309 How To Approach The Sales Process Ft. Brandon Hall

Oh, we got a treat today, gang. It is Brandon hall, founder of one of the fastest growing firms in the country. Big, sweaty growth guy. We're talking, we're talking sales, we're talking what the product offerings of his firm.

Looks like these days.

I love talking with Brandon because he is like, fully on the end of. I'm going to grow the heck out of my firm, like, fully on that end of the spectrum. And I find every time I talk with folks to kind of paint the boundaries of what the norm is, I. I'm like, oh, that's why you've grown so fast. That is so much time and effort and thinking going into, you know, in his case, sales than I ever would have imagined doing. I love talking to those outliers that show you what, like, being world class at a specific thing looks like. Because whether you identify as that or not, you pick up a couple things.

That are like, okay, yeah, I could probably. I could probably do that. I could probably do this.

This probably helped me buckle up. This was a fun one. Let's jump in. Okay, Brandon Hall. For anybody that hasn't stumbled into what.

You do on social media already, what's.

Like the 32nd Brandon hall intro?

I started my firm back in 2015, 16, went full time into it in 2016, and I've built the firm primarily through content marketing, so targeting real estate investors and just we have a podcast, YouTube, SEO, social media. Just trying to get in front of. In front of real estate investors as, as often, as frequently as possible. Today, the firm, we're on track to probably do12.2 million.12.2 million. We've got 90 or so employees across the United States and world. Um, so yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a big business these days.

12.

Just this year you're saying cheapers, creepers. So. And you started in 2016?

Yep.

Boy, there's okay, a load of tangents.

We could go down here from content marketing. I geek on that so much to your why, which I've gathered is like to stick it to the man.

Would you still say that? Like, is that still a large driving thing for you?

Yeah, I would say that I operate with a chip on my shoulder. I don't know how much it is stick it to the man as much as it used to be, but it's still there, it's still present. I actually just had a conversation with one of my business coaches recently about what is the purpose of continuing to scale the firm and how far do we want to Go. And it was a good conversation. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's, it's, it's just fun, you know, and, but like being able to topple some of these larger firms and say, hey, I've got a different way of doing it. Look at what it is. That, that's exciting for me too.

This is not all what this podcast was supposed to be about, but I can't help myself because I. There was a stage in my career where I was super sweaty. I want to grow. And was actually also founded in. I want to prove something to. To somebody or some more ambiguous thing. Where are you at?

On.

Okay, like, how quickly can we get to 20? Like, are you still wired that way or is that evolving at all?

No, it's a good question. And it's definitely evolved. I very much value my personal time and my family time these days and am not interested in working 60, 70, 80 hours a week now. As you know, it's always hard to turn your brain off. So, you know, what exactly is work and not work? Where does that line go cross? It's very blurry. But yeah, I don't. If I have to brute force anything these days, I tend to not do it. And so when I'm looking at new opportunities for the firm, if it requires Brandon to physically go and spend X amount of hours, you will probably not see us take that opportunity on. So I think in terms of leverage these days and just what's. What's the best use of my time? My. My executive's team's time, My, my team in general, what, you know, how can I best leverage everybody's time in the firm to continue to scale where we want to scale? But I'm not, you know, if we do 12 this year and, and we do projections and it's. We could hit 15 next year with. Without much, you know, brute force work, or we could hit 20 next year with insane amounts of work. We're going to target 15, not. Not 20.

Yeah, that brute force, like having to.

Step in and, and lift that yourself versus like stepping back and being like, what can the team wrangle? I think that's a big time struggle for people at every stage. What's the wisdom there? How do you. When's the time to do that and to not do that?

