118 The Future of Accounting Firm Conferences

I know about you. I feel like accounting conferences are starting to feel a little, a little long in the teeth, a little washed up. I do a shocking, a shocking number of accounting conferences and 80% of most of them are the same. But what I think makes more sense going forward is something more experiential, more hands on, maybe in some situations more intimate. So let's do a little brain dump on some ideas for how to make accounting conferences even better. Who are the right people to put them on? How do they look different? How do conferences make money? Because they still need to make money. Come on in, let's share some ideas. This may feel super inside baseball, but I would argue that if you're not the type of person today that goes to a bunch of accounting conferences, the reason is they don't feel relevant to you. Right. So what is the version of accounting conferences that would feel more relevant to you? I think especially generationally, the current setup doesn't feel especially valuable. And honestly it's because my generation, like we learn every day online and on social media and on YouTube and you now have online communities where a lot of the, a version of the brain sharing that happens at live conferences can now happen like every day or every week. In these online communities there's just such a greater volume and a much tighter feedback loop in how you share ideas and information with other firm owners. If you're watching on video, the sun is absolutely beaming off the arborvitis through my window, giving me this lovely green hue. But I think conferences have remained largely unchanged for from how they were pre Internet days. So what does a post Internet conference look like when everybody's spending their time and their days scrolling algorithms and learning on YouTube and they're in online communities where they talk with other firm owners every week. What is the place that is left for conferences and how do they not just do more of the same, but rather offer something unique that can only be done in person? Right, that's what I wanna explore today. Share some ideas. And if this doesn't feel relevant to you because you don't go to accounting conferences, I would love to know why. Like I'm a big advocate of them, of the people that you meet, of the stuff that you learn, the relationships you build. And if thus far they haven't felt relevant to you, like then I think this is why we need to have this conversation so that like the new version of conferences does feel more relevant. Something that kind of brought me back to this that was on Twitter recently, guy named Andrew Wilkinson, he runs A little kind of investment group. He's a Twitter think boy. He put together his first live event, and some of the framing that he used here was really helpful. So I'm going to grab some quotes from this tweet. So let's be real. Most conferences are terrible. The whole reason that people go is to meet other people. I totally agree with this. I tell folks, if you're going to conferences for cpe, then you're doing it wrong. But like, experienced conference goers, for sure, in the beginning, I think we're like, oh, we're planning out every session and we got our notepad and we're just feverishly writing things through all of these sessions to, you know, get our ROI for what we just spent on this conference ticket. But then you go a few times and you're like, oh, I just want to hang out with Jim and Tina. They were there last year. That was a lot of fun. And so ultimately it becomes more about the people. And that's totally the case for me. But anyways, back to this tweet. And yet, usually it's a bunch of people watching talks side by side, then awkwardly making small talk during lunch and coffee breaks. Feels familiar. It's the equivalent of inviting 20 people over to your house to watch a show together. Not very social. The worst possible way of facilitating connections. And 100% dependent on people taking initiative and amping up their extroversion to try to talk to people. Which doesn't work for introverts and is exhausting for everyone. Why, I wondered, weren't conferences about facilitating real connection? I wanted to do a conference with minimal speakers that was 100% focused on creating connections between people. So I set up a stripe checkout page and charged $2,000 per ticket. I woke up the next day and we'd sold 55 of the 50 tickets. Then I realized, crap, I have to put a conference together. This is a little. A little too seat of the pants for my liking. But here was his process. He had everyone fill out a detailed survey walking through their business, what kind of problems they were dealing with and the type of people they wanted to meet. They tailored the entire event based on this feedback, what people wanted. For example, they did breakout groups on incentives, agencies holding, companies, hiring. They strategically placed people with similar problems and life stages in different conversation groups with a range of experience levels. And instead of being forced to make small talk, they had prompt cards on the table to start the conversation. And so these prompt cards are gonna be super specific to some of the common threads that all those people had. They broke the conference into a few segments. Interesting questions designed to create vulnerability and connect people, interesting problems, group brainstorms on problems facing the group and interesting people. And of course a few fancy dinners and parties and outdoor activities. I love this, like it just the more connection based approach is super, super appealing to me. And it's not that like nobody is doing this. Like there are versions and innovative things happening here. And I think where it's happening is usually not like the big mainstream events, so you don't hear as much about them. But like last year, I don't