467 Coaching 3 Accounting Firms on Tech Selection

So I put out the call. I said, give me your accounting firm's tech stack, tell me what's working and what's not working, and I will relentlessly roast it. Today we're going through three accounting firms who did just that, had the courage of sharing what's working and what's not working. And this actually may be super interesting for your perspective, because I see just a lot of the same things over and over again, and they're the things that I come back to in my content. So much to say, like, these are the super common blockers for firms and what the solutions are running through three firms today. And you'll see a lot of common threads, common themes. So, like, I actually love the idea that you kind of get a peek into how I advise folks. And I think the net effect is it almost makes some of the solutions a little bit more obvious when you can see those common themes. But I love doing this stuff. If you like content like this, maybe drop a comment and let me know. We could find a way to do some more of it. But without further ado, thank you to these three brave souls who bared all in a LinkedIn comment and gave us the opportunity to kind of share some advice, but also let us all put our coaching hats on a bit and learn a bit in the process. So without further ado, here you go. Okay. Zach Beanstrap, maybe? That's right. Hard to say. Zach is a partner at Performance Financial, llc. Performance Financial. Got a pretty great website, by the way. I also love that it dunks. And other accountants love that there's pictures of, like, actual people of the firm. Like, you're actually getting on camera. That's great. Love that it takes shots at other accountants, business owners. Ditch your lady accountant. There's part of me that's like, chill guy. Like, we're all in this together. But then there's also part of me that's like, yeah, no, the average. The average accounting firm actually does. Does kind of suck. Got a little lead magnet on the website here. Very cool. But let's talk tech stack. So this firm, 45% of the revenue comes from bookkeeping. 45% comes from tax. 10% comes from advisory. They have two partners, seven technical staff, and two admin staff. Here's what's working and what's not working. What's working is bookkeeping. All of our bookkeeping clients are in qbo. Our workflow works smoothly in carbon, but has room for improvement. What feels like it's broken tax. We've decided proconnect is not the right fit for us. Oh, that sucks. We're in the process of switching to Drake and Stanford Tax or Sorban. Client communication with partners is our other. Oh, client communication okay. With partners is our other main point. Full tech Stack qbo switching to Drake for Tax Carbon likely implementing Stanford Tax live flow hoping to use Carbon engagements usually Gusto for payroll loom and calendly Zach T's and P's. Thoughts and prayers. Change of tax software. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Honestly, that's kind of my experience with Proconnect. Like Proconnect wouldn't do enough for us from a technical standpoint. I think it is very client based dependent. A lot of folks like Pro Connect is totally fine. But that was my experience too. Going to Drake from that, that's hard. Not a great answer. Gosh, there's just so much time that goes into relearning, remapping our brains on a different tax platform. That's hard. But what else are you going to do? Do you go Drake? Do you go Ultra Tax? I know Ultra Tax is really expensive, but Ultra Tax got a bit more of a ceiling in terms of the technical complexity it can handle. You've got an 11 person firm here that's a little big for a Drake firm. And I, I say that because Drake is just, it is a, a little more manual than some of the bigger, more powerful options. But I know you look at an Ultra Tax and you get, you also get sticker shock. If you have looked at Ultra Tax, don't use their virtual office hosting. That's actually a big chunk of the cost. Use Ace Hosting, Verito or RightWorks for hosting Ultra Tax instead. That knocks down the price a bit. But what I don't want you to do is be double the size in two years and be like just great, we've outgrown Drake and then you're starting over from scratch again. Learning that muscle memory. Something to think about. Just trying to make the existential crisis I know you're in the middle of even more intense. What else here? So Stanford Tax for tax a hundred percent. Just roll with that. You will not have any issues, any reservations with that. You said bookkeeping was going well, but there is room for improvement. Look at Keeper at some point if you haven't yet. Keeper works very nicely with Carbon and Keeper is like it's just the fastest growing tool in the bookkeeping space. It's very, very good. One thing I don't see here is, is a proposal tool Like a standalone tool for sending proposals to your clients. Maybe this is Carbon Engagements, I don't know. Is Carbon doing a version of this? Here's the real on proposal tools. I'm going to sound like a broken record. There's only two of them that I recommend, Ignition and Anchor. There's just, and we've, I've done a bunch of podcasts on this if you really want to go deeper. But there's just part of the client experience that's more important to optimize than the proposal process where they say yes to a price because that is, that is genuinely buckaroos in your pocket. Any way that that experience can be optimized. And there's a hundred different ways to optimize your three tier proposals and the whole experience of clients renewing and all that. In my firm we grew like we grew a lot. But the biggest source of new revenue still every year was more revenue from existing clients. And that was a product of like cross selling and upselling into additional or more premium services and delivering services in a more premium way that clients would happily pay for. But you can only let them self select into that if you're putting multiple prices in front of them. So the counter argument to this has always been, oh, I know best, I know exactly what the client needs, so I'm only going to give them one option and one price. And I agree with that in many ways. What I don't agree with is not