Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Hi there and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Meryl Johnston. The lifestyle accountant show exists to help today's accounting firm owners build successful firms while also living a healthy, happy life without sacrificing sleep your weekends or time with loved ones. Today I'm talking with Kelly Chart, the founder of Growth MD, which is an accounting firm providing specialized services to medical practices. Growth MD started back in 2018 and now has a team of twelve. Earlier this year, I was at the Slipstream Connect Accounting Conference in Port Douglas. Shout out to Sharon McLafferty and the Slipstream team for putting on an awesome event, and Kelly was invited up on stage to share her story at that event. And within the slipstream coaching community, they share financial metrics and Kelly shared some impressive results. We're not going to mention them publicly on the podcast today, but there was something else that Kelly mentioned that caught my interest and she shared how growthmd uses a waiting list strategy and only runs client intakes at certain times of the year. Sometimes this can result in clients waiting two, three, four months to be onboarded. So I had to get Kelly onto the podcast to explain this strategy.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Originally we didn't have this good sales process, so when I first started the business, I was like, great, I'll get my calendar set up and people will just be able to book in. And you spend so much of your time with the wrong type of clients or with people that really are just looking for answers to their problems and they may or may not pay you at any stage. So I felt like I was really ahead of the time getting calendly, and then I was like, no, I'm turning this off and we're doing a strict process so that the people that thought to me in this process are the people that are serious and the people we want to work with.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: The topics we cover today include the pros and cons of listing a minimum fee on your website. Why you should ask leads what would you love your accountant to do for you? How to avoid giving free advice during the discovery process. Whether to send proposals via email or to go through them on a call with the lead. How to keep clients warm if they're waiting three or four months to be onboarded and the impact on workflow and capacity planning at growthMd. After implementing the waitlist. All that and more coming right up on the lifestyle accountant show, it's Meryl jumping in quickly to let you know the audio quality, unfortunately, is not the same. In this episode I had Internet issues and so some of my sentences are glitching in this episode, so please bear with us. We've fixed it up as best we can, but it's not to the normal standard.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: And now a word from our sponsors.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: This podcast is brought to you by team up, helping you to recruit top filipino accountants without the ongoing monthly fees. They can source accountants with experience working at us or australian firms who are familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dext. They can also recruit specialist roles like bookkeeping team leaders who have leadership experience and australian tax specialists. I recently came on board as an investor and advisor to team up and I love their ethical approach to the offshoring industry where they look after both the accounting firm and the filipino accountants. Make sure to check out the team up newsletter for more content on building top tier accounting teams in the Philippines. That's at hireteamup.com hireteamup.com background why did you get into accounting and why did you start growth md?
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
I've been in accounting since I was about 23, 22, so 20 plus years now. I started off sort of the traditional journey, although it wasn't too traditional because I was working part time in a mid tier firm. I was doing uni part time and I was actually a single mum with a toddler at home at the moment. So it was a super busy start, but really wanted to. At that stage I just wanted to get into tax stuff. I don't know, I was a bit nerdy. Looking back, I wonder what I was thinking. But my whole thing at that time was I wanted to do tax. So I started off in a mid tier firm and was there for a little while, moved to another mid tier firm, had another two children, did my ca over that next sort of 1011 year period. And then I got to sort of my late 30s, mid to late thirty s and I sort of just wanted to do something myself, which I think is probably a pretty common occurrence for women parents.
You get to a point in time where some employers are just a little bit too rigid for you. So I wanted to start my own business, which was growth MD. I had been working with a number of medical professionals and in health for about six years prior to starting growth MD. So I knew that I really loved that space. I knew that the people were good, very empathetic and generally quite caring people and good clients to work with. So when I started my own firm, I said, well, I'll just work with this segment and we'll see how that goes. It was a bit nervy at first because I was thinking oh, my goodness. Am I going to be able to get enough clients?
Am I going to limit myself to one industry? But we went down that track and have never looked back. And it's been about five and a half years now with growth MD.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: But I have to go back to that point in your career early on, working in a firm, studying and a toddler at home. My goodness.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
Looking back now, I think if you're just coming through now in your 20s, it was completely different back then. It doesn't seem like 15 years ago, doesn't seem that long ago, but it's like a lifetime ago in accounting, really. It was like you had to wear a suit and you had to wear stockings. I remember you had to wear stockings to work.
