553 Live Coaching 6 Accounting Firms in 32 Minutes

Recently I hosted an event in Oklahoma City where I coached about 45 accounting firm owners on the things that were ailing their firm. We got into stuff like delegation, email.

Automation and how to get paid better on your three tier proposals.

We wrapped up the Q and A.

Digging into like what were the biggest blockers for these firms ended up being a really fun convo.

So enjoy this session.

From a recent Jason Mountain Firms live in Oklahoma City. I hope this was a great day for y'. All. What would be the best? Any questions that are like front of mind, having come out of the day, stuff that you want to go deeper on?

So you mentioned on delegation and getting an assistant and inbox and those kind of things. Anything else come to mind that sort of freed you up to focus on.

The firm and growth and those kind of things. Outside of that, what else comes to mind? I For me personally, getting out of client work was the biggest thing I was. And that was another thing that was really hard for kind of the culture of the company is nobody had ever not been client facing. Dude, in hindsight, this was coming into Covid. This was as we were doing all the stuff we just talked about and having the time to think about kind of the strategy and moving all of our hourly clients to being priced up front. That was a ton of work and I couldn't have done that if I was working on clients. So email inbox, at least in my case was a great proxy for all the things I hadn't yet delegated. And for you, that could be like Slack or Microsoft Teams, something like that too. And then getting out of client work, which is a really big change, especially in small firms. It means transitioning from here are the clients that I can support and here are the clients that my team can support, which oftentimes are not the same client. Like I started going down this, this path of working with software agencies because I have a little bit of a software background that was super fun for me and I could vibe with them and I understood what they're saying and all that, but nobody else on my team could do that. So it was a super profitable path. But it was happening at the time that I was trying to get out of client work and I'm like, man, that sucks. But like, we gotta be realistic about who we have.

We can try to upskill them into.

Being able to do more things for sure. But that wasn't the business that was going to let me step out of client work. So I would, if I were to add anything to that, it would Be getting out of client work, which is a big thing. Can I just say how much I love that the bartenders are like, so intently listening. Yeah. I always feel bad for, like, our AV people, where it's like, Troy, bless his heart, Troy's just gonna get subjected to day after day after day of talking about accounting firm strategy. And you're like, get home. And you're like, man, honey, you're never gonna. You're never gonna believe what I learned today. Wow.

When it comes to renewals, I think I've always just been signing people up just to wear.

They already are.

So if we want to roll out those three tiers for the renewals, how do we change it up? Whenever they're used to getting everything, you know, how do they, how do you go back and say, okay, we're going to take you down to the bronze level, and that means you're not getting any of this stuff anymore unless you pay more for it. So how do you do that tactfully?

That's a great question. Talking about the CFO guy last night where he's like, honestly, we already do, like, as much as possible for people. And I'm not even sure what that would look like. Everybody's. Everything looks different. And there's always more you can do. Like the, like. This goes as far as, like, some accountants will like, take equity in the companies who are the tippy top. So if we're thinking about the value ladder of all the things we can possibly do for folks and all the way that we can, ways that we can help them, we can always raise the bar. In the case of this gentleman I was talking with, it was like, how about a tier where it's like they come out and they spend three days with you at like a cool retreat and it's like five or six clients and this is like a hands on intensive, getting them in a different environment, totally different, different thing. And we just started riffing on ideas on like, how can we make this even more premium. So I think there always is something more premium. And it's, it's overwhelming in the abstract because you're like, I don't have the capacity for that. But you're only going down that path if it's like, why they're staffing up or cutting some of the bronze folks. The other side of that, if you do want to reel it back in, always think.

I always think about it in terms.

Of how do I stop the bleeding. So never let another client in. Under the old regime, the beauty of new clients is they're just like innocent little babies that don't know anything about the world and they think that's just.

How you do stuff.

And you're like, no, that's how it's always been. So don't let it get any worse with new clients. If you really want to, you can, you can change up the expectations with clients. And some folks are going to like that, some won't.

I think we think too much about.

The folks that won't like it. I'm usually trying to build for the people who want more and create the firm for the people who want even more of me, rather than building a firm for the people who are like already kind of at their limits and don't necessarily want more. Right?

