The Real Cost of Delaying AI Adoption: Why Waiting is the Most Expensive Option for Accountants

Intro

Welcome to the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast, where our experts share best practices on running your firm in the digital age. This podcast is brought to you by CountingWorks PRO. Let's get started.

Lee Reams II

Welcome back to another episode of the Growth Minded Accountant podcast. My name is Lee Reams II. I'm the founder and CEO of CountingWorks and TaxBuzz. Today I'm joined with my co-host Rebekah Barton. Rebekah, if you can say hello.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Hey everybody. I'm excited to dive into this one. It's a good topic.

Lee Reams II

Well, you say that every single time, which I guess I'm always excited. All right. Well, that's good. We start excited, but this one's a little uh we're going back. We used to talk about AI a lot a year ago. Um, and we did a lot of training on AI. uh but we're speaking on this topic today is the real cost of delaying AI adoption while many of our customers a year ago a year and a half ago were uh you know they're questioning it they did they trust it and now as they've experienced it and seeing the quality and the time savings they're like they've had that aha moment but um a lot of accountants still are waiting you know and I think that's one of the most expensive options for accountants CPAs EAS so the cost of doing nothing is the co is much higher than the cost of diving in.

Okay, so we're going to break down what firms are losing by delaying the lessons from startups that overdid it. You've there's been like bench and there's a couple others that have been uh big deals but the reality is they didn't use the human in the loop. They use the tool differently trying to replace humans and then how small firms can actually start using AI responsibly and more importantly profitably right now. So I broke this uh podcast into six segments. Um, the first one is the invisible tax of doing nothing. I wanted to start off with a few statistics and kind of some survey results. I think these are kind of obvious, but I help I think it helps reinforce what I am saying, where Rebekah and I are talking about today to kind of give you a little more clarity on where the future is going.

So, firms with an AI strategy are two times more likely to see revenue growth than those without. That's from a survey from McKenzie. Uh, Gartner McKenzie also did another one. uh over the next three years 92% of companies plan to increase AI investment. So if you're not moving the market is you know I want to I want to reposition AI it's not uh it isn't a gadget okay I want you to start thinking it as a labor force as your personal assistant times 10 okay and it can do a lot of tasks for you that take time or time consuming and then you with your own judgment and expertise can fine-tune it uh use the the tools to talk in conversational ways to get a better result but the reality the firms that uh scale uh you know and use it are going to win.

Okay. And the ones that stall and don't use the technology I think are going to become um a thing of the dodo bird or the dinosaur will go some we're not going to go that far. All right. We're going to keep this uh this isn't a oh my god you know the world's ending kind of thing. But the reality is I think there is an invisible tax of doing nothing. And um every day you delay its adoption um you're wasting hours. you're missing uh maybe opportunities from new leads or referral sources. More importantly, you're having issues with staff burnout or maybe not even attracting the right type of staff. Um there's a Goldman Sachs already has 97% of their interns in 2025 are already using AI in their daily life.

So, expect this. Gen Z expects this. If your firm is not using it, they're going to go work for someone else or go on their own. Okay? So firms that thinking, you know, waiting is a neutral position, so I can I can still do the same way I did it last year. It's actually starting to compound your loss. So, Rebekah, I want to start the conversation a little bit more on um examples of perhaps, you know, if you're spending 5 hours or, you know, a week or 10 hours a week doing proposals, engagement letters the oldfashioned way, you know, by templates or uh the you know, you're you're just versioning it to per client and you're trying to figure it out, you know, how much time are you losing if you use AI that could do those tasks in minutes, right?

And then you compound that throughout a year, it's it's a huge number. So kind of explain from a competitive standpoint, if your firm's still locked in the old way and you have this AI enabled, tech- enabled firm running circles around you, they could do a hell of a lot more than you can with less staff and more importantly better outcomes for their clients. So kind of let's dig in there first and then we'll go forward.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Yeah. So I think the big thing to remember here is that firms using AI are going to have a competitive edge unequivocally and all of those things you kind of just mentioned Lee the the time suck the burnout that is all going to come and it's going to make it much harder for you to stay ahead of the game. So for example let's just think about time alone a firm that's using AI is going to be able to do things so much faster than a firm that's still doing everything manually. Whether that means responding to an email more quickly, let's say within an hour instead of within 24 hours, or perhaps delivering a tax plan within a couple of days instead of a couple of weeks.

