The Death of the Funnel: Why Accountants Need Narrative Ecosystems to Grow

Lee Reams II

Welcome to another episode of the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast. My name is Lee Reams II with CountingWorks PRO and our sister company taxbuzz.com. Uh today's topic, and I know Rebekah is always excited about what we're talking about, but this is actually an exciting topic. And I never really thought this was controversial. It took me a long time to come to this conclusion. Um, but I'm 100% after what we're seeing with the results of the marketing campaigns and some of the things we're doing for our current clients that the topic today, the death of the funnel, why accountants need narrative ecosystems to grow in the modern age is more important than ever. So, I will start it out here.

If you are a marketing person, um, I know not all tax and accounting firms are, you know, the the the greatest salespeople. they're not totally into marketing, but if you are, you'll understand some of the terms I'm going to use here today. So, the first comment is funnels are dead. And yeah, I just said that, you know, if you're building your firm's marketing like it's 2010, you're already falling behind. And Rebekah, you know, what do you what do you think about that?

Rebekah Winters Barton

I think that that's a bold statement to start with. Um, however, it is true. So, traditional lead funnels that we think of that everybody used in the early 2000s, the mid 2000s, very popular. There were lots of sites like Clickfunnels, things like that that everybody was using to try to get leads. However, that does not work anymore. The internet has changed. Um, the way people navigate through a so-called funnel has shifted tremendously with the rise of social media, with the rise of AI. So, I think today we're just going to really dive into why funnels are broken and why they no longer work in the conventional sense and what's replacing it. What are we moving toward?

Because there are still ways obviously to make the internet work for you. It's just not maybe the way you think.

Lee Reams II

It's better, Rebekah. It's better. Uh most tax and accounting firms think of these as lead magnets. That's kind of we often hear that in onboarding calls or in uh the sales cycle. It's like, I need a lead magnet. And it's like, well, what is a lead magnet? Well, my SEO told me or my marketing told me person told me and and that's what we're going to talk about. So, the new solution, hint hint, is not another five-step template. Uh, it's something we call a narrative ecosystem. And by the end of this episode, you'll know exactly what that means and why it all matters to the future of your firm. And it does matter. We're seeing the fastest changes.

is, you know, I know when the the internet came out and, you know, it was all the end of the world and things are changing so fast and so many legacy businesses had to, you know, change or go under. I think the speed that AI is changing things um is accelerating this at a pace we haven't seen before. So, Rebekah, what were funnels what what were they before? Like it kind of explained to us what they used to be.

Rebekah Winters Barton

So, the idea of a funnel really stemmed from the fact that you would take people through kind of a client journey at various points in it. They would download something to give you their information. Then you would reach out and it was kind of this back and forth until they signed up. So some people might stop after the first step of the funnel, which would be the awareness stage. That would be top of the funnel is what we would call that. And then in the middle of the funnel, you would have interest. So someone who is a little bit more in depth. You might provide them with a white paper or some kind of a special offer to try to get them to actually sign up for what you had to offer them.

Then there would be a decision section which was kind of a a hyper middle of the funnel um area and then the end of the funnel would be someone either officially signing up or leaving you by the wayside. So there was kind of a three-step process. Top, middle, end of the funnel. Pretty clean and easy. Yeah.

Lee Reams II

Well, clean and easy. Well, let's think of it as a car wash then, right? You know, your prospects prospects come in dirty. they're full of problems and they go through your stages and these each of these content stages that you've created speak to them when they're at that level. So meaning an awareness stage means they may not even know they have a problem. Um you might think of awareness as awareness of your brand. It's more of like uh do I need to solve this problem or not and you're going to create content around that type of thought process. Right? When it goes to consideration now I'm like hey I want you to pick me. You're jumping up and down and picking me.

So, uh, there's a lot of ways that this kind of goes through. Uh, and then for accountants, what did the traditional funnel kind of look like before?

