577 Why LinkedIn Doesn’t Work for Accounting Firms

Have you heard the news that LinkedIn is like, tanking? People who have invested very much time in LinkedIn are kind of in panic mode. What does this mean for accounting firms? And if you're going to put any effort at all into the LinkedIn platform, how do we make sure it is effort well spent? But also today, the story of someone who came out to my live workshop in Seattle and doubled the profitability of their work. I'm going to show you how they've changed their proposals and how they can take them even a step further, further to make every single client project more profitable. And then we're digging into a whole bunch of coaching Q&As, some advice for someone who's, who thinks they found the niche they want to get into. Thoughts on the best reporting platforms right now, how to find higher end clients and a few folks who are stuck on either this tool or that tool. We're going to tackle it all today. Let's get smarter together. Let's do it. Play the jingle. If you spent any time on LinkedIn and ever looked at the analytics related to the posts that you put out there, you know, impressions go down. Impressions. Basically the number of people that saw your post. Most of the folks I talk to, your impressions are almost half of what they were maybe six to nine months ago across every type of LinkedIn post, be it a text post, a video post, whatever. And this is important because if you were to spend any time at all on a social media platform, and I know I have never despised social media more than I do today, honestly, and AI is making it worse by the day, but if you were to put any effort into any social media platform that were worthwhile, honestly, I would send you to LinkedIn. So what does this mean? Is this, is this the death of social media, ironically happening at a time when, Remember last week we talked about cloudbot, now called Moltbot, like this sort of autonomous AI that will go out and sort of do its own thing on your computer. How have you heard that? They created a, basically a social network for clodbots where they can go out and post about their humans and comments, have all these interactions there. There's like a whole Sci Fi thing going on around that right now. Like an actual social media network where all the users are bots. And if you didn't believe in Dead Internet theory before, maybe that's bringing you around. Dead Internet theory is basically the idea that most of what you see on the Internet, like actually isn't real. Like there's actually not that many humans there. It's mostly thoughts. And if you've spent much time on social media lately, you may start believing that, especially LinkedIn, you're like, where are all the people? Where have all the humans gone? So is LinkedIn even still worth dabbling in these days? I would argue, I would argue the answer is, is still yes. Not specifically through the lens of, okay, I have this desired outcome and LinkedIn will help me do it. I honestly just think that LinkedIn is sort of this serendipity machine where the connections you can make there are still vastly valuable to sort of open up your career opportunities in ways that you never could have imagined. Like, if you think about the whole of human history and all the ways that we've had to connect with other people ever, like, social media remains the most powerful machine for serendipity that has ever existed. And it's such a hack, such an advantage to simply play the game and, and be visible. Things become possible that you could have never otherw otherwise manifested into being yourself. And this is hard for us because we want control and we're like, well, next year I'm going to do this, and then the next year after that I'm going to do that. What if there's a timeline that was better than anything you could imagine or plan for yourself? Like, I would say my life is an example of, of just this. I mean, it was five, seven, seven or eight years ago. I was a numpty accountant that was thinking about buying an accounting firm. And if I could sit down and have a conversation with seven or eight year ago Jason, you'd be like, that guy's an idiot. Like, how is that the same person? But the reason I somehow ended up doing what I do today is I started being visible online and stuff just started happening. And before you know it, you're like, in this situation that you couldn't have imagined. And it's hard to trust that. It's hard to like, bank all of your, not all of your time, but it's hard to like, say, well, what's the right amount of time I put into that? If the whole notion is you're spinning some sort of cosmic slot machine saying, well, I hope this is worthwhile for me. Like, that ROI calculation is very hard to do, right? But as with all things, there's smart ways to do it and not so smart ways to do it. We want to work smarter, not harder, right? Actually don't like that expression, let's work smarter and harder, because those are the people that I Feel like actually win at things for sure, work smarter 100% of the time. But to say you only have to work smarter, not harder, that's assuming that nobody else is smart. Most of us, we have to work both smart and hard. So what is the smart approach to LinkedIn? Here are the six things that most accounting firms get wrong. And you can sometimes waste years approaching the platform the wrong way. Number one, and this is the solution actually to why impressions are going down on LinkedIn. Number one is simply going too wide. Speaking too generally when you go out and post and consistent thing not just on LinkedIn right now, but across all platforms. Even YouTube is your mega stars on those platforms are seeing lower views than ever before. In fact, they'll say a lot of things like, I can't make, you know, this style of video like I used to because nobody will watch it. So it's very, very common that year over year views for big creators right now are actually down quite a bit. And that's not because consumption has decreased. There's more people than ever before spending more time on these platforms than ever before. I mean, it's kind of crazy and actually sort of disgusting. Is the movie up where everybody is like, in this future timeline, they all just get like motored around on these wheelchair things and they've all got their big gulps. Walking through an airport right now, if you pay attention to what's happening, it's not that different than that because every single human being that you will walk by, who's sitting in the chairs and all that, they're all on their devices. They're all looking down at these little screens, swiping and swiping and swiping. The worst version of this that I saw Orlando Airport, which is just rife with children. I mean, everywhere you look, there's just way too many children. It is not only the adults, it is the children. Like everyone is sitting there filling their idle moments with these machines that will just feed you as much slop as you can keep swiping through. And it's kind of awful, honestly. But the reality is that is where people learn these days. That's where people get the news. I mean, have somebody standing in line at a Starbucks who's not looking down at their phone. And it's weird. Like you think you see them and they're up and looking around and they're like, is something wrong? What are they looking at? Go back to looking at your phone. Now. That is the society that we live in today, whether we like it or not. And my take here is society is split into creators and consumers. I don't identify as like a creator through the traditional lens of how we think of creators. You know, being like influencers and stuff like that. Like, I'm an accountant, I do not think of myself as an influencer. But I can tell you what I don't want to be is a consumer. I don't want to just sit there and be the one on the other side of that economic transaction where the rest of the world is making money on me because I'm swiping through all these different posts and ads are going by. Like, I can tell you I don't like any of this. But what I really don't want to be is the sucker who is just consuming. So I chose to play the game of being on the other side of that financial equation. I decided to be the creator. And at a time when all the mega creators numbers are going down, but total consumption is going up, the reason that's happening is that viewership attention is more distributed than it's ever been before. We all consume vastly more niche content than we ever have. I mean, you're here talking about accounting firm strategy, right? Like this sort of thing by and large didn't exist in the past. At least it didn't exist at the volume that it does right now. And so if 30 years ago we all had, you know, 20 channels to choose from and we could all sort of consume in mass, a very small number of possible things that were served up to us. These days you have kind of infinite flavors of things out there for you to consume. And so if we are going to use this machine to our benefit, it means we have to maybe go more specific than we've ever gone before and who we're speaking to. And the great news for small accounting firms, which is who we really talk to on this podcast, is accounting firms 10 million in revenue and under. If you are a small accounting firm, it doesn't take that many people following your stuff, engaging with your stuff to really impact your business. Like it truly doesn't. How many clients do you have on your client list? If you've got a 1200 client client list and then he posts something on the Internet and 1200 people look at it, you're like, wow, that's a shockingly small number of people. It doesn't take all that many. As long as we're very targeted in what we're saying and who we're speaking to, it doesn't take much. And this is really just a Continuation of a trend that was kicked off by TikTok really where in the past people consumed based on who they followed. Now media platforms, they just serve you what they think you will watch regardless of who you follow. And so LinkedIn impressions being down like there, there's a chance there that LinkedIn's just changing how they measure impressions. And so old impressions maybe aren't what we thought they were and this is simply a different way for them to measure things. But I can tell you what's happening all, all, all the other platforms, which I suspect is happening on LinkedIn as well, is