Episode 62 // How to Write a Book for Your Firm

Mike Jones:
Yeah, and I think this goes back to the first question we had, which is like, why have a book? If you’re trying to carve out a position in the marketplace, we’re really saying we serve certain kinds of businesses or certain kinds of people with a certain set of services in a certain kind of way. The book puts them all in one package with a title on it, with a listing on Amazon, with an author on the cover from your firm, and it produces this level of reputational trust that I haven’t seen with too many other pieces of content that brands can put out in the marketplace.

Introduction Voice Over:
You’re listening to the The Remarkabrand Podcast, where authentic brands win.

Mike Jones:
Hey everybody, it’s another episode of Remarkabrand Podcast. I’m Mike Jones. I’ve got Sam Pagel in the studio with me and calling in from, I assume cold, I don’t know if it’s sunny or not, but cold Idaho, we’ve got Chris Stadler from the Resound team. Very excited to have Chris on today. For those that don’t know, Chris is our chief operations officer. He oversees all the stuff and things that go on behind the scenes to make sure that Resound actually operates and gets stuff done, and we’re very appreciative of him for all that. Plus, he’s just a good friend, and I’m excited to have him back on the podcast. We ran a podcast together for, what, four years interviewing people, Chris?

Chris Stadler:
Yeah. Oh, man. It was even before I worked at Resound. It was, yeah.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, it was so fun.

Chris Stadler:
AZ Brandcast.

Mike Jones:
Yep.

Sam Pagel:
Technically, this is that podcast.

Mike Jones:
It is technically.

Sam Pagel:
It’s just rebranded into a different podcast, but it’s still the same podcast.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. And if you load up the podcast’s back feed, the archive, if you’re on the website or you go back through Apple Podcast or wherever you’re listening to this, you can dig some of those episodes out of the archive and take a listen, and you can hear Chris’s beautiful voice.

Sam Pagel:
Those sweet Stadler vocals.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, so-

Chris Stadler:
Well, gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to be back on.

Mike Jones:
Thanks, Chris. All right. Let’s get right into it. Name 10 things, right?

Sam Pagel:
Yep. And we got to do this today. Chris is with us, and so we do have an Idaho expert here on the podcast. So we’re going to name 10 things you would only see in Idaho. Chris, why don’t you get us started?

Chris Stadler:
Only see in Idaho.

Sam Pagel:
Name 10 things you would only see in Idaho.

Chris Stadler:
Only see in Idaho.

Sam Pagel:
We’ll switch off, we’ll switch off.

Mike Jones:
First thing off the top of your head.

Chris Stadler:
Me? I’m supposed to do it.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah, we’re going to just go around.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. You’re going to kick us off. We’ll just go around.

Chris Stadler:
Sugar beets laying on the side of the road.

Mike Jones:
There we go.

Sam Pagel:
That’s pretty good. I’m going to say belly button at a nice dinner. Well, I was thinking like an old man.

Mike Jones:
I like that.

Sam Pagel:
Old man sitting at a white table.

Chris Stadler:
I don’t even know what that means, but sweet.

Sam Pagel:
Yep. That’s two.

Mike Jones:
Unused potatoes.

Sam Pagel:
Ooh, yeah. Yep.

Mike Jones:
They’re just not there.

Sam Pagel:
That’s a good one. Yep.

Chris Stadler:
They do get used.

Sam Pagel:
That’s true. Chris, what do you got for us? We need a fourth.

Chris Stadler:
Milk truck driving by every five minutes.

Mike Jones:
Cool. Yep. I’m going to say potato sack children’s reusable diapers.

Sam Pagel:
Norwegians, just going to go with Norwegians.

Mike Jones:
That’s great. That’s a good one. Number seven [inaudible 00:03:38]. Chris, what do you got?

Chris Stadler:
Yeah. Pizza, other food joints that have the word Idaho in them that make you think that they sell all potatoes.

Sam Pagel:
That’s pretty good. That just-

Chris Stadler:
Potato-based pizza, Idaho Pizza.

Sam Pagel:
I was just going to say potato on pizza because that’s just one thing that doesn’t belong on pizza unless you’re in Idaho is potatoes.

Chris Stadler:
Correct.

Sam Pagel:
Like a nice scalloped potato on top of the pizza where you’d normally see pepperoni. So it’s just sad. It’s just sad. Mike, what do you got? We need two more.

Mike Jones:
Beyonce music video. It’s just not going to take place there.

Sam Pagel:
Okay.

Mike Jones:
I don’t know why that came in my head, but that’s what came in.

Sam Pagel:
Mike switched to things you wouldn’t see in Idaho.

Mike Jones:
Oh, I thought that was what it was.

Sam Pagel:
No, but that’s great.

Mike Jones:
Oh, I totally lose this round.

Sam Pagel:
That’s improv right there.

Mike Jones:
All right.

Sam Pagel:
I’ll cap it off with-

Mike Jones:
Things you would see, you would only see in Idaho.

Sam Pagel:
I’ll cap it off with a giant crack in the earth.

Chris Stadler:
That’s not true. Arizona’s got one of those too.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah, I know. I know. All right. All right. But the Idaho one, you wouldn’t necessarily see it till you’re falling over the cliff because it’s just everything looks so flat and it’s like, oh, there’s a giant crack in the earth.

