482 How Accounting Firms Can Capitalize On Changing Legislation

In the US we just got a massive overhaul. A big new tax bill, like, fairly big. And it represents an opportunity to, like, capture the attention of folks in a way that's pretty rare for us. So whether you're in the U.S. everybody else has their own version of this where a new bill comes out or even a new sort of considered change comes out. And immediately all of our clients are like, how does that impact me? And the person who's in the driver's seat to give them the best answer to that question, it is you. But so often we're like, it could all change still, but we'll wait and see how it pans out. And if we don't give them the answers that they want, they're gonna get them somewhere else. So let me run you through the four steps, how I approach something like this, because it's not often that we. That we, the advisors, we are under the spotlight. So let's make the most of it. So client calls you tomorrow. They're like, how's X, Y, and Z gonna impact me? What do you do? Usually you do some hemming and ha. And you're like, well, we'll see how this, that or the other thing happens. May depend a bit on how much you've actually looked into it thus far. But almost inevitably, we kind of sort of give them a half version of what they want. Based on what we know today. Here's what it probably looks like for you. Obviously, all subject to change. And if we're gonna do that in a very disorganized way where everybody's, you know, getting calls, different people in the firm, they're all kind of telling people different stuff. Isn't this an argument to, like, set up a pipeline, a. A more turnkey way to put this information out there? And. And again, like, I will say this 10 times. The blocker is, well, we. We don't know about X, Y, and Z yet. Then you say you don't know about those specific things. But what are the things that we know and what are the things that we don't know how to. How do we give them as much information as possible with a big old asterisk? It's still early. Like, people. People understand that. They don't expect you to have the crystal ball to know exactly how every little element is going to flesh out. But they're coming to us for answers, and if we just, like, stonewall them, like, that's. That's just a frustrating thing when your advisor is the last person who will give you advice about this, right? So I'll run you through four steps of how I approach something like this. I did a whole bunch of this during COVID relief, a couple examples of this before that with Tikta as well. I think the best practice for how to run kind of special projects like this has changed a bit in the last few years. But I'll run you through my approach. Number one, we want a landing page to funnel all of these folks with these questions too. So great example. To build your first squeeze page. Or it's got a bunch of different names, but the idea is basically this is your firm's website, forward slash, you know, our beautiful informational page or the name of the bill or some shorthand for it. Something that someone, when they hear it, they would know how to type it in ideally. So we put out a sort of 1040 workflow masterclass. As in, as in we did Jason on firms and it lives at jasonon firms.com forward/, 1040. That's pretty straightforward to remember, right? So spin up a landing page. And this landing page is your best single source of information. So it's first job is to educate people with all the basic, like all the, the very basic questions that you're getting over and over again from folks. This is a place that we can send them where they will get value. Remember though, these are normies going to this page, not experts, not people like you. So there's going to be some stuff that you think is interesting that a lot of people will be like. Yeah, not a big deal to me. Now if you serve various different profiles of people, this is where a landing page like this gets harder. Like if all I did was work with beekeepers, that landing page could be crazy valuable because it's very specific to them. If you work with two or three sort of main specializations, this may be a scenario where you have a modified version of that landing page for the dentists, for the taxidermists, and then for the, the kind of general clients, the more targeted the insights and the information can be, the better. So that's the first job is to give people value in, in a way that is more scalable than you taking calls with everybody. And if we are afraid of giving away information in a way that takes away from billable hours, man, we're playing the wrong game. The value that the client associates to their relationship with you is everything they get from you across all work. Which means if they can get value from a website, and that takes no incremental effort from me, they're doing that while I sleep, then that's value that I then that's value that at the end of the day we can capture one way or another. This is where moving to more sort of fixed recurring fee providing value in kind of one to many ways rather than just one to one ways is a great example of an opportunity like that that doesn't require you sitting on the phone with every single client to give them this information. Now in 2025 information is free. If they don't get that information from you, they'll get it from somewhere else. But application that's paid, that's what they're going to pay us to do is apply that information to their very specific situation. So the second