151 5 Lessons from Ryan Reynolds for Accounting Firms

So this year, QuickBooks Connect, you may have seen on social media, they had Ryan Reynolds out, the one and only. They always have like big name, I don't know, celebs at QuickBooks Connect. Arguably this is like the biggest one that they had. So they spent a half hour talking to Ryan Reynolds about accounting and entrepreneurship. What could that guy possibly have to say about running accounting firms? Not a ton directly. It was kind of talking about like his entrepreneurial journey. But some really interesting tidbits from that conversation. Specifically five that apply to accounting firms, how we run them, kind of our decision making framework and many of the blockers that he faced that are the exact same as the blockers that a uni face. So let's talk about it. What in the world does Ryan Reynolds have to say about running accounting firms? Thank you, Jason Daly house band bringing them holiday vibes. So I got to do the Ryan Reynolds meet and greet. As I shared, I think it was last Friday. Super cool. There's two people in this world that I super fanboy over. Ryan Reynolds and Donald Glover. And at the conference, Holy g. Like there were people lined up clear down the hall and around the corner like 45 minutes before this talk even started. So like, obviously this was like top billing. Like they were really pushing that. They had Ryan Reynolds there. What a life that guy lives. Earlier that day in Vegas, he was doing another sit down at a conference that day. He also shot a thing with the Alpine F1 team who was there because the Vegas F1 race was right after that. The next morning he accepted a an award in Vancouver, where he grew up. And then from there he flew out to London to keep shooting to restart shooting Deadpool 3 because the actor strike had just ended at the time. Busy boy like that just blows my mind. But the conversation was, I don't know, there wasn't any like super big brain moments in this conversation at QuickBooks Connect. But it was more like, like in the past they've had like Malcolm Gladwell and Simon Sinek and stuff like that. And those guys always have like, I don't know, really things that really hit. But on the, for Ryan Reynolds, it's like, it's the delivery that's just like obviously so perfect. Like he is the goat on late night talk show formats where he can do that interview and it's really funny. So nothing that he said to me was like super groundbreaking. But I thought it was really interesting how he shared his journey from like, you know, being an improv guy that moved to LA not knowing anyone to now, like the Deadpool movies and the number of brands that he's invested in and promoted and then sold. Like how he got into those things really in the last, I don't know, five to seven years not knowing anything about it and like pushing through all of those sort of self limiting beliefs that tell you like, who am I to do this thing? This isn't something that I could actually do. Well, like that was really interesting because it's very practical for everybody in entrepreneurship, like whether you're an SMB or a celeb or anything like that. And so I summarize that kind of my main takeaways from that talk into five points. Number one, stop planning so hard. He says the biggest problem that Hollywood has is that of having too much time and too much money. He's got a, basically a media company that does like the commercials that you've probably seen for Mint Mobile and American Aviation Gin and all that stuff. And like the whole premise of that media company, it's also the media company that's put together the, the Deadpool movies. He really pushed that planning oftentimes like super gets in the way of success and that the more you think about it and the more you plan like ultimately it just gets in the way of you actually doing the thing. He had worked on getting the Deadpool movie made for about 10 years before it got greenlit. And when it did get greenlit, it was like they were given a super shoestring budget. So they had to get really creative with how you would shoot a superhero movie like, like that. And like, let's not lose perspective of the fact that this was coming off of Green Lantern where he was like the lead superhero guy and it was like at a catastrophic bomb. But he's going to go back out and now shop this Deadpool movie and somehow get people to get behind it. And it actually wasn't until they quote unquote, leaked a couple minutes of footage which is like he stole the costume and went out with his production partner and they just shot a few funny things and leaked it online. And the like groundswell of community support and excitement around that leaked footage, he says, is ultimately what got it made. And if you think about what it would take to like get the, get permission to go do that thing, like, I love it as an example of just running out and trying something and seeing what happens. And now like the Deadpool movies aside, I think they also did what's that movie he's got on Netflix, the Adam Project. But those projects aside, most of what they do is produce commercials. And he says, and this is the second takeaway I had. He loves working on ads specifically, because ads are, like, kind of ephemeral. Like, nobody's looking back and saying, oh, that, that 1998 Downey commercial, that was. That was the peak. That was as good as it gets. Nobody's saying that you make a commercial and it goes through and it makes people aware of something, and then they move on with their lives. And it. Like, it's not this stain on your reputation like films can be, but the more, like, money and planning and complication that goes into producing anything, the less you're actually doing of the thing. And we talk a lot about how I think accountants need to be leaning into social media more to attract somebody who