152 BETTER Change Management in Accounting Firms

You know the old trope, you're gonna.

Pull in this automation or this new tech and get back to doing the higher value things.

Has that ever actually happened? Has that like, that's never been my experience.

My experience is I automate that task and then I actually just do more of the same and like, bring on another client or something. I had a conversation about this recently.

That I wanted to pull onto the podcast.

Please welcome COO of Boomer Consulting and Ariana Campbell.

Well, hello everyone.

We're talking change management and how to.

Actually get intentional about the change you.

Want to see on the other side of change. On the other side? No, what you want to do on the other side.

Okay, come, we'll talk about it. We'll figure it out.

Come on in. Ariana, thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be on the podcast.

Can you give us like the, the 30 second intro? Who you are, what you do, what gets you pumped?

Absolutely. So, Ariana Campbell, shareholder and COO at Boomer Consulting. I've been with Boomer for about 15 years now. My primary areas where I focus both internally and externally are on people, process and change. And what I really enjoy doing is finding the intersection of those three areas together. So how can we really build effective processes within firms to help our people to be successful? But with that, it requires so much managing of change to be able to do it effectively. And so really helping firms also understand that that's a continuous improvement journey. It's not meant to be a place that you arrive to, but it's something that you always are working on is really how I spend the majority of my time.

Bless the hearts of the people helping accountants through change management. Oh my gosh.

It is so true.

Oh, my gosh.

Yes.

My background is a small firm guy and I kind of sort of know what Boomer is, but honestly, not really.

Could you do like a 30 second.

Intro of what Boomer Consulting looks like today also?

Absolutely. So at Boomer Consulting, we work exclusively with accounting firms and. And we help them to focus on five key areas, so leadership, talent, technology, process, and growth. Because those are the five areas that are critical to firm success and we need to have those areas working together. Well, we can't just focus on things within different silos, so we help them in a couple of different ways. The first way is through consulting and a lot of focus on strategy. But our biggest area of focus is our peer communities. So we have a number of peer communities that are focused on each of those areas. Bringing leaders from different areas in the firms together to really focus on how they can accelerate the success of their firms. And then we also do training. So we've been around for more than 25 years, again, focusing, focusing exclusively on accounting firms and really, again, enjoy helping firms to be future ready and really making sure that they're going to be sustainably successful.

I love that. I'm a big peer group guy. What is like the average demographic of the type of firm that's doing stuff with?

Boomer? Yep. So we help firms primarily in the top 300. Looking at our different communities. Really how? We have firms of a variety of sizes, depending on the community. But in some cases it's focused on firms that maybe you might think of as larger size, some midsize, some small size. But then in other cases it's how can those different size firms work together? As far as roles, it varies. Like I said, for our communities, we have, I think we're up to 10 different communities. So we have a managing partner community, CIO, learning and development, talent marketing and business development operations. We cover all of the different areas of the firm. But one of our main goals is bringing those different firm leaders from those different firm sizes together to be able to learn from each other. Because quite frankly, with all of the exciting stuff that's happening in the profession, we're better together. As you said, you're a big peer group person. We can't figure it out alone. Yeah, right. So being able to gather with your peers is huge.

I love that. I love that that's happening in like bigger firm universe also. Okay, so you and I bumped into each other in New York where. What was that?

Was that a startup accelerator thing?

It was the AICPA Executive Roundtable. We were hanging out in New York City and the focus was on AI, if you recall. So. So there were different vendors, solution providers within the profession, sharing their solutions and how they're focusing on AI.

Yep. Okay, so you said something when, when we were chatting that like, stopped me in my tracks because it was such a nice framing of something that I thought a lot about. But like, you expressed it in like such a more elegant way than I was able to. Uh, but like this notion that by default, when you eliminate a task or you simplify a process or something like that, what are you gonna do with that free time? Like, if you're not intentional about that, you actually just go do more of the same. But there's sort of this assumption that we're going to do something better, but that usually doesn't Happen. So like what?

Where have you.

I don't know, where have you bumped into that in the wild? And how does that impact how you approach change management with firms?

