Jamie Herman

Teaching offers more than visibility: it builds presentation skills and gives others a reason to trust and refer you.

Unpaid tax-planning presentations at local bookkeeping-group dinners led to technical questions, relationships with bookkeepers and an invitation to speak at the group’s annual conference, Herman says. They estimate the effort generated almost $300,000 in recurring year-end and tax work over three years, and advise accountants to try things others are not doing.

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A referral is worth considering when it suits the client and the professionals have a reason to trust each other; an upfront demand for reciprocal referrals establishes neither.

In a staged account of a meeting with a wealth advisor, Herman says they would assess a referral for fit if one arrived, while noting that this kind of referral is less common than bookkeeping or legal referrals. The post ends with them doubting the value of the meeting after the advisor leads with a brochure and asks about getting referrals back.

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The role is for one experienced accountant interested in more complex tax planning and compilations; business-development interest is welcome but not required. Mentorship and technical growth matter more than making every hire a salesperson.

Herman seeks one staff member from a small-to-medium public accounting firm in the Greater Toronto Area, offering close work, mentorship and feedback. This marks a shift from building a practice through bookkeeping-group presentations to recruiting someone to help shape its next stage.

The posts describe an earlier period of building referrals through unpaid presentations and a later effort to grow the practice by hiring and mentoring one person.

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This is a concrete example of the business-development approach behind much of Jamie’s other advice.

Jamie describes joining a local bookkeeping organization about 14 years ago and offering to present on tax planning at chapter dinners.

• The presentations were unpaid, but they gave bookkeepers access to a tax professional and gave Jamie practice, visibility and relationships that led to referrals.
• Jamie says the work generated almost $300,000 in recurring year-end and tax work over three years while they were in their late 20s, after some people called it a waste of time.

For brands planning a campaign

A practice-building or referral-partner series can use this as its anchor case study: it shows a specific channel, the tradeoff Jamie accepted and the commercial result. The story speaks to tax professionals who need to get out of their comfort zone and firms that want to discuss relationship-led growth, not just technical tax updates.

This story turns a common networking encounter into a clear lesson about qualification, reciprocity and the limits of referrals without a working relationship.

Jamie recounts a meeting with a wealth advisor who opens with a brochure and a pitch, then asks how likely Jamie is to send a referral in return.

• Jamie says a referral would need to make sense based on fit and notes that this kind of referral is less common for them than referrals involving bookkeeping or legal services.
• The meeting ends with Jamie returning to work, adding the brochure to a stack and wondering why they took the meeting.

For brands planning a campaign

This supports content about referral partnerships, professional-services networking and how accountants choose advisor relationships. It gives a campaign a specific behavior to discuss: reciprocal referral requests without demonstrated fit can waste time, while qualified introductions depend on trust and a clear client need.

This shows the hiring side of the practice-building story, including the emphasis on mentorship, complex work and the kind of person Jamie wants to develop.

Jamie says they are looking to add just one staff member—not from a former firm—with several years of experience at a GTA small-to-medium public accounting firm who wants to take on more complex tax planning and compilations.

• The role involves working closely with Jamie and receiving mentorship and feedback.
• Interest in business development and growing a practice would be ideal but is not required.
• Jamie describes the opportunity as shaping someone into a holistic advisor.

For brands planning a campaign

This supports a thought-leadership angle on talent, mentorship and scaling a boutique tax practice. A campaign can discuss what practice owners look for beyond technical skill and how interest in business development fits into a role, distinguishing a preferred trait from a requirement.

Attendees paid only for their own dinner; Herman took no speaking fee.

• The talks became a pipeline: they answered technical tax questions after each presentation, practiced presenting, met bookkeepers who referred clients, and were eventually invited to speak at the organization's annual conference.
• Herman says this generated almost $300,000 of recurring year-end and tax work over three years.
• They now use the story to encourage accountants building a practice to step outside their comfort zone.

Give technical talks to professional groups whose members already have client relationships. Let the teaching create the introduction, rather than leading with a sales pitch.

Herman says they lost touch with the organization after leaving public accounting. The results they describe came from one region and one period in their career.

For brands planning a campaign

A thought-leadership or referral-partner series could show how accountants win referrals by teaching. Practice-management, tax-research, and professional-education tools have a natural fit with this material.

Examples: Source 1

Herman says they assess referrals for fit when they arrive, and that advisor referrals are less common than referrals for bookkeeping or legal services. The post ends with their expectation that they will never speak with that advisor again.

Assess each referral for fit, and say so plainly rather than promising a return referral to win the relationship.

For brands planning a campaign

This is direct source material for a referral-partner content series aimed at accountants and advisors: what makes a useful introduction, what to ask, and what erodes trust in a first meeting.

Examples: Source 1

They also describe being the person a referrer sends a client to when the work must be handled well, framing the value as making the referrer look good.

For brands planning a campaign

A collaboration on practice-building content can draw on technical substance: tax-planning workflows, compilation engagements, and the referral handoff around them. Keep the angle practical rather than promotional.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

The role involves working closely with Herman alone, with mentorship and feedback; an interest in business development is ideal but not required. Herman frames the opportunity as shaping someone into a holistic advisor and opens the post with a story about starting a business and a reference to business showers.

For brands planning a campaign

A collaboration could explore how small firms recruit, train, and retain technical staff, and what close mentorship looks like in a one-person practice. Hiring, training, and workflow brands serving small accounting firms should note this theme.

