Best Practices for Onboarding Accounting Clients

Jay's goal is to deliver amazing value to select clients rather than OK value to a large number of clients. Jay shares his process on qualifying clients to make sure he can deliver amazing value, with the ultimate goal of being able to interview and select clients, rather than clients interviewing them.


Transcript:
My name's Jay Holmes. I'm a CPA and Co-owner of Blueback Accounting.

So at Blueback, when we first started, we really took any client that walked through the door.

Kind of what we saw was that we had to prequalify clients.

There are certain clients that really work well and that we work well with.

Then, there's the clients that really don't, and, in qualifying clients, what we've realized that we can't be generalists.

We have to be specialists. We can't know every tax software or every bookkeeping software, so what we've decided, as a firm, is to embrace the Quickbooks and the Intuit ecosystem, because being an expert in that allows us to deliver better value.

We don't wanna deliver okay value to a lot of people. We wanna deliver amazing value to a select group of clients.

At Blueback, the steps we take when we get a inquiry of a new client is we send 'em a questionnaire, and what that's used for is to get a temperature of what they value.

Do you use Quickbooks online, or would you be opposed to using an online accounting platform, and we go through a lot of qualifying questions that hopefully give us a sense of is this gonna be a good fit.

What we've created is an opportunity that the client now isn't interviewing us.

They're saying, "I wanna be your client," and it becomes more of an interactive process, and, at the end of that meeting, we really have a contract that says this is exactly what we're gonna deliver, this is how we're gonna do it, and everyone feels like they put their say in it, and it's a really a win-win.