job of this landing page is to pull them into what is number two here, a limited duration project. And the only the, the goal here is just to give them some sort of standardized deliverable that walks them through the impacts that this might have on them. And I say might because all throughout this is like what is our confidence level right now? We can, we can say that and all over this thing is going to be disclaimers that man, it's, it's still early but if you want this information right now we'll give it to you. But all this project is, is sort of a standardized deliverable, could be you know, a PDF sort of slide deck. That's probably the way that I would do it. Something a little bit more visual and it's templated like there may be certain slides that only apply to specific folks but the production of this template of this slide deck is templated and the driver is probably like a standardized work paper where we collect all the information that we need from that client. Now will there be like, you know, gaps that you have to fill in or exceptions for certain people? For sure. But if we have a standardized intake process for this project where you know, they opt in on the landing page and then they get a form they have to complete to gather this stuff. Bonus points if the form tool lets you pre fill answers for them. So when they come in you can already fill out all this stuff for them that you already know and there's not as much for them to do. Some practice management systems support this if you want a really good just standalone request tool Content snare it's probably the most powerful tool for just requests where that's all it does. It is like way more advanced than a traditional formidable build builder. It'll autosave, lets you do pre filled fields. It has field types that are basically spreadsheets where you can put amounts in and lock columns and all that very powerful tool content snare. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But we're trying to make this deliverable turnkey, right? And so we're going to gather a sort of fixed set of information from folks, organize that in some sort of standardized way, probably just like an Excel workpaper, some sort of transformation or thought goes into that and then it gets generated into like this probably like a PDF slide deck. And then if you want bonus points, a cool way to deliver this is actually you recording a short video like a loom, like five minutes, walking through their results from the slide deck and maybe coming back to several elements of the bill in all of these video deliverables. So how you do that video deliverable can be pretty much the same for each client that you show em, you know, maybe a few general things that you want to make sure they see and then you walk them through their specific slide deck and you've delivered something like super valuable for them. And maybe it includes, you know, a follow up call even if they want to, where they can book on a calendly link. I think what you'll find, as we do with other types of video delivery, is sending the client a video explainer in 80% of cases eliminates the need for a call. But by even just putting the calendly link in there, then at least you're not pushing them off. You're not saying you can't meet with me, I'm sending you a video. Instead you're saying, I'm going to send you this really helpful video. And if you still want to meet, my calendar is open to you. This episode is brought to you in part by Makers Hub, who's right now using AI to crush all things accounts payable. I was recently at scaling new heights in Orlando. Makers Hub kindly let us use their booth to host a meetup. We had over 100 people come out and hang and it was funny like the conversations meeting folks, because we were at the Makers Hub booth, a lot of conversations ended up that we talked about Makers Hub. And I was surprised the number of people who have listened to my stuff, watched my stuff, seen the Makers Hub ads and they're like, yeah, it's actually pretty freaking good. Heard some pretty cool stories about like really hairy client situations that Maker's Hub handled well. And that's kind of their sweet spot is complex accounts payable stuff. Do you do inventory management, receiving? Do you have to fuss with purchase orders? I sure hope you don't. And do you work with vendors that send stupid invoices that have all these different nuances and fiddly things? Megasub is the first tool I've seen that is malleable enough to literally on a vendor by vendor basis, pull those dumb details that ought to impact how an invoice gets processed, even even right down to handwritten text because they're using AI vision models. Really, really cool tool makers hub. Even if you don't do this stuff for your clients, I've got a bunch of videos demoing it on my YouTube channel. If you've got clients with gnarly needs like this, shoot them one of my videos. They'll be entertained for five to seven minutes and it truly like transforms. Transforms the entire accounts payable department. Really, really powerful stuff. Learn more about Makers up. Check out the link down in the show notes this episode is brought to you in part by Missive. Missive is a platform for managing email in a team. And if you've heard me talk about email, you know we need to break down the silos where we all are managing our own email inboxes. Please. Email is the receiving bay of your accounting firm. Let's take the team approach. Okay, now Missive. Actually a huge percentage of