all clients want the same level of sort of premiumness in that service delivery. So is that client talking to a partner or is that client talking to a staff level person? Is that client expecting to be able to call that person at any time or do they have to book a calendly and they can schedule a call, you know, 24 hours out or something like that? Those are all things that can be built into your bronze, silver, gold package that hugely swing the price of the engagement and have a big impact on profit. And most of the time the client doesn't even use it, they just want to know that it's there. Like that's, that's kind of, kind of the. I don't want to say hack because hack almost makes it sound abusive. That's the reality of how we buy anything from a first class airplane ticket to like that. Like that is just how things get optimized is not everyone has the same willingness and ability to pay. And by giving them multiple op pricing options to opt into, they're able to self select and that becomes a profitable engagement for you now the biggest thing here that jumps out actually jumped out to me. It's not tech related at all. It is. Your note about client communication with partners is our other pain point. This is, I mean, this is like the huge pain point for most accounting firms. The majority, I can, I can speak to the majority of us accounting firms, trad firms, traditional firms, partner model firms. The partner is always the bottleneck and they never get back to clients like as quickly as they would like to, or I should say not the clients that, that they don't like because they've got buddies who will call them and text and all that. And they'll answer it every single, answer the phone, every single time, right? It's the clients who are annoying that are like, I can never get a hold of anybody. And we've all heard that story a hundred times of working with an accounting firm and not actually being able to get somebody to talk to you or respond or anything like that. So here's the thing when it comes to client communication is we always have to remember, absent some sort of system for how quickly we will respond and who on the team will respond, absent a system like that, the client will always go to the biggest brain and, and try to get the fastest answer possible from that big brain. And that means calling a partner, that means texting a partner, that means emailing them and wanting a response right away. But obviously that's unrealistic. You don't build a business. I mean, you can, like, unless it's very clear that the, the role for the partner is. All you're gonna do is client facing stuff all day and you're gonna sit by the phone to answer the phone anytime somebody wants to call you. Like, unless that's the role you carved out for partners. That's not how you build like an org chart that is in support of those partners. And we've all worked with, with that guy, with that person before, right, who's like, I just can't get anything done. And then their phone rings and they're like, oh, this is Jim, I gotta take this. And they put their phone back down and they're like, boy, I just, I've worked all day, but I feel like I didn't get anything. And then they respond to a text from a client. We gotta have a system for what is the expected response time for everyone in your firm. And so I can tell you, the way that I designed this was response time for me was minimum 72 hours out. Response time for the account manager was within 48 hours, I think. But you could call the front desk and get an admin right away. And so this meant like there was a, then a natural sort of structure there for them to be like, well, I'm first going to go to this person if it can be an immediate answer. And like I'm, I'm the fallback. And so it created this like natural sort of cascading behavior where if it really was an important thing, they would bug me with it. We did this for a while before I ultimately got out of client work altogether. But absent a system like that that they can understand, why would they not always just jump to you? And also makes like the rules around different communication channels. Very important as well, because the one time you answer the phone in a system like this, they now know, oh, that's the best way to jump the line. And you may think it's their preferred way of talking to you. What it is more often is the way that they've discovered they can get your attention fastest. So as soon as they text you and respond to the text, why would they ever wait in that line again? Why would they ever email you if there's a, you know, 72 hour turnaround time or something like that? So you gotta like, always keep in mind clients are like mice in a maze and they are playing the game that we have designed and we have set up for them. And if that system is not designed intentionally in a way that will reward them for going to who we want them to go to, then we can't blame them for interrupting us all the time. Right? And for, for me, that looked like every single client had an account manager that wasn't the partner who we really wanted to be the main point person. And when we would deliver financials or deliver tax returns, it was always that person on video doing those deliveries to kind of break down that communication barrier to make it more likely that the client would go to those people. But as long as we are perpetually, as long as the big boss is perpetually on standby to help those clients, then yeah, you kind of can't blame them for, for coming straight to the partner. But then it's just a matter of time before that gets over capacity, right? And then that kind of blows up because you're not actually being responsive with your clients and all that. And then, then they start doing things like they'll tell the client, yeah, just text me, like if you really need me, just text me and I'll get back to you that way. Well, now you've got a Text channel that's a mess. At this point, your email channel's already a mess. Maybe it's hard for you to take calls, but then you tell them, just text me if you really need me. Well, before long then your text channel becomes a mess. I've seen people who will be like, slack is really nice actually. It's great to manage all this stuff in cycle. Great. We