Marketing for TAX Firms

Always have a wait list. And clients love that. They want. You know, there's that automatic reaction that, oh, wait, they're at high demand. I want in on this.

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, and 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. I am here today with Jackie Meyer, and Jackie, you do a bunch of different things, so I think maybe I'll leave it to you to introduce yourself. And you know what, what's your. What's your background? This is the Marketing for Accounting Firms show. And so why. Why should we care what you have to say about marketing and accounting firms?

I'd rather hear what you think that I have to say about marketing. That's fine. Yes, I do a lot of things. On one hand, everyone starts with that. And on one hand I'm like, oh, I wish I was known for just one thing. But on the other, I don't think I'd ever be that person because I'm a serial entrepreneur and there's so many opportunities out there and so much fun to be had. So I am a recovering CPA firm owner myself. I had a firm for 12 years. I completely transformed my practice back in 2016 to leading with tax advisory, and it rocked my world, changed my life, my family's life, my clients, my staff. I truly feel like it is the end all, be all solution to all of the challenges that we have in the accounting profession. And so I started getting asked to speak at QuickBooks, Connect and other events like that about my wins and ended up becoming a coach to other accountants. And that's been a lot of fun. I've hosted several masterminds and then developed a tax advisory software during COVID called Tax Plan iq. And this year I am finishing a doctorate in leadership and writing a book, hopefully called something like the Peaceful Entrepreneur. So that's. That's the gist of me for now.

Yeah, this. This would give us so many threads to pull on for a conversation. What I think of when I think of Jackie Meyer is. Is the tax person. You've got a big Facebook group, right? You've got this tax planning software. Let's start with this, though. There. There are multiple ways to organize and Build an accounting firm. You know, some people have this kind of CAS line accounting or advisory services. Some people have really the taxed prepping, filing business. And then there's tax planning, which I think is your area of expertise. Unpack. Like, what do you see as some of the differences between those? And give us your best case for why, you know, why is this tax planning core the perfect solution to so many of these problems?

Yeah, I've been advocating with the AICPA to kick off TAs instead of CAS tax advisory services. You know, I don't really care what you call it, but we do need some standardization in the profession when it comes to these things. There's not really one tax advisory directory out there, which seems insane to me. The AICPA doesn't even really claim they have their personal financial planning group, which does some tax advisory. But it's very confusing the way it's all laid out there. So CAS is fine. I think it's great that the AICPA has really been pushing over the last several years for people to have CAS practices and showing the value that you can put into that practice. But TAZ is like the most profitable service, the most rewarding service. The clients adore you for it because you're producing a return on investment like that when it comes to tax savings. And so it's really just win, win, win all around. When I converted my firm, when we like tripled a quadrupled revenue, we equally reduced our number of clients because every client isn't a tax planning client, which we can talk more about that and our client NPS scores went through the roof. And I got 35 hours a week. Back in my time, I got down to like a four hour work week. So there's just so much cool stuff about it. I don't know why everyone isn't doing it.

Well, they must not be doing it because they don't know how to do it. Because whenever anyone says tax, and the reason so many of our clients are running away from it, or running away especially from, except for like taxes for their business clients, they're running away from it because of this crunch time of tax season. And I'm guessing that a lot of that has to do with how you organize and how you build out your firm. But why would I want to just focus on something that means I have to? I'm so busy, you know, for four months of the year. I bet you have an answer for that. What's what? What do you guys think? Yeah.

So the answer is you aren't you aren't busy four months of the year, you're busy throughout the year. And in fact, the first couple years that I did tax advisory work, you realize you get busier November, December, when you have to implement some retirement plans or, you know, help clients with stuff before 1231 than you were in April or the extended busy season. But it all comes down to the organization of the firm, like you said, and boundaries. 99% of the problems we have as accountants, and I think maybe everybody in the world has, is because of inappropriate boundaries. And so you have to learn to set those boundaries. It's okay to set those boundaries and to be clear what you expect out of the client and what they should expect out of you. And then if it doesn't work out, let it go. Right? Let them go and move on to someone else that's going to really, really appreciate you. So, for example, a tiny boundary in our in January or even the year before, we would say, look, this is the end all cutoff deadline. We're extending all returns that we don't have all the information in on March 15th. And then we got even more particular with it and said you have to pick a particular week that we're going to slot you in for your return throughout the year. And then there's no busy season. It's like, easy, easy. Right.

