487 How To Get ChatGPT To Send You Accounting Clients

Every day, more and more people are Transitioning to using ChatGPT or even Google's AI overview to financers to find solution providers to make buying decisions. It's kind of the future of SEO. Like, a lot of us used to spend a lot of time and money figuring out how to rank on Google search results. But is that kind of going away in the age of AI showing up in these large language models like the LLMs talking about? She's actually been a core part of the strategy behind this very podcast, and there's a whole bunch of crossover for how the future of AI could help you build a better accounting firm. Think about all these conversations that are happening around the world with LLMs. What if that thing just started plugging? You started saying, oh, yeah, Greg. No, Greg's good at this stuff. Oh, no, you need to talk to Sheila. That's what we want, right? Let's talk about that today. How to turn AI into your firm's biggest hype. Man, We've talked about more targeted versions of this in the past where you can create your own, like, AI conversational agents, where it's, like, trained on your content and it will plug your services and stuff like that. But that's not really what we're talking about today. What we're talking about today is the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT every day and how Google search is evolving into something that's more AI oriented. And I can tell you myself, already I'm seeing ChatGPT and tools like it have an impact on how people find me. Like, we genuinely have folks joining my online community now who just heard about me on social media. And if you think about it, I mean, I am like, our strategy has been to make my thought leadership about accounting firms kind of unavoidable. Like, if you're hanging out on social media, like, one of the most common things I hear is if someone finds my stuff and they're new to my stuff, other people will be like, how is that even possible? Like, how are you just now finding Jason's stuff? Because, goodness sakes, just about every social media algorithm you go to, you're probably seeing a bunch of my stuff. But that's because you've engaged with it before and the algorithm is just giving you more of it. And if you're here listening to the podcast, you're probably into it, so keep serving up more of that stuff. But the vast majority of people these days, honestly, they're not on social media. Like, the number of people who will Google search Something compared to the number of people who will log into LinkedIn every week. I mean that's gotta be 20 to 1. Most accountants, like they're just, they're just not on social media as maybe we shouldn't, all of us shouldn't be, you know, and so this conversation around like how to get AI to be kind of your hype man, this might not be a conversation that we're having enough of right now because I would argue there's many more people using these tools every day than are using even social media Today. I'm at a AI event talking accounting AI. This is obviously going to be a subset of, of nerds who are into AI things who have kind of self selected into being at this event. But there's going to be about 100 accounting for monies here. And this is, this is the third one of these events that we've done. And we always start by polling folks. How many of you are using chatgpt a ton. And usually 65 to 70% of the people who are in attendance are, are reporting that they're using this a ton. Like many, many times every single day. In fact, Twyla Barehouse, one of the other speakers at this event, she starts her talk with having people raise their hands to say, how many of you have used ChatGPT or an AI assistant like it over 20 times in the last 24 hours and probably half the room raises their hands. And I still face a lot of folks, a lot of accountants. Anytime I talk about AI, there's still a lot of people in the comments who are like, I just, I don't get it. I'll believe it when I see it. It's all hype and it's like, man, then why is there such a delta between folks who use it really heavily and folks that don't like, there's, there's folks that are drinking the Kool Aid who understand what a significant shift this is and there's folks who just haven't gotten there yet. But at this point it seems like an inevitability that more and more of how we stay productive, how we find solution providers on. All that stuff's happening via AI. And even like we talked the other day about ChatGPT agent and what a significant development that is. Even the way that an autonomous tool makes decisions, you want that autonomous tool to know about you, right? That's kind of like what we're looking for here is embedding ourselves, our essence, what we do into the future. Machines that kind of like run things and make decisions for people. So let's get down to, like, brass tacks. How do we make this happen? So if you see this discussion in the wild, it's now being called Geo Generative Engine Optimization. And this is because many of the core tenants here are actually pretty similar to SEO, I.e. search engine optimization, or what you do to get yourself or your business to rank in Google search results. So if somebody searches Bookkeeper in Memphis, Tennessee, if we are nailing SEO, like, we want to be kind of in maybe the first five results there. And that's always been a tricky game to play because the rules around SEO are constantly changing. Like, nobody knows exactly how or has the exact formula for how Google arrives at those rankings. But we know a big factor is authoritativeness. And so backlinks have always been a big thing with SEO, or how many other websites are linking to your website. And