And, yeah, if you wanted to leave early, it was like a begging thing. I had to get special arrangements so that I could leave at ten to five, so that I could catch the train for almost an hour to get to daycare by 06:00 and I'd be the last person running in the door at daycare. It was so different. It definitely was not the family friendly type of workplace that accounting firms of today or many accounting firms of today are. So, yeah, that was a little bit tough. I think the toughest time was after I met my husband and we had two more boys. I've got three boys and doing the CA program, finishing it off because I did it over eight years, which they said to me, come on, you've got to finish now. You've only got an eight year period to do it in. So I had to finish, and I had a baby at home, my third baby and two other kids, and I was still working as well. And, yeah, that was probably the tough point, I think, but got there and got through it, and looking back makes you stronger. Isn't that the same? But I think employers are probably more flexible.
So I think back then I was doing family CA program and probably didn't have the flexibility that employers offer now in relation to work and life. So, yeah, I still think anybody doing it now, you have kids, don't have kids, whatever. It's still tough. Right. So I have a very supportive partner, and he is also a ca. So I think because he'd been there and done that, he knew it was a tough program, and so I did get a lot of support from him as well.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. High five, Steve. Good job over there.
Hear a little bit more about choosing that. So you were talking about, you had some experience in the medical field, but it also felt like a bit of a risk if you limit yourself to only one area of clients when you're starting a new firm. So how did that first year go to client acquisition and making that jump?
[00:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so, look, I would be lying if I said the first year was very structured because I basically decided, and I think this is common, I've heard this from a lot of other people as well. Once you make the decision to go out on your own, it all happens very quickly. You incorporate a company, you get, in my case, a desk in a co working space, and you get your little logo done up and you create a Facebook page. And it all happens so quickly. We actually had a false start. I had a false start. I went with a different name. I didn't go medical specific for the first three months.
Word of mouth got out. I got a lot of medical clients come to me quite quickly anyway.
And then I got some advice from my sales mentor and he said, no, go whole hulk, just do it. And I was like, no, because what if an electrician wants my services and he's saying, look, you've already got clients coming to you. There's a need in this space. You've got specialist skills in this space. Why would you waste your time with electricians or the local news agency? This is your niche, just do it. So I got a little bit of a push that I needed and once we went for it, we never looked back. But I still talk to people often these days that are scared about the whole niche in prospect and will they limit their market, that sort of thing. And we're a small business at the moment. There's twelve of us, there's thousands of medical practices in Australia. We back ourselves, we're good at what we do. So there's always going to be work there for us.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Well done on the three months, although.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Yeah, when I say that though, the three months, it was a wide niche then. So it was medical, dental, the practices and the individuals. And then it got slowly narrowed down. So we sort of dropped market into dental.
We stopped taking salary and wage earners in the health space and then we slowly just focused more on medical practices and then medical practices of a certain size and of a certain mindset. So, yeah, similar to being ninjas, I guess, in that the niche slowly got narrower and narrower over the years.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: And so you talked about having word of mouth referrals in those early days. I've also seen that you're quite active, talking about medical related topics in going from just word of mouth. Or maybe it still is word of mouth. Where did you start to attract more and more clients, or what were the strategies that worked for you?
