Stop Making Educational Content. Do This Instead.

Everyone has been telling you that creating educational content is going to help you build your brand. You're going to establish authority in your space. You're going to get more clients for your business. They're wrong. Educational content is where expertise goes to die. And in this video I want to show you what you need to be doing instead. All right, this LinkedIn post is a perfect demonstration of the problem with educational content. Okay, now this guy's a cpa. So he's posting about Roth versus Pre tax investment accounts. And I'm going to blur out his name because I'm not trying to call him out here. He's a nice guy, but he's basically talking about like Roth versus Pre tax investment accounts, how to compare them and like what a fair comparison is and how to pick the right one for you. And so he's got this nice little graphic here. That's all great. But before we look at the comments to see who's interacting with this post, let's just think really quickly. Who would be the ideal person to interact with this post? So he works with consultants, creatives and clinicians according to his LinkedIn bio. And so you would think if this post worked, if this post is making an impact for his business, then you probably will see consultants, creatives and clinicians in the comments being like, thank you.

So much, this is very helpful. Like how do I get in touch with you?

Let's find out if that's true. So if we go down to the comments here, we've got business and finance manager, Tax advisor, cpa, Bookkeeping, International sales and technology leader, Financial education. So maybe, maybe that guy is an icp. Sounds like he could be a consultant. Cpa, Certified Public accountant, San Francisco cpa, Part time Indirect tax assistance, Strategic tax consultant, Simplifying wealth urology, physician. Okay, so that's one more person who's icp. Irs, Enrolled agent, Finance executive, Retired partner from kpmg. Senior wealth advisor, Managing Director at a portfolio management. Okay, so wealth advisor, yeah, bookkeeping and business advisory, Finance director. I save solopreneurs thousands in taxes. You see what I'm getting at? Your ideal client doesn't want to be educated. Now this is different if you're selling, coaching or consulting. But if you watch my channel, you're selling a real service, something generally high ticket generally in the accounting world. And you're doing stuff for people. You're doing their taxes, you're doing their books, you're building their financial strategy, you're saving them money on taxes. Your ideal client does not want to Be educated about what you do. They want somebody who's an expert, who they can trust, who can just handle it for them. And this is the thing you have to understand here, is they want to know high level, like, what to do and, you know, maybe why that's the best way to do things. They don't care about the nitty gritty. They don't care about about the how. Like, they just want to know that they've got somebody who's got it under control. And so the framework I like to follow here is to focus on the what and the why and completely ignore the how. Okay? We don't talk about how to do stuff. And even when we talk about what to do, it stays very high level. We're not talking about nuanced differences between investment accounts here. So I want to show you an exercise here that I like to use to figure out who your ideal client is and then what content you can create based on that person that will actually activate them and get them excited about the idea of working with you. All right, so this here is a client list analysis document. This is something we use with some of the firms that we work with in order to figure out who their ideal client is. Right. Sometimes people come to us and they've got a few different client avatars. They're not really sure who it is. So by using this document, we can just list out all of their clients, which I've redacted all the personal information in these columns here, and we can kind of see the overlap in the Venn diagram and we can determine, okay, who is this person's ideal client? So a couple of things that we need to note down. So annual revenue is an important one. Just understand the size of the company, next step in business or in life. This is really, really important, really crucial. What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve? Because this is a big part of what's going to motivate them to sign up and work with you. What makes them a good client? This is more subjective, but this is just like, what do you enjoy about working with them? What services are you providing for them? So this gives us a really good understanding of just like, what. What's the LTV on this client going to look like? All right, so between those three things, what I like to do is I'm going to actually download this as a spreadsheet and we're going to drop this into ChatGPT and we're going to get its opinion. All right, here's the prompt. I'm Using, I'm trying to figure out who this firm's ideal client is. This could be based around an industry, a set of specific pain points, or a set of common specific goals. Please analyze this list and give me some suggestions based on the common overlap points you see in this sheet. Okay, great. Here's our analysis. So industry overlap. So there's not one single dominant vertical, but there are clusters. So we've got service based local businesses, we've got retail and distribution, and we've got professional services. All right, that's interesting. Revenue profile. So the median revenue is around a million. The range is 150 to 11 million. Wow. Most sit between half a million and 2 million, which is kind of the sweet spot here. And I agree with this wholeheartedly. Okay, so they're big enough to afford ongoing like CFO or accounting services, but they're small enough to still need outside help and not be ready to like hire an in house team. And honestly, like that's not even an option that's on the table for them that they're considering. Right. Next steps or goals. So here's some of the patterns there. So they're growth oriented, they want to expand, they want to take on investors, they want to buy out partners. Some of them are exit planning, some of them are early stage entrepreneurs. And then some of them are dealing with like life transitions. So this suggests that this firm does well with owners in transition points, growth succession or exit, where the accounting strategy plays a pivotal role. Okay, this is also good to understand. This is not, we're not working with business owners who are like in a season of like business as usual. Right. Something big is changing client qualities. They either make good money and want a trusted fractional cfo, or they're hard working honest owners who know they need guidance and they're coachable. Okay, so this is kind of the mindset or like the psychographic part of this here and then services and price points. So this suggests the firm's best clients aren't just paying for compliance, they're paying for advisory planning and fractional cfo. That one's kind of obvious, but let's look at these suggested ideal client profiles. So profile one, we've got the growth mode business owner. So revenue is between 750 and 3 million. Their goal is expansion to new locations or just scaling their ops. Pain points is they can't keep financials and tax planning aligned with their growth and they want a trusted partner who handles the numbers so they can focus on expansion. Okay, that's cool. Let's keep this on the side here. Profile number two, transitioning owner. So we're talking between a million and five million and their goal is they're either preparing to sell, buy out a partner or transition ownership. I like that. Transition points like this are like some of the biggest inflection points in any entrepreneur's life cycle. Right. Because it's where you kind of realize like how out of your depth you really are. And so the pain point here is they want to maximize the valuation, they want to clean up their books, they want to, you know, be strategic with their cash and they will absolutely pay a premium for CFO level strategy. The other cool thing is if you serve them well during that period, then they're going to be a client for life.

