Minimal Viable Branding for Accounting Firms

On marketing, what are your goals? So how big does the firm need to be to achieve those goals? And you may not even need much marketing.

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'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 have Meryl Johnston here today. If you're a podcast listener, you may have heard her in some other places before. She's got some fun things going on and a lot of great expertise, experience in the accounting space. Meryl, thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, it's great to be here.

So we always start kind of with this question, why are you here and why should we care what you have to say about anything related to marketing and things like that? What's your, what's your background or experience when it comes to marketing for accounting firms?

So I'm the founder of an accounting firm called Big Ninjas which started in Australia and my background was accounting, not marketing. But I'm a self taught marketer out of necessity because we had zero clients, I didn't have a network and we wanted to grow a business. And so over the last almost 10 years now I've been learning about marketing and really enjoying it. So Bninjas has grown into a business. We've got about 30 staff now spread around the world and work with clients in the us, Australia and the uk. And a lot of those clients, well, they've come from two main channels. One is marketing, so SEO, content marketing and, and the other is through partnerships. So where our firm's in the E commerce niche, so we attend e commerce events and we have partnerships in that space as well. So they're, they're our two primary channels that we've used to grow the firm. So hopefully that gives me a little bit of credibility in the marketing space even though I'm not a trained marketer.

No, I mean, I think it gives you more actually because people, people listen to people who sell marketing like, and they think, you know, well, can we really trust this person? He obviously wants us to pay for marketing and marketing is expensive. Whereas you as a business owner, as a firm owner bring that sort of unbiased, you know, this is what you know about marketing. You found things that work that Perspective, I think is really helpful. Our, the topic we're going to talk about today I'm super interested in and it may even sound counterintuitive. Having just said that I sell marketing services, but this idea of minimum viable marketing. Right. There's a lot of very small firms and marketing is expensive. What do you mean when you say minimum viable marketing when it comes to an accounting firm?

It's funny, people think I'm contradicting myself because we spend thousands of dollars a month on marketing, but we didn't always. And I like to think about, as an accounting firm owner, what are your goals? So how big does the firm need to be to achieve those goals? And you may not even need much marketing. You might be able to achieve that just through word of mouth referrals from your existing client base or you might be really ambitious and trying to grow a big business, in which case you've got a different set of goals and a different roadmap to get there. But I think many accounting firm owners actually get most of their business through referrals. And I mean, we can talk about whether that's a good idea or not. There's risks associated with that. But if you're doing that, then you don't need all of the bells and whistles of a digital marketing engine. Then the way I like to think about it is it just needs to be good enough. So if your website is so bad that it looks like you're from the 80s and don't know how to use technology, you might lose trust from your customers. But it doesn't have to look like an Apple website. So I think there's a happy medium, something above terrible. But it doesn't have to be great. Yeah, because people are going to do their research on you. They're going to check you out online, they're probably going to check your website, they're probably going to check some social media just to get a bit of a feel for you. But to me it's, it's about being good enough.

Right.

To achieve your goals.

There's these. Yeah, we often will talk about. There's like a threshold that you have to meet and then obviously there, there's space above that. You know, if you're investing in a brand, for example, you can, you can go to Fiverr and get, you know, a $30 logo or you could hire a marketing agency to do a $3,000 brand package, which is pretty cheap actually as far as brand packages goes go. Or you could go to another agency and spend fifty thousand a Hundred thousand dollars on a brand package. My guess is what you mean by minimum viable is probably somewhere between that $30 Fiverr logo and that $3,000.

Absolutely. And I might tell a story here with Beaninjas. We started the business with a thousand dollars, so I put in 500 and my co founder put in 500. So that was the money that we had available for everything.

Right.

So we created our own logo, just a text logo. And it was, it was pretty bad. It wasn't even the Fiverr.

Right.

And we created the website, used some photographs that we had, and got a website up on WordPress using a theme that we bought in seven days and got a customer in seven days. And so that was a pretty bad website, pretty bad logo, but it was enough to convert some customers. But as the brand evolved, it didn't fit with our positioning and who we wanted to be perceived as in the market. And so we did a, we did a website upgrade probably two years in, and then we did a full brand refresh website rebuild maybe five years in.

Right.

And so then I was getting quotes like what you talked about, $20,000 to rethink, reconsider the logo, the colors, the style guide. We didn't end up spending $20,000 on the logo itself, but the whole website refresh branding ended up costing more than that. Yeah, but we were very clear by then about who our ideal customer was, who we, what we stood for as a business, who we were trying to attract, all of our messaging.

