Marketing, Niching, Goal Setting

Hi everybody. I hope— I'm all by myself this week for Legal Accounting Wednesday, so I'm hoping that this is going to— I'm trying to multitask here. It's not going to be easy. I'm trying to make it so that I can see on Facebook if anybody's joining me this This afternoon or this morning, depending on where you're at. But it says I'm live. Yay! So I am going to try to do my best to multitask. Not my forte. Anyway, we have a great topic this week. And because I'm by myself, I wanted to make sure that I could make it harder on myself and tackle a large topic. And I threw 3 topics together, which is why I started a little bit early. And let's dive in. So I actually created a PowerPoint to keep myself from scrolling off into a direction. So let me share my screen and we'll get into it. It's just a 3-slide, basically a 3 or 4-slide PowerPoint so that we can just get right into it. And here we go again. So when I think about, when I think about marketing, I think about— see, I need Sarah here. So it looks like it's got a delay here. There we go. So there's the topic. And when I think about marketing, I think about trying not to sell. So one of the stories— the best way to market really today is to sell you, share you. So I think about selling. I think about when I bought— used to buy a car. Every time I bought it, you buy a new car, used car, you go into the dealership and it's always a feeling. I don't know if anybody else feels this way. When you buy a car, you walk into the dealership and it feels like you're, you're the fruit and the fruit flies are kind of flying around you and it feels like overwhelming. And you know, you're going to sit through the whole sales procedure, the hard sell, the— The moments when you are in the room and they ask you, how much do you want to pay? And you know that's a loaded question because they're going to make sure the payment matches what you say you're going to pay. And those are the things that can, can get you a little bit annoyed. You don't— sometimes you just want to walk out. You don't even want to buy from that person. So that hard sell never works. The hard sell for, for me It makes me feel a little bit put off, and I tend to not want to buy from somebody that's giving me the hard sell. So I practiced that. I kind of switched that over to going back to what it was like when I purchased my latest car. I bought a Tesla. It was always on my bucket list of buying that car. And when you buy the Tesla, you go into the dealership, which, by the way, is actually in Is in your— you go into the mall, so it's kind of cool. You walk in and you say, I want to test drive it, and they take you over and they let you test drive it, and you can fall in love with a car right away there. Then you get back to the Tesla dealership and they actually say to you, you want to take the car home? You can come back 4 o'clock, pick it up, and then keep it to 10 o'clock the next morning. And I'm like, what, really? Yeah, take it home, try it out, see how you like it. What a way to sell. It's almost like when you think about selling Apple. Apple's a great example. Microsoft— not Microsoft, Apple products. When you buy an Apple product, if you've ever read the book about Steve Jobs, one of his big things is how the packaging is. When you buy anything from Apple, a brand new iPhone or anything like that, the box is so pretty and it's so minimalistic and it's just wrapped really nice. And that's how you sell. So you want to get your messaging out there. You want to get to the point where you're You know, you are selling your product, but you're, you're, you're not really selling the product itself. You're selling you. You are selling your services, but people don't want to buy from Artisani Accounting. I'm gonna tell you right now, they're not interested. They're just in buying from Linda Artisani. I'm the— I'm what sells the work, right? So When you start to get your messaging out, and for marketing, I do it a little bit old school. I still do it on a very, I'd say a minimal budget because I don't, I might spend some money on some apps, but in the long run, I don't spend money on Google Ads. I tried it, it never worked. It could work for a lot of people, it never worked for me. I tried Google Ads, didn't work. I do try things sometimes and I don't really, I don't really spend a lot of time with it and probably should. You could hire somebody to market market if you have that in your budget. I do it old school way. I do my own marketing and I do my own articles and I do my own ads and I do my own videos. And those are the things that will help you sell your services, especially if you're not local. You could— if you're local, you could actually go to what, you know, uh, one of the business meetings that are local. You could go to— you could— for me, I could go to the local bar and kind of sell my services to the attorneys. Because that's what I do. But that doesn't always work for everybody. I'd prefer having like the whole United States as my possible clients, and I've broadened my