Today, our guest is Jeremy Estey. Jeremy is the founder of AmberSky Marketing. AmberSky Marketing is a digital marketing agency for accounting firms, which ties into what we talk about on The Unique CPA. So Jeremy, welcome to The Unique CPA Podcast.

Yeah, Randy, thanks so much. Been listening to The Unique CPA for a while, and just happy to be a part of your show today and chat about some things going on within the accounting landscape when it has it relates to marketing and all of that good stuff. So, looking forward to it. 

Yeah, me too. Marketing’s actually where I live in our firm is the marketing department. I think that’s where, honestly, I don’t know where I live in our firm, but I think I spend most of our time with marketing. So it’s a subject I enjoy. It doesn’t mean I’m an expert at it, but a subject I think is important. So I just did a quick intro saying you’re founder of AmberSky—why don’t you dig deeper into that, give us a little background on you and the company, and then we’ll dig into the things you’re doing?

Perfect. That sounds great. So I guess if we. Let’s rewind back a little bit, back to 2010, I guess that’s when I got my start in the online game, so to speak. I’ve been around golf essentially my whole life. I had aspirations at one point trying to play professionally. Obviously, I found out quite early that there was a lot better players than I was, but I still love the game so much, played competitively and all that stuff. Studied communications as well. And so I guess kind of when I realized that maybe taking the professional golf route wasn’t the best thing, I still wanted to kind of keep my feet within the game that I loved, and I ended up starting a golf media company. So it was essentially like a news agency, I guess you could say, just centered around golf here in Canada, also in the U.S., Pacific Northwest. And then internationally covered some PGA Tour events, LPGA Tour events, and some big tournaments, like the U.S. Open, for example.

And so, starting that up, essentially, the business model behind that was an advertising model, so essentially getting your content in front of a lot of people, right? So then you can sell advertising, the more people you have looking at your content creates more value for people to want to advertise. And so doing that, you realize quickly what you need to do to try and get eyeballs on your content. And so that’s kind of how I got started in the online marketing game and Search Engine Optimization or SEO, as it’s called for short, is one of the things I kind of started to dig into early on. I did do some other stuff as well, but I got the start with Search Engine Optimization, and at the time it was, I don’t want to say it was the Wild West, but you could definitely do things that you can’t do now to get ranked fairly high on Google and other search engines.

And then, so I guess long story short, I ended up shutting down that business around 2016, and it just came to the point where the amount of effort I was putting in versus compensation just didn’t quite make sense, and it’s just, what’s my next move? And so I was kind of looking for other ways, or I guess to transition out of that, but I didn’t quite know what that looked like. I knew it was online somehow. And honestly, just randomly one day, I had a friend of mine post something on Facebook. They’re just like, “Hey, started up a new company, just looking for a website.” I just kind of like messaged him, just one, to check in and catch up, “it’s been a while.” And two, just to learn more about what he was up to. And then we just started talking about the website and essentially I ended up doing his website for him with help from a guy who was helping me with the golf stuff, ’cause I’m definitely not a web designer or developer by trade, but ended up working out a deal with him. We ended up doing the website for him. And then that led to other website projects.

And then eventually, I was contracting a friend of mine, got to the point where I was bringing him so much work that he’s just, “Let’s just go into business together,” so that was around 2016, and then that’s kind of the humble beginning, so to speak, of AmberSky Marketing. We ended up starting out as more of a generalist type of marketing agency, so we were doing web design and development. And then we were doing paid advertising, email marketing, SEO obviously, social media, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And we were working kind of with everyone and essentially anyone at that time, right? You’re just trying to bring business in the door. And so that did pose challenges for sure. It was great, we learned about a number of different industries, but essentially, every new client we would bring on, and if it was in a space we hadn’t worked on before and we were doing a lot of custom stuff, it makes it challenging because you have to kind of reinvent the wheel with every new client.

So it just became a little too much, I guess, if that’s the best way to put it. So we were kind of just thinking about, hey, like, how can we make this more efficient? We did like the idea of just focusing on one industry, niching down, figuring out what are the problems that customer has, or that client has, and just really building a solution around that, and that’s kind of the humble beginnings, like I said, of kind of how we shifted into the accounting space, and then now with advisory services, CAS, just expanding rapidly, that’s kind of where most of our focus is, is helping CAS firms now bring in clients to their firms.