That is such a big question. But I think if we look briefly at the evolution of process, I know that may seem strange, but the evolution of process within the accounting profession, to me, it's been a really interesting journey that gets us to this question about what are you going to do with the capacity that you create? And then how do you manage change effectively? So I've been doing process improvement for a while now with firms where I go into firms and help them improve. Maybe it's their tax process or their audit process, client accounting services, in a large scope of how can we truly look to not just optimize, but to transform that process? And it's been really interesting to see the evolution of firms really first approaching us to back in the day to answer the question, how can we be more efficient? So really, how can we work faster? That was the question, how can we focus on changing our realization numbers? And that was all the rage. Efficiency was all the rage. But now, as we're seeing firms really looking to leverage more automation, more AI, more things like that, the two pieces of process improvement that are really important are not only the efficiency, but the consistency. Because if you're looking to, to leverage automation and AI and things like that, you need to have a consistent process because it's difficult, if not impossible, to automate an inconsistent process. And so now firms are approaching us really, they've tapped into the ways through using their existing technology that they can be more efficient. But they're asking now, how can we make our processes more consistent so that we can leverage these different resources that are available to us? So with that, what we're finding is that even if you make your processes more consistent, but you don't have an answer to what you're going to do with the capacity, you really don't end up making significant change. And so the question isn't to start with asking what, what do we want to automate? Necessarily the question that we find firm, the way that we find firms to be more successful is by first answering the question, what are you going to do with the capacity that you create? Because if you do that, if you answer that question, you're most likely going to create a better strategy to automation and leveraging technology, which is then going to feed into better change. Because there's a purpose behind why we're doing this. It's just not another technology implementation or new bells and whistles or what are we doing with this? If we can rally around the why of what are we going to do with the capacity we create, that's going to help to have more effective change.

So you start with what's the new thing you want to do or the different thing you want to do, and then, and then think through the process improvement.

Is it just me or is that.

Actually a harder question to answer than how are we going to improve the process?

It is absolutely a harder question to answer, but a necessary question. So the process improvement, like I said, we're beyond. Well, I think that optimizing is important because that's just part of continuous improvement. Right? But to truly get to where we need to be in our firms of, you know, moving from being more compliance focused to focusing more on advisory and consultative services, that does take business transformation and process improvement is such an important part of that. And all of that should tie back to your strategy. So from my perspective, it's more of a concern, especially when you're talking to the firm leadership, you know, the managing partner, whoever it may be, if there's not an answer to that question and ultimately it creates a lot of opportunity to create the strategy that you can then align whatever the process improvement technology, use the rest of those things. You can find more alignment that makes more sense.

Gang.

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Okay, so a lot of listeners to this POD are small firm folks like I was. Ariana, let's say you're going out, you've got now this accounting, tax accounting practice with 10 people and you are kind of painting the picture of the vision for this firm and trying to, I don't know, create that, I guess, vision that everybody can get behind. I can understand the process of figuring out like how to identify process improvement opportunities and all of that. But what does the process look like for getting to a, I don't know, a quote unquote right answer or a well aligned answer for what we're going to do next? Is it like we're looking at our service offerings? Like, like what does that, I don't know, that process to me, feels more abstract to figure that out.

Yeah. So we always start with a vision and a strategic plan, even if we're doing a process improvement engagement. Because you have to understand, and I know it's hard to vision out five years from now. I think with just the pace of change, that's hard to do. But we need to at least set our intent and look at creating our own certainty for, let's say, the next three years. What would a vision look like? What do we want to be true for our organization? No matter what the size three years from now, and then from there, it's what are the best next steps that we need to take? We usually have the conversation in the five areas that I mentioned earlier for leadership, process, talent, technology, and growth. And once you can understand what your vision is and what the next best steps are that we can take forward to help achieve that, those things start to become more clear. And it's a great thought exercise again, of looking at the integration between those five areas, because you might find that something that you thought was a process initiative is actually more of a technology initiative, or maybe it's a training initiative that you need to be focused on. So again, by setting a vision, looking at those five areas, and then saying, what are our best next steps forward? Sometimes you can look at it for the year, sometimes you just need to look at it by quarter. That can help to provide that additional insight and direction. And then you can start to drill down to, okay, what processes support that, what technology supports that. So that helps to put it in a way that helps people to think through it, but also to stretch their thinking and challenge things. Because you don't want to build a plan just on where you are today. You truly want to build a plan for where you're trying to grow to again, no matter what the firm says.