even know, I can't remember what it was called last year. Somebody did like a summer camp thing. I don't know if it was into it or somebody that just. There was an intuit partnership there. But it was like literally I think you like stay in cabins kind of thing. I know accounting Salon has their thing they do each year which is just kind of a get together of thought leaders. The tax Twitter retreat this year I think was a lot about just like facilitating in person connections. But ultimately what I want more as an attendee now, you know, there are conferences that are CPE conferences, you know, where you go and you get your continuing education for the year or destination CPE conferences that are in really nice places where you can kind of roll that up with a vac. But when it's not about that, when it's not about the continuing ed, to me the more interesting thing is networking and learning from people like me. I love coaches, I love educational content and all that. Obviously that's like my business is making educational stuff. But nothing was more valuable to me than to be able to sit in a room with five other people who do what I do. And these were not thought leaders. These were people who were just struggling through the reality of doing something very, very similar to what I did. And it was almost, you know, it wasn't through the lens of here's the ultimate answer for how to do this stuff. It wasn't through that lens at all. It was through the lens of like multiplying my own lived experience. Right. Cause there's only so many things that you could try and you can iterate on and you can put your staff through before they get whiplash. Like there's only so many things, so many tools, strategies that one person can try. And so what was incredibly valuable to me was finding other people with, with very similar firms to mine who had tried maybe similar but different things. Cause it was almost like this peek into a timeline that Maybe I wasn't able to do myself, but I could, like, get a taste of the destination there and the stuff to avoid and what was good about it and what wasn't good about it. That was unbelievably valuable to me. Like, that was what led to me spinning up my online community and invest an outrageous amount of time when I was running a firm into, like, spending time with other firm owners. Because I had made decisions that had literally wasted years of our firm's time going to the wrong practice management system, not pricing things correctly, not thinking more strategically about the business, waiting too long to make hard decisions. And I realized, man, the very best thing that I can do for my firm is to get those really important decisions right and to come at them with an entirely different level of confidence and than that I otherwise would have had because I was like the bottom of the funnel of all of this perspective from other firm owners. And so that is what I love, that is what I think we don't do enough of is get together to kind of multiply and see beyond your own lived experience into what other people have done and what they've gotten right and wrong. And you for sure can do this stuff online, but there's something magic about being somewhere else. And maybe it's a routine thing because when you get on an online meeting, man, your email screaming at you, all these other things and responsibilities are still tugging at you. And it takes everything within you not to be distracted during an online meeting and responding to emails and stuff like that. But there's something about being in a different place where your visual surroundings are different. And I think there's actually, like, science to that that, like, your brain ends up in a very different place. Uh, you're around different personalities. You're not subject to the tunnel vision that is the people and the clients that you're around every single day. When you're in that different environment, I think something about that mindset is just much more malleable. Like, you're way more open. Uh, it's much easier to think high level about that stuff. And there's also an element of I've paid to be here and so I'm going to make the most out of it. Right? Like, we're accountants. We are ROI based creatures. 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. 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These are the people team up can recruit for you for a flat one time fee and then connect you with an affordable employer of record as well. If you need help with payroll and compliance, learn more at their site hireteamup.com and get on their newsletter for quick tips on managing overseas teams. Stuff like cultural miscommunications, best practices, everything you need to know to get started hiring offshore. You already know I'm down with offshore hiring. Learn more@hireteamup.com so you're in this very different mindset in in person settings where the stakes are higher cause everybody has taken time off of work and spent money to be there so they're committed to making it worthwhile and I think your brain is just more open to new ideas. So what is the best way you know, what does that look like inside the context of accounting firms I think it's like, it's the polar opposite of one person in front and a thousand people looking at the one person. I think it, like, goes the whole opposite end of the spectrum. One really interesting thing friend of mine now, Carter, Carter Gray, has talked about in her virtual conference that she runs, taking your firm virtual runs each summer. The last two years, they've done this speed dating thing where people meet one on one and it's gone really, really well. And in my head, I'm like, these are a bunch of accountants. Like, these introverts aren't going to be into that sort of thing. People, like, actually loved it. So that's like, in my mind, the polar opposite of the one person on stage and a thousand people in