Rebekah Winters Barton

So, it often looked like running a Google ad, running a meta ad, some type of an advertisement, capture leads with a PDF that had tax tips or a business checklist. Um, maybe you had a white paper about tax deductions, that type of thing, an ebook perhaps. And then you would send out a few nurture emails. Then you would encourage them to book a consultation with you. You've probably heard of this. It was a huge deal, you know, 10 years ago. This is what everybody was doing, not just in finance, but in every industry to try to get leads online. Uh, unfortunately, today, this is the way most of uh the SEOs and marketing companies, at least the the our competitors, they're still doing it the old way.

Um, but the reality is it might have worked 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and it doesn't now, right? So there's 50 other ways for people to find an advisor, decide how to get a referral source, uh decide who they want to to work with and um the issue here is is about the controlled flow of information and the new parameters are it's kind of a new discovery reality. So I'm going to talk about a couple things here. Obviously ChatGPT is a big thing. Um it's a a monumental technology change. It's changing the way everything is done everywhere, right? So it's changing economic models. It's changing the way corporations run, how they hire, how they do things, how they deliver services, how they price services.

Right? But let's go to the top level. Something old school SEO, search engine optimization, Google's monopoly on search, right? So Google used to basically index things based on a popularity uh process. uh they had an algorithm with all these different variables and the more inbound links you had, for example, maybe the more reviews you had, maybe if you had specific content or you mentioned keywords in in in your copy, um the more mentions of your brand, the more likely they would show you as a blue link in the search results. So, anyone who's Googled recently already has seen the AI overview sitting on the top right now. So, it used to be Google Maps, Google, that was where your Google business profile would link.

And then below that would be the organic results. And those would be more keyword results um where it kind of matches what your search query was. And this is information we think might apply to you. So, the old days, Rebekah, what would you do? You would click on the blue link and do what? You would read and then either bounce and come back and continue searching or what? So, kind of explain that old process and now we're going to talk about what is the new process.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Exactly. Okay, so the old process, we've all done it. You a SER is pulled up, that's a search engine results page. You scroll down to the organic results. You click on usually the first or second one, whatever looks interesting. And then you decide if this is for you, if it's not. A lot of the time people would bounce. Um, that was kind of the name of the game, right? You wanted to get people to stay on your site and sign up. So people tried all sorts of things to lower their bounce rate, to keep people engaged. All of that played into where you ranked today. I would make the bold statement that organic search really doesn't matter all that much anymore.

I don't know anybody who's scrolling down to the actual results. Everybody's using the AI overview. They're using mapping. They're using GPT. Very few people compared to the historic numbers are still using traditional organic search results. There's just a whole new way to search. And so I think it's really important to remember that as you create content and as we go through the rest of this podcast.

Lee Reams II

Yeah. And Google obviously knows this is happening. They started with their AI overviews where Gemini was answering at the top and now you could click a button that would go into a full chat, you know, type of conversation about that subject. But that takes you out of search, right? So Google is has announced and is testing AI mode. And that's their new advanced AI powered search feature designed to provide comprehensive conversational answers to complex questions, chat, GPT, right? Rather than just links. So it uses powerful AM models like their Gemini uh to understand nuance prompts, perform extensive web searches uh it's doing the web searches for you inside the tool, right? And then it will take that information into easy to understand summaries and citations that follow and even with follow-up questions.

Okay, now um instead of getting 10 blue links, you're getting an AI answer often without clicking through anywhere. Okay. So, uh your funnel then never starts if your content isn't cited in this AI summary. So, if you're not, uh cited in chat, GPT, Plexity, or now the AI mode, um guess what? You're no longer even in the conversation. So, the translation for accountants is your website isn't your first impression anymore. It's Google AI is. And what I mean by that is you need to seed uh all of these AI engines with your content, your talking points, your selling points. And what I think is wonderful about this is you almost can think of it as as your salesforce.

like you know even we would Google our own brand name or you know Google your your CPA firm or your EA firm's name and say what are the the the um weaknesses of this firm or what are their great points and it will actually give you its interpretation based on reviews on tax buzz what your LinkedIn profile looks like what kind of uh information you have on your website do you have FAQs that are feeding this information and what you're going to start understanding it's very conversational So it is definitely like talking to a human and talking through about a specific query or what I'm looking for. So we we started with AI mode but let's talk chatbt's market share now is 80% of conversational search that is monstrous huge volume here.