reach. But it really depends on how you feel comfortable. But when you get that person interested in your services, how do you— how do you get them interested? So when they— I always like to say hug the people who lean into your messaging. That's the first point. So if you're doing your messaging on LinkedIn, think about where your clients would be. So for attorneys, they might be looking for an accountant or bookkeeper on LinkedIn, because it's a professional network. They might not be on Facebook. But then think more broadly than that. Because when you're looking at where are you going to market, where are you going to market yourself, where are you going to put your ads and your pictures and things like that out there, letting people know what you do. If you're doing it organically and you're doing it on your own, the best way to do it really is, is to do the services. Try to pick where your client lives. So where's your client? Where's your client today when they go home at night and they hop onto social media? If you're looking at social media, how— where do they spend time? Are they spending time in Instagram. And for me, you would think, well, Linda, you're working with attorneys. Instagram would be more a place where you would be arts and, you know, crafty or someone more artistic, right? Photographers. I think of Instagram, I think of photographers. But for me, I want to market to that millennial that may be a partner or just becoming a partner in the firm, and the firm is really antiquated. They're using old desktop software. And I want to market to that person who might hang out with their friends on Instagram because they're in their 40s. And they— that might be where I need to market because I want to get that big data migration project from them. I want to take them off that old system and modernize their system. So that might be a better place for me to be than maybe LinkedIn, and maybe I need to do both. So think about that when you're trying to market yourself. That's a place to do it. Now I'm going to share a story about something that I thought was great to do and it didn't work out. So this way you can maybe learn from what I did. One of the things that I did recently was, um, maybe a couple years ago, I decided that I was going to hire somebody. So I do my blog post every week, and that is totally an effective way to market. And if you're curious about how I do that, please look at my website and sign up. Go look at YouTube, sign up for my YouTube, please, please. I'm almost at 1,000. But if you look at how I do it, you have to have your face on your videos. And video is really— today, if you think about how you learn or how you find things, you go to Google, right? And Google, YouTube, they're all connected. They own it. So it's a great place to start to get that SEO. So I wanted to up my game in the SEO, and I was a little bit tired of writing the blogs. I was running out of ideas, and I didn't have a lot of time to commit to it. So if you're in that middle place of your bookkeeping or your accounting firm, you want to market yourself, but you're trying to find some way to delegate or outsource. I hired somebody to do some of my posts. And I said, I'll just let them do it. And then I don't have to do it every week. And they were just writing standard posts. So I still did my weekly one with my, my videos. And I was getting more posts out. So their whole thing was keyword stuffing. And I wasn't really— I had done my own posts. And maybe not on purpose, but I had put keywords in, but I didn't keyword stuff my posts. Quite honestly, I don't really know a lot about it. I think I heard from— I heard about it, probably Matthew told me about keywords and putting keywords here and there, and I really didn't realize that how important that was. So these people said they did keyword stuffing. So got my first post back from them that were going to be— they know I had to review them. And when I got them back, I looked at them and I said, oh, I can't— this is that hard sell. It was that Buy from me, buy from me, buy from me. And it just, to me, it didn't sit well with me. It wasn't the look I wanted to, to present. I believe in, if you're passionate about what you do, I think that if you're really super passionate, having the ability to sell, that comes through in your messaging. And when you do your own messaging, that definitely is the case. And you could hire somebody and then maybe add your voice to it, but sell from your heart. I think that's the best way to go about it. That's my little bit on marketing. And if this is something— if you found some value in what we're talking about, what I'm talking about today, I certainly can expand on that, maybe do another one of these with a little bit more detail just on the marketing piece and some of the tactics and things that I do that have been really successful, successful for me. I'm going to move on now because I only have this short time to talk about niching and specialization. So One of the things I can say about niching is that it is by far the best