just added one more channel that then eventually becomes a mess. It's all, it's all like a capacity thing. We just got to design the rules to encourage the client behavior that, that we want. But then a really nice part about having those turnaround times and being explicit about what level of expertise your client has access to is that is now a dial that we can turn and change in our three tier proposals to give more access to the people who are willing to pay more. So if you're rolling out three tier proposals for the first time, for example, and your bronze plan is basically, basically going to be what is the client doing today? Like the bronze plan is kind of like the minimum new communication strategy where like maybe they have access to a staff level accountant, but if they want to talk to you, they got to book a call and that's like minimum 72 hours out or something like that. If it's that important for them to have that level of access to a partner, then that's something at a silver or a gold tier where they're paying a lot more for like that silver tier ought to be, you know, probably a 40% jump. That gold tier relative to bronze. That could be 80%, that could be 120% and there's going to be a lot of people that want that just so they have it, but may not even necessarily use it. But at least then we're capturing the value of that and that becomes a much more profitable engagement. But then it's, it is then all the more important as well that like we're upholding those rules and following kind of the following the structure and that sort of cascading design of who's going to get back to you fastest. The big boss has to be the slowest. Like they just have to. Otherwise what incentive do those clients have to ever go to anyone but the big boss? Hopefully something helpful in there for you. Keep crushing it. Zach looks like a cool firm. Your tech stack, honestly, like it's, it's pretty good. The changing tax software thing, that is really rough, that's really hard. But hopefully you got something helpful here. This episode is brought to you in part by carbon, the practice management system. I had the opportunity recently to participate in an event that carbon put together where they brought together a whole bunch of carbon firms. And I'll be honest, I think it was cool event, but the thing that most blew me away was the quality of, of the firms there. And if like, if we can get, if we can get real on tech selection and how we build our tech stacks and accounting firms, practice management systems today, they've never been more similar than they are now for sure. They're still different. Each one has strengths and weaknesses and all that. We gotta understand that when we're picking our practice management system. But you know what goes a really, really long ways for me when I can look at a whole bunch of firms that I respect and I'm like, can you just tell me what they're using, man? A lot of them, a lot of them are using carbon. And I'm increasingly seeing this among firm owners is if you have friends that run other firms and you're in constant contact with those people that actually like kind of auto impact how you pick your tech. Because if you have those close relationships where you're like, hey, what do you do with X, Y and Z? Like how do you handle this or that and can get immediate answers from like real people that run firms and have worked through these things, that's something that has absolutely nothing to do with the product, but makes that product tremendously more useful. So this ad read, while it has absolutely nothing to do with the Carbon product, which is like very good and they've been in my top recommendations now for several years. But like sometimes the ultimate proof is what are the big brands using? And I can tell you there's a whole lot of very smart, very progressive firms that we should aspire to to sort of build ourselves to be similar to is a lot of those firms that are running Carbon. Learn more about Carbon. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by guess who. Wrong. Client Hub. Client Hub is the practice management system that makes every season wow season, not busy season. We're delivering wows, buddy. That's for two reasons. One, because Client Hub provides a game changing client experience. They're designed with the client in mind. First, not like this afterthought bolt on portal. But second, it's drop dead simple, okay? It's not any harder than it needs to be. And one of the really cool things that they've got is magic email. So you actually use ClientHub as your email client. Some Things you can do beyond just like some niceties they've had, like creating work from emails, being able to pin an email. You can actually even reassign a pinned email to someone else. But in that screen where you're authoring an email, like client sends you an email, you get some AI options down at the bottom to generate a. Like a yes reply. Like it will look at the context of the thread and draft a response. That's basically yes. A button to draft a no reply and then an AI composer where I can give it a custom prompt and have it draft that response. Got some other buttons for like change in tone, expanding the length of it, shortening it, using AI to try to take. Try to take the pain out of email because frankly, email just sucks so very Looking for a delightfully simple yet powerful practice management system. Take a look at Client Hub link down in the show notes Tracy Brantingham. Tracy's Running Building Profits LLC, single owner, 100% bookkeeping, six technical staff for our degree counts a two bookkeepers and one person in marketing. First off, Tracy, bless your heart. What a cool. You're crushing it, man. I don't. I have a hard time when I see like successful people like this where I'm like, I. I gotta give them a my advice. But let's run through the tech stack here. I got a couple thoughts and many of them are, are even not necessarily tech related. Okay, everybody also applaud Tracy here for like putting this stuff out here because folks are being vulnerable here and giving us the opportunity to pick them apart. Right. Don't be the person that sits back and doesn't have the stones to do this. And it's like, well, yeah, they do all