How Frameworks Help You Scale Advisory Services

The real flex is not what kind of car you or I are driving, but what is your staff driving.

You're listening to the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. Each episode, we have conversations with firm owners and marketing experts about how to attract your ideal clients, foster trust, and build a marketing engine that works for an accounting firm. I'm your host, Matt Banker. I. I'm the founder of Benchmark Growth Marketing. You can find more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now, here's the show. All right, today I am joined by Ron Saharian from Profit first, and we're gonna talk about marketing for accounting firms. But specifically in the context of if marketing is a promise and if in any way you're. You're. You're making a promise of advisory services, there's a challenge when it comes to your staff. Sometimes your staff is not necessarily equipped or trained to be advisors. And one of the ways to solve that is really through frameworks like Profit First. Ron is the Profit first guy or one of the Profit first guys. Ron, give us an introduction of yourself and like, what's your background? What are you doing here? Why are you on the marketing for accounting, for instance? Yeah.

Thank you, Matt. So I'm Ron Saharian, co founder of Profit First Professionals, the organization that Mike Michalowitz and I co founded to support the teachings in the book Profit First. So my business partner Mike, he's an author and entrepreneur, and he's wrote the book Profit First. Profit first is not accounting. It's not bookkeeping. It's a cash flow system. It's the ultimate cash flow system. And so Mike and I grew Profit First Professionals. It's a membership organization of elite accounting firms, bookkeeping firms, and financial coaches that are experts in the Profit first methodology. And so I've been coaching accounting firms for about a decade now.

Okay, well, I don't just. I'll be transparent here to the listeners. I, I work with a Profit first professional firm. And I'm just going to say this from a marketing perspective. I, I have to have an accountant, a bookkeeper, you know, someone to do my taxes. Those are things that as a business owner, I sort of need. But the, the real value add, when I went out looking for an accounting firm was someone who was going to help me make more money with my business, be more profitable as a person. So there's kind of these two things as an accounting firm. There's the. There's the necessary. I'll even call it like a Necessary evil. Every, every business has to have these things in place. But the real value add that I get as a business owner has more to do with things like cash flow and profitability. And that's really where profit first comes in. Can you kind of unpack? So profit first professionals, it's, it's kind of an add on, these are my words. But an add on to an accounting firm as, as a service that they can offer or like a system that they help implement for their clients. Can you unpack how that, how does that work for a firm?

Sure. So if somebody were to say to me, Matt, Ron, what do you do for a living? And I were to say, you know, I own an accounting firm automatically, they start to go through, you know, a process in their mind and they make assumptions. They put us in the proverbial box. Right. If you say I'm a lawyer, a doctor, a football player, we're put in a proverbial box. And so marketing is all about, you know, taking you out of that proverbial box and seeing you as something different. Right? And so a lot of what's going on today and over the past decade actually has been a move to advisory services. Okay, Client advisory services, client accounting advisory services. Basically, it's a fancy way of saying, how can we advise our customers to run better businesses? And a lot of it is normally done through the financial lens through proactive reviewing of the P and L, proactives, meetings, technology, and these are all great client advisory services. But really what's going on is that business owners are looking for business advisory services. Not necessarily financial advisory services, but business, business advisory services. How do I know if I can hire? How do I know when I can hire? How do I know if this product is profitable? How do I know if I have too much sitting in inventory? How do I pay myself more? How do I design my business with my vision, purpose and mission involved? How do I, how do I do that? That's what businesses are looking for. So when. And that's exactly what Profit first is. It is a business advisory service. It is the implementation of a system. And so that's, that's what Profit first is, a business system that resides between financials, which are historical documents, and forecasting what's your hopes and dreams. And so one of the things is, is if you're in an elevator or a cocktail party, Matt, and you say, hey, Ron, what do you do for a living? Like I said, if I say I own an accounting firm, you're putting me in a box. Okay, well, I'm going to say, well, Matt, I'm sure you're familiar with what a traditional accounting firm does. My firm's awesome at the compliance. They're proactive. We're accurate. But the real reason business owners work with me and refer me to their peers is because I truly make a difference to the bottom line by introducing a system. A system that's going to ensure that the business owner is paying themselves first, if not more. Two, we're going to reserve a war chest of cash for Uncle Sam regardless of what your liabilities are. Three, we're going to have a focus on profit. Even if that profit is 3.3.5%, my customers can pay down their debt. They can hire, or they can celebrate the health of the company. That's why a firm works with a certified profit first professional firm versus a traditional accounting firm.

