Small business ownership comes with unexpected twists and turns. Andrea Kuro can speak from firsthand experience.

After working with a business identity that felt “safe” but not “her” for years, Andrea decided to hire Instinct to make the business brand and website feel less like every accounting firm out there, and bring her own personality through.

The problems:

How do we make an accounting website feel comfortable, and not remind people of the stress and drudgery that gets associated with small business bookkeeping?
How do we make an engaging social media presence for an accounting firm?
How do we attract our ideal clients?

We realized that we needed a complete overhaul, that would make the brand feel more like a warm, welcoming financial wellness space, and less “corporate”. The old website looked very similar to local competitors, and we wanted to create differentiation, as well as making the whole thing feel cozy.

How did we get there? Let’s start with the color scheme.

Inspired by the “Summit” name, we decided to pull a color scheme reminiscent of alpenglow - that magical way the mountains light up as the sun is setting. Andrea and I bonded over the fact that we both learned to ski in our 30s (we still need to get out there together!) so I know the mountains are near and dear to her heart.

While most accounting and finance-related businesses use blue prominently because of its connotations with the feeling of trust in color psychology, we wanted to make this feel more warm and inviting. We still use blue tones, but they feature as an accent to the warmer primary colors in the brand.

The Logo

The previous logo felt very similar to competitors, and didn’t have a lot of personality. We wanted to steer away from something that felt too corporate. I intentionally selected serif fonts that felt a little chunky and had a tiny bit of vintage flavor to them, without feeling too unserious.

Once we have the primary logo sorted, adding a monogram and logo alternates was the next logical step. I like to give clients lots of alternate logo orientations so there’s always an option that works in whatever size or context is needed.

Logos with taglines are great for signage where you have the space to communicate what it is you do. Monograms are fantastic for contexts where you need something small, simple and easy to fit in your social media profile pic.

The Website

Andrea’s website wasn’t accurately reflecting her current service offerings, and looked similar to her competitors in the area. Another issue was SEO - search engines weren’t finding her at all, so googling anything but her exact business name yielded no results.

We brought our SEO goddess Hannah on board to get to work. Hannah created content that helps AI search engines find the website and recommend it to users who use AI to search for accounting related queries in the area.

A third issue was the platform. Andrea was using Wordpress as her website platform, which meant that she was heavily reliant on plugins, add-ons and running updates constantly to keep everything functioning smoothly. That left her feeling like she was getting nickel and dimed to death - something every accountant dreads! We opted to move her to Squarespace and rebuild the site using a platform that had everything she needed built in. She’ll no longer be paying a company to update her plugins for her every month, and she doesn’t need to pay a separate service to handle email marketing. We can build everything in one platform and streamline the entire experience, taking some of those subscriptions, as well as the mental load of managing it all, off of her plate.

Social Media

How do you build a social media following as an accounting business? That’s the big question. We had conversations with Andrea about how we would measure success. We decided on a “serve before you sell” approach. The idea is to deliver content that is helpful to the kind of clients Andrea would like to attract, in an effort to build trust and potentially gain their business by driving viewers to the site.

Hannah has been hard at work creating content that targets the pain points often experienced by the types of clients Andrea wants to serve, and then scheduling posts based on when most of Andrea’s followers are online. We created a mix of “the more you know” type posts targeted towards small business owners, links back to the blog (SEO!), and small business shoutouts to create community partnerships.

In 3 months, we’ve seen a 12.2% growth rate, but the true marker of progress is if those follows convert to clients. Ultimately, follows do not equal money, but real connections do. we’re excited to keep climbing with Summit Accounting!

Looking for a small business bookkeeping and payroll expert? Visit Summit’s site.