GA 399 | Practicing Lean Accounting with Mike De Luca and Nick Katko

That's the hard part about lean accounting. We can explain what numbers you need to use, but getting others not in finance and accounting to use the numbers and sort of open up their ways of thinking is a challenge. It can be a challenge.

Today I'm excited to welcome Nick catco and Mike DeLuca to the show. Now, Nick and Mike are practitioners of Lean accounting. And now, full disclosure, sometimes when we hear the word accounting or lean accounting, we might think, oh, boy, this is not for me. But let me tell you, if you are practicing lean in an organization, and it doesn't have to be just manufacturing, we talk about health care and everything else in between in this episode. But I'm just telling you, this is one of those topics that if we don't get it right, everything else we do honestly is probably for naught. Because if our accounting functions and the way that we're running our company from a financial perspective isn't in harmony with the lean thinking practices that we're doing out on the shop floor, out on the Gemba, in a hospital, trying to improve flow and, and all the rest of it, all the things that we're doing, if we don't have harmony between these two functions, you're. You're in for a really, really hard time. In fact, I might even say it's going to be impossible to really succeed. Okay, so I feel like this is one of those episodes to where you've really owe it to yourself to listen to. And I got to tell you, Mike and Nick do a great job of kind of bringing life to this topic. And that's not always the case being honest with lean accounting. And they both did a great job sharing some stories and really bringing it down to earth. I am not what I would call an accounting expert. In fact, here at Gemba Academy, Kevin Meyer, my business partner, one of my business partners, he handles everything, God bless him. I'm so thankful for that. And he does such a great job because it's just not in my wheelhouse. And so sometimes I may be personally a little intimidated when it comes to all these accounting discussions, but they go. They both. Mike and Nick did a great job of just kind of bringing it down to earth and sharing some real life stories. Now, they've also written a book called Practicing Lean Accounting. We're going to talk about this later on in the episode, but there's some really good lean accounting books already out there. But what Mike and Nick do is they kind of explain what's a little bit unique about their book and why it's probably good for business owners, operational leaders, lean leaders, consultants, you know, even CPAs. You know, we should all be practicing lean accounting. And they, they, they chose the, the name of the book very intentionally so. Practicingleanaccounting.com is a website you can go to, and we're gonna put lots of links in today's show notes. So on your app there, if you probably scroll down, you can see all the show notes links or go to gembapodcast.com and this is episode 399 again, gembapodcast.com look for episode 399 for lots of. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Mike and Nick, welcome to the show. How are you guys doing?

Great. Thanks for having us.

Great. Thank you.

All right, all right. Hey, where are you guys calling in from?

I'm in Lexington, Kentucky.

Okay. And that was Nick.

Yep.

Mike, Seattle, Washington.

Mike, Seattle. And Nick, Kentucky. Are you a Kentucky Wildcat or what's the story over there, Nick?

Oh, well, I'm not a native of Kentucky. I actually grew up in New Jersey.

Oh, wow.

But came to school.

Okay, so like Rutgers or whatever.

Well, actually very, very, very close to Rutgers, but I came here to UK for school and stayed nice.

That's a beautiful part of the country. So Seattle. So Seattle, you know, as far as. Yeah, yeah. Lots of, lots of green, right? You got a lot of rain. So you got to deal with the rain, but you get the benefits of the, of a, of a beaut landscape there, so. Well, guys, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. I know we had to reschedule a couple times, so thanks for your patience. So won't we get started with. I believe, Mike, you might have a quote that you want to start us off with.

Yeah, you asked for a favorite quote. And I always go back to Eleanor Roosevelt's quote. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. And I think it applies in so many different aspects of life. But when we're trying to learn something new and different at work, in particular with lean thinking, you really have to stick with it. And so I always kind of come back to that one.

Nice. I like it. I like it. Hey, guys, tell us a little bit about your backgrounds and how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff. And then what you guys are up to these days. Maybe. Nick, you want to get started?

