Ryan Vaughn teaches free tax education to build trust and attract clients who want either DIY help or hands-off service. He overdelivers on what's promised, stays transparent about what's included, and makes occasional asks for paid products. He warns against bait-and-switch tactics and under-delivering, saying profit requires conscious choice.
What is your marketing philosophy? That's the question we were asked. Um, yeah, we ultimately— our philosophy is to educate, to share as much as possible. Um, it's what's worked for me for 20, 15 to 20 years so far. Um, it's not coming— I wish I had a more eloquent answer, uh, but that's really what it's been. I mean, when I remember starting off And I had a couple of people ask if I'd be willing to for free share some tax education meetings with some of their clients. And I was like, absolutely, because when you share, you have a demographic of people. There's always going to be the DIYers, those who want to do it themselves. And so let me— yeah, they're going to be able to take my information and use what we teach, and they're going to get value out of it. And I don't get anything in return from those people. But there's enough of people— there's enough of the people in the world who don't want to do it themselves. They appreciate the openness to share because it helps them realize we're not going to hold back. You've probably been part of seeing things like this where you join something and it almost seems like their service that they're giving you is just to sell you on the next level of membership or cost or program that you need to join. It's like, what am I learning in this thing? It's like, oh, everything else, everything that you need to learn, that's at this level. You got to pay us a little bit more. And then when you get there, it's like, Cool. I thought I was gonna learn this. Oh no, it's the next level. People don't feel good when that happens. So we try our best to share as much as possible. We would rather overdeliver and then run the risk of someone coming back and saying, hey, you know what? This just isn't valuable enough for me. And certainly with thousands of clients, we have those who don't feel like they're getting value out of it. And part of our service philosophy then is going back and saying, where did we as a company mismanage expectations? Where weren't we clear on this is what you're paying, this is what you're getting, so that we can have that fair comparison? But again, back to marketing philosophy. It's really as simple as we just want to educate and teach, and it's worked out well for us where we have enough people interested in using our services by doing that. And so I have no, no current reason to assume that that's not a good way to go about things. So we're going to keep doing it as much as possible. And I will say this, you will get people who are mad at you. It just happens. Some people that I'm surprised that they're mad at us after some of those things that we do. And there's those moments when For example, someone responds and says, all you guys are doing is just marketing to me constantly. And it's like, I don't want people to feel like I'm marketing to them constantly. But you have to understand that there's a lot of people out there who have other stuff going on, and sometimes they just take it out on you as a business because, uh, sometimes it's safer to take out your frustration on an unfaced business than it is to maybe lash out at people closest to you. And maybe they're doing that as well, I don't know. But you have a moment when you get those— we— I do— someone's like, oh my gosh, why are you marketing to me? We had a client get really mad at us that we emailed people about, um, other people's books. Like, hey, so-and-so that I know wrote a valuable book, just letting you all know that it's available. People will be like, I don't want to hear that type of stuff. Stop trying to get me to buy other people's books. And even my book, when it published a couple years ago in January, people were like, why? Who is this guy? Why is he telling me to buy this book? Don't let that stop you. There should be a good balance between educate, give value as much as possible, but You also have to have an ask. Make asks. It's okay to make asks. This month, for example, in June of 2022, we had 2 asks, or at least things. You know, it wasn't a hard sell, but we felt like it's okay. We're creating a lot of value, and guess what? The thing that we're offering also is going to create a ton of value, and we offered a very reasonable price for it, for both things that we did. So don't let the haters get you down or change your philosophy. Know who you are and stick with it. We're gonna keep sharing value. And when we have something of value to offer, we are gonna let people know when it's like, hey, we gave you this free value and now we have something else. And it's gonna, if you wanna receive it, there's a payment that you need to give us and that's okay. So keep at it. Hopefully you've developed your marketing philosophy. There's a ton of marketing philosophies not to follow, so don't follow those. I think inherently most people know which ones are not good. The whole bait and switch things, being dishonest, lying, not delivering on what you said. Those are all things you should avoid. Okay. Remember, profit is a choice. Have the courage and wisdom to choose it.