that stuff wrong. Okay, what's working and what's not working? We'll start there. What's working? Tracy says they have strong staff to get the work done, but what's broken is they struggle to get the processes dialed in and documented and just generally struggle with what tech to use and how to automate. Seems like this staff is either too busy or not busy enough with work and profit margins are too low. There's a there so many things, so many layers of that onion. That onion to unpack. One big one that comes to mind, Tracy, that I'm increasingly an advocate of, especially if you're struggling with this stuff. Seems like it's taking longer than it really needs to. And I would sure like it if my, my team was actually more plugged into developing processes and all that stuff. If you feel like you're putting all that stuff on your own back. It's worth pausing and considering. Like, have I designed the incentives for my team and a way that align with my own. I can tell you, like, one of the hardest lessons that I learned running my firm is when I worked with, like, when I worked for other people, man, I worked my butt off. I thought my job was to make the boss's money and make the company more profitable. And I was just wired that way, as I suspect, Tracy, you were. And like most entrepreneurs are, but the vast majority of people who are not entrepreneurial, their default, like their safe space, it is repetition is like doing it the same way that they did it last time, which is just fundamentally at odds with doing things better. Right. So, like the default for most people will be not the fastest version of a thing, but the most comfortable version of a thing. And that's a byproduct of work like being, I'm going to pay you 40 hours to sit in a chair. Like, the fact that most people are incentivized to just simply to do, do the time, do the hours at a good enough level to not get fired. Like, honestly, like, that's 90% of accounting firms. And it's what's made me like a real big advocate of incentive based pay. Like actually running the numbers and for your team members and the products they manage or for the pods, if you have like more of a pod setup that manages clients, those people actually getting paid based on what those clients pay us. Because as soon as you flip that, there's an entirely different appetite for process improvement. Like, I don't know if you've ever experienced this. I have sat in front of a team before and been like, look at this amazing thing that's going to save us so much time. Isn't this really cool and really exciting? And they're like, I guess that makes sense probably. And I'm like, why are you not as excited as I am? And it wasn't until I had some perspective that I was like, oh, it's because that'll make me more money, but it won't actually make them any more money. As opposed to, like, them seeing that opportunity and being like, oh, I'm pretty sure I could take on one more project if, if I could actually do that. Now they're doing the job that you feel like you have to carry 100% yourself, right? Like, if you were like me, you were the one pushing change and pushing process improvement and all that. And you look around, I'm like, why do I have to do all this stuff. Why is it, why is it all falling on my my shoulders and my experience? It ultimately came down to like what were my incentives versus my team's incentives. That is just like at the core of a firm, probably the single biggest driver of behavior and definitely something to think about now tech stack. Let's talk about what Tracy's rolling internal tech carbon. Nice ignition. Yes. Reach. Reach is a reporting tool active campaign that's like an email marketing and I think you like build the forms and go on your website with that. QuickBooks Online Smartsheets. Interesting right tool very nice. Looking at adding Keeper. Staff likes the dashboard and some features but worried that it's too much overlap. Oh preach. Tracy. A client tech QBO, QBD, Sage 100 contractor, AppFolio Buildium. Clients have all sorts of CRMs. Primary client base is construction, property management and medical but have a number of little sort of one off clients as well. Let's talk about Keeper. Looking at adding Keeper but staff likes it but they're. You're worried about too much overlap. This is kind of the hard thing about building a tech stack is if you don't build it from the bottom up you do, you end up with this ton of overlap and like this kind of bodged together duct tape like stuck with gum and paperclips sort of looking setup and Keeper because it is one of those more foundational tools at the bottom of your tech stack it does overlap with a bunch of other things. You know we've got Reach here for example Keeper, which I think of as a month end close automation tool. One of the things that they really pride themselves on is the quality of their reporting and reporting tools. I mean like reporting tools very useful and are a big help for selling advisory services which ought to be high ticket services. But when you look at the cost of all of your different software tools, reporting tools are not cheap. And if Keeper will actually do a good enough version of reporting for me and that can eliminate the need for another reporting tool like that's, that's a big opportunity as far as I'm concerned. But you're absolutely right to look at Keeper and be like well this feels like this feels like too much overlap. And to me the way to process that then is to say like okay, if we're going to pull in Keeper like this is probably looking like a more wholesale change to our tech stack because it does bump into so many other things but that's not a reason to not pull it in. Like there's Definitely a spectrum of how much time is this going to save me? Is it only going to stay a teeny bit of time or is it going to save me a bunch of time? I can tell you anecdotally, I don't know that there's a tool in our space right now that is growing as fast as Keeper. And I don't get paid to say that, and I sure wish that I did, but it's just like I talk with so many firms, it is the biggest, most like, transformational tool for a bookkeeping practice. And when something rises to that level, you kind of got to stop and be like, okay, we're