Yeah. I've been practicing lean accounting for probably close to 30 years. First as a CFO of a family owned manufacturing company that was outside of Lexington. And that's Where I learned about Lean. As we did a very successful Lean transformation, I put Lean Accounting in place. Then after that worked with Brian Maskell at BMA and he retired in 2018. And I've continued his business.

Got it, got it.

And Mike, for me it's been about 20 years with Lean and Lean Accounting. I started in the early 90s in a healthcare company, in a finance role. I was in that company for over 20 years. About halfway through my tenure, the company brought Lean thinking in. And so like Nick said, you know, we did the. We transformed everything in finance in support of the Lean company. And then I left the company about 20 in 2013, when along the way had met Gene Cunningham, another one of the Lean accounting leaders and early pioneers, and did a lot of collaborative work with her as a coach. And then through her and through the Lean Accounting summits, I met Nick. And then Nick and I have been collaborating as well last number of years. So I really appreciate that opportunity.

Good, good. All right, guys, let's just jump in. I want to kind of talk about why Lean accounting is important for any company. In particular a company trying to practice Lean. But I'm going to take one step before that even. Like, what is Lean accounting just for folks that might not be, you know, intimately familiar. Like, does that mean that accountants are doing 5s on their desk? Or is it accounting for, you know, the business? Or is it both? Right. Is there some confusion out there?

It is all of the above. I mean, no, really. So if you think about Lean, what an organization is doing when it's delivering a product or a service to its customers, is it saying, okay, well, the customer has to get something that is value added for them. It has to be high quality. It has to be delivered in a timely fashion, has to be at the right cost. So accounting produces a lot of products and services both within the company and for folks external to the company. And it's the same thing. Those products and services have to be high quality. But in order to do that, we have to be thinking about everything from 5s to process improvement to waste elimination. And so Lean accounting is really about both applying lean thinking to our processes, the day to day work that we do, but also really enhancing, transforming, adapting, translating the products and services we provide to the organization. So that might be something like a report, a forecast, a financial plan, or some other information to the company that it's using to make decisions to improve customer value. So that's really the way that Lean applies to accounting and finance.

Yeah, and I think Lean Accounting is very strategic in its nature. It's not just about the accounting people or the finance department. If you think about accounting as the primary supplier of information inside the business and also sort of the steward of the systems that create the information, you got to have the right information in the business to be able to perform the right analysis and make the right decisions as it is aligned with the lean strategy. So that's why lean accounting is important.

Okay, so why is lean accounting important specifically to a company trying to practice lean and then maybe contrast it with, I don't know, is it fair to say traditional cost accounting or something like that? Like what's the talk about that A little bit?

Yeah, you just said the code word additional cost accounting. So I'll just use that as an example. The easiest way without spending hours on this is that traditional cost accounting was designed for mass production manufacturing and it works well in mass production manufacturing. It provides the information that's needed to run that type of a business. But because lean thinking changes the way you operate, the traditional cost information does not provide is not quality information anymore. In fact, it can lead to lots of poor decisions. So how do you align the information with the way the company is operating? And that's what lean accounting does. Even if you're not in a traditional cost accounting environment, if you're, and I'll let Mike speak to health care, it's about aligning the information.

It's exactly the same story. We didn't have traditional cost accounting because we weren't assigning costs to products, products in process or in inventory. But we had traditional financial information that we provided to the organization and things like last month's budget, actual variance report or other types of allocated cost pls. But early on in my organization, I think the organization did a really good job of training all of the people managers in lean thinking so that we could apply it in our own areas. The operations folks early on came to me and my team and said, Mike, you provide all these reports and we've used them historically around the things that I just talked about, your budget, actual variance and other types of financial reports that usually come out a couple of weeks after the end of the month. They said, but what we're really trying to learn now in lean is how is it that what we're doing every day in our operational areas is actually influencing the financial outcome. So can you partner with us and help us us change the information that we're looking at? Because we really need to understand how what's going on in this hospital or what's going on in this clinic every day that the managers are trying to improve through lean thinking, how that's going to result in the financial outcomes. And so they really asked us to partner with them to change the information that we were providing. And in some ways, in some cases, that meant that we were helping the frontline managers actually come up with what are the numbers that go up on their daily, on their daily Lean visual boards that they're talking about with their staff every day. So that's the kind of transformation and like Nick said, whether it's manufacturing or another industry, there's a shift in thinking and a shift in the work that we do that really supports the lean strategy.

