355 Storytelling That Attracts BETTER Clients

Human beings resonate with stories and if we can find those few like anchor stories that will attract the type of person that we want to work with.

Man, you can tell those stories until the end of time and you are going to have more business than you know what to do with.

But what we do is we think, oh, we, we always, we have to have something novel to say we get.

Bored of our own stories.

But today I want to give you examples of the ways that I use stories day in and day out that like drive people to my business, get people to sign up to my community, engage with social media posts and how I actually don't have all that many stories.

And you don't need to either.

But I'll share the way that I use stories to find people who are at kind of a tipping point where they're ready for a change and they need to have this epiphany moment to be like, yeah, no, I think I get that.

And now I'm going to commit. Now I'll do it.

I suspect you have a few of the same, but maybe you haven't quite figured out how to make them like tactical, like put them to work for you. That's what we're going to talk about today. Come on in, it's story time.

Once you kind of open your eyes to this, you start seeing it everywhere. In fact, like every book that you read before they make a point, they're going to tell you a story about the point. It's almost, it's almost annoying once you start noticing it more because you're like, would you just please get to the point? And I'm, I am all about like first principles, thinking, which oftentimes storytelling, like.

You'Re able to sort of cherry pick the story. That sort of proves your point. But, but the fact remains when it comes to the way that people make.

Buying decisions, stories are really powerful. And maybe the, maybe the example of this that I use the most that you're most familiar with is around picking a practice management system where there's, there's two ways that I could present that to you. I could say, hey, come over here.

And complete this form and get a.

Practice management system recommendation.

Or I could tell you the story.

Of how I burned like three years.

In my firm and over a hundred.

Grand going to the wrong practice management.

System, getting 40 people, training them for 10 months, finally making the switch. All these change of verse accountants, you.

Know how hard that is.

We got three months into it and.

I'm like, we made the wrong decision. And that. That whole story, there's a. There's a 30 second version of that story. There's a 10 minute version of that story that I'll use in talks oftentimes.

And when you get to the end of that story, everybody's like, palm sweaty. Oh, my gosh.

That's like your biggest fear, right?

And then at the end, you say.

What if I could tell you in the next 90 seconds, I could give you a recommendation that would ensure that you would never make the same mistake that I just did. And then I hand them off to that form or tool or whatever you want to call it. That's the power of storytelling. It's completely different in our day to day.

I mean, there's entire political campaigns that.

Are built on just a few stories that resonate people.

And increasingly, folks will make buying decisions or choose professional help based on how it aligns with the way they see the world.

This.

This notion of affiliation.

They want to feel like they belong.

With the people that they work with.

And I would.

I'd actually say now more than ever.

That'S increasingly becoming the case where they want to feel like you're one of them. They want to feel like you belong.

A podcast I did recently about delegation and these. These moments where I realized I had to commit to a willingness to be out of touch. This podcast resonated and I heard from a lot of people that it was really helpful for them. And all it was was a bunch of these stories of these epiphanies. So to like 10,000 Foot View, the.

Outline of that podcast and how I.

Did it, I ran through six stories. One, the story of how me not mandating the final tech decision for my team.

And ultimately, like, being out of touch on the granular details of why we.

Made that final decision that put the.

Team in touch, that enabled my team.

Second story, not doing the work that.

My team was doing. Tax prep, bookkeeping, all that stuff put.

Me out of touch for how to do it, but put me better into touch with how to standardize processes and.

The value of doing so.

Third story was when we switched to a new tax software, I refused to learn it and my partner didn't. You can imagine how those two different timelines went. Story number four, not doing my own landscaping rather than being.

Oh, gosh, I was gonna say in the weeds. I'm sorry, can we just.

Should we just wrap it from there?

Okay. Ugh. Okay.

Not doing my own landscaping rather than being like, oh, what type of fertilizer do I use? Do I do this or that, like, getting out of that got me thinking.

About bigger picture stuff. Number five, not doing video editing ultimately increased the volume of what we're able.

To do, and I'm able to focus.

More on quality and strategy. Last story I told, just not running a firm anymore. What?

You don't run an accounting firm anymore? How are you really going to advise accounting firms on how to run accounting firms if you don't run an accounting.

Firm, you big poser?

