12 Steps to Grow a Million Dollar Firm

1 - Become an Outsourced Accounting firm that sells value

You cannot be commoditized.

You must deliver value, and specifically, be tuned to what’s valuable for a small business.

When you put bookkeeping, tax and accounting together, you'll be able to add a ton of value and people will want to do business with you.

Here's a Valuable Stack of Services Worth a Large Monthly Retainer:‍

• All clients get their books set up perfectly & cleaned up.
• You’ll take an in-depth snapshot of their taxes, financial picture, and accounting system.
• You’ll create a comprehensive tax plan focusing on both the current year taxes and the subsequent years.
• You’ll then do all the work necessary, within reason, to get them optimized for the plan (setup S-Corps, help direct for retirement plans, etc).
• You’ll then keep their books up to date with high-levels of bookkeeping.
• You’ll set them up on the best payroll, and either run it for them or teach them, while providing customer service.
• You’ll then provide monthly or quarterly reports with real feedback and coaching.
• You’ll eliminate tax liability surprises by helping them pay in according to the tax plan, so they end the year without owing anything or getting a refund, and you’ll do it through the payroll system.
• You’ll meet before year end, and help them make tax mitigation decisions proactively.
• You’ll close out the books and perform high-levels of year end reporting.
• You’ll make the year end tax season a breeze, because you’ve done everything through the year.
• You’ll do all the tax returns for the owners and their family.
• You’ll help provide wealth building strategies for the owner, bordering on being their financial planner.
• You’ll help them mitigate risk, recommending trusts, life insurance, disability insurance, and other simple common sense risk mitigation techniques.

This stack of services is worth a high monthly retainer.

2 -Commit to a monthly retainer model predicated on value

You should not be itemizing your services, and they should be put together in a monthly retainer

Why use monthly retainers?

Well, because excellent outsourced accounting requires ongoing engagement in order to actually be valuable.

Also, you really are a staff alternative.

Eventually you can become pickier and pickier about your customers.

As your monthly recurring revenue stabilizes, you can start to cherry pick the best clients and avoid the painful ones.

Monthly recurring revenue also empowers you to be more helpful, work in the margins of life (rather than during tax season) and really help them out rather than trying to cram everything in at year end.

Monthly retainers are good for accountants and their customers

3 - Clarify your end game

Ironically, I’m kind of cynical of goal setting, and prefer to think of goals simply as a vision for the future.

I say that because I know that action & execution trumps dreams and goals.

Set some goals, but make sure you don’t waste all your time sitting around making business plans & financial models based on something you’ve not tried to set out and accomplish.

I get annoyed talking to people who know lots about the business they never start.

But if you want a million dollar firm, you need to come to grips with what that looks like.

Here’s what a 500k and 1 million dollar client makeup or end game might look like.

1 million Dollar Firm:

12 Clients at 2500/month - 360k/year
20 Clients at 1500/month - 360k/year
30 Clients at 750/month average - 270k/year

That’s a 990k/year firm with only 60 clients.

500k Firm:

6 Clients at 2500
10 Clients at 1500
15 clients at 750

At this point, I just want you to think about what the “end game” might look like.

4 - Get enough front end activity to get diamonds

Look, you’re building a monthly recurring based business.

Not only will your business create monthly income, but usually your clients will NOT leave you.

The average client retention is 7 years for a CPA or accountant.

You’ll eventually be “fat and happy”, where you don’t have to worry so much about client acquisition.

Healthy businesses always grow, but by the time you have this many clients, you’ll see that they will refer you if you ask them and delight them.

Since customers stick with their accountants for a long time, especially when they are receiving value, you need to remember that you are climbing a mountain, and to a degree, you will eventually reach the pinnacle.

You’ll always need fresh new businesses, but you you’ll eventually be transformed into a client service focus rather than client acquisition focus.

First, you must commit to getting sales & new customers.

In the beginning, 80% of your effort must be put into sales and 20% into the accounting service itself.

5 - invest into a top caliber online presence.

Your website is your sleepless sales person.

Even introverted, less sales oriented accountants can build massive sales momentum if they have a website that communicates well on their behalf.

You need a website, you’ll need social media, and you’ll want to utilize these tools to intersect with prospective clients right where they are.

A website is your sales person.

