The IRS recently announced that, starting next year, they will require registration, testing, and licensure of tax return preparers.
What? You didn’t know that the guy at Wal-Mart doing your taxes wasn’t licensed?
Nope, he’s probably not.
The retail tax return preparation industry has operated for decades with no oversight from the federal government. Retail tax preparation companies are left to their own devices to train their employees. Many of these folks are seasonal employees with very little actual tax training. I worked one tax season for a major retail tax chain, and I was appalled at the lack of training and low level of tax knowledge of most of the people I worked with. For the most part, most of the folks doing taxes in strip malls and other places across America only know how to run the computer software, not actually do a tax return. It’s a very scary proposition.
While I am generally opposed to most forms of government intervention in the lives of private citizens and most businesses, this is a change that I actually think is too long in coming. As a case in point, the Government Accountability Office recently mystery shopped 19 franchisees of major chain tax prep firms. Here is the verbatim report from the GAO study:
The GAO study targeted 19 outlets of chain commercial tax return preparation firms.27
The GAO staff asked tax return preparers at those 19 outlets to prepare federal tax
returns under one of two scenarios for which staff from the GAO, Senate Committee on
Finance and the Joint Committee on Taxation had previously completed tax returns and
agreed upon the contents of the return and the correct amount of tax.
According to the GAO, only two of the 19 tax return preparers had the correct tax
liability and refund amounts on the return they prepared and all 19 tax return preparers
made a mistake on the prepared returns. Although most of the 19 tax return preparers
included all income for which a payor had an information reporting requirement, three
tax return preparers reported incorrect amounts of ordinary dividends or capital gain
income. Eight of 19 tax return preparers reported the shopper’s prior year’s state tax
refund incorrectly. Several tax return preparers did not ask about income from sources
other than wages and, although all tax return preparers were told that there was income
from casual self-employment arrangements, 10 of the 19 tax return preparers did not
report this income as required. Several of the tax return preparers who did report this
income on the returns they completed did not provide the shopper with correct
information. One tax return preparer told the shopper that she did not have to report the
income unless it was more than $3,200. Others advised that the shopper had discretion
on whether to report this income because the IRS would not know about the income
unless it was reported.The tax return preparers also made mistakes when it came to claiming the proper
amount of credits and deductions. For example, 10 shoppers were entitled to a credit
for child care expenses for their shopper, but none of the tax return preparers who
prepared a return for these shoppers claimed the credit. Although nine shoppers would
have benefitted by itemizing their deductions, two of the nine tax return preparers who
prepared their returns only claimed the standard deduction. Of the seven tax return
preparers who did itemize their shopper’s deductions, five prepared returns claiming an
incorrect amount of deductions. Six of these nine tax return preparers also erred in
determining the amount of education credit to claim for the shopper. The 10 tax return
preparers who were presented with an earned income tax credit scenario also made
significant errors. Only one of these 10 tax return preparers asked all of the required
questions and half of the 10 tax return preparers incorrectly reported that GAO’s
shopper was entitled to the earned income tax credit for two children when the shopper
was only entitled to claim the credit for one of her children.
So, again, the question: Who is preparing YOUR tax return? I hope and pray that it’s not some moron crammed into a cubicle at Wal-Mart, especially if your tax situation is anything more complicated than a couple W-2’s from a job or two and maybe your child tax credit or something. If you have investments, Earned Income Credit, Alternative Minimum Tax issues, a small business — anything even remotely sophisticated — please have your return done by a licensed professional. By this I mean either a Certified Public Accountant (CPA – licensed by the states) or an Enrolled Agent (EA – licensed by the IRS directly). You will most likely pay a few dollars more, but trust me, it’s worth it.
If you would like a review of an already filed tax return, or need to have your tax returns filed, please contact me directly at 866-627-7654, and I’ll help you out on this.
Until next time,
Jassen Bowman, EA
Jassen: Great. This whole time for the past hour and a half you’ve been talking about marketing into specific niches, other industry to offer your CPA services to them because almost all businesses need accounting help. So what are some tips that you might have for – I guess identifying and how to go about expanding into other niches? How would a CPA do that to grow their business?
