Opening Keynote: Growth Catalysts

Transcription:

Daniel Hood (00:09):

Liz and then Al-Nesha Jones, and then Aaron Dawson and Terrell Turner.

(00:28):

Alright, so for the next 15 minutes I'm going to pepper these folks with some questions about their practices and their firms and how they, like I said, built the kind of practices that we think are doing really exciting things and we want you to know more about what they're doing and how they're doing it. You can give questions that there should be people in the audience with mic, so you can ask questions to them. I've got a bunch of questions. You guys are going to feel exhausted by the end of this. Got you. Got a lot to tell us. But first, to sort of level set, I want each of you, if you would, to describe your firms in a little detail so people get a sense of the size and who you're serving, and virtual, non-virtual, all those sorts of details, just to give them a sense of where you're coming from so they can see how they relate to you. Liz, if you want to kick us off.

Liz Mason (01:06):

Absolutely. So, hi everyone. I'm Liz Mason. I'm the CEO and Founder of High Rock Accounting. I started at about 10 years ago a little more with the idea that we could utilize cloud technology. Crazy, right? We started with an innovative mindset and we've kept that mindset the entire time. Our firm has varied in size from me to start up to 50 people and back down to 15 advisors with an outsource team behind us. We do all remote accounting, we focus on controller and CFO services, special projects, and some really cool technology stuff.

Daniel Hood (01:39):

Awesome. Al-Nesha.

Al-Nesha Jones (01:41):

Good morning. I'm Al-Nesha. I'm the Founder of ASE Group. ASE stands for the first initial of my three children, Ava, Savannah, and Elisha. I started the business in 2016 when my youngest was one month old and the purpose was just to create a flexible opportunity for myself. I didn't think I was really starting a business. Today we lead a full service accounting, tax and advisory firm where we help clients in the New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania area. I'm based in northern New Jersey. We do taxes. I thought I hated taxes, but it turns out I just hate unorganized dysfunctional tax prep. So now we only do tax returns for clients that we work with year rounds, and my team is actually all women. That was not by any form of reverse discrimination, but we have an all be women and all be moms and they all work remote and we work a four day work week.

Daniel Hood (02:31):

Nice. Thank you. We're just going to stop and spend the rest of the day talking about that. How do we get that, Aaron?

Aaron Dawson (02:40):

I was just going to say, are you hiring?

Al-Nesha Jones (02:43):

I don't know. If we hire men.

Aaron Dawson (02:45):

I Can dress up real nice. Promise you high heels though. I don't know. So anyways, it's nice to see everybody. I'm Aaron Dawson, I'm the Founder and CEO of Opsahl Dawson. We're a 130 person CPA firm now based out of Vancouver, Washington, not Vancouver, Canada. So I got to make that real clear. They're just too close to each other. We specialize in small business USA, so we're doing small business taxes. We are serving our local communities. We do have a pretty strong a department, almost kind of out of necessity when we get those larger clients that need to be served. We're very interested in learning what CAS might look like and I think some of these ladies have perfected that, but I think we're all kind of searching for that extra source of revenue. Something kind of fun about me, there's nine CPAs and my family. So my dad was the first CPA, then his brother, my uncle Rick's in North Carolina. Then it's myself, my wife Jen is a CPA as well. My younger brother followed my footsteps and he married a woman that was a CPA and then my uncle's two kids and now my younger sister's at Gonzaga studying to be a CPA. So good luck trying to run from us. So we've solved the staffing problem. It's so big deal.

Daniel Hood (03:57):

But you all also need to get out more I think.

Aaron Dawson (03:59):

Yeah, we do. And it's kind of fun. You look out at this crowd and I don't know about you guys, but I noticed something big. I can tell who's a CPA and who's a vendor or a consultant. The vendors and consultants are very subdued to kind of relax the rest of us. CPAs got a little bit of Twitch to us getting over Covid or the last couple of years anyway, so it's good to see all you guys.

Daniel Hood (04:18):

Excellent. Alright, Terrell.

Terrell Turner (04:19):

Hi, I'm Terrell Turner, the Founder of the TL Turner Group. We're a firm that does bookkeeping and CFO services specifically for law firms. Now, although I tell everyone we serve law firms, we get a ton of people who reach out and say, Hey, I know you support law firms, but can you take us on? Yes. At a premium. And so we do work with a lot of different businesses, but mainly law firms are our target audience. And we have a fully remote team. We're about, as of I guess Monday it will be a 12 person team and we're operating out of four different countries. So the Philippines, Mexico, Kenya, and the US.

Daniel Hood (05:02):

Awesome. One of the things that, just listening to describe their firms, we've already touched on half of the dozen of the major issues that we're going to be talking about throughout the rest of the conference, between staffing and remote work and virtual work and CAS and all that sort of stuff. So it's already giving you a sense of the major issues I want to talk about. My next question, I'm going to start with you on this one. LL is about change in the plans you make for your firm and how they change. And the reason why I want to do that is because we routinely do an annual survey of what are you doing next year, what's your firm look like and all sort of things. And we ask them about their plans, what kind of plans do you have? Do you have a strategic plan, do you have a growth plan, do you have staffing plans, all sorts of things like that.

(05:39):

And routinely, most firms don't, particularly smaller firms don't have any kind of plans that don't have technology plan. They don't. They're just moving ahead with no sense of what it's chaotic, it's restless, they don't know what's going on. So I'm always curious about what firms are doing in terms of planning and thinking ahead and shaping their firms to be what they want them to be. So I want to start Terrell with you. How is the firm you have now? How does it match up with the plans you had when you started it? Or did you have plans when you started it and how, if you did, how did those plans change?