that increase in kind of the perceived level of authoritativeness of you and what you do. And the very earliest versions of AI tools, like large language models going out and pulling information from the web, they were kind of doing the exact same thing. So, like, the very first version of ChatGPT that could browse the web was actually built on Bing, and it was just pulling Bing search results and injecting that stuff into the response. It's gotten a little bit more sophisticated than that now. So, for example, what's that? What's a little bit more detailed prompt? Let's say somebody's having a conversation with ChatGPT and they ask it. I need somebody who can keep my Xero accounting file up to date, and I prefer if I could meet with them in person. I'm in Austin, Texas. That's not something that you would ever type into Google. Right. In fact, that's so much of a word salad that I don't know what the results, like, Google would even give you. What these tools, AI tools are doing now, kind of behind the scenes, is they're actually doing like a number of searches based on that product prompt. So they're probably breaking out like the zero component, the bookkeeping component, the Austin, Texas component. It'll go out and actually do a number of searches to find results that are most relevant to pulling together, like, a complete answer to that question. It's kind of amazing how quickly that stuff happens now where we can just ask a question and it goes out and like, almost runs 5 or 10 different Google searches effectively for you and pulls that together into a cohesive result, taking into account, like, all the information on those web pages and it is like fundamentally different than how search engine optimization and that is fundamentally different than how Google has found us results in the past. And so if there's one thing that's a little different to SEO about this, it's that the questions people are asking or I guess it's the fact that they are asking questions. Like if somebody would have gone to Google three years ago and asked for this, it would say bookkeeper Memphis, Tennessee or zero bookkeeper Memphis, Tennessee. And so if there's a change I would make to how I put together information like blog posts or that sort of thing that could rank or, or that that would be helpful to AI, it would probably be to orient this stuff more around the questions that people are asking. So for example, maybe that person has a question about overtime rules or how tips are taxed in Memphis, Tennessee. Our jobs really, which is kind of wild if you think about it. If you're going to nail GEO is to be helpful to the AI because they're gonna, it's gonna go out and look at a whole bunch of different websites, but it's not gonna end up using information from all of them. Like some of those are going to win and be most relevant to the conversation. And in many ways we are like serving the AI. It's really funny. People talk about like when we reach AGI or artificial general intelligence, the notion of like us going to work for a bunch of robots. But then if you look at what actually working with AI looks like these days and take like software development, computer programming, you have these various different AI tools that are writing code for you, but then something doesn't work and you have all these disjointed systems. So something breaks and so you pull information from that system. You pull information from that system, you give it to the AI and you say fix this. And I like works through all that stuff and gives you something back. Doesn't it already feel like we're working for the robots a little bit? Like isn't that kind of already happening? And that's like what it feels like with GEO is like I have to make the thing that's most useful for that AI to increase the likelihood that what I say is what is put in front of that person. This episode is brought to you in part by Maker's Hub. Hot off the presses. We recently did a video on the main YouTube channel. If you've seen seen it yet, it's kind of like a masterclass for how to automate the accounts payable department. Soup to nuts from beginning to end from how you wrangle all the bills to how you extract the goodies off the bills to how you get them through like an accounting approval that is making sure that the stuff on the invoice is correct and that the correct accounting codes are associated with every single item on a bill to payment approval. Which is completely different because usually a different group of people have the keys to the castle to be able to make payment. But because most systems combine those two approvals, you end up with like the person who can make payments approving like the factual stuff on the bill when it's like they may not even actually know whether that was invoiced correctly or not clear through to like how payments get released, what accounts they're coming from, when they're going out the door. Super cool stuff. This is like the the area of accounting that AI has most impacted is accounts payable. I did a load of AP management in my firm. Even if you don't do it, you got clients who do it. I would super recommend actually you share that video we just did with clients that are doing this stuff because it completely changes how you build your in house accounting team. But for you as the firm, if you do this work, it's actually a big time opportunity right now. So get out there and do it. Learn more about Microsoft Check out the link down in the show notes this episode is brought to you in part by Client Hub. Client Hub then one of my recommended practice management systems for a while, but they're doing some really cool stuff. One of the first PMs