Episode 009 – With Jamie Gruol

Jamie Gruol: Welcome back to this episode of Diary of a Tax Practice Owner. I am your solo host today, Jamie Gruol, and I wanted to bring this Podcast to you today because I really think that this is an important topic. So a philosophy that I have is that technology is meant to enhance my client’s experience. It allows me to be more professional in providing my services to my clients.

And it allows me to not sacrifice my boundaries that I need in order to run a business that feels good to me. And It also allows me to maintain my sanity because I’m not trying to do all the things to make my clients have a really great experience for me. So when I am helping tax professionals and accountants to implement software to help their client experience, that is really the lens that I am looking through.

And it’s important to understand why we’re doing that. And I wanted to bring you this podcast today because it’s in response actually to a comment that I got on a post in our free Facebook group, tax pros, accountants and bookkeepers, automation and workflows that lives over on Facebook. So if you want to go and find us there and hang out with us, I invite you to do that.

But this comment that I got was actually had me a little taken aback and I looked into it a little further and I will preface by saying that the person that shared this comment is newer to business. She’s been in business since 2022 and she is serving her clients and It’s working for her. So take that with a grant with the context of what I’m about to share.

But one of the things that she said in there was one sentence that stood out to me and she said that she already has clients.

There was one sentence in this comment that really stood out to me and It ran, it’s a longer sentence, but it brings a lot of context to what I want to talk about today. And what she said is, I already have clients complaining about having to provide me details and sending me bits and bytes over the months.

When I watch other tax pros on Taxdome specifically, they all say that their clients complain and refuse to use the system. And so we wanted to break this down because you might be somebody who is wary of technology. Maybe you are using Taxdome just as a portal for clients to upload and transfer documents to you and same back to them.

That is a great starting point. So let me make that clear. That is where a lot of people start. And I think that’s great. But there is so much more available to us when we determine and decide that we want to start leveraging technology to be our friend, to be our other team member, to help us in running a practice, in running our businesses, and, There’s so much that technology can do.

It’s changing so rapidly. The five years ago when things would come on the market, they would slowly shift and change. But today things are evolving so quickly and not just in TaxDome but just in the world, right? I feel it so much in my bones. But I wanted to share this with you because I think there’s a lot of things we can talk to.

And the first thing that I wanted to share is that as a person, When we’re looking at automated workflows and we’re looking at implementing technology that can take some of the burden of administrative tasks off of us as humans, that is so helpful to us to being able to be better professionals for our clients.

I am not a tax professional. You may or may not know that I have an accounting degree. I have an MBA. I spent 10 years as a senior project manager implementing software in the healthcare IT space. But I have not run a tax practice myself. That being said, I have helped over 30 custom setups in the weeds, understanding how practices work and helped over 800 practices to implement tax dome And I’ve seen a thing or two. I’ve worked through a lot of mindset issues. I’ve worked with a lot of people who have come into wanting so badly to have technology, take some of the burden off their shoulders that they, work with us because they want to make this a quick and seamless transition. And what that means is that You need to look at technology as not being a problem causing solution to you, right?

You need to look at technology as the solution to being able to serve your clients better. And I want to break down today a few things that you might be experiencing as If you have not yet gotten to the belief that technology is a client solution, that it is something that can make your client experience better.

And so what you might be experiencing if you haven’t gotten to that belief set yet is that clients are not complying with your requests for information and documents. If you are somebody who has A lot of clients who are running up to the deadlines and dumping a load of receipts on your desk at the 11th hour.

And you’re working long hours to meet those deadlines for your clients because you did your best to communicate to them what your deadlines are, but your clients didn’t respect them. That can be a symptom of not having the proper technology and systems in place to be able to tech to be able to communicate with your clients effectively Meaning that you can give them warnings of deadlines coming and when I say deadlines, I’m not talking like the April 15th deadline I’m talking like the March 15th cutoff deadline and what that looks like for them so that they can actually provide you the information that you need on the deadline that you’re providing them for cutting off the delivery of documents so you can actually have time to prepare a return.

And so when you’re, looking at how technology can do that, it allows us to be more proactive in our communications to warn our clients that a deadline is coming to then Tell them that’s two days before that deadline. And then again, tell them after, Hey, it looks like you didn’t meet our deadline.

Here’s what that means for you. And here’s how we’re going to take next steps. Could be putting them immediately on an extension. It could be a fee. It could be a rush fee if they must have it done by April 15th. But there’s so many more opportunities that we have to maintain our boundaries in our businesses that protects us from that burnout and the exhaustion that can come from trying to do this all manually.

The other thing you might be experiencing is that you might be working too long at deadlines as those The other thing you might be experiencing is that you have clients complaining or struggling with your client portal. Now I’m going to talk about a solution for that in just a moment, but a lot of people say that my clients aren’t liking my portal.

And this person here in their comment, they said they have client, they, many of their clients complain and refuse to use the system. I will say from my experience and working with very intimately and closely with over 800 practices at this point, the number of clients that say they don’t like the portal Is in the sub 5%.

