Marketing Magic: Growing Your Accounting Business

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Steven Libhart. Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. And today we're going to talk— it's just me and Steve, and we're going to talk about marketing magic, growing your accounting business. So, well, Steve, what's your top tip? I know what you're going to say.

So before we start, how are you?

I'm good. How are you?

Good. Doing good. It's the middle of summer when we're recording this. And Sarah's— where's Sarah? Where is she? You want to share where she's at?

Don't know.

Don't know? Sarah's missing. Where in the world is Sarah?

Yeah. Last I knew, she was in San Francisco at the Gusto Next conference.

Well, if she's in San Francisco, we're in trouble.

Yeah. So, yeah, I don't really know. But yeah, so I love this topic. So I just I just love— I know I just finished reading Gary Vaynerchuk's book. Gary Vee, do you know who he is?

I've heard of him.

You should. He's an interesting one to follow. He's a little rough around the edges, but his, uh, his book is called Crush It. Still remember that? How hard is that to remember? Yeah, but he did a book a long time ago about marketing, and then now he's updated it to be what today's world of how to market your firm. And it's interesting how things are changed. So I got the audiobook, and I highly recommend anybody wants to get the book. It's not a long listen, so it's not even a long read, I'm sure. But the audiobook is cool because he goes, I'm getting off script. I'm just going to go off script. And he tells stories through it. So if you like—

Nice.

He's very energized. But yeah, so I know you've built your practice basically— I shouldn't say it's all referral because really what you did was you did the groundwork and the legwork for, um, your— you've done your legwork for proving yourself out to be the expert. And that's the first step, don't you think, that you have to—

I agree. That's the tip. When you mentioned the tip a while ago, my— what's worked for me, and I, I've, I've been on the faculty at the Bar Association here in Colorado since 2010, and even though from time to time other people will step in and want to teach law firm accounting, that's fine, I welcome them. to do it because there's so many different subjects. Like the one I'm doing next month at the bar is specifically focused on accounts receivable. But to your point, you do become the expert and, you know, people may call you and say, you know, I saw your webinar that came out of one of the classes you taught at the Bar Association in 2013 and you said this. And I'm like, oh, sure, because I don't remember what I said in 2013. But, but They will contact you and you— they may not be looking for a bookkeeping accounting service at that point in time, but it's always give them the information, become the expert, even if you don't know it. Fake it till you make it, like you've always said, you know. You're definitely going somewhere.

Yeah.

And follow up. Follow up. If you, if you think you gave them a weak answer, don't be afraid to follow up and say, hey, I didn't mention this or I didn't mention that. But anyway, these classes are what's really worked for us. In this market.

But you didn't just walk in and say, here I am, can I do a class? You had to have let them know that you knew what you were talking about.

Well, I was really blessed in that an attorney friend of mine was so impressed with what I was doing in law firms where I was working that he contacted the head of the Bar Association and said, you need Steve to teach one of your classes. He's just really personable with it and brings it down to earth and all of that. And so my first class, I was scared. Spitless. I was so scared, but I did it, and I picked up 3 clients out of that first class.

That's amazing.

And I was like, well, I'm going to just go to work and do this full-time. And so, yeah.

What were you scared about? Were you scared about speaking in public, or were you scared about not knowing an answer that may come at you?

That's what scared me, because I had a room full of brand-new attorneys. It was the Hang Your Shingle workshop. Which is the newbie attorneys, and we do it once a year. And I was scared half to death that I wouldn't be able to answer a question, but it went really well and I loved it. And there were a lot of vendors there, and that was back in 2010 when Clio was in its infancy and they were there.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, I was like, what's this Clio? And, you know, and, and, and so I was learning a lot of things too from that presentation and that class. And all of a sudden it just started opening up doors. So, You know, somebody referred me to them, and that was my, my segue into teaching.

Yes, I guess referrals really were— was your thing, because you don't just— I'm— if I went to the Florida Bar starting out, not now because I've proven myself, right, with a podcast and the—

Right.

And all of that. But if I was just going to start saying I'm going to work with lawyers, and I remember this when I first decided to go work exclusively with attorneys, I remember sitting there thinking, what do I need to do to get myself out there. I already had experience in accounting. I just needed to show them that I knew how to do law.

Same thing.

Yeah, the law firm piece. And I think that if you're sitting in the same place as me and you're, you're like, how do I get the— get it out there that I know this stuff? First of all, you got to learn it, right? That's number one before you even start to promote that you do this. Right.

I worked, I worked in law firms, so I felt I had that confidence that I At least could act like I knew what I was talking about.