Let me ask you this. Do you think that you are out of touch with what the other tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of accounting.

Firms in the world are doing?

Would you say that you're out of touch in regards to what they're doing?

I bet you are.

Because you know what? You got your head so far up your own hiney every single day, you've got this tunnel vision for just what you do. You have no idea what everybody else does. I traded being out of touch of some aspects, of being in the weeds of running a firm every single day for. For being better in touch with what everybody's doing. That's the hat that I get to.

Wear now and then. I share that with folks.

So that whole podcast was a collection of stories about trading a version of being out of touch for a better thing to be in touch with. And every single one of those things may find somebody at this tipping point or this plateau in their business. Another framing of this is like, it is an epiphany. And that epiphany bridge connects the problem and the emotions that somebody's feeling today with, oh, this is a path forward, finally. And it's at these tipping points or plateaus where it's oftentimes easiest to find people. If someone's just, like, in the market.

For a bookkeeper, in the market for a tax professional, they're gonna go out.

And they're gonna pay somebody what they.

Think bookkeeping, what they think tax preparation is worth.

If they're at a tipping point where.

They'Re like, I think I'm gonna go from one office to two offices for the first time. I think I'm gonna hire, like, a.

Manager for the first time. They're at this. This plateau or this tipping point where they know they need to do a thing, but they may not know how, but they can see the opportunities that.

It will enable for themselves in the business by. By getting over this hump.

And those are actually very clear examples of where they're like, they think they. They think they know what they need.

To do, arguably even juicier examples are like, I'm stuck on this thing and I don't know where to go next.

Like, why does it, how, how is it that we can't seem to get.

Our accounting firm work to feel more systematized? Well, do you have an internal service library? Do you have a really clear vernacular for what you do for everybody?

Why can I not go out and find the type of clients that I.

Want to find to work with?

Well, do they know that you exist?

Are you on social media? Are you visible? Are you going on podcasts?

It's not enough to have a website. How are you breaking through these people's attention spans so that they even know that you're there?

And these are kind of these like, epiphany moments for people where they're like.

Oh, yeah, no, that, that makes sense. And the closer you can tie that.

Back to, like a real honest story, the juicier it is.

So what we're looking to do with.

These stories and these kind of these.

Moments for people is take their old reality, frame them in their current state.

Because it's all that they know. And we, we because there are things that are trivial for us. This can be a hard thing to do sometimes to step back into that person's shoes. Maybe it's the person that's just about to launch an accounting firm. Maybe it's the person that's still like a lurker and never posts on social media. It can be hard to put yourself back into that person's shoes the more, the more success you have. That's the first part of what you're trying to achieve with these stories. Think about where they're at with their, their current reality. Second, what is the epiphany? What is the story that arrives at that epiphany? And then third, what is that new.

Reality where the epiphany resolves the struggles.

Of your current reality, paints a picture of a new reality in a perfect world that somebody just like them has experienced. If it's hypothetical, that's not that interesting. You're like, is that real? If it's somebody that looks and talks and thinks just like you, like, the more that that person can relate with the main character of the story, the more they'll be like, oh, that is possible for me. It's why I think, you know, social proof more than me shouting at you about what to do. Social proof, I think is the most powerful thing out there. You may hear an off the wall idea and you're like, yeah, logically that makes sense. But it's not until you see a bunch of other people having success with that idea that you actually buy into it. You're like, okay, I can see what those people do. That is like, what I do now. I can commit. And so that new reality, painting the picture of what could be, that's ultimately what you're trying to achieve with this story.

This episode is sponsored in part by by Client Hub. It is tech change season when you gotta make those hard decisions. And a practice management system decision, oh, that's just about the most stressful tech call you can make. But let me simplify it for you. Comes down to the four C's capabilities, client experience, clarity, and community. When it comes to capabilities, there's a lot of PMs with all sorts of capabilities. They do all the things. But Client Hub, it sets itself apart with two things. Things specifically, it's built to support cast slash bookkeeping work with QuickBooks and Zero Integrations. And they're investing in AI with Magic Email replies, magic workflow, and magic answers.

It's a lot of sorcery.

Tell you what I appreciate about Client Hub. They're like, we're for bookkeeping firms. A lot of PMs are like, work for everyone.

We can do everything great. And you're like, really?