Missives users are accounting for probably because most practice management systems these days like with very few exceptions their email implementation like the client for sending emails kind of sucks. But also outlook awful place to manage team based inboxes. Missive we talk about like building your org chart around pods and managing client groups and all that stuff. Missive will let you set up like email management the same way in pods everybody can have their own inboxes, but you can also share those inboxes with well so people can help each other out, cover for each other. Makes it way easier to delegate the work that's coming from those emails. Really cool platform. Some G2 reviews from actual accountants. It massively improved their workflow. Makes inbox management a dream. Fantastic tool for my busy accounting firm to manage multiple inboxes for clients. Missive is all caps. Amazing and I can't live without it. If you are wasting too much time on email man, give Missive a look more info down in the show notes. So this project that we've stood up, this is presumably something people are paying, you know, anywhere from 400 to 4,000 or more, but they're paying for you to do this sort of one time analysis for them and the quality of the deliverable. I would argue is higher because we've put some work into what the final output looks like and it's like a kind of a cool style of delivery. But also the, the work of giving them an analysis is vastly simplified because we have a process for it. If we compare this to everyone in the team just taking these random phone calls and telling clients probably not very consistent things, that's not a like, very interesting way of delivering that information. The perceived value of something a little more polished, like with a video delivery, that's going to be much higher. Now whether people will pay for this all boils down to the offer and how compelling you can make that offer. Some concepts from Alex Hormozi's hundred million dollar offers because it is still like the very best literature around. How do I create something on a single webpage that people can read through, get excited about and will give me money to do? And we don't do this enough in accounting firms. In fact, I argue every single client relationship needs to start with a standalone project. Because if you immediately jump into recurring long term services with a client, for one, you don't know anything about them, but for two, they don't know anything about you, which limits what you can charge them because there's a lot of risk in them coming on board with you and that risk factors into the price they're willing to pay. But if we do a one time project with them and they're dazzled by that project, and it could even be something quick like these reports, I mean we're doing stuff like this during COVID where it would take less than 15 minutes to generate something like this. We had a standardized way of doing it and could charge really well for it. During COVID we were, we were definitely not out to make a pile of money, but we got this stuff to be really turnkey and people were dazzled by just like how polished it was and what we could give them. In fact, a lot of those templates I open sourced and put out online where people could create these cool looking reports around PPP loans and all that stuff. But when people are dazzled by that project, even if it only takes your team 15 minutes to do it, the price they're then willing to pay for ongoing services and it's much more so every single client at that point, potentially on day one, starts as a more profitable client. But the other interesting thing we've talked about on the podcast before, it's a concept from Blair Enz's most recent book, the Four Conversations. The notion of winning clients on like this, he calls it like this, armor piercing strategy of winning clients. Because oftentimes you try to win clients by doing more than anybody else. But that's a really hard business to run when you do more different things than anyone else. So instead, the better way to win good clients is by doing one thing that their current provider doesn't do. Because the best clients out there are not combing through Google reviews and are not stumbling into tax season without professional help. The best clients out there already have professional help and they are, you know, quote unquote loyal to them. And so how do I get that person to come over to my team? It's with just this, an armor piercing project, a one time project they do with you and, and then they learn about you and they see how you work and they're like, okay, this actually might be better than what I have right now. Now you're getting access to better clients than you ever would have otherwise. If the only terms on which you will work with people is just, well, you got to bring me all of your stuff for us to even talk to you. This is what makes stuff like regulatory change like this so exciting. And there's going to be people that come out of this podcast and they go and stand this up and do a really compelling version of it. And if I don't, there's a real likelihood that my client goes to the other firm who will give them the answers that I'm unwilling to give them. And again, these are not like concrete answers. We're not saying this is what your tax return will be next year. It doesn't have to be that concrete. We're telling them what we know with the information that we have today. So how juicy can we make this offer? On the landing page, a few