Onboarding Law Firm clients - Legal Accounting Wednesday

I see you're here, Sarah, but I don't see you yet, so I'm assuming you're coming to Legal Accounting Wednesday where we're going to talk about onboarding clients today. I don't know if anybody can see me on Facebook, but I see Angela and Kathy and Tanya. Hi, Toyin.

Sorry.

Hey, guess what?

What?

I think I might have fixed the live, but I don't know for sure. And I know Nicole's busy to check on us, but I think I fixed it. And I'll tell you all about that later.

Okay.

So you want to know what we're talking about today?

Yeah, I—

We're talking about onboarding new clients. And I know this is a topic we've touched upon before, but I think that, um, to be organized and do this work, I think that that's gonna help you have a good relationship with your new client, right? A lot of us start— are starting to get some new clients. You might be getting, you might be getting right now the cleanup clients that turn into new clients. And, um, I think some of the best practices, which we kind of have set up in our, our 17hats and Lissio are important. But I think, do you have any tips for— I know you don't, you just got like hit cold on what the topic was, 'cause we've been so crazy busy, but. We do have, uh, I think it's good to have a checklist of some sort so you know if you've laid out your scope of work with the client and the client has accepted. I think having that— here's Steve— having that scope of work written out and who does what when is important, don't you think?

Yeah, or I mean, if that's— if you're in a team environment.

Also, if you're solo, if you're solo, same thing though.

The other thing too is, and I always say this to people on the front end, I'm gonna go dark for a little bit. So please don't be alarmed because I'm busy working on your file. I will do a check-in and then I give myself time so I can beat that check-in moment.

Mm-hmm.

That has evolved for me. I mean, honestly, at the beginning, we just— it was hard to figure that stuff out. So what we did is we worked together and Linda Kind of tag team it, being that we have our partnership, we can tag team. But if it's solo, maybe you just put a reminder on your calendar. Hey, just want to send a quick update, even if it's just like, I'm through month whatever.

Absolutely being very transparent with your client as to where, if you're doing a project for sure, if you're, if you're doing project work as opposed to an ongoing client, we find what's been very successful is having that recurring Message, go to the client. They don't know what we're doing when we're going dark, even though we're doing a whole bunch of things and we really don't want to be bugged. They appreciate, here's what we've accomplished in your job this week. They really appreciate that you're communicating. And we've heard it many times. Here's Nina too. We've heard it many, many times from clients that they were unhappy with another person doing the work because they never talked to them. They like took 2 months to do the work. and never followed up with the client. And we know our clients are busy. You could even, especially if you're a solo and you're trying to work, do all this work, you might wanna even use, make a video for them and just maybe do a quick, you know, use Loom or we're using that awesome screenshot and go through and just say, here's where we're at in your file. And then just kind of take them through. 'Cause sometimes when you're doing a cleanup job, you might be doing a brand new cleanup and you're not going to let them in the file yet. They might be working in another file and you started a new file because it was that much of a mess. Sometimes they don't— you don't want them to see.

When the complaints come in like that, I mean, it's hard because you never want to say anything wrong of somebody else. I mean, it's their perception. We don't know the dialogue that's happened. But what we can do is, like Linda's saying, is change the way we present it. And then inside of that, it could be supportive of your stuff too. It's not just supportive just of them alone. It's a two-way dialogue. Maybe another idea, Linda, we've done this before. Rather than send onesie-twosie questions, which can get peppering and annoying, you bring them together and you have like a bullet point and you keep them on task and like, okay, I'm finding that I'm up to this stage and I need all— I have all these questions. Do you mind getting started on these? Yeah, absolutely.

And if you're doing repeat repetitive, like jobs, then maybe like we have it set up. We, I call it my buy time schedule. Like we've got it set up where there's certain templates in our 17hats that we do like a kickoff meeting. So it's like, they sign the contract. They immediately get that response saying, welcome to the team. We're excited to do— that's all pre-canned stuff that we've put together so that they think we're like on it and responding. And it actually happens on the, in the backend.

It's tailored too. It's not so much— I mean, don't— I don't want you to minimize the hard efforts you put into that. It is tailored. I mean, it has to be. Not every client is a cookie cutter. And that's, I think, what I appreciate, the fact that it's tailored pricing, it's tailored engagements. But to what Linda's saying is it helps her. It helps her with the process.