Introduction Voice Over:
Find your frequency.

Mike Jones:
All right. So the main reason we’re here, not to name 10 things. I know that’s why everyone else is listening, but we’re here to talk about books, books, books, books, books, books. I think we covered this on a previous episode already, but we thought it was just too important. We talked a little bit about brand anthem and how you can extend that into actually writing a book. We covered a little bit of the process. We’ll recap some of that. I think that’s going to be really helpful for everyone to rethink about that process, but we also want to just cover again, why is this important? Why should firms be thinking about writing a book?
How can they think about doing that in a way that really makes sense for their firm, think about what they’re going to talk about? That feels like the hardest part of the whole thing is what in the world do we talk about that’s interesting? That can take up an entire book. So we want to dive into all those and other questions today. Chris has been thinking a lot about this. In fact, he just wrote a blog post about it. It’s out on our website, resoundcreative.com, if you want to check that out, get a preamble on what’s going on today in our podcast, but let’s talk about that. Why should firms be talking about books? Why should they be thinking about writing books, getting into the publishing game? Why is this important?

Sam Pagel:
Yep. We touched on this a little bit in the last episode, and I think it starts from the baseline of a book is like the chief sales piece that you could put into your arsenal. This is not meant to be some trophy that you just stick a picture of it on your website and say, we have a book, go here, buy it. Yay, we’re done. No, this is more of a tactical thing with the leadership of your firm, the faces of your firm to have something that they can go out and say, “Hey, we are the expert on this. Check out this book.” The leadership of your firm can go out in book speaking events with targeted groups of people that you want to work with. Maybe your firm is really geared towards insurance companies and you want to go speak at an insurance convention because it sounds super fun.

Mike Jones:
Exciting. The highlight of your year.

Sam Pagel:
The highlight of your year. So you go-

Mike Jones:
If it’s done right, it will be.

Sam Pagel:
So how do you get into those places? You can’t just say, “Hey, I’m really good at insurance accounting. Can I come speak?” They’ll be like, “No, stop it.” If you say, “Hey, I wrote a book about accounting for insurance agencies, do want do me to come speak?” “Absolutely, and we’ll take 50 copies of your book.”

Chris Stadler:
Oh, yeah. Well, because that’s a huge thing. They used to say those who can do and those who can’t teach, and the idea is that when you’re writing a book, you’re someone who’s able to teach. Now, there’s a difference between someone who can just do accounting and you ask them how they do it and they’re like, I don’t know. I just do it, and then someone who really understands the process, someone who understands the process to the point where they can explain it. So there’s big difference there. If you can explain the process, you’re a lot more likely to be someone who can use it effectively and then even deal with edge cases or deal with non-standard situations that pop up. So there’s a huge amount of credibility that comes from being able to write a book because it shows a well-ordered thought process that’s born of experience that you can explain.

Sam Pagel:
I think that’s a really good point, Chris, and I think it’s fitting that you mention the word process because you’re the process guy, but it is true. How does somebody wrap their mind around how you do something? You have to have a definable process, and what better way to organize that than into a book where people can, even if they don’t read it, they can see that there is a process, it’s published, it’s legitimate, and maybe we should unpack, okay, you’re an accounting firm, you’re a law firm, you’re a professional services company. You do good work and you’ve never thought about defining the way you do something or the why behind why you do something. So Mike, how do you get there? How do you get to that point where you actually have, because you can’t just say, write a book and talk about what you do. How do you get to that point where you have a process and you have everything defined?

Mike Jones:
So I think that goes back to what we’ve been talking about for a while now, which is this brand anthem idea, this idea that you and your firm have a particular story to tell about the people you serve, the particular people that you serve, your clients. The particular way about which you do that, you might not have that defined in a document somewhere. Maybe that’s more floating around in people’s heads, but I guarantee you that there is a way in which you do what you do that’s unique to you. It might not be the totality of your entire process. Maybe 90% of your process is pretty similar to a lot of other firms, but that little five to 10%, that’s what makes it really interesting.
And that might be because you service a particular niche and you’ve developed a really deep expertise in servicing a lot of those kinds of companies, and so you have particular nuances in how you think about accounting or how you think about legal services that really play very well to that particular audience because you’ve done it over and over and over again, and you’ve learned the little particularities of that industry, the way they think, the little ticks that come with their business. Maybe there’s nuances in the way they do taxes, the way they do valuation, the way that they need to be audited. There’s particularities of how they hire and fire probably too, that have a-

Chris Stadler:
Well, and tax strategies.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Chris Stadler:
Tax strategies.

Mike Jones:
Exactly. How you approach, everybody has a point of view. Even accounting firms, you could say like, they’re all the same. You don’t want someone creatively doing accounting like you wanted to do follow-

Sam Pagel:
Some people do.

