This Accountant Makes $8708 PER DAY (here's how)

In this video, I want to show you how one of my clients made $8,708 a day last year because he quit selling tax returns. So if you don't know who I am, my name is Peter Vanderwaal. I own Social Club Studios, where we help accounting firms scale past the seven figure ceiling. We've helped a bunch of accounting firms make millions of dollars, and one client in particular made about $3.1 million last year. So if you divide that by 365, that ends up being about $8,708 per day. And for context here, he sells a yearly tax Strategy service for $5,000 and then basically upsells everybody into tax preparation services as well every spring. So his average client is worth around 7 to $10,000 per year. And so what I want to cover in this video is essentially how he was able to do that. Right. So we'll be going over the marketing funnel that he's using to get all of these leads, how we're getting traffic into this funnel, so how we're getting in front of new people on the Internet, and then how we're tracking the ROI on this funnel on, on the back end. So just starting out with the marketing funnel, we like to keep things super simple. I think a lot of people add a lot of complexity to marketing. They make funnels seem super overwhelming. And like, you have to have a bunch of fancy moving pieces that are all like, interconnected. And from a technical standpoint, yes, there's a lot of complexity plugging in all your different softwares and everything. But from a conceptual standpoint, just understanding how this system needs to work, it's not actually that crazy. So we use basically a three step process. So we have a video sales letter, we have an application, and we have a discovery call. So I'll walk through what each of these are, but that's really it. A lot of marketers make this way too complicated. But this is really all you need to be able to book at least 100 to 150 calls a month and close, you know, 25% of them, which is about what we did last year. So starting off with the video sales letter, I just want to show you what his letter looks like right now. And so we've got this whole landing page with a video sales letter, some social proof, some client reviews, an application kind of written sales letter. So, you know, a lot of people, they don't have audio turned on or they're in a situation where like, turning audio on would be awkward or Maybe they just don't want to sit and watch a 5 or 10 minute video and they just want to kind of like breeze through the page and like get the highlights. And so a lot of this is just kind of pulled from the video sales letter itself. Meet the team, see what our clients say about us. So this is just a bunch of screenshots of people just sharing the experience they had working with Ryan in his Facebook group and then consistent calls to action throughout that. I'll bring you back to this application. So we'll talk about the application in a minute here. But the purpose of this video sales letter is just to make it really easy for a prospective client or somebody looking at this page, looking into Ryan services. We want them to be able to say yes or no. I think this is for me. So they watch this video sales letter and, and they understand whether this is for them or not. They also need to be able to understand what they're going to get out of this service. So what a lot of accountants do, and I think this is a huge mistake, but they sell their service as basically, oh, we'll do your payroll and we'll do your bookkeeping and we'll do three tax strategy calls throughout the year and this and that. And it's just line items of different accounting services that they're providing. But that's not what the customer is actually buying from you. What they're buying from you is the outcome they get from you performing that service. Right. And so that's what we focus on in every single video sales letter you can see. This one is titled How Real Estate Investors Can Pay Little to Nothing in Taxes to the irs. That's what people want, Right? And for a tax strategy offer that's fairly simple and fairly obvious, for some other types of accounting offers like bookkeeping or cfo, it's a little bit less obvious because they don't actually want a financial strategy. Right. If you're a CFO and you're kind of providing like the financial strategy for their business, they don't want a financial strategy. They want the peace of mind that comes from a financial strategy. They want the ease of navigating big moves in their business that comes from having a financial strategy. But having the term financial strategy actually doesn't mean anything to a prospective client because they don't understand what that does for them. And then the third thing we want people to be able to gather from this VSL or from the landing page, at least that this video sales letter is on, is has this service worked for other people like me. And so that's why we include some client testimonials right here. Now, this is probably the weakest form of testimonial, just like written and, you know, dawn real estate investor, because this would be so freaking easy to fake, right? I could just make up a million of these if I wanted to. I could throw it in chat GPT and have it give me a million of these. But as we get further down, you can see all these screenshots from his Facebook group. These are a lot harder to fake. Obviously you could try to Photoshop them, but, you know, it's kind of the next level up. And then on some further pages in this funnel and inside the video sales letter itself, we've got kind of harder evidence. We've got pictures of tax returns before and