The Big Idea: Strategic Marketing

Today, our guest is Katie Thomas. Katie is the owner of Leaders Online, which is a marketing, and she can correct me if I get this wrong, but a marketing company that supports both the accounting profession and as she calls it, B2A, business to accountants. I think I got that right. Well, Katie, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Hi Randy, thanks for having me. I’m so privileged and honored to be on your podcast.

Well, you and I met for the first time just, feels like a few weeks ago. I think maybe it’s a month plus now, but what was that at Engage, right?

Yeah, we met at Engage and you were having some sort of sketchy, no, we won’t call it sketchy. You were having a little side conversation with Terrell. So I’m sure you guys are up to good things and I’m excited to see what deal you are working on.

Yeah. So Terrell Turner, great guy, good friend of mine. He’s actually on our advisory committee for The Unique CPA conference, Bridging the Gap. And he’s also going to be speaking there. And I think even moderating the panel. So anything time I can be around Terrell and, capture some of what he’s doing and have him rub off on me, I’ll be part of it. And you were being interviewed by him on a podcast there as well.

Yeah, Terrell, he’s awesome. He just has so much knowledge when it comes to accounting firms, growing them, scaling them, everything. So I recommend anyone listening now, definitely check out Terrell.

Terrell checks a lot of the boxes of things I like talking about. One, he has a niche practice. Two, he’s out educating, sharing his knowledge. He came into, I was doing a webinar at another conference he and I were both at Scaling New Heights. He came into my presentation. I had a two hour presentation on mental health and burnout in our profession. And I was just talking about the importance of building a niche practice when he walks in and I got to point to him, I say, that guy that just walked in, Terrell, look at him. In the last two years, he’s built a practice from scratch to 200 law firms that he’s dealing with.

That’s the importance of one, his digital marketing and two, developing a niche practice. So that might be a good segue into us talking about your journey into the profession and then we’ll get into leaders online. So why don’t you give us some background on you and the business?

Yeah, so my journey with marketing as a whole started at a super young age. I grew up with a dad that was an entrepreneur. And I really had that entrepreneurial spirit as well. I mean, I was doing everything I could to earn money. Dog sitting at nine years old. I was giving horseback riding lessons. And when I was 12, I was designing my first website. We even go back at nine years old on Microsoft publisher, if people remember that platform and then let’s see, at 16, I was doing cold calls. I was doing SEO, Google Ads. And so I really dipped my feet into marketing years ago and I always loved marketing. 

But when it came time to like go to school and be like, okay, you need to pick a profession, I knew that I wanted to go into some sort of business career and hopefully own my own business someday, but that’s not exactly a degree. And people said accounting is the language of business. So if you’re good at math, this could be a good path to go down. And so I took accounting. I loved it. I loved how everything balanced, but I never really saw myself becoming an accountant as like the traditional accountant. But you know, you, go through undergrad, you get that accounting degree, and the next thing is like, well, you could go ahead and get your master’s and take the CPA exam. And I thought, you know what? Why not? I don’t think it ever hurts to have letters behind your name. And I thought this is a great challenge. I love challenges. 

So I went ahead, got my CPA and of course, then you have to work to not just fulfill the education and the exam requirement, but also the experience requirement, and so I went to work for one of the Big Four firms. And while I was there, well, I just really loved marketing, but I noticed that a lot of the managers, senior managers, and even the partners, they did not like marketing, and they did not like business development. And whenever I’d have conversations with people that were on the partner track, marketing and business development, that was like, that’s something they’re really not looking forward to. And so I thought, you know what, if there’s this much of a pain point around marketing and business development at these big firms, what does it look like for the smaller firms out there? 

And so whenever I left, and decided I’m going to take a chance on my hypothesis that, Hey, there are some ways I could help these firms, that’s what I did. I just jumped into it and started working with smaller firms. Now we have firms that, they are still pretty small. Like maybe there’s one partner and they have a handful of staff. And then we have some that are a lot bigger, but it’s such a privilege because I love this industry. I love the work I do, and ultimately I love the impact that together, we’re able to make, because we’re able to help the firms reach more people, solve more problems, and in turn, it just, the economy, you know, creates more momentum for everyone.

