166 Launch A New Accounting Firm Or Stay Put

It's a Q and A roundup. We are talking about. Ah, when's the right time to go out and launch your own firm if you are working for someone else? Pros and cons to that. Should we charge extra for urgent work? When that spicy thing comes up, should we slap a surcharge on it? Urgency in general in an accounting firm, is this something we should try to maintain? Like should we be urgent? Like should we be pushing to be better and all these things? Right? Like what is the good and the bad version of urgency? And then how do we balance being different, being snowflakes, trying that new thing and finding a better way versus just stealing what everybody else is doing because somebody else has probably already done it. Right? Let's talk about it. Come on in. We're doing a Q and A. As always. Pop the questions down in the comments. Hit me on social media, whatever. We'll pull that stuff into here. Everything that I know is from really helpful people sharing their journey with me. That's what this is supposed to be. Kind of a reflection of that I'm a mouthpiece of what I've learned from a bunch of other folks as well as my own journey. Hi Jason. I'm working on my CPA license. Halfway there. I have eight years tax experience in a large firm doing real estate stuff. I'm looking forward to starting my own firm this year. Hopefully after I get my license in the summer. Do you think I need to join a smaller firm before I start my own business? Your help is appreciated. So two things there. The. The license is in progress and do you need to go to a small firm to get some experience before starting your own small firm? On the license front, some states you need a license to do certain things you don't usually don't need to. Like the license does not need to hold you back depending on the state that you're in and the type of work that you're planning to do. So that's. I just wanted to acknowledge that that is a false assumption a lot of us have that you have to have that certification in order to go into the business of doing accounting. You. You really don't. Second thing. So they're currently at a big firm doing real estate stuff and reality of big firm life is like the type of clients you're gonna serve when you go out and you do your own thing. It's very different. To the flip side, when you're, you know, when you are at a huge firm working with huge corpse like versus baby firm working with more mom and pop types of things. And there's definitely a risk of going out and doing your own thing when you enjoyed working on these big projects and teams and all that stuff. More the big firm environment. And there's definitely a risk that when you go out on your own and do a very different version of that, that you get there and you're like, oh, this actually isn't super fun, or this is actually much more isolating than what I did before. Or maybe I don't quite enjoy working with that type of client as much as I used to or as much as I did the larger types of firms. And the reality is, when you're coming into firm ownership, if you're considering this, you are going to have blind spots no matter what. So I try to convince people to lean into getting experience. Could you go cold turkey and probably figure this out from scratch, doing this yourself? Probably. But if running a small firm is what you're ultimately going to do, I do think it's helpful to have a peek into other small firms and the ways that they work. And so when you're first starting out, that might look like, you know, my recommendation to everybody is be starting that side hustle always. Like, even when you still have that job that you're doing, I don't recommend quitting that job and then building a new book of business from scratch. That's like the most high stakes way that you can launch an accounting firm. Honestly, there's no reason that you can't be starting to build that business on the side. And the biggest thing there is, as you're doing that, you need to be like energized and be like, yes, I am loving this. I want to do more of this. Because the worst thing you can do is make that jump and then find out this actually isn't what I enjoyed. So start doing that side hustle for sure. But when you make the jump, what I may, or what I would encourage you to consider is are there other firms that you look up to that are maybe doing things in a way that you kind of want to follow or you, you respect the way that that firm approaches doing their work where you could come in and do some contract work for them? Think about what are the ways that I can get a peek into, into how the sausage gets made at another firm. Experience can be bad when it's the wrong type of experience. I think a lot of us have seen this where we are. If we come of age in a traditional firm environment, there's certain things that may be Hard to untrain. But that doesn't mean that all experience like that is bad. Because if you can put your finger on a firm that seems like they're doing something right, doesn't mean that you have to copy everything that they do. But that perspective is really valuable. And I mean that's. That was the biggest realization I ever had. And what led me to doing things online was I always learned the most talking with other people who did what