285 How To Make Your Accounting Firm Attractive to Buyers

You may not be thinking about selling your accounting firm.

You may not even own one. But what if you did?

And what if, I don't know, you just started testing the waters a little bit?

Would somebody buy this thing from me?

Oh, my gosh.

Do you think they would? And what factors would play into how.

An accounting firm is valued these days? There's a whole lot of them.

I'm going to give you my top three. Also today it is a Q and A. How to overcome workflow headaches with bank statement fetching. Good golly. The current market for tax planning software.

Should I use an inquiry form on my website before giving clients a price? Is that a good or a bad idea?

And then what's the right way to send a proposal? You've done the discovery process. You've got that proposal all ready to go.

What's the, what's the best way to roll it out? Do I hop on a call?

Do I just chuck it over the.

Fence and see what they say? We're talking about it today and it.

Is, it is a great day to be an accountant.

I don't know if you noticed that. Look outside. Do you have a window? It is a great day to be an accountant.

Come on in, let's share some big brain, small firm stuff.

Okay. How to make that accounting firm attractive. I should state straight off the top.

I think I'm actually generally kind of anti firm sale.

When I owned a firm and I still stand by this, I could see no potential future outcome where I sold to a third party that didn't probably hose my team and most of the clients. Now there are exceptions to this. In fact, a lot of the people that tune into this podcast like they are very progressive firms where when they acquire a firm, they are generally raising that firm up. But since the vast majority of firms, they're not that and many roll ups are actually rolling up into a bigger, regional, more kind, impersonal firm. In my experience, a huge percentage of firm acquisitions leave the staff and leave the clients flapping in the breeze. And if I am the firm owner, who has invested in those staff people and got them to buy into what I'm building and came and worked for me.

Same with the clients. They're bought into us, they love us.

They love the people they work with.

And then me, the owner says, hey.

I appreciate everyone buying into my thing.

But I'm actually gonna bounce.

Boy, that would have been hard for me to do. Now, obviously a lot of nuance in there, good and bad ways to do this. The one Thing I think nobody should be doing is please don't leverage your sanity in the short term with in order to enhance the prospect of some future payoff. Right? Like, like don't inconvenience yourself now or run a firm for someone else or the way that you think someone else wants it to be run and in order to increase the likelihood of sale or something like that, like the best thing you can do. We used to work with Dennis and we gave Dennis the same advice. Don't build your whole practice around selling it someday at, you know, 0.8 or 0.85 multiple. Build it for something that's sustainable for you. Like if you can make it sustainable and then put in another one or two years of work, even if it's not full time, you got to the same number in the end and you didn't kill yourself in the process. And then at that point, heck, give the firm to your team or do some sort of sweet deal.

So in general, I am not super.

Pro selling my firm. I am more excited about buying other people's firms and making them better. And so of all the things that make a firm more or less attractive, obviously that's a massive list of things.

In fact, maybe we do another tier.

List video on the main channel that's like, you know, 10 or 20 factors and how big of a factor they are and what will make that firm an attractive target or not. And people are going to have very different opinions on this. I'm going to give you my top three. My number one, like the first thing that I'm going to look at is how removed or not removed is the owner from the relationship management of clients. If that firm owner has successfully extracted themselves from the day to day management of the clients, then the prospect of me buying it and not having to pick up a bunch of new work like that is much easier than the small firms like, like actually the firm that I bought into was a very traditional legacy firm when I first got there. And the ownership structure was you had three partners. The partners handled all the client relationships by and large, wouldn't even allow the staff to talk to clients. And as a result of that setup, they attracted a bunch of staff that were, were grinders, like behind the scenes folks. They didn't want to talk with clients like they were never let out of the cage to like let anyone even see them. And if you buy a firm like that, you just picked up a, a big, a big job, a big project because now you or somebody on your team is going to have to do all that relationship management. And arguably even worse, you have a team of staff who at the very least don't have a ton of experience doing that. So if you flip the script and you say, hey, y' all are, are managing all the relationships now, it's gonna.

