The 3 Tax Season Signals That Reveal Your Firm’s Next Growth Opportunity

Lee Reams

Welcome to the Growth Minded Accountant podcast where our experts will share best practices on running your firm in the digital age. This podcast is brought to you by CountingWorks PRO. Let's get started. Welcome back to another episode of the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast. My name is Lee Reams. I'm the founder and CEO of CountingWorks and our sister company TaxBuzz. Today I'm joined by my co-host Rebekah Winters Barton, our chief visibility officer here at CountingWorks. Rebekah, if you can say hello. Hey everyone. Yeah. And we've been doing uh what we call micro episodes. This is the fourth in a series. Uh and we're trying to give what I call processes or things that you can put into place this tax season. Really simple short uh Growth Minded Accountant podcasts that kind of have takeaways that you can say you get real ROI. on today's topic is the tax season signals that tell you how your firm will grow. Um, and I think it's really important. You know, we know tax season isn't just busy. It's incredibly revealing. And if you listen carefully, your clients are actually telling you, there's signals here exactly how your firm is positioned. Uh, and which Rebekah loves talking about position firms and where your next stage of growth is hiding. So, that is the purpose of this episode. So, I'm going to go through a few phrases that we hear over and over again. We're going to come up with a a new acronym. You're going to love it. Trust me, you're going to love it. I'll say it once and laugh and then move on. Uh, but we we came up with something very simple. Uh, we basically say don't suck during tax season. And it's a SU. So, what does that mean? The SU signals of tax season. Surprise, urgency, and confusion. Um, and we'll we'll leave the the the the humor behind, but we did this intentionally. Uh, you know, because if any of those three things, surprise, urgency, confusion, happen or consistently show up in your client conversation, it's usually a signal that something in the system might well suck or not be working correctly or as efficiently as we want it to. So, the good news is that these things are incredibly fixable because they aren't just random client comments. there signals about how your firm is operating during tax season. More importantly growth firms uh growth-minded firms just don't push through tax season they listen to it so let's talk about the SEC signals. We're going to go through them so signal number one is surprise so that is when a client says something like I wish I had known that earlier or I didn't expect this and that's not really a tax problem that is a planning signal right so it usually means your insight delivery is happening too late in the process Perhaps you covered it in your client newsletter or social media post, but they didn't see it right. Uh your data collection might not, you know, might be working perfectly. You're bringing everything in, but when your planning conversations are happening, they're after the fact. It's too late. It's historical. You're in compliance mindset, not advisory uh mindset. So, for example, we often see what a business owner uh learns in April after something that could have been addressed the previous fall. So, a simple fix many firms implement is a 15minute planning check-in every October for business clients. You know, we have set up some playbooks that auto time. So, they'll know, okay, I want to do twice a year I want to ping my business clients uh an invite to do um what we'll call an offseason discovery call, right? And I'm going to trigger this to go every let's say June 15th and every October, you know, 15th, whatever it is. And then it would send out a planned email. It would give them the invitation to come talk, right? It would give the value of why maybe it'll create some content around this. But what it does is it helps eliminate that one conversation. Um that one conversation can help eliminate what I'm calling the April surprises. So this is why that matters. Uh an init survey of tax professionals found that tax planning advisory services average guess what around 2,300 per client. We have clients charging well if they're a business advisory $2,000 a month, right? But even at 2,300, that's roughly five times the value of basic tax preparation. So I think that's a big deal. So when when I hear, "Hey, I wish I'd known that earlier." That's not just frustration. That is a growth opportunity. That's an advisory opportunity. So signal number two, urgency. Um, this is when a client says,"I need this done by Friday, you know, and then everything feels rushed, everything feels reactive, and that's usually not just about deadlines, right? It's a positioning signal." And when firms are positioned primarily as compliance providers, the relationship becomes reactive. You're here to serve, right? Um, you're not here to help or support or to be that team member. You're here to serve them. And you know, here's why a tax season always feels and all these deadline-related tasks become overwhelming, right? So clients show up when there's a problem and they need a problem solved very quickly. Year end they haven't done their books, the books are a mess and then in December, you're cleaning it all up, right? So but when the firm shifts towards strategic guidance and planning cycles, this dynamic changes. So planning replaces panic. Some firms saw this by simply creating planning windows. for example, telling business clients, "Our planning meetings happen in Q3." Again, I'm just giving examples. I'm not saying you follow this exactly. You might do Q1, Q2, 3, 4. You might do monthly meetings. It all depends on the type of relationship and how invested you are in the advisory. But once clients know tax planning or planning has a place on the calendar, not just my compliance meeting, those last minute emergencies start to disappear. So, I think that's really important. Signal three, confusion. The third signal we constantly see, right? So, clients asking why do I owe so much or did something change? Yeah, some big tax laws changed, some depreciation schedules, whatever. Right? So, most of the time the tax return is perfectly accurate. What's missing is education and expect uh expectation setting. Uh and obviously, Rebekah, you're going to jump into this a little bit more how important that is. So the client expected a look forward partner, but the service they experienced is a look back explanation. Okay, advisory versus compliance, right? So that's a really easy definition for it. The client expected, hey, I want someone to look forward. I want a partner versus, oh, this is what happened and this is what the results. So what? You can't do anything about it, right? So even something simple like sending a short email in January explaining the three biggest drivers of tax bill income withholding and estimated payments can eliminate a lot of confusion before tax season even starts. So we're really into education positioning and really uh setting your clients up for success. So Rebekah, this is where I want you to jump in. This is kind of the real world, right? So, because when firms hear surprise, urgency and confusion during tax season, that's not just a workflow issue. That's actually a visibility and a positioning issue. And I know we tell all of our clients this and kind of explain it and we set them up for success, but kind of go through how these messaging signals work.

