03.26.24 - Marketing Accounting Firms w/ Stories

Marketing your accounting practice is one of the things that distinguish you from others. Dave Young from Wizard of Ads, and Accounting Pro, Brandon Morris join us to talk about their approach to and share their experience on this topic.

QB Power Hour is a free, biweekly webinar series for accountants, ProAdvisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants presented by Michelle Long, CPA and Dan DeLong who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks and apps that integrate with QuickBooks.

Watch or listen to all of the QB Power Hours at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/blog

Register for upcoming webinars at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/

Transcript

Michelle Long: 0:30

Welcome everybody to another QB power hour. We've got a great one for you today. Marketing accounting firms with stories. So we've got some good ones coming up today with some great guests for you. So my name is Michelle Long and I am a CPA, owner of Long for Success trainer for Intuit, author of five books. You can check them out. There's the links for, of course, QB Power Hour. Our Facebook group was a, which is an awesome interactive group with a lot of support out there from your peers and the LinkedIn group. If you're interested, Dan, go ahead.

Dan DeLong: 1:03

All right, my name is Dan DeLong, owner at DanWitt, worked at Intuit for nearly 18 years, co hosting today also over at schoolbookkeeping. com, running the workshop Wednesdays, oddly enough, on Wednesdays, doing some tech editing for the QBO for Dummies series, as well as pro advisor glitches. We'll talk a little bit about that, but let's talk let's introduce our guests. The D, come on. Come out of the come out of hiding Hey, dan,

Dave Young: 1:33

good to see you again.

Dan DeLong: 1:35

Good to be seen. How are you?

Dave Young: 1:38

I'm good. Thanks

Dan DeLong: 1:40

All right Tell them tell the folks a little bit about who dave young is if you haven't Seen a seen him before on the power hour

Dave Young: 1:46

I mean i've been on the if you're not watching the backlog, the back cat catalog I don't know how long ago that was it was 2020 wasn't it? Yeah,

Dan DeLong: 1:55

during COVID.

Dave Young: 1:56

Yeah I'm an advertising and consulting, advertising and marketing consultant and I've been doing that for about 20 years or so along with my partner, Roy Williams, whose headquarters is here in Austin, Texas. And two and a half years ago, I came in as vice chancellor of Wizard Academy. It's Quasi really same founder Roy Williams founded it. And I've also founded the wizard of ads group. We've got about 70 consultants And so I have two roles here one is a as a consultant and the other is as an administrator and teacher at wizard Academy, which is a non profit non traditional School for advertising and marketing here in kind of the edge of the hill country, southwest of Austin we've got a campus that has housing for 19 19 rooms for housing. Our class only holds 32 people and we teach advertising and marketing classes. And then 8 years ago, we started a whiskey marketing school. I'm in the, I'm in the whiskey vault, which is the quiet place to go today. We actually have, that's not,

Dan DeLong: 3:06

That's not a background. That's not a background. What's behind you?

Dave Young: 3:09

No. And that's just a small piece of it. I, this, I'm in this little room that's got about 3000 bottles of whiskey in it. It was just a quiet place to come on campus. We've got just across the way a class going on. And so I need, I was going to sneak away to, to be on your webinar, Dan,

Dan DeLong: 3:26

which is not so it's not that you're there. You can assume that.

Dave Young: 3:31

No, I have a just for just, I have a glass of water here. I will not be but I also have a breathalyzer. Just in case, and all no, it's So go ahead. You want me to introduce Brandon? You want to introduce Brandon?

Dan DeLong: 3:46

Yeah, let's let Brandon introduce Brandon. Because I wanted to have if you haven't seen any of the prior webinars that we've had Dave on before, I wanted to have I noticed, from. From stalking I guess that's probably the easiest way to do that, of the happenings, both Brandon and and Dave Young are friends on Facebook and I noticed they were together. And it was really interesting about that. So I wanted to have Brandon come on today to talk about, his experience with with the wizard academy as well to see that on the, like the other side of things but Brandon, tell us a little bit about you and your practice and firm.

Brandon Morris: 4:28

Yeah. Thanks. My name is Brandon and I'm an advertising and marketing consumer with Dave and a couple of His guys and also one of my favorite places on the earth is the wizard academy co founder and CEO of Barron's incorporated. Um, super cool to hang out with Dan and Michelle, because they're legends in our space as far as QuickBooks, but yeah. What I've learned about Wizard of Ads and Dave is I suck at marketing and they don't. And so that's a good place for me to be.

Dan DeLong: 5:03

Here we go. All right. So let's go ahead and talk a little bit about the get some housekeeping and then we'll dive right in to our our agenda for today. So a little bit about the QB Power Hour webinars. They're every other Tuesday at noon Eastern. Not eligible for CPE credit. You can always check the website for upcoming events. But we're focused on QuickBooks and QuickBooks tips. But also. Accounting practices in general, right? Because as today, technology today is turning. The commoditization of bookkeeping into automation. So we want to make sure that we're holistically approaching the accounting practice themselves. So today we're going to be talking about marketing, right? So we've got the PDF of the slides, the recordings, podcasts, and other resources at qbpowerhour. com slash resources all in one place there for you. A little bit of the housekeeping here. If you have specific questions. About anything that Brendan, Michelle, myself, or Dave are talking about today, please put them in the Q& A because if we can't answer it live or, by typing in the answer putting it in the Q and A allows us to be able to follow up with that after the webinar is over, if you just have general comments or chat based things just you can feel free to put them in the chat as well. And then we also have the slides in the handout, which I should have left in the in the chat so that people can access that as well. So new for 2024 is we are we're trying out this simulcasting where we are not just doing this in the zoom webinar series as well. But also on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, which is no need to register to be able to see that simulcast. However, because we are putting this in the QB Power user group, that's a private group. And if you were to If you were to comment on the in the Facebook group, it ends up showing up as Facebook user. So there's a QR code there to grant the the streaming platform. Access to your profile so that we can see your name when you actually say something. Otherwise we'll it's far too many places to see where, who said what, where though. If you want to be a part of the conversation please just grant access to the streaming platform. We're also we launched the store and and we got our first order, which is awesome. We are putting power related things in the store for a little swag things like phone chargers and coffee mugs, because that's how you recharge Dave would would say whiskey might be a way to to recharge as well. Maybe we should make some TV and power hour shot glasses or snifters. But there's a way to access store there as well. And Michelle and I, and Brandon, are you on the top 100 voting list this year? I

Brandon Morris: 8:04

am not.

