374 Should Accounting Firms Avoid Black Friday Deals?

Black Friday is upon us. But what should that mean? What should that mean for accounting firms? It seems like everybody's getting in on the old Black Friday, like, Cyber Monday hype cycle. But what about. What about accounting firms? We talk about how we shouldn't be caudrely ol. Caudreally ol old professional services firm. We ought to be leaning into the new age of things. Cast away the old, like, high and mighty. I'm a professional services firm. Throw that stuff out the window. But how should that make us feel about Black Friday? Come on in. Jingle jangle. Let's talk about it. Okay, a point of clarification. What does that even mean, Jason? Are you talking about me going out and buying Black Friday deals? Are you talking about my accounting firm offering Black Friday deals? Both. So let's talk about the first one first. Should you go out and take care of Black Friday? Like, take advantage of other people's Black Friday deals? I can tell you, by and large, I only ever got burned by this because I had a partner who was that, that Costco guy who was like, wow, look at this. HP Power Station 8473. What a deal. Well, look at this. Look at this 4K monitor. Why is it only $45? Thanks Costco. And before we knew it, we had like, this was. We transitioned by the end to be like 50% distributed. But in the beginning, it was everyone in an office. And. And the result was just the hot mess that you would expect because there wasn't the willingness to pay for tech that would last another year, another two years. That was all the same. So it was like, interchangeable. And I think most, like if you have a physical office is still how most small businesses operate is on the end cap Costco special model. But let's. Let's be real Black Friday deals. I hate to say it, it's usually not the stuff you want. And if you want to protect yourself from this, don't just mindlessly scroll, mindlessly scroll the deals. What you do. Same thing I tell my kids, frankly. Make a list for Santa before Black Friday. Okay? Make a list of the stuff that you actually want and then go see if that stuff is on sale. And sometimes it is, but it's never like the stay in a tent outside Best Buy, wrap the line around the block sort of deal. That's usually like, you know, the washer dryer combo. That's the budget model that just got even budgeter. There's a, like, deep inside of every accountant is this. And it comes from a place of like, fiscal responsibility, but there's this, I don't know. I say cheapskate, but that's. That's too severe of a term. Cost conscious person, fiscally responsible person that lives inside of all of us, that is very hard to shed. Even when you, you know, there's probably an ROI calculation to tell you that you should probably just get the better thing and move on with your life. I mean, the greatest example of this is when someone will go with a practice management system that is, you know, $70 per month per user instead of $100 per month per user. Cause they're like, that's just. That's an astronomical cost that I'm unwilling to pay $30 a month of somebody's time. Meanwhile, they're basically commanding, you know, two to three hundred dollars an hour for their work. As much as I would love for there to be all sorts of, you know, $50 Costco dogs out there in the world, that pair of Levi's that you're going to wear for the next 65 years that just get better every year, for every hundred of those that you think you found, in most cases, zero of them will actually pan out. That is my experience. And I am quick to pay for time, quick to pay for things that save me headaches. And that's why I am a no Black Friday deal guy. Okay, now, on the subject of whether your accounting firm should offer some sort of deal, I've come around on this a bit, and it's partly because of what I said in the intro. Like, I don't want to be that cadre firm that's, like, immune to everything. Like, no, the. The rest of this reality doesn't exist around us because we are this. This kind of callback to a bygone era of kind of this, like, is this sanctity to professional services to where we won't bow to, you know, anything else that's happening in the universe. Here's. Here's where I draw the line is under no situations can your prices ever be negotiable. And it means as soon as you offer a discount or any sort of wiggle room on your pricing, as soon as you open that can of worms, like, there's no putting that genie back in the tube. Your clients now have the perception that, like, the pricing for what you do is negotiable, and you just got to avoid that. You can negotiate on scope. You can talk about, like, I think you need this, but, like, maybe they can talk you out of that or into something different. But that's very different to negotiating price. Now a workaround here, a sneaky back door, an alternative to discounts is bonuses. Bonuses being things that don't require additional team to so additional time from your team. So a bonus cannot be hopping on a call. A bonus could be a chart of accounts template or access to a course. Basically anything that is productized, anything