565 The One Sentence That Lands Better Clients

You need to be able to tell me in 10 words or less who you help and how you will make them more money. Not what do you do, what services do you offer, but who you help and how you make them more money. And once you nail this single statement for your accounting firm, it becomes sort of this galvanizing vision for your firm, the people who work with you around. What we're trying to do but then is also a killer hook for finding your next client. Because I'll tell you the thing that is much more juicy than finding another accountant to do my taxes or do my books is to find the person that's gonna make me more money. What does the version of that look like for your firm today? I'm gonna show you a bunch of examples of really, really good versions of this. How to come up with your own and the ingredients that make a good one. That is one that will convert not to get you just more clients, but to get you clients that will pay you better than the clients you have today. Big promises. Come on in, let's. Okay, let me give you five of these sentences. I'm gonna give you a bunch more later, but five one liners firms can use and I'll tell you why I think they're great and how you can get to your own. There you go. Five examples. We help food trucks track profit per menu item. We help Airbnb hosts keep more profit per stay. We help E bike repair shops track profit per repair. We help Amazon FBA sellers know which skus pay. We help roofing crews bid jobs that actually hit mar. Now you notice what those don't say. We do your books, we do your taxes. I'm a cfo. Look at my credentials. I can tell you the one thing I've learned making content on the Internet and this is honestly a great life hack, is assume absolutely nobody gives a crap about you because 99% of them, they don't. People are worried about themselves, the problems they have today and whether or not you are a person that can help them to navigate those problems. And somebody who will just will become your best friend is the person this is gonna make you more money. This is gonna help you sleep better at night while making more money. And this is the problem in how most of us talk about what we do is when I say tell me about your accounting firm, a person says, well we work with blah, blah type of person. Usually it's something very generic. Business owners between a half million and 2 million in revenue service businesses. So like a quarter of the Economy, real estate. Most of us talk about who we help, and oftentimes it's a very vague kind of broad subset of folks, but we don't have clear language for how we make them more money. And for evidence of this, like, look no further than every accounting firm website, which is just this massive list of all the services that you do. And most of us haven't yet escaped kind of the old guard approach to just being like, yeah, we're. We're kind of just order takers. We have this expertise and whatever sort of tax or accounting stuff you need us to do, we'll just do that for you. The trouble with that is selling bookkeeping, selling a 1040 tax return. It's. That's just inherently a race to the bottom because the market has already set a price for what that is worth. So when a client comes in, if all they understand about you is that you are going to do their bookkeeping or that you're going to do their tax return, when you give them a quote and you have a conversation about what you're going to do and how much this is going to cost, they're then weighing that against their understanding of how much this should cost. I mean, go to Twitter where you'll get some rando and tax. Twitter loves to just like, pile on these conversations. They get some random person that'll be like, man, all I have is like a rental and this and that and. And my CPA charged me $1,600 last year. And then like 800 people reply, oh, that's crazy, man. I only paid 200 bucks. Oh, no, I'll never pay more than $250 for a tax turn. Everybody just turns out and everyone is talking about a quote, unquote tax return as if it is this yardstick that is a standard unit of measurement. Everybody's stuff is the same and it should cost the same bookkeeping work. There's just more and more pressure on bookkeeping work. Bookkeeping has always been the thing where for decades people have said like, yeah, no, the end is near for bookkeeping. It's. It's just about there. It's almost fully automated. Still waiting, still waiting for that day to come, by the way. I don't know. In some ways, I would argue it kind of has come because bookkeeping is the entry of transactions, which we don't even do anymore because we have bank feeds when they work, and then the classification of transactions, which honestly. And a good bookkeeping file is 90, 95% automated. But now what bookkeepers are doing is actually like controllership stuff. It's not really bookkeeping. I digress. But selling these services, you're up against everybody else that sells the same services, but also just kind of what the market thinks that should cost. So for bookkeeping in the US you look at like benchmark, which is like a flat 300 or $350 a month or something like that. For bookkeeping, Intuit has their own QuickBooks Live bookkeeping service that starts at $200. But very quickly, both of these services get much more expensive. On the tax side, you have your Jackson Hewitt's, your H and R blocks, your TurboTaxes, your TurboTax full service where a tax pro just does it all for you. By the way, their small business full service offering starts at, it was either 1650 or $1750 for federal only for a business tax return. No bookkeeping cleanup. That is a number that is bigger than the average fee that tax professionals charge for a business tax return. But if we're playing the game of selling