297 Let’s Attract Niche Clients to this Accounting Firm

Buckle up, because today is going to be a fire hose of ideas to build a little bit more specialization into your firm. Because that is the path to better paying work is greater specificity makes you a better advisor because you're not reinventing the wheel with every engagement. But most of us are blocked on. It's kind of, kind of risky if I go all in on that. And also I don't know how to do it. Like, I'm an accountant, not a marketer. So today, whole bunch of ideas on how you can build this stuff. Here's what I want you to do. Let's listen for three things today where you're like, well, even I can do that and jot it down. Try to do it this week because there's gonna be something in here for everybody. Come on in. Let's attract some juicy, juicy niche clients to your firm. We've done a few versions of this on the pod in the past where we basically build a firm from scratch. This stuff's so fun to me. So basically we're gonna follow a sequen. Three things. One, we're going to build. We're going to build our first specialization. And it doesn't mean that you flip your whole firm overnight and these are the only people that you work with. It just means we're going to start tasting the rainbow. So we're going to start by building. Second, we're going to refine. That is, once we have this specialization, what people within the specialization am I best served to work with? And then third, we're going to enhance, like they do on CSI enhancement. We're going to walk fully through that specialization door to see, oh, what are actually all the other Level 2 specializations that I only discovered from having gone to level one, because that's, that's actually where we want to live several levels deep. Where it's like, really, somebody does that? And you're like, yeah, somebody does that? I do. And I charge tons of money for it because I'm the only one that does it. Okay, let's start. All right, starting out, building our first specialization and starts a client at a time. Maybe you already have some of these clients. Maybe you don't assume we're starting one client at a time first, how do we find some of these clients and how do we attract them? Starting with how to find them. Whole rundown of ideas. Number one, other people's podcasts. Every single space has podcasts these days. You look five years ago, how many podcasts were there for small firm owners? Not many. In fact, maybe none. Very few these days. Everybody and their mom's got a podcast about running accounting firms, which is great. There's something there for everybody. But the same has happened elsewhere too. And those are great little, little hubs to find that specific type of person. You can pitch being interviewed on the podcast, you can sponsor the podcast. Just find a way to get on there so that people can learn about you. Number two, other people's newsletter. Same thing. Newsletters have gotten super, super niche. Find a way to weasel your way in there. Number three, associations. For some reason, people have to make associations for everything. But these associations are developing content, they're developing lists of preferred partners. All of these are things that you can help with. Think who's got marketing dollars I could hitch my wagon to where every time they spend money, it increases the likelihood of those people finding me. Number four, live and virtual events associations actually run a bunch of these. But you're going to have conferences, you're going to have like in person and virtual conferences. Think about how you can even just turn up to one of these to meet a bunch of people. They are so valuable. Consider pitching a talk. It's a great way to cover costs. Offer to help a vendor who's exhibiting there. Many vendors will get extra badges or more badges than they need. And you can come in, do a bit of booth time in exchange for a free badge. But more than anything else, like just go and hang. That's actually if you're going to do anything, the most valuable thing that you can do, just hang out, meet people, learn the names, learn all the players in the ecosystem because any one of those players could support you in the firm you're trying to build. Number five, software. Software companies have arguably the biggest marketing budget that we can wear. Those little things that like attach themselves to will and sharks and stuff. We're that those software companies have big budgets and are pumping out webinars and blog posts and all these different things. And that content machine needs to be fed. And that's something that you can help with. Also, increasingly these software platforms are running online communities. And that's a great grassroots way to be helpful to people, improve your expertise. Just think about, I mean, how much money software companies are pouring into this and increasingly niche software companies for that very specific space. Those are the folks you wanna hit your wagons to. Number six, online communities. Cause they're not all tied to software companies. I mean like three, what is it? Four years ago, I launched an online community for small firm owners. Got quite a few of Them now that's happening in every space. It's a great hub to find folks like that consultants. We did a whole podcast episode about how to partner with consultants. You take any industry as specific as you want and type consultant into Google and you're gonna get like a whole page of results of people who consult just with that type of person. They're trying to produce content and create value for their clients too. And you can hijack some of the trust that they've built with their customers to kind of fast track the