Yeah, what you, everything you just said is the way I feel about what I’m doing in our profession too. I love everything I do. I love every day I do it. We’re helping people and so the cool part is, and I didn’t know this ahead of time, is that you came out of the profession. You’ve lived it. I don’t know if I would have wanted to live the Big Four experience that you did. I don’t know. Besides the lack of marketing, how was that overall experience?

You know, it was good in a sense that you are around really smart people. I had some wonderful managers and senior managers and even partners that I got to work alongside and they were super inspiring and motivating. And had there been maybe a different role there, for example, I asked like, could I go into a business development role or would I have to, you know, go all the way down the partner track? And they, basically were like, looked at me like I was crazy. And like, no, there’s no role for you unless you want to go down that track. But had there been different opportunities for me, maybe I would have stayed. However, it just, ultimately I looked around and I saw like the work that those above me were doing, and it was like, this is not the career path that I want to take. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong for some people, but it wasn’t for me, that’s for sure.

Yeah. And I love what you just said there, because one of the things is we don’t have to do what everybody else is doing. Someone else’s success is not our success. And I think too often we just think, okay, this is the path I need to go. And I just got to power through it and see, you know, get to the next, you know, 40 years and retire rather than following your passion. And I love the fact that you decided your passion was this: Business Development and Marketing, going out and you didn’t have that opportunity internally, so you took advantage and you went out and did it yourself. And I think that’s a great lesson for people. Follow your dreams, follow your passions is so important. 

So let’s dig into then, Leaders Online, you know, you’re working with accounting firms and businesses that support accounting firms. Give us a little more, what are the services that you offer? 

Yeah, so we focus heavily on social media. We also do PR websites and some other forms of content marketing. But our main focus is just following where the attention is of the ideal clients of the firm or the company that we’re working with. And so today, where attention is, it’s different. It’s not the same as it was five, 10 years ago. And the sooner that firms can realize that and CPAs can realize that, then they can lean into actually creating a marketing plan that works because what always works, unfortunately, it just doesn’t anymore.

Yeah, and you said this earlier and I meant to mention this, but you couldn’t go down the marketing path or business development path, unless you were down the partner path. I don’t understand. I really don’t get why partners have to be the business development people. For most of them, it’s not even their personality, probably. And for us, with Tri-Merit, I mean, we have probably 20 people in business development. They’re not partners. They’re just, that’s what they’re out doing because they are the ones that know how to talk to people and to go get the, generate the business.

And so from your standpoint, the firms you work with, are they changing their mindset that, hey, we don’t have to be just the sales team. We, you know, we can do things different. We obviously, they bring in you as an outside consultant to do marketing. Do you see any internal changes that they may be doing in general or are they pretty much, Hey, partners are the ones developing business?

I think it depends on how old of a firm it is or how new, they brought up like new partners. For example, I was just talking to a firm right before we got on this interview and he was like, hey, I just hired my first sales representative. And so like hearing that, it’s like, firms are making a change, but this partner, the firm I was talking to, you know, he bought his firm pretty recently and he was coming in and he’s, you know, doing a transition and he said, yeah, one of the first things I did was I hired a salesperson. I got a CRM. And so new leaders, they are definitely changing and shaking things up. 

And then I will say like people who are going out and starting their firm, I think for those, a lot of times they are a little bit, different than a traditional accountant and their personality is probably a bit more business development oriented in that, hey, if I’m going to start a firm and I’m doing this from the ground up, hopefully I have some sort of desire to want to go out and connect and build relationships knowing that ultimately like my business depends upon that until I get to the point where I can bring on additional help. So I think it kind of depends, but we are seeing a shift and it’s a great shift.

I think so. There’s so many times that I see these, you know, I’m going to generalize, but older, mature firms maybe just setting their ways and this is how it has to be. And these younger, and I think you just mentioned younger startup firms, just more flexible, more unique ideas. You know, friends of mine, Kenji Kuramoto and Matthew May from Acuity. I mean, they have an outbound sales team. I mean, that is just, you know, and they took their cue from the client base that they work with. I just think that is so cool to see people doing things different ways.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, look to people like you just mentioned, like Kenji, they’re doing incredible things and it kind of goes back to what we said before: You can’t be afraid to blaze your own trail or do what other people aren’t necessarily doing that’s standard. And just because it’s always been done one way, doesn’t mean that there’s a better way, or even if it’s not better for everyone, it can be better for you. That’s ultimately, like what makes, I think this job and this profession so fun is there’s a lot of ways to approach it. There’s a lot of things that we can do. Like, I’m now in marketing, there’s so much opportunity. And so like leaning into those passions, what you really like, you desire, and like, don’t be afraid to just put yourself out there. Try something else.