Mike Jones:
Generally accepted accounting principles, whatever, but there’s a point of view with different niches, there are different schedules, there are different ways people want to interact with you probably by size of business. There’s a different amount of, we’ve talked, what do we talk with our accountant about? It’s probably different than what some other industries talk to their accountants about.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah. And then I think you get into things of just how particular is a restaurant. So I have a friend who’s got a coffee shop, and we were talking tax accounting, financial things the other day, and the way he’s thinking about employment is so different than us. For instance, most of his employees are part-time. They’re not full-time. They don’t get full-time benefits. He’s only hiring people locally versus us on the other side, it’s like we’re hiring a mix of full-time, part-time, and contracted 1099. So we have complexity there. We’re hiring people from locally and nationally and even internationally sometimes.
And so there’s just a lot of different nuances to our two businesses, even though size-wise, pretty similar, tenure of business, not drastically different. We’re both here in Arizona. I think on paper, a lot of accounting forms will look at us and go, either one of these could be a great client for us, and then when you start to dig in, you’re like, okay. So there’s a lot of differences in how they’re approaching business, what their hiring practices are like, who they’re bringing in. So there’s just complexity to our business that he doesn’t have, but we also don’t have the complexity he has with sales tax. That’s, for him, insane. So-

Chris Stadler:
Well, and-

Sam Pagel:
I think it’s a good example.

Chris Stadler:
But it’s not just complexities either. Think about different accounting firms have different approaches to, for example, home office write-offs, tolerance for auditing. What’s your philosophy of that and how do you lead your clients to think rightly about it, and different firms might have different ways of doing that, different philosophies. So they need to be able to express a systematic philosophy of accounting that makes sense, and if they can make that make sense to their client base, now that’s how their client base is going to think. You write a book that makes sense of that for people. Now, everybody who reads the book and people who follow your blog and everything, now they think like so, so now who can compete with you? What other accounting firm is going to really be able to compete with you because they think like you? They only trust your way of thinking.

Mike Jones:
And I think this goes back to the first question we had, which is like, why have a book, and there’s a lot of reasons. I think you guys covered some really good ones already, but I think there’s one other that we haven’t really touched on, at least in this episode, which is that if you’re trying to carve out a position in the marketplace, we’re really saying we serve certain kinds of businesses or certain kinds of people with a certain set of services in a certain kind of way. If you want to boil down positioning to those three categories, and there’s more to it than that, but let’s just leave it at that for now.
Let’s say it’s some combination of those three things, who we serve, what we do to serve them, and how we do it, how we deliver. If we find our particular way of doing that, our secret sauce, our position in the marketplace, how do you get people to understand that and believe you that you’re actually really good at that and no one else is. So that you would say, well, we just put it on their website. It’s part of our tagline. Yeah, that’s great. That’s awesome. We talked about that in a previous episode about your brand anthem likely is going to have a tagline that falls out of it pretty quickly when you’re telling that story.
You want something catchy, you want something interesting, but a tagline, it gives me an indication of your position, but it doesn’t give me any backbone to it. Where’s the proof? Okay. Well, we have case studies. That’s also great. Proven experience is great. Tell me more about this particular way that you do it. How is it different? How is it special? Give me the details. Okay. Well, we have a page on the website all about our process or our firm brand name way. Everyone uses that one. The Resound Way or whatever.

Chris Stadler:
The Resound Way.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. Okay. That’s good. How long is that page? It’s like four or five paragraphs. Okay. Can you show me any of it? Can you demonstrate it? Can you give me specific example? Well, by the time you’re done answering all these questions that are going to start flying at you to say prove it, that’s essentially what people are asking in their minds without realizing it. Subconsciously, they’re just like, prove it, prove it, prove it. By the time you’re done, you’re going to have a book’s worth of content. You’re going to have stories, you’re going to have explanations, you’re going to have details about your process, you’re going to have internal staff talking about it, giving, here’s how I approach it, here’s what it means to me.
You’re going to have lots of anecdotes of how this worked for your clients and actual probably quotes from them, hopefully, too. So by the time you’re done, this “page on your website,” this page on your website is going to turn into just tons of content and you’re going to be like, we wrote blog posts about it and we did all these things, and it’s like, next thing you know, if you’ve done this strategically, you have built a book and that book in and of itself, even if you have all those things already defined and explained elsewhere in other formats, the book puts them all in one package with a title on it, with a listing on Amazon, with an author on the cover from your firm, and it produces this level of reputational trust that I haven’t seen with too many other pieces of content that brands can put out in the marketplace.

Chris Stadler:
Well, and I think there’s some reasons for that because you have how many people… All right. So you start writing a book and then you change your mind. Anybody who’s started writing a book, I think that’s happened probably over and over because it’s a commitment. If you take this point of view, you’re going to write a whole book about it. That’s a commitment. You’re probably not doing that unless it’s something you really believe, and everybody knows that. Everybody who sees your book, they’re like, that’s a commitment, but the other thing is it shows that I like the idea of the systematic approach.
You’re showing that your way of thinking is a system that understands the area you’re working in, understands your profession, understands your point of view, and when it’s in a book, people are able to see, wait, they said this in chapter nine, but they said something totally different in chapter one. They’re going to be able to see it’s falsifiable because you’re able to see it all in one place, but falsifiability makes it convincing when it agrees, when chapter one agrees with chapter nine, when you’ve shown that, hey, look, this system works to down to the nth degree because we’ve used it so much, so consistently, and that’s convincing.

