495 Stop Marketing Your Accounting Firm. Do This Instead

I'll be honest with you. I think the last thing that most accounting firms need, this might be too hot of a take, is a marketing agency. I gotta elaborate on that, because there are places where marketing agencies can be very valuable. But the recipe for finding new customers because of the power and the reach that we have these days has never been simpler. And I actually think it's very encouraging for accountants where we're like, we don't identify as marketers, man. But I could tell you I know what these people need because I talk with them every single day. So today we're talking about what simply being useful at scale looks like, because that's what marketing is in 2025. There used to be these, like, you know, remember, like, the newsletter services that everybody would use and they'd all be sending out the same newsletters and all that stuff. The bar back then was like, do you have a newsletter? Are you set up on a newsletter platform? Cool. You can now do marketing. But that was never all that effective. These days, people have a direct connection to you. We have ways of putting what we do out in front of millions of people with. Which means the reward for simply being useful has never been greater. And if we step back and we acknowledge the unbelievable, like, amount of expertise we have and the unique position that we're in where we work with so many entrepreneurs and see into everything that they do in a way that, like, CFOs do not. Right. They work in a single company. If we can take that expertise and help people with it at scale, you will have more great clients than you ever know how to serve. I. I want to help you brainstorm ideas for how to do this today because it is what will ultimately set you apart from all the other firms out there and build a completely different relationship with those clients or soon to be clients. So I'm at a live event recently, and Guy comes up and he's consumed my content for a while. And he's like, I don't know that you realize just. Just how many people you're helping and just how big of an impact you're having on accounting firms around the world. He's like, so many of us are at a place where we are, like, just bought into your vision of how to run a firm. And if you say, this is the tool to use, this is the way to do it. This is the approach that works. A lot of us, like, we're just going to be like, okay, at this point, we just kind of trust you. He was kind of pushing me to like put out more resources and recognize that like, if there's something I want to build or something I want people to pay me for, that there's a big number of people that are out there and like, ready to jump on it. And that conversation, like, it's been taking up space in my head because it's something that I'm honestly uncomfortable with. Like, I put what I think is useful information out into the ether and if people want to take it, run with it, great. If not, no big deal. But I think it speaks to the power of just being useful. Like, you look at the things that other people do in support of the accounting profession, like software companies who build these humongous teams and raise money, and all these people are working around the clock. You know, in theory, in, in support of accountants. You compare that to what I do with a pretty small team where the North Star is like, what can we make or what can we put out that's useful today? It's not like, what's the 200 IQA to build this marketing funnel or what's this like universe breaking thing that the profession needs and how do we raise a bunch of money to go and build it? It's just like trying to be real, trying to be vulnerable and having, or I guess leaning into the conversations that it seems like people want to have and people need to have. I wish more, more accountants were more visible out in the world. I think, unfortunately, social media platforms and even conferences, there's a void of accountants who will happily get up on stage and get in front of a camera and talk about what real practitioners need to hear. And as long as that void is there, other people will fill it. Software companies will fill it, gurus will fill it. It's like if we don't take the mic, somebody else will. And especially with the advent of, you know, say, TikTok tax advice and just all of the influencer type folks who will put out really suspect advice online. The world has never been hungrier or, or better positioned for somebody that actually knows what the heck they're doing to put themselves out there. And this is very hard for us for so many reasons. And I think it's because we look at what like, influencers do. Like the, the more cringe influencers, right, that have videographers following themselves around and all that. That's not what we're talk. This is us just putting useful things out into the world because we're so uniquely positioned to be able to serve folks in very valuable ways. I mean, we are extremely in demand. But I think a lot of folks are still blocked at the idea that we shouldn't put out too much for free or something like that. And this is. I remember getting this question at like an Intuit conference maybe three years ago. They're like, we're starting to put some stuff out on Twitter, but don't know where to draw the line between what should be free and what we should give away. And my answer for this is always give everything away. And any argument to the contrary, I think misses just the scale of opportunity that every single social media algorithm is, but also overestimates how much we think people care about what we're saying and will remember what we're doing. I mean, we're 500 episodes into this podcast, right? And I still struggle with. Have we talked about that before? As if somebody's going to be like, oh, Jason, you, you did episode 72 on this. Find something new to talk about, bub. Like, man, nobody, nobody cares that much about you and nobody remembers what you say to the level where they're gonna be like, well, a month ago on LinkedIn, you posted this resource and what you just