097 How To Steal The Best Ideas For Your Accounting Firm

Okay, today I'm going to let you in on the secret of how I have grown in five years from like this weirdo kind of siloed accountant just doing his own things that he thought were super cool to. Now I feel like I've collected like the most creative, innovative, fresh ideas in the profession and I'm like a reflector of those things for other people to learn from. You will be shocked at how naive I was five years ago. I'm going to run you through how my framework has changed and one of my favorite books that opened my mind to this. Come on in, it's Jason Daly. Well, exciting news. Today. We are dying under Sydney, Australia for 0con. And it feels like a full circle moment because I'm here talking AI today and tomorrow. Got to go to the Women's World cup final on Sunday with my wife, which was, you know, just a shocking moment. That all really stems from making the decision to post online and share my journey. And it's just wild. This would be, I thought, a fun episode to kind of put all this in perspective and open your mind a little bit to how much we limit ourselves when we're thinking about like the short term ROI calculations and how we have to build everything ourselves from scratch. And you really don't. The secret to success is stealing. It is just outright theft. So today we're talking about the good ways and the bad ways to do that. And one of my favorite books, to Steal like an Artist and how that impacts my kind of mental framework for running accounting firms. But first, a story. Okay, so back in like 2018, I finished graduate school. I had gone back to get an MBA after doing tax for about 10 years in the US so I was income tax preparer and I was kind of bored of it, to be totally honest. I wasn't really all that great at it either. Like, I was good enough, but there were other things in my life that I was, I knew I was really good at and this was not one of those things. So I kind of came to the conclusion that I probably shouldn't be setting up camp, doing that work for the rest of my life if it's not something that I'm really naturally, naturally good at. I think this is also what led me to particularly enjoying more of the firm strategy and firm running and people development stuff, because I honestly, like, wasn't amazing at all the other stuff, but knew I could do good enough, pretty good at, like, the more kind of firm running side of things. But I go back to graduate school thinking that I don't know if this accounting stuff is really for me, but I'm gonna go through this graduate program in Portland, build a network. This school had like great connections in tech and all sorts of different stuff and come out the other side of it and just see what I'm feeling, see if it opens up any new doors. And I was maybe a semester away from graduation when I had this epiphany, this John Nash beautiful mind moment of a revolutionary new way to run an accounting firm and build a practice around doing this stuff for clients. And that was to manage the entire accounting department like back office for a small business. And let me tell you, this was a pretty novel idea. So my firm or the firm I was with at this point is an 80 year old tax firm. Tax was all I had done and we partnered with bookkeepers and all that stuff. But this was different. This was, buddy, we're gonna carve out everything that goes into the accounting department. Accounting month, end close, controllership stuff, accounts payable, payroll, we're gonna do all that stuff for you. Accounting firm in a box. And this was like a really compelling opportunity to me because you could walk into like a million dollar a year reven and command like 50,000 a year in fees managing this stuff. We were able to benchmark our fees rather than against other people that did tax prep. We could benchmark it against what the cost would be to go out and hire somebody to do all this for you. And we knew we could do a way better job. And in the firm I was at, we had like 800 small business clients. So it'd be shooting fish in a barrel to go out and do this kind of managed back office stuff for them. We talked about this the other day on my kind of big trends for 23. This is what a lot of tax firms are doing now is just is eliminating the once a year tax work and moving into doing the back office accounting stuff for their tax clients. But let me tell you, this was a profound discovery that I had made and so it had inspired me to stick around. So I come back to the firm and I'm like, here's the thing, I'm build this practice for you. Here are my terms. This guy doesn't look super busy. So I'm going to pull this staff person in and they're going to help me build it. And honestly the people at the firm were like, listen, I just want to retire in the next five years, so whatever's going to keep you there so that you'll pay me out and so I was off to the races building this groundbreaking new service line that was doing accounting. And all the people not in the US are going, what do you mean? Isn't that just an accounting firm? Yes. A lot of firms in the US like just especially small firms, just do income tax because income tax is so hairy. And I hadn't been exposed to that. All I'd really been exposed to was like going out and hiring a bookkeeper just to hustle the ledger. And so my, my groundbreaking approach here was we're going to manage like the whole accounting department. And so I'm all full of energy and I think I just had our first kid at this point. And they're like that evolutionary trig just flicked where it was also like all time high in motivation because now I needed to find a new level of career success in order for my offspring to be successful and happy. So I'm in this brave new world of innovation and I go to my first accounting conference. 