Right. You need to at least— I don't think you have to be so proficient in it. I think you just need a background. You need to know some of the language.

The language.

What the account is, right? You need to know the lingo. You need to know what's a client advanced cost. There's some terms you just want to know generally that are words you wouldn't hear with a regular file with an e-commerce customer, for example. And then you want to be able to Explain those things. And I think you probably taught about trust accounting many times when you did these sessions, I'm assuming.

And I always was— they would always— I requested this, they would put me on before Attorney Regulation Counsel so I could talk about the nuts and bolts of trust accounting, and then they would follow up with the regulations, which was really cool. Oh, cool.

So you kind of learned from them too?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And whenever— a lot of times I'll go to their classes and I'll show up and they're like, what are you doing here? And I'm like, I just want to see what the latest and greatest is. And we just, we really network well.

I was telling you, you're in their space, which is probably one of my other recommendations, is if you're working with the law firms, you've got to get into— take their webinars, right? Read their electronic, uh, trying to think of the word here, uh, any notify—

any They're listserv.

Like the ABA, read their blog posts, read, read all the information you can get your fingertips on, because that's where you need to start to absorb and learn it. Because if there's a new rule, like the California rule that just came out 2 years ago with the change in what the bar was requesting from, from the lawyers in California.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Big deal. And it generated a lot of work our way because of the change in the regulations, but You want to be involved in knowing those things. If you have clients in specific states, pull up the bar rules, learn what they're asking for. That is a wealth of information right there for working with lawyers.

And you know what? This, especially in a state like yours or New York or California, there and there in Colorado, we have them, but not to the degree that you guys have in your larger states. There are so many subgroups within each bar association. You do not have to go put on a class in front of 50 to 200 people or whatever. You can pick a subgroup that appeals to you. Maybe it's women in law or Hispanic law group or whatever. Look up their subgroups in your area of the state that you're in and go speak to them. And all of a sudden you're working with people that you picked out.

Yeah.

That you want to present to, that you want to appeal to. It's really crazy.

So when you did this initially, you had an attorney kind of come forward and and recommend you. You didn't get paid to do it. You just did it because you got—

I do it for free.

You did it for free because you're getting paid by the referrals that came back to you. So in a way, you're advertising, but it's not costing you money, but you're gaining the clientele on the other side. And I think sometimes when it comes to marketing and it comes to letting everybody, let the world know what you're doing. So if you're going to switch up and just specifically narrow down into a niche like working with lawyers, You want to let everybody know that you're doing this. You sing it from the rooftops. Let your friends know. Let your family know. Let everybody know that you're doing this because you never know if just saying it might talk to somebody else or somebody else, and then it becomes, oh, do you—

You know what? You know, I'm an Airstreamer. And this weekend I was up in the mountains at a music festival and lo and behold, met an attorney up there. And he's like, are you Steve Libhart? And I said, I am. And he goes, you got the guy with the podcast. And I said, yes. And I was like, are you, are you watching our podcast? He's like, I listen to you all the time. And we sat down. His wife was like, I wasn't going to tell you he was an attorney because I knew this was going to happen. And we sat for the entire weekend whenever we saw each other and we talked and just talk, talk, talk legal. And he's, he has actually been in a couple of my classes. And so I asked, I told him what I'm doing next month at the bar and I said, so give me some pointers from your side of the fence. What I should be saying now. And I was taking notes. And it does— you become known out there. And it's not a quick fix. Don't do a one and done.

None of this marketing stuff happens. There's not a— it's not like, oh, I did it and I'm all set now. No, you have to— even if you're starting out with a website and a blog posting, this stuff takes at least 2 years, if not more. And I think—

I have the most pathetic website in the world, but because I teach at the bar, people know who I am.

Yeah, you don't need a professional one. But if you want, I mean, I probably could go back and do all of my websites over and make them better. I think the thing I took from the book, however, is, and actually podcasting is a great way to get yourself out there, social proof. People can listen to you. As Steve just said, maybe you met with an attorney, maybe he'll end up hiring you. You don't know. A lot of times there's multiple channels, right? You get yourself out in front of multiple people. One of the things I think I did as a mistake When I was marketing was I was trying to spread myself too thin in any channel.

Yeah, that's a common mistake.

Yeah. Like, I'm all right, I'm going to do it on Instagram and I'm going to do it on Facebook and I'm going to do it on Twitter and I'm going to do it in— name it, you name the social channel, trying to put myself out there in all these different places.

You had that energy going and you just wanted to grab whatever you could.

LinkedIn, right? Everybody said LinkedIn, LinkedIn. That's the way you want to be. That's where the attorneys are. And I really never got one thing off of LinkedIn other than a lot of people who want me to hire them as their Outsourcing teams.