Wanted to add something similar story. It's sort of like aha moment where when I was CFO at Bullard and we hired people with lean experience and you know, we're doing the traditional cost accounting and I talked to them about helping me set rates.

What do you mean rates?

Standards and stuff like that. Okay. And they said, you know, you do what you want because we're not going to use that information. And they said, but here is what we're going to use and here's how we want you to help. And that was sort of like, okay, so this is something different. And it was learning. But connecting back to Mike's story, what's important is in both cases, the customer, our customers came to us and said, here's what we need. And we listen to our customers. It's no different than any other business that listens to their customers to provide quality products.

Now you're talking about your internal customers, right? Yeah, so, so, so here's a, here's not a softball question for you guys. What if your customer's wrong?

Oh, yeah, so good point. And it's, you know, listening to what your customers need. I think, you know, this is just my own perspective. What we're trying to learn from them as finance leaders is what's the problem you're trying to solve with the information? Not, not because they don't exactly, like you said, they don't always know exactly what they need in terms of. Here's the, here's the key indicator on the report. I think what they need, at least in my perspective, is our partnership in us understanding the problem they're trying to solve with the financial related information and then our expertise in coming up with the. Right. With the, with the best fit. With the best fit for that particular use or need.

In my experience, sometimes the internal customers know what they need and Sometimes they know what they don't need, meaning it's like, okay, we're getting this information, but we don't need it because we don't use it, we don't understand it, but they can't articulate what they need. So it's a combination.

Yeah. Sometimes I feel like we're all like, I'm not an accounting expert by any means. Like Kevin, my business partner, Kevin Meyer, he's like sort of our cfo if we had such a thing, again by Academy. And like, I'm just like, oh, okay, it blows my mind sometimes, all this stuff. But so I would consider myself sometimes unconsciously incompetent when it comes to things of finance. And I mean, I know enough to be dangerous, I suppose, but it can be very intimidating, Right. For people who aren't familiar with it. And so I feel like when we're intimidated and we're supposed to be this big operational leader, right. And I'm supposed to know things and then I don't even know what those terms mean on your, on your spreadsheets or whatever it might be, maybe a natural defense mechanism is to sort of shun it. Right. And so perhaps finding a way to bridge that gap. I love that. What problem are you trying to solve? Because in the end, that's what it's about. Right. Because in the end we all want to do a good job for our companies, hopefully. Right. And so finding that partnership and that, that harmony between the two functions, I feel like is the answer.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious to come back a little bit, Mike, to. In healthcare, if you were to contrast, you know, it's, I feel like it's easy maybe for a lot of people listening who are maybe more traditional manufacturing or whatever to kind of see, you know, lean accounting, like the way inventory is handled. Right. As an asset and cost accounting and can be very bad if you have too much inventory sitting over here, even though it's an asset. Right. But what about in like healthcare? Like, what's the traditional approach, non lean accounting approach to accounting in healthcare?