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think fairly early on, we decided that we'd go with a content led strategy and started doing quite a lot of video on LinkedIn. And this was five years ago, when not that many people were doing video five years ago and started giving away a lot of information that traditionally accountants hadn't given away to these people and these businesses. So that's how we started. And since then, we've basically kept with the same strategy, and we've had a fairly specific sort of follow on from that strategy or where that leads. The referrals that we get now are probably. They are probably split equally between our networks. So our colleagues and referrals that we work with and probably about 50% of people that we don't know that are coming through, mainly through LinkedIn and some other Facebook chat groups. Industry specific chat groups. Yeah.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: That's great. I've watched a lot of your videos, and you were very early in doing that, and I always liked how concise they were. So I was watching just out of interest. I thought, this is a good way to create content. This is not a 20 minutes webinar. This is really concise nuggets of information that would be relevant for your target audience in the medical space. But I was finding it interesting, just as another accountant in the industry.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it was so easy to do in that it was quick turnaround. So I might think of something during the week, or there might be a question that came up in the media during the week to do with the industry, or some sort of tax issue specific to the industry, and then I would set my iPhone up and record my three minute, two minute, 30 video, subtitle it, and then we'd upload it the next day. So it was a quick turnaround. It didn't cost anything for me to do at that stage, so there was no marketing or production budget, and it was really effective. And the other thing that's great about it is still to this day, you can turn it on or turn it off as the pipeline needs and as the capacity in the firm sort of goes up and down.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: And I think it might have been a little while ago now, but go along to some kind of events. I'm not sure if it was medical conferences.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Although to be fair, most of our prospects and inquiries are coming from online. It's not a whole lot about in person, and I see some of the in person conferences, more to meet our clients from around Australia that we haven't met in person to catch up and just to find out what other people are doing and what other vendors are doing. So it really has been online and then those events are just, I guess a little bit of cherry on touch stuff that the team also enjoys as well. And I bring back so much info from those medical conferences, just talking to different people about what's going on, what their pain points are, and then that actually also gives us more information about what's on people's minds to then produce some more content. If we need to get some more content out there.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: We use a similar strategy at bean industry, particularly Wayne from our team. He goes to a lot of e commerce events in person. Occasionally we'll host a dinner or a drinks event just for our clients to meet each other as well. But a lot of it is just knowing what's happening in the industry, knowing the issues at the moment, what's top of mind, and just making sure that what we're saying is resonating.
[00:15:06] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And some of the accounting conferences are great, but I think if you're an accountant only going to accounting conferences and you have a niche or a specialty interest area, then yeah, you're doing yourself a disservice by not attending those events outside your own industry.
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[00:16:12] Speaker A: That's taxvalet.com.
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[00:16:27] Speaker A: Now let's get into your sales process. When I heard that you had a waiting list, I'll let you describe it.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Yes. So everything we try and funnel through the website, so whether that's something we've put online on LinkedIn or if we've done a mail out to our list or something like that, everything comes back through the website. Because once the client gets to the website, they'll see a couple of things there that will potentially make them drop out at that stage if they're not a good fit, and that's usually the waiting list. So they know that things aren't going to happen straight away. And this is a process. And also our minimum fees. So we've got a fee on our website, which is basically the floor fee for a medical practice. And if the prospect or the client is not going to meet that and has reservations about that, then they're not the client that we're looking for and we can't service them the way we want to. So on the website, we basically just have that. We have a waiting list register here to express your interest and it will have when our next intake of clients is. So at the moment we've got a little bit of capacity, we're a bit further through our work and we've got a new team member. So we actually had an intake this month, but after that intake we will then update our wording and it might be March or April that we'll do another intake. So that sets that expectation there so they know when it's going to happen and the minimum fees there.
[00:18:03] Speaker A: So if they're twelve months behind on their taxes and they urgently need something turned around in three weeks, then it might not be the right fit.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
I think the people that are interested in probably a longer wait time and a more in depth Discovery relationship building process before we onboard them generally tend to be the ones, the clients that we want to work with. And you probably know this too, as you just mentioned, the clients that generally come to you straight away and want to start right now, there's usually an issue or they've dropped the ball on something or there's been an issue with the other accountant or something like that. So yeah, I guess we rule out those issues by having that weight.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: And roughly what is that minimum fee that you put on the website?
[00:18:53] Speaker B: So at the moment it's around six and a half $1,000. So that's enough to rule out sort of sole trader sort of loan, small contractors and those sorts of professionals that we're probably not ideal for. Look, I will say that there is one little problem with that, is that sometimes people get that number stuck in their head. So then when we go through to a proposal stage, they've got six and a half thousand, and there might be a lot more work than six and a half, $1,000 worth of work. So that's where it becomes quite important.