If you have a thousand clients, maybe 25 of them will complain about the portal. And my question to them always is, are those your clients then? If you’re putting systems in place to be a better professional for your clients, and they are complaining about those systems, then it just merely means that they’re not your clients.

That they are not a good fit anymore because you need systems and you need technology to be a better professional. So don’t be afraid to say, I’m sorry that’s how you feel, but maybe we’re not a good fit anymore. So we’ll add that. The other thing you might be experiencing is that you’re getting a ton of questions or calls, or even, like I said, complaints about the client portal, that it’s, there’s too many notifications, that there’s too many emails, that there’s too many buttons to click.

Yes, a client portal has technology built into it. It has buttons. It has screens that are going to be unfamiliar to your clients in the beginning, but that doesn’t mean that the technology is bad. It doesn’t mean that your use of the technology is bad. It doesn’t mean that you need to throw the baby out with the bath water and say technology is not going to work for me.

It is just merely an opportunity for us to be better communicators. We’re going to talk about that in a minute too. And then finally, if you are currently sending. And then finally, this is to the person that is currently using taxdome as just a client portal or a means of getting information. And finally, this is for the person that’s using taxdome, the person that’s using taxdome without the pipelines.

If you are somebody who is manually Sending and tracking all of your client components for taking them through compliance, taking them through your tax planning, taking them through your bookkeeping, meaning that you’re using tax Dome features like engagement letters, proposals, invoices, organizers to gather information, but you’re not utilizing tax dome pipelines to be able to manage where your clients are at in your process and ensuring a standardized.

Excellent client experience. You may be experiencing some of this clients hating your situation because when we’re actually able to layer in a level of client experience that is exceptional, that has our clients at the forefront, that is making sure that they have the information and the instructions they need to take action, on exactly what I need them to do right now.

That is where you start seeing the power. of what technology can do for you. So if you are somebody that’s not fully utilizing automated pipelines and tax dome, you better listen up. Okay. So what do we do to solve this? Because we’ve heard a whole lot of like scenarios and things that could be happening in your practice, right?

I want to bring up two things for you. The first one is, that you need to be thinking about how you are transitioning your clients to new technology when you move them there. Okay. So when you determine, yes, Taxdome is the portal that I want to be using and Taxdome is the tool that I’m going to start building my practice around.

That is when you need to start thinking about how do I transition my clients to this new portal? You can’t just turn it on, send a link and call it good. We are humans. We need some love and attention, and you want to provide that to your clients. And so what you need to be thinking about is how can I provide a client communication transition plan that includes communications to my clients in various channels?

So the first one being, of course, emails. Emails are easy to get out. Taxonomics is so easy. It’s just the click of a button and you can send emails to everyone. on your client roster. Now the other thing you can think about is there may be some people that are not yet accustomed to you using technology.

If you are somebody who has relied heavily on paper returns, paper drop offs, paper pickups maybe scheduled in person events or return sessions, those types of situations, then you need to be thinking about how do I now transition my clients into a more virtual world. It doesn’t mean it has to be a hundred percent virtual where you can flip off to the Caribbean to go do your tax returns.

No, I’m talking about getting your clients to working on a client portal, allowing you to transition away from the paper heavy manual workflows that are out there. There’s a lot of practices that are still doing a lot of paper and a lot of email exchange and those are not secure. The paper is secure, but the email is not secure.

Like we need to transition this industry away from it as things like the WISPs and the different security requirements are becoming more and more prevalent and more and more regarded when it comes to people being held accountable. So thinking about how you can make sure that those kind of more I’ll call them analog processes and people are transitioning over with you.

So while emails are great for people that use email, transitioning those people is not challenging people that are reliant on your paper processes. Maybe you need to send a postcard. Maybe it’s a couple of letters that get sent out via the old snail mail. That is just what you need to be thinking about and how you can work on those multiple communications to transition your clients and make sure that they understand, Hey, we have this new portal.

This is how we’re going to communicate going forward. That is really critically important. Now, the other thing that you need to do among those now, the other thing you need to do within those communications is you need to make sure that you are warming up your clients. I know it sounds weird, but we need to, as humans understand what the benefit is to us in making this change.

Now, I have taken some change management trainings in the past from my project management world. And one of the biggest things is around helping the key stakeholders, which are your clients in this case, to understand what the benefit is to them for making this change. Now for them, it’s greater security around their financial information.

It’s improved efficiency in communicating with us as a team. It’s Having everything at your fingertips in one place. Again, the TaxDome portal is amazing for that. All of the invoices, all of the signature requests, all of the information and document requests, it all happens from one place, making sure that they’re not spending all their time reaching out all over the internet, uncertain of exactly what tool you’re using this year and where.

So it allows us to make sure that they are seeing the benefit of this is it. We’re going to make things more streamlined for you. And another one is that it’s going to allow us to spend more time working with you directly, helping you to actually solve your tax problems, helping you to actually implement planning, helping you to stay on top of things that are due.