Yeah. And a lot of times training happens, right? So you're gonna have these training moments. And this is something that Full transparency, we have not set up yet the way I'd like to, and I'm going to work towards it. But if we're training, you can use in your ProAdvisor section— say they are new to QuickBooks, so they're coming from some other platform and they're coming to you brand new, or maybe they're on a spreadsheet and they're coming to you brand new for QuickBooks— there's a whole training inside your ProAdvisors that you can link back to them. And I actually went into the program and made it look like it was our stuff. With— you had the ability to change some of the pages to make it— I made it say Proper Trust Training, you know, and it says right on there. I had the ability to take off the branding from Intuit and set that up so that it— I mean, it lets you do it and then set it up so that they get that training. So they're doing something that other people, you know, that they're busy doing this training and they think you're helping them by doing this self-training. But you're— that's buying you time to do the work that you need to get done too. I mean, I hate to say it is buying time, but yeah.

Well, no, yeah, I wouldn't say— yeah, I think to kind of repurpose what you're saying, it's more of like you're adding value to areas that might be of benefit to them and it may support them. Maybe they're kind of a DIY-ish. If that's what they need, the self-directed training is very helpful. Maybe it's just because Well, it might be just a global understanding of how the software works because they might be new to it or they've tried it and they don't understand it.

And the videos are like 10 minutes, so they're not like a lot of time that's going to be taken for the client, but the clients are so appreciative of that. And then you can— and this is something I want to do— like start to make shorter videos to show them how to do little steps in LeanLaw so that they've got that. And, and that's something that I want to have like in a library so that if a client starts working in it and We get them to that point, then they, then they're able to just— we just refer them back to that video, and then we don't have to take the time to stop what we're doing in our day to go help them, that the video actually helps them. Because sometimes you'll train somebody one-on-one and then they forget, and then they get back to a task that maybe they're not doing every day, and then they, then they need that help again, and it just kind of reinforces what you taught them.

It's all— again, I think what, what we're going to is It's taken a long time for us to develop our process. It— we're kind of giving you a high-level overview of ways to support yourself through this onboarding cleanup to mitigate, you know, any sort of ambiguous moments with clients where they're like, I'm not feeling like you're communicating, and— or whatever it is. But I— it does take time, and it takes some forethought, and it It's not one size fits all. So I think it's mostly— I love to respect that it isn't that way. I'm not a one size fits all person. I like to tailor things to what the client is, what I'm hearing that I'm asking. And if you are able to build a process in the beginning, like Linda's saying, and she does this so well for us, and we talk about it, we refine it, build this little space in the beginning, it helps. your client understand the due diligence you're doing on the work and the hard lifting you're doing to help them get, you know, a good set of books, a great foundation and so forth.

So in any way you can reduce the friction in the process of the onboarding, because onboarding does require more hands-on, more time with the client, but also it's about having a relationship with the people. And I think that's what they mostly appreciate, that you have a relationship, you're not ignoring them. So when you're onboarding a company, you realize that there's people behind the company and that initial relationship that you have with a client from the very first time they call or email you and you actually reach out, maybe do a Zoom meeting, it's got the most impact. If you have a rocky beginning, it's hard to recover from that. So those are the things, even that warm and fuzzy safe feeling as you, you're handholding this. Sarah, you've said a few times, which I always think it's just a brilliant thing to say, you say to them like, we're, we're here for you. Oh no, we're not leaving you when we're all done with this. We've built your whole file. Here you go. Boom, boom. We're done with you. No, we don't do that. We are here to walk you through We've had clients that have stayed on past our engagement a whole year because they want us to meet with them and go over the little nuances of the software. And we're more than happy. Sometimes it's accounting questions, but it's, it's, it makes them feel so like, oh, thank God. I don't want— because they're overwhelmed. You got to put yourself in their seat. They're very overwhelmed by what's happening in their world with a change. Change is hard. So anytime you can like mitigate that, you are them.

You're a business owner. You run your— you're a business owner, you are them. So imagine what it feels like if you're not a marketing person or if you're not this. So that's why I'm saying I really honor the individualizing pieces of it. It does take extra, but because of that, you do— you can have the ability to charge extra at some point in your career story.