And I think a hard thing to balance is like, the intentionality of the change. Like if a new tool comes out or a new AI thing comes out, where it's like, oh, this is going to save us a bunch of time. Like, if we overthink all of this and think like, okay, it's like, I don't know, I could see, I could see a situation where you are kind of overthinking how all this stuff comes together. When it's like, oh, no, we can just like, my, my, my brain is like, oh, I can just bolt this thing on. It's going to save us time. Like, is that problematic? How do you prioritize those things?

I think when you have so we see firms get caught up in shiny object object syndrome. I'm a full supporter of always looking at what are the new solutions out there. How can we make sure that we're leveraging those because we don't want to get stuck, because then you just start to fall behind and ultimately run the risk of becoming irrelevant. But if you have a strategic plan and a vision for where you're going, you're going to know what the best fit is for your organization. I think one of the struggles that firms run into is with the shiny object syndrome. Is that, sure, that may, that solution may have some awesome capabilities, but are you going to fix something over here when you bolt that on, but break something over there? So maybe it helps you for process, but it's a pain point for your people. Maybe it's actually going to cause challenges to your growth plan and the way that you want to grow because of the way that that technology has you doing different processes and things like that. So that's why I think the more holistic approach. And again, it doesn't have to be strategic planning or visioning should never be something that holds you back. It should be something that allows you to accelerate the progress in, in your business.

You said something there that probably triggered people, the whole, like, friction of technology change on your people and how that impacts them. And I know a lot of folks, a lot of folks who are honestly, like, wired similar to me, where they want to like, be really agile and like, change these things. And they have that, I guess, entrepreneurial mindset and it just exhausts everybody else. And so you kind of hit this, like, what feels like this limit of how much change you can actually run through your team without them getting exhausted. And so folks end up in this point where they're like, do I just need to go out and like, hire folks who have a greater appetite for change and can thrive in that? Do I need to somehow like, shift the culture with the people I have? Like, what would your advice be to those folks who have that point of friction with their teams?

I think that change fatigue is a real thing, again, with spending the majority of my time helping firms change. And again, significant transformational change. One of the things that I've learned is that if you know how, if you learn how to change, well, you can reduce the friction that comes along with change. And so really understanding organizationally is one thing, but at the heart of change is really people and emotions and feelings. And that's why people end up getting so fatigued. But what I find is that in the profession we typically don't want to talk about those feelings that are associated with change. When I went through my prosci Change Management Practitioner certification, one of the things that really stuck out was the fact that organizations don't change. It's people and individuals that change. And that's what drives organizational change. And so with that, if we can understand more of the what's in it, if we can explain more of the what's in it for me to people, if we can talk more about the some of the natural resistance, we just want people to buy in most of the time instead of taking that pause and addressing the reasons why they may not be bought in yet. Answering the why questions of why is this going to be better? Why do we need to change and why will this be better than what we were doing before? And really looking at change on the individual level instead of just organizationally, is one of the steps that you can take to changing? Well, I don't think that it's about getting different people. People are capable of change. They may have different approaches to changing, but it's really saying how is an organization with our people on more of a one to one basis, do we change well so that the organization can move forward and support people through that change? And obviously we can't stop changing because as soon as we stop changing we start falling behind. We run the risk, as I said earlier, becoming irrelevant. So not changing isn't an option, it's how do we change?

Well, yeah, like that framing of change changing. Well, like almost optimizing for I don't know, or maybe doing it in a more human way. So it's not quite such an exhausting process. Gang this episode sponsored in part by.

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Some ideas there of like in a practical way, how to make that a human first process. I'd love it if you could dig into that, maybe a little more of like practically what does it look like within your team to like enable a good version of change and maybe a more human way which can be uncomfortable for us and maybe something that we've never done before when oftentimes I it seems like maybe some of the friction comes from the fact that you, the owner or you know, whatever your role is, may not have exactly the same incentives as the folks who you're trying to get to change. So like in a small firm, if this is going to increase the bottom line or make them more efficient, like ultimately does that person have the same incentives as you? Like is there, I don't know, commission structure or something like that? Like what is, I don't know, what are some, I guess practical right and wrong ways, I guess to approach that, that Change in a more human way that hopefully kind of gets everybody like swimming in the same direction, right?