So chat GPT has become the default starting point for AIdriven discovery. So think about this you're travel I I went to uh the east coast over the summer. I posted we we want to do a college tour for my daughter. I wanted to ChatGPT. I said I want you to plan and schedule this tour. We want to go to these colleges perhaps recommend some colleges around that. We like staying in boutique high-end hotels. We like micro breweries like craft beer. We like local restaurants. Um and we want to create we want to start in Boston and end in Philadelphia. ChatBT went through the the web and created an entire itinerary for me. recommended hotels, gave me options, uh, phone numbers to contact to make reservations, how long it would take me to drive, etc.

So, think of the conversation I was having with it. Okay, that's great. I I don't like, um, you know, paying more than $700 a night or whatever for a hotel, right? Oh, let's let's let's change this. And that's how the conversation happens. Okay? So, this consumer conversational AI use um is now the new search journey. Okay? and it begins an AI chat rather than a browser. So this isn't keyword SEO anymore. So Chatch TV looks for credible, structured, really important human readable content, expert voices and real world examples, consistency across sources. So website, social directory, profile. So explain a little bit Rebekah if you could how then chatbt takes all these references and then kind of analyzes it and then is doing it's almost speaking on your behalf to that consumer or business owner talking about your brand.

Kind of explain how that works.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Right. So like Lee was saying, ChatGpt knows people in a way that Google never did. Google knew their intent. It knew they were typing in a little key phrase and it would deliver something that it thought would provide them with the best answer to that question or that query or whatever it may be. Accountant near me, for example. Um, in this case, GPT really knows people. So, instead of just shoveling people down a pipe, what you really kind of want to do is engulf them in a rainstorm at all angles with all kinds of content. And as you do this, GPT is going to go through the web and say, "Oh, okay. Here's a raindrop here that says this.

here's a raindrop here that says this and here and here and here and here and then at the end of the day you become kind of the flood so to speak that is delivering the exact service that this person is looking for. So building a brand that goes across the web is now far more important than having a website. Not that you don't need a good website because you definitely do. But all of your content put together from all of these different places is what builds your brand's personality and tells your story. And that's what GPT wants. It wants to know that you are the right choice based on this entire narrative that you've spread webwide.

Lee Reams II

Awesome. Raindrops that could you couldn't have done that better. All kinds of water references in there. And basically what she's talking about is this is the narrative ecosystem that we're going to go into detail here as we break this down here in a little bit. Um but and the website is now feeding like should be your primary source to feed it. And what happens is a lot of accountants don't realize that they're missing the talking points that um really talk about what their firm is all about because you're using a cookie cutter site, cookie cutter content. You copied someone else or you're in a a you know, one of these template farms that has 5,000 websites that are exactly the same.

You're not going to stand out. You're not going to be referenced by chat GPT. So what this means for accountants, funnels collapse even faster. So maybe you had a way to onboard clients before, but if Chad TPV answers the pro uh prospect's question directly, you know, who's the best tax advisor for small business in Austin, your ebook, your ebook funnel or your white paper that you spent all this time on doesn't even matter anymore. Okay? So narrative ecosystems win. AI models don't pull in keyword stuff PDFs. They pull in content that feels natural, conversational, trustworthy, and a consistent across multiple surfaces. That's the whole raindrop uh approach that uh Rebekah was talking about. So, proof, reviews, um authentic content, writing about local areas, uh writing about niches, that beats promotion.

Okay, so Chad CBT wants to site authentic, unique, right? and health lancers, not marketing fluff. So, the whole keyword stuff, this whole old SEO model is absolutely dead. Old world, uh, you rank for small business tax tips. Uh, new world, a prospects asked Chat GBT, "What should I consider when hiring a tax professional for my escort?" Okay, so Chat GBT is going to look for someone who's written about ESC corps as a CPA. They're going to access the tax buzz profile for reviews and does it say also that they work with escorps there. They'll look at your LinkedIn bios and narrative to align the answer with authority. Okay? And the more outside sources you have, the more raindrops you have, the bigger the flood.

