069 How Accounting Firms Collaborate With Other Firms

Welcome to Ye Olde Adjacent Daily. We're tackling an old timeyism today. Don't give away company secrets. Somebody's gonna steal this idea. You don't talk about it. This stuff's all proprietary. I'm gonna need you to sign this thing to ensure that you never spill the beans on this supes proprietary approach that we have to doing tax and accounting work. Like what? That's not a thing. Let's talk about it. Why you should share your playbook and it's all upside positive sum and if you are in a firm that struggles with this, some practical ways to open up, get some easy wins and change the hearts and lives of the people around you. Let's talk about it. First off, I had said that I wanted to get away from Old Timey Tuesday because I don't want to. I don't want to day block myself to things. I found that there's days where I'm super excited to talk about something. But like if for example, I was really excited to talk about something and it was a Tuesday, do I then just arbitrarily have to talk about an old timey thing? So we need non day based things names. That is non day based names. Similar to if you ever wanted a taco on a day other than Tuesday. Right. I think that's understandable. Did a call out for suggestions. Credit to Matthew Brunner, I think for Ye Olde Daily. Thought that was pretty good. Other suggestions? Old Timey viewsday. That's just not very good. Old Timey Doozday. Okay. And I realized as I was going back through the comments. Joseph o'. Connor. I'm sorry I replied and called you Jose because you know what? It's really hard to figure out what people's names are from their YouTube handle, but yours is literally Joseph O' Connor and I still called you Jose. So maybe I don't have an excuse. So Ye Old Daily. Let's go with that. So giving away company secrets. Chris Hervichon said something very kind lately where he said coming into Covid, if it felt like I was one of the first people talking about how all this stuff is positive some and how we ought to be sharing our playbooks more. And that was kind of the premise behind my account. Community is like, y' all know we're doing all the same stuff in parallel. Why are we doing this in such a soloed way? We ought to be working together more. I think a shining example of that was Tax Twitter during COVID Relief when stuff was changing by the Day, and people were going out there and sharing. But even beyond the scope of that, tell me if you've ever experienced this, this will probably super resonate with some of y'. All. When you are a person in a firm and you discover the Internet and you see, oh, there's actually a ton of really smart people sharing really smart things on, of all Things, Twitter or LinkedIn or even TikTok, like, pros sharing stuff for other pros. And when you get connected to that matrix and you start bringing that stuff back to your firm, everybody's like, how did you just become, like, the smartest person overnight? And I experienced this big time during COVID Relief, where, like, I was just shockingly up to date on the new stuff that was happening on best practices. And these conversations, like, really intelligent conversations are happening on Twitter at a velocity so much faster than, oh, checkpoint just came out with this. You know, their position on this or that. And, like, if you've ever, like, if you've plugged into a community, whether even if that's, you know, Twitter or, you know, public stuff, and you find a bunch of really smart people that you're learning from, you realize if you are in a firm full of folks that don't do that stuff, like, this switch goes off, and it's like, all of a sudden, you know, all of this stuff that just other people don't know, and they even look at you a little bit like, why are you so sure of yourself on these things? And, like, where is all of this coming from? That was totally the case for me. And I had this, like, never, like, this entirely new level of confidence in the things that I was saying because I had talked with so many other people who had lived this experience already that I was like, no, no, no, no. Like, this is, like, this is what we're getting wrong. Like, this is the path that we need to be on. Because most firms today make decisions based on what software sales reps tell them. That's just the reality for 99% of firms still, you don't have trusted advisors, so you are relying on what the paychex rep told you because they brought you a muffin basket. For many firms, that is our source of truth. Like, am I wrong? But, like, that was. That is why I think, like, online communities are the best thing in the universe. Because I can get super, super high context information from other people that do what I do. I can get the true scoop on a piece of software, on a strategic change, on all sorts of things from other people that have actually done it, who don't have anything to sell me. It's why, like, I'm so cognizant of never being a shill for Intuit, for zero, for like, any of the big players in our space. Like, it's why it's so important to me that as I do like branded stuff, it's really clear what a sponsorship is and what one isn't. Because we are just inundated with webinars and like, the emails that we get and even, you know, stuff coming through big publications, talks at conferences where the only reason they're getting to write that thing or present that thing is because ultimately they have something to sell you. And that does not mean that there's not value in a lot of those things. But where