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CPA & Consultant for Accounting Firms
Almost 10K, extension season, and leads are the seeds
Happy Friday!
I woke up this week looking at almost 10,000 followers on LinkedIn. That could actually happen this month, and I’m not really sure how to feel about it. I want to celebrate. It’s a huge milestone for me. But I also know how many of those followers don’t engage, don’t open a single thing I post, and are just along for the ride.
But 10,000 followers isn’t 10,000 clients, and a lot of them aren’t accounting firm owners at all. That’s OK. The people who matter are the ones I actually talk to: the ones who send me a note, a hard question, or show up to something I build. If that’s you, thank you.
Otherwise, I know a lot of you are buried in extensions right now. October 15th is less than two weeks away.
Which beast wins
Sales is the partner’s or the owner’s part-time job, and this happens in most firms. So you have this internal fight over which beast is going to win. The return due Thursday wins. Every time. And if there’s no one else doing the selling, it just doesn’t get done.
That’s why I think separating sales and operations as soon as possible matters so much. There should be some tension between the two. You have to oversell a little, because nobody hits their numbers perfectly, and the ops side needs to keep up. It’s like working out. You tear the muscle down and it grows back stronger.
Then there’s year end. Urgency drives sales, and nothing creates urgency like year end. I closed my biggest deal at Pilot on New Year’s Eve, and the same was true in my own tax practice. If you can work between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, you will close business.
Leads are the seeds
If I were running a firm right now, I’d get these in place before Thanksgiving:
- A lead list. Every person you talk to goes on it. The people you met at a networking event, the people you connected with on LinkedIn yesterday. Leads are the seeds.
- A simple pipeline. Don’t create a deal until someone is qualified, which means you need your ICP figured out first. Three to five stages is plenty. Mine were an intro call, a technical call, and a proposal.
- A weekly review. The pipeline cannot go stale. It should be as critical as your month-end close checklist or that master client list in Excel I know you all have.
- A monthly email to your referral partners. Lawyers, bankers, insurance people. It can be three sentences: “Hey James, I hope you had a good August. Here’s what’s coming up this fall.” If you email them once a month, you’ll hear back. And you’ll stay in their mental inventory.
It’s an active sport. You have to go to it. Once you know your soil and what grows well there, you can farm. But if it’s fall and you don’t have a stockpile of grain, you’re going to have to go hunt.
Sales is a service
Lera Kooper said something on my podcast this week that I keep thinking about. Firm owners who are uncomfortable with sales are doing their clients a disservice. Sales is just recommending what the client needs. If you believe in your firm and your work, recommending it is a service.
Her other line: “Do the boring thing, focus in, hit the critical points, and be okay with saying no to interesting things.” That’s the whole pipeline above. It’s boring. Do it every week anyway.
On Canopy Practice Success, episode 4 of my mini-series with Lera Kooper is live. Her firm is scaling fast through acquisitions, so we got into what to fix first when you acquire a firm, the solo-owner trap, and why boring consistency beats exciting experiments.
On the mic
I was a guest on the Accounting Leads Now podcast with James Donovan, talking about how my practice went from one $600 client to half a million in recurring revenue, what I saw as the first accountant in residence at a software company, and what I’d do if I were starting a firm today.
Playbook checkpoint
The first foundational belief in the Playbook is that you need a CRM. If you start it on Monday, October 19th, week 13 lands in mid-January. That’s the whole year-end window, with a system behind it instead of a pile of sticky notes.
How I AI
Wins and losses from putting AI to work in my day-to-day.
New win: Nintendo and the Kodak Moment
I’m working through a full presentation on Nintendo and the accounting profession’s “Kodak Moment.” Claude is helping me with framing the problems, the learnings, and the design.
Helpers worth following
Lera Kooper
COO and Owner, Proactive Advisory Group. She’s growing her firm fast through acquisitions and building the systems in real time, which means she’s honest about what breaks. Every system her firm builds gets pressure-tested immediately.
P.S. James closed the show by asking for one piece of advice. Mine is the question I ask my consulting clients: what do you want to be when you die? Then back into the life you’d be proud of.
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Luke