You need a website that moves people to trust you, see you as credible, and keeps you top of mind so that when they finally choose, they come to you for answers.

Your website needs to have compelling messaging, and should present in a way that leads to people understanding your value proposition.

Things your website should do or include:

6 - Pursue the best clients with in-person sales & prospecting

The best clients come from real sales efforts.

High caliber, high protein business owners are busy, and require someone to expertly engage and intersect with them, and guide them to a preferable future.

Great clients don’t just google “CPA near me” or “accountant near me” and call you right away.

Great accounting clients will need to be nurtured into a relationship

Nothing get’s people into your sales process better than an intentional sales person.

Business owners respond well to highly capable sales people

Even if you’re not a highly capable sales person, you can become one AND we can utilize video and digital marketing to help you.

If you want more of those juicy, higher retainer customers, you’re going to have a better time if you do both digital marketing and sales prospecting.

Advertising along with & prospecting leads to the highest success.

Yes, YOU can prospect & sell

You really can do this.

You’ll just need to commit to a certain amount of front end activity, and I’ll make this easy for you.

It’s called your project 1500

If you take 3 days each week, and find a way to ask for an appointment to 10 people, you’ll actually have success.

That would mean you’ll connect with just about 1500 people each week.

The best clients you’ll ever get are the local clients that feel a local connection to you.

Locality is a very simple common ground, and it makes prospecting really easy.

Don’t worry, local clients don’t necessarily mean that you’ll need to be a traditional, in-person firm.

You can still be a remote, virtual firm from your basement, even if you pursue local clients.

Commit to prospecting of 1500 people a year.

10 people a day, 3 days a week.

Wednesday through Friday are the best days.

You'll see:

About 8% of them will actually want to connect with you, and about 25% of those will become clients.

That means that if you ask 10 people a day, 3 days a week, you'll get

1500 People Asked each week:

8% Meeting Rate124 meetings.

31 New Customers

Imagine you commit to this for 2-4 years!

You MUST go get clients.

Your best, highest ticket clients will probably come from you engaging with them them through prospecting or video.

Excellent customers are serious about their business, and they typically have 2 hands on the wheel of their business.

What I mean is that successful businesses, with the clientele and revenue to justify your higher retainers, are not easy to intersect with.

Serious sales come from people engaging with a serious business owner.

You must learn to connect with people, prospect, and nurture relationships that lead to opportunities and meetings.

You must cold call, cold email, network, and find a way to ask 10 people to a meeting every day so that you keep your funnel full.

Local businesses are great for this, and it’s usually the easiest common ground to find and connect on.

You can use a simple email, text or MOST IMPORTANTLY - a phone call script like this.

SCRIPT FOR A COLD CALL OR EMAIL:

“Hey, is this John of John’s Construction?  My name is Rob and I own Feedbackwrench right down the road from you, I was wondering if I could shoot you an email and introduce ourselves?  Just want to make sure our local business neighbors know we’re here if they need help with tax planning & business accounting.”

You can email, text, or even message on Linkedin, but nothing is better than real personal engagement.

The key is to spark a new connection with a stranger, and then slowly cultivate it over time.

A local newsletter and a simple followup system is really good for this.

The bottom line is that you MUST commit to in person sales and prospecting if you want to succeed.

7 - Pick a niche and target them

When you target a niche, you can easily build credibility and content that positions you as a guide and an authority.

Besides that, you can create systems around your processes, which leads to efficiency in your operations.

I always get excited when we help an accounting firm or bookkeeping business, because I know exactly what will create sales and I have all the information stored in my immediate mindset.

Working with a familiar niche is easier than a totally foreign, or seldom served industry.

But when you take on clients of other sectors outside your niche, you’ll spend more calories and it’s harder work in general.

Should you then only serve clients in a niche?

As of right now, I think accountants do best serving any kind of business sector so that they can be protected and have diversified income.

Covid taught us that being concentrated in one sector can be risky.

Not only that, there are so many great customers in various industries that really don't require much nuance or change in your setup.

I recommend that people focus on helping small businesses in general, and then use their advertising & website to target particularly niches.

Help any sector, but target niches with content & ads.

Targeting a niche can be done by creating individual landing pages, highly specialized content on your blog, creating YouTube videos that speak directly to them, and then integrating all of that content into advertising campaigns on Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other places.

