Finding Your Ideal Client And Charging Them What You Want with Eric Green

 

One of the frustrations many accountants have, especially those who are still new to the space, is finding the right clients. It can feel like you have no control of who you are working with and can’t really charge them the way you actually want. In this bonus episode, Michelle Weinstein is joined by the managing partner of Green & Sklarz, LLC, Eric Green, to share with us how you can move past this dilemma and thrive in your practice. Eric demonstrates how he went from charging $500 for a consult fee to $1,500. Together with it, he taps into the importance of having the proper money mindset and how you can go all-in on your expertise. He also introduces his webinars and coaching programs that you can join in, adding more tools to your toolbelt.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Finding Your Ideal Client And Charging Them What You Want with Eric Green

Bonus Episode With Eric Green [Part 2]

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Our special guest has been here with us before, his name is Eric Green. He is the Managing Partner of Green & Sklarz LLC, which is a boutique LLC firm in Connecticut and New York. They do IRS representation works. If you’re an accountant or an attorney and want to build your IRS representation practice, he has a community called the Tax Rep Network. He also has a podcast that I’ve been on called the Tax Rep Network Podcast. Eric is also the author of The Accountant’s Guide to IRS Collection, Resolving Tax Debts and Resolving Payroll Taxes. Before we welcome Eric if you’re an accounting professional, which I’m going to guess that you are now if you’re reading this. I know you must be frustrated and stressed trying to get the right clients, having no control over who you’re working with or how much you truly can charge. Eric is going to demonstrate that.

He used to charge $500 for a consult fee, and now he’s up to $1,500 from our webinars and podcasts. You might not even believe that it’s possible or a client could even afford it. If you’re interested in learning how to detach from the emotional side of the sales process, you want a paradigm shift and you know that the sales are the nucleus and the bloodline to your business. You can have a complimentary call with me to get to some of the truth about what some next best steps are for you and your firm to get past all those barriers. Head on over to TheAbundantCall.com. If you’ve been in business at least two years, that is my requirement. If you want to build a firm, you want confidence in your sales process so you can have more time with your family and live the abundant life that you’ve always wanted and dreamt of, head on over to the website, book the first slot that you see, we can explore together. If I see something that’s possible, I might invite you to work with me and see how we can transform your firm together. Let’s welcome Eric to the show.

Thank you for having me back.

I’m excited to have you back. Those of you that don’t know Eric Green, can you share with all of the accountants reading what is it that you do?

I was an accountant who didn’t want to be an accountant. I went to law school. I fell into doing tax controversy and went through an odd way. My law partner and I started a boutique tax firm. There are 22 of us in three offices in two states, Green & Sklarz. We do civil and criminal tax controversy work as we go a lot with accountants. Through requests for training, we started and has grown into a large community called Tax Rep Network, which is a coaching, training group of accountants and lawyers to build their own IRS representation practices. As part of that, we have a weekly podcast, the Tax Rep Network Podcast.

They should all subscribe to it. We’re going to talk about some of the comments that Eric and I have heard from the last episode. There are some great topics to cover. In addition to that, we are doing some webinars. If they go to your website, can they register for the webinars there?

Absolutely. The one that we’re doing, I’ll send you the link. If they go off the TaxRepLLC.com to our Events page, it will be there too.

Money is an enabler. Click To Tweet

Go to TaxRepLLC.com to the Events page to always get the most up to date information. Eric, your webinars also count as CE credits, is that correct?

That is correct.

Two for one special over there. I do want to get an update because I’m sure everyone is like me wondering, “Michelle, I know the first time you did an episode with Eric, I think he was only charging $500 or $1,000 for a consult fee.” When you were working with a brand-new client coming on board, can you share with us where you were and now where you’re at after many conversations together and you trying new ways on new tax representation, client consultations?

As background, you were on my podcast and I mentioned how I tell my members, “You’re not doing free consultations.” Litigators looking at million-dollar windfalls do free consultations. We charge for our time because there’s a lot of good information that we’re going to be giving. Can they do an offer? Can they not? My hourly rate is $500 an hour. We were charging $500 for a consult. You told me, “That’s too little. Double it.” I was like, “Excuse me?” You said, “For the information you’re giving, it’s too cheap, double it.” I got off the podcast and the next day spoke to our people who we were all going a little gun shy. Instead of going to $1,000, we went to $950. I was on your show and you said so, “Where are you?” At the time, we were 12 of 13 for people agreeing to pay the $950. You said, “Go up again. It’s too cheap. Go to $1,500.”