All of these things make clients feel more seen. They're going to make your clients feel more understood, feel like they are receiving more personalized attention, and that's something that really only AI can deliver because it just has the capability to do things so much faster. Furthermore, we can lean into the personalized experience a little bit more. Everyone today expects personalization. It doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't matter what industry you're dealing with. Everyone wants personal. You know, when you turn your car on now, it says, "Hi." Your first name on the screen. When you turn your phone on, it says, "Hi, whoever you are." When you go to a hotel, your family's name is on the television in the hotel room. It's everywhere. And it's something that the financial industry also needs to lean into.

You need to personalize. AI makes it possible for you to deliver personalized engagement letters, personalized proposals, personalized emails, personalized newsletters, things that you literally could not do because you didn't have the time a year ago, two years ago, all of that can happen now because of AI. So, if your competitors locally are doing that, they are going to have an edge automatically.

Lee Reams II

You mean so naming all three of my cars? I I just got my daughter a car. She's 16 a while ago. Um, but her car is favorite daughter. And then my wife's car is named after my dog Ruby. Um, what hers is Rusa and then mine is Rubian. So, uh, we like the personalization and I think that's a very good example of how, you know, people expect that Apple experience, that Amazon experience. They think they expect things fast, they expect things personalized, they expect things to be more uh, beneficial. So, so about them, right? It's all about them understanding what their needs are. And that's even in if you look at just every industry from buying shoes where you can, you know, customize a shoe by building your own t-shirt designs, whatever.

It's just throughout the consumer cycle. That's what's happened. So, it's a big deal that you learn how to use these AI tools that can do these things in moments, right? It's taking all this data. It's taking all this context that you know about your current clients and being able to create that proposal specific for, you know, a restaurant in Boston in the Backbay area and use language that they care about. And if you're offering a virtual CFO services, be able to version that proposal all about the value of those professional services that you're offering. You could never do that before. Even if you had an expert copywriter sitting there, the time, the cost of doing a proposal would be hundreds of dollars. Now you can do a personalized onetoone proposal engagement letter intake form in minutes like literally minutes and you can version it you can talk to and I think a big thing we need to understand is u AI is conversational the way most of it not the AI agents but most of the tools are conversational so meaning the more you can communicate with it um the more you can talk with it the better you know the better instructions you give it the better the output so I I'm going to get into the segment two which is a little bit of fear-mongering side of me that says um you're going to have lost visibility in search and what do we mean by this?

So I I want to think of the traditional practice. Um you get you know let's say you're still relying on just referrals. So referrals come in people are googling them. Google's now coming up with AI uh information about so it's using its AI agent to come back with you know whatever it thinks about your brand. So think about someone referring you. They go to ChatGPT. What do you think about Lee Reams and Associates? um if your current web presence is not optimized to feed the AI engine. So ChatGPT perplexity um you're no longer even in the conversation. And I I I often say this thought where you don't even know you're not in the game, right? So you you need to look if you have an older technology stack, let's say an old website, a DIY website, a WordPress site that cousin Al built for you and it's just been sitting there with no blogs, no FAQs, uh no schema, proper schema.

Um you're not talking personal to niches. So you're not creating content around these niches. You are not going to be found in these conversations. And I want to give a couple examples. So, let's say you work with craft brewing companies uh in a certain area and people go into Chat JPT, hey, I'm looking for an accountant who can help me with my craft brew company. If you don't have content about craft brewing, why do you think Chat GPT perplexity or any of this intelligence would then say, "Oh, this brand, this is someone that that you I should recommend to you." Right? There's no signals. Um, so this is a big deal. So, Rebekah, just get into some best practices if you can. And I gave some examples.