feels the pains you solve more acutely. And social media is so the same way. Like, it is just about turning up and being consistent and being there. But what stops us from doing that is all the planning and the complexity we like to build up around it. The notion that you have to have this, like, process. And process can certainly be helpful where, you know, creativity isn't always flowing super easily, but. But process can also super get in the way and complicate something that is probably at its best when it's like, there's that shower thought moment and you just got a killer idea for something impactful or something funny or something along those lines. But what gets in the way of all that is, like, structure and time and money. And people like to ask, like, oh, do you have a ghostwriter? Do you have a social media manager? Do you, you know, what is your video editing team look like? And all of that. And most of the time when people are framed or posing these questions, they've never even done the most basic version of it themselves. And, like, that is always the place to start. Like, how scrappy? How scrappily can you do it, Gang? This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Live Flow is the easiest way to sync that QuickBooks data back and forth to your spreadsheets. You may see in this actually a big announcement lately. So this fall, G2 gave them the top spot in their fall 2023 report as the leader in the financial analysis category. That's right. They won number one. Nice work. If you've been around my channels for a while, you've seen Lifeloat Kindly. They have sponsored quite a bit of stuff. And I'm not, I mean, I'm not saying I'm taking credit for it, but that was probably why I'M not familiar with Live Flow. Super easy way to sync that stuff. Sync your QuickBooks data back and forth with Google sheets. They got a whole pile of templates too to make the process of building that stuff for the first time as easy as possible for you. Stuff for managing cache, AP KPIs, like everything you can imagine. Sync that data into your existing sheets to make them smarter, get it to auto sync or build your like custom new sheets that talk with QuickBooks totally from scratch. Pretty cool tool. Check that one out at LifeFlow IO. This episode is sponsored in part by the lovely folks at Copilot who know that the way that we present ourselves online is truly a reflection of our essence as super cool, modern, forward looking accountants. And I can tell you, most of the tools that we use and the ways that e.g. tax software vendors want us to present ourselves to our clients. It is, it is nothing remotely cool. Nothing remotely modern. And this is where Copilot comes in. It is everything you need from a client portal all in one place. Supes modern. Super impressive. They got a lot of cool little things like what if your client doesn't want to message you in the portal? Well, you send them a message in the portal. Clients getting an email, they can literally just reply to that email and that message will come back up. Show up in the portal just from them sending an email and they're not going to tell you what that ought to look like. Like the name of the game here. Copilot is customization. The notion that you can actually customize what your clients see. All the little nav options on the left, fully customizable what shows up on the right. They got some cool built in stuff but you can also extend it with external like third party things like Airtable or notion. Embed the stuff that you want to directly into there. Even on a client by client or client group basis. You can change what people see because your needs today, buddy, listen, they may not be the same as your needs tomorrow. Now do you want to be locked into a super rigid system that isn't going to adapt and nicely fit around the contours of your accounting firm? No. We want flexibility, right? Is that too much to ask for? If you're into that kind of thing, Check out the link to Copilot in the show notes. Third takeaway I had Scarcity is the mother of invention with that Deadpool movie. Like they just the budget they had was paltry. So there were different things they were doing with visual effects than other folks had done before to make it all feel big and more grandiose than they could actually shoot it to be. It was also very character driven. Like much more character driven than how superhero movies at the time were, where they were huge and more kind of Michael Bayish and heavy on the. The really like over the top stuff. Deadpool by comparison was very much about like a small cast of characters. And that's pretty simple, that's easy to shoot. And I see crossovers here to how you run a business when you find some success and then you pay for a solution that might be expensive. You know, if you go back to your very early days of firm running when you didn't have the money for like this really expensive senior hire, like how did you get by doing that work? Like when the, when the resources just aren't there to do the thing, there's usually another way to do the thing. In fact, the bigger you get and the more money you have, where maybe you don't notice quite as much when it's like leaking out of the business, oftentimes the more inefficient you get. So if you look at like my YouTube channel and you're like, I want to do the exact same thing Jason's doing for some reason, but I want to do it, you know, better. Like, how am I gonna do that? Because they've got all this production team and great equipment and stuff like that. Your advantage to me is the more I've developed that and the more complicated it's gotten, the slower we are. The fact that those videos are on two week production cycles now, whereas before when I was making my very first videos, it was me sitting down in front of a laptop webcam. So I think it's interesting, it's