[00:00:00] Baldeep: Do it after now. Now, I think I remember how to do it now. I did it after it started. Okay. All right. Welcome everyone to episode number nine Service Bureau Accelerator podcast. I’m here with uncle Ross. Tia, the tax goddess .Today, we’re going to be talking about best strategies for growing your service bureau. Tia, since you’re here, your technology’s working today.
[00:00:30] Tia: Let’s kick it off.
[00:00:33] Baldeep: Let’s kick it off.
[00:00:34] Tia: Yes. Best strategies. I think what I would love for us to get into is the simplicity of a strategy. The strategy is simply a plan. It doesn’t have to be complicated and you don’t need a whole bunch of people. Just one person yourself. and I always tell people when they first starting out in the service Bureau [00:01:00] learn your system, learn your strategy, do it yourself before you start to delegate it out to other people.
[00:01:04] So that, you know, what works and what doesn’t work.
[00:01:06] Baldeep: Oh yeah. We could talk a lot about that.
[00:01:07] Ross: That’s a whole topic in itself. Yes. Love that.
[00:01:11] Baldeep: Cool. Yeah, I think we should cover about just being clear on that, on your goals on who you want to work with. I like that idea, Tia, the, that’s a whole other topic that we can definitely dive into.
[00:01:25] Ross: Knowing the strategy.
[00:01:26] Baldeep: Knowing the implementing it. Yeah, I think those are some good stuff to dive into. Ross, if you want to kick it off with your idea on that.
[00:01:33] Ross: Yeah. Yeah. And we’ll definitely get into strategies as far as like marketing and, creating an offer. There’s so many things that we talk about and we’ll get into a lot of that, but one thing that we always like to start people off and actually in our training, this is like the first chapter is before we actually dive into the tactics and different strategies, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s sales, whether it’s whatever it is, demoing the software, et cetera.
[00:01:55] We always start with, The first place is goal setting. I’ve got this great analogy [00:02:00] that I’m going to share here. Baldeep’s heard me say it probably a thousand times. He hates it. When you get on an airplane and you’re flying in the air, 99 percent of the time, that plane is off course.
[00:02:12] Think about it. When you’re flying, when you’re in an aircraft, and the pilots are navigating that plane, There’s wind, there’s turbulence, there’s atmospheric pressure, there’s all this stuff that goes on and the plane is just constantly bouncing around and it’s constantly off course. That’s why there’s a pilot there to constantly steer the plane back on course, back on track and eventually guess what happens?
[00:02:34] Majority of the time you reach your final destination, right? You arrive at your final destination and without knowing what that final destination is, without having that goal. How do you know what strategy to implement and how to manage your strategy and make sure the strategy is working right? So I would like to start with the end in mind with setting goals and there’s a quick exercise that we can do.
[00:02:57] So for everyone listening, if you got like a pen or paper handy[00:03:00] I’m gonna give you like some quick little steps here just to really set a very clear goal. The easiest way is just to start with a revenue number, like what is your revenue goal for yourself and your business over the next three months, six months, year, whatever it may be.
[00:03:14] So take that goal first. So let’s say you want to achieve $100,000 in revenue over the next six months, right? Maybe that’s your goal, or maybe it’s 50, 000, whatever that is. I’m going to use $100,000. So I want to generate a hundred grand in my business over the next six months. What does that look like?
[00:03:30] So now that we have our goal of a hundred thousand, that’s cool, but we don’t just stop there now. We need to actually dial this down and drill this down a little bit. So we actually have some very clear metrics and very clear numbers. So we know, Hey, is our strategies effective? Are we on pace or we off pace?
[00:03:46] So a hundred thousand dollars, if you divide that by the six months that you have to achieve that goal, we now have just over 16 and a half thousand dollars a month. That we have to generate. Okay, cool. Now we know what our monthly target is, but let’s go another [00:04:00] step further. Let’s divide it amongst four months of the year.