Be a hard change for them just.

Cause they haven't done that before. So I'm looking at how in the like weeds of client management is that owner. The more you can extract yourself, the more attractive that business will be to somebody else. Number two, tech modernization. And when we hear that it means different things to us, it usually means something that is relative to where you are today. But if you zoom completely out and you look at all firms, especially small firms, there's a massive spectrum of modernization from the most legacy to the most progressive. I mean, there's still a massive percentage of small firms that are doing everything on paper, that are doing everything on person, that aren't doing virtual meetings with clients. That is very, very common for small firms. And if you are closer to the other end of that spectrum where you're doing more virtual distributed stuff, where everything is digital, first to acquire a firm, obviously it's a huge, like a firm that is doing things on paper. Obviously that's a huge technical challenge to get the tech stack. But from A to B. But even if everybody comes into that acquisition with enthusiasm and the, even the staff is like, okay, yeah, we'll, we'll do that. Which is, which is unlikely.

But even if they do have a great attitude about it, it's going to.

Take years for those people to be productive in this new paradigm. Like it just does the muscle memory of doing all this work on paper and having this system that you're used to, especially for folks who are decades into the profession just because they have so much like trained into them, muscle memory of how they do it, it's gonna take a really long time for them to be productive under a different setup. So it's not just the, I mean it is the change management and kind of get people energized about adopting that and all that. It's, it's that. But it's also, even in the best case scenario where they do have energy to do that, boy, it's gonna take time for them to be productive.

This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. I love spreadsheets. Yes, I do. I love spreadsheets.

How about you?

But you know what spreadsheets don't do? Integrate with anything, like anything. All the other tech that we use, except for Dax software has to integrate. Stuff like that's just a requirement now for software, but hum, humhow, humhouse. Spreadsheets have been left off the hook. And so I end up doing this hokey pokey CSV export over here, CSV import over there, big hot copy paste mess. Which isn't good when spreadsheets are a part of recurring workflows like month end.

Closes, stuff like that, where you literally.

Rely on the worksheet to make a work paper every week or every month. And gang, that is where liveflow becomes the Swiss army knife that gives your spreadsheet Jim Belushi superpowers. It's a plugin for your Excel or your Google sheets that'll pull any data in from your clients. QuickBooks files don't even have to go to QuickBooks, just Bippity Boppity boop. Couple clicks from inside of your spreadsheet and you got Data from that QuickBooks file into the spreadsheet. It can pull it in once, it can pull it on an ongoing basis. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. And that spreadsheet, it's gonna, it's never gonna stop. It's gonna keep on updating and I don't know, there's just something about that that I guess it becomes a conversation of legacy. What do you wanna leave behind? And will your spreadsheets keep updating even after you're gone? Cause you know what? With Live Flow, they will link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Team Up Storytime. Gather around. Sit in a circle. Jonathan. Happy Team up customer. See if this story sounds. Sounds relatable. Clients were beating down Jonathan's door. He was growing so quickly he couldn't keep up. The problem was he couldn't find anyone in the US at a salary that he could really afford. Then he had an experience that opened his eyes. He hired his first accountant in the Philippines. Couldn't believe how good she was. Not only did she do the work well, but she was fast. So he hired another. This time a senior accountant. He wanted to be in charge of quality assurance. He needed her to do things like set up special funding accounts and make sure equity accounts are correct. Things he struggled to get his US staff to do.

Well.

It went so well with the senior accountant, he hired another. And then in a few months, another. Now, not only is client work getting done on time, he has room to grow. Good for you, Jonathan. Here's a quote from Jonathan. We've hired very high level accounting talent stateside. I have to say that Our Philippines based team is outperforming most of our US based staff. How dare you, Jonathan. I was absolutely blown away with the type of candidates that we got from our job posting. Team up really helped us navigate the things we weren't sure of. That's Jonathan's story. A real live accountant just like you. For some reason we have this thing in our head. Maybe it's an American thing where you think when you hire somebody that's not in your country, they're not going to be as good as somebody in your country just because their power plugs look different. But that, you know, that just doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? If you're exploring hiring folks in the Philippines. If you are stuck on your your U.S. hiring strategy, hit up team up link down in the show notes to help you find some super talented accountants in the Philippines that will get that client work straight out the door on time.

