My Biggest Business Regret

Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhardt.

Hello everybody, welcome back to the podcast. We're so glad that you're here today. And Lynda and Sarah, how are you?

Good. Hey, I know we're— by the time this lands will be after tax day, but It's tomorrow for us. It's the first one before the extension ones roll out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's been the race, the race up to tax time.

Yeah, I feel like today is the first day that I actually feel like, probably because of working all the weekends, I always feel good on Monday because I get a lot done, but I don't want to work weekends. So, but I do feel like organized, like I don't have 8,000 sticky notes on my desk right now, which is my method of taking care of don't forget, like, oh, I got to remember.

And I have all these sticky notes and I try to reorganize them every day to kind of put them logically in my head.

And yeah, my sticky notes down to one note. Got a lot on it, but it's got one note. Look at you. That's way better. And I don't have papers all over my desk. So yeah, it's good. I'm feeling better.

Sarah, how about you?

It is what it is. You know, I—

It is what it is. That's not a good sign.

I know. I mean, I've been pushing so hard, so I'm really close as well, like Lynda, because we're multifaceted, both her and I, both, um, with multiple firm entities. Um, but in the same token, you know, like, I'm just kind of like, this is season whatever for me. I've done this so many times. It is what it is. Like, the sky is not falling, right?

Like— But I'm tired of it. And I keep saying, it's gonna be a better way, gonna be a better way. And every year we fall into the same thing, and it's always different. Even if you try to prepare, it always seems like Just gotta be—

I think the difference is that there's more that are onboarded that need 24 cleanup and are like literally like, oh, okay, are you, are you gonna do this? I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you just signed like middle of this day.

The ink's not dry.

Yeah, that's not happening.

Today's subject is, is my biggest business regret. And this is a great segue into it because now folks, this is not about entry-level, what's my biggest regret? Oh, I forgot to, you know, put this spreadsheet or whatever. This is, this is a more generalized conversation that can appeal to so many people. What's your biggest regret in, in, uh, in your business or in past businesses in your life? And, and what has that meant to you? You know, think about that.

That's how I prepared. I can remember when I was by myself solo and I used to mark on my calendar the day I felt like— like today, I feel like I can breathe and things are kind of organized. I used to mark that on the calendar. I haven't done that in years. It's kind of funny because I just like to know the date because every January I think, oh, I've got everything under control. And then all of a sudden, the you know what hits the fan and I'm like, I just feel like it's crazy time. And yeah, it's kind of funny. I haven't done that in a while. I wonder if I can dig it up.

What do you mark on your calendar out of curiosity?

Just make a like day of relief or something. I just write some notes saying this is the day of relief where I feel like I've got it all managed because The last few months, I feel like somebody threw all the jacks up in the air and I'm trying to run around and catch them all. And it— I always feel like I'm, A, forgetting something or dropping the ball, not doing something. Or you wake up in the middle of the night like, oh, I remember this, I remember that. And then you're not sleeping, that kind of thing where it's not your regular steady pace. And I feel like we're changing things at our firm again this year. So I think that I feel like that might be helping kind of get things under control, like that will help Feels more organized.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it'll facilitate better workflow for us going forward, but right now it's in process.

You know, and I like that, Lynda, that you do that with the calendar. I have a really close friend, her name is Alicia. So Alicia, I'm calling you out here if you listen to this podcast. She is a CPA and we've been friends forever, like for 3 decades now. And every April 15th, that night she calls me and she's like, I'm done. We're going to dinner. And we go out and have a celebration dinner like in the next week or so just to be—

How many—

April 15th.

Tax people, April 16th, they go on vacation. So you can't even get them if you have a question on something 'cause they're all gone. They've gone somewhere on vacation.

Yeah, I, you know, it's interesting that you all say that. I feel like when you look at not so much regrets, What would I do it— how would I do it differently, or how would I improve upon it?

Or what did I learn from that?

What did I learn from that? Um, but it's human behavior, some of it. And I oftentimes, what I feel, and I, I personally, I mean, I'll just speak for my own, is when I get into a file and I'm working, working, working, and then I have to stop because I have to ask you 20 million questions, then I got to go on to something else, getting back in the mindset of working in your file, if you're not on a regular basis is really, really challenging. So when I'm looking at a question of, well, do you have everything you need? That's like a loaded gun question to me. Like, I'm sorry, do I have everything I need? I mean, what have you not told me as a customer? To what Lynda mentioned earlier and Steve, it's kind of like what you're saying is sort of that path of what could you do next? What could you do better? How could you improve upon your skillset? And it's hard. Every year is hard. I mean, it doesn't matter how many years you've been doing this. You can say you've seen it all, but you haven't.