I agree completely. So let’s talk about that then. What do you see in these maybe, you know, more forward thinking firms, and I’m using that as an example, but all firms, what are the things working now from a marketing standpoint? What do you see and what are you promoting? What are you helping companies with that are really having the most impact?

Yeah, so, a lot of times people will say like, hey, what is the best marketing strategy for me? And when you really dig into that question, it’s asking how do I get more of the right attention from the right people? Because maybe it is a new client, but as we know, a lot of accounting firms as of today, they’re not necessarily struggling for clients. So maybe it’s, they’re looking for new team members. Maybe they’re looking for a referral relationship that can send them more of the right clients. Maybe they want to get attention from existing prospects that didn’t need their services right now. So it’s marketing and getting attention. It’s just so much more than attracting an abundance of new clients. 

And so whenever you think about this and like, you actually dive into what is the right marketing strategy, it’s who are you trying to reach? Where are those people getting their information? And how are those people making decisions? And today, when you think about the internet, it’s matured and it’s really impacted the way that people are making their decisions and how they’re consuming information. So if we think about today, a lot of people, they’re listening to podcasts like this, they’re on social media, they’re at events like Scaling New Heights, or Engage, or Tri-Merit’s conference, and they’re in Slack channels. 

But if we look at five years ago, a lot of these channels like social media, podcasts, they weren’t as established. And so if you were say, we’re going to look for a new accountant you might find one at a networking event, or you might ask a friend or a colleague, hey, or who are you using? Or maybe you did go to Google and you searched accountant near me. Now today, people are on podcasts, they’re on social media. They’re, like we said, they’re at these events and from there, they’re hearing things, they’re meeting people, they’re getting their information. From there, once they say, hey, I was listening to Oh My Fraud, and I heard Randy, he was sponsoring it, and it sounds like they’re doing some really cool things for accountants. Now I’m going to go to Google and I’m going to search them, and I’m going to find out more about them because I was listening to that podcast. I got my information there. Rather than just, you know, asking for a referral and they’re going to go to Google and they’re going to search Tri-Merit and they’re going to learn more. And your website ultimately is going to say, look, I captured this attention of this person. 

And so a lot of times, firms, they’re thinking about marketing strategies in terms of like, what’s just capturing the attention, such as Google searches or SEO or the ad they put up, the people who have actually already, there’s some sort of demand for them, they go and they capture that demand. But what they aren’t thinking about is actually creating demand, where people’s attention is currently at. So you have to take a broader approach and be like, okay, yes, capturing this demand of people who know about us or who know that they’re searching for our services, we want to do that. We want to capture the people going to Google, searching for us. We want to capture the people that are typing in accountant near me. But what about all of this attention that’s in all of these other channels? We need to be showing up there because if we aren’t, your competitors are, they’re going to be there. Your employees that you want to work with, their attention’s there and your competitors are going to take them. And so too much emphasis is put traditionally on just capturing demand versus creating demand.

And so there’s some people I know that I think have done, and you’re the expert, you could, I’ll ask you if you know these people and how you think they’re doing, but you know, some people that like are going to be in our, well, Terrell Turners, we already talked about him, I mean, the demand that he creates just, I think is probably through the roof, just with all his being out there. Also, Brandon Hall, are you familiar with Brandon? 

Oh, yeah. 

Okay. Ideas of what he’s doing that you’ve seen out there? 

Yeah. I mean, he’s doing a great job. He produces a ton of content. I know he used to be on BiggerPockets a lot. That’s perfect. He went where the attention was, gave value. He has his newsletter. He has a course. And then he also has someone else at his firm. I believe Thomas that produces a lot of great content as well. And so they’re out there. They’re not just, you know, available for the people that are aware of them. They’re actually creating demand in a market and in a space where people aren’t aware of them.