You just don't want them to have buyer's remorse, right? You want them to be super happy and not overwhelmed. It can be overwhelming. We find, of times when we do a big project, we're not taking them and changing the world on them at that point. We want to say— we might know a whole bunch of things that would work better in their workflow, but we'll be like, okay, let's just tackle this one thing. And this works much better with people. We're going to tackle this one change that you reached out to us initially. Yeah, we have other things in our back pocket, but we're not going to go there until you're ready because it's so important. And let them know, like, I find Personally, as we start to do these check-ins, give them a bullet-pointed list of what's happened, what's been done, what's going to happen next week. Let them know that you're very detail-oriented and task-oriented. When they see that, they are like, wow, look at how prepared they are. They are really on it. We've— we did hire the right firm because what the heck, we charge a lot of money to do some of these, um, these big conversions, and rightfully so. There's a lot of work that we have to do, but A professional firm. And if you're new to this, uh, for sure, if you start to think of it, think of the big picture and just kind of narrow it all down to the beginning. And that's always a great place to look. What's the— like we said to somebody, what is your, um, utopia? What— I love that word. What's your utopia? What, what do you want to see at the end of this? And kind of work from there. What, you know, what reports are you looking for at the end of the day? And that's Part of our onboarding and figuring out what they need. But for sure, it's starting the relationship early with the client and whoever your point person is. Build trust with them. Share their goals, their utopia, their expectations internally so that people who aren't meeting— Sarah and I are the front of the business, but we've got a team behind us. But we need to let them know. Sometimes we'll just flat out ask when we're in the meeting with the client, can we record this so that our staff We don't miss anything. Most people, I don't think we've ever had anybody say no to that.

Well, the other thing too, Linda, I think is, and where you're going with this, is it does take time and space. And the big part is what you want to, what you want to present to someone and how you want them to feel. As you think about that as yourself too, I think that's where you're kind of going with some of this, is the general feeling, onboarding respectfully, does take a longer time sometimes, not because you fall down on the job. It's just, it might not be as straight shot as you thought. The client said something different when they— when you interviewed them, and then you get in the file and we all see it. It happens all the time. How to price for that is hard to do.

Mm-hmm.

Like you're saying, Linda, it's just you're, you're learning from them what it is that they want, and then you're trying to align yourself in the process. With that is the way I'm seeing it.

And have the check-ins with them. So we don't want to just say, okay, we just got you as a client and we're never going to meet with you. Sometimes meeting with them at critical points in the project lets them, as far as the onboarding goes, it'll help you see the picture because what you might think they want and what they think they're getting might be 2 different things. And it, it will show itself early on. And then you're not having to go through the whole project meeting them at the end and saying, Well, that's not what I thought I was getting. You want to, you want to tie that down in the beginning. And sometimes we use terminology as accountants that we have these little acronyms that they, they kind of float right by the client. And being— I think building trust with the people that you're working with is important, having that relationship, being completely transparent with them. So if there's a delay because maybe your staff came down with COVID or whatever, you need to be really open with them. Or maybe, hey, it's 1099 week, we are We are a little bit up against it and we had to put all hands on deck. So this week we're only going to accomplish X. And being there, people are pretty good when you bring it up. It's better to bring it up than to have to go back and, and then say, oh, sorry, we didn't tell you. More, more information is better. Have that big plans, big picture visual for them. Structure it, structure the whole onboarding and have purpose to it. I think those are the key.

Those are the key. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we did great, Sarah, and we stuck to our 15 minutes.

Yay!

So I hope this was helpful to everybody. Uh, this week— oh, this week's great week. We have Josh Stanley from, uh, J— I'm gonna— I think it's JK. I can't remember the name of the company now. Oh, Josh, I'm sorry, but I'll put a link in. He's coming to our group. We're going to talk about entities. So, uh, if anybody from the group watching this Yeah. Any questions? He's a tax guy.

It's—

he's— that's his shtick. So if you want to come in and we're going to make a post so that people can add any questions they've always wanted to ask a tax person, but they were afraid to ask because they didn't want to look like they didn't know, this is the time. Because Josh is the nicest guy and, uh, he wants to help us. He, he believes in a great— and speaking of trust, a great relationship with, with, uh, the bookkeepers on staff. So they— that's part of what he believes is a great relationship for the client. It's all about the client.

Remember that. Yeah, no, I, it's— I'm so looking forward. And it was— I so appreciated that he already took notes from the last one in preparation because I had questions about equity sections and just things like that that I might know, but maybe other people don't know, or I need some more clarity on.

So yeah, I mean, he's doing the tax returns. So if we have questions, we want our work to be great to give to the tax person so that they can process it efficiently. So he's going to give us some tips and tricks. And if you're not in our Law Lab, the paid mastermind group, join us. I'll put a link in here too for that. And absolutely, I think it's going to be— we have some great stuff coming down the pipeline with the group too. Yeah.

Well, thank you, everybody.

Enjoy. Thank you for coming. Yes, we'll see you all next week.

Sounds good. Bye-bye. Bye.