road to being perceived as an expert influencers. Same kind of thing. They're a hub. Just like podcast newsletters, all that and then borrowed SEO. So if you Google search how to start an X business, you know, whatever that domain is, or various different search terms, oftentimes those top posts, you can get in touch with whoever wrote them and be like, hey, how can I work with you? Could I even rent space on this one article? Can I put a banner ad there and I'll pay you X dollars a month to put it there. Oftentimes they're gonna take you up on it, especially if you do something completely different than they do. To say like I'm the very best bookkeeper or tax professional for X and pay em a couple hundred bucks a month to have that in part of the article or to pay them for referrals from that article. For them comparing that to just like the ad revenue they get from AdSense and that sort of thing, you probably have more to offer them than what they're gonna make on that post from traditional ads. This episode is sponsored in part by liveflow. Boy, if you've been around this podcast, you know we have run a lot of live flow ad reads. You cut this podcast ad feed and it bleeds live flow ad read. In fact, you know what we should do? Hang on. I had a whole ad read for this, but I just got a better idea. You know what we should do? You know how we made that JSON bot that's like connected to all the podcast episodes and you can ask it questions and It'll go across 280 episodes and give you answers. Let's just make. Ooh, let's make a bot that's just all my live flow ad reads. Then I can just ask it questions. I have this workflow problem. How could liveflow help me? I spent a bunch of money on a reporting platform. Is this something that liveflow could have done for me instead in a spreadsheet? Cause that's where I'm actually Happy and comfortable. What's the easiest way to connect my spreadsheets to my clients QuickBooks data in a single click and the chat assistant would be like Live Flow. No it wouldn't. It would be like, oh man, I hear you. Oh, that's a real tough situation you got yourself there. Here's what you're going to do. And it'd be like a two paragraph long way of just saying Live Flow could be good content though. We should put something useful in this ad. Read LifeFlow. It's the easiest way to liberate data from those client QuickBooks file files. Whether you're in Excel, Google Sheets, you get a little Live Flow button. It's like an extension. You click that guy and you can run all your favorite QuickBooks reports. Sync that data into QuickBooks like one time sync or an ongoing like rolling sync. Do like some, some kind of real time reporting stuff. Great way to get data out to stakeholders who you don't want to have access to the QuickBooks files. Also be a banker, an advisor, employees of the business, quite possibly even the business owner themselves because they keep breaking things. That is Live Flow. To learn more about that one, check out the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Team Up. What if you went out and you hired an offshore person and they took some sensitive information, they did something bad with them, they stole. Oh, worst case scenario, right? How do you manage that? So to start some advice from Team up here. According to Team up, the number one and number two mistakes accountants make. Number one, thinking of your overseas teammates as, quote offshore staff. Thinking of them as, as something else rather than just an extension of our team that is subject to the same rules and restrictions and controls as anybody else that I hire, whether they're onshore offshore. Mistake number two, making global teams more complicated than they really are. The three things team up always says one, it's just people to build relationships of trust over time. And three, what would you do if you hired an Arizona? Wow. Why the heat for Arizona? Not, you know, Florida or something like that. You hire somebody in Arizona, you probably don't stay up all night worrying about them, right? And the same should be true with your team in the Philippines. Hire the right people, get to know them personally and give access to non sensitive info. First, feel like there's more a question of internal controls. Like we are accountants so we don't really rely on trust so much, right? We don't just fling open the keys of the castle for anybody to come get it. That's not an ad copy. That's my take. If somebody in the Philippines is going to steal from me, it's because I put them in that position. Just like if I hired anybody across the country. Instead, focus on the positive. Don't get too wrapped up in fear and scarcity. Be logical about thinking through those problems and coming up with solutions for them to protect yourself not only from offshore hires, but the rest of your team as well. Learn more about Team Up. Check out the link in the show notes and thank you to team up for sponsoring this episode. Okay, those are nine ways to find people to go out and find them. Let me give you five ways to attract people. First, make sure you have a super low barrier call to action. Like a free asset that someone can swipe and get value from. If the only call to action we have is for somebody to become an ongoing client, that's way too much. People will come to your site, 99% of them will bounce. For a myriad of reasons. It's risky to change your provider. Many times of the year it's not possible to change your provider because they're midstream in an engagement with somebody else. For those people that come to your website or discover you for the first time, we want a really like low friction way for them to learn more to pull em