investing heavily in workflow and if you followed my Maslow's hierarchy pyramid food chart of the tech needs of your accounting firm. Right now the workflow tools are getting super super good, but it almost feels wasteful to buy it. In addition to a practice management system, that's something Client Hub is working on. So they do all the practice management stuff that you want from the dashboards to track your work tasks that can be assigned to clients. A really good client portal, time tracking, CRM, email integration, all that stuff. But they've also got a really good QuickBooks and Xero integration for stuff like resolving uncategorized expenses, even uncategorized deposits, requesting receipts from clients, all like in the same client portal they already use. They're also doing some cool AI stuff, quote unquote Magic books review identify expense inconsistencies and other review items across the balance sheet. P and L ClientHub definitely worth checking out if you are a bookkeeping or cast practice And I love that they're going hard on workflow now. Learn more about them. Check out the link down in the show notes. Now, I mentioned the whole like in Memphis, Tennessee thing. This is something that's changed with AI assistance pretty significantly in the last six months that they've gotten like the web search stuff has gotten good enough to where it's now a really powerful tool to find like local, regional things. And we always talk about if you're going to invest any effort in marketing for your accounting firm, it has to be in a very, very targeted way. You have to pick a game that you can win. The game that I've picked that I can win is talking about accounting firm leadership. A game I couldn't win is talking about how to run professional services firms or how to run a service business or how to be an entrepreneur. That's a vastly, vastly more difficult game to win. And at least today, the only game I really have confidence playing is the accounting firm game. And so if you are thinking about who you want to work with and you're like, okay, maybe I'll talk about real estate, that's still an extremely hard game to play if you're going to do dental, honestly, even that is still a hard game to play. If you haven't done any content or social media or anything like that. Think like, what's a more specific version of this? Maybe that's single doc clinics, maybe that's working with associates, maybe that's working with DSOs, maybe that's working with orthodontists or endodontists or something more specific. You got to find a game that you can win. And the same applies to geo. And this is probably an opportunity for local folks. Like if you want to run a regional firm, like if you want to just work with folks within Memphis, Tennessee, this is a great new way to find folks. And so your website has to have that very, very clearly called out, is we want to work with people in this domain. That can't be something that we're afraid to say because we're afraid to say it, then AI assistants, just like browsing clients, will never find it. And so right now, if, if your location is just buried in the footer of your website or on the About Us page, that's not enough. This needs to be throughout your website. I mean, we need to be saying things like, we're the best solution for entrepreneurs running, you know, one to $5 million businesses in Memphis, Tennessee. And then the next time somebody is chatting with an AI assistant and they're like, I, I run a two and a half million dollar your business. I'm in Memphis or something nearby. It's vastly, vastly more likely that that thing will find your firm. And as, as you like, think through what does it look like to be helpful to the AI that's getting folks answers. It's a lot of the same things that we talk about really frequently around serving a very specific client avatar. We have this fear of doing anything but going general because going general means we can work with anybody. But as soon as you go general, nobody can find you because they, they can't tell the difference between you and literally everyone else that's super general. So, so we're afraid, we have this fear of like getting really specific on a landing page and we think about all the people for whom that landing page wouldn't be relevant to and they're all going to come now, they're just going to bounce. And we had that mindset of like, okay, of the a hundred people that would have visited my website this week, that means all but one of them, they're just going to leave when the bigger opportunity is the next hundred people that we will get who fit that bill and only find you because they fit that bill. And that's just a fundamentally like, easier, more profitable business to run. So the rules of the road here when it comes to marketing and all that largely look the same for winning in an age of geo. And for most of us, like the, the step we need to take is, is to just start. Like most of us haven't done a very compelling version of this or we've hired a third party company to come in and do this for you. And it's exceptionally rare that I hear of folks going to a marketing agency and being like, wow, yeah, this was, this was money well spent. Unfortunately, that usually doesn't work. For all the reasons that we're talking about is we haven't found that very specific person that we can make a compelling offer to that they'll get excited about. But then when we start out doing this stuff ourselves, social media content and all that, the stumbling blocks are the same. We're not speaking to a specific enough avatar, we're not doing enough volume. Like we haven't stuck with it long enough. And that's a hard game to keep playing when