The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

67 ⎸ How to meet with clients

September 28, 2022 Serena Shoup, CPA Episode 67
The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast
67 ⎸ How to meet with clients
Show Notes Transcript

In this solo episode, I give you some actionable tips on meeting with clients as a way to add value to your bookkeeping services.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • How to set a meeting agenda
  • Why back to back meetings are no good
  • What reports to present to clients
  • How to add extra personal touches to your engagements

→ Join our next cohort of Elevate, starting in October: https://www.ambitiousbookkeeper.com/elevate
Listen to Episode 5: What to do when you get your first client
Read this podcast on the blog >

Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram Stories and tag me, @ambitiousbookkeeper

For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:

Visit our website: ambitiousbookkeeper.com

Follow the Blog: ambitiousbookkeeper.com/blog

Connect on Instagram: instagram.com/ambitiousbookkeeper

Connect on LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/SerenaShoup

Connect of Facebook: Facebook.com/serenashoupcpa

Thank you for your support of our show. If you haven’t left a review yet it’s super simple. Please go to: https://www.ambitiousbookkeeper.com/podcast and leave your review.

Podcast Publishing Tools

[00:00:00] You've landed your first client and onboarded them, hopefully using some tips from previous podcast episodes like episode five. So now what? How do you know what you should be doing? And when? I'm gonna share just that in this podcast episode. So if you're interested in hearing this keep on listening.

[00:00:23] 

[00:00:52] Welcome back to the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast. In today's solo episode, I'm going to be talking about how to meet with clients, what you should be doing each month with clients and all that good stuff. 

[00:01:05] So first based on the items you told your client, you would do for them. Creating a workflow, which is really just a checklist of what you need to do each month, and when it needs to be completed is essential. If you find yourself extra lost in this, there's a few resources I'm going to list in the show notes. One of them. Being Kickoff With Asana for Bookkeepers and Accountants. Which is a program by Workflow Queen. Another resource for you is the Bookkeeping Business Accelerator. So I don't go deep into lots of different workflows, like Kickoff with Asana does, but I do cover the monthly, quarterly, annual workflows that we do for our clients inside of the program. And I give you checklists and templates for that. I also cover all of the things that I talk about on the podcast. It's a very holistic program, helping you build your business, set up your workflows, how to meet with clients, all that good stuff. But today, I am going to talk about just a portion of that. And that is meeting with your clients. 

[00:02:11] So next, I want you to put your workflow in an organized format. You can use a spreadsheet, a notebook project tracking tool, like I said, I use Asana, but there are tons of options out there. And if you're just starting out and don't have a team, you really don't need anything fancy, just find a system that you will keep up with and that you can store information in instead of inside of your head. <laugh> Then once you have all of your checklist items in a checklist, I want you to find your rhythm. Set your office hours that are non-negotiable, either every week or every month commit to showing up at the same time to complete the work for your clients. 

[00:02:52] Last, once the work is completed we want to set meetings with our clients to go over the numbers. Now this isn't something that you have to do with every client. I do talk a lot about how we meet with clients and it adds a lot of value for the client, and this creates more of a relationship with them instead of just a bookkeeping compliance task that needs to be done. So, yes. Absolutely. They hire us to do these tasks, but if you want to be able to charge a premium and provide more value for your client, it's important to set some meetings occasionally. So whether that is recording loom video, or meeting with them monthly or quarterly, having a meeting rhythm is a really good way to add value so that they remember that what you're doing for them is a valuable service. 

[00:03:40] Like I said, bookkeeping is not just for compliance, it should be used as a tool to provide insight to the business operations. The numbers do tell a story. And this, my friends, is the advisory piece that is being talked about so much. And like I said, this will set you apart and lift up the perception of the bookkeeping profession as a whole if we all start using these numbers that we're putting together for clients, and giving them valuable insights. If you aren't comfortable with this yet, it just takes practice. Practice until you are. And you don't have to practice with an actual client, although that will force you to level up very quickly. You can just practice on your own by creating a loom video and then going back and watching it and thinking like, is this something client's going to understand? Am I explaining this well? And just practice and practice. And once you have this skill of presenting numbers to your clients, make sure that you are charging a premium for it. 

