The Accounting Firm Unlimited Client Hack

Is it just a shortcut to, like, how do I find the room where all the clients that I want are hanging out? Can I just jump into that room and get all those people to come with me? Because there are slow ways to build a brand, and that's. I mean, you're like, buddy, you tell me to do a YouTube channel that could take a year, two years to see ROI from. What is the other end of the spectrum? What is the shortcut to get a bottomless supply of clients? I've heard a few stories recently that are kind of wild. And if you're looking for, like, immediate impact, how can I build an entire new niche, like, really quickly that's also sustainable? Got a couple ideas I'm going to share you today. I think you're going to like them. Let's get into it. Friends. Gotten quite a few questions lately around, like, where do I find the people that I want to work with? Oftentimes it comes from a place of. I'm not sure if they're hanging out online really at all. But either way, like, regardless, what's the most concentrated place where I can find this niche that I'm considering working on to just be plugged in there and get everybody to come to me? I've got five thoughts on this, five things I want you to consider. Because if any of us could just snap our finger right now. Finger snap. You got to do more than one. Snap our fingers right now. Sounds like this. Here's one. Here's a one finger snap. I'll do it again. You didn't even hear that, did you? If we could just snap our fingers and get access to a whole bunch of people in that niche or in that micro niche that you're thinking about, you'd probably pull the trigger, right? I think this, this one may get you excited. Five thoughts I've got here. Thought number one is consider where, like, the choke points are for people entering that space where everybody has to go through. And this can be, like, very specific subsets within a niche. But a good example is a firm that we broke down on the YouTube channel, I don't know, maybe a month ago now, where the guy works with franchisors in a. In a grocery chain, not franchises, franchisees in a grocery chain. But the franchisor requires every new store owner to go through this mandatory, like, accounting and tax class. Now the owner of this firm, they fly out, they. They run all these classes, and they get something like 80% of the people that come through that funnel, they've now Got an entire firm that is serving this specific type of grocery store. How cool is that? Now, counter argument. Well, is that risky? Like, it's a single chain? What if they all go under? Then you lose all of your clients. This is the thing about niching down is what you learn along the way, the skill of specialization that you're learning because the firm is under no requirement to do this exclusively for this one brand, right? And just think of all the nuanced experience they're getting working with these grocery stores and all the other places they could go and all the other similar rooms that must exist that they could get plugged into to serve this person by getting really, really specific, more specific than most of us have the courage to do. By getting super specific with that one type of a grocery store, I would say they have greater access to opportunity than those of us who don't, because they've seen how it's done. They're like, yeah, I bet this chain and that chain and all these other different franchises, they probably do the same thing. And you kind of got to ask yourself, like, what? Okay, this firm, like, why are they only serving that type of grocery store? I think that was. That's probably a conscious choice. And on the outside, when we're like, man, that feels risky, man. I don't know that I could do that. On the inside, they're like, kind of seems like grocery stores aren't going anywhere. But even if they did, they've got the skills, they've got the relationships that they've built to serve different type of grocery store, different type of retail store, whatever they want to go after next. So the big question is, what is your equivalent to that? What are those bottlenecks, those choke points where everybody coming into something, they all go through this process where you could set up camp right there and get your fingers into all these people. Like that grocery store thing. That's the dream, right? And that's why I frame this as like an unlimited client hack. Cause this accounting firm, as long as there are new people coming into owning those stores, they're going to be in front of every single one of them. And they're not having to go out and do a whole bunch of effort on. On all sorts of other types of marketing, unless they want to, because there's a whole other machine that are attracting people to owning those stores. And we are just, we're just a beneficiary of that other machine. And I come back a lot to software companies and their marketing budgets. Niche software companies, for you Know, fitness coaches or whatever it is, they are very similar. Where they are spending so much money to attract folks through a pipeline of their own creation to where if you could just weasel your way into that pipeline, how sweet is that? And to be clear, like maybe these things, and I'm just trying to call out all the reservations people have about this, maybe these things are not forever opportunities. Maybe that