Podcasting in Professional Services
Get inspiration and new ideas to grow your business podcast. A few times each month, hear from business podcast hosts in professional service industries. Learn why they started podcasting, how they position their shows, how it connects to their business, and more. Hosted by John Tyreman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing.
Podcasting in Professional Services
After the First Million and Accounting for Innovation, with Matt Tait
On this episode, Matt Tait—CEO of Decimal and host of After the First Million and Accounting for Innovation—joins the show to share his experience podcasting about the importance of a clear, intentional marketing strategy. They discuss how Matt balances his busy schedule and the benefits of targeting specific audiences in professional services. In this episode, you’ll hear:
- Why Matt decided to pursue a podcast-centric marketing strategy
- How Matt fits hosting two shows into his busy schedule
- Differences between hosting an interview series -vs- co-hosted commentary
- Why your personality is so important when it comes to podcasting
This episode was produced by Red Cedar Marketing. Need help launching and running a business podcast that actually produces results? Visit www.redcedarmarketing.com.
Welcome business podcasters to another episode of Podcasting and Professional Services. I'm your host, John Tieman, and today I'm excited to bring you my conversation with Matt Tate. He's the CEO and founder of decimal and he is the host of the After the First Million podcast. He also co-hosts the Accounting for Innovation Podcast with Jody Padar. Um, Matt's a great follow on LinkedIn. You should follow him there. Check out both of his podcasts. Um, I liked my conversation with Matt because he has perspective on both sides of hosting a co-hosted commentary style show, as well as hosting an interview style show. And we got into the differences and the, the similarities between the two. The different mindset that you have to bring as a host. So I thought that was one of the key moments of my conversation with Matt. Um, we also talked about, you know, one of the common challenges that I run into when I'm talking to firm owners and doer sellers and folks that are interested in launching a podcast is that, well, I don't have time to, to invest in marketing. Well, I talked to Matt about that and he is a firm owner. Um, he hosts two shows. He's a busy guy, CEO. He is running a company, building a company, and he has time to invest in marketing. And so I wanted to pick his brain around kind of pro why that's important and prioritizing that. So I think you'll find value in that as well. But first, before we get to my conversation with Matt, I have an exclusive offer for you, a done with you podcast launch package where I will work with your team to help you launch a podcast, um, guide you through strategy, the operations of it, the marketing plan behind it, and then I'll help you produce a pilot episode, And if you're interested, go to Red Cedar or marketing.com to learn more. Alright, and now for my conversation with Matt Tate. All right. Today I am joined by Matt Tate, CEO and founder of Decimal, host of After the First Million and co host of the Accounting for Innovation podcasts. Uh, you can follow Matt on LinkedIn and check out both of his podcasts. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Tait:John, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
John Tyreman:Yeah, I appreciate you coming on. Um, and it's, it's great. I feel like I know you, you're a. familiar face to me. Uh, we were just talking about that. I produce the accounting for innovation podcast, and, um, I love hearing you and Jody go back and forth and I'm excited to explore your experience with your other show too. Matt, just for our listeners, can you help set the stage? Um, what is decimal and who are your target clients?
Matt Tait:So decimal is a bookkeeping and tax company. Uh, we started about five years ago and we help, I would say small to midsize businesses, usually one to about 50 million in revenue with paying the bills, getting paid and tracking it all. So we do bookkeeping, we do all the bill paying, invoicing, payroll, and then their taxes. So ultimately, and I'm not an accountant, I'm a recovering attorney. Um, but our whole mission, our whole goal is just to make it easier to be in business. And, and this year expanding that out to also helping and working with firms on just making it easier to run a bookkeeping and accounting firm.
John Tyreman:Yeah, well put. Well put. Um, and I like to, I like the way that you describe it, at least from what I've heard on, um, your accounting for innovation podcast, you try to keep your operation lean, try to lean on technology as much as you can. Um, and I love how open you are about the way that you're building decimal. And I really respect that. So I just wanted to call that out.