scalable. I'm actually okay with those bonuses because I think bonuses actually can drive the desired behavior of folks. Like kind of current, you know, best practice for selling things online is actually having a kind of a rotating set of bonuses so that any at any given time, if there is otherwise no reason why that person ought to buy that thing today. You can use a bonus to say like, if you buy it this week, you will get X. And that's a bonus that is somehow associated with the thing you want them to buy. They go hand in hand and they'll see that and they'll be like, oh dang, I don't want to miss out on that, so I better do it now. Like, you know, right or wrong, human behavior is very much driven by fear of loss. That loss aversion, we can sort of, we can sort of game it or lean into it by genuinely like standing up things that you will lose if you don't take this decision that we, or this action that we want you to take. And bonuses are the probably the only workaround here that I'm okay with because I'm not going to do a Black Friday promo to like, you know, give you 20% off of your professional fees or something like that. Like the core professional fees themselves. That's non negotiable to me. But something that's a little bit more productized that I could hold out as a bonus, I'm okay with that. And I actually, I don't like the whole professional services being above things notion. In fact, I think, I think most people appreciate it when you're not that way. When you're like, oh my gosh, my accountant's running a promo or a special little Valentine's thing. Like, people think that's funny and you almost get double points for that because they just don't expect it from an accounting firm. There's a whole bunch of situations where bonuses are really valuable. Whether you're trying to get folks to buy up to a higher tier or getting a lead to commit by a certain deadline or something like that. There's all sorts of contexts where those bonuses are valuable and actually having kind of a library of them that you can plug in in different situations are really is a really useful thing. And that's probably the only Black Friday concession I'm willing to make. If you've ever done something Black Friday related for your accounting firm, I don't know that I've ever seen any very cool examples of that, but drop a comment below. I'd love to see it. Okay. In the spirit of thankfulness, because in the US here yesterday everybody just ate a whole lot of food, might have watched some football, might have fallen asleep. As with most most American holidays are centered around overeating, and Thanksgiving might just be the top of the heap there. But before we eat, we say the things that we're thankful for. That's what makes this one different. Let me run you through 10 things I think accountants can be thankful for these days. 1. Accounting, compared to a lot of other things, is actually relatively well protected from AI. Like you look at voice actors, designers, headshot photo takers, copywriters, VFX artists. We like to poo poo on on AI and be like, man, it's never going to be as smart as an accountant. You know, voice actors like that was not something that anybody had on their bingo card. ChatGPT's advanced voice, like how animated it can be. I don't think anybody expected it to be this compelling this soon. And when you look at white collar work in the grand scheme of things, I actually think accounting is one of the more well protected domains because of how gnarly many of the tools we have to use are. Because accounting systems are actually a pretty large, complex data set, despite the fact that outwardly, for some reason folks outside of accounting, what we do is always looked really simple for some reason. Like accounting has always been on the brink of, of extinction seemingly. And this maybe, maybe there's the nuisance factor there too, where nobody wants to do it and so everyone kind of just wants it to go away. But if you compare it to many other things, like honestly even legal and I don't know, as soon as I go outside accountants, accounting stuff, I run the risk of, you know, my ignorance to the nuance of other things, you know, just making it seem like it's easier than it really is. But I actually think that we're in a relatively good spot if we look at like a 5 to 10 year scenario where professional work is wildly different and AI has really changed things, which honestly I think will probably happen on the spectrum of how disruptible things are. I actually think accounting's on the pretty good end of the spectrum where there'll still be plenty for us to do. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. This is the season, the season of giving thanks. And you know who I'm thankful for? Live Flow. Live Flow was one of the very first sponsors I ever had on my content and they've kind of been with us from the beginning. I'll be honest, I don't know why people must be going to lifflow from our content, which is great. But I'm thankful they've been there since the beginning because it's brands like that that honestly like keep this content coming. Now, Life Flow, they started out as like a killer spreadsheet plugin for your Google sheets, your Excel sync data out from your QuickBooks files, your zero files. Now they've got like a whole dashboarding platform where you do the same thing, connect it up to the ledger, make these quick little dashboards can be either super basic, even mobile friendly or like big comprehensive, you know, multi tab sort of monstrosities. It's pretty cool. Pretty easy to set up too, like unintimidating. We did a demo day video maybe a couple months now on their new dashboard functionality. It's actually got a load of views, but check that one out if that sounds interesting. And thank you to Live Flow for being a friend of the pod. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Ramp. Do you know Ramp is. Maybe you. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Ramp is a spend management platform. Do you know what a spend management platform is? Management. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. These have kind of cropped up in the last like three to five years. And I actually think accountants are extremely well suited to bring spend management platforms to small businesses for the first time. And it is all about like better card hygiene, not using one card for everything, not having an office card, you know, that Jimmy runs out and uses for donuts. It's about using virtual cards, putting budgets on cards, how you manage those budgets across your team members. It is about enablement of your team members to give them greater flexibility to go out and do what they need to do, spend money with boundaries. And Ramp rolls all that stuff into a super tidy platform. And in the last year or so they've been investing in their accountants channel big time. You'll see them at all the conferences. Super mature product. Now sometimes we're afraid to like put that new thing in front of a client because it may embarrass us. Ramp is like aaa, very, very nice product. If that's a problem for your Clients. Also, spoiler alert unlocks a whole bunch of bookkeeping automation opportunities as well. We've done a demo day for Ramp if you want to see like a five minute demo on my YouTube channel. Otherwise, learn more about RAMP down at the link in the video description at number two, this is this two current events. Okay, I'll just do it anyway. Even if the IRS gets deleted, you'll still be busy. This is kind of a meme with ever since the election and kind of the political landscape in the US and the, you know, the government efficiency thing and how they're going to strip back and simplify the government this. I actually would not be surprised if the IRS did not exist 12 months from now. Honest to goodness, I would not be surprised if that were the case. And I wouldn't have said that two weeks ago. Lex Friedman's podcast, he did an interview with the Argentinian president who is like a. Wow, he is like a cartoon character, but went in like. And just abs similar to what Musk did going into Twitter and just like cutting 90% of people. The Argentinian president has done something very similar in just over a year he's been in office where they've just stripped it of a whole bunch of stuff. And last month he killed their equivalent of the irs. And you think, like, how is that even possible? I guess. And so whenever, you know, I think Musk tweeted a reply to somebody that they were going to delete, quote, delete the IRS whenever it comes up. It's almost like a meme, right? Because it's like, well, how could that even be possible? And so I looked into this a little further. What they actually did, I'm like, you can't, you can't just not have that service. They killed it. They seemingly reopened a new one. And I'm kind of going like, did they really just like change the, change the logo or change the naming? Right. But I think they actually rehired completely different people, went to completely different systems in the US Like, a big issue is the legacy tech that the IRS is on that is going to be just outrageously difficult to get off of. And like the current administration and how they're thinking about this government efficiency thing. They're looking what Argentina has done big time. Like that is their model that they're trying to follow. And the model eliminated the tax agency along with a lot of tax legislation. Now the, the uninformed would think that the elimination of a tax agency or the elimination of legislation extends to the elimination of tax professionals. I have A hard time seeing that not making us busier than ever before. Right. And so maybe that's actually not a great outcome either is kind of throws all your workflows out. But with, you know, AI and everything that's happening, like the fact that it seems like no matter what there's going to be an abundance of need for what you do in the grand scheme of things. I would prefer to be in demand. Right. Like I think that's a good thing. Number three category tech. As in tech for public accounting firms I would argue has never been better. We've seen some cool stuff in the last few years around like month end close automation around automating tax intake. We still need better tax software in the