How to Niche Down Your Accounting Firm

If you want your firm to stand out and attract leads who actually want your help, then there's a good chance your niche simply isn't clear enough. And no, small business owners is not a niche. Real estate investors is not a niche. These are still incredibly broad and vague, right? There's many different types of small businesses, many different types of real estate investors. And so in this video, I want to show you how to pick your niche the right way. This is going to make your marketing easier, your sales calls shorter and more straightforward, and overall, it's just going to make your firm more profitable and easier to grow. We're gonna walk through what a niche is, how to find yours using your current client list, and how to get inside that customer's head so you can create marketing material that feels like it applies to them. If you don't know who I am, my name is Peter Vanderwaal. I'm the accountants marketing guy. I helped scale a tax strategy firm from 0 to 3 million a year in three years. And now today, my team and I help accounting firms all around the country break through the seven figure ceiling and scale beyond it. All right, first off, what is a niche? Well, there's really two main things, okay? It's who are we selling to? In other words, your ideal client and what are we selling them, in other words, your core offer. So all the time I talk to firm owners and they're like, oh, we have a niche. Our niche is tax. That's not a niche. That's just a service that you provide. Now that helps you to define your niche because it helps you to go, okay, what type of customers actually need this type of service? But it's only a starting point, it's not the whole thing. Same with who are we selling to? Right? If you just slap an industry label on your firm, you say, we're the accounting firm for residential moving companies in, in and around Dayton, Ohio. That's an incredibly specific who we're selling to. But what are you actually selling to them? Right? You could be selling tax, you could be selling bookkeeping, you could be selling like a higher level CFO service. You could be selling like business valuations for ones who want to sell and like exit the business, or maybe they're trying to get some sort of loan or funding. There's so many different variables here that we still haven't identified. So if you can define both of these, who are we selling to and, and what are we selling them, then you can build a very, very predictable marketing and sales machine around this Right. You can obviously, let's say you pick kind of one main core offer that you use to get people in the door. So maybe that's, you know, let's say bookkeeping. Right. And then over time you can upsell down, sell, cross, sell them into other stuff. Maybe that's tax prep or maybe that's like a higher level, like controller or CFO service. Right. But for someone who's not like a red hot referral lead, it's actually very difficult to make that sale. Right. And so we want to make sure that we're building system and building a machine to make it as simple and as straightforward as possible. And if you've got all of these different lines of service and all of these different types of customers coming in, then like you have to create a custom proposal every single time for every single person. And that's just not realistic. There's way too much friction in that process. So you really need to systemize around one line of service and one type of customer that we're trying to get in the door. And that's how we're going to get this thing to actually be scalable. Now, I talk to a handful of firms every single week, people who are interested in, you know, possibly working with my marketing firm, and there's kind of two different situations that they find themselves in right now. Situation number one is they have no idea what their niche is. Situation number two is, of course they have a general idea of what their niche needs to be, but they don't know how to attract people and they don't have the right systems in place. And that's kind of what they're coming to us for help on. Now, you watching are probably in one or the other of those camps. And so there's timestamps below if you want to skip just straight to the section that's most applicable to you. But that's what we're going to be going over in the rest of this video is A, how to figure out who your niche is in the first place, and B, what to do once you already know your niche. So if you have an idea of what your niche is, or maybe you have a couple different ideas kind of floating around and you're trying to decide between. You can go ahead and skip to the timestamp below. But if you need to figure out who your niche is in the first place, then that's what I want to cover next here. If you have no idea what your niche should be, I'm going to walk you through an exercise here. That we do with many of our clients. So to help them decide. Right. And so essentially what you're going to do is you're going to go into your CRM or your practice management software, and you're just going to export your entire client list, right? Your entire customer list, everybody you're currently working with or maybe even past clients you've worked with. And depending on how established your firm is, this might be. Maybe you're a CFO firm and you're very boutique and you only work with 10 clients right now. So it's going to be a pretty short list. Maybe you're a tax firm and you've been in business for 20 years and, you know, you work with 500 clients every single year. It's going to be pretty extensive. Right? So based