billed me for feels a little bit like that resource these days. Information. Information needs to be free and application needs to be paid. Our job is to take the frameworks, the best practices, all that stuff that we share online, and to put it through a specific client's lens, because it depends. And it's okay to put out information while it depends. It's the depends that we charge for. So I just want to riff on some ideas with you. Four examples from kind of my business and what I have found that worked really, really well that you could probably do a version of that is simply you going out and being useful to folks because that is going to bring you clients. It's going to bring you folks that have already built a relationship with you. So day one, the price they're willing to pay is going to look completely different and it's not going to feel scummy because we're actually helping people. In fact, this book right here, Simple Marketing for Smart People. I'll link it in the show notes. Super recommended. The whole book is like anti complex overthinking marketing for non marketing people. It's like if you're smart and you know your stuff already, you're already ahead of 99% of folks online. You just have to consistently put that valuable information out there. Okay, four ideas from my own business that I think you could borrow from to provide value to. Ideally a Specific type of entrepreneur, number one is community. It's any way to get these people together. I think we forget, especially as our firms get a little more and more specialized, what a unique hub we are of a specific type of person. Even if you're a generalist firm, how often do you bump into like business owners, entrepreneurs in the wild? It's very, very rare. It's like the coolest part of running a small firm or even working in a, a medium to small accounting firm, I think, is that you spend all day talking with like very successful people. Compared to the normal distribution, maybe very successful isn't the right framing. But a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners, and we forget just how much value there is in getting those people together. If you've ever hung out with a number of other accounting for monies and kind of had that transformational moment where you're like, okay, these people get it in a way that nobody else in my life does. Your clients, most of them have probably never had that experience. And simply by creating the space for them to have that shared experience, a really wild thing happens is they get value from each other, but they attribute that value back to you because you made the space for it. And this can be as simple as like hosting a dinner, going to a trade show, and if you know some of the folks are going to be at the trade show, like put a breakfast together, have them invite their friends, it is really as simple as that. I said community and I think when I say that people jump to online community, it's, it can be, you're literally just the one getting everybody together, whatever that looks like. Then when those people have this transformational experience, making a new friend or chatting with someone, they're going to be like, man, that was because Barb got us together. Thanks, Barb. And they will forever be indebted to you for that. And this is such a hack because creating those rooms is such a high leverage thing. You start with something very simple, a dinner, something like that. But over time, as the folks in your network grow, the more you can get them together, there's like this exponential power to those people making connections and, and you're still the one setting the table. Now if you haven't done this before, it's a very stressful, scary thing if you haven't had to play host before. Honestly, I can tell you though, the one thing that I always come away with when I put these sorts of things together as I build it all up in my head, and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna have to make sure everybody has a good time and I'm stressing about all these different things and you maybe build some programming into it to make sure everybody's having a good time and then everybody gets there. And in my experience the vibe usually just off the charts and all people want to do is hang out with each other. They're all deep in conversation and honestly anything you try to do oftentimes just gets in the way. And so if you're, you're spooked about like how do I make this useful for people? Just feed them, get them into a shared space. And honestly, in my experience the rest almost takes care of itself. 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 Accountant 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. And 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 gang, we're coming down to the wire on a limited series of live events that I'm running in partnership with Canopy. By the way, this episode sponsored in part by Canopy, we're running the events in Austin and Dallas and Minneapolis and in Boston, super fun half day events. You're going to get a pile of cpe, some free lunch, fill that tum tum. I'm going to be doing a keynote. I'm going to be doing a Q and A at those. We're going to have something like 70 firms out hanging out. You're going to meet some other smart folks, we're going to get to hang and you're going to leave with some new local friends. Nothing better than in person stuff. Like online stuff is great but man, like in person stuff just lands totally different. If you are anywhere near there, I would love to see you check out the links down in the show notes for all of those events. And let me know if you're going to make it number two. Another example for my business. This is probably the biggest lead magnet we've ever made, which kind of surprised me. It's, it's my app recommendation database. It's just a big old Google sheet. It's nothing fancy of like all of the tools in each sort of software category for accounting firms, whether I recommend them and whether I don't. And there's a version of this you can absolutely do in your space. So do you work with