Business Strategy for CPA's

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?* Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe In this episode, I want to give you 12 reasons to focus on a niche or an industry, or your ideal buyer or a market segment. Whatever term you like to call it. There are slight differences in the details but what's most important is understanding how valuable it can be to your business to focus on an ideal buyer, to pick a niche and move in that direction.  It simplifies your business. It deepens your expertise Expertise is more valuable than general knowledge.  When you create value, it enables your prices to go up.  When your prices go up, your margins also go up when you niche.  When your prices go up, you need fewer clients to meet your revenue targets. Your business starts to feel easier, because there's just less to keep track of. When all your clients look like each other, it becomes so much easier to systematize. The more you can get your clients to nest the more space you create in your business and the more mental space you create in your mind.  When you niche and you focus on an ideal buyer and you deepen your expertise, you become less duplicatable. You put yourself in a position to sell expertise without having to do any work. Niching and going in the direction of deepening expertise creates options for you in terms of how to create revenue.   And here are some of the objections that I hear about niching:  Letting go of existing revenue. I won't be able to create future revenue. I will be bored. It feels limiting, as in, “I’m eliminating too many potential customers.”   Each of the above objections gets addressed.  Narrowing your industry, your niche, focusing on an ideal buyer opens up more options for you. Episode mentions: 211 Pricing for Improved Profitability 212 Hold My Beer and Watch Me Niche 220 How to Price for Access, not Work 179 Digital Products, Courses, and 90% Margins with The Real Estate CPA   Blake Oliver's Earmark CPE podcast https://earmarkcpe.com/  

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?* Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe Here are some different ways to think about what you price.  Why?  Because what you price informs your revenue. Depending on what you price has a huge impact on how much you work, or don’t work. Depending on what you price will inform your revenue or the revenue that you do not bring in.  If you look at the accounting space right now, the going model is to price work.  But there are at least two problems with this method of pricing work:  When you sell work, you're always on the hook for working. What if you think that clients value work, when in fact, they really value access more?    What would happen if you priced your packages and differentiated your services based solely on access? If work is what you want to be doing less of, what if you consider the option of selling less work? What would happen if you safeguarded your time and you priced and sold access? If your clients value access and access to you is in short supply, consider pricing for access, so you can do less work. 

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?* Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe   Accountants and CPAs have loads of systems running through their tax practice. Perhaps some things must still be done manually. But what if more of your work and your staff's work could be automated?  Here today to talk with me about this is my guest, Jason Staats.  Jason is a CPA turned automation nerd who enjoys sharing new ideas and memes on Twitter, Youtube, and Tiktok. He also built Realize, an online community of accounting firm owners.   Highlights: — “Automation today looks a little more bottom-up. It's automating the very workflow and client-specific problems that we have.” — “If you can surround yourself with people who are at varying levels of the same journey, that's just going to accelerate your learning so much.” — “The best way to think about where to start, especially if you do a lot of accounting is, what could you just automate inside of a single accounting file?” — “Inbox rules are the greatest automation hack there is.”  — “In your decision-making feedback loop, you need to have trusted peers or an external coach who can give you honest feedback that isn't subject to the groupthink that you have within a firm.”  Connect with Jason: Podcast https://www.automationtown.fm/ YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@jasoncpa Twitter https://twitter.com/JStaatsCPA Community https://rlz.io/ Software mentions: Zapier: https://zapier.com/ Make: https://www.make.com/en/  

***Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?*** Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe Today we are talking about stress and overwhelm and overworking because it's not just common in the accounting space, but it's almost as if it's expected. It's almost assumed that a firm will have or being a CPA will include long hours, and it will include the stress of meeting client demands and client deadlines. Not only does mental health suffer as a result of setting things up this way. But what we want to dig into today is a conversation about mindset because people talk about it, but it doesn't typically get understood what it actually is.  And in my program, CPA Mastermind, we face it head on and we tackle it. I have a team of coaches who coach mindset one-on-one in private coaching with CPA masterminders.  And today I brought on one of my coaches Emma Richter to talk about what coaching is and isn't, and how it's beneficial inside that program in particular.    Highlights: — “This mindset work is actually very logical, and emotions and the reactions they cause are logical.” — “When you can bring the drama out of your statements about time, you'll be surprised at how much more efficient and effective you are with your time.” — “In reality, your price is up to you. And the market will tell you whether that is a good price or not.” — “There is no failing. There's only learning. And that is especially true in running a business.” — “When you help you, you also become a better CPA, a better business owner. And therefore you can help your clients become better business owners.”  

