The Rise of the Modern Marketer | Amplify S8E4

I am Bonnie Beal-Russik, and I have career ADHD. So I have had BBR companies since '09. Prior to that, I was the marketing director for a mid-size accounting firm. And BBR, we do marketing services, and I serve as outsource marketing director for small firms that don't have that internal resource.

I also co-own Rally Rounds Mastermind Groups with Katie Tolan. Oh, yeah, that's great. And we absolutely love that. And just those groups are feed us as well as, you know, giving great advice and getting good input from others.

And then I also recently, I guess like three years ago, took over the Accounting Move Project. which we put out the best CPA firms for women and best CPA firms for equity leadership lists every year and do a lot of study. And this year we are kicking it off right now. and going to be really diving into the topic of retention and what firms that are doing that well, how they're doing that.

That's great. That's awesome. Thank you so much in the industry. That's why I'm tired and the battles under my eyes are earned.

It's also maybe why you won Hall of Fame award last night. Thank you. Yeah. Congratulations on that.

Thank you. Thank you. What would you say are some of the, you know, big lessons you've learned from being in the industry or Just kind of what's got you thinking as you think back on the career you've already had and will continue to have, obviously. I know.

I refer to it as the kind of the old-timers award because those of us that have been around for a while. And I have to say, my very first AIM conference was in '07, and that was six weeks after I started my very first job in the accounting profession. So it was kind of a bit of a trial by fire. And I came and I met people at that initial conference that I am still friends with.

I can call on when needed. They call on me. And, you know, I feel like AIM has just been extraordinary resource for those of us that have been here for a while, for new people. And I really don't think anybody in the accounting marketing profession, it makes sense for them not to be a member.

I love that. I would fully agree with you. Fully agree with you. Now, what's got you excited right now?

I know you're kind of got a lot of things going on, but some things probably pop out a little bit more. Well, I think Just because we launched the accounting move project survey yesterday. Yeah. You know, that is going to be a good that generally takes up a lot of my summer around because surveys are a big, big push.

Yes. So we're doing all that research. And this year, I'm excited to be partnering with the Center for Accounting Transformation. So kind of using our different areas of expertise to really make some changes, make some improvements, and try and reach a broader audience with this study.

That's awesome. Yeah, that's really cool. I don't know. You've been very instrumental in the DEI committee getting going here with AIM.

So anything you want to talk about there? Sure. So this is something that's always been a passion of mine, and I have to give AIM huge credit when I kind of came to them and said, I think we should have this a committee that focuses in on diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, all the things that kind of fall under that broad but often misinterpreted umbrella. And I we put together a task force that met for four or five months, and it soon thereafter became a committee.

And I think it was early 2021 and very active, a whole lot of members on this committee. I mean, we put out a whole toolkit. We do three to four webinars every year on diversity-related topics, and it's just such a wonderful, supportive truly diverse group of people in this committee that are absolutely committed to this. So I am very proud of that and was very happy also to hand the reins over to others because I'm like, I want to hear what other people have to say, and particularly younger people in this space.

So I am still a member of the committee and part of the training subcommittee, but I, I love that this group is just passionate about what they're doing and, and really making a difference within AIM and also at their firms. I'm Cassie Kleman. I'm marketing coordinator at Topo Forman, which is a firm based in Chicago, but I am in our Denver office. And you're also co-chair of the podcast committee for AIM.

I am co-chair of the podcast committee for AIM. I've been on the podcast committee for three years now, I think. That's crazy. That's awesome.

Yeah, it's great. And you've hosted, which is awesome too. Did a couple of seasons ago. I'm looking forward to maybe doing it again, but I'm glad to be here doing this little mini interview.

So we've been asking people a lot of different questions. here at Summit, but one of them is, what's been your biggest win from the last year? Oh my gosh. Well, I am a marketer of one.

I'm a marketing department of one. And this year I was actually able to utilize our recruiting coordinator to help me part-time with some of the big projects that I had, including a big video series that's going out on our LinkedIn and our website now. And having her help me was really incredible to take a lot of my load off, but also being able to help her grow and teach her about branding and teach her about marketing and teaching her about the why was really rewarding because now she's really interested in like strategic development and she's asking me questions.

