Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Free, Half Off, or Ready-Made: The AI Menu for October

Free, Half Off, or Ready-Made: The AI Menu for October

Every week somebody asks me, "Yvonne, where do I even start with AI?"

And every week I want to hand them a menu. Because that is what this is. Nobody walks into a restaurant and orders everything on the first night. You look at the menu, you see what you are hungry for, and you order that.

So here is the menu. Three columns. Pick one, pick two, or be like me at a buffet and pick all three.

The only thing on this menu that costs full price is waiting.

Before you order: it works with any LLM

Let me say this up front, because people ask me every single day.

Everything on this menu works with any LLM. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or whatever comes out next spring and sends everyone into a panic on LinkedIn. If your office runs on Microsoft 365, it works there. If you switch tools next year, everything comes with you.

We are not selling you a tool. I have stopped trying to keep up with the logos. We teach the method, and we build agents that do real work.

Column one: Free

This is the appetizer, and it is on the house. Really on the house. No card, nothing that renews at 2 a.m.

The AI Skills Black Belt, free for life. Nine belts on using AI in the work you already do: solving problems, learning faster, thinking more clearly, making better decisions, planning projects and building workflows. Self-paced, so you start the day you sign up, and it is updated as the technology changes.

A free AI agent, to start on now. Pick one ready-made agent from our library and put it to work this week. One job, done for you, while you learn the rest.

If you are not sure AI is for you, start here. It costs you nothing but 30 minutes a day, and I promise it is more fun than your inbox.

Column two: Half off

This is the main course, and right now it is half price.

In your first week after you sign up for the free AI Skills Black Belt, you can get the next two courses together for $1,000. That is half the usual $1,000 each.

AI Agent Black Belt (Builder). You learn to build, test and improve your own agents. You pick the job you dread, the one you could do in your sleep and sometimes probably have, and you build one governed agent around it. Governed means it has quality checks built in, so you can trust what it hands you, and you still make the calls that need a human being.

AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems). This is the part everybody skips. An agent sitting in a folder does nothing. It lives next to the gym membership. Role OS turns your priorities, your people and your agents into a daily rhythm, so the agents you build actually run every week.

After that first week, they go back to $1,000 each. I am an accountant. I have reconciled a lot of things. Half off is the easiest math I have done all year.

Column three: Ready-made

This is for the owner who says, "Yvonne, I love you, but I do not want to cook. I want to eat."

Fair enough. Somebody already built the agents for your industry.

AI for Accounting Pro Bundles, $249 each. Our library has more than 250 agents, packaged into bundles for more than 20 industries and roles. There are bundles for bookkeepers, tax, payroll, CFO and advisory work, and accounting firms. There are bundles for construction, restaurants, real estate, law firms, nonprofits, e-commerce, medical and dental offices, hair and nail salons, auto repair shops, and our newest, Manufacturing and Job Shop.

Each bundle is a full set of agents for the jobs that business does every week: the month-end close, the job costing, the client follow-up, the reconciliation, the report nobody wants to write. You open it, you use it, and it works with whichever LLM you already have open.

Somebody already built the agent for your 1099 chase. You are welcome.

So which column is yours?

Here is how I would order, depending on who you are.

  • You are curious but not sure. Start free. Take the AI Skills Black Belt and claim your free agent. See what happens.
  • You want AI doing real jobs in your business, built your way. Start free, then take Agent and Role OS together in your first week, at half off.
  • You want results this week and you know your industry. Grab the Pro Bundle for your niche, and take the free course so you know how to get the most out of it.
  • You want all of it. So do I. Free course, half-off courses in week one, and a bundle for your industry. That is the full meal.

Most people I work with end up in that last row. They start with the bundle because it saves them time right away, then they realize they want to build their own, and then they want it all to run on its own. That is the path: learn it, build it, run it.

The honest part

Nobody needs to order everything tonight. But I will tell you what I tell my clients: the most expensive AI plan is the one where you keep meaning to get to it.

Block 30 minutes a day. Put it on the calendar like a client meeting. Start with the free column. If you like what you taste, the half-off column is only half off for your first week, so don't let it sit.