on that, you can export just, maybe just a chunk of it. But what we want to do is throw all this onto a Google sheet, and then we're just going to go through, and our first pass is we're going to be deleting any clients who we know for sure. We wouldn't want to work with more people like them. Right. And that could be for any reason whatsoever. Any reason whatsoever. In fact, I really, I want to weed out about 75% of these people. Okay. So basically, the only people that are gonna be left on this spreadsheet are like the top 10 or the top 20% of your clients. Right. People who you absolutely love working with. You enjoy the process of working with them. They're very profitable to work with, and you'd be happy to get more clients just like them. Okay? Now the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna note, okay, what industries are they in? What's their goal with their business? What's like, their next big move coming up? What was their biggest pain point before they came to you? And by pain point, I don't mean like, oh, they didn't have good books and records. They. That's not a pain point. That's a root cause. Right. That's the reason they were experiencing XYZ pain points. Right. So what were they experiencing? Right, because they didn't have good books and records, they couldn't find any budget to be able to invest in marketing to grow their business because they didn't have good books and records, they were underpaying themselves, and they weren't taking home as much profit as they otherwise could have. And by going through this exercise, you're gonna start to see some common themes emerging. Okay. So you might see common Industries. Oh. A lot of our clients happen to be attorneys or they happen to be in the medical space. A lot of our clients tend to be towards purchasing the real estate that their business operates out of. That's like a common move that a few of these people are looking to do. Maybe if you work with real estate investors, a lot of them are kind of on the older side and they're trying to prep their portfolio for retirement. Right. Because, you know, there's different things you need to do as you're growing the portfolio versus when you're ready to retire and kind of live off of it. Now, as you start to do this, you're going to almost be like building this Venn diagram. Right? So there's, you know, this industry and this industry and this industry and this industry. There's, you know, a lot of people are looking to do this as their next big move. A lot of people are looking to do this as their next big. You know, these people are trying to buy out the building that their business runs out of. These people are trying to take home more money so they can build up their personal net worth and their investments. These people are trying to, like, scale their business really hard and, like, you know, build like, this massive empire. And you're gonna be able to see those points of overlap. And those points of overlap are your niche. That tells us the type of customer we need to be going after, and that tells us which core service offering that you have is the main one that we need to be selling to them. Right. It's very easy to figure out, okay, if somebody's in the position, let's say they're in a position where they're trying to grow their business as large as humanly possible. Right. They're trying to scale hard. Well, then the CFO service that you offer is going to be very applicable to that. Right. Or even maybe you do tax strategy, right. And you're able to help them save 50 grand on taxes. Well, what can they do with that 50 grand? They can reinvest it back into their business for growth. Right. By the way, if you want someone who's done all this before for firms just like yours to come step into your business and just build this all out for you. That's exactly what my team and I do. So we actually step into your firm as your chief marketing officer, and we'll actually help you pick your niche. We'll help you decide what strategies we need to implement, and then we can actually go build out all of those systems for you. So if that's something you're interested in. Click the first link in the description below. You can get more information there. But anyways, so now at this point, we have a general direction figured out. We either have a very clear niche that's emerged that we want to target, or we have a couple options that we just need to, you know, weigh the pros and cons and make a decision, right? Either way, how do we actually get in front of this type of customer? How do we get more of them? How do we build a system around this? Right now, the first thing we need to understand here is that the way you're going to get this person attracted to your company, the way you're going to get them inbound and actually paying attention to the marketing material you're putting out is it needs to feel applicable to them. It needs to feel applicable to their situation. And the way that we do that is by understanding what are they thinking about day in and day out, right? So I'll give you an example, right? Most of the ads you see from tax strategy firms on, let's say, like, Facebook and Instagram ads, right? Most of these ads are super, super similar. In fact, a lot of them are using almost the same script verbatim. They're basically like, you know, maybe they work with doctors, right? And so they're like, doctors, are you paying more than $50,000 in taxes every year? If you are, you're probably overpaying. Click the link below to schedule a consultation. Now, how many do doctors are actually thinking about taxes every single