software won't be around forever, maybe that grocery chain won't be around forever. But as with all things accounting, the best part of being an accountant is you can always fall back to how it was. Because if right now, say you're running a generalist firm and you got your eyes on a niche and you're like, should I do that or not do that? Let's say you go down that path and there's some sort of rug pull, as, as unlikely as that seems, something goes sideways and you genuinely have no other opportunities, which feels exceptionally unlikely. But if that does happen, you know what you can do. You go back to what you're doing today, man, like that's not going anywhere. So let's brainstorm, like what are the choke points for different types of industries? I actually riffed with ChatGPT on this one and it was pretty helpful cause I just wanted to give you some ideas. So I'm going to run through just a bunch of different industries here. Some of these are better than others. So we talked about grocery and retail franchises, new owner training. That stuff's happening in pretty much any franchisor setup. So that's obviously goes way beyond grocery stores. But other industry examples, independent auto dealers, where you're required to go through licensing and courses related to licensing when they love access to your expertise. Right. Restaurants and food trucks, they have to do permit stuff with. The health department doesn't say permit stuff. That's my words. Says health department permit onboarding. There are instructors, people that run this stuff, bars, breweries, distilleries. When you get your alcohol license, the state boards and the folks that they pull in for that stuff, child care centers, pre licensing orientation, which is often mandatory, the state will approve trainers. The beauty here is like we're not doing the hard stuff, which is like the actual subject matter. We're just popping in as like the side piece. It's like, hey, also accounting and tax going to give you a few bullet points here, but give me a call because I know that you need it. So in all likelihood you're coming in and like not really having to do a big lift. Trucking new carriers there's department of transit compliance stuff and training in every state. Freight brokers. There's a lot of words in that one that I don't know. Construction and trades, licensure, bonding salons or barbers. In many states there is a state board and you have to be licensed. Private security firms. Same thing. Real estate agents, brokerage, new agent orientation, property managers or STR hosts. Many cities require you to register yourself as like an STR host, especially when stuff like occupancy taxes come up. Medical or dental practices. This was an interesting one. The angle chatgpt took was working with lenders who are financing those practice acquisitions. Pharmacies have their own registration and state board set up. Similar for insurance agencies, government contractors. You have actual coaches that serve government contractors. There's a whole process for being awarded contracts. But getting yourself into that ecosystem, cannabis licensing, solar installers. There like the list goes on. Every single one of these industries, they have those choke points where you could try to get yourself plugged into them. And if you're looking for the single highest ROI place to be present, it's probably there. So if we were looking for shortcuts to have like an unstoppable flow of leads and potential new clients coming our way, that I would say is the first thing to think about is how do I get myself? Let's find out. We gotta find a better thing to call this than choke point, but you know what I'm saying, how do we get ourselves into that? Second thought here is if you have any of those clients on your list today, it is so, so important. Ask where they hang out, Ask where they learn. Most of us stumble into a niche because we get a client that says yes to a price that like may have been a YOLO price. We're like, oh geez. We're like, there's something powerful here that we just stumbled into. We may need to double down on this. And your life would be made infinitely easier if every single client on your client list was a copy of your very best client. I mean, imag imagine that reality, you could work with a third as many people and work half as much and make the same money. So let's not forget how easy it is to ask the people that you already have. Where are you learning? Are you going to any conferences? Where do your friends hang out? Because we actually want more people like you. And we're uncomfortable asking oftentimes because it feels like we're asking them to do a favor for us when what we're doing in actuality is flattering. Them like that will probably be how that's received is, oh wow, you want more clients like me, so don't be afraid to ask. So first consideration, find the choke point how you set up their. Second consideration for how to find like where these great clients are hanging out is if you have any of them already, ask. Third thought here is be careful not to get fooled into thinking that those people aren't on social media because almost everyone is. And if they truly aren't, in most of those cases, I would argue the people who are about to buy them out, those people are like, if we really think about like who is not on social media right now, it is, I