That’s where we left at the last episode. That was August of 2020. It’s been at $1,500. Where are we at now?

Let me tell you what happened. I talk to the team and $1,500 is too much. They’re not going to pay it. This was a counter-argument. I said, “There were 25 million people in tax trouble before Coronavirus.” The tax practice advisor did a survey and reported back. For anyone who can google and find it, 1 out of 3 taxpayers will not be able to pay their ‘19 taxes. I said, “Here’s what’s going to happen. We are going to get slammed. The phones are going to light up on October 15th,” which I will tell you about. I’ve got nineteen new calls. We get a lot of calls but that’s a lot, even for us. I said, “This is how we’re going to weed out the people.”

If they cannot afford us, I can’t save the world. We do a lot of pro bono work. We do a lot with the low-income clinics, but we cannot take in dozens and hundreds of people in trouble who can’t afford to pay us. In the push and pull with them, I said, “How much does it cost to open a file?” Let me explain it to you. Every major law firm has studied this and will tell you, like in Manhattan, it costs $3,200 to open a file. You might say, “That’s the dumbest thing in the world. Go to Staples. It will be cheaper.” That’s not what we’re talking about. Opening a file, the call with the client, the console, getting the file open, getting your document management system, their input, the billing system, getting them the retainer agreement, getting it back. The power of attorney and getting the document.

It sounds daunting and overwhelming, Eric. It sounds like you’ve got to charge for something like that.

 

I said, “How much does it cost to open a file?” After a few days, they came back and said, “$1,420.” I said, “Congratulations for $1,500.” I said, “We answered our own question.”

You are undercharging for all those other years.

Michelle, I’ll tell you and anyone reading this, the $500 was simply for me to get on the phone. I think we made money because we weren’t doing anything else. My Chief Lieutenant, Amanda, this was her argument. How good is that call? We don’t have their information. We haven’t looked at anything. She was on board with the $950. She said, “Now we can spend some time.” What I did, I didn’t say I’m $950 for a phone call. What I told clients is and what might Admin, Nicole would do when they call. They get Nicole who finds out what it is, how much is the issue and whatnot.

The smaller stuff that they own, $20,000, $30,000. We refer that out to our Tax Rep members who are new at this and are willing to do that. Assuming that we think it’s something that is worthwhile, she will say, “We’re charging $1,500, but that’s to do a consult. We cannot do this properly without the last three years of tax returns and a current profit and loss. If you have an offer that’s been denied, please send us a letter and the schedules.” What she’s explained to people is we have work to do to make this consultation worth your while. We are 7 for 7 for the $1,500.

At least I did it to get buy-in from my team, but it also gets buy-in from the clients. “Eric is asking for $1,500 because Eric is worth $1,500.” We’re asking for $1,500 because this hour that you’re going to spend with us is worth that much money. We are going to look at your stuff. People were like, “You mean, you’re going to look at my stuff?” She’s pursuing her enrolled agents, “At the firm, we have a very much up.” All of our initial admins on the front desk have all moved up into higher positions in this firm.” She basically will tell them, “You’re paying for us to look at your stuff and give you good advice. That’s what the $1,500 is for.” We’re 7 for 7 shows and people on the other end appreciate that. I’m not a disembodied voice saying, “We’ll help you, give me $10,000.”

Aren’t you rolling that $1,500 and into the other services if they engage with you to do the offer and compromise?

For an offer, we charge as a flat fee of $1,500, but because we’ve already done a big chunk of the work upfront, if they ask, “If we decide you are an offering compromise candidate, what we will do is send you the retainer agreement for $5,000 less the $1,500 you have already paid.” We don’t have to do all of that again. The $1,500 or $1,420 has built-in. They’re getting the retainer and they get the powers of attorney. We’re not duplicating effort and this way, I don’t feel we’re gouging anybody. They’re basically getting their value. We’re making sure we don’t waste a lot of time spinning our wheels with someone who’s not prepared to move forward.

