332 Attract Better Clients by issuing a REPORT

Hey, got a fun little challenge today to help you attract some better clients to your firm. You may not need more clients, but we all need better clients. We're going to explore issuing a report, the type of report that will be a page turner for your next sort of dream clients. Not that we're going to throw out the whole. The whole kitchen tub, what bath sink of clients that we already have. We're thinking, okay, just that next one client, that next five clients. What's a more specific version of that that we could pull in where they'll pay us top dollar a little more than the people we have today? How about using a report to attract those folks? A couple examples of where this has worked really well. And then just a big old list of ideas, stuff you can swipe and steal to attract a specific type of customer. Come on in, let's talk. Three examples of this we have talked about in the past on the podcast. One service you may have seen out in the wild. Big four, transparency. It they basically. So Dominic, the guy behind it, I've been on his podcast before, he runs a pretty good podcast for accountants. He kind of became like a minor Reddit celebrity when he basically stood up this spreadsheet that anybody can go and look at and began crowdsourcing salaries of people that worked for, for big foreign regional firms. And the idea was just to create some leverage for all the people that have no, no leverage in salary negotiations and big firms like that. So that you could see, here's what other people in my role are making at other firms. And that is now something like 16,000 submissions or something like that, real salary data from anonymous folks at firms. And the result there is something very, very valuable that people want to see, right? What, what if I was able to put together, I mean, that's a very big ambitious thing that's been built over years. What if there was a smaller version of that that I could put together and people would be like, oh, dang, I want to go read that. They don't care who it's from, but that's how I get on their radar. Maybe it's a hook that lets me like go then do a podcast interview or something like that. It attracts attention to you and what you're doing. Another example we've talked about of a report that had a big impact, a story from Barbara Corcoran, the lady who was on Shark Tank. I'll spare you the whole story. Cause I've read it to you before, if you're a frequent listener here. But basically in the really early days of her New York real estate firm, they released a quote unquote report on trends in apartment pricing in the new. In the New York Times or in the city of New York. They had basically sold like three apartments that entire year or something like that, and took their very limited data set and put together this report that was like, oh, here's what we're seeing in our, in our proprietary data. They sent it to all the, all of the newspapers and the writers that they knew didn't hear a word back. But the New York Times then went on to write a piece that quoted Barbara from the. Whatever Corcoran Real Estate group has cited this, that and that, and then a quotation there, which was something that they lifted off of the report. And the next day the phones were blowing up. They're like, oh, these are the experts for New York City apartments. No, they're not. They had sold hardly anything. Like nobody knew what they were doing. Later on, a couple years later, they, they wrote up this report that was like, you know, word was Madonna had a newborn and was looking to buy an apartment. And it was some sort of report about like all the different types of places that she could find and what the trends were in the different neighborhoods and that sort of thing. And again, a newspaper picked it up and did a little write up on it and they said, celebrity real estate group, you know, corand group, whatever it is. And later that year, they, they ended up buying a place for Richard Gere. Like, none of this stuff is justified. They had no relationship with Madonna, but they created this thing with data that they had. Perception is reality, unfortunately. Last example was from an episode we did a couple few weeks ago about like, how would you build a niche into golf? Caddies just kind of like jamming on ideas. And AI came up with this one that was killer. It said, how about you have a whole bunch of caddies anonymously submit how much money they make, build that out into a database. It's basically what big four transparency is, but for caddies. And then you have caddies saying, like, well, I'm in. I'm in this professional group or this tour or this tier of golfdom. And here's how much money I make for aspiring people, even for folks who've been in the profession for a while, for folks in the caddying ecosystem, everybody's going to want to see that. And so what would it take for you to put something together like that? This could be like your main hook for your firm that you use for years where you do a little bit of promoting around it, talking about it, maybe even run some paid ads for it. And people come and read their report and they're like, oh, that's pretty interesting. But they end up finding out that you exist as a result. And that's kind of the goal here, is you're creating something that people will engage with that just let them know that, like, you're on the map. And if they go a little deeper, they could see that, like, oh, like maybe you're actually the guru for this space for this type of person. So some ideas for reports we could put together. I wrote six ideas myself and then I plugged them into AI and I said, give me three more that are