day? How many doctors are scrolling Facebook and Instagram? And in the back of their mind, the thing they're chewing on, the thing that they're focusing their, you know, discretionary energy on is their taxes. I would venture to say that's very few. You might have a little bit more of that during tax season. And there might be some doctors who, like, they got slapped with an absolutely silly tax bill, and it's the first time that's ever happened to them. And. And they're really thinking about it. But for the most part, doctors are not on social media or spending time online. And in the back of their mind, they're thinking about taxes, right? What are they thinking about? Well, they're probably thinking about how do they grow their practice? How can they get to a point where they can bring on another specialist who, like, has the same level of skills they do, how can they hire an office manager, right, to take them out of the admin so they can focus on just being a doctor? And so we need to speak to those things, right? Forget taxes, they're not thinking about that. Let's speak to, for example, if you work with doctors and they tend to be earlier in their career, let's speak to. This is how self employed doctors are paying off their med school debt faster. It's by having a tax strategy that allows them to, you know, save an extra $20,000 a year that they can put back on their med school loans. That's obviously not a word for word ad script, but like that's the general idea in this, this ad that you would be putting out there, right. Or maybe you work with doctors who are like more mature in their career, right? Uh, they're in their 40s or 50s, they've been practicing for a while, they've got a successful dentist practice or they've got a successful cardiology clinic, whatever, Right. And they're more mature in their career. They're thinking along the lines of like growing their practice and kind of like getting themselves out of the day to day. So it kind of runs without them. Right. Well, they need to hire an office manager, they need to hire another cardiologist or another dentist to work under them. You know, maybe they need to market their clinic more in order to get more patients. Well, guess what, by having a tax strategy in place, they could save $50,000 this year or 20,000 or whatever your number is. Right. They could save that money and reinvest it back into the business. 50 grand is probably like most of what they would need for the next year's salary for this office manager they're looking at hiring. 20 grand is probably what they need to put into their marketing budget to be able to get more patients in and grow their revenue. Right. These are the talking points that we need to find. But how do you actually figure this out? Right. So I like to do some pretty in depth market and I like to try to use at least like five or six different sources for this. Right. So you're not just going to one place and going oh, this is what every doctor is thinking about. So source number one that I like to use is ChatGPT's deep research. This is a feature that they've got I think on like the pro plan, you can do like up to 10 of these a month where basically you put in a prompt and then you turn deep research on and it'll generate like a 30 to. I've seen up to like a hundred page research report and maybe I'll make a video specifically on this. But basically you can put in a prompt and say, hey, I'm a tax strategist and I work with doctors. I want to figure out what doctors are thinking about in their day to day. Not specifically related to taxes, but just generally speaking, doctors who own their own practice and they're further, you know, they're more advanced in their career. Let's say they're, you know, in their 40s to 60s. I want to understand what they're thinking about in their day to day. Please generate a deep research report on this so I can figure out what my talking points need to be in my marketing, right? Something like that. You could even put that into ChatGPT and say, hey, make this into a deep research prompt before you actually go do the deep research. That would be a really good way to go about it. That's usually how I do it. So that's going to generate this massive long document and it's basically doing all this research for you. But I don't want to just rely on that, right? Because sometimes chatgpt is wrong, sometimes it kind of goes in like the wrong direction on one of these things. So you use it as one of your five or six sources. Another thing I'll do is I'll look up YouTube content in the niche and so I'll see what people are put, you know, maybe there's coaches or consultants in this Dr. Space, maybe there's marketing agencies or there's other tax professionals putting out content. Maybe there's online communities that are putting out like podcasts or YouTube content, right? So we look up this YouTube content, we watch through some of it to see what they're talking about, what they're making, you know, what the topics of their content are about. And also what are people commenting under this, right? Cause that tells you like, what actual doctors are finding important, what they're finding helpful, what they want to know more about. And so we can just kind of like make some extensive notes on this, right? Watch a YouTube video, jot down some bullet points along, you know, what were they talking about? What did I find interesting, what did I, what did I learn from this that I didn't know about doctors before? And then jot down what are people talking about in the comments and do that for maybe, you know, five, maybe 10, maybe 20 YouTube