Terrell Turner (06:10):

Yeah, surprisingly it is very different. We're only what four firm? That's four years old. So I mean not a lot of time, but when we originally started the firm, we really just didn't have a real goal, a real picture of what we were aiming for. And I think probably about year or two, we were kind of stuck and just weren't growing. And then I had to take a step back and look at it and said, okay, all right, why aren't we growing? And when I realized I was like, because we don't have a picture of what we're trying to do. So the big change for us was creating what does that picture look like? And it really caused me to have to change as a leader. And we really started focusing on, okay, all right, who do we want to serve? Because early on, I mean I started the firm in 2020, so we would serve, anyone who would pay us would be a client. And then I realized that's not a good strategy at all. So that's where we really started being a lot more specific. And in that I realized, hey, we need to change our training process for the new staff members because not a lot of accountants know accounting for law firms. So we had to change how we train staff, we had to change how we recruit and we also had to change how we operate between multiple time zones. So I would say we look very different from what we started from.

Daniel Hood (07:27):

Awesome. Alright. Aaron, how about you? Is this a similar story or did you have a plan when you started?

Aaron Dawson (07:32):

Well, I had a plan, but yeah, it always keeps getting better and better and I like your idea of working for just lawyers all of a sudden I'm like, how did you get stuck doing that? There's no lawyers in here, I hope. I think maybe if I started at a firm working for just engineers, everybody just passed them all to me. My wife and I both worked for large Seattle firms and we had an opportunity in 2009 to move back home and take over one of my best dad's firms. The first year and a half was just getting a handle of taking a firm paperless. When we'd come from a big firm, I worked at Clark Newburg in Bellevue. So once we got a handle on it, I met my business partner, Matt Lee, he's back there in the back. I said to him, I said, Matt, I'm going to do all the work for you and I need you to go do one thing.

(08:16):

He said, what's that? I said, go be Mr. Vancouver. So get out of the office. We're so busy with the compliance work and some of the work we shouldn't be doing, but we do it anyways. When we finally made the intentional choice to grow and do the work that we wanted to do and the higher quality work, we started saying no to other work. We started looking at our clients and feeling comfortable saying, this is not what we should be doing. And respectfully we want to go a different direction. When we created capacity in our firm, that's when we really started to grow and that's what we've been doing ever since. So I think that's kind of my answer there.

Daniel Hood (08:50):

Awesome. I love that. That's huge. The ability to say no is a huge problem for a lot of accountants, but also knowing what to say yes to I think is another thing that a lot of accountants haven't really thought through to the degree you have Darrell in the sense of saying lawyers, that's it. I dunno why anyone would pick lawyers, but we'll talk about that of all of them. You could have picked the whole world. But Alicia, how about you? How's reality matchup with your plans?

Al-Nesha Jones (09:13):

It's totally different. I was coming out of a big four accounting firm and then I switched over to a Fortune 100 company. So I went from auditing financial statements to writing financial statements. So when I started this business and I was on maternity leave from that Fortune 100 company, I was like, I'll do anything except accounting to make money. So I actually started this business to be an administrative services sort of virtual assistant business because I thought I was going to just hire people to be part-time assistants to entrepreneurs. And as I met people, it would come up in conversation that I was a CPA and that I had this auditing experience and accounting experience and then nobody needed help with their virtual assistance anymore. And then I'd like, I really need help with my accounting. And in less than a year I found myself right back into accounting.

(10:01):

So I said, if I have to do this, at the very least I'm going to do it my way. But similar to Terrell, at first it was just take on anybody. And then I realized that probably works for them, but it doesn't work for me. Sorry about that. And then it slowly became the kind of business that thought about what the client needs. I've pretty much built an entire business around what my clients have complained about other accountants, but it's also been something that I needed because at the end of the day, the business doesn't exist without me. I still run a fairly small team, which means that it has to work for me as well, which is where all of those flexibility and planning and proactive strategies, that's all where that comes from because I'm building the type of place where I would want to work and the type of place where other people would be proud to say they work to.

Daniel Hood (10:45):

Awesome. And that's interest said, that's one of the big things about growth is that revenue growth is obviously for account, people are always going to be thinking about that, but the growing the firm that you like that you want to be at, and then if the money comes, that's great, but it's more about the life you want. Liz, how about you?

Liz Mason (10:59):

Yeah, so I thought by now we would have AI doing our jobs. So the firm I set out to build was not possible in the 10 years that I've been building it. But I do think we're getting close on that front and I'm hoping sooner rather than later, we have the technology and the automation that's going to do the back office for us so that we can focus on the mind work. And so when I set out, I set out for world domination, we did a bunch of acquisitions, we did a bunch of crazy marketing stuff, we did a lot of really interesting automation projects. We built API connectors for our clients, we automated ourselves out of multiple jobs and got fired by those clients because we were like, look at the cool thing we built that does all your accounting for you. And they were like, great, now we own this.

(11:47):

Bye. We were like, oh, okay. That's not the best business model is it? So we've made lots of mistakes over the years and I think one of the things that is not a mistake is investing in our team and building them up to be really good controllers and CFOs and giving them the insight and the ability to advise our clients and make a generally larger impact on our economy because they're able to sit down and really help make good business decisions. And that's where we've put our effort into and our focus. And not only has that worked out better from a staffing perspective, it's worked out better from a bringing value to our client's perspective and from a client relationship perspective and from a workload perspective and truly from a financial model perspective as well, because getting paid monthly to do a fixed amount of work and help our clients grow and achieve their goals, and that's actually quite motivating for people.

(12:41):

So I think similar to Alicia here, because she is built this firm to be what she would've wanted, and we had a wonderful sideline conversation about how if we could have gone back to the day we founded our firms and said, Hey, here's all the stuff you need to know. Don't make this mistake, don't do that. That's a terrible idea. Get it out of your head right now. Just focus on this. It would've made a world of difference. But both of us have made the decision that we're going to build the firm that we would've built from day one by innovating and changing and giving our people and our teams the encouragement and the support to get to where they should be today.