You know, someone asked ChatGPT, "Best small business tax advisor in Newport Beach." Um, if you haven't built your indexable content, you're invisible. So, explain from a a technical standpoint how this ties into narratives versus cookie cutter. And what we see is most accountants, if you Google, you know, there's 110,000 firms or 6 700,000 tax and accounting professionals in the US. You Google them, 95% of them look exactly the same. They say the same thing. No personality, no differentiation. You're a commodity. Why does narrative matter so much in this conversational age of search?

Rebekah Winters Barton

If you listened last week, this is going to be a little bit of review. We went over this a little bit last week as well, but it's really important and it's something I really want to keep hammering home. Your story matters now more than ever. And it's not just because it looks better on your website. It's not just because it's more interesting for people who happen upon you. That is important, but this is how you get found now. Um, AI search is drawing market share daily. It is increasing by the day. Uh, I read a statistic last week or a couple weeks ago. There are literally billions of searches per day now on chat GPT alone, not even counting other platforms. So, just have that number in your head as we move move forward here.

But the biggest thing you need to understand is like Lee was saying, this is a conversation. ChatGPT is not just searching a single search term in the way that Google once did. GEO, generative engine optimization, basically the new frontier of SEO. We want you to tell your story because that helps you rank. So this this system is looking for someone who fits the narrative that its user wants. So, when someone comes to it and is asking for a local Newport Beach accountant, for example, who specializes in uh automotive mechanics or whatever your niche may be, you need to make sure that your story leans into what you actually do. It's very easy to get on the internet and say, "I provide highquality local tax and accounting services." Okay, you and 500 other people.

If you say, "Okay, I provide local tax and accounting services for auto mechanics in the Newport Beach area and I specialize in electric vehicles, these models, Teslas, Rivians, etc." That's a way to differentiate yourself. That's a way to insert yourself into the conversation in a way that general content is going to. So, this isn't just us trying to tell you to use keywords or tell you to, you know, do some sort of highly technical thing that's going to help you rank within Google. That's not what this is anymore. This is about you telling your story so that ChatGPT can help make you part of another person's story. Yeah.

Lee Reams II

I mean, it's putting you into the conversation and it's if it knows your that's your personality, that's something you focus on, it's most likely going to resource you as a reference and put you into that conversation. I think it's really important. I'm laughing at your example of Tesla and Rivian mechanics. I mean, come on. These are EVs. They just run, you know. So that that is not the niche we're suggesting today. Not a good niche. Don't go with that. But adding statistics, Gartner came out and a stat in 2025 30% of all searches will be AI driven. Um so basically that's already where we are, not where we're going. So it's going to become a bigger deal as we as we move forward. So custom branding, don't be afraid to put your photos on your website.

Don't be afraid to write a bio about yourself. Don't be afraid to share how you help in the community. If you're in a vertical or a niche, what is your expertise? What is your experience? Make sure you have tons of fresh five-star reviews from these people. Those are resourced. They are big. And and if if your clients are talking in the language that a mechanic would or a restaurant owner would, that's even going to help you when it tells your story. So, think about it. You're almost writing a script for your own movie, okay? and you're feeding the editor, the producer, the director, all these talking points about your firm. You're you're the actor here. And it's going to then start taking those parts and it's going to like it or not, it's going to say, "Okay, I believe these.

I like these. These are credible." And then it's going to parse together a story that meets then the person on the other end's personality, too. It knows what they're about. They It knows what they're looking for, but that's how the conversation takes place. uh and it's really important to feed it. So that's segment two. I think it was my only fear-mongering. The rest is all positive stuff. So the productivity gap, hours lost versus seconds one. And I want to go into um you know what takes you hours today. AI reduces to minutes. It can scrape data from uh documents. It can analyze a tax return and create a a an AI summary of recommendations just even to the client saying, you know, maybe in like their human language.

