Coaching 6 Accounting Firms in 47 Minutes

Today we are rapid firing through a whole bunch of questions I've got from accounting firms I've coached. I think we're closing in on 3,000 firms, like directly, personally, in the last two or three years. Today we're talking through some super practical stuff from marketing, building your tech stack, some sneaky boomer advice that no longer applies to running firms, some tips on change management and the return of indecent proposals where we take a real life proposal that some firm sends out and give you a few practical ways for how to improve it. And so that every proposal you send after listening to this podcast is more profitable. Got a lot of ground to cover. Let's get into it. All the questions I'm running through today, people have texted me. Here's my number. 516-980-4968. I'm behind that text number. It is the world's first free accounting firm coaching service. But no guarantees on response time. Okay, okay. First up, some out of date marketing advice. Marketing. We talked a lot about marketing on the podcast. Myself, as someone who formerly prided myself in being like we've never had to market and like priding myself on referrals, that mindset, in my opinion, it's a trap. Because while not everyone needs more clients, everybody needs better clients. And if the key to like unlocking more profitable work is getting more clients to agree to kind of, you know, your gold tier offerings that are the most profitable. And if 10% of your clients right now will agree to that, but you really want to have a whole client list of folks on gold, how do you get there? Well, we work backwards. If 5% of people that come to your website book a call and then 20% of the people you take a call with become a client and then 10% of those clients opt into the gold plan, how do we build an entire client list of golds? We 10x the people that hit the website. So marketing, even if you're over capacity, arguably even more if you're over capacity, it matters because it's how we get better paid, paying work. I love this question. Hey Jason, big fan here. Was wondering if you had any input for this common problem. I plan to start my own firm, but everywhere I look I see firm owners saying traditional advertising, AKA Google Ads, don't work and that you would have to sign up for your local chamber of commerce and bni. What are your thoughts on this? My thoughts are that you've been talking with somebody that has yet to hear about the Internet. It's actually what we're interacting on right now. If you're listening to this podcast, you know, like, this is how people learn and build connection these days. We're here, and, I don't know, something like 1600 people or so listen to, like, a couple episodes per week. We're here talking about the inside baseball of running an accounting firm. Buddy, that is a niche thing, but this is the future of media. Is. Is niche stuff, like traditional media is kind of in the process of being disassembled, and we all spend more time than we have ever have before consuming stuff that's very, very specific to us, that in the grand scheme of things, very few people will listen to. But we love it because it's very specific to us, and there's a big hunger for this right now. And so the way to get in front of more people and to stand out and be able to command premium pricing is not to sign up for your local chamber of commerce and bni. Now, if you want to run, like, a local firm, if that lights you up and you just want to work with people in your community, for sure, like, get plugged into chamber of commerce, just show up at a bunch of local events, sponsored a little league team, all that stuff. If you are looking to run, like, the most profitable firm and find the easiest path to building a firm, I would say it's not that. It is building a firm for a very specific type of person where when the right person comes along and they see your firm and they're like, oh, my gosh, finally, an accounting firm for beekeepers. The guy I'm working with right now, he doesn't know crap about beekeeping. And I keep having to teach him all these different things. Finally, someone that will understand what I do. People get so excited about that man. Like, I share the story of my barber, who'd spent two decades working with generalist accounting firms. Until I told him, I'm like, you know, there's accounting firms that just work with barbers. In fact, I could intro you to several. He, like, dropped his clippers, did a little happy dance. He's like, are you serious? I didn't know this was a thing. And it's so easy to dismiss that and be like, well, anybody can do barber stuff. And sometimes that's true. But. But that doesn't explain why that guy was so excited. Right? And if you really think that, consider why you're here listening to a podcast about, like, accounting firm business advice rather than some generalist thing right now. Like, I think a balance is good. General business Advice along with like very niche business advice. But the truth is people get very excited when they see someone that can serve their needs specifically. So the places I would much rather see you showing up is wherever those beekeepers hang out. The podcasts, the newsletters, the influencers, the conferences, the trade shows. To me, that is vastly more useful than a chamber. Consider what you could do in the time it takes you to go to a chamber of Commerce meeting. Like to go on a podcast with someone, you know, a podcast that somebody hosts in the space to do an interview on, you know, the tax impact of a new tax bill for beekeepers and that go out and, you know, somebody's a kind of niche newsletter that goes to a whole bunch of those folks. Chamber of Commerce BNI people have for sure built tons of firms on the back of those. But in 2025, there are more dense concentrations of people hanging out in specific spots online that I think are easier to reach. And if you're building a niche firm, the reality is you're doing that nationally and the Internet's just an infinitely easier way to find folks, right? Like I'm in Orlando right now, hosted a little get together last night. We had like five 55 Orlando area accountants come out and hang and just have drinks and some food. And all of that is possible just from me. Posting helpful things on the Internet for accounting firms, it's crazy. It's like super cool. Like, it is such an untapped thing that people aren't leaning into enough yet in my mind, that is how you build a firm in this day and age. I guess I didn't acknowledge, like, do Google Ads work? The short answer is