How I Built My Firm - Matt Patrick [Updated]

Hey.

Hey.

This is Matt Banker, owner and founder of Benchmark Growth Marketing. We do marketing for accounting firms. Today I have the pleasure of presenting an episode where I'm talking with Matt Patrick. Matt is the owner of Patrick Accounting and Works, which is a company that does payroll and HR and insurance. This is part of our series where we talk to owners of firms that are part of PASBA about how they built their firm, how they got, how it's grown and changed over time. Matt has a reputation in the PASBA organization as being one of the kind of tech forward and the guy that's willing to try new and different things. His firm I believe has been awarded the top small firm, mid sized firm and large firm of the year as they've been a part of pasba. This is a great conversation if you are a firm owner. Matt is one of those folks that you want to be paying attention to in this space. So I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Matt Patrick, longtime PASBA member.

Long time was our first time caller.

How many years have you been in Pasba?

I joined Pasba in May of 2007.

2007.

Okay, 16ish years now. Yeah, I was like 32 years old with a bunch of old dudes. That's all that was in it.

You were, you were the young guy, now you're the old guy.

Hey now. Yeah, that's probably true. I'm old but I'm not the oldest guy. But no, it was like Yeah, I was 32, I was a three headed monkey. When I walked in the room I was like oh my gosh, they think I am nuts. And so it was fun. My first conference, I always say the story. I was in Tucson, Arizona. I desperately could not afford the $3,000 to go to the conference. I desperately could not afford the manuals which is going to cost me another whatever it was. I was working around the clock. I had a 2007, I would have had a four year old, two year old and a newborn at home. And I'm like, hey honey, I know we're broke. I'm going to Tucson without the kids.

And you didn't tell her how much you enjoyed getting out of the house?

Oh yeah, it was the best part. No. So I kept strep throat like I think on the flight to Tucson. And the first thing at that time we did was a golf tournament like lead up. The day was me and Cleve Gasaway and Jerry Sukowitz and Carl Cornelisen playing golf. I didn't know any of them at the time. I Am so miserably sick. It's like 130 degrees and I got through nine holes. I'm like, I'm either going to die or just go back to my room. So I've had enough golf for the day. But yeah, so way different times. It was, you know, my life changed. I was, you know, I think Ray Bush 1000%. He kept. I was on a forum on what was Arnie at the time, which is Thomson Reuters software, and he said, hey, you should look at this thing called Nasba. Nasba and like, what's that? And he said, well, here's the link to the website. And all it had was a link to a website. Then it had a link to a table of contents for the books. That was basically the whole website.

Yeah.

And they're like, we have an event and it's going to cost you. I'm like, well, I want to know how to do all these things. So if I want to buy the books, if I buy the books I can get, you know, anyway. So, yeah, it was life changing for sure.

Well, let's, let's go back. Tell me about how you started your practice, why you decided to start, how you started from scratch or did you buy someone else?

Client zero, employee zero out of my house. So I worked first for Arthur Anderson. I was with Anderson up until Enron happened. There was a little sabbatical in the middle of that where I went to PwC for a year and back to Anderson. But I had been at Anderson for, give or take, seven years when that happened. Enron happens. I move to Memphis. From Boston to Memphis. My wife's from Memphis and went to work for Deloitte and Touche. Different experience at Anderson. Post merge. Post acquisition of the Memphis office of Anderson by Deloitte. A lot of fallout from that. I probably wasn't a great employee.

You're unemployable. Probably.

Maybe I was not a probably at this point. Yeah, I was not a great employee. I had a young, I had a newborn baby. The demand of time versus what I was willing to do versus what the expectations were were all large gaps. So and so they let me go in October of 2003. Is that right? Yeah, October 2003. My daughter now is, is, she's nine months old. And they gave me a six month severance package and I went, oh shit, I'm about to be unemployed with a nine month old. This is not great. So I started looking around and trying to figure out what I was going to do, you know, in life. And I My wife said, hey, I have a co worker that needs a tax return done. And then I went to renew my CPA certificate at a PacMail franchise right by my house just to turn, you know, mail it in. Guys like, hey, you're an accountant. I'm like, yeah. He's like, I just moved here. I need an accountant. You know, I'm like, well, what do you need done? I'm just like, just curiously asking. He's like, yeah, my other guy was doing some bookkeeping for me, and he did my tax return. I'm like, how much would you pay him? He's like, oh, it was like 500 bucks a month. I could totally do that.