[00:04:39] Okay. So let's talk about prepping for your first client meeting. I am a huge preparer <laugh> and I usually prep for a client meeting the day before or a couple hours before the meeting. I do believe that the best antidote for nerves is preparation. So if you find yourself nervous to meet with a client, or being put in a spotlight, it will help to prepare. 

[00:05:03] So number one: make sure you have run your preliminary reports and notes on the questions you have or points that you want to make to the client. These are likely to change once you have the meeting with the client, especially if you were missing information from them. I tend to have working meetings with my clients where we will end up reclassifying things together while we're on the phone, because questions come up, we dig into things, and it turns out, oh, we wanna see this a different way so it's more valuable to the client. 

[00:05:32] Number two: in your preparing for the meetings phase, set your meeting agenda. So when I'm working throughout the month on a client, I will gather questions and issues that I want to address with them; we'll go over this in more detail later on in this podcast. But nowadays, since I have a team, the team is responsible for collecting those questions and issues that need to be addressed on the meeting. And we store those in a central place in the Asana project that we use. You can use a Google doc, you can use Notion, whatever format you are used to using, just stay consistent with where that information is being stored especially if you have a team. 

[00:06:13] Number three: make sure that you know how to use Zoom and have everything working properly as well as a backup plan. And I know that nowadays everyone is pretty comfortable with Zoom, but if you are in the newer stages of your business and you have not been meeting with clients in Zoom and whatnot, now is the time to start making sure you have everything in place. I have had times where my earbuds aren't connecting properly to the computer, so I've had to call in from my phone. So just make sure that you have everything ready to go, so it's a seamless as possible. 

[00:06:47] And number four: I am a huge proponent of blocking off your calendar for at least 30 minutes to an hour after your meeting, if at all possible, because things will come up during the meeting that you need to be able to action and address right away. At least for me, if I don't do things right away, that came up on the meeting and write my notes from the meeting and communicate anything that came up from the meeting with the team immediately after the meeting, I will forget <laugh> and it will be days before I come back to it. And then it's like, oh, I feel like I was supposed to do something that I might not have written down, or I don't really remember the conversation I had with the client that I need to communicate to the team. So it's just best to block off time immediately after the meeting before you move on to anything else, which is a whole nother reason why I'm not a huge fan of back to back meetings. For one, it's super exhausting as an introvert, but number two, like I have to action everything that I promised for the client immediately after that meeting, or it's not gonna happen, or it's not gonna happen well. <laugh> So often after the meeting, especially if it's like a working meeting where you're reclassifying items, getting more information from the client about something, you might need to rerun the reports with the new classifications. So that's always a thing that happens after a meeting is rerunning the reports, publishing them to their shared folder or whatever method you use to share the reports with clients. 

[00:08:20] And I also like to send a meeting recap, email with those updated reports. And the reason I like to do this, is it helps build the relationship with the client and solidify the reason that they're paying the premium that they're paying to work with you, instead of leaving it up to them to have to take all the notes from the client meeting and keep track of everything. You're kind of tying it up in a pretty little bow of what you guys talked about, any action items that they have to complete from the meeting, gives them a reminder of that, and then action items that you've promised you can list out or say, okay, these were the things that I promised and here they are and then here's the things that you said that you would work on before our next meeting. It's a huge value add because it helps hold them accountable, and that's part of the job that we have when we provide that higher level advisory service. Just giving you some little tips here and there on that. 