One student put it better than I can:

"I was afraid of it, then I didn't understand it, and now I can do it all myself with real vision and understanding."

Pull up a chair. The menu is open.

Where to start


 

Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, October 6, 2026

You Know How to Ask AI. Now Give It a Job.

 

You Know How to Ask AI. Now Give It a Job.

Let me tell you what I hear almost every week.

"Yvonne, I use AI every day. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, I have tried them all. And somehow I am not saving any time."

If I had a dollar for every time someone said that to me, I could buy both courses myself. Twice.

Here is the truth. Most people using AI right now have gotten very good at one thing: asking. They type in a question, they get a nice answer, and then they close the tab and do all the work themselves. Again. Tomorrow. And the day after.

Knowing how to use AI and having AI do the work are two very different invoices.

Asking is one request at a time

I have been in accounting for 36 years. I have watched a lot of software promise to save me time. Most of it saved me time the way a treadmill saves you a trip to the store. You are very busy, and you end up exactly where you started.

Asking AI questions can feel the same way. You are still the one who remembers to ask. You copy the answer. You check it. You paste it somewhere else. You are the assistant to your assistant.

You are not doing anything wrong. You are just still holding the job.

The next step is not a cleverer question. It is handing AI a job it does on its own, the same way every time, while you keep the judgment calls. Because the judgment calls are the part you are actually good at, and nobody is paying you to copy and paste.

It works with any LLM

Before we go one step further, let me be very clear: we are not selling you a tool.

Everything we teach works with any LLM. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or whatever shiny new thing comes out next spring and has everyone panicking on LinkedIn. If your office runs on Microsoft 365 and uses Copilot, it works there. If you like Claude, it works there. If you switch next year, everything you learned comes with you.

The tools change every few months. I have stopped trying to keep up with the logos. The method does not change. We teach the method.

Step two: AI Agent Black Belt (Builder)

This is where AI stops being a pen pal and starts being an employee.

You pick one job you do over and over, the one you dread, the one you could do in your sleep and sometimes probably have, and you build one governed agent around it. Governed means it has quality checks built in, so you can trust what it hands you, and you still make the decisions that need a human being.

  • For an accountant or bookkeeper: the document chase every tax season. You know the one. "Just checking in again on those 1099s." Or the month-end close checklist.
  • For a service business: appointment reminders, quote follow-ups, client onboarding, or the weekly numbers you keep meaning to look at.

One job. Done well. Running in whichever LLM you already have open.

Step three: AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems)

Here is the part almost everybody skips, and it is the part that matters most.

An agent that sits in a folder does nothing. It is a very good agent. It was opened once. It now lives next to the gym membership.

Role OS connects your priorities, your people and your agents into a daily rhythm, so the agent you built actually runs every week. You end up knowing exactly what goes to AI, what goes to your team, and what stays with you.

That is the difference between "I built something cool once" and "this is just how we work now."

Learn, build, run

Put together, the three courses are one path:

  1. AI Skills Black Belt: learn to use AI for the work you already do.
  2. AI Agent Black Belt (Builder): build an agent that takes a real job off your plate.
  3. AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems): make it run, every week.

All three are self-paced, you start the day you sign up, and they are updated as the technology changes, so what you learn this fall is not out of date by spring. Certification is earned through work you actually do and that gets assessed. Nobody gets certified for watching videos with the sound off. Full role certification takes all three.

How the first-week offer works

We give the AI Skills Black Belt away for free, for life, so you can see everything we have to share before you spend a dollar. Yes, really free. No card, nothing that renews in the middle of the night.

In your first week after signing up, you can get both AI Agent Black Belt (Builder) and AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems) together for $1,000. That is half price. After that first week, they are $1,000 each.

If you already took AI Skills and you have been meaning to do something with it, this is the something.

My one piece of advice: block 30 minutes a day. Put it on the calendar like a client meeting. Make it part of your day, not something you will do if you get to it. We all know what happens to "if I get to it." It goes to live with the agent in the folder.

The honest part

You will not stop asking AI questions. I still ask it things every day. You will just stop being the only one doing the work around the answers.

One student put it better than I can:

"I was afraid of it, then I didn't understand it, and now I can do it all myself with real vision and understanding."