US you want to see somebody that's going to be bummed out if they, you know, turn the tax system on its head. Anybody building software around said tax system, yikes. Cloud practice management systems are so much better than they were five years ago and continue to ship really good stuff every month. It has never been a better time for, for tech for accounting firms. Number four, the educational content in our space has never been better. Let me extend that to communities. We're talking communities this week and next week. If I compare this to when I became a firm owner, oh man, like five years ago, what was it, six years ago? Just think how much has changed around educational content for running small firms since then and the resources that are available to people. Man, such a huge improvement. I feel like the level of the conversations now are better than they've ever been before. More constructive around credentials and what's necessary and what isn't necessary. The fact that, I mean anybody can go out and Google how to start an accounting firm and the quality of what you get there, I would argue even just in the last five years has gotten so, so much better. And it's so much easier to find other people who run accounting firms. Like if you really want to make friends with other people that run accounting firms, you have to be like actively avoiding social media. Like there's, there's never been more resources than there are now. Which honestly for me would have completely changed my firm running journey. In fact, I may have never even gotten into content because I started producing content when it was like, you know, a wasteland. I mean there were, I don't know, there were like maybe less than 50 videos on YouTube about running an accounting firm. Now we publish about 50 videos a week to YouTube about running an accounting firm. Oh, number five, it's never, it's never been easier to find peers than it is now. Kind of already covered that one. But that was always. That was the most powerful thing for me. Always was like finding other people that run accounting firms. That was so valuable. Number six, more of the world is moving online, making it easier to find just the people you want to work with. There's, I don't know, accountants in general, I think, are still down on specialization. When I think of it more like, isn't that, Isn't that cool? Like, the notion that we have access to such a specific type of person these days thanks to social media and algorithms and all that. Like, isn't that cool that we can go more niche than we were able, ever able to go before? Even if it's not a business decision, like, even if it's not a financial thing, isn't it nice that you can keep things simple? You can have conversations about the same things each day, not in a way that hopefully gets boring, but in a way that, like, leads you to truly being a better advisor. We did a video on the main channel recently about, like, how do I find clients who are offline? And we shared some tips for, you know, kind of finding the hubs for where those people hang out. But the end of that video, the point of it was really that those people increasingly do not exist. Like, the number of folks who weren't online five years ago is so much more than those who are not online today. Being online, social media, all that, that's not a young person's game. It's an everyone game. And that's changed, I would argue, a lot in the last 36 months. Even if, I mean, in the past you say farmers, tradespeople, you kind of have these stereotypes in your head of the type of people that don't hang out online. They're online, you just haven't found them yet. In fact, there's a really common plateau for anyone that produces content online to where they can convince themselves when they hit that plateau that they've reached everyone, that they've found everybody that would be interested in their stuff. Which, you know, if you sit back and you think about it, how big the world is and how many people there are online, it is such a. That's such a naive thing to think, right, that everyone on this planet who could benefit from what you have to offer has somehow find your. Found your stuff. They found, you know, all the people that will find the current version of it. They have found it. The goal ought to be like, how do I find those next people? Like, how do I make my stuff even better, even easier to discover because it's never been easier to draw out like very specific types of people when it comes to building a business to serve a specific need. That's awesome. That makes it so much easier to do this than it was before when he had to turn up to like networking events and rotary stuff, that sort of thing. And I would also argue that social media is a whole lot more fun than Rotary. Like that's just a more entertaining place to be. This episode is sponsored in part by Core V. Hey, we're closing up on year end tax planning season renewals. Oh, you want to get some better paying work, buddy? Tax Advisory that's where it at Corvi it is the most mature tax advisory platform out there. From identifying saving strategies for your clients to presenting