[00:04:03] Okay. Now I have a little over $4,000, a week that I now have to generate, right? Four weeks in the month. Now let’s take that a step further. And let’s divide that by the five days in a week, Monday through Friday. That means $833. Okay, so I need to generate $833 in revenue in my business a day over the next six months to achieve that $100,000 goal. So when you reverse engineer those goals down to the monthly, the weekly, and the daily metric, now your question goes, okay, instead of how am I going to achieve this $100,000 mark, like this big lofty goal, that is just really abstract and obscure, and you’re like shit, I don’t know how to do that.
[00:04:49] Now it’s let’s just simplify it down to, how can I generate $833 a day in revenue in my business? If you’re doing tax preparation, if your average net fee is, let’s say it’s $400. That’s [00:05:00] basically two customers a day that I have to acquire. I need to generate two new customers a day in my tax business.
[00:05:05] If you’re a service bureau and you’re selling software, all right say my software license is a thousand bucks. I need to sell one person a day. In order to achieve my goal. So from there, now that you have a metric of what a clear and and very measurable goal is to, in order to obtain that large picture goal, what are the actions now required?
[00:05:24] What’s the strategies that we have to take? If I need to talk, if I need to sell one person at a thousand dollars a day. I probably need to talk to about five or maybe six qualified people to generate that sale, right? So now you can start reverse engineering in the opposite way and start looking at what kind of tasks do I have to take?
[00:05:41] Okay, I need to talk to six people. How do I talk to six people? I probably need to get in front of 20 or 30 people to have six of them book a call on me. So how do I get in front of 20 or 30 people a day?
[00:05:51] Is that social media marketing? Am I running ads?
[00:05:53] Baldeep: fucking Ads.
[00:05:54] Ross: Yeah, into the mic, run some ads. That’s what we, we always get on our members about that, [00:06:00] but run some ads, right?
[00:06:01] Or maybe you’ve got a huge organic following on social media and you can make posts, make call to actions to get people on the calendar with you. So you can talk to those six people a day. So you can close one person a day, five a week. Generate all the sales you need per month. And on that six month basis, guess what you just generate a hundred thousand dollars in your business.
[00:06:21] So starting with the end in mind, it gives you a really clear picture on the metrics that you need to hit. So you have that. It’s like the temperature reading. Am I hot? Am I hitting my goal or is it, am I down below the volume that I need to be doing? Do I need to ramp up my activity to make sure I’m actually hitting those goals?
[00:06:37] So that’s one thing that we always like to start with. And Tia, I’d actually love if you could jump back in. And talk about what you’re, cause you’re, I’m seeing you on social media, you’re out there, you’re crushing it, you’re growing your community, you want to share a little bit about like some, maybe some things that you’ve done in the past or like what you’re doing now with your strategy.
[00:06:55] And just the momentum that you’re seeing and just some of the things that you’ve gone through with implementing different strategies [00:07:00] to really grow your service bureau.
[00:07:01] Tia: Absolutely. A little tip for those who are like goal challenge who may say and get stuck. Oh, what number should I go after? I don’t know what my end goal needs to be. Simply think about what income you have now and what income you want to replace with your service bureau. Use that as a starting figure to say, okay my first goal is to replace what I’m already making because it’s something I don’t want to do and this is something that you desire to do and then make your goals.
[00:07:29] Ross: And then double it.
[00:07:30] Tia: And then, yes.
[00:07:32] Ross: From there. Let’s shoot for the stars. We land in the moon. We’re all good.
[00:07:35] Tia: Yes. And I know that at least for me, I did have when I 1st started this thought of, okay everyone is, selling software, even if I have a goal, how am I going to achieve that goal? But think about it this way, your Service Bureau, we’ll think about a chair. Everyone had a thought about a chair, but every chair looks different.
[00:07:54] It serves a different function and purpose, right? But it’s still a chair. And the willy [00:08:00] chairs are not competing with the wooden chairs. Like everyone still needs a chair. That’s how your service bureau is. Everyone needs a chair. Everyone wants to sit at the table. How can you make your chair unique and different so that you can appeal to that target audience?
[00:08:12] Yeah, so what I’m doing with my service bureau, I’m actually creating community because I’ve realized I love connecting and helping people and I had this moment where I got discouraged because my account got hacked last year and then it was hard to get that following back up. And so eventually I said, you know what, let me just start with 1 thing a day.