Daniel Hood (13:21):

Awesome. I like mind work. I haven't heard that described that way. I like that. Thanks. I like that phrase. I'm going to use that. Ali, I want to bring you in to talk about the challenges you faced as you grew. I mean there's all kinds of, we all know the staffing problems and the lack of capacity and the huge amount of work that's coming at firms. What specific challenges were loomed large for you?

Al-Nesha Jones (13:42):

How much time you got?

Daniel Hood (13:44):

We're all here for 2 days.

Aaron Dawson (13:45):

37 minutes and night.

Daniel Hood (13:46):

Grab a bottle of water, sit back.

Al-Nesha Jones (13:50):

Some of the bigger challenges and challenges I didn't exactly plan for, I didn't realize that as we grew we'd have to lose clients. Inevitably, people that we liked, we generally liked wouldn't be able to come on the journey with us. And I think I realized that when we switched to a subscription based model and we did a three year plan, I just couldn't imagine letting go of everybody with two mortgages, three kids and a blind diabetic dog and all of that's true. So we spaced it out over three years and we rolled it out slowly to clients to gauge their interest in it. But there were just some people who were not going to want that model. And these are people I like, right? I love that I get to pick clients, I speak to every single one. And if they're just not great either the team doesn't vibe with them or I don't, I love that I could say, you know what?

(14:35):

I don't think we're ideal for you. And one of my great friends taught me that you don't send them away, you invite them to be successful somewhere else. So I love that I have that ability. But yeah, there were just people that weren't going to go with us and I didn't realize that I'd have to sort of start over. So many times that growing sometimes requires you to scrap some things to get some things right. So it's like you grow and then you're like, I have to take some steps back to get to where I really want to be. I just didn't think that's how growth worked. I also did not realize that growth is pretty much impossible without putting processes in place. I just figured we would just keep going. People would just keep coming in, but you get to a place where you cannot grow any further without having some sustainable practices in place and to have some processes in place. So that was also something that was like, all right, let's slow things down and let's get some order in so that we're not creating this place that we don't want to be. Because that's the weird thing about growth. I didn't realize it was always happening until I would look back and say, oh wow, that's what was going on there. Because you can get so wrapped up in it. So just having to intentionally slow down and say, Nope, nope, this is not going to work like that. And sometimes that means slowing down to grow faster.

Daniel Hood (15:51):

I love that because one of the things is there's so much work to be done, even if you're only focusing on the work you love and you really want to do, there's so much of it, so many people need it. And even if you restrict it to a specific group of people, you're still going to be more than anybody can ever do. And it makes it very difficult to lift your head up and say, wait, is this working? We're going really fast down a blind alley or one way street.

Al-Nesha Jones (16:11):

Like my dog.

Daniel Hood (16:13):

I will. We're going to have a session about your dog later. I need to know more. Aaron, how about you? Were there specific hurdles you found? Specific challenges.

Aaron Dawson (16:24):

Yeah, some of the things with growth, I mean certainly the biggest challenge that we're all facing is the staffing side of things. That's been a big deal. I mean, thank goodness that when I was younger, somebody told me to be part of the AICPA map group. I've always surrounded myself with other managing partners. So I've always kind of been seeing in the know of what kind of the current challenges are. So our firm has grown up through the small firms group, through the PCPS practice there, and then we're growing our way up through the medium-sized firm group. And one of the things our firm was growing so fast that we just didn't have any more CPA candidates in our town and we're going to be good actors.

Al-Nesha Jones (17:06):

And is that why you procreated?

Aaron Dawson (17:08):

Exactly. Yeah. So we built our own, we grew our own, right? It's funny, but we started hiring remote even before Covid. So when Covid hit, it was easy for us. It was just like, oh, we're already ready for this. So we started hiring remote and I meet a lot of firms that think that that's going to be tough to keep that culture. And I kind of related to when I worked up in Seattle with the big firm, we were spread across three different floors. Clark new was on 16, 17, and 19. I mean, you might as well have been in a different state.

(17:41):

If you're 16, you went up to the 18th floor. They're like, what are you doing up here? I'm not doing anything. I'm just walking around checking out your guys' snack shack. But to get the idea that just because you're in a different state with telephone, and this was before video conferencing, so now you've got all kinds of reasons to get to know each other. The staffing remote staffing's been a big deal for us, so we mastered that.

Daniel Hood (18:07):

Awesome. Excellent. Terrell, how about you? Challenges?

Terrell Turner (18:10):

Yeah, I would say the big challenge for us, I think when it came down to growth was figuring out marketing. Because when I started the firm, I was like, okay, all right, we're doing bookkeeping, CFO work, everybody needs that. They're just going to come to us. And I had no idea that I was going to have to become deeply entrenched into understanding marketing, the psychology of it and all of that stuff. And when we just hit this plateau, one of the reasons was is we just didn't have a strategic marketing approach. And so I had to sit down and say, okay, all right, I'm an accountant, but I got to go learn and understand how marketing works and how to do it. And so I got really deep into it and I realized this is why we weren't growing is because no one in the organization understood marketing.

(18:59):

And so I had to step up and lean into it pretty heavily. And once I started getting into it, I realized like, oh, it's not as scary as I thought it was going to be. But I think once we kind of figured out how to create a true marketing strategy instead of just waiting for the phone to ring, because for us, we don't do tax work. So it wasn't like the April 15th deadline is pushing clients to us. So we had to get really innovative and figure out we have to actually have a plan. And I mean it was something that we realized back when we started the firm, we didn't have a plan. Alright, let's get a plan for the firm. Now we got to plan for the growth, now let's get a plan for rk. How are we going to actually make that growth a reality?