If you got nineteen phone calls, you’re not going to be able to help everyone. You have to pick and choose who you will work with. I have an eight-week sales mastery training. I know some of you reading have done it or considering it, but we were talking about a similar analogy. I know you’re in law, Eric, so you can speak on this more. The people that come to us with problems, be it tax problems, they have a bankruptcy problem. Those aren’t big problems, and the attorneys charge a lot for those services and they have to pay upfront. When I heard $500, I’m like, “That’s not a lot of money for people that don’t follow the law and what they need to be doing.”

When we spread ourselves too thin, then how can we be great and be an expert at all of them? Click To Tweet

I say, we incentivize the people that do things right and we teach people a lesson who are doing things wrong. The bankruptcy people, for some reason, all these people find $3,000, but they don’t pay their credit card bills or some of them are legit issues. Maybe some medical things that were out of their control and they didn’t have the money. We were having this discussion and one of the students was only charging maybe $500, $2,000 for a bookkeeping cleanup project. I was like, “That’s what you should normally charge somebody. If you’re doing a cleanup, then it should be three times that amount.” Her assistant was taking sales class with her and she was all about it. I’m like, “Change your engagement letter today, change your invoices, no more hourly, etc. Your minimum retainer going forward.” I think they agreed on $3,000 or $5,000. It’s crazy to see the bankruptcy attorneys do this all the time. How come as an accountant, they went the cheapy route? They found a bookkeeper for cheap and now they have a bunch of problems because they thought they could cut corners on the most important part of their business. Guess what? They get to pay triple the amount. They were all about it.

I have a theory on this and I want to talk about it. Some of the comments I got after our talk, which by the way were all good. It’s always satisfying when people like, “It was great.” There was a theme that went like this. “Eric, you make it sound so easy to do an offer or whatever. I don’t think I could ever learn that.” This irritates me. I don’t want to offend anyone. It dovetails too with people’s sense of money. If they see somebody who has money and they don’t, they’re envious, “I want to have that.”

What is driving that? I’ve never been in a situation where having money made it worse. This is why many people get there and aren’t happy. They say, “Money can’t buy happiness.” It’s about self-esteem. “When I have a Lincoln, I drive a Cadillac, I drive a Mustang, the muscle car that I always wanted, then I’ll feel good about myself.” What they don’t realize is your anxieties, your inadequacies, whatever it is that you’re mentally carrying around with you, you carry that with you. The fact that you now have money doesn’t change.

That’s all stems from your childhood. I did a money mindset class from one of my great friends, Sean Croxton. For anyone that did his first class, we get to redo it as often as we want to. I’m doing it again. He talked about this, Eric, and it’s like, “Would you rather have a ton of money and be a millionaire, a billionaire or would you rather be happy?” He was saying, “The people that say, ‘I’m happy,’ what are they doing? Sitting around on the beach saying, ‘I’m happy?’ No. Us humans, we’re here to provide and help people, make a contribution and make a difference. You can get paid for that.” You can have money and also be happy all at once because the people that say, “I’d rather be happy with no money,” you can’t do much without that. There’s only so much sitting around on rocks or the sand that before you start to go a little crazy, which I think everyone during the pandemic has experienced sitting at home for a very long time. It gets old.

Money is an enabler. If you think about charities, what do they do? Charities go to people who know how to make money and ask for money. I have to tell you the truth, Jeff Sklarz, my law partner, we both were on the same page when we said, “The best way to do charity is to build a moneymaking business that allows us to then go do whatever it is going to do.” We started the Green & Sklarz Foundation, the New England IRS Representation Conference. It gets bigger and bigger. Every single year we can donate more and more because all proceeds go to charity and the low-income taxpayer clinics. They’re going to get overrun. They are going to get hammered with this follow by Coronavirus, divorces, and bankruptcies.

A lot of people who cannot afford Michelle and Eric or other people are going to end up at the low-income clinics. I’m urging and sales are up. It’s virtual. I’m urging people that you’re driving up what we’re donating because it all gets donated. I want to say something. I don’t care what your SAT score was, where you went to college, if you went to law school, you didn’t go to law school. If you took an EA out of high school, or you went to a CPA, MST, MBA program, none of it matters. To me, there are two things that matter. That’s it. One, where do you want to go and what price are you willing to pay? Some of the comments backward, “I don’t think that I could do this.” I don’t have time. I’m going to tell you, “That’s nonsense.”

