Bad Marketing: Tactics to Avoid

I coach one firm owner who's automating nearly everything herself and another who wants almost nothing to do with AI directly, and both are growing fast and staying profitable. In this episode, I break down the three paths firms are taking with AI right now, what the tradeoffs of each one look like, and why dipping your toe in still matters even if you never want to become the power user yourself.

Some marketing tactics feel productive in the moment but almost never move the needle. In this episode, I break down why a few common approaches keep failing firm owners in the exact same way, using real numbers on how badly one of them has been performing lately, plus a giveaway disaster from my own firm's early days.

A firm that can't be clearly credited for changing a client's business becomes exactly the kind of replaceable vendor that gets shopped against a cheaper competitor. In this episode, I walk through why a proper diagnosis is the starting point for avoiding that trap, how to scale the depth of that diagnosis to the size of the engagement, and a real example of a CPA who turned his own diagnostic process into a standalone tool.

One of my coaching clients told me she gets a real physical anxiety reaction every time a certain client emails her, and that client wasn't even paying extra for the daily back and forth. When I asked my Inner Circle coaching group if anyone else was dealing with something similar, nearly every hand went up. In this episode, I break down the two root causes behind this pattern after coaching hundreds of firms through it, and exactly how to reset the relationship without blowing it up.

Not long ago I asked my newsletter readers for feedback, and one asked for more Wu-Tang references. That's how this episode got its theme, but the lesson is a real one: you need to protect your time, energy, and mental bandwidth from a constant, well-meaning stream of people and tasks that would happily take them from you. In this episode, I walk through the "Ideal Role Document" I built to map out what energizes me versus what drains me, how I used ChatGPT as a thinking partner to build it, and how you can build your own version.

Technical competence got you this far, but it's not what's going to differentiate your firm going forward. In this episode, I walk through why soft skills, things like emotional intelligence, cultural awareness, and simplifying the complex, matter more than ever in the age of automation, and how to start building them deliberately starting this week. Read the full breakdown of all thirteen soft skills here: https://futurefirm.co/accountant-soft-skills/

Losing a team member is painful, but what happens next is usually the bigger problem: the scramble to hire, the months of retraining, and sometimes losing that person too. In this episode, I break down why this cycle isn't a sign of bad leadership, and share three practical ways to build redundancy into your team before you need it, so the next departure doesn't take your momentum with it.

What if hitting seven figures didn't require a bloated team or hundreds of clients? I walk through five steps that could get you there.

Long before accounting, I lived in a completely different world, and it taught me one lever that's driven more new work than anything since.

Gut feel has been one of your most trusted tools as an owner, but it's not something you should lean on every time. Here's why that matters.