So I did that for, I mean, I brute forced it for probably three years. I mean, is. Is into 2016, Q4, beginning, end of Q3. 2016 is when I, when I went full time into the firm and I probably ran that thing 8090 hours a week, no sick days, no vacations. I worked every holiday day probably through 2019. And it was about 2020 where I, like, reached a breaking point. I was on the phone with my coach multiple times a week, and it was, it was like therapy because I was like, dude, I don't know if I can do this anymore. This is terrible. But he really helped me kind of understand how to build higher leverage skills. And in. On reflection, you know, to answer your question, to get out of the sweaty phase, what you have to do is you have to make sure your pricing's right, you have to make sure your scoping's right. Okay? But once you kind of get that right, the, the additional leverage points are not going to be, let's continue testing pricing and scoping. Right? And that's what we tend to do, I think, as accountants. Just inherently, it's. It's very much like, well, if I can put it on a spreadsheet, then. Then I'm going to just start checking the boxes off and I'm going to think very analytically. When in reality, you have to move away from the, the actual, like, pieces of the model itself and into leadership. Just how do I get more out of my team? How do I set clear expectations? How do I make sure that I've got the best people in place? And in retrospect, had I. I mean, I had to figure out a lot of the pricing and the scoping stuff along the way because we, we tested a lot of stuff, as you know, but once we had that, the thing that was missing was just setting clear expectations with people, being willing to have tough conversations, accountability, delegation, not abdication. Right? So we delegate. We don't just walk away. We delegate and we hold somebody accountable. A lot of people think delegation means, here you go, see you later. And that's abdication. I'm abdicating, I'm walking away, no support. So I was doing a lot of that. I was just making a lot of leadership mistakes, and I wasn't seeing results as a result of that. Once I fixed that, everything got easier. But part of fixing that too was also getting better leaders into my sphere so that I could also focus on trying to really hone these skills versus just sending out the next tax return. So it was kind of a combination of the model itself. How do we price, how do we scope, how do we service clients, me hiring better people so that I could step out of the trenches and focus on building the leadership skills, which are the high leverage skills that will really take you from wherever you're at to 3, 4, 5x.

So, yeah, so most firms are, like, on that journey of zero to one figuring out pricing and positioning. You're saying you got to a point where you feel like, we've got it, and then it was more about building the machine and the team around that.

Yeah. And I would even say, like, like, in retrospect, I could have stuck with my 2017 pricing model, which was a subscription. It was everything is included for X dollars. And then, then there were, like, there was another tier where it was everything and more. And, you know, you know how that works. But I could have stuck with that. I could have. I could have raised prices, stuck with that model. And I could have. If I knew. If I knew that the leadership skills were the key, then I would have switched to that, to trying to build those a lot sooner in the process. But I didn't figure that out for a long, long time. And, and now, you know, I, I help a few firms out from time to time, and, you know, we, We. We spend a day on the pricing and the scoping, and then that's it. It's done. You don't have to, like, you don't have to keep coming back to it over and over. It's the sexy thing to talk about on online, though. That's what everybody loves to talk about, because we all think that's the big leverage point. But that's not the leverage point. You can get 80% of the way there. You don't have to be perfect. You could bill hourly if you want to. It doesn't matter. Like, people have been doing that for decades. Right. But the key is, is how do I leverage my team? That's the key. How do I lead my team? How do I hold them accountable to results? What are the results that I expect? And when you start working with firm owners, you realize that, you know, they'll come up to you and be like, my team's terrible. And I'll ask them, okay, well, what was the expectation? Well, the expectation was that we file everything on time. That was the expectation that you gave to your teammates? Yeah. Well, did you get everything out on time? Yeah, we did. Well, why are you saying they're terrible? Well, because everything we got out was, like, two days before the deadline, and I wanted it to be a week before the deadline. Well, did you tell your team that? No, I didn't. Okay, so is it your team or is it you? Right, like, so it's, it's like figuring that out, figuring out how do I set clear expectations, hold people. I, I know that I keep, keep beating this drum. But that's, that's the big, that's the biggest unlocked for me. That, that's what took me from 3 to 6 million, from 6 million to 8, 8 to 12 without grinding away and you know, burning myself out, burning my team out.

Cool. So at the, at the destination as much as there ever is a destination. On, on pricing and positioning, what is, what are your offerings look like today? Like what are the SKUs? What's the range of prices people pay when they come to work with you?

So we start every new client that comes in the door, they either, they, they pick a path they can combine if they want to, but they have to either go through tax planning, which starts at five grand for 12 months, or they have to go through our accounting services and our minimum price there is like 600 bucks a month. And we do a setup which is always like a retroactive cleanup to get it ready to rock and roll. So they have to go down one of those two paths. They can combine those paths they'd like. Once they're on one of those two paths, then we run tax prep. So we'll do tax prep for everybody, but we will not prepare returns unless you go down one of those two paths. So I think our average client outside of accounting, so if they pick advisory and then tax prep, our average client is around 12 to 13,000 a year. And then we've got just like we know how many are going to stay year after year after year, so we know what the lifetime value is and project all that out. But that's, that's, that's kind of where we start. It's always that consulting or the accounting piece.

And how do you communicate who you're.

Good for in terms of like selling?

Yeah, like, like I know it's, it's real estate. But more specific than that, right?

Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's primarily landlords. We, we like to work with people that are, when we're talking to clients about this, we will, well, we talk a little bit differently to clients then. I'm probably going to talk about here, but anybody that's like a high income earner, so 5, 6, $700,000 plus higher net worth. I always say higher because I don't know what the difference is between high net worth and ultra high net worth. Everybody uses different thresholds but you know, like 5, 10 million dollar range, that's a good range for us. And, and, and we'll work with people Even if they don't have a rental, but they're about to purchase a rental, that's a good time to start. We can really get them in and get them pointed the right direction. So that, that's like one group. Another group is somebody that's got a decent portfolio already built out. So 20, 30, 40 properties, they typically need accounting help. So they tend to be a really good fit for our accounting services. And then we've kind of haphazardly built a. We call them the private equity team at our firm. These, these people are all like 10 times smarter than I am, which is kind of intimidating to hire, to hire these folks because they'll start talking and they're like, man, like, like. I'm pretty sure in tax the partner's supposed to be the smartest person in the room, but I am for sure not. So, um, but we built this team and they, they work with general partners of syndicates and funds, real estate syndicates and funds. And we've built a pretty solid business out there with that team. So there's a lot of partnership tax consulting and stuff like that. So when we're talking to clients, like, those are kind of the three buckets we're targeting, and, and we just serve up different content to those people.

Okay, so when somebody comes to you and they've got some other business, maybe that's how they got their money, do you tell them, do you do that other business too, or do you just do everything but that?

Yeah, actually, somebody asked me this and realized one time, they're like, well, if you niche in real estate, do you only do the real estate return or the real estate portion of the return? And I kind of thought about it for a second. I was like, huh. I guess, I guess we're not niched in real estate. So we do the entire thing. We'll take all the businesses on. So we, we touch a lot of different industries at the end of the day, but the one commonality with every single one of our clients is real estate exposure.

This episode is sponsored in part by Team Up. I have a story to tell you. It is the story of Laura. Laura was working with a BPO in India, basically a group that hires all the staffing and the training and all that of the people. And you're more buying, like, the work product than you are working directly with the people. The problem was they were missing important deadlines. And annoyingly, they weren't able to take the work from beginning to end. They just weren't getting it done the.

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Have you on today, sales stuff. So I've learned a bunch from you on just around sales on social media and accountants. Just in general. Like, I mean, we suck at this stuff. Like nobody went into this to do sales. And I'm, I'm curious your journey. You talk about what you do today, but I want to go back to like early days, Brandon, both the stuff that you got wrong in the beginning.

And with what you know now, like.

How you would handle sales or set up a sales team inside of a small firm, knowing what you know now.

Yeah. Okay, so before I jump into the history, if you are listening to this and you are nervous about sales, or if you like roll your eyes when it, whenever you hear, hear the word sales or, or closing or objections or whatever, my advice to you is that if you, if you want to build anything of, of real value, anything that can be Extremely impactful. If you want to build anything that will scale, you have to learn sales. But if you think about it, you can build incredible organizations around people that can bring in business and sell business. Right. Versus now. Think about that. On the flip side, you cannot build incredible businesses around a technical person. So if I've got two people to choose from, am I going to pick a technical person or am I going to pick a salesperson? If I want to build a really big business, I'm going to pick the salesperson. Right? So I want to shift everybody's perspective. Sales is an incredible skill to build. It's super high leverage and it's, it's industry agnostic. Once you learn sales skills, you can sell anything to anybody. And the interesting thing about sales is that if you're good at sales, you, you can also translate those skill, those skills into leadership skills. They're very translatable. So anyway, I'll get off, I'll get off that and I'll move, move on to your question. Where did I start? I was in my apartment in Washington D.C. and I would take phone calls off the edge of my bed and I would try to convince these landlords on bigger pockets to pay me like 600 bucks to, to do some tax consulting. And I would spend an hour sales.

Were you into sales at this point? Because a lot of people just heard.

Heard what you just said and they're like, man, I just like making the sausage like, this is so uncomfortable for me.