concepts from $100 million offers. Please go through a hundred million dollar offers. If you haven't before, I'll put a link to that book down in the show. Notes. Regardless of what you think about Alex Hermosi is, it's very, very good. So the four, the four drivers of value from that book one, what is the dream outcome? Can you give them total confidence? So Here are the four drivers of value from that book. 1. The dream outcome. How exciting is this outcome for them? You know, for the entrepreneur to have a total understanding of what the new bill could do to their business, that's the dream outcome. Number two, perceived likelihood of achievement. Do they actually think that you can deliver? If they do, they're much likely more likely to commit to it. Right? So like, what are your credentials? What have you done? You know, that's probably a line on the landing page that's like, hey, we've invested this much time in understanding this insane amount of information from not only the bill, but other thought leadership around that literature. You want your client to think that you can actually deliver on it, or client or non client. I guess it doesn't have to be a client. Third driver of value, the time delay. It makes a difference if people think they can get a quick result. So these things, we ought to be turning them around in seven days at the least, like maybe 72 hours, assuming the client gets you everything that you need. The quicker that we can get them the goods and get them answers, the more valuable that is, believe it or not, this. And oftentimes we get this backwards. We think we have to give them this humongous thing. But if you look at, you know, other spineless influencers like influencers like me on the Internet, where they will stand up a course and try to sell a high volume of this course, they're not selling 10 hour courses. They're selling like a 40 minute transformation. The 10 hour course comes later. But the first thing that they sell to people is a, is a transformation that can happen quickly because you and I don't have 10 hours to spend on this thing. Right. You may commit to that down the road when you're super bought in and drinking the Kool Aid, but initially give me a short path, a fast path to that transformation, to something better. And so the time it takes to get this back, that that makes a big difference. Fourth driver of value, effort and sacrifice. How much work does it require from the other person? Maybe if they are say a cast client, we do their bookkeeping, we're kind of their accounting department in a box. Maybe this requires nothing from them. If that's the case, say that that's great. That's more valuable to them because they don't have to do any of the work. That's the four drivers of value. Five ways to enhance the offer Further, if you're an OG on the podcast, we've circled back to these before and I just think these are like such important things to understand how you enhance an offer. Because literally every time somebody says yes to a price or a proposal, you put in front of a client with just turning these dials and enhancing that offer a little bit, it makes every single thing more profitable. It's why I always really push like dedicated proposal tools that have a little bit more flexibility here and more power than the proposal solutions from our practice management systems and is the profitability of the entire firm boils down to that single screen where someone opts into working with you at a given price. So that screen in many ways is the most important screen in our entire business. Five ways from the book to enhance your offer. One. Scarcity. Limited seats. Can you do an infinite number of these? Of course you can't. So why not communicate that we're like apologetic about our capacity when it's like no you're you have limited capacity cuz you're in demand. Why not communicate that when, when we did a really big, really hard pricing change in my firm, we said hey, basically we got to cut down the client list by a third. But if you're getting this message, it's because we still want to work with you. This was in concert with a huge price increase. And the biggest thing we heard back, thanks. We're so happy we're still on the list. And we're all like whoa, we thought these people are going to be pissed that we like increase their prices a ton of. But so many people were like oh, we're just so glad that we're still on the list. And that was because they got an understanding of the scarcity and then we can only help so many people. So don't be afraid to say like if I'm putting a three tier proposal in front of somebody, that goal, that top option, hey, I only got seven of those left. Because the reality is there's only so many hours in a day that makes a really big difference. That will single handedly cause a lot more people to go in and choose that option. But even if it's just a single option, say we're going to run 40 of these analyses this month and we're down to 12 left. The fear of missing out. For the person on the other side, the fear of missing out is greater than the kind of pain of like you know, having to pay a little bit more or something like that. Okay. Second way to enhance the offer urgency. That's just deadlines. That's if you act today, if you act by the end of the week, we can get you in. That's the price going up in a week, that sort of thing. Third way to enhance an offer, bonuses or stacking. So these are complimentary add ons that accelerate or simplify success. So that could