[00:08:32] I want to get 1000 people into my community. Let me first start with getting people to know who I am. So I started off with 77 followers, 77 followers, right? And I’m just doing content every day, whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’m just doing it. And people started to connect and attract. And so I’m like nearly at 900 followers and I’ve only been doing it for three weeks, literally.
[00:08:58] Ross: You have 99 [00:09:00] followers already. Holy shit. Nice.
[00:09:02] Tia: In three weeks, but I have people who are organically now signing up for my community because they see, even if it’s 1 person, that’s 1 person I don’t have to pay for now. Sometimes it’s 2, 3 last Monday. I have 5 people just from posting organically and being consistent. And my goal was, I want to have 1000 people follow me, but 1st, Let me start off with one thing and that’s that one post a day, that one real a day.
[00:09:32] So just dissecting that and doing what you enjoy and putting that into your service bureau.
[00:09:37] Ross: Nice. Nice. Love it. Yeah. Congrats on that three weeks. That’s from 77 to 900. That’s all right now your goal you got to do the Grant Cardone 10x that bitch and to go to from a thousand to 10,000 Followers, right?
[00:09:50] Tia: But Ross, I went back and I listened to the training. I’m like, you’re right. Massive action. I don’t need to know. I need one thing, one post.[00:10:00]
[00:10:00] Ross: There you go. Killing it, that there reminds me, there’s this the guy who launched a book recently Baldeep, you know who I’m talking about. In one of his his things, he just talks about like his kind of like little, I don’t, I can’t remember what he calls it, like the rule of a hundred or something where it’s just do one thing.
[00:10:16] Like he said, like a hundred times a day, but that’s more if you’re doing cold calls, it’s like, all right, do a hundred cold calls a day for a hundred days straight and you will see massive results, but it even can just be that one thing. So obviously the amount of work will be different.
[00:10:29] Obviously putting, doing a social post takes a little bit more time, but doing one social post for a hundred days, guaranteed you’re going to see a difference, right? And that is I think we talked about in one of the previous episodes, just like putting in the fucking work.
[00:10:42] That’s what it comes down to put in the work and staying consistent at it. And there you go to generate three weeks.
[00:10:47] Baldeep: As long as you’re clear on your goal.
[00:10:48] Tia: And stay to your course. Yeah. Same thing I was just about
[00:10:52] Baldeep: to say.
[00:10:52] Yeah. Once you’re clear on your goals. Okay, cool. We’re focused on that. We’re implementing. We’re doing the action. Ultimately, [00:11:00] the goal is to have those conversations and make the sales, right? So once you’re getting those consistent conversations. Those consistent booked appointments on your calendar. You want to start looking at creating a repeatable sales process. So what I mean by that is, the people that suck, not suck, struggle, sorry, people that struggle they focus too much on customizing things for everybody, right? We see this a lot, people doing this, and the group are like, no, stop fucking doing this.
[00:11:31] You need to…
[00:11:32] Ross: Yeah. So someone wants to, I’ll give just a quick context, just interject in there, someone talks to a customer and they want, they need hands on tax law training. So the person says, okay I’ll make a custom package where I’ll also do hands on tax law training for this person. And then someone else, they have a conversation with someone else.
[00:11:47] They’re like, oh, I want the virtual classes and I need help with marketing. Okay. I’m going to do a custom program for this person where I do. It’s now you are delivering two different things already between two customers. You cannot scale a business if it’s not consistent, [00:12:00] repeatable.
[00:12:00] Baldeep: So we want to focus our entire sales process on selling one thing, right? That makes it repeatable. That means you can bring on sales reps down the road and you can train them on how to sell the one thing, right? Somebody asked for this, and that, Hey, cool. That’s not a part of our program.
[00:12:16] This is what we offer, right? Or if you have all this stuff. Put it all as part of one sale or, Hey, we have those options down the road. Once you get set up and onboarded in our program, because we want to have our front end sale be consistent. With a consistent lead source, consistent conversations, and a consistent sales process, you can scale a service bureau, right?
