327 This Accounting Firm Just Decided to Niche Down

Paul, not you, Paul. Gym firm. Paul. Paul that's going to build a firm for gyms. Paul recently shared in the comments. This is like three or four weeks ago now. Niching into gym stuff, maybe even niching nation further today, gang, we're going to gather around and build a firm for Paul. Run through a whole bunch of ideas of how you could attract folks for this specific niche. Talking about gym stuff today, but you'll pull out some bits and pieces that's like, oh yeah, I could totally go and do that for Florida. Phlebotomists, beekeepers, designers, whoever you're going after Today, I'm going to share a whole bunch of ideas for how you could build this niche from scratch. To help you think about how that next client you bring in the door, just that one next client, could be a little bit more specific and start taking you down a wee little path. Path to specialization. Okay. We're looking for better paying work from clients that we enjoy working with. Come on in, everybody. Lay hands on Paul. Let's get to it. Anybody think Paul's gonna listen to this episode? It'd be a bummer if he didn't, right? Okay, this is why you shouldn't post in the comments. He shared some specifics about what he's looking to do. I like doing these little niche episodes where it's like, what are just a whole bunch of ideas we could use to attract this type of client? Every time we go down this path, we come up with kind of a few different off the wall things. But also so many of these are applicable to almost any type of specialization. And whether you're a brand new firm that doesn't have any clients, or you're building a side hustle and you're like, how do I even go about getting clients? Or whether you're an old firm, a firm that's seen some things, firm that's been around the block. Maybe you're at capacity and you're like, the last thing I need is more clients. The answer for those firms is the same, actually. It's how do I go from being just at capacity to adding a more specific type of client who will pay me a little more, who will appreciate me for the talented accountant that I am. The solution for both types of firms is attracting a specific type of individual. There's a whole bunch of different ways you can do that. Today we're going to talk about how to find people, how to attract people, but also how to not be limited by like your current level of specialization, how you could go Even deeper. But gyms, gyms, gyms, gym, gym, gym, gyms. Gyms are actually a unique space because it's one area where there's a ton of thought leadership already. Normally, I steer people in a direction that's like, find something so specific that you could be the very first person to start a newsletter about tax and finance, managing the back office for beekeepers, or for climbing gyms or for mountaineering equipment importers. Because honestly, the coolest businesses out there are the ones that are like, you hear it at a party and you're like, well, yeah, I guess. I guess somebody has to make that thing right. And those people, they need accountants. And if you can align something you enjoy, like a passion with a very specific niche industry, normally I would tell people go so far that when a prospect is scrolling through their algorithm and they see, like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. A podcast for saltwater aquarium dealers. Sign me up, buddy. When we get that specific, the bar is very low in terms of the quality of what we have to do. But the. The less specific we get, the higher the bar gets. And if we're giving out just general business advice and we're up against anybody and everybody's mom. Right? Why did not mom. No need to go after moms here. But you get the idea. The more general you get, the harder it's going to be to make stuff that will attract people. The more specific you get. If you're the only one doing it, you can do it really badly and it will still be useful. And for most of us, that's going to be our sweet spot. We don't hold ourselves out to say, like, yeah, we're going to. I'm going to make this incredible video, or I'm an amazing writer. Like, that's just not us. Let's make something useful. The more specific, the better. Now, gyms have an abundance of thought leadership out there, but most of it is around acquisition. How do I go out and find customers? Paid acquisition, marketing hacks, all that stuff. There's kind of this, like, hormos ification of the gym space, I think, where maybe more than any other space, it's almost been taken over by online thought leaders. And surely there are firms who have, like, integrated themselves into this. In fact, I know a number of firms that worked that work largely with fitness centers of one form or another. And a good place to start is. Is. Is poking around to see, are there already firms hanging out in this space? And if so, where are they? Because that might be the product, like, where they Ended up may very well be the product of a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get there. But don't let their stamp and them being there spook you into not being willing to go into the same channel because very often they will be doing something different for than you or they will be serving folks up market from your down market from you. So like that is a good place to start is where are the current providers hanging out if they do exist? Absolutely. Pay attention to what they do, what events they're sponsoring because you may get some helpful intel from that. Okay, one theme today, man, AI assistance, like with some really careful