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Hey real quick. We recently did an updated demo day of one of this episode's sponsors, Client Hub over on the main YouTube channel. Ran through the really cool stuff that they're doing for bookkeeping and accounting services firms building sort of the centralized brain where you manage and oversee all of the work. But also Client Hub is getting more into like the doing of the work.

The actual workflow itself.

Doing some really cool stuff around like AI month end close review and doing so with a deep integration into QBO and zero so like pulling all the transactions into Client Hub so you're able to do more of the review from inside of the practice management system. And it happens right now at a time where it's kind of annoying. We've got these really cool workflow tools redefining how efficient we can be with getting the work done. But then you've got your practice management system, which is like, disconnected from all of this workflow and seemingly just overseeing like, the status management of the work. Client Hub. They're kind of trying to do both of those things in one platform. It's been really interesting to follow if you are a bookkeeping firm or client accounting services firm. Client Hub is one of those platforms.

That I think you just kind of have to check out.

Like I said, we just did a new demo of it on the YouTube channel. I think you like it. To learn more about Client Hub, check out the link down in the show notes.

So we talked a lot today about the three tiers and going to getting more gold clients in and excited to make space for those gold clients. But what's some good guardrails to put in place just to keep myself from taking a red marker and getting rid of the bronze and copper clients.

Yeah. Are you worried about cutting too many of them?

Yes.

Really?

Dude? Usually everybody's worried about the opposite of, like, never letting them go. I love this. This is a great question.

How do you not get rid of too many? The more you can math it out, the better.

So we're talking with Karen about, like, let's make a goal headline goal of let's get to 20 silvers. Well, what does that mean in terms of dollars and cents? Like, by and large, the average client, if they opted into silver, how many clients does that mean we could afford to lose? This is another argument for staggering your renewals. If you're still doing renewals right now, start with the folks you think are most likely to opt into it and end with the stinkers. And if a good number of folks opt in, then you're more comfortable letting the stickers loose. But when I, when we did this in our. In our firm, it was such a scary thing and like getting the partners bought in there, like everything you're talking about, because I was talking about, like, chopping half the client list, they're like, this is insane. Like, whippersnapper. Like, we were not into this and the thing that brought them around was just literally running the numbers. And it's the same, like, thing where, like, people are insulted when you tell them what the math is. But if you see a path to twice as profitable as projects four times as profitable projects. It doesn't take very many people saying yes to that to be able to like, get rid of a lot of the Bronzes. So that's maybe the best tactical tip, is maybe staggering how you put those in front of folks because you don't want to send proposals to everybody. Then you get a bunch of bronze and silvers. Then you go back to the or you get a bunch of silvers and golds, you go back to the Bronze, you're like, hey, sorry, I know you thought I was going to help you this year. Turns out I can't. So maybe think about, like, staggering the folks you think would opt up. That's a great question. Everybody is worried about the opposite thing, right? Not bringing yourself to getting rid of enough folks. Like, that's the much more common pain.

I think you mentioned earlier about not selling things to a client that they may not need just yet because they'll take off running before you finish the list.

Yeah.

So one of the things that we do in our proposal is we have our three tiers, but at the bottom we have services offered but not quoted, so they know what's still available to them, even though it's not included in the quote.

One thing that's maybe hard about this.

It'S hard to say if it's harder if the other approach is a shortcut. But oftentimes people will use three tier proposals as an alternative to deciding on a scope. So they'll be like bookkeeping, bookkeeping, apparel bookkeeping, payroll and bill pay. And. And they're almost like skipping the step of understanding the client well enough to even have a recommendation and then letting them decide. Sometimes the client will be like, well, what's it gonna cost me for you to do my payroll? And they're like, they're kind of picking and choosing. And the more you get into that menu selection conversation, the worse it goes for you. And it's like, well, the reality is, like, the more of the stuff we do for you, usually, the easier it is to do all of it. So I would probably either strike through those items or I would have a deep enough conversation with them ahead of time to say, based on my understanding of your business and the org chart and your needs, here's the exact scope that I would recommend and understand that all three tiers here are anchored in this same scope of what I think you need right now. But I did do a version of that. I just didn't present it at the bottom. We had like a, like a one page PDF where we would Strike through the things we didn't do.

We do a lot of CFO services that I would describe as very involved and very strategic, high level. And it's very hard to train staff to that level of service. What would a scope of services for like CFO services that can easily be delegated and trained to other employees look like?

