What you'll learn:
- The benefits of fostering a culture of innovation and experimentation in the accounting profession
- Techniques for incorporating time for experimentation with new technology into your organization's workflow
- Tips for creating a safe space for trying out new ideas and driving continuous improvement
Heather Satterly (00:11):
So I'm Heather Satterly. I know some of you, some of you I haven't met. I'm a CPA. I'm actually a fledgling CPA, although I do have my first renewal next month and I'm, yes, panicked about CPA, so I'm like, do I have all my credits teaching? Right, right. Double points for teaching. Yeah. So I got my accounting degree a long time ago and I took the CPA exam right away cause my professor said, take the CPA exam right away. And in Rhode Island, they changed the law my junior year from 120 hours to 150 hours. And by the time I graduated, I had two kids. I'm like, Nope, not doing that, I'm just going to go to work. So I went to work and in 2017 I signed up for a Master's in Innovation program at Northeastern University. And I graduated in 2019 with my master's degree in innovation.
(01:16)
Yay. And I was like, wait a minute. I have all the hours, I now have all the education. And about 20 years ago, I passed the CPA exam. And so I called up the Rhode Island, I called up Rhode Island and I said, Hey, so that exam thing does that last forever? Is that one of those things that you take it once and that's all you got to do? And they're like, yep. I'm like, oh. I'm like, so what do I owe you? So yes, so I became a CPA. It was really, my mom was super proud. She's a retired CPA. And so that was an exciting day. So it was a long time in the making. Finally got those three letters after my name and I was super excited. So, so I have been in practice for a really long time. I've always been very technology focused, very interested in learning about the different technology, where the industry is going.
(02:11)
And when the Masters in Innovation program came around, I was like, please sign me up. And one of the reasons I really wanted to take that program was because I worked a lot with software developers and they speak a different language than we do. And so I wanted to understand how do they come up with these ideas and how do they think, because I feel that the accounting industry needs to understand the same principles because we are in an incredible time. No news to any of you of disruption. And so I really wanted to understand how does this work? How do we think we get that innovation mindset so that we can actually go with the rest of the in industry with our technology and actually evolve into next for the accounting industry? And what I learned was incredibly valuable. The course that I'm actually, that was the most impactful during that entire time was the one on change management.
(03:11)
And tomorrow I'm teaching a session on change management. And I truly believe that the firms that can nail change management are the ones that are going to survive, survive, and lead us into the next. Because if you can't facilitate change within your own firms and with your clients because yes, they are affected by all this change that's happening in our industry, then you are going to quickly fall behind and lose a competitive edge. So I'm really, really, really passionate about this topic. I'm excited to walk you through some key takeaways about how to think in an innovation way, in an innovative way. I'm going to be talking a lot about design thinking, which is a really customer focused way to think about innovation. It's focusing on what the customer needs, what the client needs. And I feel like, and Alan actually was talking about this during his session this morning.
(04:08)
I feel like that's a place where a lot of firms get stuck is they're thinking, only go after your A. Clients don't bother with the B, or well B's are okay, C or D clients. Don't bother with them. They're not the right fit for you. And when you are talking about design thinking methodology, empathy is a big, big factor in that. What is the customer feeling? What are those C client's feelings? What's that? The customer's experience. Exactly. The customer experience. So what is the client feeling? Why are they a C client? Why are they a D client? I'm telling you, the firms that crack that code and are able to actually figure it out, they're going to do really, really well. So I think that we need to understand these concepts so that we can evolve, we can lead the change and become better practitioners and actually serve our clients because that's what we do.
(05:03)
So really excited to be with you. I am the director of education and media at Woodard. I, as I mentioned, was in practice for almost 30 years before I took this role at Woodard, I actually formed and sold two firms in my lifetime. And I am the daughter of a CPA. So I was actually doing the carbon W two's and 10 90 nines way back when and recording things on index cards. Anybody else? So I remember the dark ages and I did not like them, which is why I became so technology focused in my career. Alright, I also am the co-host of the Water Report podcast and the happy hour. Anybody listen to the Water Report podcast or the App Hour? So yeah, so the App Hour, the podcast is awesome. I do that with Joe Woodard. We talk about the up and coming events, the new newest trends in accounting, and then the happy hour.