[00:12:37] The challenges you’re going to have in having multiple different entry offers, multiple different things up front is not only going to confuse your sales process, it’s going to, you’re going to limit your sales. You’re also going to limit or confuse your fulfillment process, which is a very important piece of your service bureau.
[00:12:58] When somebody comes through the service bureau [00:13:00] accelerator. The process is the same for everybody, right? The process the webinar, the sales call, the signup process. Once you’re signed up, there’s a whole shit of things that happen and it’s consistent, the whole onboarding.
[00:13:15] Ross: Getting access to training, everything is the exact same process.
[00:13:17] Baldeep: The exact same process.
[00:13:19] And that helps you scale. Right now you have team members that’s only responsible for this process, right? If something breaks in this process what happened? Who’s responsible? What were the steps that we’re supposed to do? If you have a custom thing for every customer, how are you going to train a team on that?
[00:13:35] You know it in your head. And what are you going to do with your team members? Not going to read your mind. So these are the things that people overlook, not just in the service bureau business, in any business. Let’s talk about we’re specifically talking about the service bureau is having that repeatable process.
[00:13:51] We talk about it a lot, making money is boring, right? You’re just selling the same damn thing over and over again. And that’s all you have to do, right? You want to make a lot of [00:14:00] money. You sell the same damn thing over and over again. So you can create those systems and processes on the sales side, on the fulfillment side, operation side to build your team so that ultimately you don’t have to do any of that work.
[00:14:12] Tia: And can we talk about the flip side of that? So sometimes Building out different packages and processes for people. Sometimes it’s about what you want to give them, but then also it’s about you targeting the wrong person. So everyone’s pain points are different. If you’re targeting the same type of audience consistently, you’re also not going to run into that situation where you feel like you have to keep building out new systems and new processes, because most of their pain points are going to be similar.
[00:14:45] Baldeep: Right. I think I think one of the, I guess we could use a common thing that we see a lot. Oh, my client wants, all my clients want a business tax training. For the service bureau model, you make money on bank products, not so much business returns. So why are [00:15:00] every single one of your clients wanting that?
[00:15:02] Or are they doing bank products? And our focus is bank products. You don’t make money there. So, who are you talking to? Are you selling people that only do corporations? Because if you are, you’re speaking to the wrong customer, right? That’s, one of the most common ones we see. And I think what people, when we talked about this, I think oh, Sean, our recent coaching call what are your customers asking for?
[00:15:24] What’s a common thing they’re asking for. And if it’s common and it’s relevant, then there’s nothing wrong with creating a product and upselling your customer, right? Ultimately long term, you’re going to make a lot of money upselling your existing customers on things that they need, right? You don’t necessarily need to give them everything for free, right?
[00:15:42] You can say, Hey, okay, cool. Oh, a bunch of my customers are struggling with X, Y, Z. I’ll just give you an example on the service bureau accelerator. Two years last year we saw a lot of people from the year before struggling with making content. Content, even just for simple it’s two examples, one free, one paid we’ll do [00:16:00] the free one first.
[00:16:00] So we saw a lot of people struggling with just creating any type of content for their service bureaus. So like, how do I provide additional value besides tax software? So we did this year, everybody that comes on board, even everybody that’s been here. When you set up your tax nitro count, you get six or seven value asset videos that you can give to everybody as you sell them software.
[00:16:23] So if you’re just selling software, you’re selling all the software features and benefits at whatever price point, maybe it’s low ticket, mid ticket, whatever. But then you also get all this extra stuff to help your tax office grow their tax business. Free of charge. Cool. We saw people struggle.
[00:16:37] Hey, what can I do to be different? All right, cool. Here’s a bunch of stuff to do to be different. And then to the paid side, we saw a lot of people that wanted to do launch tax academies or biz in a box type of trainings. But they struggled on, even though we outlined every single thing, here’s how you lay one out.
[00:16:54] Here’s how you do it, you could do it yourself. Here’s how to come up with all the topics. Here’s how to do everything you need [00:17:00] all the way even to launching a training platform.