Yeah, well, and you know, obviously you started Profit First Professionals with Mike Michalowicz. He wrote, he wrote the book. If you're an accounting firm owner, you haven't read the book. A, you a hundred percent need to know what profit first is because you will have clients who know what profit first is. So I, as a business owner.

Here we go. Ready? I've got 10 gift books. If anybody reaches out to Matt and said, hey, I want One of those 10 books, Matt will email me your address, your physical address, and I will personally gift you a copy of the book.

Yeah. And that's, I mean even if you, now, even if you don't go down the route as an accounting firm owner of becoming a profit first professional, you pretty much have to know. I, I think today if you're working with small businesses, you need to know about profit first and understand it because some of your clients have read the book, are reading the book and are interested in it now. Like I said, I, it's a, it's a system I use. I think it's, I think it's great if we, if we go out just a little bit broader than the specific profit first framework. There's also this idea though I hear a lot from my clients. Actually let me back up just a little bit. So I met, I teased it earlier. Marketing is a promise that you make. So whatever you put on your website, you're, you're making a promise that you then have to be able to deliver on.

Yeah.

If you, if you pay attention in the accounting space right now, lots of people are talking about the value of advisory services. You know, this business advisory relationship, this is the real, this is where you have the space for premium pricing for your firm. This is where you have the real like stickiness of relationship with your clients. Because it's not just task level stuff. As we look forward to the future between, you know, outsourcing and AI and all these things, there's a lot of questions about, you know, what, what's the future of compliance level bookkeeping and things like that. But the human to human relationship and advisory piece is becoming more and more important. The challenge I hear. And so, so that promise that you want to make, you want to make the promise of we help you make a better business, like build a better business, become more profitable, you know, do whatever it is. The challenge is a lot of firm owners feel pretty comfortable in that seat. They're an entrepreneur, they understand their business.

They can see their will growing up, right?

So they, they love it. They love to be like advising their clients. It's probably actually the heart of your business, why you got into this, cause you love that space. The problem is the people that work for you, they didn't go out and start their own business, they're working for you. And they're doing that for a reason. Right? They're probably not as entrepreneur, they're not as comfortable with risk, which you know is almost another name for entrepreneurial ism, right, Is risk. And so they're sitting in that seat now talking to the client. They can't really be an advisor in the same way that you can, at least not at a like natural level. And so the challenge is scalability, profit first and other systems like this that help people learn how to be an advisor or give them the framework that allows them to advise clients I think is so important.

This week's episode is sponsored by Benchmark Growth Marketing. Helping your accounting firm expand your niche with branding, positioning websites, SEO and marketing strategy. If you're an accounting firm looking to fix your marketing benchmark is your go to solution. Learn more at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now back to the program. So in order to, you know what? Well, let's back up that one of the reasons why I see businesses are not growing is not because of the lack of dollars is but because the business owner is the mechanic wrenching on the machine, trying to hire, trying to market, trying to do this, trying to do that. And they're not looking at themselves as a CEO. So the first thing, you know, is changing the mindset to become a CEO. Okay, then the next thing is, all right, now that I'm a CEO, I need to take a look at you know who, not what. Right, that book. And so you know who, who's on my team. All right? And then who's, who has the capable skills of doing advising, of doing this, doing complaints. And, you know, a rule of thumb, a rule that Mike and I, you know, live by, is you can't teach a fish to climb trees, right? And so, you know there's going to be people in your organization that are fishes, and if you're trying to teach them how to climb trees, it isn't going to work, right?

