According to Siri, Dave Kersting’s firm is called “Cup of Oreo.” That’s not accurate, of course—his firm is actually Capovario, but when he says the name out loud, that’s what his phone hears. Instead of fighting it, he decided to lean into the joke—buying the domain, ordering custom cups, filling them with cookies and a candle, and mailing them to current and prospective clients as a fun little gift.

And he did it all in May—far from the holidays, when everyone and their dog is doing some kind of gifting campaign—so it would stand out more. Oh, and he hand-wrote every single note explaining the quirky inspiration behind the Oreos.

I did two hundred cards,” Dave said. “My hand hurt.”

That idea—hatched out of creativity, authenticity, and a dash of humor—captured the spirit of the third session of Financial Cents’ Proudly Small series, a four-part lineup of weekly panels aimed at small and growing accounting firms across North America. Moderated by Charlotte Hanington, owner of CAM CAN Marketing, this panel set out to make a sometimes intimidating topic—marketing—feel a bit more approachable for owners of small and growing accounting firms. Charlotte was joined by four firm owners who, by their own humble admission, would rather do almost anything than market themselves: Angela Jenkins of Mindfull Money Matters, Christine Salvatore of In Line Management, Katie Helle of Scaled Accounting Solutions, and Dave himself.

The main question of the hour: how do firms led by people who love accounting—not marketing—actually get their name out into the world and in front of their ideal clients? (Spoiler: it’s way less complicated than you might think.)

Your first clients probably won’t come from marketing

Before any of these owners ran an ad or scheduled a social media post, they had clients on their roster.

Christine’s first official client came through Upwork—two of them, actually, on the same day. They were both looking for production-specific accounting help. (For context, In Line Management serves clients in the entertainment industry—including directors, photo agents, indie production companies, and talent agencies.)

That was my first cue to myself that maybe I was onto something, and I had happened into a niche I didn’t know was a niche yet,” Christine said.

At that point, all she had was a bare-bones profile on the popular gig work platform. But as it turned out, she was the only entertainment and production accountant there. Upwork noticed and offered to help her spruce up her profile and make it more SEO-friendly.

The first clients Angela found were actually friends she agreed to “help out”—free of charge at first. Eventually she started charging for the work, and referrals soon followed. “People trust me enough to refer me to other people,” Angela said, describing a client base built almost entirely on word of mouth.

Katie’s story is similar. She doesn’t have a strict industry niche—she works mostly with small service businesses and high-net-worth individuals—and most of her early growth came from referrals, too.

It’s been really incredible, the amount of people—friends, family, referral sources—that have just helped me grow my business,” Katie said.

It’s nothing groundbreaking, but referrals truly are the bedrock of any small business—bookkeeping and accounting firms included. That said, word-of-mouth will only get you so far. At some point, as Charlotte put it, you’ll realize there’s someone out there who needs your help but has no way of finding you. That’s where marketing comes into play.

Niching is marketing

Getting granular about exactly what you do, and for whom, is foundational to every other marketing effort. The clearer you are about who you serve, the easier every other marketing decision becomes. While that doesn’t necessarily require you to focus on a niche industry, it certainly can help from a marketing perspective.

Once Christine recognized her niche, for example, it became her most effective growth tool. 

When I got my degree in accounting, I had no idea that production accounting was its whole own field,” she said.

After initially launching on Upwork, Christine expanded her online presence to social media platforms like Instagram, where she follows both production companies and fellow bookkeepers. That has turned into yet another lucrative referral source.

“The bookkeepers will say, ‘Oh, I have a production client, but I don’t know how to do it.’ So then they will pass that over to me,” she explained. “Referrals within our industry are huge.”

Similar to Christine, Dave sort of fell into his construction niche. At first, he focused mainly on home builders and the trades, later expanding outward in ways that made sense. Summer camps, for example, are structured very similarly to construction companies—at least from an accounting perspective. So, he added that as a specialty.

When you can draw connections to other industries, it helps with your marketing, but it also really shows that you’re paying attention to the niche that you’re in,” Dave said.

As a marketing expert, Charlotte is all-too-familiar with the power of niching down, because it allows you to get really specific with messaging for your audience. And when you don’t know who you’re talking to, everything you do is basically “throwing spaghetti at the wall, and you’re kind of hoping it lands on a plate,” she explained. But when you know what plate you’re aiming for, hitting your target becomes much easier.

Picking your lane (and your platform)

While the panelists acknowledged how important it is to cultivate a presence on social media, they were very upfront about not trying to be on every platform, all the time. Their collective advice: choose your channels based on where your people actually are and what you can realistically sustain.

Katie has a clear division of labor. Instagram and Facebook promote the business; LinkedIn is where she builds her personal brand and connects with other professionals. “That is where the money is, honestly,” she said of LinkedIn—not because it funnels clients to her directly, but because it connects her with peers who refer work her way.

Dave, meanwhile, confessed to spending very little time on LinkedIn “because it’s boring.” And that’s perfectly okay—both Dave and Katie are right, because at the end of the day, the best platform for you is the one where:

  1. Your audience hangs out, and
  2. You’ll actually show up consistently.

Angela is pushing herself to lean more into LinkedIn, but she’s also noticed that many of her clients are active on Instagram, tagging her and extending her reach to their networks. She also shared an interesting side note about Financial Cents’ Proudly Small campaign, which has catapulted her LinkedIn impressions, taking her from maybe 25 in the first four months of the year to 400 in a single week once she started posting Proudly Small content.

[Social media] actually does have traction and momentum,” Angela said. “We all have something to say, and we may not know it. But somebody may be listening and pick up one small thing that we said, and it makes a huge difference for them. So it’s about harnessing that and then continually moving forward.”