Yeah.

I mean, LinkedIn is good for what it is. I've not had success. But then we have a friend that's in the Law Lab that she does tremendous work in her marketing, and she has somebody who does her posts, and she says she gets a lot of clients from it. So it's hit or miss. You just have to find the one that works for you. And that's the big key too. If you start to put all— lay the groundwork, you're doing a podcast, and you don't have to do a podcast like we're doing every week, but you can get yourself on other podcasts.

Exactly.

Reach out and ask, right? I'm here. I know this. Find a podcast that you think your clients will listen to and then reach out to them and say, hey, I'd love to be a guest on your podcast.

And it doesn't specifically have to be a law-related podcast. It can— you can be— these podcasts are always looking for guests. And so you can say, hey, I could really contribute. Your podcast, and it might be one on dealing with stress in an account, you know, in an accounting job. There's a podcast out there that would love to talk about that, you know, and you just have to find it.

If you come up with a topic and some questions for the host, you're going to be told. If you ask, if you put the feelers out and ask and ask if you could be on it, I guarantee if you do all that back work, you make it easy for the people running the podcast to be able to have you on. That's worth its weight in gold. And now you're opening yourself up to another larger audience. And the more people you get your name out to, the more—

And what is one of my favorite subjects, Linda?

KPIs.

KPIs right there is a huge marketing tool. If there's, if there's a niche that you want to work in, in the legal industry, let's say you pick family law. That's what you want to do. You want to work with that niche within a niche. Um, learn the KPIs that are, that are really part of what a family law firm would be working with. What are the expected KPIs, like labor statistics? You know, what are their— what is their payroll percentage to revenue to collections to, you know, whatever the KPI might be? And approach some firms and say, hey, I will give you a, a complimentary KPI study if you'll just give me a few minutes. And all of a sudden You've perked up their ears because that owner of that law firm is sitting there going, I've got this benefits package, I've got rent, I've got insurance, I've got all these expenses. And, you know, I'm doing all these flat rates for divorces. And so I, you know, I'm kind of locked in this, this one financial block here. What can I do with my KPIs to make more profit?

Yeah.

You know, there's, there's so many ways to do this to get yourself out there.

And because there really is, I mean, writing, if you're a writer, you like to write, you could write.

You're good at that.

I love writing.

I love writing. This is a great marketing tool that you've used. I mean, the 2 books you've written. Is this 2 books?

Well, one book and one in the works.

One in the works. But you let me read your first one and I was just like, this is so cool. This is a great—

And that's before AI. I mean, with the AI, you could probably even make it better. But this before AI where you had to write it all yourself and Yeah, it took a lot of time. I mean, that's a time-consuming project. But if you like to do it, it's always like—

You love.

And I think that's one of the things that my biggest takeaway from, you know, Gary Vee's book was he said you need to be your authentic self. He doesn't like to write. He said so writing didn't work for him. But going on podcasts and just doing video blogs, you don't have to write the words if you're good at video, hopping on in a video. And he did a lot of them. So when he started to blanket it, he did videos every day to get going.

Wow.

Got it out every day and he just pound out the video, pound out the video, pound out the content every single day. There was something from him. So people get used to seeing you. And I think that you have to be careful what social media platform you're using because some of them will ding you if you do too much and they definitely would ding if you, if you're sharing that content across different channels. So you have to be very careful and mindful of that. But one of the things he said was, be mindful about how you present it and be yourself. So don't try to be somebody that you're not. Don't try to be— be your authentic self, basically, is what he was saying, which makes a lot of sense, right? You wanna be— I think people will gravitate to you if you're authentic. If you— and I think sometimes if you're telling a story about a job or something that you did and, you know, you don't use the names, but you're trying to explain or teach somebody something. It's a lot about teaching and sharing what you know and telling the story like, hey, I screwed this one up big time. It just, it humanizes you, but it also makes people know you're not perfect, that you didn't, you, Steve didn't decide one morning, oh, you wake up going, oh, I think I'll just do law firm accounting today. And then everybody just flocks to you. That's not how it works.

Busy bus does not pull up to the front door.

No, you have to do the legwork. You have to put the work in. You have to do the hours. It's not simple. If you don't like marketing, you know, you have to pay for— have to have somebody do it. But if you do like marketing, there's gonna be some part of marketing, especially if you don't have the money in the beginning. Try to find some part of marketing. Like Gary didn't like to write. He went into doing video, the vlogs they call them, video things. For me, I love writing the blog posts. I don't know if blog posts are all that— I don't know if they're all that good other than a blog. If you keep a blog site on your page, You get your website, you create it, it's beautiful. And if you don't refresh it with something all the time, Google thinks it's old. It starts to drop it down from the search engine. So if you—

And you've done a lot of blogging.