Never going to work.

Never going to work. Okay, so then what do you need to do? Well, then you need to augment that with somebody. I believe compliance is always going to be around. Compliance is great. Compliance is the foot in the door. Compliance is bread and butter. Compliance is good. So anybody that's telling you to get rid of compliance, I don't subscribe to that. The emotional component, the empathy is going to really be where it's at when you're getting the information that is coming to you, whether it's AI or automation, is how are you going to translate that in empathetic ways and supportive ways to help. And so, you know, there's a lot of different techniques out there. There's a lot of coaching programs out there. And what we're talking about is how do we scale this, right? Because, you know, if you're taking a, if you, your business owner, have built a business, you've introduced your systems, you've made mistakes, you've learned, okay, well, you know, maybe what we need to do is hire a different type of person. Maybe we need a client engagement person. Maybe we need a customer service person. Maybe we need a. This. Maybe we need to hire a coach for our company to coach some of these things. Maybe we need to hire a psychiatrist, right? For, for, for some of the conversations that we have. But the, the real thing to do is to not try to, you know, put lipstick on the pig, right? Because all you gotta do is frustrate yourself and piss off the pig. So, you know, rather than looking at who now can deliver these consulting services, who wants to deliver these consulting services, who wants to be client facing, who wants to, you know, to do more of what they're looking for, leverage that person, okay? And if you don't have that person on staff, well, guess what, you got to go hire one, you got to go hire that person. And you might have to, you know, replace, okay? So, you know, there's off. If you're looking to deliver advising services and you have x Percentage of money available. Well, then, you know, and you're not bringing in more money. Okay. Or the margins are saying the same. Well, then you have to be more creative. Maybe you have to outsource some of the compliance. Okay. And use the difference in the pay to bring on somebody that's going to be maybe a little bit more consultative in their approach to working with a customer.

Yeah. Can I ask just in your experience with accounting firm owners and as you're. As they're thinking about and as you're talking with. With folks out of staff for kind of the advisory role, is that something that you see. Do you see the future of that being, you know, potentially not a CPA or an ea, you know, like a traditional accountant, do you think, you know, profit first in some of these frameworks? Do you have to have that. Do you have to have that. That background in numbers in order to do it, or is it something that can be trained to a per. For a person who's good with people in kind of the consulting space? Maybe not as. As strong in or. Or trained up till this point in the accounting space.

I'm not an accountant or a bookkeeper. Right. I own an accounting firm. I coach accounting firms. I've been coaching accounting firms. I've seen how that some of the best successful accounting firms have been run, and that's through the perspective of a CEO. Okay. And so, you know. Yeah. I can see plenty of people being hired by accounting firms that are not accountants by trade. Yeah. It'd be great if you could, you know, find the unicorn where there's a gregarious accountant that loves sales and consulting and, you know, is able to look at a tax return and debits and credits and do that, but they're owning their own company if they got that. Yeah, right. And so, you know, what, what you're talking about is, you know, making it easy for your staff to adopt, you know, whatever framework it is that you're going to be advising your clients on and making sure that that particular framework is something that you can subscribe to, something that you can experience, something that you know is going to allow you and your firm to scan. Right. And that has repetition where. So say, for an example, you know, the last thing you want is having one person be the champion of profit first. Okay. Knowledge base. And then they quit. Okay, well.

Or go start their own firm.