Matt Tait:Well, I appreciate it. And I think, you know, ultimately, and you see it with podcasting too, the, the tools you use either make your, Life easier, harder. And the problem is, is that nowadays the tools are changing at an astronomical pace. And so it's now our responsibility to. Figure out how to stay on top of that. And then you said, just being transparent, like doing this stuff is hard. You get it running a business sucks. Like it's awesome. I love it, but it also like is really a hard thing to do and normalizing that and talking about like what we do and what we did well, what we sucked at. Like hopefully it helps somebody.
John Tyreman:Well, I think so. And I think people, you know, they, they want to know they see success and, you know, it's easy to post about our wins on social media. And then podcasts give you a forum to have more of a human conversation and back to back and forth. And, you know, like, I think that's a great segue. So you launched after the first million in April 24. And then shortly thereafter, we launched season one of accounting for innovation. Um, so cool. Why did you decide that podcasting should be a big part of your marketing strategy?
Matt Tait:Well, you just kind of hit it right on the head there. Like having authentic conversations is a good thing. I mean, number one, it makes me feel good and, and like, quite honestly, doing things that make you feel good is a good idea in business. It's doing the things that don't make you feel good, where you'll really struggle. And what I see is in, in the SMB space, talking to businesses. You hear a lot about startup and you hear a lot about like, I made billions, which is awesome. I would like to make billions and I enjoy startup, but there's this like messy middle of building a company that nobody talks about where it's like, you have to go from startup phase to putting in processes and hiring employees and doing all the stuff that is hard. And. We wanted to just start to normalize and have good conversations about it. And then this year we're transitioning to making it purely about accounting firms and bookkeeping shops. Like, how do you think about scaling your business beyond a million? What are the decisions that you can make? How can we really kind of normalize and make that easier on people? And so we got into this just to say like, Hey, we wanted to take a step forward and authentically impact discussions. And authentically walk people through helping because particularly in accounting, so many of the talking heads that are out there do this in real life or haven't done it in 30 years. And that there's a big difference between me saying like, Hey, I now have 200 clients on an AI native ledger. Would you like to learn about that versus somebody who's not doing it saying, Hey, I tried chat GPT on the no clients I had. And here's how you should use chat GPT on your clients. Yeah. There's a big difference there between like thought and reality.
John Tyreman:Well in show don't tell too, right? And walk on the walk instead of just talk on the talk.
Matt Tait:Absolutely.
John Tyreman:You know, you're, you're a busy guy, right? You know, you're a busy owner, the CEO, you're a dad, you host two podcasts, you know, you post on LinkedIn almost every day. Um, Yeah, well, one common challenge I hear from folks that want to start a podcast and want to have that conversational marketing component, they see the value and the benefit of repurposing and redistribution and video on social media, but one common challenge I hear is that these experts, these firm owners, they, they don't have time for marketing. And how is it that you have time? What's your secret?
Matt Tait:Well, it's really helpful that I run a bookkeeping company and I am physically incapable of doing bookkeeping. Um, so I need to fill my time with something, um, but like, here's the reality. If you're running a bookkeeping firm and you want to grow it, you shouldn't be doing bookkeeping either. And I've just designed, we've designed decimal to make me not work in the business. what I would say about podcasting and just go to market in general. Too many people just do things. They don't actually think it through. You should start a podcast if you have something to say to a specific group of people. Period. Or you should start a podcast if you want to and it'll make you feel good. And you have the money to do it. Do it. Like, make sure that it fits some need. If it's a need in you to just be able to start to talk things out, go for it. Like that can be worth it. If you have something specific to say to a specific group of people, do it as well. Like have a goal. Too many people follow and they hear somebody did a great job and made a bunch of money doing podcasting. So they started a podcast, but they have no plan. They don't know who they're talking to. And you know, that's not a good thing. And too much of go to market and accounting is a generation behind. And. That can be where you follow too slow. I'll use a great example. I listened to a go to market webinar the other day, and it said, the way that you can become a million dollar business is to, uh, do outbound thousands of cold emails, use those cold emails, build thousands of LinkedIn messages, and do all of that, and you should write them yourself. And I'm thinking. No way. Like that may have worked tactically like six, seven, eight years ago, but with post pandemic, plus now AI, the amount of noise that business owners are getting in their inbox and their LinkedIn inbox is so astronomically high. It won't work. It will waste your time. You won't get anywhere. You're going to get spammed. You're going to ruin your domain. And it's a generation behind. You have to rethink intentionally what you're doing. Podcasting can be that if you're doing it with the right intention and the right plan. And that I think is the biggest thing is really thinking these things through and, and using it to build as part of a plan. Like one of the things we talk to new firm owners all the time is you should niche down in two different ways. One, if you have a specific niche that you've worked on or expertise, Dive into that. Learn if it's good, if not pivot away to the next one, keep trying until you find something and go local, go meet people at events, go do stuff. Don't be lazy. Go press the flesh because pulling back to old school is actually working better now because the noise online is so extensive and loud that you are breaking through it with a handshake. And so how do you get those handshakes and podcasting can be a really good part of that. So to me, long story short, I would say is. I've built this in because it's part of a very intentional plan and it works with that intentional plan in mind.