prompting can be really, really helpful. Specifically in this context ideation around this stuff. A number of situations I built like a me created list of good ideas and then I'm like give me a couple more AI, like what are a few more like this? And I'll call those out situations where AI was helpful. I've also put a bunch of prompts today if you want to play with this in either chat, GPT or cloud. I put a bunch of prompts down in the show notes and you can swap out the niche to whatever you're using to get you some ideas. They won't all be good. All it takes is one really good one. A a comedy writer framed it this way recently as they were talking about AI, a human that writes jokes like a stand up comedian. You know, one in every hundred jokes they write is going to be any good. And the same thing applies to artificial intelligence. Like don't expect every single one to be a banger, but it has value if one in every hundred is usable, if that like sparks something that gets you to a more helpful place. That's why arguably the most useful thing that AI provides right now is like a sounding board for ideation. Okay. As I said, we're going to find, we're going to attract and then we're going to enhance, go a little deeper. So finding up first, let's talk associations. Always good when you're going into a space to be thinking about associations because they in many ways are like the gatekeepers and the biggest hubs of the. I don't know if legit is the right word, but generally it's a fairly high quality client. The folks that are engaging with the associations and folks, that's generally where they're going to turn for like the most trusted thought leadership. Now there's tons of other places you can get thought leadership and a million different ways that you can find and attract clients, but each one of These episodes that we do, we kind of try to go deep on just a few of them. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. I love software vendors when they love me and it's why when I go to accounting conferences, I look around and I say who's here and who's not here. You will consistently notice that the folks that turn up at accounting conferences, the brands are the most engaged, have the best understanding of accountants. There are enough tone deaf software companies out there that just do not get it and like are not solving meaningful problems for us or are developing in this direction that they think is interesting. And we're like no, no, no, no. Like this is the path that's actually interesting for my business. Live Flow, man, you see them out in the wild. I see those folks probably six to eight times a year, the founders at all sorts of different conferences. It is a great validation that they are actually building something of meaning for the way that we work LifeFlow. Basically their business is they sync data from QuickBooks or 0 to Excel or Google Sheets and there's a bunch of different ways you can use that. From reporting to extending information to like third party stakeholders who you don't want to have in the QuickBooks file to month end close management. A growing number of firms are actually managing the month end close from a single workbook by syncing a bunch of data out of the accounting file all at once. So you got a whole bunch of tabs in this big workbook. You're not like printing a bunch of reports from the ledger, right? Like that's what they're trying to get away from anyways. LifeLow is a company that's been a leader in that from the beginning. They're not like a quick little plugin like cheap utility as much as they are. We're going to help you do this with a whole bunch of your companies. We're going to help you with consolidations. Like we are the kind of the full suite for doing this, like a platform for extending your spreadsheets rather than like a little utility to like sync some data back and forth. If you're at an accounting conference, take a look for Lifelo. You may see them there and learn more about LifeLow. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by teamup. Team up helps you directly hire super talented accountants in the Philippines. Because you know what? Double entry accounting, you can do it anywhere. In fact, I'm looking at six talented people right here who are real, real live humans. The team up have connected with accounting firms. Geralyn has got a BS in accounting. Went to work for a Canadian firm. They're paying her 900 bucks a month USD. She knows 0quickbooks bill com she had one year of experience when they hired her. Sam he had a BS in accounting as well. US accounting firm hired him paying him 1430amonth. Had 5 years experience beforehand with US companies experience with payroll. Was previously doing reviews on financial statements, sales tax. Sharon BS in accounting also a CPA QuickBooks Pro advisor. Went to work for a US firm spanner 1600 bucks a month. Had three years experience doing business returns, personal returns, even tax planning. So many people here where you're like if this was a I can tell you what most US Firms would say. If this was a US resume, you would be you'll be licking your chops. But here's the thing. If you're running a distributed team, matter doesn't really matter where they are. Now if you do tax in the U.S. are there disclosure requirements? Absolutely. But the 7216 rules are a reason to disclose, not a reason to not hire the best people to make your firm successful. That's it. If you're looking to find some folks who will work with your firm directly, Timo's got a bunch of recruiters on the ground in the Philippines that can find