And then third, pricing. Since most of these deals are done based on some revenue multiple, if this firm is charging, it's kind of a double edged sword. If the firm is charging very small rates, it's just generally going to be hard to make money on it. Right. But most of us know, as many of us have gone through relatively drastic price increases in the last five years, most of us know just how much captive profit there can be inside a firm and how few people will leave when you do make those dramatic increases. I mean, the vast majority of firms out there today, I would argue could double their prices tomorrow, tell everyone and make the same money in less than half the time or make more money than they do right now. Like I genuinely believe that. True. If you went down the list of every single small firm and everybody doubled their prices, maybe that creates problems in the market that impacts, well, they're not going to go to another firm because the other firm doubled their prices. But rule all that out. Pick any old firm. The average firm today could double their prices and either make the same money in less time or more money. I truly believe that. So if I come in and I acquire a firm, on one hand, if the price pricing is awful, it's going to be hard to make money on that. On the other hand, in all likelihood I can do a big old price increase and probably come out just fine. Now, important caveats in how you do the deal there. I would never do a purchase that was not tied to retained clients. So you know, I'm going to pay the owner out over say five years according to revenue on the clients that I Purchased capped at what it was, was when I purchased it. So if I increase rates, like I'm getting 100% of that increase. If a bunch of people leave, I'm not paying out those clients that leave. And the other opportunity here, particularly if you're buying maybe more of a legacy firm, is oftentimes there's an opportunity to pull the cash cycle forward. So most legacy firms, especially tax practices, they're billing everything in arrears after the fact. They have very few people on monthly recurring engagements. So for example, if I buy a tax practice with a hundred clients in it and I want to get 10 or 15 of those clients onto a cash offering, doing their bookkeeping, doing their bill pay per all that stuff, month over month, the current cash cycle of the firm that you're acquiring is, you know, they're probably doing that tax work in the spring or in the summer and then getting paid after that. So they're probably getting paid in the summer or the fall for the previous year's tax work. The way that I build accounting and tax work was by the calendar year. So what you pay me from January through December of 2024 is for 12 months accounting and is also for the 2024 tax prep that happens in 2025. So if I can get 10 to 20 of these, a hundred clients to come onto a monthly CAAS engagement, I'm pulling the cash cycle Forward a good 18 months. Now we still have to do the work, but that one time shift of cash like that is largely going straight to the bottom line. And it's not something I'm paying the previous owner for. Now. Will it cause more people to leave? Potentially, if, if it's the same work and you're pulling the cash cycle forward, like if you made tax clients pay 12 months over the calendar year for the tax prep that's happening the following year, that's going to annoy people because nothing about the service you're delivering is changing. But if you are getting them on a new service, you can be like, this is how payments work for this new service. Honestly, they're probably going to be, they're going to be totally fine. They're not going to expect you to let them pay you 18 months in arrears if you start their bookkeeping in January. Right. This is where there's some nuance in here also about, you know, when it comes to, if you're doing something like, like wealth management. Some of the best wealth management firms are doing relatively simple 1040s. You got folks that are retired later in life, sitting on a bunch of assets, they're doing relatively simple 1040 work, but then also doing the wealth management work. So if I can acquire a practice that's just doing bookkeeping, that's just doing tax, and then pay that owner according to just the revenue they brought in the door and then layer in additional services, but for that client, that's a good opportunity for me actually a really quick way to get on top of the cash requirements of paying out the previous owner. But if I had to pick three things, I'm going to say how removed is the owner from relationship management? Two, how modern does that tech stack look? And then three, how does pricing look? Okay, question I got privately a big struggle I'm having is with bank statement retrieval and wondering if you did a review of any software for this or if you have one that you know of. And like, yeah, I mean this is still the bane of all our existence. The amount of work that goes into if you do monthly accounting for clients, the amount of work that goes into going out and fetching documents manually, super, super frustrating. And what I find people do is they leave it to the last minute and then you run into issues with access to the login or something like that. And then when the financials are due on the 15th and you're doing it on the 13th, then you're annoyed. Maybe the client was supposed to send it to you and they haven't yet. The solution here is a combination of a bunch of different things and unfortunately there is not software that solves this in a complete way. The closest thing we've probably ever had to a real solution here was hubdoc prior to the Xero acquisition when they did bot based fetching. The only type of fetching the Hub Doc does now is API based fetching where it can make an API call to the bank and get that bank statement directly. That's much more stable than using bots to like crawl a website and download that stuff, which is what they used to do. And it would break all of the time. And the founders would even say like that's the nature of the tool is like anytime the bank's website changes, the bot breaks. But we still think that it working for you 60% of the time is better than it working 0% of the time. And I think they were probably right. That was a really frustrating state of things. But that was how it was. But all of that bot based fetching went away when Xero acquired them. So we are back to not having great solutions for this My framework for, for how to fetch this stuff on an automated basis. First things first. Will QBO pull the bank statement already if the client's on QBO. QBO's got to deal with some banks where it will pull that statement into the QBO platform automatically. The fallback I look at next then is Ledger Sync all one word. I think it's Ledger Sync. Com. They do some fetching. I don't think it's quite on the level that that hub doc was, but you can hop in and take a look and see will they fetch stuff from for banks where I have no other automated means of getting them. In my case, it actually was super helpful. We did a lot of work with regional banks where I couldn't find any other automated way to get those statements and Ledger Sync was actually able to do that for us. And then third, the fallback, making it somebody's job. It's going to be manual and oftentimes we get so annoyed that it can't be automated that we don't acknowledge it for what it is, a task that needs to be done. There's almost this like shame around the fact that it can't be automated. The reality is it can't be automated and so somebody needs to go out and fetch it. And should that be the job of your senior tech technical people? No, it absolutely shouldn't. If you run an accounting practice. Arguably the potentially the most useful episode of this podcast I have ever done was the one we did on pre accounting. Search it in your players. Search it on YouTuber pre accounting on YouTuber searching on YouTube pre accounting one word. A pre accounting process is the solution for this. This is where you're building an explicit list of everything that needs to be fetched for every single client and that gets done on the first of the month. I had an admin that would go through and honestly spend the first week of each month fetching all of this stuff that we just had to manually fetch. That was the way it was and.