that they're pushing fewer views to the folks with mega reach and more views to the folks who are talking to a more targeted audience. And if you are thinking about dabbling in social media at all, that's great news for you. That means fewer views for Mr. Beast, more views getting allocated to useful stuff for very specific people. We just have to not get caught up in vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are ultimately not what's going to help you build your accounting firm. Like the version of how to read a balance sheet that's amazing for beekeepers is vastly better than the just how to read a balance sheet video that nobody will watch, nobody will engage with because a million of those have already been made. And when you're starting out, you're not going to make the best one, you just aren't. But you can make the best one for beekeepers. And when the platform will work in your favor and serve that up to more beekeepers, that's great news for us. So biggest mistake folks make if they're dabbling into this stuff is all is still going too wide. Recognize the more specific the person you're talking to, the easier it will be for the algorithm to place you in front of the folks who are interested in what you're talking about. Second thing that folks get wrong, most posting and ghosting, they just put up a post and then they're like, I'll check back in on the platform tomorrow. These platforms are really built for you to engage with folks and like actually have back and forth conversations. And that's still the only useful thing to extract from these platforms is building actual relationships. And really like if you're posting for every time you post, you ought to be commenting on other people's posts five to ten times. Not just to like tick the box of like, Okay, I posted 10 comments today, but like to actually add to the conversation. And we can see tons of examples in the wild of folks that are doing that in a really lazy, just weak sauce way. Like the comments that are just like, that person just came by to leave a kind of nothing comment and went on their way, as opposed to the people who come by and are like, well, here was my experience with the same thing. Or what do you think about X, Y, Z? Like, the bar is not very high for adding to the conversation right now, and we should be adding to the conversation more than we should be actually posting, especially early on. Interesting thing about LinkedIn that it does more than any other platform is in your feed you'll see a lot of comments from people that you usually engage with. So what's in your feed is not their post, but them commenting on a post. That is why for you, it's equally valuable to post useful comments on other people's things as you create your own, like, posts in your own feed or post to your own profile. However, you would say that because those comments that you're leaving, they are posts that can get served up in other people's feeds just like your own posts. Third thing that folks get wrong is you run your social media platform and the things that you engage with and the people that you follow and all that, you run it around your own personal interests rather than the goals of why you're on that platform to begin with. So if you rock up to a social media platform right now, you're probably going to be very interested in accounting firm stuff, right? But if I'm trying to do bookkeeping work for truckers and I'm commenting on a bunch of posts from accountants, why are truckers going to have any interest in what I'm saying if the things that are being put into their feed from me all have to do with how to run an accounting firm firm. And this can be a hard thing for us because maybe we get some value from using a social media platform to our own ends like that, right? Like how to run a better accounting firm. The trouble is social media can't really place you in two different places. So what's the goal? What's the purpose of using this platform? And at a day and age where we don't need to spend any more time than we absolutely need to consuming this slop that's just like, honestly not a great thing for society and not a great way for us to spend our time, I think it's never been more important than it is now to consider if I'm going to now open this tab that has this social media platform on it, why am I doing it and what's the goal. If the goal is simply to consume and be entertained, maybe try to find another social media platform for that. Like there's a platform that you use for entertainment versus the platform that you use for. I'm trying to find more clients or better clients to like muddle Both of those things and how you use a platform just doesn't work. So you gotta get specific in how you use it. Now the next thing people then try to do on LinkedIn, it's kind of mistake number four is you say, well, I'm going to do my business stuff through my company page right now. LinkedIn doesn't serve up practically anything from company pages, like all the stuff that you see in your feed, unless it is a promoted post, in all likelihood it's coming from an individual. So honestly, my advice to you, don't even try to build an audience with a company page. It's very hard to do on a personal page and four times as hard to do from a company page. We did an interview with Katie Thomas recently on the main YouTube channel who runs a YouTube agency. Not a YouTube agency, a marketing agency for accounting firms. She said, treat your company page almost as like a place for announcements or press releases, that sort of thing. It's not a place to build human connections really. So if the goal is to try to use the company page for client facing stuff and your personal LinkedIn profile for like accounting firm stuff, doesn't really work because that company page isn't going to attract people who are in the industry that you're trying to serve. The unfortunate truth here is the only way to really make this useful on LinkedIn is if the things that you read and the things that you engage with on the platform are those truckers that you're trying to attract or whoever it is you're trying to get in front of. And this may mean like, you know, unplugging from some of the people that you enjoy following on LinkedIn. Here's the great news is the entire reason any of us go to LinkedIn, if you're trying to build an audience or build your business, there is to get them off platform. And so pick the three people who you really wouldn't want to miss out on anymore who are on LinkedIn. If like you're afraid to kind of take your personal interests elsewhere, who are the three people that you are most going to miss? I would hazard a guess that all three of those people have ways for you to follow them and get the same information. Not on social media. Like that might be an email list. It could be another social media platform. But at the end of the day, we're all trying to get all those people off of social media. Because the much more viable way for me to speak to you is via owned media. That's usually your email list. LinkedIn can make an algorithm change that then makes it impossible for me to get in touch with you. If I have you on my email list, I have total control over that. We had that conversation with Jonathan Stark on the podcast last week and he said something that kind of blew my mind. He said email is the last non algorithmic consumption that we do. Like, think about that. Like, email's the last place where you truly can control what you want to read and read it in chronological order, like social media algorithms. Even if, even if you follow a bunch of people, that's not what your feed will be. It'll be a whole bunch of stuff, including some stuff from the people that you follow. But we have more control over email really than anything else at this point. And so if there's a few folks on LinkedIn that you're really afraid of missing out on, find the other way to consume their stuff. Like if that's me, like if you're afraid of missing out on my LinkedIn stuff, I could tell you my newsletter is a 1000% better way to consume Jason stuff than LinkedIn. Jasonfirms.com/newsletter. And that is like the greatest hits. Like the only thing that makes it in the newsletter is the very best stuff. Hey, real quick, you tired of fist fighting all these stupid banking logins that your client gives you and then you gotta like push a code to them and you do this super insecure back and forth where you're like, hey, you know that code that you just got that says never share this code with anyone? Can you share that with me, gang? There's a better way to manage all this fuss. Is today's sponsor, Mercury. Mercury is the fintech that 200,000 plus companies trust for banking and running their finances. For banking and running their finances. Where traditional banking websites and apps are clunky and hard to use. Mercury it is meticulously designed to be an intuitive and simple experience for accountants. It is honest goodness H2G what I use myself Mercury super secure platform. And it comes with just all the user management stuff that a modern app has that we should really have with our clients when we're accessing their banking information. Now Mercury also has Mercury for accountants, where you can get up to a $1,000 referral bonus per eligible client and some other platform features that are available just for accounting firms. Pretty cool stuff. Big fan of Mercury. Did a demo of them back on the channel. If you want to see what it looks like in like five or 10 minutes, I got a disclaimer. Mercury is a fintech company, not a bank. Terms applies for bonus eligibility. See Show Notes for details. If you do any 1040 work, you know you are about to be deluged with client information. My gosh, 1040 intake. The actual intaking of the documents can actually consume up to a third of your team's tax season. And that is where this episode sponsor Sorban it is a big opportunity to save time on your 1040 work. One of the things we've been hammering on most on this podcast for the last two years is the really cool tax workflow developments that are happening. I I probably personally know over 100 firms that are very happy Soroban users. Not an exaggeration. We're getting into busy season. It is not too late. You need to look at the new AI 1040 intake automation solutions. If you haven't yet Sorban, it is at the top of my leaderboards for really good solutions for