How Alex & Dylan Partnered Up and Scaled Their Online Accounting Firm

What's going on, guys? Welcome back to another student spotlight interview here with a couple of Client Ascension studs. So we've actually had Alex on the show or on my channel before, but now we're able to bring him on with his business partner, Dylan. What's going on, guys? Welcome.

What's up?

What's up, man? Thanks for having us.

Absolutely, guys. Absolutely. I'm pumped to dive more into your guys story and the recent success you've been having with your accounting firm. And so first, I want to hear from both of you guys, like, where did you start in this business? Right, so both of you had joined Client Ascension separately. Like, what did that journey look like for both of you guys? And then we'll talk about, like, how the partnership happened and kind of what's happening nowadays with that. So let's start with Dylan. If you could just kind of walk us through where you started, how you heard about Client Ascension, why you decided to join, and then we'll kick it to Alex.

Yeah. So I followed Daniel on Twitter in, like, 2020 while I was in college. And it's kind of funny because I.

Took, by the way.

So I'm 25. I just barely turned 25. I took a sales call with Client Ascension within, like, the first month or two of you guys actually creating it, and I was super unqualified, but I just wanted to be in it. So after being on Sales Call, being unqualified, I was like, okay, I got to get to a point where I can get in there. So I was in college, and I basically started, like, a bookkeeping service while I was in my master's degree in college, and I joined Internet Money day one. And then I got a big client that paid me for a full year in advance, and I used that money to join Client Ascension almost a year ago. Exactly. And from there, added a handful of clients that summer, and then just kind of kept moving along. And then me and Alex met. We started working together on a client that summer. I needed some help with some stuff, and we started working together. And then that October, we met at the Tampa event that you guys throw every year and ended up staying together. And it was funny because on the boat, everyone was like, bro, like, you're staying with Alex. Isn't that, like your op? Like, he's your competition. He's doing the same thing. And I was like, no. Like, we're homies, like, where we help each other a ton. And then that night before, we both had flights at like, 7am and we didn't Go to bed that night. We stayed up talking the whole night about kind of our business models and the potential of partnering together and you know, how we could come to eventually dominate. And it just made too much sense not to squat up. I mean, we were selling the same thing to the same people in the same places and it just made a ton of sense for us to come together and double our efforts essentially.

I love that, bro. Yeah, it's such a cool story of like going in your own lane. And I, I think the number one thing that people need to take away from your guys partnership story is like realizing that there's enough to go around for everyone. I feel like when say like I'm a Legion agency owner and I see another Legion agency owner, like most people, especially if they're like earlier on in the game, like they see them as a threat rather than like just a potential homie. And I think people like really don't understand like how many other people are doing exactly what it is they're doing as well. And again that there's abundance in the market. Like there needs to be multiple service providers because there's so many people to provide those services to. So like you guys weren't looking at each other as like ops. You were just like homies that like you could learn from him and he could learn from you. And I think because you went into the relationship like that is what opened the door for a potential or a partnership later on. But Alex, if you want to fill us in on, on your side of the story as well, it'd be great.