Yeah, no, sales was super uncomfortable for me back then. It was not something. But I knew, but I knew that if I could figure it out, I could probably sell anything. And so that was kind of the idea. So I knew that I wanted to build the skill. But I was super nervous on all these calls. So I, I would have this massive cheat sheet. I would like, I would like prep for these calls for an insane amount of time. And I would spend an hour and a half to two hours on every single sales call, every single one. And, and I was doing probably 10 to 20 of these a week. And this was outside of my day job, mind you. It took me my, my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, or is that I should say that back where my wife and girlfriend at the time, she finally told me one day, she was like sitting there listening. I'm sure they like blew a date with her and, and she was sitting there listening to me do the sales call and she just got mad and she was just like, you just gave it all away for free. And I was like, damn. I was like, yeah, okay, I need to really reflect on this. And that, that's what actually got me pointed down the path of, wait a second, how do you have better sales calls? Am I even being effective here? So back, back then, it was terrible. And what I was doing, I was making all the classic mistakes that people, People make, which is I'm trying to prove technical competence. Right. I'll answer your technical questions. Cause I want to build trust. That's how I believe you build trust. That's, that's what a rookie salesperson with no sales skills does. And I feature vomit, right? Oh, you're going to buy this thing and here's all the amazing things you're going to get. And I call that feature vomiting. We don't want to feature vomit on onto prospects. Right? Nobody likes that. Nobody likes vomit. But if you, if I'm talking to you as a prospect and I'm like, hey man, like, we reply to this plan gets you email response times of 24. That's amazing, right? But if you don't really care about that, all you're doing now is just saying, that's why that plan's so expensive and I don't need that. So I'm just going to go somewhere else, right? So we don't want to feature vomit. We want to hold back. But I was making all those mistakes. Finally figured out now today, if I jump on a sales call, I have a sales team now that I built. But if I jump on a sales call, it's 25, 30 minutes tops. It's very surgical. And I run what, what they, what we call a consultative sales process. So there's no like, oh, let me prove to you the tax savings and your roi, because ROI squishy, right? If you're saving somebody's time, if you're giving them peace of mind, how do you sell that? You can't, you can't translate that into dollar value.

So that small firm progression, you're so edge of the bed. You're the girlfriend's, your sales coach. Uh, I, I love that. Cuz where I live now, my wife can hear all my podcast recordings and she couldn't before. And I've got some unsolicited feedback. But knowing what you know now, say, say you're running a five person or under firm. How do you approach that? Is that something where a hundred percent of the time that's going to be the role of the firm owner? Maybe we start there.

So I've talked about this in realize On. Thank you for letting me be a part of that. By the way. Awesome community. Um, if I were to start again, I would spend as much time as I could, ideally 80% of my time bringing in business and selling business. That, that's what I would try to do. And I would hire a strong technical person. So this is a mistake that a lot of accountants make. I did as well you at the beginning, especially if you're sub 10 people or so, you tend to hire the lowest on the totem pole. We start with interns, right? And then we hire associates and then we hope that they work their way up into seniors and then managers over time. And we do that because for a couple of reasons. One, we're, we're scared to hire somebody that might be smarter than us, right? To cash flow. We don't want to hire somebody for 180k. When I can hire somebody for 60k, I'll just, I'll just personally spend more time brute forcing it, right? That's where that brute force issue comes into play. But if I were to start again, I would spend all my time on the sales side as much as I could. And I would hire a really strong technical person that could lead a small team and I would pay 150 to 180k to get that done. And the idea would be I don't have to worry about client service and I don't have to worry about training the team. This person's going to do that. All I'm going to do is try to bring in the business. If you do that, I think that you can scale to a small seven figure firm. You know, small is relative. That's very large to a lot of firms. But I think you could probably get to 2, 3, 4 million dollars within the span of 24 to 48, 48 months if you could set your schedule in such a way. And the cool thing that happens when you get to about 4 or so million is you find you have enough cash flow to hire the kind of executive talent that you really need to not have to worry about managing the platform anymore. And that is where life gets easy. You know, I know that there's a lot of talk with how do you build a lifestyle firm? And I understand why that is appealing because a lot of people get burned out working in public accounting and they want to come and work 20 hours a week and make 200k. That's awesome. But on the other side of the scale piece too is, is also a lifestyle firm. Maybe not 20 hours a week, but it's 40 hours of whatever type of work I choose to do. And the platform continues to grow at a 40, 50% rate a year and I don't have to brute force it anymore, right. And so I think that there's this like, there's this dark area between like 1 to 3 million. But if you can get past that, and you can get past that via sales skills, but if you can get past that, you can really bring in the top talent, the real like leadership level talent that you need to get you out of the day to day, but then also ensure that the rest of your team is still developing, growing as well.

Where in that, you know, the sequence of hiring your first 10 people, where would you make that big technical hire? Because I think the constraint for a lot of folks is just you're bootstrapping a firm and that's often why they're starting cheap. Like how far into that would you make that investment?