Hey client, here's your the copy of your tax return for review. This is what changed and it can write all this for you. Um send out AI can actually deliver through your client hub a version of your tax return for review. The client can say yes, I accept, no, make these changes. Um it can write the copy that was on the summary of the return. It can do so much once that return is kicked off or approved. It can then kick off your 8879 eigns, right? That is things that may have taken a long time before. So, what are some practical examples? Client communications. AI can draft engagement letters, emails, proposals in moments. And again, you're human in the loop. If you don't like the result, tell it what you didn't like.

Correct this, please. Or you can go in and edit it yourself. It can do tax research for you. Uh, and a think about this. AI handles the first pass. Okay? So, freeing humans for judgment and review. So, it can gather a lot of different things. It will look at things the way you forgot or didn't know about and then you can integrate those. So you might be uh you know doing things or offering advice in a certain way. AI may see some things where others are doing it in a a new approach but the more importantly it is taking moments for this. This is where for tax research use a proven tool like max Thompson Reuters there's others I think tax GPT there's others that are I don't know the quality of these so I don't want to speak I'll speak for the quality of max.

We put our entire knowledge base of tax code, tax analysis, all of our experts from our continuing education. We put a knowledge layer on top of of AI basically that it references that we know this is all accurate and we update this daily basically. But that is where you can get trusted tax research done in moments, right? Think how much time you're saving there. That's even it could be a full-time person really. workflow automation, intake docs, uh work uh workpapers, Q&A checklists, to-do lists, right? Anything that it can scrape data perhaps and organize that data in a binder. That is time savings, right? Advisory lifts. So, how can I now do modeling, forecasting, budgeting, insight summaries based on financial statements, tax returns, things that may I had clunky software perhaps.

Uh and the beauty of AI is it thinks outside the box and this is where it personalizes. So software is coded that if A or B then you do this C um AI technology is able to kind of reduce all that and you now it it basically gives a much clearer more personalized output especially for advisory stuff like tax planning. So it doesn't just draft it drives right it moves your work through your pipeline and a lot of this happens while you're sleeping you don't even it's all autopilot stuff. So when it comes to the amount of time you save through automation, it's amazing. So I want to give an example that is something on the marketing end. And Rebekah, if you can go in and just how we as accounting works completely changed the way we do our blog content.

And so we had a library of content. It was kind of 25 to 30 articles a month. They were in categories, but everyone got the same content. We taught our AI to utilize our human reviewed version of all these articles and now we are personalizing and uh segmenting each article for our entire client base. So now every client in our database of users or subscribers gets a custom version of whatever that content was. But we know the content is 100% accurate. Talk about the changes in localizing the keywords, the generative search, all that. But think of all the time, you know, it would have been impossible in the old it would have been cost prohibitive. It would cost 30 $50,000 a year in labor minimum to get that kind of content and how AI now enables us as county works to deliver that at scale.

So kind of explain, you know, how we did it, um why it's so powerful and why it matters to each local firm because now it's optimized for their niche or local area.

Rebekah Winters Barton

This is actually one of my favorite things about the 3.0 platform. When we do onboardings, we focus pretty heavily on explaining this, at least during my part of the presentation that we do. I talk a lot about this. Obviously, syndicated content serves its purpose. It gets new new fresh content going out, but it's not going to be local. It's not going to be geared directly towards your firm. The change that we've been able to provide our clients by offering this spun content, taking our base and changing it so that it's still fully accurate but also fully custom, I would say is probably one of the most monumental things that we've been able to offer to our clients. One of the biggest complaints I hear is I don't have time to do content.

They don't understand how to do it. They don't want to do it. It they they feel that it's too timeconuming. This completely removes that that roadblock. They are able to literally put in a few pieces of variable data that we've pre-written the prompts, you fill them in, we help you do it. Um, you pop it into the back end, click a button, and all of a sudden, everything that's going out is customized to your region, to your niche, to whatever it is that you want it to be customized to. I've even had some clients who are really all in on it, who I've worked with, and we've we've put in prompts like every third article, please include this key phrase, things that they really want to rank for, that type of thing.