That is the whole point. Not a new tool. A new way of working, in whichever tool you already have open.

Now go give it a job. It has been waiting.

Where to start


Posted by at No comments:

Monday, October 5, 2026

Two Ways to Spend $1,000 on AI This Fall

 



Two Ways to Spend $1,000 on AI This Fall

Most firms and small businesses will spend about $1,000 on AI over the next twelve months without ever deciding to.

It happens one subscription at a time. A chat tool for the office. A note taker someone tried in a meeting. An add-on to the accounting software that sounded useful in the demo. A seat license that gets opened twice in October and never again after February.

None of those are bad purchases. But add them up at the end of the year and ask one question: what work is done differently now? For most people the honest answer is not much. The tools got paid for. The work stayed the same.

There is another way to spend the same $1,000.

And before you decide this is only for accountants and bookkeepers: it is not. If you are in the service industry, if you sell your time and your expertise, this is for you.

Way one: on the tools

Tools are good, and you will need some of them. The problem is not the tool. The problem is that a tool only does what you ask it to do, and most people do not yet know what to ask.

So the tool gets used like a search box. It writes an email, summarizes a document, answers a question. Useful, and about one tenth of what it could be doing. The other nine tenths needs someone who knows how to hand it a real job, check what it hands back, and make it part of the week.

That someone is the part most budgets leave out.

Way two: on the person using the tools

This is what the next two courses are for.

  • AI Agent Black Belt (Builder). You build one governed agent around one real job in your work, with quality checks built in so you can trust what it hands you. For an accountant that might be the document chase or the month-end checklist. For a salon, a contractor, a consultant or an agency it might be the appointment reminders, the quote follow-up, the client onboarding or the weekly numbers.
  • AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems). You connect your priorities, your people and your agents into a daily rhythm, so the agent you built actually runs every week instead of living in a folder you mean to get to.

Both are self-paced, and you start the day you sign up. Both are updated as the technology changes, so what you learn this fall is not out of date by spring. And the certification is earned through work you actually do and that gets assessed, not handed out for watching videos.

The tools you already pay for get better the moment the person using them knows what to do with them. That is the whole argument.

Which one are you?

If one of these sounds like you, the $1,000 is probably well spent:

  • The owner who keeps saying "after busy season." For tax, busy season ends October 15. The quiet months are the time to learn this, and both courses fit around whatever you have on now.
  • The bookkeeper or accountant with the same three jobs every month. Pick the one you dread. That is your first agent.
  • The employee who wants a skill that goes with them. The courses are yours, not your employer's.
  • The business owner who does the books, the admin and everything else. You are the one who gets the hours back.
  • Anyone in the service industry. Salons, contractors, consultants, agencies, clinics, home services, law offices. If your business runs on your time, this is for you.

And if none of these is you yet, that is fine too. Start with the free course and see whether it changes how your week goes.

Why we are doing it this way

We are giving you the AI Skills Black Belt for free so you can see everything we have to share about AI before you spend a dollar.

And we are taking 50 percent off the next two courses because we want everyone to do this. For yourself, for your business, for your employees, for your whole team. Whoever it is for, this is money well spent.

Self-paced means it fits into your schedule. Nobody is asking you to show up live every day. But here is my one piece of advice: block 30 minutes a day to start. Put it on the calendar like a client meeting. Make it part of your day, not something you will do if you get to it.

How the $1,000 works

  1. Sign up for the free AI Skills Black Belt. It is free for life, nine belts on using AI for the work you already do, and nothing renews or expires.
  2. In your first week after signing up, you can get both AI Agent Black Belt (Builder) and AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems) for $1,000 together. That is half price.
  3. After that first week, they are $1,000 each.

Your week starts when you sign up, not when we email you. So it is your week, not ours.

The honest part

You will still pay for tools. Nobody is suggesting you cancel everything and learn in a cave.

The difference is what you get for the money. One student put it better than I can:

"I was afraid of it, then I didn't understand it, and now I can do it all myself with real vision and understanding."

That is what $1,000 spent on the person buys. The tools were there the whole time. Nobody had shown them what to do with the tools yet.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls. Make sure someone in your business knows how to do both.