taxidermist, beekeepers, phlebotomists, whoever that is? You've no doubt used a bunch of tools in their back office for doing different types of jobs. And you've had clients come to you with this tool or that tool and you're like, man, I do not like that. Honestly, you can, I mean you can straight up swipe what I've got for like payroll recommendations and bill pay recommendations and stuff like that. Because in most industries we're going to recommend like to our clients the same things that I would recommend to you, the accounting firm. But something like between 3 and 4000 accounting firms have used those recommendations now at any given point in time there's like five to 10 people just hanging out in that Google sheet. And now I'm almost like building my LinkedIn sort of headline and profile page and all that just around that asset because people have to provide an email address to get access to it. And so I get them on a list and the whole like the whole reason you go out and you post to social media is to get some info from them so that you can take that conversation off platform. And so my headlines job is not to serve as like my cv, like my cover letter of all the things that I've ever done or show people this really big impressive business that I run, my CV or my, my LinkedIn headlines job or wherever you hang out on social, the one thing you want somebody to do is just go to something you made, usually exchange an email address for them, usually exchange an email address for it and they get some sort of value from that. That's the start. I think too often we make the mistake of like, no, the goal is I want them on recurring bookkeeping and tax and advisor, all these different things. It's never going to start there. Like we're jumping to marriage. What is one very, very quick win that you can give them that builds a bit of trust so that then they're willing to go deeper. Every space has their version of this for accounting for Motives. Think about the stressors that come with, you know, app selection. When you see that app database, there's a little bit of like we're scared of making the wrong choice, but there's also some fear that we're missing out on cool new options. Especially today as AI is so front of mind. You could simplify this down to like, you know, our database of, you know, 30 AI apps for beekeepers and whether or not we recommend them. That would be a very juicy lead magnet. Just as I say that, like, take any industry, make your version of that. I mean, do some research, look at what your clients use. Chuck that in, you know, chat, GPT, deep research, like what are some, a whole bunch of AI tools for this specific type of person. Pull that all together. My setup is that it is very opinionated because I'd like have the pretty deep knowledge of these different platforms and I talk with thousands of accounting firms and so when I can hear that they're not having a good experience with this practice management system that's going to make its way into my recommendations. If you don't have that yet, it can be less, it can be less opinionated, I guess. But that's still a valuable resource that gets you in the door with the type of folks you want to talk to. Two more examples from my content number three. We gave away 30 AI meeting prompts. We'll put links to each of these in the show notes if you haven't seen them, it was just a one page graphic of 30 meeting AI prompts that you can use with your meeting transcripts. So for example, this is maybe my favorite one. A prompt that basically harvests anything that the client said in that meeting that could be used as a testimonial for your firm. We just have to go to the client and ask for permission. But we, we suck so bad at asking for testimonials and those quotes, right? And I'm the same way in my business. Like, it just feels so yucky to have to ask for it. Even though anytime I do that people are like, oh for sure, dude. Like that's totally fine. Do you want me to give you a juicier one? But when we're having meetings and a client says something nice, imagine across all the client meetings in your team. Wouldn't it be great if we had an automated way to pull that stuff out of those meeting transcripts and circle back back with client and say like, hey, you said this really nice thing. Is there any way we could use this as a testimonial? This is what it would look like. Here's kind of a mockup. And almost always they're going to be like, totally happy to let you do that. So this, this little Asset is like 30 different prompts you can use to do interesting things with your meeting transcripts. People gobbled it up. Part of that was that it's like, oh, it's this free thing and I don't want to miss out on it. Like, and this may even be like, doubly attractive to accountants because we are, I don't know, maybe cheapskate's too extreme of a word. But, like, we're kind of wired to. We are wired for scarcity, to be maybe frugal. And so this dense visual of, like, all of these valuable things probably coupled with the fact that many of us are now using AI meeting recorders, but maybe not putting those transcripts to work yet. This thing has performed super well. I mean, I've gotten genuinely thousands of emails, email addresses from accounting firms just in exchange for this resource. And there's a version of this that almost certainly works in your space. Doesn't need to be AI prompts for meeting transcripts necessarily, though it certainly could be. I think everybody in every space is kind of figuring out, like, what are the best ways I can put AI to work. And if you give them a bunch of prompts they can swipe, people are going to like that. Last example I've got here. Number four is our service library template. This is kind of like my master framework for how you build out your workflow and repeatable systems in your firm. But there's a bunch of different versions of this you could do for different types of businesses from what the org chart looks like. Even if it's just the org chart for the finance department, we talked about the tech already. Like, even just a list of every