Class 3 - Getting Quality Clients

Class 3 - Getting Quality Clients Hi! Welcome to Class Number Three of Bookkeeper Business Launch! I want to thank you for being here. I want to thank you for your comments and your questions for the first two classes. It s been really awesome to see your excitement about starting your own bookkeeping business. Now, if you re like me, it s not really about starting a business. It s not about starting a bookkeeping business. It s about what that is going to do for you, your family, and your life. You see, starting a virtual bookkeeping business is all about freedom, flexibility. It s about the ability to determine where you work, when you work, with whom you work and how much you work, and your income potential. Heck, for me, it s being able to put on a vest and a t-shirt and serve my clients, regardless of where I am or where they are, and the same thing can happen for you. Now, in the first class, if you recall, we talked all about what is a bookkeeping business. We talked about the day-to-day and month-to-month activities that you will be doing as a virtual bookkeeping business owner. We also talked about the seven personal character traits that you need to have. You have to determine this for yourself that you have these seven character traits in order to set yourself up for success as a virtual bookkeeping business owner. Finally, in Class Number One, we wrapped up with what is the earnings potential of a bookkeeping business. Now, if you recall, according to Entrepreneur magazine, bookkeeping is the number one most profitable business that you can start. So in Class Number Two, we talked about the exact tools and technology that you need in order to be a success as a bookkeeping business owner. We also talked about the startup and ongoing costs. Now, it s really good because they re very minimal. Obviously, being the most profitable business, you would hope that those are minimal, and they are. And then we also talked about the number one character trait, or the number one determinant of your success. So if you ve not watched video number one, Class Number One or Class Number Two, I want you to go back and take a look at that, especially that number one determinant of success. So if you ve not done that, I m not going to tell you what it is, because I want you to go back and check that out, then come back to this point and watch this. Now, today s class is about how you go out there and get quality bookkeeping clients. 1

Okay, we don t want to just go out there and get any bookkeeping clients. You want to focus on quality clients because you want a quality life. So today, it s all about how do you go out and find these clients. What are the best means? What is marketing? What is sales? Because a lot of times, if you re like me, the words marketing and sales have a negative connotation. Well, let me tell you today that I m going to bust that myth about what marketing is. We do have to do marketing and we do have to do sales in our business, but the great thing about it is that every business owner has to have a bookkeeper in some capacity. Whether it s them, their spouse or you, they have to have bookkeeping. That s required by law, so that s built-in demand. I love that. Second, bookkeeping is very simple to explain. Every business owner knows what bookkeeping is, so you never have to educate. You can just tell them that you re a bookkeeper and they immediately know what it is that you do. But what I want to do here today is frame the best way for you to go out there and get those quality clients, because we can do a lot of different tactics and a lot of strategies, but we don t want to waste our time. We want to be very efficient. So I just want to really reiterate who I am. My name is Ben Robinson, and I am a former CPA and bookkeeping firm owner. For so many years, a lot of business was based upon the fact that I was helping small businesses with their bookkeeping. So I needed great bookkeepers in my practice, but I found it very hard to find great bookkeepers. Regular bookkeepers I could find, but great ones who could serve my clients, very difficult. So what I did is I went out there and I started giving people who did not have a background in bookkeeping or accounting and I trained them up of how they could serve my clients, and you know what? It worked like a charm. Now, what I learned from that was the seven character traits that you need to have in order to become a great bookkeeper. So you know that you have those because you re still with me. I knew that they had them, would set them up for success, so that s what I want for you also. Now, before we go into the exact marketing and sales strategies for your virtual bookkeeping business, I want to reframe how we think about marketing and sales. Now, this is very, very important. Do not skip this next section because it s very important that we understand what marketing is, what sales are, are what it is not. We re going to bust some myths and we re going to break through the barrier of how you go out there and get quality clients, so I ll see 2

