Know Your Audience
It will be harder to step in it, if you have a clear idea of who you are dealing with.
My Dad* is a bit of a rough & tumble guy. He wears Carhartt coveralls, a green polka-dot welder’s cap and is generally a little scruffy. Clean but definitely scruffy. He looks like your average working Joe and talks like one too. He loves a good convo about backhoes and tractors while sitting at a bar with buddies.
This is exactly what he was doing one fine day when someone sat down next to King at his favourite haunt (his real-life name, honest to goodness, is King).
The fella had apparently been to this bar a few times and proceeded to tell King and his barmates exactly how he would run the joint differently. He waxed on what he could better and how he could turn The Old Marina Restaurant (OMR) into a “real going concern”**.
It took him a solid half-hour to ask King what brought him the bar, to which King replied “I own it”.
The man thought he was kidding and asked the manager, who confirmed this bit of news. It didn’t take long for the feller to leave, with his tail between his legs.
Just in case you have never seen a welder’s cap…
So many learnings to be had from this. Here are just 2 to start us thinking about them.
Always conduct a proper introduction and an ask of who someone you are engaging with
Get a little bit of their story, find out how you can have an interesting, 2-way conversation
Don’t assume you can run someone’s life, business, parenting… better than them
9 times out of 10 there is more than meets the eye to any of these things
This relates deeply to us, as accounting professionals.
In order to have respectful, valuable relationships with clients we need to ask questions. We need to learn their story and what brought them to this point in their business and their life.
We need to vet them properly to begin with and we need to revisit how they are feeling about our relationship, at least annually.
Forms are the most engaging way to do this. You can do it while you are with them, or ship them off and go through them together after.
I vet clients mightily and this includes a paid review of their accounting file. Whether or not you are comfortable with a paid review, for crying out loud take a look at the story their books are telling you about this prospect. Not just so you can quote the work properly, but so that you know where they sit on things that matter to you like compliance, back-work and collaboration.
I was recently contacted by what looked to be my 5-Star client. They completed my prospecting forms and we had a great phone meeting. They hit all the high notes - Incorporated & multi-entity businesses, QBO with bank feeds connected, tax filings up to date, service-based industry and super nice.
But when I looked at the story of their QBO files they were not a fit at all. Sole props, taxes way behind, bank feeds never connected or accounts reconciled, co-mingling…
They weren’t hiding anything or misleading me, they simply didn’t understand some of the important issues with bookkeeping.
But how do you know what you are vetting against? What you are looking for in a client?
Start working out your 5-Star Client Profile right now. It’s the only way to know your audience, have meaningful, respectful relationships and not “step in it” too often.
I can help you with this. I have resources for you.
Here is a link to a FREE Setting Client Boundaries & Expectations Worksheet.
I send a satisfaction survey at the 3 and 6-month timeframe with new clients and at the fiscal year-end for all of them.
Try my survey out and give a few different answers to the “are we continuing our engagement” to see the multiple endings.
I sell prospecting and onboarding forms. Along with onboarding, re-engagement and dis-engagement workflows.
To round out things we can learn from my Dad as a business owner, I’m imparting one of his favourite comebacks (it always made the staff cringe).
Whenever he was told by patrons that they could get food or beverages cheaper, faster, different… somewhere else he told them to “hop in the car and go on over there”.
He never missed a beat on this. He knew what The Old Marina excelled at and where the value for patrons came from. If someone didn’t value what the OMR did they were not the OMR’s 5-Star customer, and they should move along to somewhere they would be happier.
Word of the week
Why are you doing what you do? Why are you doing it with who you do it with?
Tech Tip - QuickBooks Online
Managing Quickbooks Online Bank Feeds.
Always have the bank feeds for all accounts open in different tabs. Along with AR and AP reports and Undeposited Funds.
You can see inter-account transactions and not have to undo any if they are not matching
You can see if anything that had transacted in AR, AP that should be matching but is not - date transposition, penny rounding…
I publish everything as a bill so I can see issues with AP in the feed rather than need to deal with them in the reconciliation
Keeps expenses from being duplicated with open AP or bill payments
If something in AP is not a match then perhaps it was paid by the owner or petty cash - investigate (make sure you are reconciling these accounts too)
Open UNFs that should be matching in the feed but aren’t, are easy to fix in the moment rather than mucking with them later once recs are done
Keeps revenue from being overstated
Once you have uncovered issues, refresh the feeds and carry on clearing them.
Managing the bank feed tightly will result in magical reconciliations.
Sociable
- said in your head in a loud sing-songy voice
Today’s social links are all about your why and rewarding great clients.
Nicole Davis, who I met IRL at AWLS and am in awe of, posted an article worth a noodle through on thinking about your why. Do you want to scale a business or do you want a lifestyle business?
I also got to meet the amazing Kenji Kuramoto and Matthew May at AWLS. Eeeek, I have admired these 2 from afar for quite some time. They own a future-thinking firm, Acuity. And they have a podcast, Drink While You Think, and they discuss problems with scaling in this episode.
Adam Markowitz posted a fun play on FIFO. He is implementing NIFO , for his work - Nicest In First Out. Hard to disagree.
Woot, woot! I am so excited to be invited to host a meet-up at the Quickbooks Connect Virtual Event.
Join members of The Workflow Wateringhole Facebook Group*** and myself for an interactive discussion on processes and workflows for accounting professionals.
But of course, we will go down any rabbit holes that may come up. This is a fun and interaction meet-up rather than a carved-in-stone presentation. My favourite kind of session!
June 2, 2022, 12:00 - 1:00pm EST
Simply yours, Kellie :-}
::Shameless Call To Action::
I sell bookkeeping templates, standard operating process handbooks and client guides.
*King is actually my stepdad, but if you have stuck around my nutty family for over 35 years you get rightly deserved elevated status.
**The Old Marina has been a “going concern” for almost 30 years. I think my parents did just fine without the fella’s advice.
***You don’t have to be a member of The Workflow Wateringhole to join this meet-up. But you should check out TWWH anywho - it’s a pretty fun group, if I do say so myself…
