In preparation for our team retreat this week the whole PF team, and some clients, have been reading ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. The book intends to help you “design habits that work for you rather than against you.”
We’ll be sharing more of our learnings from the book after our retreat, and how you can use them to help you build habits for your accounting firm. One of the powerful messages in the book is the concept of “being in motion vs. taking action.” James shares:
“When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategising and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action is the type of behaviour that will deliver an outcome.”
This month, we’ve been focusing on taking action. Not just talking about what actions you could do or want to do in your marketing, but actually supporting you with the doing. This was at the heart of our live Lab event in Edinburgh this month and we’re running another action session in the Lab in April, more details below!
You can also read about our Accelerator member’s weekly victories and how they’re coming from the small actions they’re taking every week while in the coaching group.
Building good habits encourages you to take action. And taking action is what leads to results and victories.
What ONE action are you going to take this month?
First in-person event of 2022!
Our first PF Lab LIVE event ran in Edinburgh this month! It was a pleasure to get to spend time with our incredible clients in a beautiful (and rainy!) city.
The main focus of Lab live events are taking ACTION and connecting your actions back to your goals.
We started off the day with Pecha Kucha introductions (you can read more about these here!). Each person shared their personal and firm journey in 20 image slides. We all agreed this was one of the highlights of the day – getting to hear about each other journey’s and how they’ve got their firms to where they are today was really beautiful.
Next up we broke into smaller groups and asked these 2 questions:
1. What’s feeling heavy right now (in your firm)?
2. What’s exciting that you want to pursue more?
Some hard things the group transparently shared with us were:
- “I’m struggling with repricing clients”
- “I’m not being consistent with blogging”
- “It’s hard to show up on social media and know what to say”
- “I’m trying to encourage the team to be more involved in marketing and lean into the firm’s values”
Some of the exciting things which were shared included:
- “Starting to create non-accountant focused content!”
- “Growing my team”
- “Planning out and building my prospect and customer journeys”
- “Showcasing my tax specialism more through blogs I’m writing”
This session was followed by an action session. Each person chose one area from our hard or exciting list and identified a specific action they could take today. We then had 30 minutes to work on it.
“It’s amazing how much I can get done in 30 minutes when I plan and I am focused!” was what Karen Kennedy shared straight after.
We finished off the day with a whisky tasting and delicious dinner! It was amazing to connect with the humans we serve and honour the work they do and their efforts in their marketing.
We’re going to be running more Lab events in different locations so if you’d like to suggest our next location, drop us an email!
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some more pics from our day!
The weekly victories (which come from taking action)
Every Accelerator session starts with everyone in the group sharing a victory from their week. There’s no such thing as “a small victory” and you’re encouraged to share any thing at all from your week whether it’s “I got out for a walk in the sunshine” or “I made some tweaks to my homepage.”
We’ve been really inspired and encouraged by the victories the current group of accountants have been sharing over the last few weeks, which have come from actions they’ve taken for their firm:
“I dumped a PITA client this week.”
“I’ve written a blog, posted three times on Instagram and have a newsletter scheduled for posting next week.”
“My victory this week is having my website reviewed by PF. You did brilliantly well given the lack of content!”
“A prospect got in touch with me off the back of an Instagram post I wrote about cash flow. I hadn’t even posted it on my blog yet, and she’s already reached out for help. I want people to know social media does work and you need to be consistent with it.”
These victories come from actions. They don’t need to be week-long or month-long actions, they can be just taking 1 hour out of your week to move forward in your marketing.
The next coaching group starts on 26th May 2022 and we’d love to see you there and hear you share your actions and victories each week.
You can read more about Accelerator here!
Our new website has launched!
We’ve spent around the last 15 months building our new PF website and we were so excited to launch earlier this month!
This project started back in October 2020 with Karen sketching out her vision for the core pages and our content team sharing the first draft of the home page content.
Since then, we’ve been working on the website every single day. Writing, designing, strategising, questioning, wondering, discussing.
Between our whole team, at least one action has been taken every day since. Whether it’s looking at how sentences are structured, questioning the placement of icons, deciding on the colour of a section.
Our new website is the result of hundreds of small actions.
This is your encouragement that small, consistent actions lead to big things.
Keep going with whatever it is you’re working on and reach out to PF when you need support with your actions.
Lab action session: Wednesday 13 April 2022
The Lab action sessions are all about getting marketing things done. Things which:
- You’ve put off
- You “never seem to have time for”
- Feel overwhelming (“where do I even start?”)
- Feel confusing (am I really doing the right thing? Is this worth spending time on at all?)
- There’s other sessions and resources in which you can dig into why you’re putting your actions off, what your motivations are and how you can stay on track with your priorities.
This session is about making progress on that ONE item you really do need and want to finish.
When is the session running?
The next actions session is on Wednesday 13th April at 2-3pm GMT.
How does it work?
1 week before: You’ll be asked to share your intention for the marketing action you’ll take (if you’re not sure of your intention yet, you can share some ideas and we’ll help you chose one!). Some examples include:
- I will write a blog brief for my next blog
- I will write the key bullet points for [name of] video, and record the video
- I will write down the 3 main messages I want to share with a prospect during the sales process
On the day: You’ll join the Zoom session and we’ll go round the group so each person can explain what you’re working on, and why it’s so important to you.
You’ll then turn off your screen and microphone, and get to work! You’ll spend 40 minutes working on your action.
Once the 40 minutes are up, you’ll share your screen and show the group what you’ve been working on!
You can either join the Lab with a monthly or annual membership, or sign up for this one off action session!
That’s it for this month! If you’d like to receive these monthly rounds up straight to your inbox, you can sign up here!