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Rebekah Winters Barton

Yeah. So, what Lee described here are three messaging signals that show up as client behavior. So, this is where firms oftentimes get stuck. uh they assume that the problem is the clients, that they're being disorganized, that they're being hyperreactive, that it's a client problem. In reality, the problem is often a positioning problem. It's that the firm itself has not clearly indicated prior to the engagement what kind of relationship the firm has with the client. So, for example, surprise, there's a messaging opportunity here. So when a client says something like, "I wish I'd known that earlier." What they're actually saying without saying it is that no one helped me understand this before today. So that's a huge messaging gap. And there's a really easy way for firms to fix it. Growth-minded firms position themselves as advisers, not as compliance providers, not as tax prepar. So the positioning is going to show up in things like your client onboarding process.

How are you actually going through what your client should expect moving forward in your educational content? So, this can take numerous forms. It can be newsletters. It can be podcasts. It can be reals on Instagram. It can be posts on Facebook. However you find that it's best to reach your clients with education. That is where you want to be saying things like, "Hey, during the process, this is what's going to happen. This is what you can expect. Here's a playbyplay of our process as a firm." Newsletters again are a great way to convey this. And then in planning conversations. So when you do those initial tax consultations, it can be helpful to give your clients kind of a playbook, if you will, of what to expect over the coming weeks or months so they know exactly what to anticipate when. You're going to completely eliminate the I didn't know that problem or at least largely eliminate it by conveying this information earlier.

Second thing, urgency. This is another positioning problem. It may not seem like it in the moment, but it really is. So, if every single client request feels like a massive emergency, a 911, it often means that your firm is actually being seen as reactionary, not a strategic firm that's taking proactive measures to help your clients throughout the year. That is your problem, not your clients. If you position yourself throughout the year as an advisory firm that offers planning cycles, that offers regular touch points, that isn't just moving people in and out in 20 minute increments throughout the year, then you're going to see this shift. Not everything is going to feel immediate because your clients are already going to have a plan in place. They're going to know that you're available. They're going to have had recent touch points with you. So, it's not going to feel like every single situation needs attention yesterday, right? And that's where we want to see firms moving.

Um, you're not a McDonald's, right? You're not a drive-thru. You don't want people just cycling through with these urgent orders. You want to be uh around here we have St. Elmo's. It's Indy's prime steakhouse, right? So, you want to be a St. Elmo's. You want to be a Ruth's Chris, something like that where people are coming in, they're sitting down, they're taking their time, but they know that you're available. They know that you're high-end and they know that you're providing them with the advisory services that they need. So, you can do this again through your annual positioning. You can stay in touch with people throughout the year by scheduling quarterly planning like Lee mentioned or, you know, by annual planning, whatever it is, however your system is set up. But that's a great way to prevent this urgency from kind of creeping in during tax season. And then the final issue is confusion. And here's where you're going to have a real opportunity for segmentation.