after using Ryan's tax strategy. We've got video testimonials from real people that he's worked with. And so I would just prioritize, like, you know, especially if you're a little bit smaller and maybe you haven't worked with like hundreds and hundreds of clients, if you can prioritize just a couple of video testimonials where you're on a zoom call and you're just interviewing the person about their experience working with you, and you use that, three or four of those will go a really long way. Now, if you're a more mature company and you've had, you know, hundreds of success stories that you've worked with, I would still do those video testimonials. But the thing I would lean really hard into is volume. And that's kind of the direction we're trying to go here with Ryan's stuff. Because you look at this page in 1, 2, 3, then 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. We've got 15 different testimonials on here. Just the volume of it. And especially if you're on mobile, just scrolling through these, it just keeps going and going and going. And so over time, we're just going to keep compiling that and keep compiling that. Imagine you're trying to find a restaurant for dinner, right? And there's one that has 50 reviews that are all five star, and there's one that has 5,000 reviews that at like a 4.6, you're probably going to choose the one with 5,000 reviews, even though it's technically a little bit lower rating. And there's some kind of volume bias in there. And so if you're a bit more mature company, you've been in business longer, you've had hundreds of success stories trying to document those or get those reviews from people and just like overwhelm your prospects with volume of all of these success stories that you've had. It's really powerful technique that you can use here. So that's your video sales letter page. And like I said, the goal here is for prospects to be able to self select in or out. We want them to watch the video sales letter and we want them to be able to say yes, I think this is for me. And they go take the next step. Or they watch it and they realize, you know what, this isn't actually what I was looking for. And they don't take the next step. Either way, that's a win for you because either you got a qualified person to say yes to take the next step, or you got an unqualified person to leave, which is just as important. And so the next step here is the application process. So if the video sales letter is the client vetting you and, and seeing if they think you are what they're looking for, the application is you vetting the prospect and seeing if they're what you are looking for in terms of clients that you would work with. And so a lot of you probably have this kind of thing already in place. Maybe you use calendly to like book your calls and they've got like a routing forms feature where you can route people to book a call or not book a call based on how they answer the questions. But I actually think a lot of accounting firms make a big mistake here because they put too much form friction in this process. Now what do I mean by friction? Essentially every step you add into your marketing and sales process makes it a little bit harder to get the prospect across the finish line. Now, a certain amount of that is actually really good because it pushes away the people who aren't qualified to work with you and it pushes away the people who aren't that dedicated or that bought into working with you. But there's some types of friction that don't actually discriminate based on whether the person's qualified. So for example, if you get 100 people landing on your application and and only 75 of them actually fill out the form, it could be that there were 25 unqualified people who either got booted by the form or just realized by watching the video sales letter, this isn't for them. It could also be though, that you've put too much friction in this process and those 25 people are a mix of qualified and unqualified leads. And this happens all the time. You see, it turns out people who make a lot of money don't have a lot of time. And so they're less inclined to stick around and screw around with a form that's asking them a billion questions about their business. And so you got to figure out the right balance here because on the one hand, we do need to qualify and disqualify people, but on the other hand, we need to make sure we're not pushing away otherwise good leads. And so you can see here this application step is fairly minimal. We're just asking for first name, last name, phone and email, which obviously auto fill onto the actual calendar, booking on the next page. And then we've got what's your total income? And how many rental properties do you own? And you'll notice both of these are are dropdowns with different options on them. We're not just putting a blank box that they have to type In, I made $230,000 last year. What we're doing is your total income. Anybody who makes under $200,000, we're booting them. We're saying, sorry, we're not a good fit to work together at this time. Here's some free content you can look at, because we just know even if you own a couple of rentals and you could get a benefit out of having a tax strategy, people who make less than $200,000 a year are generally pretty afraid to make that level of investment into a service like Ryan's. And so, you know, maybe only 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 20 of those will actually close and turn into a new client. That's not a very good conversion rate. We're just going to push those away. It's not worth our time for our sales reps. And then the second question here is, how