the same thing that everybody else is selling, then we can never escape the market's understanding of how much that thing would cost. And this is, this is all, it's all very heady stuff. Like if you came of age in the accounting industry where it's like, I just work time and I bill hours and like, why are you making it harder than that? The opportunity is to like escape the trading of your time for money. Because like you'll ask the client, do they care how much time this thing took you to do? They absolutely don't. What they care about is whether how they value the work that you did lines up with what you charged them. Some people, how they value what you do, that amount they value it is much less than what you charge. And those are the people that complain where they're like, why does this have to cost so much? But you also have clients on your client list who value what you do more, much more than what you charge them. Those folks, they just aren't as loud. You want evidence that those folks exist on your client list. The biggest thing I hear from people that are rolling out three tier proposals for the first time that include a price that's two or three times as much as that person has ever paid is they're shocked at how many clients they have that opt into these bigger packages, these bigger prices. And I'm like, buddy, yeah, maybe you're gonna do a little more work for them now. But the reason they're paying you a number that's three times as big is because you were always giving them more value than you were charging them. You just didn't know it because the only people you heard from were the ones who were complaining. Geraldine Carter, who's a coach for accounting firms, she has a great exercise where she's like, go through your, go through your credit card statement. Look at each of those items on your credit card statement and think, was this worth this amount to me? I spent $110 at Cheesecake Factory. Was that worth it? This monthly subscription came through. Was that worth it? Think about which of those items are worth it to you and if you're happy with that, spend and then consider how much do you care how much time a human put in to each of those line items? Do you care how long Cheesecake Factory how to cook had to cook your food to bring out your oriental chicken salad alongside your chicken quesadilla? You don't care how much time went into any of those things. All that matters is how much you value that. Measuring time in an accounting firm is a proxy measuring time in an accounting firm. It's a way to cover your own hide and make sure you don't lose money. And for folks first starting out honestly, probably start with hourly billing, because at that stage you're competing on what your hourly rate is. But once you get to where you're serving a more specific type of entrepreneur and you're very efficient with your time, I mean, if. If you are five times as efficient as a new person and you're charging $500 an hour and they're charging $100 an hour and a client has a meeting with both, who are they going to choose? In most cases, they're going to choose the person charging $100 an hour. So the better you get at your job, the more your hourly rate works against you. And this is where we have to get away from selling services to instead selling outcomes. I'm not selling you bookkeeping. I'm selling you a better version of your own business. Services have a cap. We can only charge so much for them. And that cap is set by the market. We have no control over it. But if I'm making you more money selling you $2 in exchange for you paying me $1, that doesn't have a ceiling. That's all opportunity. And don't get caught up and like, oh, is that wrong? Is this unethical? Whatever pricing customers paying you money, this is always something that, like, you gotta understand they are agreeing to do. We're not giving Them an option. In fact, I would say the worst version of this is the one where you give them a single price. You say, it took me 10 hours, you have to pay me this now. And they're like, well, that's not worth it to me. And we're like, it's fair. As opposed to like, hey, we're gonna lead you on this path for your business to be more profitable and will charge very well for it. That's much easier than to see, like, okay, I'm making more money and it's because of you. This whole ROI calculation, it makes more sense to me. This is why this one liner that describes what you do and who you help. The crucial ingredient that most people are missing is, is an acknowledgement that we help people make more money. Yes. There's the whole issue of, like, are we really getting niche enough? Are we talking about a specific enough person? Because in 2026, the gift of the Internet means that we can all build way more micro niche firms than has ever before in history been possible. You go back to the year 2000 when nobody's hanging out online, how are you going to build a firm? You're going to go to, like, chamber meetings and like, if you want a niche into dentistry, the only way you're going to build a big dentistry dentistry client base is you're going to serve the three to five dental clinics in town. Maybe you go out and you travel and you go to conferences and all this stuff, and you can kind of build this national business. Today I can literally put out Instagram posts for taxidermists, and this content becomes a lighthouse for attracting a crazy specific type of person to you. That has never before been possible. Yet most people still run their accounting firms the way that we ran them before the Internet now. Wild how little professional services has changed. Year by year, more and more people get turned onto this. Had a post on LinkedIn the other day that was just kind of around, like, hey, you know, you want to have unbelievable