So everyone's kind of on eligible automatically for extension. And then you're setting them up to be able to figure that out. And because you're doing planning and advising, you know, you already know from last year if and what they owe, so you're not really dealing with that. We got to do the taxes. So we figure out the answer. You already know the answer, but the filing can be done kind of whenever.

Exactly. And so it's an education opportunity with the clients, or even when they're just a potential client, say, look, most of our clients we probably will extend, especially if you get a K1. I mean, there's simple things like that that just are not communicated in the initial meetings with the potential prospects that set the stage for the best relationship ever.

Yeah. All right, so you now this idea of a TAS practice. There's obviously operational and kind of business model things to be solved on the back end. Technology as well. So you've got, you've got this tax planning software, you've got communities where you help people figure out how to do this. I'm sure, you know, you're coaching and all of that. Let's talk about the other problem. Let's Say you solved the back office, people, processes, challenges. You're set up to do this. The next step is, all right, now you need to generate business. You got to bring clients in through the door. What is for a TAS practice? What do you see as generally? I guess what, the challenge and the opportunity when it comes to sales and marketing for that sort of firm.

Yeah. Gosh, there's so much to unpack there. We do have a lot of accountants out there that say, I just don't have the right clients for tax planning. The unfortunate thing is that I think that they do and they just don't know how to identify them or they don't understand how to market or sell to them. So we try to provide a lot of education around that you know how to do the sales process. What's great about this kind of trademark method called the ROI method of tax advisory that I created is that you're literally showing the client before they even sign up with you a potential return on investment. You can get them immediately tangible savings, but also intangible benefits like your competitive advantages and stuff like that. So it's really kind of just sells itself, which is great for accountants because we don't want to sell. Right?

Right.

We just want to do good work.

But this is for this, for selling mostly to like current clients. Right. So there's the like. How do we turn our practice into the more advisory tax advisory is that. That's a fear I think a lot of people have. Right. How, how many clients are going to leave if I, if I make that transition? Is that I. I'm assuming your prices are going up, so you're getting that back. 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' accounting firm looking to fix your marketing, benchmark is your go to solution. Learn more at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now back to the program. You said earlier that you, your. The number of clients you had went down. Do you have any numbers around? What, what is typically like if someone's going through this transition? What, what that might look like?

Oh, that's a great question. I, I know it's a lot less than people expect, especially with how high demand we are right now. I have not seen people blinking an eye to price increases. But especially if you're visualizing the savings and the ROI to the client, there's really very few people that would say no to that. The problem is where you have just an individual taxpayer W2 doesn't necessarily have a lot of planning opportunities. And what I like to say is think about or ask yourself, are you really the best fit for that client? And most accountants say no, because I'm too busy. I'm burnout. I'm, you know, bottlenecked here. I'm not probably giving them the best service I could and I can't. I can't really do much for them. Right, right. So at the end of the day, if you take a really good look at yourself, you realize they're better off somewhere else. Let me find maybe someone else that I could send these people to that loves that 1040 only relationship and that individual tax prep people that do. And then, you know, re niche down yourself into what you really love, what you're passionate about, and what your clients really can see a purpose in.

This is you have to, you have to be okay with letting go. I think, I think accountants like to be helpful. And everybody's got relatives and friends and friends of friends and friends of friends, relatives who need someone to do their taxes. But it's okay for you to start moving down the path and say, look, when it's simple, maybe they'd go to a big software company. You know, some. There's other options for those simple taxes. But one of the things I've heard people say is if you can double your fees and you lose half of your clients, well, all you've lost is busyness, really. Right. You've gained a ton of time for the same amount of money as, as before. Now you're in a great spot. So you don't have to be afraid of a, I guess getting over the emotional, am I going to let my clients down? Piece of it. But then be the business case for it is it makes sense to let go of this stuff that isn't a good fit for the planning side of things.