Ways to Target a Niche:

• Landing Pages on your website
• Create youtube content for them
• Create specific ads for them
• Use targeted audiences in facebook & google
• Create blog content for them
• Create email drip campaigns for them once they're in your funnel

For some reason, all of us are much more inclined to lean in when there is specific language geared towards our industry niche.

I'm much more likely to click on a lead magnet that talks about how a person built $1 million accounting firm, if I am an accountant.

I'm much more likely to work with an accountant that helps my industry specific, even if there are lots of other industries they work in.

There's certainly value in claiming you work with only one industry sector, and there are efficiencies and you can also build up relevant content the positions you as an authority, but I don't necessarily think you should exclusively work with one industry niche.

8 - Run a Value-Focused Meeting Cycle

If you understand this meeting cycle, you will be much more likely to close high retainer business clients.

Very few businesses come to an accountant looking for a high monthly bill.

Businesses are going to come to your accounting firm and bookkeeping service because they need their taxes done or they need help with their books.

You are going to frame a valuable, encompassing, proactive and year-long service to a business owner because it's super valuable to them, but they always start out wanting something simple.

One of the core ways that you will be able to communicate value rather than price and a commoditized service, is by running a sales cycle that pumps the brakes and allows you to actually identify and Connect true value to your customer.

The 3 Meeting Cycle for Sales

1. Connect meeting
2. Analysis
3. Take action

1 – The Connect Meeting

Your goal in sales and prospecting is to fill your week with proactive meetings that I call connect meetings.

In a connect meeting, you can chat on the phone, in person, or even virtually, to discuss each other's businesses and understand value propositions.

A connect meeting should be held with somebody who is a legitimate prospect, but it's also valuable to have connect meetings with anyone who is a small business owner or connected to other small business owners.

The connect meeting is really about identifying who this person is, what their journey has been, what the business journey has been, what are their struggles and what are they trying to build.

Do you want to keep 80% of your conversation about them and their business, and then be ready to peek their curiosity about how you can legitimately make their life significantly better.

In a connect meeting, you are going to identify their path and journey in business, but simultaneously identify what they have been doing for tax planning, bookkeeping, year and taxes and financial advisory up to this point.

Without identifying where they've come from and where they want to go, you will never be able to connect what's valuable to your service.

A connect meeting should lead to an analysis.

Throughout the connect meeting, you are leading up to this idea that you can identify opportunities to improve their financial position if you can only get your hands on their tax return and their accounting system.

Everything should be driving to an analysis of their accounting system and their tax return.

Some of you bookkeepers might be nervous at the thought of analyzing a tax return.

At minimum, you should be looking for whether or not this business owner has been utilizing some of the basic tax planning strategies available such as implementing escorts, retirement plans, hiring their kids, and checking out how they've done with their home office deductions or equipment purchases.

You should get excited at the thought of analysis because you're going to find people who have been sending way too much money into the Social Security coffers and are over paying in taxes.

2 -The Analysis Stage or Meeting

As I just mentioned, you should be really excited and passionate about getting the opportunity to analyze peoples financial position, taxes, accounting systems and their underlying business accounting.

Seriously, there should be less about your sales process, and more about the invigorating and motivating fact that this business owner is missing out and losing money because they are not getting a wise and insightful person like yourself helping them with their tax and accounting.

You're going to find people who have missed out for years on tax planning opportunities, and over paid thousands a year in taxes.

Not only that, but as you start looking into their bookkeeping and accounting systems, you are going to find lots of business owners who have sloppy books, that will lead to the missing out in opportunities when it's time to make a move in their business and purchase equipment, land, or even an acquisition of some sort.

The analysis needs to be driven by an authentic curiosity about their business.

Everything you do throughout the connect and analysis should be driven by a genuine love and care of people, and a deep desire to help business owners create amazing systems and their business to keep more of their money and run more efficiently.

Sales becomes much easier when you are thrilled at the idea that you're going to find over paid taxes and ugly accounting systems that you can set up properly.

3 Proposal and take action

There are three parts of a proposal that I will leave for another time.

In general, you need to frame up the preferable future that you identified which will include the amount of taxes you think you can save them, the amount of saved time you will create for them, the amount of surety and protection they will receive when their accounting is done properly, and the significant upward momentum they will experience by focusing on what they do best.