you in the next section. So what in the world is marketing? Before we go into the exact strategies that you need to use in your virtual bookkeeping business, let s frame what marketing is. So marketing is made up of three M s -- no, it s not the tape. There are three components of marketing that you need to understand before you ever try to go out there and do any marketing or sales to potential clients. Now, the first part of marketing and the most important one is your market. Okay. We need to clearly define who it is that you serve. So we can t just go out there and say, I serve any and all small business owners. That s too broad an audience, and we also can t say, You know what? I serve left-handed Tilt-A-Whirl operator owners, okay? That s a little too specific. So somewhere between the left-handed Tilt-A-Whirl operator and all business owners, we need to clearly define our market. That s why one of my main suggestions to you is that you eventually develop a niche market. Now, a niche market means that you serve, Hey, I serve everybody who s in e-commerce, who sells things online, or, I serve dentists, or, I serve coaches, or, I serve Whatever the niche may be, there are some good ones and there are some bad ones, and that s really outside the scope of what we re talking about here today. But the first thing that you have to define in your marketing is your market, number one. Do not do anything else until you ve clearly defined who that is. The second M of marketing is your message. What do you say to these people? What do you say to your market? This is very important. Now, it s not as important as defining your market because if you have a decent message to the right market, you ll be successful, but if you have an excellent message to the wrong market, you will never, ever have success. Okay. That s why we see TV shows that have very specific ads because they know who their market is and their market is watching that TV show, okay? So you ve got your market and you ve got your message. It s important that you communicate the right thing. The final component, the final M, is the media. What is the channel that you re communicating? That can be face-to-face. It can be at a networking event. There are a lot of different medias out there. One of the things that I strongly suggest is that you don t rely upon just one media for going and getting clients. You need to have 20 to 30 different medias because if ever one of those goes away, you have the other ones to back you up. So a lot of mistakes that I ve seen with practice owners is that they rely upon one -- let s say a referral source -- who gives them all of their leads, all of their potential new clients. That 3

person, they retire, and now their entire marketing strategy is blown because they relied upon one. So before we talk about this, I want you to clearly understand who your market is, what your message is and what are the best medias. We ll get into specifics here in just a minute. Now, the second point that I want to make here is that you don t want to serve just anyone. You need to be very selective in the clients who you serve. This is a less is more mentality. We don t want to build our practices upon volume, okay? I would rather have 10 clients who I went really deep with than 50 clients who I didn t go as deep with. There are fewer complications, you re able to serve them better, which means you deliver more value, and when you deliver more value, you make more money. It s more success for the business owner who you serve. So we want to weed out people who are not a good fit for us. It doesn t mean they re bad people, it just means that they re not going to be good for us to serve. Next, you need to understand that marketing is all about repelling as much as it is about attracting clients. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, you ve all seen the commercials on TV that say, Attention, Men 50 to 80! Okay. They ve called out their market, so what they ve told everybody else who s not a man, who s not 50 to 80, is basically, Tune out. This message is not for you. Now, that s a very direct way of doing that, but you need to understand that not all marketing is meant to attract people to you. It s just as much meant to repel people from you, because you don t want to waste your time. I don t mean waste like it s going to be a total waste, but you don t want to spend your time with people who are not a good fit for you and your bookkeeping business. I want to set you up for success from the beginning because, guess what? I made tons of mistakes in serving people who I never should have served. It painted me into a corner and created the life that was kind of frustrating until I figured all of this out. So I hope that this is an aha moment for you. Now, the last thing that I want to leave you with is that you need to find what I refer to and others refer to as the bleeding neck. Now, what in the world does that mean? Well, there are people who need your services as a bookkeeper, and then there are people who need your service right now. They have a bleeding neck, so it s like they re injured, they re going into the ER, they need to be seen right now because they have an issue. They have a problem and they need you to serve it. 4