Nice. So that’s the journey, the AmberSky backstory, and the one thing I really love about that is the fact that you decided that, as you say, as a Canadian, “neeshing,” and I say, and it’s not even a Canadian thing, although all my Canadian friends say “neesh,” I say “nitch.” It’s an argument I have all the time, but we won’t get into that today, because we’re both right, I know that. But becoming a niche practice, a niche business, cause I talk about that all the time for accounting firms, how important that is. And the fact that you lived it and you did it, and now you’re really working with that niche industry of accounting and even deeper into that, CAS firms and looking at advisory, I really like that. And so was there an epiphany that accounting firms were in? It was just like, “Hey, we’re going to pick one, and throw a dart at the dartboard and see which industry we hit on,” or how did you fall on accounting? 

I mean, sure, it’s like when you’re trying to figure out like what clients you want to work with, obviously there’s so many you can choose from, and I think we worked with a few firms in the past and we really kind of liked helping them and I think it just was a natural kind of thing. And I think it was just more or less let’s just go down this avenue, let’s commit to it and let’s just do it. ’Cause for myself, I kind of get wrapped up in this shiny object syndrome, so to speak, right? “What’s the next best thing?” So I think we just let’s do this. Let’s just go all in, commit to it. And that’s kind of what we did, and so here we are today. 

Well, it’s digital marketing, so you’re working with accounting firms, and I like what you say on LinkedIn, actually, you want to “work with accounting firms that are looking to ditch the time sucking, high volume, low profit, stressful tax returns for high profitable and easier to manage recurring business advisory clients.” And I’m all for that. I think using our passions, where they’re important, there’s nothing wrong with compliance. There’s nothing wrong with doing tax returns, if that’s where your passion lies, but if you want to have more impact on your clients and get to that advisory role, that’s where you help with the marketing of the things to bring in those clients to these firms. And one of the things you’ve mentioned already a couple of times, and I hear all the time is SEO, Search Engine Optimization. I almost said it correctly. That was really close. I knew I’d stumble over it, but let’s start with that. ’Cause I mean, I hear it all the time. I don’t even know what it means. And how can you, so first, what is it and how can you impact it on a positive level for accounting firms?

Yeah, totally. So Search Engine Optimization, essentially— 

—Oh, nice job. You said it really nicely. 

SEO for short. Essentially what it is, it’s the process of optimizing the pages of your website. I say “pages” because I think there’s a misconception about optimizing a website that the website as a whole gets ranked on the search engines, whereas it’s the individual pages. So Search Engine Optimization is essentially, like I said, optimizing the pages for search engines, so the search engines can index them. They can essentially move them up the rankings based on the relevancy of the content, the quality of content, and a number of other factors. And if I expand on this, if we look at Google, and I’ll probably talk about Google a lot during this conversation, just because Google has, they are the dominant search engine within the search space. I think the last time I heard, it was like 85 90%, although there’s some stuff coming down the pipeline in regards to some antitrust stuff, but we’ll see what happens with that.

But for the sake of this conversation, Google—they have what’s called ranking factors, and these ranking factors are essentially rules, I guess you could say, that are like, this is what we want you to do to your website so that our algorithms, our search bots, are able to crawl your website, decipher the information on your website, determine the quality of the content, determine how relevant it is to the specific search phrases that people are searching for, right? And so, the better optimized the content is, the more relevant it is to the keywords, as they’re called, those are essentially the phrases people type into Google to find what they’re looking for. That is going to boost you up to search engine rankings and the higher you are on those rankings, the more traffic you get, and then essentially it’s a numbers game after that, more traffic leads to more inquiries, right? 

And so there’s a lot of variables that go into it. It’s not just like creating content around your one specific keyword, although that’s a big piece of it, but there’s like technical SEO, there’s off page SEO, there’s on page SEO, and so there’s a lot of things that kind of encompass Search Engine Optimization and having all those things work together is essentially what gets you success within the search engines.

Alright, and so you said content a few times and keywords obviously within that content. Is part of what you’re doing working with the content or you take the content they already have and you optimize that to increase their relevancy in the searching or are you helping them create content as well?