Yeah. Or go start their own firm. Right. And you know what? You do call me. But, you know, so. So having. Having redundancies, having a framework, having the systems and processes in place, well documented, okay. Video libraries so that you can bring somebody on in to do it. And so one of the examples that we have, we have a really cool cold outreach program where it's a, it's a system in a process of reaching out to owners of accounting firms in all over the globe, introducing them to Profit first, sending, developing a relationship with them, sending them, you know, information and all with the goal of having a conversation with me. Okay? That's a system in a process and well documented so that an intern can do it or an 80 year old can do it. Okay? Same thing with Profit First. How we've, how we've architected the curriculum is exactly so that an 8 year old or an 80 year old can go into it. So generally how it works, Matt, is the first two years, it's, hey, I want to be more consultative, I want to help my clients more, help me price better, help me be more. Okay? And that's what any client advisory service is. That's basically what the first two years of learning a new thing is. Okay? The foundation. Then the second two years I've learned has been, hey, Ron, I'm sick and tired of talking to my customers. Help me get my staff involved, help me systematize, help me grow, help me niche specialize. Okay? So we have to have frameworks and curriculums that, you know, are on that path. Then after a couple of years of that, it's generally like, hey Ron, help me make more and do nothing. And so this is where, you know, you're really, really a CEO in redesigning your business. And really, you know, hopefully we've been designing it in a way over the past six to eight years so that you can take, you know, a month, two months of a total digital disconnect for the company. And it's running like clockwork. But it's all what we're talking about, Matt, is purposefully built and designed businesses that leverage the compliance aspect of it, but also has a framework of a client advisory services that is scalable. Profit first just happens to be a well respected brand that comes with both of those two things.

Yeah. And it's, it gives you the advantage of, you know, you can, you can invent your own wheel or you can adopt a wheel that's already been invented.

Right.

And, and so it, the nice thing is that it's a system that has already been proven out through other firms and through this, this system that you can adopt, you know, the word you mentioned a couple times that I, I think is so key is this idea of scalability. Everybody knows that a business owner is often the biggest, you know, bottleneck in the business's success. The more stuff that has to go through that person, the harder it is to grow and scale. And I think we're really talking about this at two levels. So at one level we're talking about how do you make your accounting firm scalable? Because. And get yourself out of that role of being the bottleneck, the only one who can advise your clients. But then secondly, you're talking about how do you make your clients businesses more scalable? Cause that's really the value that an accounting firm brings to their clients. This kind of goes back to my first point of, I mean, compliance is always going to be there, it's always going to be needed. But the real, like the real value that you can add. And when you think about adding value, that's where you can price at a high, at a better rate, you know, premium pricing. The real value is when you can help them scale as well.

So I want to talk about that a little bit. Let me, I'd like your permission to ask you a personal question. Okay. Have you ever bought anything customized before? Cabinets, doors, windows, socks, cufflinks, ties. It's expensive, right?

Yep, a few times. Yep. It, it's more expensive? Yes.

Okay. Everything we buy that's customized we're assuming is going to cost us a premium price. Except for accounting and bookkeeping services. We allow people to come into our office and dictate to us what services they want. Okay, I want this, I want this, I want this, I want this, I want that. Then we give them a quote and they say it's too expensive. They just customized our relationship and now it's too expensive. So that's the problem is when we're customizing our engagements and charging not a customized rate, there's never going to be enough meat on the bone in order for you to scale. So when I'm teaching our members how to design their pricing, that's where it's key. Okay. Because, you know, most people are taking a look at an hourly rate and then how long it takes them to do it multiplied by this and a little bit of, of, of bluff. And that's what, you know, I price it at. Well, that way of pricing, you forgot to add in culture. Okay. You forgot to add in technology upgrades, computers. You forgot to upgrade date. You forgot to include charity. You forgot to include half day Fridays for the entire company. You forgot to include 10% raises every year. You forgot to include profit sharing. You forgot to include all of these things that'll help you scale and run a business. You're not. They're not designing their pricing with mission, value and purpose in mind. They're allowing the customer to come on in and architect the workflow. Now you have 50 different bosses. How are you going to bring somebody in? Okay. At this level? Okay. I got to learn all this people. Okay, now. Now I got another customer. And it's kind of similar, but it's not similar. Now I got another customer, another customer. Now I got this. Now I got this. We're mixing and matching and you're scaling and everything. What. Who gets the priority? Who gets, who gets hung up on and picked up for? Who's the smiley face when you call? Who are the customers that you're trying to replicate and double down on? Right. And so you know, the billing practices and the methodology of how you come about to get your prices is antiquated and broken. And so we got to take a holistic approach to our pricing. Right. And really get down to it. Because if you mo a million dollars, okay. A million dollar grossing firm is a nice size firm that will allow you with enough meat on the bone for you to pay yourself well to live a lifestyle you want, keep your expenses low, keep your head count low and pay that minimum headcount healthy so that they don't leave so that you. The real Flex is not what kind of car you and I are driving that. But what is your staff driving? How many weeks vacation or PTO are you offering? Are you, are your kids, are you missing your kids events? Yeah, like the Flex is not, you know. Oh, I drive a Rolls Royce, Cullen. Yeah, great. I'm glad you do and that's awesome. Okay. But are you seeing your kids? Are you missing birthdays? What have you been doing the past decade in your pursuit of high of revenue? How, how much money are you giving away? How much staff? If we pulled your staff and they said who's the number one boss? Are you coming up. That's where the problem is, is the shortsightedness of not looking down the field and properly designing your business with mission, purpose and value in mind. Hmm.

