Last year we engaged our visual design and branding agency, Owen Design Co. (the brainchild behind our name and branding) to undertake a strategic communications and marketing plan for GAAP Dynamics. The main reason we undertook this project was that I felt that we had strayed a bit from our brand, mainly because of turnover at our DMLS position during the past few years. In addition, we thought the exercise would be worthwhile as we’d never actually done a formal marketing plan before, and it would also give us a chance to hear from our clients via an independent, third party. However, what started out as a project to “fix” our branding, turned out to be so much more valuable and has resulted in five changes that you can expect from GAAP Dynamics in 2024.

Before we dive into the changes for 2024, let’s first hear what our clients had to say. Specifically, they felt that our unique selling proposition was that we offer personal service, responsiveness, smarts, and humor. Here are a few of the customer quotes from that survey:

• GAAP dynamics is the best customized CPE training company.
• The humor is working. It works because you are, first and foremost, a very bright group of people who keep pace with the changing CPE environment, both holistically and at the industry level.
• You bring energy to every engagement. Participants want you back.
• Your material is highly relevant. CPA’s use your materials as examples internally and in client presentations.

When asked to complete the sentence, “GAAP Dynamics is [blank],” here’s how they responded:

• Best in class
• Trusted
• Knowledgeable
• Exceptionally reliable
• Nimble
• Strengthening
• Empowering
• Worth a little extra
• Makes better-informed CPAs

Wow! That’s very nice feedback and, to our clients, a big “THANK YOU!” We are honored to be your training partner and will continue to do all we can to exceed your expectations.

As a result of their feedback, the team came up with a brand-new value proposition:

In a nutshell, a value proposition is the reason why a customer should buy a product or service. For us, it is the fact that we provide best-in-class training to accountants worldwide, guiding them through complex accounting and auditing rules – saving them time, money, and mistakes!

This led us to re-examine our “Why.”

Change #1: New Mission Statement

After setting on the value proposition, we turned our attention to our existing mission statement:

To share our passion for accounting by creating relevant and engaging learning experiences.

We noted three main “issues” with our existing mission statement:

1. It was focused on us instead of the customer.
2. It didn’t talk about who are customers are.
3. It didn’t communicate our “Why.”

With new-found clarity, we revised our mission statement.

Change #2: New Branding

We aren’t changing our name or the beloved “flaming conch,” but we did refine our logo a bit.

As you can see our old logo was more vertical, which posed problems as it took up a lot of real estate within headers. The new logo is more horizontal, which solves that issue and aligns with the logos of most of our clients and competitors. As far as the font, our old logo was dainty, a far cry from “strengthening” and “empowering,” words our clients used to describe us. As a result, our branding agency decided for a new, bolder font, or, as they described it, “NASCAR-esque.” Not a huge NASCAR fan, but there are a ton of Ricky Bobby quotes I could pull out right now! What was the one about excellence?

Our branding agency thought the old tagline was problematic for existing customers. In short, why are we telling existing clients to “change the way they train?” Made sense to us, so we undertook a company-wide initiative to come up with a new tagline. After sifting through all the entries, some better than others, we ended up with: Innovative training. Brilliant results. Innovative because we are unlike any other accounting training firm on the market and brilliant because, according to the Oxford dictionary, it means “exceptionally clever or talented.” Hey, that’s us! Plus, it is a word not often heard in America, so it is not overused like “engaging.” Hey, that used to be us.

When we launched our eLearning library back in 2018, we branded it the Revolution. I don’t exactly know why. I must have been listening to the Beatles song or watching an old Apple commercial. Anyway, as you can see in the previous logo, we said it was “ignited by GAAP Dynamics,” but other than that you wouldn’t even know it was produced by the same company. And neither did our clients! Of course, this issue was made worse since our eLearning courses had to be hosted on a learning management system (LMS) which is a totally different website with a different URL. Not an ideal situation for branding purposes.

As a result, we’ve renamed it the GAAP Dynamics eLearning Library and gave it its own, but similar logo. At least most people now should know our eLearning is produced by GAAP Dynamics!