many rental properties do you own? And we're not actually booting people if they don't have enough rental properties. We could, but we've actually seen that that doesn't make a huge difference in terms of whether or not they say yes on the call. And so a lot of you are putting in, like, how much did you pay in taxes last year? Which, by the way, 99% of people don't actually know the correct number. They might think they know because they paid 15 grand whenever their tax return was filed last year. But, oh, by the way, you actually paid in 35 grand throughout the year in payroll taxes and quarterlies and all this stuff that you didn't think of. And so your actual tax bill is 50 grand. But you go into the call thinking, oh, this person only paid 15 grand on $300,000 worth of income. They're doing pretty all right. Essentially, any question that causes them to have to think think is a bad idea. We want this to be robotic. We want to be qualifying or disqualifying them based solely on general facts that can just come to mind for them instantaneously. And so from this application, anybody who makes over $200,000 a year gets to go ahead and book a discovery call. And I think mechanically, most of you are probably doing this part right already. You might use calendly or some other scheduling software where they can select the time on your calendar to. To speak with you. And it's on a zoom call and they get the reminder sequences and the text reminders and everything from you. That's all great. If you don't have that, you need it. We're not talking about that here. The mistake I see most accounting firms making on their discovery calls is it really is just a discovery call or even a qualification call. They're asking a bunch of questions to basically determine whether this is a client we can work with and what can we sell this person? Like, which service do they need to buy? And then they basically go, okay, sounds like we can help you. Here's our service. And that's no way to sell anything. See, your actual objective here is we need to identify where the prospect is currently and where they want to be. So we're creating a gap. And so we're not just going to be asking, like, questions that you could put on a form somewhere. In fact, when you're coming up with your sales script, I always start with the pitch at the end because that tells me what questions I need to ask in the beginning. Right? So if my pitch is a tax strategy service with, you know, three calls during the year with a cpa and we'll review your prior year tax returns and, you know, maybe you've got a weekly community call where all of your clients can hop on 48 our email support. We need to be asking the type of questions that would make the prospect realize that this service is what they need. And so really we're just trying to get the prospect to say, like, I'm paying a lot in taxes. My local CPA doesn't do any strategy for me, and he says no to all my suggestions. And I feel like he doesn't really care about me. Like, if you can get the prospect to say that to you, then that's really all you need to be able to say, okay, great, our tax strategy service is going to fix all of that. And by the way, our Average client saves $28,000 a year or whatever your number is, right? Because once you sufficiently uncover their pain, you can pitch your service. If you haven't sufficiently uncovered their pain, then you're just gonna be talking to a brick wall when it comes time to like, actually show them what all your service entails. And the important thing to note here too is that all of the parts of the funnel that came before this can make sure that this call is properly framed in the prospect's mind. So what do I mean by that? If you're seeing the same exact objections come up over and over and over and over again, if you coming onto the call and they're like, what are we supposed to talk about on this call? I don't remember. Actually happens with high level business owners who book calls. I promise you, I've seen this. If this stuff is happening, then we've got a framing issue earlier on in the funnel. So it might be your video sales letter, it might be your landing page, it might be your client testimonials, it might be your email sequencing, it might be your ads or your content where you're sending people into this funnel. But regardless of where specifically it's at, we need to address that. And so that means actually going back, making that tweak in the funnel, and then taking a few weeks or a month and seeing how your calls pan out over that period. By the way, this whole funnel that I've been walking you through, this is part of the service that my team and I provide for all our clients. So if you're interested in having your first real marketing funnel done with only about two hours of your own time invested, then go ahead and click the first link in the description, there's a video going over all the details, and you can book a call there. And so at this point, when you've got this video sales letter, you've got this application, you've got this discovery call, you've basically got like a minimum viable product for your first funnel. There's other stuff you could possibly add in here, like lead magnets or an email list, or different elements that can be helpful down the road. But to be honest with you, we've got all that stuff over at Ryan's firm and still probably 80% of his results come through this funnel. And so once you've got this built, it's really just about getting traffic into the funnel. Now, over time, you'll need to make adjustments because we want to make sure every element, every step of this path is operating at 