those people for you. I'll put a link to Team up down in the show notes. So associations they're putting on live events. They put out a huge amount of content. Some of it's free, some of it's paid. I often think of like the paid sponsorship opportunities as the front door. We've talked about this framing before. There's a whole book about it. The Front Door. If you think about a nightclub, the front door is like that's where everybody waits in line to go in and pay the COVID charge. The back door is where like the VIPs are let in, right? But then the side door, that's where like the cooks and Cousin Vinnie and and the other people come through. We want to find the side door. You can certainly sponsor events. In fact, I don't know that I should actively encourage people not to. But not everyone's always going to be in a situation where that's practical. Right? But I started real high level here with a chat GPT conversation that basically just asked it to provide me with associations I ought to be looking out for. So here's the prompt again, all the prompts I mentioned today. You can swipe copy pasta down in the show notes. I said, I'm going to need my accounting and tax firm to just work with gym owners and owners of fitness centers. What are associations, governing bodies or organizations that certify for things that would be specific just to the owners of these businesses? Not necessarily fitness coaches or other adjacent things, rather, what would be most relevant to the owners of these businesses. Give me A table of 10 organizations and what they do and what about them. Specifically targets owners of gym businesses. So it gives me a table of, of 10 things and about half of them felt relevant to gym owners and the other half didn't. And here's a hack with AI assistance is literally just ask it to do the same thing, but better. So I circled back and I said, improve the quality of your response. Just focusing on gym owning entrepreneurs because that's who we want to attract in a business. Like, if we're trying to work with a specific type of business, all I care about is in that business, who's the person whose attention I need to get. In this case, it's the owner. It's the gym owner entrepreneur. Then I followed up with an improved list of 10 that were a little bit better. International Health Racket and Sports Club Association, National Independent Health Club Association, Medical Fitness Association, Club industry, Whole bunch of them. And this is where you can go full keyboard warrior and literally sync days to doing like, you know, trying to make connections and meet people. Like, there's so much you can literally just do from a keyboard. It's not as good as showing up in person, but when you have like, you're at such an advantage from having expertise already, you have something really valuable to offer and oftentimes we discount that. We don't assign as much of a value to it ourselves as we should. You are, you are so far ahead of the, the folks hustling in your social media dms that are like, oh, do you want this or that? You're like, no, I already have something super, super powerful. I'm already enabling transformations for this type of business and I'm happy to support you, the association and what you need to develop content or whatever that looks like for you. I'm here to help. So don't feel like the scummy person because you're not. Like, you can definitely frame it in a scummy way, but we're, we're looking to just build connections in a network and be helpful and the rest takes care of itself. So I went a little deeper there with the very first association that called out the ihrsa. I said, Find any reference that the IHRSA has ever made to accounting firms who support fitness center owners with tax or bookkeeping. It came back and it gave me a CPA firm. And I'm like, that's not really what I was looking for. I said, you just told me about an accounting firm website. I, I want to know how the org has worked with firms in the past, promoted them as partners, that sort of thing. And it gave me a list. Number one, IHRSA has published best practice guidelines for accounting and finance tailored specifically to fitness studios, awesome partnerships and industry experts, educational content, webinars, strategic partnerships. And it gave me deep links to all of those things. So it gave me a shortcut to a bunch of ways that they either have in the past or could presumably work on with accounting firms. I think one bonus, one upside of working with reputable associations is, and we see this, a good analogy here is software in the accounting space. When you see a new software company come into our space, oftentimes they'll do co marketing with existing software companies that have a lot of trust. And by doing that co marketing, you kind of hijack some of the trust of that other brand, right? And that's kind of what we're, we're trying to do by getting involved with these associations. If they already have trust, can they. Short path, short path, shortcut the path to me building some trust by association, increasing the perceived value of myself and what I can do. If you're the only one showing up on webinars for this big super like legit association, people are going to be like, well, you're the person for this, right? Like, I haven't seen anybody else. That's exactly what we want to be. We want to be the person for X. We just eliminated so many substitutes. That puts you in such a better place to have a market advantage to charge more than you can charge for general work and be perceived as the expert there. I did some more digging