We've done entire podcasts, I think, on segmentation maybe a year or so ago, but this is a really important, really simple thing that a lot of firms miss. So, when you don't segment, every single client is getting treated the same, but not everyone is, right? Every client is unique. Even if you have a niche, there are going to be unique nuances between some of those clients. So, what you want to do, you can start high level. You can segment people by business owners, uh, dual income families, for example, and real estate investors. That would be kind of a starting point if real estate is a is a niche for you. Growth-minded firms are going to have different touch points, different types of communication for each of these segments. And it's not a hard thing to do. You can set up, for example, a different newsletter every month that addresses issues important to that particular group. An individual client doesn't need the same information as a business owner.

Um, so there's going to be different nuances here for each group that don't require a lot of time to set up. You can even do, you know, you could do reels. Uh, one day a week you post a reel that pertains to each of your segments and then maybe you shoot off an email to those people or you segment your Instagram list. That's a thing you can do, too. And you can send that reel directly to only the people it affects. So, there's a lot of ways here to segment your clients and to get the right information to the right people. And that's where you're going to see your client experience start to improve immediately. Yeah. And I think something Rebekah hinted on is that positioning shows up in and she mentioned client onboarding. And let's explain a little bit how that works. If my proposal is onetoone to that client, personalized to that client, I'm setting the expectations. What are you responsible for? What am I responsible for? When are we meeting? What are we talking about? What are the metrics we're looking at? If you follow that up with your engagement letter, it starts putting it repeatedly into your flow and into your process.

And that's what makes it scalable. That's what makes it something that your client expectations are set. You lose scope creep, the big killer of most firms profits. And I think that's really important. So going back to kind of wrap this up, uh, you know, that's why tax season is so valuable. It gives you real-time feedback about your firm and how you're actually operating. So the questions you ask your clients, the frustrations they express, the surprises they experience, those are, you know, key elements to say, you know, these are red flags, right? So they aren't random. They're signals, uh, you know, telling you where your systems, your processes, your messaging, and your planning uh, can improve. Okay? So the firms that grow the fastest aren't necessarily the ones working harder during tax season. They're the ones that are actually paying attention and studying this. So, you know, here's a quick question for you as you finish this tax season.

You know, which one of these happens most often in your firm and ask your whole every partner, everyone who's client facing, is it surprise? Is it urgency? Or is it confusion? Because these signals um are probably pointing different directions and more importantly showing you what your next growth opportunity can be. So, start writing down the phrases you hear from clients the most, the surprises, the urgency, the confusion. Um because these conversations are telling you exactly where your next stage of growth lives. And you realize tax season isn't just work, it's feedback. And more importantly, if you take all these data points and you throw them in a tool like Max or ChatGPT, you can actually help your firm create a game plan on how to improve your processes, how to handle these things more often, uh in a better way, basically. So that type of feedback is is amazing and you don't have to be a data analyst to figure it out, right? So that is the beauty of AI.

That's how you utilize these tools. It helps you reason. It helps you kind of go through the processes and say, "Okay, next taxis or next interviews, let's start doing XX and X. Let's start integrating personalization through the onboarding process. Let's start educating our clients about advisory year round. Let's start segmenting our clients and putting content and topics that they actually care about and actually moves them." Um, I think that's how most Growth-minded accountants just don't survive tax season. They learn from it and they make sure their systems I'm going to say it one last time. Don't SU next year. I won't say it. Uh so again, thanks for listening. Hopefully this has been another good uh kind of micro update during tax season. Um again, thank you for being a follower and a subscriber of the Growth Minded Accountant podcast. We're going to continue these shorter forms throughout the tax season.

Again, every single one, if you missed the first three, every single one of them has a tidbit. How to start an interview, how to finish an interview. All of it is setting you up to offer and sell more advisory services to your clients and to serve your clients better. So again, good luck through the rest of tax season. We'll see you next week. Thank you, Rebekah. Thank you.