For CPAs, the need for technical proficiency and an awareness of changes to standards and regulations will never go away. Still, in a competitive marketplace, the possession of CPA soft skills takes on an even larger importance. To talk through several of these skills, such as networking, social media marketing, and personal branding, we met with Edward Mendlowitz, a partner with Withum Smith+Brown, an author of 27 books, and a member of the Accounting Today Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting.

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By: Bill Hayes, Pennsylvania CPA Journal Managing Editor

Podcast Transcript

Being technically proficient and keeping up with changes in standards and regulations will forever be of importance for CPAs, but it is becoming more and more vital for accounting professionals to grow in the area of soft skills, such as networking, social media marketing, and personal branding. To provide details on the need to bolster these skills, today we are with Edward Mendlowitz, partner with Withum Smith+Brown PC, the author of 27 books, and one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting, according to Accounting Today.

Technical skills are still incredibly important for CPAs. They're certainly not going anywhere, but soft skills are becoming more and more vital to people. One of those aspects is networking. What are one or two important best practices for CPAs when it comes to networking?

[Mendlowitz] One of the most important things is to show your availability, which means that if you're going to network, you have to be places, you have to deal with people. You could join organizations, you could join a church group, a business group, and even accounting organizations. Show up at the meetings. Say you go to meeting for the first time: you don't have to go to the meeting and try to meet everybody. Just go, be there. And you keep going to all the meetings so people get used to seeing you and they get an idea that you're available. People like to do business with people that are available. Also, if they have committees or if they need work done, volunteer for the work. Because that's how you meet other people. You meet them in small groups. So you get to know people and then you get to be known as someone who's willing to roll up their sleeves and do work. The best thing is to be available. I tell that to everybody.

You're a recognized thought leader in the area of social media and the accounting profession. Obviously, we talked about the honor from Accounting Today. What do you think CPAs can do to become better social media marketers?

[Mendlowitz] I think that we're not, as a profession, we're not that good. But I have to tell you, my firm, Withum, is doing great. From our social media efforts, we've gotten audits of over a hundred thousand dollars a year, for the audit through the internet, through our website, without even meeting people. Our New York office got an audit from a California company from social media. You have to be active in social media. You have to have good material that people want to read. You have to develop a list. If you're going to do anything at all, you have to develop all this. You can't go to LinkedIn, which I'm on, and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, but you can't go to LinkedIn and expect people to say, "Gee, that's a good firm." You have to find a way to contact, to connect with the people separately and start sending them your newsfeeds.

The shorter the feed, the more likely it'll get opened and read. If you could write something in 300 or 350 words instead of 600 or 700 words, it has a chance of having it opened. You need a very good headline also. I believe today that most people are getting their news from their iPhone and from the email that they get. From stuff that's pushed out to them. They look at the headline. If the headline doesn't grab them, they're not going to do it. If they open it and they see it's all long and the first sentence is no good, they're not going to read it either. So you need a great first sentence. The Gettysburg Address was only 270 words. When I do a blog, I use that. I keep that as a goal.

But actually my first five years of blogs, my average words was 400 words. And some of them were quite long. But all of them, I try to keep short. If you have two things to say, make it into two articles or two blogs. I think that the best thing is to develop the list. Then you'd develop it by putting things out that people want to subscribe to or ask for. Everybody you meet, you've got to get a ... you're going to get the email address. You don't need their mailing address. You don't even need their name, but you need the email. That's what the currency is becoming right now. I think that would probably be the best thing that you could do, and have good content.

If people can't write well, they could subscribe to services that will actually provide them with new stuff. Of course, if 12 CPA firms have the same news, then people are not going to look at you as a thought leader, but you could put together the ideas and hire a freelance writer to make it tight. When I do a blog, my first draft takes me an hour, and then it takes me two hours to edit, to tighten it up, and get rid of all the extraneous information. Sometimes when I do that I say, "Gee, there's a thought I want to emphasize, but it's the second thought." I make it into a second blog.

Part of what we talk about there when you're saying if CPA firms all have the same ten news pieces, then it starts to seem same-y, that sort of comes back to the idea of personal branding. How would you define a personal brand and what can CPAs do to bolster it?

[Mendlowitz] First of all, everybody has a personal brand. They may not be aware of it or they may not notice it, and they may not care about it. I have a personal brand, so I'm going to tell you what I've done. I have made Topps trading cards. I've made my business card with Topps trading cards. So my picture on it, it's a baseball card. Actually, it has home plate in the lower right corner. I have a slogan, “E equals FS4UH.” “Ed equals financial security for you at a higher level.” Right now, I'm wearing a sweater with that logo and I have a briefcase with that logo on it. You have to do something that stands out. Some people … look, everybody knows Donald Trump has … his blonde hair at some level is a brand.