Though Tax audit firms, go away, skip this ad. But if you're doing books, if you're doing advising stuff, Client Hub might be for you. Check out that, that linky link right now in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Finn Daily Man. There are, like, so many powerful tools now that can automate some adjacent services.

To what we do.

I'm a big advocate of not being in the business of just selling more bookkeeping or just selling more tax prep, because that's usually where we're most constrained. It's the work that's the hardest hire for. Rather find a specific type of client with adjacent needs where we can build adjacent services that don't have this, like.

Commoditized value that's easier to hire for, that's easier to automate fit and daily. Fantastic example of just that. It's actually an app that I founded, later sold, that was built just to automate the cash advisory services I was providing to my clients.

We started doing bookkeeping, then we got into bill pay. Then we learned that if we do.

Bill pay, we had a great understanding of their cash. And this cash reporting made all that other, like, work worth it.

We can make more money on the.

Cash reporting than all the other stuff. Combined and it was way easier to automate. I did that with Finn daily. It's a super cool tool if you haven't seen it before. Learn more about that one at the link in the show Notes. Let's run through some examples of stories.

You probably already have some ideas in.

Your head of, like, here's kind of what I think my stories are, but how do I maybe refine them in a way that is more contextual and will find people a little better? A story I've used. Sometimes when it comes to changes in my accounting firm, technology changes, you know.

Telling everybody, all my clients in my firm, they have to submit docs to.

Us in a particular way, stuff like that, that feels really scary and really high stakes. I've got a lot of examples of this. The big one is the practice management system example. We talked about the story here. I frame it up with like, these are really stressful changes. My team is exhausted by change, which is a product of oftentimes not making the right change and then needing to change again. I was at a state where I was feeling this, and then I talked with some other people that ran accounting firms or I went to a conference for the first time. And I, I remember, I actually remember vividly being on a zoom with somebody and explaining to them what I did. And their reaction was like, they laughed when I said, here's what I. What we thought we needed. Here was where we were and here is what we did. And they were like, oh, no, no, no, no. You're never, you're never going to get that out of what you just did. And that. We just sunk over, you know, a year and a half into this problem and have one conversation with somebody that's running a firm and they're like, you.

Know, we did, we tried that about six years ago.

Here's what we learned. Here's what worked, what didn't work, here's what we ended up doing. And it was in that moment that I was like, oh, somebody else already has the answers that I need to find.

Or the epiphany could have been, oh.

I made a decision based on what a salesperson told me. And I now see that that's ridiculous.

What is the new reality then?

It's a better version of validated decision making.

It's stop making decisions based on what.

A salesperson tells you.

Ask around. Make friends that run firms, see who's done it. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there and say, does anybody have any wisdom on this? Make sure that they're not, you know.

An implementer for that platform and stand to make money from it or something like that.

But the new reality is you literally shaving years or decades off your learning process because you're stealing the best ideas.

From everybody else rather than like guessing or relying on bad information. Another story I come back to quite a bit on change management. A lot this will like, land for a lot of you. My old reality, I couldn't understand why the people around me and my firm, my colleagues, maybe my boss, I couldn't understand why they didn't see the world the same way that I did.

I would take great ideas back to.

Them and they just wouldn't land. They just wouldn't get it. And I'm like, I'm like, are you people just dumb?

Like, do you just do not get how this stuff works? How could you not agree with me on this? And the epiphany was, it wasn't until I met people online who were consuming the same things that I did that were in that same bubble. It wasn't until I had conversations with those people where I was like, yeah, you guys are smart, you guys are good, you guys, you guys have something that all the people I work with don't have. My realization was, oh, they're being programmed by the same things that I am. They consume the same things that I.

Do, whether that, whether they're smart or not.

And until the people around me are exposed to the same conversations and experiences and stories that I am, I cannot project onto them myself.

Being the product of all those things.

I can't expect them to come to.

All the same conclusions that I would.

Because they haven't gone through those things.

Like, this is where, you know, people's.

Lived experiences shape the way that they see the world and the decisions that they make. But if you're sitting there like listening.

To this podcast or watching my videos.

Or, or hanging out on, you know.

Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever the group think is for accounting firm owners in each of those spaces, when you then come back to your team who isn't engaged with any of that stuff and doesn't have any of that context, those puzzle pieces aren't gonna fit together the same way.