I would have loved to automate it.

As much as anybody else. But the frustration over the fact that we couldn't was not a reason to not acknowledge it for, for the task that it was and delegate it to somebody that was not too high skill level to do that thing. That explicit pre accounting process started as just bank statement fetching, but very quickly evolved to well, if they're going to get the bank statement, they may as well just put it in the work paper file where it needs to go. And, and if, if the admin is going to put it in the workpaper file then, then they may as well just name it and like index at the number that it should be named and indexed. And they're going to do that. They may as well like highlight and annotate the document the way that we want to see it. And before long we actually had admins building out like half the workpaper paper files for a month end close. But it all started with like it being a task, acknowledging it for what it was, getting it off the hands of our senior people and ensuring that it got done as soon as it could. If you had a, you know, a credit card statement that closed the 25th of the previous month, pull it on the 26th, you got enough things to do at the, at the start of the month, we're going to pull that stuff as soon as we can. So I, I have been guilty of this an embarrassing number of times. Oftentimes you will try to automate something and you fail and as a result you end up with no system for that thing. A manual process. Write this down on a post it note, stick it on your forehead and go look in a mirror. Manual systems. Humans having to go and do annoying manual things. Having systems for manual things is infinitely better than some botched together automation that doesn't work or trying to automate something and then failing and then just leaving it and having no process. I spent like a decade doing that where I'm like oh man, I gotta figure out how to automate this things. We're super cool, impressive. And then it, it works for a week and then it breaks or it didn't work at all. And so that we just abandoned the project. But it's like wait, we still don't have a system for this. Humans are really good at doing repetitive things, but our hatred for doing repetitive things almost make us feel this shame to put that responsibility on somebody. Here's the thing, if it has to happen, it has to happen. We don't need to live in denial of that. It can be hard to find the person who is happy to sit in a chair and do that for you for sure. But, but it still has to happen. So if you're struggling with that, highly recommend going back and listening to that pre accounting episode. And it is a bummer that there's not a better solution for this. There are over 5,000 banks in the US getting all of them onto a system where you can do standardized reporting, like it's just a huge logistical struggle. Logistical struggle in the us in the UK they have like a banking API initiative where I think now everybody has to use a specific API, so you can pull this stuff. In Australia, you have like four to six banks, so it's not a big deal. But in the us, just as a product of being better than everyone else in the world, it's. It's a little trickier.