this. So if you don't have that yet, here's what I want you to do next. Pull over to the side of the road, put the hazards on, get your phone out, go down to the Show Notes, click the link for Sorban to learn more. Two more suggestions to make any time you spend on LinkedIn more worthwhile. Number five is you got to DM people like you have. You have to take things to the next level. Like if there's somebody that you're vibing with, you can't be afraid to be like, hey, do you want to hop on a call and talk through X, Y, Z? Like that's the most valuable thing that can come from these platforms. So do like do the uncomfortable thing and understand you might get rejected. But if you get rejected, you don't really lose anything. If they say yes then like there's upside there for you. So it's one of those like asymmetrical bets where it's like, well what's the worst case scenario? They don't say yes or they don't respond at all. But there's a chance they might say yes and that could lead to something great. So don't be afraid to slide into those dms. And then number six, recognize that like all things, doing it well takes more time than you think it will. Like that's that is just. We chronically underestimate how long it takes us to, to do anything, let alone to do anything well. And it's. This is one of those things where there's really no shortcuts. And over the course of years, you learn how to do it better. You learn how to write a better DM that somebody's more likely to respond to. But I still believe in this day and age, building the ability to show up and be memorable online is absolutely a superpower. Because so many of us, like I've said before, we're professionally invisible. And the day that Al Gore flipped the switch on the Internet, we all immediately, our biggest problem immediately became a distribution problem. Like, we have so much reach, so much access now because of the Internet, that overnight, the thing that is all of a sudden like, the best way to spend your time is how do I get in front of more people? Because the a hundred clients that I have on my client list today are surely not the hundred people in the world who most acutely feel the pains that I solve for and thus are like really happy to cut me a big check to do this work for them. Now it's really easy to get sucked into just the doing of the work and be heads down all day, every day on just, well, here are the clients that I have today, and so here's all the work that I'm going to do. We think about what is the right time to balance between doing the work and putting efforts into finding people who will pay you twice as much to do the same work. Surely the right answer for the amount of effort to put into finding more clients is not 0% of our time. So we have to somehow make the time to lean into these serendipity machines, like these opportunities where somebody can find you and unlock your next great opportunity or find that next client who is so excited to have found you that they'll pay you as much as any of your clients with an even bigger smile on their face. Those people are out there. They exist. And the only way we don't find them is if every hour of the day we are heads down in our work. Really hard thing to escape, right? Because we say yes to more and more and before you know it, you're over capacity. So much easier said than done. But the path out of that, like the path out of capacity issues and all that, it is always a better client. It's somebody who will pay you better. It's every project becoming more profitable so that you can afford to do less. That is the ultimate gift you have in an accounting firm where you have control over who's on the client list and how much people will pay you and all that. Like, that's the dream. That is why we are not all working at Big four, right? And the people who are. I'm so glad you're here and can't wait for you to go out and launch your own firm or go to work for some of the really cool modern firms that listen to this podcast. Okay. On the subject of making your work more profitable, let's very practically talk about how you can do that by showing you a proposal that just landed a twice as profitable client. Let's take a look. Roast a proposal. It's Roast a proposal. Let's rose this accounting proposal got a note from someone the other day and they sent me a screenshot of their three tier proposal. Love it, man. Here's what they said. I took tips from your Seattle workshop and applied them to my three tier proposal. I recently sent one out to an espresso repair shop. Hold up. An espresso repair shop is. I have so many questions. Do I take my espresso there? Like, do they work on espresso machines? Anyways, sent it out to an espresso repair shop that I wasn't sure would spring for the cost of a bookkeeper after using Intuit Live. Ooh. And the owner doing the books themselves. Okay, so there's a new client coming in. They're used to DIY books or very cheap books. And so you think they're probably not going to spring for anything expensive. I was pleasantly surprised when they picked the middle package with 30% more profit and signed in less than 24 hours. Yeah, buddy. Curious. If you have any suggestions or tweaks to my packages here, feel free to use it on a roast episode. Listen, we all salute your courage. We're talking about your proposal here. You're letting it all hang out for us to. To see, and we're all going to get smarter because of it. Okay, so they've employed my pricing methodology here, which is basically your bronze package. Your cheapest package is just a price bump over last year. The scope is like Sally, whatever you did in the past, but, you know, 5 or 10% more. And then the silver. The silver option is basically what is the profit margin in your accounting firm? That's how much more that silver tier is going to cost. So if you have a 30% margin accounting firm and the bronze options, 100 bucks. Then the silver options, 130 bucks. Because I Love the silver option being a twice as profitable project, because every time a client says yes to silver, you're like, nice. I could actually go back and cut one of my bronze clients if I wanted. And I'm like, making the same money. And half the time, like, that's a huge win. The way I build my packages, bronze, silver, gold. Silver and gold are not more work. They're not doing twice as much work, three times as much work. They are just a more premium service delivery. So the volume of work you're doing is the same. What we're selling is coach versus business class versus first class. And this person has done this very well. So, for example, at their most premium tier, which is called the VIP bookkeeping package, there's a line here that says direct access to Mary's cell phone. But the only way you get that most premium package is at a very premium price. So the pricing they've got on the three tiers here are 775, 995, and 1600. So somebody picks 995, that's still a win. That's still a 30% more profitable, not 30% more profitable. That is still a twice as profitable project. And we always forget this. It actually doesn't take all that much of a price bump to get to a project that's twice as profitable. Wouldn't it be nice if those were all of your projects and you could go home at lunch again? This is why the profitability of our projects solve all problems from capacity to hiring to just everything. So the silver package, the middle one, doubles profitability. But if somebody goes for the gold one, that is the profitability of like, four or five bronze projects. And at the end of the day is not all that much more work. Wouldn't that be nice? Imagine your whole client list being those gold clients. That's possible, man. And that looks like you making the same money with 20 to 30% the client list that you have right now. And for most of us, that's a more attractive business to run where we're going deeper with a smaller number of people. So on their gold package, they've got the greatest level of access to the firm owner. But that's only on the gold package. How many of us have been giving that away for years, right? You're like, crap, everybody's already got my cell phone number. How do I reel that back in? I mean, this is another argument for annual renewals, which is what they're doing here, basically. You agree here. Here's the level at which we're going to serve you over the next 12 months and that might change a year from now. You may need a different level of service, but we're going to stop and have that conversation every year because what you've done in the past does not necessarily represent what you're going to be able to do into the future forever. And so if you have to break the norm right now and break the expectations of what people have always been able to demand from you, then we have to send out a new proposal. Like we have to get in the habit of doing this every single year and revisiting this conversation of how much we're going to do for them and what level of access they have to you and or your team. And the reason that I'm such a fan of three tier proposals is exactly what this firm owner is explaining. They're in this situation where they're like, I don't think this client's even going to go for the minimum package. But come to find out they're actually going to go for the middle package. And had this person only put a single price in a single package in front of that client, what would they have done? They would have put the most basic option in front of them. Right. But they didn't. They gave them three options. As a result, the client surprised them, picked the middle option, and this project is twice as profitable as it would otherwise be. And as long as we are only giving our clients a single price, a single option, it is costing us a tremendous amount of profit. Across your entire client list, you've got people that complain because the fees are too high. Right. And this kind of biases us to not price as aggressively as we probably should. But. But the people you don't hear from on the client list are the ones who will happily pay more. And you don't know who those people are until you put multiple prices in front of the client and let them self select into which one they feel like provides them the greatest value. And there's a lot of things that factor into this from their actual needs to like, are they a premium buyer? Like do they drive a Lexus or do they drive a Toyota? Like people