0con San Diego 2019, four years ago. So from today, almost exactly four years ago, first accounting conference I'd ever gone to. And I still remember the very first morning they've had this little breakfast set up. And if you ever been to a Zero Con, like their stuff is just so distinctly zero. It was no doubt like a cage free kale salad breakfast or something like that. And I sit at this little square table and there's four chairs there and there's, there's a lady there maybe in her 60s, and there's another guy there maybe in his 40s. And I'm like, I'm still an accountant. Like it's not easy for me to just go out and start conversation with people. But I was like, hey, new me, I'm learning, I'm out here, I'm about to turn this entire universe inside out with this exciting new model, meet some cool people. So I start a conversation with this lady. I was like, tell me what you do. Like, do you, are you a bookkeeper? Do you run an accounting firm? And she's like, well I've been a vet tech for the last couple decades and I'm thinking about getting into bookkeeping, so I'm just here to learn more. And I'm like, oh, wow, that's interesting. I start talking with the guy next to her and I'm like, what are you doing? He's a little guarded, but I can tell that he runs an accounting practice. They do some stuff with more kind of mid market accounting tools like NetSuite and with some more Prodding. I basically figure out that this guy does like the managed accounting department back office stuff for Kaiser Permanente. He doesn't. His firm does. And if you're not in the U.S. kaiser Permanente, I think is the largest single health care provider in the us. So he's doing this novel, groundbreaking thing that I had just come up with coming out of graduate school for this massive, massive healthcare group. And in the moment I'm going, oh my gosh, I found the only other person in the world that had this killer idea. We're going to be best friends. Let's keep this on the DL, buddy. 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 long term. They're not gonna 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 gonna build our own pipeline in the Philippines, gonna 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 cloudaccountstaffing.com hey. This episode sponsored in part by Firm 360. I know you're just about to ask Firm 360 practice management system that gives you a 360 degree view of your firm. All that stuff all in one tool. And if you listen to me talk software much, you know that I'm an advocate of asking my peers, hey, what are you using? What is working and not working. And you know what, there is a whole bunch of reviews online for Firm 360. And I'm not talking about the stuff on the Firm 360 website when you know, you know they just cherry pick the winners. I'm skulking Capterra right now. Come on in. Whole lot of happy people hanging out there leaving reviews for firm360 so I know I can trust them. Let's talk about Tempe B Certified public accountant. Got a 1 to 10 employee firm quote. Great solution for small firms. We've been using Firm360 for several months now and with each monthly feature update we are loving it even more. We're a very small firm that needed an affordable yet effective CRM solution. And firm 360 has filled that need. I've implemented other software programs. This one has been the easiest by far to get up and running. What else do you need to hear? Okay, be more like Tempe. Learn more about Firm360. The link in the show notes, I gained so much perspective about just like how many nuanced problems these people had a great understanding of and could help me with just from sort of learning their experience. And honestly, it's really embarrassing telling this story. Like just I may be embellishing how creative I was feeling a little bit, but honestly only a little bit. But this was how naive I was four years ago because I'd only ever lived inside my little firm bubble. And it's a very traditional paradigm where you're like, buddy, you're a company man. Like you work for this firm. Anything you create, any good ideas you have are property of this firm. And there is no positive sum thinking when it comes to interloping with anyone from other firms, sharing ideas, anything like that. You just don't do it, buddy. In fact, I'm going to make you sign this thing to make you promise you won't do it. But I came out of that conference, I think, a fundamentally changed man and realized, oh no, this isn't actually about being a mad scientist that can make cooler potions than anybody else. It's more about finding the people who can get you over whatever hump you're at. Like each step along the way, like, how can I like increase my surface area to have these conversations with super smart creative people that have had experiences that I haven't had the chance to have yet, pour all that stuff into like my own little punch bowl and from that, like craft my own vision of what is the right way to run a firm that's informed by all these other people's experiences? And within a record amount of time, like within my firm, I became this somehow this like super well informed person that was annoyingly confident in what I felt were kind of the right ways to do things. And some traps maybe that we weren't considering around decision making. And people are like, how do you know this stuff? And I'm like, because I just talked with the guy last week that tried this thing a couple years ago. Here's what worked, here's what didn't work. And it is not lost on me that I sit here today as this person that people go to looking for advice. Well, literally four years ago, I was an absolute dummy, and I still am in many ways. But it goes to show you, like, within that time, I was working with partners that had done this stuff for decades, but