recognizing now we need to build around this. And it absolutely will change what the other right tools to put around it are. And like, frankly, a really, really helpful thing here is if you can weasel your way into a friend group of other firms that use Keeper, this can be a tremendous help too. Like, they're ahead of you on the journey right now. They've rolled it out before. In all likelihood it changed some other aspects of their tech stack and like, pushed some stuff out. But to be able to see what they use alongside Keeper, that's really, really valuable. I mean, the easiest way to do that is to try to build some of those relationships online, on social media, at conferences. It's the reason why, like people like me, we run communities to help folks build those connections. Well, but that's a really, really big help. If you are thinking about making the switch to Keeper, don't go it on your own. Pull in a Keeper implementation expert. Like, they will shave years off of the process of your team learning Keeper, but they'll also have a lot of really helpful insights for how does that impact the rest of my stack around that tool? Tracy, beyond that, I don't know. Your tech stack, frankly, looks great to me. I would try to squeeze Keeper in there. You're already using Carbon. I know a ton of people that are very, very happy with Keeper and Carbon. Like, that's a great stack to build around. It sounds like the biggest thing the firm right now is probably pricing issues. So profit margins being too low a, you know, factor. There can definitely be how much time it takes to get the work done done. But the much bigger factor there is is pricing. And to be clear, we should work on both. Like, how do we get more efficient but also how do we just get somebody to give us a hundred more bucks every single month to do that exact same thing? And that usually comes down to serving a more specific type of client and the perception of what you do being, like, more premium or the clients perceive there to be fewer substitutes. And if you're like me, this is a accountant to, like, go out and self promote and be like, hey, here's why we're the best. Best at this thing. It means, like, in all likelihood going to go to trade shows, like, speaking, stuff like that, maybe getting on the board of, you know, some sort of. Getting on some sort of board that's related to construction or property management or. Or something like that so that they can see, like, oh, wow, this person has a very unique perspective and set of experience that most accountants will not have. And this makes them uni and will let you justify more premium pricing on your engagements. We've done a bunch of content lately around things like how to be perceived as, like, the expert of all experts inside of a space, being more of a product of visibility than your true expertise, unfortunately. But that can kind of create some imposter syndrome where we're like, well, if I'm going to go out on podcasts and be visible and I don't want to be this construction celebrity or property management celebrity or something like that, like, we get in our own way because our happy place oftentimes is just. Is just doing the work. But unless people know that you exist because they see you out in the wild, they won't know to come and work with you. And that probably, like, ultimately boils down to, how's your team spending their time? You have one marketing person right now. Like, do you feel like that's working? Like, is it possible to pull in an outsider that maybe doesn't have that expertise and expect them to do a version of marketing that converts? Because I can tell you, Tracy, today, the version people get excited about is what I'm doing right here. Like, I'm buried into a LinkedIn comment thread and, like, sharing thoughts here that are like, why is a person doing, like, going to, like, great marketing these days? It's personal and it's helpful. It's like just giving value. And I'll be honest, like, if I run an accounting firm and I'm trying to build a client base around a specific type of client, I'm pretty sure I can't hire a marketer to do that. So I don't know. I don't know enough about how you're approaching marketing to say, like, is that really, like, converting? Is that leading to being able to command higher prices and all that? When oftentimes. What I see working best today is the unicorn You, Tracy, like being the one to be visible as much as that can be uncomfortable for us and not something that is in our nature. I think the best framing of that that I can give that's hopefully comfortable is most of us. What we really love is like sitting down with our clients and providing value and just being that advisor. All good marketing is is doing that stuff in a format where people can see it like doing it in public, oftentimes doing it with non clients. And yes, gotta be careful about like well I can't give you tax advice and I don't, I don't know enough information and all that. But you know a tremendous amount to where if we had a strategy to put your expertise on blast a little more, that's honestly the best possible version of marketing you have in 2025. And so what are some really easy ways to do that? If you have an AI meeting assistant, I don't see one on this list right now. You have an AI meeting assistant, try to capture more of the advisory meetings that you do with clients because those meetings become a super rich source of meeting your expertise that can get repackaged in different ways. And you know, we're not cutting client meetings and posting them as shorts or something like that, but you can extract from those meetings like hey, what are some, some of the like strongest points that I made here that I could turn into a social media post. Or this is actually a great way to work better with marketing partners, be it folks on staff or marketing agencies. If they can have access to those meetings of you advising, then it's like that's truly you. Like that's your voice and your tone coming through. And they can then repackage that into something generic, something obviously that doesn't apply to that client but is ultimately valuable to all the other people like that client that have the same problems. And if you have a client