(05:58)
My really great friend Liz Scott and I, we talk about accounting technology and we drink. So it's on Tuesdays at four. We'd love to have a cocktail with you. Please join us and you can find that@theappyhour.com. So these are learning objectives. I'm not going to bore you with them, but you can find them in the deck. So let's get started. So the same as last year, mindset may be comfortable, and you guys know what I'm referring to here is I'm referring to same as last year. And I remember when I was a fledgling accountant in the CPA firm, when you got to a place on the balance sheet of the P and l and sorry, walking away from, can you guys hear me there? There we go. And you got to a place on the balance sheet of the or the P and l that didn't make sense.
(06:47)
And you asked the senior what to do because there didn't seem to be a work paper for it. They said, just write SALY, you guys, you know what I'm talking about. And the SALY would carry forward for years and years, sometimes decades, because no one ever questioned, well, what was SALY? SALY now goes back 20 years. What was it? And it isn't until somebody who comes in and says, wait a minute, SALY's not good enough. I need to know why. What happened 20 years ago? And is that even still relevant? And that was me. That was the person who was like, Nope, SALY is the easy way out, but is this still relevant? And you know what? I've saved a lot of clients, a lot of money because I asked that question. So I think that that's something that when we get into that mindset, because it is easy and it's a way to move the engagement forward, we're actually doing a discredit to our clients and to ourselves because we've put ourselves in a mindset where we're not thinking forward, we're just doing the easy.
(07:51)
And it's really important for us to get out of our own ways in that way. So why do firms need innovation? I mean, this is pretty obvious. We want to boost our profitability. And the way to do that is to work smarter, not harder, and to implement processes, technology partnerships that are going to reduce our expenses, boost our sales, and increase our bottom line. We need to adapt to the rapidly changing technology. So AI, how many people are terrified of AI in here? Yeah, it's pretty scary. Right now, we still control it and I think that we will for quite a while. It's very, it, it's fascinating to me. I don't understand how it works. I just bought a book so that I will, because I really don't understand what does this all mean? They're creating all these artificial neurons and things that are happening in people's brains, but they're doing it in a computer.
(08:55)
That's really fascinating to me. I use AI every day in my life, every day. It's like my best assistant I've ever had anybody using or experimenting with Chat GPT, it's amazing. One of the things I love about Chat GPT, and I'm just only going to spend a second with this, is that right now you can use Chat GPT, and I'll give you an answer whether it knows the answer, right? It'll make stuff up, what do they call it? It's hallucinating or something like that. But if you don't know what you're talking about, you can't recognize the errors. So it's still a very viable tool for us. But you do tool for us, but you still have to know what you're doing. So we do have to adapt to rapidly, rapidly changing technology. We need to address clients' needs. So our clients' needs are changing and they're going to continue to change.
(09:51)
So when you think about all the things that are going on, our clients have tons of questions. They're calling us going, we've got cybersecurity issues, new tax laws, the new ways that we're actually delivering services. And we need to understand what's happening. And in order for us to be competitive and to meet those clients needs, we need it to attract top talent. The folks that are coming out of university into our firms now, they want technology, they want cutting edge technology. And really we need to stay on top of it because we need that competitive edge. Other people are doing it. And those firms that are staying on top, they're going to ride this wave and lead us into what is next for our industry. So there's two different types of innovation. I learned this at Northeastern, so I thought I'd share it with you.
(10:48)
They're sustaining innovations and sustaining innovations or innovations that you create within your business, an accounting firm to meet the existing needs of the client. So it's getting better. So the example that I chose for my husband is the Camaro. So my husband actually has the top Camaro, the 69 convertible. It's beautiful. Love it. So the new 2023 Camaro is a sustaining innovation, looks very different, but it does the same thing. It probably has some new bells and whistles that the 69 version didn't have. But really the crux of it is, is that they're meeting their existing client's needs. So they're in constantly innovating for something new, to stay competitive in the market, to meet the changing needs of their customers. But they're not innovating anything that's super out of the ordinary. Still a car still has four wheels, still has a steering wheel, it just looks different, has more updated features.