just a little bit further into your web. Because when the barrier is so high that they have to become an ongoing client, when those people aren't ready and they leave, most of them are never coming back again. So how do we baby step into there having some sort of asset that they can swipe, some sort of really simple thing that doesn't require or create any risk for them. Number two, build out your own niche newsletter. Especially if you're having a hard time finding newsletters or podcasts that other folks have have stood up in this space. We're still in a time right now where like you will find things so specific that newsletters don't exist for. Like what my brother does for work. Very, very specific IT stuff within us, like certain really valuable domain. And I was like where do you learn from? Like who do you follow on social media? And he's like, honestly, more general stuff because nobody's really talking about what I'm doing. And I'm like, why don't you like stand up a newsletter that just talks about that? Who are people that you know that would be into it? He's like, I've got 10 or 20 other people that I know that do what I do that will love that sort of thing and more kind of information sharing. So if it doesn't exist, create it. Create the space for it. If there already is a bunch there, then create the one that is focused on the accounting and the tax and kind of that more financial entrepreneurial sort of angle to it. Number three, issue a report. I love this. Just the I don't know what a game it feels like, but issue some sort of report that these people will find interesting and you'll be shocked at how folks are willing to redistribute it. But when it's got your name on it, then immediately you're perceived as an expert. Number four, build your own niche podcast. Same thinking as the newsletter. Number five, same thing on social media. Algorithms are so good these days at finding like pinpointing people with specific interests that you're not going to do big numbers. And frankly, you don't want or need to do big numbers. You want to do specific numbers. If something gets five likes, it means way more than five people saw it and all it takes is one person who is the right person and there's your next great client. Don't be afraid to get specific. As soon as you zoom out, you're up against everyone else that's talking general and nobody's going to see it. So let's say we're going to build firm four professional golf caddies. Because I'm thinking like what's an interest someone would have that we could marry with a niche, let's say professional golf caddies. I don't know anything about this. Here's some ideas based on that outline that we just went through. Here's some ideas. I was bouncing around with AI, had to generate about 50 and I pulled out my favorites here. Number one, create a referral program for influencers who bring in caddy clients. That is a way that most influencers make money is via referrals. And because what we sell is relatively high ticket, if somebody signing up for a software will give that influencer a $2 referral fee, but somebody signing up with you will give them a 300 doll fee. That's totally worth building. Number two, create short informative caddy finance minute segments for podcasts to use as filler content. I thought that was an interesting idea like record a 60 second thing and shop it around and be like, you can use this in your podcast if you want. It's just valuable stuff. Number three, write a punchy email template for caddies to request higher pay. Offer it for free online. Maybe not higher pay. It's an interesting idea, but like something like, I don't know, the benefits of an accountable plan or something that would save them money and how they get paid or how they engage with whoever they're a contractor for or an employee for. Like build that template for them so it makes it as easy as possible for them to do something with it. Number four, offer a free consultation for caddies who mention specific caddy content where they, where they heard about you from. So like if it's in a podcast ad read, say use code X to get a free version of this consultation. Another good idea. Number five, offer for free, you know, say a basic tax review or accounting review for the first ex caddies who contact you. I think this converts much better as if in that same ad you say the first 10 people or the first five people who do it will get that promo, then it creates some urgency. Number six, in your ads just provide helpful information like a tax tip or an accounting tip or something like that. Don't make it an ad. Read about your firm or what you do. Just be like here's a thing that's helpful. Number seven, design a bold are you leaving money on the course flyer and ask pro shops to display it. That's interesting. Number eight, partner with well known golf consultants to create an exclusive financial mastery for caddies course. I like doing stuff with other accountants. You kind of, you borrow from their expertise. You get to kind of hijack the relationships. They already have three more to go here. Create a top 10 highest paid caddies list with estimated earnings and highlighting the tax implications. That's a version of creating a report would be super viral and if your name stamped on that, you're immediately perceived as the expert. Post a LinkedIn poll. What's your biggest financial challenge as a pro caddy? That's something that's going to work super well in an algorithm to find where are the pro caddies who will contribute to this. And just like that, now they've engaged with one of your posts and it's much more likely that your future posts will show up in their algorithm. And then the last one, create a caddy wealth leaderboard spreadsheet comparing take home pay of various caddies. This is interesting if you've ever seen Big Four transparency. It started on Reddit. 