Change #3: New Website

Fixing the name and logo of our eLearning library is all fine and dandy, but it wouldn’t do us any good if nobody could find us on Google! And this was the issue we were facing because of our LMS (Docebo) not being searchable by Google, which we weren’t told when we decided to switch our LMS several years ago, but I digress.

What’s the solution? The only one we could come up with is investing in a new website that includes our eLearning library so it can be found on Google. We’ll also be able to direct the customer experience and better lead them to the solutions that they are searching for. Plus, our new website will be ADA compliant, which, although we technically are not required to comply, we want to to ensure all our customers have equal access to our information.

Given that we launched our old website in 2015, I’d say she had a good run!

Change #4: New Business Development Manager

We’ve also recently hired Garrett Walker, our new business development manager. For the last 23 years, business development and sales has largely been the responsibility of Chris, Bob, Vicky, and me. However, there were two main problems with this arrangement. First, we all have other jobs, namely delighting our clients by developing and facilitating awesome training, in addition to running a company. Second, is that we weren’t any good at it. Sure, if you called us looking for training, we would be able to steer you into a tailored solution that would meet your needs. Nobody is more passionate about GAAP Dynamics than us. However, if for some reason the deal got cold, our follow up was horrible.

In short, we were “order takers,” focusing on what we could sell right now, without worrying about the future or our pipeline. That’s fine when everything is popping, but not so great when a whale client doesn’t surface one year, or the economy slows a bit. I have full confidence that Garrett will be an “order getter,” getting to know our customers, focusing on building lasting relationships, and, ultimately, helping influence their buying decision and making sure their needs are met.

Change #5: New Webinar Platform

Since COVID, we have been doing A LOT of webinars, both for clients (paid) and ourselves (free marketing webinars). Our old webinar platform (GoToWebinar) was fine. It was reliable and worked. No issues there. Also, its reporting was good, generating everything we needed to issue CPE in accordance with NASBA regulations.

However, a constant complaint from webinar attendees was that we didn’t give them their CPE certificate immediately. As this feature is not available in GoToWebinar, we had to manually generate the CPE certificates and email them to attendees within, hopefully a 24-hour period. Not ideal, especially given some of our webinars had nearly 1,000 attendees. It also lacked some of the fancy “bells and whistles” of other webinar platforms.

A few years ago, we went through the process of researching webinar platforms, but they were much more expensive. At our annual meeting, Dale said to me “Mike, is your training best-in-class? If so, you need a best-in-class webinar platform.” Gosh darn it, the Canadian was right. So, beginning in April, we are migrating to a new webinar platform (ON24) which has the “bells and whistles,” and, much to our clients’ delight (and our staff), will enable us to immediately issue CPE. We’ll talk more about our new webinar platform in next week’s blog.

Ch-ch-ch-changes.

Turn and face the strange.

About GAAP Dynamics  

We’re a DIFFERENT type of accounting training firm. We don’t think of training as a “tick the box” exercise, but rather an opportunity to empower your people to help them make the right decisions at the right time. Whether it’s U.S. GAAP training, IFRS training, or audit training, we’ve helped thousands of professionals since 2001. Our clients include some of the largest accounting firms and companies in the world. As lifelong learners, we believe training is important. As CPAs, we believe great training is vital to doing your job well and maintaining the public trust. We want to help you understand complex accounting matters and we believe you deserve the best training in the world, regardless of whether you work for a large, multinational company or a small, regional accounting firm. We passionately create high-quality training that we would want to take. This means it is accurate, relevant, engaging, visually appealing, and fun. That’s our brand promise. Want to learn more about how GAAP Dynamics can help you? Let’s talk!

Disclaimer  

This post is published to spread the love of GAAP and provided for informational purposes only. Although we are CPAs and have made every effort to ensure the factual accuracy of the post as of the date it was published, we are not responsible for your ultimate compliance with accounting or auditing standards and you agree not to hold us responsible for such. In addition, we take no responsibility for updating old posts, but may do so from time to time.