practice management system for dentists, like, because there's loads of them. Put those 65 on a list. Use that as your starting point. People are going to love that. Sops, so processes. This is especially relevant if you're talking about, like, how to help, you know, game development studios build a more turnkey finance department. Great, let's build some SOPs for how you handle everything from AP to payroll. These are things that you can build once and they honestly don't really take all that long. In fact, don't overdo this. Like, you don't need to build videos into this. Like, don't overthink it and try to keep it simple and then test. Because for every one of these things, for me that's landed there's been three or four that like eh, just didn't land that well. And then if you have one that's super sticking for sure you could do a deeper dive version. But even then your goal is to give somebody value in the quickest way possible. Because if there's two versions here where it's like build a better finance tech stack in 90 seconds versus 90 minutes, that 90 second one is going to convert at 10x the rate of the 90 minute one. Now it doesn't mean that there aren't still people who would go on to the 90 minute version, but you don't start with that, you start with the easy win roast my finance tech stack, that's probably not a great one because roasting is kind of scared and requires some scary and requires some vulnerability. But the resource that can give them quick access to something that enables a quick transformation, that's where we want to start and we are, we're so suited to do this. It doesn't take all that much time and it is the very best form of marketing because you're not asking anybody for anything. You're building trust. And the more trust you've built with someone, the more likely they are to share what you do and then if they ever do come and work with you. Man, like wallets out like that is such a wildly different experience than somebody coming to you because they saw your Google reviews or something like that. Right. How do you get to a place where you're like almost the inevitable choice for accounting for tax, vcfo, whatever it is inside of a space right now, like I'm pretty hard to avoid on LinkedIn, on YouTube, stuff like that. It's just a product of being useful and doing that relentlessly and it does not require a big follower count. It really doesn't. That's one of the great things and one of the bad things about social media right now is the way social media used to work is that you would see the posts of the people that you follow. Now that almost doesn't matter. And TikTok brought this around where what it would show people was really just high performing stuff in the realms of what they're interested in and that's what it shows them. And every other social platform has moved the same way now. It's why if you engage with something on someone that you don't follow, it's very likely you're going to see posts from that person down the road in your feed, whether you follow them or not. For established folks with a bunch of followers, that kind of sucks. It means you got to stay on that treadmill and every post has got to be really good. For new folks without a following, this is great news for you. Means the next useful thing you make for a specific type of person, a bunch of those people can see it now. The goal is not vanity metrics. That's definitely a trap. When you are talking niche stuff, you're going to have a niche following. But the good news is you don't have to have that many in a niche following to completely transform your accounting firm. 10 great new clients and that is a different universe for 5 million and under firms that can completely reshape the direction of your business. I'd encourage you to think about that. What's one super useful thing that I can make in three hours or less? Don't overthink it in the beginning. Honestly, you don't even need to put it behind an email wall. This is what I do is actually like the first version of these useful things that I put out. I literally just link that thing and anybody can grab it. If it works well, then I'll put it behind an email sign up and I just use my, my email marketing platform for this and then when I plug it in the future. Because if you get this thing that works, you're going to be plugging it every week, every two weeks, and it will find new people every single time. Don't worry about repeating yourself. But then those people down the road, you get their email addresses. In my opinion, it's just not worth the added infrastructure until you know that thing's actually going to work. So there you have it. Go forth and be useful and do cool stuff like turn up for live events. If you're listening to this podcast, the day it comes out tomorrow I'm going to be in Minneapolis, Minnesota, all all bundled up. I love just saying stuff about cities that just gets the locals so wound up. I was in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. I posted a picture from my hotel room with Lake Michigan out the window. Posted a real ugly selfie and I said, beautiful morning in Chicago. It was, yeah, beautiful morning in Chicago. I've got a great view of the ocean because it's like Lake Michigan. It's humongous. Oh, and the number of people that engaged with that post. It was perfect. It was. I was so pleased with myself. People are like, well, you, Dumbness, Lake Michigan. I'm like, oh, no, pretty sure you're wrong because I'm in Illinois. It's just something special about calling cities by the wrong name. Anyways, Minneapolis going to be there tomorrow and then Boston on Friday. This is not my first Boston meetup. I think that's going to be a biggie. A big one each of these 50 to 100 accounting folk hanging out totally free events. Learn more about them at jasononfirms.com/events. Any cool lead magnets that you have put out into the wild. Useful stuff that you don't mind sharing down in the comments. Post that stuff for folks to get some ideas. I'll post links in the show notes for the stuff that I shared here. I'll see you in the next one.