Daniel Hood (19:44):

That's awesome because one of the things, there's all kinds of plans that firms need to have and they all interrelate. But that's the thing, it's a famous story. I remember hearing a consultant for growth talk to a firm and they said, well, we want to grow 10% next year. And they said, okay, well what do you have in your pipeline? And they were like, pipeline said, how much new business do you have? Because you're going to have a certain amount of attrition. They're like attrition, you're going to lose 5% of your clients if you want 10% growth, you've got to have 15% in your pipeline. Do you have that much? And they were like, lemme get back to you just because as you say, a lot of it's just the phone rings and it comes to you. I also bring up something I wanted, you had touched on this in terms of all the things, as you start to do all the different changes that you have to do to make your firm grow, they tend to reinforce one another.

(20:26):

Your decision to focus on lawyers will in the end make your marketing easier because you're like, okay, this is a clearly defined set of people I want to approach. So having made that decision at one point helps you later on when you start looking at, or I'm assuming it's helping you, when you start looking at the marketing aspect of things, it's simpler to market to a single identifiable group of people than it is to all the clients who could sign a check. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's that absolute virtual virtuous circle of all the things we're going to be talking about today. As you start to do them, they all start to build on each other. I want to talk about things that surprised you. I think some of the things that have surprised you as you want to know, some things we've discussed already have been surprises, but things that were less like, oh, what a horrible surprise. And more just like, huh, I just didn't know that. Aaron, if you don't mind, I'm going to start with you on that one.

Aaron Dawson (21:11):

Surprises. Well, I'm sitting here thinking about you with your marketing and attorneys only. That's kind of cheating. That sounds easy. The rest of us are out doing every single business under the sun. How'd you figure that out? That's kind of genius. I like that. Surprises. I think when I think about growth, one of the things that surprises people, they're going out and getting more clients and more clients, more clients, more clients, more clients, and they got to sell, sell, sell. Matt and I have always talked about why don't we try serving versus selling? So when we started serving, we were just, instead of getting that nervous phone call to a client trying to sell your service, I was just offering our service. We were just going to serve them. The sales cycle became a lot easier. So we're spending more time and kind of preaching to our junior staff.

(22:01):

Don't just finish the tax return, call your client and talk to them. Just a simple question, how's your year going? What's next year look like? Just those super simple questions will drum up so much work. So I think it's just retraining ourselves and retraining our staff that we can do more than just tax returns. People ask, well, we got to get into advisory. Well, what's advisory? Advisory? Gosh, how do we do that? And how do I leverage advisory? I can't have junior staff do an advisory all over town. They don't know what they're going to talk about. And I was like, well, before we go and jump off the bridge into this advisory that maybe we don't even know what it means, why don't we just start small? Not as scary. So maybe advisory is just talking to your tax client, just asking them a question, how's next year going? What's happening new? So when we kind of started just honing in, not letting our minds wander too far about what advisory was, it started to kind of simplify our sales cycle. And I think that you asked me what surprised me. I think it was just surprising that sales isn't really that hard. As long as you kind of focus in a little bit,

Daniel Hood (23:01):

That makes a lot of sense. It gives you an easier story to tell, and I know you're purging it more from, Hey, how can we serve you? It's more of a question, but if you're asking the right question based on that goal, it makes a lot of sense. Joel, how about you? Anything surprised? Obviously the need for marketing, but anything else that's a big surprise and it can be on the upside if it was a pleasant surprise.

Terrell Turner (23:21):

So a pleasant surprise was how easy it was to impress clients because I came from a big four accounting background and use it in a big four accounting background. You're talking to other accountants, controllers, CFOs of businesses. They know a lot of the technical accounting terminology. And so you get a little bit more deeper into it. I'm like, I'm a CPA, I have a master's degree, so we need to talk at this level. And then I had a meeting with a client and they asked me a question, and during the meeting, within 15 minutes, I share my screen, I pull up a spreadsheet and I put five numbers on the page and they were like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. This is worth every dollar I pay you. And I'm like, really? This 15 minute conversation, they need to charge you more. And then also doing the marketing.

(24:11):

I started listening to the types of problems that people were having, and I'm like, I don't need any of the technical stuff to solve that. And so we really started shifting things, and I'll say it helped us when it came down to hiring because now a lot of people would say, okay, yeah, I have a degree in this. I'm like, I really don't need that. Your degree isn't the most central thing. Can you simplify things? Because the audience we're working with, the clientele we're working with, they don't need your technical skill. We don't need to talk about lease accounting. Lawyers don't care about that. They need the very basics. And I think as we started doing that, it helped us even create new service offerings to where we started creating more product offerings to where I'm like, if I can get the data in a spreadsheet, I can just create a simple kind of dashboard. We started offering things and we started growing that way because we started building our services from the problems that we were hearing in the marketing work we were doing. And when I realized how simple it was, I was like, this is a pleasant surprise.

Daniel Hood (25:18):

It is amazing. The degree to which, and a couple of people were talking about the need to listen to the clients and meet them where they are with the services they need as opposed to, here's what I do and it's good for you. Liz, how about you? Surprises along the way? I mean, obviously there's been a lot, but yeah.

Liz Mason (25:33):

I get surprised every day, to be honest. I think the biggest surprise that I've dealt with is actually how much corporate trauma humans in this country have and how much undoing you have to do to get them to trust and give generous assumptions. I think we unfortunately have a really horrible overarching culture in our profession, and I know that there are people working every single day and many people in this room to break that and to fix it and to create what we all dream about working in and change what that looks like. But there's still a lot of people coming out of large firms, large corporate environments that have a lot of trauma to deal with. I did not expect my role as CEO to be counselor.

Daniel Hood (26:19):

Well, I want to dive a little bit more into roles you didn't expect to have in a second, but I wanted to get any surprises for you as you well.

Al-Nesha Jones (26:28):

A lot. But similar to Liz, probably the biggest surprise, especially because I came into this saying just keep me away from the crazy deadlines, was that we actually know all the deadlines. There's literally not one surprise deadline. We know them all.

Daniel Hood (26:46):

And yet people were really surprised.