mean it skews age wise older business owners, fewer of them are. But what are all those people doing right now? Succession planning. Maybe the kids coming up and they're taking over the firm, maybe they're selling to somebody else who's doing a roll up. The only ones who aren't online right now, I would argue most of them are on a path to being bought out by somebody who's online in the very near future. And what leads us to think this oftentimes, well, this type of client isn't online at all is my fourth consideration here. Be careful not to be fooled by your own social media algorithm, which is uni to you. Many people will say things like all I get in my social media stuff is like accounting firms talking about tax stuff. Like I don't see anybody having conversations that my clients will care about on social media. I don't see anybody doing that stuff. That's just a product of what you have engaged with and what your social media algorithm looks like, which is different to everybody else's. If you don't engage with content that is like nuanced stuff for beekeepers, most of which is going to be like well below you and Super Easy 101 for you. If you don't engage with that stuff, you're never going to see it. But the fact that you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You know how many videos are uploaded to YouTube every single day? 4 million. And so if you rock up to your YouTube homepage right now and you're like, oh man, nobody's having these conversations on this platform so my clients must be hanging out somewhere else. That is because what you are seeing is your own algorithm. Social media platforms and TikTok really accelerated this, have moved from the follower graph. That is you are served up things from the people you follow to what is called the interest graph Graph. And the interest graph means you are just served up stuff that the algorithm thinks you're interested in. And so if you got a, a baby goat video one time and you watched it or you interacted with it, you're much more likely to get that next time, right? And so now social media algorithms by and large are driven by interest based stuff rather than who you follow, which is a big like punch in the gut for people who have built followings. I will post on Twitter, on LinkedIn, I will publish a YouTube video. And the way things work now is unless you seek it out, most of the people who follow me that thing I made will never show up in their feed because the feed is showing them what it thinks they are interested in. And what you are interested in in all likelihood is not the same thing that your clients are interested in. So because your algorithm doesn't feel relevant to them doesn't mean that a relevant to them algorithm does not exist. And I can tell you, even like through the lens of making stuff for accounting firm leaders, nobody was doing this on YouTube when I started doing it. And still in the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge number of people, but like those people are here hanging out now, right? And the thing that I'm frankly really excited about is what all this looks like 10 years from now when you've got a whole generation of people who long before they came into firm ownership or were even firm leaders, were consuming my stuff. And now like when they are like further down the road and they're finding success is like, man, like they were into your stuff early on and now we've got like a whole generation of really talented people that know and have so many more shortcuts for running a great accounting firm. And we've just got like a more efficient profession overall. But had I looked at YouTube back then and been like, well, there's nobody, there's nobody making content for accounting firms. That must mean there's no accounting firm leaders hanging out on YouTube. Had I said that, I wouldn't have started. And you still have people who say that where I tell them what I do and they're like, wow, really? Like there's, there's an audience for that, for accounting firm stuff. It's like, yeah, there's a ton of accounting firms out there. It's a good example of something that seems micro niche to everybody else being a plenty big play space for me to be able to keep busy. Can I just air a grievance with you right now we are in peak tech selection season and your most important tool in your firm, it is your practice management system. But when you go to these providers and you ask them what firms are you great for? You know what pretty much all of them say accounting firms, everyone. Our tool is the best for everyone. Buddy, that just ain't true. And one platform that is being built for a very specific type of firm, it is Client Hub. They know who they're great for and it is CAS and outsourced bookkeeping practices like accounting department in a box. Is that what you're doing for your clients? If so, buddy, look at Client Hub. They're building for that very specific type of firm. Good example. They have like a, I don't know, arguably a deeper integration into the ledger than maybe any other practice management system because they give you like an entire way to manage the month end close inside of Client Hub. It's the sort of functionality that with most other practice management platforms you would have to pull in a separate month end close automation tool to get that functionality. But it's all happening