A lot of blogging. So if you keep putting up blogs every— like Law Lab, I put a blog post up every week. Artist on Accounting, I've dialed that back to once a month only because I can't do 2 blogs. I haven't done any for— I've done a couple for proper trust. And we were gonna— Tia and I were gonna try to do something there and make it work, take some of my old stuff and just repurpose it. Because you can—

Sure.

Yeah. You can repurpose, and it saves a lot of time. You just have to map it out. One of the things that's cool about the, the ChatGPTs of the world is you can tell it what you want to do and then tell it to make you a social media calendar. And then you can come up with— it'll help you come up with the topics. So if you're not quite sure what you want to talk about, You could do that. Now, I've always been a person, and probably not a good way to do this, but I always try to write from what I feel like happened to me during the week or what I think came up in a question. Somebody asked me a question.

You know, that's funny you mentioned that because I've gotten that feeling from you watching some of your recordings. I'm like, she— so this just happened to her and she wants to—

There's no flow to it.

Yeah, no, but it's cool. You want to share it. You want to be excited.

But I don't know if it's a good way to do it. I'm not sure if it's better to like plot it out and say, okay, I'm going to talk about Clio for the month of August. I'm going to talk about LeanLaw for the month of September, and I'm going to talk about client costs for the month of— maybe it's better to do that and to really plan it to keep the audience hooked in instead of randomly whatever Linda feels like the day she wakes up and is going to write that day. It's going to be whatever happens to be on front of mind.

Spontaneous is good too, because that attracts people and they're like, what's she going to talk about today?

What's next, right?

Yeah.

Maybe. I don't know. I know there's schools of thought. You can really study it. I think if you go on HubSpot, it's a great resource for like what's up and coming, what's being used. There was a lot of things on that audiobook, places I never even heard of that he talked about learning and growing and building your brand inside of these places I've never heard of. So there's a lot of social media places. I think there's a lot of social media. I mean, you know, the big players, but there's other ones that are there that maybe you can be, um, a big fish in a small pond as opposed to being a small fish in a big pond.

Well, and I'll tell you, if you're, if you're new to this niche and you're scared and you've got your first client and you're just, you know, you've taken them because you've got to pay the rent, if you, if you Use the right language with them. Instead of saying, I'm going to teach you this, you can change it to, I'm going to share this with you. I have something really exciting to share with you, and it's KPIs. Instead of, I'm going to teach you KPIs and this is what you're going to do. You know, it's all in how you listen to them, how you phrase it, and how you appeal to their sense of urgency. Because attorneys— we were talking about this before the podcast started this morning.

Yeah.

You know, attorneys generally, when, when they need something, all of a sudden it becomes an emergency and they want it right now. And so you, you learn how to work with them and how to use their language, but also how to calm them down, how to become the expert with them, how to create that safety that you're going to always follow through. And before you know it, they're saying, hey, I've got this really great bookkeeper. You know, or like on the listserv with the Colorado Bar Association, I look at it every day and every once in a while There'll be a posting. I need a good bookkeeper, I need a good accountant or whatever. Our name might come up, somebody else's name might come up, but I like to read why people are recommending them and how I can use some of that the next time around when I'm consulting with someone. Does that all make sense? It's how you approach it, and that's marketing.

Yeah, you know, it truly is. And if you get— there's nothing like a referral either. That means that somebody adores you that much.

Yeah.

Now telling somebody else about you that you might want to reach out to this person because You've got this problem and I know they can help you. And the fact that they've worked with you and they think that much of you to refer you over, because attorneys are— they do a lot of that networking.

They do.

Work together a lot of times, or they meet at places.

And they're opposing counsel and yet they'll go out and have a drink after the hearing, you know.

Right, right, exactly. So I mean, those are the things that I think when it comes to marketing, there's a lot of work. You've got to look at your website. You want to look at Google My Business, which is not called that. I think it's just called Google Business.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. You wanna have Google Business because you wanna have that presence. You're telling Google, this is formally what my business is. And they make you make a little tiny website that's in their temp. They have like 5 or 6 templates. Not very pretty, not hard to create it, but you— it wants that to be able to— when you log in and you do a search on that little right-hand box that pops up, that's you. And you wanna create that. You don't want them to create that. You wanna create it yourself with the hours and the details and photos and post to that. And at I think that sometimes that's a piece that's missed by a lot of businesses, but it will also help you with search engines. Search engine, you wanna be able to be found. And if you don't have that happening in your, your website, it takes time. That also takes time to elevate your site. Your new sites don't—

Sure, sure.