just buy different things. They buy a first class ticket instead of a coach ticket even though they're going to the same place. And when they look at your three options, they will buy based on their identity. But as long as we're only giving them a single price, we won't know who those people are. So we can't capture the added profit opportunity that's there for premium buyers. Now, I did want to offer a few coaching tips on this proposal. Specifically, I know that 80% of this is just giving the recipient multiple prices, like that's the biggest thing. For the reason they just explained here, they didn't expect them to say yes to this more profitable option. And the only way to guarantee that they never will is to never put multiple options in front of them. Right. But the reality is, within that game, then there's all sorts of ways that you can optimize it to make people more likely to say yes to a bigger number. A lot of the things they're already doing here, for example, the pricing spread that we talked about, 775, 995 and 1600. If all you hear are those three numbers, what seems like the best value, the middle one. Right. Because it's such a big step up to the most premium one. And if we sell middle silver options under this approach all day long, that's awesome because those are twice as profitable as the Sally. Like same as last year basic project. But a few other things we can do to dial this proposal in further that are kind of things that are, I would say, universally relevant to any proposal that you send to a client, be it a new proposal or an annual renewal that you send to a client. By the way, if it's not clear, I recommend doing both. So you get a new client in the door, we're going to send them a proposal with three options. But also then every single year, when you're doing the renewal with your existing clients, we're also sending them a proposal with three options. So first note I made here of how this can be improved. When they're looking at the three options, we want to make the differences between the three options as clear as possible. And the best way to do this is to put like the similar services or the options that like escalate in quality across the three tiers, we want to put those on a single continuous horizontal line. So I told you, at the gold tier, the most premium one, they have direct access to them via their cell phone number. So that's one of the lines under the gold tier to the left of that on the silver tier, what I want to see directly on the same line is, okay, what level of access do I have at the silver tier? Like, do I have somebody else's cell phone number? Do I just have to email the same person who do I have access to? And then down to the bronze on the same line, what level of access do you have there. You want to be able to visually scan from left to right how the level of service improves from bronze up to gold. Right now it's a bullet point list that's kind of jumbled up where you can find the most related thing in the other tiers, but it's like at a different vertical spot in the list. So we want to make this as clear as possible. We want to see basic middle of the road advanced and all of those things being continuously sort of presented on sort of a horizontal line. We're really fighting against this proposal being overwhelming because we use so much jargon in these proposals and clients are already overwhelmed. Even if you just give them a single option, they're like, I don't know, most of this stuff is, but I guess I'll say yes. But you put three options in front of them and they're like, I don't even know what I need. How do I pick from one of these three things? So we're trying to make this as concise and as clear as possible. Second suggestion I have for them, let me just read the bullet points under the silver package for you and I think you'll get the gist. Priority month end close video recording, review of monthly reports. Add more advanced metrics and insights in monthly reporting. Phone support on team contact number transaction entry, bank reconciliations, up to three accounts, Payroll management, Washington state B and O, Department of revenue filings, City B and O filings, 1099 review and year end filing, year end reports and year end adjustments. Monthly quality control process, Monthly financial statements, unlimited email and portal and text communications. Meetings booked and paid as needed. That's a lot of things. It's also a lot of jargon and stuff where it's like, do I need a monthly quality control process? Do I need, I don't know, City B and O filings? The list gets a little long and I think we have to fight back against this. This is an example, I would say, of speaking accountant and outlining some of the things that we think are important. When in the context of this three tier view where you're in as concisely away as possible trying to communicate here's what bronze is, silver and gold. Want to keep that view as concise as possible. It doesn't mean that on a subsequent page there can't be more service details. But try to think of that grid view of the three columns and the three options keeping things as simple as possible because that's where they're actually saying yes to a specific price. And we could Dig further into, like, what those bullet point items ought to be. What I would say for now is those bullet point items kind of fall into one of two buckets. I think of them in terms of scope. That is, what are the technical things we're going to have to do for them? And then I think of them in terms of service delivery, and those are kind of two different types of bullet points. What you will find if you send a proposal to a client and there's just 40 scope bullet points on there of all these technical details, by and large, clients won't ask you about the technical stuff. They'll come back and be like, can I call you? Like, they'll ask about service delivery related things, not the technical details. And if you're thinking about the bullet points under an option, if you got 10 bullet points there, I want five of the bullet points to be about service delivery and five of the bullet points to be about scope. I want that to be equal. And most of the time in accounting proposals, way too many of these bullet points are technical and there's virtually no thought put into the service delivery. But man, the service delivery, it is so important. It's. There's probably an iceberg analogy here. But like, the only part, this actually is a great analogy. So the client is on the cruise ship, they're on an Alaska cruise, and they see an iceberg, and all they see is a little baby top bit, right? And there's hardly anything there. While underneath there's all this work that goes on, the stuff that's underwater is all the things that we pride ourselves in, all the technical stuff, you know, the actual doing of the work that we're doing for the clients. But that little bitty, little bitty bit on the top, that is all the client sees. And believe it or not, that's what they're making their buying decision based off of is how courteous were you on the phone? Did you get back to them very quickly? When you don't understand any part of the process that's going on, you make buying decisions based on the limited part of the process that you do see. But unfortunately for us, that client service part of it can really become an afterthought. But if we think of what our iceberg ought to be on our proposals, I want as many of those bullet items to be about service delivery as they are about the technical stuff, because that what, that's what gets the client excited. Oh, sweet. I could just message you on WhatsApp like, oh, I can I get a 24 hour response time. My last guy wouldn't get back to me for like a week. That's awesome. And so, so be careful with those bullet points. Not to let the list get too long, not let it get too technical on this proposal. What I'm saying it's a little too heavy on the technical items. It's more like 25, 75 or 8020 where I want it to be 50 50. Tell me about the client service delivery and tell me about the technical details. So this last fall we did a tour of 13 cities, hosted workshops for over a thousand accounting firms. And I bumped into a lady at one of these events and she said this week I have four new hires starting from this podcast sponsor, cloud account staffing. To be clear, she didn't say in the context of that conversation, this episode sponsor. She just said cloud account staffing. Four people starting at the same. Can you imagine? I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. But you know what? Cloud accountant staffing makes it possible. Back in my firm, we hired both onshore folks and offshore folks. Try to get the best of both worlds because there's problems to just doing one or the other cloud accountant staffing. They're gonna help hold your hand through this stuff. It's actually founded by a former accounting firm owner. And so all the questions around, what about security? What about it? What about do I have to disclose this to my clients? They can help walk you through all that stuff. And one of the coolest new things I've seen in staffing recently, they launched a portal where you can see all of the candidates they've already pre vetted. And even from that portal you can book an interview. You literally just have to give them your email address and you get access to the portal. You can see the tax talent, the accounting talent, the executive assistants, all these folks they've sourced, they've done like some personality assessments for them. And you can book an interview with these candidates directly from that portal. Super cool. If you're building out the squad for 2026, it's worth giving it a serious thought. That's to going cloud accountant staffing. Learn more at the link down in the show Notes. It's that time of year, the time of year where your hosted tax software starts grinding to a just to a halt because everybody's trying to use their computers at the same time. This is because when you host your apps with most providers, like your tax software provider, the servers you're accessing, they're shared servers. Everybody and their mom are logging into those Things trying to get stuff done at the same time. The solution is Today's sponsor, Verito Man Baro is going to give you your own private server where all your tax stuff, even any hosting needs, QuickBooks, desktop, whatever