the audience, right? But what's been most impactful for me is, like, groups of like, five where it's small enough that nobody can be anonymous. Like, there's a threshold beyond which it's okay to not be engaged. And. And like, in online meetings that's, you know, maybe six or seven people, you get beyond this threshold and it's like you can kind of just hang out and not contribute and maybe nobody will notice in person. Maybe that threshold's a little higher. But there's value in having a group that is below that size where everybody kind of feels like they have some stakes and feel some pressure to, like, show some mutual vulnerability. But if you think about the level of information and demographics that are taken about attendees before you go to a conference today, I can tell you how I feel when I complete, like, the very limited information that's there. I'm like, oh, cool, this is just filtering for the advertisers, for whoever my email is gonna go to, right? Like, that's why they're gathering this. And honestly, all it usually is is like, a dropdown of my role within the firm and a dropdown of, like, size ranges for the firm. And that's literally all that goes into it. But what about, do I do tax? Do I do accounting? What do I want to work on over the next three months? What is my biggest struggle right now? What's the biggest win we've had in the last 12 months? What is the bit of software in my firm that I struggle with most? What's the new type of software I'm most excited about? Like, there's such more, like, rich information we can be gathering about people before they come to a conference so that before anybody even arrives, you've been filtered into some cool contextual groups and there's A whole ton of different dimensions on which you can do this because obviously we're all entrepreneurs and there's a bunch of different things that we're juggling, things that we aspire to do better and want to learn from other people on. So the same people can absolutely be slotted into several different groups. It's not as if you're going to come to a conference and like, well, here's your squad of five now and you're. These are your bunk mates for the next three days. Or like it doesn't have to be anything that extreme. So I like the notion of being put into kind of these groups. They could be done with or without facilitators. Like there's some value sometimes in there being a person there that's designated to be the boss and keep things going. And it cuts through some of the uncomfortableness of sitting down with a bunch of new people sometimes. I would absolutely love that. And I think you've got people at their best when they're most open, most willing to share because they're away from their desks and their computers and their email and all that stuff. And that's just going to make for some like really profound learning. I think now that is on the attendee side. I also think like some of the, the most memorable conference stuff that I've done has been when you're doing that stuff in the context of like some sort of experience, like a boat ride or I don't know, like just, just something that is not sitting in a conference chair looking at a stage. Right. And a lot of this stuff is hard to scale. I mean you actually can, like a lot of this, you can scale, but that's okay, right? Like that's, I mean my accountant community we capped at 500 people because what made it special, I was like, beyond a certain size, it's going to lose this. It's not going to be cool anymore. It's not going to be intimate. It's. People aren't going to be willing to be vulnerable because there's just too many people there that they don't know. So I also think, and this kind of brings me more to like, what does it look like on the event runner side? How does this change? I think we got to stop chasing numbers, man. And it's the age old problem of all types of entrepreneurship. Everybody's just chasing numbers, trying to do more when oftentimes that ruins a good thing. And the very best version of it's actually something much smaller and more intimate. And so in the example of this, this event that I explained up at the top, like, everybody just paid a couple grand to be there. And you could run an event where it is as simple as that. And there's a certain purity to that. Most I say most, I don't know that I know a single conference that isn't this way at this point. That's like the stage time is absolutely a monetized thing. Like, I mean, I, there's, I can almost guarantee you there is not a conference out there where if a person's on stage and they're connected with a software company, like, there's virtually no scenario where they didn't pay to be there. Like, that's just part of the sponsorship packages is you get stage time and all that. And usually that's fairly transparent on the participant side, but good God, I'm not gonna buy a ticket and fly across the country to go sit at an in person webinar promoting their thing. To me, like, oh my gosh, what an unbelievable racket. Now there's a lot of software folks who are super, super sharp and have really, really good and helpful things to share, but not all of them. And I, I also think, like, I mean, you see the, so many of the same people at all these conferences. I was talking with somebody recently who was like, when are we going to get all the fresh voices? Like, where are all the, like, Jason, where are all the people from your generation? And how do we get them all to conferences to share, like, new and fresh ideas? And I'm, I, what I said was like, I just think my generation learns differently. Like, they are learning on social media, they're learning on YouTube. Like, when they need to learn something, they stop, they go and they learn it. They find a person to educate them. They buy online courses. And like, honestly, I think the next generation of thought leadership, you're not going to go to a