Other parts in the process where we start having some more fee conversations. Yeah.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: So what happens next? So someone fills out form and what type of questions? Because I always find it tricky of how long to make those inquiry forms, because more information the better. But if you make it too long, then maybe that's frustrating.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: So I think there's two questions on the form. One is, tell us a little bit about your needs. And one is, what would you love your accountant to do for you? And what would you love your accountant to do for you? Is usually the one where people will state what they're not happy with in their present arrangement. So that might be, I want proactive tax planning, or I want extra advice, services about profitability in my business.
So there is some extra things that we can garner from that form, but the form really is just the first mini step. I think the most important part of the process comes after the form submission. So after the form submission, Kelly and our team and other Kelly will basically do a triage process. So that involves looking at the form, doing some online browsing.
We can get quite a bit of info from online, particularly because we're looking at business clients, so we can see the size of that practice.
We can see what their website is like. Are they online bookings and is there some tech stuff in their website? What kind of services? Are they just gp, or do they offer some other really cool services or value add services? So there's a fair bit of info we can garner from looking at that website, which is a good first step for us.
And then Kelly will have the triage call with them, which is usually in the first 48 hours after the submission. And this is, I think, the most important piece of the puzzle, because this is really like the triage. Are we going to take this any further? So Kelly will, number one, try and find out what sort of client they know. Are they a nice person, basically?
Are they nice to talk to? Are they friendly, the people that everybody wants to work with? So that would be, number one. She'll find out where they came from. So if they're already in our network, then they're more likely to be a better client or a better prospect if they're working with our known suppliers and that in the network, in the industry. She'll talk to them around the fees again. So reiterate the fees and what sort of ranges you might be looking at for your size of business. She'll get some background on structure, what software they're using, how many owners is there, is there additional services they need. So she'll collect all of that information for me, and then we will meet, post that, and she will have her initial gut feeling, I guess we'd call it. Look, this person, they were a little bit rude on the phone. I'm not sure if that was just them having a bad day, but just want to let you know, they also said that they didn't think that they would be willing to pay the fee, so therefore, that's obviously a no, we're not going any further, but there's just all those pieces of information that we then say, okay, yep, that's great. And we can then schedule when a discovery call will happen, if it will happen. Kelly also requests all the financial data from the clients prior to that next discovery session.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: What about those that make it to the discovery process? How do you run?
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Yeah, so Kelly's already requested all those financials.
So going into that, that's usually with me or another of the other couple of senior people in the business.
So going into that, we should have their structure, their financials, what services they need. Do we have any reservations about them being a good client to work with? Do they have any reservations about fees or other issues?
Hopefully not, because then they shouldn't have really come to that stage. But sometimes some slip through occasionally. So we should be armed with all of that information so that when we get that half an hour discovery meeting, we are ready to go. So I'm not spending my time trying to find out if this is a good fit. I'm spending my time working out how are we going to work together and what services are we going to be working on and what proposal am I going to put together and how am I going to price this up?
[00:24:06] Speaker A: I love that, that there's someone else in the team that's doing a lot of that initial background work. I know some firms do a paid discovery phase, some don't. What's your approach?
[00:24:19] Speaker B: If they've gone through that process and they look to be a good long term client and somebody that's our ideal client, basically, we do a half an hour discovery meeting. There won't be any fee for that. If at some point in that process it looks like they want one off advice or we have some other reservations, sometimes we will go to a meeting stage, but it would be a paid meeting, particularly for one off advice because we often get people coming through saying, look, I'm happy with my accountant, but I really need somebody that's a specialist in this industry just to advise me on these matters so that's paid advice. We won't want to be giving away our time under the guise of a discovery for a long term relationship when it's just a one off advice piece. So those ones are paid. But yeah, so we do that. And look, the idea is it's only meant to be half an hour because we're already armed with all the information. And it's really that meet and that scoping stage. There is times I'll get to the end of that discovery meeting and think, I still feel like that something's not quite right here and I'm not going to go and spend our time putting together a proposal and going to the next stage again. So we have to reiterate, these are our fees, this is how we work. What are you looking for?
And sometimes it ends there as well.
But I'd rather have that than go through and do a proposal and do the follow ups and that only to have them turn around say no. Actually, we're not comfortable with the arrangement.