I would, that would be my first hire if I could afford it. That would be my very first hire if I could live. So, so what I did when I started my firm, I moved in, I bought a three unit property. So I used my EYW2 to buy a three unit property and I moved into one of the units. So my, my rent in D.C. at the time was like, I don't know, 1500 bucks a month. Once I moved into this three unit property, I actually earned like $200 a month, which then went to my, my utilities. So my housing costs went to nil. Now if the market crashed, I don't know what would have happened. But luckily the marketing crash. So it all worked out for me. But I, what I'm trying to say here is I would try to reduce my own spending, my own financial costs as much as possible. And this is, if I were to do it all again, my very first hire would be that 150k manager. As soon as I had $12,000 to $15,000 of cash flow coming in a month, and that might take like 12 months to build out, I might have to do a lot of the technical work until then, but I would give all of my cash flow to that person. Because as soon as you can stop doing the client work, you can focus on bringing in new work. And so the real risk of that type of hire is not 150k, it's 13k a month, right? With, with benefits and taxes and everything. And so the question that I would ask, and some people have asked me this same sort of scenario, and so I asked Them this question. If you had somebody that took all the technical work off of your plate and it costs you $13,000 a month to do it, how many months would it take you to claw that hundred, that $13,000 a month back with new sales? And typically the answer is like three months. It's not a long period of time. Right. Like, if you're freed up and you can go and crank on, on bringing business in, it's not 150k risk, it's a $36,000 risk or $39,000 risk. This is why I hire accountants and I don't do the math myself.

So the.

I want to dig into that. The psychology of, of cranking that big crank energy that I, I think a lot of people do you feel like.

You had that big crank energy when you were sitting on the edge of.

The bed or did you find it? Like, was it learned?

Yeah, I think, I think that I, I had it going into it only because I knew what I did not want, which was to work at ey for the rest of my life. And so I figured, okay, if I could just get to. I think it was like 150k or something net, then I'd be set for life was my original goal. And so it was just, okay, what do I need to do? How hard do I need to hustle to get there and. Or what do I need to do to get there? But it was just a lot of that, that brute force type work, just putting in the hours to get it done. Now, again, in retrospect, like I said, I spent probably three years just every day grinding it out. I don't think I had to do that. I just didn't know what I didn't know at the time.

If you were to put one book or resource or something in the person that's in that spot's hands right now, what would it be?

We'll do. I'm gonna do two books. I'm gonna cheat. Sorry. Traction by Gino Wickman. That's a good one. And then there's another one that's kind of similar. It's called Scale. I forget who it's by, but that's one of my favorite books. So if you read Traction and then read Scale, you will have enough combined to build the systems to put employees into and then leverage yourself up, get out of the day to day.

Hmm. I like in my head, those are more. I don't know anything about scale, but at least eos, like is not really sales heavy. It's more systems Heavy. Right. So you would like, you would go to a systems book before you would go to a sales book.

Yeah. Because if you, if you hire the 150k employee, how are you going to know that they are doing the work and delivering? Otherwise you're going to continue to be pulled back into the fray. Right. So I mean, you have to, you don't. The other thing too is you don't have to build all the systems before you pull people onto your team like this. You can put duct tape on the plane while you're flying it. But the question is, where am I going to spend. If I have, if I want to spend 80% of my time on sales and 20% of my time building the platform, what do I build during that 20%. Right. Do I build a scorecard? Do I build an org chart? Do I waste time writing an sop? What do I build? And I think that those books will kind of help you with the framework. And it's something too, that you can build a rudimentary system in a lot of these people management areas within a weekend if you read those two books. So I think that there's something to be said about having a reporting structure in place so that you can have the confidence and you don't have to think about or be worried about what's going on behind the scenes. And it just enables you to, to crank on the sales.

So like, you're getting to a place of freedom. Like figure out how to get that freedom so that then you've got that flexibility.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Hey, so I was recently at Zero Con in Nashville and you know who else was there? Live Flow. Because they recently launched a Xero integration. It's a big deal. It means whatever your favorite spreadsheet app is. Excel, Google Sheets. Wow. Edgy. Whatever. Your favorite spreadsheet app, you can use Live Flow to pull Xero reports into your spreadsheets. Pull them in one time, pull it like auto sync it on an ongoing basis. You got a little button now in your spreadsheet app that'll bridge any data from any old client, QuickBooks or Xero file into your spreadsheet app of choice. Bunch of ways you can use this. From giving like fractional access to accounting data to stakeholders, like members of the team, the marketing lead, an investor, maybe even the business owner, because you don't want them in the accounting file. Give them access to the spreadsheet instead of the accounting file. Could save some headache. Also have a Growing number of firms that use LifeFlow for month end closes. Like they have this big old workbook template. They pull in a whole ton of reports from the accounting system with the click of one button. And then you got this giant workbook where you can manage the clothes. It's got all the actual ledger data but in like a spreadsheet file rather than running umpteen PDFs or something like that and having to figure out how to organize all that into your file storage system. And they also do consolidations. So you have to like roll up a bunch of that reporting every single month. I had a dental group I worked with, it was 26 entities. We'd have to do this consolidation. We would only do it once a because it was so much freaking work. It was like a full day to.

Do all that stuff.