be, you know, if you get this to us today, we'll get it to you by the end of the week. Maybe it happens faster. This works sometimes if you have complimentary services or if you have a few different one time projects that you do, sometimes stacking these to get somebody over the hump is worthwhile. Especially if it's like a triple a potential client that you want to do new ongoing work with. Today's episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing who helps you find talented offshore and nearshore accountants to come to work for for your firm. It is run by former accountants and a cool thing they just launched is what they're calling a candidate portal. That is you can hop in, see the candidates they found that could come and work with your firm. Filter by years of experience, filter by software experience filter, filter by region. Are they in the Philippines, Latin America, South Africa? That matters. Depending on the role, is it important that the time zones align? Are they going to be doing anything cloud facing? But they've now got kind of a self service portal where you can go in, see the folks book interviews like in real time? No, like weird kind of recruiter gatekeeping. Right. And like I mentioned, cloud account staffing. The folks who put this company together and actually still run it to this day, they're former accounting promoters so they actually understand what you do and what it takes to like effectively integrate folks into your team. If you want to learn more about cloud accountant staffing, check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Mercury, the fintech platform that over 200,000 companies trust for banking and running their financials, finances. Cause traditional banking websites, banking apps, they what words are we allowed to use here? They're no good, they're very bad. You hop into Mercury you're like oh okay. This is like What a modern SaaS platform for managing this stuff in my business ought to look like. Like stuff like being able to invite clients to set up their own accounts, manage multi user stuff, manage access. It's actually pretty fully featured like invoicing, bill, pay card management and all the stuff you need for like moving money around wires, ach, all that stuff. The before and after of working with a client with a modern platform like Mercury versus a traditional bank. I mean if you're doing bookkeeping it's a tremendous time saver, vastly simplifies the month end close. But oftentimes we don't feel like we're, we don't feel like we can be opinionated about what bank they use. It's actually a great example of when we talk about in say a three tier proposal letting someone just rock up with whatever bank they want to use that's going to cost them more money for me. And at a certain point, honestly, that like, that may not even be an option. There is an easy solution for crusty old banks and the workflow issues that they create. I encourage you to check out Mercury. Like you will hop in there and be like, okay, you know, I get it. Okay. I can tell you that with confidence because it's what I use. Honest to Goodness HTG. You can even get up to $1,000 referral bonus per eligible client. Okay. Disclaimer time. Mercury is a fintech company, not a bank. Terms apply for bonus eligibility. See Show Notes for details. Learn more about Mercury. Yeah, look down there. Check out the show notes. Fourth way to enhance the offer guarantees or risk reversal. And this just seems, this is like unthinkable for folks in professional services firm, the idea that if they're not satisfied, they can request a refund. This isn't contingent fees, like we're not tying it to a tax outcome or something like that. But you see this all over the place. No money back, no, no questions asked, money back refund. People do this because the psychological impact of seeing that where they're like, oh no, I, I actually do have nothing to lose. The psychological impact of that is more beneficial than the number of folks who will actually ask for a refund, which is an incredibly small number of people. Like less than you expect. Can you do this in a professional services firm? You can. Like on a limited scope project like this, you absolutely can. And a lot of people hate that I say that, but I'm just, I'm just not into like the pearl clutching kind of old school way that we need to sell professional services. There's definitely a line there where it's like, I'm not going to do that on a, you know, a tax return or on a recurring monthly project or something like that. But all we're talking about is a little standalone thing where I'm trying to get new people in the door. I would consider it strongly. Last ways to enhance the offer. Naming a memorable outcome oriented name that says what it does, not what it is. Big, beautiful clarity. That's actually not bad, right? I mean, Right. Okay. This is kind of a fun little entrepreneurial challenge in an accounting firm. In fact, if you're a business, if you're the firm owner and you got a good sized team, this just reeks of the sort of thing that you'll get excited about and be like, yeah, we should do this. And then it never actually happens because it falls into your lap. This could be a super fun entrepreneurial challenge to put to your team. Put everything that I've said in front of them and consider, like, like task them with, how do we put this together in an interesting way? How do we build that landing page? What's the report that we would give them that we're comfortable with