Yeah, I'll try to keep this pretty short and summarize it, but. So I started off in public accounting, got my cpa. I was working in Los Angeles for this big accounting firm. Absolutely hated it. I was going around LA auditing companies. I mean it was kind of cool because you know, we get to go to different businesses. Accountants really love their lunches. So we always get like free lunch, partner, come in, take us somewhere cool. So in that sense it was cool, but I just, I knew I wanted to basically just run my own business. So I quit after I got my cpa, went all in into drop shipping. I feel like that's just like everybody ends up going into dropshipping at some point. But started a high ticket store, scaled that for a few years. That company ended up getting acquired, ended up doing some consulting stuff, going into like other bookkeeping firms and kind of tidying up their operations and their sales. And ultimately I ended up actually just like getting myself into Some trouble financially and just like made some really stupid moves. And it was kind of like a really tough lesson actually for me. And I don't talk about this very much, but it's part of my, my story. And you know, one of the large reasons why this, why I ended up starting Stacks. But I, at the time, I basically had to move back in with my parents, get my shit together, get two different jobs. One was an accountant for this like, healthcare tech company. One was for this company in LA that was doing finance and basically realized, hey, I can actually hire some, some people help me out and facilitate both jobs while I pay back some debt. And it was definitely like a big lesson to just realize, like, you really need to prioritize your financial habits, keep track of what you're spending, keep track of what you're making, and stay on top of everything. And I, I told myself, like, I don't want anybody to have to end up in that situation that I was in. Which again is like one of the main reasons why I started Stacks. And it wasn't until I met Tyler, who was closing for you guys. I think a while back we met up and a few of the guys that were in there in Client Ascension basically convinced me to join. So I was like, all right, let's give it a go. And basically started scaling it for the first three, four months, started getting some pretty good traction. And then Dylan and I started talking more and more because we were inclined Ascension. And then, yeah, we got out to Tampa for that event and we both just were like, all right, I think it's time we can just monopolize this whole space and ultimately add more to the fulfillment that we're doing. And because of our offer, it's complex and it's not like your typical digital marketing agency. Right. And that's one of the great things about Client Ascension is it's not just for marketing agencies. Like, there's a lot of different businesses that can really benefit from the program. So yeah, we realized, like, let's both put 100% into this and we can both scale this twice as quick. So that's basically where I heard today. But it's been going pretty, pretty smooth. We've been tidying up a lot of our operations and hiring and it's been a lot of fun.

That's awesome. Yeah, it's so cool. Your guys story is just super unique because both of you again, like joined the program separately and then met up at this event. And we're open to partnership, ended up partnering and I know like, one of the main themes at the last event was, like, the importance of business partners and finding the right business partner. And I didn't, like, intend to, like, force partnerships, but a lot of partnerships happen at that event, I think, because of, you know, what the content was about, because that's what the client ascension story really is. And all the stories of the businesses that I've ever started, it's because of the business partners I've found that makes, you know, those businesses so successful and impossible. And so what I'm super interested in to hear from both of you guys is like, what was either like, the biggest bottleneck or, like, pain point that partnering up together solved early on. So starting with Dylan, a pain point.

That partnering solved, you said?

Yeah. So, like, for instance, like, one of my biggest pain points was I hated sales. I did remote sales job for over a year before starting our agency. And I knew after leaving that sales job that I did not want anything to do with sales ever again. And so partnering with Dan, one of my business partners on the agency, made so much sense because it solved the pain point of having to do sales because Dan did all the sales.

And so for you guys, yeah, very similar, actually. Like, we were both getting to the point where we were both booking calls pretty consistently and we were both, you know, heading the fulfillment to where that was. One of the big things initially is I was able to take all the sales calls to free up Alex's time to focus more on, you know, some of the operations and fulfillment. So that was a big one initially. But honestly, like, it's something that doesn't get talked about a ton is, like, when you're growing a business, like, initially, oftentimes it's by yourself. Like, getting to that first 10k, 5 even to the first 5k, 10k, 15k, 20k, like, whatever. A lot of that is super by yourself. And it can feel very lonely in a way. So even just in the sense of having someone to talk to about what we're trying to grow and do almost gives you more energy to go out and do it. At least that's what I found. Like, it was just. Just the feeling of, like, okay, I know that Alex is over here tackling this, so I can put all of my energy into tackling that over here and not have to worry about it. And I'm sure he's felt the same way in some capacity of just like, us being able to come together and be like, hey, I'm going to go crush this. You're going to go Crush this. We'll come back together and reevaluate and just kind of keep doing that over and over again. And I think it's allowed us to move a lot quicker than we otherwise would have been able to doing it alone. I think both of us would have been successful if we stayed by ourselves, but I think by partnering we've just accelerated that by double. And the other great thing about partnering is it essentially doubled our social proof overnight. You know, I had some fairly big name clients from Money, Twitter and so did Alex. And coming together now, it's just like we have a ton of them, which was another huge pro as well. The last one I'll say is Alex is an amazing accountant. He's a better accountant than I am in a lot of ways. So it's like we've doubled our expertise. We were now providing an even better service than we were before because we're combining both of our accounting minds together as well.