Right, Exactly.

What, so what are the complaints or challenges you hear from your, from your community, from people who use your software, everyone that you know when it comes to like bringing in new business, like connecting with new clients that, that you don't have any relationship with? Is this hard? Is it harder than I. It's harder than just getting 10, 40 clients, I imagine. What's the challenge here? For sure.

Yeah. I mean, the biggest complaint is that the clients end up being PETAs. Have you, you know the word PETA? Yeah.

Yep. So you can say here pain in the ass, right?

Oh, there you go. Pain in the ass. All right, cool. So those pain in the ass Clients are actually really easy to figure out from the very first interaction you have with them. People just don't even think that they have the ability to choose who they want to work with. And so I went from, you know, I'd say we all have boundary problems. My personal life, I'd say I have all kinds of boundary issues growing up with my family. But that's what made it so much easier for me to set strict boundaries in my work. And so it's like if you can't, if you can't set those boundaries there, I don't know how you're going to be able to do anything in life. But just ask the clients certain questions that are going to pre qualify them and even look at their personality type. We look, we look at their disc. So I have an app that's called Crystal Knows and it looks at their LinkedIn profile and sees what disc type they are. I'm a D and I love working with other Ds because they're direct, they get to the point they want results, et cetera. Most accountants are Cs which are what I call the thinkers. And they talk a lot and think a lot and overthink and overthink. And they're harder to work with honestly than a D when it comes to tax planning. And so look at if your personality is going to match up. Look at if they actually get you the stuff you ask for right away or if they say, oh, I can't share my private return information with you. That's a red flag. That's a huge red flag. Just move on. Right?

Yeah. So you gotta basic questions, you gotta do this filtering. I, this is a thing we see all the time that is different. So as a company, we focus on marketing. For accounting firms, most generalist marketers, their advice is, you know, get rid of form fields on your contact form, make it easier and easier for people to book time. And what we found is actually because of the shortage, because of you're actually in more demand than there is supply. Right. Of your services, people are worried that they're going to turn away good, good business. And, and so, but we actually find that a lot of firms get more, they get more benefit by adding friction to the process in order to qualify and make sure that you're only talking to the people who are, you know, a little bit willing to put in the work and are willing to work within your system. That is totally okay to like add some friction. You don't need to just make it easier and easier to book time with you or.

Yeah, I love that. There's another aspect to that. People always say, oh, you put your starting prices on your website. I would never put my prices on website. And I'm like, if you want to be selective and you want people to weed themselves out that are never going to ever understand the cost benefit of more than 300 or 500amonth or something, just put it on your website.

So forces you.

That's. Yeah, exactly. And then you can let them weigh themselves out and move on to the better ones. For sure.

Yeah. I mean, if we were in a. I mean, accounting is competitive in one sense. There's a lot of folks out there and it's hard. What I'd say is a lot of firms struggle to really differentiate themselves. They don't have the language, they don't have the positioning figured out and on their website to show their clients that they're different. But people need the services a lot. And so there's plenty of opportunity here. You don't have to be desperate and, and you don't ever really want to be competing on price either. There's, there's so many other things that you could be focused on. So yeah, it kind of comes back. It's okay to add some friction in order to, to only talk to the best clients. Do you, do you run into a lot of cases though, where folks are just, they're really struggling saying, I just don't have any leads or I don't know where to find any of these clients.

I do, and it kind of shocks me, but to be honest, I mean, I'm in one of the most affluent cities in the nation and so it's pretty easy to find high net worth clientele, executives, stuff like that. But I always just say get your address on Google Maps in an affluent area because fluent people will find you that way. Yeah, but they exist. They're all over. And there's so much opportunity nationwide virtually to work with anybody. Post Covid, I went 100% virtual and none of my clients cared. So it's all about just them appreciating what you do and they're going to work with you in whatever capacity that you can.

Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought up the Google Maps thing because, you know, whenever, whenever you are a little bit more of a generalist. Right. Or you have, you have a broader set of folks that you can work with. You know, any business owner, any high net worth individual, I mean, with some criteria, I'm sure, but it's general. What it means is that basically your niche is your local geographic area. And so the marketing that you need to do is figure out, how do I get, how do I build a footprint here, where I'm at? And there are, like you said, there are people around there that are a good fit for your services, but you need to be findable first, and you should focus locally. I often will tell people, you know, it's more beneficial to focus on that local stuff than social media and things like that. Unless. Unless you have a good way to. To develop new connections and networks you end up attracting. If you're active on social media as an accountant, you're likely going to be followed by a lot of other accountants, and then you're going to get a lot of interaction with your posts that are about accounting. That's not who you want to talk to.

I don't think I got a single client from social media when it came to taxpayers. I get a lot of accounting clients like accountants, as, you know, users and whatnot. But yeah, I mean, high net worth and, you know, affluent business owners are not hanging out on Facebook looking for an accountant. They're going to see who's down the street from me, where I live, and do they get good reviews from other people that I might know?

Yeah. Do you, do you struggle or do you find your. Your community and your folks struggle with investing in marketing or knowing where to invest in marketing?

Oh, for sure. I think there's a wide array of services and pricing and all the things when it comes to marketing that's very overwhelming to accountants. I don't think, you know, most of the ones that I've met have never been exposed to marketing, so they don't even know what they could get out of it. I remember, I'm curious what your thoughts are on, like, LinkedIn and Facebook advertisements, but when I first started my firm in 2010, I did some LinkedIn ads and I actually got some really good business clients in the Dallas area. And then the pricing went, like, skyrocketed. So.

Yeah.

And I filled up so quickly that I didn't really need to do it anymore. Right. I like your recent tweet. If you don't need a market, if you don't need new clients. Right, exactly. But I'm curious, how do you see the LinkedIn and Facebook ads? How do you see that all coming together right now?

Well, I mean, the, the thing is, all of these platforms, their incentive is obviously to get businesses to spend money, to get exposure to prospects. And so they, they're always pushing the limits to find out like, how much can we charge and how can we optimize our, you know, it's just their incentives. It's not, it's not evil, but it's, it's expected. And so you need to understand what is the incentive of the platform and what can I get out of it. And, and that comes back to like when you have a good number in mind of what is, what's a reasonable cost of acquisition, you can find like what's the best channel that you're going to go to. So LinkedIn is amazing if you are focused on kind of more white collar business or like professional services type clients who are very active on LinkedIn, you can target by job title and location and industry and company size and all these, you know, revenue, headcount, whatever it is. So you can very easily make sure your information is just showing up for a very specific audience that is your ideal clientele. So that's great. But because of that specificity, LinkedIn knows that they can charge a real premium for us to get access to it. Now, if your audience and you're trying to serve mostly like regular people aren't as active on LinkedIn as business owners, for example, also if you're a plumber, you're not going to be on LinkedIn, you're probably going to be on Nextdoor and Angie's List, if anything. And so you have to know like, where do you want, who's your ideal customer and what platform is going to work best for you? We generally, we use numbers like if you can get something like bring in a client at less than 7% of their lifetime value, that might be a good number for folks who are on more of a subscription basis. It's kind of like, you know, one third their annual fee or like four months of your fees to bring them in, then you're, you're kind of in a good spot. But one of the challenges we often have is helping, helping accountants and firm owners to the point where they're developing a healthy budget that is kind of reasonable for what, you know, they need to bring in the door. And, and so as long as it's just a line item of unexpected expenses that came up this year, like, oh, I guess I gotta do marketing now, it's going to feel really painful because it's more expensive than everybody ever realizes. At least it's either expensive in time or it's expensive to hire someone to do a lot of this work. So budgeting is a, is a big question that we often have around how Do. How do firms get to the point where they, they can invest in marketing like they should?

Yeah, I'm curious. You mentioned that you work with more established firms. How are they doing it? How are they growing still when everyone's got a shortage and everyone's full of clients, they letting go? Are they constantly letting go of clients that aren't a good fit? What are you seeing?