Where to start

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, October 2, 2026

The Best Time to Bring AI Into Your Firm, Business or Job Is When It Is Already Changing

 

The Best Time to Bring AI Into Your Firm, Business or Job Is When It Is Already Changing

Yesterday someone tried to sell me a lead list. I said no to the list, but one thing in the pitch stuck with me.

The three sample "opportunities" he sent were all accounting firms in the middle of a change. One had just joined a larger network. One had been acquired and was folding its systems into the buyer's platform. One was the second acquisition in a month for a firm stacking up offices. His point was that a firm in the middle of a change is rebuilding how the work gets done anyway, and that is exactly when it is willing to try something new.

He was right about that. And it is not just true of accounting firms. It is true of any business, and of any job.

Nobody changes how they work on an ordinary Tuesday

Every firm, every business and every job has a way of doing things, and most of it was never designed. It accumulated. The month-end checklist is a document someone made in 2019 and nobody has touched since. The follow-up on unpaid invoices lives in one person's inbox. The welcome email for new customers has a paragraph nobody remembers adding. The weekly report you send your boss takes two hours because that is how long it took the first time.

On an ordinary week there is no reason to touch any of it. It works well enough, and changing it costs time nobody has.

Then something changes. A merger. A new partner. A move to new software. A key person leaves. You start a new role, or get a new manager, or take on someone else's work. Suddenly the old way of doing things has to be written down, explained, moved or rebuilt, and the cost of changing it drops to almost nothing, because you are changing it anyway.

That is the moment to bring AI in. Not as one more project on top of the change, but as part of how the new way gets built.

The change you can schedule: the off-season

Most of us are not in the middle of a merger. But every firm in tax has a change it can count on, and it is coming in thirteen days.

October 15 is the last extension deadline. After that, the season is over, the pressure drops, and for a few months there is room to think. The off-season is the closest thing a tax practice has to a planned rebuild, and most firms spend it recovering instead.

If you are not in tax, you have one too. Every business has a slower stretch, and every job has a quieter month. That is your off-season, whether you call it that or not.

Here is a different way to use it. Spend the next few months getting ready for a better busy season. For tax, that means a better April 15, 2027:

  • Write down the three jobs that hurt most this year. Not in general. The specific ones. For most firms it is the document chase, the organizer that nobody fills in, and the review backlog in the last two weeks. For a small business it might be the quote follow-up, the invoice chase and the weekly numbers. For a job, it is the part of your week you dread.
  • Pick one and hand it to an agent. One job, built properly, with quality checks, tested on old examples with the identifying details taken out. If the agent can do last year's version of the job on old data, it can do next year's on real data.
  • Build the rhythm before you need it. An agent that only runs when someone remembers is not a system. Set it to run on a schedule, so that when the busy stretch comes, the work starts on its own instead of in a panic.
  • Train the team while there is time. Nobody learns a new tool well in the middle of the rush. Everyone can learn it in the quiet months. If the team is just you, that applies to you too.

The people who do this will not have an easy busy season. Nobody does. But they will have a different one, where the work that used to eat the last two weeks is already moving months earlier.

I did this in my own firm

This is not theory for me. I did exactly this in my own firm: used the quiet months to change how the work gets done, so the next season ran differently.

The result is something I had not had in 36 years in this profession. Work-life balance. Not a lighter season, an actual life outside of it, for the first time in my career.

I am not saying that to sound impressive. I am saying it because I spent most of those 36 years assuming the crunch was just the price of the job. It was not. It was the price of doing the job the same way every year.

What it looks like in practice

The free course is where to start, and it is self-paced, so it fits around whatever you have on right now and then into the quiet months:

  • AI Skills Black Belt (free, for life): learn to use AI properly on the work you already do. This is the fall project.
  • AI Agent Black Belt (Builder): build one agent around one real job, with quality checks. This is the winter project. For a firm, the document chase is a very good first agent. For a business or a job, pick the task you would hand off first if you could.
  • AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems): connect your people and agents into a weekly rhythm, so it runs without anyone remembering. This is what you have in place before the next busy stretch.

All three are updated as the technology changes, which matters when the tools you learn in October will have improved by spring.