You do have the time and we make time for what’s most important to us. For the people that are saying that you don’t have the time, I hear this with people who enroll on my sales class, “Michelle, now is not the good time.” Let me tell you, you’re an accountant in an industry where it’s never a good time, but you get to pick and choose. You can either choose to stay where you’re at and be miserable and unhappy or not get the fees that you’ve always wanted to charge, or you can learn from Eric and others and become an expert in an area that requires an investment of time in the short-term for a very high ROI.

 

In the interim, it might suck bad because you have to do all your work, you have a family, you have kids, you have the pandemic, you’re now a teacher at home. You’ve got all the things going on, but at the end of the day, if you don’t make the sacrifice, then you don’t. It’s like you say, Eric, there are two things. Where do you want to go? What is the price you’re willing to pay for it? If you’re not willing to pay the price to sacrifice, to learn something most people won’t learn, then you’re going to be average like everyone else, or you can say, “I’m done being average. I want to be known as an expert in the field. I don’t want to be your traditional CPA.” What Eric is saying, and I believe everything he says is fairly spot-on. I’m not an accountant, but I think a lot of people are going to be in a lot of trouble in the next 6, 12 months.

You could pivot your firm to thrive during this time and do something different. You have to say, “I want to go somewhere else. I am sick and tired of not getting paid what I should be.” In order to have people invest in you at a high level, you have to invest in yourself at a high level. That means pay Eric a lot of money. You could pay me too, but that’s not mandatory. You have to invest in your education in areas that are difficult. I work with a lot of people on the tax planning side too. They put a lot of energy and work. One of the accountants was telling me about a C corp, S corp combo. I’m like, “People like me, the regular people, we don’t understand it. It’s like Japanese.” For you, it should be a lot easier to conceptualize, especially if you’ve been in the industry for a while. You get to become an expert in your niche and area of specificity and get to be able to pay or charge fees like Eric, you’re doing at $1,500 a consult and now you’re 7 for 7.

There are a couple of things. If you’re a CPA or an EA, even if you’re running on your role, you have the expertise that most people do not. What was going on before is you can make money and do everything else. Your view of yourself, the baggage that you’re bringing, you’ve got to leave behind. How do you do that? How do you change your identity? There’s lots of stuff about this. You can go and listen to podcasts. There’s lots of good stuff for you, but recognize that you have this expertise. If you don’t have it, go learn it.

For instance, you can join Tax Rep. We will shortcut that for you, but it’s all there. You can go and do it. What can you do? Work your job right, have dinner with the kids. From 8:00 to 11:00 is plenty of time to do damage, plenty of time to build your brand, do the marketing, your blog, whatever it is that you want. It doesn’t have to be tax resolution. Maybe you want to become a forensic accountant and pursue your CFE. Maybe you want to get into financial planning and get your CFP. Whatever it is, I created the Tax Rep, the initial training that CCH license for their certificate program at our dining room table at night after coming home from the firm that I was working for, and weekends. My blog is written at 5:00 AM on Sundays. I got up, I have my coffee, by 7:00 when my older daughter and the twins woke up, I’d hear them waking up. My blogging for the week was ready to go. I would post one on Sunday, one on Wednesday consistently. That’s 100 at the end of the year. It was impossible to not find me. It was an hour and a half a week to generate a $200,000 business.

You said you have to change your identity. I think Eric, it goes back to what you said, the two things. Number one, identify where you want to go. Until you have that, you’re not going to do much and do anything. You’re going to want to go to sleep after dinner. You’re going to want to turn on the TV and watch Netflix, or you’re going to want to do things that won’t progress you in your expertise. Number two, as you said, you have to think about what price you are willing to pay or sacrifice. That could be a monetary dollar amount and a time sacrifice for a short-term payoff. It will be maybe a 2 to 3-month investment of money and time, but think about what’s your ROI. Does that get you to where you want to go? I think you laid it out perfectly.

I’ll give you an example. I have the bench press records still from my high school to this day. When people come up to me and they comment, “You’re in shape. Do you workout?” I’ve always hated the gym. Someone will tell me, “Why do you go to the gym if you hate it?” That’s life. I want to look a certain way. Why did they create Tax Rep at night? My wife was like, “What is this? How do you make money with this?” My thought was whether I could sell it or not, it forced me to roll up my sleeves. I’ll be honest. You don’t need tax rep. You can do it on your own. I did it on my own.