Yeah, when you're unemployed, 500 bucks a month.

Hey, man, anything for a buck. And then he said, hey, the next. The guy just moved to next store, just bought that Allstate franchise. He needs the same thing. And he knew we were just talking about it, so don't talk to him. So I talked to him, and then that turned into. He invited me to a B. And I. And within like, a month, I had 30 new clients. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what I was selling. I had bought a computer now, at this point, a printer and tax software, and that's all I had. And I was up and running.

And you were just. You're doing whatever they needed anything for anything you could.

I really quickly found I was a tax person by trade, so tax was where I started. And then all of them use QuickBooks. All of them needed kind of the basics done. But, you know, I also found that I'm really. I love the tech side of accounting technology. I didn't know that really until I got into this. And so I quickly got into QuickBooks consulting or helping them implement an inventory system or building. Integrate their point of sale into their books or whatever. And I just kind of. I enjoyed that. Can't make any money at it, but I totally enjoyed it. And then, so my. My favorite story, I was like, I, you know, I did 100 grand in revenue my first year, and I made 60 grand. And then I did 200 grand in revenue my second year and made 60 grand, and I had 300 grand. My third year, made 6 grand. I said, I'm not. I don't think I'm doing this right. And I was working around the clock.

Yeah.

And at that point, it's when I found pasba. Okay, so. Yeah. But Client zero.

So how many years into your practice?

I'd been in the Practice about three years when I joined pasba. I wish I didn't even know about it. If I did, I would have joined it day one. Maybe. I probably wouldn't have recognized it at the time, but once it became apparent, like, hey, this organization kind of has it figured out about, hey, they're not trying to recreate the wheel. Also, the big one for me was as an accounting firm, as an accountant. I don't have to be the accountant. I can be a business owner that owns an accounting firm, which is mind shifting for me. I never really thought. I just thought I'd be the accountant. It's a superstar model. All the work will come through me. I'll be the rainmaker. I'll go do the tax work. I'll be the. Our goal is to find really complex hard tax work that we can build a lot of money for. And that's not really what we're doing. That was not the driver. What this is, this is all about how do I help business owners be successful? And I love that story a lot more.

How many employees did you have when you joined pasba?

Four. Four, okay, five, something like that. We have a couple of them. Still just had one retire, but yeah, I mean, we were. I mean it was four or five at max. We were. I had a lot of helpers is what I had at the time. I was the person who was the professional. I say, and I had a bunch of helpers help me. I had a couple admin, I had a couple bookkeepers that did some tax preparing. I was still unique, using some friends that worked in other firms to moonlight for me and do some pack to turn tax season. But I was getting it done. But it was. I mean, I, I remember sleeping in the office for three straight days around those times, and my wife would bring me change of clothes and make sure I had my toothbrush and yeah, hey, I could sleep on the chair for an hour or two. Those were miserable years. That was the year I was like, this has got to change or I'm going to die. I'm like 32 years old again. I don't think I'm lived to be 35, so.

So, all right, so this is the marketing for accounting firms. Podcast sales and marketing. Very fuzzy line. Kind of the same thing. We're just trying to bring in business. As your firm has evolved over time, what has changed in how you found new business and brought in clients? I'm interested both in the, like, the lead flow, but also how you decided who was a good client and not and how that changed things.

Yeah, so in the very beginning, obviously word of mouth, I was the salesperson, I was the marketing department. I was networking, going to events, getting active in clubs. It's a traditional, you know, start. I mean, I joined the Rotary, I joined bni, I joined, you know, a couple of business networking groups in town. I would go speak as a, you know, I'd give them Rotary. I would do the annual tax update on what's going on.