Dan DeLong: 8:05

Oh my goodness. We should

Brandon Morris: 8:07

be. We've got several people that are within in our accounting success group that, that are. And so yeah, that's, we're still happy to have those acquaintances and people that sell and consult with QuickBooks through our program that are in that channel.

Dan DeLong: 8:23

But voting is open I think until the end of the month for the top 100. So please if you feel free to, You can vote up to three different people. Definitely give that an opportunity there. So our our agenda today is we're going to talk a little bit about with Dave and Brendan about bookkeeping being a grudge purchase which kind of changes things as far as the type of industry and the way maybe the best way to, to, to market and advertise that type of product. And then we'll recap some of the things that we had talked about with Dave before about creating a character and how to tell a story and really just having a discussion about the process of doing so. And getting Brandon's take on his experience with working with the wizards there at the Academy. So let's first start off with a poll because. As Dave was mentioning, we love our polls here at the QPPowerHour, but now I need to find out where it is. Okay, there we go. And we'll launch that first one about how do you currently market your practice? And Dave, if you want to talk a little bit about, How we met and those types of things will start. We'll start with that story.

Dave Young: 9:40

Yeah. I'm trying to think like it was, but what year it was 2017, 18. When I, you were in a BNI group that I joined. And so yeah, a word of mouth and referrals networking groups, those kinds of things. I joined the BNI group One of our partners in Australia was a member of B and I group, and he recommended it. And in fact, he was my reference. The president of our group had to call Australia to find out anything. Oh, and Craig Arthur is he's 1 of the guys that's working with Brandon as well. Brandon knows him. But it's it's a great way of just getting the word out in a small group of here. Here's who I am. And here's what I do. I'm not sure where else you wanted me to go with that, Dan, but

Dan DeLong: 10:22

It was great to meet with, to make that connection with you in the B and I group. And, we ended up. Becoming friends because of that meeting. And we would hike, the local Hill Tumamoc Hill in Tucson. And just, in, in one of those, one of my favorite stories about Dave is how he saved my house, when we were, debating this whole or trying to do this selling of our home and moving into a, an RV nomadic lifestyle Dave came through at at a pinch when we really needed him which is Moving of heavy furniture.

Dave Young: 10:57

Yeah, don't expect a marketing story. I didn't sell Dan's house. I'm just the kind of guy, the kind of friend that will show up if you say, hey, we're loading the truck tomorrow. Can you be there?

Michelle Long: 11:08

That is a true friend because that's when most people are like, oh, sorry, my back hurts. So I got to do this. I got to

Dan DeLong: 11:15

do

Michelle Long: 11:16

that. I'm going

Dave Young: 11:16

to Starbucks tomorrow.

Michelle Long: 11:21

Here are three today at 1045

Dan DeLong: 11:23

a.

Michelle Long: 11:24

m.

Dan DeLong: 11:24

I didn't do it.

Brandon Morris: 11:27

I did.

Dan DeLong: 11:28

Was that Alexa or Siri?

Brandon Morris: 11:31

No, that was Google.

Dan DeLong: 11:33

That was Google. Okay. Fantastic. So we do have some prior webinars with Dave about telling your story and some personas and copywriting. So if you want to get a little bit more Deeper dive into some of the things that Dave has talked about with us in the past. You're welcome to do that. Now, do you want me to stop sharing so you can pick it up from here, Dave? Or do you want me to just continue?

Dave Young: 11:57

So if I advanced, I don't know what's going to happen if I'm let's just count on you doing this. Okay, I'll watch it. And I'll just be surprised. Whatever slide comes up next. We'll treat it as just a big, happy accident. Okay. The Bob when we last talked, we were talking about, and more specifically like thinking of your company as a character in one regard and thinking of your customers as personas or characters in another, and it's really interesting how How story has continued story and content have continued to really play a very important role in marketing, even as we see the rise of a I and the people figured out that the advanced targeting that they thought works so well, doesn't work so well anymore. But there are some cool ways around it. You mentioned earlier that bookkeeping is a grudge purchase. And by that, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, Oh, I need some good bookkeeping today. I'm going to go out and find myself a bookkeeper and get all my receipts organized. And I, this is going to just, I'm going to love it. No, we go. Oh, gosh, this has grown to the point where. I think I better find one. So it's a purchase that's similar to having to need a plumber. I need a plumber at my house right now because something's leaking in my front yard near all the valves and shutoffs. And there's like a little swampy area of about two square feet. I don't know what to do about that. I didn't wake up this morning and want to call a plumber. I woke up this morning and now I need a plumber. So who do I call? If I don't know a plumber, I go to Google, right? Or I call somebody that might know a plumber in my neighborhood or I go to a Facebook place. And that's where you by making yourself known in an area, you. You create some opportunities for referrals and that kind of thing. But the only thing I really mean by a grudge purchase is that it's just triggered externally. So the triggers are usually things like I mentioned, right? I I gotta get caught up. Yeah, go ahead. Lay these bullets on us, Dan. Boom boom. These are, in fact, I think these are bullets from the last one. And, yeah. These are all things like these are probably the triggers that your customers experience when they start looking for somebody to either buy QuickBooks from or to do their bookkeeping or their accounting, right? They they've got to get reports filed. They've got to, these are

Dan DeLong: 14:31

the leaky faucet of bookkeeping.