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?* Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe In this episode, I share with you how you can get down to a 40-hour workweek, work with great clients you enjoy, all without forsaking revenue.  It's what we do in Down to 40 Hours with CPA Mastermind, my four-month program designed to help CPAs like you build simpler, more profitable, easier to run businesses.  It is the best program out there for the CPA who wants to get down to a 40-hour workweek, and now is the best time to give it to yourself. So an episode today in five parts:  What you want What you have instead and how you got here  What the solution is  The process for getting out  What you'll have when you travel the length of the process   If you're a CPA who is ready to have a practice you love making solid money, working with clients you enjoy and doing rewarding work without the insane hours, check out CPA Mastermind and get on the waitlist: https://geraldinecarter.com/waitlist If want more details, and have questions, check out https://geraldinecarter.com/cpa-mastermind. And if you still have questions, email me at gc@geraldinecarter.com.   Highlights: — “When you sell work, what that means is that you're going to do work all the time because that's what you're selling.” — “Focus on the value that you can create for your clients.”  — “We help you get better at communicating value so that you don't have to feel like you have to justify your prices or your bill to your client after the fact.”  — “When we focus on exactly your ideal buyer who you want to work with, and you begin to work with only those kinds of clients, you generate efficiencies as you see ways to improve systems and stop doing all kinds of stuff to please all kinds of people.” — “Knowing what to do is only half the battle. The other half of the battle is having your head in the right space and having a mindset that works in your favor.”

***Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?*** Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe   We're talking with Sheila Hansen, who is a participant, a masterminder in my program, Down to 40 Hours CPA Mastermind, to get her perspective on the experience of what it's like, and the value of being in this program. Sheila helps female-owned creative businesses understand their numbers while increasing profit and scaling to $500K-$2M in revenue.   Highlights: — “One value of this program is really digging into niching. In some ways it was giving myself permission to go the route that I wanted to go.” — “We don't have to have it all figured out exactly today.” — “Clients care about if we can provide a solution that helps them see where their cash is going, and how to keep more of it and spend (or not spend) in a way that aligns with their goals.” — “In the 10 weeks since we started, I have grown my monthly recurring contracts by 65% in revenue dollars. And in doing so, I only grew my client roster about 25%.”  — “The mindset coaching sessions help me go from being paralyzed and not taking any action or avoiding it all together, to actually moving forward and getting something accomplished.”  Connect with SHEILA: Website: https://www.hansenllc.net/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sheila.hansen.cpa/ Get first access when CPA Mastermind enrollment opens: https://geraldinecarter.com/waitlist

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?* Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe Today we're talking about disengaging and disengagement letters and the process of letting go of some, or many of your clients so that you can free up space and bandwidth in your business to focus on generating high-margin revenue.  I want to share with you what this looks like, sounds like, and feels like, so that you have a sense of the experience, so that you know that this is doable for you.  Not only is it doable for you: it is imperative if you are a CPA, especially when working 70, 60, 50 hours a week, and you’re exhausted and worn out and want to keep being a CPA.    Highlights: — “There's more revenue to be created when you focus at the top end of your client roster and figure out and design higher-value, higher-margin services that are designed to solve problems for your clients.” — “The risk of not appropriately disengaging so that you can get your time and your bandwidth back is that your best clients, who can't get your attention, leave.” — “Your position is your north star: it informs your strategy, packaging, pricing, and how you promote your business. Without a north star, a business owner wanders all over the map.”  — “The strategy is universally the same: isolate who you want to work with, decide what problem you're going to solve, choose your prices and your packaging, and then focus on selling to only those people.”  — “Disengaging is good for you. It's good for your business, and it's good for your clients.” Episode mentions: 211 Pricing For Improved Profitability  https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/211 201 Effortless Value https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/201  