I did, who ran firms who in a very contextual way understood the struggles and the pains that I had unlike anybody else. And if it's just you, and if you are going out and starting a new firm from scratch and you don't have any of those, any of that perspective, you don't have any of those relationships, that going to be tricky because you're going to have a lot of just dumb meat and potatoes everyday questions where you're like what is the right thing to do here A or B and having that experience with other firms, having those relationships you can lean into that becomes super valuable to shave like years off of your learning process. So good of you to be thinking about how going from a big firm to your own firm, very different thing, very different lifestyle, very different type of work and type of client you, you could do an intermediary step there where you go to work for a small firm, but if you're already building up that side, hustle a bit and starting to take on clients, I think you could probably weasel your way into a firm on a contract basis just to get some of that experience. It's a good way to float you cash wise too as you're building out that client list over the first year or two, right? A lot of folks that listen to this podcast have done just this. Oftentimes the best people to get advice from are the ones who are just a step or two ahead of you in the journey. And any wisdom you have, the folks who are listening who have done this in the last, you know, five years had to make just this decision and, and figure out when the right time to do that was. Would love to see a comment from you just sharing your experience, like don't worry about having anything novel to say. I would love to just hear here's a situation that I did, here's what I decided and here's what I got right and what I got wrong. Like that stuff is gold can save other people a lot of headaches. One other question that's similar and then we'll get onto some other stuff. Early 30s soon to be a dad. Woo CPA debating the jump to capitalize on our AI remote resource revolution to niche my way into working with farmers, estate tax or sit tight with a firm that vibes with my entrepreneurial spirit. Thoughts? Question mark. So working with a firm right now that vibes with your entrepreneurial spirit, thinking about going and doing your own thing with farmers, some estate work with farmers, presumably, and having a kiddo. There's something to be said for, for working with a firm that you vibe with. I mean there's most of the people that are considering doing their own thing. The opposite is the case. Like they, there's. They have friction with the model and the people that they have to work with and that what is what pushes them out to do their own thing. So if you have something that you really vibe with, I would think really hard before giving that up. That being said, you said it's. It vibes with your entrepreneurial spirit. I don't know if maybe that that could be at odds with having a child or you're thinking maybe you want some more independence because you're going to have a child. I could tell you when I had a kid there was just like a fundamental brain chemistry shift that happened for me. I don't know what this experience looks like for women. And there's a, I mean, blows my mind the number of women out there who run their own firm in the same situation, have their first child, have subsequent children. Like, it's amazing to me. I can tell you on the dad side when you have a newborn and like the kids in the breastfeeding stage and like you generally kind of feel useless and you're just kind of there running support for your partner, just being like, just tell me, tell me what I can do, how I can help. Just trying to be helpful, right? You got those months there where you feel kind of useless. And for me it just dumped gasoline on my internal fire. For I have this thing that I have to produce now for like this is my contribution now. And my family situation is not the same as everybody else's. But like for me that was like, it just like, I don't know, a switch flipped in my head where simultaneously I had something for the first time that was fully dependent on me to, to keep it alive and provide for it and all that stuff. And that was a really, really profound moment. But at the same time you have something that is now more important than anything else you've ever had. So the stakes just went through the roof and you need to be there for that thing. Like you need to raise that thing, be pre all that stuff, right? And those two things are really at odds. The notion that you're going to go full, full meatball, work your butt off. But you need to, you know, be there for that, that human being. You know, people often ask me, jason, who is this episode sponsored in part by today. This episode sponsored in part by Live Flow. Did you hear the news? Liflow just launched a consolidation product. You actually might have seen it on the main channel recently. We did a whole demo day of it. Live Flows automated multi entity consolidations. It's beyond simple to use. You can easily map multiple unmatching chart of accounts from multiple QuickBooks Online companies into one standardized report. And once it's set up, LifeFlow is gonna get to work updating the