Dave Young: 14:34

Yeah, exactly. And so whatever you're doing in marketing address these things. And I'm going to talk about targeting through copy a little later on but keep these things in mind because these are the kinds of questions now that you can put at the top of an ad in Facebook or in a video in YouTube and say, Hey, are you trying to get organized for a bank loan? And that's targeting by It's targeting by inclusive copywriting. So the challenge has always been, how do I target people that are trying to get ready for a bank loan? Can you buy that group on Facebook? I don't think Facebook knows who's trying to get ready for a bank loan. Or

Dan DeLong: 15:16

they do, and they're just not telling you.

Dave Young: 15:18

They're not letting you, they're not letting you make that a choice in your targeting. And they may know because there may be other people that are running ads like this. But if you just buy a broadly based demographic and you put in your copy, an opening question are you trying to get ready for a bank loan? Do you need your finances organized for a bank loan? And you show that to a broad range of people, the people that are getting ready for a bank loan will read that message and self select and target. And that's it's actually a way you can train an AI, believe it or not, is by writing. If you've been asking questions and identifying information in your headlines of your ads, and you're now training the AI. Oh, these are the kinds of people that I'm looking for. And yes, Facebook, Google, they may actually know that you're getting ready for a bank loan, but they're not going to let people target that way, but they will show you ads if they know, right? Because their goal is to get you to click on an ad, and so if they know that you're not caught up for your taxes, they will they may not specifically know that, but, uh, they, who knows what they know? They listen to us all the time. So I'm sure just the fact that we're talking about getting caught up for taxes we're probably going to see some of that in our own Facebook and social media feeds.

Dan DeLong: 16:40

So you mentioned AI and we've been talking about how AI is affecting the accounting industry. Sure. How is AI affecting the marketing industry, which I'm sure that is, part of the, some of the challenges where, maybe you have some obstacles, when you're talking to I can just ask chat GPT to write me some copy. Can you talk a little bit about how AI is is changing.

Dave Young: 17:03

I've got lots of colleagues and friends that have gotten neck deep in AI and I haven't dabbled in it a whole lot yet. And I say that just in that I'm I'm keeping an eye on it and I still haven't I haven't seen an ad that I feel is a better written ad than what a human copywriter can do, because we're talking about artificial intelligence versus real intelligence. An AI can get you part of the way there. I don't we talked about this earlier. I'm not going to talk about QuickBooks because I don't know anything about QuickBooks, but I'm guessing what you're saying is now I can just hand an AI all my receipts and very similar

Dan DeLong: 17:49

to what you just said, and we had and Michelle had discussed it like AI is like an intern, right? If you treat AI like an intern, For rough drafts and those types of things, they can do a lot of the legwork that, that an intern might do. As far as the final draft that it really needs some human eyes and especially some, someone that has some experience with these sorts of things to, to make sure that it is exactly the same way. Can you tell us the story about what you were just talking about with the, where Do a do an ad copy.

Dave Young: 18:24

It was more of a fun way to write a radio ad. Because this was about a year ago. And, it was a I was bubbling up is this big hot topic. And so actually found an AI that was informed by stupid writings. Like it was, I think, I don't even think the AI is around any longer, but it was called too dumb to destroy or something like that. So it was like informed by Monty Python and Dr. Seuss and, National Lampoon kind of thing. So it wrote a thing that was clever and it was about 15, 20 seconds I incorporated it into a radio ad, but made fun of the fact that we asked in the AI. to write it. I wouldn't turn creative control of anybody's ad campaign over to AI just yet. There are probably a little too literal.

Dan DeLong: 19:14

It's a little too literal to to really Michelle, you were talking about AI generated images and some of the funny things that you had experienced with with that. But before we get into that, into another option, where we're talking about AI and marketing, let's talk about some of these things that, Really accountants and bookkeepers can stop doing, rather than trying to figure out what is the, what is it that we can do? Talk about some of these these things here, Dave.

Dave Young: 19:42

Yeah we talked about this last time too, unique selling propositions. When you read advertising books, maybe you took a marketing or an advertising class in college and everybody talks about What's a unique selling proposition? This is what my company does that nobody else could possibly do. And honestly, that doesn't exist, right? There's nothing that you can do that other people can't do that you could brag about in your advertising. Because the especially in the accounting world, right? It's pretty cut and dried. You're either doing it right or you're not doing it.

Dan DeLong: 20:20

Yeah.

Dave Young: 20:20

And we reconcile accounts.

Dan DeLong: 20:22

4. 5 seconds faster than the other guy.

Dave Young: 20:25

Yeah. Now you've got time to take one more sip of coffee. But we had a student. We actually had this came from a student last week at our magical worlds class and we were talking about. Yeah. You need selling propositions and people, let's say it's a food ad and they say we only use the best ingredients. And the question is, why wouldn't you do that? So if you have a unique selling proposition and it can just be torn down by somebody saying of course you do that. Why wouldn't you?

Dan DeLong: 20:58

There are the I think the other example. The other example is, your there's a guy in Tucson that would be like your I can't remember what he said, but your satisfaction is our priority like that. Yeah, Would that not mean I would I would hope so any business.