So you can get really nitty-gritty if you want to or you can be more general and just say, "Hey, I specialize in restaurants in Boston." Whatever it is. So it's highly customizable as well. So you can get it to be more personalized or slightly more general based upon your preferences based upon what you want. This is a great way to get custom content going out at the click of a button. And like Lee said, it's something we couldn't have offered before the existence of AI. And it's really a gamecher for people who have specific niches because like we've established this is something chat GPT heavily draws from all AI models but we'll stick with GPT for the sake of an example. It often will look at your content clusters your blog posts on your website to see what you do, who you are, what your specialty is.

So, by making these articles spun and customized, that basically is giving GPT a much bigger pool to draw from when it comes to your highquality content and really teaching it what your firm is all about. So, it's super important and it's super exciting and it's something that I would encourage all of our subscribers if you are listening to this to reach out about if you haven't turned it on already. Yeah, we're talking about productivity games and I wanted to give an example. Um, and it enables us as a vendor now to provide our clients with custom narratives, custom copy on homepages, custom blogs, custom social media at scale. And you know that talking about productivity for you as a as a as a customer or a CPA or an accountant.

Uh, you couldn't reach certain markets like we have playbooks now for all sorts of things. You want a playbook attract dual income people, we have a playbook for that. You want to attract Gen Z gig workers or NIL, we have a playbook for that. Uh you want to find business entities that are just starting up or tech enabled like uh tech firm SAS companies, we have playbooks for that. And what they do is they automatically run on autopilot, creating optimized content for your firm, personalizing your tone and attracting people from these areas that you could never have seen before without a significant cost and labor, uh ad spend, marketing spend. And so it's great. So, I'm going to move into now segment four, the human cost, and that's staff burnout and turnover.

So, we know the the the theme for the last several years is uh accounting firms are burnt out, boomers are retiring. We're seeing it all the time. Uh even our existing client base where they've sold or people are retiring. Um but that's this is this a grand transition. The good news is Gen Z is picking up the slack. I love you, Gen Z. I'm glad you're seeing the opportunities here and you're much more tech- enabled. much more um excited to use these type of tools. But if you're an existing firm and you have younger staff or um you're trying to get more out of them or keep them happy and you're still ignoring all these AI tools, um I think you're probably losing people because you're forcing to do the wrong work, right?

They don't want to chase e signatures. They don't want to be rekeying client data. um you know these tedious tasks that AI can do now um you're you're making you're forcing your people really to do the the worst of the worst tasks right um anyone that's doing that would get burnt out you know so if you can reduce your burnout um it cuts your turnover cost okay and I think that's a huge cost as an accountant to analyze if you're not if you're one retaining more people you have less turnover you're not dealing with training you're not dealing with recruiting um I think there's a lot of benefits there that kind of seem to add up. Uh, you know, and I I think you're seeing it already in firms that I'm seeing transition where, you know, the the partners are the older partners are now in their 60s and the younger ones are taking over and they're just redoing everything.

U they're doing everything that they wanted to for uh the last 10 years. Uh but now if you don't change, they have options. It's much easier for them to go. I mean to be honest with you, you don't need a huge budget to go out on your own anymore. Okay? And there's so many AI tools. A small shop, a boutique shop can look really powerful. And I think that one of the things that I haven't gone into here is AI when you have, you know, the big four putting billions of dollars in AI, you have tech enabled competitors, you got into it coming after your clients. Um, a small firm, a boutique firm with the power of AI and automation can now serve much higherend clients.

Uh, you can serve more clients. You can get premium pricing and you can compete with anybody at this point. So, doing nothing if you're if you're making your staff waste time. Um, you're going to you're going to see the creep and then more importantly, you're going to start losing clients because they're you know your your staff isn't jumping up and down every day when they go to work. Um, so that that's kind of segment four. I wanted to go into this whole idea of AI without oversight and why it fails. Um, we know the story of Bench when they try to add a lot more automation. There was scale factor as all and there's a lot of firms offering this AI only accounting bookkeeping. Um, there's got to be a trust factor, right?

