Ben Walker, Founder of Inspire Accountants and High-Performance Accountants shares about learning from his expensive marketing mistakes.
Here’s what he said on the recent ‘Creating a High Performing Accounting Firm’ webinar –
Marketing, this is an expensive one but one that definitely helps with growth.
There are problems at different stages.
Inspire 1.0
I relied on word of mouth only. I had a limited audience, which was my own network and also a limited track record. I remember I was 23 years old, I was sitting with clients who were in their forties, sometimes fifties, and sometimes I was taken as a bit of a joke. So, it took me a couple of years to build a track record and to be okay with being pretty young at the time as well.
And the other thing that I struggled with was having just not much marketing budget. I had to do a lot of things. I chose to do a lot of things myself. I learned digital marketing by doing courses and studying and getting coaching.
Inspire 2.0
I had a core group of clients and they were starting to refer clients, that was a great point. I remember that the magic number was about 12. So, once I had hit 12 clients, they started to come from that client base.
My marketing was reactive when I ran out of leads or had gaps in capacity, burning through cash with a high cost to reach new people. We were doing events in our event space. We were flying to Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne.
In Inspire 2.0, we were spending tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads and room hire and flights. Our marketing was focused on us as a firm, not the client themselves and it came across as a bit salesy at times.
Inspire 3.0
The marketing results are capped by the investment you give in time, team, and resources. So, a good bunch of my time in Inspire was actually spent in marketing. We’ve got Roze, who’s our full-time Marketing Manager and we’ve got two Assistants, Tey and Rons. And also Glaze, my Executive Assistant, does help out with coordination and a few bits and pieces with marketing as well.
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