Mike Jones:
Yep. And it gives everyone in your firm, we’ve talked about this before too, gives everyone a place to point back to and be like, no, remember, that’s how we said we’d do it, and this is the language that we use to talk about this process or this position that we have in the marketplace. Let’s all be on the same page. Let’s all sing from the same hymn book, if you want to call it that, and I think there’s a lot of different ways to tell that story in the book. You don’t have to think about it as like, it’s a textbook. It doesn’t have to be this super academic, incredibly researched footnotes on every page, half the page is actually footnotes type product.
It just needs to be thorough and explain your thinking. It probably doesn’t even have to be as long as you think it should be. I think that’s another issue that I hear from a lot of businesses who are going into this process is they’re like, oh, it’s got to be 40,000 words, it’s got to be 60,000 words. It’s got to be substantial, it’s got to be thick, and I’d argue there are people that you’re going to run into who want the whole book and they want every word. They want to dive super deep.
But the reality is most people that you encounter as potential clients will never actually read every word of the book. They’ll read the parts that matter to them, or they might not even read it at all and they just go, “Wow, you wrote the book on that? I want you as my firm,” and so there’s an element of yes, it needs to be thorough, it needs to be well-developed, it can’t just be garbage, but it maybe doesn’t have to be to this academic degree of we’re going to spend eight years developing this thing and we’re going to have research out the wazoo and it’s going to be this massive volume, thousands of pages long.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah. Well, we talked last time about don’t expect this to be a New York Times bestseller. Don’t expect to even really see it on any physical bookshelf in any store. It’s not why you’re doing this. You’re doing this because this validates everything that you probably think internally about your brand, and it validates the work that you do more than just the words on your website can or a slide deck or whatever.

Chris Stadler:
Yeah. Well, and there’s one other thing too, and we talk about this sometimes with B2B selling. So a company who was buying accounting or buying some professional service, if they can go with a cheaper firm, but if they go with McKinsey, or what are some other big firms, Mike? I mean-

Mike Jones:
Yeah, like Deloitte.

Chris Stadler:
If they go with a big firm with Deloitte, well, we go with Deloitte, I can’t be blamed because I went with Deloitte. We paid big money, but we went to Deloitte and whatever advice they gave, it’s not my fault because I followed their advice and they’re Deloitte.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. And they have a whole section in the Wall Street Journal. So we can’t have been wrong for hiring Deloitte.

Chris Stadler:
No, it’s not my fault because they’re generally accepted as the best. Similarly though, with a book, so now maybe you’re not Deloitte, but you wrote a book and so I think those are little hints and those are things that stack up and that separate you and give you a little bit of monopoly power against the people who are working, your competition, your local competition.

Mike Jones:
And just, again, it stakes out your position. It clearly gives you a position in the marketplace that is just harder to do if you don’t have the book, and we’ve talked about this before too. Maybe this isn’t the only book. Maybe there’s aspects of your business you want to go a lot deeper on and it’s going to take a couple different books to do that, and that’s fine too. I think there’s lots of room here. I think when you talk about professional services firms, not everyone can aspire to this, but maybe the epitome is can you write enough, do you have enough deep thinking about what you do and how you do it that you start to carve out a training program around that? Well, even if that’s just internal, but then maybe you could offer that elsewhere as well.
And I think you’re starting to see that. There are a handful of accounting firms I’m seeing that are starting to birth consult… There’s been this tight integration of accounting and consulting for a while now, but there’s this new wave of consulting that’s beyond just providing consulting services in the Deloitte fashion of like, we’ll, look at your numbers. We’ll do some research. We’ll provide insights and advice for whatever your decision making around a business is, but actually starting to say, no, there’s actually a way that we can do this and we can train you on how to do it. Really shifting consulting into more of an integrated consulting and training approach rather than just this single consulting service.
I don’t know if that makes sense to people, but makes sense to me, but I think that’s where there’s opportunity to say, if we really have that depth of thinking, there’s so much further we can take this. We can even develop products out of it that can drive revenue for our company, not just as a marketing tool, but I don’t know that I would encourage every firm to think that that’s possible, or to think that that’s the norm, and to not be dissuaded and say, we don’t have anything like that. We’re not that deep thinking. It’s like, do you have enough, can you just get enough together to put a book together that says this is what’s unique about us and we want to just share it with the world, and I think at the end of the day, that’s all we’re talking about.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah. And you’re not saying this, Mike, but it can’t just be like, here’s our firm, we’re amazing. This is why.

Mike Jones:
No, no.

Sam Pagel:
There has to be a target. There has to be a focus to the book.

Mike Jones:
Yes. And I think that’s a great lead in. What’s the first thing you do to start this process? Chris, I know you’ve had a lot of thinking about this. What do you think?

