[Growth Series] How can we growth hack a new CPA practice?

If I Partnered With a CPA that Wanted to Start a New Accounting Practice…

I’ve been thinking about a meaningful way on how I can share what we do at Keel Advisors, while giving value to others by helping them think through any marketing challenges they’re currently facing in their business.

I'll be 100% honest, this is what we do at Keel Advisors, so we're incredibly biased, but my clients averaged 3.75 new jobs created over the last 6 month period and have experience skyrocketing growth, including buying out competitors.

We all know what we're doing at Keel Advisors. :)

If you have any questions on anything covered, please visit us at www.keeladvisors.com, or you can reach me at [email protected] or (206) 496-0637.

With that out of the way, I’d like to introduce the “If I partnered…” Growth Series!

In each installment, I’ll pick a different business type and scenario, and I’ll write out a plan on what I would do during the first couple months “if I partnered” with that expert to grow their business.

Assumptions:

• I partner with an expert in that field to start a business, and I have an ownership stake
• We have a large marketing budget to pour into online marketing and other strategies and tactics
• Timeline is the first 2-3 months

For this installment, let’s assume I become a business partner with a seasoned CPA that just started a new practice.

Let’s get started!

Groundwork: Why are we doing this? Who are we serving?

My CPA business partner and I would come up with our purpose, vision, mission, and core values.

Who are we and what do we stand for?

We’d work to define our core market and services.

What about pricing? Do we want to be a high-volume firm, like H&R Block, or a bespoke firm that works with less demanding and higher dollar clients? Will we niche down into one industry? Value based billing, or hourly?

Are we going to tap into the B2B market, and offer services like bookkeeping, interim CFO services, advisory, etc… – or will we only focus on tax?

What will our customer experience look like end-to-end?

All this will help us build our company story – which will be the core of our brand, and sales process.

Does my business partner need sales training? If yes, I’d work with them to implement and train them on the sales process I follow that’s driven over $31b in sales.

There are all sorts of other questions that we’d work through too. All are important to consider before we build our brand.

A business name is important. We’ll come up with that right now. :)

Business Optimization and Automation: How do we up your effective hourly rate?

This is an upfront and ongoing process.

As someone that loathes unnecessary, time-consuming work, I do everything I can to build processes, systematize, automate, and outsource everything that I can.

First though, we need to build the systems and processes for the business. If these aren’t in place, then how can we expect our team members to do them for the company?

From here on, my business partner should begin to shift their focus on generating more revenue (their current highest leveraged priority) and only focus on their highest and best use. 

We need to ramp up their effectively hourly rate as fast as possible, because if they’re not generating money for the company, we’re losing money. That’s expensive over time.

Everything else will be outsourced or passed to an external team member.

The first step would be to hire a Virtual Assistant (VA), using a service like Virtual Staff Finder (my time is better spent on generating leads for us). The VA can handle their email, sending engagement letters, and other small tasks for the office.

The next would be to hire a call answering/front desk service, something like CallRuby. They can handle the inbound calls, and outbound calls, such as reminders for appointments, client payments, and more.

As we grow, I can use Upwork to build our external team to hire tax preparers (on an hourly basis) to handle basic income tax returns, another CPA to handle simple customer tasks so that my business partner can focus on their highest leveraged priorities, and bookkeepers to work on our client’s books.

We can think about turning external team members into internal W2 team members when revenue supports it. When we do hire, every employee will get their own VA, because focused happy employees are at the core of a successful business.

Get a Website Built and Hire a Copywriter: The ultimate trust builder

You know who's really in the 1%?

Businesses that have a customer-focused, cleanly designed website that has clear calls-to-action and effectively communicates their company story.

While a website doesn’t sell for us, it will build our credibility to sway visitors to become leads to become potential prospects that contact us much faster so they can become our clients, after working with us once, they’ll become long-term clients and then refer to us.

Further, great copywriting will tell our story in a meaningful way that connects with our intended audience – who wants to talk to yet another boring accounting firm?

On why I think websites are important, are people going to want to work with an accountant that has a website pulled from 1998 and looks like it was build on GeoCities (with content to match), or a highly polished professional website with great content that effectively tells our story?

Claim All Social Media Profiles: Basic but necessary

This is important.

Platforms like Yelp, Facebook, YouTube, and many others are search engines exactly like Google and Bing.

I would also build out the profiles using great content, e.g. great pictures and written content. A local photographer would be hired for headshots.

Reputation Management System: More reviews = an additional revenue stream

Reviews are important.

92% of consumers will find reviews on our company before even contacting us – if the reviews don’t stack up to their desires, they won’t even think of contacting us.

Further, a business' star rating is the number 1 factor when customers chose to contact a business.

I have a client that gets half his business from Yelp - without paying them a dime. How's that for free, inbound revenue?

