457 Why Better Clients Aren’t Finding Your Firm

Okay, today I'm breaking down what I see people having the most success with when they are being visible, when they're attracting as many as people as possible to your firm. Because we don't all need more clients. In fact, most of us, we've already got too much stuff going on in the life cycle of like running an accounting firm. It's usually a very narrow window of time where you just need more. But. But all of us need better. And better is a result of just more people being able to see you and you being able to be more selective. So what are the people doing who are absolutely crushing this in 2025? I'm gonna break it down for you today, and I think you'll actually come out of this with an abundance of ideas for very simple steps that you could take that could lead to that next killer client finding you. It's gonna be a good. Okay, so here's the thing. I feel like we've known this for a few years now, but I'm noticing it now more than ever before because it's been taken to a new extreme is the people that are crushing thought leadership and being out there and being visible, they are giving away, just straight up giving away more than ever before, like putting an insane amount of. Of value out there. And so if you look at, I don't know, as much as I hate to bring the name up, modern philosopher Alex Hormozi, the reason that he has such a cult following is the volume of stuff that they give away. And if you haven't noticed, like, this is a very core part of my own business strategy, because I'll give you my take, as this applies to the accounting profession, because I think the same thing holds up for anyone that you serve. The same thing holds up for you in the accounting profession. I think there's still way too many people who are paywalling their toolkit, their expertise, their thought leadership, when in 2025, information is free. And the quality at which, the quality of information that we all have access to for no cost or for very, very little cost, it's so good. Like, it's so much better than it has ever been before. And if we layer into this the AI of it all and the fact that large language models are being trained on anything that they can hoover up on the Internet right now, the future of how people get all forms of information, it's being embedded into large language models. And so if you think about what I do, I. I mean, I think I am the most visible accounting thought leader that that there is, and that's by design. And I'm sorry. And there's a lot of folks who are very annoyed by me. Like, and it's things. It's really funny. Like, when you're this visible, it's things as simple as your tone of voice, your. Your method of delivery. You know, I get. I. When you have as much stuff out as I do, you get mean things in various channels every single day. But a very common one is like, hey, thanks, the content's great. I just wish that the delivery wasn't, like, at a ninth grade level. Like, you. You sound like you're trying to capture the attention of a high schooler. And, I mean, in many ways they're not wrong. And in many ways, I actually hear that as a compliment because I am trying to do things in a more engaging way. Because, boy, like, most. Most of the stuff in our space is just so stale. But that's kind of the cornerstone of my business is I give absolutely everything away. There is no, like, no ideas that are up and up in here that are just so good that I can't possibly give them away. When these good ideas come, they end up on the podcast. They may bubble up to the level of, like a main channel YouTube video that a bunch of effort and production goes into. But all of the. From the small things, the little ideas, the little hacks to the big stuff, the frameworks, the large projects, 100% of that stuff we give away. And I can get away with that because the way that ultimately my business is monetized is my community. So what people pay me for is my network. It's not what I know. And if you can find a way to build your business around being able to give away 100% of what you know, that's just a much, much higher leverage way to build a business these days. And for accounting firms, this has actually long been a concern. Whenever anybody talks, man, I remember being at a conference maybe four or five years ago, and there was a Q and A, and a lady stood up and she's like, I want to start doing social media, but I'm afraid of giving away kind of my secret sauce. So how much of it do I give away versus how much do I keep for myself? And what if a client sees me talking on social media about something that they just paid me to do? All totally valid concerns. And honestly, I think most people are still blocked on this. My advice to you, give absolutely everything away. And if you're afraid of. Well, if I give absolutely everything away, Then what will people pay me for? People pay you for application. People pay you for applying that thing to their specific circumstances. So if you're like having a conversation with a client about getting their payroll set up and you just do that for them, and then the same day you go to social media, you go to YouTube or whatever, and you give the soup to nuts, step 1 through 10 of how to do a payroll setup, that's fine. I genuinely don't think you need to be worried about the client being like, hey, what the heck? Why did I just pay you for that? The answer is, well, because I did that for you. And this is the toolkit. Like, if you want to do it yourself, knock yourself out. In fact, do you want to? I, I can almost guarantee you what they will say is, is no. Or they may start down that path. They may begin and be like, hey, I actually have 50 more questions that are specific to my situation. Can you just do it for me? And you're back to square one. And so this whole fear around being afraid of giving away the framework like it was not that long ago when, when I think this was probably the right approach to keep that stuff proprietary, your 21 step framework for X, Y, Z. But just because the way the world works these days, and because we have these unbelievably good algorithms where if you actually have something that's world class, that's really good, it will rise to the