By Andy Frye
A growing business reminds me of what my brothers and I used to do to the refrigerator back when we were teenagers:
Eat everything, immediately.
Otherwise known as: “Every time I’m in the kitchen, you’re in the kitchen.”
In the process of spending money hand over first to finish building out the Pronto Tax School Online Learning Platform, I came up with an idea about how we can spend our money with people who spend money with us.
Check it out…
Your Brain Is a Goldmine
One of the most fun things about doing this whole Pronto Tax School venture has been discovering how many smart, funny, and just downright cool tax preparers are out there doing your thing, and doing it damn well, in this crazy, often brutal business.
I’ve been able to work closely with tax preparers all across the country and even several in other countries and I gotta say:
You teach us just as much as we teach you.
I can honestly say that the knowledge of our community of experienced tax preparers is such a hugely valuable resource for us here at Pronto Tax School.
But how do we “extract” that knowledge, for the benefit of the community?
That’s my question.
First method I found to access the collective gold-studded brain of the tax preparer community was to create our Tax Preparer Support Group, on Facebook, which has been an awesome resource. Whenever a tax preparer has questions, other tax preparers jump in with answers. I wish I would have had something like this when I was doing taxes full-time!
Second method I found was to start reaching out to other tax professionals and help them create courses on our platform, and then pay a royalty to the professional on each sale of their course. CPA Adam Shay was the first participant in the course creator royalty program.
We have a few other tax professionals in the pipeline with their own courses.
Now I want to add in a third way to access the riches of your mind, for the benefit of all mankind (or at least all tax preparers).
Let’s Find a Way to Pay You Money
Why do I need to pay all these consultants loads of money to help me create, edit, proofread, etc. these courses?
Why can’t I just find a way to pay our Pronto Tax School Customers to submit your knowledge and we can use it to create learning materials for the whole community?
I couldn’t find a reason why we couldn’t and shouldn’t start paying our customers to help us improve the courses; after all, you’re the ones doing this type of work all day, with real clients!
So, that’s what I’d like to do: if you can help us improve our products, we’ll pay you. Let’s call it the Earn Cash Back Program. And let’s get you a new source of revenue in your life.
We’re going to start small with this concept, and only offer it to the Beta Group for our new Business Tax Verified Training Program, teaching on the topics of corporation, S corporation, and LLC tax work.
How the Pronto Tax School Earn Cash Back Program Works
Simplicity is perfection.
Go through our course, find a topic that interests you. A lot of times the best topics are things you’ve struggled to understand in your own experience.
Make a brief video teaching us, your fellow tax professionals, about the topic you’ve selected.
Fit your instructional video into the Pronto Tax School paradigm, represented by these three core values: 1) relevant, 2) convenient, and 3) non-boring.
Make the video five minutes or less in length. “Quick hitters,” if you will.
Send the video to our customer service department via email: teacher@pronto4tax.com.
The customer service team will then pass the video on to me.
If I feel the video would be useful to our community, I’ll make an offer to purchase it from you.
You can then make a decision about whether you’d like to sell us your video.
If you sell it to us, cool! You just made some easy cash. And you’ve raised your profile within the community of tax professionals who utilize the Pronto Tax School Platform.
If you don’t find our offer appealing, no worries! Feel free to use the video on your own YouTube channel or however else you like. And also feel free to submit more videos, so that we can make you more offers to pay you.
NOTE: we will never use your video without your permission.
If you want a cool, free tool for making short videos, download this nifty little screen record program called Jing.
Questions? Comments? All Feedback Is Good Feedback
If you have any questions about this new program, please post them in the comments of this blog post.
Feel free to also post suggestions for how we can build out this program. Just keep in mind that right now we want to keep it very, very simple. If it works in this basic format, rest assured that we will continue to develop and improve our Earn Cash Back Program over the coming months and years.
Let’s unleash your knowledge on the world and see what we can build together!
What do you know that we need to know, right now?