Yeah, for sure. And thank you for the compliment, brother. Sometimes I don't know what, you know, there's always something in either accounting or tax where it's like half the ball game is like going to have to look up something in some tax treaty because you're dealing with some other country and you're like, what the heck is this? No, but thank you. I definitely agree, like a lot of it is, you know, go further together. I looked at this from a long term point of view. Given the understanding that you're not just starting from day one, finding a business partner, like some of that you do have to flush out. Is it you internally that's like coping and you just want that crutch and having somebody to help you, or is it the fact that like you're established, you're both established, you have a long term goal in mind and there's synergies at play and you have complimentary skill sets and we can map out in our heads how can we reverse engineer this goal of, you know, becoming a seven, eight figure firm. Ultimately, you know, we decided we can get there quicker and we have a lot of complimentary skills. We get along. I do think, like if you're just starting out, you know, I just turned 31, like I've done a lot in terms of working with prior businesses in the accounting field, working with my own companies, you know, so like, I wasn't starting from day one, but I think people that are just starting out just suss out the need of feeling like you need to, to partner with somebody to get to 10 to 20k, whatever the case is, really just focus on building your skill sets and just honoring your time with improving the process and just always be thinking, how can I make the fulfillment for this customer better? But yeah, I mean, we're pretty excited about our growth and it's definitely been a big plus to partner up. And yeah, it's a great story for client ascension. You know, there was definitely a few partnerships that burst from that event. But yeah, ultimately we're pretty excited about where we're going. And it's been, it's been a fun shoot, man. It's been already six months, I think realistically since that event. It's been a lot for sure.

Yeah.

And to get a great partner too, like, you have to be a great partner yourself. It's like dating, like, to get a great partner, you have to be great yourself. And I think that what was great about me and Alex, like, he said neither of us were starting from zero. We were both over 10k a month when we partnered individually, so. And I think I earned a lot of Alex's trust because honestly, I was asking Alex a ton of questions, hey, how are you doing this? What's the best way to go about that? And when he told me, I would immediately go and do it. So then in his mind he's like, okay, this guy is willing to go and do these things. He already has some competencies and he's doing some things well to where I think it made it him more comfortable partnering with me versus me being at zero and having, you know, no skills or experience to bring to the table.

Yeah, dude, absolutely. I love what you said about, like, you have to be a great partner to attract a great partner. That was like the entire premise of my presentation at the last event we did like two weekends ago is like, I gave them all the strategies of like, how we run multiple seven figure businesses and talked about how, like, a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm partnered with Daniel and Dan and Christian and all these guys that they also look up to. And I just had them ask themselves, like, are you someone worthy of partnering with someone like Daniel right now? Like, are you the person worthy of having a business partner that is at the same caliber as someone like Dan or Daniel or Christian? And like, I at one time wasn't. And so that's the first question I'd ask myself is, am I worthy of having a great business partner? And if not, that's okay. It's. There's very clear work that you can do along the Way to get there. But I love that you shared that learning. One of. One of my favorite things that you mentioned as well is, like, one of the benefits that doesn't get talked about much with having business partners is you get to, like, celebrate the wins together and also, like, learn from the losses together. The wins are always so much fun, dude, because you can celebrate as a team. And so, like, what was one of the first wins or one of the first milestones that you guys hit that you guys celebrated? And how'd you celebrate?

You got it, Alex.