John Tyreman:Yeah. There's one thing you said, Matt, that I want to unpack a little bit. And it was, you were intentional about structuring decimal so that you didn't work in the business. You're working on the business. And so. I would imagine that, that, you know, obviously that frees you up to invest your time a lot in sales and marketing. What, in what other ways are you investing in marketing in, in outside of the podcasts?
Matt Tait:So we're now, we are a much different use case. We have 110 employees. I've got a team of people that do marketing. I've got a sales team. They're the ones that do the boots on the ground. My job is to create thought leadership. And this year focusing a lot on AI, on outsourcing, on just building a better firm that makes it easier for people to work an appropriate amount of time and make the appropriate amount of money. So we've just designed, but even at the very beginning, I was the person selling, I sold the first million dollars in deals. We're well beyond that now, and we have a team of people that do it. But now it's my job to strategize and help figure out what's working here, what's not working there. We now have a full marketing playbook, and we have multiple playbooks that we run. But part of it too is just figuring out the strategy behind things, testing it out, seeing what works, pulling back what doesn't, testing something else out. And you and I talked about this earlier, like pricing go to market is a moving target. You will never lock in permanently. And if you think that through, it means you're always focusing on it. I would argue that the most important job of any accountant and bookkeeper that owns their own firm is selling, selling, selling. People assume you can do accounting. You need to sell to grow to make money to do things.
John Tyreman:in order to sell, you need to understand your ideal clients.
Matt Tait:A hundred percent.
John Tyreman:and That's the, key to selling is, is really understanding their needs. Um, so, uh, you launched after the first million and it's an interview series and you're interviewing successful entrepreneurs about, you know, that messy middle and what it, what happens after that first million, um, accounting for innovation on the other hand. Is a co hosted commentary style show. You and Jody are going back and forth and you're talking about AI and you're talking about outsourcing. Um, having experienced both of those, um, sides of podcasting, how would you compare and contrast those two formats?
Matt Tait:So one is pure interview and one is just like thoughtful banter, right? I think both can be really powerful An interview allows you to go deeper on a specific topic. I like that personally because I enjoy like diving deep. I like depth. Depth is something that, that I enjoy that makes me feel good. It's, it helps pull out the stories that gets real tactical advice. I learned something on every podcast interview. I do. I bet you're the same. Like you interview a deep thinker and you have these conversations and you're like taking notes afterwards and you're like, gosh, I'm going to try that. Or I'm going to give this a shot. And like, that stuff's awesome. the. What I love about the banter with Jody, it's a totally different brain subset where we pick topics and, and Jody's just awesome, but we're also like the podcast of misfit toys. Like she's always been the radical CPA and. I'm the non accountant that is building a successful accounting company and, and I compete with accountants. And yet I'm also like, I want to help them do better because I see this as such an amazing time to build and be an accountant and build an accounting firm. And so it's, it's also about finding the right things. Like you've probably seen this too, where Jody and I, I think have developed a good rapport. Like we are both perfectly fine, like arguing and moving on and, and that's made it fun to have these conversations and we don't agree every time. And that's what also makes it, uh, I think a worthwhile conversation and, and it's what keeps us, even when we're not recording, talking every couple of weeks and catching up on topics is because, you know, we don't agree and, but yet we are both, I think genuinely good people that enjoy talking and spending time together. And. Ultimately it came from like, Jody and I had a random conversation. Then two and a half hours later, we both realized that we should have left for the three meetings we missed. And we're like, we should turn this into a podcast. And I think it's been fun since we did.