(11:50)
So sustaining innovations have incremental improvements to existing product services or processes. They maintain a competitive edge just by catering to those existing customers. They're not looking to break into a new market and they focus on that continuous improvement. That's really where accounting firms have been, right? At least what we consider forward thinking ones. There's some that I'm sure still have a bunch of filing cabinets in their offices. The second type of innovation is disruptive innovations. And that's where we are now. So we have, these are breakthrough innovations that find a new market. So they create something that is for a completely different market. It can also disrupt existing ones. So examples are Airbnb, which disrupted the hotel market somewhat. You've got the iPod, which I used to work in a music store, can tell you now that music store isn't a music store anymore. It's a gift shop because the iPod came along and they didn't need it. We've got Uber and now we've got AI. So these are disruptive innovations. Does anyone have another example in our accounting industry that could be a disruptive innovation or has been a disruptive innovation? QuickBooks. Yeah, QuickBook. TurboTax, right? Do it yourself tax and possibly even offshoring.
(13:25)
One of the thoughts that came to my mind, and this hasn't happened yet that I have seen is what happens if offshoring goes direct to consumer? That'd be pretty disruptive. What's that? What happens if offshoring is offered direct to consumer? That would be pretty disruptive. It's a new market. So those are the types of things. What's that?
(13:48)
A smartphone was just Yes, absolutely. Actually, one of the disruptive innovations that I think is really fascinating is did you guys remember regular rotary phones or even the digital, the touch tone phones that had those really cool the cords? Yeah. So do you know what they did with that? They now make them into hair ties. So nobody was using them. The people that were making that were like, what are we going to do? We have all of this curly cue phone. Oh, thank you. That's helpful. Is it on? It's on. Can you guys, okay, so yeah, so they now make hair ties. So that's pretty cool. Found a new market for their product, which is fantastic. All right. So disruption in disruptive innovation can hurt if you're not the one doing the disrupting. And that's by Clayton Christensen. Have anybody heard of Clayton Christensen? He is the founder or very well known.
(14:49)
He actually passed away in 2020 of disruptive innovation and those theories. And that is a true statement. So if you are not ahead of the curve, which we all need to be, it is going to hurt. Absolutely. So the challenges that we're facing in the accounting industry specifically is balancing rules and innovation. So we have a lot of rules and regulations as accounting professionals and some of the innovations seem to want to bend those rules. And as an accounting firm in order to be compliant, a lot of the innovations that have come out, at least in my career when they first came out, were like, we're not doing that cloud. What? We're going to put our stuff on somebody else's server. No way. Never going to do that. I got to look at this box in my server room so I know it's safe. Got it.
(15:48)
Tuck it in at night and take the backup home with me. There's no way I'm putting all my stuff in the cloud. But we did allocating time for exploration. We're busy. We work a lot. I was at the BDO conference last week in Las Vegas and they were talking about one of the discussions they had at one of the round tables was reducing the work week. Typical firm, you're talking 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And they were talking about how one of the goals and everybody was really impressed was one firm wanted to get down to 45 hours a week. And I'm sitting there thinking that's still more than 40 hours a week. And in other parts of the country they work 32 hours a week. We work a lot. And so how are we going to allocate any time for exploration and actually looking at new technology and new processes?
(16:43)
Cause it's not just technology. I'm not just talking about new apps. I'm talking about different processes and the way that we do things and the way we deliver our services. Overcoming resistance to change. How many of you like change? A few people change, you probably don't like change, but you've actually convinced yourself that you really enjoy it. I don't like change, but I get excited about change. Does that make sense? What's that? I'm not, that's great because that's the biggest challenge is, and I'm going to be talking a lot about change tomorrow and fear is the driver. Yes.
Audience Member (17:26):
Decision, right? So you don't deal with change consistent, but change.
Heather Satterly (17:39):
Absolutely. And there's an investment which often is looked at as an expense to facilitate change and make it happen. And so our thoughts are, this is going to hurt. My team's not going to like it. My partner's not going to like it, right? My clients aren't going to like it. It's going to cost me money. It's going to take me away from getting client work done. And that's sound very fun. Change is not fun. I'm here to tell you right now and tomorrow's all about change. So I'm only going to spend a minute here, but it is something that is very difficult for us. But I believe it is the most important thing that we have to overcome in order to get through what's going on in our industry now. And we can do it shifting from a traditional mindset. A lot of firms are doing really well here, but one of the things that I just want to point out is that the people in this room were already thinking forward.
(18:37)
So many of our peers aren't still doing it the old way. And I want to reach all of them. I want to tell them, come on, you can do it. And then fear of failure. Anybody afraid to fail? Fear of failure holds you way, way back. Failing. And we're going to talk about this in a few minutes, and I love what Alan said today is that the firms that are the most successful are the ones that fail repeatedly. And that is key to innovation. You cannot innovate unless you're willing to fail because it's all about experimentation and taking risks to find something that's going to stick.