Al-Nesha Jones (26:48):

And could rattle them off like a song. So it was like, wait a minute. It doesn't have to be this crazy. It's my choice. I spent the first couple of years letting people show up on April 9th and say, oh yeah, I'm really hoping to meet the deadline. And I'm like, oh yeah, we'll totally meet the deadline. I knew it was April 15th. They knew it was April 15th. So it doesn't have to be this constant race to a deadline. We know the deadline is the same every year or practically the same. We don't even believe in changing the April 15th deadline. I don't care if it falls on a Sunday or alien day. April 15th is the due date and in our firm, you need it to be filed seven days before my kids go on spring break around the same time as the tax deadline. So it was just kind of this surprise that we don't have to constantly operate in this place of panic that the IRS's deadlines do not have to be our deadlines. We're allowed to set our own internal deadlines and working backward from those deadlines. And the power of reverse engineering does have the ability to create a space that's not constantly crazy. It doesn't have to be that way.

Daniel Hood (27:52):

It's not as dramatic.

Al-Nesha Jones (27:54):

It just doesn't have to be that way. And I don't know why it was like that, but yeah, that was probably one of the biggest surprises that I don't have to work off of the governmental set deadlines. I could totally work off of my own.

Daniel Hood (28:05):

Well, this is a big part of a story we hear from firms like yours and from other firms that are doing interesting things, is the ability to say, no, I'm just going to do it the way I want to do it. And to make your clients come along with you and to make your staff come along with you and to say, listen, this is how we're going to do it. It makes sense for us. It's not just this is how it's been done or how clients are used to it or all that sort of stuff. Taking charge and making your own. But part of the problem there is to do that, you have to be thinking about that as opposed to thinking about the work you've been doing. You're like, I can get you to the deadline so I don't have time to think about, well, what would it look like if I made you, give me me this two weeks ago?

(28:42):

And I want to dive a little bit more into that. You had mentioned not being prepared to be a counselor or not having a, and you talked about marketing, you've all talked about your background. Y'all obviously super technically expertise. That's not a word. You have great technical expertise. I like that word. Those are English, that's the English language that I know. But from your backgrounds, from big four firms and from large firms and all that stuff, you obviously, you know how to be accountants, you know how to do the basic technical work and not even just the basic technical work, but I want to talk about the things you discovered as you went along. You're like, I didn't know I'd have to do this. I'd have to know this marketing, being a counselor. I think about those sort of things, those extra skills that you as a firm leader, growing a firm or building the firm that you want to be in, that you're suddenly like, wow, I have to do this too. I have to learn how to be a first aid provider, or what other kinds of things as you went along, Charlie, I dunno if you have, marketing was obviously a big one that a lot of people suddenly discovered that they've got to learn. I dunno that they dive into it quite as much as you have. But are there other skills that you had to pick up as you were growing your firm that you're like, I never thought I would be doing this?

Terrell Turner (29:45):

Yeah, I mean, I think to what Liz was saying is being kind of that counselor and at times I feel like I'm the dad of the business because there's different things that I see that I'm just like, all right, I got to step in on this. One of my staff members, and it happened two weeks ago where she was sending an update on, there was a client she was working on and she was meeting a deadline. She was like, Hey, I got this done. I'm like 80% done. I'll get all the rest of this done tomorrow. She was like, but I have to go to a doctor's appointment. I was like, oh, what's the doctor's appointment? She was like, oh, I have to go in for surgery. It's not a big thing, but I'll be back tomorrow. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

(30:25):

And so I call her immediately. I'm just like, why are you coming in tomorrow? You're going in for surgery. It is not that type of environment. I don't need you back to work tomorrow. Somebody else on the team can pick this up. And then after I had that conversation with her, I talked to the rest of the team like, Hey, this person's going to be out. They need to get surgery. And I was like, now, if I need to call your mom in the Philippines and tell her to keep you at home, that's what we're going to do because we don't need you pushing your body to show up. And just being able to step in, I think to tell people, Hey, that's not how we work here. It's okay for you to take care of yourself because hey, the processes are what run our business.

(31:10):

We don't heavily rely on the people to be cogs in the wheel. We have processes for a reason. You can step out and take care of yourself. Or there's something that was going on. Another team member, her children had a fever for two weeks in a row. I'm like, okay, you don't need to be here. Someone else on the team will pick this up. I can tell you are not focused. I wouldn't be focused either if I had kids who had a fever for two weeks. And so I think having to step in and do that was something that was a surprise to me. It's like having to reengage that skill of compassion, which I've learned that accountants are not really known for their level of compassion. And so it's just really having to develop that. And I grew, I'm the youngest of four boys, so I definitely didn't have that skill of compassion. So that is a skill that I really had to develop. And for me, it's spending a little bit more time with my mom of just like, alright, how did you deal with all of us? And just learning that because I mean also my father and my godfather were in the military. One was a drill sergeant and my father spent 26 years in the military. So it's like, alright, this is totally not my skillset, but having to learn that compassion, paying attention to those details and also giving the team a little bit more comfort and support that, hey, I don't need you to push yourself to exhaustion or I don't need you to push the limits. It's okay for you to take care of yourself. We have processes to take care of the business.

Daniel Hood (32:45):

Excellent. Well, as you say, it's the trauma. People are traumatized that this is how we're supposed to do it. I'm supposed to come in the day after my surgery because this stuff's got to get out and the client's got to get served and so on. And it all comes from, comes a good mindset. It's just not the best mindset. We want to make sure we serve our clients. We live 110%. We'll go above and beyond. Don't sound like we're slamming all these other firms, but there's a better way to do it. And as you say that, it's not that skill of basically what you're doing is reinforcing your culture and that's a difficult thing. You want to jump in.

Liz Mason (33:14):

Just to note, I don't know that there's better or worse, but there's a more human way to do it.

Daniel Hood (33:20):

I generally think that things are more human or better, but I hear what you're saying. It's not a place of judgment.

Liz Mason (33:24):

Is a judgment just that.