The next two are $1,000 each. If you buy them in your first week after signing up for the free one, you get both for $1,000.

The cost of one tax return

Here is the easiest way I know to think about that price. Both courses together, in your first week, cost about what it costs to have one business tax return prepared.

If you run a firm, that is roughly the fee for one return. If you own a business, it is about what you pay someone to prepare yours. If you work a job, it is a single bill, once, for skills you will use every week for the rest of your career.

Now think about what that one return's worth buys if you spend it in the quiet months. The skills to build an agent that does one real job for you, over and over. A weekly rhythm that keeps it running without anyone remembering. If that saves you even a few hours a week, it has paid for itself many times over before April 15, 2027.

That is how you up your business game, or your career: not by working more hours next season, but by investing the cost of one tax return into how all the rest of your work gets done.

We would never tell a client, a customer or a friend to skip a $1,000 investment that pays back like that. Most of us are just not used to giving ourselves the same advice.

The point

The best time to change how you work is when it is already changing. If you are in the middle of a merger, a new hire, a new role or a software move, fold AI into it now. If you are not, the quiet months are your change, and for anyone in tax they start in thirteen days.

Nobody wants to change how they work, except during the three weeks when they have no choice. The off-season gives you three months. Use them.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls.

Where to start


Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, October 1, 2026

What Happens After the Free Course

 


What Happens After the Free Course

Every free course has a second page. You know the one. You finish the last lesson, feel briefly accomplished, and then a banner slides in with a countdown timer and a price that was not mentioned anywhere on the way in.

I have been on the receiving end of that page more times than I can count, and I have never once felt good about it. So this post is the second page, written before you start, with the prices in it.

The free one

Our AI Skills Black Belt is free. Not free for 14 days, not free with a card on file. Free for life, through my link, and nothing renews or expires.

It is nine belts on using AI for the work you already do: solving problems, learning faster, thinking through a decision, and creating the first draft of almost anything. It is self-paced, so you can do a belt on a Tuesday night and the next one three weeks later, and nobody sends you a sad email about it.

You keep it whatever you decide about anything else in this post.

https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc

The two after it

There are two more courses. They are where most people who finish the first one end up asking to go next, because the first one teaches you to use AI and these two teach you to make it do a job.

AI Agent Black Belt (Builder). You build one agent around one real job in your work, with quality checks built in, so you can trust what it hands you. For an accountant that might be the document chase, the month-end close checklist, or the bank reconciliation you have done forty times and could do in your sleep. That is exactly why it is the right one to hand off first.

AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems). This is where the pieces become a week. You connect your priorities, your people and your agents into a daily rhythm, so the agent you built actually runs on Monday instead of living in a folder you mean to get to.

Both are self-paced, the same as the free one. Certificates are earned through work you actually do and that gets assessed, not handed out for watching videos.

And all three courses keep up. As the technology changes and the agents improve, the courses are updated, so what you learn this month is not out of date by spring. With AI, that is not a small thing. Half of what people learned about it last year now has an asterisk.

The prices, all of them

Here is the whole thing, in one place:

  • AI Skills Black Belt: free, for life, and updated as the technology changes.
  • AI Agent Black Belt (Builder): $1,000.
  • AI Role OS Black Belt (Operating Systems): $1,000.

And the one offer, with its one condition:

  • In your first week after you sign up for the free course, you can get both of the next two courses for $1,000 together. That is half price.
  • After that first week, they go back to $1,000 each.

That is the entire offer. No countdown timer that resets when you refresh the page. No "only three seats left." The week starts when you sign up, not when I send an email, so it is your week, not mine.

https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/KZ8E57JCPNC3U

Why the first week

A fair question is why there is a deadline at all, if I am being so virtuous about fine print.

The honest answer is that the first week is when it works. People who move from the free course into building an agent while the first course is still fresh tend to finish. People who mean to come back to it later mostly do not, and I would rather give the discount to the version of you that is going to finish.

It is not a trick to rush you. If the first week passes and you decide you want the next two courses in March, they are $1,000 each in March, and they will still be worth it. You just will not get them for half.