Chris Stadler:
Yep. Yeah. So to your point earlier, you said not everybody can necessarily generate the depth of insight to warrant a book, but I think the first thing to try to do though is to start seeing the difference between how you handle things and how someone else handles things, and as people, as new clients come in who have left other firms to notice those things and say, hey, here’s frustrating about accounting these days, can you imagine? If you had your point of view and then said, here’s what we do, that’s a little different and here’s why we do it, and it goes with how we think. So now you’re building your values and everything into these insights.
So pretty soon, you write four or five blog posts from these experiences that you’ve had, some frustrations that you’ve had working with other, and once you gather up a few of those, I think at that point, when you get to that place where you’re starting to see those insights, that’s when you got to stop and say, you know what? We have something here. Do we have three rules? Do we have three insights? Do we have three steps in a process, or something like that. So as soon as you start seeing those kinds of things form, I think that’s when it’s worth starting to formalize it, and I’m going to leave it there for a second. I think we have more to say on that, but I want to see what you guys think about that.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, I think that’s a great first step. I think even before that, you alluded to this, they got to know their values. You have to know what do we as a firm believe about how to do business? Those might, in and of themselves, be worthy of a book, especially if you can take them, and let’s say you have five values, take each one of them and say, here’s how we think about business in our particular part of the world where we do business, whether that’s geographically or within a certain industry, a certain position, a certain group of people that we are uniquely suited to help with our services, and again, that comes back to branding. We talk about that, to eat our own dog food here, we talk about that in our book.
We talk about brand is we can confuse brand sometimes and forget that it’s as simple as you as a firm, you as an organization are uniquely suited to serve certain people in the world with certain set of skills and services. That’s it. It can be as simple as that. If you can’t answer those questions, who do we serve, how do we serve them in a unique way with specific services, then that’s where you need to start. How are we uniquely suited to serve people in the world? Start there, and that’s brand. You got to do some brand work. Once you’ve done that though, I like what you just said. I love this idea of the next step is how do we systematize that? Are there three steps? Are there three ways? Are there three insights? Are there three, I don’t know, used another word and I’ve already forgotten what it was, but there was a good word there.

Chris Stadler:
Yeah. Like three steps in a process or something like that, but I think what you just said is a good way into that. So you could start, say you’re a small firm, you have three people today, but then as you grow, you start getting these insights. Sometimes some of those insights start coming first, but then on the other side of things, you might decide, hey, we do need to establish our brand, which is what we do every day, and one thing that you said, it reminded me of a client we helped recently, AmPhil. So one of their frustrations, so what you were talking about, Mike, sounded to me like a manifesto. What frustrates us about this that we set out to change part of our brand anthem.
And so what they said was, we all worked at consultancies and what we saw is consultants showing up with advice and not being willing to do anything. We wanted to be a consultancy that actually did the stuff because guess what? Now we’re going to give more relevant feedback because we’re willing to do it. We’re going to give feedback, we’re going to give advice where the rubber can actually meet the road. We’re not going to give advice that’s irrelevant, that’s too hard for the company or whatever. So they’re connected now, and that was the difference and so can they write a book on that? Heck, yeah, and they have so many examples.

Mike Jones:
And they have. They’ve written a few books.

Chris Stadler:
They have already.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. They’ve got a couple books already and they’re working on another one right now.

Chris Stadler:
Well, that proves my point.

Mike Jones:
I think they’re a great example. If people want to look and see how someone is taking that approach as a professional services firm, I think AmPhil is a great example. AmPhil.com, just go check them out, and there’s always room to improve, there’s always room to communicate that better, but I think they’ve got the right strategy in place. They’re really thinking about this, especially having talked with their founder, managing partner several times about where he’s headed in terms of the next book, and they’ve got this pretty well figured out and they’re following it pretty well.

Sam Pagel:
So I’ve got a question.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
I think this is geared more towards the marketing directors, the VPs of marketing who are not going to be the authors of this book, but we talk to a lot of VPs of marketing, marketing directors, communications managers and directors, and when we mention this process, we get a lot of like, that sounds so cool.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, they all love the idea, they all love the idea.

Sam Pagel:
Wow. How does a marketing manager, VP of marketing, somebody in that role, the marketing role at their firm, how do they take this back to the partners and get them excited about it? How do they sell it internally?

Chris Stadler:
That’s the hard part. I think there has to be a partner who’s the champion, and probably is the one whose name is going to go on the book, probably a managing partner. He or she probably needs to be convinced that this is really good for not only them, but for the firm. Ideally, you as the marketing leader, need to be able to show them not just that this is a doable process, which is going to be a hurdle to overcome. Everyone’s going to think, man, this is really hard. It’s going to take a long time. I’m not a writer. How am I going to get this done? So you’re going to need to show them a process that removes those obstacles, and there’s great ways to do that.
We’ve talked about some of those before. We’re going to talk about more of them today too, but you also need to show them the business case, which I think is what we’ve really been trying to outline, is there’s so many ways in which this benefits the firm well beyond the particular authors that you put on it, and that’s another thing. You don’t have to stick with one author. You can have multiple partners from your firm as the authors on this book, or if there’s other key personnel. Obviously, you can’t stick eight names on there. That’s just not going to fly, but you can stick probably up to three names and get away with that and have that provide some legitimacy to their own individual business development efforts.
But then that also compounds for the rest of your firm. Everyone in the firm can say, we’ve written a book. Even though your name might not be on it personally, if you’re in that firm and you’re doing any kind of business development, whether it’s actually going out, tracking down leads, doing networking, going to events, trying to speak even, or you’re an operator, you’re in the background, you’re getting stuff done and you interface with clients, and sometimes you actually come in and help close deals because you’re that subject matter expert. You’re the technical expert. Every one of you can say we’ve written a book.
As a firm, we’ve written a book about this, what we do. We have credibility. There’s lots of tactics in there about how you use the book and I don’t even know if we’re going to get to those today because I think we’re going to run out of time. I think there’s another episode of how do you use the book in your marketing and sales? How do you market the book? How do you think about marketing the book because I think there’s some confusion there still too. I’m talking to a firm right now about their book and how to market it, and it’s like, are we selling the book or are we selling something else through the book? That’s a big question.