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This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Genwise. Have you ever wanted to hire like.

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All right. The offshore accountant 23 asked. Pricing on websites seems like something where you're darn if you do, darn if you don't. How about a form quote, inquire about pricing where you collect some data on the nature of their business size and all that and email them back with the price after that. Which tier would I put that pricing approach in? So this is a reference to a video we did on the main channel recently where I kind of like graded all the different approaches to putting pricing on your website, from putting your minimums to having no pricing. This comment I was proposing, like, what about an inquiry form? I would categorize that as. As no pricing because it's. It suffers from all the same cons, all the same issues of, of no pricing. Maybe it's slightly better. But the biggest downfall of no pricing in my mind is the number of people that will come and will just bounce because there isn't any transparency there and they, they have no expectation. I would also argue because the vast majority of accounting firm websites still have no pricing. When you don't have pricing, it kind of homogenizes you with everyone else. I'd actually say the same for this inquiry form because this, if, if no pricing is the most common thing you see on sites right now, this inquiry forms probably the second most common. I don't think it does enough to help a client or a prospect visualize what it would look like to work with you. I can see how maybe it's better for us, how maybe we're, we're more protective and not committing to anything by making them giving. Give us details before we give anything in return. But this, I think this misses the opportunity there is to provide specificity on a website to make a prospect feel like, oh, I finally found the firm. The firm. That's for me. There's all sorts of different types of specificity from the ways you prefer working with people to the industry that they're in. But the price that is also a form of specificity. When you have premium buyers that are looking for something better, when you have budget buyers that are looking for something cheap. If we don't say anything about what we do, in the same way that a general website that isn't speaking to any type of entrepreneur in particular doesn't really connect with anyone not having a price and not giving that info, I think sort of homogenizes you as well. My favorite approach still is combination of putting like median price out there because I don't want all my prices anchoring to the minimum, but then also putting examples there of like actual client engagements or hypothetical client engagements where you explain a bit about that client and you can redact it doesn't have to be somebody real or use their name and then what they would pay. It's just a very honest example of what it would cost with the added benefit that a client who is, who is similar to that example and, and we're, we're putting examples up that we want more of. Right. Like that's, that's a great opportunity is to put on blast. I want more of this type of client. Then when the client that looks a lot like them comes to your website, they're like, oh, cool, this is the place for Me like I can see myself in that example. And your website is then set itself apart from others with that specificity. Last question we're tackling today from Painter CM in the comments, what is the best way to provide a proposal? Most firms, mine included send it post meeting but sales pros say that the most successful way to seal the deal is to lock someone in while on the call. My acceptance rating is only around 10% right now, so figuring this out would probably be the most impactful thing on my end. 10% I would not say is, is too low by any means. It is definitely a product of how much screening and how much of a price conversation are you having throughout that process? The big mistake I know a lot of us make and hopefully eventually get away from is not talking money early enough. And then you go through and you do all this work, you have this whole whole drawn out process and you get to the end and you go tada, this is the price. And you're like oh we're, we're actually in completely different universes and just, just wasted a lot of time. If you're not doing a ton of screening or you're not doing communicating that price much upfront right now that 10% makes sense. But I would say the sooner you can, you can set those expectations the less time you'll waste on that 90% right now that are saying no. That's actually the, maybe the bigger thing that I'm seeing here than how you're sending the proposals. But what is the best way to send the proposals? I understand the general sales advice around get them on the phone and try to seal the deal live. And that makes sense, but I would argue that makes sense for something where maybe the scope is more simple and more mutually understood. So if I'm selling something, something where the other party understands exactly what it is and what they are getting and they can get their head around that on the phone, then I think that makes sense. I'll be honest. The most of the proposals and the engagements that we send to people have so much to them because we're told get really explicit about this scope boundary and that scope boundary and here's what Bill Pay 2 is and what it is and what it isn't, Nobody, absolutely nobody is going to be able to get their head around that over the phone. Like they have to be looking at it to understand that stuff. Now is that a, is that an argument for stripping back and stripping away a bunch of the complexity of those proposals? Maybe the alternative has a lot of problems too, where you don't define those boundaries. But for me to pick up a phone call, pick up a take a call to client and be like, hey, so you're going to do bronze, silver, gold. The amount of detail that I had in my proposals, because I think like the current accounting meta is to like, take pride in the amount of absurd detail and scope defining that goes into your proposal. There was so much in there that like, there was no way I could on the phone talk somebody through that. So my approach was here is the proposal and here is my calendly, let's hop on a call to discuss it when you've had a chance to review it. That way, when I'm on the call with them, hopefully they're looking at their screen and reviewing it as we're talking. And to me that feels like the best, a balance of both worlds. Oftentimes people are perfect, perfectly happy accepting it, like without another call. But you, you really should at the very least like give them a, an easy way to book a call with you. And you may go as far as to say, you know, before accepting this or even before accepting or rejecting this, let's hop on a call so that we can make sure that it means the same thing to you that it does to me. And then you've got them on the line and you can, you can flex those sales chops a little bit more, which I know most of us don't have. But even if you don't have sales chops, I think a person is generally.