I'll give you a couple of examples of how some more traditional financial approaches in healthcare don't work as well for the lean organization. One of them is it's similar to cost allocation. We had in my organization a, a reasonably well thought through but somewhat complicated step down cost allocation process. So if I were looking at a cost report for a nursing unit or a primary care clinic, it would have what we would have called a fully allocated cost per patient day or cost per visit so that basically takes all of the direct expenses in that department and adds portions of overhead from all around the organization, assigns cost of the square footage. And so you get something that looks like $1,000 per patient day, I'm making up the number, right. And then the risk is in using that for decision making since that's a blended allocated cost per unit of service. If you think, okay, we're going to increase or do we expect to increase or decrease that volume, that patient demand is going to go up or down for whatever reason, what's the implication for our future financial planning? Or we're thinking about taking on some more business, how much is it going to cost? And I think that the risk is not understanding that the costs that are allocated and blended in that key indicator don't all behave the same way. So you might make a decision based on $1,000 per patient day in a hospital that is not in line with what would actually happen financially. Like I said, if you took on more business, if you opened up another nursing unit because you've got shell space and there's demand, what are the actual financial imp from a revenue and expense perspective? So that's one example and that's a shift that we needed to do, which is I think the non manufacturing analogy to unwinding standard costs is really unwinding how you're currently allocating overhead to your productive units of service or the services or products that you provide. I think the other example for us, which was it's probably pretty analogous in other industries, was our financial planning process, which was very traditional, became very, I don't know, had a significant conflict with the continuous improvement idea in lean thinking. And we were about two or three years into our lean, adopting lean thinking in my organization and the executive leadership team. And it was that time of year, August or so. Maybe a lot of people can relate to this. Oh, let's start the budget process, right. Everybody's all excited about that. We look forward to it. It's almost like Christmas, right? There's going to be, pray you get in your email and things to unwrap and then occasionally there are returns because the size isn't right. So there's a lot of back and forth. Anyway, I'm being silly, but everybody has their own emotional reaction to the budget process. But for us it was about a three or four month out of the year cycle where we developed budgets, we matched them up against anticipated revenue. And so it's a similar story. Went through a number of iterations to come up with a financial Plan for The next fixed 12 month calendar year that we thought was a reflection of what we expected to happen. And it went to our board, et cetera. What happens is folks say, all right, well in order for our costs and our revenue to match up so that we're generating enough margin to continue to invest in the business, because I was in a not for profit environment, but you still have to generate margin in order to invest in the business and support its growth and its stability. We would have to then say, okay, we need changes in the cost structure because the revenue is. There's a limitation to the amount of revenue that we can foresee based on projected demand. Okay, so again, similar story to a lot of organizations. What that means though is you have to think about changes that can go into place before January 1st in order to balance the budget. In a lean thinking organization, what you're doing is you're continually improving. So you might be partway through a value stream improvement that you expect to show returns over the next six to 18 months, but there's not a switch that's flipping on January 1st that's necessarily resulting in a different cost structure to balance your 12 month budget. So the executive team said wait, the whole timing of our financial planning cycle, which is causing us to make maybe shorter term reductions to cost which aren't necessarily aligned with our continuous improvement in, in our lean thinking, they don't match up anymore, so let's do something different. And so we moved to a more quarterly planning, rolling forecast approach that allowed us to really take into account all of the financial impacts anticipated and actual financial impacts of continuous improvement. But it got us out of that rigid 12 months. I got to make changes by January 1st and it's September and you're asking me to come up with something that I can implement in the next three months. So those are two ways that in that it really impacted our organization. And again, I think those are the idea of allocations and the idea of financial planning in some way are pretty universal across different industries and different sectors.

Yeah. When it comes to understanding costs in companies, any kind of cost allocation system creates this certainty linear relationships. These are the way the costs behave because you're using. And these cost allocation systems are baked into companies and even budgeting and planning. And so you get people start thinking a certain way. And if you stay in a company for any length of time, you're going to say this is the way everything works. Lean is about changing thinking. And part of lean accounting is how can we look at the true relationships between Lean operating performance and financial performance. Learn these relationships to control our costs and also grow the business. And that's the hard part about lien accounting. We can explain what numbers you need to use, but getting others not in finance and accounting to use the numbers and sort of open up their ways of thinking, it's a challenge. It can be a challenge and I.

Think part of it. Thinking operationally. From an operational perspective. One of the things that's really difficult thinking about, we mentioned visual management boards and so forth, forth earlier in the episode, you know, thinking about that relationship between leading indicators and lagging indicators. Lagging indicators are super easy to come up with.

Right.

And we can plot them and all the rest of it. But it's sort of as they say, trying to manage by your lagging indicators is like driving a car, looking in the rearview mirror. Right. Like you're going to crash into something. And so having a partnership with your accounting professionals to help identify those leading indicators, you know, that help us drive the car.