Right.

And I think you don't know that six months into your business, you're learning, you're iterating. And so all of that's probably going to change anyway.

So the, the key is it we're not, we're not saying don't invest a lot of money into marketing because it's not important. What we're saying is don't run down a path too far before you really know what you are, who you are as a business, who your customers are. Because, you know, obsessing over a logo is not to be the best use of your time. When you're starting out your business, you're trying to build a client base, you're trying to figure out where you fit into the market space. There's so many other problems with an accounting firm to be figuring out that the logo should just, again, you have to hit a certain threshold. But that, that marketing side of things is not going to make or break your business at that stage. There's so many other things that you need to be focused on.

I agree with that for sure. And I'm working on a similar project now at a business called Team up, which is not an accounting firm, but it's in the accounting space and solves problems for accountants. And we're thinking through so that that logo and website would be probably nine months old. And we're working with a professional designer developer now. But the same thing we could, the website and the logo. It's okay, the logo's okay, it's decent. But we could spend money to upgrade it. But is that our biggest problem right now? It's not. Our biggest problem is that the messaging, the copywriting on the website doesn't reflect who our ideal customer is anymore and it doesn't reflect what problem we're solving. So at some point we'll redo the logo, the style guide, the fonts, but we're not touching that at the moment because that's not the most important problem that we need to solve.

Well, I'm glad you bring that up. I think that's one of my. One of the key things that we focus on. We call ourselves a words first agency because the copy and the messaging matter so much more than design. You know, the design threshold. Again, having something that looks decent and professional, there's a lot of ways to get there. You know, Squarespace has some great templates. You could get something on Wix or a WordPress, whatever. But the copy and the messaging piece, that's actually the bigger risk, I think, for a lot of firms to say, oh, I'll just grab some copy paste from a template, you know, for accounting firms, and then I'll throw it on my website. That's probably hurting you more when it comes to your marketing than, you know, the fonts and the colors and all of that kind of stuff.

Absolutely. And that bit's hard to get right. I'm mostly about trying to move quickly rather than perfectionism. So I just move fast, get it out there and then get feedback and iterate. But with, we probably had four goes at writing the copy. So we worked out the sections and kind of subheadings on the. On the website first. And then there's been quite a lot of iteration, which has been good. It's been hard thinking about it. What makes us stand out? Why are we different?

Yep. 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 and did I read somewhere, are you a story brand? Is that the Donald Miller?

Yeah, yeah. I was certified as a story brand guide in about 2017, back when we were a generalist marketing agency before we had decided to niche into the accounting space. But that's, that's really where it comes a lot of. At least my perspective on the messaging and the words first is through storybrand and using that framework with our clients.

I'm a fan of that framework too. And that you're not the hero.

The idea is that the customer, yeah, your customer is the hero. So you want to be setting yourself up as the guide in if you imagine a story and so you're coming alongside them to help them accomplish their dreams. And it really ends up impacting the messaging primarily because you're not there saying, here's the clients that we want or you're not saying here's why we're the best accounting firm. What you're saying is we're here to help you, business owner or whoever you're working with accomplish your dreams. It's a subtle, it's a subtle shift, but I think that companies like understand that and get it right. It has an outsized impact, I think on the effectiveness of all of their marketing when they have that perspective aligned correctly. So, Meryl, so you, you mentioned you had started being ninjas. You're involved with, with this team up brand right now. One of the things that we had talked about was, you know, what is, what is working or how would you approach marketing today? And it sounded like what you did with your first company and what you're choosing to do now is slightly different. Do you want to kind of walk us through what the differences are and then why you've chosen to do it different this time around?

