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How to Use Your Accountant | Dominate

 

Want to dominate your area’s IRS representation market? Want to own your city’s tax advisory internet turf? You need to understand that planning to compete is simply not enough. You must set out to dominate your competition. To do that does not require some advanced degree or some weird level of intelligence. You just simply need to become obsessed with succeeding and determined to make the climb to the top of the mountain. In this week’s episode, Eric discusses what it takes to build that practice you want and dominate your local industry with nothing but grit and determination.

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You Must Dominate

If You Have Your Own Business, You Must Dominate – Just Competing Is Not Enough!

I want to be very clear about something. If you’re going to be in business, you must learn to dominate. You are going to dominate your business. We do not get into business to compete. I’m bringing this up because I’m getting a lot of feedback on the Million Dollar Practice book where people say, “I’m going to try this,” very wishy-washy. No. What we do is we go to business. We go all in and we dominate. How do you do that? How do you dominate your market, your business, your area, or your piece of the internet turf?

How To Dominate Your Local Market

I’m going to break that down for you during this episode. It’s just me, no guests. I wanted this to be one-on-one with me and you. First and foremost, we are going to change our mindset and we are going to dominate. For me, IRS representation, we dominate Connecticut. We’re known nationally, but I’m more interested in Connecticut. That is where my clients come from.

 

How to Use Your Accountant | Dominate

 

I’m not so interested in trying to compete in California and Texas. There’s plenty of work right here. I don’t need to go looking nationally. There are plenty of people in trouble right where I am. Lovely New Haven, Connecticut. My goal is to dominate New Haven and the surrounding areas of New Haven here in Connecticut. When I say dominate, what do I mean? Anybody who thinks about somebody with a tax problem in Connecticut is going to think about Green Esquires. They will not be able to go onto their smartphone, on their computer, or the internet and not find me.

This is not complicated. This has nothing to do with getting a college degree or a doctorate or 30 years of experience. This is about mindset and a lot of action. You show up and get to work. A couple of things, I’m going to break this down for you on how we do this. Not complicated, but we need to do it. What do we mean by that? We want to get to the top of the mountain. How do we get there? We have to climb the mountain.

You can go fast, you can go slow, it doesn’t matter, but you got to climb the mountain. This long slog of doing the marketing and the networking and getting your skills together and all of that stuff. You can do this fairly quickly or you can meander. It’s up to you. I don’t know what you want. I’m going to focus on IRS representation here, but if you want to dominate your part of the internet, where you are, where you live, or where your clients are, you can do that this year. It doesn’t take years and years.

It helps the longer you do it. You keep building and building. This is something I found that I left a big firm and started my own practice. Within two years, I was making more than I was back at that big firm. I had made up my salary on an annualized basis by the end of the first year. When I left, I went at this like a crazy person. I was obsessed with building a practice and being one of the people known for this. At the time, we had a lot of competition here in Connecticut. There were about twelve lawyers, all former IRS and DOJ, that did this. Today, we have almost nobody that competes with us.

Part of that is those folks have retired. A lot of people have not gone into this. My biggest competition is other tax rep members. If you want to focus on financial planning, you want to focus on forensic accounting, you want to focus on bookkeeping or accounting, it doesn’t matter. Whatever it is you want to dominate, you can do that, but you have to focus on it, change your mindset, and you have to make it happen.

Step 1: Master Your Craft To Dominate Your Industry

Step number one, how do you do this? First and foremost, whatever it is you want to do, you need to become a master of it. You dominate IRS representation if you don’t know how to represent taxpayers. If you’re saying to me, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” that’s fine. We just have to get trained. In whatever it is we want to do, you go find the best training you can and you do that. You don’t meander through it. My honest advice is to turn the TV off, put your phone down at night, work all day, go home, and spend a couple of hours with your family.

From 7:30 to 11:30 at night is plenty of time to do damage. Four hours, five days a week. I’m not even asking you to do it on your weekends. That’s twenty hours a week. Give me two weeks and you can get through all of our training. The core CTRC and the other important training around that, including our marketing training, you could get it done in two weeks if you’re willing to sit down, be disciplined, and put your head down and do this. We’re committed to it. We are going to focus on this. We’re going to dominate and we’re going to get this done.

I’m not going to do a little here and then be tired. I got to watch my show. Sorry, we’re going to focus and do this. First of all, we have to get trained. The other way you get trained is you immerse yourself. Yes, there are training materials, but there are other trainings. There are audio books and there are videos. Go on YouTube and find channels that are good for you. Maybe you’re watching this on YouTube. Go find a YouTube channel or YouTube channels that are good for you. Video, audio, and reading, these are all different ways to learn.