not as well as all the stuff we just talked about. There's a world where if you have something that works really well on social media, just an organic post post. Like a good example for me is our app recommendation database. Like, it's. It's over a hundred apps for accounting firms, which ones I recommend and whether I do or don't. And it's probably the favorite thing we put out that I always hear from folks. Like, we really rely on that when I post on social media about it. Those posts do very, very well. That sort of post. If you can figure out the revenue model of how that thing ultimately makes you money, that sort of thing you can justify as a paid ad because it is a very good ad. What most people do with paid ads is more like a billboard. Here's who we are and what we do. That in my mind, that stuff usually doesn't work that's actually a pretty costly way to find folks. It helps if you're more specific. So like if you do want to work with beekeepers, maybe there's a version of that that targets beekeepers and works like it's worth testing. But the even better version of that is to create something useful for beekeepers and then market around that. And then once they use that thing like you get a drip sequence or you send them an email saying like hey, wanna hop on a call sometime? Something like that, to try to bridge that to a paid engagement like a one off project or becoming an ongoing client. Good question though. I mean that question, I think it's just the product of like wisdom that's probably 20 years old now. I would say. It's amazing how many aspects of running professional services firms remain identical to pre Internet folks run their firms the exact same way that they did before. Like the Internet has opened up so many cool new opportunities that we haven't yet leaned into in our firm. And this, what we're doing right now is a great example. Okay, Tech Stack, thank you for the question, by the way. Any questions? Chuck them in man. 516-980-4968 country code one because I am in the land of the free. Hello Jason. Your content is always great. You're insightful and inspiring. I'm a solopreneur that provides bookkeeping, individual tax prep and CFO with AI sliding into the mix. Oddly, the AI work allows me to be creative, so. So I may make that my mainstream of income. I don't know if that's like advising small businesses on AI use or what. I use the Microsoft suite, Drake and QuickBooks Online. Starting to post on social media with ads created by ChatGPT. I want your advice on Tech Stack. I'm looking to be in the 300 to 500k annual income level. I may have one employee at some point. Okay, Tech Stack for a solo operator looks a little different than the Tech Stack if you're planning to grow to a team of 5 or 10 or 100. Because when you are a solo operator, there's a lot of stuff you can kind of keep in your head now that like there's a risk of trying to juggle all that stuff in your head and becoming overwhelming. But more basic versions of tracking, like, and I hate to say this aloud, a spreadsheet, they can get you further as a solo operator than someone who's running a team where they need everybody to kind of be on the same page. So my take Here is rather than investing in the systems that manage the work, that is the practice management system usually which is the 10,000 foot view of where all the work is in the firm that in this case you first invest in the workflow. So the tools that will help you get the work done faster. I think that is a better ROI than a practice management system if you are a solo firm. So this person, they're doing bookkeeping, individual tax and CFO work. So everything okay? Best platforms on the bookkeeping side right now are probably double for month end close. Automation, formerly Keeper, Client Hub is kind of a hybrid month end close platform and practice management system. Client Client Hub's very good. And then Financial Sense is a little more practice management system that does like a bit of bookkeeping workflow. If you're doing a high volume of individual tax, I probably wouldn't recommend Client Hub or Financial Sense. Like if you're doing 500 or a thousand 1040s a year, those systems aren't like super suited for that. That would probably take you to a Tax Gnome or carbon or Canopy. This is why we've got a whole app recommendation database by the way. But to bring this back to like the workflow tools that would be highest impact here. Double is a great example of a bookkeeping workflow tool that will help you close more monthly books faster. On the tax side, this is where you want to pick up a tax workflow solution. The best things these do right now is automate 1040 intake. So they will look at the prior year, build a custom list of exactly the things that you need from the client this year and give you a place to collect all of that information and sort of auto organize it. The best platforms here, my leaders and my recommendations are Stanford Tax, Soroban and Trust. There's a bunch of tax automation stuff happening in other parts of the tax process right now. From automated delivery to some AI review stuff. The most real, the most universally helpful tax workflow solutions right now they're handling 1040 intake. That's where the greatest time savings opportunity is. And so in this case if you're a solo operator, rather than going down the path of like spending a bunch of money on a practice management system, I would say first look at these workflow solutions that will just help you get work out the door faster. Then if you want another system, you feel like you need a system to manage the overall flow of work. Take a look at those practice management systems that I mentioned. Those will get you to half million in revenue at no problem. They'll get you way past that, dude. Low key Solopreneur accounting firm, 2025, pretty great single person business. One other sort of newbie question here and then we're going to get into kind of more of the big boy firm questions. Should I get my CPA first or launch my accounting firm first? Let me give you a first first to do before these firsts. First learn what you enjoy in the accounting universe by getting as much experience as possible. So like the best thing you can do out of school is get some audit experience, get some tax experience, get some bookkeeping experience, get some experience managing clients. These are all things that will inform if you do someday want to run your firm, run your own firm. They will inform the type of work that's going to light you up. I didn't talk CFO in there like some sort of advisory consulting