I know that's a big deal for, for you all at. At profit first. And it sounds like that's something that, that carries through then with. I guess naturally you attract the sort of folks that resonate with the values that you carry as a business as well.

We love the contrarians.

Yeah. Well, let me, let me ask you. I'm. I'm gonna Ask you some, some hard questions about profit first. This is just, you know, this is what I've heard from accounting firm owners.

That I've talked to.

So the first one is, you know, does a, does the accounting firm have to be using profit first for themselves in order to be able to help implement or help their customers do pass.

It's mandatory 100%. I will not allow you to be a member of this organization unless you're experiencing profit verse within your business. It is mandatory. You need to walk the talk. It's good for the business, and you're even more relatable.

You know, it's like a, it's a buy in question. Right. You can't teach something that you don't believe in.

Right, Right, Absolutely. It's, it's, you know, I mean, can you imagine being a stockbroker? And, you know, you say to your customer, hey, you know, I, I'm recommending GE for you. And I go, okay, Mr. Stockbroker, do you have GE? No, I don't have GE.

Right.

Why are you giving it to me? Because the way we teach how to introduce profit first is not to introduce profit first. I don't, I'm not here to teach you how to sell profit first. The membership is also designed to help our members share the value and the benefits of working with profit versus a tool and a component. Okay. If they know about it, it's shooting fish in the barrel. But if they don't know it, okay, this is how it works. So, Matt, I understand you indicated that you haven't been paying yourself consistently. Your expenses are out of control and you're not profitable. Would you be interested in knowing the methodology I use in my own firm to ensure I'm paying myself right?

Yeah. All right, well, let me, let me, let me go to the next level of this question then. Accountants, I think, read profit first and they're like, why do you have to make it so complicated? You got all these different bank accounts. Why don't you just do it in the books? Like that's how they would do it. Like, I get the concept of dividing these things. Now I have an answer as a business owner, like, it makes more sense to me to have these bank accounts, but to you as an accountant, I get it that you would just rather do it in the bookkeeping. What do you tell people on that? Yeah.

How often are books being updated? How often is books actually be updated? How often are you messing up your spreadsheet? I've seen so many accountants ruin profit first because they're doing it wrong. Right? Because, you know, also, it could be horrible. A situation was where we were working with a $15 million company. They had five, six accounts. One of them, one of their accounts was marketing. Okay, they have a marketing. Right.

How about that, right?

You love that? I love it. Have a marketing account.

Can we make that part of the official curriculum, Ron? That they have to have a marketing account and then send it to me?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. Right. So this $15 million firm had a marketing event.

They.

Long story short, they, they, they changed CFOs. They went through CFOs. The CFO was, you know, not a necessarily a fan of profit first, but he's like, listen, we don't need all of this stuff, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to do it. You know, the owner's like, no, we're doing profit first. Don't monkey around. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Guys like, all right, so the owner is a bad man, right? He's all over the place. Like, he's moving.

Classic visionary, right?