top of the algorithm and people will get excited about it, then that's like a way, way bigger opportunity, the fact that a million people can find that than keeping it behind closed doors and nobody ever finding you at all. And it requires some humility here because, like, when what we put out there is out there for anyone's consumption, it can for sure be picked apart. But you know what? Like, a really big benefit of that is being that visible in your thought leadership and everything that you say and do that makes you better. Like, there's going to be a subset of people out there who will see that stuff and who will offer commentary and who will pick it apart. But that's a very small percentage of the folks who are out there. Like, in all likelihood, your clients never see any of this stuff, but all of your clients benefit from that because oftentimes you'll get fresh ideas when people push back and challenge this or that. And when you do that over the course of the next decade, that makes you so much better. I mean, I am 100% a product of that, a byproduct of putting Those ideas and those frameworks out every single day as people pick them apart and they offer feedback and as a result they get better. So I ultimately am the biggest beneficiary, beneficiary of that transparency. But if I, you know, stopped what I do, what I was doing today, or if I was running a firm, or if I did, I did private consulting, which I don't. But if I did, all of the people that I worked with in that capacity would be the beneficiaries of that right? Today's episode is sponsored in part by Team up, the people who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines and hire them directly. Did you know in the Philippines there's actually some really good talent tax talent out there? What did he just say? You can hire tax professionals in the Philippines? Of course you can. You can hire any type of talent. In fact, Big four's regionals, they all have huge offices in the Philippines. Hiring there looks, I mean it looks a lot like hiring in the States. Let me give you the profile of a recent actual hire team up made for a firm who was looking for a senior tax accountant. They had over 20 years of accounting experience. The last eight with US accounting firms working on tax, they've done it all. Partnerships, S Corp, C Corps, individuals, Trusts, proficient with QBO, LACERT, Go System Tax RS. Oh, gross. CCH Engagement, SurePrep Tax caddy. Nice firm hired this person. We think they cost. Drum roll please. 2,700 USD a month salary for a senior tax accountant in the Philippines. Usually gonna come between $2,220 $800 US USD per month. A lot of folks worry about whether this jeopardizes like your onshore pipeline. I always tell folks doing the two things they are not mutually exclusive. I need to be building talent onshore. But when this sort of talent is about a quarter of the cost offshore, the reality is I also need to be building talent offshore. I gotta be doing both. Team up. They just worked with accounting firms. Great place to start to learn more about them. Check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Maker Sub. I took some heat on social media lately because I said that, uh, nobody's crushing accounting AI. And if you think about it, the tech in the accounting vertical, there's like, I hate to say this, there's kind of no cool AI happening there. The cool AI is like meeting recorders, chatgpt stuff outside the accounting vertical. But there's one exception to that. And the exception is inside accounts payable makersub arguably the leader here. They're like an AI first accounts payable, like bill pay solution. They are driving innovation on what is literally the fastest changing part of accounting. The part of accounting AI is most disrupting AP and it's because vision models combined with large language models can get us way further than OCR ever could. Vision models, they can read everything down to like handwriting, way more accurate than OCR was. But then large language models, they can use a bit of intelligence to be like, does this pass the sniff test? Like, does this actually look correct? And the combination of those two things, like it can, it can take it way further than ever before. Makers have especially good at really hairy stuff. Pulling a huge number of like itemized things. All the, all the dumb ways that people invoice you that are like off the wall. Done some demos of maker sub actually on my YouTube channel if you want to see how it works in like five minutes. It is very, very good to learn more about makers of Check that out or check out the link to them down in the show notes. So two, two forms of giving it away. Small gives and big gives. I'll walk you through some examples and hopefully this is a little bit more practical to get your, your wheels turning. So small gives are, are like stuff that can come out of just a meeting with a client. In fact, you can even set up AI to give you a lot of these things automatically. And a manual version of this, you can go out and try it right now. Take a recent meeting transcript with a client and you may like, remember that meeting and be like, there wasn't anything novel in there. In all likelihood there was like the stuff that's novel for us or the stuff that's not novel for us, it's novel for somebody else. So if you're looking at a transcript and you're like, I don't know if there's anything actually good in there. In all likelihood there still was something useful. Take that full text Transcript, go to ChatGPT on the team plan importantly, because it is a client conversation. So we want the security of the ChatGPT team plan. Take that to ChatGPT and say, I'm trying to create some social media content that is just like giving away really, really valuable stuff for and then tell it the specific type of individual you want to be helpful to, be it millennial entrepreneurs, be it beekeepers, whatever that specificity looks like for you today. And I will come back and actually it will do a very good job of giving you stuff that you said through a very helpful lens. And that's, that's a manual version of doing this. There's also fully automated versions of this that we can build where let's say you get that