always worth challenging. How would we get this thing done if we had like a tenth the means? Because there's usually another way. And I've paid this tax before, the tax of I have this painful problem that I need to solve and I can like go to an agency for, you know, design or video editing or something like that, and it's going to cost me a pretty penny, but I know that it will get done. Interestingly, like, I've actually appreciated having a, having a view into the processes of those agencies to understand how they get that work done before ultimately bringing that stuff in house and, and like building a design team internally and an editing team internally and all that in most cases, like be it the cost of your tax software or how you manage projects or what you can get done with that next hire, oftentimes the I don't know, the common wisdom is like overly complicated, I think, and overly reliant on human expertise. I would say actually we, we often over hire expertise due to a lack of systems and we talked a bit about this yesterday when it came to how to build technical review processes that like your admins could help out with. It is really easy for me to hire admin folks to hire killer like offshore operations folks. So the more that I can build my business in a way that leans into that, from the services we offer to how standardized we are about how we get the work done, to maybe not going down the advisory path because that's harder to systematize and instead going down this other path where it's a pain that's specific to my clients, but one that a team of offshore people could fulfill. When you're forced to be scrappy, like I think it changes. I don't know how you strategize and all that, but the bigger and the more successful and the more mature you get, the more I think you can kind of slip into this complacency that is kind of slow and oftentimes overpaying. And that is where like profits start disappearing. And I think the business gets a little bit less interesting because you're not having to be scrappy. I got a ton of examples of this and the stuff that I do now running the firm though I had examples too of like doing work with agencies, different types of outsourcing options, where in a pinch those like came through for us in a big way. But long term, we basically just ended up building like our own sort of similar internal outsourcing options, if that makes sense, like through building our own offshore team. But all that was learned through iteration and like trying to challenge. I don't challenge the notions of what exactly we needed, how much technical expertise was required because that was always our bottleneck was like really high level technical people. Gang. This episode sponsored in part by by Teamup who helps you recruit top Filipino accountants without any 0 ongoing monthly fees. They can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms. People who are familiar with stuff like Xero, qbo Dex. They can find them for you. 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Learn more@hireteamup.com 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 a hundred percent 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 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 at 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. my fourth takeaway. Just tell a story. We try to focus on these kind of, I don't know, big brain, mega resource roundups, all these different things when like his Ryan Reynolds approach to promoting his brands is more just tell a story and put the product in the ad. And in our case I think our expertise is the product. So we oftentimes get fixated on having something razzle dazzle or impressive or novel to say when sometimes all you gotta do is like tell the story of the problem that your product solves or your expertise solves. A like killer example of this that was went super viral. Was it? It was maybe last holiday season. So peloton you may have seen this peloton puts out this Ad for Peloton, like, the exercise bike. And this guy, I can't remember what it is, but this guy buys his wife a Peloton bike and then is like, all encouraging her to, like, exercise and all these things and all came off, like, real, like, not great. Like, there was some backlash to that. Like, it just. It was felt a little like dude objectifying his wife, getting her to be more fit. And this blew up, like, in Peloton's face in a big way. And in a shockingly short turnaround, Ryan Reynolds production company goes out, hires the actor, the woman who had been in this ad and was like, the wife. They shoot a super low budget, like, hacked together ad with her sitting at a bar, like, chin rested in her hand, like she's, you know, exhausted or overwhelmed or like, what's happening, Happening to me. Flanked by a friend on either side who are like, kind of encouraging her, like, you know, everything's gonna be okay. This is gonna blow over. And the moment you see her, like, you know, if you're aware of this Peloton commercial thing, like, oh, my gosh, this is the same lady. And as it's pulling out, like, there's an aviation American gin bottle and shot. And then it like, cuts to like an end card of aviation American gin with like some sort of tagline or something. And you hear one of her friends say, but you look great. Which is like, was just the best punchline for this whole arc of Peloton making this commercial about this guy giving his wife a bike and telling her, oh, you're doing a great job of being fit. Now to that blowing up. And this poor lady, like, the actor being in the middle of all of this stuff blowing up. And like, she is the face of this now to like, I think it was like within 72 hours or something like that, they had put this commercial together and released it. And it's the same lady. And I don't even think she said a single thing in the