6,000 anonymized submissions from accountants sharing how much money they make, what firm they work for, their seniority, their role and all that stuff. It's a big old public Google sheet that anybody can go look at. Big four transparency. Do the same thing for caddies. And you're gonna create this viral resource that everybody will contribute to and share around and, and you're now kind of the king Maker, because that is your thing that you've created. Super cool. What does a version of that look like in what you do? This episode is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub. AI this, AI that. Listen to me, I'm the captain now. The biggest thing that is going to impact our accounting workflows over the next 12 months, and it's already impacting them now, in my opinion, is AI vision models. It is the ability of AI to look at something and understand it and pull stuff off of it. And it is already much better than anything OCR has ever done, even picking up like messy handwriting. But when you combine AI vision models with large language models, they can do a bit of reasoning and like fill in the blanks and make a. Make a little decision. The combination of those two things means we can pull people things off of documents and put them where they need to go in a much more automated way. And the company that is crushing this for accounts payable right now is Makers Hub. We've done a few demos of their tool on, on my main channel, kind of like finally delivering on the promise of automated extraction for invoices. Like people have been telling us that this could be fully automated for a long time. Feels like we just got like a way bigger step closer. Going to be particularly powerful for the hairy accounts payable workflows where we got to pull a bunch of item detail off of some invoices. We did some wild examples in the last demo day video we did with Maker's Hub, chucking super gnarly, humongous invoices at it. And it lifts like hundreds of lines of item detail like almost instantly the same text impacting our 1040 workflows as well in a really exciting way. But if you sell accounts payable to your clients or if you're exploring doing this, I think AI has changed how profitably we can do so. To learn more about Makers Hub, check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Stanford Tax. And I'm sorry if I sound upset today or a little emotional. I just got the news that we lost someone that was very near and dear to all of us. If you came of age in this profession doing tax work, Stanford Tax, they just killed the paper organizer. You know, the paper organizer, you print out your tax software and you send it out to your clients and send. It's big and it's dumb and it doesn't make any sense and asks him a bunch of pointless questions. But it's dead and it's never coming back. Okay, stand for tax. It gives you a modern way to gather the same information using pro forma info from your tax software. Like it will actually intelligently ask the questions that need to be asked, taking into account that pro forma data so that on January 3rd every year you aren't cleaning out the local staples, printing out umpteen reams of paper organizers, only to mail them to your clients and never get them back. We did a demo day of Stanford tax on my YouTube channel where you can see how it works in five minutes. If you're still using paper organizers, please stop. Please, please just stop it. I know you're still working on extended 1040s, man, this is the time to be kicking the tires on new tax tools. So you're not going in blind to next tax season. So you know exactly what you're working with and what'll work and what won't work. So by the time you get to next January, you are absolutely humming. Okay, if you do tax stuff, check this one out. Stanford Tax. I'll put a link in the show notes. Okay. I told you it was gonna be a lot today. That is stage one building. How do we go from zero to one and start attracting some of these clients? Step two is refine. Because once I have a bunch of these clients in this new reality, they're already paying me better than my last crop of clients because I'm solving more specific pains. But now that I'm here, I'm gonna realize, oh, I'm better for some of these people that than others. So what are some kind of variables within the caddy universe that could make me a better fit for some folks than others? Some ideas here. Those with income variability who may need help planning cash if they get like very infrequent influxes of cash or if it's tied to tournament results where you don't know when the next windfall is going to come or if it ever will. Catty's doing multi state and international work. Maybe you limit it to. I'm just going to do it with folks who are doing international work because that's particularly tricky and we're really good at it. Independent contractor versus employees. Those that do specific off season work, what do they do when they're not caddying? Maybe a number of them, you know, do a certain kind of teaching or something like that and you get in, get in with those folks, those who are thinking about retirement, maybe they're later in their careers and you could pull in like an asset management aspect where we're going to do all this stuff but also help get you to retirement. Caddy Player REV sharing agreements so caddies with complex profit sharing arrangements based on player performance may need, may have special needs Yardage book creation income Caddies who create and sell yardage books as a