Yeah. So there’s two sides to it, right? So let’s say a firm works with us, they’ve already got content on their website. We’ll keep the content that’s there, but we’ll go through it. We’ll optimize it, make sure that we’re making changes to it so that it fits within Google’s ranking factors so that it can jump up to search engine rankings. And then also too, getting them on to a regular content schedule as well, and then that’s more from the blog side of it, but then also creating pages as well, and essentially you have to look at when you’re ranking for keywords, keeping in mind what’s the user intent or the search intent, right? Because there’s a number of different types of, I guess, keyword intentions. 

The two main ones you want to focus on are transactional and commercial. So those are keywords somebody would type in where they’re ready to buy essentially, like I need an accounting firm now or I want to buy this product, right? So those are essentially what are called “money keywords.” and so usually you would focus on your services pages around those types of keywords, right, and then there’s what’s called like informational keywords, which would be more like blog posts and just really high value content, giving people information that they’re searching for as well. 

And I think something to keep in mind as well is that Google, one of the biggest things that Google is looking for is user experience. And so ensuring that you not only have high quality content, but really making it easy for that person to get on your website and making it fast, and the load time is quick, and really just creating that great user experience also plays into this as well. And I hope I answered your question. I feel like I kind of talked kind of in different tangents there, but. 

Hey, I am the king of tangents, so don’t worry about tangents at all. We can go anywhere. But I do want to go then to kind of equate something that you did personally with becoming a niche marketing agency to the importance of niche in accounting firm—I’m sorry, I can say “neesh” too—niche in accounting firms and equating that to their SEO rankings and all that because I think, I’m assuming you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m assuming it’s probably important to be a niche practice because that’s going to also help to optimize you because you can concentrate your content on certain subjects and I’m guessing that helps get you up the rankings if it’s constantly the same type of content and showing that this accounting practice is niche helping professional services firm and now that content can be created around that. Do you see the importance of niche for accounting firms especially when it comes to the SEO? 

 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because we’re a niche agency, “nitch” agency right now—

You can say your word, you can go “neesh.” I’m fine with that. 

I do have a passion for just like, having a niche business. And so, yes, I do feel like having an accounting firm that is focused on a very specific client and solving a specific problem, I think is key. And especially now with how—I don’t want to say saturated—but how competitive it is out there, right? If you’re an accounting firm that’s just more of a generalist type of firm and or have the same services as the accounting firm down the street, it’s really hard to differentiate your firm from that person down the street. And essentially when you are a generalist firm and you’re just offering the same things as similar businesses, one of the only ways to compete really is by price, and essentially, you end up having to undercut and then at the end of the day when you’re lowering your prices, you’re discounting, it’s just a race to the bottom, thin margins, maybe you do make a little bit of profit but not enough to really do anything with the firm. So you’re kind of stuck in this like hamster wheel so to speak that you can’t get out it’s hard to scale. And so that’s why I really believe in you know nicheing a business down. 

That said, when you look at it from a Search Engine Optimization standpoint, or even just a marketing standpoint in general, it makes things a lot easier and more effective, because you know who your clients are, you know who you want to work with, you understand the problems that you’re solving, so you can go directly to where they hang out and where they are, as opposed to if you’re a general type of firm, it’s more of the spray and pray type of model. You don’t really know who you’re trying to attract, so you’re just kind of putting stuff out there and hoping something sticks. And so there’s challenges to that. You can waste your marketing budget and not necessarily get a return on that. And so if you’re more focused on a client solving that one problem, then it’s really easier to get a better return on that, and you just position yourself as the expert in that space. People want to work with the expert. 

And so if you look at it from SEO, then it’s about, okay, these are my clients. Now it’s about trying to get those clients in the door through like specific keywords, right? And we do a lot of local SEO, meaning that the SEO that we’re doing for firms are based around the local area, trying to get them to attract local clients to their firm. And so optimizing your content and the website and all that around that specific client, and that problem you’re solving, so that includes messaging and all that, that’s kind of what is going to help you stand out from the crowd.  