inside of Client Hub because they know exactly what the firms who are a great fit for them need. Buddy, it is no different than what we talk about in accounting firms where it's way easier to serve a specific type of client at a very high level. That's what Client Hub is doing, man. They're building a platform for a very specific type of accounting firm. And if that is you, they really ought to be on your short list of practice management systems that you're considering rolling in to 2026. So to learn more about Client Hub and actually some really cool new AI workflow stuff they've got going as well, check out the link down in the show notes. Really exciting new tech announcement from one of this episode's sponsors, Canopy, the practice management system. They've announced Smart Intake and it's a collection of features that vastly improve the tax intake system. We talk a lot about the new crop of like tax workflow tools, right? They're doing that really well. But then practice management systems, historically they haven't done that part well. And knowing having to run two different tools for that. This is Canopy's response. Some new things Canopy's doing. They will create predictive lists of the like the goodies you need this year using AI based on past work. They'll build out the checklist and the questionnaire based on pro forma information. This one is sick. They will pre fill those questionnaires based on everything they can see about the client in the file system. That one's pretty cool. When the client uploads goodies, it'll like match those goodies against the request items. And this is kind of related. It'll rename those documents for you automatically when they come in. Actually at the organization level in Canape, you can create file naming conventions for different types of files and anytime it identifies a file of that type, it'll auto reduce, rename it according to the convention. Pretty cool. Great news here. If you're thinking about a change to your practice management system, worth chatting with Kanopy. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Last thought number five here on how to find the rooms where all these people are hanging out is look at the big conferences in the space that are coming up and specifically look at the agendas and what the talking points in those agendas are. This is a great way to like weasel into what are the most important talking points in a niche that you may be considering. The even better version of this, if you can be at the session, is to see the questions. Like any talk that has a Q and A component, I'm going to run for that talk. Because seeing the questions from the people in the audience, that's the real stuff. If you got in a mini accounting conference, you know, like, sometimes the talking points are kind of 10,000ft, like way up here. But if they have any sort of Q and A component, boy, those Q and A's, they bring you right down to the ground real fast. I mean, I still remember going on AICPA Town hall, that's maybe a year and a half ago. They wanted to ask me questions about ChatGPT, and at the time I was helping the AICPA get out their first generative AI toolkit, and we talked a little bit about ChatGPT, and the vast majority of comments were, what's a ChatGPT? In fact, there may have even been a poll. Over 50% of viewers, like, didn't even know what it was. This was probably more than a year and a half ago now, but it was like Chat GPT had been out for, I think, at least a year at that point. And that input is really useful, honestly. Like, it's easy to roll your eyes of that and be like, wow, you know, of course they're behind. Reality is that's where people are and in the spaces that we are serving. You're going to have such a huge spectrum of where folks are at. And it's an example of where oftentimes we set the bar too high for ourselves to be able to impress the folks we're trying to serve. Like, the most useful thing for those people at that point would have been me showing. Here I am logging into ChatGPT and here I'm going to send it three messages that would have been tremendously useful for those people because they had never even seen it before and didn't even know what it was. But for me, that would have been so boring. Right? Like I'm trying to do advanced stuff and it's a great example of where we will like, really overthink the, the, the technical nature of, of what we think is impressive when what is useful to the people that we're serving is vastly more simple. So if you want to find these rooms that have very valuable people in them, number one, find the choke points where they all have to go through a single process and figure out how you can show up in that process. Two, if you have any of those clients today, just ask. If you haven't yet, that's a great place to start. Number three, don't get fooled into thinking they aren't on social. Number four, don't get fooled into thinking that your social media looks like your client's social media probably doesn't. I can promise you that, that your client's not getting podcasts about accounting firm stuff in their feedback. And then number five, take a look at the conferences to see the talking points to get a better sense of like, what sentiment is for people and what are the really juicy problems that you could potentially come in and try to offer a solution for. It's time for review