Right.

Because without the really good leading indicators we're blind. Right. And so I feel like I'm curious to hear from your guys perspective on a lean accounting, that relationship between leading and lagging indicators.

Yeah. And you know, there's a mixture of them when it comes to measuring performance. The. Well the great thing about lean performance measures is most of them are leading type indicators and it's important for accounting and finance to learn what they mean. That was something that I learned when it was putting performance measures into place. These things work because if you want to change financial performance, operating performance must change. It's as simple as that. It doesn't matter what business it is. But we can't do it top down. We can't say reduce your costs by 5% or we can't just throw a budget out there and say meet the budget without having the indicators in terms of operations and they have to be lean focused on measures. And it's pretty basic, you know, you measure, you know, SQDC boards for example, you know, on a daily basis looking at productivity, things like that. And so once the lean performance measures are understood throughout the company, then it's easy to start forming those relationships. And I think, you know, one of the, the aspects of lean accounting is for accounting to embrace the lean performance measures and also be able to talk both financially and talk through the performance measures and also talk financially, be able to do the translation. That's really important.

Yep, yep. Hey, so I wanted to ask about this earlier but we have such a good conversation but I want to for sure focus a little bit. You guys have written a book and you've titled it Practicing Lean Accounting. So I'm curious, what's with that title? Nick, tell us a little bit about. Why did you guys title it Practicing Lean Accounting?

Well, we started first with another idea on a book, and it was going to be like a Lean Accounting travel guide. And we actually started writing a little bit, but it got a little too deep. And I remember listening to Mark Rabin speak at a Lean Accounting summit about five or six years ago, and he wrote a book called Practicing Lean, and that was what his talk was about. And it sort of just jogged my memory. And I started thinking, hold on. Lean accounting is thought of in terms of numbers and do this and do that, but if you think of it in terms of practices, well, you always have to practice. And so that's sort of where we came up with that name. And also sort of the whole layout of the book in terms of if you learn what to do, you learn the practices and you just keep practicing, it's not going to end.

Right. And that's for me, early on when I was learning lean as a finance leader in my organization, like I said, I think the company did a really good job of teaching all of us as leaders what Lean practices were. And so I took it for granted almost. This was the way that I needed to do my work every day. It was really changing the way that I was going through my entire workday. It wasn't a project. Right. It was a daily practice. And so I think it surprised me when I left my organization, started coaching other companies that a lot of companies approach lean as, oh, we're going to do that Lean project now, and then we're going to go back to business as usual. And then until it's time to do another Lean project. And I think Nick's and my opportunity to really emphasize this idea of this is a continuous practice, not a project when you get around to it, but actually the way that you do and think about the work that felt really important to emphasize.

Yeah, yeah, we broke the book down. We have like four basic foundational practices. Understand value, identify, waste, measure, measure, and use pdca. And, you know, so those are things that have to occur. And then you take those four basic practices and you improve your accounting processes, and then you improve your financial management practices in the business.

Why did you guys write it? So there's some good lean counting books out there already. You know, genes, real numbers, you know, and it's kind of a classic and all the rest. So what's new with your book? What value are you bringing that wasn't out there already?

That was daunting, I have to say, for me, because I was a consumer of all of those other books and real numbers came out, I think, right about the time that we started our main journey in my organization. So that in a lot of ways was our blueprint. And then of course, Nick, you've got your first book and we have Jerry's books and there's Brian Maskell's. So for me was a little bit daunting to say, what do we have to contribute that is really additive? And I think for me in particular, when Nick came to this framing of the whole book as this is really a practice guide. It's to help folks really develop and sustain and continue to build on a practice of lean accounting, lean financial and leadership, that it felt like, okay, you know, even if there is some overlap between the content, it's the, it's the framing of it as a set of practices and a practice guide that we really hope that folks will find. That will find uniquely useful.

Yeah, yeah. I think you could, you could probably read Practicing Lean Accounting and then take any of those other books and look at them and you can, could. You know, some of the things we. The way we were talking about it is a little bit different than the way others talk about it. And it was just a matter of, you know, we wanted to get companies and also accounting and finance people to get beyond. This is something that we just do. That was one of the keys. And like Mike said, you know, you don't stop doing it.

