Imagine creating a space that feels like an experience from the moment you open the door.

When Shandrica connected with me, she had the vision, the drive, and a gorgeous space, but she didn’t have the website or the infrastructure to support the experience she wanted to create for her clients.

The problems:

How can we make a website that feels like an extension of the luxury the client experiences when they’re in the chair?
How do we communicate the level of service that clients can expect by booking with Cultivate?
How do we extend that experience beyond a client’s time in the chair?
How do we attract more of our ideal clients?

When we started, we had just a generic booking page through Cultivate’s booking management platform, and it wasn’t giving any information on services, showing a portfolio of work, or feeling elevated.

How do we get there? We start with a website that exudes luxury.

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.