“In the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro
This photo is me in 2011.
Just started a new marketing agency to help accountants. Fresh from working directly for an accountancy firm as their marketing manager, looking for ways to help accountants with their marketing.
Every time I’m the guest on a podcast, the first question I am always asked (almost without exception) is, “How did you get here? How does someone with an American accent end up in Scotland running an agency exclusively for accountants? Tell us how it all began”.
And I go back – to my university days, and how and why I decided to study accountancy. To the teacher who encouraged me to major in accounting, even when I didn’t think i wanted to at first, and made accounting understandable and practical (thanks Dr Nancy!). To my first job as an auditor, my move to Scotland (totally unrelated to work at first), and the slow realisation that no one at that time was actually doing marketing work for and with accountants. Everyone was simply telling them what to do, and leaving them to figure it out themselves.
And then we sort of fast forward to 2026 and talk about what marketing is like now for accountants in the age of AI and buyer cynicism and the power of story, and whether websites are needed and how search works now and how referrals are drying up and what lead gen looks like now.
It’s fascinating to me that everyone, always, wants to know how you got here from there.
- How did it begin?
- What’s your story?
- What’s the origin of your business?
- Why did you start it? Why do you keep running it?
What people ultimately want to know is, do they have a connection to your story?
“In the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro
I was meeting with an accountant this week who works with group therapy practices. She was telling me how she got started – how therapy changed her life and impacted her for good. How she relates to her clients because they, too, start their practices out of a desire to help people like themselves. People with anxiety, or OCD, or ADHD, or trauma, and who they relate to personally.
This accountant discovered (almost to her surprise) that she is very like her clients in drive, in ambition, in finding it a challenge at times to focus on where the money comes from (because they’re so focused on helping anyone who needs help).
And I encouraged her to tell her story. Tell it on her website, in social posts or blog posts, in video format. The more she tells about who she is and where she came from and what she’s motivated by, the more her prospective clients will think, “Yes, this is the way it feels to me too.” They will connect with her story.
You’ll be the same. Whether you serve a niche industry or a variety of different business owners, you still have a reason you started. My clients’ origin stories include…
- wanting more time or flexibility with family or kids
- tired of working so hard for someone else’s business
- realising that their accounting or bookkeeping skills were needed and appreciated by a certain type of business owner
- filling the gap from their “other job”
- supporting a partner or family member in their business, and discovering they actually like this work better
Whatever your story is, make sure you tell it. Start small – put it in a LinkedIn post and “re introduce” yourself. People want to know – and the right kind of client will resonate with it.
Would love to hear yours, if you haven’t shared it all with me yet!