I love this. Can I use this in my own my own social post? All right. So, uh, the big takeaway here is Google is changing what people see. Chat GBT is changing who people trust. Okay. Both are signaling the same thing. The funnel is dead. So, what matters now is being part of that AI conversation layer where your narrative shows up as the authoritative trusted voice. Uh, so now we're going to get into a little bit of I think we've kind of discussed enough why funnels are broken. Do you have anything to add there, Rebekah, or do you think we've we pounded this the point and people don't want to hear? Okay, I get it. I bought in, you know, let's talk about the narrative.

I'm kind of beaten the horse at this point.

Rebekah Winters Barton

I do. Okay. Um, so what is uh a a narrative ecosystem? What replaces the traditional funnel and that is narrative ecosystem? So Rebekah, kind of explain that a little bit. So the idea of a narrative ecosystem is what we've really just talked about that raindrop effect. You're going to want to create a story that's going to resonate across multiple platforms. Whether that's um thirdparty sites like Tax Buzz where you can post articles, social media, your own blog on your website, maybe getting involved with Reddit, posting YouTube videos. There's all these different places online where you as a brand can involve yourself in the conversation. And if you're posting consistent things, you have a personality for your firm that you're kind of cohesively building across all of these different raindrops.

you are ultimately going to be successful because GPT, other AI systems are going to see your story. They're going to understand your story because they are intelligent and then they're going to recommend you to people particularly in your area who are looking for the exact type of firm that you are. So, GIO allows you effectively to draw in the right clients in a way that SEO never did. I don't know if we've defined geo yet in this episode. That's generative engine optimization. basically the new frontier of SEO just to put it in layman's terms. It's what we are now focusing on in my industry. We want you to be ranking in these AI systems, not just in these s pages that are really kind of becoming outdated.

Lee Reams II

We let's go search everywhere optimization. So I think we're getting the point across here. It's your story and your narrative. So what does your brand stand for? Who do you work with? What is your personality? What's unique about you? And what you want is to have that narrative across every single thing that you publish. So your newsletter, your Medium article, if you're doing a press releases, even in the way you communicate with your clients when you onboard them, like the language that is used inside your proposals, for example, it should be one-to-one personalized to your clients, right? But also telling the same exact story. And that's the power of a of a narrative ecosystem where if you're using tools like we have Max and County Works Pro, we're able to feed it and develop this narrative that we can now pass that information across to every single outbound whether you're pushing content or you're pulling content or pulling you have content that's pulling people in your newsletter, your communication, everything sounds the same.

It is your story. You can tell when there's an Apple ad pretty quickly by the style, by the the quick, you know, big headlines and promises. It's emotional. You can see their brand in all their communication. They don't go from what you see at apple.com to Instagram and have a completely different brand. Most tax and accounting firms do. So, that is where, you know, you got to start uh kind of figuring things out. So, a business owner Googles, for example, escorp versus LLC. They find a find your blog with a really clear answer. Uh but then they go and look at your newsletter. They see a case study. Um they you know your engagement letter. Everything now is kind of personifying or tying all this together and that it tells the same story.

So every touch point reinforces trust. Uh so Rebekah kind of explain that a little bit. Um versus oldfunnel versus now. Like this trust factor really is a big deal. So, I think one of the big problems that we now see retroactively with old school funnels is that they felt very artificial. Oftentimes, they would make these promises about, oh, here's five tax tips that are going to save you $10,000. And you just you couldn't necessarily deliver on that type of a white paper with every single client because it wasn't speaking to their unique situation. Today's funnels are more personalized. They are speaking to people more directly and they are building that trust and authenticity. Nobody today wants to know they're in a salesunnel.

That's just the fact of the matter. Everybody wants personal content. They want things that are authentic. They want you to be transparent. They want to know your pricing. They want to know what you're going to offer them. They want to understand your value. And all of those things are possible by creating a narrative ecosystem as opposed to a clear funnel that's just here's step one, here's step two, here's step three, and people feel like they're being shoved through a line. like at an autograph session when you go to meet a sports star and you have two seconds for them to sign your picture and then you're just funneled out. That's kind of the harried feeling that people get in a traditional online salesunnel.

Narrative ecosystems flip that on its head and they allow people to feel really nurtured and like they truly know your firm before they give you the okay.

