Marketing Advisory Services For Your Firm

Hey, welcome to the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. You can probably guess what we talk about. It's mostly marketing and accounting firms. And today I've got Mark Stovall on the podcast. He is going to talk, we're going to talk a bit about advisory service in your firm. So many of you may know I have a background, I'm a story brand guide and I really believe in this idea that in your marketing you really want to position yourself as the guide and your customer as the hero. And they're really looking for someone who can help them win the day and that can give them guidance and really a major aspect, I think, of the value that an accountant can bring to their customers, their clients in is not just being a tax preparer or a task doer or something like that, but someone who actually brings that advice and that guidance. I know as a business owner, that's something that I have really valued in my own accountant. So, Mark, welcome to the show. Give us your quick background and I don't know your kind of spiel about advisory and why you think it's important.

Right on. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me here today. So my background includes, you know, I've been in public accounting since 2010. I started with a big four firm, Ernst & Young, and then after four and a half years there, I went and worked in industry with a small manufacturing company and ran primarily, well, initially the finance group and then moved over to work with the operations group and spent just over three years there. And when I moved to operations, it was mind blowing for me because I was used to, you know, working with the numbers day in and day out and not really making too many operational decisions decisions. When I switched to operations, I had 17 people report to me. And then all of a sudden I had to start looking at optimizing operations and understanding the metrics for each piece of equipment that was in the shop and, you know, working with that. And then that layered on top of my financial background. It was really awesome to be able to kind of make the connection between the expense, well, you know, revenue and expenses and tie it to the operational side of things. After that, I moved across the country with my family and launched my virtual CPA firm and had no local network, had no digital marketing plan, really had no idea what I was doing. I just had some, you know, operational and financial experience and felt that I could leverage that in my firm. So it was a struggle for sure for the first couple years trying to figure out, you know, what was my niche, who was I working with? What services could I offer? And like most firms in that position, I offered everything under the sun. I provided tax prep, I provided financial statement preparation. I didn't do any advisory. Sorry, Yeah, I didn't do any advisory at that time. I didn't do any audit work either. I was just kind of focused on those primary services. And as I started to grow and as you know, clients came up that needed more than just tax preparation, I started putting my toe in that advisory pool and started trying to figure out a framework to offer that efficiently and in a way that could be scaled. And, and then from there I now continued to build my book of business around year ends or year end write ups, tax prep, and then took on some larger clients and became a fractional CFO for three tech companies. And then in 2021, after fighting the good fight for over four years in public accounting with my own firm, I decided to sell and sold off the book of business, including tax prep and accounting, and actually stayed on as fractional CFO with those smaller companies. And I'm in the office right now of one of my clients, an augmented reality startup. And yeah, working, working that. And I now work with firm owners to kind of build out their offering, automate their services and get really clear on who they work with and what they do for them.

Yeah, that's great. Let's unpack. When we say advisory, it's a fairly broad term. I think that in some ways every accountant offers a certain amount of advisory to their clients, some tax planning, I might call them up and ask for their advice on something. But when you say advisory, is that synonymous with kind of moving in that direction of like a fractional CFO type role or how do you, how do you delineate the different ways that a firm can be offering advisory services to their clients?

Right. So I kind of phrase it or kind of frame it this way. So advisory services are anything other than, you know, compliance work. So it is a big term. The, I'm going to call it the gateway advisory service is usually cash flow projections or maybe budget projections for clients. And I kind of break down that cash flow advisory side into kind of three big buckets. So when we track cash flow, that's the bookkeeping side of things, that's the compliance side of things. We're tracking bookkeeping. And then the first step into advisory is we do projections for cash flow, which is basically taking historical information and projecting it down the road. Quite simple. We leverage historical information. We don't add too much to the projections. We just, you Know, we have good historical data. Us accountants, we like to be conservative. Going forward, this is how it's going to look. And then from there, there is what I call, you know, improving cash flow. So improving the cash flow conversion cycle. So you're not really doing much by way of operations, however, advising on systems, on processes to collect that cash faster or to churn, you know, a dollar around faster in the business. And that's, that's pretty, that's project based advisory and it can be really valuable for clients. And then after that, that's the improving, sorry, increasing cash flow. So we have improving cash flow, which is systems and workflow related. Then we have increasing cash flow, which is more like, okay, strategically, what do we need to do to bring more cash in the door? And that is definitely outside the comfort zone of a lot of traditional accountants because you are making suggestions based on market, based on what you see. You can't rely on your historical information. And so that is very uncomfortable for a lot of accountants who like to tie, you know, projections to historicals, tie them to, you know, what did you do in the last three months? Because that's basically or assured to happen the next three months. So you have different levels of advisory. There projections being quite simple, low value work, but safe for the accountant. Then you have improving, you know, systems. A lot of accountants don't necessarily like to talk about systems. They'll leave that up to the business owner. And then increasing cash flow, which is in my opinion, the highest value that can, you can offer.

