What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #132

Author

Jason Staats
April 25, 2024

📈 The HIGHEST MARGIN Service Your Firm Could Launch This Year

Paid membership communities are hot right now. Every influencer and their mom wants you to join their community.

But here’s why accounting firms are better-suited to launch valuable, long-term membership communities:

  1. Your expertise is founded in something very real and very valuable - many influencer communities are built around their celebrity, or fluffy hooks like ‘productivity’ or ‘scale’

  2. You’re already a hub - The best communities are specific. Particularly if you’re specializing, your firm is already a unique hub of folks in a domain

  3. Street cred - You’ve built a successful firm, you’re walking the walk. People in their domain already go to you for advice

And it’s worthwhile because the economics of membership communities are wild.

Let’s say we pull 40 members at launch for a $200/mo community. This is a very inexpensive business community, but you have to start somewhere. Day 1 that’s $8k/mo in revenue that will require much less time to service than traditional client work.

Remember the value of a community lies in the ability of members to provide value to each other. It doesn’t all come from you. When someone refers a friend to the community, they’re more likely to join because their friend is already there.

If you add 2 members a month, by the end of year 1 the community's running $12,800/mo. If you add 4 members a month the next year and increase the price to $300/mo for new members, you’re running $27k/mo by the end of year 2.

On the pod Monday we ran through how to think about developing programming for your community, and overcome the urge to associate community pricing with what you charge for your other services (they’re completely unrelated).

I’m so jazzed about this right now I’ll be running a 4 week live workshop, the first live workshops I’ve run in over a year in my community next month. Soup to nuts, everything you need to launch a community inside your accounting firm.

Slots are limited, we’re down to the last 70 spots in the community and 30+ joined last week. We’re also matchmaking people into mastermind groups next week, which only happens once per quarter 🧠

💎 This Week's Sponsor

Check out Jason’s 5 minute demo video 👇👇

📅 This Week

  • I’m in Florida next week for the PASBA conference and would love to see you there!

  • I ran through an exercise doubling the profit of this $1.8M firm with only 10% price increases

  • If you’re a QBO user, everyone on your team should at least be using the free version of RightTool - nobody’s paying me to say this unfortunately, but this is the biggest no-brainer in accounting tech today

  • How to develop an expected response time policy in your firm Video Audio

  • A sales assistant where AI plays the role of the customer to train your team

  • Some fresh delegation ideas to get the juices flowing Video Audio

🔮 Q&A

How should I handle the quick questions? We run recurring live meetings but unsure what to push off to those vs handle via email. Link

No perfect answer here but three maxims to keep in mind:

  1. No question is too small not to capture. ‘Quick’ is the product of years of expertise, and the privilege of being on your client list.

  2. Batch small requests into ‘office hours’, these are easier to knock out a bunch at a time. Even share when those office hours are with clients so they know when to expect a response.

  3. Hire for ‘quick’. A team should have quick responders and slow responders. If you’re the big boss, you’re a slow responder. If you’re quick, why would they ever go to your team with a question?

  4. Experiment with better self-service options. A help desk, a blog, a client-facing AI assistant. Generous self-service may give you greater permission to defer quick asks.

Take care not to swim upstream against client behavior. If advisory clients keep wanting answers over email, maybe that’s how they’d rather be engaging. If so make sure that’s sustainable for you, and better align the deliverable with what they want.

😍 From The Community

My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, now capped at 500 members.

▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯ 430/500 members