similar. Actually, I said, generate a bunch more that are similar. And I picked out my three favorites. They're actually pretty good. Recently, we. We built out a hypothetical, like, gym owner niche. Like, what if we're going to go after gym owners? And so I kept it. The same theme here can be any specialization. Doesn't really matter here. First report idea, gym profitability database. Anonymous figures submitted by region and by gym type. Where possible, we could pull in some public data to kind of seed this until we can get, like, real people loading a bunch of information into it. This is a report that we're going to have online. Gym owners can download it. Maybe they have to give up their email address so you can get them on a list and they're going to see rough profitability figures. Right now, the call to action here, because this is the bottom of our value ladder for our firm. This free thing, this is like a hook that can get people to learn about what we do. So the call to action here might be like a free profitability review. You share your P and L and general ledger. And as you know, when you pick that up from somebody, you will find some things oftentimes so you could give them a review and be like, hey, here's what I'm seeing that maybe you're missing. Maybe that leads to more of an advisory conversation. Maybe that leads to your bookkeeping services. When what they send you is like the picture of a napkin and you're like, this isn't accounting. What. What is this? That. That report, the gym profitability thing or a database, whatever it is, that's how people learn about you and find out that you exist. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. True Story was just shooting a Sunday YouTube video and whenever I write these, I'm like, what's a good, like, ad partner that would Fit in real nice and organically to this video. The video, I think is gonna be a banger. It's about how to better use your scheduling app to like automate and standardize everything, everything that happens around meetings. And I thought, what is a great tool to like standardize the prep work for meetings? Oh my gosh. Live Flow. So many situations. Think about like a client discovery call. Being able to use Live Flow to pull a huge spreadsheet, Excel or Google Sheets workbook worth of data out of QBO or Xero, a whole bunch of tabs of information with the click of a button. Then literally select a different company that you're connected with. Click of the button, pull all that data for that company too. Say you're headed into a client discovery meeting. The client books that on your calendar. You also book 30 minutes of prep time. You pull all that data from their accounting file into a spreadsheet. You've got an easy way to review it all, go through it with them in the meeting. Another cool example, Lifelo's got like over 100 templates of like different dashboards and advisory stuff. One of them is like a four week cash flow dashboard, like this big elaborate thing. You click the button, it pulls all the data from the accounting file. Let's say as one of my accounting packages, I do like weekly or monthly advisory calls with them. I use my booking tool for the client to schedule that live advisory meeting. I then book a prep meeting on my calendar, say 15 minutes or something like that. To get ready for that meeting. I hop into my spreadsheet app. I hop into my spreadsheet app of choice with the click of a button. I pulled that cash flow data into a spreadsheet. So I got like everything. And just like that, 90% of my prep work buddy, it's, it's there. And I can customize that template to be whatever I want, use it across a bunch of different clients. Imagine making those types of meetings. So turnkey. Or you just use Live Flow to pull all the data that you need for that meeting in with the click of a button. Man. So cool. Really fun. Use case of Live Flow. I often forget Liflow also does consolidations. So where this is a real headache is when you got to pull stuff from a bunch of different company files. You can do that with a click of a button as well. Even if they have different chart of accounts set up the mapping. Once you could be heading into a big old board meeting with like a bunch of different companies involved. You could pull all the stuff that you need with a click of a button. Super cool. That's Lifeload. Learn more Check out the link down in the show Notes this episode of Sponsored in part by Team Up 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 to BS in accounting as well. US accounting firm hired him, paid him 1430amonth. Had 5 years experience beforehand with US companies experience with payroll. Was previously doing reviews on financial statements. Satisfied sales tax charnon BS in accounting, also a CPA QuickBooks Pro advisor. Went to work for a US firm spanning 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 would be licking your chops. But here's the thing gang. If you're running a distributed team, doesn't really matter. Doesn't really matter where they are. Now if you do tax in the U.S. are they 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, TMO'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 Number two A big old gym software feature comparison. You may have seen. I did this last year, the Practice Management Software Roundup. Basically there's a whole ton of practice management softwares in our space, right? And, and I took what I thought were the 14 leading platforms for US firms. We did a massive feature comparison across like 250 different features. What are the things that some platforms do and the things that other platforms don't do? It was a good amount of work. Not necessarily like highly