Challenge - Improving marketing for accountants

The Profitable Firm helps accountants and accounting firms do better marketing - improving marketing for accountants. They needed to log their KPI results so they could action the results faster. Using Xero was doing them well, but there was no way to plan their future in it. Mostly looking back at past history didn’t suit owner Karen Reyburn’s way of working, so she needed a solution with a similar ethos to her own.

Solution - supporting accounting firms with the help of Futrli

Working with accountants means Karen’s got her ear to the ground with the latest trends and releases to support her clients with the best marketing plan and marketing efforts. She heard about Futrli from advisors and wanted to see how the visualization software would work for her business. They’re able to add in their non-financial data, which has helped Karen see much more about her company. That confidence and knowledge can help solidify their business plan and tackle their target market and target audience.

Results - improved marketing efforts for the accounting firm

Working with Futrli has helped The Profitable Firm look to their future, like many other successful firms. They’re able to review what’s coming up, how they’re performing to date, and see what they can learn from the last few months of trading. Karen’s future focus has been matched by the Futrli software, which is a great partnership and helps improve the firm's services.

Interview in full

One of the things that MD Karen Reyburn and her team have noted is that whilst accountants are experts at working with their clients on their finances and providing other accounting services, this expertise is not always showcased in the digital marketing arena - online marketing can often be improved. And many marketing ideas just sit on the shelf. So, the Profitable Firm team helps with a marketing strategy to move those ideas off the shelf and online.

Futrli is one of the areas that accountants were asking The Profitable Firm about in terms of marketing. How were they to market it, or share it with their existing clients and potential clients? What emails would they send? How would it be mentioned on the website?

“We already loved Xero and then we realized everyone and their brother/uncle/relative/cat were singing Futrli’s praises,” says Karen. So, naturally, the next step was for the Profitable Firm to see how it worked in practicality. Fortunately, their accountants happened to be a Futrli accounting partner and a Xero Gold partner. My Accountancy Place introduced Karen and the team to the benefits of beautiful, visual management accounts. “We were blown away,” says Karen.

We trust Xero to take care of our accounting but this tool is a business driver. The data is just there, and it is so easy. The conversations we have with My Accountancy Place have completely changed. Instead of just looking at the accounts, checking cash and profit, we’re starting to look at the non-financial numbers. We’d been working on our own KPIs and systems for a while, but having a monthly Futrli meeting means that we now action things a lot faster. As a professional speaker, it is amazing for me to see the impact of metrics like this reported against our income – so we can make better decisions in future.

The Profitable Firm is essentially a creative agency, so design is important to Karen and her team. “We love Futrli’s visual impact,” Karen enthuses. “As a photographer and artist myself, I can understand a list of numbers, but it’s fairly dull. I trained as an accountant and know my way around a set of accounts, but as a business owner, I don’t have the time or inclination to go back to that way of thinking. I want to know the interesting things, the critical numbers, and I love seeing the little colored lines go up and up and up!”

The Profitable Firm also credits the Xero community as a big part of why they love Futrli. “It’s exciting to be experiencing this on the client-side. So many of our accountancy firm clients are using Futrli exploring how best to market Futrli to their own clients – or better yet, incorporate Futrli into the services they already offer. However, it isn’t about selling a product to their client. It is a product and a service. As we’ve experienced first hand, the real value is the meeting where we run through our business in Futrli with My Accountancy Place – reviewing what’s coming up, how we’re performing today, and what we can learn from the past few months’ trading to improve.”

Finally, it’s not just the product and the community. “It helped that we’d already partied with the Futrli team at Xerocon and we could tell they were our kind of people,” Karen says. “This is very important to me. It’s not solely about the product, it’s about personality and thinking alike. The passion and ambition the team has are infectious. They never seem satisfied with what’s available today and keep talking about what’s next. I love that.”