Your Personal Brand as a Firm Owner

All right, we are back with another episode of Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. This is a show where we talk about marketing for accounting firms. It's pretty straightforward, very descriptive title. I have on the show today. My guest is Nicole Davis and we're going to talk about personal branding and social media and a bunch of other things. She's a firm owner and I'm going to hand it over to you, Nicole. What's important to know about you and why should people care or listen to what you have to say?

Okay. All right. So I'm Nicole Davis. I'm a wife, a mom and a cpa. I have a small firm based out of Covington, Georgia. Now we just moved to our new office. So we have about 14 team members. Most are in house. We also have a few team members offshore and one remote. So our practice is primarily about 60% cast, 30% payroll and about 10% tax. And we primarily work with independent pharmacies, construction companies and service based businesses.

It sounds like you have your client profile like pretty well dialed in. You know exactly who you're talking to, which is great. I saw you on mostly on Twitter, I think, so you're pretty active on social media and there's a group of or there's a lot of lurkers out there. I know that there's a lot of accounting firm owners who are on Twitter watching like the tax Twitter community or on LinkedIn following. And then there's a smaller group of people who are really active and talking about building their business and really as kind of a public face of their firm. That was one of the things that really I was interested to hear. You know, I talk to a lot of firm owners who they want to disappear, they want to be in the background, they want their firm to operate without them. And I totally understand that. You know, introverts I think probably are a little higher, you know, higher representation in the accounting space. But you are, you're very much out in front as kind of the face of your business. I'm interested just to hear, was that a conscious decision? Is that just, you know, who you've always been and what has that been like? To be? Yeah, to be, I guess building in public and kind of talking about your firm and talking about these things out in social media.

It's funny that you mentioned that. If I've always been like that, I would say I am proud. Probably the most introverted person. A lot of people say I'm not, but I am pretty introverted. I always say like I'm like 87% introvert and the rest. So when you see me showing up on Twitter and all these public spaces, that's the other 13%. That's the part that likes to speak. So for me, I would say I'm also like most accountants. Initially, I definitely didn't want to like, be out front. I wanted to like, stay in my little corner, do the client work. But eventually, I think my firm started to evolve, but my goals started to change. So I started thinking about, okay, where do I want to see my firm in five years and do I want to be at the helm of all the client work by then? So for me, it was all about, okay, how do I get from where I am right now to where I want to be in five years? And that required me to take a step back, look at how I was currently doing things, and then decided to change that. So I started building my social media presence so I could attract people to the firm. Not only clients, but also team members, but also kind of support of the goals I wanted to do as a, as an accountant.

Yeah. So accounting is very much a trust business. Right. People, you're dealing with their money. Accountants probably know more about you than you wish they knew. You know, because they see all the financial transactions and all that kind of stuff. Right. You probably know more about some of your clients than they do.

Yes, I have a client, he was like, you know more about my personal life and finances than my wife. I was like, okay, that's probably a problem.

Let's talk about that. Well, so there's. It's a trust business. And so I, you know, I sit in a marketing seat and we help firms all the time. And what I found is that the firms that want to just be a brand sometimes really struggle actually to gain traction. And you mentioned both areas. You're. You're trying to attract clients. Again, very trust based. They want to know who is behind the firm. It's not that they're exactly worried about ethics, but they do want to know, is this a good fit? Do they, do they understand me? Can I trust them? And then a really big part of it is we know that it's hard to hire and retain great talent Right now in the accounting space, people who are thinking about working for you are 100% spending time looking at your social media. And when they see the firm owner active, they can really get a much better sense of what is it like to work here. I think it's a good strategic decision. Did you go into it with specific goals and outcomes or was it more like I'm just going to start being more active and I'm going to see what happens.