Love it. So to what degree do you have sort of systems and frameworks that you consistently run these people through? Or is it all to kind of like shooting from the hip advice? That's the path to like getting at more turnkey. Right. And the more specific the type of person you're serving, the easier it is to get to a more specific way of delivering the service. If you want help with the starting point with this, having your meeting transcripts and then using AI to be like, hey, start helping me put this into a framework is really helpful. That's ultimately. And you know this, that's ultimately how, how you kind of make the CFO thing more scalable. It's just being able to get more systematic. And so Karen, Karen has a 12 sort of 12 foundational things, right. Where it's like she. These are. She's got a very clear framework for what you need to run through. Then she's got an eight week workshop where we go through these 12 things. Like, what's your version of that for a specific person? Where we run people through this sequence. And the more systematized it is, the more you deskill it, you can still be available, but now it means that you can also help people down here and it's not totally reliant on you or at least is less reliant on you. That's a look of like. That was kind of an incomplete answer.

No. I think we'll just have to take it back and kind of piecemeal how we are currently advising clients and there's probably just going to be aspects where we say we just don't go to that level anymore. And that's probably the right answer.

Yeah, it's the same conversation of like, what's the business I can build versus that my team can support. But I would encourage you to think, think about how to. Could we reverse engineer the thing that feels really abstract? Right. That can be a really helpful exercise.

Yeah.

This is a little off the wall, Jason, but I initially found or stumbled across your podcast, you did several segments on M and A and how this typically bookkeeping companies can essentially acquire another bookkeeping company. Is this a good way to grow? Is this not a good way to Grow. And you had Conrad here, who is doing like one bookkeeper to 300 companies and you have this tour where you're visiting like 10, 12, 14 cities, talking to all these professionals that are doing kind of like a crossroad potentially what AI is doing. Have you seen anybody be successful at acquiring mass acquisitions of bookkeeping firms and applying one bookkeeper to 50 companies, 70 companies? Is this pie in the sky? Are people actually doing this? It seems like there's a real opportunity. I haven't seen anybody doing it. I know the technology's there. I'm just kind of just throwing it out there because this is what initially kind of brought me to your podcast.

So yeah, there's a tremendous amount of capital being deployed around that kind of thesis. Right. I mean, what people universally find when they're doing roll ups is it's just much more messy and much harder than they ever thought that it was going to be. It's kind of an extension of like the external perception of accounting being more rote and repetitive than it actually is. When in reality what accountants do right now is just all the crap that slips in between the cracks. Like we're not sitting and doing the same things day after day after day. Like, you know, the, the AI companies that will talk about like, hey, here's the percentage of transactions that we can now auto classify. We're so close to full automation. It's like, buddy, classification is like 20% of the month end close. Like it's all the other messy stuff. Like we're already doing all the things that slip between the cracks. So I personally don't think feel like that full kind of end to end automation is as close as some people will tell you. Just because it's so reliant upon stakeholders and legacy systems and all these things that we don't have control over, it doesn't mean that the tech that we have cannot be much better. I mean you look at like intuit and 0 now and, and they're fine, but they're both very mature platforms that have not changed much in the last 10 years and have not changed an iota since generative AI. Um, so all the tech can, can certainly get better. It will be kind of an incremental improvement for sure. 50 to 70 is not out of reach right now. That that's, that's fairly common. It's just, I mean there like there'll be people in this room who run a firm where one bookkeeper can handle two companies and one bookkeeper can handle a hundred companies. So it's very much down to the profile of the company and, and the complexity of all that stuff. I, I think everybody would agree we're marching towards a path of like, vastly more powerful automation. And there's some people that think that the engineers will get there first and there's going to be kind of this tipping point and they will just kind of be able to do it.

In the US at least that feels.