as well. You just don't know what you're going to like until you actually do it. There's no shame in going to work for somebody else. In fact, this is the best way to get some experience to learn what you do and don't like. It will accelerate the rate at which you learn. I mean, if you are in a firm that does a bunch of this stuff, you're going to learn how to do this stuff four times as fast as going out and doing it on your own and just trying to like muddle through it and figure it out along the way. That is a, that's a worthwhile shortcut to take in most cases. But once you know what you like and you feel like you're ready, just start. Don't procrastinate. The most common thing I hear from people who go out and start their own firms is they wish they had done it sooner. But then when it comes to whether or not to prioritize a cpa, think about it this way. The goal when you're running a firm, whether you have a CPA or not, is to be scarce and in demand for people to come to you, to be like, dang, this is the person that I need to help me. And I don't see a lot of other alternatives. In fact, if I can't work with them, everyone else feels like a step down. That's where you want to be, that's how you want to be perceived. That's how you can command really good fees for what you do. So how do you get there? There's a whole bunch of paths to get to being like this sort of scarce, in demand person. But to just outline two paths One, you could do what we just talked about earlier in this episode, where you find a very specific type of person that you can solve, like not real estate or dental. There's tons of people that do that. Go more specific. So specific that it makes somebody stop in their tracks and be like, oh, dang, finally somebody is doing this just for me. The world is humongous. It will always be bigger than we think it is, which means there's more people in a micro niche than you think, than. Than you suspect. Like, our kind of monkey brains aren't able to. Aren't able to get around just how big the world is and how many people there are. So don't be afraid to go very specific. It's actually an easier way to find people than going general. So consider how much time and effort it would take to be the leading accounting firm for taxidermists. I don't know, something specific you can get there in 90 days. Get the landing page stood up. Go do a bunch of podcast interviews. Figure out who the influencers are in space. Be the most visible person there's. Show up at some trade shows and you are scarce. Like, you are the expert. Don't get blocked by needing the expertise to go and do it. Building the expertise is a product of going and doing it. If you're stuck on this, like, I don't know the space well enough yet, consider the fact that every other generalist firm out there will happily take the taxidermist when they don't have any others. And they're like, well, yeah, we can figure this out just by investing a little bit of effort into learning and showing up. Events like, you will so quickly surpass the generalists and the expertise will follow. So that's one path to you being scarce. You can do that pretty quick. Funny thing happened recently when I was at a conference with one of this episode's sponsors, MakersHub so Makers Hub. They're like an AI accounts payable platform. The party trick is they're using, like, AI vision models to do extraction at a level that was kind of never before possible with OCR technology. But I was doing something at their booth. Some of the customers came by. Like, it is one of those tools where the customers are kind of raving fans. But a funny thing kept happening. Like, people kept throwing out these ridiculous document situations they have where they're like, I got this client, I have X, Y and Z problem. It's a total mess. We spend so much time on it and they just start riffing on it. Like, with the Maker Sub team and they're like, oh yeah, now I can see like you do this potentially. Like our product doesn't really do that, but actually if we change this or that this could potentially work. The team is just like, they're just a bunch of like document processing geeks who are also AI nerds. And the product very much is like the marriage of those two things. And so what Maker Sub does best right now? Like the biggest, ugliest accounts payable stuff that you got. Man, I had some gnarly clients where Makers Hub would have saved us so much time. But if you got any ugly bill pay stuff, class tracking projects, inventory, manufacturing, stuff like that, definitely worth giving Makers Hub a look. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. If your firm still runs on spreadsheets, sticky notes, or a half a dozen different apps to manage work, there is a better way. Enter this episode's sponsor, Financial Sense. It is the all in one platform for accounting firms to manage everything. Workflows, client requests, capacity, billing and team collabs all in one place. Automate recurring work, track deadlines and get visibility into what your team's working on. Built specifically for firm owners who want less chaos and more control. That's, that's actually an important detail if you're the type of firm owner that wants more chaos or if you want less control. This one, this one's actually not for you. Now this December 12th to 13th, Financial Sense is hosting WorkflowCon, a free virtual conference built around the theme Clear the chaos, find your comm and me. I'll be joining for a live Q and A on the subject of smarter client comms, but comms of all kind using AI alongside a bunch of other firm leaders. It's pretty like rockstar. List of speakers they got. Register for Workflow Con via the link below. Start your free 14 day trial of financial Sense using the link below with coupon code Jason 10. Grab all that stuff down in the show notes second path what if I go out and get my CPA? A lot of folks do this to be scarce, to be perceived as more premium and be able to command some more fees. The reality is going out and getting your cpa, that's usually a year and a half investment. And the reward on the other side of getting your CPA OR is being one of 653,000 active CPAs in the United States alone. That's a pretty rough trade off. And there's some situations where you need a cpa like are you going to do assurance Work great, but it is, in the grand scheme of things, an inefficient path to being scarce. And then when you get your cpa, you still have to do the exact same thing. You got to be like, okay, how am I going to be the best CPA for this type of person? You still have to do that exercise