So an accountant or a firm owner or an accountant, they have a lot of the skills and the knowledge to be able to do this. But it sounds like there's a fairly significant mindset shift in terms of how you think about your clients. And it sounds like you're saying there are times when folks don't feel comfortable making that jump from being focused on the numbers and the historical data into like now I'm going to be strategic and I'm going to start giving advice to the clients. Do you think there's a personality profile that works for that sort of person or is it something that you feel like is something that can be taught and that an accountant, whoever they are, can kind of live into that sort of role, even if they feel a bit uncomfortable playing that role?

Right, right. I think personality does come into it a little bit for sure. My dad's a CPA. He's been a CPA for 45 years, you know, longer than I've been alive. And he has this, you know, Persona that, not very risk tolerant, he avoids those things. And he kind of raised me that way as, as a, as a teenager and heading into my college years. I remember second year in college, I asked if he would support me in starting a landscaping business during the summers to kind of work for myself, make money. And his first. And his response was no, he had no desire to do that. And if there was anyone more qualified to help me, you know, it was, it was him. Like it was him. With, with his background, he could, he could set me up for real success. But there was this aversion to, to, to risk. So there is a level of risk that you have to embrace with advisory services, but that risk can be mitigated through a few different things. And I'm prepared to jump into those things right now. But, but yeah, so personality important, but it can be cultivated. But you know, there are, there, there's the book the E Myth that talks about, you know, the operators versus the visionaries and you know, kind of knowing your role and how to kind of leverage your strengths. So if you're in a firm and you're the solo owner and you don't feel like you have that personality to kind of venture out and take on that risk, like you've taken on some risk already. Cause you're already a firm owner, you're already a business owner, but you know, now you've built a book of business. You have recurring annual revenue, maybe recurring monthly revenue. And, and it's safe and comfortable. But if you want to go beyond that, maybe you look at bringing on a partner or a seasoned financial professional, that can be that impetus, that catalyst for moving forward with advisory services. So I think personality does play into it, but there are things that you can cultivate and do to set yourself up for success.

And maybe this is where you're about to go. But in terms of recognizing if and when you're ready to add advisory services to your offerings is what are, what are some of the criteria? I don't know, the pre work or the, Sometimes it's even like personal work that needs to be done in order to get yourself to the point where that is a true option and something that you should be thinking about for your firm.

So I push my clients, the firm owners that I work with, to become expert firms or to develop a niche. Because expert firms, number one, they can charge more for what they do. And they go beyond doing the check boxes and balancing the balance sheet and what typical accountants do. Traditionally, expert firms were only the large firms because they could leverage their multilocational offices and have a collective of professionals to pull information from various or similar businesses into kind of a mastermind that they could then sell to the market. Whereas, you know, smaller firms historically have only been generalist firms because they haven't been able to focus on just one industry there. They're kind of restricted to their, to their geography.

Yeah.