business decision I've made. 100%, hands down. Took a lot of work to get there, but I did it. And specializing is for certain not an easy thing to do. First of all, you gotta pick the industry. Picking the industry is hard. It's hard. I remember thinking when I looked at my list, gosh, I love all of these clients. How am I going to pick? And then a very wise friend of mine, Beth David, said, you don't pick one, pick 3 and then figure it out. It'll fall in place for you. So I did that. I picked 3 and I looked at the 3 and I picked legal because I liked— we had 1 or 2 clients within the legal industry. So I picked that because I liked working with these clients. I really liked the professionalism. And obviously other reasons are like they're a little bit more recession-proof than like my contractors. And I just decided that that was probably one of the better ones. And I didn't have to chase them for money. They always paid me. There was a lot of things in the past. So looking back, and then I looked at real estate and I looked at startups and I love working with startups. Oh, I love working with them. They were so much fun. They were so full of dreams and big ideas. And they were really— I used to give it away. I used to cut the pricing so I could work with them because I felt like I could mold them and help them grow. And I grow with them and They never had the cash flow. And it was more of— that was definitely an instance of leading with my heart and not my head when it came to business. That wasn't probably my best thing to do, but I really enjoyed them. And when it came to that, when you think about that, I sat with those 3, and right away the real estate one fell right off, right off the top. And I knew that the startups wasn't going to really work out for me. And the reason for that is the commoditized bookkeeping that was getting— but back when I did the original bookkeeping with the, the smaller startups, which were fun, and they didn't know anything about accounting, you could teach them that. Oh, thank you. When we started to do that kind of work, it was fun, but I knew I can see the writing on the wall with QuickBooks Live, with Thoughtkeeper. I mean, you name it, Bench. Those companies right now, they're still in their infancy. They're still the commoditized bookkeeping. I think the best way to think about it is I remember sitting in QuickBooks Connect and I can't remember which one it was. It might have been— well, obviously it wasn't last year, but it was maybe a couple of years ago. And Sasan Ghatarsi got up on stage. And he was giving his keynote speech, and he started talking and showing slides of the fabulousness of what AI is going towards and what Intuit is spending money on making it better. And he showed the bank feeds and all the fancy things and what they were looking to do in the future. I can remember even maybe 2 or 3 years back where the person got in the car and she says, hey, QB, blah, blah, blah, what's my open balance on so-and-so in the, in the, in the AI would answer her. And I remember thinking, oh boy. So as this starts to grow, what's going to happen to my startups? Because they were basic. They were write-up clients. Where are they going to go? They're going to go to these services. Because as this starts to get automated with AI— and they'll always have that human touch. But with the AI, and they can get it better and better, faster and faster. It's like anything else. I mean, think back to how you used to manually enter things, and now you use other products to do these. same tasks, things get done quicker and faster. And with commoditized bookkeeping in its infancy still, I think it's still— the results aren't that great, but it's not— it's a matter of time. And with technology, it's super fast. So I think that if you think of it in that terms, you want to pick an industry or a vertical that you can hang on to and grasp onto that, you know, like My friend Megan does nonprofits. Veronica Wasek does e-commerce. There's plenty of different ones out there. But if you pick the one that works the best for you, that will help you. And if you need to pick 3 and let it fall where it is, that's the way to go. And I can go into this a lot deeper because I've been through the experience and I can tell you what happens and what you should do and probably maybe what you shouldn't do. You need to have cash in the bank though. Know that cash Cash flow is always king, and it's not something you want to do if your bank account is kind of low. I think I had about $20,000 in my bank account as a cushion because I had done all this marketing, marketing out to everybody on everything. If you go back into my blogs and go way back prior to 2018, you're going to see that way back then I was marketing to everybody, everybody, every industry, didn't matter. And Doing that is like opening this giant fire hose, and I could just spread it out there and it could come all towards me. Now I went to take that fire hose, and with my legal industry, I started to switch up my content to be targeted towards the attorneys