you don't know if it'll ever stop, like start working right. Like, I think that's what, that's what keeps us from starting is you're like, when will the ROI happen? And if I'M doing this for six months and it still hasn't happened then. I don't like the risk of that. So I'm not even going to start when the bigger opportunity, like, the bigger argument for starting is learning that skill of being able to capture attention and command, like the universe, to sort of bend to your will and be like, I know that we have this juicy thing, and I'm learning about the different ways to talk about this juicy thing that will attract people. It's also a bit of learning what version of that is sustainable for you, because we've got more tools than we've ever had to make content creation more accessible. I mean, a huge percentage of things that are posted on LinkedIn right now are AI generated. And I've. It's very rare that I do this, but we've had five or 10 posts that we've tested that have been 100% AI generated. And several of them have, like, racked up around 300 likes and 50 comments on LinkedIn. Like, they'll perform very, very well. But the ones that performed well, they were bangers because the underlying context that I gave it was very good. So it'd be like a juicy podcast episode that was maybe a little controversial or like some sort of tough love sort of stuff. I give it that context and I give it some instructions for how to write out a good LinkedIn post using this subject matter. So if the subject matter is good these days, AI is good enough to write something that will convert. Now, we've all seen, like, a really lame version of AI writing, so I would say use that as a first draft and then inject a little bit of humanity and storytelling into it. In fact, that's one of the biggest tells of AI writing is AI doesn't have any lived experience. And so it will speak in general terms. It'll say, most people. Xyz most people, rather than. I was on a call with 20 people doing this last week and somebody said this very explicit thing that's like a much more interesting version of writing than AI sort of speaking in general terms. But if we're playing a game that we can win, that is we're speaking to a very specific type of person. If we're working with taxidermists, you gotta find for yourself, like, what's the sustainable version of creating content? Stuff that will attract those people. Thought, leadership. And even when I say content, I think people kind of cringe because they're like, I'm not a content creator. It is just putting helpful things out into the universe. What's the sustainable version of that for you? Because it could literally be, well, I go on a walk every day. I can just do like a 10 minute voice memo and write like dictate some thoughts from meetings that I had yesterday or meetings I had during the workday today and just share some thoughts and then have AI write up a little 500 word thing for that. That's good. That's infinitely better than nothing. Maybe you just love having conversations about this stuff. That's a great opportunity to do blog posts that are like interviews. Maybe that's a podcast. That is an interview format. Starting this journey, like gets you to the version of that that you enjoy and that you can do sustainably. Because all else being equal, two accountants who are doing everything else, the same one that decides to be visible and put themself out there, everything about their career journey changes. Like those two trajectories look completely different when you're leaning into kind of the serendipity of putting stuff out there, but also developing the skill of being comfortable with being visible and talking about what we do. Like most of us are so bad about being self promotional and having confidence talking about what we do, I myself included. But it's like if you have literally devoted your life to something, I mean, think about that, like this is your profession, this is what you do. If you've literally devoted your life to something, but you can't even recommend yourself, man, we gotta get over that. And sometimes that comes from a place of I don't know what I'm better than anybody else at. Like I don't even, I don't have that confidence for myself. And so maybe it's that we haven't found the specific person and the specific framework that like unlocks this really meaningful transformation for someone so that we can really get excited and tell the world about it and have that 30 second elevator pitch to say like, yeah, no, most taxidermists have X, Y, Z problems, but we've got a team that has now done this with over 50 taxidermists. And here's what these people report back after we've enabled this transformation for them. So maybe it's just, maybe you just haven't found that yet. But, but learning to be self promotional in a non scummy way, it's definitely an art form. That being said, I would say like the way that I approach content, it's not even self promotional. Like it's just, it's being useful. Like that's the bar these days. If you can simply be relentlessly helpful at scale. That's really good content. So have your team collect all the questions that your clients are asking specifically the clients that you want to find more of. So like what are those a clients asking specifically? Collect all that stuff. If you're comfortable getting on video, like make a 60 second video explaining the answer to it. If that's not you, then do like a voice memo sort of brain dump into just a voicemail on your phone and chuck the transcript into ChatGPT and say give me a little write up on this. Start experimenting with what way is most sustainable for you. You'll find that stuff that's authentic