So is the Prime Minister of England. He has the same kind of hairdo. When we think of these people, we think of the hairdo. It's not negative; it's not positive. It's just something that makes people picture you, and remember you. One way of developing a personal brand has to do, again, with availability, being available could be a brand. By being available, you let people know you were around and then you follow up. You send things. I buy books for people and I send it to them. I must send out 100 a year to different people. Not books I write. I don't send books I write, because I want them to buy it. But I'll buy a ... I'll give you an example. I don't remember how long ago, but a number of years ago, and this is still good today.

Someone wrote a book called Lincoln the Lawyer and I bought 36 copies of that. First, I bought the book and read it and it was about him being in the business of being a lawyer. I then bought 36 copies of the book. I also download on the internet a lecture about pricing, billing, and collecting. Three separate things. Pricing is one thing, billing is another thing, you're collecting is another thing. I printed out that thing from the internet with the proper credit. I mailed it to 36 lawyers. Not only did I mail it to 36 lawyers, of those lawyers I had seen and I did not give it to them, but I followed up the meeting a day later. Said, "I enjoyed meeting with you and thought maybe you will enjoy this book."

I wrote a handwritten note to send it to them. So, your brand is everything you do. You have to decide what you're trying to accomplish and what you're trying to accomplish is to get business, and to get referrals. People will want to refer people that they like; they want to refer people. Again, I'm going to keep saying this: being available. Everybody, every one of us, is equally qualified in mostly everything that we do, so why would somebody get the business and somebody doesn't? I once got a very large client because I was the first person that responded. They sent out a letter to all the earning firms in a half-hour radius from the office. What happened was he's an accountant, they called the AICPA, and the AICPA sent out the PCPS directory. The controller made note of any accounting firm a half-hour from their office and sent the letter. I was the first guy that responded. I got the client. It was a big client. It was a very big client. So, your brand has to be that you're available. Part of my brand, which is a secret, so don't tell anybody, my secret is whenever I have a meeting with somebody, no matter what the meeting is and no matter where it is, I always call them the day or two days later and say, "I was thinking about what we were talking about and I want to just give you an extra idea, an extra comment about it." So I've had that second thought and people love it. I find people are very appreciative and it shows that I'm thinking about them and that's part of my brand.

Written communications are a major part of CPA interactions. How can a CPA and even one not extensively trained in writing, make theirs better. I know you talked earlier about maybe even you have to get a freelancer involved or something like that. How can they make their written communications better?

[Mendlowitz] First of all, we do more things in writing now than we probably talk. We certainly do more things in prose than in numbers. So, you've got to write well. Most software has spell checkers and they have grammar checkers. You use that. One of the things I do is I add extra space between my lines, because I want it to look good. I want to communicate ideas. If you're using Word, you could block what you did. You right-click, and then you got a paragraph and then you make the spacing 1.1 spaces instead of single space. And I think that makes it look a little better. You want to make your writing attractive. You have to take away all the extraneous words and all big words. There are some people that make themselves think that they're important when they use big words. You and I are talking right now, and between the two of us, the biggest word you used was network. All the other words, we're not using words that people are not used to hearing.

People are very brusque with emails, and they should be. But they should still be full sentences. Unless you're going to say okay or thanks. Another thing about written communications: if somebody sends you an email or something that you have to respond to, you should always let them know you got it. Or if they send you something ... you know what upsets me? I could send people books and they don't even send me an email thanking me. I don't know if they received it. I'm used to it now. But good grammar, spelling errors? Can't be done. The worst thing is to spell the client's name wrong. The only thing that client will know for sure you spelled wrong.

So, it's simple things that we learned when we started in grade school. Going to write an article where you want to be published or write a press release. You hire somebody, you write it yourself, and then you hire a freelance editor, a writer. Then you look at what changes they made. You do this ten times, by the tenth time you will not make any of those mistakes. It's really simple. Make it look nice. Even your letters. People think that they write a letter and they have full justification. They think it looks nice. It does look nice, but it's harder to read. And it doesn't look as inviting as something that's justified. This is not rocket science, but I've been doing this for years and I also have gone back to using the Times New Roman fonts when I write stuff now. The Calibri font, I like a lot. I think it's more elegant, but Times New Roman is more familiar. Again, not trying to impress, I'm trying to communicate ideas.

