It’s getting hairy out there, isn’t it?
The war in Ukraine horrifyingly continues. (Our Director of Operations, Eugenia Brock, grew up in Moscow AND in parts of Ukraine — as well as Florida, so this hits pretty close to home here too.)
Inflation is spiraling upward.
The footprint of the IRS and the federal government’s presence in the lives of SMB owners and families is only increasing … even as evidence of their competence and capability seems to be crumbling apace.
YOU are the port in the storm for your clients.
Leadership isn’t necessarily the role you signed up for when you opened your practice, but here you are.
Misinformation and disinformation abound — on both sides of cultural questions. Social media is increasingly a toxic location to spend your attention (even as it remains a massive component of marketing your practice successfully).
So your clients are turning to places they can trust. And, ever increasingly, those trusted locations are people that they know and like.
Just by virtue of your professional role as a mediator between government regulatory agencies and taxpayers and business owners, they WILL be (and are) turning to you.
All of this might seem obvious, of course, but I see practitioners dropping the ball on embracing a leadership role … and treading water as a result. They don’t grow, they develop a mediocre reputation, and they find themselves unfulfilled and frustrated by their vocational existence.
How do I see this leadership role being avoided? Lots of ways, but here are a few:
* Failing to communicate to their clients clearly via email what is actually happening — both with the regulatory agencies (IRS, FASB, etc.) in code updates AND in the behind-the-scenes operational details of their practice. They just let everything come to them and fail to be proactive.
* Orienting their entire business model to extract the most amount of profit possible from their clients, rather than creating a model that enables a virtuous cycle of mutual blessing — where the practitioner is paid WELL, and the clients are served just as well. This gets reflected in great attention being paid to sales processes … but very little attention being paid to operational processes that will effectively serve clients.
* Allowing themselves and their team to burn out because they take on any client that breathes. And, as a result, they are burning the candle at both ends and not offering their full capacities to their work … and everything suffers.
* Ignoring the communicative value of effective email marketing. Sure, this one is a bit self-serving — it’s one of our primary areas of service to OUR clients — but it’s also an extremely important channel. It is becoming increasingly important as the “Big Four” tech firms are causing havoc in their advertising and organic algorithms that many agencies and marketers are pulling out their hair trying to work within. Censorship, monopoly power, and massive faceless bureaucracies are turning these companies from nimble advocates and valuable resources for SMBs… and now they are more and more like giant mountains of AI-driven regulatory mess.
Email marketing is your way around these blobs of power. (Find out how we can help you with that here.)
There’s plenty more I could say on these topics, and I surely will in the future, but here’s the big takeaway:
You have an opportunity to SERVE here during this crazy busy season. Your clients need you to interpret the world around them, and the old sources of trust are melting in front of our very eyes.
Will you be there for them… a beacon of leadership in the storm?
Serve the world unselfishly, and profit…