And you know the lesson here I think is AI isn't the advisor. You are you're the one with the trusted relationship. You're the one that's in the community. you're the one that knows personal details um about your client base. Okay? So AI is the labor force that scales you. Okay? So you have all that knowledge. You are the human in the loop. And I think you need to understand there's a difference between reckless automation and responsible augmentation. And that's what you're doing. You're using AI to help augment a labor force. Maybe you couldn't afford or maybe you couldn't attract. So uh there's definitely a big human in the loop issue here. Rebekah, just from a point of view of how you use AI with human in the loop, if you just went in a generic and let's say you're creating copy for somebody or maybe writing an article and you went to a tool like chat GPT for example and said, "Please write me a a 529 article, but you didn't give it the tone, the target audience, the type of article, the style, the content, how long, uh where it's going to be read, how it's going to be positioned.

What do you get? you get generic, right? So, kind of explain how that works. So, yeah. So, AI is very powerful and even at its base level, it's very powerful, but like you just said, Lee, without that customization and the prompting, without training it, without spending time with it, it is going to deliver more generic content. So, I personally have spent hours and hours and hours of my life training my my AI assistant to do what I want. And I know Lee, you have too. I know you and I both talk to them very much in a conversational manner, giving it prompts that are sometimes several hundred words um to really get the outputs that we want. I never view it as AI writing something for me.

I view it as it assisting me in writing what I want to write. And I I know I've heard you say the same thing. So I think people who are kind of AI power users or people who use AI all the time, like I know we both do, you get to a point that you really learn how to prompt it and it gets to know you. These machine learning models are intelligent. They are going to pick up on cues. You can train them on your past writing.

Rebekah Winters Barton

One thing I tell a lot of our clients if they're diving in for the first time is to take writing samples that they already have, maybe papers they've written for some kind of a tax journal or local newspapers or whatever it is maybe that they've written in the past, blog posts, and upload those into the AI system and say, "Hey, this is how I write. This is the tone I use. This is who I am." That's a really great way to start training your AI system. And never be afraid to correct it. I still will go in and correct my AI if it delivers something I don't like. Don't argue with your AI. I know. I do. I do argue with my AI. Be polite. Be polite.

I try. I read that it's wasting a lot of water to tell it please and thank you, though. So, I don't know. But, but on a serious note, the more information you give it, the more personal you are willing to get with your AI as far as the outputs you want and the more back and forth you're willing to have, the better the outputs are going to be. So this is not something where a robot is doing your job, which I think is is one of the misconceptions that people have. This is you using a tool that you are very lucky to have access to actually that is going to help you become better at what you do. I would say I'm better at my job now than I was before AI because I'm able to dedicate more time to thinking through strategies for our clients and helping them put together these great websites.

I'm better at doing blog posts for our company because I can produce more of them that are high quality in a much faster time than I previously could. So, I think when you really look at it, this is a tool that helps you become better at what you're already good at as opposed to something that's going to take your expertise and steal it from you. Yeah,

Lee Reams II

I'm going to go in a couple directions here with this. Uh, first of all, use the microphone. um use the transcription tools inside any of your AI tools. If you're using uh again Max or Chat or Plexic Cloud, talk to it. And when Rebekah and I say we give it a hundred words, I give it more than that. I will do a rant and I will go through all the different things that I want to accomplish. And what this does is it gives me the power to create an output that I may it may have taken me a day or two that I can do in 20 30 minutes now. And the outputs aren't always perfect when they first come out. But it also helps me brainstorm.

And as Rebekah said, it helps us as a company as counting works do things that we never thought we could. I always envisioned being an agency like having agency level customization. And up to a year ago, you know, there was never going to be possible. Our competitors are still doing cookie cutter for whatever reason. Accountants, some are still buying cookie cutter, which I don't get. I'm like, wait a second. We're doing custom copy. We're doing agency level stuff that's accurate because we know the tax code and we know accounting. Um, this is the no the biggest no-brainer ever. But what it's done is it enables us as a smaller team to do things that you would take hundreds and hundreds of employees to do two or three years ago.