videos and you get a pretty clear idea, right? You can do the same for social media content in this niche, right? So find influencers on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever who are in this niche, in the medical niche. In this example who are creating content targeting towards doctors, right? What are they talking about in this content? What are the comments saying, all that kind of stuff, right? Reddit and Quora forums are a great resource. So you can find subreddits or you can find questions on Quora related to topics in the medical space and see what these questions are and then see what the answers are that people are providing beneath that. Right? So get 5 or 10 or 20 of these and just comb through them to see what's going on in there. You can also pull this from your sales calls, right? So if you record your sales calls, which by the way, if you don't start doing that today, then you can use those sales call recordings to find what do doctors find important? What do they really care about? And by the way, this might require you to start asking certain questions to probe a little bit deeper if you're not already doing that on your calls. Another great way to go about this is to just literally ask your clients, right? So I'm assuming you probably have some clients in this niche already. So go talk to them. Ask them about the experience. Ask them about how they were thinking about growing their practice before you started working together versus how they're thinking about growing their practice now. Ask them about what they've been able to do with these tax savings that you've gotten them or with the increased profitability you've gotten them through. You know, you're going through their books and records and helping them find, like, ways to make more money or ways to spend less or whatever. And so what you're going to do is all of these different resources you've got. You're going to compile kind of your broad, high level general notes, all the common themes you're seeing. Compile this onto a specific document and you're going to note what are the most common themes that we're seeing. All right, this is your messaging. This is the. What do we need to be saying in our marketing to be able to attract the right people? These are the topics we need to talk about in our marketing to be able to attract the right type of customers to our firm. And what I want to do is I want to actually show you. We call it a brand messaging blueprint here at my firm. But I want to show you what these research reports actually look like for real life firms that we're working with. All right, so number one, this is a CFO firm we're working with. I've just redacted the name so you can't just copy Paste what they're doing. And what we identified as their niche is basically successful CEOs who are making a big next move or they've got a big next move on the horizon. We went through their client list and basically everybody on their client list was like trying to buy the building that their business operates out of or buy building for the business. Or maybe they're trying to open up their next location, you know, something of that nature. Right. They've got this big strategic move they're trying to make. They need somebody who can help them navigate that successfully. So that's their niche. And so the way we're doing this is just kind of noting, you know, this is kind of some basic stuff. These messaging pillars are really great. You know, turning your next big move into your best move yet. That's awesome. But here's the important stuff is the target audience, right? So this is. Who are we actually speaking to? So we're talking to business owners with 2 to 10 million in annual revenue. They're on the verge of making some next big move in their business. They've been in business for at least five years and they've seen really fast growth because they've got great product market fit. All right, now that's demographics, okay? That's the factual things you can know about their situation just by kind of like asking some basic questions right now, psychographics. This refers to, like, what's going on inside their head. Right? So this type of person is growth oriented and they're ready to scale faster. Right? They're looking for a lot of clarity and strategy to make sure that their financial performance is actually aligned with their goals. And the things that motivate them are, you know, maximizing profitability and being able to scale their business confidently. Okay. Now we noted down here some pain points they're feeling and some of the symptoms of those pain points and kind of how this company addresses that. So that's really big here. We noted down some of these big business moves that they might be having. So it could be expanding to new locations. It could be creating some sort of strategic partnership or like reorganizing a business partnership they're in. It could be they're trying to make large investments, large capital expenditures. It could be transition planning. Right? So they're planning for an exit. We built out what their marketing funnel needs to look like based on everything that we've talked about so far. And then this is part of this that I absolutely love. It's the buyer types. Okay? So if you haven't Read the book. Surrounded by idiots. That's a great resource to understand buyer types. But, but basically there's four different buyer types, and each of them is going to make decisions slightly differently. And so we need to be able to kind of optimize around each of these buyer types so that regardless of which buyer type our ideal customer is or