Empower Your Accounting with the Best Data Conversion Lead for Accounting

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it's now my great pleasure to introduce to you today's special guest presenter michael kirby michael has been the managing director of exo accounting for over seven years he's accredited with the tax practitioners board and is a certified practicing accountant michael may be familiar to you as the reigning award winner of the professional services category of the 2019 city of melton business excellence awards or as a member of the venture melton business network michael has carved out an impressive career in business development and financial analysis and shows a real passion for helping new and small businesses become established and profitable ones as illustrated by his recent assistance with our hot house participants in our program this year so it is indeed uh gives me a great pleasure to welcome michael as he shows you how to get more customers in your business and how you get more time in your day over to you michael thanks peter um thank you uh to the melton city council for this opportunity so just to introduce ourselves exo accounting our aim is to assist you to reach your financial potential our core sort of beliefs are time money and team what we try to do is create more time for you which is a valuable uh resource make money or save you money and also become part of your team as peter said we are a cpa practice we're a platinum member of xero we actually are the reigning uh zero partner of the year for victoria uh we're also members of capricorn co-op group so just to kick off uh yeah when we've got clients we look at the building blocks of a business and we go through these with our clients every building every part of the block is is important what we're looking at really here today is the middle and part of the bottom tier for the for the building blocks of business so what we're going to focus on today is what we call the business chassis so um it is all about generating leads and also sales and but also making sure that your time and your investment in generating those is maximized so by understanding the business chassis you actually get a bit of bang for your dollar in developing your business and your business profitability is going to grow much quicker by understanding all the components of the business chassis one of the things that we find the clients are too worried about their outputs outputs are what's my revenue what's my profit rather than focusing on input so as we go through the chassis you'll understand what i mean by those so at the top of this chat say and what we're going to do here today is we're going to use my own business as an example so we've gone from five years ago from having zero income up until this year uh just gone over two million dollars in income so so what we'll do is basically show you what we've done internally and hopefully some of those lessons you can take to your own businesses so generating leads there's a number of different ways to do it you know google we get a lot of clients coming to us via google we focus a lot on making sure our seo gets us at the top um and we don't do that by paying someone else we do that by our own effort in posting blogs uh articles videos to basically increase our score we also do social networking so all that basically comes into google as well so there's a crossover benefit between that so again we're constantly posting articles videos this is basically to to help you know communicate with potential clients communicate with existing clients and also build up our reputation as an expert in our field one of the biggest areas that we get our clients from are referrals and our own networks um a lot of people are afraid to afraid to ask for referrals we ask all the time we have a referral program in place we have we thank our clients and our business partners who refer to us we reward them they don't ask for it we actually send them rewards which they really appreciate so we actually have that going all the time that changes all the time we also have used from time to time lead generation companies they're very good they sort get us warm leads um you know we generally will use them when leads start to dry up or you know if we've got a promotion we use them to do the grunt work in communicating with our one with our clients another one that we get a lot of clients from is just walk-ins you know making sure that your business is presented well from the outside in people are going to look in if they see a professionally run business they're more likely to come and use your services or purchase goods off you if it looks like yeah it's a mess and disorganized they're going to keep walking conversion rates this is where i had the biggest problem so as you can imagine accountants we're not great sellers yeah we're great with numbers we're great with uh reports but selling is not our our forte early on when i first started we were getting around about 30 to 60 leads a month my conversion rate for the first four months was nil i actually got no clients to sign up walked away from meetings thinking are they going to sign up no worries not one of them did so what i did is actually went off and started to learn about what i needed to do to actually increase my conversion rates we're getting leads in the door but i just couldn't convert them it wasn't our price because our prices were competitive it wasn't our service because you know the services are what people wanted it was me basically i just didn't know how to actually communicate and sell to our clients or potential clients so what i did was did some coaching uh with my business coach um and what we sort of looked at was he talked about the yeah to get a client to come across you've got to actually get beyond their resistance to change and everybody's got that resistance to change so you know there's you know a bit of a formula that we thought worked out was the dissatisfaction the vision and the first steps you know they have to be less than the person's resistance to change so you know what we try to do is make it easy for people to come across we make it easy for people to you know we understand what they're looking for and we try to put a solution in place so by increasing you know improving that communication um aspect and sitting down and listening to the clients rather than trying to sell to them we now sit down and ask them what they're looking for why they're actually currently dissatisfied with their current accountant what are they not getting that they want sometimes it's doesn't call me back i'm not happy with the result it's costing me too much money it might be just a personality thing so understanding what their dissatisfaction is we then basically try to sculpt a solution for them that's actually increased our satisfaction rate from zero up to 75 percent that caused us another problem where our conversion rates were too high um meaning my prices were too low um people were happy with me they were happy with the the company they'll have with the services you know the conversion rate should be around about 55 to 60 percent if your pricing is right so we actually did a review of all of our pricing so if you get your conversion rates right you've got your leads coming in that leads to us an output which is new clients or customers the next thing was average spend so you've got the client in the door you've actually spent the time the money the you know the effort of getting the client in the door now the focus for us was how can we actually get them to spend more with us then the other thing was the number of transactions how many times are they actually purchasing from us so the idea there is we actually tried to find some ancillary services that clients wanted that weren't being provided that we could actually provide that led to an actual increase in number of transactions we reviewed our fees which led to an average increase in the average spend all of that basically meant that our revenue basically goes up so as we work down this chassis you can see there the leads the conversions equal to new clients the average spend the number of transactions leads to revenue the next important one is margins um what we found here is we actually went through and we found that we were actually pouring a lot of dollars down down the toilet basically um so we actually hadn't reviewed our expenses um of our business and there was enough business that we took over