[00:17:03] Ross: Literally how to record.
[00:17:05] Baldeep: How to record.
[00:17:05] Ross: How to host them, how to grant access. We show everything.
[00:17:09] Baldeep: But like I’m just not confident maybe in recording it, or I don’t know what to say.
[00:17:14] Or time, right? Some people have
[00:17:15] Ross: This is taking too much
[00:17:16] Baldeep: much time. Look, if you don’t want to record all that, but you want to sell it, here’s a bunch of videos you could buy already pre done for you. Tia recorded a bunch of them, right? So it’s Hey, here’s a bunch of videos you could buy out the box. It’s going to cost you XYZ.
[00:17:33] But it’ll save you this time. You can make it yourself or you can just buy these and do that. If you want to go that route, so go ahead.
[00:17:41] Ross: And then if you want to get really gangster on it, you just sell it ahead of time and then collect people’s money and then use that to buy the training videos.
[00:17:47] Baldeep: Yeah. Hey, you want to go ahead and sell it before you give us any money for it. Here’s a whole presentation on how to sell this thing that you can go sell it, make money, and then use that money to buy it and then deliver it after. So there’s multiple [00:18:00] ways to do it. But again to go back to the best strategies to growing a service bureau, just have to have consistency in your sales process, in your fulfillment process.
[00:18:13] If you try and do too many things, you’re never going to make any money.
[00:18:19] Ross: And I want to drive into that a little bit more. And also like the actual just basic strategies we can talk about some actual tactical stuff for everyone who’s listening. It’s here’s what you can literally go out and just start doing now to actually start having conversations.
[00:18:31] Because I think one of the biggest reasons why a lot of people end up having, they come to us, they’re like, Oh, I got this person who wants this. How do I offer it to them? And then they like, two weeks later, they got, Oh, I’ve got this other person who wants this. The reason why they feel like they have to make that custom deal.
[00:18:47] It’s because it’s the only fucking person they’ve talked to in two weeks. And so they’re so desperate for a sale that they’re trying to do whatever they have to do to generate that sale. And what the actual underlying, [00:19:00] like real problem is there is that they just straight up do not have enough people to talk to, because when you have a very specific program, a very specific package that it is the only thing that you’re selling, yeah, there’s going to be a lot of people you talk to that’s not a good fit.
[00:19:16] But if you have an abundance of people to talk to, if you have a consistent stream of people always coming into your pipeline that you can talk to, have conversations with and make offers to, you don’t care anymore if that person is not a good fit because you’ve got another 200 people who are a good fit that you can talk to.
[00:19:34] And so I think that’s where really some of the fundamentals that people do struggle with is just having enough people to talk to. And so how do we get over that? How do we. Have an abundance of people to talk to when we can have multiple conversations on a daily basis.
[00:19:46] Baldeep: Run fucking ads.
[00:19:49] Ross: So couple of things you can do, obviously, I always like to break it down and like the two things it’s either you have more time than resources, i. e. money, you got more time than money, or you have more money than [00:20:00] time. Usually the strategy is going to break into those two things. So if you have more time than money. And not always, let me also give some caveats there. Some people, there’s other strategies just resonate more with people, right?
[00:20:11] Tia is out there. She’s you know what? I love building communities. I love helping and like coaching people. That’s her thing. And she’s growing a community and I know she’s going to absolutely crush it. Baldeep, and myself while I love coaching people and I do love doing that. I personally hate social media.
[00:20:25] You will not see me doing the shit all on social media because I don’t care for it. I use it as a tool, but I am not going to go and build my own brand. I’m not going to be an influencer. I personally just that is not me. So understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and what, how you would actually want to do some of these strategies, but a couple of things, organic strategies, right?
[00:20:44] Start networking, start prospecting, get online, get in social media, show your personality, present yourself. Be someone that people want to align themselves with, right? And put that out there and be consistent at it. Tia said, every single day, making posts every single day. [00:21:00] First of all, at the end of the day, no matter what we talk about here, it’s all going to take work.