Going to be more likely to say.

Yes when you have them on the phone than if they don't have you on the phone because it's, it's just from a human uncomfortable sort of level. It is much easier to say no to a thing I'm saying on my screen than it is to say no to a person that's clearly an expert walking me through this. Like, easier to say no to a, to a computer than it is to a human. Now there's all sorts of going full zig ziglar and, and, and knowing how to like close that deal and be really good on the phone and stuff like that. Most of us don't have those skills, but in general I do think they're more likely to say yes if you can get them on the phone. Thanks for the question. Great questions this week. Keep them coming. I got a, I got a few, actually that I had to punt out to next week. Man, every time you chuck a good question down there, a bunch of other people learn amazing example of this. This week actually. Questions from some folks that are running a side hustle and they're like, where's my community? How do I find community as a side hustler? One person dropped that in the comments. Two other people who are in the exact same situation commented as well. Now those three people are connected and they're hanging and stealing and like, I don't know, like they, they now know people that do that exact same thing just by having the courage to not lurk but to engage in the comments.

I love that we get about three.

Quarters of our listeners just on the audio only version of of this podcast.

Never be afraid.

In your podcast player there's a link to the YouTube video. Never be afraid to come out. Come over, see what the weirdos on YouTube are talking about in the comments. That's one kind of bummer thing about podcasts are kind of isolating. You don't get to meet other people. Never be afraid to come over and see what's going on in the comments and drop something in there. You may make a new friend or meet somebody that can connect the dots for you. Okay, thanks for coming and hanging this week. Keep those questions coming and I'll see you in the next one.