And that's where I talked about productivity. It makes us as a firm more pro, you know, more productive. And all these tools now are passed on to you guys as accounting firms. And it it is amazing how much you can do, how big you can look right away. Just starting out. You don't have to have some cheesy DIY site that's not going to be read by Perplexity. You know, you can invest in someone like us. We can build this custom narrative. We can make you look incredible. And I think that's a big deal when you talk to it. When I say conversational, literally think if you're sitting there with one of your assistants and giving them a a task and tell them exactly what you wanted to do.

If they come back and they're off, then just click the microphone, say, "Hey, you missed this, this, and that. You know what? I think your fourth point is a really good idea. I didn't think about that. Can you elaborate?" And now put this all back together in one comprehensive uh response. And now that's your output. Okay. So, you're saving so much time. Think about writing an email that a client had something that they would need to tax research for. Talk to the max assistant. Talk to Chat JBT. Um, tell it exactly what you think. It's going to go back into its knowledge base and come back to you with a response again that may have taken you an hour or two in research back in the old days.

These are huge, huge wins. Really something you need to do. Um, so how can small firms start today? Uh, AI adoption doesn't have to be complex. So start with one task that's stealing your time. So explain, we've gone through this, but if you could, Rebekah, some talking points here, you know, what are some lowhanging fruit things? We talked about engagement letters. U, maybe just explain an FAQ, you know, and how you can use AI to create an FAQ for a target audience and how now ChatGpt and Perplexity will use you as the expert when talking about that subject. So, let's just give a like a a lesson on how to create an FAQ for a specific niche um or service you're trying to and then how you create content that now will bring in clients.

Rebekah Winters Barton

That's actually what I wanted to get into here because I do feel like we've hit proposals, engagement letters pretty heavily. FAQs are hugely important in the AI space. Uh AI systems draw from them very heavily. They are answering questions very clearly and succinctly and they provide a lot of information in a very very narrative type of way. Um so it's they're super good to have. I would never ever recommend not having an FAQ at this stage of the internet. So, what you want to think about as you're crafting your FAQ are first of all, you want to think about the questions you get asked most often because those are the things that your target audience is asking. So, if you're getting this question over and over from people who are existing clients, you need to address those things.

Whether it's do you provide X service, uh do your virtual CFO services include this particular thing, whatever it is, go ahead and put it in there. Also include generic questions. Does X firm serve X city? That can be really important because people are going to be searching. Who is a local accountant? Who is a local tax firm that can help me? If you're clearly stating, I serve this city, this county, that's going to put you in the crosshairs of all of these AI systems right off the bat. You can also use AI to help you build out your FAQ. That's something we've been doing um for our clients. We'll say, "Hey, look, this this pro this this person we're working with is based in this area.

What are some of the most common questions that are being searched for tax and accounting professionals in this part of the country, in this city, whatever it may be?" And it's spitting out the questions that we need to answer. So, there are a lot of things you can do to build an FAQ. I would recommend starting with, if you don't want a huge huge FAQ, start with 10 to 15 questions. Answer them. Pop that page on your website. I think you'll be astounded by how quickly you start ranking within these AI systems. We've seen people ranking within a couple of days, very literally 48 to 72 hours, starting to gain some traction. It's faster than Google ever was. Um, it picks you up more quickly and it tends to recommend smaller firms more often.

So, there's a massive opportunity here. Uh, you just kind of have to be willing to dive in.

Lee Reams II

Yeah. And what people should do, a good exercise is go go go to ChatGPT and say, "What do you think about your firm name?" And what you're going to see is its opinion in a conversation answering that question about you. And you're going to go, "Whoa, is that a favorable light? Does it does it say the things I want it to say? Is it missing information about me?" And when it's missing information or perhaps there's some talking points that it is not uh utilizing in that conversation, that's how you backfill it with FAQs. Um the content on your site, the narrative on your site, the blogs you're writing, um the reviews that people are leaving. That is where this context comes into. And it's not a ranking thing.