[00:21:02] So you have to take massive action, but you can start with a free organic strategy where you’re just networking prospecting. You could do start your own community. You could go and start engaging with other groups. Don’t be spammy, right? Like you’re not there to just try to sell people shit, provide value, help people, coach people.
[00:21:18] Support people and they’re organically going to gravitate towards you and be like, what is Tia doing over there? Like she’s always helped me out in this group. She’s always answering questions. She seems like she knows her shit. She’s got her shit together. Let me go find out what she’s all about.
[00:21:31] Cause I would love to somehow, if it’s possible, work with her. And then Tia goes, Oh yeah, let me hook you up on this program. They go, Oh sweet. You got software too. I’m in. So that’s an organic strategy where you can do daily active prospecting, be a mentor to people, provide value and shouting groups.
[00:21:47] So that’s one organic strategy. Second strategy is complete opposite. And this is really what we do. This is what Baldeep, and I do, because we know, we just turn the tap on and we generate business, which is running paid advertisements [00:22:00] where we take time to develop our ad copy, develop our ads, and then actually run people through an advertising campaign where they click it.
[00:22:07] We click their name, email, phone number. Now we follow up with them until they either buy from us or they tell us to get lost. And that there’s so many other steps in that as well that we won’t really go into all those details because it could be hours long, but there’s a lot of steps that you need to take all through the prospecting process to get someone from, Hey, they just saw you, maybe they just saw your post on social media, or they just saw your paid ad, whichever one it is all the way through getting them on the phone, having a good conversation with them, presenting your product or program, then converting the deal.
[00:22:38] But those are like the, some foundation I just wanted to cover just on some strategies, how to actually start getting in front of people and actually talking to people once you’re doing that consistently and your calendar is being filled up with multiple booked appointments every single day, guess what?
[00:22:52] Now we’re getting closer to that activity that we need to hit that goal. We talked about at the very beginning of the call, Right? One close a day [00:23:00] over five days a week over, four weeks a month over six months from now. You’re going to hit that six figure goal.
[00:23:07] Tia: And I do want to add to that, that again, I just noticed that they’re just the smallest thing that will hold people up, because I’ve even experienced it myself. If you’re finding that, Maybe sitting down and creating your avatar or your target audience, it’s taking up so much time.
[00:23:22] I’m going to be honest with you. Just get comfortable with communicating with people. Like some, a lot of us are, Oh, by your tax professionals. We’re boring. We used to work in the corner, doing our thing, doing our thing. So before you start to spend hours and days, like getting bogged down with that, start talking to people first, get comfortable with communicating, articulating, being detailed, and being able to have people see your vision.
[00:23:50] Start there first.
[00:23:51] Baldeep: Tia, it’s funny you brought that up, because I remember two years ago, you were all on to me like, Yo, I got, I’m doing this whole thing, I’m gonna make my whole customer [00:24:00] avatar, you’re doing this whole fucking thing. It’s like, Tia, just go talk to people.
[00:24:05] Tia: This is why. So everything that I’m doing.
[00:24:08] Ross: talk to people, you’ll find your customer avatar.
[00:24:10] Tia: You will find it. Once I started talking to people, I realized, you know what? I actually don’t like that. I like this. And I’m telling you because I got drilled by rules. Bible deep. But it does work. It works now. I’m figuring out what I like and what I love.
[00:24:25] And I’m just going in that direction. Everything else is blinders.
[00:24:28] Baldeep: Yup. That’s funny. I think that’s a good place to end it for this episode. So a little plug, cause we didn’t, I don’t think we did it. If you guys want to learn more about Service Bureau Accelerator, want to join the program, join the community of over 500 service bureaus go to ServiceBureauAccelerator.com, register for a webinar go through that process that we just spoke about and we’ll see you
[00:24:53] Ross: See how we do it, first
[00:24:54] Baldeep: Just watch it. I’ll watch the process in action.
[00:24:57] Ross: By the way, once you give us your name, email, phone number, we’re going to keep calling [00:25:00] you. So just be prepared. We practice what we preach.
[00:25:03] Baldeep: Called you a lot. Awesome guys. We’ll catch you on the next one.
[00:25:07] Ross: Take care.