Lee Reams II

Yeah. And that you know them, you know, they should feel surrounded by your story and then you need to start infusing the their needs, their pain points. That is the beauty of AI for future growth. So explain how AI changes the game and allows personalization at scale in moments.

Rebekah Winters Barton

One of the reasons that traditional funnels kind of failed is because they required manual effort on the consumer's part. People don't necessarily want to do that. They don't necessarily want to be inputting all kinds of information and all of these things. By using AI, you can personalize things to people. Email campaigns, for example. Let's just start really simple. An AI system can personalize an email campaign for a specific lead in seconds. So, you can effectively create nurture campaigns that are individual to every one of your leads as opposed to just having a generic email that goes out to everyone. If they tell you, maybe they just have to click a button. Maybe on your your landing page there's a button and they just click what their biggest pain point is.

and you can create in seconds using Max or another AI system a nurture campaign that speaks directly to that painoint that they're having that is going to automatically make them feel very seen, very heard, like you really get their problem and can solve it. So, that's just one example of a way you can use AI. Um, you can also create for existing clients, even personalized tax plans, upsell campaigns, all of these different things that we're always talking about that are really kind of this lowhanging fruit to allow you to increase your revenue very easily. And not only your revenue, but increase the value that you're providing to clients. So I think the the difference in the AI funnel compared to traditional funnels is that it allows you to authent a authenticate not authenticate make things more authentic uh and personalize situations in a way that you never could have before because it would have taken you literally hours if not days to create these kind of custom nurture campaigns for every one of your clients.

Lee Reams II

You shouldn't use big words in a live podcast because you never know when you get authenticate a big word. Well, for me, I know you're, you know, that was I was a business major, remember entrepreneur program. I didn't go to journalism school. So, um I still, you know, and I'm looking at my daughter's AP Lang, you know, rhetorical writing and all this and going, "Oh my god, all this stuff to learn." But I think you entered something that I think is really important and there's a huge disconnect understanding like traditional chat GPT AI chatbot tools versus tools that are closed systems. So uh Max and county works we use a closed system that is powered by the underlying chatbt and Gemini.

And what that means is we have a knowledge layer on top of chatbt that we know is all trusted, human verified, human researched information about the tax code, perhaps best ways to write a proposal, best ways to write an engagement letter. Um we have tools that allow you to even control the context even more where only use this context when writing a blog article or let's say we have a blog article that we have written in our library that our experts our tech you know tax technical group went through our professional copywriters wrote it for SEO best practices for geo best practices for schema best practices and we have created this perfect template so to speak but now what we're able to do with tools like max is we pull in the context and the knowledge we have about each individual firm and personalize that blog to them.

We localize it. Local information is key for chatbt and these other tools to pull it up and recognize you as the expert in San Diego versus kind of this commodity going uh across. So, you know, tools like Max now your ecosystem runs on autopilot. It is amazing because once you set it up and you give it the right instructions and inputs, blogs can be optimized automatically, right? Social media posts done for you. Your Google business profile adding a fresh content so it rank still ranks high. Done. Proposals that sound like you and your client that speak to your client's personality or their their niche or their what they're looking to do, aspiring to, not a template.

This is all done in moments. Okay. Onboarding that keeps your story consistent, done for you. So, it's it's basically like hiring an invisible labor force that scales your story across every channel. More importantly, it is a trusted layer. There's a whole different um world when a an AI tool just goes out to the the worldwide web and is searching for answers because if they pick up that Forbes article that was written by a journalist that doesn't know the tax code and then cites it, that's where you can get in trouble. Okay? So, you don't want to put out um information that's incorrect. But you also cannot do the cookie cutter content model anymore. You have to amplify your narrative.

You have to have a homepage that is unique to you. Unique photographs. You need copy. All of your content then tells the story. Let's back up before I go to kind of move this conversation along. We've talked about this in other things, but like what is personal branding or branding for a small, you know, tax and accounting firm? And most of our clients by the way you know 1 to 10 1 to 15 our biggest clients 50 60 we have some like 70 80 but you know most of this industry they're small to mediumsiz businesses. So explain the importance of branding when because we say word big words like narrative and they're like what is narrative?

