Harnessing Social Media

Today, my guest is Logan Graf. Logan is a CPA. He is, according to LinkedIn at least, the chief tax officer at the Graf Tax Co. I’ll let Logan expand on that. I’m very fortunate to follow Logan on social media and got to meet him in person for the first time at AICPA Engage where I got to film a little video with him, which was a lot of fun. So Logan, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thanks for having me, Randy. Yep. Logan Graf. I own my own CPA firm down in Austin, Texas, where I serve kind of a small amount of clients, but business owners, individuals, typical CPA firm services. I also run a YouTube channel that Randy got to experience this year and be on a video, so if you’re interested in watching that video, it’s “Why Did You Become a CPA?” on my YouTube channel. I think you can just search me Logan Graf, but yeah, excited to be here and talk with you, Randy.

Yeah, I’m excited. So I screwed up twice. You and I tried to record, the first time I had to reschedule because I can’t remember, I was somewhere that my schedule is just crazy, but no excuse. And then today I was like 15 minutes late because I just gave a presentation and I saw my calendar. I’m like, “Holy crap. I’ve got to run back to the hotel and get on with Logan.” So thanks for your patience with me and we’re good. So let’s talk about your firm a little bit because I think I saw recently, wasn’t it recently you were talking on social media about hiring your first person? Did that happen and how’d the process go?  

Yeah. Right before we met at AICPA Engage over the summer, I had made the decision and it was like, I need to hire somebody because I’m at the point where I either need to cut back on a bunch of clients or I need to hire somebody because my capacity is just gone between January and April. So I landed on hiring somebody. I think it would be the way to go, more fulfilling that way as well. 

As I was flying to the conference, I was getting all these applications in to work with me. So I basically utilized Twitter, the community that I’ve built, and LinkedIn to essentially link to a web form saying, “Hey, fill this out if you want to work with me and provide all this information.” So as I was flying to Vegas, I was monitoring all the submissions that went through and ended up hiring somebody right at the beginning of July. They’ve been with me now for a few months and it’s been great. Can’t wait to see how it works during tax season.  

What role did you hire for? Tax work or administration or a combination?

Yeah, for tax work and accounting work. I called it a “taxologist” position just because I wanted to name it something cool. So they’ll be doing a lot of taxes, primarily personal tax returns, and hopefully helping me with my monthly accounting. So it’s kind of a hybrid role. Essentially, almost like a mini-me that’s helping me out with all the work.  

Nice. So this is, I guess, a testament to your social media presence that you were able to get people applying through that. The process went pretty smoothly. I mean, it sounds like you had enough applicants. Did you, from an interview process, did it all go through Zoom or Teams calls or something like that?  

Yeah, all virtual. And I had about 25-30 applicants right off the bat within the first week. It was crazy. I don’t know what the typical… it’s my first time hiring somebody, so I don’t know what it’s usually like. As I was looking through all the resumes, a lot of them were great, but there was one that just stood out to me. I think he’d be comfortable with me sharing this, but he reapplied twice, he reached out to me on Twitter. He was like, “Hey Logan, can I reapply? I just want to adjust some things in my application.” I said, “How much would you like to be paid?” because that helped me gauge budgeting and can we actually make it work? You know, how much do you need to be paid?  This was a very limited position between the start date and January because I can guarantee you 10 hours a week, but that’s it. I’m going to pay you for 10 hours a week, no matter what. If you don’t work 10 hours, that’s fine. I’ll still pay you, but I can’t guarantee you, you’re going to be paid that much. So there’s very restricted pay, and then it’s going to change at the beginning of the next year because we’ll have tax season and all this other work that they’ll have access to. 

What he did, was he lowered his rate that he wanted to be paid. I was like, okay, that’s interesting. He really wants this job, it seems like. He was the first one I scheduled a meeting with. The interview went so well, I just had a really good feeling about this guy. He has great character, he’s very well-spoken. I was fumbling during the interview with words. And he was very clear and communicated well. He’s a very young guy. I think he’d be a Zoomer technically. I was just super impressed. 