(19:18)
So you want to drive innovation in your firms through strategy, collaboration, and adaptation. So to develop an innovative strategy, you have to start where you need to start with your vision, mission and your purpose. Why are you doing what you're doing? It has to come down to your core values and your purpose for your firm. Everything should spring from that. So it's something that you really want to work with your team on, your partners, and I would say your entire team, because your whole team is going to need to get on board and should get on board in innovation no matter what role they have because they see things that the partners don't see and they have very, very valuable insight into how the firm can change for the better. You want to set those smart goals, identifying initiatives and different resources that can help.
(20:15)
You want to establish timelines. So when are we actually going to make this happen? If you haven't gone paperless, I'm just going to use that as an example, set a goal for it. Don't just say Someday I want to be paperless because guess what? It's never going to happen. You have to say bye 2020, end of 2025, I want to be paperless. And now we're going to set a timeline to make that happen. Allocate resources, and this is a big one, especially in smaller firms that don't have a ton of resources. You have to allocate resources and invest time, budget and personnel to support the innovative events and strategies that you're trying to accomplish within your firm. And then leverage external networks. How many of you work with technology? We have all kinds of technology partners here. Guess what they're really good at doing? Innovating. Talk to them. A lot of them would be really happy to have a design thinking workshop for your firm and to talk about how they innovate within their own organization. You can also reach out to other professionals within your firm or even clients that are innovating to find out how they're doing, doing it, and maybe do a workshop on how to innovate, have a hackathon where they come and they participate.
(21:39)
So aligning your innovation strategy with firm objectives. You want to define your strategic objectives. You want to define, identify supporting opportunities for them. So where are there opportunities to increase in this or to improve? And so this is looking at your firm and looking at where are our customers satisfied? Where are they dissatisfied and where they are dissatisfied? Are your opportunities for innovation to improve them and to find better ways to work with them prior prioritize based on impact. And what I mean by that is I still do a lot of consulting on change management and helping firms to implement software within their firms. And typically that's not just one, one technology. It's a whole tech stack. And so one of the strategies that I utilize is finding the biggest win in the shortest amount of time. What is something that we can implement really quickly I know has a very high probability of success and adoption?
(22:50)
And I'll do that first. And the reason I do that first is to get buy-in from the rest of the organization. Make somebody who is that is not on board, make their life a little bit easier. And guess what happens? It's beautiful. All of a sudden they're on board. What can we do next? So you want to prioritize based on the impact that you're going to have both on the firm, your team, and your clients. Establish milestones and KPIs and we'll talk a little more about that a bit later. And you want to continuously evaluate strategy. Another really important about innovation is it doesn't stop. It's not like, okay, we're going to innovate and then we're done. We're in a rapidly evolving industry and we need to continuously be learning and looking at what's happening in the market with our clients and with our competitors. So it's not just a one and done thing like okay, we're going to innovate this year and then we're done. You got to keep doing it.
(23:50)
So where do you start? You're going to start first by assessing the firm's current innovation landscape. And the best way to do this is to survey is go ahead and survey employees on innovative culture. So you're going to be asking questions, right? You're going to be asking questions on how well they feel that the firm is actually giving them opportunities to experiment. So an innovation culture is a culture that allows a experimentation that allows a safe place for failure. It encourages the team to think outside the box and offer new ideas and then it gives them grace to go through and actually try out those ideas. You want to analyze your existing processes and tools. You're going to want to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your firm. So all of this you're going to be doing within a survey benchmark against industry competitor. So look at other firms. There's lots of data out there that with the AI, CPA accounting today, they're sharing what other firms are doing and what is successful and what isn't. And compare, talk to your peers when you're at networking events like this to find out exactly what they're doing, where have they been successful? And then gather insights from your clients and stakeholders. Send out a survey. How many of you survey your clients?
(25:20)
Okay, so not a lot of you. That's actually a really great place to start is to find out what their pain points are and what their satisfaction is. That sounds scary. It really does. But it's actually scarier not to survey your clients because then you have no idea what they're thinking. If you know what you're thinking, then you can change. You can start to innovate around those problems. But if you never ask the question, you don't have the opportunity to solve for the problem. And that's where the design thinking mentality comes in. When your design thinking is based on what the customer experience is and your empathy for their experience. So thinking about the client and trying to understand how to make their experience with the firm better is going to it's show you and highlight opportunities where you can innovate the way that you're already providing current services and also it's going to uncover possibly new services that you haven't even thought of.