I would say, you know, we got a lot of interest in. Basically, we formulated a bit of a launch offer when we, you know, pulled all our resources together, and it just got a really, really good response. And we must have brought in, like, six or seven clients. And this was, like, in the span of a month or so. And in hindsight, I laugh because there was still so much we had to transition over because, you know, we've got access to all these different client files and banking portals and accounting platforms and softwares that need to get integrated, and we just kind of sent it and played catch up along the way. I mean, we figured it out, but that was pretty special to get the response from the market itself and just kind of validate the fact that, you know, one. The fact that we beefed up our services for this and, you know, really made an intentional effort to hone in on the different components of the offer that were that we weren't providing previously or, you know, we made more clear for people that were interested. It was pretty exciting to see the response and close a good amount of clients that some of them we knew. You know, we work with a lot of clients that are in client ascension, and I think just seeing everybody else kind of have a sigh of relief too, like, oh, I gotta pick between Alex and Dylan. They were just so stoked to be able to come together and work with us both. And it was just a nice moment for. For us to validate, like, all right, you know, we're already cooking. We got. We got some good stuff, and we're making some good progress already from day one and just kind of really catalyzed a lot of momentum and energy to just keep. Keep crushing and just keep building along the way. So that was definitely a fun moment. This was back in, like, December, January of this year.

Yeah, totally. And I would say, yeah, the biggest win was successfully merging. I mean, we picked a very busy time of year to merge. I mean, we merged basically over the holiday season, over Christmas, and Then that goes right into tax season. And then we added a bunch of clients. And honestly, merging through accounting firms. Yeah, And Alex was out of country. We were both out of country for a week or two in December. And, you know, merging two accounting firms was much more logistically intense than we anticipated. But, I mean, honestly, we pushed through it. There was a lot of, you know, 1, 2, 3am Nights getting stuff all, you know, put together. So just getting to a place where now it's like everything is fully merged. We have systems and processes. We have a team now, and we're really slated, you know, for a good amount of growth, and we're in a place where we can handle a good amount of growth ethically and responsibly at this point as well, which is cool and fun.

Yeah, it makes it really fun. And I feel like what you guys have done a really good job with, too, is, like, cornering a market that is, like, money, Twitter, and working with guys that, like, you vibe with and could be friends with and could be, like, homies with. And that's kind of like the culture we've created at Client Ascension as well, is, like, we work with people that we'd also just be friends with if it weren't for Client Ascension. And I think you guys have done a great job of that as well, like, with a business model like, accounting. Like, I feel like it's very rare for, like, business owners to, like, be friends or to think their accountant is cool. It's very rare for. For me to talk to a business owner that's hyping up their accountant and talk. Talking about, like, not just how good they are at their craft, but also, like, how cool of a person they are and how fun they are to talk to, but you guys accomplish that. And, like, one of the things I think, Dylan, you did this way back, but. And it might have been with Eamon or someone else, but, like, when Eamon signed on for your services, like, you ship them a pair of, like, dunks, which is, like, no one would think to do that because it's such, like, a niche thing in pop culture with the people we work with and in our ecosystem. But, like, talk about what went into that and. And is that something you guys still continue to do or, like, how do you continue to attract the same types of clients that, you know, you thrive with and can really help?

Yeah. I mean, client Ascension, slash money, Twitter type of clients are definitely, you know, our favorite. And that is what's great about working with them. And they do become friends is you know, when you're friends with them and you have to hop on a call to go through accounting, if you were doing that with maybe a traditional accounting firm, that's a very dreadful call. Like, that's an energy draining call for most business owners to get on. But I think with us being a little bit younger ourselves and most of our clients being on the younger side of things, you know, those calls, even though they're accounting related, they end up being fun calls. They're not energy draining calls. And when the friendships and the relationships are actually there, you know, on our end too, we end up caring more about their business. We genuinely want to help them out because, you know, accounting and taxes is a very high stress subject matter for a lot of business owners out there. So just being able to provide that is awesome. And yeah, we do still send some physical gifts to new clients. Sometimes shoes, sometimes we got some shirts back there we'll send out. But the whole idea with that is like, dude, you have, you know, one chance to really wow someone in the onboarding. And when someone signs on for accounting services, like, they're just praying that you do the accounting correctly. Like, they just, you know, they're buying accounting services, they want the accounting and tax services done. So to hit them with something in the mail quickly after they sign with us, that really ends up putting us over the top and builds a lot of goodwill with those clients. And, you know, we found they're more likely to refer and they stay longer. And so it's definitely worth it to, you know, hit them with a nice gift because we do appreciate their business as well.