So the Internet has blown that wide open. Cloud accounting allows you to be connected to similar businesses coast to coast all over the world. And so you can really develop that niche quickly. The smallest firms can be expert firms if they really focus on a specific niche industry type of tool or, you know, offering that a business can provide. So with that develop a niche, you know, become an expert in something that doesn't mean turn away the other business that can, that will come up. You probably need that for cash flow purposes, but like, really hone in and develop your skills around an industry. And I'm not just saying, you know, know the, the tax rules about, you know, different types of equipment for that industry, but know the tools that that industry works with both on, you know, internally and interacting with their clients. Know the seasonality of that business. So you can add very timely and pointed advice throughout the year, Understand how the labor laws work in that business. So when you make suggestions, you can say, hey, you know, make, maybe contractoring up makes sense for these certain projects or whatever. But obviously employees versus contractors is a hot topic that we won't get into. But these types of things help you become a real expert with these clients. You're no longer talking about, well, you know, your expenses have increased by 10% and whatnot. But you're saying, let's blow open a new revenue stream because we know in your industry, these are what other companies are doing. They're going to trade shows, they're developing, you know, relationship with influencers, with micro influencers, and you can really add some, some value at that point. So it is again, a step out of the traditional accounting role. But everything a business does has a financial impact, and that financial impact needs to be captured and measured. And that's what we do best. But if we could, you know, put a nice little package around that system and deliver meaningful, timely advice, you know, that's where our value will go up. And if we start to do it with, you know, one, two, three clients, then you can see that value compounding. But as soon as you start doing it with five or ten clients, you're already going to know what those roadblocks are going to be with A new client in that industry and you can deliver value almost immediately in the first conversation. Like, hey, are you looking at this? Are you doing that? We need to get you on this system to maximize, you know, your financials.

Yeah, I'm a huge. I'm a huge proponent and believer in having a clear niche. I myself, marketing for accounting firms is a very specific. And one of the things I love about it is actually there's a lot of overlap in terms of how I approach my marketing services and the services then that my clients are giving to their clients. Because there is, there's an advisory kind of guiding role in both of those things. And so it's very easy for me to, to put myself in their shoes in certain ways. One of the. And choosing a niche or why you should choose a niche that could be its own huge conversation. I know there's a ton of talk about that. So many firms find it so difficult to choose like one specific industry because, well, they have. Part of it is actually they're concerned about their client base that they currently have. Right. I don't have one type of client. I work with all different types of people. So what happens when someone refers, you know, someone who's not in my new niche? Or what if my current clients go to my website and they see that I just work with these people? And from the marketer's perspective, I always like to think that there's a difference between your target, which is pretty narrow. You draw a small circle. We're going after a very particular type of client that's your target and then your market, which is a little bit bigger. And then those are the people that you will work with or that do fit your model. And it's worth having them as clients. But it's maybe not as narrow. And you can. The, the baby steps that I often will tell my clients to take is pick, pick a focus. And you know, your website could just be your messaging and all that could be focused on a very specific target. And then you have a little, little link or a button that says, oh, are you not a manufacturing company? Click here and you can learn about, oh, we also work with some non, you know, manufacturing clients or whatever that your, your niche is. So there's ways to approach that. The other thing, and I want to, I want to kind of steer the conversation now to thinking about how do you now market advisory services? How does it change the way that you go to market or you present yourself to the public? Because I think there's a ton of advantages in that do you, in your experience, is there a big shift? Do you have to. Do you add advisory to your services as one of the line items? Or do you. Do you recommend that you actually shift your kind of focus to be positioned as an advisory firm first, who happens to be able to help with, you know, maybe some of these other tasks, accounting, you know, corporate tax prep, whatever it is. Or do you. I guess I'm gonna leave it open. Or do you. Or should you just focus on advisory and cut out those other things?

