For a number of years I made my living trying to help accountants market their practices. This may have been an odd choice of profession because, as I eventually discovered, most of my customers weren’t particularly interested in marketing. They were certainly interested in getting more clients. They just weren’t all that enthusiastic about doing the things required to get them.
I Built Them a Marketing Machine
Sometime around 2005, I started building what eventually became a fairly elaborate marketing system for accountants and other small professional firms. The basic idea was simple enough. An accountant usually had plenty of expertise, but not necessarily a steady reason to stay in front of clients and prospects throughout the year. I thought I could give him those reasons, preferably already packaged so that marketing wouldn’t become another full-time job.
That simple idea produced a ridiculous number of things. There were customized newsletters, small-business workbooks, special reports accountants could send to clients, postcards, marketing lessons and seminar packages. If an accountant wanted to give a seminar, I even supplied promotional material to help him fill the room. New material appeared regularly because I wanted members to have something useful waiting for them throughout the year rather than join a website, download everything in sight and disappear.
I also wanted some of the material customized for each professional and released automatically over time, but I couldn’t find software that did what I wanted. So I hired a programmer in Pakistan. He hadn’t encountered anything quite like it either, and we figured out what the damned thing needed to do while he built it. Whether we were actually early with the idea I don’t know, but we were early enough that neither one of us knew where to buy what I wanted.
Then the Damned Things Started Breeding
Because I have never been particularly good at leaving one idea alone, the product family began breeding. I bought artwork, including Ron Leishman’s cartoons built around that old nickname for accountants, bean counters. The cartoons could go into newsletters, but once I owned the artwork I began wondering what else it could become. Accountants had clients who sometimes brought children into the office, so I made a Bean Counters coloring book that could occupy the kids while Mom and Dad discussed taxes. Later I produced a 192-page Bean Counters Cookbook that an accounting firm could customize and give to clients, where I imagined it sitting in somebody’s kitchen quietly reminding them who their accountant was.
Neither idea exactly caused a stampede. I also tried variations of customized marketing material aimed at convenience stores, restaurants and bars, construction companies, auto-body shops, childcare businesses, veterinarians and medical practices. Those didn’t set the world afire either, although I apparently required quite a bit of evidence before accepting that the world was not waiting impatiently for my next marketing product.
They Came Every Week
The accountants themselves were giving me a different kind of evidence. For years I held a weekly group consulting call for clients, and those calls were jammed. Week after week they came, so there was certainly interest in growing their practices and enough perceived value in the sessions to keep people attending. What I gradually noticed, though, was that showing up to talk about marketing and going away afterward to actually market were two entirely different activities.
The conversations had a tendency to drift toward accounting. They liked talking about clients, tax problems they had untangled and whatever other accounting exploits had occupied their week. I don’t mean that critically; accounting was what they knew, and they were comfortable talking about it. But we were supposedly gathered to improve their marketing, and I gradually came to believe that many of them were hoping marketing contained some trick I could reveal that would cause new clients to appear without requiring quite so much of the repetitive, uncomfortable work involved in finding them.
I Was Selling Plans. They Wanted Miracles.
A plan says send this to your clients, contact these prospects, hold this seminar, follow up with those people, and then get up next month and do another round of it. A miracle says there must be something Kirk knows that will make the telephone ring without requiring all that damned carrying on.
There was one fellow named Ralf Reinberg in New Jersey who increasingly fascinated me because he actually did the work. Ralf didn’t merely come to the calls and discuss marketing; he took ideas away and did something with them. Over time I came to admire the way he worked at marketing because the weekly calls were giving me plenty of opportunities to see how unusual that behavior was.
Eventually Ralf stopped coming to the calls, but not because he had decided the ideas were useless. He got too busy. Somewhere in there is one of the better reviews my consulting ever received: the fellow who actually followed the marketing advice became too occupied with his business to keep attending meetings where we talked about marketing.
Then I Discovered They Weren’t Using the Damned Thing
The same odd behavior eventually appeared in a form I couldn’t ignore. After I closed the larger membership operation, I continued selling customized monthly client newsletters to accountants as a subscription. The accountants bought them, I produced them every month, and by the traditional rules of commerce this looked suspiciously like a successful product. Customer wants newsletter, customer gives Kirk money, Kirk supplies newsletter. Everybody goes home happy.
Then I began interviewing the customers and discovered that many weren’t sending the damned newsletters to their clients. They weren’t complaining about them, demanding refunds or telling me the product was bad. They were paying for a marketing tool every month and then, as best I could determine, not performing the final act required to make the tool useful.
That bothered me enough that I eventually stopped selling the newsletter. Looking back, I suppose I could have continued collecting the subscription money. I was delivering exactly what I promised, and a businessman might reasonably argue that what the customer did afterward was his own affair. But I hadn’t created the newsletter because I had some deep desire to manufacture PDFs. The newsletter was supposed to give an accountant a reason to stay in contact with a client, and a newsletter sitting unused on an accountant’s computer wasn’t doing that.
There Was One Part I Couldn’t Automate
Looking through these old files twenty years later, I can see how much of the business was built around trying to remove obstacles between the accountant and marketing. We solved customization. We solved PDF production. We built timed delivery. We kept producing new material. If an accountant wanted to hold a seminar, I didn’t merely give him the seminar; I supplied material to advertise it. If he needed something useful to send clients, there were reports. If he wanted another reason to contact them next month, something else would be waiting.
But there was one part of the machinery I never managed to automate: the customer eventually had to do something. I could deliver the newsletter to the accountant, but I couldn’t make him send it. I could provide the seminar and promotional material, but I couldn’t make him stand in front of a room and give it. I could create the postcard, but somebody at the practice still had to get the thing into the hands of a prospective client.
Twenty years later, that strikes me as a more interesting business lesson than whether my Bean Counters Cookbook was a good idea. We spend a great deal of time asking whether customers want a product and whether they’ll pay for it, and those are certainly useful questions if you have developed the troublesome habit of eating. But perhaps we should spend a little more time asking what the customer has to do after buying the product before the promised benefit happens.
Buying something and using it are different behaviors. My accountants wanted more business, and many wanted it badly enough to pay me to help them get it. They attended the calls, bought the newsletters and collected the marketing materials. But many seemed to want the result more than they wanted the process that produced the result, while Ralf did something different. He took the ideas, did the work, and eventually became too busy to keep coming around to talk about doing the work.
Twenty Years Later, Here I Go Again
Now, because the universe apparently enjoys recycling its jokes, I find myself in 2026 building The Old Gits Website. We have stories, cartoons, a newsletter in development, a book waiting in the wings and God only knows what we’ll invent next Tuesday. We’re even thinking about releasing things over time so people have a reason to come back, which sounds remarkably familiar now that I’ve spent a morning digging through twenty-year-old files.
There is one important difference. Back then, much of what I created depended on somebody standing between me and the person I ultimately hoped would see it. I made the newsletter, but the accountant had to send it. I made the seminar, but the accountant had to give it. This time I can make something, press Publish, and throw the damned thing directly over the fence.
That eliminates the accountant standing in the middle, but it doesn’t eliminate what Ralf taught me. I can write the thing, build the website, make the cartoon and push the button. I still can’t make anybody on the other side give a damn.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s your job.
Well, hell.