Optimize your customer lifecycle funnel for accounting

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professional service firms have been built on one-to-one services for ever you work directly with clients one-on-one and by definition this is like the lowest leveraged type of work you could ever do right it's like learning to be a great cook opening up a restaurant and only letting one person in at a time that would be weird so is it possible to alternatively build a firm around one too many services the difference today to 100 years ago is we have the internet to enable distribution but can you actually do that when clients still need personalized advice today we're going to dispel some myths about one of many services talk about using one of many to build deeper client relationships and at the end talk through a simple really heck and profitable one-to-many service you can roll out tomorrow okay myths first that every client is a unique snowflake this is technically true but it doesn't mean you can't still do one too many work for them how about doing their one-on-one work where one-on-one is necessary while also giving them access to one-to-many resources now to be clear you can set up camp at any level of technical nuance you could keep things super general and broad this will cast the widest net but provide the least value the other end of the spectrum is one-on-one violent tax returns personalized advice doing their books but there's a sweet spot in the middle there being between one to one and one too many that the one-to-oneers especially can tap into rather than exclusively doing 101 start moving into more profitable one-to-many services second myth i'm no influencer what am i going to do become a youtuber start a podcast i'm a bean counter false false you're probably already doing this in some form or another an email blast to all of your clients or maybe a subset of your clients whether you like it or not you're already an influencer because people are coming to you for advice they respect your expertise and that expertise influences their decision making your job is to take that gift that you have and find the highest leverage way to help people last myth that you have to stop doing one-to-one no doing one-to-one is what makes you really good at one-to-many it shouldn't be either or we've all seen those youtubers and influencers who very obviously do not do one-to-one it's your one-to-one experience that will make you great at one-to-many and if you can sell to a hundred people what you're currently selling to one it goes without saying you don't have to charge much you gotta make more money just a matter of finding those 100 people so how do you start how do you start to transition that mindset from one to one to one to many because who the heck are you bob what makes you think people are gonna spend their hard-earned cheddar on anything you could produce two steps to get you there it's easier than you'd think build for who you have you already have clients who trust you who given the opportunity would go deeper start with them start a monthly mastermind group grab 10 great fit clients give each month a topic and solicit questions from this group attempt in addition to those questions pull in the questions you really want to answer poke around online to see what questions people are asking and this will get the discussion going schedule this session for 90 minutes leave the last 15 20 minutes for q a people love this crap i understand you may have never done it but there's a ton to be learned from people hearing other people's questions your clients don't know the questions to ask they draw a bunch of value from simply hearing that and they're chalking that value up to you because you made it happen you set the table okay so that's building for who you have now let's talk about building for who you want you've taken one-on-one clients and made them one too many clients let's go the other way imagine someone starting as a one too many client and then becoming one-to-one or even better staying as a one-to-many client forever it's like this sweet super profitable friend zone yeah who's laughing now we're the ones friend-zoning people yeah so how do we build for the people we want let's talk about a concept called parasocial relationships the context in which this phrase is usually used is with celebrities someone's listened to every tim ferris podcast is madly in love with him and eventually gets a restraining order this is an unhealthy parasocial relationship you might also be thinking of those weird little fish that like attach themselves to sharks again not related but these relationships take many forms at varying levels of scale from your kim kardashians to your person with 10 twitter followers and you and i are an example we're here building a relationship right now for goodness sakes you are watching a youtube video about parasocial relationships you're only here because you have some degree of trust that you may learn something and this trust could have stemmed from a bunch of different places maybe we've been friends on twitter the last few years maybe we spent some time together in my accountant community maybe you saw my youtube channel has some followers and that was the little bit of social proof you needed to watch it that trust while it can absolutely be abused is valuable if i put out a course if i was going to sell a book when we have this trust you're much more likely to buy from me because you know me we're already somewhat aligned so that thing i'm selling is much more likely to resonate with you than some other person's course who you don't even know this is how you build for the people you want you want their trust you're building toward trust and there are a ton of ways to do this this could be a youtube channel a blog a podcast i think actually right now podcasting is an incredibly powerful way to do this because by definition they're long form think about this you record a one hour podcast per week about the things you want your client to hear that will provide value to them and 100 people are walking around with you in their ear for one hour per week are you kidding me whatever your relationship is with that person now meeting