Part of selling your or your business’s services is portraying confidence. How can CPAs better exude that?

[Mendlowitz] I'm going to repeat myself and I can't repeat it enough: by being available. You show up, you meet your deadlines. When you tell someone you're going to get something done in a certain time, that's a promise and you keep the promise. If you can't meet the promise, because things come up and we can't meet it, call. Don't call a half-hour after the deadline to say you're not going to make it. Call the morning before the day of the deadline to change the deadline. The other thing is make realistic deadlines. Everybody wants everything right away. And they force us to sometimes make promises that are not realistic of when we're going to deliver it. If you tell them, someone comes in and they say they need something by Monday. You say, "Look, I can do it for you, but I can't have it done until Wednesday."

They'll say, "Okay." Most of the time. If they really need it by Monday for particular reasons then of course you take it on and you get it done. You'd have to work on the weekend, but most of the time we set our own deadlines. The clients don't set the deadlines; they suggest deadlines, but we set them. Make a deadline that we know we could beat. Of course, never be late for a meeting. Meet your deadlines, be available, and follow up. That's part of the best way of displaying confidence. And if you ever make a mistake, which I can guarantee everybody listening to this interview, including me, makes mistakes from time to time, we're people, apologize, deal with it right away. Apologize.

Give the client the reason why it was made. Even if you screwed up, even if you did something terrible. Give them the reason and assure them that won't happen again. If you don't apologize the right way, you can lose the client. You could make the worst mistakes in the world and you handle it right, you could have a client for life. That's how you build confidence.

Let's say new information arises about your firm. There's changes, there's developments. What's the best way to keep a client in the loop about those changes?

[Mendlowitz] You tell them about it. You make them aware of what's going on. You send emails, updates about new services. I just found out a couple of days ago that my firm has a former secret service agent who worked on cyber theft, heading up the cyber theft department. He gave a little presentation at a partner and manager's meeting. I'm going to be posting a blog in the next few weeks why Withum should be the first person you call when you have a cyber breach. Having to explain in 400 words, why would we be the best person to call. That's really making people aware of it.

Then what I'm going to do, I'm going to send that blog. Whether people read it, I don't care. I mean, I would like everybody to read it, but I'm going to send links to all of my clients saying that they must read this and I'm going to print it out and then I'm going to mail it to them two or three days later in an envelope with a little note in case they haven't seen it.

This is very important. And I, or the person in charge of it, should be the first call, God forbid, you have a cyber breach. So, you let the clients know about it. The other thing that a lot of firms are lacking in is not letting their staff know about the services they do. Because the staff are the ones who meet with the clients all the time. You have to educate your staff about the new services, and a lot of firms are negligent in this. Even if you need to sometimes bring a staff person to a meeting when you're going to introduce a client or tell a client about a service.

It's not going to be charged book time. But you have to have your staff aware of what's going on and you've got to make the investment. The investment is in time where the staff person shows you at a meeting to learn about the services and how it could be applied specifically to the individual clients. This is a barrier that … it's not just keeping the clients in the loop, which is very important, but I think keeping the staff in the loop, too.

We talk about talking to the clients for new developments, but is there importance to just doing periodic staying in touch with clients when you maybe don't have incredibly new information to communicate, and, if so, what's the best way to go about doing that?

[Mendlowitz] Very, very simple way. You call the client. I do this all the time and actually I learned this from Bill Hagaman, our main partner, when I joined the firm. I found that, and he did it, he would call a client. He would call people all the time. And I would only call people when I had something new to tell them. Or something specific. So I asked, "What do you say when you call them?" He says, "I just call. I say, 'Hi, it's Bill. I'm checking in. Is everything okay? Anything I can help you with? Okay. Goodbye. I'll call you in a few weeks.'" I do that now with almost everybody I know and with every client for sure. I call them periodically. Some people I might call once every three months. Some people I might call once a month depending on who they are, but I never would let three or four months without checking in with somebody I haven't spoke to. “Hi, it's Ed, how you doing? Everything okay? Just checking in. Just want to know if everything's okay. Anything I can help you with? Anything I should know about? Anything new in your life or anything that might have a tax consequence?” That's it. If they say no, okay, they say, "No, everything's the same." Say, "Fine. I'll keep in touch. Don't forget. Give me a call if anything new happens. Goodbye." Two minutes. Very simple. The other thing I do, which I do a lot of, is I would send them an article. Or I would print out a blog and mail it to them. Or I would send them a book. One time, I read an article, this goes back many... it’s about branding. I remember the year, I think it was 1998 when I first found out about branding, and that's a long story, so I won't tell you that, but I was in the bookstore and they had a magazine, Strategy and Business by Booz Allen Hamilton.