What you do not have to decide today

You do not have to decide anything about the paid courses to start the free one. Start it, do a belt or two, and see whether it changes how your week goes. If it does, the next step is sitting right there with a price on it. If it does not, you have a free course and I have one more person who knows how to use AI properly, which is the point of all this anyway.

To be clear about where I stand: the free course on its own is a perfectly good place to start. But my recommendation is all three. The first one educates you. The second one improves one real part of your work. The third one is what makes it stick, by putting it into your job or your business every week. Learning AI without implementing it is a bit like buying the gym membership for the parking.

The best thing anyone has said to me about these courses came from a student who went through them:

"I was afraid of it, then I didn't understand it, and now I can do it all myself with real vision and understanding."

Afraid, then confused, then capable. That is the whole path, and it is the reason I recommend all three instead of stopping at the first.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls. That applies to this decision too.

Where to start

There is no upsell hiding in here. The upsell is right here, in the open, with a price on it.

Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Three Hundred Clients Still Owe You Documents, and October 15 Is Two Weeks Away

 

Three Hundred Clients Still Owe You Documents, and October 15 Is Two Weeks Away

Yesterday morning I sat on a call with a tax firm we work with, and somewhere in the first ten minutes the owner said a number out loud: a little over three hundred extension clients who still owe documents.

Not three hundred returns that need preparing. Three hundred people who have not sent the thing the return is waiting on.

I had walked into that call with a picture in my head. I assumed the list lived in a client portal, with reminders going out on their own and a dashboard someone glanced at. It lived in an Excel export from the tax software, one row per client, and one person on the team was working down it by hand. My picture was wrong, and I suspect it is wrong about most firms, because it was the picture of how it is supposed to work.

The problem is not the preparing

If you do tax work, you already know this. The prep is the part you can control. Give a good preparer a complete file and the return gets done. What you cannot control is the file arriving.

Read your own extension list slowly and you will find the same people I found on theirs:

  • The client waiting on a K-1 from a partnership that files on the last possible day, every year, on purpose.
  • The one whose brokerage sent a corrected 1099 in August, so the first one is now wrong and the second one is in a drawer.
  • The rental property owner who is "pulling together the expenses," a phrase that has meant the same thing since May.
  • The daycare provider's tax ID, which nobody has, including the daycare provider.
  • The client who will send everything tonight, and has said so every Thursday since June.

Every row has a status column, and every status column says some version of the same thing. Waiting on client. Since April.

What the chasing actually costs

Here is the part that gets missed. The person doing the chasing is usually good at their job, which is exactly why the list gets handed to them. And then their October disappears.

Each client needs a different email, because each one is missing something different. A 1040 client waiting on a K-1 needs a different message from an S corporation whose books have not been closed. The ones who sent half of what you asked for need to be thanked for the half before you ask for the rest, or they stop reading. Then you need to remember who you wrote to, when, and what came back. Three hundred times.

Nobody does that well from a spreadsheet. They do it until about the ninetieth row, and then the rest get the same email.

What we built for it

So we built the firm an agent to do the typing.

It reads the extension list straight from the tax software's export. It sorts every client by what is still missing and by how close their deadline is. It writes the chase email for each one, for every return type, in the firm's own voice: individual, S corporation, partnership, corporation, trust. It asks only for what has not arrived yet, and it thanks people for what they have already sent.

It works on a schedule you choose. At fourteen days out the email is friendly. At nine it is firmer. At six it names the deadline. At three the agent stops writing emails and puts the client on the phone list, because by then an email is a way of not having the conversation.

And it keeps the list current. As documents come in, the agent updates who has sent what and who is still waiting, so the person running the chase starts each morning with today's list, not last Tuesday's.

One thing I will say plainly: take the Social Security numbers out before anything goes near an AI tool. The agent does not need them to chase a document, and neither does anyone else.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls. The agent can tell you who is missing a K-1. It cannot tell you which client needs a phone call from you personally because they are going through something this year. That part is still yours, and it should be.

If your list looks like theirs

You have about two weeks until the October 15 deadline, which is enough time to change how the next two weeks go and not enough to keep doing it by hand.