connections and possibilities and all these things that you never could have, like, willed into being yourself show up online every single day. And I know it's hard for all of us. Like, it's not comfortable for anybody. That is why you do it. That's. That makes it an even better reason to do. To. To do. To do. To do it. You know what I'm saying? The fact that other people won't do it, the fact that other people won't show up on video, won't post reliably consistently, those are all reasons for you to do it, that's your moat. Because it is hard, you're going to suck at it. But you do that consistently and people find out you exist. Most of us, we are professionally invisible. We either lurk online or we're not even present online at all. And so our only network is the people who have just stumbled into our lives and the people that those people have sent us. And to be clear, you can build a business on that. You can be well over capacity just with that. But how likely is it that if you're going to have a client list of a hundred clients, that in the entire universe, the hundred best clients for you, that is the people who most acutely feel the problems that you solve, that will cut a big old check for you to solve that problem with a smile on their face, how likely is it that the hundred very best clients for you just walked in your door? There's not. It's that. No, it's. It just. It's not. That's not what happened. You got 100 of what you got. And to be clear, you can build a really cool business with the hundred people that are just who you got and make more money than you ever thought. But with the right messaging and showing up consistently and getting our head out of production a little bit, the doing of the work and focusing on kind of the bigger, more meta issues in the business. I mean, a whole, a big theme of my, my workshop tour that we just did, so we were in 13 cities last fall. The big theme was kind of how to get paid better for every single project. And some of it's three tier proposals, some of it's just the nuance of how we communicate things to people. Some of it is what we were just talking about, that on every client list you have stinkers who complain about the fees that, that you charge them. But every client list also has this secret subset of clients who would happily pay you much more. But when you send them an invoice for a thousand dollars, they don't raise their hand and be like, hey, can you charge me $2,500 instead? And you will never know who those people are who will happily pay you more until you give them the opportunity to pay you more. And you do that with three tier proposals, putting multiple prices in front of a client. This is untapped money that exists in almost every accounting firm right now. So this was a big theme of these, these workshops is how to do this. In fact, I'll just read a very kind message that I got on instagram Yesterday I got to do a better job of capturing these because it's like the best social proof to get people out to events. I'll keep it anonymous. Here's the message. Five of us from our firm came to your Atlanta event. I have to tell you, we went back and quickly redid engagements for about 160 current clients to include tiers, multiple tiers. We sent them out December 15th and asked clients to sign by December 26th. Lots of explaining and it has been slightly terrifying, but we've gotten all but about 20 clients through their proposals. And you were right. While most of our clients chose the base level and we lost 12 clients, which is less than 10% for them, we are set to do less work for most of them and we will make more money. Some of our clients chose the higher tiers and a few surprised us by going clear up to the top tier. You were right. We just wanted to tell you that we went home, implemented and it worked. If you consider one engagement. So the average margin of an accounting firm is about 30%. Obviously it's a huge, huge spectrum how much, how profitable firms are. But let's just take the average of 30% on $100 engagement. Let's work with small round numbers. On $100 engagement, that means that you're making 30 bucks, right? The next client who will pay you $130 instead of $100, so they're only paying $30 more. That is a twice as profitable engagement. A 30% increase in price at a 30% margin firm doubles your profit. And so when we're talking about three tier proposals where your silver tier is like 30 to 50% more, your gold tier is, is over double the price. Usually between 2 and 2.5x the price. You find one great fit client who will say yes to say a silver tier, that's usually going to mean you can cut two or three legacy projects. You find one great new client that says yes to a gold tier package, that means you can probably let four other clients go and make the same money if you want it. That is the power of a better client list. Like that's we think the game is getting the work done and getting the work out the door, not losing our minds and managing a team. The game is the client list. And it's hard for us as operators who came of age doing technical work for other firms to all of a sudden go out and do our own thing and have to do this entirely different job where it's like, no, I just do the work I don't, I don't go out and dance on TikTok. That's not me. And so for most of us, like, that will never be our comfortable spot. But there's like a minimum viable level of effort that we have to put into this that will make a really big difference. Because it takes such a small number of great new clients, honestly, to change your life. If 10 people go out and say yes to a gold tier right now, that could be 40 bronze projects. You send packing, making the same money, doing one quarter of the work. I don't wanna get too far down the path of three tier