458 This Is How You Find A More Profitable Client

It's a big world out there, gang. Until people know you exist, I promise you, you will have not found the best client for you yet. There's so many people out there with nuanced pains sitting on Scrooge McDuck money that are just waiting for somebody like you to come along, solve that pain in exchange for duffel bags of cash. And if you want to increase the odds of you finding those people and you being the solution, let's optimize for luck. Let's optimize for them finding you and be as visible as possible. And I know we aren't marketers the moment I say that word, people click off of my content. Today, I'm going to teach your Canon 20 super ideas straight in your forehead. And I. And my goal for you is by the end of this, you can take one of those where you're like, that actually sounds like a good time. And a new, excellent client finds you as a result. Let's get into it. Okay, pay attention. We got a lot of ground to cover. Number one, we talked about this last Friday. Create a free solution to a common industry pain. Oh, if you didn't hear last Friday's episode, it is so, so important just to have that one thing that'll make somebody skirt stop in their tracks and be like, oh, oh, I need that. And I'm actually happy to part with my email address in exchange for getting it. The best example in my business is my app database. Database of. Of all the apps I recommend for accounting firms, whether I recommend them and whether I don't and why. And that's valuable to you because you know how much it sucks to have to pick software? Making the wrong decision is expensive. What's the version of that for the person you're trying to serve? Once you have that really juicy thing, every single marketing effort that you ever do becomes higher roi. Because just take me, for example. Let's say I'm going to go out and give a talk at some, say, a lunch that a state society is running. None of these people have ever heard of Jason's stats. I get up on stage, I'm like, blah, blah, blah. Here's this thing. Maybe it's useful, maybe it's not. And then I leave. Will I get value from that? I'm going to walk in, I'm going to walk back out. If I get value from it, it's going to be like, did a conversation happen there? Maybe you know, they saw you and they remember you and something comes back around down the road. But it's marginal. Right. Will that actually be worthwhile? As opposed to, let's say I got this call to action that's like, hey, this, this app database for accounting firms. And the talk that I give is about the right and wrong ways to select tech for your firm. And I'm like, oh, man, it's so hard. Their marketing so good. It's easy to be fooled and to think, this good app and that, that's a bad app. And, oh, let me tell you the things that I've heard, having worked with thousands of firms. And then at one point in the talk, I'm like, I'll just give you all the answers. If you just go swipe this spreadsheet, in fact, you can have it for free. And they scan a QR code. I've done this at talks before. I have. We've done the math on this, like 85% of the room to not only scan the QR code, but then give you your email address to then get that thing. Because you worked them up into a lather and they're like, oh, I gotta have this now. And so let's compare the ROI of that talk to, to the ROI of how most people do talks where they rock up, they run through a slide deck, and that's it. Like, here's my email address. Or get in touch if you want to learn more. That sucks, man. And that's why this CTA, this free solution, is number one on this list of 20. Because once you have that thing, it makes any other marketing efforts that you do vastly more worthwhile. Okay. Number two, offer to work the booth for an industry software vendor at a trade show. And if I want to work with beekeepers software companies, man, they are, they are great folks to buddy up with because they have marketing budgets where it's somebody's job to spend that money every single quarter promoting their product and your expertise. They don't have it, but they want it. Lots of things we can do with that marketing budget. But when they go to conferences and they do the whole expo hall thing standing there, they get usually X number of tickets, oftentimes more than they actually use. They'll have extras. If not, they get additional tickets for their team at a steeply, steeply discounted cost. And what that enables for you is full access to everything at the conference in exchange for, I don't know, hustle in their booth for a half day or the whole time, if you really wanted to. Along the way, you're going to make relationships with the folks from this software company. But you're also going to get into the industry show for free. Totally, totally worth doing if you don't know what that industry looks like yet. If you're still like, I'm not sure where I want to settle down, even though it feels like an investment, going to an industry show like this is really useful because you'll figure out if it's something you want to do really fast. And speed, Speed's helpful because if it takes me six months going down a path, trying to figure out if I want to work with golf caddies or not, and then at the end of that six months, I find out I don't, I would have much rather figure that out within one month's time. Right. And if you're doing this for the first time, I, I guarantee you, you will not guess what is the best niche for me on your first try. But I guarantee what you will do is you will learn the skill of specialization and be inf. Better at it the second time, the third time, the fourth time. That's why it's worth doing. If I can implore you to do like one thing or have kind of one takeaway from this list, be biased to action. Stop overthinking, start doing. Because that's how you learn. Okay, number two, go work for an industry software vendor at a trade show. Number three, guest