and the law firms. And when I did that, that kind of put a crimp in that fire hose. And there were moments there that I sat back as I went through this process and realized I, I was worried. I'm looking at my bank account going down. I'm looking at my sales funnel. It takes time. It takes legs. Going back to marketing, when you start to do this stuff, and if you want me to go deeper into this, I will. You start to do this stuff, you're going to be amazed. But it takes so much time to get the work done. You start a brand new website and you're brand new to the Google world, it's going to take you some time to get that out there. It's gonna be a lot more work in the beginning, but you do have more time in the beginning if you're just starting out. So that's the plus side of it, I guess. But definitely, uh, you want to do that. And the other thing I wanted to talk about really quickly before I move on to the next, uh, slide, which is goal setting, which is way bigger, and I know I'm probably gonna run out of time, uh, with, with all of these. I remember even with niching, I'm like, I want to niche, I want to niche. And I sat in QuickBooks Connect and it was like, you got to do advisory, you got to do advisory. When it comes to advisory services and having that be a product that you sell, it's really difficult, especially with your current clients. And then I even experimented with doing advisory services and offering it up to my clients that I, I had brand new, and they— nobody picked it. Like, I kind of made it an add-on. Don't make it an add-on. If you want to do advisory services, bundle it in your pricing, and when the person picks you for that, you've now had it in there and you're being compensated for it. If you want to test out advisory, we go into a lot of this in the lab. If you want to test it out and figure out how to make it work, I can tell you from my personal experience, the solo lawyer— for me, the solopreneur— can't afford it and isn't that interested in it. It's very rare to find that person that's really interested, and if they are, they don't want to pay for it. They just think it should be included in your bookkeeping. So For me, getting that services out there and advisory services only happened when I targeted the mid-market with that bigger firm with multiple business owners that were multiple business owners who are more invested in who's going to make more and that you start to put classes in and you're starting to divvy out the data by attorney and then you can look at it and there's so much more you can do. When there's more people, more personalities. So it's a fun thing to add advisory. I love it. I love the KPIs. I love all that data metrics tracking. It's a lot of fun and it's fun to go into the goal setting and all of that, but bundle it in and make sure you're getting compensated for it because that's higher level. But that's what you want to be doing. If you're not that beginner bookkeeping service, if you're in that mid place where you've hired people to do the bookkeeping and you've got that extra time to be able to do that kind of work, it's a lot of fun and you get QuickBooks Online Advanced and get certified in Fathom because there's a lot of tools in Fathom and one of them is really good for the next slide. So let me move on to the last slide here. Yay. So we're getting into the next level and this is more— I want to shift this over from the first 2 are kind of like, how can I get myself out there? How can I make my business survive the commodity of bookkeeping being sold by SaaS companies? And how do I get— so now I've started my business, I've marketed it, I've work to specialize my business so I can really blossom and do advisory and grow? What's your next level? So obviously to niche, you want to learn, study, and strategize. So the strategizing piece is here. What are you passionate about? And this is so key because what's possible and how do you move to the next level? And this is kind of where I'm sitting today. And I can be totally honest here that when I was so busy building my business, I didn't really think about my goals. My goal in the very beginning was make enough money to have a paycheck. Quite honestly, that was it, and pay my health insurance. That was my 2 goals when I was first starting. And I started out part-time and it grew. And then as I got to start to grow, grow a little bit bigger, my next goal when I was in the middle of being so busy was just trying to get the work done. And I never took the time to sit down. And this is what's great about a mastermind, because I don't think I really ever thought about this until I was in '97 and up. And it was brought to my attention that something you should do is set a goal for yourself. And it's so hard to kind of figure what do I want for a goal? You can make it a monetary goal. I like to think of it as what are your dreams? So if you visualize— I like to visualize my dream day. So I'm thinking like maybe 5, maybe 10 years in my future, what would my dream day be? So I want you to, with your pen and your paper, I