There was no course. I created it. I rolled up my sleeves and IRA tax liens. I went on to read the publications. I read the Internal Revenue manual and I looked at cases. I pulled together stuff that happened in the practice. Over time, I had a 1,000-page guide with my letters, my forms and outlines that I’d used in talks. Is it easier to pay a tax rep and go through the training and download it? It is all there but you still have to put in the work. Can you go and learn sales? Of course, you can. What you do is you pile up the failures. You work and you work, or you could go to Michelle because we’ve done a lot of this. Here’s what we find works and shortcut this for you, but you still need to do the work.

Find something you like and never work a day in your life. Click To Tweet

It’s a lot of work. For those that have worked with me, Eric and some of your people now have, it’s so much work. One of them is David. He’s in your program. He’s like, “Michelle, I have so many sales books on my bookshelf, but I don’t read them and I’m never going to implement it.” He decided, “I’ll shortcut this whole thing because I know you’re going to hold me accountable.” I did. He even made a video that we played for your last webinar. It’s crazy what will happen, increasing revenue, $20,000, $30,000, but you can. You can read all the books you want. You can listen to podcasts.

I don’t even know if they have an online school, but there are people once you pick a specialty. If it’s the tax resolution, the offer and compromise, then I don’t know. If I were you, I would be signing up for Eric. I’d pay him all the money I could and say, “Teach me at all as quickly as you possibly can because I’m thinking about my ROI. I want to become an expert in one thing and do that one thing good.” Eric, I have seen way too many accountants, “Michelle, I do this, I do that.” I’m like, “You do a lot of things.” When we spread ourselves too thin, then how can we be great and an expert at all of them? It’s not possible.

Find something you like. The old saying, “Find something you like and never work a day in your life.” There are days I complain. I work with clients I don’t love. The government could be mean to me too. I’ve never been happier. I enjoy what I do. I like the strategy of it. When we solve someone’s problems, we’ve had people cry. We get all the gifts at the holidays. There’s something rewarding about it but do take away from this. You have the ability to do literally whatever you want to do. Maybe not basketball. I can’t decide I want to be the next Kobe Bryant. I don’t have the physical gifts, but if you want to do financial planning, you can do it. You have it within you. Not to start dragging in other people’s quotes, but Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.” What’s holding you back is you, you can find the time. Turn off the TV.

For those like you, you hate the gym but you say you want to have a certain amount of strength and look a certain amount of way. It’s not going to happen without doing anything. I’m like you, I go to the gym six days a week. That’s the thing that keeps me sane. I wake up, I eat something and I’m out the door within about 30 minutes of waking up. It’s how do you make the transition in your business the same way. Eric, what other comments did we hear that you wanted to cover? I know this was an important one and hopefully a wake-up call for some of you because if you decide to go all-in on this expertise, my guess is you will be paid and rewarded very well. You could be happy, have money and make a lot of donations and contributions because there’s going to be a lot of people needing a lot of help.

I don’t remember if I mentioned it on my podcast or on yours. My very first Tax Rep member, his whole market was one newsletter to his existing 410 or 440 clients and putting IRS representation on his website. It was a one page what to do if you can’t pay the taxes. He added $148,000 of new business in the balance of that first year. I use it as an example. You don’t have to be on the radio, TV and have a $100,000 budget for marketing. The best referral sources will be from clients who already like you. One of the comments I got was, “Eric, I listened to you and Michelle and I decided I was going to do this.” She didn’t sign up for Tax Rep. She bought the books. She went out and bought from TG Publishing three guidebooks, which honestly is not a bad way to start. You read them in a weekend, they’re written to be read by anybody.

Not me, Eric. That would take me a year.

They’re in informal English. A lot of the comments are, “They’re great. It’s like listening to you.” My law professors would be horrified, but most people can read them and understand them. What she said is she got them and she did the same thing. She put it on her website and sent out an email with our year-end stuff saying, “If you’re going to have a tax problem, let me know.” She emailed and said, “I have to join up now. I have eighteen new clients. I don’t know what I’m doing.” I said, first of all, “Congratulations. Sign up because in there is a help desk. Do the initial checklist, get the information, and then let’s get on a conference call.” We helped her through the stuff. The first way to get to where you want to go is the first step. Start moving and get up. You don’t want to work. You don’t want to go to the gym. You don’t want to get out of bed. Get up, get out of bed, go to the gym, pick up the book, do the blog with your coffee, make the first step and make it a habit.