No, we did that one time, remember? And then something came and I'm like, oh, that blew that theory out of the water. We were like, we've seen it all. This is like the worst. And then the next time you go around, something's worse. So. But people are people.

Things change, right?

You were very excited about this topic. So what is your biggest business regret?

I wrote it down because I really, I really thought about this because I've, I've I grew up in an entrepreneur family.

Oh yeah.

You know, lots of relatives having their own businesses. And you know what my very first job was? I was 9 years old. We lived in a little town up in the mountains of Colorado, and there was a company called the Cheerful Greeting Card Company. And I found it in the back of a comic book, and I saved my money, and I bought the little suitcase with the greeting cards, and I went around town and sold those. And that was my first business.

How cute is that? I bet you had, do you have any pictures? That would be so cute. I can picture you in a little business suit walking around ringing doorbells going, "Hi." In this little town of 3,000 people, and I made tons of money doing that.

And I was like, this is, I mean, I loved it. And you know, I owned a day spa, an Aveda day spa that was very successful. And in fact, yesterday, you know, I was telling you the show that I went to and a good friend of mine who was in the same business, she and I were reflecting. It's kind of funny we have this subject today. We were reflecting on the day spas that we owned and what we learned and what were the pitfalls and all that sort of stuff. And you know, business is business no matter what you do.

Yeah.

And it's about people. So the notes that I made to answer your question, Lynda, was that whenever the temptation that comes up of wondering what I could have done better or what the regret, what I regret about in a business comes to mind, it causes me to stop and reflect on where I am now and accepting that where I am now is a result of all of those regretful situations. And more importantly, the successes that became the final solution for all of those businesses. Because when you're in a business, it's like a child.

Mm-hmm.

And you grow that child and then eventually it graduates and you don't become stale. That's my experience. I've been blessed and been in some really cool jobs. Sarah, you and I have talked about that a lot.

Mm-hmm.

You know, we both worked in the hotel business for a couple decades, and that was such a rewarding experience.

Yeah.

But, you know, I reached a point with it where I was like, okay, what's next? I didn't, I didn't get into that rut of I'm going to work for the same company for 40 years, get my gold watch, and retire. I've done a whole variety of things, and I think that I just, I'm really grateful and love that. So what do I regret? Hard to say. I think in, in the accounting world, we were talking about this before we started up the podcast today, and that was not documenting the SOPs.

Yeah, we all regret that. Or using something written down, because when you start out, you just put in your head, and then you maybe move to a spreadsheet, which is—

Right.

We did that, and then you found— was it Asana? Is that how you say it? I always say it like the yoga.

I think that's what it's called. Yeah. Yeah.

And then you went there because it was free and it didn't cost you anything and you try to set something up, especially if you hired like your first employee and yeah.

And then you go through all the little softwares and what works and what doesn't and you know.

And then you don't document everything like you should. There's no SOPs in there and, and then somebody leaves you and then you're stuck and you have to jump in and you don't even know what's going on in your own file because the person's been doing it for so many years and then now you're faced with Why do they do it this way?

You know, we didn't have— if you think about it, it wasn't that long ago, we didn't have stuff for accountants per se. It was always the bigger platforms that were attached to tax. There was never really anything, so we were all kind of left our own devices. And then as people matured into it, there's a lot of workflow products that have been built. But you know, when you're starting out, you can't afford everything. So how do you document? What's the best way? And And now I think because we've all seen it, you've— we've lived through a space where, you know, that you had the remote workers, then you have going back to the office, and there's been a lot of documentation, there's been a big swing in employment. And I do feel like what I have seen when I sort of was curious, like what I see in social media and LinkedIn and those things, is I often see people post about that some of theirs was either they didn't sell it fast enough or soon enough, or they didn't invest in their culture. It was like some of the layers of things that I've seen on business people that talk about, which is a sensitive topic to say regrets because not everyone likes to say that they have regrets.

It's like—

You learn from them.

You learn from them.

We learn from them by not having those things. We learn that we should do those things. And I think too, like, if you go all the way back in, Tiara, kind of like, I know what you're going to say when we talk about this. You're going to say that you didn't charge for a file review. For many years, which is absolutely true. I didn't charge for it. I never set goals. The goals might have been up here, but I never actually— like, I think the first time I set a goal, Sarah, was with you in Texas when we were like secretly writing it down in a group. And then we both shared it. We had the same exact goal, which was kind of ironic because we were starting in our business then. And then, by the way, we beat it. Yeah, we did. We just keep setting the bar up. But, and then doing a budget. Like, nobody wants to do a budget. That just— the word budget kind of—

It's an ugly word.