So what we need to do is make sure that our marketing finds those bleeding necks, finds people who not only need you, but they need you right now. There s a whole art to going about and doing this, and weeding out and the repelling and knowing your market and knowing your message and knowing the right media to find those bleeding necks. So there are some frames that I want you to have about marketing, what it is. Now, one thing that it is not is greasy salesmanship. Okay, we also always think about the -- I want to say the car dealer, used car dealer or used boat dealer or somebody like that. That s not what you re doing here, okay? Really, your marketing and your sales is all about educating. So don t think of it as salesmanship. Think of it as education, informing your prospective clients about bookkeeping, about best practices. If you take that philosophy that, I m educating and I m giving a lot of information away that I may never, ever get paid for, then you re okay. You are on the right path. Okay, so there are some frames of mind that you need to have about what marketing is and what it is not. So in the next section, I m going to give you some very specific strategies, my top three, that I m going to recommend that you use to go out there and acquire quality bookkeeping clients. I ll see you there. So let s talk about the top three marketing strategies, ones that you need to employ to go out there and get quality bookkeeping clients. Now, remember the three M s of marketing, so think about that as we re talking about these three strategies, because strategy number three is all about you creating content. You re creating content that your prospective clients are going to consume. See, content creation is really value creation. You re helping somebody to avoid a pain or to solve a problem. That s all content creation is. Now, as an example, what you are consuming right here, right now is content creation. We know that most of the people, 98 percent of the people who watch these free classes will never go through one of our paid classes, and we are okay with that. You will experience the same thing. You have to be okay saying, When I create content for my prospective clients, most of them will never pay me a dime. But what you have done is that you ve established yourself as an authority. So that two percent of people who need you and need you right now -- remember the bleeding neck -- they are going to value who you are. They are going to value because you have given to them first. You have provided them with hope, and let me tell you, hope is a very powerful thing. When you provide hope to a business owner, watch out because now they re going to beating a path to your door. 5

Now, when you provide content, it may be strategies of how to do something, how to do something that they don t know how to do now or overcome a pain or overcome an obstacle. Guess what? Most of them, even if you told them step-by-step what to do, are never going to do it themselves. They have hope, they like what you re saying, but they re not going to take time to actually do it. So this is when they would contact you and say, I love the value that you gave me. Become my bookkeeper. Now, it doesn t happen that easily, but that s the whole paradigm of it. Now, content can be distributed in a lot of different media, a lot of different forms. It can be online, it can be offline, it can be your blog, social media, it could be at a networking event, it could be one-on-one. You never know, but there are tons of places that you can distribute content, and that s marketing strategy number three. Now, marketing strategy number two goes a little bit deeper than number three, and that s where you do training. Okay. This is where you do training for business owners where you go a little bit deeper. So with the content, maybe you told them What. In the training maybe you tell them How, and again, don t be afraid to give away too much information. But let s say that the training is online. Now, it could be offline, also. We ll cover that in just a second, but let s say that you say, You know what? My market is X. My market is dentists and I know, because I serve this market, that these are their challenges. What you do is you develop a training around those challenges to help them to overcome them. You put an ad out there or you put information out there or somebody else shares that you are doing an online training. You drive these dentists to that training and you educate them. You give them knowledge, you go deeper and you take their questions and you answer them. In exchange, you re going to get people contacting you because they see you as an authority. Think about it like this. Let s say that your local library is having a published author to come and speak. Okay. Immediately, you see the words published author and you think, That person has to have credibility. That person is someone because they re a published author. Well, when you create content and when you do online training or offline training, you are immediately seen as an authority. You immediately have trust and credibility, so that s really what you re doing with this online training. The great news is that it s not complicated. You don t have to have a PhD in finance or 6