So in the early days of being ninjas, we did a lot of content marketing and that was some SEO driven writing. So we were writing a lot of articles. But that was back in the day when Twitter and LinkedIn weren't as popular. So people were actually commenting directly on the blog posts that I was writing. I was writing income reports, sharing our numbers transparently and just trying to build interest, build community about, around and get people behind what, what we were doing. And I would share those posts on Facebook and a little bit on LinkedIn. I wasn't so much on LinkedIn back then. And then you weren't so penalized sharing external links on those platforms so you could still drive traffic over to your website. And then from the website we're trying to get people onto our weekly newsletter and then I suppose get them off the rented platform, which is. Yeah, the social media channels, and onto our own platform, which was our website and email list, which we control. So that was the strategy, but that doesn't seem to work so well anymore. And so what we're doing with Team up is focusing again on those rented platforms first and we're focusing on LinkedIn there because that's where a lot of so team up. The customers are accountants and a lot of accountants are on LinkedIn. They're also on Twitter. But we're trying to just stay focused, pick one platform to start with and maybe we'll go to tax Twitter later on. And just focused on who are we writing for and what are we writing about and posting regularly on LinkedIn and engaging that. So that's the primary focus. We are doing some content as well, but it's less SEO based and it's more about trying to answer commonly asked questions that come up in sales calls to educate the customer through the buying journey so that the sales calls can be shorter and not answering the same questions over and over.

Yeah, so that's when you think about SEO, which you'll hear stories everywhere of companies that have just had massive success with an SEO strategy. And there are a lot of really, really smart, really great SEO agencies out there. So a lot of businesses in, I'll say the last, you know, 10 years have built their businesses off of that. It's, it's become a really matured platform or channel for marketing. There's a lot of competition there. And one of the things that I've been really thinking about is, I don't know, it's not that SEO isn't important or doesn't work anymore, but I have concerns about what's happening with AI and AI generated content. It's so easy to create so much content now that the possibility that all of this hard work to write good content for people isn't being found. Like, the problem really is it's a discoverability problem, it's not a content problem. And so with SEO, you think of it as, it's like a pull channel or, or a capture channel. People are already looking for a thing and you're trying to show up for what they're looking for. The difference between that and focusing on like a LinkedIn first channel is now you have to, it's an interruption channel. You have to like, you have to capture their attention when they're not necessarily thinking about the thing that you want to talk about. And so you end up the focus of those articles or the titles. How you present it has to be slightly different than if you were just writing for discoverability. But that was one of your words, though, when you say discoverability. Why, why was it you, you mentioned LinkedIn. You chose it primarily because that's where accounting firms are hanging out. Is that, is that the right perspective? So when you're writing and creating content for LinkedIn, are you, are you doing kind of longer form posts directly on LinkedIn and getting engagement that way rather than linking through to a blog post?

Right, correct. Yeah, I occasionally link to something directly, so I just shared my 20, 23 year in review article. So that's a personal review, not a business review. And I dropped the link in and oh, my engagement was way down. So I occasionally make that mistake. Normally now I just put an image in and then I don't think it even works to say link in the comments anymore. You've got to be quite strategic about how you get, get the link. Or in the case of Team up, we're trying to get people to subscribe to the newsletter.

Right.

But it's a bit of, you've got to be a bit clever with, with how you do it or not too obvious.

Well, you, you had mentioned earlier, you know, renting versus owning and it, it's, it's not. No one, no one's evil here, but if you understand the incentives of the platform, you're going to be able to understand how to be successful on it more easily. So a mistake that people often make is, like you said, you, you link to content that takes people off of LinkedIn. Well, just inherently that's against the interests of LinkedIn as a platform. They, they want you to be on their platform because that's where they sell ads and that's how they make money. And so when you're putting content on the platform, you keep people there and LinkedIn likes that. So it's, their algorithm is built to put that stuff higher up. If you're sending people off of the site, they're, they don't like it as much because now, now they're not on LinkedIn. And so you gotta, you figure those things out. And those algorithms, they, they change over time. Obviously the companies get more sophisticated in what they want to get out of it and then we as creators have to be more sophisticated as well. Are you, are you building your brand primarily through the company page or are you doing it through personal accounts? On LinkedIn.

So we're doing. Well, it's an interesting question. So we're building. So there's different strategies. So Isaac, we're doing his through a personal page. I say we. He's actually doing most of the content now. I just helped at the beginning. So that's a personal page and that's all about one topic. He's writing every day about building accounting teams in the Philippines. There's a business LinkedIn page for team up and we're using that to attract candidates. So that is all about. It's from the perspective of the Filipino accountants and it's more about connections with people there. So I think we've got about 13,000 followers from that in seven months, which our LinkedIn account manager was saying, wow, that's pretty fast. I think that's less about content creation though. And that's just. Filipino accountants are very interested in this direct hiring model. So that. That's the company page. And then personally I'm writing about topics that are relevant to accounting firm owners, not necessarily outsourcing. I write a bit about E commerce accounting. Kind of a mishmash of everything. Probably need to figure out what my strategy is more. Yeah, I have a podcast called the Lifestyle Accountant show, so we use that company page to promote the episodes. But it gets far lower engagement, probably maybe a tenth the engagement of what I would get posting promoting the same episode on my site. So I mean, my general lesson there is that it's better to share content as an individual rather than a company on LinkedIn. That's been my experience.