And so what is the new reality?

Well, if you actually want your colleagues to get on board with that stuff, you have to expose them to some of those mind opening things.

You have to keep convince them to.

Come out to a conference and have some conversations, to watch a video to, you know, learn about a few different.

Practice management systems, whatever it is you have to inspire them to get some.

Of the context that you have. This is actually one of the reasons why, like, one of the biggest things I pushed my team to do was to learn more about the world beyond the boundaries of my firm. I think as soon as you can get people to do that, their entire world just opens up. Oftentimes people are afraid to do this because they think it's going to mean they go off and they find something better or God forbid, they become more capable and independent. All these things that we want them.

To become that, that we are as.

A product of, of thinking bigger and looking outside of our firm. And we get frustrated that the rest of the team can't be the same way. Well, like, you can't have it both ways. You either got to expose them to that and reap the benefits of it, or you can't really blame them for them not having all those, all that perspective. Right. So my new reality there became, unless folks have that context, I, it's unfair for me to expect them to think about that the same way that I do. Another one that I think we all got red pilled to just the way that we absorbed knowledge. This was pro, this was a Twitter thing for me. I don't know if this was happening on LinkedIn. The way that we absorb knowledge and Covid, this was kind of the, the kickoff of, of tax Twitter. And my old reality was, was in.

My firm, as we were headed into.

Covid and all the, all the COVID release stuff was kicking off and overnight we became so in demand for our clients and they wanted daily updates. Even daily updates didn't feel like enough. For a while there, my colleagues were.

Like, almost like, I don't know that I believe you.

How much you think you know about this stuff?

Like, how are you learning all of this?

How are you plugged into every little thing that's coming out? And I'm like, okay, gang, here's what we got to do. Here's what we got to do. Here's what we got to do. And they just, like, they couldn't, their minds couldn't pivot fast enough and they couldn't get their head around. Like, it was almost just like an.

I don't, I don't believe you.

Because I, I, you could not be this right almost. And that's, I know that's kind of a dumb thing to say, but that was almost sort of how it landed.

Like, how is it that you are.

So sure of yourself? And my epiphany was I didn't realize this at the time is I was.

Learning an impossible amount of stuff because I was consuming what a whole bunch.

Of really other smart people were sharing online. And this is still a problem. It was even more so the case, you know, three or four years ago. But the perception is people who are hanging out online or on social media have nothing better to do. The people that actually have something to offer the world, they're out helping the world. And so if people are having these conversations online, they must be relatively low value conversations. And these people aren't experts. And that absolutely wasn't the case. And I would actually argue in the last five years that may have even flipped where the people with the most to offer the world, I would argue, have the most to gain by being as visible as possible in the world.

And it is now online content and social media and algorithms that provide exponential.

Rewards to the best of the best.

That now make that the very best.

Place for those people to be. Now, our profession has absolutely not come around to that. I can't believe that there are not a hundred times, you know, a hundred people doing what I do and more specific domains in accounting. But that was the perception at the time is if the conversation was happening online, it was ultimately not a very high level conversation.

But you compare that to the context that just random one off people inside.

Your firm have where they don't talk.

To any other firm owners, they're literally.

Just like living off the next, I.

Don'T know, checkpoint email update or something.

Like that and just reading whatever somebody else wrote.

But the epiphany I had at that time was I was growing at like.

An impossibly fast rate because I was the product of all of the very best and the very smartest people sharing this stuff online. And so my new reality then was.

We got to stop trying to reinvent.

The wheel and we need to tap into this feed of information and stop doing in a siloed way what everybody else is already doing. Like we need to validate some of this stuff for sure and make sure that it's correct and kind of form our own opinion around it. But the right thing to do was.

No longer to wait and sit back.

Until that, you know, research platform sent their weekly email. When my clients want updates every single day. There's a wealth of information online that.

Honestly makes those weekly emails nowhere near.

As useful as they as they used to be. In fact, my preferred version of that is something that's a little more opinionated from a person that I trust where they are plugged into all the same things that that research group might be plugged into. But I want somebody to better contextualize it for me in the way that I work with my clients and that sort of thing. So my new reality was this is just the best way for us to learn and this is the best way for us to be plugged in.