He's like, he called, he calls the cfo. He's like, hey, listen, I'm looking to, you know, do this, this, this. Do we have enough money? Right? Okay. It's a marketing event. Hey, I'm going to do this marketing event. Hey, do we have enough money? Okay, CEO looks online, goes down to his looks at all the, the bank balances, the totality of it. Yeah, we got enough money. Boom. Go ahead, spend it. Spent over a hundred thousand dollars on a marketing event. Okay. The business owner then was like, okay, great. All right, let's, let's, let's take a look. They didn't have enough money in the marketing account to spend a hundred thousand dollars. They had enough money in the, in the totality of the general.

Yeah.

So what the CFO did, he pulled from another account. Okay. Balance out so that the owner could spend.

Right.

Guess what happened when time came for the other spends to happen. There was no money in there because they already spent it.

Yeah.

Guess who got fired the following week.

Probably not the owner.

Yeah, fired. He got fired because he didn't follow the system. He didn't follow the program. And this is exactly what happens. You steal from Peter to pay Paul profit first. It puts guardrails in place. So that, that, that's, that's kind of the primary reason why have the bank accounts go.

Going back, you know, just at, at this fundamental level, I think what. This is true for accounting firms. There are some accounting firms that are great with other People's money and not great with their own business. And so they could really benefit, I think, from, you know, implementing profit first.

You know, on working with, working with over close to 5,000 accountants over a decade, 83% of them, if not more, run bad businesses. Financials, they're just as bad as everybody else out there. The cobblers had bad shoes. So, you know, it's an ego thing. You know, I don't need profit first. I'm an accountant or. Oh my God, I, I, I should have been knowing better. I'm embarrassed. So I'm not going to do anything. Yeah. And so here, here's the simplistic thing. If your customer, if you're an EA or you're a, an accountant and you're like, ron, it's bullshit. We don't need all these accounts. I'm going to ask you, okay, well, if your customer charges sales tax, would you recommend having a sales tax account? 100%. Yes. Okay. Because that's not money. Theirs. And every accountant has seen the horror stories of when they don't have a mechanism in place for the business owner to collect the sales tax. Right. Well, how does, and then I'll say, how does that work? Well, basically what we do is we take 7% of whatever the sale is and we put it into a bank account that is called sales tax. Then when sales tax is called quarterly, we take that money out and we move it into opex and then we pay sales tax. Yay. Okay.

It's actually profit first.

It's profit first. Same thing with a payroll account. Oh, we, we're having problem making payroll. Well, why don't you open a payroll account? You're not collecting checks, you're not collecting income on there. Okay. So your, your customer hasn't been paying themselves. They haven't been profitable. Their expenses are out of control. So now following the same exact methodology doesn't make sense. Really?

Yeah.

Come on.

Well, so firms should use profit first for themselves. I think. Now my perspective on one hand, I kind of don't care about that. Like, yes, they should do it. I do want my, I do want my clients, accounting firms to be profitable and do well for themselves. I think what I'll say from a, from a marketer's perspective is you have to differentiate and you have to be able to have true value that you bring to your clients, or there's very little that marketing can do for you. Right. Like I can't, I can't go out there and drive a bunch of traffic to a website that doesn't offer high value services and just, you know, put lipstick on a pig and say, you know, this is why you should spend a bunch of money. Marketing can help really support the value that you add. And I'm a big believer in clarity. Right. And we're a story brand firm. So this idea that we can tell you the value, that we're, we can help you figure out the value. How to say this is the value we bring. But if you don't have something below the surface where you're really delivering that value, you know, you're, it's not a promise that you can really keep. And, and there's only so much that marketing can do.

So same thing with profit. First, just because you're right doesn't mean you're going to get tons of applicants and that they're just going to sign up. No, it doesn't work that way.

Yeah.

The problem. I have a question for you. One of the things I've noticed over the years is that if I were to take a shaker and I put five accounting websites in there and I shake them all up and I throw them all out. And these are companies that have had marketing agencies. I can't tell the difference between a lot of them and a lot. I see a lot of the marketing companies using the same differentiators. Right. For everybody. Everybody's on the cloud, everybody is timely, everybody's friendly, everybody's got a tech stack, everybody's got blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everybody's moving to advisory. So how do you really differentiate somebody in a crowded life like that?