(26:24)
I love that list that Alan put up today of the things that, the wishlist that the clients wanted that was really insightful. And he's right. Clients want more of us and you just have to ask the question. All right, so we're going to talk about the ideas framework for innovation, and it's going to start with ideation, discover, engage, adapt, and sustain. And so this is a framework and it's basically it's based on a collection of different types or different methodologies by different scholars. And I kind of package it into my own version of it and I'll provide the resources to you at the end if you want to read more about it. So let's go ahead and focus on this roadmap for innovating within your firm. So it starts with ideation. And I want to just kind of stop here and say that there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens before you get to the ideation stage.
(27:33)
You have to be presented with a client problem. Something's wrong or you want to make something better. So there's a lot of research that goes into coming up getting to this ideation point where you've discovered that there's an issue. You've done the research about what others have done to solve the problem. You've done surveys. And once you have that information, now you're ready to ideate. So ideation is really coming up with possible solutions. So it's the process of coming together with others or you can ideate by yourself, but it's not nearly as much fun. And you're going to start thinking about how can you come up with a inventive, innovative solution. So you want to embrace new technologies and methods. You want to encourage curiosity and questioning within your firm. I see a lot of firms, this is an issue where they don't want the questioning SALY, SALY, just SALY, and we'll be done with this engagement.
(28:40)
We can move on to the next one, right? Stop asking questions. We want to encourage questions. That's where we're going to get great ideas from our team. And that's where you're going to find your rising stars on your team. The ones that are asking questions, they're going to do some really cool stuff. Offer training and support. So find resources to teach your team how to ideate. There are programs out there that can help you. There's books which I'm going to share with you at the end that I recommend for learning strategies. You can have ideation sessions where you bring the team together and you say, okay, we're going to solve this problem of getting rid of all of these file cabinets in the office. We want them gone. Let's brainstorm some ideas on how we can do that quickly. Cause we want to get it done in six months. And then let your team break into groups and come up with some ideas and then you discuss those ideas. And then prioritize value, mindset and client focus. Again, back to the design thinking. It's not just about how happy are we in our firm, we're a service industry. What's going on with our clients? Are they happy? How many of you have a client portal that your clients don't use?
(30:01)
Has anyone asked your clients why they don't use it? Anybody you have? And were you able to get information on? Did they know they didn't know? That's right. And they probably didn't know and you didn't find out because you weren't asking the right questions. So a question and for that particular instance is if they're not using it is what are you doing right before you try to go and upload information? And they may say, well, I don't ever get to that point cause I don't know how to turn on my phone. Be all right. That was a bad joke, apparently nobody laughed. So you want to ask the questions about it. What were you doing before? What are you doing during and what was the stopper? It's not just why didn't you like it? Because the answer is going to be, I don't know why I like it. So you have to keep digging to find out exactly what the circumstances are.
(31:02)
I have worked a long time with Intuit and they use design thinking in their entire company and they do these things called follow me homes. And it's where they actually send a team to watch accountants and end users do their work on their products to understand what that experience is like so that they can ideate on how to make it better. And they ask a lot of questions and then they're able to uncover insights that they can bring back to their project, their product management team to say, Hey, this is what we found out from our customers and that's why, or that's how they're coming up with these great ideas and these new innovations within their product. I believe if we do the same thing in our firms with our clients, we're going to uncover some really great insight that can set us apart from the competition.
(31:54)
What if you had a webinar or even an in-person event depending on your firm where you actually bring your clients in and you show them how to use your practice management software and you help them get logged in? Ideally you'd only have to do that once and you would record it so that when they call you and ask you to show them again, you can send them the video and they can watch it. So these are ways that you can problem solve to make things stick with your clients. So Ideation Meth methods is a offer Design thinking workshops. So work with your team to become client focused and to think about solving for these problems. Conduct brainstorming sessions and you can also mind mapping anybody, do any mind mapping? Mind mapping's really cool. You start with an idea and then you draw a line that basically brings you to another place.