Yeah, yeah. It's harder to pull a client up to advisory services if you started with, you know, bookkeeping and tax. It's better to start as an advisory service provider and then know that, you know, offer that you can provide bookkeeping services for them. And it's a nice little. It's a nice little complimentary service because you say, you know, to deliver expert advisory services, I need to have clean bookkeeping, which is a given, but I need to have segmented bookkeeping, meaning I want to be able to track by geography or track by client type. And then all of a sudden you're like, and I. And we're built for that. Most bookkeepers are just going to put the transactions through and aren't going to add extra layers of tracking or categorization on that information to be able to get, you know, a good output afterwards. So now in terms of positioning yourself as an advisory firm that can be on your website, like, hey, I work with, I just released this in my newsletter this morning. You know, I work with salon and spa owners that sell online products and packages. And so that doesn't restrict you from working with other spa and salon. Salon and spa owners. But you want to focus on those that have, maybe have an E commerce arm or sell online as well, because that's where your expertise lies. You can offer complementary services to understanding their systems, optimizing their systems, things like that. So you position yourself as. That's who you work with instead of right off, you know, you go on a lot of accounting websites. First of all, they list who they are, you know, their guiding principles of we're trustworthy. All these things. Like, those are a given. If you're not trustworthy, get out of the profession. Like, because you're trustworthy doesn't make you. That's not your competitive edge. Right? Your competitive edge is your experience with working with salon and spa owners in the E commerce space. Like, that's your competitive edge. And so when they start listing their services like bookkeeping, sales tax, corporate tax, or you Know, flow through entity tax, like those, those, those Boar people, those are kind of. You're speaking to no one there, because everybody needs those things. So when you outline your niche and you say, this is what we can do, and then I really push my clients to make sure that your call to action, wherever you're putting anything down, whether it's on your website or a lead magnet or in a conference or anything, you push them to get on a call, a discovery call. And you don't start that call with, oh, what do you need? Because that puts the client in the driver's seat with the conversation. But you start asking about, for me, I would, this is what I recommend. Start talking about their operations immediately. And then you start picking up problems instead of saying, hey, what's going on? What's, you know, what's the problem in your, in your business? And they might tell you that, but it's going to take a little bit of work to unearth that true problem. And if they go into the conversation knowing that there's a potential engagement, that's going to help happen, they're going to test your expertise. So the first couple of questions are going to be that you know them, ascertaining whether or not you're an expert. And then the exploratory questions happen afterwards. So you want to demonstrate your expertise in those first, you know, five, 10 questions. So you can ask about the systems, you can ask about, you know, how did that seasonality nuance that only spas are impacted by? How did that impact you? And then they know that you're legitimate and that you have value that you can bring to their business. And then when you get past that, are you an expert phase, then you get into exploratory where, like, okay, what didn't work for you last year? Are you seeing a growth? Are you seeing a good ROI in your marketing? Are you tracking these things? And then, no, no, no. It's like, okay, then all of a sudden you're in a position to say, I can help you with this, and this is how I can do that. And bookkeeping and tax work is a given. Like, we're going to do those things for you, but let's build you a plan. Let's find out what their destination is and then build that plan to get there. So that's kind of my take on it is, you know, start with those advisory questions from the very beginning, establish your expertise, and then if you need to, you can work back to the bookkeeping and tax prep. If, if that's what they need.

Yeah, it's, it's so important going into a client engagement to, to try to maximize your authority at the beginning because a lot of people don't realize that actually over time as the most value you can bring to a client is really solving the big problems. And, and over time it actually kind of drops off because as the big problems get solved now you're solving smaller problems and so you want to start from the biggest problems possible. It's very hard to move uphill, to start with the small problems, which are tasks, sort of things, the bookkeeping, you know, the reporting, all of that, that kind of stuff and try to move uphill because as that relationship goes on, it's just, you've already set an expectation down here. A lot of. There's a podcast I listened to, they were talking about the reverse Trojan horse. We try to get our foot in the door at the bottom level with like, you know, the basic services and then surprise, it's a good surprise. We have all this strategic advisory stuff and we try to move people up the ladder at that point. And it's just so much harder to do it that way than if you sell the advisory first. Because if you move up, you're starting with like your lowest cost services and then you're asking them to spend a lot more money. And that feels really hard for a lot of clients. But if you start with that highest value thing and people will pay a lot more money for your brain than they will for your time. And so if they're used to thinking about the value you bring to them is based on the time it takes you to do stuff for them, it's going to be very hard then to say. But for this time when we're on the phone talking about these strategic things, it's going to cost you a lot more. It's very difficult leap to make for a lot of, for a lot of clients. Absolutely. Where. Let's talk money and my business model. Right. So I'm assuming you think that adding advisory or leading with advisory is a really great way to actually make more money in your firm, like part of it or the profitability. And I'm going to maybe seed the question a little bit. We're seeing massive changes, I think in terms of the task oriented things, AI changing things. You know, outsourcing has always, has always been a part of it. But the, the stuff that just takes time is going to take less and less time as we move forward in the future. But the thing that's not going to be able to be replaceable, I think, is, is this, this ability for you to be a strategic guide and know what your clients really need. So where, where do you think things are going? I mean, on a scale of 1 to 10, how important is it to be thinking about advisory just in terms of your business model from a financial standpoint?