want you to actually write this down. And you have to do it now, and the video will be there as you go through, so you'll be able to really look at this later and maybe rewatch it to think about this and do this work. When I'm talking about your dream day, I'm talking about for me, and I'll just give you an example so you can understand where I'm going with this. With this is your dream day. It would be— for me, it would be one of my biggest dreams is to have a house on the beach. So for me, I would be waking up out of bed, and I want you to go like into detail, like I had like a white shirt on and some little shorts on, and I got up and I made a cup of coffee, and I opened the big slider, that big glass slider overlooking the ocean. And I went out onto the patio and there was a beautiful breeze and the sound of the ocean. It was super early, like the sun was just starting to peek up over the sky, in the sky. And if I'm in Florida, I'm not seeing that sun because I face the West Coast, but you know, you can visualize it's just starting to get light and I'm just sitting there and I'm enjoying my cup of coffee and I'm just enjoying the smell of the water and then I'm deciding I'm gonna go for a nice power walk, and then maybe I come back and sit back on that deck and I meditate and I do a little yoga, and then I come into my office and I start to do my, my work. So I, you know, I just start to formulate my day and I start to teach, and I'm teaching at the lab and I'm teaching courses here and I'm teaching courses there, and I check in with my accounting firm. But this is past that, so that's past my day. So the things that I'm really passionate about, and teaching is definitely one of them, something I want to do in my future, I want that to be my future goal. And if you think of it like that, what's holding me back from doing and having that dream life? What's, what's holding me or you back from stepping into that place? I'm looking into the future now, 5 to 10 years. I'm not looking in the short run. I'm looking into the long run, the future. Um, and know that you probably have not— I feel like I've not hit my potential yet, so maybe you haven't hit your potential either. I like to think that none of us really have. So if you're thinking about niching your practice and you've been thinking about it for a while— I thought about it for a while— what's holding you back from actually doing it? Is it the cash flow? If it's the cash flow, why not start to put money in a savings account and save for it? For me, the beach house, maybe I need to start a savings account, call it Beach House Savings, and start putting money in. I have to fill it up right away because my dreams might come from a lot of the things I do, but at least putting that money in there gets me started. As I feel like I take— I took an actionable step towards it, right? And then You open yourself. So what are your dreams, and can you open yourself up to the possibility of that dream coming true? Can you open yourself up to that possibility? So with your homework, I want you to say— sit down and say, what are your dreams? So really write it out, draw it out, maybe draw a picture, write it down, write your goals down. And then it's like really think that everything is possible. Every single thing is possible. If you had your perfect day, everything is possible. And then get to your goal setting. Write down your goals. If your goal is to specialize your practice, write down. Tell everybody I'm niching out my practice. I like to say I. Really like to say phone a friend, get a buddy, an accountability buddy, and that person can be there for you when your, your sales funnel starts to get that little knot in the, in the hose and the sales stop coming in and the calls stop coming in because you've retargeted your marketing towards a new way. Have that friend that you call up and say, hey, I think I don't want to do this anymore. And that friend tells you, stop it, Linda. Stop it, Linda. You're going to keep doing this because you're doing the right thing. You need that person. I know I needed that person. I think I would have quit halfway if I hadn't had that person. Um, so if you write down the goals, then after you write them all down, read them, read them out loud. And then after you write the goals down, I want you to think about how you'd feel. How would you feel? And I'm not talking about your dream day, I'm talking about the goals. How would you feel If that happened in your life, if those goals came to fruition, how would you feel? Would you have more time to do the things you want to do? If you're working 7 days a week, 12, 14 hours a day, and you established goals that helped you get to that place, how do you feel? How would you behave after you had these goals? So I'm not talking the dream scenario, I'm talking about obtaining those business goals. How would you behave after obtaining the goals? Would you feel like less rushed? Do you have more time? More time, more space, less rushed. Would you maybe have better sleep if you're not worrying so much about