After framing up the opportunity costs, you'll want to dive into a list of everything they will get when they sign up for your outsourced accounting services.

If you notice the order here, we are starting with the benefits, moving to the features, and then finally we land on the price.

First comes benefits, then comes features, then comes price.

1. Frame. Tax Savings & Financial Benefit
2. Pile on everything they get
3. Lead them to the price

Absent a value interpret tater, all negotiations deteriorate into pricing.

If you want to land higher retainer clients, you need to build up the benefits and overall services into a compelling package that's worthy of a monthly retainer.

In short, you will be much more likely to land the type of clients you need if you run a meeting cycle and do what I just told you here.

9 - Emphasize the S-Corp & Staff Alternative Value Prop

Two major pieces of your overall value proposition are going to be tax savings and serving as a staff alternative.

In general, the Pareto principle is very real when you think about who you were going to serve and what's going to be the most impactful for them.

In general, 20% of your recommendations will get 80% of the payoff for the customer.

Setting up an S Corp. and being a staff alternative with fully integrated services is going to be the two major value propositions to a degree.

Nothing exposes the level of tax planning a customer is currently receiving like an analysis of their S corporation decisions.

Not only that, but the majority of their tax savings is going to come from implementing an S corporation and helping them mitigate Social Security and Medicare taxes.

You'll learn in my course how to use the S Corp. and how to provide leadership, even to prospects, about the S corporation.
 
Staff alternative means that you are going to be compared to what it would cost to hire additional help even for an hourly rate.

As soon as your customer is starting to think about what it would mean to have somebody work for them 8 to 15 hours a week, you’re starting to stack up value.

If they hire someone for $25/hour, for 8 hours a week, which is very typical, they will pay:

8 Hours x $25 a Week = $800 a month

Tack on their tax return, their bookkeeping software and their payroll software, and you’ll see how those costs add up.

You will legitimately helps save them more than eight hours a week in their business.

One thing you'll notice with business owners that have been around for a while, is it they often have a part-time bookkeeper helping them. While we love these people, these are employees that you can probably help them avoid having to hire.

As soon as your prospect is starting to think of you in terms of a replacement for their staff, your monthly retainer starts to feel comparatively low.

The bottom line is that the S Corp. along with being perceived as a staff replacement are going to be too massive value propositions.

10 - Position Yourself As a Staff Alternative

When you're selling, it's critical that you position yourself as an alternative to hiring a part time or full time staff person.

You're not trying to get the business to buy your services, you're trying to see if you can help them achieve the future they desire.

Growing Businesses need to invest in staff, and it's best if they can be production, sales or leadership staff.

If they hire you, they can prolong hiring more admin staff.

You need them to be thinking about how you are an alternative to the admin staff they'll need very soon.

Staffing is expensive.

When they see EVERYTHING that you do for them in terms of tax planning, compliance and CFO, and they consider how much staff time will be saved, they will be more likely to say yes to a larger retainer.

Large retainers are still cheaper than a typical part time accounting employee.

You'll get larger retainers when you get them thinking about his.

11 - Provide CFO Level Guidance 

& Operational Improvement

You want to add significant value, but you don't want massive scope creep.

One way that accountants can add huge value, is to start guiding the business to improve operations and start providing CFO level reports.

Don't just send historical data, engage to help them develop understanding.

Don't let the business stay where they are, help them take steps towards a more efficient, streamlined and profitable company.

One major way you can add serious value is to help them implement systems like Service Titan, Jobber or other workforce software.

For a company to grow, they need a system.

Jobber and Service Titan can help you become a CFO, and start measuring the leading indicators that are driving your lagging indicators.

Tracking the production of each team member, driving towards efficiencies and job costing, and equipping them to run more efficiently is a huge deal.

You should become competent in Jobber, Service Titan, Buildertrend, Procore or other software so you can add huge value.

12 - Rigidly Accept Only Outsourced Accounting Clients

Good is the enemy of great in this business.

You won't be able to deliver high-retainer service, if you're bogged down doing other work.

When you stack bookkeeping, cleanup, tax planning, CFO, and tax returns - you're able to deliver higher quality at each service.

Do yourself a favor, and don't allow any clients that are not doing the full monthly retainer service.

If people don't want the full stack of services, then send them to a local competitor you actually trust.