380 Helping Your Firm Find Its Voice (+Why You Should)

Having something to say is arguably, like, the ultimate hack to break through the noise, the generic fluff that's out there. We talk about, like, accounting firm websites and just how vanilla they are, right? Well, social media, you have the same problems, honestly, even just having conversations with potential clients. If you're on the other side of that, most accountants, man, they sound the same. Some of us are blessed with, like, a very unique personality, and you immediately stand out. And that can be a great thing to have if you run a firm, because people may resonate with that, but most of us, we just don't. And the notion of your firm having a consistent voice, even if you have a unique voice, building that into the rest of your firm, that's really hard. So today we're talking about, like, getting explicit about what is the voice of your firm. How do you scale it beyond yourself? And how do you align a type of character, a voice for the firm with. With the person you're trying to go after. The needs of a specific individual where. Where, like, a specific type of voice will resonate best with them. How can we kind of craft the best Venn diagram there? Come on in. Let's talk about it. Okay. I didn't plan on shooting anything today, but I kind of got. I got inspired by, like, the intersection of. Of a couple of different things I've been listening to and reading. Two things that I'll link in the show notes. One.com Secrets. It's a great book. A little bit on the cheesy, like, online seller, end of the spectrum, but still a lot of good, actionable tidbits in there. And then second, an interview with. I'm going to butcher her name, Lulu Chang Meserve on David Perel's podcast. I will link that in the show notes. And what Lulu does is she's a PR person, that her kind of mission in life is picking apart corporate speak. And she just. She had such a helpful framing around this and even called out a lot of versions of it that we do unwittingly oftentimes in our writing where it's like if you actually sat down and you said aloud that thing that you just wrote, often times it just would feel incredibly cringe. And this whole, like, corporate speak thing comes from the fear, I guess, our. Our fear of getting it wrong or doing it different. It is like preservation. She had a amazing line. I can't remember what it was. Something about you, how you kind of inherit the language of your professional ancestors the way that you've seen other people talk that that came before you. But doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of your existence? That's a little extreme. But, like, doesn't that defeat the purpose of then you having a voice if what we say is just a product of what we've seen other people do? And I would argue, like, this is a huge problem in accounting firm websites where everything looks the same and people are afraid to do something that looks different. In fact, we heard from Logan Graff recently, who runs an accounting firm, publishes YouTube videos breaking down his entire income statement, where anybody can pick that apart. You have a firm owner showing how much money he makes, and it's a pretty positive story. Like, he's making good money. He. He's increasing prices pretty aggressively on people year over year, and then he still goes to YouTube and publishes his entire income statement. Meanwhile, most accountants, they're afraid of literally, like, commenting on a social post because what if a client sees it or posting something for beekeepers? Because what if my carpentry client sees it and they're gonna think I'm not for them? Like, we have so much of this sort of, like, spotlight effect syndrome. We think everybody's watching us, and it sort of paralyzes us to keep us from doing anything interesting that will actually make a difference when these days, which is actually pretty cool more than ever before, like, buyers want to work with people who have something to say and they want to allocate their dollars to places where they feel like they'll belong. Like, where they are where they are one of the crew. The whole notion of, like, you know, keep personal and politics and all these different things out of business. Honestly, if you think about, like, the coolest brands for specific types of people, they are very opinionated. And the world's big enough to where you can be opinionated, find your people. And that's probably just a more fun way of doing business. But it can be hard to unlearn and overcome the fear of, like, just really vanilla sort of corporate speak. But a different framing for this. That's from the Dot com Secrets book. Their framing is that every business needs to find its, quote, attractive character, that is the person that those people can connect with, that will bring them into. Into the brand. It's pretty amazing. If you think about a platform like LinkedIn and what you see come through your feed every day, and what you will engage with LinkedIn, you think of as being like, the most corporate social media platform there is. But how many people do you follow versus brands? Like, who you follow is 99% human beings. It is exceptionally hard to produce things that will resonate with people on social media through the lens of a brand, because people just want to connect with people. And I would argue it goes as far as the algorithms actually rewarding people. I think it's actually the deck is stacked, stacked against you a bit to try to grow a company's page or channel or whatever it is. But even if you are building a business, the best way to do that is with a specific voice, with a specific story to tell. And the book.com Secrets outlines sort of four different types of attractive character. And I want to read through this because I think more than likely one of these will resonate with you and just how you naturally inherently are. But then I specifically want to try to apply this to the types of clients that you work with. What type of character is best going to resonate with them? Because we can actually assume this sort of Persona where you become exactly what that type of person needs. But