of, like, building a firm for a specific type of person. So go out, get a bunch of experience, see what you enjoy doing. But then I would push you in the direction of, like, building a firm for a very specific type of person, CPA or not. Okay, next question is on sales funnel. Here's the test. Trying out the phone number. Welcome. You probably thought I wouldn't go anywhere, huh? But here we are. I started my own CPA firm last year, specializing in audit and a test. Bless your heart. Who? I? I. You know what? Auditors are people, too. But I had one audit class in college and thought, this is. This will not be for me. And honestly, it's what kept me out of Big four, because I knew they were just going to chuck me into audit. So in the end, that was probably a good thing. Anyways, back to the text. Since then, I've had two prospects and kind of. I had two prospects and both kind of backed out. Now I guess I need to build a proper funnel to generate more leads. Any ideas are appreciated. When most people ask me this question, I don't have any more context than this, so I don't know where this person's at. When most people ask me this question, they've done very little to, like, solve the problem. And it's almost like you don't know where to apply your efforts. Right. And if you can't sit back and those things don't just, like, roll in on their own, then you kind of just start to panic. But the reality is, like, the people who will win here are the ones who are hustling, like, showing up in the most places. Like, my business. And what I do is so much a product of volume, of doing more than anybody else we'll do. It was like, 22 events in the last two months of this year. Over 70 live events this year, more podcasts, more videos than anybody else. And then people watch them and they're like, man, you're such a natural. You're so good at this stuff. And I'm like, man, I'm just doing it more than anybody else's. And, like, the goodness comes with the practice. Heard quote the other day. That quantity has a quality all its own. I think it was. Who was it? It was. It was Hermosi. Dang it. I get made fun of whenever I reference her mosey, but I'll do it again. It was a clip I saw from a workshop of his. And it was a lawyer that ran a pretty good sized practice. It was one at one of Hormozi's workshops. And he gets up to the mic and he's like, I just don't know how to grow my legal firm anymore because we can't find any attorneys. They just don't exist. Like there's not enough attorneys out there to keep up with the growth that we want, that we want to sort of reach. What do I do? And Hormozi is like, what would you do if 30 days from now someone was going to come and run off with your kids if he didn't find another 20 attorneys in 30 days? And he's like, well, we'd probably do 10 times as much as everything that we're doing right now and hire five more recruiters and all these different things. And he's like, cool. Like, there's your answer. Oftentimes we, I think we look too hard for the sexy answer when it's oftentimes the unsexy thing that gets results. Like the number of people that ask me, they're like, I assume you're not the one responding to texts. I assume you're not the one managing your social media or posting comments or sending all those DMs. Oh, oh, I wish that were so. I wish it were not me. And someday it almost certainly won't be. But sometimes you just got to do a bunch of volume and like make the time for it. And that is the solution. So if that, that sales funnel is empty, take all the principles we've talked about so far. So in your case, you do an audit. Who are the people that buy audits and where do they hang out? How can you develop a course around audit readiness for a specific type of business? Maybe run ads around that. That's one that I think would actually work, especially if the handoff is then to a, you know, $14,000 audit engagement. Decide like where you are going to put in your efforts and then just hammer on it. Whatever level of effort or number of iterations you're thinking of, like what would have to be possible to do 10 times as many of those and it's going to be more work and it'll come with some trade offs, but you're gonna learn faster, you're gonna figure out what works and what doesn't work a lot faster. And then don't forget about other accounting firms, especially in audit. There's a lot of accounting firms with more work than they can handle who are more than happy to refer work out to new firms. I was talking with somebody last night where a bunch of firms in their town have just started cutting any clients under their minimum annual fee of 10k. So they go through the whole client list. If anybody didn't pay them 10k last year, they're out. If you're a small firm, you're doing tax or bookkeeping work, there's a lot of meat on that bone for you still, right? Pick up a $7,000 a year tax client and these are like good, totally normal people, right? Firms are cutting that stuff left and right. I got a buddy who went out and started a benefit plan auditing firm on his own. He's still solo, he's got a couple of employees and his first audit clients came from the firm that he left. And he told them, I'm going to go out and start an audit practice. And within a month they'd already referred him several audits. So if you can build a network with firms that do this stuff, I'm increasingly convinced that may actually be the fastest way to fill your client list. And those don't have to be forever clients. Because when you're collecting the scraps from other people, like it's inevitably probably going to be a hodgepodge. But the goal right now in the early days is just, just to get there, just to put food on the table. Right. You can evolve that long term into a better client list for sure. But at this stage we're just trying to get the work in the door. All right, one more question and then we'll hop into a real accounting firm proposal. This is a good one. This one hit home. I dealt with this one a lot. Here's the text. I can't believe you gave out your phone number. That is so awesome. Maybe for you, my friend. Would be great to hear you touch on the following. I'm the director at a firm similar to your old firm. Older partners using hourly billing, very good tacticians. We're on track to do close to 2 million this year. Tax and accounting services to the partners have incredible experience. One has 30 plus years tax experience, the other many years of running businesses, being a CFO, raising capital, etc. I'm trying to push them to step away from doing the low value day to day tasks like tax