Yep. And then when the firm decides this is, yes, we want to do this, we’re prepared for growth, we’re prepared for new clients, we’re prepared to transition from just compliance to advisory or whatever the reason is, how do they know when they’re prepared? What are things that they need to, I mean, hey, let’s say you do the most unbelievable job of getting this optimization. All of a sudden the leads are starting to roll in. I mean, they can’t just say, “Hey, let’s go do this.” They have to have a game plan in place, I assume, because now we got new leads. And how do we handle that? And when we do, who’s going to be in charge of talking to this? Is there a step there that needs to be discussed or at least they need to be prepared for? 

Yeah, for sure, and I, I think just to back up really quickly, I mean, yes, we do like to focus on CAS firms, but that said, we can totally work with just more traditional accounting firms as well. That said, I think you bring up a really good point, is okay, we can bring you in the leads, but do you have the infrastructure in place to be able to manage those leads in a timely manner? And I think that’s a key piece to this. So, we like to work with firms who, they have the operations to scale, they have a team in place already, and maybe that’s one admin person, two admin people—whatever that looks like for the firm—but when the leads start coming in, they’re able to handle those leads in a very timely manner, because if you’re not following up with them, or you’re not answering phone calls, the chances of them bouncing is pretty high. So essentially, if we bring you those leads, but you’re not doing anything with them, you’re essentially wasting money, right? Because you’re not converting those leads. 

So Search Engine Optimization is great. If your firm may not be able to handle influx of leads or more business at this particular moment, maybe it’s not the best time to utilize it. There’s other strategies you can look at, but also as well, just having a team that would be able to just really take those leads and just run with them, and I think that’s a key piece, right? 

And how about, let’s go over quickly, like a success story, somebody reached out to you and they wanted to do this and this is how they did, and this is the result that they got from it. Do you have one of those we can share? 

Yeah, for sure. I’m just trying to think back. I mean, there’s been a few. I think we were working with a firm that was a smaller firm, I think they had 2 or 3 people. They actually did have an admin person. And so, I don’t know, I think they were around already for 2 or 3 years. They had a website, their kind of mindset was I have a website up, the leads are going to roll in, right? But that’s not the case. If you have a website, you need to optimize it so that the search engines can see it, and so you can get traffic going to it. And so what we did essentially, we set them up with a local SEO strategy. We helped them optimize their Google business profile, which is a key piece to any local Search Engine Optimization strategy. We got that up and running for them. And then we were focused on bringing them traffic through targeted, location-specific keywords. 

And then from there what we did was we focused a lot on citations and if you’re not too sure what citations are, those play into a local SEO strategy and so essentially that’s name, address, and phone number, NAP as it’s called, getting that information onto local directories, local websites, other relevant websites within the area, and that tells Google essentially that you’re a legitimate business, you’re trustworthy, you have authoritativeness, and all these other things, and so that helps move you up the search engine rankings, right? And then that also plays into the user experience aspect of it. 

And so it wasn’t like they were instantly getting leads when we started to implement their SEO strategy, but within, I think, four or five months, they were starting to get people raising their hands and getting phone calls. And I think they have scaled back since, just because they’ve got more leads coming in than they can handle. But at the end of the day, we brought them enough leads that they were essentially at capacity. 

Nice. All right, so let’s go back to niche for a second, because what I’m seeing is when people do things like this, when they want to grow, when they have a game plan in place already, one of the things is that they need to work on is that whole, what is the product that I’m offering now for this niche? How do I put this together? How do I price it? How do I figure out how to differentiate myself with this knowledge base that’s showing through SEO? So do you have a game plan or does this discussion come up with, hey, how do we turn this, our services, now into a product for the niche that we’re serving? 

Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think that’s one thing that I love talking about, because I think it’s something that a lot of firms, in regards to the CAS space with the advisory stuff, because there’s kind of different things that make up CAS services and from my conversations it seems like that changes from person to person of what I think is CAS and what’s not CAS. But if we look at just from the advisory services standpoint, one of the reasons why niching is great is because when you do figure out which client you want to work with, and you understand the challenge they’re having with a specific accounting thing that they’re trying to solve, is that you can figure out which CAS services are actually going to solve that problem, and then you can package them into like essentially a product and then start marketing that as a product to solve that specific challenge that this client base is having.