let me walk you through the four different types of attractive characters. Number one, the leader. When your attractive character is the leader, their goal is to take the audience from one place to another. They're the ones that can take you by the hand and show you the ropes, helping you avoid common obstacles and pit stops while sharing secret shortcuts to speed up your success. So that's positioning yourself as like the expert, which isn't always the move. And that's why there's different types of leaders here. But if you want to come out and be kind of the advisor, then you have to position yourself as not a know it all, but somebody that can actually like, back up what they're saying. I would say in most cases, this is the type of attractive character that I am. Like this, my Persona is more the leader because I am a just a super irritating, know it all, but. But that's just like, I don't know. My communication style. My vibe is one of like, you know, a lot of momentum in how I communicate. Sound very sure of myself much more than I actually am. Just talk to my wife about it. She loves it. Second type of attractive character is the adventurer or crusader. The adventurer is driven by curiosity. They don't always have the answers, however. They're willing to bite the bullet and go through all the hardships to learn valuable lessons and give back to their followers. When, when you look at it, you'll probably notice that the adventurer is very similar to the leader. But instead of leading your target audience to their goals, the adventurer goes on a solo mission to uncover secrets so that his audience doesn't have to. Now this is a really valuable one if you don't have the confidence or feel like you have like arrived to present yourself as the leader right now. Similarly, the third type, the evangelist or reporter, when your attractive carrier, when your attractive character embodies the identity of the evangelist, they also go out to discover secrets. However, rather than taking on a solo mission like the adventurer, the evangelist will uncover ultimate truths by interviewing experts, authorities and other people in the industry. This is a powerful identity because rather than having to convince your audience how powerful your uncovered secret is, you have others convince your audience how powerful your uncovered secret is you have other sources testifying for you. So the evangelist or reporter, you're going out and pulling in other experts all kind of around a common theme. But, but the previous attractive character type, the adventurer, you're doing it solo. You're kind of going on your own journey. And so that solo journey looks like just documenting what you're learning day over day. And this is very much that's. That was where I was when I, you know, started on Twitter maybe five or six years ago as I was kind of learning no code automation stuff. And I'm like, here's what I know and what I don't know. And I was just sharing what I was learning day over day with the goal of attracting other people who are interested in the same stuff because I wanted to be able to learn from them. The evangelist or reporter, this is like, you know, you run an interview podcast. This is someone whose job is to highlight the truths that other people have uncovered. And by association your standing is kind of raised. This episode is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. I am a unapologetic lover of notion. In fact, my whole like personal and business life runs on notion now. And the reason I like it is it's just like a very open ended tool for like doing data and database stuff, but also narrative things like writing. If you're a notion nerd, you get it okay? Live Flow's new financial dashboards are the closest thing I have seen to finance notion in terms of. I can build like open ended narrative docs that I send to my clients with all the words and explainers that I want to include, but embedded with very real financial Data from their QuickBooks or their Xero file. And I can publish these reports either as snapshots that are static and never change, or even publish like continuously updating reports that are pulling in live data from the ledger. So as long as the accounting file is up to date, it continues syncing that stuff in. If that's a, you know, a dashboard that the client looks at on their phone every morning or report they check in on every week. So super flexible reporting platform. Not like this, sort of pretty templatized. Here are the 12 different types of reports you can present. It's totally open ended, you can connect it back to anything in the accounting ledger. But because it's liveflow, they also give you a bunch of templates if you don't wanna have to build it from scratch. Gives you a much easier way to get started. And that's why I like liveflow. Learn more Check out the link down in the show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub renewal season Cross Sell Alert Bill Pay One of the things that is being changed the fastest by a regular old bill pay, but also like crazy technical bill pay. You got people that are doing like receiving inventory management. This is where like there's mountains of time savings to be had by getting into bill pay. It's actually a great way to specialize your firm, like differentiate you from other providers. If you're looking for a way to get a foot in the door with folks doing, you know, manufacturing anything that requires warehousing, having a service like this that you can crush and come in and get an immediate win with someone. Especially as there's so much marketing hype around AI. If you can be the accounting firm that's like man, AI is totally transforming this type of business and our firm's going to come in and show you how really cool. Opportunity Makers Hub, more than anybody else I've seen, is leaning into AI vision models and large language models to push this stuff like to a level that's never before been possible. If you're looking for a way to spice up renewal season, think about BuiltPay. I did it in my firm led to actually a bunch of other great cash advisory services could be worth checking out. Learn