They still have the magazine and the headline, the premise there was how to brand sand. Which sounded very unusual. Basically how to brand the commodity, and the company figured out how to put their sand in bags and put a brand on it to get more money. In fact, John D. Rockefeller branded kerosene, which is a commodity. He called it Standard Oil. That's where he got the name. And Standard Oil was known to be safer kerosene and less flammable then the other kerosenes on the market. Of course, he did very well with it. I'd say we all heard of him. But I read, I saw this article, “How to Brand Sand,” which I read and I decided that I wanted to send it to the clients. I could've bought reprints of the article from Strategy in Business. I could've bought the reprints of the article at that time for five bucks a reprint.

The magazine was $12 a copy. I ended up buying 35 or 36 copies of magazine. I ripped out that article and I sent it with a little note to 35 clients that had branded products, that were manufacturers, distributors with a little handwritten note. “I just read this article,” I said. “You might enjoy it.” Had nothing to do with accounting, it had nothing to do with what I do. But it elevated me at that point as a thought leader. And I was thinking of these clients. The reason I ripped it out and sent to them, I wanted the impression that I sent them the copy from my issue, and I wanted that effect. I could have sent them ... it would have been fancier and nicer and more prestigious to send the reprint just as you could get reprints of Harvard Business Review.

I also did it with Harvard Business Review, so I've bought lots of reprints from there, but there were times that I ripped out, I bought extra copies and ripped the articles. This is how you keep in touch. You call. You send an email all you want, but everybody sends emails. You call, I call and I send them little notes. Things I read in magazines, newspapers, or whatever. I actually photocopy an article and send it to them. Sometimes I photocopy it and I sent it to them as PDF, as a picture. You just want to show clients that you're keeping in touch, that you're available and you're thinking of them.

Is there a way to monetize your networking efforts, and how would you do that without seeming sort of mercenarial to a client or a contact?

[Mendlowitz] I'm going to give you a specific example. I have a lot of clients that are single-owner businesses and they don't have any kind of plan that if they drop dead, what happens to the business? Does it have to be liquidated, does it get sold? Who makes out the payroll check? The next payroll, who signs the check? So what I did was I wrote a couple of blogs about this. And I write the blogs and anybody wants to read the blogs. What I did was I printed out the blogs. I have a little masthead of the heading of the blog. One page. It's a one-or two-page thing. And I printed it out. I mailed it.

I had four clients at that moment that I was trying to get business from, to do this for. And I wasn't succeeding in getting those clients. I wrote it out, I mailed it to the four clients. Within two weeks, three of them retained me. I didn't even call the fourth guy, because I was busy. So you follow up. Now, one of the things you'd do if you meet, I’ll give an example: you meet a lawyer at a networking event and you get to know the guy a little. Say two weeks later, you mail him a book. Lincoln the Lawyer. “I read this book. I thought you might enjoy it.” You're not asking for business. You're not telling them you're an expert in anything. You're keeping in touch. I was talking to somebody yesterday who happens to be from Texas and he's a black CPA.

He called me with a question. I had a Topps trading card of the first black CPA. So I said, "Give me your postal mailing address and I'll mail you this card." I mailed out the card today. If I speak to a woman CPA, I have a Topps card with the first woman CPA. These are ways of keeping in touch. Of course, I give them my business card, my Topps card, so I have a gig. But you monetize your networking efforts by showing your availability. That's all. Everybody assumes that everybody is good and we're all CPAs. Everybody assumes that every CPA is good. That's it.

Some could be better than others, but the bottom line is clients don't know if I'm better than anybody else. They might think I'm better, but they don't know. But if you're available, you meet your deadlines, you don't give them things late, you're consistent and keep in touch, ou're monetizing your network. You don't monetize it by calling up and saying … of course, if I meet someone at a party and they tell me that they are having a big problem with an employee compensation package, I might call them up and say, "You mentioned it, I have done some work on this, and I have some ideas. I could meet with you and I could bring our expert from our firm and we could spend an hour with you and you could tell us what kind of problems you have."

So that's a way of doing it also, but that needs a specific issue, a specific problem. But the minute you say you are going to bring somebody else, you're putting them on alert that you're trying to get business, which is okay. It's okay to ask for business.