the business aspect? Would you have more sleep? Maybe you'd meditate. Maybe you'd exercise a little bit more. You have more time, right? Maybe you'd eat better. These are the things. Maybe eating better is on your goal list. And maybe it's just being healthy. I want to be healthier. How would you think— would you be less stressed if you wrote these goals down and started to take actionable steps? Because it's so easy to write goals and never really take action on them. It's easy for Procrastinate on them? Would it be helpful if you were able to obtain the goals and you didn't have to start your day immediately? You could actually take the time to go for that beach walk and do a little meditation and do a little yoga. Everything is possible. If everything's possible, what's going to stop you? Right? What's stopping you right now from having that 7-figure income? Maybe six-figure income. What's stopping you? Nothing can stop you because you haven't achieved your potential yet. You haven't made it there. So if you think of it in that respect, it's important. And this is going to sound so controversial, but I'll tell you, this is something that for me, I was that girl sitting in an office. for many years wanting to speak, do public speaking, wanting to be out there, wanting to teach. I've always wanted to teach. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a teacher, wanting to teach, wanting to be out there. Then I sat in my office and I didn't do it until I got a phone call. I got a phone call, I partnered, and I had somebody that was like, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this. And we did it. And the dreams that he mentioned to me were dreams that I had always wanted. It was like he read my mind. And those were the things that got me out of my— and I was way out of my comfort zone. When I tell you I was, it would be like pushing me into deep water and I can't swim. It was out of the comfort zone. Like, and it's so funny that when you push yourself to that place to get out of your comfort zone, surprise, surprise, it starts to get comfortable. It starts to be okay because you're your mind gets accustomed to it. So if you think about it, maybe your goal is what is your next level in your finances? Where do you want to see yourself in 5 years, in 10 years? Where do you want to see your business be in 5 or 10 years? Maybe, maybe your goal is your health. Where do you want to see yourself? Can you visualize yourself like really healthy and in a place that you've always wanted to be in? What's stopping you? What can you do today? Starting with the goal list, starting with the dream scenario, what can you do today? Start to take an actionable step to get to that place to where you want to be in achieving your potential, because you all have not made your potential. So I hope that this was helpful. I just really wanted to share some of the things that I know for me my journey and some of the things that really helped catapult me to where I am today. And I'm not done. I'm not done. I feel like I'm still on the cusp of something bigger and better. And I hope that this, this little presentation— we talk a lot about different things in the Law Lab. We talk about things like business things. We have an amazing group of people. We mastermind. We share ideas. This week we're actually going to be talking about— this is what it is. It's not just talking trust accounting and some of the boring compliance things that we have to deal with, with lawyers. We're actually going to be talking about the psychology around our client and what works and what doesn't. And it was actually a request from some of our members. Like, we were just discussing some of the things that happen, and it's really almost like a relief valve when you get into some of these conversations with everybody because Yeah, there's a personality type to attorneys. There's a personality type for accountants and bookkeepers. We have a certain personality. We have a little bit of OCD and a little bit of, you know, we're a little bit very Type A for the most part. So attorneys. So we're gonna get into that in our group. So if you're interested in joining our group, I will put the link into the comments. And I hope this helps you. Sorry for the little bit of a clunky beginning here, but if you want more of this, And more topics like this when we come on to our Law Lab weekly Legal Accounting Wednesdays. Just reach out to me, post in the page, and let me know that this is something you're really interested in. I think if, if Seth David hadn't put that seed in my head that I needed to start getting a goal, and then my finance guy told me you need a goal, you need an exit plan goal, and I was like, oh, why? And, you know, and it was just if somebody didn't actually plant the seed And maybe you've never even thought about niching, but now you've got that seed planted. I hope that helps you maybe move on to achieve your potential. Thank you all for coming today. Thank you for listening to me talk for over 30 minutes, and I will see you all next week. Bye now.