So there's lots of those checkpoints along the way, making sure everything's a good fit.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: The part where you're talking about the one off advice resonated with me. I think a lot of accountants sales process will be them selling their technical expertise. And so they'll give a lot of great advice away in that initial meeting as a way of conveying how they can help. But then sometimes it is only one particular problem that the client's looking for and they've not been able to charge for that.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
You're so right. I think that's so common. And I used to do that as well. Originally, we didn't have this good sales process, so when I first started the business, I was like, great, I'll get my calendar set up and people will just be able to book in. And you spend so much of your time with the wrong type of clients or with people that really are just looking for answers to their problems and they may or may not pay you at any stage. So I felt like I was really ahead of the time getting calendly, and then I was like, no, I'm turning this off. And we're doing a strict process so that the people that talk to me in this process are the people that are serious and the people we want.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: To work with related to the beaning's sales process, just briefly. So when we started, we had pricing tiers on our website with a buy now, not even a calendar option, straight to pay to set up a recurring subscription. And then we quickly realize okay, don't buy bookkeeping like that. They want to meet you first. They want to have a conversation. They're not committing to ongoing monthly services without some kind of contact to know who you are, especially with a new business with no social proof. So we stopped that. And then it was me on sales calls. Well, for many years, actually.
I did consulting before beaningers, so I'd do consultative selling. So basically explore all their finance systems, go through all their problems, and then figure out how I was going to solve them, which is not how you sell a standard scope monthly bookkeeping service. We went off down a lot of tangents and rabbit holes until I read the book sell actually really helped me where it compared the consultative selling, where you're just trying to add problems and then help with a solution compared to if you have a product which already defined, and then you're trying to find people that want what you're selling rather than adapting your service to fit what every unique person needs.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a trained skill, too, because when someone comes to you with a problem, you naturally want to solve it and you know the answer. So it's really difficult sometimes to not solve it right then and there. And they're probably going to walk away and think, wow, Kelly was really smart. She gave me the answer straight away, but she's a bit expensive. I might go back to my accountant around the corner now. So, yeah, it's a hard one because you have to balance that, really wanting to help people and demonstrate your expertise while focusing on this is a process, and I'm not here to give free support.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: When you get to that proposal phase, how are you sending that?
[00:29:11] Speaker B: Yeah, so it will depend on the client. After the discovery call with me or with the other senior team members, there is a follow up notes email that has to happen within 24 hours of the original discovery meeting. So that will go through a recap of our understanding of the needs and their situation and their pain points. So why they came to us, and it will might sometimes have some follow up questions for them, or it will sort of say, we're going to proposal and you will receive this in three days time or two days time.
So that's good. We try and do that while it's fresh in our mind. They get it and they think, wow, these people are really organized. They've listened to me, they've captured all that information, they understand what I want, and they've gotten back to me quickly and then post that.
We would then move to proposal stage. So some clients will come back from that and say, yes, you captured everything. Actually, I've thought about, or I've spoken to my business partner and I think we'd be interested in doing monthly meetings for some extra advice as well. Can you include that in the proposal? Some will just come back and say, that's great. Some we just go straight to proposal stage four. So the proposal is we use ignition, which is fairly common these days.
We do that proposal up and then we would send that to them, usually with a loom video explaining the proposal and the value in each of the services, particularly some of the non compliance services.
I learned early on that I understand what an advisory meeting and benchmarking and quarterly reporting means, but the clients generally have no idea what that means to them and how that's going to help them. So giving them a bit more of a context around how we'd meet, what we'd talk about, the kind of things that we would benchmark verbally in a loom video helps with that process.
And then that's basically where I finish the proposal stage, and it goes back to Kelly, who was involved in the initial stage to do the follow up to acceptance, through to onboarding.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: And at what stage are you saying what their start would be? I know through that waiting list process, you give them a bit of an idea of when that next intake is.
When do you confirm when we're going to be on boarded?