That's the other problem with all this is that everything takes time. So it's not instant. We talked about this in the Law Lab today. We were talking about When you start to work with attorneys, getting going and getting the work to come in, when you start to do this, you don't just fire all your existing clients. Like, I don't work with you anymore, you know, contractor, Mr. Contractor, Mr. Pool Guy. You don't, you don't do that. You got to eat, you got to pay your bills. You keep them. I call them my legacy clients. I keep them. Eventually they age out or they close, right?

Right.

And I'm not seeking them anymore, but I've not I, I still take care of them, and they feel almost like family. I've had them for 20, 25 years now. So—

I've got a few of those.

Yeah, you don't want to ever— I think sometimes it's a misconception. People think when you're done, when you decide to just work with attorneys, boom, that's it, you're all done, you're going to go right to— you just get rid of all those clients. Sometimes you don't. You just keep them, and you just keep them on the side, and you do the work for them, and That's how you're gonna make the crossover. And eventually, I can remember the day when I got— LeanLaw had given me some referrals. So going to a vendor that you like their software, they will refer it back to you.

I was just gonna say vendors.

Yeah. And then I remember the day that I got my first client because that's how I started. I got one from off of the ProAdvisor site of all places. Think about that, how many years ago that was. And then getting him and then Putting him into LeanLaw, then meeting LeanLaw, and then starting a relationship with them, which was great. And they would feed me some referrals. Um, Clio does referrals, and I'm sure all the other ones do as well. And then that's a way to build up the practice. And then—

Absolutely.

I can remember from all the changing my blog posts from being just talking generally about things that happen in QuickBooks to just talking about law firm stuff. And it took a good full year, and I still can remember it was in September, and I remember sending a message over to Jonathan Fishman at LeanLaw, and I'm like, I got my first one on my own from my stuff that I was putting out there, my marketing, my blog post, my information. And I can remember he was like, congratulations. And it wasn't a LeanLaw one, but I got my first one. And it felt good to be able to get a client on my own. That meant my marketing was working. But literally having this broad scope of knowledge base that I'm talking to a lot of people and then narrowing it down to attorneys, it dried up the calls and the marketing kind of stalled because I didn't have enough information out there to tell people what I was doing. And I was stopping. It was almost like taking that fire hose and like squeezing it down to a drip. And that's a scary time of the year. So if you find that scary time in your practice, if you end up doing this, make sure you have some money to carry you through because you might find that as you shift your messaging over, you might not get the referrals or the regular clients that you were getting before. They might land on your site and say, oh, she only works with lawyers, and then bounce within seconds. And if that can happen, you know—

And then going back to LinkedIn, a lot of attorneys live in LinkedIn. And I have found— I quit doing posts on LinkedIn several months ago, but every day I have 10, 15, 20 hits every morning. And I think this podcast has a lot to do with that. And, you know, I get messages and I get people asking questions and things like that. So I don't, you know, let's not overlook LinkedIn, but it's not as— what's applicable, I guess, is the word I have found. And I think you found the same thing, but it is just another way free to get that information out, you know?

Yeah.

Write an article, write an article about trust accounting and post it in your LinkedIn page and see what you get. Throw it out there, you know.

And I can remember my husband going through my stuff, reading my articles, going, why are you telling everybody what you do and how to do it? Isn't that kind of not the right thing to do? Because then they're just going to do it on their own. You're making videos and they're going to do it on their own.

Oh, they'll be there. They'll come back.

They don't want to do it on their own. And you know, you have to create the videos to help people. I can help other accountants, but the attorneys themselves, they don't They don't have the full knowledge base that maybe an accountant might have that would help them. That video might only help them to a certain point, and then they're gonna sit back and go, oh, the point of that whole video and to tell them how to do it is then to look, she knows how to do this. Why don't I just go directly to her? And I think that's the bigger part of it, is that you share what you know. You are gonna help people. And if you find that attorney and you step through all the steps, and that attorney wants to do it on their own, and they're gonna do it anyway. That's fine too. They're not going to waste your time. Yeah.

Yeah.

And there are attorneys out there that will do that.

One of the magical questions to ask those attorneys that really believe in you is, who else could use my services? When you're talking to those attorneys in a casual conversation, who else do you know that could use our services? And instead of saying my services, say, even if you're one, just one by yourself, say our. Use the verbiage we, us, our. Make it seem that you're bigger because all of a sudden you will be bigger because you're going to need more people to help you out because you're growing. There is such a hunger for us out here. It doesn't matter if it's legal. It doesn't matter if you're catering to the bakery, bakery business or whatever it is.