Yeah, I mean, there's different ways to grow. I've heard that, you know, you, you reinvent your firm one client at a time. And so the more clearly, I don't think, I don't think there's any. There's never a good time to just say, hey, let's pause on growth. Because at the very least, you can be adding better clients and letting go of the ones that aren't ideal. You know, whether that means getting more into a particular niche industry or something, or if it just means you're getting rid of the PETA clients. Right. So you can always be reinventing your, your business. And so I think it's a good investment to build that marketing or sales engine so that you constantly have a good inflow. And so you can be pickier, you can charge more, you can choose who you want to work with that's like at least going to get that benefit. And then if you want to really add to your bottom line, you obviously always have to be adding more. The bigger you get, too. You're always going to get some drops year over year, so you have more clients to replace every year just to, you know, maintain where you're at. So we do see that grow over time. Small firms are usually spending around 5% of their revenue, 4 to 5% of their revenue on sales and marketing. Once you get a little bigger, you know, over a couple million in revenue, you're probably closer to 10. And then the really aggressive ones, our, you know, 15 to 20% goes to sales and marketing, which is a big chunk of revenue. But that's, that's kind of what it takes if you want to be really aggressive.

Yeah, I love that. And I'll tell you, one of my best secrets when it comes to always be growing is have a wait list. Always have a wait list. And clients love that. They want, you know, there's that automatic reaction that, oh, wait, they're high demand. I want in on this. You know, there must be something to this. And so from the very first interaction with any potential client, we say, look, we have a waiting list. Let us know your urgency. And if you're able to wait until after, you know, 4:15 or something for us to work on your turn because then you don't have so much pressure, but you can still kind of hand select who you want to work with and when. So that was always a really good way to continue to bring in the business development leads, but not necessarily feel all the pressure in the middle of busy season.

Yeah, yeah. I mean I feel like all, all the smart people and I'm going to include you in this, Jackie, that I know in the accounting space we all come at it from different perspectives, but I think that everyone ends up circling around similar advice, which is you really have to be clear about who you are and what your ideal clients are going to be. You need to, you know, from my perspective, you have to be able to message that and communicate it to the world. You know, you have to be able to do that in the back end. You have to have the right people in place to do this. But it has a lot to do with narrowing who you, who you serve and what you do so that it works for you and then spreading out that work across the whole season so that you're never hitting these crunch times or cash flow crunch times. And so whatever you're doing with your firm, those are the big problems to be solved. Sometimes it's a marketing discussion, sometimes it's a process discussion, sometimes it's a, you know, leadership discussion. Right. It can be, it can be any of those things.

Yeah. I think my biggest fear for accountants is that they don't know what they don't know. And the in, in my perfect world, even a year from now, with the advancement of AI and whatnot in tax on iq, we would be automatically. So at this point we can load one, you know, one client's return, tell you suggest attack strategies. That's great. But like imagine a world where as you finalize someone's return, it's just automatically tax client keys over here. Like, whoa, there's 50k of tax savings for that client. You need to meet with them next month or after 4:15. That's like the world that, that I would love to live in. And then we're trying to get towards is automating so much of this to where the accountant can't ignore it anymore. You can't ignore the task because there's too much oper opportunity there to go on to something else.

Well, it's interesting you say it that way too. I think that really the future of has tas, whatever it is, I think the relationship side of things is where and Being able to be a bit of a guide for the clients, that's where the real opportunity is and will continue to be. Tools are making it easier to do the stuff right. So instead of pouring through the tax return for hours looking for opportunities, I don't know if that's really what you guys do, but you know, if you have an AI assistant that's helping you.

Hour plus to come through a return and look for opportunities. Yeah, if you don't, you know, know it like the back of your hand. So yeah, it takes time and, and.

We'Re, you know, everybody's looking for ways to streamline that process, but you can't streamline the relationship that you have with a client. And really, you know, in our world, something we say is people, businesses sell solutions to external problems. Like tax savings is a solution to an external problem, but people buy solutions to internal problems. And the idea of like I know that someone looked at my return and has really figured out the best sa like that peace of mind of knowing that it's been done even if there's not a lot of savings, there is also a huge value add that people really appreciate. And often knowing the person and being able to trust them and count on them is the value that you, you offer. And that's automation, offshoring, you know, all these other ways of extending yourself come secondary to that, you know, face to face thing which you'll continue to be able to do if you, if you have that guide advisory service kind of built into your product offer for sure.