Yeah, you know, there's, there's firms that will succeed with kind of the volume work in the future, but efficiency is going to be so important, they're going to have to deal head on with the talent crunch in the accounting industry. So it's doable, but they will have to leverage automation significantly. They will have to leverage offshore talent. And you know, it's going to be, it's going to be a race to cover costs. There's a lot of firms that their margins could be significantly better if they were to just switch the work that they were doing. But it's almost like a golden handcuff scenario where they have a bunch of recurring, you know, I'm going to call it busy, not busy work, but like doing recurring, doing work, which is good. It pays the bills, pays the teams, but they're so bogged down by it and busy with it that they can't branch out and look for higher volume, higher margin work. So, but moving forward, you know, we're knowledge workers. We're not, we're not doers. I've never really liked the term tax preparer because the tax, the tax return is actually just the medium that we communicate our knowledge through. And so, you know, a lot of accountants are focused on doing the work. There's a deliverable, there's a tangible thing that we provide the client. But we are going to leverage, we need to leverage our knowledge more than our hours to succeed in the future. And so we're gonna see, you know, a polarization to a certain degree where the firms in the middle that do, you know, a lot of the, you know, checkboxing are gonna have to pick where they're gonna go because they're gonna have to either compete on price and efficiency or they're gonna compete on value and quality. And I always say, where do you want to be in this? So let's retool your, your skills. Let's, let's look at how we can deliver value. Now the thing with advisory services and providing value, it's not as scalable as the doing work. You can, unfortunately, you can't outsource, you know, the seven years that you spent getting your, your CPA letters. So there's Things that you can do, you know, definitely an engagement has to be broken down in discrete tasks and make sure that those tasks are assigned to the right role. There's a lot of firms that have one or two people doing the entire engagement from signing of the engagement letter to, you know, buttoning up at the end. Whereas a cpa, their expertise is only really needed for kind of a smaller fraction of that work. So if you can build a team which includes non designated professionals or even finance people like you can get VAs, you can get, you know, IT people to build out a lot of your team and then you kind of come in just when you need to have that conversation and you need to spend that time thinking about the client's problems. And so that's how advisory services can be built and scaled is making sure that you know what you're offering, the steps of that are required in that offering and then getting people in the right place for those steps. Fractional talent is really good at helping a small firm grow because you don't need a full time employee to do, you know, step A, B and C of an engagement. You can bring in someone on a fractional basis until you grow and need them full time. But most firm owners said, oh, you know, that doesn't take very much time. I'm going to do that. Which is fine for the first one or two engagements, but then, you know, they're doing all of the engagement, all of the work when it, when it can be outsourced. With fractional talent.

Yeah, I was good. There's a, I think a lot of business owners, lots of industries, but accountants, this is, this is definitely true, get fixated on the fact that they can, that they can solve external problems. They can, they can help help a company grow. They can do the books, it's all around like what they can produce or deliver for their clients in a very like tangible, practical way. Super great. But I think one of the biggest advantages or one of the biggest values that you bring as an advisor is not external, but it's internal. Solving internal problems, which are. Business owners want to know that they're making good business decisions. They're looking for things like peace of mind. They're looking for like being understood, you know, someone to help validate the decisions that they're making. And that's an incredibly valuable thing. But it's a very relational piece of work rather than just a practical, like, I know, I know what your numbers should be. They're here, they should be over here. Let's, let's Fix that. Do you, do you see that as well? Maybe. Here's where I'm going with this. One of the ways that I see the future of accountants, whether that's you as the lead person in an engagement or even like a staff accountant or someone down the line, the people skills and the ability to have that like client facing aspect of what the work that you do is going to become more valuable and more of the stuff that happens in the background is going to be able to be automated or outsourced or handed off to like you said, fractional people. And so I guess I'm wondering your take kind of on that, the relational like face to face side of things, if that's, do you, is that something that you see as important in the future or, or not?