Dave Young: 21:13

Yeah, I would hope so right? Sure I'm all for that. And I so I guess what i'm saying is where we're leading with this is What you have in your business? That's unique Is you right and that's that's actually what we've been working on with brandon the most is how do we incorporate the uniqueness that is brandon, right? And we love brandon and he is He's so unique there's a lot of things You probably don't know about brandon and things that he's done in the past and things that he does now And those are things that are pretty unique, right? So you make somebody interesting through the stories that you tell And then when they need what you sell they remember. Oh, yeah that that guy from alabama that scuba dives It used to be EMT, that guy. Bearded guy. Yeah, that dude with the beard. I saw him somewhere. Yeah, and it's not so much growing a list and marketing to it or being unique, it's being memorable. And we're not doing, at this point, we're not doing mass media for Brandon, but if you Brandon and you're in business in Mobile Alabama. LA as he likes to call it, lower Alabama. Um, you think of, Oh, that's that guy. Yeah, I know him. He's a cool guy. He does QuickBooks too. He, Oh, he can put together inventory management for me. Oh, I never, I would never would have guessed that. So you connect something that's actually true about your business with something that's, um, surprising and it makes you memorable. For the most part, the work we do with our clients is is to make them famous in their town. We work with a lot of local businesses. Now, Brandon's trying to reach a broader audience with some of the services that he does franchise operations, for example. And that's, all of the franchise. Franchisors, the guys that own, the company that franchises businesses, they're not all in mobile. So we have to reach out a little bit further. But you target you target by what you say, not not necessarily by the kind of targeting that we've been able to do with Facebook and LinkedIn and things in the past. You can still do a little bit more of it with LinkedIn when you're talking about business to business, but really, you want to be memorable. Yeah. The heating and air conditioning company that I talked about, um, we're doing ads that like they, they have a really unfortunate name. Their name is B. W. S. plumbing, heating and air B. W. S. And they thought about changing it when we first started working with them, because it's not an easy name to remember. But they decided they didn't want to do that. And that gives you creative handcuffs to work with. So the ads all tell the story of BWS, but we talk about how these three little letters are easy to remember because obviously B is for plumbing, W is for heating, and S is for air conditioning. And we have this sort of Quirky, weird spokesman that is doing all these absurd things all the time, but at the end of the day, it's It comes down to remembering these three little letters now kids go grab a sharpie and write these three letters on daddy's hot water heater right And so when the hot water heater breaks, there they are. And we're very transparent about that in the ads, right? It's tongue in cheek. And yeah, we think it's a good idea for kids to do that. Maybe mom and dad don't, but if they do, that's a wish, but at the end of the day, it's famous in their market.

Dan DeLong: 24:53

And Brandon, what is your, tell us about your journey with working with the wizard Academy and some of the courses that you've taken and your experiences there. What that's been like.

Brandon Morris: 25:05

Sure. So we started out with a discovery call much like most salespeople, right? I think the most interesting thing was we've been working with Dave and Craig and Johnny for a while. And we would go through and say, Hey, what do you do? I don't know. I do QuickBooks and we, we do inventory and we do all the things that QuickBooks does. We've done, we've been doing this thing for 20 years. But that's the rollercoaster. That's been the this process is nobody really cares about what we do and all the things nobody wants to talk about accounting. And nobody wants to talk about bookkeeping or QuickBooks or third party apps until they have a need. So it's the journey that I've been on with Dave is realizing that. Yeah, we can talk about all the stuff and when they have a need, they're interested. They've got two or three questions. That's it. They don't want to learn. They don't want to know anymore. Even if it's relevant. They just want to know that I know what we're doing. But the only thing that they really care about is they know me, they like me and they trust me. Yeah, I know how to do QuickBooks stuff and we're probably going to talk about something else. Maybe this scuba diving or the army stuff or EMS stuff or all the other things that we've done. It's just not being don't talk to them about crap they don't care about. And most of it is accounting and bookkeeping and all that. So figuring out how to work your stories in and be likable and approachable and yeah, not not boring and not mundane and not the stereotypical accountants. You need, and if you can't get away from that, you need to have somebody else doing it for you that can be more interesting than you.

Dave Young: 26:57

So even when Brandon's going to the, we were talking about what's the big event coming up that I'm not invited to? I told you were scaling. Scaling new heights. Scaling

Michelle Long: 27:06

new heights, David, when you are invited, we'd love to have

Dave Young: 27:09

you. Scaling what?

Michelle Long: 27:11

Scaling new heights. Scaling new heights.

Dave Young: 27:14

Scaling new heights, and this is QuickBook training. Okay.

Michelle Long: 27:17

It's a conference. Yes,

Dave Young: 27:19

but it's in Orlando.

Michelle Long: 27:21

It's in Orlando for a Disney World. I'm

Dave Young: 27:24

down for that. I'm

Michelle Long: 27:25

Orlando. Yes, we can. We'd love to have you come

Brandon Morris: 27:33

Dave. I may have a ticket for you. Let me check. Sweet.

Michelle Long: 27:38

Accountants can party. You'd be surprised.

Dave Young: 27:41

Oh, I'm looking forward to it. I'm in the whiskey vault. I'll come do in fact, I'm a, I'm a. Let's bring some samples.

Michelle Long: 27:47

There are some pretty wild parties.

Dave Young: 27:50

Since we're on this, do you mind a little, this is the ridiculous medallion you get when sommelier school.

Michelle Long: 27:58

Oh my, wow!

Dave Young: 28:00

Grass, it weighs about a pound, and so I mean if you want, come to Orlando, we'll do a whiskey tasting. Oh

Michelle Long: 28:08

my!