John Tyreman:I think one of the things that makes a co hosted show work is the chemistry that's built up over time. Between two individuals or three individuals. Um, I saw this, um, post from James Carberry the other day where he was talking about how three co hosts actually creates an even more dynamic environment because, you know, with two you're pressured to respond after your co host kind of ends their thought. But with three, it's like whoever has the more kind of pressing, you know, whoever is adding the more value kind of gets the spotlight there. So I thought that that was an interesting dynamic from a co hosted perspective.
Matt Tait:You know, the other thing that can be tough is. When you're, when you're doing an interview, your ego can do what you want it to do. When you're co hosting, you also have to have some humility to actually listen and take in what other people are saying and not just need to talk. And I think that can be the tough thing is when you're co hosting, you share the stage and to do that well, you have to be willing to take a step back versus when you're interviewing, it's all about and how well you do it, interviewing somebody and pulling out the great story from them
John Tyreman:Well, and, and then in interviewing that it's a different kind of listening because you're listening to, uh, uncover new insights for your, your listeners, because you always got to keep them in mind. They're the third person in the room.
Matt Tait:Every time. Oh,
John Tyreman:are the insights that will add value to them? So you're kind of listening to, to risk, to dig deeper as opposed to listening, to respond. Um, But also kind of active listening as well, because you want the conversation to be natural and meaningful and, and valuable. So there's, there's a lot that goes into hosting a podcast. And that's why I wanted to explore that with you because, you know, I host a co hosted show and interview series as well. So I see both sides of that coin.
Matt Tait:Which do you prefer?
John Tyreman:honestly, I, I, I, I love both because like you, uh, you know, I learned so much from the interviews. I see it as a form of market research because I'm interviewing folks that are, you know, maybe there are a few steps ahead of me and I want to take notes for myself. But I know my, my listeners will probably get value out of it, but, um, it's really, it's really an exercise in market research too.
Matt Tait:Yeah, I agree.
John Tyreman:So in, um, and then on your guest side, how do you go through that guest selection process? Like who is your ideal guest for after the first million?
Matt Tait:You know, in the first season, it was people that, Had built companies and, or were currently building companies and had gotten after that first million and could kind of tell the lessons of what helped them get there, where they screwed up, what they learned. That was the real impact. I think of season one was just general business owners from all walks of life that, impactful story season two. And we're started with a, uh, LinkedIn live conversation tomorrow. Um, Which will be way before this comes out.
John Tyreman:Time is a, is a full circle in
Matt Tait:Oh yeah, um, but it's, it's going to be focused on people building bookkeeping and accounting shops and how they can get over the first million. And to me where that is kind of niching down is I've got a conversation this week with an amazing woman who has built one of the most successful orthodontics shops in the country. And that conversation is going to be on the importance of niching. And finding a niche and how expertise is important for building rapport and growth. Uh, the conversation with Sasha is going to be on cutting edge technology and how not just waiting till everybody else does it, but really getting out in front of AI and how to make it approachable and, um, how to take the first steps. Because implementing the right tools is so important. Um, and then other conversations are just going to be people that have scaled their accounting firms or their businesses or partnerships or, you know, all the aspects that come into building a successful scaled company. And niching that down to how do we help accounting firms do that better?
John Tyreman:Okay. And so to be clear, this is a, an accounting firm that focuses on orthodontics that vertical.