Right.

And so when you start using the word practice and you look the definition of word practice up and we use some analogies even about playing a sport or playing a musical instrument or something, if you want to get good at it, you have to practice deliberately.

Practice.

Yeah. Deliberately, absolutely. And here's just one really quick example. I think other books have done a really fine job of describing the importance of and methods to improve the month end close process, the financial close process, I think. And we also describe in how those foundational practices of value waste measurement and continuous improvement apply to month end close. I think what we tried to do to add to that was to really say what are the daily practices that sustain the improvements in month end close? Once the team has done that, once the team has looked at ours or someone else's approach to improving month end, what is the sustaining daily practice of lean management that says this is still working well and when it's appropriate, we're identifying additional opportunities to improve. And so that's where we really tried to take these foundational practices. In particular emphasizing daily management as part of preparing for an improvement, learning about the current condition and then sustaining and building on that improvement once you've done it. So again that gets us out of the project Y feeling of lean. Let's do a project to improve month end close and gets us into the. We're continually, we're using lean as our daily management of month end close. And it's always, and it's consistent, constantly getting better.

I got a tactical question for you guys and this is for my business partner Kevin. Okay. So Kevin and his team, they've, they relentlessly attacked Gemba Academy's closing month end closing process. And it's a month. They report on it every week. And I mean we, every day, our morning meetings, different functions, you know, take a day and they really dive deep into their function and so they've gotten it down dramatically. However, at this point now the gating function for this them is the dang bank waiting on like statements from the bank. Like so how do, what do you do there? You know, like we, you know, we can't make our bank go faster necessarily. Right. So what's your advice for Kevin? Because he needs to speed it up man. He doesn't really, it's already great. But I'm curious like in that perspective, what do you do?

Okay, so I'm not sure what that, what the tactical answer is, but you're waiting on statements for from the bank and yet you've got real time information available online. So what is it? I'm just curious. I would be curious. And we don't need to obviously answer it now, but what's, what's on the statement that's not available?

That's a great question. I don't know, I shouldn't even, I shouldn't even open my mouth because I know like, I just know that he's like every time he says ah, we did, we, we, we've basically rung the water out of the sponge, you know, and, and so I want to have a follow up conversation. We'll bring Kevin on and you guys can, you can coach him them up. But they've done a great job practicing like quick changeover kind of techniques. Right. You know, on, on the way they're, they're closing. So it's, it's been really fun to see, see us try to you know, applying it to, to our, our financial practices. And it's pretty tricky for us. You know, we've got all these, you know, subscriptions and all over the world and different laws and this and that and the Europe, you got to do it this way in America, do it this way and, and it's pretty complicated. But yeah, they've done a great job. So, hey, last question that I have for you guys is there's someone listening to this right now and they're intrigued. And I mean, they've made it this far, so they're genuinely intrigued in this topic. What are some practical tips or advice that you can give them for getting started? Obviously, go buy your book. Okay, I'll say that. But other than that, like, are there some, some, some practical things that you could, you could offer that, that individual as they get started on their lien accounting journey?

Yeah, I, I think the first thing is to have a, a discussion inside the company. And typically I would say it's between executives, owners, leaders, financial leaders and operational leaders. What is lien accounting? There needs to be at consensus what isn't lien accounting and how does it fit into our overall lean strategy and sort of just talk at it at a high level, don't get into the weeds about what do we have to do yet? And then from there, or Mike said, what problems are we trying to solve? What are the gaps? Understand, educate, understand where you are. Create a plan to get started. Much like a lean pilot. If you want to become a lean company, you don't just open up the doors of the business one day and you're lean. You start small, you pilot lean practices, you teach and then you demonstrate and then you expand. And lean accounting works the same way way whether you're doing it in accounting or whether you're doing it on the information side. And you have to really structure the beginning and train and educate people and then gradually expand it. But you got to have a plan. It has to be part of the overall lean strategy.