Dave Young: 28:09

I'll bring my medallion because it unlocks it unlocks better olfactory senses and taste. That's some magical powers. It's basically magic. Yeah. But you when you talk about things like that, um, Now, some of you that are on this call will go, Oh that's the guy that was in that whiskey room on that call. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He had that big, stupid medallion and that's crazy. Oh, but he knows about marketing. Yeah maybe we ought to call him. When Brandon shows up at a chamber of commerce meeting in mobile and he looks like all the other three piece suit dudes And businessmen and women at the Chamber of Commerce meeting, he doesn't stand out and you don't go, Oh, I wonder what his story is, but if he shows up as his authentic self and has scuba diving conversations with people and talks about his experiences training his service dog and all these, this myriad of things that he's interested in. And the fact that he just looks interesting people tie those two things together, right? And they, when they finally do need what Brandon does, or they come across somebody that does, it's like so you meet a CEO on an airplane and he's frustrated about not having software in place that all his franchisees can use so that he gets uniform reports across the entire organization. And you met this guy at this chamber meeting and you go, Oh man, I know a guy. He's you're not gonna believe this about him, but he knows exactly how to solve that problem. And so he becomes the remember Pulp Fiction in the scene where they have that guy killed in the back of the car and they call Winston Wolf. And he's a fixer, right? And he's there in 10 minutes speeding down the streets and he tells them exactly how to solve this problem that they have. And so you can use a metaphor like that to for your own marketing for the stories that you tell. And that's where we're headed here. Um, in terms of using character.

Michelle Long: 30:14

Can I just add on to that? And that is the best thing too, is that word of mouth recommendation. But the one thing that so many people fail to do is when that CEO would call Brandon and say, Hey, so and so recommended you. Or whatever, Brandon has to follow up on that lead and so many people don't follow up, because that is a warm, hot lead. And that is the best thing that you've got there. But so many people won't follow up on that and follow through when you get that hot lead. So that is critical because you get that, you've got to follow through on that lead. That's

Dave Young: 30:58

fantastic because we know this from a lot of the home service companies that we work with. A lot of them have the text us to contact like you need your air conditioner fixed. You can go online and they have the little text box, text them and they'll get a response and close rates fall off precipitously after 20 seconds. If you don't respond to them within 20 seconds. You're way less likely to land them as a customer, right? Yeah, no, no pressure, but Michelle, you're dead on. Absolutely right. You, if you have a lead and you don't just call them right back the odds are dwindling further and further that they've called the next person that they could think of because. That I couldn't get ahold of you, so I called the guy across the street.

Michelle Long: 31:53

Even on the referrals from the Find a ProAdvisor website, which is something that Intuit does for us, to send referrals to ProAdvisors, there's so many people that report that when they try to contact someone from the Find a ProAdvisor website, that they don't get a response.

Dan DeLong: 32:10

Yeah.

Michelle Long: 32:10

People are getting an email, and then they don't get any response. Yeah. Follow up when you do like a contact, figure out how

Dave Young: 32:18

to put the emails from that site on some kind of alarm bell that goes off in your house or in your office.

Michelle Long: 32:24

Even if it's not right for you, let's say somebody contacts me and say, Hey, so and recommended you, can you help me with the taxes? And I don't do taxes. I still follow up and say, no, that's not the type of work I do, but I'm going to refer you on to so and so still follow up with them. Because you don't want the person that made that referral to stop giving you referrals and then follow up with the person that made the referral. Thank you for the referral. It wasn't right for me because I don't do task work because then you're also telling them what's the right client for you, you've got to keep that working for you.

Dave Young: 33:01

That's exactly right. And if you need to call like you said, it's not enough to just say, Hey, maybe you should talk to Dan. Cause I think he does taxes. It's better to get them on the phone and say, look, I don't do taxes, but what kind of taxes are we talking about? Or are we talking about personal income tax? Are we talking about for profit? Are we talking about a real estate partnership? Are we talking to these are all, Really special specialized types of taxes, right? You want to make sure you send them the right person and then that's what really cements your relationship to the person that you're actually sending a lead to because it's a good lead it's really strong because it fits them perfectly. So you've gotten to know that so this sort of lands this whole thing about Quick response to leads this first bullet focus improvements on things that matter to your customers. And we just told you what matters to your customers. And that is prompt response. So your business improvements. If don't go out and spend money on marketing. If you don't have a system in place to respond to the leads that you're going to get from good marketing. You better have a way to make sure that you call people or respond to them in 20 seconds. And that's where you should focus improvements in your business. Story based ads. We've talked a little bit about that. Um, and study how to brand unsexy externally triggered businesses. Honestly, I'll come to what's it called? Arise what is it? Dailing new heights. Scaling new heights. The best thing that would happen if I came to it, I would get ideas that I could use with my plumbing and heating and air conditioning companies. So one of the things I always tell people is study other businesses, study other business models that have similar characteristics to yours. We're a grudge purchase. Nobody calls us until they really need us. And we fix, problems that are popping up just like an air conditioner that's broken in the summer. Study like honestly, find one of your favorite clients and you want more people like that. Find out what convention that person's going to and go with them to that convention, and you'll probably find ways to market to them. Your QuickBooks or your accounting business by attending somebody else's industry's event that has similar problem topology to yours. We call it

Dan DeLong: 35:24

What is the heating and air conditioning conference for accountant to go to?

Dave Young: 35:30

Gosh I don't, and there's a bunch of'em. I'd probably focus on one of the ones that are run by there, there's organizations that do like mastermind. Groups with them, honestly, they wouldn't be hard to find. Call

Dan DeLong: 35:45

and tell them, what is this all about?