Mm. One of the, I would say if there is a wrong way is to just have it be a top down approach where the business owner stands up at the front of the room or on the virtual meeting and says, here's what we're going to do. So we're kicking that off on Monday because it's going to be awesome for profitability. We're going to see great numbers and our clients are going to be wowed. Everybody sitting listening to that call is like, but what does that mean for me? Because all of us, including you and I have the same question when there's a significant change of what's in it for me, that's just how we're wired as humans. And so that would be an example of how not to do it. One of the more successful ways to do it, even if you have a smaller organization, it may maybe your whole team. If you have a larger organization, it's really getting a good cross section across the different levels and putting together a team that can help to navigate change with their peers at their levels. So when we think about change, really having it be the human element is also making sure that it's coming from someone who can understand your perspectives. And if I'm the staff person and the business owner, imagine managing partner is telling me about the changes that need to happen. That's where that disconnect can be that you mentioned before. But if we can help to put together that cross functional team and provide them with the information and have the conversations around what's the impact that it makes at these different levels and have them be ambassadors for that change who can not only explain the why in a way that's relevant to the people, they can also provide a good feedback structure to be able to bring the feedback from people to leadership and management to make more informed change decisions. And yes, that means you actually need to talk, talk to your people. But what we need to have that happening at is at peer to peer levels because you're going to have more authentic conversations or also focusing on supervisor to the supervisor, supervisors communicating to the people that report to them instead of just always having it be a message from top leadership.

Yeah. So to put this through the small firm lens, let's go Back to the 10, the 10 person Campbell & Co. Hypothetical firm. Let's say you go to, we're going to digital next week. You go to digital, you see there's some vendor there and you're like, oh, man, this is sweet. This would solve so many of my problems. We're all excited about this. How do you, as, you know, the managing partner or whatever, when you have that energy, what is the. And let's think in a small firm setting, like, what is the best way to bring that back in a way that feels, I don't know, like, helpful to everyone rather than you'd like kicking the door down and being like, awesome, we gotta do this in the next month.

Because that's always the risk when the leader goes to the conference, you know.

When they get back, I know, right?

They're about to start wrecking shop with all the ideas, for sure. So a tool that we always share in our community meetings as well as our presentations, when my fellow consultants and I are speaking at different places throughout the year, we call it the Take it back tool. So identifying while you're actually at the conference, what are the things that you want to take back? Why do you want to take it back? And it has to be more than just, it's a shiny new object. What's your actual why? How does that tie to strategy? And who do you need to take it back to and by when? So just framing your thinking throughout, you know, whatever conference you're attending is really important. But ideally, being able to have a debrief once you get back to your firm. And it could be if you're in a smaller organization, you're pulling, you know, an all team meeting or you've identified. Here are the five people on my 10 people team that I want to make sure that I'm sharing this information with so that first of all, you're getting it out of your head, because the information can be a silo and sometimes it doesn't make it back from the conference, but also so that you're not just coming back and sharing the different exciting ideas to a variety of different people, really taking that time to sit down and to have an intentional debrief and conversation about that. Hopefully leveraging your take it back tool because you could have all those conversations at once and then saying what could be our strategic approach to looking at how these ideas are interrelated or how this single really exciting idea ties to our overall overall strategy, which again, gets back to the importance of having a strategic plan and vision, because then you can actually run those exciting ideas through that lens and say, does this really fit? Does this really make sense? And again, if we use this tool and it's super exciting because it's in line with our strategy and it's going to solve all these things. What are we going to do differently with the capacity that we gain? And so if you're having a conversation like that before you dive into doing all the things again, no matter what your firm size, that is going to help those ideas really take hold and be more productive.