with that problem, it means there's 10,000 more people out there who can get value from that same wisdom experience that you have. Like that stuff as, as uncomfortable as we painting ultimately the path to being able to command higher fees for our work and solve that profit margin problem doing construction and property management and medical as well as other one offs. That's, that's a lot. Especially when you look at the construction stuff and property management that requires knowing special software platforms. I know we have fears about fully niching down into one thing and the risk of just being that focused. If I could steer in a direction, I would say like of all of those clients who are Your A clients today, like, who are the very, very best ones? Where if you could clone one of your clients today to have another one of them, who would that be? And then when you're thinking about growing your firm, all we got to think about, like, at any one point in time is who is the next single client that I want? If John Smith is the client that I want a copy of because they're great, because they pay top dollar and they're really happy to do it, then what does marketing look like that would attract the next generation John Smith? And it doesn't have to be any more dramatic than that. We don't have to rebrand the whole firm or do anything over the top. Like, it can be as simple as just doing whatever we need to do to attract that next sort of a client. And we can go to the client we have today and be like, hey, where do you hang out? Like, what conferences do you go to? What publications do you read? That's a really great place to start to decide how do I put Tracy on blast and be visible, even if it's a very uncomfortable thing for you, like, that's how we win more of those A clients. Tracy, hopefully that was helpful. With the little context that I have. Hopefully could pull a couple. Couple useful things from there, but also keep crushing it. Like what? Like what a cool firm? Like, you know who you're serving. You've built a team. Like, kudos to you. Keep up the good work. This episode is brought to you in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing, who helps you hire staff, come work for your accounting firm. But they live in the Philippines. I did at my firm. My last four hires were in the Philippines. If you listen to the podcast, you know this by now, but when you're getting inundated with, like, all sorts of offshore options every single day, how do you know what the right one is? Huh? Well, I can tell you for one, Cloud accountant staffing, we partnered with them because I actually know a bunch of firms that have had a very good experience with them, but they also used to be an accounting firm, so they get it, man. Now, another reason we're heading into conference season, Cloud Accountant staffing. They're actually going to be out at a whole bunch of the big accounting conferences, same ones that I'm going to be at, which means, man, they're. They're part of the zeitgeist. They're out there jamming with accountants, hanging out. They get what's going on. They know about the new tax bill. They're in the thick of it, man. And I want that with the people that I partner with, not that random weirdo that just sends me a LinkedIn DM. Okay, that's not the move. If you never hired in the Philippines both before, you're gonna have a bunch of embarrassing questions they can answer em for you. You got nothing to lose. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Finn Daily. Did you know? Here's some pretty good Jason on firms lore. Did you know I once founded and sold a SaaS app? I did. True story. It's the app that is the sponsor of this video, this podcast. Where am I right now? The app was Finn Daily. Let me, let me tell you all about it because it was after it was my brain baby. So here's the thing. My firm got into doing like cash advisory work and cash reporting for clients where we'd send them these reports every week or every day to kind of show them like that very short term sort of upcoming cash situation, like everything leading up to the next pay run and all that. So we'd send these emails that were kind of sort of templated, but it's like a manual thing of pulling together all this different information every single time. So I built Fin Daily to be almost like a templated email platform where you just pull in variables from accounting apps, from like banking connections, all that. So imagine drafting an email template, but inside of that template having placeholders for upcoming bills, from the accounting file for the credit card balance, all these different variables and it pulls those values right before it sends the email. Now the team now has built it out to do a bunch more stuff, like a bit of math to roll up several figures so that what it presents in the emails is like the total connecting multiple different accounting files so that all that stuff is piping into like one email summary. Super, super cool. Frankly, I'm still in love with it. Like the whole concept of just this automated email that pulls in live data at send time and then goes out to a bunch of stakeholders. Your client could go to you. But the whole premise is it's like a super connected email template. You could use the same one with all your clients, different ones with different clients, but just think like you got a client with a bunch of entities, how you can roll all that up into an unbelievably good digest to send them every single day, every single week. And the reason I built it, clients will pay really, really good for this. It's a super useful service anyways learn more about Finn daily to check out the link down in the show notes. Okay Darren, spill. Darren runs SSOC Controllership Solutions, accountant controllership and fractional CFO services for small businesses and not for profits in the Winnipeg area. Oh, okay. Old Manitoba. All right, Darren. Bit of background about his firm. 75% bookkeeping, 5% advisory, 25% controllership. It's interesting you break that out. I think oftentimes people do bookkeeping and what they're actually doing is controllership and we're frankly really bad at communicating that to clients because I mean the price to hire a bookkeeper versus