conference to find them. Like, those people already exist in the algorithm. Like, that is the next generation of thought leadership. To me, for all of the flaws and biases of algorithms, I would still argue they're a whole lot less flawed and biased than the ways that we choose people to speak at conferences. I mean, you want to talk about an imperfect machine, like, that's all about personal relationships. And, you know, when it comes to sponsors, a lot of like, financial, what makes sense? So I think, I think the next generation of thought leadership, like, they're probably already out there. It's just the generation of folks who are probably most amped about the current conference paradigm. I don't know that they're the same ones that are super engaged in social media. That being said, like, I'm a millennial. Like my most meaningful, profound experiences with family and with friends and all that stuff, it's all in person. Like I love, like getting together with them. Like that is so meaningful. And so it's not as if millennials and zoomers don't want to have those in person experiences. If anything, I think we assign an even greater premium to them because we do so much interacting online and in maybe a less personal way than people used to. We're not chatting on the phone and all that. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Tech Guru because you got better stuff to do than worry about your computer problems. Tech Guru is an IT firm that just works with accountants, accounting firms so they understand you understand the annual cycle, the oftentimes awful software you're forced to use. Not always. And they do it via their three S's approach. That's right, there's three of them. I'm now going to give them to you one at a time. One, strategy, industry focused tech strategery. 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I saw a quote on Twitter recently that was a little tongue in cheek that I thought was kind of funny and usually true. They said they were super grateful that the world's brightest thinkers choose to share their gift via the conference circuit when they could instead be making billions of dollars accurately predicting the future. And yeah, like, there's the. And a lot of accountants are pessimists. There's the real pessimist outlook that is like really bubbling. If you're so good at this stuff, why are you. Why are you telling anybody about it? Like, are the best and brightest thinkers really out there just going around giving that information away, or are they spending their time doing it, like, investing and doing it? Like Brandon hall always says, you know, never, never take the advice of the person that isn't actively doing it. And I think that's almost always correct. And so most of the time, like when you have speakers up on stage at conferences, they got something to sell you and that's why they're there. Like, even if it's not a sponsor, most of the people that you see at conferences who have tremendous things to share and value and experience, much of that is fed by their core business, which may be coaching or consulting with firms or whatever it is. That stuff can genuinely make you even better at that stuff because you get to do it with so many different firms. But ultimately the reason that they're on stage is exposure, because they have this adjacent business that they want people to find. I mean, that's why I speak at conferences. I go to conferences and don't always speak at them. But if I'm going to get on stage, it is going to be to get in front of a new group of people to ultimately discover my content. Like, that's. That's my business is my content. I will go to conferences oftentimes and not speak because I just have so many friends now that go to those. And it's a great excuse to go out and hang and see a lot of people. But the reality is, like, that's it's a business proposition for most people to get on Stage and speak. And there isn't always enough, I think selectivity there. Sometimes it feels like we're kind of rehashing the same old talking points over and over again. Right. And even in like a more experiential sort of conference, I still don't mind like traditional talks. Like it's just if it's 100% traditional talks, if it is stage talk after stage talk after stage talk after stage talk, man, that's a long day. Like when I get asked to do conferences where that's the case, I'm like, can I do a Q and A or fireside chat or something like that instead? Because like I can jump up and run around the room and be silly and interact with the audience in a way that will hopefully break up the day a little bit instead of just sitting and watching people look at slide decks. Like so many of these conferences are just slide deck machines where you have this super locked down way that you work with all the speakers and you get all your slides in by this date and it's like, here's the slide template and that's just kind of how you machine out all these talks and then you feed and water these people between sessions. And that's kind of all that it is. I will say one thing that personally I absolutely love is like the software expo element of it. Software discovery is so hard. And we also spend so much time talking over email with our software vendors to where it's really nice to meet the human beings behind those products. Interesting. Learning more internationally about what tech looks like in other regions. In the UK for example, there's actually a massive volume of different tools for firms. So much so that they're like having to acquire each other just to survive. They're in kind of this period of consolidation because there's just so much and firms are just overwhelmed and don't know how to choose software. It isn't quite that bad in the US but we may be getting there. Like we may be kind of on that path. And that expo hall, like is really valuable to me. And I've been at conferences