But explain what a brand does and how it positions you as unique and a unique resource to help your eat score uh and and how that feeds all these engines.

Rebekah Winters Barton

So the size of your brand doesn't really matter, but when you think about the big brands that do this well, you can replicate a lot of what they do on a smaller scale. So think about the Apples of the world, the Starbucks of the world, the Disneys of the world. They have very clear narratives. You know what they are. If you think of Starbucks, you immediately conjure images of kind of these very clean wood panled shops with white coffee cups and a green logo. Immediately. Everyone thinks of that if you know what Starbucks is. You want basically that same thing when people think of your brand. You want to have an aesthetic that people connect with that should appear everywhere.

Your logo should appear everywhere. It should have a very immediate reaction from people. Your copy should all kind of drive home those same points. So with Disney, for example, you're going to constantly see words like magic and wonder and dream. You want to have words like that that the minute people hear them, they think of your brand before anything else, especially in your local area. So, you want to kind of develop this persona. And this doesn't have to be hard. You know what you do. You might have to sit down and think about it a little bit of how to differentiate yourself from other tax and accounting firms, but think of a niche. Um, we have people right now who we're working with who work exclusively with real estate investors, exclusively with breweries.

I had somebody the other day who works exclusively with inhome medical care providers. So figure out what you do, figure out what you do well, and then create a narrative around that that's going to resonate with the people who you want to walk in your door or schedule a Zoom meeting with you, whatever it is, however you want to interact with them. But you've got to create a personality for your brand in the same way that you have a personality that you like to project to the world.

Lee Reams II

I'm glad you brought up Starbucks. You could not have set this up better for me. Uh, the other part of their brand is personalization. What do you mean, Lee? It's coffee. Um, it's drinks. It's sugar drink. They're selling sugar. They're selling caffeine and sugar. But the reality is the little notes and the time. Hey, you know, even when they spell your name wrong and whatever they say, have a good day. They don't do that anymore. Did you know that? Or they stop doing the app. So, they see your name spelling now when you pay because the pays with the card. It's crazy. My name was always misspelled. So I that's the best part about it. I need to talk to the CEO.

He used to live I think his kids went to my daughter's uh elementary school. He used to live around here but we'll talk. But the point is that is what the power of personalization does for a brand and now AI can do that at scale and let me give you some examples of how we're doing it at county works. So we are able we have for example dynamic intake forms that we can create a intake form specific for a client. Okay. So meaning they are looking for virtual CFO services. Uh they own a car dealership and we want now what are the intake kind of questions or what are the questions we want to ask or maybe even the interview but we collect all that data and it sits in context in that client profile.

So then when I do a strategy for that client it can now reference those answers and provide better insight or more personalized strategies for per se um based on having all that knowledge there. you would never be able to do that as a person and software can't do that. AI can. Um, so you you want to start thinking about the value of personalization and then sharing that narrative that you know across the web. So, uh, I think we've hit this pretty well.

Lee Reams II

Funnels are relics. Uh, narrative ecosystems are the future. And Rebekah, you know, who's winning? The firms that are embracing narrative ecosystems. Um, it is really important. We we can kind of laugh about it here, but this is a super important thing if you want to rank in the future. And I think it doesn't have to be super hard. It doesn't have to be overwhelming.

Rebekah Winters Barton

I love to see people have fun with it. Um, today is October 3rd, which if you're a millennial woman, Taylor Swift's new album dropped today. So, everyone's kind of honing in on this. And I saw just a little bit ago Starbucks is actually leaning into this pop culture moment. And I've seen some finance brands even today kind of posting like these funny sort of memes leaning into the fact that hey it's Taylor Swift day. So you can have fun with this. You can make it something where you're actually being culturally relevant. You're leaning into things that are kind of fun and enjoyable to help tell your story. So it doesn't have to be this stodgy, oh am I getting this word in this piece of content and you get overwhelmed by it.