James Orr: Well, I really see it being two primary ways and one way is a couple of subways. So the two primary ways is either geographical expansion where you are offering your service maybe in your local market at first and then you decide – it occurs to you at some point, “Well, what if I offered my service in the next city over?” So you could be, “I’ve got an accounting service that we offer to clients in Fort Collins and I also offer to people in Loveland or people in Denver, people in Colorado Springs,” or you could go out of state and keep expanding that way. That’s what I called geographical expansion. You are almost pretending that you have a virtual business in all these different areas. You could either create new websites for that or you can create new content where you focus on catering to people in those communities with your service.
Jassen: Okay.
James Orr: The next way, the other major way are niches. We talk a lot about niches tonight and focusing on specific ones but I break that down in three sub-categories. The one that people tend to be able to do easiest is they tend generalized when they begin. So they offer accounting services to everybody. Anyone in the world is their client or potential client.
The easiest way to start increasing the number of niches you serve is start narrowing down your niche from there. You can’t get too specific. Well, you probably could but it’ll be really hard for you to get too specific with your niche because you really could go after very specific sub-niches. Instead of just real estate investors you could go after multi-unit property real estate investors or single family home real estate investors.
The more specific you get, the easier it becomes to really target and laser focus in on those guys. So if you wanted to focus on single family home real estate investors you can buy a mailing list of single family home real estate investors and if you’ve got a really good widget for them like a special report that deals specifically with the challenge that you know they have from your point of view, your accounting, that CPA type of stuff then you can really do a great mailing to them where they can request the information for free. Then you’ve got a much smaller list of people that have raised their hands and you can cater to that niche. So getting specific you get all those benefits we talked before about focusing on very specific niches. That’s one way to do it.
The other way to do it is to expand out. Most people don’t do this but instead of just offering accounting services you could offer accounting and business planning services. You can niche up instead of niching down into a specific industry you can say, “I’m going to expand and expand my services and maybe what I want to offer.” So maybe you offer a planning service where you do financial planning or retirement planning and you also do accounting, different ways to expand up and deal with that.
Then the other side is go with closely related niches like you Jassen, you probably could do some accounting type services or bookkeeping services but you also have the enrolled agent side so you’re specifically doing IRS, debt reduction and debt negotiation type stuff and so that’s a very closely related niche that you’ve expanded out to. Does that make sense?
Jassen: Yes.
James Orr: Okay. So those are really the two major ways and then the second way you had some kind of sub things which is niche down get into some really fine details. You can niche up and take on a bigger perspective or you could like side niches where you have closely related topics to do.
Jassen: Alright. Well this has been really informative. I hope that everybody on the line got a lot out of this. Definitely we went through a lot of marketing information here. I’m sure that people have additional questions on their mind out of this so if folks wanted to get in touch with you James, how could they reach you to kind to pick your brain on some more of these stuff?
James Orr: Well, I’m going to practice what I preach here and tell them you can go right to my blog at learntoberich.com and on the right hand side is a link that says downloads. Guess what? You’re going to find all widgets there. You’re going to find lots of special reports and audio downloads and great resources for you to access regardless of what industry you’re in. We cater to a lot of different industries. You’re welcome to go there and download the resources and you will then be automatically signed up to receive our newsletter and some information from us. So we would love for you to do that and get some more information. The website again is learntoberich.com and it’s all spelled out all the words spelled correctly and everything.
Jassen: Alright. Well, I really appreciate you joining us tonight and for sharing all these information with our listeners. Is there anything else you want to add before we close out?
James Orr: I think that’s it. I really appreciate it you have me on and I hope that everyone got a lot of great information and is going to actually act on it and implement some of the ideas to really increase their business.
Jassen: And that is the key right there, isn’t that is? Taking action on what you learn not just sitting on it.
James Orr: It absolutely is. That is the big difference.
Jassen: Alright. Well, thanks a lot, James. I’ll look forward to speaking with you again soon and you have yourself a wonderful night.