you got, it's hosted on a server that only you're accessing. So it doesn't matter how many people are hammering that server, the only people hammering it are you. It's easier than it sounds to get started. They can actually transition you in just a weekend. And especially as we're heading into busy season, gang, this is the time to do it Verdot. Vastly cheaper than the hosting you get from your tax software provider and faster. Like kind of a no brainer. Now Bardo can also do your whisp, the little security thing you got to do. If you do tax work in the us they can also be your entire IT department. In fact, the cost of hosting your apps and them being your IT department is less than Thompson Reuters Virtual Office know a lot of people, they're very happy Verito users. In fact, the average response time from Verito Support if you come to them with an issue is now less than 60 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Like I said, now's the time to do it before we get too far into busy season. To learn more about Verdo, check out the link down in the show notes. Two more thoughts and this next one's a big one. Under the three tiers there is a section that spans all three tiers. It says Estimated Tax Processing Add on. We will process your estimated tax payments for you via IRS's direct pay additional amount. Drumroll please. $25 monthly so they will make the payments for you. This is something that's become more popular with accounting firms. Actually I have a tax firm that I work with now obviously because I don't have tax software and all that. The firm that I work with now makes my estimated payments for me not quarterly but monthly because that's just my preference is the chunk comes out every single month. Now they have an add on here. I'm generally not a fan of add ons myself, but my biggest objection is that the add on is $25 monthly when if you think about what are the juicy things that you could pile into the VIP package that are not that much work but make the person's life easier. Man, it doesn't get much better than like tax payments on Autopilot. Like that's a really juicy one. So last thing here, let's think about what are some really valuable things we could pile into this gold package to get more people saying yes to $1,600 a month. Remember, bronze 775amonth. Silver 995amonth. Gold 1600amonth. And to be clear, we don't want gold to be three times as much work or twice as much work. We want it to be no more work or marginally more work. But we are okay being more available at that tier. Right? Because the trade off is if clients are saying yes to the gold package, we can serve like a quarter as many clients because that's a vastly more profitable project if we're pricing it appropriately. So what are the low lift things that will get more people saying yes to the gold package? Because it feels like a premium thing. I would argue this estimated payment processing ought to be reserved for the gold package. And this is a great example of something where when you look at it in a vacuum, you're like, okay, we could do this add on for people. How much should this cost? Like, it's not hard, I don't know, 25 bucks a month. Like you could just give it away that easy. Or you could reserve that add on only for the folks that are on the VIP package. And when folks are skimming that list and they're like, oh dang, I don't even have to remember to make the payment now that's really nice. That thing may very well be what puts them over the edge to get them to say yes to the crazy profitable package that we otherwise would have given away for 25amonth. Don't do that. Reserve the coolest stuff, the stuff that feels VIP and premium and makes the person's life easier. Reserve some of that stuff for the most premium package. Even if it only takes you 10 minutes to do that. Doesn't matter. It is the value of it to them because they now don't have to forget to do it. They may be worried, am I going to do it wrong? Do it in the wrong website? I would say you save that for the premium package. But three other things that I think would be cool to stack into the VIP package here. One, an offer to work either directly with their team, that is the support team for the business owner or third party advisors. So that could be their attorney, that could be their, their wealth management folks. This is something that I would separately state inside of a proposal is a great example of something we just give away because we don't think intentionally around like, well, could we actually do this for some folks if they're willing to pay for it. But on this proposal, I'm going to say we will work directly with your team. We'll work directly with whatever is going to make the most sense for the type of people you're trying to serve. Your attorney, your wealth manager, and your attendance is optional, honestly. And that's really, really exciting for a busy entrepreneur. They will happily pay more if they don't even have to be part of the process. If it just happens, right? Like if you're a busy entrepreneur, like you vibe with that, you're like, oh dang, like I can get help and like that stuff will just happen. That's really attractive. I think I've shared the story before. We won a pretty big monthly account, like five or six grand a month. And they got quotes from three or four accounting firms. And the guy later told me that we had the highest dollar quote. But they said yes to us because on our proposal I called out that at that top tier we would work directly with their team. We want to understand their org chart. We want to go to the people with the answers. We don't want to play telephone. Rather than them having to lead the process. We're like, no, we're the experts. Help us understand your business and who we need to talk to and we're going to take it straight to them and make stuff happen and only pull you in when we really need you. They saw that and honestly, gang, the other accounting firms that they may have gone with, I'd almost be surprised if they weren't willing to do the same thing. But they didn't call it out in their proposal, right? And so this proposal right here, if you're hearing this and you're like, well, this is a thing that we already do call it out. Like that's, that's a super valuable thing that we can pull out into that most premium package where your most time constrained people will find that very attractive. There's going to be situations where people would be like, I would pay twice as much for that because the squeaky wheel is always me. It's always waiting on me. And so if you can actually take it directly to the team or whoever else needs to be involved there, that's really valuable for them. Another thing we can stack in this gold tier is a good one. If you run a local firm, how about letting them book time in your office? If you have an office? Let's not rule anything out here. Like, how can we be helpful to the clients that we support? Maybe you're in a big City. Like let's say you're in LA or you're in New York City, something like that, and you've got a little bit of office space. What would it look like to let them book time in your office if that was helpful to them? There's going to be certain people where that's extremely valuable just to have that there. You'll find actually for premium buyers that they will buy things just in case they need it, right? Just they will buy that level of access, oftentimes not use it at all. They just want to have it. They feel like they should have that sort of access. Last idea here is on this gold tier. Could we figure out a way to do maybe an in person thing? Is there a version of that that might make sense? Especially if you run a virtual business and you never see these people in person. Is there something you could reserve to that for that most premium tier where you come out and meet with them in person? Like it depends on, on ultimately the size of these packages. I mean, in my firm we were serving way too broad a client base, but we had, you know, one off tax projects down to 250 bucks. And the, the biggest engagement I ever closed was like a 1.3 million dollar engagement. It was like a. What was it? It was a two and a half year deal or something like that. The monthly fee was between 40 and 50 grand a month. And there's, there's a bronze, silver and gold version of every single one of these projects. But if the incremental cost and the time commitment for you is not that big or consequential to be able to come out and do something in person with somebody, consider it like for the right person, you coming to them, that might actually be really attractive. And that might make the whole relationship a little more sticky as well and sort of unlock some new conversations that wouldn't have otherwise happened. The whole idea of that gold tier is we're trying to build it in a way that is attractive to premium buyers. And the fact that we may not ourselves be premium buyers, we may be the Southwest flyers. Right now we're super mad that Southwest going to assign seating. And you're like, oh man, I love just the mosh pit. Getting onto the plane, that was, that was my energy. But the fact that we may not be premium buyers doesn't mean that there aren't folks out there who, if we give them a first class option, will happily pay for the first class option. And that, gang, is a much easier path to running a much more profitable firm than just doing more work. Because that's the way that most people wade into three tier proposals is bronze is some work, silver is more work, and gold is all the work. Like the first time you send out a gold package, you're like, what's anything and everything I've ever done for anybody. I'm going to put all that on here. They're going to have my home address, I'm going to have my cell phone number. I'm going to let them take my kid on the weekends if they want to. Like, what are all the things that I compile into gold? That's not what we want. That's not better. That's more what we're looking for is better. Like I said, we salute your courage. Thank you for sharing your story, sharing the proposal. You want me to take a look at a proposal that you've sent out? Email it to me, DM it to me, send me a text, text me a picture of it. That's what a lot of people do. Send it to 1-516-980-4968. You got my number in your phone yet? Tell you what, my, my texts been popping off lately. I fell off the wagon a bit when I