Right.

I don't remember any business coming from that, by the way, but I did spend a lot.

You were networking, you were being.

Yeah, I was involved in every chamber event that was, I was the face of the business after I joined Pasbin07 the next year. We happen to have a speaker from a firm here that's been around forever, that has a sales department. I went, wait, you could have a sales department in accounting? I didn't, that's not possible. I'm the partner. I've got to be the person who brings the revenue in. And that was really eye opening for me. Like, wait, well that's, that's possible. And then like, wait, how do they get them to, they're not an accountant, how they sell accounting services? How did they explain what we got to do to them? And so that was very, you know, changing for me in the very beginning. I mean, you know, from a marketing standpoint, it was, I mean, I remember the first thing I did, I had some postcards made up and we sent out. I got a mail list and we sent them all out. And I had, you know, we sent out 5,000 cards and I got 15 clients out of it. And I say clients and then I did 15 tax returns for about $87. But it was great. But yeah, that's how I got started. And then, you know, the networking thing for me was word of mouth. And that was just a way for me to get to know everybody. I had to figure out what we wanted or didn't want. The first thing there was how do I generate leads to go have to run appointments. So we outsourced some of our lead generation to a firm that we found through PASBA called Lead Generators. Judy Johnson, she's now passed, but it was an interesting, I mean they just basically did calling for us and we would run the sales appointment. I ran sales for, I did sales for four or five months after that first conference went, hey, I think this is possible. I basically created this manual that said, here's all the stuff you need to have for an install meeting or for a Discovery meeting. And here's. It was very paper based and this is, you know, 2009 or whatever.

You're documenting all of the things.

Yeah. And basically creating a model and then, okay, how do I price this stuff? And let's have a consistency of pricing. And I'd steal that stuff from other passive members or at the time and just kind of figure out and create our thing. Well, at the end of that summer, I, you know, we had a, I have a friend of a friend, a good friend of mine. He had, was in transition of his job, trying to figure out what he wanted to do. He was in his early 50s and he's like, you know, I want to find a job. I could stay until I retired, but I don't know what that is. And I said he had an mba. He had done marketing for big businesses, what he'd always done. He worked at Kimberly Clark, he worked at Mattel Toys, he worked at St. Jude and that's what he was doing when he left. He ran events for St. Jude on their tennis tournaments. Like, man, this guy has like way too much expertise and experience to want to work for my five person accounting firm. I'm like, hey, I don't know if you'd like doing this, but in the meantime, as you're just like trying to figure it out, why don't you try for like 90 days and we'll do this together. And if you don't like it, you can tell me to just stick it. I'll go do something else. But I think you might really, really like this. And so I hired him and August of 2008 and he just retired in October of 22. He helped me build my practice. He went and found 35 to 50 new businesses every year for 15 years or so.

He was, he was an outbound guy. He was out there.

It was all relationship though. I mean he wasn't, it wasn't like a sitting the desk call all day. He was, he was kind of doing what I was doing the beginning, which was this. I'm going to be active in everything.

Yeah.

He already knew everybody in Memphis. That helped a lot. And he could talk to anybody and he had no fear of like he walks in a restaurant, you know, like the owner's in the background. I'll just walk. I mean he would walk right through the door like he's, he owns the place.

Yeah.

And I could never do that. But man, he was, he did it with like, it was genuine. It wasn't pushy. He didn't like, it was Just I was very blessed to find him and connect those two dots from there. Just trying to get our story right. I mean I didn't have a brand in the very beginning. I had my shamrock logo like I still do today. But I had a crappy website and non consistent. We had inconsistent stuff everywhere and just wasn't super professional. We joined Root works in probably 2009 or 10, got a standard kind of brand at that point we immediately kind of got off of wanted to look like all the other 400 at root work sites. But same time the logic of it made sense to me. Hey, I want this to look consistent. It could be our brand. We're going to be very consistent about brand and we've done a good job about that since then. We've always been an outbound focus.

Sales led, right?