prompt down and AI actually is giving you something really, really useful, but it's still requiring you to go out and do it manually. You can use a tool like, like Zapier, like N8N like make to actually make that happen automatically so that the trigger for the workflow is a new meeting transcript is ready. Whether you use, you know, Fireflies or something else, maybe fathom, most of these come with like support for Zapier and that sort of thing, so that anytime a new meeting transcript is ready, you can run an automated workflow. But basically what this looks like is the first step. The trigger is new transcript is ready. The second step is it makes an API call to OpenAI, does basically the exact same thing that you would do in a ChatGPT conversation. So you give it the prompt that you're using that you like, it pulls in the transcript and then it can send you the output from the AI model, it can email that to you. It could send you a slack message, a teams message, but in the end you've got this automated workflow running so that you know, 20 minutes after every meeting's done, you're getting a digest of it. Like, hey, here's some really smart things from that meeting that you could post to social media. And now those itty bitty gives, like the, the little insights, it's kind of on autopilot and then it's just up to you to go out and post it. Although to be honest, you can even automate the last like mile of that or pull in a social media manager or something like that that could help you with it. Those are small gives. And this sort of thing, like this day and age, in my opinion, you want to kind of just be habitual, like you want this to be a thing you're doing every single day because different people are walking by your shop every single day. And rather than focusing on these like, big lift amazing things, reality is social media in many ways. It's a volume game. It's more about consistency than it is taking the time to do something that's going to just totally knock people off of their socks every single day. So that's the first type of give is these small gives. The second type, the big gives, these can completely change your, your business. And this is where you put a little bit more effort into that thing. Whatever it looks like, maybe it's a, a framework or, or a useful thing that you're giving away. These ones involve a little bit more effort. And so a few examples. In my business, to get your wheels turning, we talk about, you know, systematizing your accounting firm and building your like internal service library. We built this huge spreadsheet basically that breaks down all of the services that accounting firms most commonly deliver. And what are all the varia within how those services are delivered. Basically an approach to systematize how the work gets done inside of your accounting firm. And this spreadsheet was like a big resource to start that process. Another recent one is this app database that we developed. Basically it's over a hundred apps for accounting firms, which ones I recommend, which ones I don't, and why. And it basically rolls up everything that I've heard from all the firms that I work with. It gives all of that information away to say like, here's the short list of stuff that you should consider. Because as an accounting firm owner, it's so hard to cut through the marketing BS and know like within a category there may be 20 tools. I mean, take practice management systems, there's like 40, 50 tools. I cut that down to a very short list of the only ones that you should consider. That took a bit of work to put that stuff together into a spreadsheet. Like that was probably a day's project. And we've, we've added to it over time other stuff like, you know, payroll platforms and reporting platforms, stuff like that. But anybody can come and grab that for free. But what I've done is I've stood it up on a landing page so that you have to provide your email address in order to get access to that. And so this is a bigger give. And I didn't start with like email walling it. I didn't start with putting it on a landing page. I started with just giving this away on social media and saw a huge sale signal. I saw a whole bunch of people that were really excited about this, that got a bunch of value out of it that were very thankful. And it's not until we saw that signal that I like made it even better and added more stuff and added information about like security of the systems, actually set up the landing page and set up the email capture and all that. This is the great thing about social media is you can test a ton of stuff to see what people get the most excited about. So my audience is firm owners. When we saw that they were very excited about this resource, we made it better. We put it behind an email wall. And this, I mean we, we launched this properly like 3 weeks ago and it got me like a thousand emails on my email list in a week, which is, which is more than we've ever added in a week's time. And this is the sort of thing that we need to be looking for. Like what's the resource that our icpr, our kind of ideal client, is going to get very, very excited about. This is a step into a niche that is a great opportunity. So if you find whatever this is for beekeepers or gym owners or whoever it is that you want to serve now you've got a great way to capture the email addresses of a bunch of these people. And whether or not you want to run like a weekly email newsletter or anything like that, having email addresses is a great way to, or like the first step to being able to remind these people that you exist. So anytime you have something helpful, as frequent or as infrequent as it is, you send an email out your email list like, hey, here's this resource that we developed or here's this 500 write up of this 500 word write up of this subject that I've kind of been like thinking about lately. Now that you have those people's email addresses, you're not reliant upon a social media algorithm showing them your post. Maybe they've taken a break from social media. Most people go through cycles, but you send that email, that's a much more direct delivery channel to get in touch with those people again. Now once you've got that sort of like bigger give