bookkeeping or accounting or anything like that because most business owners, they don t know diddly about finances. Now, it s not their fault because they re never trained up in that, but what we can do is teach you a few tricks that you can impart to them that is of tremendous value. That s where you get paid, is when you contribute value to the marketplace, to your market. If you take nothing else from this marketing, understand that your pay is directly proportional to the amount of value that you put into the marketplace. Now, it doesn t happen overnight. It does take time, but over that length of time, that s when you get paid. Okay, so that s strategy number three; content marketing, strategy number two. Now, let s go into strategy number one, and that is referral marketing. Referral networking. Now, what in the world is this? Well, let me explain it to you like this. Let s say that you move to a new town and you don t know anyone. It s just you and your family, and finally you meet your neighbor at the bus stop. You have your kids out there and you re at the bus stop, and you meet your neighbor. Over a few days and weeks, you begin to talk to her and everything s great. Well, now you discover that you need a dentist. You don t know anybody in town. You only know your neighbor. So what do you do at the bus stop the next day? You say, You know what? I m looking for a dentist. Do you know somebody? She says, I ve got the greatest dentist in the world. Give her a call. Schedule your appointment. So you go inside after the bus stop, you make a call to the dentist and now you re on your way for somebody with a big drill to put in your mouth. And the only thing you know about them is that your neighbor said that they were good. Your neighbor in this case was a referral partner, and that s where you want to be. Now, obviously, we re not talking dentists and we re not talking about your neighbors, but what we want to figure out here is, Who is already in front of my market? This, again, is why determining who your market is of utmost importance, because we have to say, Who s already out there in front of my market? Okay. It may be an attorney, it may be a commercial banker, it may be a payroll service provider, which I strongly recommend that you work with. It could be a whole host of people. There are about six to 10, depending on your market, of who s already in front of them. Who has already trust factor built up with your potential clients? Because that s what referral partners are all about: it s about you borrowing somebody else s trust. That client, that potential client has built up a relationship with a referral partner and now you re going to build up that trust. So like in any relationship, this takes time, but the leads 7

and the clients who you get from referral partners are very, very rich. When you are referred to a client, you ve got about a 92 percent chance, in my experience, to actually secure them as a client because they were referred to you from a trusted source. Now, there s a whole art about going about how you do referral marketing. It does take time. It doesn t take a lot of money, maybe a couple of dinners and some coffee and lunch and that sort of thing. It does take time. It does take effort. It s not a one-hit wonder. You re not going to do it one time and then expect to yield a lot of clients. It is a process and it is a system. Now, as with everything in any business, the more that you can systemize and the more efficient and effective those systems are, the quicker that you will get jobs done, the more value that you ll contribute, and the more money you will make. Now, in the next section, I want to talk to you about a very specific system that you can use if you ve decided that a bookkeeping business is right for you. [Music plays] Listen, if you ve determined that starting your own bookkeeping business is right for you, then I want to tell you about a proven blueprint that we have that can help take you from where you are today to where you want to be with your virtual bookkeeping business. Now, remember, this is not about bookkeeping. This is about delivering to you a life that you deserve, a life that you want, a life where you pick when you work, where you work, if you want to wear a vest and a t-shirt, you certainly can. So we have to get really clear on why you are doing this, but if you ve gone through the classes that we ve talked about, you know that you have those seven character traits, you know that you would make a heck of a bookkeeper, then Bookkeeper Business Launch is the most efficient way for you to get there. Now, in the coming days, you re going to get a video that explains everything about Bookkeeper Business Launch, what it is. Again, it s the proven way to get from where you are today to where you want to be, and that s having a successful business that gives you the freedom and flexibility that you want. So I want you to be on the lookout for that. We also do a little bit more training in that video so that you can understand more about the bookkeeping business, but I want to leave you with this right here. You, and only you, can determine if this is right for you. I ve given you information, okay? This is now for you. Your action item is to determine, Hey, is this right for me? Now, there are a lot of positive things about a bookkeeping business. It s the number one most profitable. It s one of the least costly to start up. There is built-in demand. 8

Okay. There are a lot of positive things, but if you don t have those seven character traits, if you re not okay with doing marketing and some of the other things, then it might not be for you. So that is exactly why we ve created this video series, is for you to make a fair determination, is this right for you? So if you have made that decision, then you re going to get the best solution that will save you tons of time and tons of money and help to get those clients for you fast. So be on the lookout for that video in the next few days. Now, in the meantime, I ve got one more thing that I d love for you to do. That s to comment and have your questions below, right below this video, because this is how we make the training better. This is how we make it more applicable to you and your circumstances and your needs. So please put your comments below. Let me hear those questions, and I ll see you in the next video that s all about Bookkeeper Business Launch. 9