They're going to be like, man, like Peter and his team were there for me like in this really hard time when I was, you know, buying out my business partner and things were tight and man, they did so well. They helped me out so much. I'm never gonna leave.

Number three is owner led service businesses. This one's pretty basic and I'm not a huge fan. So it's industry agnostic revenue, 500k to 2 million goal is like builds to. So this is the people where business is kind of running as usual and it's just the regular like books are messy, taxes are stressful. To me this is not that compelling of an ideal client profile. And so that basically leaves us to choose between one and two. Which one do we want to focus on? Now profile number two is a little bit tough because a lot of these transitions here mean that the business owner isn't going to own their business anymore. So they're preparing to sell or like transition ownership to the next generation. So it's like the business is going to come under new ownership and is the new owner going to keep this firm on? Maybe, maybe not. That's an open question there. So growth mode business owner kind of feels like the safe option. If you know me, I'm not the guy who's going to follow the safe option. So we're going to go profile two and we're just going to explore that a little bit further. Now that we've picked our ideal client profile, here's the next prompt I'm going to use. So please build a deep research prompt based around Understanding Profile 2 and their psychographics, demographics, pain points and needs. This is the important part here. I want to know what they think they need versus what they actually need. Because a lot of times those are two completely separate things. And if you just tell them what they actually need, they, they're not going to listen to you, they're not going to buy from you, they're not going to be interested in learning more. If you tell them what they think they need and then you can transition subtly to what they actually need, that's where you're able to completely shift somebody's mindset around their willingness to invest into your type of service. All right, so we're going to build a Deep research prompt specifically around this. If you're not familiar with deep research, by the way, I'm going to show you this. This is pretty insane. Basically it's going to spend like 10 or 20 minutes building like this really in depth research report, going through a ton of sources and a ton of just like information out there on the Internet and it's going to compile it all together into this one research report that we can use as basically a messaging blueprint around. Here's exactly who this ideal client is and what's going on in their head, what they're looking for and how do we create content, how do we create ads, how do we create sales videos based around what they're looking for and giving them what they need. So here's our deep research prompt. I'm not going to read through it for you, but I am going to hit the highlights. So demographics, that's basically like statistical facts about them. You know, what's their age, what industry are in the end, where are they located. Psychographics is what do they value, what do they think about what's going on inside their head. Pain points, perceived needs, which is what they think they need. Actual needs, which is like what they really need to be successful here. And, and then strategic insights. This is basically like bridging the gap between what they think they need, what they actually need. So I'm going to copy this and we will paste it down here. And then to activate Deep Research all you have to do is you just have to. It's one of these tabs down here. I think it's. Yeah, this one. It's like a telescope. Is that a telescope or a micro. It's a microscope or something. I don't know. So we'll get this going and usually it asks like a few like clarifying questions. So yes, focus on the US industry should be based on profile 2 above and we'll hit start. So it's starting research and now we buckle up and wait. Okay, that took I don't know how long Seven weeks. But here we go. This is our deep research report. All right, so transitioning business owners, comprehensive profile, blah, blah. I'm just going to breeze through this real quick. All right, so we've got the demographics, their age, their gender, their education, all that's great. Psychographic profile, core values. They're deeply invested in their businesses. Legacy is often paramount. They want the company to endure and kind of like reflect their life's work. This is awesome stuff. Transition motivations. Number one is retirement. Others include burnout and fatigue, desire for a new chapter, family succession, sometimes a personal catalyst like illness or divorce. But they're never selling on a whim. The definition of success at this stage. So what, how do they actually define a successful exit? The emotional landscape that they're feeling. This is awesome. Pain points and challenges during the transition. We've got financial challenges like being due diligence ready, stuff like that. Operational challenges like how do you handle that transition, that handoff, Emotional and personal challenges. And then perceived needs. What do they think they need? So they think they want to reduce taxes on the sale. They think they need someone to clean up their books and financials. They think they want the highest price. So they need somebody to value their business. They think they need to find a buyer or get help selling quickly. They think they need a business broker or an M and a advisor, probably a CPA and probably an attorney. Keywords they often search for selling my business, business exit plan, retirement sale, how do I sell my business? What's my business worth? Now the actual need is some strategic financial planning and value optimization. Identifying their blind spot, the unknown unknowns. And by the way, if you're a CFO who's ever worked with an exiting business owner like this, you're