was on the workshop tour and got way behind on messages. Actually in the process of getting caught up now. But don't be afraid to send me a text, leave me a voicemail every time you ask those questions and we have that conversation, it helps us all, we all get smarter by talking through it. With that, let's get to the mailbag. We got a lot to cover. Mailbag, mailbag. This segment is called these questions. Came in across social, email, text, all every way you can imagine. A pigeon flew into the window earlier today. I went outside, a little note tied to its leg. Please don't do that. Had to call a bird hospital. That's a thing. Evident it was a whole thing. First step, I want a niche into the CrossFit world, even though it's currently a mess. But I love the methodology doing CrossFit myself and I know gym owners need help with more than just the books. Tell me, how do I get into this? This is a thing already there are other people in this space, which is not a reason to not go into this space. But that would be the place to start. In fact, the conversation we had with Karen Rayburn on the podcast this week, she had some really good ideas around how to use AI to research your competitors to see what they're doing, what's working, and then find your Space within that. Like, how can you do something differently? Recognize if somebody's coming to you, there's a good chance they're going to go look at those other folks as well. So how can you stand out? But I will say, if it's coming from a place of passion, that is the best way to build a nation. We don't all have that thing that we are, we're passionate about. I know I definitely didn't, like, I wish I was that kid that growing up was like, yeah, I want to be. I want to be a veterinarian. And you have that thing that you just like from the early days, you know, that's your path. I've never had that. I still don't have that. What am I doing right now when I publish this podcast? I don't. Are humans watching it? Is it, Is it people's clod bots? Who can say for sure? But if you have a passion, brother, that is a gift. Do not let the people who say, don't let your passion. Don't turn your passion, your hobby, into a job. Terrible advice to someone who's going out and like, starting a business or something like that. To be like, oh, yeah, that thing you love. No, no, no, no, no, no. Run as far away from it as you possibly can. How is that good advice? Now, it is true that when you work on something and you get good at something, you can learn to enjoy it. And that's great. That stuff happens. That's definitely been my journey with accounting. There was never a stage in my life where I was like, ooh, accounting like that, that gets me hot under the collar. That never happened. But as I got into this stuff further, especially accounting from a strategy I love, like preparing tax returns. Did not enjoy doing month end closes, actually enjoyed a little bit more because there's more of a tech automation angle there. But what I enjoy more than anything else is just kind of accounting firm strategy. So I found a passion in that. If you already have a passion, brother, don't hide it under a bushel basket. Marry that with the fact that everybody needs accountants. That's the best thing about accounting. So if you are doing this CrossFit thing from a place of passion, that's awesome. That's the place to start. The people who are the best at anything are the ones for whom that thing doesn't feel like work. Like, who is the person where, like, they're gonna go home at night and read about it and watch videos about it and be geeking on that thing. Whether I Employ them to do that or not. Like, those are always gonna be the people who are best at that job. So how do you wheeze your way into the CrossFit world? There's, I mean, infinite things you can do here because there's all sorts of influencers and consultants and folks in this space already. Always look for the hubs, the people who are connecting the types of folks that you want to get in front of. Software companies are also great here who are, like, building software specifically for CrossFit gym owners. Three specific ideas I wanted to give you that I think are particularly juicy. One, how about an app rec database for CrossFit gym owners? I could tell you myself it may not be quite as an acute, quite as acute of a problem for CrossFit gym owners as it is for accountants, but for people at accounting firms, tech selection and choosing the right tools is a major headache. Like it just is. And you have to use so many different tools. I don't know that it's quite as hairy for CrossFit gym owners, but I can tell you there's a tremendous amount of interest in am I using the right tech in my business? Because tech is kind of like this. It's almost like found money where when you find the right thing, it's just like this magic wand that can make things more efficient or make you more money. So do what I've done for accounting firms. I mean, swipe all my stuff, knock yourself out. Build an app REC database for CrossFit gym owners and don't get too blocked by like, what do I know and what do I not know right now? Like, just start, like, start with the leaders who are the biggest platforms out there. You don't even have to do it in an opinionated way, necessarily. The version one doesn't have to say, these ones are the best and these ones stink. Do that once you have more reach and you've had more conversations and you actually do know which ones are good and which ones aren't. My recommendations are driven on what people tell me about the platforms. And so I talk with hundreds of accounting firms pretty much every single month. And so I just hear a lot of stuff that other people don't hear. The apprecs are how I can, like, give really good information in as concise a way as possible so it's easier for firms to make buying decisions if you're not on that. If you haven't seen those jasononfirms.com apps. But do the same for CrossFit gym owners, for whatever reason, People are into it. People will engage with that stuff. Second idea, put together a report. How much money does the average CrossFit gym owner make? And this is a really easy thing to do. You basically build a survey. You get gym owners to complete the survey and you have to provide something of value to them. It could be a copy of the report or some sort of benchmarking or something like that. And all of a sudden you, as the holder of that data now have a valuable asset. And people are going to want to see this. From the looky loos who are thinking about starting a CrossFit gym to gym owners who are like, how do I stack up against other folks? All of a sudden you have something that all of those people want. A great example if you're looking for ideas of somebody who's done this in the wild. Big four Transparency. Basically a guy stood up a form that lets people who work for big firms come and share how much money they make. And it's now this humongous database with thousands of submissions with really good benchmarking data for how much people make inside of accounting firms of all different shapes and sizes. That's like a very sophisticated version of this. But if you're looking for inspiration of like, well, what does the intake form look like? What could I do with the data? Big four Transparency is now like a whole business of its own, where accounting firms pay for access to that data to like use it in their hiring and stuff like that. But you could do a super basic version of this and it would become a big talking point. You could go and do podcast interviews about it. And every single submission you're getting the email address of someone who's either a gym owner or someone interested in doing this. Right. By the way, this whole thing, you could apply this to just about any industry. Dentists, how much money do dentists make? Like, run with this. It will absolutely attract people to you. Last idea here, find all the CrossFit tax firms. So sometimes the best partnerships you can build are other accounting firms. I think I had it in my head that this person wanted to do bookkeeping. I think they want to do bookkeeping and tax, but build out a network because in some industries more than others, like, there's always going to be hand me downs that are valuable. And I would say when you're just getting started in a niche, any hand me down is valuable. Almost any firm has stuff that they won't touch. As, as we should. Like, you should have boundaries of. Here's what's in your lane and what isn't, talk to those other firms, see what's in their lane and how you can kind of fit in there. And then if you can get their scraps, man, that's great. Like, you know, if you're sitting on some legacy clients right now that you're having a hard time getting rid of, you know just how valuable it would be to you if you had a firm that you could send that stuff to where you knew they'd be taken care of. So a lot of accounting firms, like, if you can break through the outreach, which is hard, like outreach to accountants, because we get so much of it, it's very hard to know what's real and like, should I actually respond to this person or not? But if you can make that connection, those can be kind of the ultimate referral source for you. But you can do it. Yeah, CrossFit, like, CrossFit's burning down. But honestly, the world is big enough and we are like, we're so far from niche and micro niche saturation in accountingdom. Most business owners are just tickled when they find out that there's an accountant that works with people just like them. Like, I know why it works that way, but they're very excited about it. And the fact that you're doing something more specific generally gives you more pricing power to be able to price what you're doing in a bit more premium of a way. Hey, real quick, if you use Microsoft Outlook or Gmail in your accounting firm, pay real close attention to what I'm going to tell you next. This podcast sponsor, Missive. It is email like you have always wanted. It is a team first approach to managing email. Would you believe me if I told you Microsoft Outlook, which came out, I think we worked it out. It was pre middle school for me. Microsoft Outlook, it is not the best like email platform for accounting firms. That may come as a shock to you. And when we're spending a huge percentage of our time on email, accountants on average in my polling spend one to