And so it takes you out of the hourly pricing model more into the value based pricing and then you can look at it as more of you know a way to sell recurring services, because you’re selling this as a monthly retainer to that client. And so that’s one way CAS firms can think about putting their CAS services together and actually getting that recurring revenue, ’cause like I mentioned to you before we started recording here is I had a conversation with, I mean, I’ve been having lots of conversations with firms lately, but one yesterday, they were saying that they are starting to kind of do CAS, they’re putting the pieces into place, but they’re not quite sure how to kind of put it all together so that it can be more of a recurring type of model as opposed to more transactional, and so I brought up the idea of hey, well, look at who’s your client? Who do you want to work with? What is that challenge that they’re having? And what are they asking for over and over again? Figuring that out and packaging those services kind of into one product, and then yeah, I mean, if you want to go deeper on this, you could create some type of name for that product, and then you can essentially sell it as one thing.

And also, when you end up doing that, it streamlines operations because you start developing processes and systems, and then essentially, if you want to hire, it’s easier to scale because you’re just bringing people in to basically deliver that product at the end of the day. And I think that makes it a lot easier from a scalability standpoint. 

Yep. You got your standard operating procedures in place for that specific product. You got your pricing in place. You know how much time it’s going to take you with each client. You get rid of the billable hour, which I hate the billable hour, and you start to create this, what would you call it? A work-life firm. But that’s not the word I was trying to say, but you’re actually realizing that you don’t have to work 80 hours a week and you can start delivering value and have impact for your clients rather than delivering hours to your clients. So I like that aspect of it a lot. 

Well, Jeremy, this is great. I love the ideas, especially when we’re talking about niche, when we’re talking about product development and pricing, and I think these are all important things. And it all comes back to having that message that’s important that people are searching for and getting those keywords in place. So any last words for you before I ask a couple of questions, a couple of final questions?

Yeah, I think too, I’m just kind of going back. We, like I mentioned, we do work with CAS firms, but I think it’s more or less giving them kind of the opportunity to take on the tax and compliance because they want to, not because they have to for the bulk of their revenue. And I think kind of getting them to think more about that is kind of where we’re coming from. So not saying you have to get rid of that, but just transition out of that so that you have it as more of a value type of service, right? 

Yep, and I had this conversation this morning actually with somebody and it was just, hey, yeah, no, we, we have these available to you and it’s going to augment the services we’re delivering already and you can have people in your practice that are passionate about tax and passionate about bookkeeping and passionate about other things and then the advisory is just another aspect that other people are doing. So I think that’s important. Well, great information. 

A couple of final things before we close: So great discussion on SEO and niche, but when you’re not thinking about business, not thinking about helping accounting firms, what are your passions outside of work? What do you enjoy doing, whether it’s on Vancouver Island, where you’re at, or elsewhere? 

Yeah, so, I think you know this just from our conversations—super passionate about golf. I started playing golf when I was six. So I’ve kind of been around it my whole life, so to speak, played competitively, had a very small window where I thought I was going to try and play professionally, but realized quite quickly that there are others who are way better than I am. So that dream was short lived and that’s kind of how I got into the marketing space. But I try to play much golf as much as I can right now, although we do have a little one who’s coming up on a year and a half. So I went down from around a hundred rounds a year to over the last couple of years here, probably 10 to 15 now. And then also with AmberSky things are going well here. So it’s a matter of picking and choosing your battles, right? And I’m sure you can relate to that. 

Yep, alright, and then last question, I’m sure people are very intrigued with our discussion today, if they want to find out more about AmberSky or connect with you, what’s the best places for them to look?

Yeah, so, very active on LinkedIn, I post daily, so you can just send me a DM through LinkedIn. You can also check out the website, AmberSkyMarketing.com. If you would like to get a hold of me directly, you can send me an email. My email address is Jeremy@AmberSkyMarketing.com and I send me an email, usually get back to you within 24 hours.

Nice. And we’ll have all that information in the show notes as well. So Jeremy, thanks again, I appreciate your persistency of—is that a word?—persistence, of reaching out to me. We’ve been trying to schedule this for a while, so thanks for being patient. I’m glad we got it done, and thanks for being on the show.

Yeah, me as well. I know you’re super busy, so just appreciate you taking the time to have a conversation. Thanks so much.