The New Business Model For The Modern Accountant

Let me share with you in this video a powerful idea. My name's Mark Wickersham and I want to share with you a new business model for the modern accountant. As you probably know, the world's changing. We need to start adding more value. Cloud accounting is reducing very significantly the amount of time required for data processing, for doing bookkeeping work, for doing year end accounts. And so we have to figure out new ways of adding value. And a great way of doing that is to run online mentoring groups where you teach your clients valuable stuff. And if you're thinking, well, what could I teach them? I'll share with you some thoughts very, very soon. But first, let me give you some of the big benefits and then we'll look at some of the things you can talk about. So when you run an online mentoring group, which basically means once a month you get a group of business owners together, let's say 10 of your best clients, 10 of your best prospective clients, and once a month you just jump online and over the course of 60 to 90 minutes, you teach some stuff. You might get them to interact and share some stuff and share some stories and so on. The benefits are multiple. And perhaps the biggest benefit of the lot is what I call leverage. What that means is that historically, as a profession, accountants and bookkeepers, we work with clients one on one. And that means that it creates an upper ceiling on the amount of time available times your scarce resource. But if we can figure out ways to work with many more people at the same time, it opens up opportunities to generate significantly greater revenue. So let's imagine for example, that you charge 10 clients, let's say $200 for 90 minutes a month. That's $2,000 for 90 minutes of work, which is probably a lot higher than what your current rates would be. And there are many firms now starting to do exactly this. So it's firstly, the big benefit is it's hugely profitable. Once you build a group of just say 10 people. Just to illustrate, I work with two, just over 300 accountants and bookkeepers around the world, and I do all those mentoring sessions in just three days. You can do the maths. Next big benefit is it's a great way to add value, to make a big difference to lots of people. When you work one on one, obviously you can make a difference to one person's life at a time. But if you could get, let's say 10 business owners together once a month, share some ideas, you can help 10 people in a very leverageable way and make a big difference to people's. Lives. I'll give you some thoughts on topics very soon. It's also a great way to collect stories. One of the things that I found over the years is that stories are possibly the most powerful tool that you can use in your marketing. When you share stories, stories of how you've helped clients get better results, then people see you as being the expert and they'll want to work with you. When you run a monthly mentoring group with clients every single month, and as you start to make a difference their lives, they will tell you the results they're getting and you can then capture those stories and use them in your marketing forever. Next is it's also great market research. What do I mean by that? Well, if you get together once a month with a group of, let's say, 10 business owners, then over time they will start to tell you things that they want help with. And that's great information for you because if that type of business owner is telling you they want more help with cash flow management, for example, is telling you you need to create a more formal package solution offering because those people want to buy that and probably other business owners just like them. Another big advantage which then follows on is it's a great opportunity to cross sell other work. Let me give you an example. Imagine you're running an online session with 10 business owners and one of them says, I have a challenge this month. I'm finding it difficult to manage cash. And you might give some advice. You might say, well, one of the ways you can solve these cash issues is making sure that you have a regular cash flow forecast. Well, what's that? You describe what it is. And he might say, do you know what? I think I need one of those. And then other people in the group would say, that's a good point. We don't have a cash flow forecast. Tell us more about how you can do that. And suddenly you find that many people in the group will be saying to you, yes, we need some cash flow forecasting doing and you create a cross sell. And last but not least, it's great fun to do. I've been doing this myself for many years now and I just love helping people. And to help people every single month in groups is a way of making a difference to lots of people. So you should be doing this. It's great fun as well as being very leverageable, very profitable. So I promise. What would you talk about? Because that's the most common question I get from accounting professionals. They say, mark, I love this idea. I want to help people. I want to mentor people online, but I don't know what to say. What do I talk about? Well, lots of opportunities. The most important thing I think is talk about stuff that you are passionate about. Also talk about stuff that you have knowledge stuff that you have perhaps done yourself in your own business. After all, you're a business owner. There's a lot of stuff that you've learned that you can teach. So some of the accounting professionals that are doing this, that I've taught how to do this are running sessions built around, for example, some of them base it around what are the key numbers you should measure in your business, because we're the numbers experts. So we could look at things like teaching clients what are the right KPIs and every month you could focus on a different KPI and how to measure. May be you teach how to grow a business. You might teach pricing, for example. Many firms are learning the pricing that I'm teaching them and they're taking those same ideas to then teach their clients how to price more successfully.

Many things that you could talk about because you have got huge amounts of business experience yourself being in practice. If you want to find out more, if this is a model that excites you and you want to tap into the opportunity, I've created a detailed video training program where I tell you everything you need to build a great online mentoring group. To find out more, there's a link somewhere below this video. Go and click on that now and find out how I can help you and take you to another level. And also I'd love to get your feedback. If you've got any feedback on this video, leave a note for me in the comment box. I will see you on another video soon. Bye for now.