Daniel Hood (33:25):

That I'm totally judging.

Liz Mason (33:27):

But there are people that don't believe that. And so prefacing it and understanding that there's a more human way to do it is an easier way for people to understand what that is without feeling judged. Right.

Daniel Hood (33:39):

Well, exactly. And maybe a way to reinforce that, right, is that at a time when there aren't enough accountants and we could barely get their work done, we need all these people in.

Liz Mason (33:46):

Well, that's why we need the robots. So for the sponsors listening.

Daniel Hood (33:49):

Treat robots and that's a whole thing.

Liz Mason (33:51):

We're going treat them very nicely. We're going to say please and thank you.

Daniel Hood (33:54):

We don't treat ourselves nicely. I'm pretty sure we're not going to treat the robots nicely.

Liz Mason (34:00):

They don't even know what they have coming.

Daniel Hood (34:01):

No. The robots are in trouble, at least for the first 10 years or so until they unionize and then.

Liz Mason (34:06):

Well, they'll remember that I said, please and thank you.

Daniel Hood (34:09):

Exactly. In the end they'll be like, don't destroy her him though.

Liz Mason (34:13):

Exactly.

Daniel Hood (34:14):

Sorry, we got a little sidetracked. We'll talk about the robots in greater detail at some point, but Al-Nesha, how about you? Are there aspects of running a firm that you suddenly discovered, well, I have to do this too.

Al-Nesha Jones (34:24):

Yeah, similar to what everyone else has said, those all apply, but I also realized, and I come from big four, so I know we talk a lot about tone at the top and tone at the top. And to me tone at the top was just be nicer, understand where people are coming from. But tone at the top has also meant for me, I have to change the way I move. I'm a very early person. It's not uncommon for me to work at 5:00 AM, right? Because that's what works for me. I've been juggling this with parenthood and marriage and all those sort of things for a long time. But me sending emails at 5:00 AM to a team of women who have also come from Fortune 100 companies, sparks in their mind, oh shoot, she's working. I better get up and work. And when we implemented four day work weeks, we all agreed that Friday would be the day off.

(35:12):

That doesn't mean that I don't work any Friday. I still work some Fridays. That does mean that I had to schedule the email to go out Monday morning because I can't put that sort of undue pressure on my team that I know she said we're off on Fridays, but she's working really hard on Fridays. So I just had to realize tone at the top is just not me taking care of my team and saying, it's okay to do this. It's okay to do that. The same things I'm doing for them I have to do for myself because I have to be the role model for the firm. It can't be like I work very hard the owner, which I do, but it does have to be, I want you to see that I do the same things that I'm telling you to do so that you feel like it's okay.

(35:50):

It's weird to say you can leave at three and then every day you walk past my office, which doesn't happen. They don't work from the office, but I'm like feverishly typing, you can leave at three. It's okay. You don't get the sense that you could actually leave at three. So I just am constantly being very intentional about if it is that I'm working outside of normal hours, I never send an email to them during those hours so that I'm constantly being clear about what the expectations are. And I find that that works well with clients as well. I don't want to email them on Sunday and then they email me back on Sunday. I'm like, I don't know why you expected a response. We don't work on Sundays. I can't do that. That's a mixed message. So that tone at the top just goes a lot further. And I didn't exactly think I'd have to change the way I work to communicate that, but I have, and that's perfectly fine.

Daniel Hood (36:39):

The whole communicating things in ways you don't even think you're communicating is huge. The scheduling of emails, one of the beauties of it, in addition to making it clear, yes, I'm scheduling this for Monday morning at eight, so we're not working on Saturday afternoon, but it also means that you can send it to them, like you said with the client, and then you don't have to worry about it for a day and a half. It's scheduled. No one can act on it until eight o'clock in the morning. Also, this is when we hear a lot about, people talk about we're giving Saturday afternoon or Friday afternoons off in the summer, or we're taking the day, the day be a couple of days around Christmas or holidays off. And firms discovered that lots of people weren't doing that. They weren't actually taking the day off. Yeah, they'd said, we have the day off, but I know my boss is going to be in. So you see firms that are sort of progressive on that will close the office. So just say, our office is closed. Even if you wanted to come in, you, the doors are locked and you can't come in because that's how you have to send that message. And it's interesting, when you become that leader, you suddenly realize that people are looking at you in ways that you wouldn't necessarily expect, and it becomes, you have to think about it in a very different way. Aaron, how about you?

Aaron Dawson (37:41):

Oh, some of the things that we had to change, I mean, early on I found out that when I took over this firm, it was tough working with the clients were tough, the clients were working the way they wanted to. So one of the things we changed was I like to be a very intentional person. I only get one chance to live my life, so I want it to be the way that I like to live it. I'm kind of surprised that's not true with everybody. I think a lot of accountants are kind, can tend to be so serving that they're kind of getting whipped on the clients say, I need this done. You do it that way. I started thinking, I was like, if I need to borrow money from a bank, I can't just walk in there and say, give me your money. If I did, it's a whole different situation.

Daniel Hood (38:19):

Very different interaction.

Aaron Dawson (38:21):

But what I need to do is I need to follow their procedures. I got to fill out their loan application. I can't fill it out halfway. I filled out most of it. But that's so interesting, right? In our business, if they fill out half an organizer, we'll do their tax return, we'll fill the rest in. I mean, that's how it is. I think in our business there's a lot of room to train our clients. I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. I think, Dan, you want to know who our cheapest labor is? Everybody says, well, the interns or overseas, the cheapest labor is our clients. If we can get our clients to work the way we want them to, I mean, it doesn't mean that my service is any less valuable, so I don't need to adjust my bill down because it was easier this year.