I had a way more perspective than they did just by putting myself out there and being willing to learn from other people, share what I was doing, and like, sort of collect their experiences to better inform my decision making frameworks. So coming out of that conference, I started going to more conferences, but I also started getting involved on social media, which I know is something that I harp on a lot here. The two big things, like my two main takeaways, engage in the replies and the comments and all of that for every one time that I post on my own feed. Still to this day, I'm posting elsewhere 20 times in the replies of other people's posts and the comments. That is the gold of social media. Our mental view of social media when you're just starting out is like mega star social media. It is Kim Kardashian, it is Dwayne Johnson. It's people posting stuff and moving financial markets. Buddy, we're not playing that game in our little universe. The version of social media that I live in is super nuanced. It's other people that run firms like mine. I just wanna share my experience with them because then I get to learn from like the collective experiences of all those other people that I haven't been able to get yet. I would happily hear, like, what are the things that they screwed up so that I don't then waste years doing the wrong thing? And that's the goal here, is honestly to shave years off of your learning processes doing the wrong thing. And I think a big reason why we maybe don't do this and why we try to do it all ourselves is like we struggle with this, this notion of like stealing other people's ideas. So you may have heard of a book from Austin Kleon called Steal like an Artist, One of my favorite books. It is a super easy, super short read. I'll put it in the show notes. And it is like a reminder that everything out there is theft. Absolutely everything is every new Creative thing that you see is a combination of old things like that punch bowl is kind of the pooled experience of what you're learning from everybody else. And so me and the way I've designed my life now, I have this really big surface area for luck, for meeting cool, interesting people and brands and learning things from all of them so that I can then reflect them in a way that's gonna help people. But people come here and they say, oh, Jason, you're so smart. How do you know all these things, buddy? I'm not, but I've been super fortunate to honestly build a business around collecting that stuff. Like, definitely wrapping some production value and entertainment around it by helping people learn, by sharing and regurgitating, like, the best and the coolest and the most creative stuff that I hear from other people doing this. So some really cool lessons from steal like an artist. The Beatles, they started as a cover band. And oftentimes we get stuck with, like, where to start and how to make take the first steps. When the reality is you find yourself in the doing of the work. I think you find what you enjoy, you find what feels uniquely you by doing it. So if you have to start by ripping somebody off, great. That's a great place to start. But for whatever reason, we have this, like, force inside of us that's like, well, that's not fair. I need to find my own path. Reality is, when you're starting out, like, you have no idea what that path should actually be. So I think to give us permission to beg, borrow, and steal, let's define the bad version of that. The bad version of that is plagiarism. It is taking something without giving credit. But I'm gonna let you in on a secret. Running accounting firms, it is more about consistent execution than it is like, a super novel creative approach. This isn't really a hub of innovation, I would say, which is good. Most people don't go into accounting to, you know, put a man on the moon. KFC has their, you know, 21 herbs and spices or whatever it is. Most accounting firms are going to have their equivalent of that. So your job is less akin to Colonel Sanders task in the team with Fried Chicken Innovations, and it is more akin to, like, collecting the best practices that have been developed for decades and aligning them in a way that makes the most sense for the type of client that you want to serve. There's still a bunch of diversity in how firms are run and what makes sense for different clients and how you position yourself in the market and your job is to learn as much as you can from other practitioners and apply that stuff in the best aligned way possible to the people who you want to help. Now, this book is basically a collection of like 10 lessons. I'd encourage you to check it out yourself, but I'll rapid fire through them here and kind of share how I apply them to the stuff that we do. So, first lesson, steal like an artist goes through a bunch of examples of, you know, quotes from people who we perceive as, like, being mega creative and all that, and how really all they're doing is just being inspired by other people and pulling together their own version of that. Talks about how when you start seeing the world this way, you don't worry about what's good or bad. You only start seeing things through the lens of what is worth stealing and what is not worth stealing. So, for example, when I craft my Twitter feed, all of the people that I follow, the only stuff that's worthwhile to me is the stuff that is going to teach me something that may be worth stealing. And it's not because it's good or it's bad. It's that it's specific to me, is that it will solve the problems that I'm facing or be relevant to the people that I'm trying to help. Ultimately, your job is to position yourself to best collect all of those good ideas. So how can you surround yourself with the people who will expose you to the most kind of good ideas