Right. Right.

Shortage of people in accounting nationally. And it's, it's to a desperation stage. There's work for everybody out there in this industry.

100%, Steve. 100%. There's work for everybody. I don't worry about You know, maybe one of our colleagues gets a job and I didn't get the big job or whatever. I don't worry about that because there's so much—

I don't either.

I don't have time to worry about that. There's plenty for everybody. And I just wish it would come in as a nice pace instead of like 5 people call you at once and it's like, ah, then you get a month where there's nobody. So know that that happens too. It's very cyclical.

It is cyclical.

We have a joke at our firm. I'll say to Sarah, oh, we haven't had any. I've been doing all these posts. We haven't had anything. And she'll go, oh, Why did you just say that out loud? And then sure enough, I'll say it, and then all of a sudden we start to get the calls in again. So it does go up and down. Um, now is a great time to really do the groundwork to get your file. Like, you know, we're taping this in July. July and August tend to be a slower time.

Clean everything up you can right now.

Yeah, this is a wonderful time of the year, isn't it? It's just like Christmas for us, isn't it?

It is. It is, but it's a great time to market. It's a great time to get ready for year-end. Right now, if you're one of those geeks that likes to do 1099s, build a 1099 marketing package and go out to law firms and sell it. All of a sudden, you know, not only will you be doing 1099s for them, but you will be doing their bookkeeping as well. Because then if they've got that going on, there's something else going on within their—

I mean, even if you build it up, but you schedule it out, right? So when we do get busy, it's scheduled and it's, It's it's just it's done. So it's not you're doing the work ahead of time. I always try to do them things like try to do things ahead of time. Like I know I've got some conferences coming up, so I'm trying to like get myself pre-scheduled because I can't I just can't get busy and I don't want to get behind. I'm I'm a very much of a planner and a scheduler. And so if you can get that chat to build you up a social media calendar and then just kind of follow it and then get them. Queued up. I even have Tierra, like, I'm like, okay, you remind me if you don't see that there's nothing there for me. Don't let me know like the day before. Give me a heads up that, hey, I ran out of articles. Um, just like topics for the podcast, right? You run out of topics. We need to keep the topics flowing. So all of those things are things that we, we try to stick with and try to get planned out. And I think marketing, when it comes to marketing, that's kind of important. So you want to make sure your website looks good. I mean, that's your first— that's your first representation. I call it your billboard. Somebody who wants to know about you, they're going to hop in and kind of look and see. You want to make sure that people can get that first good impression. You don't want a kind of a messy— I mean, I've seen some attorney, uh—

Well, like I said, mine's a pathetic one, and it's just because it's not this big fancy one, but it does get the point across and people seem to like it. So now I want to be devil's advocate with you. Let's talk about AI and let's talk about how do we market AI safely to our clients?

Market AI. That's a great topic. That might be a whole podcast.

That might be a whole podcast.

Yeah, really? Because AI—

Because we have to create safety. Yeah.

You know, it's funny because most of the software are adding it, and I don't know if a lot of the software that is adding it is actually adding a lot of value on some of them. Everybody kind of wants to throw that in. I had a comment the other day that's like, I think I'm gonna name my, my company dot dot dot AI. And I'm like, you're gonna put AI in the name of your company? Like, really?

Is that a good idea?

Why?

I don't get it.

I don't know. But it's funny that you want to always keep security front and center with your, with your clients. So, and we were talking about this before we started taping too, that when you add any software to a QuickBooks file, the client is notified. that you've added software. I had it happen with Lissio. Some— I logged in, I had to change browsers.

Oh, that's what you were talking about.

I logged into Lissio and it sent the client a message that I logged into Lissio and it didn't say me. It said unknown. The way it was worded would scare me if I wasn't sure. Like he said, is this you? And I'm like, he said, I obviously think it's you because it's your tool that you use to communicate with me. But he got notified that I logged into another browser to log in because I'm having trouble with Chrome. And I ended up using the other browser, which is called Brave. And I was like, wow, he got notified that I tried to log in.

Yeah.

Like, what is that all about? Maybe he did, and maybe it's his— he logged in. Who knows? He might have logged in himself, or maybe somebody in his office did. It didn't tell you anything. It didn't tell you location or anything like that, where QuickBooks will tell you if you're adding software to a client's file. Like, I want to add Keeper. And I'm going to attach Keeper to a client's file to help me. It's a tool to help me give back accurate records. I attach Clio— I mean, I attach Keeper, and it sends the client— if they're the primary admin, they're going to get a message saying that Linda Artesani attached Keeper. And if they don't know what the heck Keeper is, or any other software that we add, we have to actually have a conversation to tell them about that because they're going to—

A little sidebar here, that better, that better be in your contract with your With your attorney too, that you do use third-party software.