James Orr: I appreciate it. Thanks, Jassen I’ll talk to you soon.
Jassen: Alright take care.
James Orr: Bye-bye.
Jassen: Bye-bye.
Jassen: That’s a great way to go. It’s part of that whole [inaudible][01:19:40] clichés which is one of those thinking out of the box things.
James Orr: Absolutely.
Jassen: Okay. Now we’ve already talked about a little bit about meet-up. You mentioned that in an earlier segment but could go on to some more detail about using meet-up to meet new people and grow your CPA clientele?
James Orr: Yes I definitely can. There are basically three ways that I can think of to use meet-up and they sort of overlap in some ways. The first one is you can use it find niches that you are interested in serving as a CPA or accountant. Then you can join those meet-up groups, become involve in the group. Share information, be helpful, and learn about their challenges. Learn about their problems, see if you can help. Offer them access to your network and try to get access to their network and just overall become part of that community. So that’s number one is focus on specific niches your interested in.
The number two one is you can actually create your own meet-up group and cater to those niches. Seven or eight years ago I forget what it was now, there was not a local real estate investor group in Fort Collins nor in Colorado where we are and so I ended having to form a local real estate investor group. I started holding meetings and then I started networking with everybody. It turned out really great so I recommend people start groups if there isn’t one in niches that you want to cater to. Then grow your contact base from there. People will flock to you. People interested in that will want to join your group and provided you’re giving them good value and good information and great opportunities there, they’re going to want to keep coming back. They’re going to see you as an expert and be more likely to do business with you in the future. So you can definitely grow your own meet-up groups if you need to do it that way.
The last one is you can go outside of your local market and contact group owners outside of your area who you may want to cater to. One of the great things about being a CPA business is you really can do it remotely, right?
Jassen: Yes.
James Orr: So if you wanted to go and start saying, “I’m going to really focus in on this one niche.” You could go find other meet-up groups outside of your local area and cater to them and give them access to your special reports or your lead generation tools and then let them offer them to their group as a free resource that they can download as long as they get their contact information. Then you can start marketing to them over time to.
Jassen: Exactly. Okay. Now the next one – people are going to scratch their heads when they first hear this but just because you have a service business like a CPA firm that doesn’t mean that you cannot use ebay to sell your services.
James Orr: I want to correct what you said because part of the challenge is that people do look at CPA or accounting business as a service business. One of the great things about using widgets is you can convert a service business to a physical product business. By going out there and creating products whether that’s a special report, a little mini booklet, a audio CD, maybe it’s a three hour seminar you do, whatever it is that you can do in order to create a physical product then you can start marketing things like physical products that will have an upsell or back end of your actual service. So you want to actually take that into account when you’re thinking about other ways to market your business. You’re right. Most people would be scratching their heads, “How do I market my CPA business on ebay?”
Jassen: So explain real quick, how do they do that?
James Orr: Well it’s easy. What you do is you go create a very specialized report for a very niche industry and you sell that report as a product on ebay. So for instance you might make a two hour audio CD talking about how to setup your bookkeeping system for electricians or for retail shop owners or get more specific than that in mind but you can go and do all the variety of these things.
It might be really simple things that you have – a normal conversation about with all of your clients and it seems so second nature to you but every time they hear it they’re like, “That makes perfect sense. So now I know how to setup my file system,” or “Now I know how to setup quick books,” or “Here is the software I need.” Whatever those questions are you could make an information product, a physical product. Maybe it’s a booklet, maybe it’s a special report and you could sell it even at a loss – I don’t recommend it – but you could sell it at a loss and consider it cost subduing business for your lead generation. So maybe you have a CD that cost you a dollar to make, you’re going to sell it for $0.99 on ebay and with the marketing fees you have to pay ebay maybe you’re at a $0.30 loss. But now you’ve got someone’s name, address, telephone number and e-mail address who is interested enough to pay a dollar for that product. Now you’ve got an opportunity to put them on your mailing list. There is a much higher probability that they would become a client than just someone on the street.