proposals. Cause the way that most people do them is on the gold tier. They just pile mountains and mountains of additional work. That is not the right way to do it. In short, think of bronze, silver, gold as coach, business class, first class. First class. Faster access, greater access to more senior people and all that. But the same work across the board. Hey, do you enjoy managing your it? Trick question. Of course you don't. That's awful. You got better things to do than to be playing it night Janitor Kay. That's where this episode sponsor Farido. They can help. They will be your entire IT department. Because you know what? They do it for hundreds of other accounting firms. In fact, they only do it for accounting firms. Compare that to hiring the IT guy down the street. Oh, I am speaking from experience here. Hire the IT guy down the street. And he comes in and we're like, yeah, here's the problem. And he's like, what on God's green earth is this app, man? And I say, well, this CCH engagement. And he says, okay, give me a week to figure out how this app works and then I will fix your small problem. That's what you're paying for working with IT groups that don't just support accounting firms, Barretto. They know their stuff, man. This is all they do. This is their lives. They'll migrate you over a weekend and actually recently learned they have. They've had like this five minute sort of support guarantee or something like that. They said average response time from support, like 20, 24, 7, you can call. Average response time was less than five minutes. They actually told me recently average response time is now less than 6/60 seconds. 24 days a week, 7 hours a day, 24, 7. That's a bad joke to make because that's. That's not clear. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Verdo. They will also do your WISP. 500 bucks, flat fee. They'll do the required security thing that you have to have as a tax firm in the US and they'll do all your hosting. Stop paying Thompson, stop paying Drake. Don't pay the provider of the software for hosting. You can get it from Verito way faster, way cheaper. I know a ton of firms that are weirdly like raving fans of Barado. Honestly, like, it's a weird thing to be so excited about, but if you're getting that it sorted out for 2026, man, like now is the time to do it. Learn more about Verdo down at the link in the Show Notes. In a world where there's more just AI over hyper Y than ever before and you see a new landing page every day that's like, oh, this sounds exciting. But then you can't actually tell if there's anything real going on there. When all that's going on, it's nice to know what things actually work, what are real, what is tested and firms are big fans of. I'll give you one what firms are like actively using and having success with. I'll give you one tool. Stanford Tax buddy. They were kind of first aboard like the AI tax workflow hype train, but they're now, I don't know, three or four years in. I know probably well over 100 accounting firms that love Stanford Tax is a really, really good solution for better organizing your 1040 work. It gives you a single place where you can pile all those documents in. It creates this like AI checklist based on the prior year tax work of exactly what items we need from the client. Then I can just chuck all those documents into one place regardless of how they come in and it'll automatically check those items off the checklist and then give me like an actual like work paper in the cloud as an alternative to an Adobe Acrobat PDF. Whether your clients want to work with another port. There's a lot of people that are just now using Stanford Tax internally because it saves you a pile of time on the just the managing of the documents and all that stuff. It's a great company. They've been around an AI accounting solution that's actually really, really good. Worth checking out if you do 1040 work. Learn more about Stanford Tax. Check out the link down in the show notes. Okay, this one liner. We're building this one liner to attract the best type of client for us and show them we can make them more money. Let me give you a bunch of examples of good one liners. We help locksmiths track profit per service call. We help pool service routes. No profit per stop. We help shopify brands keep more cash for ads. We help Etsy makers track profit per product line. We help daycare chains track profit per classroom. We help chimney sweeps what price jobs so ladders pay. We help nail techs stop tax surprises and keep more we help private therapists keep more tax home pay tax home take home pay. You know, some of these are even seasonal. Go let's go back to the nail tech one. We keep nail techs we we help nail techs stop tax surprises and keep more I'm probably using that one liner around busy season. Sorry around tax season. And then I'm switching to a different one liner that is more consultative when we are outside of tax season. So something more along the lines of making every appointment more profitable. We help independent truckers maximize profit per lane. We help physical therapy clinics improve profit revisit. We help subcontractor electricians track profit per crew. I've got about 50 of these. Are you on my newsletter? I don't think it's this week's newsletter because one as you're hearing this if it just if this episode just came out, newsletter's going out tomorrow. The newsletter in the following week. I'm going to share about 50 examples of this. But I will also share a humongous chatgpt prompt that unfortunately is too big to put in the show notes here where you can go to ChatGPT. Actually go to any AI tool, give it this big old prompt and then you tell it who do you want to work with and it will give you great examples of one liners you can use. So actually let's