That second part. So, yes, I didn't go into it thinking, well, I'm going to build this huge social media presence and I'm going to start making my firm more visible, making myself more visible. It was more like an outlet, honestly. So I started using Twitter just to talk about my life being a wife and mom and a cpa and it was just a way for me to kind of tell my stories, tell how I was doing things right or wrong. I'm very transparent, I tell you, the good, the bad and the ugly. So it was definitely more. So I just want to talk right and not have anyone talk back to me because again, it's the introvert in me. I want to put things out in the world but not have to have a one on like a two way conversation with someone live all the time. So that's why I started using Twitter because I could put all my thoughts out. I didn't have to hear anybody give their feedback to me or reply right away.

Is your increased presence on Twitter and in social media, is there a correlation between that and your firm growth? Do you draw a line between those?

Yes, I definitely think there has been. We've so we are very avid marketers in my firm. So like from day one we had a marketing budget. So the social media just kind of, I guess it kind of elevated our marketing because now we have this face behind the name. So for me it was definitely more so. It was definitely more so that now that we've always been able to like add clients, we'd always been able to like create a presence in our local community. And then now we're creating a presence more online and we're starting to see that the traction. There's been traction now as far as people like, hey, I know who you are, I want to work with you. And it's not so just the clients, but it's also other accountants. I'm getting more into coaching where I want to show people how I did it. So it's like a two way street. I'm getting the growth from the client side, but I'm also getting the growth from those goals that I want to pursue as a firm owner.

I love it when I talk to someone and they say they have a marketing budget. I mean, okay, so accountants, you're always going to be focused on roi. But I meet a lot of accountants who somehow they have in their head, this is what we think marketing should Cost, and this is what we think it should result in, but they don't really have a good way to come up with that. I'm curious, when you were starting out, when you were small, how did you build your marketing budget? And how did you determine what you were going to spend and how much? And then what are the sorts of things that you did early on?

All right, so, okay, that's a great question. So let me see. So I definitely think, like, we didn't have a set number. We more so built our marketing around, I want to say campaigns. Right. So for us, it was about, okay, this is what we want to do. How much is it going to cost to do that? And then we're going to measure the ROI to see if we're going to keep doing it again. So one of the first things we did because again, the cast practice has been growing, but we didn't have a lot of tax clients at the time. So for us, we wanted to attract more tax clients early on. And so we did a new homeowner campaign. So with that, we bought all the new homeowners in the area. They have moved to our town. And then we send them out a refrigerator magnet with a letter congratulating them on their new home. And so the budget behind it was, how much did it cost to buy the list? How much does it cost to. To get the magnets? The number that we needed, how much did it cost to get to mail all of those? It's a physical mailing. So those marketing dollars were more. So, okay, here's what we want to do. How much is it going to cost and was it worth it? And then eventually, as we started to scale, then we started putting dollars behind, like, okay, now we're setting aside this much to do all the things we want to do as far as marketing. So I saw a marketing budget. We spent a lot of marketing. So we do Google Ads, and we have a budget of about $500 a month on two separate ads. So it's about a thousand a month for both ads. We also, we have an email. So marketing is also like having an email nurturing campaign. So we have. We invest into email nurturing software. So I would say, here's the thing, Matt. How much should we be spending on marketing? I would say our budget problem right now is probably between like 8 and 10% of our gross revenue.

Yeah.

Like I said, we spent a lot on marketing.

Yeah. And, well, what I found is you're always going to have a floor of clients that are just going to find you some way. It's through referrals or online. You do nothing and you're going to get a certain number in as you grow, though that often can't keep up with your drops. Even if you have like really good client retention, if you're losing 15% or 10% a year, you usually need to spend a little bit more just to keep up with. And then if you want to grow, you got to add on top of that. And it does get more expensive. The other thing is that if you're, if you're a smart firm, you're probably trying to charge premium rates and you're raising your prices. And the great clients also become more expensive to get just because there's fewer of them. Right. You're looking for the ones who value you and are not price sensitive. The short answer, we use two equations that either one works. The simple one is start with 10% of your budget and then put it. So that's like your revenue 10%. It's an easy place to start. The other way is firms grow through acquisition all the time, right? So you pay 1.1.2x annual revenue to acquire another firm. You don't know who those clients are. You don't know if they're good or bad. You're going to lose some of them. You might end up paying, you know, 2x per client. When it's all said and done. So we say, what I say is if you can acquire a client through marketing for Anything less than 1x your annual fee, you're, you're doing well because that's, that's better than acquisition in my mind, right?