I love it, bro. We might have lost Alex, but it's all good. We could wrap up here in a couple of minutes. But yeah, a lot, a lot of good insights there is like how to keep attracting the same types of clients and making the work that is accounting, which most people dread and don't look forward to something that they do look forward to and actually enjoy and see the value. And so you guys have done a great job framing your services in that sense. And you're just really focusing on the experience you give your clients, which a lot of people address how important that is. One of my other questions for you, bro, is like, what is the day to day or even the week to week of running a partnership look like? Because when you're like a solopreneur, you're kind of just like head down, grinding on your own. You're not really having to like report to someone else or have someone else to Bounce ideas off of necessarily. So, like, what does that cadence look like between you and Alex? Are you guys like texting every day? Are you doing set meetings? Are you guys meeting up in person? Like, what does a healthy cadence look like for business partners? Sure.

It's a mixture of all of it. So we have a Slack channel that's just me and Alex, where we. That's where we talk most of the time. Oftentimes end of day, we'll kind of summarize, you know, what each of us did just in a sense to keep each other accountable and just show that, you know, we're actually working each day. We do have some set calls throughout the week. This is something we've recently been trying to optimize and work on is when you have a call with a partner. There is literally a million things that you could talk about on a call like that. And, you know, we've oftentimes had four or five, six hour calls, but we're working on having one call each week that is focused on in the business, you know, today, like operationally, and having one call a week that is on the business. More Bird's eye view strategy, business model, where are we trying to go type of calls. So that's helped a ton lately. Like the past couple of months, we were both super heavily focused on hiring, systems, operations, SOPs, that sort of stuff. Product, which we still are heavily focused on. But we got it to a place where, you know, as of late, I've been able to branch off a little bit and start focusing again more so on the lead gen, the sales, that sort of thing. And still some of the operations and hiring and whatnot. But that's been where I found a ton of value in Client ascension.

Specifically.

Like, you know, the core of what you guys do is cold email, teaching people how to cold email. But for me, I've gotten the most value out of the sales coaching. I mean, you know, between Drew and David and Orey and Dylan Rich, like that alone is worth paying for Client Ascension. And that's only like maybe a sixth of what you're getting. So that's where I've found a ton of value. And then also even just the connections with people like, okay, we need, you know, we need some op stuff. Here's Tony and Ryan. We need xyz. There's this person in here that you can go to that's a vetted, you know, expert. Kind of got off topic a little bit there at the end, but.

No, it's good, bro. It's good. This is a client ascension success interview. So it's good to tie back into the program and kind of the different ways that you guys are able to use it on a day to day. And that's really my last question is like to guys incline ascension? You know, we have accountants in there, we have marketing agency owners in there. Like, what would be your number one piece of advice going through the program? Because you were successful up until the event and then obviously partnered with Alex and now you're more successful. But like, it's not like it was just the partnership that made you successful in the program. And so what were some of the keys along the way, even before you partnered up with Alex that you would attribute to like getting the most value out of a program like client ascension? Sure.