With Liflo, we could have mapped that and ran it pretty near instantly. We would have had to do some eliminations, but we would have taken an eight hour thing to like maybe an hour tops. And the big news is recently they just shipped that zero integration. So whatever your ledger of choice, liveflow's gonna work out for you. Check out the link down in the show notes. The most important software decision oh. That you'll ever make in your accounting firm. It is your practice management system.

Oh.

This episode sponsored in part by Client Hub. Good way to think about it. The four Cs cut, carrot cut, no capabilities, Client experience, clarity and community. I've already told you about the first three Cs. Today we're talking about community. Client Hub is particularly suited here because they got a co founder that was a former firm owner and pro advisor top 100. Pro advisor. Not just a pro advisor top 100 that knows how accounting firms actually work. Imagine that software people that actually know how this stuff works. When you adopt Client Hub, you don't just get a practice management system. You get a community that is aligned around their simple vision. Happy clients, happy firm.

That's nice.

As part of Client Hub you can ask questions, get advice, share your perspective, all with a welcoming community of small firm accounting professionals. So at software but Client Hub, they're actually going to deliver a service to you that is sharing the value of what all the other firms that are using Client Hub are figuring out. Just the other day we were talking about how we have this divide between workflow tools and the client experience. If any practice management system was built from the ground up around the client experience, arguably it's Client Hub. It's basically like a two sided task management System where the client logs in just like you do and you've got like a shared space to knock out those tasks. That is Client hub. To learn more, check out a link down the show notes.

What is, what does your sales team and process look like today? What is that? What is that machine?

So I have a sales manager and then we have two business development reps underneath him. And between the three of them, they take 90 or so. Is that right? Yeah, about. No, that's not right. Yeah, no, that's about right. 80 to 90 calls a week, all inbound. And so so basically my job is to go and get people to fill out our web form. And then we have a. We actually have another person on our sales team. We call her the sales setter. So she goes through all the web form entries and then routes them to the appropriate person on the sales team. And then. And then they just hold the calls and try to get the deals closed.

You said those 80 or 90 leads are all inbound and you're the, are you kind of the show pony to it to attract folks to that. You say that's kind of your role now?

Yeah, yeah, I am. Um, I. It's also something that I'm trying to figure out how to systematize at this point. Uh, our, our SEO and our podcast bring in a significant amount of leads. And I'm just trying to. Now, right now I'm trying to figure out how much value is the social media content these days because the algorithms have all changed, as I'm sure you know, to interest based, not followers. And so each piece of content can now stand on its own, which is great for people that don't have a following. A bummer for people that built a following, but that's neither here nor there. So my. What I'm trying to figure out now is just is my time better spent creating these pieces of content and really trying to hone that, or should I just really double down on the SEO, make sure that podcast is solid, Just kind of run a general marketing campaign, email campaign, webinars type of thing. Not juice it with the social media and take that time and go focus on something else like acquisitions or, or leadership or building the team, stuff like that. Hmm.

You started the podcast that was like three or four years ago, right? It was a while ago.

The podcast I started, I think back in 2018, it was 2017 or 2018. And I ran it really haphazardly. I mean, it was like one month I would do two episodes. The next month I would do None. And then next month I would do one and then I think it was like 2019 or 2020. My now partner Tom was said, hey, I'd love to take the podcast over, like we co host it together, but I'll run everything. We're going to do it weekly. The only week that we'll take off is Christmas and we're going to get a bunch of influencers on because they'll share it with their networks. And once we started running it weekly and getting the influencers on it, it blew up. It blew up. Yeah. And I don't actually run it anymore, so I replaced myself as co host with, with my sales manager, actually Ryan. So Ryan and Tom now run it on a weekly basis.

If somebody, if they're looking for like, what is that anchor thing that's going to bring me my 80 to, you know, however many leads every single week. In 2024, if you didn't already have the podcast, if you didn't already have investments in SEO, would you still start there or would you start with something different?