Yeah, create demand is something when I’ve talked to him, it’s like, you know, he generates 250 leads a month and he gets to pick and choose which new clients, and anybody that doesn’t know Brandon, he deals with the real estate industry is basically his client base. In fact, I think The Real Estate CPA might be a website of his, but also I think HallCPA.com as well. But yeah, he just creates this demand through his online marketing and being in the place and generating the demand rather than waiting for people to come to him. From that standpoint, how do you, I mean, do you help people set up podcasts or webinars or are there anything like that, or is it more just not just, but the online presence through websites and other things? What are the types of things that you use to create that demand?

Yeah, so we create the content, we’ll actually go and manage the social media profiles. Like we will pretend that we are you and go out and comment on other people’s posts. inbox. So actually start real conversations, not spammy bot ones, that build relationships. We are distributing all the content. We’re also like on the specialized platforms like BiggerPockets. We manage profiles there. We will help you get in touch with other content creators. So for example, if you serve law firms, we can help you find other coaches and people that are also serving law firms so that we can help you get in front of their audience. It’s thinking bigger picture today. And like, how can you truly be a resource to your niche? So, niche, I love that you were talking about niche earlier. So important.

I was going to ask you about that, what you thought about niche. And did you only say “nitch” because I did? Or are you a “neesh” rather than a “nitch?” 

I’m a “nitch” person, not a “neesh”.

I’m a “nitch” person as well. So, so is this any advice you give to people when they’re, when you’re out there marketing that if you have a niche, it’s easier, I can do more, there’s more content we can share, there’s more knowledge we can share because you have this expertise, is that everything, anything you’d discuss with them or it just helps when they are a niche?

So, we require them to at least have a marketing niche or marketing niches. It’s okay if you say our firm, if I go to your homepage and you serve multiple, but if you’re just an accounting firm, just a CPA firm, why is anyone going to pick you? And more importantly, when you’re talking about marketing, no one can find you. You’re the same as everyone. And so we need something compelling that makes you stand out, shows that you’re actually an expert, allow someone to consume that content and be like, that speaks to me rather than, oh, I’m just a business owner. It’s like, a business owner isn’t going to connect with that. They want you to call them out. And be very specific to them.

And so Brandon obviously does a good job. Terrell, who we’ve talked about twice already, deals with law firms. And it was funny because he made a switch. He was restaurants and then all of a sudden he showed up as the law firm accountant. And he’s done a great job with that. I can name a bunch of people that, even larger firms that I deal with. There’s one, John Sensiba, who I just saw last week. I think they’re just changing the name of their firm to Sensiba. It was Sensiba San Filippoc. But he has, and they’re, a $30, $40, $50 million firm now. And he has a philosophy that they won’t service an industry unless they have somebody internally that is passionate about that industry, because that passion and you’ve mentioned passion before is so important. Is that, I guess, from that standpoint, passion, obviously you have passion for what you’re doing. I have passion for what I’m doing. I think it just makes everything we do so much more fun. I assume passion comes in big when you’re dealing with marketing as well.

Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen firms that say we want to specialize in working with doctors. And when you’re like, okay, why? There’s no story behind it. It’s just, well, they’ve got a lot of money to pay us and that’s literally it. I mean, it sounds funny saying that out loud, but people literally make decisions like that. And how do you think their marketing efforts go? They fall flat because they’re not passionate about what they’re doing. They don’t care about the industry. They’re not excited by it. You have to be passionate and excited about what you’re doing, I believe, to be successful at it long term.

Yep. Oh, for sure. So let’s talk real quick then about, cause you know, looking at your website, you know, I see you talk about coming up with a 12 month marketing plan. You want to explain that to us a little bit? Why a year out or what the plan is like, or?

Yeah. So whenever we create this 12 month marketing plan, we’re really looking at where are you at today? Where do you want to be? And what are your resources like? So, how much time do you have? How much money do you have? What are your skill sets like? And depending upon those, we’re going to create this plan to help you get to where you want to go. And sometimes that means that we need to start with updating your website. Sometimes that means, hey, you’ve already got a great website, and you’ve got some traffic to it, so we’re going to lean into that.

Sometimes that means you don’t really have anything started, and we can go and we can get some quick wins by having you really niche down on social media. I just said “neesh,” by the way. 

You did!

I always say “nitch.”

I confused you before! 