them in a way that they will actually understand and pay you top dollar for like framing the savings in a way that makes you look valuable rather than just doing a whole bunch of work and like planner CS or like BNA or something like that and then just telling the client here's what we did and here's the extension estimates. That's. That's not framing your value up in a very positive way. Corvey, in my opinion, is is like the most premium tool out there for doing this. If you want to trade in the mill of just pumping out tax returns for something better, something more valuable, Buddy that is tax advisory and software, the right software is going to make that much easier for. To learn more about Corby, check out a link down in the show Notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing, who helps accounting firms work with talented accounts in the Philippines for the first time. Origin Story of Cloud Accountant Staffing A guy named Jordan was running a cloud accounting firm team of about 15. This story may feel familiar to you. Like most firm owners struggle to find onshore accountants and after having four consecutive offers rejected in 2020, was burned out on hiring. Oh buddy, if you've ever hit that wall, you know what that feels like. That's when he turned to offshore staffing companies for help. Although his experience was not a big success, he realized there was like something to it. The underlying people were great. So he started building his own offshore hiring pipeline in 2021. Now his accounting firm has nine full timers in the Philippines. Light bulb went off and cloud account staffing was born. Now he's doing the same thing for other firms. Like it's as simple as that. The number of slimy DMs I get from. I. Maybe I shouldn't say slimy from random people I don't know anything about on LinkedIn offering their services. I can tell you Jordan is literally just a guy that runs accounting firms. I don't know. I don't think he still runs his firm, but that was how this whole business got started. Was he just. He just started doing it for other people? People who have all the same questions you probably do if you haven't done it before. So if you're feeling blocked on hiring heading into next year, give me a shout. Cloud account staffing link down in the show notes. Number seven. It has never been easier than now to start your own firm. Even just like starting your own business has gotten simpler. There's an abundance of, you know, entrepreneurship advice everywhere you look, guides here and there, you know, sales scripts. Like, every aspect of running a small business, I feel like, has been simplified. Not to make it sound easy by any means, but the quality of the conversation is just a lot better than it used to be. And I think coming through Covid, like the number of micro businesses and small businesses is. And people interested in doing their own thing and maybe gig work was the very first version of that. We just have more people than ever starting their own firm. Number eight, it's never been easier than now to find firms that align with your interests. You ever think about what it's like to be on the other side of the equation, the client that's trying to find somebody? And we hear a lot about folks that will just say it's very hard to find an accountant. But I would argue that oftentimes they're getting wrong the same thing that we get wrong. And that is not looking for something specific to your needs. And the people who, like, don't really have any specificity and they just, they need a simple tax return filed. Like, yeah, that, like, that's. That's very hard to find somebody to. To do that work because everybody's kind of running from it. But if I'm a beekeeper, when I listen to my beekeeping podcast, hopefully there's an accounting firm advertising on that beekeeping podcast. When I read that taxidermy newsletter, hopefully there's an accounting firm advertising on that newsletter for taxidermists. We heard the story the other day of listening to the pod rocking up in a. In a Reddit thread for machinists and mentioning that he runs an accounting firm for machinists and gunsmiths. And a whole bunch of people jumping on that thread and being like, oh, man, can we talk and picking up some clients from there. If you're on the other side of this, if you are an entrepreneur running a specific type of business, I would say, well, while accountants are definitely in short supply, more so than ever before, you can, you can find a firm that aligns with what you do. And increasingly people are buying based on affinity, based on feeling like they belong because the organization or whoever it is has something to say. Like they actually, they're not like this sort of spineless vanilla homogenization of whatever the current like corporate speak is like. They're willing to be like, no, this is how we are. Here are the people we employ and here are the people that we want to work with. I think that's cool. I think that's a great way to build a business. Number nine, suckers be leaving. Creating more opportunity for you. All the accountants that left during COVID those little, those