consolidations automatically in real time, the realest of time. So you can focus on analysis using instantly updating data across entities. LifeFlow can even consolidate financials that are in different currencies. That sounds disgusting. Yikes. And it doesn't stop there. Liveflow offers flexible, powerful reporting tools. Create customized dashboards that meet your specific needs. Little Snowflake build executive presentations, cash flow forecasts and more with just a few clicks. The consolidation thing is actually super cool. You haven't seen that yet, check it out on the main YouTube channel. And thanks to Liflow for sponsoring the pod. So there's definitely value for me there was definitely value in optimizing for flexibility. Now the reality is if you work for an accounting firm, you ought to have honestly phenomenal flexibility. And a lot of accounting firms like they still don't allow for this like flexible work schedules and being able to work remotely and stuff like that. Having a child whilst building a new firm from scratch, that feels like a lot like that's a very personal decision that's taken on a lot of change all at once. I get the allure of starting your own firm and all that stuff and there is a real path to making more money. But going to work and then coming home from work and being present with your family, that's not a bad gig either. I think the worst thing you give up is when you work for somebody else. For me at least it was much easier to have like a very binary work mode, not work mode. And as soon as I became self employed, you still try to manufacture those boundaries as much as you can. But for me it got a lot harder. So I wouldn't like push you out the door if you got something that you're really happy with. That can give you flexibility. I get the appeal of it and the allure of it, and that may be something that makes a ton of sense someday. But I wouldn't push yourself too hard if you have something that you're already happy with, but also you're what, early 30s? Like none of these things are forever decisions to the way that we think through this, starting a firm or leaving an employer or something like that. These feel so, so high stakes usually because of the interpersonal relationships that are involved. But these things all feel so high stakes when none of these things are forever decisions. Worst case scenario, you're out on your butt. You're an accountant with a bunch of skills. Are you going to be able to find a job? Goodness yes. For all the things that stink and are not always fun about accounting, that's a pretty darn good one. The fact that like are you really ever going to find yourself in a tight spot if you can do accounting and you know this stuff like from a technical standpoint, probably not. Maybe the best part of the gig. I don't know. If you've got other advice, feel free to chuck it in the comments. Should we charge extra for urgent work? So a client comes to you with a spicy need. Maybe it's their fault, maybe they waited too long. Maybe it's totally not their fault. Like it isn't always. Sometimes there's legitimately stuff comes up where they need something urgently. Uh, some folks online shared they will just tack a surcharge onto rush jobs like that. And I'm curious what yalls take is on this. If you have experience if, if you've done this, I would love to see your thoughts in the comments. If you listen to the podcast feed, your podcast player will have a link to this YouTube video you can just click through. Drop a comment if this is something you've done. Have you had positive experience or not? I talked a bit about this on the episode not too long ago when we talked through should we ever discount work. I think anytime you fuss and that's kind of where I'm at right now, but I can be convinced otherwise. Anytime you fuss with the price, it sets a little bit of the precedent that your rates are negotiable either up or down. Like that's a two way street in my mind and as soon as I have an interaction with a client and I'm like well that's going to change the price to this or to that. Like based on urgency, not based on scope or changing what we're doing. I think it kind of opens the door to that just kind of being an ongoing thing, which I don't, I don't want. I'm not going to haggle over. Okay, now I want you to do this thing. What's it going to take? Like, that's just not a precedent I want to set. I have heard anecdotally from folks too, who, when anytime a client pays you more for something to cut to the front of the line or anything like that, the people who oftentimes pay the price will be, you know, your staff or you, if it's just you, because you've kind of given this client a get out of jail free card, which for some clients can embolden them to ask for things that maybe they wouldn't otherwise ask for or feel entitled to. You now doing anything and everything because they're. Because they're paying extra for it. Right. And that's not really a spot you want to find yourself or your staff in either. I do know a good number of folks that do this have, like, mechanisms for charging for urgent work. I don't know, maybe there's a methodology to doing that that I just haven't seen. But for me, it feels like it just sets a precedent that I don't really want to fuss