Sam Pagel:
And that’s probably part of that internal sales process where you, as the marketing person, you want a tool like that, it would make your job so much better and easier, but how do you sell that to a partner? Well, you got to paint the roadmap out for them, and accounting’s interesting, just like law firms where the majority of accounting firms, you don’t have that one. You probably have a managing partner, but there’s all these other partners, and so how do you just pick one partner to do that? Well, there’s a roadmap there. Maybe Janet is the managing partner and she’s really good at this thing. That’s the first book. Then you’ve got John over here.

Chris Stadler:
There’s book number two.

Sam Pagel:
He’s really good at the car sales guys. We always do that with, he’s really good at auto-

Chris Stadler:
Car sales guys.

Sam Pagel:
The used car lots, the used car lots. He’s an expert somehow.

Chris Stadler:
What was his name?

Sam Pagel:
John?

Chris Stadler:
Poor John. I feel bad for John.

Sam Pagel:
But John loves it, man. He loves those guys. He’s in the trenches,

Chris Stadler:
He loves those used car guys.

Sam Pagel:
Then you’ve got Paul, who is really good at tax, business tax, and there’s an angle there. So there’s a roadmap. This isn’t just a one and done thing, and with an accounting firm, maybe you have eight to 10 partners that need to be appeased at some level, and so paint that picture for them. I think if we can get into the okay, you’ve got the book, how do you use it now, that’s part of that sales process too, internally.

Mike Jones:
The other thing I was thinking about too is how you can use the writing process that we outlined last time, this idea of capturing their thinking, maybe through a podcast or some kind of recorded audio content, get them to talk. That’s easy. Now we’re not talking about every partner having to be a writer. They just need to be thinkers that can talk, and you can leave the writing to, if you’ve got someone on your team or you have an outsourced writer, or you have an agency that can help you with that, let them do the writing, get a professional to do that, but you’re just trying to get ideas out and so get those ideas out. You got to create an outline. Obviously, you got to have lots of questions, but get all the ideas out.
And then every one of those ideas becomes fodder for content you can start publishing now before you’ve written the book. The transcript for the podcast itself, the transcript for the podcast, if you can do some video capture either through Zoom or actually professional video capture of them talking, well, every one of those becomes media that you can start publishing now, and so what you’re doing is you’re creating marketing content while you’re writing this really big piece of marketing content that you won’t see for a little while. The book won’t be available for a little while, while you’re developing it.
But along the way, you can start to publish out these ideas and so now when you’re telling your managing partner, you’re telling the partners, hey, I’m making a business case for this, one of the business cases is we’re going to leverage this in the in-between. We’re not going to just sit back in a corner away from everything, not publish anything for a year, and then start publishing once the book’s out, and nobody’s going to sign off on that. They’re like, we have a business to run. We need leads today, and you can say, yes, that’s right. That’s part of this process. This can actually either supplement or augment or even maybe be the central point of your content marketing for the next 12 to 18 months. So I think there’s a huge business case there for that too.

Chris Stadler:
And that takes planning, and I remember when I got here, I remember Eric and I, when I first started at Resound, we were talking about how do use all of the animal, and there’s that idea that you go hunting and you kill a deer. Well, what do you just take the best parts and then just leave the rest wasted there, or do you use all of the animal? All right. So you’re creating, you’re writing this book, so you plan to write this book. Why not take those chapters out and say chapter one, that’s going to inform all our content for the month one. We’re not going to waste any of this and it’s going to go out everywhere it’s going to be useful, and then chapter two.
And so what it takes, I think what’s missing and where most brands might fail is that you don’t plan at the beginning and you don’t follow that discipline process because you do have other things to think about. Tax season’s a certain time of year. Basically, how do you negotiate that with the book, and the difference in this process is really, a lot of times, we do content strategy workshops. We’re looking at a B2B schedule for the year. We’re saying what are the conferences that are important? What are the dates that people are going to think are important?
Is this seasonal, and you’re looking at all those things and you’re coordinating your content according to what needs to hit at certain times. Well, what we’re doing in this case is we’re saying, okay, all that stuff, we’re going to deal with that differently or we’re going to handle that over here, but what we’re doing right now is we’re writing a book and we’re telling people how to think, and so it’s a little bit of a trade-off. What you’re doing is planning that ahead and then keeping a disciplined approach and just saying, okay, and that takes place in the workshop, which we can talk about if we want to.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. I think we should touch on the workshop before we wrap up here. I think there’s going to be another episode. We got to talk more about the details, the nitty-gritty of the process, but then I also want to talk about how we get to actually marketing with the book, doing sales with the book. How do you market the book itself? How do you get the word out that you have a book? I think that’s going to be the next episode for sure, at least on this topic. We might have some other episodes in between.