your reviews, where we break down your most brutal Google reviews. Let's get into it. New segment alert. A whole bunch of people have been sending me their bad Google reviews and we're going to pick them apart and give you some actionable advice on, on what you can do with them. If you want to send me your bad Google review, air it out in front of podcast listeners and got a like, text it to me. 516-980-4968. That is 516-980-4968. That is my phone number. That's where this Google review came from. Here it is. I used this company back in 2017 and 2018 when I was an owner, operator, truck driver. I felt I was not important to them. I guess my revenue was too small for them to deal with me. This stuff just makes your blood boil, right? But it matters. Imagine if the valuable room of people that we were trying to get into was owner, operator, truck drivers. If the next person comes along and sees this review, like they're going to have a moment's hesitation as a result. So what do we do? Let's acknowledge that it's really frustrating, that it's really hard not to get mad at these, that oftentimes they are wildly inaccurate from a factual standpoint. Process all that, let that stuff wash over you and then let's buckle down and have a difficult conversation about it. We're going to cover three things. What could have happened that led to this review? Number two, what system could prevent us from having future Google reviews like this, even if they're simply misunderstandings? And then number three, how do we respond to this specific review? Literally, what do we post and say back to them? Because that's very important. So number one, what could have happened to get to a review like this? The person felt that they were not important to the firm. They said they guessed their revenue was too small for them to deal with. That to me, that has all the smell of they couldn't get a hold of them. And sometimes that's justified. Like accountants are hard to get a hold of and not as responsive oftentimes as we need to be. Other times this can happen simply from a misalignment of expectations. You'll have a client that thinks that they can just pick up the phone and call you anytime and you're like, buddy, you realize I have a thousand people just like you, right? I'm not able to pick up the phone every time somebody calls me. But they, they may not get that. So this is all about setting expectations. And this to me comes back with setting standard turnaround time expectations for everybody in your team. So the big boss, they ought to be the least available, but then the accounting staff is a little more available and the admin team is the most available. And it's very important with existing clients, with new clients that are coming in the door, they need to know exactly what the expectation is. This is even something that you can put in your email signature so that they're reminded of it every time you interact with. But if all we do is do the shoot from the hip, like yeah, usually we try to do it within a couple of days and we tell that to some clients when they come in. We don't tell that to other clients when they come in. And is another issue. If we don't have a rule with our team and we just leave it up to our team to do that gut check, then the moment you have a client Come in where their expectation doesn't align with yours, that's a problem. That's risky because if you tell them the expectation and they don't like it, at least you're meeting that head on up front, right? Like, if they expect that, they're going to hear back from you within a couple of hours. And we had somebody on the podcast who's telling us that works with, like, a lot of Millennial and Zoomer clients, like, they just have a completely different expectation for responsiveness. So they're having to build a different sort of support team that is much more real, like, real time. I guess I'm trying to say if somebody like that comes in with that expectation, buddy, let's have that conversation day one, right? It doesn't mean they're right, doesn't mean they're wrong, doesn't mean we're right. But if we never have that, like, alignment conversation up front, you run the risk of something like this happening. This sort of review has like an a, too much of an impact, unfortunately, because a lot of people will see it. So I suspect what happened, the client couldn't get a hold of somebody or didn't like how long it took for the accountant to get back to him. Number two, how can we prevent this? To me, that is just all about setting expectations, but also reminding them of expectations. Oftentimes we will tell them something once, they immediately forget it and we are like, no, we've said it. And because we are kind of more self focused than they are, we're disappointed that they don't pay it the same attention. We probably need to think about, like, what is that mechanism that's continually reminding them of what sort of responsiveness they should expect and who they should expect to hear from. One thing we did in my firm that I really liked, we used an email help desk tool that let us dynamically set the email signature according to who we were interacting with. So every time we sent an email to a client that had, you know, this manager, this staff accountant, we were able to put their entire team in the signature of all the emails that they received. So they