with. On the subject of urgency, I had posted something. Oh, no. Last Sunday's main channel video. Recommend you check it out. It was. I had a lot of fun with that one. It's got puppets. It was pretty funny. And it was basically about like a roundup of tips to run a more calm accounting firm this year. And one of the very first ones was root out sources of urgency. And the thinking is we have kind of rush orders come up or a surprise thing comes up in your email. What are the things that are causing these high stress situations and how can we mitigate them? Get out in front of them, but also then designate some firefighters in our firm because there's people who. I had people on my team who, like, loved the firefighting, and then I had other people on my team who like, absolutely could not handle that. And if stuff just came in the door and it went to whoever it went to by default, you'd end up with people who hate that stuff doing firefighting while your firefighters are sitting on their hands. So I kind of shared some ideas around how to better. How to better optimize all that and, like, be more intentional about who your firefighters are also. But a few people responded about the. The value of urgency. And there is a. Maybe it's on the like sweaty, sweatier work culture, end of the spectrum. I have seen folks kind of glorify this kind of passive level of urgency that keeps everybody working hard and growing and doing all these things. And I probably used to assign more value to that than I do now because I didn't want to like sit on my hands. I didn't want to be the slow moving, firm and person and all that. And there's a, basically a conversation I heard from Tim Ferriss. Derek Sivers has this, you know, notion of a 45 minute versus a 43 minute bike ride. The whole notion that you can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other 95% of the results. Is there a mode where you're just absolutely going ham and you can probably do a little more like probably. But the framing he used, which he got from somebody else, I don't have it quoted here. The phrase was no hurry, no pause. And then another from, from a Navy SEAL guy. Slow as smooth, smooth as fast. I haven't always been this way, but I think where I'm at now is I would rather find a cadence that doesn't feel like you're huffing and puffing until the end of time. That may not be squeezing the ever living heck out of yourself and everybody on your team, but right now I don't think we're doing enough to optimize for sustainability. And when we're pushing past 95%, it's worth thinking about why. Why are we like trying to squeeze that extra little bit out? Is it like better ROI on, on my staff and they're going to make me a little bit more money? I think oftentimes the, for me anyways, in the past, the pressure to push like over the threshold was, was internal voices, was fear, was insecurity, was maybe not being this cool, forward thinking, you know, trying harder than everybody else sort of person. But ultimately, who is that approach in service of? I think it's probably in service of a bunch of people who ultimately don't care about me. Or it is me trying to, you know, impress a bunch of people who I, who I maybe don't even like or don't even care about. Right? Like the people you disagree with or the naysayers. I think we, we put a tremendous amount of time and energy and oftentimes build our lives around trying to impress people who couldn't care less about what you're doing. Maybe it's somebody that hurt you in the past. Maybe it's Maybe it's family member, maybe it's parent. These things can kind of fuel us in a toxic way. And for me, I think the things that were, like, pushing me over my ski tips when I was trying really, really hard were probably not healthy things. There was like, I'm definitely very wired for, like, being an achiever and my 20s. Like, all I really wanted to do was work because I was like, I'm out of school now. I want to set myself up for success in the future. I didn't have kids yet, so I'm like, what the hell? What the heck else am I going to do? Like, I'm probably not going to get up to any good if I'm not working. And there's probably a degree of truth to that, but that ain't me anymore, man. I, like, I want to. A lot of that changed with getting married, with having kids. I've shared before my dad on his. My dad worked really hard. Didn't see my dad much growing up. On his last day, when he retired, on the drive home from retiring, he'd had this big, kind of successful outcome where he had, like, bought into the company with a group of people and they sold it, and it was this big, like, kind of successful thing. But the, you know, growing up and this is really a generational thing, he worked a ton, and the trade off was always that he wanted to retire early. And so he's putting in the hours now so that we can get that time back with him later. Right. That sounds. That sound familiar? Well, on the drive back from his last day at work, he was diagnosed with cancer, and they told him he had a 30% chance of living on his last day of work. The day he was headed into retirement, they told him he had a. I think it was a 30% chance of being alive 12 months from then, which is like, I can't. I can't imagine a more powerful thing to wake you up