That's. That's been our experience as well. And this is a challenge for when I think of a lot of accounting firm owners. The reality is not everybody likes social media. And I've met a fair few of accounting firm owners who like, actively dislike social media. And. And a lot of them don't want to be part of that content creation. The reality, though, is it works way better if there's a person behind it. And so, you know, even if. And there's ways to do this, I think still fairly authentically, if you have someone in your team or you're. You're. They're using the firm owner's profile as the primary channel, but you think of it almost as the company channel. But people like, there's a social aspect to social media. They like to connect with people. My guess is that that aspect of it probably has. It might have somewhat to do with the platform. Platforms like to get companies to pay for things. They like to give People things for free. And then some of it has to do with user behavior where people like to connect with people, not. Not with companies. I mean, I'll be honest, I just, I don't have any interest in connecting with any of the firm's, like, company pages that, that we serve. Part of that might just be we all are, you know, we have a habit or we understand the content coming from those pages. It's usually really pretty bad or uninteresting. So that's probably part of it as well. We've been, you know, conditioned to not like company pages very much.

There's an interesting strategy I've seen on more so on Twitter than LinkedIn that's kind of between those two. And so it's the news car guy or it's the writing guy.

Right.

And it's more of an anonymous profile that could have a whole team behind it. So it's not a, it's not a particular person, but it's a Persona that is more easily associated with a brand. So I. Potentially, you could, I think there's space for that, for accounting firms to be the real estate finance girl or guy or however you want to frame it. And that's. If there's a firm owner that doesn't have to be the face of it all of the time, there's an option there. Although I've, from what I've heard, those accounts maybe aren't performing as well recently. That was probably a trend a couple of years ago.

Yeah. Well, one of the things you mentioned though is it sounds like a lot of the content you're creating, it's not just about your business. I think this is an important thing to know as, as a firm owner, if you want to build your, your firm through using social media as a channel. It's not that you should be just constantly talking about accounting or things like that you want. There is still a social aspect. People like to connect with people. And then there's also an element where the example I always use is like a wedding photographer. But wedding photographers on social media, they need to talk a lot more about weddings than about photography. Because if you talk about photography, you're going to get other photographers who are going to follow you and they are not your prospects and clients. And so with your content, you're. You're talking about business and more kind of general things that are applicable to accounting firm owners, not just about, you know, the outsourcing, like, stuff that you do.

Absolutely. And if I think about that through the lens of Bninjas, our Audience at E commerce brands. So our newsletter, it's not all about accounting. It's about trends in the industry. And what kind of salaries do e commerce brand owners pay themselves? Or is Black Friday coming up? What are some planning or what are some great articles with tips to prepare for that? So I mean, some of it is tied indirectly to finance or forecasting, but some of it's completely unrelated. It's just about trends that are happening in the industry.

Yeah. If you're seen as, as the, the guide or the expert about e commerce in general and then people check your profile like, oh they do, they do accounting as well for e commerce companies. You know, you've already built some of that trust. There's also, you know, it's kind of this like this sideways way of, of sales and marketing is we all have really strong filters when it comes to like what we recognize as a sales message or a marketing message. And so we have a tendency to put our guard up as soon as we see someone who's like pushing too hard on the sales side. But you can develop trust by providing value and by engaging authentically in the conversations that are happening. And then, you know, though, people will get curious, they'll click through, they'll find out about your business and that often can be a more effective way to build your audience and, and to get sales than if you were just like you know, every day trying to post about the, you know, the, the service that you offer or trying to tell people to, to sign up or, or you know, go to your website right away. Right.

Yeah, that, that's spot on. And I've noticed an interesting cultural difference between sales in Australia and America. So Australia has something called tall poppy syndrome where you can't really self promote or talk about yourself too much. And so what you've said very much applies in Australia and so I had to learn in America you can kind of talk about yourself a little bit more. You can be a little bit more pushy on the sales approach.

Yeah.

So that was an interesting learning experience for me having done sales in both markets now. But I think it's definitely takes a little while for a US salesperson to adapt to the US Market because the Australians are so skeptical.