Yeah, I mean, there, there are for sure different ways every firm has an, and, or can develop a unique approach. You know, one of the examples that I use sometimes though is it's very difficult to be the best in one category. And people don't usually make choices based on the best thing. So it's very hard to be the best basketball player in the world. There's only one of them. It's very hard to be the best, you know, guitar player. It's, it's very hard to be the best accounting firm. Plus, how would we judge this? We, we don't know. Now the example I use is, is Lin Manuel Miranda. He is not the best historian, he is not the best theater actor in the world, and he is definitely not the best rapper in the world, but he's the best historical theater rapper in the world.

Right.

And so he's, he's cobbled together a few different things and people actually think you Know, they think of him in particular situations. Even, you know, movie directors will come up with opportunities to work with someone who's known for these things. And so I think just in a really simple way, when you start to pull together a few different things, like, you know, we are, I know you guys do this a lot with, with some of your firms. You know, when you're the, when you're the advisory firm that uses profit first for roofers, right now, you've got a real differentiator. And, and the reality is there are plenty of roofers in the world to make you a very successful firm or, you know, you pulled it. And it doesn't necessarily have to be profit first, but if you, if you even develop your own, you know, we, we have a, you know, scale, your scale your marketing agency framework that we use, as well as doing the accounting, the compliance, or maybe you can, you know, pull together wealth management and, and bookkeeping. And that's, there's different ways you can, you can put this together. But it, it's true that you need to develop some things that, that set you apart as a marketer. I would say there's, there's a little bit of space there for messaging to do the differentiation work, but it can't do all of the work because you're right there. It's, it's hard. The positive things that a good accounting firm does for their clients are very similar one to another. And so you gotta find a way to differentiate.

I don't, I think the result might be similar, but I think that the empathy and the handholding that is getting them there is really going to sit well moving forward in today's market because, you know, it's moving so fast, it's so complex. The laws are changing, everything's changing. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't, I can't see through the trees. I, I don't have financial clarity. I need, I need clarity. Help. Help. Help, help, help. And then when I see testimonials of, you know, when I'm researching firms for membership and I see testimonials and it's more empathetic. It's more, hey, this person did this. More than not, you know, you can tell the fluffy ones that people just do them because they were asked do them right. And, and so, you know, looking at the heartfelt ones and the ones where, you know, they made more of an impact to that person's lives, I think that those are the firms that are really gonna, you know, shine through over the next decade.

Yeah. And, and specificity really matters. Right? I, I had a friend who said, I think it was a, A pastor who had, who had taught him, like when, when he's preparing a sermon, he thinks about one or two people and he speaks just to those one or two people. Because when you have that sort of specificity, it resonates actually with a wider group. And when you try to speak to everybody at once, it actually falls flat with all of them. And so you're better off having some specificity. So like you said in testimonials, in the way that you work with people having those like real examples, they're unique, specific to one individual company. It's going to help people understand well, if they can solve this really specific problem for so and so. Well, if they can solve this really specific. Help me solve my specific problem too. Yeah, you're totally different problem.

Yeah, Mike, Mike Aguilera understand and you know, taught me. He's one of our coaches, mindset coach as well. And Mike Aguilera, you're that customer and the struggles and everything. And so you're marketing to him, but you're, you're marketing to everybody like him or her in a particular industry and field. And you know, it's like done right. It's like, how'd they know I'm experiencing this now?

Yeah, exactly. And the fear is often. Well, if I speak too narrowly, then am I driving away all of the people, you know, all of the other people? And, and the reality is it's actually the opposite. It's counterintuitive. But it's a true, it's a true thing that happens in, I mean, just communication in general, but specifically in.

Oh, it also doesn't have to be complex to be impactful. Right. You know, hey, listen, if you're an expert in solving, you know, boiler issues, well, you know, you're going to be marketing in New Jersey versus someplace where they only have gas.