any particular lead is, we've got a path for them to find the right information they're looking for. And we've got a way for them to, you know, come across the finish line and ultimately buy. Right? So red, this is a dominant buyer, okay? This person, they need results, they need efficiency, they need wins, they're goal oriented, they're focused on outcomes. So here's the messaging and kind of the strategy we need to follow with that. Right? Green, stable buyers, same deal. These are more trust oriented. They value long term relationships. They value kind of having this, this reassurance from you that things are going well, they're steady, they're loyal, they love consistency. And so this is our messaging and our strategy for that type of person. Right? Same for an analytical buyer. Same for an optimistic or creative buyer. Okay. And then what we did here is we actually built out a buyer Persona. Okay? So this is literally a person. So we can actually like visualize who this person is. What buyer type are they, what do they value, what are they motivated by, what are their pain points, what are their desires, and what are they aspiring to? And here's what life looked like before working with this CFO firm. Right? So literally wakes up at 6:30am Right? Like, very, very granular, going through the day. What she's thinking about and what she's doing at different parts of the day. Right? What this allows us to do is understand our buyer and what's going on inside their head better than. They know what's going on inside their head better than. And so this is how we create marketing material that actually feels applicable to them. If you've ever seen the movie Inception, you know, where they're like trying to kind of like put this idea inside of this guy's head to make this particular business move with his dad's business. And they want him to think he came up with the idea himself. But we want our marketing to do the exact same thing for our leads or our potential customers. Right? We want to implant these ideas in their head, but we want them to think that they came up with it themselves. So this is a brand messaging blueprint we made for a different client. And this one is a little bit Simpler niche, right? This is a bookkeeping firm for local moving companies. Very simple niche, very straightforward niche, to be honest. And so we're able to just get through this kind of same framework here, but for a local moving company owner, Right. So we're talking about, you know, kind of, who is this local moving company owner? Where are they at in their business journey? What buyer type do they tend to be? So in this case, they tend to be a red buyer or a green buyer. What are their pain points? What do they desire instead? Or what do they aspire to? What are the key messaging points that we need to use in this marketing? And then, you know, same kind of this, this, you know, customer profile. And what does a day in the life look like for this person? Right? So at this point, you've got your niche. You know, what you need to be saying in your marketing to be able to attract this type of person. But what do you do with all this? This is the thing, like a point of a niche isn't just to have it. The point of the niche is so that you can create a marketing message that gets really specific on the value you can actually provide for your clients. Right? So instead of making them do the mental leap of, okay, if I get tax savings, what am I going to be able to do with that? Well, I guess I'll have. I'll have more money in my pocket and I can, you know, be able to, you know, hire somebody I couldn't hire before or I could, you know, buy some piece of equipment I couldn't afford before. So instead of creating a message around helping you know your numbers, right? It's like, what can that actually do for the business owner? Right. Helps them to reinvest into the business more confidently because they know their numbers. Or it helps them make their next big move more confidently because they know their numbers. Right. And so I want to show you here one of the ads we ran for this bookkeeping firm that works with moving company owners. Local moving companies are making big moves like buying more trucks and hiring more staff, even in this economy. How the owner knows their numbers. Okay, that right there, that's how we use this messaging, right? So here's the thing. You want. You want to buy more trucks or you want to hire more staff? And the way you're going to do that is by knowing your numbers, which is what I'll help you do. And so this is how we're getting their attention with the thing they're already thinking, thinking about every single day and then showing them the path to get there. And for this particular accounting firm owner, this works like, incredibly well for him. In the first three weeks running his ads, he closed 16 new clients, which at his price point is about $8,000 a month in recurring revenue. And then most of those clients signed up for his tax service as well on the back end. And so he made about an extra $130,000 over the next 12 months just from those essentially three weeks of running ads and getting leads. So now that you know your niche and now that you know the message you need to put out there in your marketing material to get in front of this niche, you can run ads, you can create a social strategy, you can go to events and sponsor events or speak at events. And you know what to say to get this type of person actually interested in what it is that you do. Hey, if you like this video, you're definitely going to like this one. I'll see you over there.