write an industry newsletter. I'll tell you knuckleheads like me that write weekly newsletters, it's a job, it's a, it's a hamster wheel. Every single week, you got to have something. And guest writing, it's usually something that person is actually very open to, especially if you have a type of expertise that will be really, really valuable to your readers and you do. Like the thing about being an accountant for X, for a specific vertical, specific type of person, people get really, really excited when they hear that because they all know the pain of working with a generalist that doesn't understand what they do. So if you can be like, hey, let's talk about the new tax bill that's been proposed for beekeep beekeepers, or hey, let's talk about what, like most beekeeping businesses get wrong in their finance tech stack, that's incredibly valuable. Like, if working with you is normally $150 an hour thing, then somebody who runs a newsletter, many of them will be very happy to have you come in and guest write it. And part of that is going to be like, you'll be able to have a call to action in there to go swipe that really valuable lead magnet or just to join your email list. Okay, number four, assign a member of your team to go out and hang in an online community for an industry that you want to serve. Online communities. I keep thinking we're at peak online community and I still don't know if we are. At some point it's got to come back down, but there's little bubbles that have popped up for all types of people on the Internet. And if you can just go hang out there, don't shill, but go hang out there and be helpful. It's a great way to build your business. In fact, Brandon hall, his firm's done this for years with real estate people. They will just go into these big communities, they have some of their own too, and just hang out, answer questions, be helpful folks, then find their podcast that's about this. They learn that their podcast is run by this firm who's kind of like the guru for real estate folks. And it's how people learn that they exist. Totally worth doing in a firm full of people who are like, we're accountants, we're not marketers. Who's a member of your team who can simply be helpful? Like, that's good marketing. Just being helpful. Today's episode is sponsored in part by TeamUp, 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 tax talent out there? What did he just say? You can hire tax professionals in the Philippines? Of course you can hire any type of 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'd done it all. Partnerships, S Corps, C Corps, Individuals trusts. Proficient with qbo. Lacert. Go System Tax rs. Oh gross. CCH engagement. Sure Prep Tax Caddy. Nice firm hired this person. What do you think they cost? Drumroll please. 2,700 USD a month salary for a senior tax accountant in the Philippines. Usually going to come between $2,200 and $2,800 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 excluded. 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 got to be doing both. Team up, they just work 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 Makers Hub. I took some heat on social media lately because I said that 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 Oculus OCR ever could. Visual 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. Maker Sub 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 Makers Hub actually on my YouTube channel if you want to see how it works in like five minutes. It is very, very good. Learn more about makers of Check that out. Or check out the link to them down in the show. Notes Number five, Issue a report about how much money SMB owners make in the industry that you support. People love reports and most reports are pretty dubious in nature. Like, how authoritative is this information really? We've talked in the past stories about Barbara Corcoran, the New York real estate lady who's on Shark Tank, about how like tremendously grew her business by putting out reports. And then news outlets would pick it up and they would share a couple data metrics from that report. But as soon as that happens, you're the expert. Like, again, this is an example of perception being reality. You put out the report, it gets picked up in, you know, some sort of newsfeed or, or something like that. Somebody writes about it on a, on a blog or talks about it on a Podcast. And now simply because you put out the report, you're the expert. That's the goal. As much as that as as that kills us, because we're technical people and we want our work to stand out on merit and our technical capabilities. Perception is reality. Like, as far as the client's concerned, perception is reality. That's what they'll pay for. And as much as that grinds our gears, we have to invest in perception as a result. Now, perception with nothing behind it, that sucks. We don't want to do that. Right. But having everything behind it and not investing in the perception, which is what 90% of accounting firms do, we could be very good at the technical stuff, but we don't pay attention to anything else. Then you got a crappy client experience. People don't understand what's going on, and they have like, very little excitement to pay you very well because they're like, I feel like I'm just getting jerked around. Okay, number six, pitch yourself to be interviewed on a podcast similar to how got online communities for every little bubble. These days, there's podcasts for just about every single industry. You have a very specific type of expertise. Get in touch with the podcast host. This generally works for smaller podcasts. For bigger podcasts, you probably have somebody in charge of booking somehow. See if you can weasel your way into that network. And the social proof here is like, bro, I run a firm. People pay me X dollars an hour to give them advice, and it's a firm for the podcast's audience. So there's a tremendous amount of