That's funny. So you with Beam Ninjas, you've got clients in Australia and the US Elsewhere too. And the UK and the uk. Any let's go down this path or as we. There's a lot of folks in the accounting space and I think those three places kind of dominate it in a lot of at least what I've. Where I've interacted and then the Philippines and India and some other places do a lot of support for accounting in those. In those other places. But as in kind of this international space. What. Are there any things, I don't know, particular things that are interesting or funny about these different markets? You mentioned the sales thing, the difference between Australia and the US what else have you noticed?

So I would think if I think us, I think tech hub really advanced with technology. But interestingly in the accounting space if I had to rank those countries in terms of tech adoption around things like banking, I'd rank Australia first, then the uk, then America.

Interesting.

I'd never heard of checks still physical checks still being sent in Australia probably for more than 10 years. So I think there's more adoption of people using Internet banking and just the banking systems being more easy to. I guess Australia is a smaller country so we don't have so many banks to contend with. Zero. Cloud accounting came out of Australia and New Zealand. So the cloud accounting market which then led value based or fixed fee pricing to me happened in Australia and New Zealand. So the firms were probably 10 years ago, I'd say three to four years ahead of where the US firms were. And the UK market was just a little bit behind Australian is it. But I would say over time that's shifting.

Yeah.

So I'd say that there's less of a gap now. But that's a I suppose an observation about how the industry has been changing.

I was talking with someone earlier today. I was on a, on a conference call with some folks in the accounting space and they were saying that niching has become a really a much more popular and common thing in the US and they were saying it seems like it's had. They've had trouble getting that to catch on in the UK that there's more of a desire for the generalist firm instead of that specialist firm. How much have you focus on E commerce? So you've kind of had a niche. What have you seen And I guess what's your perspective on niches in general?

I think they're great. There's pros and cons to them. For us it really accelerated our growth and allowed us to command more premium prices when we did that. So there was a, a marketing angle that we were now experts in E commerce, not generalists. And so by doing that people are those specific types of brands wanted to come and work with us. So it was good from a sales and marketing perspective but it was also good from an operational perspective, because there was one tech stack that, that we recommend for our ideal client. And so our team could all go deep on that and really understand, well, how to link Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce into Xero and then into QuickBooks. So that, I would say helped improve profit margins too, because we weren't spending so much time on learning and not having good processes around the tools. So I'd say they're the advantages and it's been good for us. We also went through. There was an E Commerce boom.

Yeah.

During COVID people were spending more on products than they were on travel and other experiences. So we experienced that. But I'd say now E commerce is having more of a tough time. So financing is more expensive, which is a key part of that business model. They need to buy inventory in China or wherever else they pay for that first before they get the money in from their customers. So that's a challenge. There's been shipping issues or there were. And so we're more exposed to that being in one niche. If that industry is not going so well, then that can be. Have a more significant impact than if we were more diversified.

Yeah.

So that's something I'm still thinking about. I feel like it's the right decision. But how do we mitigate some of that risk?

Well, I. In different industries, but sort of similar, we had, I had a generalist marketing agency and we decided we wanted to really focus on accounting firms. That's really where my energy is. But we, we ended up launching a sub brand rather than trying to pivot our, our existing company. We decided, let's, let's just, let's spin this off. We can really focus on it here. We can create the product or the service that really is needed for this, you know, for this niche without, you know, totally, you know, turning off the spigot, you know, for sales that were happening in a more general way over here. So over time, it actually quickly shifted because there, like you said, there's so many sales and marketing advantages to having a specialty. You quickly find momentum in that space. You get some, you get some referrals, you build some partnerships and you can really get. It's. It's just an easier flywheel, I think, in, in, in a niche. But the generalist space is kind of nice as well. Or it's nice to not like, turn away some of the. You still have some good generalist clients. Right. We would still have, you know, random website clients come in who are not accounting firms. We didn't want to like immediately be set up to turn those away. So I don't know. Yeah, there's some different ways to do it.

I've got a. I've got a question for you about that. So I've. Because I'm. Again, it's something that I'm thinking about. It's a major strategic decision, so it's not something I want to change overnight. But I'm looking at what other people are doing in the space. And so it seems like a massive pain to. To have two brands instead of one. But it also seems like you can really get clear about the audience and the Persona. Is your back end the same across both businesses?

Yeah.

So how do you manage that? I'll give just a little bit more context. Context to that question because I feel like if we were to do that at business, I'm not saying we would. The same, very similar team could, could operate. But then do we have to get new email addresses for everybody? Yeah. Like, what's the back end look like when you're doing that?