worth stealing as possible? Think of yourself more as like a collector of those things. Second, we kind of touched on this. Don't wait until you know who you are to get started. Quote here. If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from many, any of its research when you're getting started, like, you learn through imitation. I've got so many examples of that, of things that I thought were really inspiring, and I just run out. And I'm like, I just want to make my own version of that. And that is a whole lot better than not taking action, right? Than sitting back and, like, doing the playing house of business of, like, thinking through, oh, workflows and like, building all of this infrastructure when you haven't actually done any of the work yet and you don't know the problems that your clients have. You just got to get started. And getting started with somebody else's formula is a whole lot better than sitting there and waiting until you come up with something totally novel. Hey. Today's episode is sponsored in part by financial sense and I am very excited to share. Financial Sense is putting on a virtual conference called WorkflowCon and yours truly will be there talking about how to use AI for workflow stuff. Conferences happen in late October. Got a actually a pretty like rock star cast of speakers. Don Brolin, Ryan Lazanis, Kelly Parks. Now Carter Gray, Veronica Wasek, Allison Ball, Terrell Turner, Nicole Davis. Whole bunch of super smart people use the link in the show notes to sign up for free. Yep, I said it for free. They've got all the sessions organized into tracks so you can pick something that makes the most sense for you. You know how I feel about conferences. It is the best way to get out of your kind of group. Think tunnel vision that we all have within our firms. Come check this one out. Hit the link in the show notes for more information. This episode is sponsored in part by Copilot Gang. I like tech as much as the next guy. I like finding new apps, plugging new stuff into my stack. But you know what I won't stand for is a scattered client experience. Imagine this dream world where a client can log into one thing and get access to all the things. Easier said than done right now, right? Cause you got all these different tools with magic links and logging to this, login to that. To get like all of that stuff out of a single portal is really hard right now. Oh that was until Copilot. It is an all in one portal platform. It's not like a here's how to do all your workflow sort of thing. It is a here's a super powerful platform because you know who knows best how to put that together? You. You know what your clients need and you can even customize it down to the client, down to the client group. Got a bunch of great built in functions, but you can also embed other apps straight there into it. So you have one seamless experience without any seams. Popular apps people are embedding in there calendly. Ever heard of it? Jotform, Airtable, Google Sheets, Power Bi, ClickUp, Google Data Studio, Typeform, Excel. You can embed all that stuff straight into their portal. No more hopping around all those different places. To learn more about this one, check out the link in the show notes or head over to copilot.com third write the book you want to read. This is kind of live out the story that is most interesting to you. So run the business that is interesting to you to run or work with the client who is interesting to you to work with. You're getting to craft your own Reality of what this business looks like, what ideas you're going to collect. Do that in a way that's compelling to you. Like what is the version of that that would get you really excited? Fourth, use your hands. Basically get away from the computer. Like do other things for ideation. I don't know about you, I have to. We do like this white collar, staring at your computer all day stuff. Like I definitely have to have time away doing physical things and that's really good for my mind. 5. Side projects and hobbies are important. Don't be afraid to lean into your other passions, even if they're not really work related at all, because there's inspiration to be found there. There's also an element of that recharging you creatively. I think much of our business success is driven by the energy that we can bring to solving problems and all of that. And if you are fully charged creatively, it makes all that easier. 6. The secret is to do good work and share it with people. I can't remember who said it, maybe it was Tim Ferriss. Something along the lines of how sharing your playbook is an asymmetric bet. So if you do this thing and this cool thing in a vacuum and nobody ever hears about it, like, okay, fine, you did that cool thing, but if you do that cool thing, but then you share it externally for hundreds of other people to see, it makes the fact that you did that thing more meaningful. It creates more opportunity for from it. And we struggle with self promotion and stuff like that. So think of it more through the lens of I just did this cool thing or I learned this novel thing. Here's how I can help people, here's how I can put that out there to increase the likelihood of someone else being able to have success in the same situation. Think of it more through that lens. And so when those really awesome things happen, think about whether there's a way to amplify those things to help other people. So I got to go to the World cup final the other night with my wife and that all happened because I made the decision to start posting stuff on social media, be transparent about the work that I do and increase my surface area for luck and for meeting cool people and brands. And when I sat down and first made the commitment to it was really posting three times a day to Twitter for