valuable information that I can give people by coming on your podcast. Because there's a podcast hosts get a ton of outreach right now. That's like really crappy outreach, usually from PR firms just trying to get their person into an interview. Don't be that. Call out some recent episodes and tie that into like, hey, I can put this through the lens of, you know, bookkeeping or tax or whatever. You could actually speak to. Number seven, have your team collect quote client questions throughout the week and post your answers to social media. Obviously, they're not going to be about the clients themselves. And sometimes they're like, what if. What are the clients? These. That I just. I just put that answer out there that the question that they asked. But they. But they had to pay me for that answer. They can be bent out of shape. No, like, the version of the answer that you gave them is the one applied to their circumstances. Information is free these days, and the actual questions that your clients are asking are the Best predictor we have of what questions other people who are not on the client list would ask. Right. And so this could be like harvested automatically from meeting transcripts. It could be stuff that comes up from emails. But like crowdsource this stuff from their team, from your team, have everybody just dump it into a shared spreadsheet or something like that. And like, this is going to make content creation so much easier because when you take a call with a client and they ask you that question, you can answer that question in your sleep. That's not hard. But when you turn to like a LinkedIn, you know, new posts, you're like, oh yeah, I don't, I don't know, I don't know what to say. Just treat it the same way that you work with clients. Like you have expertise to share. I mean you can literally just write the question, write the answer. Like, don't even, don't even complicate things any more than that. Now, number eight, landside baseball and social media strategy here for the questions and answers that are highest performing on social. So let's say you do that every single day. You post a client question and an answer for a week. One of those will outperform the others. Maybe they all get one like and one of them gets two likes. Nice. We got an outlier. Congratulations. Now what we're going to do is we're going to record a video answering that question, a short form video. Literally just grab your smartphone, don't worry about what you look like. Nobody gives a crap about you. They only give a crap about what you have to do for them. Record yourself answering that question over video. This is the highest performing question from the last week. Now post it on Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever, TikTok. And this enables like a different level of connection with you than just a text post. Most of this stuff, the really high performing stuff that you see on social media, it's recycled stuff that has worked in the past. Very little of it is new. Because when the same stuff will work time and time again, it's risky to try to do something new, to try to reinvent the wheel. This is the case for social media stuff like LinkedIn. Right now it's the case for YouTube. Hugely the vast majority of YouTube videos follow the same formats. Most people will only post a video with a certain style of packaging in a certain format because they've seen a hundred other examples of it perform well. As I record this yesterday I had a LinkedIn post that went like really huge. It's a post that I did four months ago and I changed like two or three sentences and the picture, I changed the picture and it did really freaking good again. Unfortunately, that's, that's kind of the game right now, but it means you don't have to reinvent the wheel from scratch every single time. Okay, number nine, let an industry software company. Remember we talked about going to a trade show with a software company. Let an industry software company use a blog post that you've already written. You got anything sitting on the shelf? I mean, you could write something new for them as well. But that marketing department we talked about with the budget, like there are hungry hungry hippos when it comes to any sort of authoritative content and you can provide it. And as part of that, like, be sure to think about like what is in the this for me. If you're just getting paid for it, that kind of sucks. If you can have a call to action to like a lead magnet or to get people like readers on your email list, that's much better. I'm going to take that 11 times out of 10 instead of them paying me a couple hundred bucks to write it. Idea number 10, propose a talk to an industry consultant who runs monthly calls with their clients. Every single industry has consultants who are already hubs of the same type of people that you want to serve. Similar to someone who's writing a newsletter. Those consultants have an obligation to provide ongoing value to the folks they work with. And if they can pull in someone who those people would otherwise have had to pay to get value from, they will happily be like, hey, could you run my my July session and talk about tax stuff or something like that. You're now talking to a collection of people who are already used to paying top dollar for help from, from a professional buddy that is a great group of people to get in front of. Literally all you got to do search Google, search social media platforms, whatever industry you're looking at, consultant. And they grow like weeds in every industry. Number 11, make friends with a specialized bookkeeper or tax pro niched into the industry that you're looking at. If you're a bookkeeper, make friends with a tax pro that's serving whatever industry you're serving. Same going the opposite way. If you're a tax pro, find a fractional cfo, find a bookkeeper, something like that that's serving the same industry. Don't come in