were always reminded of who the folks on their team were, what they looked like with every single message. Because I often have you, like, had a client say, like, I don't even know who I'm supposed to talk to. I came in talking with Jim, but sometimes I hear from this other person and I just don't know who to go to for what. The more we can remind them of that, the better. Okay, last number Three. How do you respond to this? How do you like reply to the Google review? Because we need to reply to all of our Google reviews. We do. Even if they are totally messed up. If you don't reply, it just looks like you're not on top of things. But oftentimes we don't because there's like no way that it feels like we can win. My general advice here, in general, we don't need to admit fault. We absolutely cannot dispute facts directly. That is just opening a whole can of worms where you end up splitting hairs and just fighting in public. So don't dispute specific items directly and kill them with kindness. To be clear, there is no winning when it comes to responding to a Google review. Like just accept you cannot win. What you can do is be kind and show that you are present. Show that you're acknowledging it, that you know for the business it looks like somebody's got their hands on 10 and 2. That is the best case scenario. Worst case scenario, you dispute some fact and then they come back with another reply that has even more details and now it's even more problematic. So how could we respond to something like this where the main objection is they didn't get enough attention. Something as simple as, you know, we so much appreciate this feedback. It goes without saying we weren't aligned on communication expectations and we regret this. Wishing you all the best in the future. I'm not saying I'm going to fix anything. I'm not saying they were right or wrong. I'm saying there was a miscommunication and we're wishing them the best. I'm not giving them any ammunition that they can come back with. We are just looking like respectful, present people. Right? We're responding to the, to the review and we're moving on with our lives. In reality, like we ought to review. Like how did this get here? And is there a system we could put into place to ensure it doesn't happen again? But we're not airing all that stuff out in Google reviews. And if you work with business owner clients, they know a lot of people that leave negative Google reviews are idiots because they've had some version of this happen before as well. Now this is why it is actually so important to always be proactively asking for positive reviews. Because while there's no way to completely eliminate people leaving dumb reviews, the best thing we can do is drown out those dumb reviews with good reviews and that, that discomfort that we have with asking for a favor. I know most of us struggle with that think of this more as asking for people's feedback and feedback is hard. Like, like this is not a thing that is comfortable and a lot of times it annoys you. But then upon further reflection, you got to, you got to find the bits of truth within that feedback. And asking for reviews like it is all part of that process. Are we, you know, every quarter or every year if it's an annual project, are we asking for feedback afterwards? That's generally the time that we're going to be asking them to leave a review as well. Got to be careful there. Like, you can't selectively only push people to review if they give you great feedback. It's actually against the rules, even though that's what most people do. But those two things ought to be happening probably at the same time. Tell us how we can do better and leave us a Google review, buddy. If you got a stinker, I'd love to see it. It's stinker of a Google review. I mean, again, shoot me a text. 516-980-4968 gang, thanks for being here. I'll catch you in the next. Hey, real quick for my podcast friends. We just announced 21 live events we're running between now and the end of the year, starting with dinners in Denver, Chicago and New York City this week. Get the whole team out. If you do tax work, celebrate getting past the deadline. Right from there we're headed into it. Connect in Vegas. After that, events in Toronto, Orlando, Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, L.A. atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Washington, D.C. philadelphia. We're back in New York City again. And then Boston. And 13 of these events, they are what we're calling Jason on Firms Live, a half day workshop experience that rolls into a dinner that I am so excited about. We've built these ones from scratch. These are events where I want you to bring your entire team to get everybody rowing in the same direction headed into 2026. If you're an accounting firm leader that has ever struggled with change management, with having all this enthusiasm, but not being able to like get the team to commit to your vision is the entire reason we built these events. If I've ever inspired you on this podcast, the idea with these events is that we can now inspire your entire team to get everybody working in the same direction so you're not putting the whole thing on your own back, we'd love to see you out in the wild. Head out to jasononfirms.com events. You'll find up to date information about everything that's coming up, and I'd love to see you there.