Category: Advanced Tutorials

I have long advocated that marketing needs to be a daily priority within your tax practice. In fact, unless the building is burning down, it’s your absolute, number one, top, nothing-else-matters priority for running your business.

Never forget: Without marketing today, you have no new clients tomorrow.

The point of this checklist is to provide you a tool for accomplishing your marketing tasks with laser-focused efficiency. This checklist should be completed during the time of your day when you are at peak performance. Your marketing deserves the best you can give it each day.

For many practitioners, the nature of running a busy practice makes it difficult to do these tasks during the regular work day. Certain items on this checklist can (and often should) be delegated to staff members, with you verifying their completion. But some items require your undivided attention, and I’d encourage you to consider arriving to the office before any other staff each day in order to accomplish these important revenue-generating tasks.

Do note that this is not a marketing startup checklist. Rather, it assumes that you already have the referenced systems in place, and this is your daily roadmap for operating those systems. If you are focused on doing the tasks, and have systems in place, then you can easily hit the by-the-minute markers indicated.

The “bonus points” section of this checklist, which includes tasks that can take several additional hours each day, helps you to achieve ideal tax practice growth. Finding ideal clients, creating marketing systems that feed long-term lead generation on autopilot, and tapping into more complex and lucrative lead generation channels.

To get this checklist, which is combined in the same PDF as our fee quotation guide, sign up for our email list here and it will be sent to you automatically.… Continue reading

May 2013 Advanced Tutorial

Over the weekend, I discovered an Enrolled Agent that is simply rocking it with the simplest marketing plan on the planet.

In fact, it’s an even more simplified version of the simple plan that I’m always talking about for solo practitioners.

This EA asked not to be named, but he allowed me to share with you the details of how he’s building his practice. In short, he has the simplest marketing plan in the world, and it’s working very, very well for him.

He is a solo practitioner that does ONLY collections representation work. He doesn’t have a large practice, but more than adequately supports his family on three new clients each month.

His fee model is also simple: Hourly billing with a $2500 minimum retainer. Most of his cases exceed the initial retainer by at least $1,000.

Here’s his entire marketing plan:

1. Every month, purchases 800-1000 tax liens for 941 debtors across the country, with debt amounts between $50,000 and $200,000.
2. Runs the contact info from the lien through a separate data service to obtain the home address of the business owner, from which he will obtain at least 500 home addresses.
3. Using the 500 best results, send a simple, one-page, no frills letter of introduction in a stamped, hand addressed envelope (his wife and two children help with the addressing).
4. In the letter, he does nothing but mention how he found them, how he can help, and offers both a free consultation and invites them to sign up for his email newsletter.
5. Every other week, he emails out a helpful piece of tax advice.

Between the mailings themselves and the email newsletter follow up, he generates $7500 per month in new retainers.

That’s it. That’s the entire secret sauce. Let’s look at his costs:

Liens: $200

Address lookup service: $160

Paper: $20

Toner: $60

Envelopes: $20

Stamps: $230

Email service: $50

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Total: $740



That’s just $740 per month to generate $7500.

Of course, this doesn’t count the value of the time that goes into preparing the mailings. It’s basically a weekend project once a month for the entire family, he said.

The most amazing part of this, to me, is that he’s been doing this, month in and month out, for over 10 years. This is what he was doing when he first obtained his EA license, and it still works, so he keeps doing it.… Continue reading