anchor thing that people are obviously excited about and I'll just use this app database of mine as an example because it's something that you can understand. You're almost the customer in this situation. Right. What do you do next? Well, how do you connect that, that, that valuable giveaway to something that they can pay you for? Because at this point in time they haven't paid you for a thing. This is completely free. You've now built up some goodwill. They know who you are, they're appreciative of what you've done, and they're infinitely more likely to kind of be pulled further into what you do to pay you for something. In your case, this is where you probably want to design an offer like a one time standalone project that you'll do for people that connects nicely to that lead magnet. So let's say I work with dentists because most accountants seem to. Let's say you did something similar where you Took all the practice management systems for dentists and you put them on a big old huge comparison grid. This is the sort of thing people get totally geeked about. It doesn't even have to be opinionated. You don't have to say what one works great and what one doesn't. Just do, say, a humongous feature comparison. People love this stuff. They eat it up. There's like this, this FOMO anytime, anytime it comes to tech where people are worried that there's a better platform that they're missing out on. So you put this out there, let's say they really like it. What is a like one time project that we could do for prospective clients that would connect nicely with this? And I'm, I'm a big time proponent of these, these one time projects or offers because it gives you a chance to work with the client before going straight into recurring services. It lets you decide if this is actually somebody you want to work with on an ongoing basis. But the bigger thing is the client will pay you more for recurring services once they've had a good initial experience with you. So if you do this, this initial project, and these initial projects can be pretty turnkey like you, you've got kind of a canned deliverable. It doesn't require a ton of expertise to get people through this project because you do the same thing for everybody. So like it's not gonna be a huge drain on your, your most scarce professional staff. But when a client comes in without this initial project, they don't know anything about you. There's some risk baked into whether or not they will say yes to what you propose. And that risk will decrease their willingness to pay as opposed to them having a really good experience on this initial project. It eliminates a bunch of that risk of whether or not they will want to work with you. And I can do this initial project with clients who already have professional help. So this is like a, kind of an armor piercing strategy here where I can even do this project for folks who are already working with another accounting firm and may not be set on switching. By the way, these are vastly better clients than clients who have no professional help. Like the people who find themselves with no professional help. Those are generally not the best clients. So with this sort of upfront project, we're, we're solving two things. We are giving them a taste of working with you. So that when I then propose recurring services to them, that's probably going out the door at 20 to 40% more on day one. And that's where they will initially anchor their understanding of what they will always pay you. So it can always go up down the road. But when they start at a higher level from day one, in all likelihood that 20 to 40% increase, that is what like you're getting in perpetuity over what that like baseline engagement would have been had you not done that upfront project. So it makes all of your work more profitable. But second it gets more prospective clients into your web because there's a lot of people who will take you up on that one time project if it solves a meaningful pain who would not have otherwise taken you taking you up on recurring services. Right? Because they may already have professional help. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, the practice management system. You may have seen a lot of the content I've been putting out around building your your tech stack from scratch and why the order in which you pick your tech is so important. Because your core tools, you want them to do as many things as possible for you in Canopy, bro. Canopy's got features for days and not, not all just like bolted on sort of half baked features. Pretty polished stuff. Everything from like really, really well done document management to a super polished like client portal. All the client facing stuff's not going to be embarrassing. It looks really nice, a level of depth and workflow management down to things like like on the views, just being able to customize all of the columns and, and save those views. You know you work with apps sometimes it's like those views are super locked down. So irritating. Canopy's got a lot of those details right, the flexibility there that you need. And they're one of the only tools, cloud practice management systems that scale really well beyond like 30 or 40 employees. No tool can do everything perfectly for your firm. But when you're trying to build a more lean tech stack, a practice management system like can be, that'll do a lot of things for you, can help you run a more organized firm. Got some demos we've done of Canopy on my YouTube channel if you want to see how it works in like 5 minutes. Otherwise check out the link down in the show notes to learn more about Kanopy. This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about client billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't, you can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing cause it's, it's icky. You let things slide, you don't get paid you waste time, waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just, I didn't want to waste time chasing them and so I would just, I just eat it. Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our ar, it's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients, saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year because they didn't have to bill all that stuff manually. Man. With Ignition, we want more business with impressive online performance proposals. No more hustling. Hustling PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment up front or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on Ignition at Ignition app. But link in the show notes. So to take this all the way back to that lead magnet, that one thing that kind of hit on social media, you've now got proof that people are very interested in this thing. The next step is to connect that to an offer, something that someone will pay you for a limited scope project. And you make this connection probably with an email sequence. So if somebody grabs this lead magnet, you send them, you know, three emails. That kind of warms them further to you and, and bridges them from the lead magnet to the value of the offer. And if they open all three of these emails, like maybe you offer to hop on a call and just like have a 20 minute conversation, if they can talk with you live, it will like further break down their barriers to doing something with you. Or maybe you just pitch them on the offer then and you're like, hey, here's this one time project. It's $795. It takes two weeks for us to get it done. And here's what you're going to know. Here's the valuable thing that you're going to have by the end. Consider the quality of that lead. By the time they get through that initial project, how much they're willing to pay you. The fact that that person may already have other professional help and didn't even think that they would be shopping, but now they're so impressed with you that they're willing to explore coming to work with you, they're going to pay way more and they're probably A much better client because they weren't like, completely out of professional help to begin with. That is a vastly superior client to get into your web. But it all starts with giving it away. And the more valuable that thing you give away is, the more likely you're going to pull more of those folks into your web. Now there's all sorts of, like, micro optimizations of like, what's the right way to post this thing and get people to engage and this, that and the other thing. This is kind of a problem with overthinking and accountants. We love to overthink everything. You just got to start because most of us, we're not doing it today. Start small, maybe even build an automated way to get ideas for those small things you can give away every single day. But then when you're starting to see a need, take a couple hours to build something a little bit bigger, put that thing out and see what people think. I mean, it took me a while before I found something that was like, wildly popular like that. And so it's kind of like you don't plan on getting it right on the first try. And different niches will be more juicy than others because these things work so well. So if there's a killer offer and a killer lead magnet for a specific niche where those folks have have money to pay you for ongoing services, that makes it a better niche. If there is a really juicy lead magnet and offer that you can set up, that will get people excited. But none of that's going to happen for as long as we are trying to like, lock down our expertise and put it behind this paywall. Information needs to be free. In fact, if you want to win in the next era when everybody's using AI for everything. Let me give you, let me give you a little peek into the future when accounting firm owners five years from now turn to ChatGPT and ask it for strategic information about. I don't know whether or not to give information away or whether to put it behind a paywall. What's ChatGPT going to say? We are literally writing the fabric of the future of how people get information right now. Are you participating in it or not? A funny thing is going to happen when the next generation of accounting firm owners turn to AI for advice on all things about running their accounting firm. When I have more content out there on accounting firm thought leadership than anything else, you know what that is going to sound like? I'm sorry, it's. I'm sorry, but when I hoover is everything up and the response is what it finds online. And your stuff is. Is what it finds online. Like, you are in the driver's seat. You are. You're almost like bending the world to. To your will at that point, your point of view. And, like, for sure, there's risks to that and downsides to that, but you're either playing that game or you're not. And like, in 2025, people. People break down on either side of either being a consumer or a creator. Like, the vast majority of people. For. For every 10 people that engage. Sorry, for every one person that engages, there's 10 people who just lurk and this stuff isn't going away. Like, more people are living more and more of their lives online, and you kind of got to decide for yourself, do I want to be a creator or do I want to be a consumer? And I. It's fine. You don't identify as a creator. I'm not an influencer. I'm not any of these things. But I can tell you I would rather say aloud that cringe thing of, okay, I want to be a creator. I would sooner do that than give in to simply being a consumer until the end of time. Right? You have. You have so much to offer, like, so much to gain. We are in such a privileged place to talk with business owners all day, every day. Like most people, they may not know a business owner, like, period, but we have an unbelievable amount of access to really smart people who want our expertise. We learn a bunch just through the process of giving that expertise. And when we put that stuff on blast so that other people can benefit from it, man, it completely changes the opportunities that you're exposed to. I've been seeing more and more of you who I know listen to this posting online, and I love to see it. In fact, if you know, like, other listeners or even down in the comments say, like, hey, I'm trying to do this stuff. Here's my social media handle. Support each other. Get out there and do it. Try to make it a habit, because it makes a really, really big difference. Gang, thanks for being here. This is one that I'm obviously very passionate about. I'll see you in the next.