It is, right? Yes.

And you're, and you get to interview every CL before you bring them in the door. Now that's an all in cost. That's sales and marketing, right? And so generally what we'll say is like, okay, what's the client worth to you in one year? Cut that in half. 50% for sales, 50% for marketing. Now you say we want to add 24 clients to a month. You multiply that, you know that amount and that gives you your marketing budget. So that's more of the like, if I need to know exactly the number, I'm going to spend $50,000 this year. You can get an idea, you know, how do you judge whether this is working and effective or not, right? And then you gotta, then you gotta think like, where's the best way to allocate these resources that's gonna get the best ROI most of the time, you know, if you can get them for less than 1x. Great. But most of the time it should be a lot lower than that as, as you get your marketing dialed in. But. But that helps set expectations a little higher. You say you're spending a lot on marketing. The reality is marketing, I always tell people marketing requires investment and it's expensive and you can pay in dollars or you can pay in time. And for most firm owners, for most firm owners, they would actually rather throw some money at things than have to give a lot of time to it. And that's totally understandable. So yeah, that's kind of my, that's my spiel on marketing budgets. I know that's a little bit of a rabbit trail, but so tell me about. You said early on you were trying to get more tax clients. And as you've grown, things have changed. You've grown some through acquisition, some through marketing. What has been your firm growth trajectory? Have there been trigger points or changes where things, what you've been doing and how you've been getting clients has really shifted over the years.

Yeah, so it has. I would say we started from scratch. I started my firm with zero clients other than family and friends that work paying me anything. And so we eventually my first few clients I marketed locally only. I went to the chamber or the, or the city hall, wherever they applied to get the new business licenses. I got a list of all the new business licenses and I cold called them one by one until someone told me yes, they wanted to meet with me. So I got my very first large cast client who's still a client today just from like that marketing tactic. So that's when we kind of started like oh, this works. So we kind of still do a lot of that. And eventually like I said, sales just started to take off. Like my first year, I think I did like $32 a month. I don't know where that $32 came from. The second year, I think we did 30 some thousand the second year. And then from there it has been just growing exponentially. So this year we're probably in a right around 1.5. We, we projected 1.5 to 1.7 million. We're probably a little below that based on just kind of a lot of changes we've been making in our firm. So like I said, the only year that we. And we've been pretty profitable as well. So the only time that we didn't really grow, but we also didn't lose a lot of sales either. That's the good was during COVID Right?

Yeah.

So we just maintained pretty much our sale and what. We still invested in marketing throughout. And I would say we. We have a really great retention rate with our clients. Like, we. Most clients don't leave unless I fire them. But now we had one re. One leave recently, but it was out of our control. But other than that, we've done really good. Retaining clients and then just added them is like gravy for us.

Yeah, I'm interested to hear you mentioned that you're getting more into kind of the. The coaching space. What? So folks that are listening on audio and they don't see us. Nicole is a black woman in accounting. There's a fairly, I would say, underrepresented in that space. I know you have a podcast as well that you have with some other women. Yeah. I'm just interested in your experience and what you want to bring to the accounting space in general from a coaching and that perspective. What. What is interesting about that to you and what do you hope to be able to do for other folks that are building their firms?

Yeah, so I have. So the coaching program that my friend and I, Barbara Richardson, are rolling out is called the Martin Bookkeeper. So it's not a technical training program. So we're not teaching bookkeeping. We're not talking about how to do bookkeeping. We're talking about how do you build or run a modern bookkeeping practice. So we're taking all of our lessons learned, all of the mistakes we've made, hoping to help others avoid those same mistakes and get there faster than we did. So that's what it's all about. It's all about building bigger, better businesses.