This episode is sponsored in part by Mercury. Hey, you know where my money's sitting right now? Sitting in a Mercury bank account. Look at me chilling the dog food that I eat. Mercury today is loved by over 200,000 customers. Does business banking that is transformative. Corporate debit cards, credit cards for expense management, free wire transfers, treasury yielding over 5% interest on idle funds. But Mercury for accountants, that's you lean in.

It's their new accounting partner program which.

Wants to get you your time back and drive client value.

This is cool.

They got this thing called Panorama. You can actually see a whole bunch of client accounts in a second single views.

So you don't have to like drill into all these different things or log.

In and log out of umpteen different accounts. Panorama. That's right.

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What a great name. Plus they get all the cool features that you do if you use Mercury Banking Bill pay, custom approvals, invoicing, document upload, GL code mapping, reliable integrations with QBO 0 Netsuite, everything you need to make those accounting workflows sing. Learn more about Mercury. Head over to mercury.com account accountants to learn more about the Accountant channel or check out the link down in the video. The show notes the words under the thing. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow gang. Live Flow launched a new dashboarding platform and I got to have a play with it the other day. It's actually pretty darn cool. They've got loads of templates like they've.

Always had Live Flow for context.

In the past there were utility that connected your qbo, your Xero with your Google sheets, your Excel so that pull any like client data into there. Now they're doing the same thing but for dashboards. Bunch of dashboard templates you can swipe.

With like full blown like a suite.

Like combinations of all these different reports, executive summaries and it all connects to that client data the same way their spreadsheet tool did. So you literally just pick a different company from a dropdown. So I can pick like make a cool custom reporting suite looks super impressive and then to like deliver it to another client. Literally as simple as changing the dropdown to A different company and pulling all.

That live data in a no brainer way.

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Learn more the link down in the show Notes so three kind of bits.

To these stories that we're looking for. One, what is the old reality, the current reality that that person is stuck in?

Two, what is the story that leads.

To an epiphany that resolves that to get to three the new reality that they desire and too often in especially in service businesses. Because we're not product companies and we don't, we're not exposed to the value of investing in a thing and then selling that thing a thousand times.

In service businesses, we can sometimes fall.

In love with reinventing the wheel more than we need to because every, every scenario is unique and every case is different and we can sometimes let that infiltrate every aspect of our businesses when it, when it really doesn't need to. And part of this is impacted by, by the Internet and what social media enables and how we now have more reach and access on an unbelievable scale than we've ever had before. There's over a billion people on LinkedIn, but the same people who won't post on LinkedIn will go to a chamber meeting, a room of 20 people and 80% of them are Realtors. What you're looking for is the juiciest story, the one that finds, you know, working backwards for from what is your A client today and what's your A&plus client? That's a, maybe an even better version that you would love to work with. What are the, the plateaus that those people end up getting stuck on? The tipping points. And maybe this is a little harder to find until you're serving a lot of those people.

Where are the places that they get stuck?

And have you seen people overcome those things? Or even better, do you have a story in your entrepreneurial journey that can be tied back to that blocker that that person was, was stuck on?

You're looking for old realities that are.

Ripe for, for a story that can get them over that hump.

And these days with as big as.

The world is like, there is so much wisdom in just finding the very best version of that thing and cranking on it until the end of time. And that may sound really boring, telling one story until the end of time, but we simultaneously want to systematize and standardize the stuff that we're doing right. And if we are reinventing our own wheel Every single time. We're not ultimately going to get to.

A place where we can make it turnkey.

Like, as soon as I oftentimes start pushing that conversation towards like, hammer on this, hammer on this, hammer on this, Whatever the juiciest problem is, that will bring in really like nicely paying people, just crank on that. As soon as you start going down that path oftentimes you're like, well, that sounds boring.

And it's like that's, that's what you wanted all along. Is that standardization? But you're making it so hard on yourself because you're serving different people and telling different stories and doing different, doing this completely different ways.

Usually as a product of people just kind of like drunkly stumbling into awareness of your existence rather than contextually going after that plateau that they're on that tipping point that they're at where you can be the solution and you can enable a new version of their business.

That they're gonna be incredibly thankful for and will pay you top dollar to enable and to get there. There is one story that like, when refined, when told for the 300th time, is infinitely more juicy than not building.