(32:47)
It's a really great way to get all of your thoughts on a canvas that so you can look at it across the entire problem. The next step in the ideas is the discover. So you're going to evaluate and refine ideas. So everybody's ideated, they throw through a bunch of ideas on a poster board or on sticky notes, and now what you're going to do is you're going to go through and you're going to evaluate them. So you're going to prioritize the high impact ideas. So what are the ideas that have a high rate or the highest rate of success and are the lowest impact or the lowest? What's the word I'm looking for? The lowest cost or effort. Those are the ones you want to go after first, right? High probability of success, low cost, align with your strategic objectives. So some people are going to have great ideas that don't fit your firm.
(33:45)
We should open up a coffee bar. Great idea. How is that going to benefit our firm? And maybe it will. Who knows? Test and validate concepts. So try it out. Has anybody ever implemented a software and asked a client to be the Guinea pig? That's a great way to do it and say, Hey, I've got this thing. You got to find a client that's an A client and then adores you and say, Hey, I want to try this thing. And they always want to and they'll give you the honest feedback. It's great. So you could do that. Encourage feedback and iteration. So that client that you try it out with, what do they love, what do they hate? And then try again and ask them to give you additional feedback. So don't give up and there should be a kill switch. And that should be defined within the process.
(34:33)
As you are going through and trying out new processes, there should be a list. And this comes back to your strategy when you're coming up with where you're going to innovate, when do we pull the plug? What are the things they're going to cause us to pull the plug? It could be time, it takes too long. It could be if we have five clients that really don't like it, we need to just move on. Whatever it is, depending on the situation, you want to have those already established so that you don't end up wasting time and resources chasing after something that's not going to work. And some of the resources that I'm going to recommend at the end, they give you some really detailed templates and advice on how to determine what those kind of kill switches should be. So discovery methods, you could do a SWOT analysis, strengths, weakness, weaknesses, market research and competitive analysis to see if there's an innovation in service.
(35:35)
Is there a market for it? I don't know. You got to do some market research. Sounds like a good idea, but we got to decide. Figure out is it then you want to engage? So collaboration, a collaborative innovation and empowerment. You want to encourage teamwork. There's a book that I'm reading, I haven't quite finished it because it just came out like two weeks ago and I've been traveling and it's by a guy named Michael Lurik and he is big in design thinking and innovation and he talks about radical collaboration and I love that that term radical collaboration is creating an environment and a synergy within your team where people are with different disciplines and different ways of thinking about the world come together and they collaborate very quickly to push an idea forward or to discredit it to say it's not a good idea. And I think that tomorrow in the change management class, we're going to talk a little more about that.
(36:43)
How do we create those interdisciplinary teams and the multidisciplinary teams within our firms to ideate quickly so that we're making sure that we're putting our efforts in the right place as we innovate in our firms. You want to implement regular feedback loops. Who's using teams or Slack? Those are a great place to come up with a channel. We had a channel in ours which was great ideas and people could just go if they had an idea working on a client, they could just go and throw it in there. And then during our team meetings we would discuss them and talk about whether it was something that we should pursue, delegate authority, authority and encourage ownership. You don't have to own every idea in your firm. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I thought I had to own every idea that anybody had in my firm and that I had to drive it.
(37:32)
And then one day I learned I didn't and it was awesome. Somebody come up with a great idea and be like, great, go figure it out and then come back and let me know if we should pursue it. People love that. Give them ownership. They get excited and they're going to go do a really great job and they're going to get incredible satisfaction out of doing that and bringing it back to the team, especially if it ends up being a great idea that transforms the firm. Wow. Give them the opportunity to own that. Create safe spaces for experimentation. So I here is, here's my rule in my firm was everybody 10% of their time, which is a lot and not everybody's going to agree with that. 10% of the time they could use to take a class, do CPE if they wanted to experiment with a new tool, kind of rework processes if they wanted to go through our practice management and kind of think of a different way to do it.
(38:28)
But I wanted them to have that time to sit, stand back or stand back from the actual work and the production to think about how can I do my job better? How can I provide better client service? And when you give people the space to do that, miraculous things happen. You end up getting Slack messages or if you're in a brick and mortar firm now knocking on the door, I have this great idea because you gave them that time to experiment and try something new and to pursue something that they were really interested in or that they felt would really benefit the team. So it's a really great impactful thing that you can do. And then recognize and reward innovative efforts. When people do this, let them know. That's great. Encourage them to do it and they'll continue to do it. So engagement methods, cross-functional teams.