100% efficiency. But once you've kind of got these core elements put together and ready to go, now we just need to get people into this system. I like to think of it almost like an assembly line, where our content or our ads or whatever external marketing we're doing to get in front of new people. We're just trying to send raw materials, essentially, AKA cold leads, into this funnel where they get warmed up, they get crafted, they get educated about your brand and kind of indoctrinated into your way of thinking and your way of doing things. And they come out the end as a warm lead booked on your sales calendar, ready to speak to you. And so that being the case, you can have as many traffic sources as you like. So for Ryan's company, we post organically on basically all the social media platforms. We post on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter. We run ads on Facebook and Instagram, and we also publish a podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. So our objective here is essentially omnipresence. We want to be everywhere, because if somebody sees a couple of his videos on Instagram and then they also somehow stumble upon a couple of his videos on LinkedIn, and then they also somehow stumble upon a few of his podcasts on YouTube, Ryan has a whole different status in their mind than if he was just posting on Instagram and they were just seeing his content there. And a really important component of this is something called the 7114 rule. So there was a big general social survey that came out. Google did kind of a meta analysis on it, and they came up with this. Basically, in order to become a dedicated customer of your brand, people need to spend seven hours with you across 11 different touch points and in four locations. And so having all of these platforms is really crucial when you're at the size of Ryan's firm and you're still growing at the rate of his firm is growing. For context, he was a corporate W2 employee until 2022. So this is really recent development for his business. And so with this, there's different ways to interweave it, right? He comes out with a podcast on YouTube, and then we can share that podcast on his Instagram story and on Facebook. And that's all important. That's all, like, social media tactics, which I don't want to get into in this video. I want to cover More strategically, what this is and how this works. All roads need to lead to Rome, okay? And so roam is of course, this two hour funnel that we just talked about up here. So they find him on LinkedIn, they end up in that funnel. They find him on Instagram, they end up in the funnel. They listen to a podcast, they end up in the funnel. Even if they find him on Instagram and then go watch a podcast and then they Notice him on LinkedIn, they still end up in the exact same funnel no matter what. Because we've optimized this funnel for conversion for this tax strategy service that he sells. And so once you've got the funnel built out and you're getting traffic into the funnel either from ads or from social media content, it's really important to have data tracking and attribution systems on the backend so that you can track your roi. Because let's say you're posting on a bunch of different platforms and you're not sure where most of your leads are coming from, which platform is most effective for you, which ad strategy or ad campaign or ad platform is the most effective for you, then you're just kind of throwing stuff out there and you're like hoping it works, right? And sometimes you stumble upon greatness. In fact, this is actually how we started out with Ryan's company. We didn't have this data or attribution tracking, and he scaled really, really quickly. The first two you run into is anytime there's a downturn, you kind of don't know what happened. You know, if we're used to getting a hundred calls booked a month, and this month we only get 50, is it because our ads are less effective? Is it because our Instagram content isn't getting out there? Have our podcasts been less interesting to people? What's going on? And by the way, same thing would apply if you're booking a hundred calls a month and you suddenly you get 200 in a month. Like, I want to know what you did different or why it is that we just doubled our call volume, because then we lean harder into that, right? And so we've got this software called a Hiros plugged into Ryan stuff where you can see here, these are all calls that recently booked on a sales calendar over the past week or so, I guess. And we can see exactly where each of these came from. So we're tracking origin source, which is where they first found us, but we're also tracking last source, which is the last thing they clicked on before they ended up booking that call. And both of these are super important here. Now you'll see some of these people are coming from. This is a Facebook ad. This is Facebook, just his profile on Facebook, his Facebook group. So people are finding him a lot of different ways. But the majority of these people, the way they're actually going ahead and booking a call is just by Googling his company, which is really interesting to me. And I actually made a video a little while ago about making it easy for people to Google you. Because even if they find you from an ad or from social media or from wherever, even from an outreach message that you sent, they're going to Google you. And it's very possible that that's the way they'll ultimately convert, but that doesn't mean that's the way they initially became aware that you exist. And that's what we're seeing here with some of this data here. Now there's two main metrics that we're tracking