prep, answering random questions, putting out fires so they can focus on higher value tasks like tax planning, training, fractional CFO and running the business. The problem is they will not let go. They complain about how busy they are and that they want to do these higher level things, but say they can't because they're too busy. How do I convince them to let go? Is it a trust issue? Maybe an identity issue? Both are over 60 and should not be working as much as they do. So many thoughts. So many thoughts. Two steps here. First, are they actually convinced and convicted that the thing you want them to do is the better thing? We come to people when we have our own big brain ideas and we learn things from, you know, the podcast or content or whatever it is, and we come headlong at people with this conviction of like, okay, here's what's got to happen now, guys. And then when it doesn't land, oftentimes we're disappointed that they don't have the same level of enthusiasm as you. In this case, the person asking the question, this has raised to a greater level of importance than it has for the other folks. Yet you can make time for anything. It's just a matter of how important is it to you. If I said, I just put a million dollar bill just outside the door of my hotel room, I'm in Orlando, Florida, if you're within a 10 hour drive of here, your priorities just changed, right? So whether they will commit to the change is a product of how convicted they are that the change is worthwhile. So consider, how can you make that feel more important to them? And one of the best things that you can do is expose them to the same context that you were exposed to that made you convinced. Why are you so convinced this is the right path forward? And can you get them plugged into whatever brainwashing got you there? But then also you have to show them an abundance of proof from other practitioners that they will listen to and respect. And usually that means people that look like them. So you could sit them down in a room with a 30 year old firm owner and the 30 year old firm owner's like, yeah, we're selling tax planning work for, you know, 12,000 a project. In fact, we won't take any clients where we won't do this and the 60 year old partners will be like, that's interesting, good stuff. But then immediately disqualify that because their client base is older or somehow different than this person, as opposed to a 60 year old gray hair he can put across them and they can tell the story of the Things that they do, that is a very different level of connection. It takes people saying folks like that to actually believe that for them it's possible. And we all have our own version of this. We really, really do. You will hear things, these big brain ideas, and you'll be like, I get it in theory, but it doesn't seem real until you talk with people who are actually doing it. And the more you talk with them, it just becomes normal. You absorb it like it becomes part of your reality in a way that wasn't possible before. This is the value gang of peers. And knowing other people that do this stuff, the more time you spend with them, their normal becomes your normal. And so if you have any way to do this, the best thing you can do to bring this type of person around is expose them to other people who are doing it, who got there. That reprograms their reality to see that like, okay, this actually is something that's achievable for me now in practice. The reality of actually getting there, of getting to that more valuable thing, human nature, if we save time on anything, is to simply do more of the things that we already do. Like that old adage of, oh, we can save a bunch of time on X, Y, Z and get back to the more valuable stuff. That almost never happens. You actually have to be very careful if you are going to save time. You have to plan ahead to say, what are we going to do with that saved time that's more valuable? Otherwise you'll just take on one more bookkeeping client or one more tax or whatever it is. You'll fill that void with more of the same. That is just. That's the default for everyone. So we got to get intentional about, like, how much time should we be spending on this? Literally make it a number, like, make that a goal for next quarter. But then the way you get there is through elimination is, well, something's got to give to get me the time to be able to do that. Right? And so this is going to probably look like an uncomfortable level of delegation. Breaking some assumptions around what is possible to be delegated and what is not. And it's something you've never delegated before. You gotta figure out how to do it. If you can talk with other people who have done it before, pull an assistant in your email inbox for the first time. The number of people that still don't do that is shocking to me. But so many people have. And so if you're stuck on how do I do that, go talk with people who have go ask on social media, join my community, make a post. Anybody wanna just hop on a zoom call and tell me how you've pulled an admin into your inbox and in 48 hours you will have a model for how to do that. Because if you are very far along in the firm running journey, it's not a question of money, it's a question of know how you can afford a va. You just haven't seen a clear path for how to do that yet. So it's gonna take stuff like that, like learning new delegation skills and challenging your framework for how you have to work right now to free up the time to be able to go and do that new thing. And if we couple this with just our inability as humans to estimate our own capacity, having wiggle room to be able to do this other stuff, it won't happen until you have delegated and cut so much stuff that part of you will be like, what am I going to do with all this extra time? Like, that's the degree of elimination that it requires because we always underestimate what we've got coming in the pipeline and how much time it will take. So it should be like, how do I get down to half time? If you look at your responsibilities right now, you cut half of that stuff successfully, you'll find you pick up another 30% of the things you weren't doing that you should have been doing because you were over capacity. But at least now you have 20% of space to do that new thing right? That is a universal truth. I found that list of things that you really want to get done today that you always only get halfway through. That's not a list of to do's, buddy. That is a wish list. Wouldn't it be nice if I could get all those things done? And so we kind of just have to like build that bias