I'll just test it right here with a few examples. Let's say I want to work with pet groomers. I'm popping this into the exact prompt that you get on my newsletter. Create three ideas for a firm that works with pet groomers. All right, the idea is here. We help pet groomers price add ons so every bath makes profit. We help pet groomers track profit per appointment and raise rates fast. We help pet groomers pay themselves monthly and avoid surprise taxes. Let's do one for creative agencies. Even though creative agencies kind of vague. Here we go. We help creative agencies track margin per retainer and stop scope creep. We help creative agencies price projects so revisions don't kill profit. We help creative agencies see which clients fund growth and cash flow. So those are a little math for me. Let's do one more. Let's do a roofing company. We help roofing Contractors bid jobs that hit margin every time. I think we, I think we actually already had that one. We help roofers stop small jobs from stealing all the profit. We help roofing crews track profit per job and pay owners monthly. Now this could be a single statement that is your ride and ride or die 12 months around the year. This statement could change with talking points, conversation points in the industry. Maybe there are seasonal talking points that land better with people and so you change that up. But what we want to get to is the statement that makes clear how them coming to work with you is actually going to unlock profit in their business to me, unlocking for them profit, money in their pocket. That is more juicy than peace of mind. Peace of mind can be a product of making more money. I think the one liner that will drive more attention and more excitement from potential clients is the one where you show them the path to a more profitable business and the means of getting there. To be clear, it's bookkeeping, it's tax stuff, it's some advisory work. Yeah, we're going to do all of that stuff. But we don't just do that. We're not this transactional thing where you give me a pile of stuff and I do the books. Give me a pile of stuff, I do the tax. When you're serving a more specific type of person, you can build a system so that when that work goes out the door, we have like a clear framework for okay, we have the books. Now here's where these numbers ought to be. Like, let's do a monthly call. We can recommend the right tech stack to make all this stuff easier to track. We understand how to itemize all the details on your invoices so they can be costed appropriately to the different projects. So you have that information for the first time. By the way, that's all just bookkeeping. Right. But when we frame that through the lens of not here are all the services we do, but instead, here's the language that you use and how we will make you more profitable that lands much better with clients. This came up on the workshop series as well, a concept from Karen Rayburn, who runs a marketing agency for accounting firms. PF is what it's called. We are pf.com. the fact that most of us have written our websites and our proposals and all of that stuff, we have written them in accountant. The language that is being spoken is accountant. That is not the language that our clients speak. They don't know what all that verbiage, that vernacular means. I mean, think about all the technical garbage we put on our proposals that clients just do not understand. Because at some point I'm a tax guy. So here's my example. At some point when I was a, a fresh cheeked tax intern, the tax partner told me like, no, we want the invoice to print out with the tax return because the invoice shows every single tax form from the tax return. When the client sees that invoice with all those on there, they're going to be very impressed. So like most of us still have not escaped that way of thinking. We just got to make it look big and then they'll be impressed. The stuff we're putting in front of our clients, we are speaking accountants, which does not resonate with people that don't speak that language. Instead, our proposals, our website, copy all of that stuff. I don't care what you think about it. I care what your clients. I care what the next person you want to attract thinks about it. That's who it's for. It's not for you, it's for them. And being able to put how we will make them more money into their language will separate you from every other accountant who is out there saying like, yeah, sure, we can figure out your bookkeeping. Those people, they'll be commanding, not commanding, they'll be taking bookkeeping rates, your rates. They kind of don't have a ceiling. They're going to be more. And the beauty is when we've got those systems nailed down and we are serving a more specific type of person, we can more consistently deliver these reliable outcomes to these types of entrepreneurs. And then when you find the people where nailing this for them actually makes them a lot of money, there's your killer accounting firm, there's your killer business, there is your great client to double down on. The one where your unlocks make them more profitable so that your fees, I mean they're, they're the monthly cost that that client is happiest to pay because you're the reason they got to where they are. If you're not on my newsletter yet, it's jasononfirms.com newsletter. I'll put that down in the show notes. If you can't remember it next week you'll have that big old prompt. You can have some fun with it if you want. If you got a one liner that you're proud of, pop that stuff down in the comments. Happy to share some feedback if you want or just, I'll just give it a like so you can have a little glow up gang thanks for being here today. Great crowd today. Looking smart. Have a great day. I'll catch you in the next one.