Category: 30-Day Tax Marketing Challenge

In yesterday’s challenge, you did some research in an effort to find bigger companies to do special marketing initiatives to.

Over the rest of the month, we will revisit this super-short “hit list” a couple times, but today, we start in a meaningful way.

First, do a little bit more research on Google, perhaps even LinkedIn. The goal: Find out who is in charge overall, and who is in charge of the accounting, finance, and legal functions. Yes, that means up to four people. If not people, find out who their accounting firm is, what local law firm they utilize, etc. You may need to pick up the phone for this leg work.

Once you know the names and addresses of the folks in charge, here’s what you’re going to do:

1. Print out copies of any “financial turmoil” media articles you found yesterday.
2. Type up a cover letter on your letterhead saying you came across the attached news items, and provide 2-3 specific suggestions for how you could help based on what was publicly reported.
3. FedEx or courier this entire stack to the people you found in your research. Not email. Not fax. Not USPS. FedEx or courier. Don’t be a cheapskate on this, it’s worth the extra few dollars.
4. Add to your calendar a to do to follow up via telephone in 48 hours.

In this day and age, showing even the tiniest demonstration of competency and tenacity goes a LONG way. Frankly, it’s frightening how low the bar has become for impressing people. This makes it easier to get a meeting with some local corporate mid-wig than you think it is. By taking the time to research a company, try to understand their problems, even with incomplete external knowledge, and offer possible solutions, you’re probably being more proactive than their controller or CFO.

That’s how you land whales.… Continue reading

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