little knobby kneed, weak wristed, they didn't have what it took, okay? They didn't make it through like you and I did. Now we're better for it. Are we better for it? Time will tell. But as big of a problem as it is that people are leaving is a lot of folks in other professions. Take Hollywood for example. Man, Hollywood is in a rough spot for a lot of reasons right now. Because everybody wants to, you know, everybody wants to do the Hollywood thing. But also there's just this consolidation going on where fewer and fewer things are getting made. And the only things that are getting made are like Humongous Marvel and Mission Impossible type films. Imagine if in that industry people were like, oh no, everybody's leaving. Now what? How do we get more people into the pipeline? Hollywood people have never said that in a million years, I don't think. And so while it is a problem that people are leaving, the accounting profession could be worse, right? I mean, it's creating opportunities for you and I. Last number 10, you've never been more in demand than you are now. Giving you the opportunity to only work with people who love you. Aw, Jason. Genghis. It's never been a better time to be an accountant than it is right now. Is the old like AI asteroid about to wipe out all the knowledge work on the planet? Maybe doesn't seem like it, but maybe. But if there's a problem for accounting firms today, it's having the gumption to say no and get more selective. And on the spectrum of problems to have, that's not a bad one. There's a lot worse problems to have than people want to work with me too much. Now, how do I, like, make the most of that and kind of turn it on its head? I get really selective about who I think I can best help. And if I'm running a small shop, especially if that shop is kind of just built around me, you know, these are shops one and a half million and under. If I kind of want it to be built around me and around my interests, I'm looking for the Venn diagram of problems that are, like, rare problems that are viable that I can solve for people. Looking for the intersection there between that and the stuff that I'm into because I'm a human being with interests and needs. But let's just talk about my interests. I used to race rally cars when I was a child. I collected Beanie Babies. Oh, did I wait in a lot, a lot of lines to buy Beanie Babies with my mother? I'm kind of over that now. What else am I into? My kids are getting into archery. I could see myself being an archery guy. I don't know that I'm quite, like, butch enough for that, but it's something I could aspire to. Super into fitness stuff, super into creator businesses, like, businesses like mine. So how could I marry those interests? The things that I super enjoy doing with valuable, like, rare problems that entrepreneurs have who have the money to pay for the solution. Because the best competitive advantage you have is your interests, the stuff that you would do whether you're working or not. What do I do, like, at night? Like, what do I read about? What's the stuff that comes up in my, you know, my Google news where I'm like, oh, I want to learn about that more. That's what makes you you. And if you're looking for an entrepreneur to work with, a bad place to start isn't folks that have that same stuff in their feed, right? Like, if you're not into dentistry, but you spend the rest of your years talking to dentists every day, like, that's fine. That's not the end of the world. But if you can talk with people who are into the stuff that you're into, so, like, it doesn't feel like working. You have fun hanging out with them and talking to them. That's pretty great, too. Now, can you burn out? Can you get bored of that? You certainly can. But you also don't need to run the same accounting firm forever. You can pivot to something else. You could sell the practice and go start a new one. I'm kind of over the notion of, like, forever. Practices. In fact, I've seen some unbelievable practice sales from people lately. In fact, I think it was beginning of this week on this podcast, Rebecca Driscoll was talking about tweeting and posting on LinkedIn to say, like, I'm gonna sell my cloud accounting practice. Let me know if you're interested. And got hundreds over a hundred. Lois, I think she said she got. Excuse me. I will be honest. There's a part of me that on the inside was like, holy heck, how easy would it be for me to sell a firm? Should I just be creating a firm every 36 months and then selling it off? There's downsides to that for sure. But like, you know, the decision to, like, DM a podcast host today to go on this lawn mowing podcast, the decision to send that DM shouldn't be blocked by what if I get bored of lawn mowing one day though, right? That's the trap is like, we're thinking too far out ahead. And so we just keep, like, being a generalist. Anyways, you've never been more in demand than you are now, which means you kind of get to, like, make up the rules along the way, decide who you want to work with. And that is worth being thankful for. That's it for today. I love you all. I'm thankful for you. Thanks for tuning in by. Sa.