about two years. And like most things, the best things, the things that are most successful, are done by the people who are doing it more than anyone else thinks is reasonable. So my videos are good because I've invested more time and money into videos than anyone else would think is reasonable. But when I sat down and I made that commitment to myself, it wasn't so that, oh boy, one day I can go to the the World Cup Final. It wasn't any of these things that honestly have happened, like to be able to build a business around content and stuff like that. I'm in Sydney right now, honestly, a place I never thought I'd be. It's an unbelievable city. I wanted to record this episode today to open your mind to the amazing things that are possible that you just can't foresee. I just shared what a total knucklehead I was four years ago and I still am today. My hope is that by sharing this like, amazing opportunity I've had, you are inspired to do something that is leaning into leverage or outside your comfort zone because you genuinely can't comprehend the cool opportunities that are out there if you make the most of the Internet of networking, of putting yourself out there and meeting cool people. So lesson six, the secret is doing good work and sharing it with people. That's like my full time job right now. I feel like sharing the cool stuff that I'm able to learn from other talented people and reflecting that back so that other folks can learn. 7. Geography is no longer your master. We can get really locked into our daily surroundings and where we go to work each day and what exactly that routine looks like. But that can limit you when it comes to thinking outside the box. The more you do that, the more sort of tunnel vision you get. We've talked a lot about this. When it comes to going to conferences and meeting new people and meeting new firm runners, you don't realize just how much you're in this group. Think with the same people and the same clients you work with every single day. Your reality is kind of limited to what makes sense within that bubble. And it isn't until you get outside that bubble that you realize oftentimes there's fundamentally better ways to do these things. Things Number eight, be nice. A lot of this stuff does come back to like, just being helpful. Everybody has problems in the world. Everybody can benefit from you making a connection for them. And that's one of the, honestly, the most fun and fulfilling things for me right now having met a lot of folks is being able to make connections. But that all starts with like building friendships and being helpful for folks and just like building that goodwill along the way. Number nine, be boring is the only way to get work done. So this is along the lines of how doing meaningful things is usually just a product of super consistent effort. This has definitely been the case for me, my main YouTube channel. I made two videos a week for a year and a half and I think at the end of that had 500 subscribers. And that was like an ignorance debt that I paid down through a whole ton of repetitions, making a whole bunch of bad videos that nobody watched so that I could then make better videos. And when those videos got better, it attracted more people. But that all happened because I was willing over 18 months in that span having two kids to commit to publishing two videos a week. So like, I think it's easy from the outside to think that like I'm some like a unicorn combination of being able to make funny things and understanding production and all this stuff. It's just because I was willing to make that commitment and like with consistency. And I've done it more than anybody else in the space. So please, I hope the product is better. So being boring. Repetition is what's going to make you great at something. And then 10. Creativity is subtraction. It's easy to be overwhelmed in this day and age. Like there is never going to be a shortage of things to do. And there's just as much like creativity and opportunity in doing another thing as there is and not doing another thing and doing less. I've been thinking a lot actually lately about scarcity since we talked the last like a few weeks ago about kind of the offer framework within an accounting firm and how to bring in stuff at like double the prices and how a big product there is communicating the scarcity around how many people you can help. I don't know that we've thought enough about that and exactly how scarcity can be a driver of success for your firm and how you honor onboard clients and all that. Or even like being more aggressive about the stuff that we won't do, like the types of services we won't support, the type of people we won't help in our firm. Getting to a more profitable firm, honestly, unless you're just starting out, is probably more about subtraction than it is about addition. There you go, there's your cross stitched potholder inspirational quote of the day. Running a successful firm is more about subtraction than addition. I think that's probably true, man. That was the case for me. My last couple years in firm running were all about subtraction. I had way more fun when I was getting smaller and charging more than when I was like going after these sweaty, pointless growth metrics so my secret to growth, buddy? Figure out how you can steal a whole bunch of ideas from other people. That is what it's all about. A lot of really smart people tune into this podcast, so please don't hesitate to post your, I don't know, embarrassing or ignorant questions in the comments. I started all this stuff from like a huge place of ignorance, and the sooner you can pay that down, the better. The sooner you can move on to cooler stuff. That's all I got today. Thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you in the next one. Fun.