Brandon Hall says that the reason accountants have such long and grueling busy seasons is that “firms try to make way too much money at tax prep.” Firms don’t have enough capacity to deliver on services, so everyone – including the partners – ends up working a ton of hours.
Because partner pay isn’t included in payroll, the margin on tax prep is likely much worse than the 30-35% that shows up on the income statement. Hall’s target for the 2024 filing season is just 10-15% margin on tax prep.
Amber Setter, the chief enlightenment officer for Conscious Public Accountants, started out as a Type A overachiever CPA, but after a few busy seasons, she realized that she “didn’t want to be an accountant anymore.”
Karen Reyburn wants accountants to stop thinking “about marketing as this one-off thing where you tick little boxes,” but instead about the ways you can use your marketing to connect to the human experience. Her company, The Profitable Firm, or PF for short, has been helping accountants with their marketing since 2012.
In Reyburn’s view, marketing is closely connected to the business. “If you have a marketing problem, you have a business problem. If you have a business problem, there’s often a marketing solution that can help with it.”
This book springs out of a PF coaching group called The Accelerator, where participants were guided through a process of creating a structured approach to content marketing that made their marketing better. Reyburn and PF take a collaborative approach to marketing. “We don’t do marketing for people,” she explained. “We do marketing with them.”
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