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If your firm looks and sounds like every other bookkeeping practice out there, you are not alone — and there is data to prove it. Mike Jones, CEO and managing partner of Resound, spent years watching accounting firms copy each other's brands before deciding to do something about it. He joins host Michael Palmer to share what he learned from the Remarkable Brand Index, a study of nearly 1,500 firms, and what bookkeepers can do right now to stand apart.
Mike and his team at Resound had a nagging suspicion: most accounting and bookkeeping firms look, sound, and position themselves the same way. The problem was convincing firm owners and partners without hard evidence. "We would look at brands, we would look at firms, look at what they're doing and go, wow, this just isn't different. This is very copycat." The Index was built to replace that anecdotal argument with real data — 40+ data points collected from nearly 1,500 firms across the US and Canada, scored against principles of brand differentiation.
The findings are striking, if not surprising. Blue is the dominant color by a wide margin. Over 95% of firms use founder-based names. The most common tagline words — "solutions," "trusted," "advisor," "partner" — appear so frequently that Mike built a slide showing a word cloud of the top 30 tagline terms. "I put that up, I give presentations, I show people that slide, and the whole audience every time is like, that's us." Free Google Fonts dominate websites, and social media presence is inconsistent. The firms in the top 20% of the Index are doing things measurably differently across all of these categories.
Mike is careful to point out that a full rebrand is not always the answer — or even the right starting point. Secondary colors, premium fonts through Adobe Creative Cloud, and more intentional tagline language are all low-cost moves that can improve differentiation. "It doesn't have to be an all-in-one kind of solution. There's a lot of things you can do incrementally on the edges to improve your brand." The Index exists specifically to show firms where those edges are.
Beyond tactics, Mike makes a deeper argument: a brand that genuinely reflects who you are will always outperform one built on borrowed best practices. He encourages firms to ask "why" repeatedly — about their values, their culture, their clients — until they hit something real. "I would rather have a client who is just authentic and true to themselves and doing the best they can to communicate that than one who is just going to use all these best practices but it's not really them." For bookkeepers who wear every hat, that kind of clarity is both a practical asset and a competitive one.
The annual report is free to download at rsnd.co/index. From there, firms can request their individual score and ranking, join a monthly 30-minute open Q&A session, and explore deeper workshop options with the Resound team. If your firm is not yet in the Index, Mike will add it for the next edition. The third edition is planned for release in 2025 and will include YouTube and video usage data.
Mike Jones is the CEO and managing partner of Resound, a strategic brand firm focused on professional and financial services. A graphic designer by training, Mike has spent over two decades helping B2B firms find and communicate their unique identity. He is the author of a book on brand strategy and the creator of the Remarkable Brand Index, now in its third year of publication. He is based in the US and, when not studying brand data, is most likely sword-fighting his three kids with foam lightsabers.