[00:31:42] Speaker B: Yeah. So usually if we've gotten to a discovery stage, you would usually want to get there within and have four to eight weeks until onboarding starts. So it depends how long that initial process has taken, how long it's taken us to get to discovery. The initial phone call from Kelly, the triage call and the discovery can sometimes be a little while apart, one because of the waitlist, but also because the practice owners tend to be quite busy and I'm trying to do less after hours meetings. So we tend to phase that out a little bit. We keep them warm. We don't just leave them and say, we'll come back in two months. We've got a meeting in two months because we know by that time they've probably moved on. So Kelly will keep in contact with them and be requesting information and that sort of thing in the meantime. But, yeah, so we generally want to have to like a four to eight week time frame. But I've been having conversations now with people that will start in July next year.
So it can vary depending on the client and depending on that capacity and where we are at that point in time, the waitlist can actually be different for different clients as well. So at the moment we've got capacity for some compliance services, which is the intake we're taking now, but we don't have capacity for some of the extra advisory services or the business improvement services. So if they wanted those services, there might be a longer wait.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting too. I interviewed a guy recently, Alex, from tax valet, and so he's one of the only other people I know in the industry who has a waiting list like what you're talking about, and he does just sales tax compliance in the US, but he ranks his clients in terms of how hard they are. So a, B and C clients. So if they can only take a certain number of hard clients per month because only the senior team members can have those. So similar to what you mentioned, the waitlist times vary depending on how complex that particular client is.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And look, I mean, it's not probably nice to say in case there's any clients and prospects that listen to this, but everybody has their aaa plus ideal ideal client. So there is going to be some flexibility in the waitlist depending on if my best ever ideal client walks through the door. I'm not going to say see me in six months. I'm going to find a little bit of wiggle room and look. That's the part that's the beauty in having a waitlist is you're not going to work with everybody that comes in and you're going to use the waitlist process to, I guess, weed people out but also manage your team and your capacity, but also have that wiggle room so that if your dream client comes in you can work with them. You don't sort of join the waitlist at the bottom and know wait your number to go through. Basically, yeah.
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And what has the impact been like from a capacity perspective with your team and onboarding new clients?
I can get interested to hear it from you.
[00:35:57] Speaker B: Yeah, look, I don't know that we've got it 100% right yet because there's always that fluctuating. You think you have extra capacity so you will take on x number of new clients onboarded in this period and then something big comes up and you have multiple clients at once wanting to buy new businesses or sell businesses and things. So it is always tricky. I don't know that you're ever going to get it 100% correct, but I know that we have gotten through our work this year quicker than normal. So we've gotten through most of our compliance work we will have by Christmas, which is something that didn't happen in previous years because we've got new team members. So that snuck up on me a little bit quicker than I had expected. So because we have people there on that waitlist that basically we know want to go, we can bring them in and bring them forward so we can start onboarding new clients. The onboarding, as you would know, the onboarding stage, it's so time consuming. It might be different for different businesses, but you want to make that experience the best that you possibly can. So you want to do it really well. There's sometimes things that you didn't know about or that pop up, hopefully not too many, but there's occasionally things that happen that require extra time and input and yeah, you want to kick it off. Well, I think that's the other advantage of the waitlist, is that you can actually plan for that onboarding. So it's not a new client just coming to you in your busy period. And yeah, we can do your work. We'll onboard you now. And it's a bit of a half ass attempt because you're doing it when you're at peak busy season. It's more. I know that we've got capacity now. I know I'm going to be able to do a really good job and go through the onboarding process with the client in a systemized, organized manner and make that experience really good for them. I don't know that any of us have got it 100% right, but we're also a work in progress with making that onboarding experience the best it can be. And I think we're getting better all the time at that. I guess my fee wise, I'm sort of nearing capacity now, so it's time to have other people join the business and other people in the business step up.
The growth over the last twelve months has been a lot slower and a lot more deliberate because you can only sustain that fast growth for that first sort of few years before things start having to slow down. But that's actually been a really great experience too because we've really been able to focus on our client list. So who do we want on that client list? So if you can only have a couple of million dollars of fees, who is that couple of million dollars of fees made up of and then working on processes as well to make that couple of million dollars of fees the most profitable that it possibly can be.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: You touched on something interesting there that you're thinking about strategy and what the future might look like. What's ideal future look like for you personally? So I'm interested to see what you're striving for over the next couple of years.