Sam Pagel:
And Chris-

Mike Jones:
We’ll circle back on it. We’ll circle back.

Sam Pagel:
Chris, You’re pretty good at content marketing workshops and taking a lot of complex ideas, thoughts, personas, and organizing those into something that’s actually accomplishable. So can you walk us through what that looks like when somebody’s like, “Hey, we know we need to start writing stuff for our firm, for our brand. How do we do that?” Walk us through that process.

Chris Stadler:
Yeah. Well, so I think one of the principles that’s super important is this idea of creating the path of lease resistance for the people, the busy executives, the busy partners who are going to have to actually do this, and so I always think of that. So if you have a 401K or an IRA and your company matches, you get that taken out of your paycheck right at the beginning because you don’t want to see it. You just want it to be a sunk cost. I don’t even see that anymore, and so if we can create a process that makes it really easy, hey, it’s the same time every week or the same time every month, we get the partner into a podcast. We make it as enjoyable as it can be. We write up the questions for them, we get them primed.
We do whatever we need to do just to make this easy for them, and so by creating that plan, that reliable plan, you’re creating the path of least resistance not to avoid writing the book, but actually to write the book. So make it easy or it doesn’t happen. From a content strategy standpoint, to make it easy is we get together in a content strategy workshop and part of that workshop is we talk about is there a manifesto? Do we have this idea of something we’re just kind of like, man, we’re angry about? We’ve seen this in other firms. We don’t like how clients are being treated and we want to do something about that just like AmPhil did, and so now you have this manifesto. Now you just have to think about, okay, well, what are the things we do?
And this is a possible way to do this. We’re mind mapping out a book outline, but what are the possible ways that, what are our approaches in the different areas of our firm where we’re actually living out that manifesto? What are the things we do that are a little different and then how do you really focus in on those things and make them big, make them a chapter’s worth, and that’s easier than you think, and so that’s the first thing, I think, is get into that workshop and then we work together and we create that outline, just a guided conversation about that outline looks like.
So we first brainstorm, what’s the manifesto? What are the things that really stand out? What are we excited about, passionate about, and then create that outline, and once you have that outline, now basically, you divide that up over the months and you create that content strategy. From the mind map, you have an outline. From the outline, you write questions, and that’s exactly what we did, and Mike, I think if you remember when we started, I think someone wrote an outline. It was you or one of the guys, Jeff or someone,

Mike Jones:
David, actually, I think did first draft of the outline, and obviously, we had the benefit of having talked about a lot of those topics for a long time and so the outline was really just almost like a distillation of all these things we had been talking about. How do we put them in an order that makes sense, and I think the first stab at that outline was literally a whiteboard and it was just throw all the ideas we’ve been talking about for the last eight years on a board and then put some kind of order to them, and then I think David and then Jeff and I made some comments on that version of the outlines that refine it and say, oh, no, maybe this one needs to go first before this.
We missed this. We need some setup so we’re going to need another chapter here at the beginning to give some preamble to set things up well, and then it was a matter of questions and I think that can happen all in the workshop, which is get all these ideas on the table, refine them, get them into some kind of general order, and then write almost like sales FAQs. What are the questions that you get on each of these chapters or these topics for each chapter that your clients are giving you. In the sales process, they’re probably asking, well, what about this?

Chris Stadler:
What are the objections?

Mike Jones:
What are the objections, tell me more about this, I don’t understand that term, and so now you’re writing all these questions, and those become essentially the questions that you’re going to ask. You’re going to interview one of your partners, or the managing partner, whoever’s going to be the author, and if you want, get a couple of them in a room and have them spitball back and forth. In fact, I actually recommend that because I think you’ll get more developed ideas than just one person talking, like what we’re doing on this podcast right now.

Chris Stadler:
Well, and what we did to write the book because once we had that outline, if you remember, well, we got on a Zoom call and I interviewed you guys, and Jeff had written a whole bunch of really good questions in there and so I read down that and I just asked you guys questions, you and David talked, and a bunch of the book got written just right there.

Mike Jones:
Yep. And that became a transcript and we’re getting right into this very specific process, but transcribe that, hand that over to a writer or someone on the team who can write inside the firm, outside the firm, get a professional writer, have them turn that transcript into an actual manuscript that actually makes coherent sense because the transcript is going to be a little perky jerky. It’s going to be a conversation and that doesn’t translate perfectly over to a manuscript for a book. You’re going to have to have somebody to massage it, add in more examples. That was a big thing that we did after the transcript was done and we did a first manuscript version was, all right, let’s throw in more examples.
Let’s back this up because that didn’t always happen in the conversation. You don’t always have those things right at the tip of your fingers in your mind. You might have a couple here and there, but let’s have more data, let’s have more examples, let’s have more case studies. Let’s have more stories. That was another part of rewriting that transcript into a manuscript was putting some more storytelling in it. Maybe developing out an idea that didn’t get super developed or there was some hangups in it. We also fell into bringing an editor into that process later on, and they were super helpful in just critiquing every concept and just saying, does this stand up to logic?
Does this stand up to my outside perspective? I don’t know everything that you all know, but here’s where I could take that idea as an outsider. Are you okay with that? Does that break your logic? Do we need to address that? Do we need to refine that idea a little bit? Even just having somebody who’s outside your business that you trust to read through it with that kind of lens of, does this make sense to you? Sam, I think you did a really good job with that. You came in pretty late in the process too, and I think your first read through of the manuscript, you were like, I love everything after chapter one.