I guess, well, that's, you know, you hit, you hit the nail on the head when you said there's this internal that needs to happen. You know, we're not accountants, we, we don't coach. Coaching is probably the number one thing we will be doing moving forward. Helping the business owner understand themselves in the context of their business and how they can make better. I, you know, share this example. A couple weeks ago on LinkedIn, I had a client that grew 23, 300% over five years. He started with, you know, I remember he was working, doing installations in malls after hours and he made $47,000 the first year. Fast forward to now and he is at 1.3 million, I think heading into 2023. And the thing with him is I had a subscription agreement with him and subscription agreements are kind of the hot thing coming up for a kid. And so, you know, he paid a flat fee and included his bookkeeping. It included his tax prep at the end of the year. And that stuff was automated. It was quite quick. Didn't take me and my team and myself very much time to do. But almost every month him and I would chat on the phone twice and I would, you know, he would be driving back from a job site, he's in the kind of demolition, asbestos, remediation space and he would call me about everything. And there was this evolution of him as a business owner as we worked together. So he would call me and one time he called me up and said, okay, I have this contract with this other contractor, he wants me to do the work, although he's the holder of the client agreement and he's going to move his leaves into my company just for the project. And all these red flags came up and I said, you can't do that because there's just so many labor laws and payroll issues that will come up with this. And we talk through it and, and he's like that makes a lot of sense. I'm like, you need to first cover your own liability and mitigate your risk before you start bringing on other contractors. And, and you know, it was. He had operational experience, but he was not, hadn't been a business owner for a long time. And so these are the types of relationships that accounts are going to have to have with their clients moving forward. It's, it is this subscription model that will really flourish where they have you kind of as a consultant, not 24 7, but access to you to make decisions. We talked about truck leases, we talked about repairs. We talked about when he bought his first shop and like how he could some of the extra base space in the, in the building to cover parts of his costs. Like there were all these things that I had experience with because I had been in the industry and had talked to other clients about similar things for the last four or five years. So all of this was new to him. And as you know, the accountants that can turn the model that I just described from one to one to one to many are going to win, are going to win in the future. Because the fastest growing business model today is those micro businesses where people either are selling something on Etsy or have a small or our small micro influencers like that. That group of business owners is growing significantly, but they don't have the capital to pay for a CPA full time. But if you can get them into a community or a mastermind group or something where you can have those conversations that subscription feel with them, that's going to be hugely impactful for them and is going to be the way that accounts will deliver more value to more people with the same amount of resources.

I think one of the. Maybe this is kind of where people really need to start. You need, you need the knowledge, the experience, the reps in the one to one to be able to build up your expertise and credibility in a space. But long term, if you really going back to like the E myth if you want to not be working in your business, but you're working on your business, you know, over time as the, as the owner or the lead person, you want to shifting more into that one to many role and less of that production or one to one role. But there is, there are stages. And so I think having a clear niche and committing to one, which is the hard part for a lot of accountants, you know you start there. You need to build up your expertise. You need to have experience with multiple clients in the same space so that you have the knowledge base and then you can what And I found this is my, for my own business in, on the marketing side is that once you understand what your clients need, you can turn those into processes that other people can, can execute for you. It's building off of the knowledge that you have, but it's not taking your time to do it. And then eventually you can turn into more of, you know, an influencer. I don't know if that's like necessarily where we all want to go, but you know, you're, you become an authority in the space and then you're able to bring people into your processes and systems that you've, that you know and you've built over time. But the place to start kind of going all the way back to the beginning is you do need to to a certain extent identify a niche. Because if you just are a generalist and you're solving different problems for different companies every, you know, every hour because you have these different clients, it's very hard to build on those and hand off those processes to other people. Because we love being problem solvers. I guess there's a worry maybe that you'll get bored and you like new problems every, every week. But it's very difficult to scale if, if you're the bottleneck and everyone needs you to solve every individual problem in order for your, your advisory service to, to grow. At least that's, that's been my experience in the marketing world.