(39:05):

So I've trained a lot of our staff to really focus on let's hold our ground a little bit here, especially these days. I think I'd encourage everybody to think that through. Let's start having our clients give us stuff the way we want it. So just throwing a bunch of rental stuff at us. Why don't we give them our spreadsheet that we're familiar with and clients will tell you, oh, I gave it all. It's all right there. How many times have you heard that? Well, okay, I got 8,000 clients. I got 8,000 different spreadsheets. It takes me a half hour just to figure out what you're trying to tell me, and then I got to figure out how to put it into my own format so my staff can understand it. So if we can try to cut that down, I think there's some room to improve. Training the clients has been a big deal for our firm.

Daniel Hood (39:42):

Awesome. Makes sense. Everyone agrees with that.

Aaron Dawson (39:47):

Everybody like that. All right, let's go get them.

Daniel Hood (39:48):

Exactly. Yeah, nicely. Aaron, I want to stick with you for a couple of seconds. Among other things your firm has interesting, has experienced the PE realm, so I want to ask you to talk about that a little bit after that. I'm going to go to questions. If you guys have any questions, start getting ready to share them. But let's talk a little bit about that. You have a really interesting experience. The group you work with, ascend is really interesting, but just I think a lot of people are curious about the whole private equity experience.

Aaron Dawson (40:17):

So you want to know about that day, huh? Yeah. Okay. That was a good day. We're really proud of Sal Dawson. What we built, everything that you guys are talking about, intentionally building your firm tone at the top, treating your people well, servant leadership, hiring, remote. We've done all that. We're really proud of our firm. We knew that we're enjoying growth. We've been growing. We've been training, we've been leveraging watching. I mean, I can't tell you how many interns we have that are now junior shareholders at our firm. So we've had a very low turnover at our firm. That culture is really high. So I think the story of private equity for us isn't that we are running away from anything because I think private equity solving some challenges for people, succession, staffing, what are we going to do when AI comes? So some people look at it as a solve For us, we looked at it as enthusiasm, so we weren't solving anything.

(41:12):

We had junior shareholders coming up. We had a great firm. We were hitting record profits. But when, I'm just a curious person, so when I got the call from David Waba saying that Alpine's looking to start a new fund and ascend and high level ascend is stay independent, ascend together. So each state region will have its own platform firm. So even though we're backed by Ascend, we're still Sal Dawson. So that's kind of confusing to people. They're like, how come you're not CLA or some other firm? Why didn't your name change? Well, the idea is that we built a good culture. We built a good platform. Our people like it. Our town, our city likes it. Our region likes it. So if it's working, let's let it keep working. When they came in and said, Hey, do you guys want to keep growing and you want to learn some new skills?

(42:01):

I was like, heck. I mean, being a tax intern was fun. Staff manager, senior manager, firm owner, growing a firm, appreciate you recognizing us as third fastest growing firm this last year. All that comes with just some more firepower, some more opportunities, and me an opportunity to operate at a different level. And my junior shareholders too, they've all elevated. They've all taken different roles. Sierra Eckman, one of the most powerful young women I've ever met was our intern turned shareholder. Now she's our chief operating officer. She's interacting with other firm owners now. So long ago she got rid of her client list Recently, she helped me oversee our remote workforce, and now she's helping oversee the other firms that we're bringing in The Ascend model, the People First back office. They've got 40 plus individuals that have taken over our bookkeeping, our payroll, HR benefits, recruiting, provided us with Brian Smith, our chief growth officer.

(43:01):

He's out here in the crowd somewhere. Having these resources provided to a CPA firm has added a lot of firepower to us, and that's making a lot of fun. There's a lot of pride within the firm that we're continuing to grow, and it's hard work if you grow. Last year we acquired two other firms. This year we're hoping to do the same thing. Growth is hard. Keeping the culture positive is hard, but where there's a will, there's a way, and if you've got the right team, the right firepower, we can handle it. So it's a new venture, but I'm really proud of what we are doing.

Daniel Hood (43:32):

Awesome. One of the cool things about that, ascend in general, but it's not just true of Ascend. There are other platform firms, platform PE firms that are doing a similar thing is that it's not just about a succession issue or , Hey, we want to go out and buy a bunch of firms. It's just about empowering whatever your growth is and sort of supporting it. And then also those back office resources for a lot of firms, the hiring technology, that sort of stuff is super, super useful. I want to open it up to questions from out there if anybody has any, but I've also got a ton of other questions and maybe one that we can talk about if there's any questions from while those come up. Oh, there you go. Yeah, if you would.

(44:13):

Actually, you know what? If you hang on, Heather's got a mic, she'll bring it over to you.

(44:21):

It's a much bigger room. This is great.

Audience Member 1 (44:24):

Yeah. I have a question for Terrell. He says he has people in the Philippines, Mexico, Kenya, and the us, and you're also Eastern time zone. I looked at your website, so I know that. So how do you operate in multiple time zones and especially the client facing, I'm assuming maybe your Kenya and US team members are doing that.

Terrell Turner (44:52):

Yeah, so he asked the question of how are we managing having teams in four different countries? How are we managing time zone and client facing? We designed it to where we would have a two hour overlap with our team. So not everyone works US hours. Part of that was from doing the marketing, one of the strategic moves that we made, and we realized if we could respond to clients faster, we could win more business. One of the things we were realizing was everybody was working us time. I'd meet with a client, let's say if I met with a client at 4:00 PM no one was there to do the work, but when the Philippine team started working in my nighttime, I would meet with a client that evening. I would send a video or email to my team, say, Hey, here, we need to get this, this, and this done.

(45:42):

So first thing in the morning, I can respond back to the client with the answer. And what we realized is that became a strategic way for us to win more business because again, it just impressed the client being able to respond faster. And so we decided to strategically kind of stagger the team to where the Philippines team works in the evening. And then our team in Mexico, we got someone who wasn't in the Eastern time zone, someone who could have a little bit more overlap with the team in the Philippines. And so she gets the directives and she's meeting with the team in the morning, kind of giving them their guidance on what they need to do. And then we started using our practice management software a lot more to where it really laid out, here's what I need from this person, this person. And we really had to improve our level of communication and collaboration is a really, really big thing for us. So we ended up leveraging videos. I would have a meeting with a client as soon as the meeting was over, I would create a two minute video. Here's what the client asked for, here's what we need to do, send it to the people who need to work on it so we could have a better turnaround time.