Dave Young: 35:49

Oh, this was this. This slide was I appreciate you finding the old slides, Dan, because I didn't have to make new ones. There you go. This is a little peek at what we do when we do a thing called uncovery and Brandon went through some of this, but we typically like to because Brandon became a client in the tail end of the pandemic. We, we did a lot of this here in Austin but these are just some of the things that, We go through to help us understand who a client is so that we know what we can do in the advertising and what we're not again. Remember, we're not looking for unique selling proposition, but we are looking for what makes this client unique, not what makes his QuickBooks business or his, you know, it's what makes him unique. So things like a North star Oh, man, here on the Wizard Academy campus, we get really gosh, I'll scare some people away. We get a little woo over things like North Stars. And if you know what the North Star is and how it works it's a star that sits right above the pole of the Earth. The Earth spins on its axis, and there's a star called Polaris that hovers right over the North Pole and doesn't move. So it doesn't move in the sky. And that's what allowed navigators to get across the ocean was they had a fixed point of reference. And if you're out in the middle of a lake or an ocean and you can't see land having a fixed point of reference changes everything right now. All of a sudden, if you know how to measure that, you can figure out your exact position. And so a north star is in your business. What do you believe? What's your vision? How important is it to you? All these things. So we're looking for somebody's North Star. We're looking for their origin story. How did they get into this business? Those are usually pretty unique things. Sometimes it's just nepotism. Sometimes it's partnering. It may not be nepotism. In Brandon's case, you work with your mom, but I don't think that was nepotism, right? That was you guys setting out to build this thing together, right? You're way more partners than you are. Second generation in a business, but you run into a lot of a lot of businesses where it's a next generation that's stepped in. The reason B. W. S. plumbing, heating and air didn't want to change their name is because those are the initials of the founder. And so he's not really running the show anymore. His son is, but his name is Kevin, and it doesn't make much sense to say, you don't want to change the name to KW. So figuring out that origin story and seeing if that makes a difference. When we do this uncovery interview, what we're looking for are what we call unleveraged assets. So origin stories can really be unleveraged assets. We've uncovered great stories from people that make really good ads. We I've got a podiatrist client in Milwaukee who we have a great origin story from him because he had some problems with his feet. And when he was in high school playing basketball, it was another podiatrist that really got him turned around and got his feet working right again in his ankle. And it got him interested in that profession. And that makes a cool story. Um, the sword in the stone, like in your business, what will you always do? What will you never do? What do you stand against? And those are the kinds of things that make really interesting talking points, especially if you're networking, right? Oh, we would never do that. You might hear about somebody else that does something that. Feels a little shady and you'd say no that's never going to happen with us. So that's really uncovering is us doing a deep dive into the business owners world and figuring out what makes them tick and figuring out if there are some things in what makes them tick that we can use as we start to put together stories and messages for them. All right, so some interesting characters we have. Some brand characters. There are some great stories with all of these. We don't have time to, to tell all the stories, but a really strong brand has this thing that that you can look at and say, oh that's the brand. Yeah. And if you know what the brand stands for and you've been exposed to it long enough, you can know a brand by its codes. Like if you look at these, there's a few of them that don't have any kind of logo at all. But do we need a logo to know who Tony the tiger is or Mr. Clean, right? We can just look at that and go, Oh that, that's Mr. Clean. And in fact, we might see a guy that looks like that at an airport and say, he looks like Mr. Clean. So the brand has become so ubiquitous that that you can get away with just using what we call brand codes the things that signal to people that it's a brand. You don't see Ronald McDonald a whole lot anymore, but what you do see are you might just see an ad, you might see a billboard that's just got the McDonald's colors and a picture of French fry. You might hear a McDonald's ad. Or see one on a YouTube pre roll and all you hear is ba, right? That's all you hear. They don't even say the name. Because all they have to, we've heard it so long, all of us, from probably before we were born, that we don't need to hear the words anymore. We just need to be reminded ba and I'm hungry. Or you want to you can smell like the man that's in this ad, right? Those kinds of things. So you start identifying those and then that becomes a part of your campaign. And your campaign, even in networking, right? You be, it becomes the things that you always do that you've become known for. And there were always a few people, Dan in our B and I group that, You knew we're going to do a thing, right? They were going to stand up and do a thing that they became pretty well known for. I think of the, there's a jewelry guy in BNI and in Tucson that always showed up at other BNI meetings with a rack of jewelry. It's Oh, Hey, jewelry guys here. And he had a story to tell, but he also had product to sell. There was a carpet cleaning guy that one of the most amazing 45 second B and I demonstrations I've ever seen in his little thing. He gets to talk for 45 seconds, right? He stepped out to the center of the room and sprayed his carpet cleaning stuff on this coffee stain that had been in that hotel conference room for years and clean in five seconds. Dang, that was pretty powerful. But he came, he became that guy. Figuring out What's unique about your brand is it falls back to the stories that we were talking about with Brandon on the next

Dan DeLong: 42:33

and with Brandon. And with how is that? How has that story evolved with you and your journey with with the Wizard of Bath?

Brandon Morris: 42:41

We had a conversation yesterday with Dave and Craig and all of them, and creating that outline of all the things that you do I was challenged by the last slide that, all these are national campaigns, big budget advertising, and, but what about all of us that are doing, say, QuickBooks or accounting or bookkeeping, We don't have those kinds of budgets, but what resonates with me is going through that that exercise. And I'm, I think Dave is gonna give you the slide that you can actually go do this, but it's going through all the things that you do and answering those questions. So if you're going to do a blog or a podcast or an interview, however, you're going to do it, it's. Not just what you do, because we're gonna, we're gonna do that. We're gonna talk about what we do, but nobody cares. So we, we do that, but we also we truncate it. We make it five minutes about what we do, and if we could throw a story in there about, and what makes us interesting, or what something, a, we'll say a success story, or maybe it's just some little thing here and there that sets you apart from everybody else. That's That resonates with people. They want to hear a success story or a case study or something interesting about you and just know that you can, yeah, you can do inventory or manufacturing or lot tracking or serial numbers, serialization or whatever it is. Okay, he can do that, but hey, he's a pretty cool guy, right? Um, Dave's daughter's a glassblower but he's really good at marketing too. There, there's a, it's not about, it's not about you. And that's what I've learned. It's not about me or what we can do or what we've got that the tools to make happen until you need it. Then as long as they know that we can do it, then it's just about making a friend, making acquaintance or yeah, just having somebody that you can what I usually do is my customers, I ended up buying from them because I know now what they do and I like them. So we've established trust in a relationship. By marketing myself, I've usually marketed them to, and I ended up going to them for services that I need later on. But it's just about being relatable and likable and just letting them know what what it is we do.