I think running a business is like 30% being good at the thing that you're good at. And like, 70% is everything else that you didn't realize you needed to learn. And of that, so much of it is actually like internal, personal work, like understanding. You know, how do I exist as a business owner? You know, how do I understand my own value? How do I charge enough? How do I not give everything? And those are the things where I think having a community and having coaches who have. Who have done that is so valuable because that 70%, like, you know, that 30% is. Do you know accounting?

It's engraved in us. Right, right. Debits and credits. Right? Yeah.

You can. You can take classes, you got a degree, you got your CPA, all that. But it's that 70% of, like, what does it mean to be. To run a business? And. And all the personal stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah. So that's the whole purpose of this coaching program, is to like show people how to do that. Because again, we see so many coaching programs where people were teach, where they were making money from coaching. They've never run businesses. So for us it's like, okay, we've done it. We've been, I would say we've been successful doing it. Okay. How can we, I guess, have others have that same experience or an even better experience as business owners? So yeah, that's like that 70% is exactly what we're doing.

Yeah. Not, don't make the same mistakes as we did make. Make entirely new mistakes. If you're right, make a new mistake and recover faster.

Yes.

Well, let's. Okay, let's get back to the, a little bit to the kind of personal brand and building, building in public thing. So you're active on, on Twitter and LinkedIn. Unpack those two different platforms. From your perspective, what do you, are you the same person in both places or do you kind of shift what you talk about? What's, what's the difference?

I am definitely not the same person in both places. I would say Twitter, Twitter is more so like my personal diary, right. It's where I can share all the random things or organized things that go through my head so I can be myself again. It also goes back to who I can put out into the world without having to have that two way conversation through verbal conversations. So I'm talking about everything from being a mom. I'm a mom of five. I'm talking about being married to my husband of 20 years and I'm just talking about being a CPA to the many clients that we serve. So it's like a combination of stories, anecdotes, inspirational quotes. It can get very random. My Twitter account, right. I'm trying to make it a little more organized, but other than that, it's very random. LinkedIn is very, it's a lot more structured. It's very intentional because again, it's more so a professional platform. So the things I'm putting out, I'm very mindful of the audience. Like we have two different audience. The audience on text Twitter is totally different from my audience on LinkedIn. Also, most of my LinkedIn audience are clients. There are other businesses that we're working with. And so again, I'm not as random. I'm not as transparent either. Right? Because I can not say transparent. I mean, like I said, I tell a lot about my personal life on Twitter. I don't do that as much on LinkedIn. Because again, it's, I'm trying to create that no, like trucks factor and I'm able to do that better on LinkedIn versus Twitter. Even though people like, I guess they like follow me on Twitter because I'm very authentic and transparent. Transparent. But it's not the same on LinkedIn.

Yeah. How much time do you. Okay, this is a two part question. How much time do you, do you spend during the week, you know, in, in your, we'll say public facing, you know, role for the firm? There's an overlap. We're going to include Twitter and LinkedIn here. And then also do you, do you have that structure? Do you have time set aside to do that or do you just do it, you know, as you have time? And it's kind of comes more naturally.

Obviously when I first started posting on Twitter, it was. When I said it was random. I literally mean I would only post when I had some downtime. So when I'm. So my husband and I drive to work every day. So when he's in the car driving, I'm usually posting when I'm standing in line trying to check out. I'm usually posting when I'm waiting at a restaurant for dinner. So it was like very rare. It was only doing down times. Right. I didn't have any time set aside. I was like, I'm just gonna post down because I feel like it. Cause I have some, some time now. There is a lot more intentional. So I do have, I set aside Wednesdays, Wednesday on my content creation day. So then I'm sitting down and scheduled a lot of my content. The ideas I, I get for content, I jot that down throughout the week. And then I get to get sit down on Wednesday, look at everything, all the ideas I created, then start creating the content from there. So it's definitely more intentional right now.

Do you struggle coming up with ideas for content? Is that a, is that a challenge?

No, I don't. Like, literally I have my, so my, my iPhone, my, the notepad. Anytime I think of something random in my head I want to talk about later, I just put it in my notepad. So I kind of park it and come back to it later. And I think that I think I could talk about, I could talk about a whole lot more. I just don't. I kind of reserve something. I can't tell them. I can't tell the word everything. Right?