on that, ended up finding there's like $1,000 a year partnership thing that this group does that look like it would probably be worthwhile because they'd give you a bunch of exposure because the nature of what we do is fairly high ticket. Oftentimes financially, these things totally make sense. I want to get one good client from $1,000 a year partnership thing. And that's, that's great ROI for you. I also then went a little deeper in the same conversation and said, do the same basically for Oregon for me locally. And I found a bunch of local equivalents for Those types of associations, especially if you are early on in your journey, could be worth exploring local because it's cheap to get out to those things in person. And in person always just cuts through a bunch of noise because they can meet you. When you've got more reach and more money to travel and more flexibility and all that, the national stuff, the reach is going to be bigger there. But if we're just starting out, man, boots on the ground, showing up at events, that goes a long ways. Okay, finding people, that was the first one. Associations. Second, software companies. There are so many software companies who have built like gym management software and Googling. That led me to a Reddit post which this sort of thing is gold. Reddit is so good about it. Make sure it's not super old. This one's only nine months old. But the post is all the gym owners out there, which software is best for gym management. And there's a whole bunch of whinging in the replies. But basically everyone rallied. A huge percentage of people rallied around an app called Push Press was kind of what most folks were saying is the best option right now, better than some of the bigger options. Great, that's an awesome place for me to start because the most plugged in gym owners are probably going to Push Press. And so if I, if I had my pick of who I get to work with, I'm going to try to work with them. And so you go out to Push Press's website, they've got guides, like a gym guide, they've got blogs, they've got a newsletter, they've got a whole bunch of stuff that I could contribute to and offer like helpful, valuable content to. And again, if people are coming to a single watering hole, which most people, the way they consume, they'll come to a few different places. But if you are the only person for X in like the watering holes where they're hanging out, their perception will be this is the guru for this space. And they'll literally come in maybe being afraid that they can't afford you, because the perception is that like gurus, they're just more expensive. Should they be? Probably not. There's some justifications for like areas that are nuanced, but whether that's real or not, the client doesn't know. They will just come in with a different expectation. And for you, that's good. So how can it be helpful to this software company? Software companies more than anyone else have like dedicated, big old dedicated budgets to getting in front of people. They're pouring money into webinars into big, expensive exhibitor booths. All of these things. How can I ride those coattails, right? Like, how can I create helpful things for them so that those marketing dollars are actually being poured into getting me in front of more people? That's a great side door in to getting in front of folks offering to go stand in a booth at an event for them and talk about the app. Offering to do a bit of stage time. Oftentimes with sponsor packages, they may get 10 or 20 minutes on a stage. If you offer to come up and do five minutes as part of that and be able to like provide something of value. These are all killer ways to get in front of people leveraging someone else's credibility. This episode is sponsored in part by Finn Daily Pop Quiz Time did you know that I once developed a SaaS app for accountants that fully automated the cash reporting that we did for our clients? True story, I built that like three years ago and then I sold it to a guy, Luke Templin, and Thin Daily is still running strong. I'll put a link to it down in the show Notes findaily IO I frankly love it. Maybe I'm slightly biased, but basically how it works is is it's like it's an email builder, kind of like an email marketing tool. But you plug variables into those emails and those variables can be values that are pulled from QuickBooks, from Xero, from Plaid, like banking figures, even from like zapier. If you want to pipe in your own information, you build these email templates and you plug variables in. It can do stuff like math, like adding up a number of outstanding bills, that sort of thing, tables of like outstanding invoices, build all this stuff into emails and then you set the schedule that email will send on and at the time that it sends, it goes out, makes the API call to all those services, pulls in current data and then sends that email off. And this was the cash reporting that we were doing for our clients to be like, hey, here's the bills we got coming up, here's how much money's in the bank. Here are all these different factors all in an automated email. And folks were paying me a bunch of money for this service. Now since I got out of thin daily, done a bunch more stuff like being able to connect to a bunch of different QuickBooks files and like pull that stuff into a single email for like multi company sort of things. Banana bunch of cool things. Super useful tool. Like it's one of those things where if you have the use case for it, you're like oh my gosh, where has this been all of my life? And if you don't, you're like why would. I don't