We have that in our contract.

Yeah, so do we. So do we in our contracts, because we've got to have those tools to do our jobs. We've got to let them know that there's this third party looking at it, and they're usually fine with it. But if you—

They are, but you should notify if you have to— even if you have to reconnect, they get notifications.

Wow.

Yeah. So, and I had that happen. We logged in and connected Keeper. And then we hadn't used it on a few files, and when I logged in, it had disconnected and I had to put them back in there. I've had happen with LeanLaw. LeanLaw disconnected one time. It was like a glitch and everything disconnected. All the client files disconnected.

What?

And it's a couple of clicks, but that doesn't notify you. So sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. And this morning, if you watch the news, there was a big thing that happened with—

Huge.

With a whole, like, shut down airports and hospitals couldn't use things. And it had to do with— it was random, but they're saying it was a software thing, not a hacker.

It was a patch on a security piece of software.

Yep. And I know one of our staff were flying, and she was fortunate. She was up in the air when it happened, and she landed in Atlanta's airport, and she said it was mass chaos in that airport because nothing was flying out. It was all—

It reminded me of 9/11 because I watched a map online this morning.

Last year where the lights went out?

Where all the— no, where all the airplanes suddenly were like landing everywhere and the skies were clear. And I was like, wow, that didn't happen since 9/11.

You know, that was crazy.

That was crazy.

I never saw anything like that.

And the same thing happened today with this glitch with Microsoft.

So yeah, and it affected a lot of things. We don't realize how many things are connected.

Right there is a subject to talk to your clients about. That's a marketing subject right there.

Yeah.

And you can market yourself to them. You're teaching them safety. You're teaching them.

I think that's a great topic too, because everybody's concerned about it, especially with all the AI stuff coming out. I'm concerned about the fact that it can replicate your likeness, it can replicate your voice, it can do a lot of things right now. If you're using it to write blog posts, don't. I recommend if you're gonna write a blog post, you can ask it for topics. Doesn't do a really great job on that yet either. Maybe it's my prompts, I don't know. But then if you ask it to write you the article, it's gonna— I call it like Sarah likes to call word vomit. It kind of word vomits out a very basic article that's— you can see from 10 miles away it was a chat article.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're better off saying, I wanna talk about, for example, trust accounting. Can you give me a bullet-pointed list of items I should write and use in my article? Now it's gonna give you those subheadings and then you write it. And the way I wrote for many, many years and still do today, which is why sometimes it's whatever front in my brain is on a blog post, I go for a walk every day. I put the article in my Google Docs. And so if you have that outline and you can just go through, now it's formulated and mentally mapped out what you want it to say. And gives you the topic headings, and then just go in there, put the cursor there, and just talk and, and dump your brain into that article. It might not be pretty, but then go back and copy it and put it back in the thing and say, can you make this— can you clean this up and make this sound professional? And that's a way to formulate a good blog post. You can make a blog post.

That's a great idea.

It's a better way of doing it because it's your voice.

Yeah.

It's not da da da da. In conclusion, and what's the other word? It likes to use the word delve, which is not a word you hear in language when you talk to people. So one of the other tips I have when you're writing a blog post is go in and write the blog post like I just said. I have the outline. Write the write it by talking, and then come home and tell it in take and copy and paste it and say, make this more readable. So you're telling it that it might not make a lot of sense. And believe me, when you see something—

Make it more friendly. Yeah.

With my accent, when you look at it, sometimes I'm like, that's not what I said. You know, IOLTA cracks me up when it tries to write the word IOLTA. And I use that a lot when I'm— oh, and Clio always is spelled C-L-E-O. It doesn't spell it with the I. And you just have to tell it. And then you can just, once it's in a Google Doc, you can do the find replace and just have it replace it to be the right way. But then read it, right? You gotta read it. I'm fortunate to have Tierra who can also read it to make sure that it makes sense. And I've had her come to me and say, is this what you meant in this? I'm like, oh no, that had to be me talking and it didn't pick up. It didn't understand what I said.

Well, and speaking of AI too, a great marketing tool within AI is just to pick out a subject and say, tell me how to teach this subject to somebody and it's going to give you all of it. Have you ever done that?

It— no, I've not done that, but I've also done— and this one's kind of not worked well for me because I'm more of not reading a script kind of person. But if you're—

Right.