That is going to be hugely beneficial to your clients, and they’re going to jump all over that, especially after the first year. The second thing I wanted to talk about is that you need to be thinking about when you’re building out automated workflows or considering implementing automation, when you go and do this, you need to be thinking about how my client experience is happening.

A lot of firms that I know go straight into it, and they just build it out to streamline the process within the practice. Totally get it. That is definitely important. You want to make sure that you are standardizing your workflows, that you are being most efficient as a team, allowing you to better serve your clients.

But what they oftentimes, but what they oftentimes forget is that you have to layer in a layer of client experience. You need to take off your hat and put on that client hat and go through the process and experience it as a client. Not as a tax professional, not as somebody that’s got multiple years of experience, not as somebody that knows what the heck a 1098 int is and go through it as a layman at a fourth grade reading level and say, if I was that person, I put myself in my client’s shoes at that level and that comprehension of what taxes do and how they work.

Would my client, would I as a client, I should clarify, Would I as a client succeed in what I’m asking them to do? The old school way of sending these engagement letters, hoping that people send you the proper information, doing the return or sitting down with someone to have a full blown interview and then getting and gathering any missing information after that.

Those days are gone. In the past, if you’re still doing them, I totally get it, but there is a huge shift in a transition that’s happening within the public, especially with the younger generations that are coming up and becoming the income earners of our society. They don’t want to sit down with somebody and talk for an hour about their taxes and getting information that they could just spend.

Send you in a form. They want to sit down with you and have conversations about how they can save money on their taxes. You’re not able to do that in a one hour interview style where you’re gathering the information. So what I’m saying is that when you’re thinking about your client experience, or excuse me, so what I’m saying is that when you’re thinking about your automated workflows, you’ve got to consider most importantly, what that client experience is like.

So this can look like, So some of the things that you’ll want to consider having are simple instructions, broken down processes. Don’t front load everything once at the beginning, break it down, get your clients to get through the things that you need them to get through and then ask them for additional details.

Don’t try and do everything all at once. It is really hard for the clients to make sure and for you, honestly, to make sure that everything is getting done by every single client. If you try to glump it all together and say, I’m just going to throw this all at the client, they’ll get it back to me in time because they always do.

That just causes a lot of friction there and we want to streamline the clients. Now we have a method in our workflows for taxpayers program where we call it breadcrumbing them to success. So how can we throw out little breadcrumbs along the way and allow our clients to guide themselves down the path to our ultimate result which for something like tax prep is a finalized return?

without there being a ton of back and forth. That is how we can do it is by breadcrumbing them to success. So bite sized little chunks that go out with the appropriate instructions that are simple to follow broken down to ensure the processes are followed. And then finally using a language that they will understand, not acronyms, not industry jargon.

Simple terms that anybody could understand that’s from fourth grade. I always think my son’s in nine, I was nine years old now. How would Ty understand that? How can he, would he read this and say, Oh, I know what they’re asking for here. That’s what you need to look through on your lens. Now, I wanted to share with you a client, Brittany of ours.

So she had a client who she reported back to us, was very hesitant about working with her as like a virtual firm. I say that in quotation marks, if you’re listening to this podcast on the, radio or on the mobile device, but the virtual firm that he was expecting was one that was not going to be friendly.

It was not going to be easy to do. And she said that she received an email from him after she started working with him and he was celebrating her workspaces, her client portals, her, online presence and he fell in love with it. And she said she didn’t even know that he was actually like going through her onboarding process at that point.

So efficiently and effectively until she received his documents and his information for his return. And she got the notification that she had to go and take action on the documents that he had uploaded and that it was time for her to go and review them. And so she was so surprised because he was so hesitant about working with a virtual firm, but he just said it was so streamlined and smooth.

It was no problem. So I love that story. And I just wanted to share that with you because you may have clients that are hesitant. You may yourself be hesitant about working in a virtual space or within technology. But I think if you can adopt the philosophy that I have, and that is that technology will enhance your client experience and will allow you to be more professional in your services and allow you to not sacrifice your boundaries and therefore your sanity, You’re going to find that the momentum into technology is a lot greater.

If you let go of the resistance of the change for you and your clients, you’re going to find that technology and using a tool like taxo is going to quickly transformate. You’re going to find that a tool like tax dome and technology are going to quickly transform how you are working in your practice.

Therefore, how you are living your life and therefore how much joy you have and how much more freedom you have. So if you have found this valuable, I’m so excited for you. And I would love to ask if you have a moment, if you could give us a Raider review, if you found this helpful and you think someone else that you know in the industry would find this helpful as well, please forward them this episode because that is how we can grow this podcast and how we can have more impact and helping more people see the technology doesn’t have to be scary.

Technology doesn’t have to mean that I am sacrificing my client experience. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I get to have more freedom. I get to have a better client experience. All leveraged through the power of technology. So thanks for being here with me today. I’m excited to see you in our next podcast and until then, take care.