Dan DeLong: 45:02

So do you find that, do you find that stories that you need that, that are best told in the accounting space are examples Of those types of things or is it more of stories about you and your company that helped? make them memorable.

Brandon Morris: 45:21

I think it's a combination. Stories about if somebody asked me about inventory or about, Hey, can you do this? Yeah. And here's the case or I don't even call it a case study, but we did this once for certain company out of somewhere. And this was the this was the takeaway that it really worked and they love me now. And I wanted to change her processes and I made her feel like an idiot. Look, I'm not an accountant. She had a degree in accounting, so it was a fun story. I think I told Dave that, but it wasn't what the guy wanted. The CEO that's now running the company, it's his stepmother that was that was the accountant. So he told me what he wanted to do. I went to her and said,

Dan DeLong: 46:04

all right,

Brandon Morris: 46:04

so your accounting is fine. Obviously you've been doing it for years. But in order to get the results that he wants, we've got to be, we've got to change the way we're doing estimates and so we can get the reporting right so that he can get what he wants and compare the actuals versus the estimates and change the way that they're scoping the jobs. But the funny story is she cussed me out. I got a 10 minute lashing that said that I made her feel stupid and she's not and yada. So at the, in the end, she loves me. We say we address some things they weren't doing and save them a ton of time and got exactly what they wanted. So when we tell that story, it says,

Dan DeLong: 46:42

Oh,

Brandon Morris: 46:42

that's cool. Yeah probably benefit. And then we start talking about other stuff that's completely irrelevant, but it also seals that relationship between us.

Dan DeLong: 46:55

So let's talk a little bit about characters. And yeah, I think

Dave Young: 47:00

Daniel will quickly go through that. We talked in depth about this last time. But what I want to get to are the if you think about yourself and I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you a super simple shortcut to finding what character. Would you depict of yourself right? And maybe you need somebody to help with this. But if you go to the website tv tropes, I think it's tv tropes dot org. Yeah. A tv trope is they're just this stereotypical sort of character that we've seen a million times on TV, right? All different kinds of them. And you don't have to bring this up. Just make a note of it. And we'll talk about these four examples. So with this slide that we're looking at, a lost wallet lies on a Manhattan street stuffed with cash, a white middle income male New Yorker between 30 and 44 picks it up. Will he look for the rightful owner or will he pocket the cash? And it depends on who that 30 to 44 year old person is, right? Because we don't have enough information. If it's George Costanza, We know what he's going to do, right? So he's think of him as a trope. We know exactly what a George Costanza would do. And if I'm not saying, Dan, you should think of yourself as George Costanza, but if you were like George Costanza, and he was the one you identified with these next four slides of your profile from a while back. Are written in the style, right? So if you were George, the IRS was angry that day. My friend, one phone call, that's all they gave my client, right? That's a George kind of thing to say. And the law and order SVU if she were to write an opening line to a profile, some things you can put them behind you, but they do change you. Let's get caught up. So very relational type of thing. The good wife. Man we're talking about loyalty here, right? Friends come and go. My clients stick around. We're loyal that way. And what was the last one? Ah the what was his, the spider? What was his name? And Game of Thrones. I can hear the numbers whispering. True power comes when you master your numbers. So if you're writing just gets better, if you can put yourself into the mindset of someone that you can relate to, here's Snape and what did we put? I make it my job to protect you. You'll find safety and tidy books and sleep all the better for it. Those are four or five dramatically different statements. Bookkeepers are time travelers. How far back was me go?

Dan DeLong: 49:26

I can see Michelle. Like these are awesome.

Michelle Long: 49:28

I love it. These are so creative and I couldn't come up with these myself, but I could use AI to come up with these.

Dave Young: 49:35

No, so I, even better than AI, think about what characters. I don't even know what this was. This is a cosplay thing. So think of yourself as a cosplayer and think of who do you relate to that? That's who's your hero on film or in TV, right? And in this case, video games who's your hero and try to put yourself in that mind set as you write. As you write, and it will change the words that you use. Um, I haven't even told Brandon this. If I had to pick a TV trope for Brandon. There's one on TV tropes dot com called Southern fried genius. All right, Southern fried genius. And we've all met these people,

Dan DeLong: 50:25

right?

Dave Young: 50:25

You might like I'm going to read just one little paragraph. The simple country lawyer exemplifies the trope. He uses his intelligence and accent as a weapon talking in simple allegories and colloquialisms in order to make people think he's a moron and then brutalizing them with superior will. There was and Brandon he's one of these, one of the smartest guys I've ever met. And he's also a scuba diving fishing he's got dogs. He, he does all these amazing things. He's got amazing background and chooses to live in Mobile, Alabama. So he can be. With all the things that he loves, but he's wicked genius. If you need help managing inventory and hooking up a CRM to your QuickBooks, so you can keep track of these leads that are coming in, right? He's got these superpowers that belie the fact that he's this. This dude down in mobile. Does that make sense checks in

Brandon Morris: 51:24

the mail

Dave Young: 51:25

checks in the mail? Awesome Yeah, I don't know that we have time. Where are we at on that dan? We're at noon

Dan DeLong: 51:30

Yeah, we're coming up at the top of the hour we can stay a little longer if you have if you guys have the time if anybody needs to drop off, of course, we will have this recorded. And for available viewing after but what any anything that you wanted to Wrap things up as we come in for a landing here, Dave.

Dave Young: 51:49

Find a way to be you and tell the story of you and don't worry about making it marketing sounding right? Find your story, find who your best customers are and tell stories that are going to resonate with them. You can do all this mapping and let's just let's just jump to the slide. That has the outline exercise. I'm actually this is on We've got a lot of things that we didn't cover. Yeah, do all those things. Do all those things. I think you skipped it. Did I? Slide 43, maybe. Oh. This guy. That's it. So, find yourself a trope that you relate to. And maybe find a trope that your best customer, maybe find two or three tropes that your best customers. You can see your best customers through those tropes. You go. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Dan is the I'm trying to think of who I would pick for Dan what's the old cartoon with Sherman and the professor the way back machine Mr. Peabody, Mr. Peabody, right? You're that kid that's always with Mr. Peabody, right? He's super bright smarter than anybody knows. And he's hanging out with this scientific dog.