It's again it's a conversation. Even though it's it's artificial intelligence, it is a conversation about your firm going on right now. people are asking these questions and based on what is I just did here I'll give a perfect example I just bought um I wanted to get weighted vests so like rucking and I walk a lot I walk my dog all the time so I went into ChatGPT and I said hey you know go is a brand that I I trust and know what are some other alternatives for you know rocking bags and backpacks and it gave me a whole discussion and we went through you know how how tall am I how much do I weigh how how far do I walk? I was going to buy a different completely different bag, backpack, weighted vest, whatever you want to call it, than I ended up with.

And it helped me really identify a lot of different brands, but that is the way people are using these tools all the time right now. And there's no difference in the tax and accounting space. So, I think we've run full circles about why this is so important. So, every month you delay, you widen the gap between you uh like what you could deliver and what your competitors will. So others are jumping all over this. All right. Uh and AI doesn't lower client expectations. It actually raises them if you're using the right tools, the right onboarding tools. You're actually better at your job. You're making it easier for your clients to work with you. And more importantly, I think you're giving more personalized advice. Hopefully better financial outcomes and maybe you're identifying things that you didn't really think of.

Okay. So the bottom line here is the cost of waiting is real. You we went through this. You lose web visibility narrative. So cookie cutter is dead. Um, if you have not upgraded your website, uh, you're going to start seeing yourself. I mean, right now, Google, I don't even know where the Google organic results are anymore. They're so far down, right? Um, so you don't want to work this hard to build this firm so large. That is your moat. These client relationships, your reputation is your moat. Okay? So, protect it. Upgrade your website. Utilize some of these best practices. Okay? More importantly, you waste hours every day, you know, creating a proposal. You know that AI can actually tell you is your bid the right price?

Think about it. If you're charging a client in Oklahoma the same thing as a client in San Francisco, um you're losing out because that San Francisco client is used to paying more and your market rates and AI can identify that. I mean, so there's, you know, you're you're not just wasting hours in putting together their proposal, you're wasting opportunities, okay? You're burning out your staff. They're doing stuff that they're like, I cannot believe I'm doing this again when AI could do this. Hey, my buddy is at such and such firm and their their their process is completely automated, right? So, you risk losing clients to firms that already look faster, fresher, and more modern. And we don't want that for independent tax accounting firms. That's what we're all about.

Uh so, AI is not going to put accountants out of business. Uh accountants who delay, they might put themselves out of business. And I I hate saying those kind of things, but you know, just like with any big migration of technology, whether you know it's the the ledger and QuickBooks, if it's eiling and paper tax returns, um the question is it's inevitable, right? So the question is how much longer can you afford to wait? Um so I hope we've given you a pretty good overview here. I I don't want to continue drumming the the beat the drum beat here. I think I've said kind of how this works. Um if you are interested or want some more advice um our team here at counting works pro is uh we're doing all of this for our clients right we're optimizing in ua using AI for all the client-f facing experiences how do you attract new clients how do you onboard them how do you work with them how do you keep retain them long term right client retention is huge AI makes client retention basically put on autopilot right so we've built all these tools we are not a back-end system we're not trying to do AI tax prep.

We're not doing AI accounting. We're just doing all the things that your touch points with your clients. Um, so anyone can utilize these things. So, whatever you do, stop delaying. Try out a tool like Max. Start using some other tax related expert tools that you trust. I think you'll really see a big difference in your practice. So, that is a wrap for this week's podcast. Said a lot, Rebekah. Did I miss anything?

Rebekah Winters Barton

I don't think so. I think we covered everything. I talked about my daughter, my dogs, uh, rucking, um, and my car names. So, that's a lot. So, we're on a journey today, I feel like. Yes, very much so. So, anyways, thanks again for being a subscriber to the Growth Minded Accountant podcast, a listener. Please share this with not your competitors. Share it with your colleagues and friends. Uh, spread the news and please before this tax season, start utilizing AI as much as you can. You're going to love it. Appreciate you uh, being a follower of ours.