are you going to get, like, truth and like, real experience and the nuance? It's other people. It's conversations with folks who do what you do, who don't have anything else to sell you. Those are the most valuable things. And it starts with sharing your playbook. It starts with the opposite of what that agreement you signed when you were a staff accountant told you to never do share company secrets, right? Like, like it is. The more you put yourself out there, the more you open the door for people to reciprocate and learn from their shared experience. So, like, let's talk about that today, like, why that is valuable and how to maybe get folks in your firm if you're stuck in a situation like that, over the hump a little bit, get a couple initial easy wins to lean into that further. Because no amount of shutting yourself into a garage and coming up with really novel ideas will lead you to success. The path to success is stealing everything you can from other people, putting it in a big old pot, stirring it up until you've got something that feels true to you. That is a combination of a bunch of real life things that you've learned from other people. And honestly, that Stewart, that's me, I'm that stew. Like, that's what I do. Like, as I just talk with people about firm running and I constantly learn things from them. And that's how I've got to kind of my own view of what firm running out of be these days is not like climbing a mountain and sitting up there and coming down with these stone tablets of wisdom that I created myself. No, honestly, like, it's probably because I've had more of these conversations than almost anybody. And like, I put this stuff out here, out there ultimately to attract hopefully smart, innovative people to it. And then I get to have conversations with those people and all of those conversations, like make me better, like, and refine my model for the best way to do this stuff and what has worked and what hasn't worked. So I am truly a reflection of that and all of the conversations that I've got to have. And you should be too. Like that is what ultimately makes you the best version of yourself and what will make your firm really special. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. Hey, Tales from the Hub is back. Season two, Episode one Buckle up. Recently on Tales from the Hub, you'll remember super smart accounting firm well, they adopted Client Hub to manage their work and collaborate with clients. Right after busy season, they sent out a client feedback survey. They are super smart after all. And the results are in. Of course. Clients love working with Client Hub. They're eating it up. When is the last time you heard a client clamoring for a client portal? Right, the clients love the client tasks feature. Super efficient and intuitive. No more emails flying back and forth. Clients love to have access to the super smart firm staff via messaging and Client Hub. Clients are saying the firm is a modern tech forward and client service oriented firm. You already knew you were, but now the survey proves it and Client Hub played a big role. Great job Client Hub. That's it for this week on Tales from the Hub. Learn more over at ClientHub app or click the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Do you hire accountants? Bless your little heart. Not the best part of the job in my opinion. Not something I ever enjoyed. Well listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work 100% full time for your firm. Their accountants aren't freelancing or contracting for multiple firms. They're all yours. They work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team. Luckily, long term they're not going to get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said, you know what? We're going to build our own pipeline in the Philippines, going to pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the story. I've been talking about a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines, like totally red pilled Me to like, oh geez. Like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out. Link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com so what are the kind of the common points of resistance you get? And honestly like the gut reactions we have to this stuff? Like if you came up in regional and Big four and stuff like that, like there's no collaboration happening. Like you have built in you this like love this degree of propriety around everything that you do when that's important when it comes to client information. But is your business ultimately built around proprietary tech or processes? What is your accounting firm's 11 herbs and spices? I hate to break it to you, I don't know that anybody in our space really has that. Like there are like new agey firms that like have built their own platforms and maybe you've got like the pilots of the world and stuff like that, where half of their team is engineers and so they are truly building stuff that is helpful for them and that software is ultimately property of them and makes them more productive. But for the numpties like you and I that are just going out trying to run a little accounting firm, buddy, that doesn't apply to us. Like we are all skinning the same cat. Hopefully we know enough to know what types of cat you're going after versus, you know, the type of cat that I'm going after. It's a strained analogy, but we are fundamentally like doing the same stuff at the end of the day, you know, if you do tax, it is on the same set of rules that everybody else is working with and