It's a bad word, right? So, but if you did a budget, you'd probably be able to— I mean, we go through our stuff, but I don't think I ever formulated— it seems like a lot of work. And maybe going forward in the future with AI, it won't be. But, um, because you can see stuff starting to happen inside QuickBooks files. Like, I, I did a record— I recorded a client payment for one of my clients this weekend, and I saw that it said this client typically pays over 90 days when they make a payment. When I was in there making an invoice for something she forgot to make an invoice for and she had recorded a payment. And I'm like, oh, I've never seen that before.

Mm-hmm.

But that's in there because it's analyzing the, the data set that's there and telling you on average this client pays in 90+ days, maybe giving you the hint that maybe you should turn on the credit card feature or have a conversation with them before you do the work. And I thought that was interesting. If you're gonna see more of that kind of stuff when it comes to the AI and analyzing everything that's in there. And maybe it'll come out to be a budget and it will make suggestions on where you need to do things to improve.

They've had this tool in a lot of products. I mean, Intuit purchased Credit Karma, but—

And the budget is in there in the forecasting here.

Well, they've had like Mint and those, and those, to your point, Lynda, I mean, I think that it's now, it's like a race to display data is what I feel like. It's a race to, I mean, if you think about it, the banking apps, have had it in a certain subset. Yeah, they're not that good though. Yeah, but it's not great.

They should be better than what they are now.

Yeah, they should be, but I mean, I totally agree. It's interesting though that you're talking about this and I do think about it in the sense of how we've grown through it and our adoption to it. I think that's the hardest part right now is not so much a regret, it's like how do you grow into this as an established firm to make sure that you're, protecting information, building out processes that are very well written and documented to support and build a culture that can enjoy what they're doing versus feel stagnant or bored. And we're in a day and age where everything is just like flying at you. It's changing all the time.

If you think about big business regrets, I could go down to the fact that I had this one client that it was a big business regret that I learned big time from it. Was a client that I had that I didn't engage with the client. I engaged with the office manager, who then all of a sudden it became a problem.

Oh, yeah.

When it came time to get paid, that they said, forget it, I'm not paying. I didn't authorize her to do all that. But that one business decision that I made working directly with this girl and not going to the right channel led me to have a meltdown. And then because he threatened to sue me, and then it made me meet Sarah at a different level, which then led to all these things. So how bad of a regret was that? It probably was actually a good karma thing that happened off bad situation. I learned a lesson and I get to meet Sarah and do this work together.

So we're the sum of all of those regrets. That's just part of the path that brought you to where you're at. You really— we really are. I mean, regrets are part of it. You have to feel some pain sometimes. Yeah.

You know, well, I don't know if, uh, you feel this way, Lynda, but I do. Sometimes it's like, I just want to— I know the journey is hard, but I just want to experience the journey and not live in the past or the future of it. I just want to be in the present of it sometimes. Not for any reason other than we're doing this together. I mean, it is a beautiful thing when you can work with someone, roll up your sleeves, and not say too much, but know exactly where to land and what to do. You know what I mean?

I think that might be rare, though.

It's rare.

Let me ask this question. Let's talk about contract workers and employees and that sort of arena. We all have regrets from time to time with decisions we've made or ways we've had to handle things on the fly when, you know, the fire's turned up and we're in the heat of the moment and trying to respond to a client and those sort of things. How have you handled those sort of regrets when you make a certain decision and then you're like, "Uh-oh, this really isn't the decision I should have made," but you are the leader and you still want to support the employee and you want to take them a different direction? Do you know what I'm asking here? You know, how do you handle those? Because we've all had those regrets from time to time. Yeah. With an employee or even a customer, a client.

I had that with a subcontractor. First real hire that I had that was not outsourced. It was just— well, she was outsourced, but it was by herself, a direct hire. And then she ended up starting her own business. But I was in deeply working into the files myself. So I started seeing the decline in the work, realized that she'd started her own business, same kind of business, and she was very focused on her own and not my stuff. And I was secondary in that I had to let her go. So, but again, another learning experience, you know, then I ended up moving to outsourcing a lot of the work. And then you can go down to the regret on that too, right? How you have to kind of pivot and maneuver. It's part of doing business. It's being a business.

And you get into the woulda, coulda, shouldas in those sort of environments.

