EL 023: Is Usefulness the Future of Marketing? Darren Root on the True Client Value
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“Number one key is knowing who it is that you want to serve..then it’s creating information that’s interesting to those people.” – Darren Root
When describing the idea of his new book, The Intentional Accountant, Darren Root says that a lot of small businesses happen by accident, like an unintentional brand, client base, or their marketing strategy. He wants marketing to be helping people, not hiding from people. Listen to my podcast to learn how accountants and entrepreneurs can exude the true client value and successfully market themselves.
Find out more about Darren Root at www.rootworks.com. Root coauthored Youtility for Accountants with Jay Baer, and his new book is called The Intentional Accountant.
Root brings up a great point: When a consumer feel like someone is answering their question instead of trying to sell them something, it’s more likely they will engage. I find it brilliant that Darren Root’s accounting firm’s website is root.com, he teaches his marketing strategies and shares his successful tips on rootworks.com.
Mistakes made by accountants in regard to marketing:
1. They are not being specific about the kind of clients they want;
2. The client drives the process;
3. Think the website design or a mobile app is not worth being invested in;
4. Lacking a business model.
Darren Root emphasizes that he never sets the expectation that it will be him who services the clients. Instead, they rely on the system he had built.
In this interview you’ll learn:
- 01’31” Learn about Darren Root and his new book
- 03’55” What accountants are doing wrong in marketing
- 10’30” How Root’s evolved over the years
- 12’35” Continuum
- 14’25” RootWorks’ system and business model
- 23’27” Root’s failures – Saying no
- 25’12” Work-life balance
- 28’13” Root’s digital future predication
- 30’11” Root’s favorite quote and book recommendation “The Seven Habits” & “The E-Myth”
Written Podcast Transcript:
Jacob: Hello everybody, this is Jacob Sapochnick. Welcome to the Enchanting Lawyer Podcast where we talk about marketing, business, entrepreneurship. Today, I have an interesting guest, Mr. Darren Root.
Darren Root leads the strategic direction of Rootworks. He formed the vision, educating small and mid-size accounting firms on the value of technology, solution workflow, and efficiency.
With more than two decades of working in the tax and accounting profession, Darren is a highly respected CPA. He pretty much [rootanize 00:00:57] the CPA industry with his innovative marketing strategies.
He recently co-authored a book, Youtility for Accountants, with Jay Baer, the marketing superstar. I’m honored to have Darren here on the show with us. How are you, Darren?
Darren: Fine, Jacob. Thanks for letting me come on the show today.
Jacob: Darren, first of all, you are on vacation right now which, I think, is important to mention that because one of the things that I’m going to ask you on the show is once you reach a particular success in your business, you also want to be able to have a work and life balance.
Darren: Sure.
Jacob: Why don’t you tell our audience a bit about yourself.
Darren: I started out as a practitioner. I had a CPA firm — and still have a CPA firm today — a really successful small firm. In America, there’s about 138,000 accounting firms, Jacob, which about 45,000 of them are CPA firms. And about 99.5% of them have less than 25 employees. So, probably not a lot in like legal profession. It’s a boutique business, right?
I have a small firm. We do a couple of million dollars in revenue. Have about 10, 11 staff. I don’t spend a lot of time in the accounting firm. Started a company called Rootworks. We tried to help accounting firms really sort of think differently, run their practices differently.
You mentioned Youtility for Accountants. That’s a book I did with Jay Baer. We’re on our third book. I did one with a guy named Michael Gerber who wrote the book called The E-Myth, a pretty successful book. We did an E-Myth for accountants. I did one with Jay. Jay’s been a very successful, as you know, social media marketing … content marketing guru really worldwide.
To continue reading the complete transcript from this podcast, click here.
If you prefer to watch the discussion in action, here is my recorded interview with Darren Root (please refresh your browser a few times if it isn’t loaded properly the first time):
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