two hours a day just managing email. It means the tool you use for email is incredibly important. Missive. Over 500 accounting firms have moved their email to missive. We did a demo of missive on my YouTube channel a few months back. People freaking flipped. In fact, I made a social post, a sponsored social post. A couple of days later. Over 50 people opted to hop in on a demo like a little show and tell that we were doing the next week from an accounting firm that's been running all their email on Ms. For the last few years. Some practice management systems will manage your email inbox, but most of them, all they do is connect to it, which is great. So I can see the emails associated with my client records, but that is not a like productive place to be composing and managing email by any stretch of the imagination. Missive it is the inbox tool for teams built from the ground up to make you more productive with this stuff and give you a path to like delegating email work for the time first. First time too. I'm a big fan of the tool. To learn more about Missive, check out that Demo on my YouTube channel. Then head on down to the Show Notes to learn more. Hey, if you've got any clients that have to do like ugly project tracking or have any degree of inventory management or big ugly invoices like the type you see from construction companies that are a mile along and have all this item detail, then my brother this episode sponsor Maker's Hub it is for you, even if you don't do the accounting is a big one to share with your client. Because truly the area of accounting that has been most turned on its head by AI is accounts payable. And it's not even close. We had some big meaty bill pay engagements we did with clients where I truly could have automated 80% of what we were doing. With Maker's Hub, the extraction quality is so far beyond what OCR could ever do. And because it can now pull like every little fiddly detail from the invoice in a totally automated way. Like, like by the way, we, I think we're actually very close to fully automated extraction, which people have been saying for over a decade, you don't have to review the bills anymore. It's like really? Because my job is to do the bills and if there's an extra zero that slips in there, I'm going to lose my job. Feels like we're actually getting close to fully automated extraction, but because it can pull all those details really well, you can then build all sorts of automated workflows on top of that for like really complex approvals. And we're talking more than just like pull the date and the amount from the invoice. We're talking about every single little fiddly detail in the item, like itemized list. This is crazy. Microsoft, we did some examples on a demo on YouTube where it was even pulling handwritten text accurately. Crazy stuff. Even if this is not something you're doing for your clients, if you have clients that are doing gnarly billing and Inventory management, all this stuff, Makers hub, a lot of people that are raving fans of it because it just takes the level. This stuff can be automated, like just to another level. How many times did I just say level? Okay, you know what to do next. Learn more down at the link in the show notes. If you got a client you want to share this with, I would say either send them the landing page or send them one of the demos we've done on my YouTube channel and in like seven minutes they can get a sense of what it is. That's it, that's the ad read. Next up. And this was on the topic of LinkedIn and social media impressions going down. If impressions are noisy, then what metrics do we pay attention to? Do we shift to profile views, inbound dms, post saves, or even some sort of off platform outcome like an email signup? Otherwise we're optimizing for a number that may not map to anything real, that being impressions. And you're totally right. So you gotta think about, like, why am I even showing up on this social media platform? What is the goal? What are the KPIs? I can tell you what it is for us. We have two social media metrics. One is impressions and one is email list signups. That's the only reason that we're on social media, is brand awareness. And then ultimately, how many people can we get off platform to the email list? Got just over 15,000 people on the email list now, and for me, maybe 7 or 8,000 of those have been from LinkedIn. And so we track impressions, but at the end of the day, if I had to pick one of those metrics that mattered more, it would be email signups. Right? And I can tell you just myself, anecdotally, email signups have not gone down, even though my impressions have gone down by maybe a third. So that's an example of where it's like, well, are we actually getting more of the desired outcome and is that related to impressions at all? Because you can even see a world where you post more targeted stuff and your impressions are a tenth of what they may have been the previous week, but you get more email signups. So we gotta be really careful with social media because it can be such an infinite time sink. Gotta be very explicit about why are we engaging with this platform and what are the goals and are we measuring the goals so that we know if, like, what inputs are leading to the most valuable sort of outcomes and what are the things to double down on. Good question though. So, yeah, impressions kind Of a weak sauce metric, Measure what the great outcome is for your business. All right, when doing pre billing, this is upfront pricing at a predetermined price. Have I ever had clients wanting a partial refund if the scope and time came in less than expected? That is a great question. So you're moving to fixed upfront pricing for the first time. We're always afraid of, like, oh, what if the project ends up being really big and we didn't guess that number enough? And you're like, well, at that point, you just have a scope conversation and you say, hey, scope was way more. We quoted you this price, assuming scope would be the same. It wasn't. Scope is more. So let's talk about the new price. But what about the opposite? What if it comes in way low? I can tell you, having done this on literally thousands of projects, I have never in my life had a client come back and say, hey, this should have been way less. Like, you're like, you shouldn't bill me this much because your time was less, or something like that. The client's like, at the end of the day, like, they didn't know how much time that we sunk into it. And people generally don't care how much time and effort it takes you to get to an outcome. They just care about the outcome. Sometimes you'll have people that will complain about the price, like, and that's fine, and that's justified. Just means they don't value what we've done for them up to what we're charging them for it. But that can happen for a number of reasons. In fact, I would say we had way more people that complained about price because they just didn't value what we did than we ever had complain about our price because the time we put into it didn't justify the price. Like, folks weren't concerned really about how much effort did it take. They were concerned about, how much do I value this? Am I paying more than how I value it, or am I paying less than how I value it? So I would say the fact that nobody complains or next to nobody complains, if we give them an upfront price of a thousand bucks, and then the time and whip came in at, like, 600 bucks, but we still bill it out at a thousand. The fact that nobody's going, ooh, ooh, that's a problem, I think, is just further proof that, like, people will pay based on outcomes, not based on how hard was it for you? Curious if you've ever done a review of different KPI Dashboards that integrate with accounting platforms. So basically reporting systems. I think I can tell you I haven't because I've never really been like a reporting software guy. I'm just not that into reporting tools. Never had much success with them. I would also say the explosion in popularity of spreadsheet integrators, that is tools that will bridge data from your accounting ledger to your spreadsheet, those have gotten much more popular and actually eaten away at the reporting market. A lot of people that used to use reporting tools that now just use a tool to push ledger data into a spreadsheet and they kind of create reports of their own design using that data. So I've never really done like a review comparing them. We may add reporting tools to the app database at some point. It's a tricky one because it's so subjective. People need different things from their reporting tools, so it's hard to say which ones are best. But I haven't gone that deep on that one before. I will say we'll probably add it to the appreciation just so I can give you a big list of like, here are all the ones to check out. I love this question. How do I go about finding more high end clients? That was the entire email. How do I go about finding more high end clients? I don't know what that means. I'll assume that that means clients that are willing to pay more. So first things first, I would say, do you have any, quote, high end clients today? However you would define that, is there anyone on your client list you're like, yeah, more like them. If you do, you start there, you ask those people for referrals, you learn more about them, figure out where they hang out and go and hang out in those places. Ultimately, like the job of, you know, any leader in an accounting firm, like the most important job you have is managing and curating the client list, like ensuring that you have as many, quote, high end clients as possible and that it's always trending in a direction that is high ender. And this is not to say that like we outgrow helping people. We should absolutely help people. But my take on how best to help people is to run a really premium business and then you've got an abundance of time and money to help people that have nothing to pay for help. I don't want to help low bono clients, folks who are paying like, you know, 70% the normal rates. They should go to another firm while I should be helping the people that can't really pay anything for help help. So if you have any, so if you have any, quote, high end clients today, start there, figure out where they're hanging out. But also consider like, is your brand high end? And there's, there's a lot of mistakes we can make that will