I drive back and forth to work. I listen to audiobooks. Every now and then, I’ll admit, if I’m having a bad day, I might listen to music. For the most part, I’m listening to my audiobooks. It’s how I get through all these books every year because I don’t have a ton of time to sit and read. That’s what I do. If I’m flying to a conference, I’m flying to meetings wherever, train out of New York, there are a couple of hours each way, audiobooks.

You want to have a board of directors. You want to have some folks who you can go to for advice. These aren’t people that you’re paying. People will come and go in and out of your board of directors. Sid Kess was always on my board of directors. Former attorney and now retired John Tannenbaum here in Connecticut was very helpful to my career. We’d go to lunch and I could ask for advice. He was very forthcoming with me, giving me advice, what he had learned along the way and his thoughts. You want to have a board of directors so when you get jammed up, you have someone to go and talk to.

Like a tax rep, we’re your help desk. Our tax rep members can log on and they can talk to us if they get jammed up. Me, Jeff, Lisa, Amanda, we’re all here. We give them our two cents on the matter. You want to have a board of directors. This will take time. You’re going to have to meet people. You don’t send out an email saying, “Would you be on my board of directors?” You don’t even have to call it the board of directors, but you want to have some folks in your professional world who you can bounce things off of. This is why it’s very important to get involved in organizations because you will meet other like-minded people just like you who can be helpful with good networking, advice, training, and all of that.

Finally, in terms of becoming a master, embrace the technology and automate everything you can. I’m going to focus on the IRS rep. Could you do IRS representation without any software? You could. The forms are on the IRS website, the tables are on the IRS website, but we are much more efficient, much more profitable because of tax help software Ignition.

You’re going to want to automate everything that you can automate. If you’re a tax pro or an accountant, Ignition. Automate the engagement letters, make sure everything gets signed, and make sure you get paid upfront. Especially if you’re going to do relationship pricing, getting paid upfront. Dawn Brolin and I did a whole episode on this a couple of weeks ago. You can go check that out. How to use your accountant, but she talks about how she transitioned to relationship pricing.

A lot of her profitability and the fact that she’s got way more free time now, even during tax season, is because of the automation, Liscio, Ignition, Gruntwork, RCReports, Tax Help Software. We automate everything we can automate. One more point on that. Some of you are going to sit there and think, “That’s $200 a month. That’s $700 for the year.” First of all, you have to start thinking like a business owner. The government is paying for part of it. It’s deductible. It’s part of my business. I’m not paying $300 a month. Probably 30% or 35% is in tax savings. I’m paying $200 for that.

Here’s the other thing. How many hours do I save by not chasing people for engagement letters and not checking out to see if we got paid? In that episode, Dawn said she’d already collected 170,000. It was the second week of February for tax season. She was 170,000 ahead of where she was the year before simply by automating that. With Liscio, you’re going to cut out hours and hours if you do tax prep. Gruntworks will automate it. You have to review the return. No software is perfect, but that stuff should be automated.

Embrace technology, put the software in place, and automate everything you can. You’re going to find that you have free time. If you’re looking at it like, “It’s costing me money,” one, it’s a deduction so the government is helping pay for it. Number two, you’re getting back all this time, and number three, what are you going to do with all that time? Make more money.

We are going to master this. By mastering, we get trained, make sure we have a board of directors, we’re going to immerse ourselves in audio, video, reading, going to talks, and doing everything we can to become a master of what we do, and we’re going to automate everything we can to be as efficient and profitable as possible.

Step 2: Market Yourself To Get Noticed

Number two, we need to market ourselves. Marketing is a word that a lot of accountants are like, “I don’t like marketing.” Marketing is simply getting attention. You need to get attention for yourself, your brand, your logo, whatever. You need to get attention. If you have to go out with a bullhorn and scream to do it, then do that, but we need to get attention.

We’re going to market ourselves. I want to dispel a few things about marketing. You do not need to spend much, if any money, for marketing today. There are some wonderful free things all based on the internet. You can blog. I do. YouTube videos. If you’re watching this on YouTube, I’m sitting here, Zoom recording. You can get a free Zoom, but you’re limited on the amount of time. I have the paid version. It’s about $15 a month or whatever it is? It’s nothing. I can sit and record, put this out there, and share my message with the world.

Marketing is simply getting attention. You do not need to spend much, if any, money on marketing today. Share on X

You have a referral network. I bet you have friends and family that like you. You probably even have a couple of clients that like you. These are your best salespeople. Most people would prefer to get referred to somebody. Even I’ll tell Jeff, “Do you know a plumber? I need something.” They’ll say, “Yeah, we use this person, love them.” I’m calling that person. I’m not doing internet searches and all that. I’m calling the person who I got referred to. The folks who already like you are your best sales force. If they don’t know that you do something, they can’t send people to you.