Unlikely because the regulatory environment is such that there's 5,600 income tax jurisdictions that mean that one Starbucks purchase could be classified nine different ways for federal purposes, let alone state and city and all that stuff. Right. So we all know like where all that stuff breaks down. But yes, things are changing. Things are changing faster than ever before. It's never been more costly than it is now to not be changing. So like, we have to somehow get comfortable with being able to change faster and put more of a premium on hiring people who are energized by change rather than fighting you every step of the way. I know a lot of folks that have, that have done rollups and, and you can talk to the people that are inside those rollups and everybody's like, yeah, man, that's a freaking mess. And rollups of all types are like that. Like acquisitions, mergers, like, it's very hard for that not to be a mess. I haven't seen anybody that has nailed it. I could tell you I have a very different take on this. As someone who like creates content for people that have a specific vision for how to run a firm, I think that is the prerequisite to doing a good version of a rollup. If you're buying this, this and this and this based on a balance sheet based on a P and L, everybody.

Always ends up stuck on the humans.

And it's like, well, we still need.

The humans to do quite a lot of work.

So like their alignment and their thoughts on all this stuff, it matters a lot. I would love it if somebody like me did a roll up where they're like, hey, here's our vision for how this stuff works. And everybody's like, yep, totally bought into that. And it is, you know, a sort of, I don't know, some sort of resource share or roll up or portfolio firms or something like that. I see more of like a general approach and methodology first sort of selection making more sense than just going out and buying it because it is an accounting firm. And then just like rolling all these things together and expecting that to work. But man, is there a lot of capital going in I live, so I live in New York, like right on the Connecticut border now. And it is like PE sort of hedge fund bro central. It seems like everybody I talk to is either in PE or an attorney for PE And I, in fact, I was on a flight last week with a lady who's an attorney and I didn't get her full background until later and I had already fully put my foot in my mouth. She asked what I do and she's like, oh yeah, I know a lot of really cool, exciting stuff happening with PE and accounting firms, right? And I'm like, yeah, Spence Spencer, you ask? And she's like, yeah, but there's, I mean there's this, this firm and this firm, this firm, all these, all these real like, all this cool, exciting stuff happening. And she's like, even she asked like, kind of what my audience is. I'm like, it's more smaller firms. And she's like, well, even for these smaller firms, like the opportunity's never been greater. And I said something probably too flippant, which is my own take on this, which is if I build a thing to like, you know, 5 million and I get all the people there who are most bought into my vision and the clients are bought into my vision and all that stuff, and what I ultimately do is like, hey, just got a great multiple. See you later. That's appealing to a lot of people. It's just not appealing to me right now, right? And I kind of gave her my version of that and then five minutes later learned like, yeah, no, I'm an attorney for P.E. like we just, we do. All I do is this stuff and it's so exciting. And I'm like, oh, whoops. So it will happen to some degree.

We've all got a lot of great.

Clients from roll ups and acquisitions, right? Man, I got some of my best staff. Every time a firm would sell to a regional, we got so many great things that, that came out of those transactions. Honestly for us, all of this is opportunity. If you do want to sell at some point, loads of opportunity. If you do want to find better clients and better staff, loads of opportunity. Every time a transaction happens, good people fall out of those things, right? So I feel like, I don't know, I guess I worry about kind of the scope of what I care about, which is still not like the big roll up stuff. It's what does it look like to frankly run a really cool business where if we can get out of our own way, it can cash flow like crazy in a way that Very few other businesses do. But yeah, man, the key is not getting in our own way, right? Like it's really hard to get sucked into the monster and it just become too much.

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In a world where there's more just.

AI over hypery than ever before and.

You see a new landing page every.

Day that's like, oh, this sounds exciting. But then you can't actually tell if there's anything real going on there.

When all that's going on, it's nice to know what things actually work, what are real, what firms are like actively.

Using and having success with. I'll give you one tool. Stanford Tax Buddy. They were kind of first aboard like the AI tax workflow hype train.

But they're now, I don't know, three.

Or four years in. I know I probably well over 100 accounting firms that love Stanford Tax is.

A really, really good solution for better organizing your 1040 work. It gives you a single place where you can pile all those documents in. It creates this like AI checklist based.

On the prior year tax work of exactly what items we need from the client. Then I can just chuck all those documents into one place, regardless of how they come in, and it'll automatically check those items off the checklist and then give me like an actual like work paper in the cloud as an alternative to an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

Whether your clients want to work with another portal or not, there's a lot.

Of people that are just now using Stanford Tax internally because it saves you a pile of time on the, just the managing of the documents and all that stuff.

It's a great company. They've been around an AI accounting solution that's actually really, really good. Worth checking out if you do 1040 work. Learn more about Stanford Tax.