Dan DeLong: 52:57

Sherman was Sherman.

Dave Young: 52:58

Yeah, so but so right in the voice of your trope to how you perceive your customer as a different trope. Maybe jet clamp. It is the ideal customer for you, right? Somebody that just came into money and they don't know how to manage it. Guess what? I can help you with that, Jed. I speak your language. I know your problems. I can relate, right? That's a way easier story for Jed to understand than just we, we do all manner of QuickBooks consulting work and can handle any financial situation. So speak to your customer. You don't even

Dan DeLong: 53:36

need to move to Beverly Hills to do that.

Dave Young: 53:38

No. So I would pick those two things first. Pick your trope, pick the trope of your customers. It's a shortcut to doing personas. Personas can be a lot of work. And then this exercise Brandon just did it in the last week and takes about 45 minutes. There's a PDF on that page that you print out. And do it by I recommend doing it by hand. You'll have a, you didn't do it right. If you don't have a cramp in your hand at the end. But all the instructions are there. And what you'll end up with in 45 minutes is. 60 topics that you could write on today, you could absolutely just sit down and say I need to write that one now. And that's usually the first step in, in deciding what it is. Most of the time people can't think of, I don't know what I'd write. I don't know what I would write. I don't know where I'd put it. If you write it you'll have it so that you can put it on LinkedIn. You can put it in places where people will see it. You can tell people about it at a meeting, all kinds of things, but you got to write it first. And this helps you organize it to to get it written. Does that make sense?

Dan DeLong: 54:42

Yeah. Yeah. I've used this, this, I don't know what is this called? Like a

Dave Young: 54:47

brainstorming exercise.

Dan DeLong: 54:50

Yeah, there we go. It's almost like it's on the slide. But I've used this for multiple projects that I've been wanting to do, whether it's, blog topics or chapters of a book or, creating a course outline. So these are this was a great way to, to just get it, do a brain dome, get those topics out on, on, on paper and the way that you structure this this brainstorming exercise is to not not stop yourself.

Dave Young: 55:18

Yeah, you have to click the play button and just plow through it. And it's actually a mind trick. It tricks your brain into just not judging the things that you write down. Because if we said, hey, between now and tomorrow, could you give me a list of 20 things that you could write blog posts about? You'd write a list of 40 and scratch 35 of them out. I promise you would do that.

Michelle Long: 55:41

So Dave does a shot of whiskey help if you do that before this exercise,

Dave Young: 55:46

I like to think of it as writing oil.

Michelle Long: 55:49

There you go.

Dave Young: 55:50

There's a song I could probably get it. There's get

Brandon Morris: 55:52

started,

Dave Young: 55:52

There's a bottle right up there called Writer's Tears.

Brandon Morris: 55:56

let's say at the Wizard Academy. If you ever go and take a class there, they're gonna start the wine pouring about nine or 10 o'clock in the morning. And yeah it will help you unleash your your creative side.

Dave Young: 56:07

We call it purple coffee. And what we, what Wizard Academy really is a place that you learn things in a, in an environment that's unlike any place you've ever learned. And so it, it gets it out of your head that you're sitting at the what was it called? Summit? Ascend? We all know what's going to happen in Orlando. We're going to be put in a room with in a room with accordion doors and there's going to be a little a little square coaster that the iced tea sits on. It's going to be dripping in that all day. They're going to give us a crappy little notepad in a hotel pen that doesn't work and try to teach us stuff, right? And we're against all of that. We believe you should sit amidst art and beauty in the woods and have a nice night's sleep before you start in on class. And And then when you sit down in our classroom in a super comfy leather chair and kick back and enjoy a glass of wine and we start with loud music and it's crazy. It's fun. So that's our vibe here. And we teach this kind of thing. This is this topic. Brainstorm was actually taught. It's where I learned. It was at Wizard Academy. An author named Keith Miller taught it 20 years ago, and I've been using it with clients ever since.

Dan DeLong: 57:28

It's a fantastic, it's free, it's, you have everything on that link in that website, which is in the the handouts somebody asked where we're going to get it in the handouts.

Dave Young: 57:38

I don't even like, dude, I don't even ask you it's free to the point that I don't even I don't ask for email. No, nothing. It's just there. It's free. Take it. And

Dan DeLong: 57:51

that's part of your story. Where you're, you're that guy that gave it all away. And then when you need more, you know where to find them in the whiskey cellar of the wizard academy.

Dave Young: 58:05

No, we have a wine cellar. This is a whiskey vault.

Dan DeLong: 58:08

That's right,

Dave Young: 58:10

That's actually the inside of a vault door. I was expecting somebody because we just, they just broke for lunch. I was expecting somebody to come barging in here. But so far, so good.

Dan DeLong: 58:18

Before that happens, we'll go ahead and wrap up here. Dave, I appreciate you joining us again on the Kibbe power hour. And Brandon is great to see you. And we will maybe see you all at

Dave Young: 58:30

And then it's a joy to see both you and Michelle again, and I appreciate being able to just come on here and tell you about what I love and what I know, and I'm just going to remind you, Dan, because I know you live a mobile life. We do have a camper parking spot. Oh really? Come to Austin.

Michelle Long: 58:53

This was great and very helpful and good to see you Dave and Brandon again as well and Dan Always, thank you for all that you do and thanks everyone for joining us. All right. We'll see you next time on

Dan DeLong: 59:04

the QB Power Hour