into our planning. The fact that it will never go as well as you think it will, which is just kind of a sad framing for that, right? Okay, let's look at an accounting firm proposal. Roll that spicy, spicy transition. It's time for Indecent Proposals, where we fine tune your client proposals to help you land better paying projects. Let's get into it. So I'm talking with a person last night, listens to the podcast. They're like, I keep getting ads for the movie Indecent Proposals since. Since watching the podcast and you know, Google can see like, what is the. What is the script in the podcast that they're listening to? And we say indecent proposals a number of times because that's the name of the segment. They're like, since listening to this, I now get served as and I see like Demi Moore stuff and all these things. If that's happening to you, drop a comment. I would love to know if that's an anomaly or if this person just like me googled indecent proposals to make sure that this wasn't too problematic to use as a segment name. I just thought that was hilarious. So if you follow my main YouTube channel, you know that about six months ago I ditched my traditional bank for Mercury. Mercury, now sponsor of this episode. I actually made the move before they sponsored any of our stuff. Mercury. Over 200,000 companies now trust them for banking and managing their finances. It's everything that you wish traditional banks were like, good access management. Not having to do two factor authentication Olympics to get into your client's banking stuff, which is by the way, like a major security risk to your firm. When the strategy to get the info we need is to tell the client to forward you the code that came to them in a message that says, never share this code with anyone. And we, we feel dumb about it, right? We're like, yeah, no, really sorry for the convenience inconvenience. Don't be sorry. Tell them there is a better way. Mercury. It gives you firm level access where then you can give the members of your team granular access to whatever they need, even down to like specific bank accounts. Much better from a security standpoint, but also like from a workflow standpoint is gonna make your life, oh my gosh, so much better. Now Mercury, they will literally pay you money to put your clients on Mercury. Thousand dollars referral bonus per eligible client. Terms and conditions apply. Of course you get Mercury Pro for your firm. It's worth checking out. It's really good. Mercury's a fintech company, not a bank. Terms apply for bonus eligibility. See show notes for details. Totally worth checking out. I really like Mercury. Get all that down in the show notes. Boo. You know what's the worst, man? When you hire somebody and they start working for you and you're like, I thought this person knew stuff. The number of times I've been hoodwinked by somebody that interviews well and they have umpteen years of experience and you pull them in and you're like, what? You did? You don't. What? You don't even know your stuff, man. This isn't gonna work. Let me tell you what one of this episode's sponsors, Cloud Accountant staffing is doing about that. So cloud accountant staffing help accounting firms find talent around the world, be it the Philippines, South Africa, Latin America. And they have an online portal where you can go out and see folks that they have recruited, schedule interviews with those people directly on their platform. And one of the things now that every single one of those people have is a collection of assessments. I'm looking at one right here. Assessments for business tax, for individual tax, for critical thinking, for understanding instructions, their personality type. And so many of these things like individual tax, this person I'm looking at, they're in the 93rd percentile. And so cloud account staffing, they have a huge volume of folks that they have go through these assessments and they hand pick the highest performers and they serve them up for you to make your wildest dreams come true. Cloud account staffing's backstory there actually ran an accounting firm, hired some offshore folks, had an amazing experience, and then just started helping other accounting firms do the same. Interested? I thought you might be. Check out the link down to cloud accountant staffing in the show notes. Okay, this is a proposal that somebody texted me. Buddy, you want some free feedback on a proposal, text it to me. Should I say the number again? 1-516-980-4968. Pull that. Pull the train over right now. Get your phone out. Just put my number in, save first name, Jason, last name from the Internet. 516-980-4968. Next time you're stuck on something, fire a message off. Just give me 68 weeks to respond. All right, so this proposal is put together in Dubsado, and it is. Dubsado can be customized to a hardcore degree. In fact, the proposal feels more like a full blown landing page than what you normally get from proposal platforms like Ignition or Anchor. In some ways it's cool, in my opinion. In other ways, it feels like a lot. The nice thing that most proposal platforms do is they show you one screen and that's all you have to process and then you go to the next step and you've got a new screen. That's all you got to process. And it's already hard not to make proposals overwhelming my initial impression of like a full blown landing page proposal is at feels like a lot of information to process. I don't know how much of this is like, I don't know, personal opinion, but that's my take on a proposal experience that has a lot of stuff. Quick hits on what this proposal is. Honestly, it doesn't even matter what the meat of it is. The Suggestions that I've got are kind of just more tactical and they apply to any type of proposal. They have three tiers here. Cfo, VIP and Advanced. Which one do you think is the top one? You probably can't tell, right? Cfo, vip, Advanced, I don't know. In this case, Advanced is the lowest, VIP is the middle, and CFO is the top. Am I vip? Almost seems like it ought to be above cfo. I've mentioned this a number of times now. Make sure your bronze naming is something that hurts to click on. This says Advanced. That seems cool. I opt into advance. I'm like, oh, wow. Wearing sunglasses. I'm advanced instead. I want that to be like minimum bronze getting started. Something that sort of hurts to self select into. But the main thing I wanted to dig into today is an example of decoy offers. The pricing of these three packages are $750, $1,000 and $1,500. So a little bit bigger of a jump from step two to step three or tier two to tier