Check out the link down in the show notes. I have a staffing question. We're having a hard time finding someone that could be bought into the, the vision and you know, take over client work on the tax side. Any advice on where people have been finding good folks? Preferably not remote, but we'd be open to that. Yeah. I mean, show me a, show me a tax firm and I'll show you somebody looking for a tax manager. I hate to quote modern philosopher Alex Hormozi because it's hard to say things that he's done and be taken seriously, but I mean, his books are like unbelievable. I think he's doing an amazing thing right now. I saw a video from his workshop. An attorney and an attorney came up and like, he's like, hey man, we're grow, we're growing like really, really fast. And like, we just can't find enough attorneys to keep up with our growth. And accountants are like. And we got growth coming out of our ears. Like if we get hired people until the end of time, we could probably keep them busy. And our Moses response was like, what would you do if I told you 30 days from now I'm going to take your wife and kids from you if you can't solve this problem and find your next 10 attorneys? And he's like, well, we got one recruiter right now. I would probably pull in like 10 recruiters. Like, we're, we're doing this right now. We would probably do 10 times as much of this. We're doing this. We do 10 times much. It is, so much of it is up just about volume and doing it more. I mean, there are things like, does my website sell people on why this is a good place to work? Right. There's things like that where we have to think about like, do we actually.

Have anything to offer that other firms don't offer.

Like sometimes there's some hard introspection there that's like, I'm actually no different than any other firm, so why would somebody come worked for me? It's a great argument for specializing if you find folks who are passionate about the types of clients that you specialize in. Man, that is such a win win. I really think it's about volume. So much of my business is about volume. Like more videos than I. When I started doing this stuff, nobody was putting out videos for accounting for monies. More videos, more podcast episodes. Quantity has a quality all its own, right? Most of us don't make the time for putting in the reps that will be required to get what we need because we're too busy and so we can't work on the more meta sort of macro things. So it is whatever we're doing now. But more sometimes it's challenging assumptions. Boy recruiters are expensive.

Like, do I really want to pay that ransom? Like, well, the approach right now is not working right.

For some people that's going remote the first time, for some people that's going offshore the first time.

For some people that's hiring part time.

For the first time, the folks that like don't want to work year round. So it's. I always really encourage people. Whatever you're stuck on, it's not that it's impossible. It's that your approach right now has plateaued. There's people out there hiring thousands of people a month. Like just astronomical numbers. Like it can be done. We just ourselves haven't learned that skill and figured out how to get there yet. I actually had a really cool story a couple of weeks ago. Who was the first firm? This firm started an initiative basically and the staff within the firm were encouraged to simply document like, here's what we do in the firm. And it was not a big firm. And I've seen versions of this actually from like Big four where it's like the tik tok of like day in the life working at Deloitte and they're like going to Starbucks and stuff like that. And everybody's like, your life sucks, man. Don't you're not fooling anybody.

I saw a version of that in.

A smaller firm where I was like, we're just going to talk about what we do and the people that we help and we're just going to try to capture it more and, and put that stuff out there. And they started getting people from Big four and from regionals just in droves. That are like, man, this looks way less sweaty than what I'm doing right now. Like, this actually looks pretty fun. And it was not a sales pitch or anything like that. It was simply visibility. So the secret sauce of being for a specific type of client and being a great place to work for a specific type of person, whether that's people who are into beekeeping or, you know, moms that need to be able to.

Work from home, like, whatever that is.

Be great for a specific type of person, but then be super visible. And that's a hard thing for most.

Of us because we're not comfortable putting.

Ourselves out there or being self promotional. I mean, I'm talking to myself here. But for most of us, like, going out there and being visible, that's a really hard thing. That's not a natural thing. Somehow we've got to get around to. Like, if we are pouring 100% of ourselves into one thing in this earth, helping this type of entrepreneur, this is our life's calling. We are doing everything we can to make this work. If you're not going to promote yourself, who will? Like, we gotta get over that virtue signaling of like being so afraid of talking about cool stuff that we do that we won't show up and nobody's entitled to anything. Like the day you put your shingle out and say, I'm gonna do accounting, like, you're not entitled to squat, like, you stand up that website, nobody's gonna see it. Like, our surface area of who will find us is a product of how out in the world are we? How much do we talk about what we do? There's for sure strategy aspects of that, but if we're so heads down in the work, it's really hard to ever solve that problem because we are not out and being visible. And honestly, coming to stuff like, this is a good example of like, I know just how hard it is to get people out of the house right now, let alone accountants. And it amazes me that you all come out like, like Nick Bless hard from four plus hours away, right?

