We want to tell you a story.
Once upon a time, in a village far, far away there lived a financial planner. This financial planner knew a few CPAs and he was trying to build better relationships with them, in hopes that it might lead to business referrals.
The financial planner was always reaching out to his CPAs friends, offering tips and tricks and helpful strategies whenever he could. He covered just about every topic he could think of…except for anything having to do with business organization or finances. Because, he thought, “if anyone knows anything about business organization and finances, it’s the CPAs. They don’t need me to teach them anything about that.”
Little did the financial planner know, his CPA friends were superstars when it came to managing business organization and finances for their clients. But behind closed doors, the CPAs had a very dark secret. One that the cobbler had, too.
You see, while the cobbler was busy making perfect shoes for everyone else, he never got around to making his own. And while the CPAs were fascinating their clients with their superstar business organization and financial insights, they never got around to organizing their own businesses and you don’t even want to know what was happening in the financial realm at their place. They were simply too tired to do it for themselves after long days at the office doing it for everyone else.
One day, a little birdie named CTC flew into the village and shared this secret with the financial planner. To say the least, he was shocked! But he was also very excited. Because he could smell a fabulous opportunity. An opportunity to truly help his CPA friends by solving one of their biggest problems.
So the financial planner reached out to his CPA friends and started to tell them about tools that could help them get their own businesses and finances organized quickly, easily and efficiently.
First, he told them about Shoeboxed—a tool that does a little bit of everything to streamline life. He knew it was something his overwhelmed, way-too-busy CPA friends desperately needed, so he told them about two of his favorite Shoeboxed features.
“Shoeboxed can help you with receipt and document management,” he said. “In fact, it uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to pull information from receipts and automatically fill in the text fields on your expense reports. Simply take a picture of a receipt using your mobile phone and you’ll be done. And get this,” he continued, “if you need to present receipt proof to the powers that be, you even have the capability to attach images of your receipt to the expense reports you create.” He went on to explain how it could also transform paper clutter into digital records using a prepaid “magic envelope” service. And of course he told them all about how Shoeboxed could automatically import receipts from gmail for them so their receipts didn’t get lost somewhere in the depths of their computer anymore.
“….But that’s not all it can do,” said the financial planner. “Shoeboxed can also help you with business card management. It can get those dusty business cards off your desk! Here, grab a card of your desk,” he said. The CPA did as he suggested and the financial planner said, “if you simply take a picture of it on your phone, you can import it right into your contact list. You can even add it to InfusionSoft, Constant Contact or another similar service,” he exclaimed. “And did you know it can also help you track your mileage? It has this super cool app that automatically detects when you’re moving and for how long, giving you the ability to easily and accurately track your business mileage. It can help you seamlessly import documents and expenses with Evernote & Quickbooks! And it can even handle all of your invoicing, accounting, payroll and payment processing in one place!”
The CPA smiled at the financial planner and knew a powerful relationship was being formed.
The financial planner continued to share helpful, judgment-free insights with his CPA friends regularly and one by one, they started to notice. Really, really notice. It was obvious that he was in their corner and word got around the village that he was a true strategic partner that everyone needed to know.
That’s when everything started to change for the financial planner. The CPAs couldn’t help but recommend their clients to him. And before he knew it, the financial planner had more business than he could handle. So he started to scale and his company grew and grew and grew. And so did his bank account.
And the newly organized CPAs, their wealthy clients and the happy financial planner all lived happily ever after.
The end.
