Data as a service
When the story is more important than the work
We could do mediocre work, but communicate really well and our clients would still be happy.
Don’t get me wrong. We do excellent work.
But it doesn’t matter how good the work is if you’re left in the dark.
You shouldn’t wonder what the next step and whether or not we’re waiting on you.
And when the work is complete, you definitely shouldn’t be left scratching your head wondering if it’s correct or what it means.
A year or so ago I read “Clockwork,” by Mike Michalowicz (the author of Profit First). In it, he talks about identifying your business’s “Queen Bee Role.” The thing that everyone on the team is responsible for protecting and nurturing even though they may have their own tasks and assignments.
No matter how many times I went through the exercise, I kept coming back to “Communication” as our Queen Bee Role. It didn’t make sense at first. We’re an accounting firm. Shouldn’t our Queen Bee Role be accounting? Or taxes? Or at least something a little more definable than “Communication”?
But then talking to our clients, it started to click. Everyone was saying the same thing. They weren’t getting enough communication from their prior CPA. They never felt listened to or quite understood what was going on.
Sometimes when we looked at the other CPAs work it was hot garbage. But just as many time the work was good. Even excellent.
But what does that matter if you don’t know what it means?
Because of that we’ve been building communications throughout the business. We remind each other that if you’re wondering whether you should communicate something to someone, then the answer is yes.
Even if it’s just to say “Thanks, got it!” we communicate.
Or “Just letting you know, we got your question, but it’ll be a couple days before we can get back to you,” we communicate.
Or “We told you we’d have this back to you by today, but it’s looking more like tomorrow,” we communicate.
What we’re working on now is deeper communication about the numbers.
On the tax side, we’ve done a good job of communicating things. Every single tax return gets a 5-10 minute recorded video going through the main points of their tax return. In that video we show what changed from the previous year, why the results look the way they do, and tips on saving more taxes moving forward.
On the bookkeeping side, we’re realizing that bookkeeping is just data management. It’s organizing the data of your financial transactions into financial statements.
But your business is so much more than financial transactions. Average order value, conversion rate, newsletter open rates, and a myriad other things you should be tracking never end up on any financial statement or anywhere in QuickBooks.
This is where I get excited, but we recently came across a platform that will let us show not just financial data, but also non-financial data in some really nice graphs. The system has a good balance of structure and customizability (we can literally pull in any data as long as it can be put into a spreadsheet) to help us tell the story that you’re numbers tell.
With AI getting better and better, putting expenses in categories or deductions on tax lines gets less and less meaningful.
But as long as we keep our focus on our Queen Bee Role of communication, it won’t matter if it’s human fingers or robot fingers clicking “post” on a transaction. Our job is still (and will always be) to help you understand what those numbers are saying and how to use them to build the business that supports you and the life you’re building for yourself.