probably recognizing a lot of this, right? So here's the role of a strategics of a fractional CFO or a strategic advisor and how we shift them from reactive to proactive. So the biggest unrealized need is shifting their mindset from just get this done to strategically planning the exit. So they often approach it with a reactive stance, like I got an offer, now I need to lower my taxes or I'm listing my business help help me tidy up. They're not thinking about like, you know, let me take a year or two, let me take five years and prep for this sale to make sure I'm really, you know, locked down and ready to go. And then there's strategic insights. So like bridging the gap basically between their perceived needs versus their actual needs. So this report is like incredibly in depth. And I don't actually recommend like reading through this thing word for word. That's not really necessary here. What I recommend using it for is actually as a tool for the next AI prompt that we're going to drop in here. All right, so here's the prompt. Based on this deep research report, I'd like you to help me build a content strategy to reach these business owners. The content should be split between top of funnel, which is talking about the things they think they need and what's already top of mind for them at any given moment. That should be 50% of the content. Middle of funnel, where we transition their mindset to start focusing on what they actually need. This can be case study and demonstration. Heavy showing versus telling. That should be about 30% of the content. And then bottom of funnel talking directly about what they actually need, which should be 20% or less. And I'm actually going to change this and I'm going to say 35% and 15%. Let's prioritize short form video content and plan a month at a time. All right, here's our content strategy. We're doing a month of short form videos and at about four to five posts per week. So top of funnel the themes and examples. All right, so tax mistakes. How to reduce your tax bill when you sell. That's great. How to properly value your company. How to make your company more valuable. Books and financials, buyer sale process. So like who needs to be on your deal team? How do you know what your business is worth? Should you sell now or wait. This is fantastic. These would all be great video ideas. All right, middle of funnel. And this is going to be seven or eight videos total for the month. And so this would be case studies and demonstrations. So like just pick a client example and talk about the scenario. Ideally, if you can visualize it, a really great format. Right now at the time I'm recording this video is like if you have stuff you can show on your computer screen and then just like literally just like record it with your phone and talk through it and point mindset shift. So why getting the highest price isn't about your tax rate, it's about your buyers. I'm not sure what this means. I need it to elaborate on that. Maybe that's just because I'm simple minded and I don't know all the ins and outs of selling. Though most owners focus on the tax bill, the smart ones focus on the value. Again, I'm not really sure what that means. So this is where you might need to like iterate or get it to clarify on some of these themes. Your biggest risk isn't taxes, it's due diligence. Killing the deal. This is kind of pointing towards like, you know, building a financial strategy in advance. Buyers don't just buy numbers, they buy your systems. Here's why that matters. Again, like, this points towards like having a CFO in here helping you like build KPIs and for all your systems demonstrations. So showing a mocked up P and L before and after cleanup. I don't know, maybe that could do something. Quick walkthrough of like buyer red flags versus buyer green flags. That's cool. And that could be a whole series. So the format it's suggesting here is story driven clips. So basically like storytelling, straight to camera, whiteboard explainers. I love that. This is a format that crushes on social and then split screen before versus after which that can also work if you do it right now. Bottom of funnel. This is where your actual like calls to action would be like hey DM me or click my link in bio or like comment keyword and I'll send you some kind of lead magnet. Bottom of funnel. We're talking about exit readiness. We're talking about like what a fractional CFO is. We're talking about how to get peace of mind with selling your business. And then here's your posting plan. So Monday through Wednesday is going to be top of funnel content. Thursday is a middle of funnel case or demo. And then Friday you're basically rotating between top of funnel or middle of funnel. Saturday you could potentially do bottom of funnel there. So that's a pretty solid cadence. And this would be totally doable to take like three or four hours once a month and just knock all of this out. Just plan out 20 videos, record them, literally record them on your phone. If you don't have a fancy studio set up like, like all of this. And I mean that's your social strategy right there. Like it doesn't have to be complicated to start out. The complexities come over time. Now that you've got something that's working somewhat, but you need it to work better. That's where it gets complex. Starting a social strategy, there's no complexity to it. The only thing holding you back is literally whether or not you're gonna do it. At the end of the day, guys, this is not complex. It's just getting inside your ideal customer's head and being able to transition them from what they think they're looking for to what they actually need demonstrating that to them, educating them on why that way is better, not how to do it. And that's how you get customers. If you like this video, you're definitely gonna like this one. Check it out and I'll see you over there. Are you. Are you gonna go? No. You're not going to check it out, are you? You're just gonna sit here and see how long this goes. I got you.