that isn't guaranteeing any outcomes by any means, but just saying with what we know today. Here's our take through your lens and how it applies to your specific situation. This is, this is the opportunity because we are at like peak excitement, peak interest from folks wanting to learn more about this stuff. Okay, I told you I was going to give you four things that I would do. That was number two. Number three, I'm definitely sending out an engagement to have them pay upfront for this. And if you've never done this before, this is a great way to get their payment information in your proposal platform so that the next time you're going to do an engagement with them, they can opt in the payment methods already there. You can auto bill it at the end of the project, or it can auto bill month over month. Even something as simple as the payment method already being in there will make somebody more likely to say yes to a proposal, as dumb as that sounds. Going back to the four drivers of value, this is number four, effort and sacrifice. It's easier just because it's easier. So for a project like this, I'm definitely, like pushing out a proposal. They're paying up front. Define the scope. Well, maybe there's one optional call at the end. Maybe there's a premium version where they get the video delivery, something like that. And then number four, keep these folks updated because more information will come out, right, whether this is the big beautiful bill, whether it's something else. Now we've got a list of people who have opted into wanting to know more about this stuff. And so if there are changes down the road, we can keep them updated. It takes me back a little bit to Covid, honestly. And what a. Oh, what a manic time that was with all the COVID relief and things changing every single day. I think that forced a lot of us to be a little more willing to say, here's what we know today, here's my advice today, but just know it might change tomorrow. I don't wanna go back to that. And I'm glad this, this is nowhere near the level of scrambling that that all was. But. But many of us learned during COVID that there were more efficient ways to get information out to people than taking calls one by one. Because in Covid like overnight, every, every single one of our clients wanted to get on the horn with us and we just couldn't. Like that was just, that was just impossible. So we had to get creative. That experience actually totally changed my life. That was the very first time I ever ran a webinar or my 80 year old firm had ever run a webinar. They went really well. The very first time that I started like building landing pages and pointing everybody to a single source of information. The very first time my firm had an email newsletter, we were sending out really good information every week or even more frequently. And then a whole bunch of non clients got on that newsletter because we were putting out good information. We had clients for the next three years who would come to us and be like, you know, how did, how did you hear about us? And they were like, we were on all your Covid stuff. I know you from those three or four webinars that you did. And we, and we just thought they were so helpful and that they remembered that that set our firm apart and they eventually came to work with us. These are rare opportunities. This isn't Covid level. But for entrepreneurs seeing all the headlines around this groundbreaking new tax bill and all the opinions everyone have about it, because it's kind of politicized, we have an opportunity to provide like a grounded resource because if you don't, you're literally their advisor who will. I'd encourage you to do it. You got any questions, any blockers or concerns, stuff you're scared about, Drop that stuff down in the comments too. We can talk more about it. This is the stuff that gets me amped up because it's an opportunity. Like stuff like this can kind of be a turning point in an accounting firm where you start working with a new type of person. It's also an opportunity to like go on podcast interviews and guest write a newsletter. The folks who are the hubs for of attention within a space, the consultants for the taxidermists. If you ever wanted to weigh in, this is a great opportunity. Speaking of great opportunities, live events coming up, including four new ones. If you're listening to this the day it comes out, I'm in LA with over a hundred accountants talking AI doing a one day AI conference. July 16th, I'm in Denver doing the same thing. July 22nd, I'm in Chicago. July 25th, I'm in Atlanta. But four new events after that claxon sound. Boop. July 31st, Austin, Texas August 1st, Dallas, Texas August 7th, Minneapolis, Minnesota August 8th, Boston, Massachusetts. To get tickets for these events, head over to jasononfirms.com events because I want to see you IRL, buddy. I think I've met, oh man, probably over a thousand accountants this year at event. I. I'll I think we're pushing like 40 events for the year now. A lot. Plenty. But it's the best because you come out to stuff like this and like, we can hang, we can meet, but you also meet a whole bunch of other local folks that are like, oh, you're into the same stuff too, and you leave with some new friends. And man, there's nothing better than making friends that do this stuff, that run accounting firms, especially if they're local and you can actually hang out. That's a big bonus. That's all I got for today. Thanks for coming and hanging and I'll see you in the next one. Sa.