with, hey, can you give me a bunch of clients and boy wealth advisors, they love to do this. Come in to tax pro and to talk to tax pros. And be like, hey, there's a, there's a lot of, a lot of synergies here. We should, we should refer stuff. And you're like, I don't, I don't know who you are, buddy. Don't come in and do that. If you're a tax pro, be like, hey, is there a way that I can provide value to your clients? Like run a webinar or anything like that? Same going the opposite way. Start with being helpful and all the, all that other stuff will take care of itself. Number 12, provide free services to a spineless industry influencer. I don't care what you think about them. Influencers, I mean it's right in the name. People make buying decisions based on what influencers say. And like there's in many ways no greater social proof than somebody that you look up to using something. I actually talk about this in tech selection quite a bit. If there's a firm that you look up to and they're using a system that's like, you know, maybe in your top five or something like that, sometimes the best answer is just to steal what they do. The same thing applies for professional help. If there's somebody who is looked up to in the industry and you can become their partner and they'll even let you be like, you know, used by top beekeepers like Richard McGuffin. And then someone comes along and like, oh my gosh, this is this who Richard McGuffin uses? They're going to be, they're going to be super excited and come work with you. 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 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. And Canopy, bro, Canopy's got features for days and 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 is 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 can be 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 Canopy 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 five minutes. Otherwise, check out the link down in the show notes to learn more about Canopy. Hey, quick word from one of today's sponsors. Me. Me. Yes, I run a community, realize that is for accounting firm owners. And realize it's kind of the secret behind how I've done all of my content and been able to like, financially turn thought leadership into a business. About a hundred firm owners in there realize is a systematic way to build connections with other peer firm owners. It's not a framework for how to run a firm. It's a way to introduce you to other super cool firm owners. Right now we're putting together small groups so you can have a group of like 5, 6, 7 other firm owners just like you that you meet with every single month run very similar firms. Having this for me, totally transformed firm. Running my North Star. Like, my goal for you coming into this group is to make a new best friend, somebody that runs a firm, because that was what I needed in my journey. The whole community is built around that. It's called Realize. Link down in the show notes if you want to learn more. Number 13. Highlight a successful industry veteran each month with an interview. This is like, I mean, we're at like peak interview podcast right now. I'm not super into interview podcasts. Besides, like kind of the top five where it's like, it's like real big, smart people talking. Otherwise, I'm more interested in what a specific person has to say. And if all your podcast is just an interview podcast, I'm interested in the people who themselves have something interesting to say. But that being said, nothing pierces the old stranger danger veil faster than, hey, do you want to come on my podcast? And you have to be mindful of like, are there other podcasts in the space? But just look at the accounting space. At one point, I rounded up a list and there were over like 40 or 50 podcasts for accounting firms. But still, people are flattered to be interviewed on a, on a podcast for accounting firms, right? And it wouldn't even need to be a podcast interview. Like, if you write a newsletter, you could do a, you could do a, even an asynchronous interview where they answer a few questions and you put those answers in your newsletter. But fact remains, people feel flattered by being asked to be interviewed. And sometimes that's a good way in. It's also a great way to just like build a relationship with someone that you wouldn't otherwise know. I mean, you can literally go down the list of folks that you want to become clients and interview them. And that's a hell of a way in, right? Like, don't abuse that. But it's just a matter of time before all the sales reps at every software company have their own podcast and they just spam podcast interview invitations to accountants all day, every day. And they're like, oh, I would love to come on this podcast. And that's just their way of booking you on a 20 minute call. That sounds. That's terrible. That's the worst timeline. Number 14. Redact the transcript of a recent advisory meeting and use AI to generate a list of hypothetical questions. This is kind of like the one where your team gathers questions throughout the week, but maybe you're out of questions. AI can be really good at like taking all the subject matter that was discussed. It's actually really good at like creating quizzes and stuff like that. And this is sort of similar. You can have AI generate a list of questions that were answered in that discussion. And that just gives you some fodder for content that you can post on social media. Just Q and a stuff. Number 15. Create the only newsletter talking finance in brackets industry. So there may be a bunch of beekeeping newsletters already, but is anybody talking beekeeping taxes or beekeeping finance or dental back office automation? Like create something so specific that the right people will stop in their tracks and be like, oh, I got to be on that one. I didn't realize that this was a thing. If you can be the author of that. The more specific