Jassen: Exactly.
James Orr: Does that answer your question about how to market a service on ebay?
Jassen: Definitely I’m sure some of our listeners are surprised in what they’ve never thought about being able to market a service on something like ebay with it’s geared toward physical products. But they’re very, very doable.
James Orr: Yes. I would generate a hundred plus new increase a month from selling information products on ebay for a business.
Jassen: Okay. I think most of our listeners would be thrilled if they were able to generate a hundred new inquiry in a month into their CPA firm.
James Orr: I agree. I was doing a lot of products and this is not just one product doing this. I mean would create lots of very niche focus products and I’ll be able to sell those over a period of time. You know as in aside, if you hook up with someone else that has a product or service that they’re selling, couldn’t you do like a joint venture like let’s say somebody was creating websites. You can go and joint venture with somebody who’s selling websites to electricians or contractors and network with them and bundle the two together in a special report on how to setup your business from the tax side plus this website. Now you just share the names and addresses and contact information.
Jassen: Exactly. The next two things I want to talk about are two very specific and kind of out there marketing tactics. These are very specific strategies that CPA’s can use to market their business. The first one I’d like you to talk about is using business cards to market your CPA firm. How do you do that?
James Orr: Well I’m going to tell you that this is one of the more aggressive ideas I have. So it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. I don’t recommend people use traditional business card. You can definitely have a traditional business card. What I’m more talking about here is like a mini flyer. You can have mini flyers printed up online or you could use business cards for it but the business card is really an offer for one of your widgets – special reports, something that they can download, free consultation, whatever it is that you’re trying to market. The idea is to get these out as aggressively as possible. It sort of inline with a lot of multilevel or network marketing companies might do in order to just blast the word out in a gorilla marketing style. Just get it out there as much as possible.
So I’ll just name off a couple of different ways to do this and you can decide whether or not you want to do any or all of them but realize that some of them are a little bit more aggressive. You may get some slack for doing some of them but just make sure you’re complying within the law and don’t do anything crazy. So here’s some really basic ideas.
Whenever you go out to a restaurant you can definitely leave a business card with your tip. The bigger the tip the better it’s going to be at being detected, I can tell you that. If you’re going to a restaurant you can leave your card with free information about that. You’re probably not going to get a huge amount of business from it but you’ll never know. You could have the right person to pick it up and you kind of get one and these things are cheap. The more you get out the better it is.
Another one is ATM machines. Anytime you go to an ATM machine to make a deposit or withdraw money, you can leave a business card near the ATM machine. Where I got this idea from is a lot of these networking companies will stick like half cut open envelopes with [20][01:13:50] business cards right inside of the machine and people find that effective. They made it work. I know people that are marketing their network marketing company business with that. So just adopt it and use it that way.
Here’s one of my favorites and that is if you go to a library and you’re taking out books and reading on things, a great bookmark to use would be a business card and if you happen to forget that when you return the book then so be it. If you happen to be in the library reading the book and you happen to bookmark it and put it back in the shelf accidentally so be it that way to. The same thing goes for books in bookstores. You’d be surprised how many books I see in the bookstore where they somehow have a magical business card stuck in the middle of it.
Jassen: Yes. [laughter]
James Orr: So it is a way in order for you to get your word out about your business. Leaving them as bookmarks in bookstores but you can also use bulletin boards. Anytime you’re out in the supermarket or the mailbox place or anything like that that has a bulletin board and you’re allowed to post things on, the university library, any place like that you could put little things on the bulletin board. Just make sure you put it out there and replace it frequently every time you go there go ahead and replace it.
Jassen: You just carry these things around with you and so when see the opportunity to leave one then do so.
James Orr: Absolutely. My first real estate broker told me that if you leave in the morning with 10 business cards in your pocket, you should do whatever you need to in order to get those out during the day. Whether that’s posting them on bulletin boards or handing them to strangers or whatever you need to do and if you do that everyday you’re doing a good amount of marketing just to get your name out in the business world.