where they had those expo halls and I honestly don't think they leveraged them enough. Enough like they had all these talks going on in all these different places, but there weren't really enough periods of time that were centric to that expo hall. And oftentimes you got like 50 companies in there and there's like, you don't have time to go talk with seven of them, let alone like get an understanding of what most of those companies do. So that is one thing I actually really love about conferences that I would like, do not want to lose. But then ultimately on the event runner side, like who ought to do it? Like who, who are the ought to be the people behind these events, to be totally honest. Like I love the notion of people doing events, you know, around community. So if you already have a community, so you know Ryan Lozanis and you know, there's a number of online communities now where going deeper with that group I think totally makes sense. I've talked with a number of really inspiring people lately who just stood up their own independent events and that's so cool because I, I love like your, your QuickBooks Connects and your zero cons and stuff like that. But they're always gonna be done through the lens of that vendor, right? And so something, something more independent that feels fresh is really cool. I think that like that software haul is still a plenty good way to monetize it. And like, I'll be honest, I would have paid and I still would like paid well to go to a better version of a conference that I was gonna get more value from. Like in the grand scheme of things, I think we benchmark what we pay for all these conferences against each other and there's this sense of what is normal. But ultimately if I'm going to do something that is more peer led and experiential, like man, I would, I would have no problem like paying for that. You're going to cut the cost of a lot of the speakers. Like I don't think you need the same number of speakers and paying them to come out and all that stuff. So you're probably getting some money back there. You can still do the software haul. So you're going to have sponsorships there that can pay some bills for the event runner, but simultaneously like shying away from just doing numbers and trying to grow every single year and instead leaning into how do we make this amazing for a really concentrated group of people, I think those become the best in person events. So if you think about the demographics you gather of those folks before they come out to a conference, what are the really core powerful things that a lot of those people are working on where you can bring together those people in very similar roles within a firm? You know, a partner at a, you know, 800 employee firm is very different than somebody running a team of 20. They may have the same problems. But put me in a room with people who are in a kind of very similar situation to myself, that's Ultimately where I'm going to find the most value. And so there may be an element of, of specificity that's missing from some conferences where there's, you know, some sort of filtering or maybe you run a couple conferences a year that filters for different types of firms or different types of participants. I've always avoided like what I absolutely don't want to be in the middle of is something that feels like a popularity contest and like me having to choose, oh, this person is worthy, but this, this other person is not worthy. That being said, there's absolutely quantitative, you know, filters that you could absolutely use to ensure that stuff is super relevant to those people. I've talked with a lot of folks from very small firms who will go to like, you know, AICPA Engage or Digital or something like that. And they're like, man, it just didn't feel super relevant to me. And it's because I think those conferences are going more upmarket, but they're not coming out and explicitly saying it. So it's the same problem that I think a lot of software companies have is they're unwilling to say who they're not for. And so they're just kind of meh for everybody. And that's especially relevant with conferences as they go a little more experiential and try to make meaningful connections is you probably have to be for a more specific type of person or firm. And that's great because that like that is ultimately more valuable than trying to be the place, this kind of mass appeal thing. And there's probably going to still be a, there will be still a place for the mass appeal conference. Like I'm still going to go to QuickBooks Connect. I'm happy that Intuit is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to have Ryan Reynolds out to speak there. Like cool, that's awesome. And that's going to probably be the like most banging software expo hall there is because it's a big ecosystem one and for that, for all those things, it'll be a good version of that type of conference. But what I think we're all sick of is like the trade show, like just sitting and watching slide deck after slide deck, like let's get more hands on and do something that's a little more geared around building meaningful connections. That's really cool. That stuff gets me really excited. Uh, I would love to hear if you have done something at a conference that kind of really stuck with you, that is kind of along those experiential lines. If you've seen a good example of that. I would love to see that. Also, if you do not go to conferences right now, I'd love to know why. Like, what about conferences today? Don't feel relevant to you and what may move the needle for you? There's a lot of people that listen to this that do events, and so, like, hearing that information would be good. And hopefully we can just swap some ideas that'll make this better for everybody. There you go. Conferences. That's it for today. Thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you in the next one.