 

I even think you could even bypass the whole blog thing. Here’s what will get them into action. It’s what you said. I think this is what they all should do. Send you an email and you can report back to me. Everyone reading, if you have 1040 clients, which Eric, I think everyone has those. Send an email with the subject line of the two that you said. Subject line number one, “What do you do if you can’t pay your taxes?” If you want a different one, you could say, “If you are going to have a tax problem, let me know.” Get a pulse and that should be it. Don’t even put anything in the body of the email. Say, “Let me know,” for both of them and see how many responses you get to see how many people you respond to. You might be the woman and have eighteen new clients, now you don’t know what to do.

You could say, “Now I have a purpose and a reason to go all-in on this expertise.” Learn it, figure it out, spend between 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM, enroll in Eric’s program. You’re going to also need to know how to convert and sell. You and I can talk about that, but that would be a great first step to say, “Now I have a reason to get into action.” If you have 400 clients like that person did, you should get a minimum of twenty emails. I don’t even know but I can fathom, especially now with the pandemic, how many responses you’ll get.

You can figure out how you want to navigate that and join Tax Rep or buy the books or farm out the business, because you’re like, “I don’t want to deal with this stuff.” Maybe you’re like, “This is my transition out of 1040 work.” I hear from many people, “I want to do more high-value work. I want to do more consulting work. I want to do this. I want to do that.” Here’s your first step to take a pulse. You are needed for those services. You could transition all your 1040 work to someone else and now focus on the eighteen clients that will probably pay you the same amount of revenue as all of your 1040 clients put together.

Here’s what I like about my practice. If nothing else a pandemic has answered those last few that were hold-ups have had a meet with me, no, you don’t. I could do it from anywhere. It is of high value. There are very few people that do it well. I have cases all over the world. I have clients that are in Paris. I have clients in Israel that have IRS issues. The thing that’s beautiful about the IRS is it is standard across the board. Frankly, if you can do a 1040, you can do an offer and compromise. It’s not that complicated. What you need though is the desire to do it.

The desire could come from sending this email and seeing how much interest there is, and that interest will help the desire come to reality. Eric, is there anything else that you want to share from the comments that we got before that we haven’t covered?

No. They were all variations on that.

I think you all have some great next steps to take a pulse on your client list, see what’s possible and be able to make these pivots so you can thrive during this time instead of what I call contract. When we say, “We’re not going to go to the gym, I’m going to watch Netflix.” I can’t do that. I never learned that. That’s too complicated. That’s a lot of work. You get to make the shifts because otherwise, you’re 97% of people that are actually contracting and standing still or moving backward.

I have found it helpful. My Tax Rep members, what I’ve said to them, and what I would say to you is if you’re one of these people that are like, “I don’t know what I want.” I’ve been there. At one point a couple of years ago, my practice was out of control. The friend who helped me said, “What do you want?” I said “What do you mean what do I want? I want my money.” “No. What do you want?” In other words, tell me what you want your day to look like and you start there, and you engineer backwards. When you feel lost, it’s easier to say, “What do I want to do? I want to be a resolution expert. How am I going to get there?”

The best referral sources will be from clients who already like you. Click To Tweet

First of all, I need you to learn to do a resolution. I need to figure out how to get clients. Eric Green’s got these books and Michelle Weinstein’s got this. What you do is you engineer backwards because the old saying is, “If you want something, it’s a dream. If you’ve put steps in front of it, it’s a plan.” You figure out the plan and you work at the plan. We’ve mentioned the gym a couple of times and it’s one of the examples I give people. When they ask you, they say, “I’m lost. I don’t know what to do.” For me, it creates discipline. Go to the gym whether you hate it or not. What I would suggest is this. You’re not going to get in great shape going to the gym Monday for four hours. You get into great shape going to the gym for 30 minutes day after day. It is a consistent effort.

I don’t ask my Tax Rep members to give me more than two hours a week. You do have to do it every week. I don’t care if you do it 30 minutes a day. I don’t care if you set aside the weekend. You’ve got to continue to put the effort in. If you do, you’ll be one of my seven-figure people. We have a platinum level membership because I had people that said, “Eric, I’m at $700,000. I want to get to $1.5 million. That is my goal. It allows me to do this. I’ve re-engineered. I’ve got my steps. Can you sit and spend time with me on my practice because I hit a wall?” I have to tell you, it’s fun.

