How To Use Business Networking For Certified Public Accountants
Jassen: Okay. Let’s change gears a little bit and talk about some specific methods for branching out there and getting your name known. Let’s start with some offline stuff. You’ve got here four ways to build your CPA business offline through networking opportunities. Could you go through those real quick?
James: I’d be happy to. In my mind there really are four major ways to go out there and network in the community. You know some people will say, “I’ve got this other obscure one and of course you can definitely come up with those too.” But here are the four ones that I think of when I think about networking.
The first one is you need to be building and marketing your client and prospect database. So basically the strategies that we’re going to talk about when were talking about offline networking really are ways to build that list inside your business so you could continue to market them. It’s not enough to be able to have one-impact marketing. You don’t want to have message go out there once they see once and that’s it. You really want to be able to hit them over and over again so that they know, like and trust you and then they want to become clients of yours. So you need to have that internal list. So that strategies that we’re going to talk about are going to grow that list.
Number one –hands down, join your local Chamber Commerce. It is a great way to meet other business owners which a lot of accounting CPA guys are focusing on, working with business owners. Isn’t that primarily what the market is working with?
Jassen: Exactly, I guess.
James: Yes. So you want to go meet other business owners. You want to go to before hours parties. You want to go to after-hour parties. You want to go and do the actual lead generation group type things. In my opinion a lot of people go there and say, “How many business cards can I collect? How many people can I add to my list?”
I have a slightly different take on it and that is I think you should go and make one or two or three better quality contacts. Have some face time, develop a little bit of relationship, of course exchange business cards; you want to give them your card. You want to collect their cards from them and the only reason to give your business card really is so that you could get their name, address, telephone number and so you could put them on your newsletter list and make sure that they get contact from you on a regular basis from now on. That way when either they need an accountant or when they have a referral who could use an accountant, they think of you first. So that’s really the number two, putting on the list was joining your Chamber of Commerce and that’s a really important one. In your business do you use Chamber of Commerce at all?
Jassen: You know we actually don’t. For those that are listening and don’t know, I’m an enrolled agent and we do tax representation. We operate nationwide and we don’t need this kind of networking type functions. We finally put together a plan however which is very, very recently like literally is a course of week to start doing some of the stuff within our association what not. But now we’ve never taken advantage of the chamber and leads groups and things like that.
James: Okay. They’re very effective especially regarding local business. So if you’re trying to grow your own local business, you’re focusing on that you know, chamber of commerce is another great one. The other one that I found to be highly effective is Meetup.com. Meetup.com for those people that don’t know is a website that has local meetings where you go to on very specific topics. So somebody who wants to start a meet up group about bash fishing or writing books or playing video games or playing board games or anything like that, you can find very specific meet-up groups for a variety of topics.
The ones you probably want to focus on or ones that are more business oriented. So once that you have business owners go into and you could do very similar things you do with the chamber you go to the meetings. You become part of the group. You network with them. Establish good relationships. Get their contact information. Make sure that they’re on your mailing list to get your newsletter and then you grow that relationship over time. Then the great thing about meet-up groups is there so many different ones and you can go out there and join a variety of them and just really connect in at a great level with these guys. So that would be the third one on my list.
Have you used Meetup.com much?
Jassen: Yes, I love meet-up. Maybe two weeks ago I was looking at a bunch of different of meet-up groups just here in the local, the greater Denver area and it really kind of surprise me that the number of individuals that were members of business related meet-up groups was second only to membership for local singles meet-ups. I was really surprised. I thought that it would have been much lower thing behind singles would have been I don’t know maybe hiking and outdoors type groups and maybe parenting and things like that. Business was number two. I was really surprised by that.
James: Yes. A CPA trying to really focus on growing their business, there are plenty of business related meet-up groups that they can join. I realized too that some of your referrals are not necessarily going to be coming from other business owners but they’ll be coming from individuals who happen to know business owners and that they’ll be able to refer business to you as well. So you’re not just going for business owners – I wouldn’t exclude somebody from your newsletter, your list just because they don’t own a business right now.
Jassen: Right. People that … I’m sorry go ahead.
James: I was going to cover the last point but if you want to add something go ahead.
Jassen: Well, I was going to say individuals know other individuals that own businesses even if they don’t own a business themselves.
James: That’s correct, absolutely. Now that ties right into this last point which is volunteer your time and meet other charitable minded individuals. So if you’ve got a great charity or volunteer group, definitely get out there and volunteer. Make new contacts. People tend to give much more credit to people that are willing to go and volunteer their time and be charitable than a business that is not. So if you go out there and you really do it because you want to volunteer because you want to be charitable and you’re meeting these great new contacts that way – they really see you in a great light and they’re much more likely to do business with you by meeting you in that capacity.
Jassen: Great. Those were great ideas. Thanks for sharing those.
James: You’re welcome.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. I strongly recommend you check out The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book.
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