Jassen Bowman EA
Jassen Bowman EA

#8 Trusting In Your Systems & Staff

In this episode, Dan discusses how he’s able to maintain revenue yet be gone from his practice for all but two weeks out of the entirety of May and June, including nearly three weeks in Italy with his family. We’ll discuss systems he has in place to enable him to do this, and have a lengthy discussion about finding good people and trusting them with your business.

In addition, we answer a few questions from Claudia Moncarz, an attorney in Florida. Specifically, she wanted to know…

  1. What is a good follow up sequence for a tax lien list once they sign up for your opt-in? Do you do the 8-week sequence and then once a month?
  2. Why do you recommend actual snail mail as opposed to email for your newsletter?
  3. For a tax resolution client that is not in compliance, how far back do you go? Do you prepare the last 3 years of returns? 7? More?

We welcome your own questions, and invite you to leave a comment at taxresolutionacademy.com/8. Also, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes. … Continue reading

Marketing cost comparison for reaching $1 million

I recently released the 5th edition of my book about building a million dollar taxpayer representation firm, and one of the things I addressed in this edition is the concept of stepping up your marketing expenditures in logical increments.

As I was thinking about this, it dawned on me that many existing IRS representation practitioners probably think that it’s cost prohibitive to build a practice that size by using the kind of marketing that I advocate doing. Due to this line of thinking, they instead do what “tax resolution” firms do: Hire an army of telephone openers and closers to cold call tax liens.

Not only is this practice a violation of Treasury regulations, it’s also one of the practices that gives a black eye to all of us engaged in taxpayer representation. Companies use this boiler room telemarketing approach for an obvious reason, of course: It works.

This leads practitioners to think it’s more cost effective to do business this way. But is it really?

What does it take to hit $1 million in new client fees annually? Grab your calculator, folks…

Assuming an average fee of $3,500 per client (which is actually on the low side, but it never hurts to be conservative), we need 285 clients per year to hit the magic million mark.

Now, you’re going to have to take my word for it on these conversion numbers — but I can assure you they are based on real life experience in real tax firms, not just on conjecture. The average telemarketer (“opener”) must dial 60 tax liens in order to find one interested person, who is transferred to a sales closer in most boiler room operations. This closer will close, on average, 9% of these prospects. So, in order to get ONE new client, a company has to churn through 660 tax lien filings, at a typical cost of 35 cents per record to purchase. So, that’s $231 just in lead costs.

Now, the opener also typically gets a 10% commission at most companies, and the closers receive, on average, 20% to 30%. Lets’s again be conservative, and together give the sales guys 30%. Note here that we are also ignoring minimum wage laws and other costs for this sales staff, which most firms do ignore, believe it or not. So our $3,500 new client also costs us $1,050 in commissions, for a total of $1,281 that we … Continue reading

#7 Tax Court Fun Times Part 1

In this episode, Jassen Bowman & Dan Henn, CPA delve into the wonderful world of tax court! We cover two interesting tax court cases of late, and also delve into a discussion about the value of taking the tax court exam.

230 Insider provides news, insight, and analysis for Circular 230 practitioners to help you build a better tax firm. We provide information specifically for those tax professionals that practice under the auspices of IRS Circular 230, including regulatory updates and tax firm marketing strategies.

Please leave us a review on iTunes, and feel free to leave us comments for this episode below. We welcome your feedback, story suggestions, and are openly looking for show guests to discuss interesting representation cases, tax practice anecdotes, and marketing strategies.… Continue reading