and, like, shake you and be like, you got to find a way to enjoy the journey. Like, you need to start having fun today and stop fixating on just getting to that next thing. Because honestly, all that really matters is the journey. When you get to that next thing, you're gonna look around and be like, what the heck do I do next? Like, this was supposed to be what fun was, right? So for me, it was a lot of. Probably a lot of different things, but that there's like a. I feel like I can. I can work at 90% and still care a lot. It can still matter a lot to me. And maybe that's the difference is I don't want to go through life and work on things that don't matter to me. But I also don't need to like absolutely kill myself to get there. Right? I don't know, I'm kind of off the manufactured urgency bus. Maybe it's just also just accountants coming out of COVID Relief and Tikta in the US and just like what a beast doing accounting has been for the last years. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant staffing. Y' all know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to 100% distributed US and then 100% distributed globally. Hiring and honestly is the best thing I we did it virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on. Because you know what, the folks we hired offshore really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms. You know, know offshore outside the US you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself, figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start. Cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple at accounting firm in the US Hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like, I'm going to stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked with other practitioners, I talked to some of the vendors that would like help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and you start heading down that path. Consider clicking Cloud accountant staffing. Last question. Being different from other firms versus copying. So I I had a tweet that went out earlier this week. It Wasn't a tweet. It was on all the socials. If you're doing something new or better or different, you're inevitably going to be at odds with people who do the norm. You can't be exceptional without being different. Don't let the folks doing it the regular way, or anyone else for that matter, hold you back as like a, like a feel good kind of rah rah quote, right? Can't be exceptional without being different. But some folks pushed back rightly so, saying, really? Because it feels like everybody's always trying to reinvent the wheel when what we should be doing is just like borrowing the best of what everybody else is doing, which is 100% I'm in agreement with so many times, and this is like my pre Internet days before I was on social media or anything like that. I would just like shut myself in my office and come up with these things that I thought were cool and novel as opposed to how I figure things out. Now. It's like I have a network and I'm like, I can ask around and talk with 10 people who tried the same thing and maybe worked on that for years, and you can learn something from them that will shave years off of your own learning process. So should we be trying to reinvent the wheel from scratch every single time, or is that just fundamentally the wrong thing to do? Right. The place that that tweet and that thought was coming from is more about the people and the colleagues and kind of the folks that we bump up against in life. And I've been thinking a lot about this lately because this, the last 12 months has been a huge year of change for me. I literally got out of college, went to work at a public accounting firm. I followed that track and success in what that track looked like. Sidebar. The Pathless Path. It's a book. It's a killer book. I'm going through it right now. The way they refer to this is the default path. Most people go through life on the default path where you start playing a game, you come into a place of work, and success is defined by the people around you in that environment. When success, like, that's not rooted in reality at all. Like, that is you're playing a game within a bubble. But like, the default path is just to do that thing. So I was on my default path probably up until the end of last year when I got out of firm running. And the first year for me after firm running, honestly was just like, what the heck am I even doing now? Like, can I build A business around not running a firm and just kind of the uncertainty and the stresses that came with that as opposed to like this year, I feel, I feel like I'm in a way, like, better place, more sure of myself place. I've gotten away from some of that urgency, and I probably had some of that urgency last year where I'm like, well, I got to, I got to. I got to prove to myself that I can do this and that I can make this work. But I've been doing a ton of reading the last few months and I feel like, like I'm like investing in myself more. And the result is like, like I'm changing. Like, I feel like I'm growing. And something I've been thinking a lot about lately is, and this, this all comes back, like when you go back for the holidays and see your family and stuff like that, right? And in my family, no one