there is so much abundance out there and so much work to be done that I really don't see a risk of somebody else stealing your lucky charms. One of the narratives with all this AI stuff and AI doing things that we currently do and is there risk there? Like there's this kind of flawed notion that there is a fixed body of work that we can do for clients and that this kind of the sum of all of the work that we as advisors can do for our clients and the size of that pool of work is fixed when that's fundamentally not fixed, never has been otherwise. When we got calculators, when we got, I don't know, writing, when we got computers, all that work would have gone away. Right? Like the people that were doing this stuff a thousand years ago, how much of that are we still doing? Probably not much. Like the pool of what can be done is not a fixed thing. So if we all make each Other smarter in the same way that if AI comes in and improves something or bank feeds came in and improved things, there's still gonna be plenty to do. And along the way we hopefully moved up the value chain and are doing more meaningful stuff now. Some of this even applies in client facing contexts when we think about in our marketing materials. What if I, what if I share the playbook and they don't need me anymore? I think we probably overstate the risk of that. But let's circle back, let's circle back to that. So what are the pros of doing this? We all, you know, there's however many people in the world we have very, very narrow understanding of, you know, like we are one of so many and we have the lived experience of a single person, which is fundamentally limiting. If you've never gone to a cloud practice management system before, you don't know what really goes into that. You don't know what's going to work well about that and what won't. As compared to the second time. Maybe you few years later you start another firm and you go to a cloud practice management system, you're going to be better prepared because you had that experience. But when you think about kind of the pooled experience of the people within your network, the people you go out there and meet and ask questions of and all of that, that is like the, that is the upside here is the shared experience. You will always be limited in what you've actually executed on as compared to everyone else, where there's largely nobody doing like truly novel one of one things within our profession. Even when I think I've come up with something super cool and creative, I put it out there and I hear from people who are like, oh yeah, we tried this five or seven years ago, but then I can pick their brain and they can be like, here's what worked about it and here's what didn't work about it. And just like that I'm like, rather than that first implementation paradigm, like I'm jumping to that second implementation paradigm because I'm able to cheat off of what these other people have already done. And if you are stuck on the risks of doing this versus the upside of doing this, here's how I think about it as people like thank me for sharing what I know. And they're like, why do you, like, you know, when I was running a firm I would just put stuff out there and they're like, why do you share all this stuff? Like nobody else is doing this. That's not true. But what they would ask why? Like why are you sharing this stuff? And it's because I can put it out there and a bunch of people will join in the discussion. And the only way I go backwards there is if I truly have nothing to learn on that topic, right? Like who would I be to think that the collective experience of, of everyone else, all of those things that people can chip into the discussion, like if you really think it's not worth it for you to put that out there, then kind of the inherent assumption there is that your model is somehow inclusive of like the lived experience of every other firm who's gone through something. And that just seems unrealistic to me. And like maybe there's a counter argument there of like it's one thing for me to put that thing out cause I have an audience and a following and people who engage with it, but that's not me. If I put that thing out, like nobody follows me. That's like, that's, I'm not gonna have the same experience. And like I started from nothing also. But I think with when it comes to social media, something we often get wrong is that 90% of what makes social media great is the discussion, the replies. For every one time I tweet on my own timeline, I probably am tweeting other places time 10 to 20 times. I'm living in the replies, trying to like find some nuance. I'm engaging with other people's replies and that stuff is open to everybody. So I can post that thing to start the conversation. But when 20 people reply, you can benefit from that just as much as I do. So this notion that you have more to lose than to gain by doing that, kind of baked into that is the assumption that your model has already taken into account everybody else's lived experience, which just isn't realistic. Right. This episode is sponsored in part by Firm 360, the practice management tool that gives you a 360 degree view of your practice. Talked about this in the past. Project management, documents, time and billing, all that stuff's in there. Manage all that stuff in a single place. Story time though, let me tell you about Lee Lee's team. They were looking for a solution to modernize their firm's processes. They've grown 30% year over year for the past five years. Holy mama. And their processes were no longer