and actually coming from you will vastly outperform what a marketing agency will do for you. Because these days people connect with people. If it was as simple as being able to hire a marketing agency and them create the best, most high performing content for you, then like, wouldn't everybody be doing that? Isn't that then the bar? Isn't that what every single post looks like? Which then kind of by definition makes it not perform the opportunity? The interesting thing is you and the experiences that you're having with your clients every single day. And we still have this. I don't know if entitlement is the right word, but we have this expectation that just by putting out the shingle to do this job, people will just stumble in and find us. And that will happen to a degree, like clients will make referrals and all that. But it's certainly not the optimized way to run our business. Right? And this is coming from someone that had a 2000 client firm that spent decades only taking referrals. We got loads of referrals from all of our clients and I can tell you those were not the best clients. Oftentimes your referrals skew more from your C and your D clients than they do your A and your B clients. Because oftentimes C and D clients are getting like a good deal. They want to tell their friends about it, Their friends come in, they expect a good deal and you like. It's this weird sort of social thing where you want to show appreciation and so you feel like you can't say no to them. Send you that, sending you that person. Rather than the proactive approach of going out and being like, who are our A clients right now? What's some stuff that we could create for people like them that would be helpful bring more of those people into our web. And these days that starts with like, what are we putting out into the Ether, that's not your website because nobody will ever find your website if they don't see something else first. Website is like further down the funnel. These days people discover things via Google searches, via social media, via talking with an AI assistant. It's only then if you get them to your website that your website even matters. And so for not doing anything beyond the website, I mean we are, we're talking about a, you know, thousand x version of the reach that you already have. Not even building a big following. Like it's just unless you're out there, unless you exist, people won't know what you do. Today's episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing, who helps you find talented offshore accountants, but now also nearshore accountants. So cloud account staffing, it's actually run by former accounting firm owners. They started hiring in the Philippines, had great luck, ended up hiring some local recruiters and the rest is history. But now they're expanding to Latin America and South Africa. The main benefit of this, if you've worked with folks in the Philippines, is having folks in different time zones makes it easier to align with your work schedule. Particularly if these are folks that are going to be either part of a pod that like needs to really be able to work like live shoulder to shoulder. And also if you're going to have these folks like serving clients directly in client facing roles. Now cloud account staffing has helped hundreds of accounting firms build teams in the Philippines. But now I've got more flexibility than ever to learn more. Check out the link down in the show notes. Hey, real quick. I want to invite you to my super excellent weekly newsletter. My newsletter was like the start of my thought leadership journey. It's where I try to collect what I think are the most important things for you to see every single week, sent to you every Wednesday morning. Make sure you don't miss any of the good stuff, right? Increasingly, we're also building into that some like of the best evergreen thought leadership I've ever done. Kind of make that like the most action packed, highest quality email you get to your inbox each week. Because listen, we're all busy, all right, you're not gonna see every single little thing that I put out. Goodness sakes, there's just too much. If you're not on my newsletter yet, check that out jasononfirms.com or I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. Last bit of advice, besides just being visible, being out there, like if you think about what I do, if you go to YouTube and you search anything accounting firm related, like, it's very hard to not find me. And YouTube's ultimately like a search engine. So that's a game where like, we have the quality of content and the volume of content, where we've, we've done very well there. And it's very hard not to find me on that platform. But we've never done any SEO. We don't do blog posts or anything like that. That's a huge opportunity. Probably five times the size of the YouTube opportunity is people just Google searching for specific things. And so we're missing a lot of folks because of that, especially because many of the people that Google search things are not social media folks. So it's like a new audience we haven't tapped into. But there's a very large body of information out there from me that's feeding these AI assistants because we have video transcripts. And these tools will look into like, they'll serve up text, they'll serve up videos, they'll serve up graphics, but they will look into the transcripts of videos to pull information from them, especially the Google AI assistants. So right now I perform better in like Gemini than I do and say chatgpt, which doesn't look into video transcripts. But as you're finding your own version of that. And how do I put like this body of thought leadership into some