That question like got in my head. But so it really depends upon the firm and their goals and then also their niche of like how we can help them reach their goals. Why is it a year? Because marketing takes time. A lot of people just want to flip a switch and have leads flowing in. But whenever you think about who you buy from, who you do business with, and especially if it’s something as sensitive as your financial data, that’s often not going to be just a, let me do a Google search and I’m immediately buying from you today. Especially if you’re some specialized practice. Now, of course, someone like Brandon Hall, if you come across him, he clearly is really credible and yeah, you might be ready to sign up pretty quickly, but think about how much time that took for him to build that up. And so it’s important to be realistic in what you can accomplish in what time. And the great thing is with marketing is if you do it right, there’s a snowball effect where, yeah, you might have to put in some time to get things going, but when you’re doing it right, it’s like I said, the snowball effect it’s going to speed up and it’s going to lead to quicker results over time.

Yep. And we’ve seen that and I have no marketing expert and we started Tri Merit without really a marketing plan in place, probably, not probably, definitely. But we early on realized, at least from a marketing standpoint, that what we need to do is we needed to go to CPA firms and educate them on what we do and then build those relationships and then that would start to snowball. Now, no official marketing plan. I knew it would take a while, because relationships aren’t built overnight, but we’ve seen that, and we’ve gotten much better with the marketing. I mean, we have, what do we have? Six or seven full time people in marketing now, and we’ve seen that snowball effect that, you know, we’ve had tremendous growth. And I think a lot of it is, we have a huge presence of feels like, online, and people know who we are. So that helps. And we have a—I think we have a good message. You may look at it and say, Randy, there’s so many things you can do better. Let me give you some advice. So that you don’t have to do that now. I’m not asking for free advice, but I am promoting the fact that getting a good marketing plan in place is so important.

Randy, I’m curious what inspired you to start creating this online presence?

It’s funny. It wasn’t even intentional on my part. And I don’t know if you mean me online present or our team online present, cause they kind of go together. So we hired a full, our very first full time marketing person about four years ago. And she came in and started just doing more, whatever, SEO, looking at and putting more blogs out and things like that. But then she came up with an idea for, we’re going to do a podcast. And I’m like, okay, great. And you’re going to host it. I go, what? I’m not hosting a podcast. What are you talking about? 

But the podcast, you know, this Unique CPA has become, you know, I’m going to say the word wrong, ubiquitous. It’s tied to Tri-Merit. And that, I think, really started it. Once the podcast got out there, once I got to talk to so many cool people like yourself and the 120 other guests I’ve had on so far, and just sharing their knowledge, that gives us credibility that we’re out there to help. Because we’re not, I’m not out there talking about tax credits and incentives on the podcast really ever, maybe a couple episodes, but we’re out there to help the industry. And if I should think, this is my philosophy. If we show that we’re out there to help the industry, I think that’s why we start to get recognition. 

So I had no intention of doing it. This came about, now we have, like I said, like six or seven full time people in marketing, and they are constantly putting content out that I think is at least keeping us in front of the audience that we try to be attached to.

That’s awesome. Yeah. And it’s just interesting to hear from people like yourself that a lot of times they’ll say like, it wasn’t necessarily intentional from day one, whenever you started you know, this content creation. But you just led with, from the right spot and had the right intentions. That’s ultimately like what works. Whenever you show up to serve and you add value, it’s not like your content, that’s a sales pitch, that’s what’s really adding value. It’s actually leading from a place where you want to help people. And so that mindset shift of how to approach your marketing is really important whenever you’re doing any sort of marketing, whether it’s actually like doing a podcast, or creating content for social media, or content for your website, has to be valuable to the person consuming it or else they’re going to leave and not consume it at all.

Yep. From day one, when we started Tri-Merit, and I’m a CPA, it came out of public accounting, you know, just like you, when we started this and we decided that our business, you know, model was going to be go to the CPA firm. That’s where we’re going to go. And then they’ll send this to their clients. And it was like, I know CPAs don’t want to be sold to, I can’t go out there and sell them. I just have to share knowledge, educate them, show them why this is beneficial to their clients, why they’re going to be the hero in their client’s eyes, you know, when they bring, you know, a hundred thousand dollars of tax savings that is so complicated they probably can’t do internally, but if they team up with us and they feel comfortable that we are going to be servicing their client the way it should be serviced, they just, our philosophy is. We don’t want to be the hero. You’re the hero. We’re just there to support you. That seems to have worked for us.