three. If I look at the features here, so the list of things that are included, the incremental increase in size of that list from bronze to silver and gold is pretty much equal. It's kind of linear. So it goes up kind of an equal step with each tier. And I actually think this is really important to the psychology of what you say yes to in a proposal where you have several options. It's the. It's why it's important for all of the features to be presented horizontally, all next to each other. As you can see the relative length of each. And if we bring this back to kind of the decoy pricing theory, sort of, I don't know, science. If you go to the movie theater, this is super obvious in a movie theater. You've got the small, the medium, and the large bucket of popcorn and half the buckets up on the wall behind the cashier. And you can see the size of them and the sizes increase linearly. Small is small, large is large. Medium looks like something that's actually exactly in the middle. But the pricing does not increase linearly. And that is very intentional. The pricing is usually going to be something like $4 for small, 6.50 for medium, and $7 for large. So you've got a 250 jump to medium, but then only a 50 cent jump to large. What option do they want you to buy here? They want you to buy the large. Right. The large is an equally big step up from medium, but a tiny price increase step up from medium so big movie theater has decided we're going to make the most money if people buy the largest. Now why don't they make this $4, 5:57. That's more reflective of the volume of popcorn. Right. Isn't that, doesn't that make more sense? Isn't that fair? Here's the thing. Simply by increasing the price of medium from 550 to 650, you will get way more people to buy large. But I don't, but I don't need that much popcorn. I actually just want the medium amount of popcorn. But you will buy large because you'll feel like a sucker if you buy medium. And we think people rock up to these proposals and look at all the, the detailed items and are like, yes, here is what I actually need. The reality is it is more complex than that. If we set these prices linearly. Yes. Then I think people just rock up and they're like, what do I actually need? It's all kind of logical. If we effectively employ decoy pricing, they will go that little bit extra to get that little bit more because it seems like a good value. Right. And so if we go back to the pricing in this proposal and if the services grow linearly with each package like you get with the popcorn, small, medium and large, then what feels like the best deal here, 75000 or 1500, a thousand. Right. Because that's the smallest price. Delta 15 now seems like astronomical because I'm only getting the same additional amount of services as I got from bronze to silver. Now, the devil's in the details of what these service items are, but the reality is the buyer, the client, the prospect, they usually don't understand what the things are that are listed in the service proposal. They really don't. And they certainly don't know the relative amount of effort that goes into each of them. Only we do. And so the size of the list actually makes a big difference. And so if you're thinking about the best way strategically then to set up your proposals, I would recommend this. You've got sort of the pricing spread and then you've got the feature spread. One of those two spreads I think ought to be linear, ought to be an identical step up from each tier, from bronze to silver, then from silver to gold, similar to the popcorn. Like, there's only so much mathing that we can do to sort of get to an option of what feels like the best value. So either your price or the list of features needs to go up equally on each step. And then you use the Other one to create a decoy. So the way that I would do this in most cases is my list of features would go up equally with each tier, but then my pricing would not. If you just want like the swipeable option here, what I recommend, make sure your features go up an equal amount with each tier. Set your bronze pricing to 105 or 110% of what they paid last year. Set your silver pricing to be pretty close to your bronze pricing. The bump I recommend is generally whatever your service margin is. So if you run a 30% margin, firm make silver 30% more than bronze. Now every time somebody opts into silver instead of bronze, that project is twice as profitable. Again, 30% margin firm client pays 30% more for an engagement project is twice as profitable. Means you could cut two bronzes. Means you could cut one of your bronzes every time you pick up a silver and make the same money, gang. This is why this is so important. You're closer than you realize to a way more profitable firm. Way like way better capacity management. So bronze is 105 to 110% of last year's fees. Silver bumps that up by whatever your margin is. And then gold is a YOLO price. Gold is a big step, say 100, no less than double your bronze, probably 2.5 to 3x whatever bronze is. Now the crazy thing is if you set this up right, people will still say yes to gold from time to time. And whenever that happens, you got to stop and figure out like geez, why did they opt into this? Because I would love to find a bunch more golds. But through the decoy pricing lens, there's an obvious best value here, right? The one we want them to pick is silver because it is a small pricing step bump up seems like a better value. I'm not picking the bronze option. That's kind of cringy because it's called starter or basic or minimum. I'm not a starter basic person. I don't want to pick that. So we opt into the one that's just a little bit more compared to the jump up to gold. But by the way, that little bit more that is silver. That's a twice as profitable project, buddy. If two bronze projects take you eight hours to get done, that silver project has you going home at lunch. And it doesn't take many of those to genuinely change your life. That's the game. That is how you build a better accounting firm year over year. That is the importance of three tier proposals. That's why getting off Hourly billing is the first step to getting there. And that's why we have to make time to do proposals, right? People get to the end of the year and they're like, I don't have time to do annual renewals, man, I got holidays. I want to do all these other things. I have to do tax planning because I get paid well for that. Where is the more important place to spend your time than on how much everybody's going to pay you? And you can see just by dialing in this a little bit how this