I would not start there in 2024. What I would do is I would be looking for communities that do not have like, like the modern social media algorithm in play. And what I mean by that is if you're, if you're going to try, if you don't have a platform at all and people do not know that you exist, first off, it's a complete waste of your time to spin up a website. Your website should be one page and it should be an intake form and that's it. We help X, do Y, we help real estate investors save money on taxes. Fill out this form for a consultation. That's literally all you need. You don't need this incredible website. You're not going to out compete people on SEO because we invest thousands of dollars a month in it. Bigger firms do as well. Just don't worry about that piece right now. All you need is eyeballs. You need traffic. So the question is, how do you get traffic? If you jump onto the various social media platforms, you're playing a pretty tough game because like I said, every piece of content stands on its own. So you have to invest time in every piece of content, figuring out the hook, how to open the loop, how to rehook, how to close the loop, open a new loop. And that takes a lot of time to figure out, like a lot of time being 6, 12, 18 months to really learn how to do effectively. And it's not that transferable from one platform to the next. Like I thought I was crushing it on X and then I switched and tried to do the same thing on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube shorts. Falls flat. So it's just like a completely different beast. So if I were to start again and I didn't have a platform, I would be looking for communities that are off essentially online, but offline. So like, like realize, for example is an example. It's a circle community. There's no algorithm. You just go in and you post. Right. And I would find communities where my target client, my target clients hang out and I would jump in there and I would answer tax and accounting questions and I would try to get in good graces with the owner of the community and see if I could launch like live Q&As on a weekly basis or webinars. Just add a lot of value. And you know, if you're in the real estate space, then go to biggerpockets. It's still a thriving forum and that's a great place to start. That's where I started. But you'll, you'll ensure that you get in front of people in that type of situation. I would not go to Facebook groups. There's tons of big Facebook groups out there. But Facebook has that same algorithm issue. Right. Even though it's a group, it's a community, it's still algorithm driven. So I would try to get away from the algorithms if I could.

Yeah. The flip side of this, we've had a bunch of accounting space related communities launch recently and I, I think we're kind of, I don't know if we're reaching peak community or not, but it's not just an accounting industry thing. It's everywhere. And every one of those people launching communities like they're looking for collaborators that can add value to the community. And that's gotta be a real opportunity right now where you can get connected with those so folks can get in front of like I'm in a, I'm in a professional creators community where like there's, there's thresholds on like you have to be making X amount of revenue and, and all that. Like that's exactly the kind of pool I want to get into to, to find some specific clients.

Yeah, a hundred percent. And, and I think at least recently I have been talking to a few folks about wanting to launch communities or be part of different communities. Not accounting related, but it's all the same thought process. It's. Man, my social traction is really tanked because it's not based on followers anymore. My followers are no longer seeing my stuff, and I didn't build my email list or whatever. And so how do I still get in front of people? Well, let's go launch a community or let's join communities that already have all my clients there. I think that's a great way to go, and I think it's a much easier way to generate leads and generate business quickly. And it all depends on your time horizon, too. Like, if you told me I have 12 months before I have to generate a dollar, then forget everything I just said, go figure out social media, go figure out TikTok, go figure out YouTube, and that's where I would start if. If you had a longer Runway. But if you told me I have to generate a thousand bucks next week. All right, we got to go join five communities today, and we're going to go post a bunch of tax knowledge and accounting knowledge today, answer a bunch of people's questions, and we're going to start taking calls tomorrow.

Cool. Okay.

Two questions I want to make.

I want to make sure I asked you before we wrap. One, what is your relationship with value pricing? And is this something that your sales team has been baptized in? What aspects of it do you use? What aspects of it do you not use?

This is a trick question. This is gonna get me in trouble. I. You know, okay, so. So the theory of value pricing is phenomenal, right? It is. It's, hey, everybody values things differently. And I believe that to my core. And I see that play out every day in my life, right? Like, I'm much more willing to pay somebody to mow my lawn because I value my time versus me, go and do my lawn myself. So that that exists, and that is true. Now, sitting here and trying to price every single client differently based on how they value things, I think is a complete waste of time. I think it's a complete waste of time. And I just think in terms of leverage, right? Would you rather spend all that time trying to uniquely price people, which is a skill that is not transferable or scalable, or would you rather figure out a way to productize your services? So define the scope and the price that you're generally willing to accept. Then do the next one. Then do the next one. So create a five, a nine, and a $15,000 plan, right? You're kind of value pricing at the same time, but it's just that if somebody wants $15,000 plan, if you're making $1 million, it's still 15,000. If you're making 500k, it's still 15,000. We're not going to jack it up based on how you might value it. I just don't think it's very scalable. And I think that, I think that you really, you know, if you, if you want to get out the trenches and if you want to get out of the day to day and if you want to build something that can build itself without you having to brute force anything, you really have to think in terms of scalable systems. And teaching somebody how to price is extremely hard to do, especially if they don't own any stake in your business. It's extremely hard to do. So not to say there's no merit to it. I just, I just don't think it's scalable and I think it's a waste of time as a result. So I would, I. What I chose to do is to figure out what are the general prices that the market is generally willing to pay for this scope of services. These various scopes of services will price that, will scope that, that will be standard. And now look, I can have a sales team go sell it and this, the two business development reps that we have, they don't have any accounting or tax experience. So if I can teach them how to sell product services, then I can scale an awesome sales team because I don't have to have accountants doing any of the selling. Right. So my pool of talent expands. It's just, I just think in terms of the systematic piece to it, again, there's merit to it, it makes sense. But I think in practice the juice is not worth the squeeze.