Daniel Hood (46:53):

Awesome.

Audience Member 2 (46:56):

As you've each grown and scaled your firms, how are you intentionally growing your leadership skills as well as the leadership skills of the directors, the junior shareholders, those below you who are going to continue growing everything you're building?

Daniel Hood (47:12):

Let's tackle that. But I mean, we talk about, one of the things you discover, and it was sort of touched on in a bunch of the different points that people made, is that leadership really is very different. Everyone gets promoted based on the technical skills, which have nothing to do with then turning around and leading people and knowing, understanding how they view you because viewed differently as a leader, that sort of thing. And those skills are, and they are skills. You can learn them. I think a lot of people think, oh, leaders are born and not made, and that sort of thing, but they're not. You can learn them, but you really have to think about them and rise above all the sort of day to day to apply them. Are there leadership skills? You've all been focusing on you.

Al-Nesha Jones (47:48):

Not one specific leadership skill, but two focus on growing my leadership skills. I've joined a number of, and really masterminds, but sort of growth groups and probably the most impactful one to date was the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program, which is a national program. But I entered that program thinking, oh, my business is newer than some of those businesses. I'm smaller than some of those businesses. And I think the biggest thing I discovered was, oh, everybody has problems. Okay, because I thought it was just me because I was running this newer business, but I met people in that business who were making 70 million a year. They're still in the program, which means you have to literally constantly be learning. And the issues that I had, perhaps they had them at a larger scale or they had moved on to another issue. I met people who were making 10 times as much as I may, and they're like, I still don't make enough money to take home pay.

(48:47):

And I'm like, I literally can't run a business as a hobby. I don't have that luxury. This business doesn't work if I can't take home more than I would've made in corporate, otherwise I'll go right back to corporate. I don't have any shame. So I'd like to find programs like that. I learned from my colleagues, I have the pleasure of being in groups. Some put together by people like groups like Intuit and some more personally put together. But I had the pleasure of being in groups of people who have businesses younger than mine and older than mine. And I learned from them. And I think by finding your people and being able to ask your people questions without judgment, you mentioned judgment and being able to get their advice. The easiest way to learn from me is to hear the mistakes of others. Like be brutally honest about how you messed up. I don't want to step in your mud, I want new mud to step in. So that's the way I've learned and I constantly find ways to be in those kind of spaces so that I can continue to learn and grow as a leader.

Daniel Hood (49:48):

This is that kind of space.

Al-Nesha Jones (49:50):

This is that kind of space. Exactly.

Daniel Hood (49:52):

One more question and then I want you all to think about this for after this question, but after this question, because we're late on time, one quick thing from each of you. The one takeaway you suggests for everyone to take away, but think about that while you ask this question.

Audience Member 3 (50:06):

So mine's not actually a question. Rachel and I are presenting this afternoon on the evolution of the profession, and I just wanted to say we've worked in the profession a very long time and this is by far the absolute most refreshing perspective I have ever heard on the future of accounting.

Daniel Hood (50:28):

Totally not a plant, not a plant in any way, but absolutely true. This is exactly what we wanted for from this panel. And I want to.

Aaron Dawson (50:35):

You know how to make a panel blush.

Daniel Hood (50:39):

But seriously, just because we've got 26 seconds real quick, one big takeaway that you think everyone should take from this. I'm going to put you on the spot and have you go first.

Liz Mason (50:46):

Absolutely. I'm going to steal errands. Be intentional.

Daniel Hood (50:49):

Alright, I love it. It's brief.

Al-Nesha Jones (50:51):

Do what works for you. It's your journey, not anybody else's. So figure out what works for you and find your success on your own terms.

Daniel Hood (50:58):

Excellent. Aaron.

Aaron Dawson (50:59):

You're going to hate growth. You're going to hate leadership if you have a lot of work to do. So my biggest thing I come back to is create capacity. If you're wondering about hiring that next person, if you find them, you better hire them, train them, pass your work down, and now you've got nothing to do. So naturally you kind of want to become a leader. You need something to do, and that leadership really gives you time to kind of expand your skills and to focus on the firm, work on the firm instead of in the firm. So I just really encourage you to hire, hire, hire, and get that extra person. I think Rob Wheeler, the old president of Clark Nber told me, Aaron, when I was talking to him about should I hire another guy? He says, a gal, another person. He says, great, CPA will always keep themselves busy. So go hire that next great person, leverage your work down, and that creates leadership opportunities for you. So that's been a big deal for us.

Daniel Hood (51:46):

Awesome. Terrell?

Terrell Turner (51:48):

Yeah, I would say getting very comfortable, giving honest feedback, but don't forget to combine it with compassion. One of the things that I realized in our organization was that we had people who were wanting to do great things, but because I wasn't giving them honest feedback fast enough, so we ended up coming up with a process to doing monthly performance reviews. Everybody gets a monthly performance review, including myself, and which it gave us a way to give people honest feedback and to help the business stay on track to continue growing.

Daniel Hood (52:22):

Awesome, awesome. And I would say just one thing that should be clear from all this we're talking about, we're giving you all kinds of tips and strategies and practical things to grow. Growth requires work, right? There's no easy growth and in the end, the worst place you can be is having all this growth happening, but it's not being managed and you don't know what you're doing and it's stressing for everybody. And it's terrible. You really need to do the work of thinking about it and shaping it and making it be what you want and taking control of it, being intentional about it and directing it in the right way. And I think we've got a lot of great ideas from it today. I want to thank all of you. This was awesome. Liz, Al-Nesha, Aaron, Terrell, thank you so much for sharing. Thank you all.