Someone told me at Engage, I was kind of asking people, all these other CPAs or professionals that have been there and done that, like do you have any advice? One advice that I got, I think it was from Kristin Keats who we were just talking about her. She’s like, if there’s someone that shows initiative, like go for it. And Gary, my employee, showed a ton of initiative, it seemed like to me. I was like, okay, I think Gary’s the one. I did one interview and I told my wife, I was like I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, but I think I’m just going to go with it. I don’t want to interview everybody else and have to go through all that process. So let’s cut all that out. So far I’ve been very proud of the decision, no regrets. He’s very new to accounting. He has very little experience. That’s the thing. He didn’t meet my experience requirements, but I think I can train him to be a good accountant.  

Is this person an accountant by degree? Is it a CPA? Not a lot of background. What is the background?  

It’s going to blow your mind. He has no degree and no CPA. He’s studying for his EA. 

Okay.

So yeah, he’s… as far as I know, I don’t think he has a college degree. That was also like, okay, is this the right decision? If he has no accounting training but really, I don’t think that’s that necessary to be a good accountant. Of course, it’s going to help, but I do have to teach him a lot, but I still think his loyalty to me and his willingness to work and get better and take feedback has all been amazing and very positive.  

That’s great. 

And that’s probably like where it matters the most right now because I’m not expecting him to be a whiz kid.  

Yep. And initiative and willingness to learn and curiosity and all that. I think that’s, I mean, honestly, and I’m a lot older than you, but when I, again, remember what I learned in school, I learned so much more after, I mean, just out working, that’s where you learn everything, honestly. So degree, the letter CPA, sure, it stands for something, or EA as well. I don’t want to… I know we have a Unique CPA podcast, but we are the Unique Accountant, Tax Advisor, More podcast. So I think that’s great. I love this getting on the ground floor of seeing how your firm’s growing and all that. That’s pretty cool.

Let’s segue a little bit into, and I want to talk about social media at some point, but I want to talk about the firm. So you mentioned accounting, tax, 1040, business tax. Do you have a, what would be the word? Do you have a game plan in place of how you want to grow or the type of clients you want, or are you like a lot of people? Hey, you’re starting out and you’re going to take everybody on. And then you’re going to learn which ones you do like and which you don’t and where you are in that process.  

Yeah, I started off very 1040 heavy and only like five to 10 business returns, maybe at the most. I’ve quickly learned that heavy 1040 work just completely blows everything and it takes so much time for each client, and it just complicates things. So I’ve now set my minimum for a 1040 to be a thousand dollars to get in the door. I might increase it by the end of the year because I try to increase it every year. Last year was a thousand. So maybe I’ll do $1,100 or $1,200, but that’s just to make people realize like, okay, if I’m going to work with this guy, it’s got to be worth it to me. And that makes my job better when they see that value. And then it also prevents how many 1040s come to me. 

I definitely don’t mind working with them like I love specific 1040s. I’m really gearing towards business returns and business accounting services because I get a lot of energy from other business owners and talking to business owners because I’m one. I’ve found that there’s way less grind time between January and April essentially because you’re doing all their accounting throughout the year. It’s just a lot smoother.  

Yeah, so I’ve never done any sort of marketing. I was just on a podcast with Jason Staats, we were talking about YouTube, and I was telling him I don’t use YouTube for any marketing, but I think I’m going to start doing that because I want business clients, and I can use the skills that I’ve learned so far in my CPA channel, or accounting firm owner channel, to attract business owners. So I’m really excited about marketing and advertising for the first time. I’ve never done that. I’ve never had to.

So let’s talk about that then. When did you actually start the firm? How long have you been in practice now?  

Yeah, started it in the end of summer 2020. So height of COVID essentially. 

Yeah, perfect timing!

Where it’s like, is the world economy going to explode? And yeah. Who cares about accounting if that happens? Like is the world gonna end? I don’t know. It was like, very dark thoughts were happening, like completely irrational thoughts. But it was a perfect opportunity to launch a virtual CPA firm, as a matter of fact, because people didn’t want to see people in person and meeting people virtually was great. 

What happened was, I was working for a firm that previous tax season earlier in the spring, and we had an agreement: I’m going to purchase a set client list for a set amount that I billed for those projects during tax season. They’re going to move over to my firm and any clients that I added that year under their firm, I didn’t have to pay for. So I started with 60 to 100 clients, probably. It was a great base to start a firm off of, like a livable amount theoretically to survive for the next year. If no work comes in, I can survive. But a ton of work did come in to where I was able to financially make more money than I’ve ever made as a CPA. So pretty crazy how that happened.  