Okay, so you've done a ton of this with different, different firms. And I love how I honestly, I think my brain is like the polar opposite to yours where you have like this framework that I'm super jealous of of like this very practical like methodology of thinking through this stuff. So of, you know, the work that you've done and what you've seen in the wild working with different firms. Give us like what is like your top. It could be change management, it could be process improvement. Like what is a, a nugget of advice that you're super excited about? Either something new or something that most firms are still getting wrong. Like what's something that like really gets you jazzed right now?

So I would say the thing that I'm most jazzed about is within our Process Circle community. So that is leaders from different firms who are focused on leading process improvement within their organizations. It's really the evolving intersection of process improvement, project management and change management. And realizing that those three things are interconnected. I would say that process improvement has some good traction within the profession. We're still trying to figure out change management, especially the people side of it. Like the people side of it that can get, that can make people nervous, but the project management side of it and really realizing how when you put those three different parts together, you can really do all of them more effectively. I'm excited about those conversations. I'm excited about being able to help firms with that. My colleague Amanda Wilke and I, she's the co facilitator for the Process Circle being able to talk to firms about how they are not only implementing that in their strategies, but also looking at what different roles might we need in order to do that well. And again, no matter what size firm you have thinking about what's our approach to process improvement, what's our approach to project management and what's our approach to change management and how are those working together? Like as a business leader, am I thinking about those three things together? Am I evangelizing that to my team? Am I empowering them to be able to focus on all three of those areas? Heck, have I even defined what the three of those mean for our organization? It starts to. We start to think about Things differently, ask different questions and make progress in new and different ways. And that makes me super excited.

Very cool. Yeah. I think the. Have you even defined those three things? Like, I think that's probably what just punched a lot of people in the face. Something more involved than like coming back from the conference and telling Bill and Tracy to get started on this.

That's exactly it.

Any, any. Okay, AI. I gotta ask you about AI before we go. Any like non obviously hot takes on AI or you think maybe the discussion is going here but you think reality may be something else. Anything you see in there?

I think that as far as AI is concerned, that obviously there continues to be a lot of opportunity. I think that related to the profession continuing to define what it actually means, there's a ton of opportunity there. But then I also think that AI and strategy, just as a technology strategy, used to be a foreign idea. I think really digging more deeply into again, how can we leverage AI in a way that's unique to our organization and how can we make the different pieces work together? Well, instead of just taking a whack a mole approach, I think that the organizations who are doubling down on figuring that out. I'm not saying that it's easy, but I think that it is necessary. That's when they're really going to see the exponential compound benefits of whatever AI they're choosing to leverage.

Have you seen the meme where I think it's from a made from TV commercial where the guy like slaps a piece of tape or something over this thing that's leaking water and it like, like stops the leak? I feel like that is AI right now. Like we're just looking at everything in the accounting profession like oh, pipeline, oh, this bad process. Oh, and it's like we're just slapping AI on it.

Yeah, exactly. But I think that's also allowing people to maybe in some cases test it, dip their toes in the water, not be as scared of it. And I think that that's beneficial. But I think just as we've seen the evolution from efficiency to consistency to capacity, AI approaches are going to continue to evolve. And I think we're just in the very beginning, I think that firms also are going to to start taking more consideration and intentionality around what do we need it to do for us? Like coming to the table with here are the problems that we're trying to solve from an integrated approach. How can you help us solve that instead of it being the solution providers saying here's just all the things we can do. I think more of a partnership and I think the solution providers are ready for that as well. It's just bringing those pieces together. Yeah.

Cool. Awesome stuff. Thank you so much for doing this. Let's ride this promo pony out of here. Where can people find you if they.

Wanted to work with you?

If they want to work with Boomer, like, where could they find you?

Absolutely. So boomer.com is one of the best places to check to learn about our services.

What a great domain, by the way. What a killer domain to have it is.

That's because we got in on it back in the day. You know, we are that that established that we could have that domain. But we're also on all the socials. You can find us on Twitter, well, the site formerly known as Twitter X and LinkedIn, all of those places. But also just reaching out, going to the website and reaching out via email is always a great way to dive into any of these things more. So appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast and to have a conversation with you. All good things for firms to be keeping in mind.

Yes. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody for coming and hanging today. If you got any questions or thoughts, drop them in the comments. Keep the discussion going. I'll see you in the next one.