I think that what Nick said around level setting about what lien accounting is and isn't is important to start because folks may have a misconception that we're going to now create a second set of books. We're going to risk not being in compliance with external reporting requirements. And actually what we're going to do is we're going to simplify, make those easy to do compliantly and also then based on the same core financial transactional information, create information within the business that's going to be more useful. So it's not a second set of books. We are not at all challenging compliance with external reports requirements. We're actually ensuring quality first compliance with those requirements, but with minimal waste. So the first thing is level setting on what it is and what it isn't so that we can identify and then address any of those misconceptions. And then, like Nick said, when what's the problem we're trying to solve? When folks first came to me, they said, hey, Mike, we need a different engagement with our operational departments. And like many lean leaders, my response was, yeah, I really want to do that. We don't have any capacity. So the problem for us to solve was twofold. It was creating capacity while at the same time learning about how lien accounting needed to support operations. So we had to do two things at the same time. And like Nick said, we took a pilot approach. I dedicated. You know, I had 30 people reporting up to me. I took three of those folks and I said, I'm redeploying you. And while you're working with this operational area to figure out what it is they need, I'm going to work with the other 27 folks and figure out how we can create some capacity. So. So I think that's really the way to get started.

Love it. Guys, this has been fun. We just talked about Lean accounting for like 38 minutes and it was awesome. I loved it. So thank you. You know, we were joking ahead of time before we hit record that sometimes lean is boring to talk about. So stories and whatnot and making it real. And you guys did a really, really great job of that. So thank you for that. To wrap things up, why don't you guys both take a turn and tell folks how they can connect with you over whatever the interwebs. And then one more time about your book and how folks can get their hands on that.

Well, the BMA website is www.maskell m a s k e l l dot com. Ryan created that website many, many years ago, and it works quite well in terms of guiding people. So visit the website. There's lots of free stuff. There's case study videos of companies that have been involved in the lean accounting transformation. There's blogs, there's ways to sign up for webinars and courses and things like that. And a lot of it's free now.

What about you, Nick? Are you on LinkedIn or anything like that or.

Oh, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, all that stuff.

You got a Snapchat, Nick? Be honest. Be honest. You got a Snapchat?

Snapchat. TikTok. That's a little beyond me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although that dang TikTok, I don't have an account, but my daughters, you know, my teenage daughters do. And they'll send it like a little funny video once in a while and I'll click on it. I'm like. And next thing you know, it's like five minutes later. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I gotta get off. TikTok pulls you in, man. They got it dialed in. I tell you, the addiction is real. What about you, Mike?

I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. I've got information out there on Nick's website, like he said. Also, in addition to the fact that you can go to www.maskell.com, you can actually go to www.practicingleanaccounting.com and it sends you to the book page on that website. But yeah, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn and contact there.

Lei, Mike.

Yes. And then I also work with the Lean Enterprise Institute and put out a periodic Lean Accounting newsletter through that. So if you go to. And Lei's got a brand new, really nicely redone, reimagined website and you can look under practice areas and find Lean Accounting and sign up to get that as well. So I would suggest folks get on on both the BMA mailing list because like Nick said, there are a lot of great resources on there. You know, once a month we host a free discussion session for folks to just participate and bring their questions about and what they're doing with Lean Accounting and then have conversation with us and with each other. And then also get on the Lei mailing list for the Lean Accounting newsletter for other case studies and information, information about learning opportunities.

So that's a lot. So what we're gonna do, everybody, we're gonna put it all in the show notes. We're gonna link it all up. I got homework for you guys. You send me all those links and this is going to be. This is episode 399, one away from 400. And so go, go, folks. Go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 399 and then. Or just scroll down on your little app, whatever. All the links will be there more than likely in the show notes here for this episode. So, guys, thanks again for coming on. It's been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. And hey, man, let's do it again. I'm sure I'm gonna bring Kevin back on and you guys are gonna coach him up on improving Gemba Academy's accounting function.

Okay, thanks very much, Ron. Really appreciate it.

All right, take care guys.

Bye.

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