technical work, but I had like probably admin level folks working on it for a couple of weeks. We posted it to LinkedIn and this was an important thing. As I said. Reply or comment on this post if you want to get a copy. That's important because as people engage with that post, it makes it more likely for that post to be displayed to more people. But within 24 hours that post had something like 1300 comments of people wanting to get a copy of that. And that was because picking a practice management system for accounting firm, as you know, man, that sucks. Like it's a lot of work to do all that research yourself. And if it's, if you got nothing to lose by getting a copy of that report, like I didn't ask for email addresses or anything, why would you not take a look? So firm owners were taking a look, but also other people in the ecosystem wanted to take a look and it was a bit of research that was helpful for them too. But like all in all, that expanded my reach a ton. Like a lot of people found my podcast when I released this report because they didn't otherwise know that I existed. And so here we're talking about doing the same for software for the gym space. And you can put all this together largely based on public information. And a nice benefit of this actually is you're going to get the attention of the software vendors as well, who can be killer partners for you and getting in front of more people. Now if there's a call to action here, maybe maybe you do like tech stack reviews for your clients. Maybe there's a call to action that says like, hey, our firm will actually do more hands on advisory around your tech stack with you if you're interested. Okay, number three, more holistically like an industry vendor support. So a big old list of the various vendors in the space by category, contact information, like anything that would be valuable here, events that they're exhibiting at now this would be a helpful thing for you to build, is almost like a hit list of folks that you could potentially partner with. But if you're going to build that yourself, why not also give it away? That's going to be useful for people. Folks, I don't know if this is a good or bad human trait, but we don't want to miss out on something on a tool or an advisor or something like that. And all the content I do around like tech roundups and that sort of thing, it's always, it's, it performs very well because there's just something in our human nature that's like we don't want to miss the boat on something. And this report very much leans into that. Here are all the providers for medical billing, window washing, like what are all the different categories that would make sense for your specialization? I'm going to build a giant list here. Don't get blocked on whether it's complete or not, because the act of you putting out this list will cause a whole bunch of other people to come around and say, what about this? What about this? What about this? Other vendors? And in the process of doing that, your list gets better. Now, at a certain point, you got to get selective there, and you can't just let anyone and everyone on the list. But that's a good problem to have for down the road. Our goal, really, it's just for folks to find out that we exist by grabbing this report. If there's a call to action here, maybe we give them feedback on their vendor list. Like, I mean, if. If you think about it through the lens of what you do, like, if your client shows you their finance tech stack, you're going to have some feedback, you're going to have thoughts, right? So, like, if you are really learning a space and you know who the best providers are, you're probably going to have feedback on their vendor list. And that would be a really valuable thing for someone who doesn't maybe know all of the people that you've presented in this list. Number four, the big book of fitness entrepreneurship podcasts. I did a roundup like this a couple months back that was like, here's all the podcasts in the accounting space, and there were like 40 of them. And that got great engagement. People are like, oh, yeah, this is interesting. I don't know why, because nobody could possibly listen to 40 podcasts, right? And it wasn't even specific enough to say, like, here's who it's for, who might like it and who may not like it, but people just don't want to miss the boat. And this is something that reports are probably good at, capturing a bit of that, like, shiny object syndrome and leaning into the FOMO that we all have. But a great side benefit of this is when you're missing a podcast, someone will get in touch because they want to be on the list too. And. And it puts you on the map for all the people who run those podcasts. You're doing a service for them. People are helping. You are helping people find those podcasts. And so you've got a bit of credit with those folks. Now maybe they'll have you on for an interview, that sort of thing. Like being friends with podcast hosts that have control over reach and attention. That's a great benefit, right? The next two are Similar. The big Book of Fitness entrepreneurship newsletters more or less the same as the podcast thing, but everyone has their own preferred method of consuming things. Right. And I may go back and do this for the accounting space because there's a ton of newsletters, but there's a lot of people that don't listen to podcasts who would just rather consume a newsletter. And again, great upside here is making friends with the people that write those newsletters. So you could do some partnership content down the road. And then another one here. The same thing for influencers. Not exercise nerds, not exercise influencers, but. But people