Make sure you’re communicating with your referral network. In terms of putting stuff out there, and again, I want to dispel some of this stuff. When I talk about blogging, 300 to 500 words. That’s it. It’s like two or maybe three paragraphs. You can go out and look at my blogs. They’re not long, they’re not complicated. I’m not trying to teach someone how to do an offer. I’m discussing what they need to know to understand I’m the guy they need to do an offer and compromise. That’s it. That’s all we’re doing.

In the old days, you’d write a book and you could build credibility through being an author. A lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of expense, and I don’t know that you get the bang for the buck. I think blogging once or twice a week, but if you could do it daily, even better. You’re constantly putting out content. What it says to the audience is, “I don’t know who Eric Green is, but he certainly seems to know a lot about IRS representation. Maybe we should call him.”

YouTube videos. My podcast is a bit different, but YouTube videos, 2 to 3 minutes, that’s it. That’s about all the normal American can handle these days, sadly. It’s a different issue for a different podcast. They don’t have the attention span. Two to three minutes, that’s it. That’s all you have to do. You can do it on your phone. No equipment is needed. I’m sure you have a smartphone. You hold the phone, hit record, give your 2 to 3 minutes, try to be personable because people want to listen to people who are personable, not boring and dull, and post. Done. That’s it. That is as easy as it is.

We have some other new tools that I didn’t have 25 years ago. Artificial intelligence. You have AI, ChatGPT, and Jasper that’ll generate written content. They’ll also generate pictures. Pictory will generate a video for you, all AI. You don’t even have to be in your own pictures and videos. There’s no excuse today for why people put out content. You have to be disciplined about it. There are two of the big things that I find with successful clients of mine. I do have a couple of clients who are brilliant people. They’re brilliant people. They’re like oddities in that way, meaning they’re so brilliant. They’re special. You didn’t even know them, but they’re rare.

The other billionaire or close to billionaire clients I have, if you want to use money as your definition of success, are not brilliant. They had an idea, they executed on that idea in a disciplined, obsessive way, and they kept driving the machine. Ulysses S. Grant, maybe the greatest general we’ve ever had or certainly one of them, was quoted as saying, “After a battle when both sides feel that they’ve been beaten, one side will continue the attack and that is the side that will win.”

If you’re a history buff, you go back to Shiloh. The Union gets beaten the first day, but they manage to hold on to that little piece of land. The next day, when both armies normally would have slunk away, he went on the attack. He got more troops overnight. They went on the attack, crushed the Confederates and sent them running back to Corinth. The point is, if you’re worried about having competitors and other firms, they’re not going to do this. They’re not going to do it.

If you want to master this and if you want to dominate, and that’s what we set out to do, you have to be disciplined to keep doing it even on the days you don’t feel like doing it. If you do that, I can guarantee you that your competitors won’t. That is how you’re going to dominate your market. There are a lot of other lawyers that have watched me. I’ve had them copy my webinars and they’ve done 2 or 3, and that’s it. They’ve stopped. It’s a lot of work. They weren’t seeing anything and they moved on to something else. We keep doing it over and over. Over time, it builds and builds. There’s no secret to what I do.

I even wrote a book about it, How to Build A Million Dollar Practice. They don’t do it. They can do whatever they want with it. The point is, from marketing, you don’t have to be on TV and have acting lessons. You just have to be helpful. Put out good content that people want to hear. If you go into it with a view of, “I am here to help people, I can help people solve their worst tax problem. I don’t know how I’m going to solve it yet, but I can solve it if you work with me,” and you put out content with that in mind, you will attract clients.

They’re going to want to be associated with you. Don’t get hung up on the marketing, but you’ve got to market. We have a whole section in TaxRap that does this. We do a monthly marketing call for this reason. We have members, and that’s usually their biggest thing. They want to get trained to do this, and they want to know how to get clients. They’re usually a little underwhelmed about, “That’s all I got to do?” It’s not complicated. The marketing is not complicated, but you have to do it. It’s the discipline that most people lack.

Marketing is not complicated, but you have to do it. It's the discipline most people lack. Share on X

Step 3: Price Yourself Accordingly For Success

Three, we’re going to price ourselves accordingly. I don’t mean to offend the accountants. Bookkeeping can be automated. There are a lot of bookkeepers. Tax prep can be automated. Ignition for the letter, Liscio for the organizer, feeds it into GruntWork, and prepares the individual return. It’s got to be reviewed. That’s automating. We are going to become specialists. What do you want to do? Tax advisory. Get into doing tax advisory. The return is an afterthought. It’s a report card that comes up after year-end. The real work is done during the year.

If you can explain that to your clients, your clients are going to be willing to pay the higher fees because they understand what they’re paying for. If their view is, “It’s a tax return, I can get a tax return anywhere,” who’s doing the planning? Who’s helping you with your cashflow? Wouldn’t you like to know what you’re buying and those moves you’re making during the year? How do those impact you, and can I give you advice on how to minimize your taxes? The return is the report card. IRS rep, there aren’t that many of us. We charge very good fees and people pay it. They need us.