the price to hire a controller. Very, very different. Right? Number of owner partners, Me. Me being Darren. Number of technical staff, Just me. Number of admin staff. Just me. And that's the joy of running your own accounting firm by yourself is you do the big brain stuff. You also do like all the taking out of the trash that just happens as being a business owner. What feels like it's working. Clients are happy with the service and refer me to others. What feels like it's broken. Too much time spent on manual tasks. Full tech stack, QBO, ChatGPT, Hubdoc, Fireflies, Adobe, and most likely adding Keeper soon. Add Keeper send you down that path. I mean if, if the cornerstone of your business is bookkeeping and controllership. Keeper, unless you're doing like hairy stuff I think I saw you may do some nonprofit like unless you're doing things on other ledger platforms. I highly, highly recommend Keeper. If the bulk of what you're doing is on QBO and Xero. Like that's just all of the most forward looking bookkeeping firms that I know are using that no practice management system which could be a bit of the problem with the old manual processes. But I don't know that I would add a PM at the same time that I'm adding Keeper. I'd probably just start with one of those things. The unfortunate reality of running your own solo thing is like there kind of just are a lot of manual processes that are still unavoidable. As much as I'm an automation geek and try to avoid that stuff like the plague, the reality is manual tasks exist at the moment, can't be automated, and oftentimes a trap can be that like we're annoyed or frustrated that they do exist and so we almost don't acknowledge them for the thing that they are, which is work and a task that needs to be done, that needs to live somewhere in a system so that on the 14th of every month somebody goes out and does that thing. And like, this is what would make it very, very hard for me to run a solo practice is I just, I am like Teflon man. Like some sort of responsibility comes along and I'm like, you seen the gif of like the anime guy that does like the hip back and forth thing and he's dodging everything. That's me. Like I, I just try to delegate really aggressively because I don't want to collect more recurring things. I love as an entrepreneur, like being able to pull in folks for whom doing that recurring thing is actually an opportunity at their stage in their career. And I can move that to them. Darren, I don't know if you ultimately want to build a team or pull in other folks, but right now the messaging on your website is like, hey, the difference here is like, you just work with me, like I'm just working with you. And that's a, that's a going to be a compelling thing for folks who have worked with accounting teams and maybe just prefer the feel of one fractional person. But that doesn't mean that you can't have a support person. Like you could maintain this, maintain this sort of messaging. And I know a lot of people that like, I mean they run. May run a team of 10 or 20 and they are the face with every single one of their clients. They're the only person that they talk to. But that person is very highly leveraged and that they have a whole bunch of folks behind the scenes actually doing the heavy lifting and the prepping of all the stuff. So it's not to say that you still couldn't do that, but bless your heart, that's no small thing. Like just doing that also like can be a very isolating thing. Like hopefully you've got some friends that also run solo accounting firms because it can be tremendously recharging to have those relationships. So being active on social media to try to find some of those folks, not being afraid to send the, the like strange danger first DM to someone that it seems like is smart and maybe you've interacted with a bit like commenting on posts, that sort of thing. Also turning up to events. I don't, I don't know anything about Canada besides I live in New York now and it's shockingly close to where I am. Still haven't been there, but from what I hear, they also have events and they get together and they do whatever the Canadian version of that is. So if you can make friends with a few other folks that are doing that that's super, super helpful, especially when you're a solo. Last thing that I would say as it, as it sort of comes to referrals is the fact that clients are sending referrals is awesome. But I can tell you I, I hit a couple of phases in my journey where I almost felt trapped by referrals and where it almost like, damaged my sense of agency, where I thought that the people I would have the opportunities to work with would simply be a product of whatever the world sees sent me, rather than like, manifesting well, who do I actually want to work with? And when you are doing your own thing and it's just you, it's even more important than it is for a bigger firm to be selective about who you let in the door next. In fact, hiring oftentimes is a band aid for a bigger problem that is not being selective enough and not getting rid of legacy clients. And so in bigger firms, people can hide from those hard decisions and maybe folks, clients that they shouldn't have let in the door in the past, they can hide from all that by the real problem being needing to make a next hire or not being able to find good people anymore. And it's like, no, like, ultimately you can only serve as many people or as many clients as you have the staff and the capabilities to serve. But when you're, when you're by yourself, you got to be so, so careful about that because you can very quickly outrun what one person's capable of. Right? So referrals are great, but, like, they can sometimes back you into a corner of like, I feel like I should be grateful for this right now, but I can also see how maybe that's not the perfect person for me. And that could lead to an uncomfortable, uncomfortable conversation with the person who sent you the referral to have to be like, you know, sorry or like, actually, actually kind of not a fit. And one of the most powerful lessons I, I ever learned was, oh, I actually do have control over who I work with. And maybe, I don't know, maybe this isn't a problem for you at all. Darren, I can tell you this