Jassen Bowman EA

Today, we’re going whale hunting.

Or, at least the research required to go whale hunting.

First off, what’s a whale?

One of the nice things about 941 work over 1040 work is that the cases are much more diverse and interesting. Over 90% of 1040 tax resolution cases are just the same thing over and over and over. Most of them are Streamline or, as they are now called, “Expanded” Installment Agreements. Same thing, over and over…

Not so with 941 cases. 941 case work is much more varied, making it inherently more interesting, at least to a nerd like me.

One little factor that makes it more interesting? You’re much more likely to land the occasional mid-sized business as a client.

Depending upon whom you ask, a mid-sized business is defined as one with more than 100 employees, but less than 1,000 employees, or that has revenue in excess of $10 million per year but less than a $1 billion. The US SBA definition is much more complex, based on industry.

Medium-sized businesses are excellent clients for a number of reasons that are really beyond the scope of the challenge. From a strictly tax resolution perspective, they’re great because they can afford to pay you higher fees, and also because the root cause of their payroll tax problem is usually a short-term problem. Lastly, they can cash flow their way out of the federal and state tax debt. Oh, and for-reals lastly, they generally don’t have unfiled returns or mountains of accounting work to be done.

In other words, they’re pure representation clients. For somebody like me that doesn’t like doing tax prep, and isn’t an accountant, I love cases where all I’m doing is the representation!

Identifying potential whale clients is fairly simple, but marketing to them can be a different story. Today, we’ll talk about identifying them, and over the next few days we’ll talk about marketing to them.

Finding whales starts with having the right boat. For our purposes, the main boat you need is Google.

1. Start by Googling phrases such as “your-city business in trouble” and “your-city company financial issues” and “your-city business faces losses”, etc.
2. Find your local business journal, and start scouring for news articles and reports of businesses in trouble.
3. Look online for your local “Book of Lists”, usually put out by a business journal publisher. Scour that list for year-over-year declines in staffing.
4. If you

Sometimes, even the best laid plans go awry.

Take something like, I dunno, a 30-day challenge. Yeah, that’s a good example.

Across the 30 days, things are going to come up. Family matters. Business fires. Deadlines.

And then, before you know it, it’s 3pm and you haven’t done that 30-day challenge task yet, and you just know it won’t be happening that day.

Like with any journey, one must simply brush themselves off and plow ahead the next day. I’m sure that’s what you’ve done on a 30-day challenge, perhaps even this one. It even happens to the authors of said 30-day challenges, thus explaining why this particular series will forever lack a day 9.

So my apologies for missing yesterday. I just didn’t get to it in the morning before a meeting, and that meeting became an intense 4-hour mindmeld. By the time I got home, the work day was pretty much already done for everybody except the west coast, so I threw in the towel. In my defense, the result of that mindmeld session is going to benefit YOU in a few weeks, so in that regard it was very productive. If you want the inside scoop, I recorded an interview last weekend with my friend James Orr about the Real Estate Financial Planner software that he’s programmed, and how we’re going to bring that to you to help you grow your practice. The interview is about an hour, and you can listen here.

So hopefully you used yesterday to catch up on any of the eight previous challenge tasks you missed. Today, we’re going to continue with the “Weekend SEO Warrior” short tasks that we started last weekend, so today is pretty quick.

Across every iteration of the Internet era so far, there have been some websites that carry fairly higher authority as backlink sources for SEO purposes. Back in the day, a site called EzineArticles wore the crown for a long time, until one infamous Google update totally destroyed all SEO juice gained from that site.

Today, one of the most prominent sites that serves such a purpose is Medium. Medium is a blogging and article sharing platform created by one of the founders of Twitter. Items posted to Medium rank very well, and give you a bit of SEO boost when you include links back to your own site. Your task today is to simply create a Medium account… Continue reading

Are you enjoying becoming reacquainted with your telephone this week?

I hope so, because we’re not done with the Old Timey Talky Box quite yet!

If you attended yesterday’s live training, then today’s challenge is going to sound really, really familiar. Yes, it’s tactic #2 as discussed on yesterday’s webinar.

As discussed on that training, referrals from other tax professionals is one of the best strategies to use for jump starting your tax resolution business. It’s an even more valuable technique to apply on the 941 side of things, because there is a strange presumption that 941 case work is somehow more difficult than 1040 Collections representation, and so even fewer tax pros want to do it.

Sure, it’s different, to a certain extent, with more moving pieces occasionally, and more aggressive IRS enforcement… But those are all good things to me, as it justifies higher fee. But more difficult? Something to be afraid of? Not at all!

Here’s what you do:

1. Download the IRS PTIN list for your state.
2. Open it in Excel and sort by ZIP code.
3. Find your ZIP code. Just yours.
4. Call the other other small practitioners (skip the big firms) with your elevator pitch and ask if they’d like to get together for lunch to discuss mutual business development relationships.
5. Pick up the tab for lunch. That’s your marketing cost (and it’s still deductible!)

Easy peasy, right? Right!

To make this mini-campaign even more successful, throw in a direct mail letter. Hand addressed, real stamp. We’re talking about sending 10 or 20 letters, so the cost is minimal.

There is a sample letter of introduction in the members-only marketing library that you can use as a template. If you’re not currently a member, take a gander at our 14-day trial offer on Gold membership that is currently running.

Tomorrow will be our last heavy phone day, and then we’ll head into the weekend with some more marketing you can do without direct human contact. 🙂… Continue reading