else is self employed, employed. Like everybody else in my family works for somebody else. That is the reality that they live within and they cannot comprehend anything else. But when you're doing really hard things and you're changing and growing and going through all this different stuff, if you think about one holiday to the next holiday, now I want to, like, it's not really about family in particular. This is just probably an easy example. When you go from one year to the next, what other people may say is like, oh, wow, you've changed. Whereas what you would say is, well, I've grown. And so what for some people is like, what you're not. The person that you used to be for you is like, yeah, but that's exactly how I want it to be. And oftentimes the people and the colleagues and the relationships we surround ourselves with can be in conflict with the person that we want to become or the business that we want to build. Because that relationship was founded when you were a different person. And I'm of the belief we should be investing in ourselves in such a way so that we are changing so that, like, I don't want to look back 12 months from now and be the exact same person. And I don't want to, like, act like I'm better than anybody else or like, say, people in general don't invest in themselves or not. But the reality is, like, if you're listening to stuff like this and thinking about entrepreneurship and starting your own business or you run your own business, you're not normal. Like, there's a degree of risk, risk tolerance and, I don't know, freedom of thought that you have that most people do not have. And sometimes when you're surrounded by people who are not the same way, you feel like the outcast. And there's just inherently going to be friction there because you don't think and you don't go through life the same way that they do. And if you're not careful, like, you can kind of put that on yourself and be like, well, why. Why am I different? And am I letting these people down by changing and all that? As if, like, they have control over, you know, your agency and what you ought to become. Right. And this is made worse when it's like, you know, close personal relationships and you have family or whatever it is, and they see this, like, and they're kind of in agreement that, like, yes, you've changed and. And they might long for you to be the person that you used to be, but if you're fundamentally not that anymore, it's hard to not feel like you're letting those people down. Right. And there's a whole lot of stuff wrapped in on that into that from, like, there's certain people in your life that, like, you just. You have to. I think you probably have to maintain a relationship with. And so, like, that's obviously a very complex thing, but ultimately, it's up to you and nobody else to decide who you want to become. And along with that, we need to be really mindful of whether we're surrounding ourselves with people and consuming media and building relationships that are in service of the person that you want to become or do they want you to be who you were? Are they gonna make you feel bad for growing into the person that you want to become? Right. We've probably all had experiences with that where you look around and you're like, I don't like these circumstances. I don't, like, want to be here anymore. I see what success looks like there, and I don't want that for myself. But when you're in that environment, you're surrounded by those people. Your idea of what you want to become is going to be at odds with everyone around you. And that is normal, and that is probably growth. I've felt that at a lot of points in my life. I've even felt it lately as. I don't know, I'm feeling like I have a degree of freedom in doing all this stuff now. But you feel the pressures of other people around you and the folks you went to high school with and all that. Right. And that's the. The holidays are. Are definitely a reminder of that. But here's permission. Don't let anybody get in the way of. Of you becoming who you want to be. If you're trying to do something different, something better, you're like, there's going to be friction with everything you built back then, everything you built when you were a different person. Right. That's just the reality. But if we live in service of our past selves, if we just live in service of the person that we're trying not to be in the. And doing that at the cost of the person that we're becoming, I think that's the wrong move. And I'm not trying to be, like, I don't know, mysterious or arcane or something like that. I just think that's something that we bump into a lot in life. I mean, a great example is clients, man. The client that you picked up when you were a different person, when you were a different firm, and they don't like the person or the firm that you are now. And it's like, sorry, bub, I grew. Like, we were a great fit back then, but if my option is to stay that same person in that same firm forever or to become something better, I need to become something better. Whether that's good for you or not, that's kind of the gist of it, I think. So for all you that are out there growing, keep on growing. You got to do you. Thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you in the next one.