throughout Ryan's entire funnel. Okay, so number one is roas, and number two is LTGP to cac. So to walk you through each of these and what they mean, ROAS is basically a short term metric that we're using. So it's just very simply new revenue divided by ad spend. So this is a really great short term metric of how scalable a paid ads funnel is. It's basically how much are you spending right now on ads versus how much money are you making back from those ads right now? And bare minimum, you got to be break even on this, right? Like if I'm spending $5,000 a month on ads and I'm only getting $3,000 of new clients each month, then that sucks. I'm not going to keep doing that even if I know those clients are going to pay me more later down the line. I'm essentially going into debt against myself to try to scale that. So the target we like to aim for is usually about a 4 to 1 or a 5 to 1, meaning you're making back $5 for every dollar you spent on ads. We do have some clients as high as like a 10 or 12 to 1, but usually a reasonable expectation is around 4 or 5. And so the second metric that we're tracking here is something called LTGP to cac. And this is more of a long term metric or a holistic metric on your business. But essentially LTGP is lifetime gross profit. So obviously you would calculate that based on, you know, what's the lifetime value of the customer, how much are they going to spend throughout their entire lifetime with you, minus the cost of goods sold over that lifetime. So how much is it going to cost specifically to deliver on them? This might even be a metric that you're tracking already overall on your business, maybe just not on a client per client basis. Right. You could probably figure out what your gross profit is right now, and you can just divide that by how many clients you have, and that's that. Now the other metric here is called cac, and this is your cost to acquire a customer. And so the way you would calculate this is basically what's your total marketing and sales spend divided by your number of new customers. And so a lot of people, especially a lot of agencies, if you're working with an agency right now and they're giving you a CAC number, it may not be accurate. And the reason for that is a lot of people make it just ad spend divided by number of new customers. And so let's say you spend $5,000 a month on ads and you get five new customers, your CAC would be $1,000. But the problem with that is there's other costs associated with your marketing. And the only reason you have those costs is to get new clients in the door. So that's part of your cost to acquire a customer. So if there's software that you use in your marketing department, if there's people working in your marketing department, if you're paying an agency fee every month, that's part of your marketing spend, right? And so you might be spending $5,000 a month on ads, but you might also be spending $3,000 a month on the agency service to do those. You might also be spending $2,000 a month on video editors for your social media content. And so your total marketing spend is actually 10,000amonth divided by those five new customers that you just got. And so your CAC is actually $2,000. So this is really, really important here to get clear on what's your total marketing spend. Now, this metric is a really good long term measure of how scalable your business is. Right? The higher the ratio, basically the more you need to just pump growth as fast as humanly possible. And so if you're seeing a 4 to 1 here, that's okay. That means every dollar you spend on getting new customers, you'll get $4 back. That might not be right away, but that'll be over the 12 or 18 months or the three to five years or however long the client's gonna stay with you. But if we're seeing something closer to 8 to 1 or 10 to 1, or 15 to 1. That's an incredible number. And that usually means you stumbled upon some sort of new opportunity. It's very rare that you see those numbers on a business very long term. And so probably you've just got this opportunity for a brief window before everybody starts doing whatever it is you're doing that's getting you this good of a number. And so you just need to make hay while the sun shines. Something that's important to understand here is the more you make per client, the more you can afford to spend on marketing. And the more you can spend on marketing, of course, the harder it's going to be for your competition to be able to keep up. And so the long term game here is basically just getting your CAC to a respectable number, something that's like fine, and then spending 100% of your time on increasing LTV on every customer. It's kind of like the budgeting versus like just go make more money debate. Like, do you focus on budgeting and saving money or do you focus on just making as much as possible? You can only budget your way down to zero. The lowest CAC you could possibly have is zero. And none of us are ever going to see that, ever. Theoretically, the LTV of the customer, the amount of money you can make on the customer is kind of infinite. Like if you can come up with a service where people stay with you for 10 years, I mean, the LTV on that is insane. And so we really just want to get it to where our cost to acquire a customer is fine. It's not bad, it's not amazing. And then focus everything we've got on increasing customer LTV over the long term and making as much money as humanly possible from each customer. And if you like this video, I've got another video right here showing the math to actually calculate your own LTGP to cac. There's an Excel spreadsheet template, you can grab it over here.