more about Maker Sub Check out the link down in the show notes Last the fourth type of attractive, attractive character, the Reluctant Hero. Then there's the Reluctant Hero identity. The Reluctant Hero is shy and doesn't like all the hype and attention that they're getting from their amazing discovery. They'd rather be behind the scenes of it all, minding their own business. However, they understand that the secret they discovered is so powerful it has the potential to change millions of lives, including the lives of your target audience. So out of a sense of duty, they break out of their comfort zone and share their secrets with the world reluctantly. That one might resonate with a lot of you, the folks who are like, I'm. I just don't. I super don't want to get in front of the camera. Like, this isn't a comfortable thing for me. I'll tell you what, the notion of being able to step into this identity, like, may actually make this a lot easier for you. It is okay to be reluctant, and in doing this stuff, like, you don't have to come. I, I mean, I certainly was not as comfortable as I am today in front of camera and, and, you know, giving talks to conferences and stuff like that. By no means did I have that confidence when I first started out. And so it's completely okay to step into the role as the reluctant hero, and that may change someday. But I love this notion of out of a sense of duty. I. I think that probably super resonates with a lot of you where you're like, no, I actually do have a lot of helpful things to share. I just struggle with being the person to do it. But. But you also know, if you don't do it, like, who will? And there's a tremendous amount of value in putting out helpful things into the world and seeing what happens, seeing what comes of it. And so maybe that reluctant hero identity resonates with you. You'll notice only one of these four types requires you to be an expert. A know it all right? The adventurer is about you going on a journey and sharing the journey. The evangelist is about you pulling in the people that you think are interesting and picking their brains. The reluctant hero is you being like, I think we found something. And it's hard for me to do this, but, like, I'm. I'm going to talk about it. The reality is, if you run a firm and you're helping people, you have a lot of expertise that would benefit folks. Like, even if you're not confident writing online, you're not confident producing videos, you're not confident taking sales calls with potential clients. If you are in the business of being, doing this, like, you are leagues ahead of the regular old, like, everyday people who don't do this stuff. So whether you like it or not, like, there's value there that you can provide folks with. But an interesting wrinkle to this, to me, is what type of character is going to be most interesting to the type of person that you're going after? So I can give you a dental example, because I did a bunch of stuff with dentists what were the pains and the frustrations going on in dentistry? And like this state of dentistry, which now is largely the same and it's progressed a little bit, the big pains, there were DSOs, large dental groups, like they were gobbling up small independently owned practices, and they were kind of the evil corporate overlords. And a lot of clinic owners took pride in the fact that, like, they could run their own independent clinic that was going to be superior to these kind of big groups that were doing these rollups. But then the other bad guy in the profession is the insurance companies who are putting the squeeze on the little guys. And there was this sort of narrative that you may have to roll up and get big to have any bargaining leverage for those insurance companies to pay you what you ought to be worth. And so you had all these independent docs that felt like they were in this impossible situation where they were unwilling to sell out to the big groups, but by doing so were, were left like picking up the scraps and didn't have any leverage over the insurance companies and were just kind of stuck with whatever they would pay them. And if I am, you know, running a firm that is targeting those independent docs, which of those personalities or voices, which I think probably starts with an individual but ultimately is adopted by the firm, which of those voices would be most attractive? Well, how about the reluctant hero who has stumbled into something that is like the solution to all these problems? Maybe you are the fee for service dental accountant, the one that's helping dentists transition to clients, just paying them directly, not through an insurer, just paying them directly for dental for dental service or the subscription revenue dentist accountant. You work with the dentists who are transitioning to patients just paying a fixed monthly cost directly to the dental clinic for, for their ongoing needs. And you transition the whole firm to this recurring revenue model. The reluctant hero in that scenario is able to hold themselves out as someone who has identified a solution to the problems ailing that specific type of dentist. And you can probably go out and be the only subscription dental accountant. Like, that's the thing that you're really pushing. And you partner with the platforms that are like, you know, enabling dentists to sell subscription, subscription services for the first time. There's a number of software platforms that help with that. But the, the voice, the identity that's going to be appealing to the people in that situation. To me, that probably sounds like the reluctant hero, the one who's like, I get what everybody's going through. We think we have a compelling solution here. Our content is not top notch and we may not sound super confident about all this stuff because we are accountants at the end of the day, but, but boy, isn't that going to like win over the people who feel like they're stuck in that position. Right. You get it. I mean compare that to a generalist accountant who doesn't get it or as you know, just kind of a know it all or like doesn't have a deep understanding of the frustrations to that type