The second book that impacted me these past few weeks is “High Tech, High Touch”.  I’ll sum it up with this statement:

The more High Tech we become, the more High Touch we crave.

I’ve been really pondering what that means for my new tax firm, Diane Kennedy’s Tax Services.  Part of the reason that the model works so well is that we’re able to hire much better than average CPAs.  You might not know this, but there has been a shortage of CPAs for years.  If you have a CPA firm, you have to either settle for less experienced or less qualified or pay more money.  And of course, if you pay more, you have to pass that on to your clients.  

I’ve struggled with how to make money with a CPA firm for years.  But then I started moving to a more virtual, commoditized way of providing services.  Clients have clear understanding of what things will cost.  There is a flat monthly amount - no matter if you have 1 question a month or 1 question a day or no deals to analyze or a dozen to analyze.  You pay the same.  Most people like no surprises.  Plus, we value bill.  In other words, we don’t bill you by the hour.  If you ask a question that takes us 100 hours to research, it’ll still cost you the same flat fee.

And the other part that works is that we went completely virtual.  Our people all work from their own homes.  We’ve been able to attract a better experienced, more entrepreneurial CPA that way.  And that means we’ve got happier people for our clients.

But it also means that we’ve gone High Tech.  So, how do we add the High Touch back into our business?

These are some of the things we’re doing immediately:

-  Publish my email address.  I’m at Diane@TaxLoopholes.com.

-  Starting after the seminar, do regular coaching calls for my clients.  I’m thinking that we’ll do that weekly, but need to see if that makes sense.  We’ll tape them if someone can’t make it.

-  Send at least 2 cards per day out - a thank you, nice talking to you, how’s the weather, whatever type of unexpected card.  

My husband, not to be outdone, has started to do this as well.  

Now here is the amazing thing.  I have done a lot of research on the results when you put a campaign like this in place.   If you spend $10/week on 2 cards/day for 5 days/week for 6 months, you’ll increase your business income by AT LEAST 20%.   Most of the cases I saw were actually higher than that.

I’ll keep you posted on the results.  One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that RIchard and I are having a lot of fun sending cards out.  I’ll give you a link in a few days for the source we found.  I’m having trouble with the link right now and don’t want to post it until I know it’s working right.