Right.

But I do tell them a lot. So. But it's all. I have content for days. I can create content.

I think, I think a Lot of people, I'll say firm owners feel a little intimidated by social media because they think I'm gonna run out of stuff to say. Like, how do you. You got this blank page problem. And what I tell people is, the more I think, the more you do it, and the more you think about it, the more comes. You know, like, it's. It gets easier. You don't actually run out of ideas. You come up with more ideas as you practice.

Exactly. Because then you start. Because you also get ideas from the people that interact with you on social media, so they'll ask you questions. Also, when you're reading other people's content, you'd be like, ah, I didn't think of that. And you may have a different play on that same subject matter so that you can talk about that also, too. I tell people, and I learned this from Seth David. I was like, it's okay to take something someone else said and put it into your own words. Right. Like, people afraid, like, well, I'm gonna copy what they said said. No, you're not. Sometimes a particular person may need to hear it in your voice or your words in order for it to resonate with them. So I'm like, listen, if you're not sure where to start, go look at other people's and see. Can you kind of. Kind of get ideas from what they're posting?

Yeah. And with social media, your audience is. Is constantly evolving and growing. And so some of the things that you. You said six months ago, there's a bunch of people that you're connected to now that haven't heard that. And so it's okay to hit on the same topics again and again. It doesn't have to be.

I just thought about that. I was like, I need to go back into my archives from, like, two years ago, because there I have. Because back then, I probably had a couple thousand followers. Now I have about 12,000 on Twitter. I'm pretty sure there were 10,000 people that didn't hear what I said.

That was good stuff.

That's good stuff. I need to recreate that. Yes.

Yeah. The other thing about writing, and I mean, this goes back. You said you set aside Wednesdays. That sounds like a very expensive commitment to a lot of people who are listening to this in the time. Right. Like, that's. You've put a lot of priority and time into being the face of your firm. Now I'll say yes. It's helping you drive leads. I'm sure it's also helping you create credibility kind of in the space. And it gives you the opportunity as a firm owner to do more one to many communication instead of the one to one step, which helps the rest of your team actually by doing that. But it does, I think for a lot of firm owners, that still feels like a lot to give up to put into it. And so I understand that they wouldn't want to do that. The other thing though is I really believe that writing, whether it's on social media or blogs or emails, it helps you clarify the way you think, which then allows you to provide better insight and services to your clients. And so taking that time to think about it, you know, how do I communicate this out into the world? Is helping you grow in your own practice and your own ability to really serve your clients well. So I think people underestimate maybe the kind of side benefits of spending time creating content, writing and thinking about your business for your clients. It's more valuable than you realize. It's not just about marketing stuff.

It is. And you made the great point earlier when you talked about how some accountants, it's either going to be a time investment or a cost investment. And I think that investing in your social media strategy, your personal brand, is a huge return. It will provide a huge return if you're consistent, if you're putting good content out into the world, like the opportunities that open up for you, like, you wouldn't even imagine these things happening had you not had a presence on these social media platforms.

Tell me about that. So you're active, like you've had some opportunities. What, what sorts of things are now are available to you that you sort of didn't expect before you started doing this?

All right, so one is definitely speaking engagements. So when I started my firm early on, I said, okay, I definitely, I'm an introvert, but still I wanted to be on stage. I like being on stage. I have a performing arts background, I come from a performance arts family. So naturally I want to be in the spotlight. Right. But only when I'm on stage speaking. After that, I want to go back in my little shell and go back to tweeting things behind my phone. So I would say it opened up more speaking engagements for me. It allowed me to be a part of software partner councils. It allowed me to, I guess, have a voice for issues I care about that I can now lend my voice to and out into the world. So the benefits have been tremendous. I'm able to write for more blogs, I write for some industry publications and all of that just because I was tweeting when it boils down to it, it. Just because they saw I had a voice and I opened my mouth and told them, these are things I care about. This is what I'm doing in my life. And people, like, people just gravitated towards that.