side business could need help with inventory tracking and small business tax filing. I love that one. So when you've got this, this caddy book, it's inevitable that when you have it you'll be like, all right, I've got these clients now, but now I'm seeing these are my A clients and these are my C clients and these A clients value me more because they had this problem with selling yardage books that we've sold because we have an understanding of E Com or like we help them with these international issues. Once you get there, you'll see these are the ones who value us most and now we're going to double down again on these. And that could look like only working with folks who have those needs. And maybe you sell info products or you know, you have just kind of a different line of service for the folks that don't meet that mold where you're not really going to do hands on stuff with them. But we're now in the caddy universe which is going to expose us to a bunch of other stuff that we couldn't even comprehend before, before we get there. Right. And I would argue this is actually the kind of beauty of niching down is you walk through that first door and this is, this is a framing from the one Without Pitching manifesto that I come back to a lot. You are afraid to walk through that first door because of all the other doors that you see that you're leaving behind and think you'll never be able to return to. But when you walk through that first door and you're on the other side of it, you see there's actually a bunch more doors. So if we niched into golf caddies or what are those other doors? What are the little things within that ecosystem that we weren't aware of before that we can now become like even more specific, specific niche experts in. I got a short list here for you. Caddy gear manufacturers. Companies that produce specialized equipment like caddy bibs, range finders, yardage books and weather resistant gear tailored for caddies. Caddy management software developers for tracking player stats, course mapping, performance analysis tools Caddy training academies, caddy insurance providers. Imagine being at a, at a party and saying, I run an accounting firm. We just work with caddy insurance providers. And the person's like, somebody does that, that's what you're looking for. That is the killer business. And when we have that fear of like, can I really go that specific? What if something happens, happens to that business? I would argue you're fine because like you're in a more specific arena where you can see the whole rest of the ecosystem too. So we actually found a bunch more things we can do just by getting more specific. Custom yardage, book creators, companies that produce these things. Caddy uniform suppliers. I guess that's a thing. Caddy equipment transport services. I thought about that. How do they get their stuff around? Like who coordinates travel for them? Caddie communication technology providers. Firms developing discrete communication devices for caddie player interactions during tournaments. Is that a thing? Do they have like, like little spy thing in their ear for discreet communications? I know they're not like holding the, the big yellow next tail walkie talkie and going, how's it looking big boy? 260 to the front. I think you're going to want to pull out the eight wedge picture for this one. I know golf stuff. Okay. Fire hose of ideas there for how to build a niche from scratch. I've kind of been developing this sort of ultimate niche builder doc that is still kind of in the works and I want to refine a little more before I put it out world. I think most people can understand the value of getting more specific, but they struggle with the quote unquote marketing or thinking of how to get there. I think the more we have these conversations, the more we kind of add to those ideas of stuff that we can swipe. I mean just gold things like caddy finance minute, like little 60 second audio clips that you could chop to podcasts and they could like put in as part of an episode. The, the big four transparency idea sort of thing for like for a domain. How much money our caddy is making, being the owner of that list and attracting people as a result. Every little, every little corner of entrepreneurship will have some cool ideas like this where you could pick up the mantle and make that thing and become the go to for that domain where there are no substitutes, where you get to make up the rules, decide how much you want to charge everyone. That's where we want to get to. Rather than being the general firm where that client that comes in doesn't know the difference between you and the person across the street. That's the goal. That's what we're trying to escape. If you're a niche firm, pop a little comment down below. I think oftentimes folks maybe haven't bought into this because they haven't heard from enough people who have done it successfully. But whenever you do find someone who's done it, they're like, absolutely. And I'm never going back to before, but for most of us, we can't get to that level of conviction ourselves until we've seen a certain number of people have success with it. And then you're like, okay, okay, okay. If they're all doing it and it's working really well for them, then I got to challenge some sort of assumption I have right now that's keeping me from doing this thing. So if you've done this successfully, drop. Drop a comment down below. Maybe we could pull some folks on to chat about just, like, how they found their niche and what the before and the after looks like. That's all we got for today. You might need a cigarette after that one. Thanks for coming and hanging and I'll see you in the next one.