Do you, when you look at something like tax planning, does everybody pay the same thing for a tax plan? Is there like a graduated scale? They're based on various factors.

So we have the three services, it's like 5, 9 and 15K. And we have different pieces of scope. So one of the plans includes unlimited calls. One of the plans includes quarterly tax estimates and a year end plan, whereas the base plan does not. One of the plans includes real estate portfolio analysis. So we'll sit down quarterly and analyze how your properties are performing. So we, we kind of predefined the scope based on what we're hearing from the market. And we'll change the scope in each one of those plans, again, based on what we're hearing from the market and just kind of seeing what people are talking about and what's interesting to them. But we're not going to say, oh, we can save this person $1 million. So we're going to charge $100,000 for this tax plan. Are we giving something up? Sure. Yeah. We're giving up a significant amount of revenue in that one case. How often does that happen? Not very often. If that happens a lot to you, then just create a $50,000 plan. Right. Like, like I just wouldn't look at it on an individualized basis. I would try to, I would try to create something that most of those people would pay for.

And then subscriptions. You do some aspects of what you do subscription and some are not. Right.

Yeah. So we have, so we run monthly accounting. That's every single month. The annual planning that we do or the planning that we do, those are 12 month engagements. And we do want clients to renew with us at the next 12 months. So it's kind of subscription esque, maybe not monthly recurring. But tax prep is billed totally separately. We price tax prep separately. We, we work on it separately, we bill for it separately. I don't roll it into any sort of like master service agreement, but it is something that we're, we're going to be looking at next year. So I do want to caveat that and, and make that known. I don't know that it's going to be a subscription in the traditional sense, but what we're trying to work on right now or over the next six or so months is if a new client comes in, we want to be able to say, hey, your advisory, the planning piece is going to be about 5,000 and then we think your tax return is going to be about 6,000. So if you sign all of this today, you can lock those prices in. We want to feel very confident in that. But the problem is always what if the price should have been 10,000 for the return, not 6,000? What do you do then? And that subscription pricing really bit me early on when I was trying to do that, I was running it on a monthly basis and you know, you'd sign somebody up in November and you, you'd go monthly, monthly. And then they would leave you in, in April. And then it's like, okay, wait a second, do I accelerate payments or how to. Creates a lot of admin work, a lot of accounting gymnastics. And I don't like creating admin work in my firm. I also, that's why I don't, I don't allocate indirect costs to service lines. This always blows people's minds. But like, you know, like sales and admin and marketing and just, just general travel. But we just have a GNA column on our P and L. I don't allocate that to my tax line, my advisory line, my accounting line. And the reason is, is because I don't want the service line leader sitting there fighting about it and wasting time on things that they can't control anyway. So I try to stay away from the accounting gymnastics that us accountants tend to like to play around with spreadsheets for, for a long period of time with.

Yeah. And like, and whip allocations and all this like inside made up stuff. Brandon, thanks for doing this, man. It's always awesome hanging with you.

No problem. Thanks for having me on.

Folks who want to hear more, Brandon, online, what's.

What are the best places to find you?

I'm on Twitter at B. Hall, CPA on LinkedIn. I tend to talk a little bit more about firm running, so check me out there too. And then somewhere around here we've got a link to join my newsletter. I send it out every Saturday morning on firm running. Just different things that I'm experiencing and what works and what doesn't work. And I'll tell you what doesn't work if, if I've tried it and lost money.

So yeah, it's good stuff. We'll put a link to that down in the show notes. Brandon, thanks for doing this, man.

Appreciate it, man. Thanks for me on.

How good was that? We got to come up. I feel like we got to come up with more excuses for Brandon to come back. He dropped some moms there.

We got a Q and A tomorrow.

I get. I almost need a reaction to some of those things, like the value pricing thoughts. Do you keep working on your pricing and positioning or do you just build the machine around it? Maybe we'll digest a little more of that tomorrow. But thank you for Brandon. To Brandon for joining in. Check out the links in the show notes for all sorts of Brandon stuff. At the very least, get on his newsletter. One of the most unique thinkers we've had in the profession in a long time. Whether you agree with him or not, he's thinking differently about it. Building a firm largely from growth marketing, which is virtually unheard of and I think impacts how we think of a.

Lot of things like value pricing and.

Specialization and all that. But make sure you check out Brandon's stuff down in the show notes. Thanks for coming to Hang today. We'll see you in the next one.