You've mentioned it a couple times, and I think it's really important to make sure you think this. My advice to people, don't go to the market trying to reverse engineer what people want to hear. Like, you should really go, like, who. What is. What is your perspective and voice that you can bring, because there. It's such a big. There's so much opportunity. And really, like, the more, I'm gonna say narrow, but the idea, you know, the more, like, distinct or specific that you can be, you're gonna attract the right people for you. There are other people who are great businesses, but they're not the right ones for your. For you. But when you try to be a little bit more broad, and I want to speak to everybody and connect with everybody, you. You limit your authenticity. And I think what it does is it doesn't truly connect very strongly with anyone in particular. And so, you know, having that, you know, I'm going to be me, I think that that's a big part, I would guess, as far as those opportunities is that you come across as. I'm a real person. Yeah. I own a business.

Real world problems. Yeah.

But I'm a. You know, I'm a mom. You know, we're dealing with, you know, all these. All these kid things. We're dealing with family vacations and, you know, all that. So if you had to go back and just give advice to someone who's. They're following tax Twitter, but they're not ever posting anything. Right. They're just like, you know, scrolling along and you had to say, all right, here's the advice I'd give you to get started. Like, where would you tell someone to start?

Ah. So if you're a lurker and you. And you've been following, I would say say speak on something you're comfortable about or speak on something you're passionate about. Right. Because then you, like, there's something that you can talk about for days. Right. You can. There's. If there's nothing else in the world, that's something you really. And it doesn't have to be tax. That's the thing about tax Twitter. Like, I rarely ever talk about tax. Right. I'm always talking about being a wife. Again, it goes back to my handle, wifemomcpa, cpa lasts for reason. Because I don't talk about a lot about being a cpa. I talk about owning a firm, but not about the tax aspect of it. So I would say start talking about something you're passionate about. It doesn't have to be tax. If you love surfing, talk about surfing. People want to see what's behind the tax Persona, because right now, most people just have that tax Persona, but, like, what else is there? And that's what people really care about. That's how you build that know, like. And trust factor.

Yeah, exactly. Because people. One of. One of the firms I work with, they have this kind of mantra of, like, we like you and we're like you. Right. And so, like, you attract people who do respond and, like, you know, the energy that you bring and that's the, like, you know, the know, like. And trust. That middle piece of like is. Is important. You got to have that trust factor for sure. And obviously they need to know about you. But, you know, if it's too bland, especially in this, like, personal branding space, and you're just like, we just want people to know us and trust us. You miss that little thing. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't work as well. Well, Nicole, where. Where can people find you and, you know, connect with you? What. What do you want to. What do you just want to tell. Tell the audience that's listening to the show.

All right, so you can find me on LinkedIn, I'm nicoledavis and CPA, and on Twitter, you can find me @wifemomcpay100. So what do I want people to know? I would say, since we're talking about, I guess, social media, marketing, personal branding, like, figure out who you want to be to the world. Figure out who you want. How do you want to portray your subsequent the world, and then do that wholeheartedly.

I think that's great advice. And if you are. If you're struggling with that, you know, find your community and. And start having conversations. You know, you can always ask the people who know you well, who should I be to the world? Not that you should be someone different, but you know, how other people can call that out.

You can ask them, like, if you. If. How do you do. How would you describe me to strangers? Right. And here and just hear the insight they have on how they perceive you, and then that's usually something you can use and you can run with. So.

Yeah. Well, this. This has been a great conversation. I'm so glad that you. You came on the show. Go follow Nicole on on Twitter if you want to get more of the the wife, mom, CPA side of things and go connect on LinkedIn. If you want to see the the business side of things. She she's a great person to be following in both places whether you are accounting firm owner and you just want a good example of someone who's active on social media or I guess if there's some just regular old business people that are listening, especially if you're in the Atlanta area, you should get connected. So thanks again for this was fun. Yeah, this is, this is a great conversation and yeah, I think we'll just leave it there for today. All right, 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 Benker on LinkedIn.