talking about the business of gym ownership. So issue a report of influencers, maybe organized by social media platform, by follower volume, maybe gamify it and like rank them. You know, come up with some sort of scoring or something like that, which is going to make it even more contentious and more people will talk about it as a result. Today's episode is sponsored in part by bookkeeping, the tool that's gonna automate a whole bunch of your e commerce accounting workflows. You know, apps like to get all up in your face and be like, come use me, bookkeep. What people love about bookkeep, this is an actual user quote. Bookkeep works so well, I forget I am using it. Don't you want the thing that just works? Here's the thing with bookkeep. Bunch of their team, actually most of their team are accountants and bookkeepers. They're not software nerds that were looking to cash in on some sort of plugging a thing into another thing, arbitrage. What's the difference with bookkeep? Well, they use sale data while other apps base their entries on payout data. This means that they're like inherently cash basis. Right? Bookkeep uses sale data. Means you have way more granular control over what you can do with it. Seeing very detailed information from each sale and giving you greater power for handling very complex scenarios where, say you're selling across multiple e comm channels, taking various payment methods. You can map all that stuff so you're not just stuck with the payout data, right? They handle tricky stuff like booking Shopify revenue based on fulfillment date as opposed to the default, which is the order date. Somebody listening to this just got really excited, man. No other app does that. Okay? Your payouts will always reconcile to your bank feeds to the penny. And you're never going to miss a payout because bookkeep will literally tell you every single day how much money each selling platform owes you. That is the power of using the sale data, not just the payout data, right? If you're hustling E comm stuff, please just don't stop DIY and hacking together. You just, just don't. Okay? Get in touch with the folks at Bookkeep. They're accountants and bookkeepers just like us. You will feel heard and understood. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Core v. True Story. I don't think I fully got my head around tax advisory work until maybe seven or eight years ago when I saw my first demo of corvee. What Corvey does really, really well is it visualizes the savings you provide by delivering tax advisory work. And this is something that our tax software is just horrendous at. It doesn't do it at all. All it really does is report back on like outcomes. And you could use maybe say BNA and have like kind of compare some columns of before and after. But what Corvi does is they have over 1200 like quote, unquote tax strategies, which are many things that we know and we take for granted, but we don't always present to our clients to be like, hey, look at this smart thing that I did for you. And it explicitly outlines the various strategies you're employing for the client in terms of like real dollar savings, dollar savings over time, year over year. Like, you know that selection I had you do two years ago, like, here's the rolling savings that we're getting you. And this is why some firms are able to charge like north of 10k for tax planning work even very small, like 3 person firms, while other firms are doing quote, unquote tax planning at the end of the year. And like charging 300 bucks. It is all about the framing of the value to the client. There is kind of a small category of tools growing around just tax advisory. CORVI is one of them. Admittedly, they're not cheap tools, but the reason they exist and the reason they're finding success is because the firms that are using them are charging top, like top, top dollar for tax advisory work. If you tune into this pod, you know that my belief is if you run a tax firm, tax advisory work, getting people up that value ladder is arguably the best thing that you can do for the profitability of your firm. Now tech can be a massive help here. I honestly don't know how I would do that work without Corvey or something very similar to it. Learn more about Corvey. Check out the link down in the show notes. Okay, those first six were created by me. The next three I dropped the outline for those first six into a chat assistant. I think it was ChatGPT and said give me some more good ideas like this. I did it both in cloud and in chat GPT and I handpicked my three favorites here which are pretty darn solid. So the next report idea the State of Gym Membership Pricing report. A deep dive into pricing strategies across various regions and gym types. Include data on the most successful pricing models, add ons and discounts that drive membership growth and retention. I would probably augment this one by by proposing it to a software company and saying hey do you want to co brand this one and put it out together? I would look for an app that holds itself out as a as a pricing strategy expert. Like that's kind of a differentiator for some software platforms is they'll enable certain things like add ons or some sort of flexibility there that maybe other platforms don't offer. The nice, the really nice thing about about partnering with software platforms on this sort of thing is you can get them to do a lot of the heavy lifting and you can also use their data so they have access to data and, and, and grunt work. You have the expertise and that can work really well. If you want to ship something that's co branded is you can be the face for it and talk about it and honestly get a lot of the credit for it while