make our brand not be perceived as a premium thing from your website. Like how does that come across to the pricing? Like literally people will leave if they see that your pricing is too cheap. If we bring this back to three tier pricing, like I always tell people, if we don't put a first class option in front of them, first class people will assume that you're not a firm for them. And that may sound very hoity toity, but like that is the reality. Like when a first class person goes and looks at the ticket options on a Southwest flight or a Spirit flight or something like that, and they see that they can't buy a first class ticket when that's all they ever buy on Delta, then they are going to think that's not an airline. For me, the same thing exists inside of our accounting firms. Like are we offering a first class option? If we're not, then first class people are going to think that you're not a place for them. And third, consider, are you a cheapskate? Like oftentimes our client lists are a reflection of us and a lot of us accountants, like, we're just very frugal people. And it's very hard to like build a list of very premium clients if you yourself do not behave and identify as a premium buyer yourself. So this is your chance. Go out and buy that chain, get the upgrade the, the Camry to like the, the higher tier, the higher trim level, whatever that looks like for you. Those, our client lists in some ways are like, like a window into our own souls, right? And so if you are, if you like behave and price things in a very frugal way, it's going to attract frugal people. I mean we love the expression you get what you pay for, right? So people should pay more. That one cuts both ways. If we price what we do in a super discounted way, we attract discount people. And the only way to ensure that you never get people who will pay really good money for what you do is if you never put a price in front of them that represents, quote unquote, really good money. Okay, next up. I just started my own accounting firm in 26 who. Good for you. I have experience with Taxdome but wanted to know what you recommended for a pm. I'm using Anchor for Proposals Pro Connect for tax software. I feel gross about it because proconnection into a product and trying to decide if I should stick with taxdome or try something else. Technology is my thing. I love the process of building a firm more than the accounting work itself. I can relate building a firm's fun man, except for when it's not. What practice management system for you? So I assume this is still a solo practice. If you're running a tax shop, the options they would be Taxdome, Canopy, Carbon, or probably Firm360. If you already know Taxdome like Taxdome is a great option, I would say Taxdome probably tops out at like 20 to 30 employees. So depending on how big a shop you're trying to build, it doesn't grow to like a hundred plus employees, though arguably none of them do well. Canopy and Carbon will will support bigger teams than taxdome does. Those are my words. Not taxdomes. The bigger thing Two things because all four of those are very good options. Bigger things are one pulling in an implementer. Get an expert to like help you with your initial setup and it will save you so much time and headache. Even if you are the geek that loves tinkering with everything, it's tremendously useful to get the perspective of somebody who is an expert. If I can plug I haven't plugged my community yet today realize RLZ IO we have experts in residence on all of the major practice management platforms where you can for free book a call with them every single quarter to coach you on your setup of your practice management system. I don't think I've ever shared that before. That's just one of many things we do in the community that I think is useful. But second thing, if you have friends on one of these platforms go that way because having people that you can shoot A quick question to to say what do you do for this and that that's tremendously valuable. It really is. A couple more to go here. I see you continuing to push the chat GPT business plan, but I don't see you talking about cloud much. I find cloud to be really good, especially with CLAUDE code for automation workflows and I just think the user experience is better than chat GPT they said I think all their paid plans are quote unquote safe in terms of not training on data. But are there any other red flags that keep you from talking about Claude more? No, we we did cover this I think in the last podcast that the cloud for work stuff is good and so it's actually Cloud team is probably the Best plan for your accounting firm. Honestly, the reason I don't talk about Claude is that accounting firms are just kind of overwhelmed by all the different options. And if I had told you to hop to Claude every time it was marginally better than Chat GPT in the past. It's probably been five or six times where there were there where that was the case before. And so it's just hard to steer people in a direction when it comes to AI assistance because I don't want to give you a different option every single month. I would still say ChatGPT is the only platform that has been the best or very nearly the best from the beginning. And that's why I've always come Back to chat GPT.cloud right now is very good. We will see if Chat GPT catches up. I don't know that it is so much better for most people to where it will make that much of a difference over Chat GPT. What this person is explaining is Claude code which let's be real like as far as AI users go, like that's a pretty advanced like big brain AI user. So if you are that type of person for sure cloud's got some super cool stuff. But if I'm running a firm of 40 people, all my people aren't going to be hopping on cloud code and like using some of the things that are, you know, more unique just to the cloud ecosystem. So right now I would still say like my firm, I would still be running with ChatGPT because they've just been the leader from the beginning. There's increasingly an argument if you're on Google Workspace to just go with Gemini. Though the app itself is still very, very basic, the models are good, it just doesn't have all the helpful functionality that ChatGPT has. But main reason I don't talk about Claude more is I just like I don't want to confuse people any more than I already do telling them to hop around a different AI assistance. But you sir are a big brain nerd. If you are using cloud code so the world is your oyster, go wild and let us know what you build with it. My biggest issue is workflow and making sure things don't fall through the cracks. We're scaling rapidly and I find all the firm practice management solutions I've demoed are bloated and overwhelming. I just need a running to do list of monthly tasks and any available automations to help mitigate them. So far my paper, my paper notebook is the number one solution. But I'm outgrowing it quickly. Good problem to have. I know. Is this my wife? Your paper notebook is your number one solution. Hang on, is she not listening? She's not listening. Real quick, between you and me, oh, I'm going to get torched for this. I shouldn't say this. I'm going to say it real quick. I give, I give my wife a hard time for like manual journals and post it notes on everything and all that. I'm like, you know, you could just do this stuff on your phone. She's actually not the only one I've seen do what I'm about to tell you now, but one time she had a post it note and she stuck it to her phone and I'm like, do you realize the power that's at your fingertips? You would write something on a post it note to stick it to this device. So far, my paper notebook is the number one solution, but I'm outgrowing it quickly. Good problem to have, I know, but don't want to get buried as we grow. Or worse yet, miss something important. Here's the thing, gang. Learning to run your firm in a practice management system is a learned skill. You have spent years managing what you do in a paper notebook. So it's what you know and it's what you are good with. There's a lot of people out there who've spent a decade running their accounting firm on a spreadsheet and it's what they're comfortable with. It doesn't mean it's the best way to do it. It just means it's what you know. So from what I've gathered from this question, you know that there is value in moving to a system to manage your firm on it. You just, you just gotta learn the skill. You gotta pull in an implementer also, like, go to the best platform for you, which will not be perfect. It absolutely won't. Pull in an implementer that can help. Best marry your ambitions with what the platform will do. But recognize if you're building a team and you're scaling rapidly, it's gotta work for the entire team. How's that paper notebook working for the rest of your team? Like, it becomes a collective decision. Not just what you need, but what is going to be most helpful for everybody on the bus. Again, yet another thing that is helpful to navigate and to learn around your peers, not your employees, not, not the people that work for you, but other people who have gone through the same thing is tremendously valuable. If you end up going on taxdome or canopy or whatever it is to be able to have other people you can tap and be like, what did you do for xyz? That is like the power of having a peer network. Because what's normal for you? Like, you go to all sorts of people who are like, could you run your accounting firm on a paper notebook? And they'll be like, you kidding me? No. That is your normal right now. You want to find people for whom their normal is running everything in a practice management system. And the more time you can spend with them, the more that normal will become normalized for your normal. You can do it. Okay, gang, lovely to see you today. Can't believe you came back after the last one. Hope to see you at the next one. Leave me a comment. What are you working through right now? What are you stuck on? There are some really sharp people in the comments to these podcasts, like great sort of people to spark up a conversation with. Drop a comment, shoot me an email, drop me a text. Hope to have the dates and cities for the workshop tour for you super, super soon. Hopefully next episode. So looking forward to seeing a bunch of you live again. Either way, I will catch you in the next episode. Thanks for being here.