You can claim a version of this for free. Ask for the Document Collection Chase Agent: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent

If you want to learn to build and adjust agents like this yourself, our nine-belt AI course is self-paced and free, and nothing renews or expires: https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc

And if you would rather compare notes with people whose extension lists look exactly like yours right now, our free community is full of them: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1024923770013348

The returns are not the hard part this month. The hard part is three hundred emails, each one a little different, sent by one person who also has a job. Give that part to the agent, and give the person their October back.


Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Your First Client Almost Always Already Knows You

 

Your First Client Almost Always Already Knows You

Over the weekend a bookkeeper replied to a message I had sent her. She is qualified, she is ready, and she is having a hard time finding her first client.

She had found one. He turned out to be a scammer.

She also said the marketing company she had hired was starting to look suspicious. Then she asked me the question I get more than any other from people starting out: how did you get started, and do you have any tips?

I want to answer it properly, because the honest answer is a lot less exciting than the ones she has probably been sold.

First, the two things that are not clients

A real first client will never need you to send him money. Not to "cover a fee", not to pay a vendor on his behalf, not to return the extra from a check that came in too large. The overpayment is the scam. The check bounces a week after your refund clears.

Other signs worth knowing:

  • He is always in a hurry and never wants a phone call.
  • He cannot give you a business name you can look up.
  • He asks for your bank details to "test a deposit".
  • He wants you to buy gift cards, which no business in history has ever paid a bookkeeper in.

The client who needs you to send him money first is not a client.

The marketing company is a different animal, but the pattern rhymes. Be careful with anyone who guarantees a number of clients, wants payment up front for leads you cannot check, will not tell you where those leads come from, or locks you into a long contract before you have seen a single name. Anyone selling you guaranteed clients is selling to you, not finding clients for you.

None of that makes you naive for trying. It makes you normal. The people selling shortcuts to new practice owners are very good at finding new practice owners.

Where first clients actually come from

Almost every first client I have seen come in has come from someone who already knew the bookkeeper. Not from an ad. Not from a directory. From a person.

Think about who is already in your life:

  • The former coworker who went out on her own last year and is doing her books at the kitchen table.
  • The neighbor with the food truck who keeps his receipts in a shoebox, and says so.
  • The hairdresser who does her own bookkeeping on Sunday nights and hates every minute of it.
  • The guy from church who builds decks and has not reconciled a bank account since 2019.
  • The person on your LinkedIn you have not spoken to in four years, who just posted that they started a business.

You already have a list. You have just never read it as a list of clients.

The part I got wrong, recently

The work is going through those people one at a time and saying something real to each of them. Not a post. Not "I am now taking clients!" to everyone at once. One person, one message, about them.

I know this works because it is how I spend part of most mornings. And I know how easy it is to get wrong, because I got it wrong last week.

Two people turned down something I had never offered them. One filed it as help she might ask for later. The other filed it as a feature she could add for her clients. It was neither. It was a free course for them, and my message had led with the offer instead of with the person. The fix was not a better offer. It was putting them first in the sentence.

That applies to you more than it ever will to me. When you write to the former coworker, the first line is about her new business, not about your services. The services come up because she asks.

Doing it without a spreadsheet of guilt

The hard part is not writing one message. It is writing forty over a few weeks without it turning into a list you feel bad about.

That is what our LinkedIn Connection Engine is for. It is the outreach system we run on our own list, packaged for yours. You export your LinkedIn connections, it sorts them into who to approach first, and it gives you ready-to-send messages with a space in each one for the thing that is actually true about that person. There is a follow-up sequence and a 30-day plan, because most replies come after the first message, not from it.

You can claim it free. Just ask for the LinkedIn Connection Engine: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent

And there is one more place worth being. Our free community is full of practice owners, and some of them hand out overflow work when they are busier than they can manage, which in accounting is most of the year. That is a very common way to land a first client and prove yourself on someone else's file before you have your own: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1024923770013348

If you want to build the skills while you build the list, our nine-belt AI course is free, self-paced, and nothing renews or expires: https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc

What I told her

I told her she was already doing the hard part, which is asking. Most people starting out do not ask anyone anything. They buy the thing that promises they will not have to.

Your first client probably already has your phone number. They just do not know you are open for business yet.


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)