Sam Pagel:
Well, I read it one night and I was in a bad mood, and not because of the book.

Mike Jones:
That’s great. You should have somebody in a bad mood read it.

Sam Pagel:
Yeah, yeah because I was like, I’m not in a good enough mood to try to reach for what you’re trying to tell me right now. This doesn’t make sense.

Mike Jones:
That’s what you want. You want somebody who can really honestly tell you it doesn’t make sense, and that might be part of the writing process itself. If you’re not going to write it internally, have an outside writer and they’ll give you that. They’ll be like, hey, this part of the transcript, this conversation here, I don’t understand what you guys are trying to get at, or I kind of get it, but here’s some conflict I’m seeing in the logic. So that can be super helpful.

Sam Pagel:
Another aspect that we always touch on in the workshops is figuring out that single persona that you’re writing to. Define the persona, give him or her a name, find a stock image to envision that person, give him a headshot and write out, Chris, you’re really good at this, write out details about their imaginary life. They’ve got two kids. They’re 45 years old. This is how much they make every year. These are the things that if they could solve these things, their life would be so much better, and that’s the starting point.

Chris Stadler:
Yeah. If you have that, think about you’re writing a letter, you’re writing an email to someone you don’t know. It’s going to be formal and you’re trying to not mess up, but if you’re writing to somebody who you really know, you can be fun, you can be personal, and people feel a connection there. You write like someone people want to connect with.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. Because you’re inside their head. That’s the goal of the persona is that you’re so inside and you’re feeling, you’re empathizing, you’re understanding, you are resonating with them in these challenges that you’re about to solve for them or propose solutions for, and if you haven’t done that, man, I think if there was one thing I would go back and do different with our book is having that persona more developed than we did. I think that would’ve benefited our book. It is what it is and I think you work with what you got and you do the best you can to develop out that persona, but the more detail, the more specific you can make it, the more powerful your book’s going to be. It’s going to help too on the back end when someone’s like, hey, I want to share your book. Who’s it good for, and your answer is, I don’t know. Everybody?

Chris Stadler:
People who need accountants. Well, and so again, that’s the benefit of professionalizing the process and sometimes it’s more professional to realize this needs to be outside. This needs to be a writer from the outside, or this needs to be someone from the outside to help us out with this, which brings me to, I did want to make one point about how to structure all these steps because Mike, you mentioned, I just wanted this to be clear.
It’s almost like a three step process, and I’m curious what you guys think, but in my mind, if you want to really do it well, you want to build your company and you want to do it in a big picture approach, step one is doing that brand, really getting your brand clarified and then having that brand anthem, that brand story, that thing, that manifesto that says here’s why we’re different and here are our values and our distinctives. Here’s how we think and why, the why we do what we do.

Mike Jones:
You have to have that. You have to have it.

Chris Stadler:
And the thing is, if you come out of that with not just values, traits, and story, but also with verbal and visual guidelines, now you’re set up to write the book because now the visual and verbal guidelines tell you how to write and how to design your stuff, and it comes from your values and from your brand, and so they extend. So what that means is you’re not going to have to go back when you write the book. So that’s the first step, and then you go to that content strategy with book writing in mind and you do that process, that package process.
You’re not going to have to go back and say, well, we didn’t know. We didn’t make sense of our brand first. So now we have to go through the book and we have to smooth out the language in this new way. We have to redesign everything. You don’t have to do that because it was already figured out because you did in the right order, and that means you’re saving money and you’re saving time. So step one’s the brand workshop, step two is the book writing. I think step three in this big process would be, all right, what are you going to do with it and how do you market that book well so that it actually does what it’s supposed to do for you?

Mike Jones:
Totally agree. Totally agree, and I think that is a good segue for next time, which is what do you do with this? How do you get the word out that you are writing a book? How do you use it well in the in-between while you’re writing it, but also what do you do with it once it’s done? I think that’s the next big question that we need to tackle. Thank you all again. We really appreciate you listening to this. I know that these can be a little in depth and they can get a little long, but if you’ve been sticking around this long on this episode, I hope that you have found some really, really helpful ideas for you and your firm and how you’re going to go to market.

Sam Pagel:
The Remarkabrand Podcast is a project of Resound and is recorded in Tempe, Arizona with hosts Mike Jones and David Cosand. It’s produced and edited by Sam Pagel. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and at remarkablecast.com. If you’d like more episodes, subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. To contact the show, find out more about The Remarkabrand Podcast, or to join our newsletter list to make sure you never miss another episode, check out our website at remarkablecast.com. Copyright Resound Creative Media, LLC 2022.