Right? Yeah, exactly. So you gotta, you, you gotta know your market. We, you know, I've been recently just on my show and, and with some folks, we've been talking a lot about niches and, and how do you find your, your true market and the redo A test.

You have to test if it's saturated or if it's right for picking.

Yeah. One. And you have to know there's like multiple pieces to it. You've got your, what's your approach that's gonna help to point you in a direction. This is kind of what you were just saying. If you Know what it is that you offer that helps you point in, in a direction of what are some of the markets that really need this. And then you look at the competition and you want to know like, is there opportunity here? Is it, is it saturated? And. But you can't just pick a market and not have a good approach that that's going to add benefit to them and you can't.

So here's the thing. You know, when we walk our members through the, the identification of a niche, a niche or a niche, sometimes it takes three or four iterations. Right. Like sometimes, you know, going after Pilates studios isn't one of the best things in the world. Right. Going after law firms and dental, dental practices. It's a little saturated these days, you know, and so sometimes. Oh, or you might go through it and you'd be like, you know what? I just don't like the makeup of this industry. Industry, right. And like, so what are you passionate about? What do you geek out on? Like, I like cars and sports. So, you know, I'm going to be working with resto companies and you know, sports people and stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah. There's something about you that's unique. I, I think, you know, the real takeaway that I would say just from this conversation is you, you have to have a way to, to bring value to your clients. You have to know who they are in particular and you have to be different from the competition. Having a framework that delivers some specific value starts to solve a lot of those things at once. When you have a good framework, you're delivering value. It helps set you apart from the competitors and it points you in the direction of a good market where people really are going to need your service. You can help, you can narrow in. Even at like a psychographic level. You understand a good fit person for, you know, like a profit first type service. It's not going to be a good fit for everyone because there's a lot of business owners who don't want guardrails.

Right.

But there are some that really do and it's going to be beneficial to them. That's going to help you kind of understand and narrow who it is that you want to work with. It's a, it's a real amplifier to the work that you do, you know, both in terms of bringing in more leads, I think, and in terms of this premium pricing. All of these things are going to be beneficial for your business and it.

Makes it easier, right?

Like, well, yeah, the operations have to.

Learn every single illness that's out there. I'd rather just be a heart surgeon and do the same thing and get premium pricing versus trying to cure every sniffle and, you know, cough out there.

Yeah. Well, Ron, this is, this is great. We could go on probably for hours about this and so. But we better, we better wrap it up here. Where. So you mentioned earlier. I'll mention it again if you email me. You reach out to the show. Ron's going to send out some free books. So if you never. If you're not familiar with Profit first, you should definitely get on that train and then, you know, where can people find you? What would you point them to? Accounting owners, if they want to learn more.

So Profit first professionals dot com. That's where we have a lot of resources and information where you can also find out how to become a member and also work with a member. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn and in Facebook, so I'm the only real Ron Saharian out there.

You, you've got that advantage. There's a couple other Matt bankers in the world. I, I actually follow all of them on Twitter if they're on Twitter, just cause I want to see. You know what else? There's, there's one who's a. I think he's a football coach in Kentucky or something like that. I don't know.

There's. My dad's name is Ron.

Okay. He's not as active on LinkedIn as you.

No, he's not even on LinkedIn. But there's somebody like there, you know, there's somebody very similar, but they're more Middle Eastern. Yeah.

Well, find Ron on LinkedIn profit first professionals. Com if you want to learn more about Profit first and reach out to the show if you want a book. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Ron, for being on the show.

Appreciate it. Thank you guys and may profits be with you.

All right, see you later. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. If you like this conversation and found it valuable, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's really good for the output algorithm and it helps other firm owners find this show. You can subscribe to our weekly Marketing for Accounting Firms newsletter at marketingforaccountingfirms. Com and you can connect with me, Matt Banker, on LinkedIn or Twitter. We hope you tune in next time for another episode of Marketing for Accounting Firm.