With all the craziness going on at the government right now and over at the IRS with the layoffs and everything else, the IRS won’t go away. The automated enforcement is going to expand, which means taxpayers aren’t going to be able to deal with a human being. We’re already seeing an uptick. We’ve had accountants call, the appeals officer is now retired, their client is hysterical, they don’t know where their case is, they need us. The demand for our services is only going up. We charge accordingly. Clients generally don’t balk. Why? They need us. This is the difference between being a family physician and a cardiac surgeon.

If you need a cardiac surgeon because you’re going to die if you don’t get the heart transplant or the bypass done or whatever, you’re going to pay whatever it is. Who’s going to argue the price at a time like this when the government is squeezing them? There’s a saying that some people in organized crime that I’ve met over the years have told me, “When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Meaning, when they need us, they’re going to do whatever it takes. They may not like it, but they need us.

I’ve had some clients over the years say, “Thank you very much. I hope I never see you again.” I get it. It’s not personal, but you don’t want to be here. I said, “No. You want to come here. You want to go over to the other side of the office for the corporate and estate planning.” “That’s right. If I come back, I want to go right, not left.” If you come into our office and you head left, Jeff Sklarz and the bankruptcy group is there, and then you run into the tax group where we do controversy. If you go right, you run into the corporate M&A folks and our estate planning partner. If you’re successful, you go right. If you’re having problems, you head left.

Anyway, we are going to charge accordingly. We are now masters at this. We’re good at what we do. We’re good at communicating what we do, and we charge accordingly. I am not the cheapest person. I’m not the most expensive, but I will not be the cheapest person. I don’t want to be the cheap option. If you want to go cheap, go somewhere else. You’d be happier somewhere else.

Step 4: Make A Commitment To Yourself Today

Lastly, with everything I told you, what you need to do right now, if you’re driving, listening to this, if you’re watching this on your phone, make a commitment, not to your friends and family, I know you love them and they love you. You’re making a commitment to yourself, the person looking back at you in the mirror. When I went on my own, I was terrified, but I had to do it. I remember looking in the mirror saying, “I will not let you down and I would get up early in the morning, and I would work, and I’d run to my appointments, and I would get home at night and do the work because I needed to make the money.”

On weekends, it did put a little strain. My wife understood it, but it was tough. That was it. Make the commitment. What are you committing to? You’re going to make the climb. You see the top of the mountain, you’re going to make the climb. You can go as fast or as slow as you want, but you have to commit to making the climb. It’s the same way if you want to get in shape. Make the commitment. You don’t go to the gym in eight hours and crush yourself. You’re going to probably end up at the doctor’s office, but you’re going to commit.

I’m going to go every day for 30 minutes. That’s it. I will get into shape because I’m doing it over and over and over. It’s the commitment and the consistency that matter. Whether it’s the marketing, whatever. Parts of this are going to suck. There are going to be bad days. There’s going to be marketing that doesn’t work. You’re going to try it and it doesn’t work. Get up and try something else. Keep going.

One, you’re going to make the climb and embrace the suck. Understand that there are going to be pitfalls, things that go wrong. We’re going to pick up, brush ourselves off, and keep going. If you want to make a change, you need to bring massive effort to it consistently. Make the commitment to do this. Make the commitment, and you’re making the commitment for yourself. Yes, your family and your friends and all the rest, that’s all well and good, but you’re doing this, I assume, for yourself.

Embrace the suck, understand that there are going to be pitfalls. We're going to pick up, brush ourselves off, and keep going Share on X

Be happier, own your own business, create an asset that you can sell, and get control. Live a rich life. Rich, we don’t mean money but a life where you can do what you want, go where you want, work when you want, and with whom you want. Isn’t that the dream? Not too many people I know want to sit around and do nothing, but they don’t like the way they have to work now. They’re not happy with what they’re earning now. Let’s make the change. It’s the commitment. The commitment is to yourself.

One more final thought. We keep putting out content. If you can, go in and comment. Tell me what you think. Tell me about your journey and your experience. I will try to comment back. We have a great community, we keep growing. If you like what we’re doing, you’ll like the content. If you could hit like and subscribe, let’s keep spreading the wealth. Share this video with some other folks you think might need it. Remember the lesson for today. We’re going to dominate.

Make the commitment to dominate whatever it is you’re focusing on. Share on X

For me, it’s the IRS. Whatever it is you’re focusing on, make the commitment to dominate that. It’s not complicated. You make the commitment and put forth the effort, and it’s going to take a lot of consistent effort. Trust me when I tell you that you can do this. There’s nothing that is beyond you. You just have to be willing to do it, make the commitment to the person in the mirror, and get after it. Thank you for tuning in. See you on the YouTube channel or next week’s episode here at TaxRep Network. Bye-bye.

 

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