call. So that's a little easier said than done to like blindly trust invoice extraction when it comes to bill pay. But we've done some, some demo days on my channel now with Makers Hub showing off like just the level of detail that it will pull off of invoices, especially complex accounts payable use cases where you're doing like inventory and receiving and matching numbers of widgets to products in your system and all that. I had clients that had multiple staff doing like detailed receiving and all that matching with purchase orders. An insane amount of like manual work in these systems that Maker's Hub is now like automating to a level that it's never been automated before. If you're looking for tech enabled opportunities where you can, where you can use AI to deliver super like high leverage, more profitable work to your bookkeeping clients, Makers have a really interesting example to look at. I'm actually excited for, for more of this stuff. I feel like it's, it's kind of like the cloud accounting transition, but with even like even more promise, potentially even higher leverage. You want to explore that for ap, check out microsub, put a link in the show notes. Next point I have here. Never forget that the success of your firm largely comes down to your client roster. I've made the baseball team analogy before. You've got X number of players on your roster and how good those players are will generally dictate how successful your team is. Now does a team have staff that will get the most out of those players and keep them healthy and train them on how to be better and all that for sure. But we look at our client lists as like these static rosters, as if they can't change and don't evolve? I mean I was at a firm that prided itself on the fact that they had largely the same client roster for decades. And that is cool in some ways. But if your firm is trying to like grow and find a different type of client that you can solve more meaningful problems for. You're not going to do that by training or fixing or changing the clients that you have. It is all about your roster. It's all about who you remove from the roster and what you do to pull in even better players to the roster. You're the gm. You're the general manager whose role is to oversee the players that you get and the players that you get rid of. If your job is like just to be the team medic, then you're just perpetually going to be like living in the paradigm that you're in, working with the people that you have. But your reality in your firm is crafted by that roster. So like, some level of investment into how that roster is built, like, has to be prioritized. I got three more. The next one here. I think it was Mo that asked the question on social media the other day on the subject of website, like the pricing you present on your website for your firm. Should your firm have a free tier? Absolutely right. Like, surely you have some way of giving people value when they come visit your site. If those people don't become clients, think about how many clients come and then bounce when they see the prices or when they see they're not quite ready for you. They're maybe at the wrong stage. But if there was something there that could give them value where you ultimately got them on an email newsletter list or something like that, you're expanding your bubble so much because you didn't lose that person that otherwise would have bounced and probably never seen anything from you again. Nurturing those folks the same way that them listening to a podcast or reading a newsletter or something like that builds a relationship with that person to where down the road, if they eventually become a client, that relationship's going to look completely different. Like they will come in being willing to pay higher rates, they'll have much more trust in the services you can provide. But these people could also connect you with other folks who maybe are ready. Like if I'm going after beekeepers. And this is an aspiring beekeeping entrepreneur who maybe isn't quite there yet, but they've got a really good friend who is. They see you doing something valuable. Like people generally try to be helpful where they might actually connect you with somebody else that may be ready for what you do. It's another example of if you've got two firm websites that are otherwise the same, but one's got a killer resource, that's the one that's going to stand out, right? And 2 thoughts on Self enablement Like clients being able to make use of these valuable resources when we're going through Covid relief, we put together, I put together like a massive resource for helping people navigate the PPP loans and loan forgiveness, employee retention credits, when that was still super early days, put together a ton of resources to help them to navigate that stuff themselves because we weren't going to be able to help everybody. And then we stood up a premium done for you service and most people use the DIY resources and that made it way easier for them to get that stuff done and they were incredibly appreciative of that. Now if we think about stuff like how you manage your back office, virtual card hygiene software, subscription hygiene, making tax payments timely, there's so many things where we could create a resource that would be really valuable for our clients that is not something that we may even be willing to do for them in a hands on way. Maybe it is like a premium service that we do for some folks, but there's so many of these things that we talk about that we act like are common sense that our clients don't know or understand where we could put a resource together. It's going to be useful to a bunch of people. But also then down the road when you get questions from a client or you see a client has this problem, you could point them to that resource and that resource then is working while you sleep. It's helping people out without you having to lift a finger because it's already been built, it's already really helpful and any number of people can come consume it without any incremental effort from you. So it's going to drive self enablement not just of potential clients, but of your existing clients. And then the last point here, I think it can actually help you build leverage by potentially getting you out of some of the least valuable work that you do today. So there's a lot of stuff that we do for clients that is not hard stuff to do. It's just stuff that we've kind of gotten stuck with like oftentimes payroll for a very simple business, not complex 1099 stuff like that. Imagine if you could create a guide to help some clients do that stuff themselves. The work that you really really don't want to do, so that you can instead focus on the more valuable stuff. Like what if you could selectively carve out of those engagements the stuff you really don't enjoy that the clients are probably perfectly capable of doing themselves when you give them a killer guide and path to being able to DIY that work, either the business owner or a team member or something like that, I would argue you're still largely providing the same value to the client because they're still getting that work done. Now there's some people that just want to come to you to do the work for them so they don't have to do it themselves. But if we push back on this a little bit, I would hazard a guess that if given a really clear, helpful guide for how to do xyz, oftentimes clients would take you up on using that guide and it would enable delivering even more value value to that client with no extra effort from you. So does that mean they would pay more for the engagement as a whole? Potentially. And if we especially drill into the things where we're like, I just don't want to take the time to do that for a hundred clients, that's fine, but could we put together a guide to make it easier for them to do? Even though that's something we are theoretically giving away, it is boosting the value of the entire relationship, which is ultimately how people make buying decisions and how they decide whether to join the client roster or whether to leave. Even though this stuff is free, it's all like building into this relationship and the value of the relationship as a whole. So most of the time if you are stuck on should this be a paid thing, should this be a free thing? The answer is almost always give it away. We need to optimize for discoverability, find that next great client, and also lean into really high leverage things where any number of people can consume it. It works while you sleep and you don't have to do any extra efforts to help one more person with it. Give that some thought. If you've had any wins on giving away stuff that maybe was once paid like, drop a note in the comments. It'd be good to see that. Any examples of where this may have bitten you? I think as a profession we just need to lean more into giving more away so that folks become more aware of what we do and we keep upgrading that client roster. Thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll see you in the next one.