they're able to do a lot of the heavy lifting and also add some weight and some reach to this report that you otherwise may struggle to get out in front of a bunch of people. If there's a CTA here for you, maybe you do like a free pricing analysis or an analysis for a specific gym. If they provide you with some data that goes even deeper. And so it takes maybe the surface level insights in the report but then goes a step deeper and puts that alongside the data for their firm. So maybe that's like the bottom of the value ladder, a very basic thing that you can give them. But maybe then that next step of the ladder is advisory sessions, something that is even more hands on. We've been talking about the value ladder a lot lately and honestly I like it. I like the idea of having something for people at different steps in the journey, having more at the bottom of the ladder that's not a bunch of work but at least gets people early on and more likely to come into kind of my my core services. Okay, idea number eight. This one came from AI as well. Operational Efficiency Benchmarking Report. And you can think of this largely just like you would, you know, a profitability report or something like that. But rather than profit figures, it is specific KPIs, because most industries will have KPIs that they really focus on like churn rates, stuff like that. You can literally pick a single KPI or a collection of KPIs and be like the ultimate churn rate report. You know, gym owners can use this data to compare their performance against industry averages and identify areas for improvement. Prerequisite here is that it's, it's a KPI that can be standardized as much as possible. That's always the problem with benchmarking is people find creatively different ways to measure things and then that kind of torpedoes the value of the metric. Right. If there's a call to action here, it's probably some sort of analysis digging more into a specific gym's KPIs, maybe offering additional data that wasn't available in the surface level report leading to, you know, some sort of advisory sessions. Or you find that the underlying data has issues and that can lead into your bookkeeping services. And then the last one here that I liked, this came was from AI as well. The Gym Real Estate Trends Report. So it says, analyze optimal locations for different types of gyms. Include data on rent costs, foot traffic and demographic information. Provide insights on upcoming hot areas for gym expansion. I would say this one's particularly good if you do cost segregation studies. That's a US tax thing. And if you can partner with a group that like builds gyms or advisors that have this data and will make recommendations to firms. If you have a things go hand in hand. If you can co promote this report that will get people excited about potentially building a new gym, that sort of thing that leads in very, very nicely to a cost segregation service, tax service to, I don't know, a partnership with a lending partner. The idea is to get that report out there to kind of scratch some element of people's curiosity where they're like, what do I have to lose by looking at this? And that's where you got them. Like right now they're at the bottom rung of your value ladder. And so the job of that report is to give them value, but also then to get them sniffing it. Like, what is the next step on that ladder? As much as social media can be this hamster wheel of like I have to turn up every day and do this and that and it's so much work, there's A balancing act there where when you find something that converts, it's worth cranking on the thing that converts. Sometimes I feel like I talk out both sides of my mouth where I'm like, oh, man, you gotta follow your curiosity. This and that. And that's true. You never wanna be so chained down to one thing that it's like, well, this is boring. Now I just have a job. But also, when you find the thing that cranks, crank on the thing that cranks. Right. I still have that practice management report pinned to the top of my Twitter, even though it's almost a year old now and out of date. And people still ask me for it every single day because I've never made another thing like that. And I probably need to look at my life choices and be like, this is a. This is a sign. There's probably something more useful to do here. You need to follow through on this. And if I was more serious about, like optimizing for profit and all that, I probably would. But if you can find something like this that people love and like Big four, transparency is a good example of how that resource just becomes more viable year over year over year. There's something like this that people will get excited about. Man, you could probably build a whole firm around that silly report. Right? Doesn't hurt to give it a try if you're doing bigger, more ambitious stuff, like, be sure to pull in like a VA or an admin. Like, don't burn three weeks of your time when a lot of this stuff is just like data gathering and formatting. But I love this as like a side door to get the attention of a specific type of person that you may not otherwise be able to get in front of. If you've seen any examples of reports that got you excited where you're like, oh, I have to read this worked on you, or anything in your. In your industry that was particularly high converting. Like, someone in your space got a bunch of leads by doing this. Share a link to that. It'd be interesting to see because this isn't something that I see accounting firms doing all that much, but if you find the right one, like, man, it could get a lot of attention. Right. That's all we got for today. Thanks for hanging and I'll see you in the next one.