understand this. Why does this even. Why does this exist? I don't. Why would I want this? I find that people are in like one of those two end of the camps. I still love it. Still around a fun bit of Jason Daly lore thin daily is. Check out the link down in the show notes to learn more. This episode is sponsored in part by Forwardly. Are you sick of waiting for ach transfers that stick to bank hours or checks to get caught in the mail? Do you want to save hours on bill pay each month for you and your clients? Forwardly is your solution for Instant Instant Instant B2B payments. Forwardly offers an easy to use, award winning arn AP solution for accountants and their small business clients featuring advanced approval workflows and a revolutionary four way sync four ways with accounting software. What could the other ways even be? The software eliminates all manual work, automatically categorizes and records financial transactions for both customers and vendors, maximizing cash flow by ensuring payments are received instantly in your bank account. Enjoy same day Async for free. Why is that not a thing? Why is that not more of a thing? Forwardly? It is a thing obviously. Set up your free account@forwardly.com to work towards a free iPhone offer. Color me intrigued. Check out a link down in the show notes. Okay, and the last one I I did a chat GPT prompt for influencers and this is a to like like find influencers I could use to get in front of entrepreneurs. And and this is a great example where specificity in how you prompt for this is really important. So here's what I said. I'm going to niche my accounting and tax firm to just work with gym owners and owners of fitness centers. What are social media influencers, newsletters or podcasts that would be specifically just relevant to the owners of these businesses? Not necessarily fitness coaches or adjacent things, rather just the owners of the business. Give me a table of 10. My fear is I'm just gonna get a bunch of fitness influencers, which isn't what I want, right? I want the owners of the business. And the response pretty good. We got the Gym Owners Business Podcast, the GSD show, which I guess is for gym owners looking to grow their business. The Fitness Business Podcast, Barbell Business, Fitness Business Authority Podcast, a whole bunch of them, the Gym Owners Podcast by Gym Insight. All sorts of opportunities there to like come on as a guest to potentially sponsor Again, we're thinking about the watering holes where people learn and consume from. If you're the only one, if you're the only tax pro, if you're only the only, the only bookkeeper, the only CFO that they see talking about what they do, right or wrong, you're going to be perceived as the guru there. So that is finding them, going out and seeking, seeking those clients. And that's usually where you're going to start. You're not always going to have the leverage to be able to attract people in the beginning. Long term attraction is the most powerful. It's the widest reach. It is somebody listening to your podcast for a year before deciding to buy that person. Like they have a entirely different relationship with you than anyone else. But that's more of like a long term luxury. That's something that, that new firms, a luxury that is not going to be afforded to them. Right. But a few ways we can attract. I actually put together a few frameworks because we talked about frameworks recently. What's a framework that could get people excited? 3 ideas for frameworks. 5 step framework to simplify going multi location. So what are the things that gyms get wrong that they have to change the first time they go multi location? It doesn't matter how many steps it is. It's just like the common traps you see and how to solve for them. Stuff like class tracking, your payroll system being able to support multi location because local jurisdiction may be different. Tax withholdings, all that. A bill pay system that supports class tracking or maybe their very first bill pay system. If it's a single location, they may still be writing checks. The call to action here is like maybe a one off consulting call or handing off to your bookkeeping team because once they go central, once they go multi location, it's like where is your admin going to be? Well, we can actually kind of centralize that for you by our off site bookkeeping team handling it for you. Second framework, five steps to leverage real estate to reduce gym owner taxes. This is the lead people into a cost segregation study service. But you'd also pull in like financing partners. There are consultants that will help you find good gym locations. But notice that we're calling out gym owners. We're saying gym owner taxes, which is probably a better way to say that. And we know that that's not a real thing. But those are like three keywords that will attract the very specific person that we want. Right. And then third framework X Things to measure to maintain your sanity. And this is coming back to the setting up your first set of KPIs where you've got two KPIs that are the biggest profit levers for the business and then one personal KPI that is, you know, how many hours are you working, how many nights a week did you get home for dinner? Like a metric, that is how you are personally managing being an entrepreneur. So the call to action there, we can give you a free package that's like the most common KPIs and they could pick and choose from that. We can do a live call where we'll analyze your profit and loss. A mastermind to connect you with other owners who are like trying to be mindful about