So you started with a great base, which is awesome. I kind of did the same thing when I started my firm, which is pretty cool because it got something. You take a lot of the risk out of the… or maybe some anxiety out of it. Although I personally don’t see risk, which is a problem probably. But, you take that out, but now you did mention that you have had quite a few new clients come in, and we were talking about that you really haven’t been marketing. So how did the firm grow then and how did you get ahold of these new clients or they get ahold of you?

Yeah. So there’s another firm down the road where I live essentially, and he runs a great firm and has, he’s established himself well in the community. So he’s at capacity ever since I’ve known him pretty much, and graciously, he puts me on his referrals for other tax preparers. So I get a constant stream of potential clients hitting my intake form from his firm essentially. It’s awesome. That’s like at least half of my new clients probably. 

Really! That’s pretty cool.

Yeah, I try to ask, how’d you hear about me? They’ll say it’s referral, so I’m assuming it’s from this other CPA firm. That’s why I tell a lot of new people that start their firm, if you’re trying to grow, there are going to be other firms in your area that aren’t taking new clients that you can reach out to, and they would love to direct somebody to go to because it’s always hard to be like, sorry, we’re filled up, can’t work, and then just cut it off. You want to have some sort of way to help somebody. This is a great way for both parties to win.  

That’s nice. I kind of have the same thing. People know I’m a CPA and so I get people reaching out to me like, “Hey, can you do our 1040?” I’m like, “No, I don’t do taxes,” but I do have somebody that I send them to now. It took me a while to realize if I have people coming to me, I should be sending them to somebody. I know so many people in the profession. Why am I not? So I’ve done that now where I have somebody I send them to, which is great. I love being able to support the profession and that’s something I probably missed for a while, but now I got that in place. So we’re doing that. 

Let’s talk a little more about the direction of the firm. You’re three years in, you’re growing, you’re building, got the first employee now. Have you determined or even decided that you want to have a certain niche? Is that part of this practice or are we just still growing and going to see what makes sense? You know, it sounds like from a standpoint of the first growth, “Hey, 1040s, let’s kind of change that and let’s go more business,” but now when you’re getting into these businesses, is there a certain group of clients that you really are trying to target more, or hoping to come to you?  

Yeah, I’m really trying to stay in my wheelhouse and not accept clients that I know require skills that I may or may not have. So anybody with high-tech R&D credits, I’m not going to take on. Anybody with a lot of construction accounting, I’m not going to take on. Anybody with inventory, I’m not going to take on just because I’m not the best-skilled person for that. So it’s really the easy people, the easy businesses. So, really just service-based businesses because it really simplifies things. 

I don’t have a specific niche right now. As I create content to attract clients, I am going to have to market towards a specific niche because I don’t just want to attract any business owner. It needs to be someone that would be a good fit for me. That’s going to narrow down a lot of things. I think it might take a little longer to build a base or get those clients, but maybe not. I don’t know.

Well, let’s talk about that then because social media is a place you hang out. You’ve got what, 16,000 followers on Twitter, I think, and over 2,000 subscribers on your YouTube channel. You already mentioned you haven’t been using that for marketing. So that’s a great base now that you’ve set up, but what have you been using the social media for?

Yeah, so I’d account for my first employee as a result of having a Twitter following and just having a wide base of people to choose from because if I never had a Twitter account, this person never would have applied to my job, in my opinion, because they would have never seen the application, never would have gotten in front of them. I attribute maybe the best hiring decision I’ve ever made, hopefully, as a result of social media, which is really cool to think about. 

I’m using social media right now specifically for YouTube, I’m trying to help the next generation of accountants, CPAs, EAs, and firm owners to think about running their own firm or inspire them to get into the profession, because as we all know, it’s not looking too good for who’s in the workforce. I see all these articles about the lack of accounting students, and we need to inspire the next generation. The way a lot of firms are set up right now aren’t doing that. A lot of things have to change. I’m hoping to move the needle just a little bit on that and get the next generation excited about accounting.  