Yeah, it's still a struggle. Something that we're figuring out a little bit here. I know this happens with a lot of firms that I've worked with will have an accounting firm and a payroll firm and they're separate businesses or an accounting firm and a wealth management firm and they'll be separate, but the people or especially the principal might operate in both spaces. And so you'll have communication from one person and it's coming from two different email addresses. The main thing is we try to be upfront about it when we start working with clients so they're not confused. Why are we getting an email from Matt Anchor Creative over here and then benchmark growth over there. But yeah, some of the advantages are on, on the back end. You know, it's one legal entity, shared team, doing a lot of the, like the deliverables, the, the production side of it. Most of the advantages are, I think, on the. The marketing side, but there are really process advantages as well. We, when we split them, we. We ended up with one on one side of our business. Now we do, we do websites for lots of different types of clients. So actually, let me just say if you're an accounting firm owner and you've got clients who need websites, you can send them to me, but we just do websites. We decided we're not going to do any SEO or Google Ads or content marketing, any of that kind of stuff for other businesses. We limit it to writing, designing, building and supporting websites. And then with the marketing for Accounting firms, we were able to broaden the services because it's still a fairly tight group of services that accounting firms need because it's a, it's one type of business we work with, but it's a very specific client. We only do it for accounting firms. And so in both cases we really simplified our offer so that we. And, and it was kind of a niche. But it's. One is horizontal around a service, the other one is vertical along for the client. It's an area. And this is kind of coming full circle because when you think about going back to minimum viable branding, I think a great use case for launching a sub brand is to build out minimal viable marketing for that sub brand, test out a market, use it as an opportunity to say we could have accounting for. I don't know, what's an industry that you could see yourself maybe going into.

Probably agencies, because we turn a lot of work away from the agencies that work with the same clients as ours.

Right. So accounting for agencies.com powered by bean ninjas. Right. You have this like separate brand over here and, and you build out again like a preferred service or a tech stack. You build out a really specific, you know, service offering because, you know, some types of businesses you don't need to deal with sales tax and other ones you do. And you know, there's all these things. I love the idea for an accounting firm. Yeah. So anyone that's thinking about that, you should. If you end up doing that. Anyone that launches a sub brand for an existing company, I'd love to follow along and see how that goes.

Me too.

Yeah. Copy us both on that, on that email and let us know. So. Well, I think we'll kind of land the plane here a little bit. You have a couple things going on if folks want to get connected with you. What, what are the ways to get connected and. And what? Yeah. Are there ways that folks can work with you?

Yeah. So I suppose the audience of this show is accountants. So they probably wouldn't need the services of being in.

Probably not.

That's where you need commerce brands. But potentially team up. So Team up helps accounting firms scale their team by hiring Filipino accountants. And we encourage people to hire direct rather than going through a middleman, offshoring business. And yes, there are ways to be compliant when you do that. Things like an employer record service. It's a commonly asked question. So love to chat with you about. About that if you're interested. At B Ninjas, we've got over 20 staff in the Philippines and ran a team retreat there and it's been fantastic for that business. And I'm also active on LinkedIn, as we talked about, so feel free to connect with me there. I'm Meryl Johnston on LinkedIn and happy to have a chat there as well.

Yeah. And I mean, my recommendation really, to any accounting firm owner or marketer in house, if you're thinking about, like, how to do better on these social media platforms, the best way is to connect with people who are doing the work and have had success on these social media platforms and watch them, like, see what they're doing, put, you know, hit that little bell on the profile so, you know, their posts pop up and all that. So I would encourage you all to go and follow, follow Meryl on LinkedIn and you know, if, if she ever gets on Twitter, on Tax Twitter, if that, if that's a thing again too. We'll watch, we'll watch for you. And if Twitter doesn't die, I feel like the last thing to die on Twitter is going to be tax Twitter. They're very established there, so they're gonna be, they're gonna be the ones turning off the lights when it's, when it falls apart, if it does. Well, great. This is, this is really fun. I, I love just chatting about marketing in general and I'm, I'm excited to see what happens with, with your new project. And Being Ninjas is, I think, a great example of a firm that has figured out a lot of this marketing stuff and yeah, so one to follow and pay attention to. So, yeah, thanks for being on the show.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been a fun chat.

Good, good. All right, we will leave it there. Talk to you all next week.

Thank you.

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.