So I played sports like my whole life and I played college sports and I tie a lot of how I think about business back to sports. So like the core theme of my college football journey was relentless effort. You know, craving the end result so badly that the work becomes irrelevant and taking that into business, it's just being willing to do what other people aren't willing to do and you know, implementing stuff with relentless effort and with speed. So when you come into a program like this, it's really easy to think that you know better, but it's like, you don't. These, you know, you guys run a multi multiple seven figure businesses. It's like, okay, if Daniel tells me to do something, I'm going to fucking do it. No question. I'm just going to do it. And I think most of the successful students that come through your program have that same attitude of, you know, if an, if an expert coach that is ahead of me suggests that I try something, I'm going to try it. I'm going to at least try doing it. So it's willing, it's being willing to relentlessly implement what you learn versus just consuming the content and doing nothing. And I think for your most successful students, that's probably a core theme. I know, I felt this way. It's like you get into the program, you consume a bunch of stuff, learn a bunch of stuff, and the successful people in your program, they'll disappear for a month or two, I think because they're relentlessly implementing all the stuff they learned. And then they come back and say, okay, now I'm here, I need to learn this versus just, you know, hanging out and pretending like you're actually getting better and implementing the stuff. So I think it's that, you know, relentless effort, the Ruthless implementation of what you're learning and being willing to do what's necessary and do what's required for months at a time without seeing results and having the faith that the results will come if you keep showing up every day and doing what you're supposed to.

I Love that, bro. 100%. Yeah. And what you said about the most successful students kind of ghosting for a couple of weeks is so true. It's because there's just so much to implement and at some point you get enough information to the point where it's just you need to go out and implement it for it to actually matter. And so, yeah, it's cool to, to hear that coming from a successful student. But anyways, Alex, perfect timing, bro. We're just about to wrap. My last question for you guys is where can the audience find you and follow you? And most importantly, learn more about working with you guys. Because like I said earlier and a little bit off camera as well, it's like accounting in the services that you guys provide are one of those things that of course, every single business owner needs and most business owners can't provide on their own. It's not like cold email where you can go out and learn it and do it yourself. You have to have the degree and the skill set and the background in accounting and what you guys do and like tax and research. And so I always recommend business owners and agency owners especially to work with guys like yourself. So if you could just shield more information on that and we can wrap there.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, accounting is the heartbeat of business. No matter what you do, there's always going to be a financial component to it in business. And kind of the thing that sets us apart for what we focus on is not so much just like, hey, here's a bookkeeper. It's actually way more than that. But bookkeeping really sets the foundation in the US if you're going to do your taxes and you're going to save a bunch of money on it, the books have to be right. The tax preparer is only going to be taking the books that you give them and punching those numbers in. So that's really, you know, the foundation where all the fun stuff starts to, starts to happen. And we really put a focus on really analyzing the business itself and what are the key drivers. Reverse engineering goals from a financial perspective, ultimately, to give owners, founders, CEOs more clarity on, on their business and their goals as they scale. So for us, you can go to our website, Stacks Pro, Dylan and I's Twitter I'm sure you probably like link that in the video below in the notes, but for the Twitter handles. But we're also on YouTube. Alex, scenario.

Sweet. Yeah, I appreciate you guys. For everyone listening again, highly recommend exactly what Alex was saying, like counting is the heart of your business. And having the numbers not only documented the right way, but also understanding the numbers and how to reverse engineer the key levers to driving more and more growth, knowing where to spend, how much you can spend, where to cut back, these are all so important and. And just help with the bigger decisions that you have along the way in business. So appreciate you both hopping on and. And sharing a little bit more about your story and your success in the program and with your partnership at the event and just pumped to continue following the journey. And I know also for people that are listening to this, that are inclined Ascension, both of you guys are collabing on some really educational, high level educational content on finances and business accounting that'll be made available to everyone in client Ascension. So really excited to get people's feedback on that as well. When it's in there.

Yeah, that'll be awesome.

It's a no brainer.

We'll see you at the next event. We'll see you in October.

Yeah. Bigger boat. Bigger boat, Bigger boat.

Let's go. Yeah. Yeah, we got.

All right. Appreciate you guys. This is awesome. All right, Andre.

Thanks, man.