And it was, I think, rewarding for me and the firm and for her. That's awesome. Yeah. You're getting to multiply yourself.

I know. I wish I could clone my, actually, we don't need more of me. There's one of me is enough. But you need more people.

Yes, absolutely. You're doing good work. And she did great. And I felt rewarding to be able to train her and coach her as well.

That's awesome. That's really cool. That's a great win. My name is Jeremy Shen, and I'm the Chief Strategy Officer at YHB.

And I'm on the board for AIM somehow. So very excited to be here, though, at Summit. I'm glad you're here, Jeremy. I wouldn't be anywhere else.

So we were talking a little bit before coming on here about biggest win from the last year for you. Yes. So I'd say maybe not for me, but for my team, because they do all the work. We technically have six people on my team, but I always say we have five because I don't add a lot of value.

They do all of the work. But I think we went through about a year and a half of integrating an incredible amount of technology into kind of our MarTech stack. And so this was the year where I felt like it was great to not integrate something new per se, but actually see things, refine things and start using them well. So I think the biggest win for us was that we maybe didn't integrate anything new per se, any new technologies.

And I'd say there's always lots of updates and things like that that happen, but we refined our processes. So I know that's like maybe not the most exciting thing, but allowed us to do better reporting. So this is the exciting one. Okay.

So get a lot of better unified reporting from, you know, our Proposify that we use, our HubSpot, our website, our internal kind of reporting things. And so we started doing a monthly business development report to the to the partners. So we have a group of BD principals. to them and to our executive leadership team.

And then we would do a modified version that would be shared with all of the tax principles, assurance principles, then another modified version that would go out to departmental meetings and things like that. And so what we saw was principles are generally kind of competitive. I don't think you get to that position at an accounting firm without being somewhat competitive. Yeah.

So what happened was we hit our full year growth goal that we had for our team, which when I first set, when I was meeting with my strategic growth manager and our marketing operations manager way back when we did our planning, when I set that goal, they just were like, You're setting us up to fail. And I said, Have I ever set you up to succeed? But that's hopefully not true. So it was a stretch goal for us.

But once we saw and we got this report, use this technology to give that to the principals, the behavior changes it drove within the culture of our principals. That halfway through the year, we hit the growth goal and I had to reset it to another one that they all said, like, how bad you are this? Like, why are you so bad at setting these goals? And I knew it was a stretch, but I was like, well, I apparently way under shot the last one we did.

And so we did kind of the forecast for the rest of our year. We're like, we might actually hit this one too. And so I think it was more the exciting one for us is we saw when we did this reporting and we shared it in the right way and created a story, the behavior changes it had in terms of business development for our principals, they wanted to see their names in that report. They wanted to get the shout outs.

They wanted to get acknowledged for the work. They didn't want their team, their niche team to be the lowest in wins. They wanted to track things. And so the behavior that drove to create the right culture of winning was the big win for us this year.

That's awesome. I think that's huge. That's really cool. It's been fun.

That's awesome. I'm just really bad at setting goals. No, but I think the lesson about just like when you report on the right things, right? And you show them in the right way, telling that story.

that you can actually drive change, right? I think that's huge. I think that's a huge lesson for every firm. I think we all know it, but...

Yeah, and I think we all know, but there's things that we look for, our KPIs as a marketing team, are a little different. We don't put all of those in this report. It's just what started with the practice lines, having a lot of leaders, having a lot of ability to shape what they wanted to see and taking that feedback and collaborating through it to not just put what we think they want. Now, there's some things in there where I'm like, hey, this is why this is important and give that context.

The majority of it was shaped by our practice leads to really make it meaningful for them. Yeah, and I think you probably alluded, you did allude to it. There's a competitive nature with a lot of them. And there's a way to tap into that competitive nature and really like push growth and push both change, but also just acceleration, right?

Through that competitive nature. We've seen. that with a lot of firms. I know a lot of larger firms have these really robust dashboards with Power BI.

We have some of those. We're not a huge firm, but we do have resources still. I think you can do this at any stage where you're at. It does take work.

The first report is the hardest. The second one gets a little easier. Then by the fifth one, it still gets harder again because now you go back through and they say, Oh, this is great. We want this, this, and this.

Just expect the process to be iterative and just expect it to be open and it's not going to be perfect right away.