And that's why I always actually only had. We all have different kind of fee structures, but I would never charge for the initial proposal or tax plan. It would always be, I never called it a complimentary tax audit, but that's essentially what it was is like can I find the savings for you? And are we the right fit with personality and all the other things to work together? And so I wouldn't charge for that initial meaning and proposal. I would, I would make sure that it's the right fit and then I can bring the roi. And then I would charge a much larger implementation or onboarding fee for the tax plan because I've already identified most of what I can do and then ongoing monthly fees. Which leads me to a question for you. I'm curious how many of your clients are putting different packages up on their website Because I'll tell you what drives me nuts these days is we're in such a subscription world and yet accountants are so scared to put any kind of different package Levels and it really just clarified everything for me and my firm. And I highly recommend having that on your website.

Well, we, we're 100% a pro pricing page agency. The pricing page, when it's on a website is, is literally the second most visited page. And what that tells me is it's a question that people have. And if people have a question not getting an answer is. Is a limiter, they're less willing to move to the next step. People don't like to move into ambiguity. Now putting pricing, you mentioned it already. It does two things. Gives people clarity about what they can expect and it helps to eliminate people who are going to self select out because they don't want to pay that price. So it's a good thing in both of those cases. Now people, not everybody loves pricing. What we'll, what we'll say though is you don't have to have three tiers of packages, but you do have to answer the question of what is it going to cost. So your pricing page could be more of a paragraph text thing that says, you know, how much does it cost? The first line might say, well, it depends. And then you can write the article or the, you know, two paragraphs that explains what it depends on. And you can give people, you know, here's our starting at price or here's the median, you know, fee that our clients typically pay. Gives you a lot of flexibility to still customize it if you need to, but it answers the question. So either way, I believe you should have a pricing page and you should either list your prices in a way that's clear or you should answer the question of how are you going to come up with the custom package. It's going to definitely get more people who are right fit to book a call with you and it's going to help keep people away that aren't good fit. So win, win in my book.

Yeah, and I love that. I love that. So a free resource for your listeners. If you want to see exactly the packages that we offered at Meyer Tax and they were very successful, you can swipe and deploy from Jackie cpapackages. I've put it out there for anyone and everyone to go grab because I believe so strongly in the boundaries that it helps set around the scope of your work and, you know, showing that initial pricing and whatnot to your prospects.

Yeah, that's great. Well, let's use that as a lead in Jackie, what do you, how do, how do people work with you? You've mentioned your software company and what are the different Ways that, you know, an accounting firm owner or marketer could be thinking, yeah, I gotta get in touch with Jackie. How would they do that?

Yeah, so I do small group masterminds around tax planning and just general accounting firm best practices and boundaries, of course. My favorite word, boundaries. So you can go to Jackie, cpa, J, A, C, K, I, E, C, P, A and check that out. And then we have tax plan on Q, which was awarded the AIC accelerator program this last year, which is really exciting. And it is managing the entire tax advisory process for you, that whole TAS process and suggesting strategies for you and saving a ton of time for people that are really busy and don't know if they can do that tax planning side of things. So you can check that out, do a free two week trial. We're growing very quickly. It's really exciting, but there's always more people to reach and it's really my mission to get the word out there about tax advisory and to make it clear that it's really a great thing to be doing.

Well, if you are a CAS firm or accounting firm in general and you are not sure about taxes, you're not sure if it's worth it and profitable to build this into your core offer, you should definitely be following Jackie. You should connect with her, find her on LinkedIn or all the platforms, whatever platforms she's on and yeah, I think we'll leave it there. Jackie, thanks so much for being on on the show and yeah, this has been a great conversation.

Yeah, thank you so much, Matt. Appreciate it.

All right, we'll leave it there and see you next time on Marketing for Accounting Firms Podcast. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. If you liked this conversation and found it valuable, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's really good for the algorithm and it helps other firm owners find this show. You can subscribe to our weekly Marketing for Accounting firms newsletter@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 Firms.

It.