once a year once a month whatever it is that level of trust is going to skyrocket you cannot mimic this with one to one and when you have that trust with them simply put you're going to convert on those one-to-many services now let's talk about some examples of services you could put out there one word of warning first building trust takes work you have to deliver consistent value to someone in order to earn that trust just to get them in the door one-to-one is easy because people have something they need done they need their windows clean they need their tax return prepared getting somebody in the door on one to many is harder because trust is a prerequisite they won't buy if they don't trust you already so don't forget you have to build trust first before making the ask but once you've built that trust machine it works while you sleep it's infinitely scalable so let's cruise through a few one-to-many services we're gonna end with a simple zero tech no-frills solution that you can sell tomorrow online communities super popular right now being a facebook group slack community people are actively looking for communities who will help them solve their problems these work best when they can be specific what's the specific type of client that you want let's say creative agencies under 10 employees create a community as a space for you to share your expertise and even better enable community members to share their expertise with each other the best version of a community is not a fan club it's a way to get peers together and share stuff now if your goal is to build your audience which for 99 of us that should be the goal your issue is distribution it probably makes sense for the entry-level version of this to be free but this community can absolutely have a paid tier that can be extremely profitable different benefits different access as accountants we actually have access to a lot of really interesting folks the business owners and a community can be a way for you to enable those valuable connections that people wouldn't otherwise have access to now i'm a big fan of email journeys that take someone from point a to point b with an email marketing tool you can build out a sequence of emails could just be a few could be every week for years but it takes the person on a journey so for example let's say someone's just getting into real estate what are the things you want that person to hear email campaigns are a great way to take that person on a beginner to expert journey in a totally automated way regardless of when they sign up they start at email one email two comes the next week etc you could even gather some details about that person when they sign up that impacts where on the journey they start the nice thing here is you can also see who's reading and opening these emails take your most engaged people on that list they've already built that relationship with you say hey check out this podcast i do also or this course or my monthly office hours all right last this one is a slam dunk opportunity no reason you couldn't roll this out tomorrow let's build out this mastermind group concept we talked about earlier you call it office hours masterminds whatever the idea is you hand pick 10 people from your current client list do a monthly live session with them where you simply answer questions you make sure you've got a complete set of questions ahead of time a combination of soliciting questions from them and going out and planting your own questions all tied to a monthly topic you answer these questions leave a little time for q a at the end when you first start this out reach out to those clients saying hey we're trying this new thing it's going to be free for the first six months i've hand-picked you wanna give it a try and see if it's valuable for people in that six months you're gonna learn a ton you're gonna learn about how to make these sessions as useful as possible you're gonna have some topics that are winners and some others that are stinkers but that first six month run is gonna let you build up a library of the most helpful monthly topics and questions so check this out you get through six months and start a second group still invite only reach out to 10 more people say hey we're kicking off this invite-only group of folks i've hand-picked 100 bucks a month 50 bucks a month 200 bucks a month whatever you're gonna charge here's a few testimonials from the people in our pilot group so you find 10 people willing to join that group and your content schedule is whatever worked best from the last group maybe you grab the four best monthly topics favorite questions and open it up to new questions from the current cohort virtually no prep work and it's already kind of been validated because you went through this process with another group now looking at the economics it's really easy to see you make great money doing this and that price whatever that monthly price is can continue to go up over time as you get more niche and those topics get more specific so let's say after that first group finishes their initial six months you're gonna charge them 50 bucks a month to keep on the program and keep doing month-over-month meetings that's ten folks paying 50 bucks a month 500 bucks a month for an hour of your time so 6k per year for let's say 12 hours two full days of work including prep time what are you gonna do the next two days is it gonna generate 6k maybe that's a pretty high like billable hourly rate here's the thing though it's a good start it's only ever gonna get better from there that's an extremely conservative example people happily pay hundreds even thousands of dollars to be in mastermind groups right now but here's all that matters you're now trading one-to-one work for one-to-many work it's fundamentally more profitable than the work you're doing right now now it isn't perfect it isn't infinitely scalable and you should absolutely invest in those channels that are but it's something you could start tomorrow that's probably two to five times as profitable as the work you're otherwise doing so why would you not i'd love to hear how you're approaching one to many any successful projects you rolled out drop them in the comments below let me know what you think [Music]