(39:22)
So we have tax departments, audit departments, cash departments, wealth management that all kind of act in many firms in silos. They may serve the same clients but they're in silos. What if you get these cross-functional teams together and start talking about what they do and the point pain points that they're seeing in their particular department? I bet you're going to start to see that there's a lot of cross kind of pollination and ways that you can innovate together to create synergy across those and maybe even come up with additional product lines or service lines that you can offer. Hackathons are really fun. So a hackathon is something that I stole from the tech world. A hackathon is where you have an event maybe on with your firm, you come in and you have a problem to solve and then you break your team into teams where they go through the process of innovating or ideating a solution.
(40:26)
And then after they ideate the solution, they get up in front of the group, each group gets up and kind of pitches their idea to the group and then the group chooses a new one. But what's great about that is you're going to get a whole bunch of ideas from your groups that will get their creative juices flowing and it's a lot of fun and it's a great team building activity as well. Anybody done anything like that in their firm? Super fun idea sharing platforms. So that could be Slack as I mentioned, or Microsoft teams. And then regular feedback sessions is really important. Get feedback not just from your clients but from your team. Maybe they don't like something, there's a software that we use at Woodard and for some reason my brain just can't wrap around it. Anybody ever have software like that where somebody's implemented and you're like, my brain just doesn't work this way, it can't bend this way.
(41:19)
So what I gave that feedback and then it turned out that other people in the firm felt the same way that I did. And so we're looking at some other solutions at this point, but if I felt like I just needed to live with it and never said anything and the other people in our firm or in our company that felt the same way, we never would've known and we wouldn't have had the opportunity to find a better solution. All right, adapt, navigate, change for continuous improvement. You want to balance the rules with flexibility. And here's a tough one for us, because we're accountants. We have a lot of rules that we have to follow and we have to be really careful. But there are ways where we can innovate safely to do what I people call a proof of concept that something will work. So if you're thinking like the cloud, we can't do that, right?
(42:17)
That you can find a safe place to do that either within your firm, within internally, things that aren't using client data. One example of that is I use a program called Zapier, which is a no code solution to build automations with between over 3000 apps. When I first started doing it, I didn't do it with client data, I wasn't sure it was going to work. I didn't want to mess up somebody else's stuff. So I started doing it within my own firm to automate things that were not client sensitive. And then once I had success with that, then I started to look at, okay, now I'm going to vet the security. Can I actually build automations that are going to protect my client data and be able to innovate to streamline processes using this tool for my client work? So I went through that, but I did the proof of concept on my own firm's books with my own data to keep it safe. And then I went through and I vetted it. And that's really what the innovation innovative process is about. It's giving yourself that blank slate to go through and try things out. Then in the discovery phase, go through and make sure that it's going to be possible and compliant.
(43:38)
You want to replace task checklists with process overviews. So what I mean by that is when I have a checklist that says Do A, B, C, and D, somebody new that comes into the organization will be like, okay, but where do I get A and when am I supposed to do B? Right? So coming up with a process overview is really giving narrative narrative to the process so that as somebody coming in actually understands. So it could be a Loom video or if you don't have Loom, I use Zoom. Just open up a Zoom, hit record and talk your way through a particular process. Now you have a video you can share with your team where you're actually talking through all those little nuances and things that somebody else might not know if they're just looking at do A, B, C, and D, right? Stay agile in response to industry changes.
(44:36)
So this chat GPT thing, try it. If you haven't tried it yet, go figure it out because it's going to be pretty soon. It's going to be in most of the software that you use. We're already seeing practice management Canopy was the first to put it in their practice management software. Carbon just added it last week. We're going to start to see that technology in the apps that we're using. You can create a free account and try it. Now, don't put any client data in it, don't do that because remember we want to do it safely, but go out and see what it can do. Cause it can do some really amazing things. And then transition to value-based pricing, right? We've got to get away from the billable hour. We have to because the billable hour, pretty soon it's going to take us.
(45:18)
I mean, stuff that used to take me hours takes me like 10 minutes. Now I can't live on 10 minutes of. So we need to do the value. And I also, I just loved the session this morning talking about the value. And I think clients, they do, that's what they're looking for. They want outcomes. They don't care how long it took you. All right, adaptation tactics, agile project management. I don't have time to go into agile project management, but it is really sum summing it up means the ability to move quickly when you are going through a project, when you're implementing a project. Change management. Change management I think is the keystone to making innovation within your firm work. If you don't have that, it's going to be throwing spaghetti at the wall. It really is. You've got to understand and be empathetic to your entire team and your clients and continuous learning programs in the sustain. I already said before, innovation isn't a once and done, it's continuous. So once you've innovated in your firm, you're not done. You're going to keep going and you're going to keep having these hackathons and this open communication with your team and providing new tools and learning opportunities.