Collecting reviews is a fairly automated process, so it doesn’t take up my time or effort to bring in that revenue.

Credibility Builder: Make You the "Go-To" Expert in Your Target Market

I would get my business partner into the local spotlight using a thoughtfully crafted PR campaign.

The goal is twofold:

1.    To build credibility among potential customers

2.    To build credibility among peers

To build credibility with customers, I’d get them on the local morning shows – TV and radio, on the popular blogs around town, on podcasts, and get them featured in the local newspaper and business journals.

To build credibility among peers, I’d have them write articles for industry journals, magazines, websites and blogs, and set them up with speaking gigs at trade shows/seminars, and to be featured on industry websites, blogs and magazines.

Depending on the niche and ideal clients, we can go national or international with the PR campaigns.

Why is this important at such an early stage?

It boosts our credibility fast.

This is important for us since we are such a new CPA practice. While initially the PR campaigns would provide a quick boost of leads, it will allow us to uplevel our prices that much faster. Since we can feature all the content generated on our website and in our marketing, we can quickly to boost our credibility and perceived dominance in the local market.

Qualified Lead Generation: Inbound leads (and clients) start in week 1

Using our company’s story, I would craft paid advertising campaigns on two platforms to start – Facebook (outbound), Google AdWords (inbound), and LinkedIn (outbound and inbound).

An added benefit is that all leads generated will be stored in highly segmented email lists. We can build email drip campaigns around these audiences to contact them later.

To get back to leads…

The psychological roadmap of a lead generated from an outbound campaign is different than from an inbound campaign. An outbound campaign is a little like a direct mail campaign – you have to build a reason(s) on why the lead should contact you. An inbound campaign is different – a prospect is actively searching for your service and needs to contact someone right now so they can buy right now – so the credibility and reviews of our firm are important.

Facebook Ads for CPAs:

Since we are reaching out to potential prospects, this takes more research and testing.

For the exact offer we run in our ads, it would depend on the customer and service we want leads for.

For example, if we’re targeting consumers for tax returns, I’d split-test a number of different offers, e.g. a 15-minute call to see if they’re a good fit, automated webinar on common mistakes make when people self-prepare, download a whitepaper, etc… There’d be a different campaign for each service, e.g. bookkeeping, B2B clients, etc…

Google AdWords for CPAs:

The thing I love about AdWords is that interested people are actively looking for our accounting services. When compared to other types of marketing, it can be a much shorter time from their initial search to them choosing to work with us. These types of campaigns are a little more straightforward and we can have the ads directed to basic landing pages to capture lead information – rather than a complicated follow up sequence.

LinkedIn for CPAs:

This is a great platform for picking up B2B type clients.

There are a few possibilities here:

Farming: I would gain access to my business partner’s LinkedIn profile, with two main goals. I would build out their profile to match their excellence in the accounting field, and start to build their follower count.

I would also build out a calendar for meaningful content that’s driven to engage our target audience/customer.

After I gain a reasonable amount of followers on the profile, I’d start a multiple LinkedIn communities – each around our target B2B audience. Are we targeting law offices? New community. Are we targeting dental offices? New community.

Hunting: There are a couple different paid ad types that can be used and tested (e.g. paid InMails, in-feed ads). We can see which generates a ROI, then scale from there. They’d be similar campaigns to the Facebook and AdWords campaigns.

Since I have been building the credibility of my business partner’s profile, I can then do outbound messages to the people I am now connected with. This would not be the typical message you see on LinkedIn, e.g. “We’re connected, buy this thing now!” 

Rankings: Where 80% of consumers go to find a business

That new website needs to begin the process to get ranked in Google search results.

Since we’ve also been getting great reviews (captured from the reputation management system we implemented), we can start the process of ranking the Yelp profile in Google search results too.

This way we can capture up to 4 spots on the first page of Google:

• Google AdWords – right at the top
• Google Maps – show up in the Maps section of search results, including the Google+ reviews
• Website – rank the website in Google search results
• Yelp profile – for local service businesses, Google will show a third-party platform in the results, includes a snippet of the number of Yelp reviews

Rankings do take time (3-6+ months, more time for super competitive search terms in big markets), which is why I started right after the website was finished.

Some More Ways to Bring In Leads…

With all that out of the way (and we have a few months of data), we can start to get more creative in our marketing to target our ideal clients that have the best ROI on my business partner’s time.

This can includes strategies and tactics like our Dream Client Campaign, email list building, email drip campaigns, retargeting campaigns, and more.

We can also focus on building strategic partnerships at a local level, and if needed, at national and international levels.

If I partnered with a CPA that wanted to start a new accounting practice, that’s what I’d do in the first 2-3 months to easily get to six-figures by end of the first year.

Do you have any questions? Do you have a suggestion for my next installment? Contact me at [email protected]