was a big problem for me is I was just like, felt like I was just kind of hanging onto the mechanical bull and it was going to take me where it was going to take me. And we would get clients from whoever sent us clients rather than proactively doing a couple of different things. One, having the stones to ask my A clients for referrals and ask them where, where they hang out. Because if I Could rebuild my client list to just be copies of like my very best client. Right now that's a way better business, right? Like what are the conferences they go to, what are the publications they read? Who are their friends that they could send to me? That is like kind of step number one and how to have an even cooler client roster. But then step number two is, and this is very tricky in a solo firm is like how do I be visible for that specific type of person so that those folks see can find me? Because the difference between attracting someone who probably already has an advisor, probably already already seeing seeing someone. The difference between being like a professional services home wrecker where you can come and take them from their current advisor versus just serving people that like don't have professional help or have found themselves in a lurch. Who by the way, those aren't the good clients, like the people scrolling Google reviews that, that are in a pinch and need a tax revolver. Something like, like that. Like those are not the good clients. All the good clients, they already have professional help. They are quote unquote loyal. And so it takes a different level of dazzling to pry them from the hands of whoever they work with right now. And that never happens if they don't have the opportunity to be dazzled by you. And that fundamentally comes down to like changing the breakdown of how we spend our time and acknowledging that like some percentage of our time has to go in to non client facing stuff where it's an opportunity where someone could see me or hear from me or learn from me, maybe that's on a podcast or speaking at an event or doing a blog post for a software company that serves the space, something like that. Always consider like how is that next person going to discover me? Because those are like incredibly premium clients, the ones that are already working with somebody else. But if they come in and they've already been dazzled by me, like we've kind of removed the substitutes, we have so much more pricing power and that can be a much more premium engagement. Easiest thing to do that is like serving a more specific type type of client. And right now, at least in the, the website messaging, it's like you know, small kind of small businesses and, and nonprofits in, in my area, a really easy place to start is like who's my favorite client and what do they do? Because if there's one person that does that, there's more that do the same thing and that have the same problems. And how could I just find that next one doesn't have to be a Big dramatic thing doesn't mean you need to become, you know, the maple syrup accountant. And that's all you do. Like it can just be adding one client at a time in a specific domain. And if you really find that you like that long term, then maybe it makes sense to do the more dramatic, like branding around a niche and all that. But in the meantime, it's really just about how do I add my next client? Because if you reimagined your client roster to be copies of your very best clients today, that's just a much better business to run. And when you don't have the luxury of hiring a big old team of folks to do the legacy work that you should probably just cut to begin with, then you got to be a lot more selective. Did I give you any tech tips? We did, we talked about. I also don't see here a proposal tool. Proposal tools, they pay for themselves so fast. If you do a deep dive on anything that'll like put immediate money back in your pocket. Deep dive on like the psychology of three tier proposals and all the different ways that you can do those. Because it literally makes every single project more profitable. Because every client that you work with has a different willingness and ability to pay. And by giving them multiple prices for what they can pay, like you're letting those folks self opt into paying you more. And the real opportunity is that those three levels of service, like the way that I approach that bronze, silver, gold tier thing, is not most work, some work, the least work. I set that up like on a spectrum of how premium, how premium the service delivery is. So in your case that could be like turnaround time, expectations, could be how quickly we close the books, stuff like that. Because you always have to close somebody first. And if somebody's paying extra to be closed first, great. If somebody wants, you know, 20 within 24 hour access to you versus having to book on a calendar, versus being able to text you or call you or something like that. Like those are all opportunities to price those projects in very different ways. Oftentimes in ways that people don't even use. Like they just want to feel like they have that level of access even if they don't use it. People are funny that way. Like they will buy the Mercedes instead of the, the Camry and just think that they're deserving of kind of the more premium option. And if we give people that way of working with us, then oftentimes that can be a vastly higher margin project. Since the only other tech recommendation I'd give you here as is a proposal solution. The winners right now here are either ignition or anchor. Darren hopefully something of value there. Keep crushing it man. Good for you. Building your own thing. And yeah, manual tasks like it is a spectrum. Like there are things we can do to avoid them, but as long as you're working by yourself, there is no way to a hundred percent get away from them. But I wouldn't be afraid about like pulling in an admin that can support you behind the scenes so you can get to the good stuff. Thanks again to those three folks for letting us pick apart their tech stack. If you like this, maybe drop a comment and we'll figure out how to do some more of these, modify the format, something like this. And thanks for hanging. I'll see you in the next one.