I Read 66 Bookkeeper Profiles Yesterday

Yesterday I sat down and worked through sixty-six new connections. Bookkeepers, accountants, firm owners, a few controllers and CFOs. I read every profile properly before writing to anyone, one after another, for most of a day.

Before anything else: I am not going to name anyone or quote anyone identifiably. What follows is the aggregate, the thing you can only see when you read that many in a row.

Because nobody gets this view. You see your own profile. You see a handful of competitors when you are feeling insecure at eleven at night. You never see sixty-six back to back, and it turns out sixty-six back to back tells you something that one at a time does not.

One: almost everyone is saying the same sentence

I stopped counting after seven, in a single morning, whose profiles said some version of this:

Helping small businesses increase their profit with accurate financials.

Helping business owners make better financial decisions.

Financial clarity. Actionable data. Accurate books so you can grow with confidence.

Different words, same sentence. More than one in ten of the people I read, and I do not think that sample was unusual.

Here is the thing. None of it is wrong. Every one of those people meant it, and most of them can deliver it. The problem is not honesty, it is that the sentence has stopped carrying information.

Ten years ago, saying "I do advisory, not just data entry" was a position. It separated you. Now it is the price of entry, and a claim everyone makes is a claim nobody hears. You are not competing on it. You are just present.

Two: the ones I remembered were specific, not better

By the afternoon I could tell within about four seconds whether a profile would stay with me.

The ones that did had a noun in them. Bookkeeping for cleaning and moving companies. Cleanup and monthly work for solopreneurs. Accounts payable support. Full charge. Bilingual.

Those people were not necessarily better bookkeepers than the generalists. I have no way of knowing that. They were legible. I knew immediately who they were for and what they did, so I knew what to say to them.

The generalists took me thirty seconds to place, and honestly I was still guessing. If it takes me thirty seconds and I am actively trying, imagine a business owner scrolling with none of that patience.

Three: the newest practices had the sharpest positioning

This one surprised me, and it is the inversion worth sitting with.

Several of the people who had opened their doors this year had clearer, more specific positioning than people with fifteen or twenty years behind them.

I think the reason is straightforward. When nobody knows you, the profile has to do the work, so you are forced to say something specific or be invisible. When you have two decades of referrals, the profile does not have to do anything, so it slowly drifts back to the safe general sentence. It works fine, right up until the year you need it to work and it does not.

Four: nobody differentiates on words any more

So here is the uncomfortable part, and it is the reason I am writing this.

If everybody claims advisory, the claim is worth nothing. So what is actually left to compete on?

What lands in the client's inbox on the twelfth of the month.

Take two bookkeepers who both say "actionable insights" on their profile. The first one sends a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet. Accurate, on time, correct. The second sends a page in front of the statements that says: margin fell four points this month, most of it from materials running over on one job, here are the three things I would do about it and the first one is worth about eight hundred dollars.

Same claim on both profiles. Completely different businesses.

The claim is free. The deliverable is the differentiator.

And here is why that matters more than a wording exercise: for almost everyone, this is not a skill problem. You already know what you would tell that client. You have known since you closed the month. What you do not have is the hour per client to write it down properly, so the insight stays in your head and the statements go out on their own.

That is a time problem, and time problems have a different solution than positioning problems.

Five: what I would do if I were rewriting my profile tomorrow

Name who it is for. Use a noun, not an adjective. Contractors. Coaches. Dental practices. Moving companies. Anything I could point at.

Say what actually arrives. Not what they will feel, what they will receive, and when.

Then delete any sentence that every other bookkeeper on the platform could have written about themselves. If it survives that test, it was never doing anything for you.

One more thing, and it is not about marketing

Two of the people I wrote to yesterday were running their own practice and openly looking for employment at the same time. Both were good at what they do.

Nobody in this profession talks about that, and it is far more common than we admit. If that is you at the moment, you are not failing at anything. You are doing the sensible thing while the practice fills up, and the skills point in both directions anyway.

Where this lands

If you want the claim on your profile to be true in the client's inbox rather than only on the page, the work is to build the thing that produces it every month without costing you an hour per client.

That is what we teach, and the next week of it is free. One hour a day, live at 3 PM CST, every session recorded, no card and no coding. The next weeks are September 7 to 11, September 14 to 18, and September 28 to October 2: https://humansplusagents.ai/legacy-sbc-aia

You do have to register to get the replays, because they only go to people who signed up.

If you would rather see one first, take a free agent and run it on one real client file this week. Nothing renews: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent

And the free community is open to any practitioner, no cost and no pitch, which is genuinely the best place to find out how other people are describing themselves: https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/community

Sixty-six profiles, and the ones that stayed with me were not the most impressive. They were the clearest.

AI does the typing. You make the judgment calls.

— Yvonne Razo, Co-Founder, AI for Accounting