If I started again... 4 more things

Hi there. Welcome to the video. It's Mark Wickersham here, author of Effective Pricing for Accountants. And the other day I did a video on if I was to start my accounting firm all over again, which I did back in 1996, what would be the three things that I would do different? And I thought I would. It's been so popular, I thought I'd do another video because there's other things that I would do different. So I thought today I would share with you some other things that if I was to build a practice from scratch, what would I do? So the first idea I want to share with you is I would think about content, creating some content and content marketing. One of the things that has become clear to me is one of the most powerful ways to grow your firm, to grow your personal brand, your firm's brand, is through content marketing, creating content. That means perhaps you have a blog and you write blog posts, perhaps you've written an e book. Content is so powerful because when you get content out there, and social media these days makes it so easy to distribute your content, when you get content out there, valuable content, what happens is you increase people's awareness of you and people start to see you as being the expert. And when people see you as being the expert, at some point they'll want to hire you. So that's the first thing that I would do different. I would create content. The second thing is then linked to that. One of the things that I would become obsessed with is lead generation, collecting leads, building up a database of prospects, of people that I'd like to have as clients. If I think back to May 1996, I didn't really have a database. I had a system somewhere with my clients names and emails and contact details, but not prospects. And then after a little while, I realized that I should be doing that. But it was very unsystematic. I would go to networking events, I'd collect business cards. If I got a business card, it would go into the database of prospects. And after two or three years, I was proud that I'd built up a database of 100 contact details. In hindsight, looking back, that's shocking. That's absolutely shocking. One of the things I have learned over the years with marketing is that your income, your profit of your business, your income is directly proportional to the size of your list, your prospect database. And so you want to become obsessed with building up leads. These days, it's so easy. Technology makes it easy. We can use tools like mailchimp to build up our email our contact database. And then using the idea of content marketing, we could write for example, an ebook and then we could give that away for free, promote it via social media, for example, give people a free copy of our powerful content in return for their name and email address. And again, there are so many tools that make this so easy these days.

Such as clickfunnels. You can create what's called a lead page or an opt in page in minutes where you just put a form name, email address and when they fill it in, it sends them to a thank you page. They can download something really valuable.

In the last year, this year I've built up my list. I've grown my list by 10,000 and I think back to my accounting firm days and after three or four years I'd grown to 100. If you focus on list building, it means that let's say you decide you want to run event, it may be that once a year perhaps the tax rules have changed, you run a budget up event or something and you want to invite people to your workshop, your event on the latest tax changes. If you've only got a list of 100 people, you may get 10 people show up. If you've got a list of 10,000, your only problem is finding a big enough venue.

If you've got a list that's 10 or 100 times as big, you'll get that many people more coming to your event, you'll get that many more times the sales. The size of your list is proportional to your income and profits. So that's the second thing. Third thing I would change is after three years of being in my accounting firm, I started in 96. By the end of 98, I came across an amazing book which you may have heard of, if you haven't go and read it. It's called the E. Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. I would say it's the most important business book for any business owner to read. It talked about the power of systems, systemizing what you did. And in my firm in the early years, I had no systems. Every system was in my head. It needed me to be there every single day to make sure things were done right. I found that my team were making mistakes all the time. I'd be blaming them, I'd be cussing them for making these mistakes. But I then later learned that the mistake was mine. I'd not created the systems for them to follow.

So that's the next thing I would do. And the final thing I'd change is I would make sure that I moved from compliance to advisory right from the outset. Again back in 1996 I never heard of consulting work or advisory. I just did compliance work. It wasn't until three years later my friend Steve Pipe opened my eyes up to the possibility of helping clients grow their business, increase their profitability. And throughout 19, 19, 99, 2000, most of my profit came from advisory work. If I was to start again, I would do advisory as well as compliance, perhaps even totally and focus on that one thing. Okay, there's my thoughts on what I would do different if I was starting my accounting firm all over again. If you like this video then please hit the thumbs up, share it and subscribe to the channel. And if you want some more help, I'll put somewhere underneath some links to other free resources for you guys. Grab that free stuff and I look forward to seeing you again on a future video. Bye for now.