of. For that type of entrepreneur. Now on the flip side of that, my firm also worked with the bigger groups who were rolling up dental clinics, DSOs. And this happened a couple decades ago in health in a big way where like these huge groups rolled up like primary care docs. That whole process happened like a decade or two before dental. But if I'm going to take the DSO side because we did a bit of both and we're a little bit split on like boy, these DSOs. This is a really compelling solution for really compelling thing for our firm to get into because you'll have like 10 docs that roll up their clinics into a single group for the first time and none of those docs want to run the back office as kind of a perfect like managed accounting setup where it's like someone has to do all this stuff. Well, we do it for a bunch of other DSOs. We can do it for you as well and centralize as much of that admin as possible. It's a pretty like, pretty juicy offer prop as all these clinics are grouping up to become the go to firm to serve them. And so if that was, if that was our target customer, then what Persona makes sense? They're probably not the reluctant hero. I would say maybe, um, if you are trying to catch the docs who are rolling into groups, I think the appealing thing there may be the adventurer as you are like sort of discovering this journey in the same way that they are. You're learning what it looks like, the differences between running your own clinic and rolling your clinic into a group. You're sort of sharing what that journey looks like. Maybe you can be the know it all. Maybe you can be the super confident voice to say like here are the upsides and downsides of doing this. But we believe in it and that's why we support people. Because you know PE is going to come in and you're going to get that multiple spoiler alert. You won't. But let's say PE is back channel on you, enough money for you to actually believe that Then you come out as, as the leader. You're. You're the expert, and you have something to say. That's going to be probably the best profile of an attractive character for that type of client. Whatever the client is that you are going after this, there's probably. And a style of attractive character and voice that is going to be most attractive to them. And most of us are early on enough in the journey where it's probably us that is assuming that role, playing that character. But the problem you eventually have there is, well, what about when I want to grow my firm beyond just myself, right. What if I want to hire a marketing person or not be involved in client service quite so much? Now somebody else has to play the role of the attractive character. But that's, that's the value to me of being able to define what it is. If we circle back to the conversation with, with the PR gal, how you do communications as an organization, if you can do that in a, in a human and consistent way, that's really, really valuable. And so what, what we're trying to do is not just mimic Tina's voice. You know, whoever the original founder of the firm was, the goal shouldn't be, let's just sound as much like, as much like Tina as we possibly can. The, the idea is like, you have a very intentional voice that resonates with a specific type of person. And once we've defined what that is, it's much easier to plug other people and content into that in a way that will actually convert and be useful. I think most firms, they haven't gotten this explicit about what that voice is. If anything, it's just relying upon the talent or the copywriting ability of the specific individual who is putting out that content or writing that headline or whatever it is. But the reality is you need that to be representative of your firm and the specific types of people that you're trying to attract. Right. And so in many ways it's easier if this is all just one person. And that's a, that's probably a blocker for some of us to say, well, we're never going to do social media as good as, you know, say, Brandon hall, because we don't have that voice. He just has such a great, confident voice that attracts people on social media. Well, your version of that can simply be like, here is, here is the style of attractive character that our firm is and I sort of the general tone that we use. The type of content that we develop, is it interview content, is it thought leadership content? We landed on this specific tone because we think the next client we're trying to attract is going to find this one most appealing. It, to me feels like a great way to escape the risk of just the super homogenized vanilla landing page copy and content that doesn't actually connect with anyone because it feels too corporate. When I was reading through this, I was just connecting all these dots for the ways that we were trying to find people within that niche. And I was realizing, like, man, this was the voice to take like, that voice for in the case of dentists. Like, it was almost a rallying cry where we could, like, stir up excitement in the right type of person to say, like, here's what we do and here's the people we serve and here's why. And it was probably through the lens of this reluctant hero type character. And it just makes you realize different people need different things. And if we just. If we just fall into, like your default of how you communicate or something that feels corporate but may be useful like, it. It can be useful while not being particularly attractive, but in a perfect world, it's both. Like, it's attractive. It's. It's something that will resonate with people so they will engage with it while still being useful. That's not just magically going to align with whatever your personality is probably. And so a more intentional approach to, like, we're going to define our voice, that's probably going to land with a lot more people. Super encourage you to check out those two things I linked in the show notes. Learned a lot from both of them. If you've gone as far as defining what the voice is for your firm, that would be really interesting to me how you've done that. Drop that down in the comments. And thanks for coming and hanging today.