The face vs. the firm

Personal branding was a recurring theme during this session, and the panelists were candid about both its power and its pitfalls.

The power: people want to work with people, not faceless companies. Charlotte is a firm believer in personal branding precisely because it builds trust and humanizes the company brand. 

The pitfall: if you lean too hard into putting your face on the brand, your clients might have a hard time working with someone else on your team.

When I have attached my face too much to my company, then my clients only want to work with me, and it’s hard to transition them to a team member,” Christine said.

She knows she needs to introduce her team on the firm’s Instagram—but she’s gotten stuck on how to do that without confusing the message. It’s a real tension for any owner trying to delegate as they grow.

Charlotte’s advice was to bring the team into the picture early in the client journey—literally. Get them on the website, get them on the socials, and let clients see that the firm is more than one person. Being the face, she noted, doesn’t have to mean being the one doing all the work.

Failing forward

Some of the most useful moments of the hour were the missteps the panelists shared. Dave’s was perhaps the most jaw-dropping: he spent more than $20,000 on a marketing company, and he didn’t even have a single social media post to show for it. While his in-house team was still creating some social content, it was totally disconnected to what the marketing agency was doing—and that really muddied the brand message Capovario was broadcasting to clients and prospects.

I was like, I’m done being noise,” Dave said. “Let’s just not do anything, because that’s probably better than wasting all this time.”

He’s since started rebuilding his marketing plan, this time making sure his team is much more involved in both the strategy and the execution.

For Angela, the fail was subtler and, she suspects, more common: paralysis. “When I get overwhelmed, I do absolutely nothing,” she said. “My fail is not doing anything.” A self-described perfectionist, she admitted to sitting on social media posts that never went out because they weren’t flawless. Hiring an admin with a journalism background has helped her get out of her own head. Now the standard is simpler: “Is it good? It goes,” she said.

Christine’s fail was a four-year-old email domain so long that clients kept remarking on it. She knew it was a problem; she just procrastinated on fixing it. “When I get decision paralysis, I just freeze,” she said. When she finally tackled it, the fix took about two hours.

Katie admitted she’d been sitting on an email from her social media specialist—a list of videos to record—for months. The common thread, which Angela articulated best, is that accountants are wired for precision.

Everything has to tie out at the end of every month—double line, double check mark,” Angela said. “So for us, it’s almost ingrained that it has to be perfect.”

While putting something imperfect into the world might feel deeply uncomfortable, it’s important to remember that on social media, a post exists for an almost miniscule amount of time. So, as Charlotte pointed out, done truly is better than perfect—and it’s the only way to get the data that tells you what’s actually working. Plus, as Dave put it, authenticity is what makes you human, “not the influencer that people know has 15 people behind them taking videos.”

If you can’t show the work, show the authority

One marketing problem that is unique to many service industries, including accounting, is that you can’t really “show” what you do. A chef, for example, can show the dish—and the process of making it. An accountant who is working with sensitive client data can’t show the books.

I’m not gonna show myself typing at a computer and not show my screen,” Christine explained. “I don’t know how to show that I can do it well.”

The workaround: if you can’t show the work, demonstrate the authority around it. Dave does this by being visible at conferences and answering real client questions during his presentations. He also messages clients before an event to ask what’s burning a hole in their brain, then goes around the trade show floor to find answers from the vendors—which becomes additional fodder for presentations and social content. Speaking, teaching, or posting about a common pain point are all great ways to demonstrate expertise without ever exposing confidential client information.

Just do something

Charlotte closed by asking each panelist for one piece of advice to jump-start a firm owner’s marketing. “Bias to action” was the unanimous battle cry.

Angela went first and kept it short and sweet: “Do something. Doesn’t matter what it is.” Katie doubled down by urging listeners to “put yourself out there, even when it’s uncomfortable.” Join communities, and refer out the work that isn’t a fit for you—which is its own form of marketing.

The more you do it, the repetition—honestly, it does get easier,” Katie advised.

She added that social media posts featuring pictures of herself consistently outperform those with stock photos or other visuals—enough that she’s invested in professional branding photography more than once. “People want that real-life connection,” Charlotte agreed.

And if you’re stuck on what to post, Katie suggested leveraging AI to brainstorm some ideas that can get you off the starting line.

Dave borrowed the classic Nike tagline—“Just do it”—and added a tactic for those attending in-person events. Before a conference, pick out one person you want to meet (a speaker, influencer, etc.), and make it a point to find them, introduce yourself, and tell them why you wanted to meet them. He’s actually planning to take his own advice at the next conference he’s heading to, where he hopes to finally meet Dawn Brolin.

“You’re building a relationship, but you know what Dawn’s gonna do—she’s gonna turn around, and she’s gonna take a picture with you,” he said. “She’s gonna post it on her social, and then you’re gonna post it.”

Christine’s advice was maybe the most freeing: use the first take. On her hobby Instagram account—which has surpassed an impressive 27,000 followers—she’s found that re-recorded videos never perform as well as the original. “Reps over research,” she said, quoting a creator she follows.

In an industry where trust and strong client relationships are the key to a thriving practice, the importance of the human element cannot be overstated. Even if you’re known for perfectly polished books, when it comes to marketing, being perfectly imperfect is a much more effective strategy.

You don’t have to be the marketing expert,” Dave said. “You can just be you, and come out into the world the way you want to.” 

For a room full of people who hate marketing, that’s about as good a place to start as any.

This was the third of four sessions in the Proudly Small series. The next one, “Running Lean and Loving It: Operations, Tech & the Art of Doing More with Less,” takes place June 18.

Visit the full Proudly Small hub to meet the firm owners on our panels, and add your firm to the Wall of Small Firms. It only takes 30 seconds.