I’d say so. Seems like it’s working great.

Yep. Alright. Well, this has been a great conversation. I love the, I mean, I honestly probably, and I keep saying it like probably, I am the mar, in the marketing team. I am a marketing team member. That’s what I do, even though it doesn’t feel like it to me. I just go out and talk. If there’s anybody out there that really wants to start putting a marketing program in place, seeing the importance of it, you know, talking about the people we talked about today, it’s been so beneficial to them. How would you suggest they start, jump in? And what advice would you give somebody looking to do this?

Yeah, the first thing is to not be afraid to step into the unknown and try something that you’ve never done. So I think a lot of times people see marketing, they’re like, I’m an accountant. I can’t do marketing, but marketing is just about adding value to an audience. And so anyone can do it. Check out some of those people that we mentioned like Terrell or Brandon. I also share a ton of tips and strategies on my social media profiles, on my website under my blog. So there are a lot of ways to get started and you can just take baby steps or you can always, you know, reach out to professional to help guide you through that process, but I truly believe anyone can become a marketer. You just have to start. Yeah. Just do it. No one is going to hold you back more than yourself.

Right. And things that I didn’t mention, you know what you’re talking about. You are well respected in this profession. You, what, you’ve been on the Practice Advisor 40 Under 40, Top 50 Women in Accounting. I’m sure there’s a lot more accolades out there that I haven’t mentioned. And I just noticed 43,000 followers on LinkedIn. So people like to listen to what you say and you putting your content out there is obviously getting a lot of traction as well that people are being educated by. You’re adding value, which is awesome.

Thank you!

Yep. Alright. So two final things I want to talk about. One, this is a question everybody gets, you know, we’ve been talking about business, talk about marketing, which I never knew how much I would be in marketing, and this is amazing to me, but I really like what we’re doing. We talked about that, but that’s again, not necessarily who you are, it’s part of who you are, but what do you enjoy doing that isn’t work-related? What are your outside of work passions?

Yeah, so of course, hanging out with my family. I have a one year old daughter that’s amazing. And so my husband and I, we love just doing anything with her, spending time with her, also seeing friends, but I’m a big horse person, so I grew up riding horses, showing horses, and I still ride horses today, so family, friends, horses, that’s what you’ll catch me doing outside of work. 

Are you familiar with Heather Satterlee by any chance? She’s a big horse person as well. I don’t know if you’ve had discussions about this before.

No, I did not know that she’s a horse girl. I’m going to have to reach out and have a conversation about that.

Oh yeah, she’s big time. And we were, she and I were just talking last week and she said like, cause we were talking about, you know, mental health, something I talked about. And she says, part of my mental health is just, and she says you know, out working in the barn, shoveling horse crap, and because I get to free my mind and it’s, and I didn’t use this, we’re trying to be a clean show here. So I didn’t use the word she’s used at the time, but she says, nobody thinks, they think I’m crazy, but that’s what I like doing. I’m just there with the horses. I get to clear my mind and I get exercise and I don’t have to think about anything else. And so, yeah, reach out to her if you, yeah, she really loves it.

Yeah. That’s why I have stuck with horses my whole life is because I feel like whenever I’m riding, I’m never distracted. It’s like, you can’t be on your phone. Your mind has to be thinking about what you’re doing. And it’s just, it’s like bliss.

Yep. Alright. Well, that’s great. I love your outside of work passions. So if anybody wants to hear more or want to get more information on you and Leaders and seeing what you’re doing and hopefully reaching out to you for help, because I think what you do is extremely important to every firm out there, how can they get ahold of you?

So I’m Katie Thomas, CPA on all social media platforms. My favorite social media platform is LinkedIn. So. Send me a DM there, but you’re welcome to also reach out to me on Instagram, Twitter, wherever you’re hanging out. And then you can also, if you want to learn more about working together, just go to Leaders-Online.com and you can book a call there.

Katie, this was awesome. I have known of you for years. I was grateful to be able to meet you a month ago, and I’m glad we scheduled this and got this conversation recorded because this, I think is very important. So appreciate you being here.

Thanks for having me, Randy. I appreciate you.