[00:39:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I'm a little bit of a contradiction, Meryl, because I have these plans of what I think my future will look like. But then I love some days just getting in the weeds with the clients, going through their numbers and those sorts of things. So look, I think I'm just doing more and more advice work with clients. So working on business improvement and board of advice type services and I also work with on a consulting basis with some larger corporates and sort of health tech companies. So I think that's probably in my future. But I love growth. MD as you probably love being ninjas, you grow and evolve within the business and your role as yours has been, you grow and evolve in the business and you don't want to leave it, but you don't necessarily want to be reviewing tax returns or that sort of thing for forever. And look, I love the sales component of the business.
To me that is the fun, really fun side of the business. If I could just do sales all day, that sales process, making videos, writing blogs, I would be a happy person. And then maybe one day a month I might review a tax return or something.
And it's just because you naturally gravitate to what you like to do. It's so easy just to focus on that one side of the business. So about, I think it was about two to three years into growthmg we had the best sales process and we were onboarding clients and it all looked so great, but all the work was coming in and then somebody had to do all the work and all the processes at the other end were not ready. And it was almost like that production line where I kept putting work on the conveyor belt, but it was sort of not really. It was all clogging up down the conveyor belt. So we had to actually really delve into the business in probably year three and four and really work on processes, team training and some of those things to make sure that that conveyor belt, that work sort of was streamlined to the end.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: Well, that sounds like a topic for another podcast episode.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: Thanks so much for coming on today. We're almost at time. It's been really interesting, and I appreciate you walking us through in detail. So thank you so much for coming on. Is there anything that you wanted to say to wrap up around sales, marketing, niching, anything like that? I know you've got a ton of knowledge.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Just in terms of know, the biggest thing that helped me was getting a sales mentor early on. So I don't know if you know Wayne, who I work with, Wayne Schmidt, but he helped me very early on in accountability. So he helped me put the process together. But it was also the accountability of having somebody sit with you in those early stages each week and saying, what's in the pipeline? Have these people been followed up? Did you do this? Did you follow the process? And when I deviated from the process, we would lose that prospect and he would pull me up on that. And then he went on to work with my team as well and Kelly to upskill her on her pieces of the process as.
Yeah, if I was, if you're in a business and you needed to focus on that, I would probably get some help or some accountability from somewhere.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: Amazing. And if anyone wanted to get in touch with you or watch some of these LinkedIn videos, I mean, we'll drop your LinkedIn profile in the comments, but is there anywhere else that you'd recommend getting in touch or where they can follow your content?
[00:42:53] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, primarily LinkedIn. If you wanted to see how we do blogs and our waitlist process and that, of course, go to the growthmd website.
Yeah. And I'm happy to lend an ear or have a chat with anybody that's got some questions around niche in and that sort of thing and help on that journey.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: It was lovely chatting with Kelly on the show today. I know lots of accountants are selective about who they work with, but I don't know of many firms that can ask their clients to wait two or more months to be onboarded. There are a couple of things that stood out in the conversation from my perspective today, and the first was the grit needed for Kelly to complete the CA program while also working and bringing up three children. I think the accounting industry still has a way to go in making the profession attractive, but if I look back to my days as a graduate accountant where, as Kelly said, you had to ask for permission if you wanted to leave at ten to five, I think we have come a long way in terms of flexible work conditions since then. Most of the episode was spent talking about the mechanics of running the waiting list strategy, something that we didn't spend a lot of time on. But I think that is important is that unless you've got a great reputation, the waiting list strategy is not going to work. In order to have people willing to wait, not only do you need a great reputation, but you also need some kind of marketing engine so that you're generating more leads than you need. As Kelly described, there's a lot of places for leads to drop off in this process before they become a client. But I think ultimately it means in Kelly's case, she's working with more clients who fit her ideal client profile than I think many other firms would be. I also like the way Kelly's been able to hand over most of the sales process to her team, and that's a combination of, as she said, the other Kelly, handling the triage process with new clients, also gathering documents before the discovery meeting and chasing a proposal tools afterwards. So she's got a lot of assistance in running that sales process, and also she's trained a couple of other senior team members on handling those meetings, too.