[00:09:22] Now let's talk about what goes into your meeting agenda, cuz this is likely why you clicked on this podcast episode. How to run a meeting with your clients, especially if this is something that you're like, I know I don't even know what I'm supposed to be talking about how the meeting is supposed to go. I like to have an agenda that we use across all of our clients. Yes. Some client meetings will go a different direction, but the core of the meeting always starts with this little agenda and it helps streamline and keep us from being so nervous about meeting with clients because we know that we've prepared for this. We know our talking points, and yes, the meeting can go off track and it often does. And we often talk about lots of other things besides what was on the agenda, but at least I know I can come to the meeting and these are some things that we're definitely gonna talk about. 

[00:10:15] So, if you haven't yet now is a good time to get out a pen and paper, <laugh> and outline this together with me. So this is your meeting agenda outline, and this is what you can use to create your meeting agenda, you can pull up a Google doc, Microsoft Word, whatever. There's lots of meeting agenda templates that you can use online, or you can just start with a blank document and go from what I'm gonna share with you. And if you like the tactical explanations of like, okay, now I have this agenda, what do I do with it? And you wanna be able to save it in a consistent way, I like to save these. When we were doing these in Google docs or a Word doc, we would save them in the client folder, we name it ClientName_meeting_Date. Sometimes if it's like a monthly. Standing meeting, it'll be like year_month_ClientName_meeting_date. 

[00:11:14] Okay. So. Number one: you always wanna start with a greeting and a personal touch. I like to ask how their family is doing and how business is going. I like to ask them if there's anything. Top of mind that they are hoping to discuss on this meeting, that way I can kind of rearrange what I had for the meeting discussion until later on, because a lot of times some of our clients will come to their meeting really eager to talk about a certain topic. And so I wanna help them just get that out of the way, right away. So I always ask, you know, how things are going. I usually follow my clients on social media, so I kind of know what's going on and I'll be like, Hey, I love what you're doing here. I notice that you're doing an open house. How did that go? Things that show that you're paying attention to their business and you care about what's going on is such a value add and it just helps build that relationship with your client. I also like to record the meetings, so I ask if it's okay to record. That way, both of you can focus on the meeting and not really on taking notes. And this also gives them something to refer to after the meeting, especially if you are showing them how to record certain transactions, or run reports, depending on their level of involvement with the bookkeeping. 

[00:12:32] Now number two: if there's nothing that they have top of mind that they wanna focus on, we will move on to number two, which is following up on prior meeting agenda action items. So this is where you're gonna dive into things that either you or the client was supposed to complete after the last meeting, and regroup about. This is also this section that we'll go over any uncategorized or ask my accountant transactions together, so that we can get those knocked out and out of the way, especially for some of those clients that aren't great with doing things via email, we just tackle them on the meeting together. And then I will run the reports with them on the phone so that we can drill into the numbers and talk about them together once everything is categorized. If there isn't anything to fix, this is when I pull up the reports that we're already prepared. 

[00:13:22] Number three: look at the monthly trends. So in podcast episode, I think number five, I talk about things to look at on each report. So definitely go back and listen to that. Also have it on the blog. I will link those resources in the show notes. So the monthly trends and reports that we run every month for our client is the income statement, the balance sheet, the cash flow statement, accounts receivable aging, and accounts payable, aging. Now, some clients don't have any AR or AP, so those reports are blank, but that is the report package that we run for every single client, every single month. So within these reports we will talk about the changes month over month, quarter over a quarter, whatever period that we're looking at. 

[00:14:12] I will ask questions of the clients. Especially earlier on in the relationship, I'll ask them what information you would like to see in the future. We'll ask them if they're tracking any KPIs and, if not maybe talk about some KPIs that might be useful for them to track. And this is where it's kind of on you to understand the industry and think of the KPIs that you could actually help them track because we don't have all the information for all the KPIs that they could be tracking. So there's some that are non-financial, those we might not be able to track because we don't have access to that system. 