commercial. Like, it was just her and her friends were saying things and it was like a 30 second ad and it was huge. And what the hell did it have to do with American Aviation Gin? Like, absolutely nothing. But they got so much earned media from that. And, like, it was in the commercial and like, they were the ones to think of putting that commercial together and all that, but just by being the one to tell the story, like, they got. They got all of the upside from that. Like, they were the ones to benefit. So do we need to be useful and, like, providing value and all that stuff. Yes. But, like, oftentimes it can be as simple as telling a story. And so this could be, you know, something a client got wrong, and you help them through that. Or common questions you get from clients, like, tell the story, your expertise is the product, and you don't really have to think, overthink how you inject yourself into that. Like, sometimes the story is enough and it actually connects with people much better than something that feels like, I don't know, trying to sell people on something. Fifth and final takeaway. Failures are absolutely going to happen. So he had worked to get this Deadpool movie made for 10 years, came on the heels of the Green Lantern movie, totally bombing. But does anybody really think about that now when they think about Ryan Reynolds? Like, I don't think they do think about what a long arc that is. Think about trying to get something made for a decade. What's the last thing you try to do in your accounting firm for a decade before finally getting over the hump? And it happening like that is a long, long time horizon for my little millennial brain to imagine. So what does failure look like for us? Like, over the course of running our accounting firms? Probably stuff like picking the wrong niche, hiring the wrong person, not deciding to hire when you should have hired, hiring when. Maybe that wasn't the right answer. Giving clients the wrong advice, like sending them on the wrong path. It's absolutely going to happen. That's just part of the game, though. And it feels like oftentimes this huge, monumental thing that will, like, crush you and you will never recover from it, or the prospect of failure is something that is so spooky that you can't even imagine starting down that path in the event that you do fail. But on the other side of that is a better, more capable version of you. Whether you fail or whether you are successful, you want to be the person that's, like, not afraid to try these things. Because on the other side of that, even if you did fail, you're better than the person that didn't try. And honestly, nobody remembers that stuff. There's certain things that are inexcusable. You have your enrons of the world where it's like, good luck ever getting out from under that. But that's not really like, our lives. And the result is, like, we need to be leaning into change and risk taking. I think maybe a little more than we are naturally than, like, our natural tendencies have us do have us do. Look at me. Make word good. So it requires, like, pushing ourselves, I guess, a Little more outside of our comfort zone, especially in firms like tax firms where they're on kind of this annual change cycle. So it already feels like everything is evolving really slowly. Just accept the fact that failures are gonna happen along the way and they're not gonna define you. If anything, they're gonna define you in like a more positive light because of what's possible on the other side of that failure. That would not have been possible had you not been willing to fail. Bravo. Too into it for getting old Ryan Reynolds out. I bet that was a. It was a big check. Big check. But, uh, that was a lot of fun. QuickBooks Connect is probably the like of the US conferences I go to is arguably the best hang. Like there are a lot of people there from small firms specifically, like the type of folks you bump into online. And that makes that one feel like a really unique, really unique get together. Had a lot of fun with that one. This year I'm going to be at Digital back in the freaking same bloody place, the Aria in Vegas next week. If you're going to be a Digital, track me down. I got a couple sessions there. Would love to meet you. Met a ton of super cool people at QuickBooks Connect who listen to the pod. Thank you for not being weirdos. Thank you for introducing yourself. But this chat with Ryan Reynolds was actually a ton of fun and I got the pick to prove it at the meet and greet. I just wish they didn't put the QuickBooks Connect thing over your head at the meet and greet. Like they're. I get that they're taking credit for you getting to have a picture with this person, but it would just be much cooler if I could just like whip it out and be like, hey, look, I met Ryan. Me and Ryan, we know each other. And instead it's like this very branded thing. But I get it. They had to get some sort of credit for cutting that check, right? Any other folks that were at qbc, I know a lot of you listen here, would love to see your thoughts. Like, what did you think of that session? They bless their hearts. Before they interviewed Ryan Reynolds, they made other people go on stage for like 30, 40 minutes when everyone is very obviously there for that talk. So they put like Shane Mason and Kenji Kuramoto, like they interviewed a few accountants on stage before that. And you want to talk about the worst speaking gig you can imagine, having to go on stage when everyone is there to see Ryan Reynolds and he's on right after you. Absolutely brutal. That's all I got for today. Got a super fun one in the can for tomorrow that I think you will like. And then Friday, we're doing a Q and A like we do every week. Got any cues? Drop them in the comments and we'll be sure to pull them into that episode. And I'll see you in the next one.