leads to your projects just being much more profitable. Like it is real. I wish I could show you the DMs I get from people. They're just so exciting. They're like, just got my first silver, just got three more Silvers. Oh my gosh. Just got my first gold. Like it's amazing to see it actually working for people. It's super cool. Last bit of feedback I have on this proposal. I'm going to read through what the silver package includes and see if you can hear it. This package includes 0 subscription receipt bank, the software platform, monthly record keeping, monthly financial reports and dashboard, unlimited communications, quarterly strategic meetings, 1099 compliance and filing, year end tax ready financial package, annual financial forecasting and cash flow forecasting. I don't know that your client knows what most of those things are, but I know what they do want to know is, is it cool if I text you? We use Slack. Is there any way we could pull you into our Slack? How much time should I expect it to take to hear back from me? Because my last guy was a nightmare to get ahold of right now. In this proposal, the only service item they have related to the client experience is they have unlimited communication at all three tiers. That service delivery is a super valuable dial to capture people's willingness to pay for premium stuff. What's going to make somebody say yes to that YOLO price is that they identify as a gold person, as a VIP person, they're part of the President's club. They go to the airport and they walk straight into the airport lounge and then are escorted to their first class seat. Some people are just wired that way. Many people are wired that way and don't make very much money. But they'll pick the option that sort of aligns with their identity. And this is where building out service items that are actually about the service delivery and not about the service itself will speak to clients oftentimes more than the underlying service. Great example of this is you do a month end closes Somebody has to get done in the first of the month. Right? If you instead make the firm policies that everybody gets done by the 15th of the month, then we're not getting any more money from the folks that are like, I should be in the front of the line. And so if we have varying levels of ability to deliver, to deliver, let's, let's price that into our engagements. In this case, I think it's a missed opportunity to say unlimited communications is available on all plans because that's a lever that we can use to push more people up to the more premium offerings. That actually doesn't take a huge amount of more time for us. We don't want the gold tier at three times the price to be three times the work. We want it to be three times as premium. And if that means they get a 24 hour response time, whereas the bronze get a 72 hour response time. And by the way, most clients will use that once a month, twice a month. But then that gold project is 2 to 4x as profitable as the bronze project. As silly as it is that people will buy it just to have it. They will. And if I don't give them the option to give me the money for that, they will actually think that my firm may not be for them. Like if they are the person that needs the VIP fast lane and I don't show them a VIP fast lane, they'll go and look for somebody else who will and they'll pay them for it. And that firm will make a bunch of money on that client. Can you tell how geeked I am on proposals? I did this stuff in my firm and it absolutely changed so much. Like I spent a lot of time on proposals. This is when I'd managed to get myself out of client work. And dialing this stuff in, optimizing every single one, squeezing another five to honestly 25% out of every engagement. Like you can double the profitability of your firm in one or two annual cycles of this stuff. Like it's, it's so crucial and this is the time we need to be thinking about it. Now Radius, two thirds of accounting firms still do not do year end annual renewals. I would encourage you to change that if you're still doing after the fact hourly billing. This is as simple as giving people a price up front for the first time. That's kind of step one. And all you're doing is saying, assuming this scope is pretty much the same as last year, this is what we're going to charge you. But then build on that to say this bronze option is what you've done with us historically. Did you know we have more premium options and you're off to the races. Like there's so much opportunity in doing this. Gang, I want to say thank you for the text, thank you for the questions. We wouldn't be here having these valuable conversations if folks didn't share those questions. If you got one, pop it in the comments, send me a text, shoot me your proposal link if you want to do more of these sort of indecent proposal things. Hopefully you aren't getting ads with Demi Moore in them. And thanks for being here. I'll catch you in the next one. Hey, real quick podcast friends. I'm coming to a city near you running a bunch of live events before the end of the year. We're going to be at Intuit Connect in Vegas. We're going to be in Toronto, in Atlanta, Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Louisiana Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Washington, D.C. philadelphia and Boston. If you are there or anywhere near there within a half tank's gas up there, buddy, I want to see you. We've put together some super cool events that I'm very excited about all around getting you and your team aligned. Heading into 2026, the biggest problem I had running a firm was I had an abundance of ideas but was always blocked by trying to get my team bought into those ideas and everybody working in the same direction. And it's why I believe the biggest way I can help you is actually getting your team inspired, getting everyone energized for the year to come. So it's not just you, but also because these are live events, you're going to meet a whole bunch of other local practitioners as well, which can almost certainly unlock some cool things for you. I'm especially looking at you solo firm runners and side hustlers, where your team effectively is the people you meet along the way, the relationships that you build, the people you can go to with questions when you get stuck on this or that. Going to be a super fun experience. Including for some of these events we're recording like a live interactive version of the podcast where you'll get to be part of the conversation. Very, very excited for these. I want to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.