Yeah, I don't— it's like It's like resolutions. I'm not big in those. I'm not big. Honestly, life is— it is too short to have to sit here and have regrets in that regard. Honestly, it's an experience. It's a learning process, and I honestly truly think that it's how internally I want to feel about my process or my decision. You know, it's— I don't need— I think maybe it's just rare for me. I'm not really— when I need the extra support, it's not validation of my fear so much. It's validation of, is this— am I thinking about this clearly? Am I being practical and not emotional about this?

Um, oh, that's really good.

Yeah, pretty much make up my mind on things like this. Lynda knows this, but I also have to allow myself, okay, give, give a minute, rethink it. Don't shoot from the hip. Don't fire off too quickly. I don't want to be unpractical about my process in the, in how I engage. I do feel that we're in a day and age though right now where we are always on demand, always on cue, always on boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You should know this. Why don't you know this kind of thing? And to be fair, I'm more and more saying, you know, I really have to think about I'm not really interested in making that decision right now. I feel like that's, that's probably one of the things that you will hear more frequently from an established owner is giving yourself the time to breathe and think it through versus the reactionary.

Very well put. Yeah, sometimes it's okay to say, hey, you know what, I'm gonna have to get back to you on this one. I've really got to think it through. But it's also appropriate to avoid those sort of conflicts that you'll regret later, to say, what would you do? You've brought me this situation. What do you think? What, what's your— what's your—

Oh, Steve, I—

everyone's—

I don't know. I'd like to have them involved. Yeah, it is, it is.

It's so different and so uniquely the moment that it occurs. So how I would respond would be completely different than yourself and probably different than Lynda. But then we— the benefit to us is that she and I have each other to— to—

Right.

Just have a conversation, or we heard something. We're in the same meeting. We literally heard it differently. And then we're talking like, oh, okay. No, I didn't.

That's not how I heard it, but that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Sometimes just the matter of having Sarah come into a meeting with me, and if we're doing something with a client, we're doing something with a client, she reads the email and I'm thinking it's one thing, and she'll go, no, no, no, that's not what they mean there. And I'm like, really? Because I can't figure out what the heck they mean. And then she'll read it in a different way, and I'll be like, oh, you guys are good at that together. I don't know how you figured that out, but okay. But it's different too when you talk about being reactionary. I think sometimes in the beginning of a business journey, we take any client we can get. Do they breathe? Okay, they're my client. I mean, there's a whole different experience, which is part of the learning process, that when you're first starting out, it's different than where we're established. And we've been around a long time, and we have elevated ourselves to a status, all 3 of us. Where it's different than if I remember how I was when I was first, first in business. I took everybody, good and bad. It didn't matter. I had to pay my Blue Cross and my paycheck. So I took who I had, and then you kind of weed them out. I don't know if that's a great business decision, but it's born out of a reason, right? You have a reason for it. So I think for that, you got to look at where you're at in your career too when it comes to that kind of stuff.

Well, you don't know what you don't know too. How are you going to know unless you experience it? How are you going to stand how to make a decision differently.

And it'd be great to be able to step back and take the time to think about it. If you are off, if you, if you are listening to this podcast to hear some advice, that's a good piece of advice. Find a mentor. That's another advice. You know, I did a lot of mentoring when I was, I was a QB Community Live group admin. That was one of the things we did. That's how a couple of people that I know pretty well Rasana being one that, you know, I met her through that process. She was just starting her business and met with her every week. We filmed it so it could benefit everybody. And I think that if you can find a mentor, you don't have to do it outwardly like that on a, on a group setting. You could do it privately with somebody. Even if you— we've had it happen in the Law Lab. People meet up and they're like, hey, I'll take this offline with you. I got some questions. And they're getting that mentorship, which I think is a great thing that— because there's so much— that's the benefit of the meeting every Friday too. Everybody comes from different angles and we all share share our experience with X, Y, and Z. And then it's like, oh wow, I never thought of it from that way. And that's the benefit of being in these groups or having a direct mentor that can help you. And we've had mentors our whole— my whole business career. I mean, my husband was one of my mentors when I first started off. I still ask him for advice to this day on things because he was in business a long time. So that can be a mentorship too. I mean, there's lots of places to find them. For sure.

I think on the Law Lab that you brought up, Friday was pretty impactful.

That was such a good Law Lab.

That was a good one.

Just ask me anything week. It was nothing special, but yeah, it was really good because of the things we dove into.