(46:34)
You want to encourage innovation as a core value of the firm. Everybody on your team should know. We're always looking for ways to do better. And so one of your jobs as a member of our team is to be always thinking about how you can do better, how we can do better as a team. And that's really going to get their creative juices going. Support ongoing learning and development set and review your innovation goals with your team. You should do that at least once a year. Typically what will happen is you'll end up getting into six month increments of that and then celebrate innovative achievements and successes. So innovation metrics. There's a great book I'm going to be talking about in just a minute by Michael Lurik. That is design thinking and innovative innovation metrics, which is fantastic. I haven't even finished it yet and it's blowing my mind.
(47:25)
Just love it. Periodic reviews and recognition and reward. If people are being recognized for being innovative and asking questions and trying new things, other members of your firm are going to start to do it too. People like reward. We like dopamine. And when someone says Good job, we get a little hit of dopamine. So if you want innovative behavior, reward, innovative behavior, reward, innovative thinking. All right, so me, innovation metrics, because we're all about metrics. We're accountants had to have this in here, they're going to want to see some stuff. So measure what matters by John Doerr talks about the OKR methodology. Anybody use that in their firm? Yes, Randy, I know you do. So it's objectives and key results. So it's a methodical way to measure what success looks like in projects that you're doing within your firm. A great book by John Doerr.
(48:22)
We use it extensively in the Woodard organization for everything that we do. It helps us to break a big project into little pieces and gives us the roadmap for success for those particular projects. So a couple of metrics are number of new ideas generated. Now, Michael Lurik would say that that is a vanity metric. Who cares? New ideas? I could tell you 10,000 ideas right now. If none of them are impactful to my business or to your business, who cares? That's like he says, that's cool, but not really a metric that we really want to rely on too closely. Idea to implementation ratio. That's a good metric. How many new ideas are generated? And how many of them actually went through implementation and made a difference in our practice? Time to market. How quickly can we actually get through these innovations? Return on innovation, investment, ROI, innovation pipeline strength. So how often are we getting new ideas? Considering new ideas and actually taking the actions to see if they hold water and then following them through to implementation if they do.
(49:30)
And measure the level of employee participation and innovation. So how many people are actually giving new ideas If they're not, how can you help them to become comfortable? It took me a long time to be able to stand up and speak to folks like you. I was the girl that didn't raise her hand in school. You have to encourage it and allow people to fail and reward them for speaking out and questioning. That's so important. All right, so the books that I recommend are Measure What Matters. And the one I'm reading right now is Design Thinking and Innovation Metrics. Amazing, really, really good book. So shape Your Firm's Future Drive Change by adopting the Ideas framework. So generate the ideas, discover and vet them, engage your employees, adapt to the changing climate within our industry. And then you need to have sustain that level of innovation within your firm.
(50:28)
It's just going to get faster. Change is not going to slow down. It's going to go faster and faster and faster. And we need to keep asking questions and keep rethinking our processes in order to stay competitive in the market and to serve our clients well. Invest in your people, processes and technology. Don't be afraid to make that investment. It will pay off. And it's really important. Build strong relationships with clients based on the value that you're bringing to the client and find out what they need. I, I can't tell you how much I love that slide about what the clients really wanted. It's fantastic. And continuously evaluate your innovation strategy. And I think we're a little over, oh no, we're, we're just like two minutes over. So I'll take a couple of questions and then I think we got to get to the next session. Are your brains full? Yeah. Okay, awesome. Well, thanks guys. And oh, my book slide wasn't up there, so I'll just tell you what they were. I'll go back to these two books, measure What Matters, design Thinking and Innovation Metrics. There's a couple of books by Christian Clayton's that I recommend as well. And hold on one second and I'll tell you what they are.
(51:55)
They are The Innovator's Dilemma, which talks about the innovation, the innovation cycle. It's a really long road, great book, and the innovation, the Innovator solution. And then there's another great book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans called Designing Your Work Life, which is about design thinking. So thank you guys.