I love that because I’m the same way. We need to show that this is a fun profession. We need to show that the stigma attached, or the perception of somebody at their desk 100 hours a week during tax season, never sleeping, all stressed out, pulling their hair out, whatever, that’s not reality. This new generation, to me, you’re the new generation—I’m 61, you’re in your 30s—I love to see the fact that you’re already trying to think of that next generation.

One really cool thing that I just saw today, Lisa Simpson from AICPA posted this, I think today, it was talking about Purdue University and how they’ve seen a really big spike in accounting applicants or people going into the accounting profession. Partly it’s because they’ve been proactive at promoting it, which I love to see. They’re changing the program. They have almost some incentives there, but they’ve seen an increase in the people applying and staying. So not just starting in accounting, but staying in accounting. So that was at least a piece of good news that came out of this. Hopefully, we’ll see that as a trend. Hopefully, what they are doing at Purdue, other universities will start to mimic and we’ll continue to see this uptick because we need it.  

Yeah, if colleges and universities use social media to reach out to students, I think that would be a great start, like an easy way to start. This is our accounting program, and this is what our graduates are doing.

Yeah, and that’s what they did. That’s a good point. They had graduates come back to talk to the classes, and there was actually a requirement. I’ve just read it briefly, but I’m excited about it. I want to dig deeper into it. They talked about how there’s a requirement for the first-year class, which is more about what paths accounting can take you into. It was a pretty cool thing. 

The other thing that you mentioned and you’ve seen is just the bashing we’re getting. The Wall Street Journal, for some reason, seems to be bashing the accounting profession lately. Just talking about how we’ve got this burnout and nobody’s coming in. I’m on a rant here. Sorry, Logan, I’m going to go on a rant for a minute. Because of that, I just wrote an article that’s kind of refuting what they’re saying and saying there is positives, and we are not this dying profession. We are an exciting profession. We got people like Logan Graf out there putting all these cool videos on YouTube showing how cool it is. 

I’ll stop my rant now. Let’s go into this transition in your social media from what you’ve been doing, supporting the accounting profession with what you’ve put out there, to turning it into a business generation tool. Have you come up with a game plan to do that?

Randy, in my dreams. I have not put it on paper ’cause I am running my own firm and so projects are getting in the way. I love half of my time spent in my firm and half of my time creating content. That’s kind of my goal one day, and hopefully, my new employee is going to get me there. But I haven’t quite planned it out yet, because I’m so focused on the projects in front of me. I am set on creating a tax channel, a specific tax channel. 

That was my original YouTube channel idea, to talk about tax on the Tax TeleGraf on Twitter. So I’m going to make a Tax TeleGraf YouTube, talk about taxes, and I made a bunch of tax videos. I would sprinkle in some like, how I run a CPA firm in there, and all the views were hitting the videos where I talked about running my firm. I was like, maybe I need to shift what I’m talking about because my audience is here to watch me and hear me talk about how I run my firm, how much money I make, my transparency and all that. So let’s put taxes down and talk about firm running. 

So I want to create a specific tax channel just for that type of audience. Through there, I will do a call to action for who I want to work with. Let’s say I’m discussing business entity setup or certain specific business-type deductions. I’ll be like, well, if you need help with this and blah, blah, blah, you need all these requirements, feel free to reach out. I’m hoping to create a channel through that lead funnel, as they say, and that will help gain some traction. That’s just an idea. Us accountants, we’re not social media savvy, you know.

Well, you are, maybe not all of us. I remember, I don’t know if it was last year or something, you and Jason Staats were having this race to what? 10,000 followers on Twitter? I’ve talked to Jason about this actually when he was on the podcast, and I brought up the fact that you won, and he gave me a hard time for bringing that up. 

He would. 

Exactly. 

He doesn’t like losing, that’s for sure.

He accused you of rigging the…

I got accused of one of my supporters buying a bunch of bots to follow me at the last minute. I don’t know if that’s true or not, ’cause I really think my supporters pulled through. I did a last-minute call to action on LinkedIn, and I think that helped push me over, but he won’t accept it. But if you look at the numbers now, he has like, gapped me, with followers—he has several thousand more followers than me now, so he should probably feel good about that. He calls it vanity metrics. He understands it’s all vanity.