we hadn't actually they hadn't actually looked at their expenses for about five years so what we did is we actually went through and looked at every line of our expenditure and reviewed did we need it could we get a better service could we get a cheaper service so obviously the lowest hanging fruit there was telecommunications so we were spending something like three and a half thousand dollars a month we actually got that down to eight hundred dollars a month fixed fee there was no more variable cost uh now we're you know we saved ourselves almost thirty thousand dollars just by changing a supplier and getting the same service with someone else that meant we saved money and we actually had more certainty about our costs going forward we looked at our electricity again hadn't been done eight hundred dollars a month we saved by just changing providers um so what we do now is we actually go through every year once a year and we review every expenditure line and see is the expenditure required if it's not we eliminate it is there another service provider or an alternative if there is we'll find that and we'll actually employ them and our margins continually improve the good thing is well the main thing is yeah that's the last hanging fruit so if you can get your margins right you've got your clients coming in you've got your revenue been generated and now you've got your profit for us it's then well which one do we actually look at first we looked at the margins first so um you know with our clients one reason being is it's the last hanging fruit it's where we've got direct control over so we actually look at the margins first there's no sense in getting more clients more sales if your margins are wrong and you're not making you're making a loss or you're not maximizing your profit so the important thing for us is making sure the margins are correct before we sort of go too far down the track average spend a number of transactions uh you know jointly related you know you're trying to get your best bang for your buck and also i think it actually adds to your story when you're going out to potential clients if you've got a better service coverage where they can go get more services and they feel like they're being looked after you're going to get a better rapport with your clients leads and conversion rates are last now we've got everything in-house really occurring so what we try to do then is okay let's start generating the leads let's start getting the conversion rates up so it's basically working out what's uh you know where we've got the direct control over which is one two and three there four and five yeah you can control it a little bit however in the end of the day it's going to be the client or potential client's decision whether they come to you so they're in control now the beauty of the business chassis is the geared effect so if you have a look at you know if we look at the current situation we've got 10 leads you know coming in on a regular basis we're converting 30 of them which means three new clients the average spenders 100 they're only spending once 300 in revenue the margin's 15 so our profit is 45 so that's our current situation let's say that we actually uh looked at our margin first so we've actually increased our margin or improved it by five percent so you can see there the effect of that is 33 on our profit okay just by a small percentage increase in in the margin if we have a look at every area function of the uh the business so you can see there we've actually increased the leads by two we've improved our conversion rates so now we're getting six new clients the average spend is up to 110 the transactions are 1.5 which means 990 dollars not 300 the margin is 20 so now we've got 198 which is 340 improvement in our profit so if you can imagine that in your own business it has a dramatic effect fairly quickly with the the smallest amount of effort by putting all your eggs in one basket you'll get you know you'll get a return on on your yeah on your effort however if you look at look at trying to get a small increase improvement in each area you're going to have a much much better effect on your business so what we do with our clients is we go through all of this with them we've got systems that allow us to do all that and we can actually analyze their business and we actually put a plan in place so how do we do it really it's all you know with us we're very systematic we use systems that are live in real time there's no sense having information that's a week old a month old a year old you know you need up-to-date information and the systems are out there these days that you can actually do that so we use a number of different systems to be able to do that all of our systems are integrated which means they all talk to each other so all the information coming through basically they all talk to each other um and it makes our life a little bit easier we're also getting into the area of smart or ai technology now um systems like xero now has ai being built into it so the system itself will actually do a lot of the grunt work and processing for you allows the business owners to actually work more in the business rather than on the business so our main you know sort of thing is having all these systems that talk to each other that we can actually see live 24 7 with ourselves but also of our clients we plan we have budgets and business plans so yeah these are you know these can be very good for a business or that can be very bad a lot of business plans people spend a lot of time and effort developing being you know hundreds of pages long and they sit in the top drawer gathering dust plans that we sort of develop are more they've got to be more task orientated they have to be direct action so trying to work out what are the things you need to do when do you need to do them who's going to be responsible what's the outcome of the plan so can we measure okay we're expecting to get six new clients we only got four why did we only get four new clients is it our conversion rates that are dm which brings us to report and measure so we report on everything that's financial and non-financial so financials obviously are your income your expenses and that you know your debtors your creditors your cash at bank those sort of things your non-financial data is just as important so how many leads did you get him where did they come from what was your conversion rates what sort of services are they looking for how many people have come back and bought a second time how many people are referred clients to you so all those sort of financial non-financial data do have an impact on each other measuring them you know will actually give you some sort of indication of future sort of action so a lot of your marketing sort of activities isn't going to have an impact directly right now it could be six months it could be 12 months we've had clients come back to us two years later and say listen i saw your presentation at x you know two years ago um i had you in the back of my mind not happy with my current provider i want to make a change so yeah keeping that information and understanding where they're coming from is very important every plan and every budget shouldn't be written in stone you should be able to review that and adjust it on a regular basis i'm not saying every week but we review hours on a quarterly basis um we don't go any more than 12 months in advance we do have a three-year you know goal in mind but however the more detailed plan is 12 months we break it down to three monthly and then weekly tra tasks orientated which when we then uh account were then made accountable to so being accountable's another thing one of the things that really helped me was having someone who i'm accountable to uh the beauty of that was i'm the sole owner of the business you know the buck stocks were for me but it was great to have someone that on a fortnightly basis i had to front up to and explain what i'd done why i'd done it what i hadn't done so it sort of gave me more incentive um even though you know this incentive should be there but by having a business coach for me was was fantastic a bit like an athlete has their coach a business person should have their coach as well someone who basically holds them accountable basically does the tweaks points them in the right direction they don't control the business it's a sounding board more and a trusted sort of relationship there that we do have with our advisors that's it [Music] you