Yeah. I mean, it was really honoring how do you grow a firm, what's the idea of a firm, what do you want it to be, do you want to grow, are you okay with where you're at, hiring practices. I think as individuals in that group and the support with each other around that was really nice to hear, like you said, the different voices to it and the confirmation of thought process, too. We've had a few privately. Lynda and I have felt like, oh, we don't like this idea. And then somebody's like, oh, yeah, this happened to me. Same idea, same moment. Right. And so it was nice to see, Steve, that you actually—

You went back and watched the replay.

Watched it. I never miss a Law Lab.

You know me for that. And I had to miss on Friday, but Saturday morning I got my coffee cup and I'm like, I'm going to watch the recording. And then I sent you guys a message. I'm like, oh my God, I missed it. And look what— how powerful this was. It was amazing.

Good one.

Just amazing. And there were, you know, there was our subject we're talking about today. There were some regrets in there. People were exposing those and realizing they had, like you said, Sarah, the same challenges. That happened to me too. What did you do? And, you know, That's what's— I just love that.

It was like not hiring fast enough or not firing fast enough, not exploring things. Like, I mean, there were some— without divulging too much, there were some things in there that I was like, wow, I would not take well to that. However, the person handled it really well. I was very impressed with how she navigated that. I wouldn't even thought to ask, right? So fire in my eyes, I'm done. I'm, you know what I mean? Yeah.

I mean, if you have— I think somebody brought up like they had a key employee that they had for a while that they groomed up and that person went on in a good space. They were happy for it, but they were like, I'm missing this one person. But then they went through the process of how they found somebody else and we had to learn about that one. It was really— I love how everybody shares there. That's amazing. And the fact that, you know, we are all in the same kind of bucket and then you'll have somebody randomly like in the chat go, how do I get more law firm clients? And they'll go into another conversation about that. So it kind of that week always directs into different directions. And that one was for sure a lot about business, which was really cool.

I think we all crave it as far as the conversation goes. You see a lot of it right now. It's hard to navigate right now to understand with the noise of everything that's going on, where is the economy going to be? What is going to happen? It's hard to navigate. And there's probably a lot more concerns with business owners in general, regardless of the fact that we serve this niche.

Yeah, you're in a pretty good niche, though, for that. That's one of my checkboxes. Checked off when I picked law firms. I was like, contractor, uh, no, law firm. Because it was, uh, I knew the ups and downs. I've had many contractor clients and I knew the ups and downs of it and it was, it's difficult.

Well, you, when you grow up in it too, like in the sense of like your professional career, which you and I very much had a lot of that too.

And I still love my legacy clients. I mean, I'm getting to know them at a different level again because I always had a team working on it. I'm doing a lot of that myself and changing processes and Putting in my SOPs much better. The old clients that never had really an SOP, and I'm going through to see what was done in the past and how can I fix it and make it better. And why was it done this way? This makes no sense to me. And I'm going in and fixing it. But it's nice because I'm having a little interaction with them that I haven't had probably in 5 years. Like, other than at tax time, I really wasn't having a lot of conversations with them. So it's been—

Yeah.

It's been kind of nice to be back talking to them. I think they appreciate it too.

Yeah. Well, Steve, you, you, I know that you liked this topic and I think the way you talked about it in your, in your recap earlier, I do feel like honoring where you are and as a business owner and—

We're not, we're not perfect. We're all human beings. So, you know, feel your regrets, but move on, learn from them and embrace them. And they brought you where you are.

Yeah.

It's a big part of being an entrepreneur too. Don't you think that you have to be okay with that up and down of life and it's on on you on everything.

Know that that's like—

So sometimes, yeah, sometimes, yeah. But sometimes it's like when you get them all looking at you going, what do we do next? And it's like, ah, I'm the captain of the ship, I gotta drive it. So yeah, that's part of being— you gotta love that if you're gonna be an entrepreneur. If not, don't, don't do it. Stay worker bee, it's okay too.

That's okay too. I mean, truthfully, it's okay to be—

We need worker bees.

Yeah, it's— oh, I mean, I, I Interesting enough, we're having kind of a very similar conversation where somebody wants to be the worker bee, doesn't want to own the business anymore. And it simply sounds from the outside, they just purely don't want the liability and all the, the decision-making pro— they just want to be part of someone else's decision-making process. That is great. You can identify that it isn't for everyone. There was that time where it was like, everyone go out and be your own entrepreneur. Some people can't cut the mustard in that way, and that's not a bad thing. It's just honor who you are in the process.

So yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Great conversation today, you guys.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

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It changed.

Well, thank you, everybody.

Thank you. That was good.

Yes. Happy Tax Day tomorrow.

Yay!

Woo!

Enjoy the rest of the week.

We'll see y'all soon. Bye.