Examples: Source 1

The posts use recreated dialogue, name the tools and organizations involved, and often close with a number or direct advice to other accountants, such as thinking of things other people are not doing and going for it. One ends with an open call for direct messages and the sign-off “With tax love, Jamie.”

Tell a real story, draw out the lesson, and end with a prompt to act or get in touch.

For brands planning a campaign

Co-created content will feel more natural in this scene-plus-lesson format than as generic tips. A brand should provide a real situation or brief that Herman can narrate from experience.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

The themes remain consistent—referrals, technical tax work, and deliberate practice-building—as Herman's role shifts from practitioner in a firm to owner recruiting for a practice.

For brands planning a campaign

Frame a series around the stages of building an accounting practice, with Herman speaking to accountants earlier in that journey. The arc gives a brand a reason to commission sequential content rather than a single piece.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

They offered to present on tax planning at chapter dinners and were later invited to speak at the organization’s annual conference. The presentations were unpaid; Jamie says attendees often referred clients and estimates the effort generated almost $300,000 in recurring year-end and tax work over three years in their late twenties.

Original disclosure

Events were dinners that you could attend by paying for dinner, and I did not receive a fee.

View example

A working-tool reference, not a stated commercial relationship.

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She built Rise Up Bookkeeping into a boutique firm with a team of seven and more than 100 clients, and now teaches a six-week program covering pricing, contracts, back-end systems and how clients were won — the same territory Herman covers when describing how presentations turned into referrals and how to bring on a first hire.

Martinez sells a structured, cohort-based course with live sessions and founding-member access, focused on running a bookkeeping firm: pricing, contracts and operations. Herman teaches through unpaid talks to local professional groups and posts, focusing on tax planning, compilations and referral judgement rather than firm operations.

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Like Herman, the value comes from naming the specific questions and checks that change a decision.

Renée S. writes for business owners choosing and paying for bookkeeping services, and offers a downloadable interview guide. Herman writes for the accountants and bookkeepers doing the work, covering how to win clients and advise them on tax.

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In one story, an auto repair shop that had given up on a bank got a $15,000 credit line in 15 minutes through QuickBooks, then needed advice on how to use it well. It’s the closest match to Herman’s wealth-advisor meeting post, where the real lesson also comes after the transaction.

Safeer works on cash flow and advisory for a broad finance audience under a named framework, the Five Pillars of Cash Flow Mastery, promotes a paid management program and writes disclosed partnership content for BILL. Herman focuses on Canadian tax planning and compilations for small firms, and writes about referrals and mentorship rather than cash-flow systems.

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The material is already framed as teaching for bookkeepers who are good at the work but underpaid and have nobody to learn from, which lines up with a series aimed at firm owners and senior staff. Aileen Martinez also brings a tested teaching format — a six-week live course with weekly teaching plus Q&A, templates and the SOPs the team works from — so a commissioned series can reuse a structure that has already been run and refined.

The subject is bookkeeping practice-building, not tax planning or referral relationships between tax and accounting professionals, so a campaign aimed at professional introductions would need a different angle.

• The teaching sits inside a paid, cohort-based course with a founding-member offer and lifetime replay access, so a commissioned series would run alongside a commercial product.
• Neither post covers client-fit judgment, referral qualification or work carried out for another professional’s clients—the mechanics a campaign about professional referral relationships would need.
• With only two posts, ask for more examples before judging the fit for a broader series.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The material answers buyer questions directly: what monthly bookkeeping includes, when the close will be completed, what reports a client receives, how questions and missing information are handled, how confidential records are protected, how the bookkeeper works with the client’s CPA, and who performs and reviews the work.

• It also tackles software costs in practical terms: whether a business is paying for QuickBooks features it does not use, and how FreshBooks, Zoho Books and Wave compare on number of entities, bank and credit-card connections, reconciliation and reporting needs, payroll and 1099 requirements, accountant access, and how easily historical data can move.
• That makes it a natural fit for referral-partner content a firm could hand to its small-business clients.

This is buyer-education and checklist material delivered as advice and discussion prompts, with few first-person, scene-based stories to carry a thought-leadership narrative.

• One post promotes a complimentary downloadable guide—an 18-question bookkeeper interview guide with warning signs, note pages and a candidate comparison scorecard—rather than a published piece of writing; the other closes by asking readers what software they use.
• Neither post describes how firms win introductions, qualify referrals or grow a practice through them.
• With only two posts, ask for more examples of narrative-led work before commissioning a series.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The posts lay out a defined framework—five pillars of cash flow mastery, with mindset first—and argue that owners who avoid their numbers are overwhelmed by scattered systems rather than indifferent.

• That offers a usable angle for advisory and fractional-CFO content.
• One post tells a client story about a line of credit: weeks of lender document requests, a $15,000 credit line approved in fifteen minutes through QuickBooks and funded two days later, followed by the more important conversation about which borrowing source should cover payroll and which should be kept for bills with nowhere else to go.
• Safeer also has a visible sponsored-content example: one post is marked as a paid partnership with BILL, and another promotes a cash-flow strategy library of 240+ strategies offered as a pilot at no charge.

The buyer decision is different here.

• This content is for accountants, bookkeepers and advisors helping business owners manage cash and credit, not for firm owners looking for referral partners; it does not cover the review, hiring and introduction themes that campaign would need.
• A commission would also sit close to David Safeer’s own commercial offers—a paid strategy programme and a free pilot for it—so agree on scope and any competing product claims before work starts.
• With only two posts, one sponsored, ask for examples of unsponsored editorial work and multi-part commitments before commissioning a series.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2