I bet it’s very fulfilling and rewarding.

I discover things. Together in working through this, we have our second platinum cohort going. There were six of them. We have to keep it small. They’ve gotten very tight together. In going back and forth with marketing and looking at their stuff of what we’re doing and they’re doing, all of a sudden, we’ll hang up. Nicole and Amanda, if we were in the office, we look at each other, but we’re on Zoom and say, “We’ve got to do that. That’s a great idea.”

I think it stems from one other thing that we didn’t talk about yet. It is community. When you have a community that’s standing together, they always say you can do a lot more with a team. I learned that with my last business. I always said, “I’ll do it myself,” because everyone else is going to make a mistake or whatever it is and putting trust in your team. I’ve transitioned that into this business. With the Abundant Accountant, I have a great team. They’ve been with me from day one. There’s been no turnover. When you can have a community and a team together, you can get a lot further.

I bet your ideas together, marketing, even if someone were to enroll in Tax Rep Network, you’re shortening the time investment to figuring it out and you’re making it as quickly as possible. I’m always about, how can I be the most efficient in the shortest amount of time to get to where I want to go? I think with the platinum membership, it’s the same thing. Together, you’re able to go so much further. Eric, thank you again for being here with us. It’s always fun to have you here. If everyone wants to go and check out what Eric is doing, you know how to find him.

Thank you for having me. It’s always fun. I always learn something.

I’m going to want a report in the future. I know you’re 7 for 7 of $1,500. We’re going to get another read on where Eric is at with his enrollments on the consultation fees being at $1,500.

If you want something, it's a dream. If you've put steps in front of it, it's a plan. Click To Tweet

They send something out of your two emails, I’d be curious how many people contacted them and where it went. Do let me know.

You let me know too because I don’t give out my email address.

If you go to TaxRepLLC.com, you can always send it to hello@taxrepllc.com.

Send them all to Eric and he’ll report back.

You can send it to me.

Thank you again for being here with us.

Thank you.

—

What an amazing show with Eric. Once again, Tax Rep Network is how you can find him on Google or go directly to his website. For those of you that think, “I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do tax resolution. I’ve always wanted to. It seems so complicated.” We always will make time for what’s important to us. If you want to get a pulse or if you even have the potential within your business, send an email to your 1040 clients. If you need those titles one more time, take note of these. For the subject line I would write, “What to do if you can’t pay your taxes? Click here.” “Interested in knowing what to do if you can’t pay your taxes? Let me know.” The other one could be, “If you are going to have a tax problem this year, respond back to this email.” Get a pulse on how many people might need your help and that might be the little thing that will get you into action.

You’re going to have an abundance of leads like he had that one Tax Rep member. She had eighteen people respond to her email out of 400 1040 clients. What are you going to do with them? Once you have the lead, do you have a sales process? Do you have a system or are you winging it all the time and you’re frustrated and stuck? You can’t do the technical work and the inbound process. What I’ve found is that when we don’t have a sales system or a solid system that we follow, we typically won’t charge what we want and we’re not working consistently with high paying clients.

If you want to build the firm and feel confident about your conversion process, sell high level services like tax resolution, tax consulting, whatever it is with ease and have more time to spend with your kids and doing homeschooling and live that abundant life, book a call over at TheAbundantCall.com. Together, we will explore how to detach from the emotional side of the sales process, how you can create a paradigm shift in the nucleus and the most important part of your business, which is what do you do when you get the referral or the lead. Possibly even see how an objection could be an asset to your firm. Once again, if you’re willing to get to the truth of any of that, then book your free complimentary call with me over at the website. Pick the first thought you see because there’s not that many. One last thing, please make sure you’ve had your accounting firm for at least two years. I’ll see you in the next episode.

Important Links:

• OnTheClock.com
• Google Play – OnTheClock
• App Store – OnTheClock
• Green & Sklarz LLC
• Tax Rep Network
• Tax Rep Network Podcast
• The Accountant’s Guide to IRS Collection
• Resolving Tax Debts
• Resolving Payroll Taxes
• TheAbundantCall.com
• Previous episode – Engineering Your Dream Practice Backwards – “You Get Out What You Put In”
• Sean Croxton
• Green & Sklarz Foundation
• Support@TaxRevLLC.com

About Eric Green