able to keep up with the amount of staff and projects they had going on. Real talk your systems. Like yeah, no, that changes with the size of your firm. They still had some of their documents and paper copies. And they were going around the office to hand off projects to team members. Yuck. Once they were on firm360, they were able to get all their digital, all the goods, all the stuff in a digital format and save a ton of time. Cause they had it all in a single system. Got visibility into project process. Everybody's on the same page about what they're supposed to be working on. They even implemented the secure client portal allowing them to deliver documents and collect payments digitally. You know what took them? Two months. Two months. Not bad. Not switching PM's not fun. But knocking that out in two months, that's pretty darn good. Hey, let's be a little more likely, huh? You hustle in spreadsheets to manage that stuff. Knock it off. Shuffling papers around the office. Modernize your practice. Learn more about this1@myfirm360.com this episode is sponsored in part by Xero hey, listen up Zero Roadshow. You ever been to a Zero road show? It is like a. It's like a big family band that drives all around the country getting people to come out and hang and talk about zero and learn stuff. Not like an actually actual family band. Like there isn't a bus or a van or anything like that. I think most of them fly. But it's coming to specifically Austin, Atlanta and LA. So first up we got Austin coming July 27th. At quote unquote the line looks like a fancy hotel. If you have ever been at a Zero event, you know those people know how to throw a party. Am I right? If you haven't, think about it. So Zero roadshow, chance to come and hang with a bunch of folks into kind of like the progressive approach to building an accounting practice. Meet some folks that are using Xero in their firm. Six hours of CPE per event. Whoa. Learn about the latest Zero product updates and even hang with some of the Xero like community app ecosystem folks. So July 27th, check that one out in Austin, Texas. I'll put a link in the show notes to register and if you go send me some pics. Send some pics over. Maybe post some pics in the comments. I've been to some Zero roadshows before. They're a good time now other pros is you putting your stuff out there and being perceived as a thought leader which to like the cadrely accountant side of our brain that is allergic to virtue signaling and you don't want to be that person. I get that. Like I don't need a participation medal. And for people to tell me that I'm smart. But ultimately the value of being a thought leader is you're gonna get access to rooms that you wouldn't otherwise have access to, right? Like, there's a lot of really cool stuff going on out there, especially as you get more into the domain specific stuff that you're pursuing with your firm. Mastermind groups of like really high level people in those spaces. Being a thought leader gets you access to those rooms, to really interesting people, opportunities to present to groups of folks that you want to get in front of. And ultimately, like much of running a successful firm just boils down to attracting the perfect client. So like, when you run down that client list of the hundred clients that you have today, you can go down that list and be like, this client's great, this client stinks. And a lot of that comes back to how much value that person assigns to the problem that you solve for them. The folks that are really stuck on fees, it's because they don't value what you do for them. And that's not their fault. What you do for them actually may not have a ton of value, as opposed to that other person who you just saved 50k, they're going to. They assign a huge value to what you do for them. Right? And it is really hard to be valuable to anyone and everyone. That's why the greater the specificity you find in your firm, the easier it is to be valuable to that very specific type of person. And so a lot of our jobs at the end of the day boils down to how do I attract the people that have that very specific type of problem. And the only way I know to do that, I mean, the best way I know to do that is just to be like, really, really consistent about being out there and engaged in a conversation, whether that's Twitter, whether that's a Facebook group, whether that's a private community for phlebotomists, like, turn up there every day, be helpful, don't get fixated on. Well, they're not on the client list. And it depends. Like, find a way to be helpful, share what you know. And like, ultimately people find you. You get access to really cool opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise have access to. And that client list can ultimately be curated to be filled with people for whom you solve a really painful problem, right? So they're happy to pay you more money to do what you do. As we talk about, like being able to price higher like that is, that is the ultimate path to flexibility and freedom, to working less, to like solving the problems of burnout and the hamster wheel and like all that. If you take a step back and you strip away like all of the trappings of running a firm and how we usually just kind of fall into what we've seen done by other people. Like we're not really reinventing the business model of accounting firms. Usually what we do is a reflection of what somebody showed us to, showed us what to do at some point. If you strip away like all of that kind of structure and traditional aspects of