You can enjoy this and it's a really good way to be authentic with potential clients. Um, I've liked things today just because of this album release that I probably wouldn't have interacted with if they hadn't been leaning into this kind of fun pop culture moment. So, I just it's an appropriate day to mention that you can have some fun with this. You can make it I think it's more enjoyable in some ways than traditional SEO was 10 or 15 years ago. you can really lean into it and have fun telling your story and draw people in in a a very authentic way, which was harder to do when you were worried about getting X keywords on every page of your website.

Lee Reams II

I think the biggest thing, and thanks for reminding me that Taylor Swift's album came out because all I had to hear, yeah, my daughter after water polo practice instead I'm like, okay, what are you studying for tomorrow? Dad, you don't understand. It's 15 minutes until Taylor's album comes out. I'm like, I don't I don't care. Yeah, you do. you listen to Taylor Swift all the time. I'm like, "Yeah, cuz I'm in the car with you all the time." But um I think that's important. But my point is you have the ability right now. Um there is a lot of people who are so riskadverse they will they won't even they have company policies. We won't even touch Chat GBT.

We will not touch any AI tools because we don't trust them. Um there's a reason uh you know some of the big accounting firms are spending over a billion dollars in AI. There's a reason that Lake Michigan, I think it was like 2.8 million gallons of water were needed to cool uh the Microsoft AI farm. And I'm like, whoa. Environmentally, I'm like, okay, this is bad. But the progress is happening. We're in a arms race obviously with other countries to own AI technology. And I think what this does for the tax and accounting space is 95 of your percent of your customers, they're going to ignore this. And by the time they figure it out, they're they're going to start going like this.

They're going to have they're going to start leaking clients. They're going to start uh attracting fewer clients. Those that have learned how to optimize this are going to find the clients they like because they they're in the conversations that are happening. Okay? Um your next client isn't in an old funnel. It's not even in a referral anymore. They're going to go to chat GPT and ask about you. They're in Google. They're in ChatGpt. They're in LinkedIn. They're in Perplexity. Okay? and the narrative ecosystems are replacing funnels with proof and trust everywhere. And more importantly, Google always let the the you know the homecoming king and queen were who they ranked at the top and the rest of us smaller commoners we you know we were pushed down in the search results unless we wrote some insane content.

Narrative ecosystems replace that right they it's a game changers. It's an equalizer. you now have just like YouTube has done to media um and the ability for people not to have to work at CNN or Fox or MSNBC and they have their own podcast and they they make more money than they ever did saying what they want to. This is the same kind of thing that's happening here if your firm starts pivoting and getting your personality out there and really utilizing these tools. So, you've given it away, Rebekah. We did this podcast early. This is my second one of the week. Um I really like this subject. I hope there's been a lot of value. Obviously, accounting works pro, we're all in on custom narratives.

We say cookie cutter is dead. We truly honestly believe that and more importantly, we're seeing it with every new client that trusts us, puts out that custom narrative, gets that the narrative ecosystem going and starts showing up in these ChatGPT conversations. These are more qualified leads. These are people that you're going to want to work with, and I think you're going to have a much better um experience with your firm. So, uh, the Growth Minded Account podcast, this is for next week, but we're going to put it out early. Um, we we have a blog article that goes with this if you want to see more details, perhaps more examples. It will be on our blog next week at countingworkspro.com.

Rebekah's going to be out on a nice vacation. So, I have a couple maybe solo guests or I have some people that um we're trying to get in as a guest to talk about some new subjects. So, again, thank you for being a listener of the Growth Minded Accountant podcast. Hopefully, you had some value. Please, this one you can share with everybody. Um I think this is a really valuable one for your colleagues. I hope I have um communicated what has changed, why it's different. Uh even huge firms like HubSpot, Salesforce, they all see it. Uh HubSpot even admitted, oops, our old ways, the way we've been selling all you consultants how to market is dead.

I mean, they finally came to the conclusion and then they they they've learned how to play the game uh with FAQs and and feeding the narrative ecosystem as well. Uh, so this is not going backwards, it's only going forward. So hopefully we can work with the best of the best. So if you're interested in doing your own narrative, uh, and doing it at a low cost, not at an agency level 30, $50,000 investment, please reach out to us at countingworkspro.com. We'd love to hear from you and talk about how we can help your firm navigate the AI future. Thank you.