No, and you're, you're, you're bang on with that. Like I'm thinking about firm owner that has worked with, let's say a marketing company, but one of them, just one marketing company for the last 10 years. There is a richness and expertise there. But let's say you are a firm owner and you work with five marketing companies. You can get way more expertise and way more experience with five companies over three years than you can with one over 10. Yes, that accountant is more experienced, maybe long term, 10 years, maybe they've seen changes in the tax law or whatever. But you know, yeah, like get really focused on who you want to work with and then get as many of those as possible. And there's this evolution that's going to happen with, with the firm owner, with, with accountants that you're not going to know everything at the beginning. But as you start, like I saw to myself, you know, I would, I would work with one Client. I had a couple interior designers. I had one interior designer from the very, you know, at the beginning was learning all of her systems and then when the next one came on, I was like, hey, this isn't working. Have you thought about bringing a system like this in? And she's like, this is exactly what I need. And it was just because I had experience with the other one. And so it's, and that was totally outside of anything I learned in college. That was just the experience and a little bit of system knowledge and like digging in and understanding the tools that they used. But that was significant value to that client. So yeah, I agree with you in terms of putting the reps in like that there's going to be a little bit of, you know, doing things over and over to get that experience. But you know, the term life hacking is quite popular these days. But there is a firm hacking model that like niche down, like get deep into these companies and you can, you can come out like providing real value and have the, and charge the fees for that expertise.

I know as a, as a marketing firm, most of my clients are still generalists and essentially their niche is geography. It's their local area and there, and there are marketing tactics that you can use locally. But my, for me, like as someone who's chosen an industry niche, you know, we can do things like I can go to LinkedIn and I can target people based on their job title and the company size and their location, or I can go to a conference where everybody who's my ideal customer is there because they all want to learn from the same places. From a marketing perspective, it's so much easier to find more of the right fit clients when you have a narrow niche. And if it's just geography, it's actually quite difficult to market effectively as well. So there are advantages both from, I think the business building, the processes, the profitability, developing your, your niche and your advisory services. But there are also advantages on the marketing side when you have a clear niche to be able to go to the market and find the people that, that you care about. The challenge is no one knows how to pick one. It seems they, they all say, well, I look at my, my client roster and you know, I don't have two clients from the same industry or my favorite clients. I don't know how to get any more people from that, any more companies or whatever from that industry. So they're, they're kind feeling like I can't blow up my current client roster in order to choose a new niche. What's your advice in terms of deciding is it okay to just arbitrarily pick one or how do you coach people to figure out what their niche should be?

Yeah, I would look at, you know, what do you want long term and well, I kind of have two pieces of advice. So for me, having a virtual firm, it made sense to be working with companies that weren't afraid of the virtual environment. And so, you know, if I were to start a firm again, my secret sauce here, if I were to start a firm again, I would look at E commerce businesses like they have no problem adopting Remote Advisor. You know, because they're built in the cloud. They understand how important it is to have, you know, a stretch across the country, the continent, the world. And they are not afraid to have an advisor that is not in their city. They don't care. And that's going to be pretty, it's going to be pretty common moving forward that people aren't going to be walking down the street and looking for an accountant that's on their, on their block. It's just not going to happen. They're going to look at, you know, what are the influencers, what are they suggesting, who are the, the accountants that are front and center when they're on their social forms and things like that. So one is like, look at what kind of flexibility you want in your client base. Number two, and I use this before, like when you are on Instagram, your personal Instagram, what are you watching? Like what? Like for me I love to watch tile setters and framers and that's, that's really weird. But I really like, it's just, you know, I kind of grew up working with my hands. I feel like sometimes I'm a blue collared worker in a white collar job. Like I like to, I've done renovations, I've built part of my house. Like, and so I have this interest in that industry and I could speak the words of that industry a lot better than say like a dental or medical practitioner. Like, I already knew a lot of the tools that these, these contractors are using. So I was able to leverage that knowledge with a fair amount of my clients. I had a fair amount of construction clients before I sold my firm. And the conversation was really natural. And they, you know, you know a construction client that says, hey, you know, I bought a tool, I bought like a circular saw. And they'd be like, okay, you know, okay, what is that and how much does it cost? Just things like that. Like an accountant that knows and understands your language can Be really, really powerful, and it's an interest that you have. So, yeah, some people say, oh, I don't pick the niche or the niche. You know, the niche picks me. But I would disagree. Like, be intentional. Be really intentional with what you want, because this is your firm. This is, you know, this is how you're going to spend a lot of your working life. You know, let's be intentional with what we do.