running an accounting firm, you have a set of skills and like bigger picture. Ultimately we're looking for what is the highest leverage way for us to apply our skills to help people to solve problems. And I think sometimes we get too fixated on the traditional firm models. That's why I talk about doing more one to many work. If you sell an hour of your time right now for $200, but you could run a monthly mastermind group with 10 clients in there who will all pay $200 a month to be in there, that's a great use of your time, right? Like what is the higher leverage version of getting your stuff out there in the world? Digital products, like think outside the box from that one to one work. In an accounting firm, you probably still need to do the one on one work. You need to prepare their tax return. That's not going to be a one to many thing. Do their accounting and all that. That's great, but it doesn't mean you only have to exclusively do one to one work. And so as we're looking for higher leverage ways that the Internet enables to get our stuff out there, to get out in front of people, we have to attract them somehow. We have to be helpful so that we they find you. Because right now they don't know that you exist. And right now you don't know how many of those folks out there exist for whom you would be a phenomenal solution. Like of all the people in the world, all the problems that are out there, that hundred client list is not the hundred people in the world who most value what you do. And I think of my job as a firm owner of each day getting you kind of one step closer to that perfect list of 100. Like it's not possible. You're never going to find those hundred people. But it's a big spectrum from here's the hundred people that just stumbled in the door because they saw me in the white pages, yellow pages, to oh, I've been posting online every day for the last five Years about why it's hard to run the back office of a phlebotomist's office. And now I have this client list as a result, right? So on the client side, sharing the playbook, like that is a great way to attract a person with a very specific type of pain. But on the internal firm running side, like, what are you gonna do really? Like if there's somebody on Twitter that is having the same problem you are, or maybe tried something before that you're considering, what is the harm in shooting them a dm? I think our, like, because the world is so much bigger than we can comprehend, we think, oh, they're gonna steal a client someday or that will somehow harm you, that maybe there's some value that you shared with them. I can tell you. And all the stuff that I do, like I am posting everywhere, obviously I'm super, super visible for the first time in the last three months. I met someone who ran a firm in the same town as me who maybe like if we were serving local clients, may have someday within that town bumped into a client that ultimately could have been my client. Like I bumped into the first person, lovely guy showed me a local train park that my kids are going to be floored to go to. So that's already paying off for me. But in everything that I do, I bumped up against that like once. And that's even just assuming within a town that's a pretty good sized town, we're somehow ever going to like bump into the same client, which is unlikely. So the likelihood that sharing your playbook with another firm owner is going to somehow come back around and hurt you, like probably just not going to happen. But we think that because in our minds the world is much smaller than it actually is in reality. So how does this change your day to day, your decision making framework, all that stuff? For me, I never would execute on a big decision unless I was able to validate it with a bunch of other firm owners. Whether that's a software change, whether that's change in pricing strategy, I would talk about that stuff consistently. And along the way I, I would find people who would engage that conversation. Maybe they're going through a similar change, maybe they had done that in the past. But just by being out there, it introduced me to new people who by and large are going to be happy to hop on a call and have a conversation about it. So stop, like, I don't know, thinking small and like locked into your own little universe because there's a bunch of people out there who are working on all the same stuff and we can all make each other better as a result. The show is an example of that. The things that people post in the comments is an example of that. If you have a boss that is really stuck on this, get down to a specific thing that you are stuck on. Maybe it's an integration between two pieces of software, just something like that. Find a person that can help work you through that problem. Pull your boss in on that call. Like, it's like to get a person to come around on that idea. You gotta start small. There's so many like, little workflow niggles in our firms that we get stuck on, right? Like, maybe that's a good place to start where you can encourage the folks in your firm to begin having more transparent conversations to make everybody better and see that, oh, like no, this other firm and Tim Duck Timbuktu, like, isn't actually going to burn my firm to the ground because I shared this T sheets integration thing or something like that, right? That's all I got. Thanks for coming and hanging today. If you got any killer ideas that we can steal from you, please put them in the comments and we'll all get a little bit better too. Loop. See you tomorrow.