It seems like we are forever starting something new as professionals. I personally feel that in my bones right now as I embrace my new role as CEO here at TPM.
For you, though, there’s perpetually new rules from the IRS, new governmental policies to follow, new tech to integrate.
If you think back to your first days as a professional accountant or tax preparer, and compare your industry knowledge to what you know now, the movement is undoubtedly forward. I know that is true for me.
Depending on how long you’ve been in this industry, you’ve categorized hundreds and thousands of indexed notes in your mental card catalog through the countless interactions you’ve had with taxpayers, business owners, and government agencies.
In other words, you didn’t become a tax or business expert overnight. There is always some new education, training, certification, specialization, goal, or experience to be had. I’m hearing many conversations about this from professionals in the industry this off-season.
When you take on more advanced software or hire someone new to work in your office, you know at the front end that the process of integrating these new elements into your practice will take time.
When you started your business, you didn’t have a full schedule or a waitlist your first month. Maybe you still don’t. (If that’s the case, you’re not alone, trust me.)
We’ve all, at some level, accepted the role that time plays in the advancement of things.
Here’s an example from the marketing world: organic SEO.
Meaning, traffic you push to your website through search engine optimization that is not a result of advertising. You’re optimizing your website so the search engines know when to put your website in the search results of people looking for your services. That doesn’t happen quickly or by accident.
Organic SEO is what distinguishes an effective website from a shiny placeholder. Not all websites are created equal – and the differentiating factor is NOT how they LOOK.
It comes down to doing the work of organic SEO rightly. (“Rightly” is a keyword there. There IS a wrong way to do it.)
Do it right, and you won’t have to weed through 99 bad fits to land one ideal client.
And here’s what I’ve been trying to get to: the work of organic SEO takes time. It takes time for the search engines to crawl your site, compare it with other listings pointing to yours, track clicks to your site for all the keywords you’ve optimized for, measure bounce rates and clicks once they get to your site, scan your pages for copycat or plagiarized content (beware of AI-written stuff for this reason), and check the boxes for various other parts of their algorithms.
You can’t start thinking about your site’s SEO in December and expect your calendar to be full when tax season starts. But I’ve talked to so many business owners over the years who have this mindset.
The right time to fix your website is now, in the off-season, to give the search engines time to figure out what you’re telling them with all the tools available and according to their rules.
Let time work FOR you in marketing your firm for growth.
Start today.