Matt Tait:No, this is going to be the actual orthodontist. Talking about from a client perspective of growth, why having expertise in a niche from a partner and particularly an accounting partner is important,
John Tyreman:Okay. So they're providing market perspective to accounting firms,
Matt Tait:right? The importance of like, what is the, we all hear about niching and finding a niche and finding them specific vertical, but it's a theory.
John Tyreman:How does that resonate with the
Matt Tait:right. How does it resonate with the buyer? How does it resonate with successful people? How does it resonate with the industry? Why is it important? Um, all of that stuff I think will be, uh, really cool.
John Tyreman:Well, that's, that, that is one common theme. I studied high growth professional services firms for seven years at an agency called Hinge. And, um, the research that we did, we found that specialization was. The number one driver of high growth and professional services across all industries, accounting, AEC, consulting. And I've also too found that to be the case with podcasts, podcasts that focus on a specific industry segment. Um, there's one show that, um, is in my portfolio. Um, one of my clients is a financial service provider for ground transportation companies. And we built a podcast around that niche and that industry, and he's got all these relationships and it's, um, it's working out really well. So yeah, then industry specialization is definitely a key to growth.
Matt Tait:Oh, I agree completely.
John Tyreman:so Matt, um, if you were talking with. A firm owner, let's say they're an expert. Maybe they're a seller do or a do or seller, and they've been tasked with, you know, okay, you need to do some marketing or they, they need to market their firm and they're considering launching a podcast. What's one piece of advice that you would give to them?
Matt Tait:I would think through what is really great about what you do. Like, what do you do uniquely well? Is it your personality? Is it your niche? Is it your team? Is it some aspect of what you do? And then start to build off of that. I think find what you truly believe you're really great at and amplify that. That I think will also make you feel good. It'll be authentic. And I think when you start to talk about that and build a show around that, I think you have the chance to turn your podcast into something that can be impactful for your business.
John Tyreman:Yep. Build around your strengths, build around your personality., We were just talking about co hosted commentary versus interview style shows. One of the, one of my common, rocks that I lean back on is, you know, lean into your personality. Are you more curious and inquisitive, you know, maybe an interview show is better for a better fit. Or are you, do you like to talk, you know, do you have the gift of gab? Right. You know, maybe a monologue series is right up your alley or. You know, do you have co, you know, banter that you can have with someone else in the industry? Maybe it's within your firm. Maybe it's in a, with a strategic partner in the industry. Finding what works for you, what fits your personality, what you like doing, that's great advice. Uh, well, Matt, um, I just want to say thank you so much for your time today. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that, about podcasting, about your shows that you want to share with our listeners?
Matt Tait:Look, have fun with it. That's the biggest thing too. And also so much of downloads viewership takes time. And anything in marketing in general takes time. And so make sure whenever you're, whatever you're going to do, whatever you're going to start, if it's well thought out, give it time, give it three, six, 12 months and say, Hey, I'm going to do this for a year. And then we're going to evaluate it because it just, it's unlike sales where you can have instant gratification. Marketing is always, all aspects of marketing are designed to be a slow burn. give it time and be patient with it. And I think that's an important addition.
John Tyreman:Well, the reason why is because sales cycles are so long, right? You know, you, you, you get, uh, uh, an inbound inquiry and they're ready to have a conversation from that point on, it takes 120 days on average. Right. So what happens way upstream from that? Right. Um, so yeah, marketing is absolutely addressing that 95 percent of the market. That's not in market for services right now. Maybe they're satisfied with their status quo where they're open to, um, hearing what else is out there.
Matt Tait:Yeah.
John Tyreman:Matt, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your experience, hosting, um, your, both of your shows, um, for folks that are listening, they can go to decimal. com. Check out after the first million and accounting for innovation, Matt, thank you so much.
Matt Tait:John, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
John Tyreman:Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Matt Tate. If you've found this episode valuable, please subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify. We have a YouTube page, subscribe there. Um, just search for John Tieman or Podcasting and Professional services and leave us a rating and review on Apple that really helps us grow the show. Alright, happy podcasting.