But you make like sort of wild.

Connections that you hadn't planned on oftentimes referral connections. Where's cannabis lady? That was a, that was a rude way of putting it. That boy, that hand shot straight up.

Don't want cannabis stuff.

There you go. I like, there's so many examples of that where, like, man, there's a bunch of ways that we could work together. Especially if you just do bookkeeping or you just do tax and you're serving local People. And so like, even just showing up today is an example of like being visible and like leaning into the fact that sometimes you just got to trust that being out there is going to make it happen. And if we can not obsess so much over ROI and just trust the kind of bigger picture things where like.

Pretty sure if I put in more.

Reps on this, that and the other thing, it will help me like, that you have to be able to lean into that to a degree. When I published my first YouTube video and was running a five million dollar practice, I didn't publish that video and be like, man, someday I'm going to be in Oklahoma City hanging out with Brenda Cannon, teaching a bunch of bartenders about accounting firm strategy. Like, that was a very big ambitious thing. Like, that was. I was running a practice, I had plenty to do. This thing, this frivolity was like, it was actually a fun creative escape because I was feeling really bored and kind of stalling out on the firm. And I just needed some sort of outlet. And I'm like, I think I have ways that I can help people. So I just started doing that nobody was watching. I made, I made two videos a week for 18 months and at the end of that had 500 subscribers. 500 subscribers. Two videos a week for 18 months, running a 40 person firm and had 500 subscribers. Why in God's green earth would anybody keep making videos? That's a great question. What I found was that was actually super fun for me. And I'd never been a video guy. I hadn't been a theater guy, anything. It was a fun, creative outlet for me. It was like a way to make silly jokes and sort of a different medium. And so it didn't feel like work for me where it felt like work for everybody else. So I could come home and I would shoot the stuff at night and like I put the kids to bed and I'd go back out and shoot a video. And like, this was the thing that kind of didn't feel like work to me. Which, by the way, is like the secret to being a successful adult in my opinion is everything is so much about repetition. Like when people pull up one of my videos now and they're like, wow, you're a natural man. Like, you were born to do this, my dude. You weren't watching any of my videos when they were awful. Like, I'm a natural now because we've made all these videos and we have a big team that makes me look really good. And like we've kind of Built the machine, and then somebody watches it and it looks super easy.

And they say, you're a natural.

Can you give me the name of your editor? And, like, man, it's like eight people, like, with their fingers in every single video. And we've gone through over 100 editors. Like, no, you can't have my editor. But the reason I was able to do that was I found a thing that, like. And naval's got a quote about this too, that's like, you just. You gotta find the thing that feels like work for other people, but doesn't feel like work for you. Because when we play the long game of adulting, success is who's putting in the most reps. It really is. And there's not a sexier answer than that. Like, some people have some inclinations, yes or no, but the biggest thing is, is. Is repetition. And there's something about our childhood where we see other people that are natural talents at this and that, and we're like, oh, they've got that gift. I don't have that gift. But that phase of our life ends at, like, 25 years old.

Everything after that is about, how many.

Reps are you putting in and are you building an interesting stack of skills that is unique? I am a firm owner, and I'm good at video. That's an interesting stack, right? And I can be, like, persuasive and stuff like that. Interesting combination of things. But I only got good just by putting in repetitions. And so if you have that thing that doesn't feel like work for you, and you're like, yeah. People say, like, don't make my hobby my job. Like, we're like, don't pay attention to that stuff. Like, man, that's a gift.

Like, it really, really is. If there's that thing that you can.

Do and you can put in more reps than anybody else because you love it, that's a great way to, like, build your own competitive advantage, be it a niche that you're passionate about or whatever that is. Like, to me, that is kind of the secret to being a successful adult. That's what I would tell my kids. Anyways, I can't thank you enough for being here, gang. This is amazing. I love doing this stuff. I hope you had a great time, and I look forward to hanging more.