Stories around this stuff and feeling like you have to do it differently every single time.

So can this get boring?

Absolutely.

But the beauty of standardizing anything is not only can you tell that story.

You can hire salespeople to tell that story. You can get your social media marketing agency to like find new creative ways to tell that story. Not that it's an untrue story or that it's untrue, um, losing some of that juice because maybe it was otherwise a very personal story to you, but.

Having something you can crank on, that's.

Standardized, that's a great problem to have. That is a wonderful luxury. It's a business that you can more likely remove yourself from. It's a business that actually runs like a machine. Rather than being reliant on your secret sauce and being able to pull the magic out of the bag every time you sit down to work on a project or have a meeting with a client, like, this is what we are looking for is what's the repeatable thing?

And if you even just think in.

Terms of the renewals that we're coming up on now. If you're planning on putting three tier proposals in front of your clients, think about the difference of conversions you're going to have.

Version one, you just email this sterile.

Proposal with no context to your clients and there's versions, bronze, silver and gold. Version two, maybe you write a juicy Email. Maybe you have a webinar, maybe you have a conversation with the client and you tell the story. Let's go back to my practice management story. You tell a really painful story that they can deeply understand.

You share an epiphany that somebody that was at the same plateau that they're.

At right now was stuck on. You share that epiphany and paint the picture of that new reality. And then you put the exact same proposal in front of them. I can't tell you what a, what a massive difference this makes. And we're talking like 2x3x the number of people who this will resonate with and who, who will ultimately make a buying decision because you framed that up in a way that opens their eyes to a new opportunity.

Makes a really, really big difference.

You've probably stumbled into just like kind of half baked versions of this story of a few different stories. And the more you can refine those and tie them back to like a specific. Gary Vee's last book about social media talks about thinking about specific cohorts of people that you go after. And this is through the lens of like marketing campaigns and paid advertising and stuff like that. But I think it's a helpful mental framework for what are the various cohorts of people that you are serving. I come back to dental a lot because we did a lot of dental in my firm and a couple cohorts I've shared in the past are docs kind of at their ceiling with a single location, looking at doing a second location for the first time. That's a cohort of docs where you can build stories around solving their problems and unlocking opportunities. Another doc I had had tried to get their office manager to do bookkeeping and payroll and back office and benefit admin, all this stuff for like the last two decades. And when she came to us, she was like, you guys can just do all this stuff for me and you will do it perfect and right and I don't have to manage it. Where have you been the last 20 years? That is a cohort, a business owner who has an office manager right now that is not doing that stuff to the level that they need to and they keep getting sucked back into it. Or the other cohort for the same thing could even be the office manager themselves who want to help and want to do this stuff well, but just don't have the expertise to do it. These are different cohorts that we can go after with a specific type of storytelling. In your client list, you will have clients today that align with one of those cohorts and then a lot that don't. Maybe they are a type of client that you're not serving quite as much anymore. Maybe the direction you are trending doesn't quite align with them in the way that it used to. But as you're heading into renewals, think about what those cohort cohorts are like. What are the common plateaus those clients are stuck on?

And with a bit of storytelling, man.

That can massively change the success you have in renewal season. To get them onto something that is not more for your firm. That's not the goal just to do more work, but better work for your firm. If, if gold is just two times the work of silver and you're getting paid two times the money, don't do that. That's probably not worthwhile.

Maybe it is.

If you're serving a smaller number of clients then. But gold has to be better. So how does that get to paying you 1.5x2x for the same volume of inputs? Let's just say that compared to the next step down that value ladder, the silver package, whatever it is. Stories, those epiphany moments, those can be a huge enabler for you.

That's all I got for today.

Increasingly, I'm thinking about the stories that find people where they're at. Because as much as I like to be like first principles, stories aren't real. Just get down to the real nitty gritty. We are just as humans, we are wired where that just connects in a way that nothing else does. I actually like, don't really like it because I hate how people will cherry pick stories just to prove a point. Drives me nuts. But I don't know, lately I've been. I've been playing that game more and it works on me. And I think it finds people because buying decisions are, are, are emotional decisions. Like, you can't just pretend that that's not part of it.

Thanks for coming and hanging today.

I'll see you in. The.