[00:14:46] And then I will start going through the reports and kind of educate them on different reports if they seem lost on what they're looking at. Generally, they are looking to us to guide them toward what to actually be paying attention to. So, this is something that I dive into in my program Elevate, which is separate from the bookkeeping business accelerator, it takes you to that next level of how to analyze financial statements, what things you should be pulling out and talking to the client about for pretty much any industry. And we dive into forecasting and budgeting and all that good stuff, but it definitely starts with the basics of analyzing financial statements and talking to clients about certain numbers. So if this is something you wanna go deeper on, I highly encourage you to get in on the next cohort. We are doing this in October. So the full month of October, we meet weekly for a couple hours and it's live hands on presentation and training with you. So you can get your specific questions answered about specific clients. If you have them. 

[00:15:51] Okay. So number four: I ask them if they have any questions or concerns about things going on in the business. So if they did not come to the meeting with something top of mind already at the beginning, this is where I open it up to ask them if they have any questions related to the reports that we looked at, or concerns about things coming down. The pipeline in the business that they'd like to discuss. Now, this is another area where if you are not strong or comfortable with your own skills in being able to have these conversations, it's going to happen over time. I can tell you. Even with my corporate background and the experience that I had, I was not confident in having these conversations earlier on in my bookkeeping business. So I don't want you to feel like you should be comfortable right away with this. If you are, great, but that's okay. We don't all start there. So I wanna caveat all of this with, it's okay to just provide the bookkeeping service and send reports with maybe a couple summary points in an email if you're not ready to meet with clients. But as you continue to work with the clients, you're gonna start learning more about their business. You'll be able to add more value. So just keep that in mind. It doesn't happen overnight. 

[00:17:08] Okay. And then the closing, number five: the closing to your meeting agenda. We want to confirm the action items each of you have, create maybe an agenda for the next meeting if you know there's some things that you wanna tackle and discuss, set another meeting date before you get off the phone, that's really helpful. I have some clients that we have just a standing meeting every month, the same day. That's helpful too. So to offer that to your client towards the beginning of the relationship to schedule out your next six months of meetings or whatever. And then thank them for meeting with you, and like I said, if you've changed the financial statements, make sure you let them know when you'll be sending the updated reports after you get off the call. It's really good to just set expectations and let them know, yes, I remember that I'm supposed to be doing this, and this is when you can expect them. 

[00:17:56] And then after the meeting, there's this wrap up period. After you get off the call, like I said, it's really, really important to have maybe 30 minutes to an hour blocked off so that you can wrap up everything that you needed to complete after the meeting. So you're gonna send your meeting notes to the client if that's something you want to do, a summary email, your updated reports plus the link to the recording, if there was any recording or training that happened. And then you get to work on your end of the action items when everything is fresh. Trust me <laugh> this is the best approach. <laugh>. 

[00:18:30] Okay now, remember. Like I said, preparing for the meetings is going to help battle those pre-meeting nerves, but don't over prepare. I think I've talked about this before on the podcast, maybe not, but I've definitely talked about this in my program. Sometimes we can over prepare and it makes us actually more nervous. So give yourself a time limit of preparing before the meeting, and don't spin out of control with being nervous about the meeting. Just pull out a few key points that you wanna talk about, you don't have to go into detail on every single report, in fact, that's really overwhelming for clients. So pull out the key information that you think that they want to know, or things that you would want to know about your business and your financials. So I always like to say, if you're uncomfortable with reading reports and interpreting them for clients, start on yourself. Because you know the business, and you know the information that's going to be valuable to you as a business owner. 

[00:19:30] So. That's a really good place to start. So I hope this podcast. Episode helped you as you start to step into maybe meeting with clients. And I'd love to hear how this works for you, and if you've made any modifications to the way that you meet your clients, connect with me on Instagram. I'm @ambitiousbookkeeper, I'm on LinkedIn, Serena Shoup, and I will talk to you next week. 

[00:19:58] 

Podcasts we love