platform that I enjoy working on? Remember that the goal is always to get people off platform, is to get your hooks into folks directly. And so if step one is having some sort of thought leadership out there somewhere so that it at least exists, then step two is how do I get the folks who are drinking that Kool Aid into something where I can then have a direct interaction with them. And that's usually an email list. And that's not a hard thing to build. It's literally just having a landing page and giving people a reason to subscribe. The very basic version of that is, hey, if you liked this, I'll send out some thoughts like this every single week. It'll go directly to your. To your email inbox so you don't have to roll the dice on the algorithm actually showing you useful stuff. That's the basic version. The better version is actually giving them something of value for signing up. And this is, you know, a lead magnet is what most people would call that. Right now, the juiciest lead magnet that I have is my app recommendation database. We put it out earlier this year and folks super like it because it's a single sort of spreadsheet workbook with a whole bunch of tabs where you can see the only platforms that I recommend accounting firms use. And so they see kind of the premise of that. And they're like, oh, great, this is a great way to get some quick answers. Whether I agree with them or not, I at least want to see what Jason said take is. And that takes a landing page where you're trying to get their email address from something that may convert 10% of the time to like 50% of the time. Because they're like, oh, dang. You mean if I just give you my email, I can get these answers, like in the next 90 seconds? That is a higher ROI version of putting thought leadership out there is when we can end up having direct access to those individuals. So that future step that you think is valuable enough to share with that email list, it goes directly to them every single time. Because most of your social media posts, even if somebody follows you will not show up in that person's feed. They may not be scrolling social media that week. That post may have just not performed all that well. And so it's only going to get showed to a small number of folks who may be interested in what you talk about. But your email list, every time you send that out, like it shows up, that person's going deeper and building even more of a relationship with you. So a lot of the same best practices where we've, that we've talked about for like building a better client list, I would just say that AI assistants increase the importance of this because in an age where we're concerned about people just going to AI assistance for answers instead of us, I prefer the timeline where the AI assistant is actually getting answers from my content. So I think that's an opportunity. It's making all this stuff that we talk about a little bit more of an imperative. But then second, like, the way that people interact with these assistants is a little different than the just straight up Google days. It's more like looking for answers to specific questions, trying to solve a specific problem. And so our content and the things that we talk about probably need to lean a little bit more that way. Lean into the very common problems that the folks you're looking to work with have, the more rare those problems, the better. Just by the nature of how algorithms work and how people discover things. If the problem is I don't know how to read my P and L, that's a very, very common problem. Right? Like, folks in any sort of business don't understand that. But if you're working with taxidermists and there's specific compliance rules around this stuff or specific ways you got to track inventory or something that's unique about that type of business. Those are the answers to zero in on. And people are so appreciative when somebody puts those answers online for the first time. You generate so much goodwill. And because it is sort of embedded in that level of specificity, people will actually find it, including AI assistance. Which is kind of wild to think that every taxidermist that's having a conversation, I mean, imagine if, if ChatGPT knows this about the user, that they are a taxidermist. Maybe that's in their custom instructions. Maybe it's a memory. Every single time somebody has an interaction with that AI assistant, it's much more likely that it will end up talking about you or sharing some of your thought leadership. Just because we had that level of specificity in our website and our copy and how we talk about what we do. If you want to test this, like go out and like poke and prod, ask it questions about like accounting firm thought leadership or Jason Stats specifically, It's actually very interesting to see the kind of stuff that it comes back with, how it cites what you do and like that's what we want going forward is AI plugging what we do for people. Speaking of plugs, I'm in. I'm on the road right now at a series of live events and buddy, I would love to see you there. This week we had events in Chicago and Atlanta. In the next two weeks, we have events in Austin, in Dallas, in Minneapolis and in Boston. Those run from July 31st to August 8th. Totally free events. Would love to see you. There will be about 70 firm owners at each of these and just firm owners, firm leaders as well. Learn more about those. Head over to jasononfirms.com events if you got any stories about AI assistants sending you work, I would love to hear that. Drop that stuff in the comments. Maybe there's some angles we're not thinking about for this yet. Thanks for being here today. I'll catch you in the next one.