About doing a video. So I like to do a video and a blog so that my voice— and sometimes the video gives more details than the written, or vice versa. I do a little high-level short video and it's more detailed in the video and the article. But I'll say to it, I've taken my blog and dumped it into the, into the software. Like, I like Gemini better than ChatGPT. I'll dump it into Gemini and I'll say, please make me a script for my video.

There you go.

Off the base of this article. And I'll do that. But it, I've not had success with that. It doesn't, it doesn't sound like me. So again, you're gonna lose that authenticity.

Right.

So sometimes you might wanna go right back to take those bullet points and put that in on the screen in front of you and the heck with the article.

Personalize it.

Just take the bullet points and then just do what you did when you were walking. You're reading and telling it what you know, and you just follow the bullet points so it keeps you in consistency with the article.

And I think that— Yeah.

So there's lots of tricks of ways to do this. I mean, I remember, I mean, back before any of this stuff, I remember doing the talking into the Google Doc and then coming back and having to manually rewrite it because we didn't have the AI. And it would be time-consuming, and I would even be looking at this thing myself going, all right, you didn't get my accent again. I don't even know what I said then.

I don't even know what I said.

Yeah. I don't even know what the heck I was saying over here. Maybe a neighbor stopped me on the walk and was talking, and it picked that conversation up. Who knows? But I mean, that can happen too, right? But it's, it's a good time. You're out walking, you're kind of mentally clear in your head, and it's a great time to write, I think.

I like that. I like that.

So it's, and it's fast. It's a fast way now with AI. It makes it a lot faster. You still keep your voice though. I think it's important to keep your voice if you're teaching. And it's really, it's all you're doing is teaching. You're teaching what you know. And exactly, people will see that and start to see your face around and you wanna have your face on in the video. You know, I mean, a dear friend of mine said to me, you, why don't you have your face on? I didn't, beginning, I didn't turn my camera on.

I'm like, ah, nobody wants to see me. Really? Really?

He said, "Oh yes, they do want to see you." He said, "They don't want to buy from Artisani Accounting; they want to buy from Linda Artisani." From you, from you.

Yes, yes.

And I was like, "All right, I'll put the video on." I love it.

This has been an incredible conversation today. Oh my gosh! I wonder how many words, how many words did we just say?

Yeah. I don't know. I'm kind of talked out. I mean, I was all alone on the law lab, and I was like. For an hour, then I think it's like a 15-minute break and I'm back in here doing this. But yeah, I feel like I talked a lot. I think I know. I think I want to go into silence now.

Well, I'll tell you, marketing is a passion of yours and a passion of mine.

And it is. I love it.

There's so many ways to be creative with it and effective with it. And you'll make mistakes. And if you make a mistake, say, hey, you know what, I'll fix that.

You know?

Yeah. What were you gonna say?

If you get on conferences too, if you get invited or get to speak at any conference, that's social proof that you know what you're doing. So it's all of these things and you don't have to do all of them at once. Pick one, master it, move on to the next. Start with your website, get that looking good.

Yeah.

Add the blog, do the blog, do the videos. I mean, those are easy things that are just your time, a little bit of money, but not really. I mean, I, I think that you might want, if you wanna hire, you got the money to hire somebody that knows how to make the website pretty. Yes. It's expensive though. I mean, the last time I did mine was like $7,500 to do it. It was, it goes by how many Right. And then we actually, with ours, we ended up templating for the proper trust and Tierra did most of ours and it came out, I think came out beautiful, even better than the first one. So, you know, it's all, it's, you gotta be able to do that work though. And that's a different mindset than the boxed-in accounting. You have to have that creative mindset. So if you can't do it, hire somebody to do that part. You can hire somebody to write for you too. I just believe in your own voice and just to market your firm, market yourself. But if you're just an introvert, which many accountants are, find a medium that will work for you that will help get your word and your words out in your account.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Good topic, huh?

A great topic. I love this. I love marketing.

I do too. Okay, Tiara. Take us away. To support the Accountants Law Pod, please take a moment to like, share, and review this episode, and be sure to subscribe to this podcast on YouTube and wherever you find your favorite podcasts. If you have questions, topic requests, or guest suggestions, you can email us at info@accountantslawpod.com or send us a message through our website, accountantslawpod.com. To join us in the Accountants Law Lab, which meets every Friday, Visit our website at accountantslawlab.com to sign up. You can tell who's a real pro doing this. It's Tiara.

Yeah, we love Tiara.

We do.

Well, maybe next week and maybe for our next episode, Sarah will be back and we can learn from her.

Yeah, I think we have a couple we're going to be doing next week. So, yeah, so a great topic. We'll see you all next week. Bye now.

Thank you.

Take care.