Opening Remarks: Daniel Hood, Editor in Chief, Accounting Today

Transcription:

Daniel Hood (00:09):

Welcome all. Thank you all for joining us for the Woo. All right, that's what I like to hear. All right, are none of these people are plants. That's all genuine enthusiasm. You'll get your envelopes later. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us for accounting today's second annual firm growth form. We're super excited about it. It's bigger, it's more exciting. It's got more people, it's got more sponsors. There's a lot of great tracks going on. There's a lot of great sessions. There's hopefully going to be a lot of great networking going on. So I want to thank you all for attending. I want to thank a bunch of different people to start. I want to thank our sponsors and we got a lot of sponsors this year, so I have to check my phone to make sure I've got everybody. Our platinum sponsors, miles Talent Hub, and Zoho.

(00:51):

Thanks to them. I want to thank our gold sponsors, Avalara, Safes send, B10 Capital, Truist. I want thank our silver sponsors, ADP, Corio, Sage, Mac Maker Hub, right Works and scrubbed. I want to thank our research sponsor, Intuit. And then somewhere there's a slide with all the other logos of all the different sponsors who are here. We want to thank them. They really make this possible. I'd encourage you as much as possible to go out and talk to them. They're all bringing useful solutions to help you fuel growth for your firms. Those of you here last year know the quality of the conversations to be had out and amongst all of our exhibitors and our vendors and our sponsors. So I definitely recommend you talk to them because brought solutions that really are practical for you to help you, free you up from all the constraints that limit you and achieve the kind of growth you're looking for.

(01:35):

Because that's really our goal here over the next two days is to give you a lot of very practical tips. We've spoken to all our speakers, we've asked them all to really focus on the practical, really focus on the things that will help you supercharge your growth and go forward. There will be a couple of sessions where we take a step back and give a little bit of a 10,000 foot view, but the point of those sessions will be, and we'll clearly let you know what they are, is to give you some context in which to set the practical growth that you're going to be doing. So that's our goal for the next couple of days is to really give you a million different ideas to go back and plague your staff with to help fuel the kind of growth you're looking for. And I want to take a second to talk about what that growth might look like.

(02:11):

Obviously for a lot of firms and for a lot of the profession, the kind of growth we're talking about is generally revenue. You want to grow your firm, you want to be bigger, you want to have more people to drive more revenue, to serve more clients. But there's other kinds of growth as well. We think a lot of the things we're going to be talking about today and tomorrow will apply to. There's different ways to grow your firm. You can grow the kind of firm that serves clients that you're really excited about working with or that gives you the lifestyle that you really like. So it's not always about revenue. Sometimes it's about building the kind of firm that's perfect for you. And I think you're going to find a lot of the stuff we're talking about over the next couple of days relates to that as well.

(02:44):

But obviously also there'll be a big focus on revenue. Great. Alright, so having that said that, I want to shout out a couple of other people. I want to shout out. Our advisory board, you're going to be seeing them on panels and in sessions presenting on their own over the next couple of days, but they've already had an enormous impact on the shape of this event by helping us fix things that were not as great as last year as they could have been. They've helped us think about a better ways to present to you, better topics for you, better things that will help you fuel growth. So I want to thank them in no particular order. This is definitely not alphabetical. It's more as they come to, to my mind and as I was typing them in my phone. But Seth Feinberg was a big part of that.

(03:24):

Randy Crabtree, Heather Satterley, if you're on the advisory board, please stand up as I call your name so people can recognize you're going to be seeing 'em all later. But Randy over there, Heather Satterley, Kristen Keats, Mike Max, Bob Lewis, and Doug Lewis. And I think, did I get everybody I want to make sure I did because they were, yes. That's how all them, they were a huge part of helping us shape this event. So we want to thank them and I encourage you to pay particular attention to everything they say. If you disagree with it, feel free to approach them in the halls or in their room or wherever you find them and give 'em a piece of your mind. No, as they always say, they gave us a tremendous amount of great advice. Any mistakes that happen are our fault, not theirs. But they were really influential in helping us set this up.

(04:07):

So I want to thank them. I also want to thank all of you, particularly those of you who are joining us for the second year. You as the attendees play an enormous part in this conference. I always say that there's no problem or issue or challenge in an account that one accounting firm is facing that some other firm hasn't already faced or dealt with or handled or at least is experiencing. So you can commiserate. Conversations among yourselves are hugely important. We try to build as much networking time in as we can. But I also encourage you just to talk at your tables, to talk at lunch, to talk amongst yourselves. One of the beautiful things about the accounting profession is the degree to which you all share with each other. Things that in other professions, they would hug close to themselves and treat as proprietary information.

(04:45):

So your willingness to build your profession up amongst yourselves is enormous. And I encourage you to talk amongst, amongst yourselves and grow that knowledge base. Again, it's all in the pursuit of growth. Alright, a little bit of housekeeping things. CPE. This is one of the things we improved from last year. We hope we've improved from last year. The way it's going to work this year is you scan into each session. That'll be people at the doors ready to scan you in. And there'll also, for the large group sessions like this, there'll be people moving around with scanners to make sure you get scanned in. You scan in once for each session, and then you only need to fill out the evaluation once. There's QR codes on all kinds of signage out in the hallway. It's also in the app that'll lead you to the single evaluation form that you fill in when you're done and send that in to get your CPE credit.

(05:31):

So scanning in for every session once at the beginning and then after the event's over following that QR code to the evaluation form to fill in to make sure we get it, to get you all registered for credit. That's going to need to be completed by the 23rd, so by Thursday. So hopefully that's easier than last year because we want to make sure everyone gets credit for everything they've learned. And I think that's everything I have in case we're going to jump from the opening remarks straight into our opening session. This is a little different from some of the keynotes you may see at other events because again, it's in the pursuit of growth and we think one of the great ways to pursue growth is to find people who've done it or are doing exciting things in the profession and get them out here to talk to you and share what they're doing.

(06:13):

And so our opening keynote today is not a single person, but we've got four leaders of firms that are super doing super exciting things in all kinds of different ways. They're approaching the pursuit of the kind of firms they want to build in unique and really, really interesting ways. I'm going to call them up just by name because I'm going to let them introduce themselves in their firms in a little bit more detail and then we're just going to throw questions at them and get them to tell us exactly how they did all the exciting things they've done. So with that, let me call up for.