it is, the lower the bar is for how polished and pretty and perfect it needs to be. And that's, that's a game that I'm interested in playing where the bar is nice and low. Number 16. Rent space on the highest performing SEO articles in an industry. This can actually be done for cheaper than you'd think. So how to start a beekeeping company. There's going to be top performing SEO articles where people put in a lot of work to be like the top ranking things in Google. You can reach out to these people and be like, hey, can I have a paragraph in here that's like a sponsored placement of, you know, we're the best tax pros for beekeepers or the best. The best beekeeping bookies. And it's usually, I mean, oftentimes it depends on how big of a keyword it is, but you can do this for a couple hundred bucks a month. And I mean, the real grift here is if then those sites are scraped and you start showing up in large language models where someone goes to chatbots and is like, hey, how do I find a tax pro for beekeepers? And it's like, well, wouldn't you know, it turns out this one is actually the best. In fact, people are finding my stuff increasingly from LLMs. Kind of wild. But anyways, top performing SEO articles, you could probably weasel your way into those. Number 17, crowdsource gathering an anonymized key industry metric that's typically private. Good example of this in our space. Big four transparency. They've got like thousands of staff accountants, like not owners, but accountants who submit their salaries and who they work for and what their role is and all that. And now Big four transparency have this giant database of what people make and they give that information away so that like, if you're an accountant, you can use that to kind of negotiate like, or at least understand, am I being paid appropriately? But they also do stuff with that data to like support accounting firms to ensure that they are paying folks what they need to be paid. Like, there's various ways to use that data, but in terms of a lead magnet, like that's a great way to get people onto your email list or something like that if they want to be able to see that data. Number 18, pitch a webinar topic to an industry insurance provider. That's a great idea. It's boring, af, but that's real. And honestly, this boring stuff like this that oftentimes is a great way in. Number 19, create an industry ecosystem map visualization tagging those featured. We've all seen this now, the graphics of all the tools in a space, but then there's like quadrants that are like this type of tool, that type of tool, putting all the companies in there, but then you actually tag those companies for you. It's great to be on the map of the software companies inside of a space because again, they've got big budgets to put out content and get in front of the same people that you want to get in front of. And so putting out a visualization like this and then tagging the companies involved could start some great conversations. And that stuff generally performs pretty well. Those visualizations get pretty good engagement. Number 20. Join the advisory board of an industry association. If there's a way that you can get involved with that association, that's like an immediate boost to your legitimacy. If there's an association that's well respected within an industry and you're part of it, but you also run an accounting firm that's pretty, like, rare air. Rarefied air. You know what I mean? For other people in that space, it makes you immediately seem super legit, right? So, like, if they've never seen somebody in the space and they see you have the credential that, like, you're, you're on a board with this association, but you're a tax pro or bookkeeper or something like that, they're going to be like, oh, wow, like, they have a deep knowledge of this stuff, and you immediately are ahead of 99% of other people. And those landing pages that, like, may not have a lot of meat to them, but they say that they're for those people, right? Like, this is you, a person, an identity being grounded in a very specific type of expertise in a way that can't be faked with a fancy landing page. And oftentimes, like, it's. Those boards are like, you're on a meeting or two a month, and it's not a very big commitment. And you actually make some really good connections along the way, too. You meet the people that are on those boards. Probably worth doing. But think about, like, is that something that, you know, like, if I had to commit to that for six months and like the golf caddy thing, if I find out in two months, I don't actually want to be doing this stuff, probably just don't commit yourself to something unless, you know, like, hey, I want to stick around here for a bit. You getting good ideas from that? Anything you're excited about, put that stuff down in the comments. Engagement on this, it matters. Like, engagement on any other stuff, right? I appreciate the folks that hop in and share their thoughts. Any other ideas for how to get in front of people? Stuff that you've done that has worked for you in the past? We heard from somebody a month or two ago that, like, posted in this super niche subreddit, like, answering a question, and a whole bunch of people jumped on and they're like, whoa, you're a tax pro for this stuff? And they booked like 10 or 15 meetings from it. The only thing, like, the worst thing you can do is nothing. Like, try not to overthink this stuff. Just start, just be visible. And man, the more you're out there, the more good stuff just happens that you couldn't have otherwise, like, willed into being. Like, it's so much about just building the habit of being visible, being out there, and being helpful. And then things, in many ways, kind of fall into place themselves. I am a living, breathing example of that. Gang. Hey. It's so good to see you today. Look. Looking smart today. I'll see you back here for the next one. Until then.