I think a worry that a lot of people have in choosing a niche is that they'll get bored just working with the same type of client over and over again. But if you choose a niche where it's something where you're already curious and interested in that, you just go deeper and deeper. And I think that most people have not really experienced the satisfaction that comes from deep expertise in one area. And instead what they think of as like, hey, I'm not bored, is really like shallow expertise. And it's the ability to problem solve or think on your feet in a lot of different contexts. But it's actually quite satisfying to have a. Have a deep knowledge. I, you know, I think that if you, if you have nowhere to start, you know, starting with what you're curious about is definitely a way to go. You know, I think there probably are situations where a niche kind of chooses you and you just look around and you find out, I really like working with these. That's kind of what happened with me. I have a. I have an art. I have a fine arts degree. I study conceptual installation sculpture in college, which is about as far from accounting as you can possibly get. But I had a few clients in that space and I realized, oh, I really like these guys and gals, and the perspective I can bring to them is valuable because it's so different than what most of them have, kind of naturally. And so there was a bit of a yin yang advantage in that space, and so we kind of doubled down in that area. And then I found out that actually I'm more and more interested in accounting. But I think probably more significantly is the accountants that I work with are interested in building a business and are interested in that idea of business growth, both for themselves and for their clients. And so that's a very shared perspective that we have, is that as a marketer, I come to my engagements with a very similar, you know, a different. We're coming at it from. With different tactics, but with a similar goal in mind is like, how are we going to use this thing, accounting, marketing, whatever it is, to grow your business? And it turns out all of the, all of the really smart people in the accounting world who are coaching accounting firms are saying things like, you know, choose advisory niche down, you know, thinking about how you price and productize your services. And that's the exact same stuff that all the smartest people in the marketing world are talking about. So there's, there's a ton of overlap I think between those two, those two industries.

Comment on, on the interest component, like getting bored with, with one niche encounter different things when they grow. And that's like, that strategic stuff is really enjoyable, like really fun to do. Like if you're just doing tax returns just for marketing companies, I can see how that gets boring. But if, if you're looking at a marketing company that needs to expand, like purchase another, you know, either buyer lease space or buyer lease or buy another company or go into a different market or offer a different service, like that's really enjoyable. And that, that never gets boring. And there is, like you said, there is this gratification that comes with being that expert and knowing that hey, if you, if you expand or you take on more office space, like you're going to need to hit these metrics or know that you're going to be in a loss position for this new space for 7 to 12 months or whatever it may be and just be prepared for that. And that's really enjoyable because I've done it, I'm doing it right now with a few clients just like, you know, let's look at the scenarios and see what can fall out and what's, what's the best bang for our buck moving.

Yeah, that's great. Well, let's end with this Mark. What is, what's, what's your pitch? Who, who are the types of folks that should be working with you? How would they know if, if they're, you know, if they might be a good fit for the type of work that you, that you do with your clients with other accounting firm owners and how, how should they find you?

Right, so go to firmnexus.com and there's a sign up for my newsletter there or you know, or if you want to get straight to, you know, understanding how I can work with you and your firm, you can sign up for a trajectory call there or we go over your team, your tech and your team trajectory for your firm and how we can make improvements there. And I work with clients, you know, on a, on a one to one basis to help them, you know, modify that, mods that mindset and then move towards improving the components of their firm. So, you know, check me out on LinkedIn. Get a flavor for how I see things and how I advise people to move forward with their firms and. Yeah, let's connect.

Yeah. Well, this is great, Marcus. Thank you for being on the show. I think this is super interesting. I'm sure. I know you're on LinkedIn. People can find you or me there. Connect with us on LinkedIn and I look forward to continuing to see your insights and things online here. But I appreciate you being on the show. Any last piece of advice or wisdom nugget that you want to leave folks with before we wrap up?

Being unhappy with your firm is okay. That's part of the evolution to something better.

All right. We will let people think on that and leave it there. This has been the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. We'll see you next time.

Thanks.

This podcast, marketing for Accounting Firms, is brought to you by Benchmark Growth Marketing, a marketing agency that helps accounting firms get more calls booked through their website. You can find us@benchmarkgrowthmarketing.com Connect with me, Matt Banker on LinkedIn.