Yeah, I’m looking right now. It’s less than 2,000 more than you.

Oh, okay. Maybe I’m catching up. He did a big jump, and now maybe I’m catching up.

I think I saw you were at 16.6, he’s 18.2. So I think you got to do a race to 20 now.

Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe. He’s gained popularity in the last year, but he’s at every conference. I can’t compete with that. If he’s just going to a conference and says, “Here’s my Twitter,” he gets like 300 followers right there.

Well, he was at our conference. I’m sure that’s pushing him through the roof. You should have been at our conference, and we would’ve got you there then too. I’m going to take credit for it. Alright, I’m going on tangents now. What I want to do is I want you and me to talk again in a year or something, and I want to follow how this went, how the social media marketing to bring in new clients is going. I want to see the plan in place, no pressure, whatever you’re doing. But I’m really curious to see, you know, you’re going to pre-qualify them on that list, but then are you going to have even a data sheet when they link to your website where it’s like a yes or no, and as soon as there’s a no, you know, they’re out, they’re not a potential client or, you know, something like that? Just curious how this ends up evolving over the next year.

Me too, ’cause that stuff, I love that kind of stuff, even though I’ve never done it. I loved marketing in college and in high school. It’s just been so hard when you’re at capacity and you don’t have any employees, you do it all. But now I have an employee, so I should theoretically get some time.

There were a lot of other things I wanted to discuss today, but if we’re going to do this again, I’ll bring them up next time. Things like how you’re billing, are you doing subscription pricing or by the hour and all that. But we’re not going to talk about it now. We’ll talk, you know, there’s other things I would like to discuss to see how you’re building this practice. I’m just so, I get so excited when I see someone younger getting energized about this profession and building their practice. I just love following that progression. There’s a handful of people that I’m doing that with on this podcast. It’s about time for episode two for these people. So I’m going to start reaching out to a bunch of them to do that. If you don’t mind, let’s plan on this again in a year.

Yeah, I’d love to. Yeah, talk about anything. I love talking about myself, so.

I’m pretty good at that too.

Who doesn’t?

Before we wrap up today, a couple of questions. Anything you want to add before I go in a different direction?

Yeah, if you’re interested in seeing how I run my firm, I have a lot of videos on why I do what I do and how I do what I do. I’m very transparent in running my firm through those videos. You can see how much money I made in 2022.

I did see that. I didn’t watch it, but I saw that you have that out there. We’ll promote, have you tell us the links and everything, and we’ll put that in the notes section of the podcast. Before we wrap then, before I get to that, everyone on the podcast gets this question, I think I forgot once or twice, but I’m not forgetting today. We just talked about what you do in the tax and the growth and the social media, but what do you do when it’s not work-related? What are your outside-of-work passions? What do you love doing in Austin or wherever you’re out doing things?

Yeah, I love to work on my car. I have an old classic Mustang. It’s my forever project. I’m trying to get it restored by the time my oldest kid can drive, which gives me like 10 years. So 10 more years to work on it. It’s an old 1965 Mustang that I used to daily drive. She needs some tender love and care. Any chance I get, I’m out in the garage working on that thing. I love being outdoors, mountain biking, and just getting exercise and making YouTube content. I’m a pretty simple man.

Those are cool things. The final thing then, if people want to see your YouTube channel or Twitter and all that, or just reach out to you in general, what’s the best place for them to look? 

Yeah, @LoganGrafTax on Twitter. I guess X we’re calling it. On YouTube, my handle is LoganGrafTax or you can probably search Logan Graf and I’ll pop up on YouTube that way.

Alright. Awesome. Well, Logan, I really appreciate you being here, and I really appreciate you being patient with me being 15 minutes late today.

Yeah. Anything else you want to talk about? 

Oh yeah, let’s talk about, well, we’ll do this next time, next year. There’ll be more things to talk about. 

A little teaser. 

I guess we could talk about your hair compared to Jason’s hair and…

I don’t want to compete on that. I don’t want to compete with Jason’s hair, so.

You think he spends like two hours a day getting every strand in the right spot?

I’ve seen his products line and he means business.

Alright. That’s too much Jason talk. We have to stop. Alright, Logan. Thanks again. I appreciate you being here.

Thanks, Randy.