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?* Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe As an accountant, chances are good you don't like selling: you don't want to be dirty, pushy, smarmy or gross. Nor do you want to have to convince buyers that accounting is good for them (they should know)! If you’re stuck believing “sales is dirty,” you will hinder revenue coming in the door.  When you believe that what you offer solves problems for people, and you work in service of your buyer, selling becomes a conversation where you seek an understanding of the problem and the solution, and explore ways to work together that are mutually beneficial. When you understand the six elements to be looking and listening for, selling gets so much easier. It also helps you see how your buyers view what you offer, which simplifies what you need to communicate when promoting your tax practice, and having discovery conversations.  These six elements help you understand your prospect more deeply, which makes for conversations that get to the heart of the matter more quickly, quickening the sales cycle and improving your conversion rates.    These elements are: symptom, pain, solution, process, result, and value.   Highlights: — “Your clients are coming to you because they believe that you may be able to help them get from where they are now to where they want to be.” — “When you talk to your buyer, in their buyer's English, that's how they know that you're listening and that you actually understand them.” — “When your buyers know that you understand them, and you have a process for helping them, it deepens trust which accelerates their journey of working with you.” — “The more you can create a repeatable process, the easier it will be to systematize, the less work it will be for you. The more you systematize, the more time you get back, through delegation or otherwise.” 

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?* Subscribe at https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe Many CPAs tell me they are looking for high-paying clients. They wonder where those clients are, and “how to get them to spend more.” Knowing what I'm about to tell you will expand your view of what's possible for you when you have a deeper appreciation for what's valuable to me as a multi six figure coach and what is less so. This episode is born of a conversation that came about in CPA mastermind, my four-month coaching program for CPAs to help them build businesses that are much easier run and much more profitable.  They were asking about what my experience as a coach is, so I shared with them where I invest, and how I think about the value of each of the services I receive from my tax return-only CPA to my cashflow CFO/CPA, to my business coach.  This proved to be a helpful way for them to see where I was investing my money in my business and to help them think about their clients and their buyers and where they may be able to capture and create value that they might not have already been seeing.   Highlights: — “When you don't know where or how to create value, that's value that you cannot capture with your prices.”  — “Working with coach helps me see what's possible for me in my business that I couldn't have seen myself.” — “I think of my tax return CPA as somebody who tells me what I owe on what I made. I think of my cashflow CPA as somebody who tells me what I need to make. And I think of my business coach as someone who tells me how to make the money I want to make.” — “When I invest in expertise, the dollars I give to that expertise come back multiplied.” — “If you have a roster of smart clients running solid businesses, you have latent high-paying clients.”  

*Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?* Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe Many CPAs serve all kinds of clients, from service-based business owners to manufacturers to nonprofits. It seems like accounting is accounting and tax is tax, and you can do these things for anyone who needs them.  The problem with generalism is that it leads to broad but shallow expertise. And shallow expertise is not worth as much as deep expertise. Acquiring deep expertise requires focusing on a specific type of client.  Focusing in this way can feel scary and limiting: the thinking is that it will be harder to find clients because there will be fewer of them. Or, “it's hard enough to generate business as it is, so why would I want to limit the kinds of clients I work for?” Here today to talk with me about his journey taking his CPA firm into niches is my guest, Josh Lance. Josh is a CPA CGMA and the founder of Lance CPA Group.    Highlights: — “You can't just leave that expertise in your brain. It has to be freely shared within your organization.” — “If we are really experts, and we are good at what we do, and we're going to solve our clients’ problems and help them achieve their desired outcomes, there's a price to pay for that.” — “If you want to niche, you have to go all in on the niche.” — “Specialization is going to be a bit messy at the beginning. But in the long run, it's good.” — “There's so many more clients out there than we could ever imagine to serve that there's no worry where we box ourselves.”  Connect with JOSH: Website: https://lancecpa.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshualancecpa/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/lancejd1 Email: josh@lancecpa.com