getting through this stuff while maintaining their sanity. Like those are all really valuable things. Where at the bottom of the value ladder is this resource that can give them ideas of KPIs to use. But that leads in really nicely to what if we did like a one on one just accountability call every single month and that was it. Like what's the next little baby step? Oftentimes the first step to work with you is really high. It involves divorcing their current accountant, it involves maybe a higher ticket spend. Whereas if there's a way to baby step them into that, you may be more likely to then convert them to something higher up on that value ladder later on. Okay, last, enhance a gym. Gym owners, it is a niche, but it's not a particularly niche niche. You can get more specialized, right? And this is arguably the biggest benefit of special specializing. Is it leading you to what the next specialization is like? Specialization is not a one and done sort of thing. Specialization. You ready for this lean in? Specialization is a way of being. You are always on a path to getting more specialized, to exploring different specializations. In all likelihood you are not always going to be stationary. So as we're thinking about gyms, I want to look at two things. Kind of the surrounding ecosystem for gyms and, and for some of these ideas I used AI to generate them. I put that prompt down in the notes. So what are the. What is the surrounding ecosystem of a gym where we could also potentially serve some of these other players that are not as well served as gym owners are, but also what different types of gyms and trainers are there. So let's start with the surrounding ecosystem. I got a short list here. Fitness equipment manufacturers, gym management software providers. I ended up like getting into like healthcare software providers. I was like starting to baby step into that agencies that worked with healthcare software providers. And it was super interesting. And had I stuck around with my firm longer, we probably would have gone deeper, deeper into that because there were trade shows around it and that, like, that was becoming a really interesting niche. Anyways, gym management software, totally a thing, right? Ton of providers there. Sports nutrition supplement companies, locker and storage system suppliers, personal trainer certification organizations, sauna and steam room equipment suppliers, commercial H Vac contractors for gyms, specifically fitness equipment leasing companies, virtual fitness content creators, fitness industry marketing agencies, and fitness business consultants. So being the advisor to the advisor for fitness businesses, a niche, like, that's great because they've already got an audience and you can actually be helpful to them. That can be your way in. Like, you talk to a consultant and you're like, hey, do you want me to run a session for you on tax planning? And they're like, yeah, actually, that would be killer. All of a sudden you've got everybody's attention, but then that consultant, they're going to be putting you in front of everybody also, right? So like, that is a niche where the network effect of going into that niche is actually going to lead to. To a bunch of connections. Okay. And then gym and trainer types. How's this? Climbing gyms, CrossFit. And there's actually a whole bunch like CrossFit adjacent things, but virtual trainers. Virtual trainers for specific types of people, for firefighters, for celebrities, for the disabled, fitness retreats, boxing or fighting gyms, float tanks, sensory deprivation, I love that stuff. I think I went on a rant on that in the past. I love float tanks. Cryotherapy. Now, these are all like the next level deeper, the niche or niche. But even within each of these, honestly, in most cases you can go deeper. Virtually all of these niche niches will all have their own trade shows. Cryotherapy, Trade show, absolutely. And I think the deeper you go here, like, the more interesting things get. And you don't just have to go all in on one. And it doesn't mean divorcing your whole client list overnight. That's not the way to do it. All we're talking about is what is the very next client that I want to go out and find or attract. That's ultimately how you learn if this is something that you're going to want to do. And before you know it, you end up in these little networks where you're like the guru now, but you got a collection of people who, it's as simple as they are willing to pay you more than the folks that you have on the list today. And so it means picking up one of those clients in exchange for like two of those legacy projects that you can drop off. And buddy, now we are getting to the very best of small firm running where you've got a profitable business, you don't have to work yourself to the bone and your clients value you because they think you're the guru, even though you're telling yourself right now that you're not. Perception is reality. That's just kind of how it goes. Paul, I hope you picked up a couple useful tidbits here. And for anyone, if you're thinking about getting a little more specialized with that next line, hopefully there was, there was a tip or two here that you can crank on and find a few clients. With that being said, you got any tips for Paul or other folks that are thinking about specializing, any particularly successful things that you have tried? Man, drop that stuff in the comments. That's gold. Plenty of clients, plenty of fish in the sea for all of us, right? That's all we got today. Thanks for coming and hanging. I'm gonna see you in the next.