Yeah, sales led today even. I really think of marketing as our sales enablement. How do we, you know, make our buying process easier with marketing, how do we do a good job of educating our buyer along the path of what it looks like to buy from us with driving transition look like and then just really trying to repeat that same story over and over again. The story brand model, which is, you know, we are. Our client is rocky and we're Mick and we want to help them be the champion they want to be. If we can just repeat that over and over again and that's the story we tell. It's really galvanizing both for our clients, but even more importantly for our employees. It aligns what they're doing with a purpose which then aligns to. You can see it in the work that we do and how they serve our customers. And then that hopefully just keeps repeating itself. So.

And you.

But.

So you've invested in people though.

Yeah.

Never had this expectation that we're just going to sit back and hope that leads come in. You've been proactive about when it was you and then you hire a salesperson and you've built a sales team now. And so the marketing piece of it has really. I mean it's just. It's lead flow but it's outbound primarily and that's been, that's been good. Now you're focused mostly in the Memphis market. I know not every.

Yeah, probably in accounting. 70% of our businesses in Memphis or Memphis surrounding area, we have about 30% of our stuff outside with some franchises we're with and some clients that have referred us to somebody somewhere else or whatever. But for the most part on accounting side, we're probably more 70, 30 payrolls, probably more. 50, 50, just because of the work we've done outside of Memphis to grow that. But yeah.

What do you. When you. When you think back about just like catalysts of growth along the pathway, are there. Are there specific moments or decisions that come to mind as this was really important, a really important decision or hire or. Yeah, anything like that?

Yeah. I mean, the first one for me was the. The undying commitment to never not having a sales model that I'm running. This is a sales volume model. We're running, recurring business models, a subscription service we have. It's sales focused.

You never stop selling, even when things were hard internally. Processes to figure it out.

We will figure it out. Also, there's a lot of levers to pull when it comes to managing capacity. You can change. All right. Every time I bring in a new client, I got to get rid of my worst client or I can change. All right. I'm going to. We're going to be really selective. We're only going to do this type of work. So which means we're going to start tightening up our client list or we're going to raise some fees, or we're going to really go through and be really picky with what we. When we want them to. Onboard. We can. There's all kinds of leverage you can pull, but the sales engine cannot turn off at the size we are today. You know, the. The replacement. Just to keep our current level of clients.

Yeah.

Not because we do bad job, but clients, we're small businesses. They go out of business, they get bought, sold. You know, at some point they don't make it. Sometimes they outgrow us. There's all kinds of reasons why a client will leave. You know, we're gonna lose 10 to 12% of our clients a year. If we have 300 clients, that's 36 clients. If we just. Just to stay level, you're like, that's not a great idea to turn that engine off. You know, our referrals generally will make up most of that, you know, from just client referrals and, you know, clients that expand and all that stuff. But that's not enough to get us to where we really want to go.

Yeah.

So sales is my first focus. I was very lucky in the very beginning. I mean, in this world, you'll hear a lot of the passive guys say, it took me nine salespeople to get to the first one that I liked. I hired one and he stayed there for 15 years. That's not common. And then the next thing for Me was understanding our brand and how consistent and the story behind it. The story brand work that we did with you was really important for us solidifying our vision because it was, it was a, it was a foundational set to actually set the actual vision where we're trying to go. It's like we are here to help business owners succeed. How do they get to be a champion? That's, that's the. That they came very clarifying in our. This is our vision we have for the firm. And that's. It just made things a lot easier for us to educate our staff on. And even like it's the filter that we put everything through. This isn't helping some of us succeed. This is probably not the right answer.

Yeah.

So you, you've grown from, you know, you said four to five at. When you joined Pasba. How many?

We're right at 40 employees today. Yeah, I said we know we did that $300,000 right before. $300,000 made 60 grand.

Yep.

You know, we've done a pretty good job of basically adding, you know, 300 to $500,000 a year in growth. And now it's exponentially. You know, this year we'll will grow by a little more than a million bucks. But that's not.

Yeah, that's. You get there eventually.

It's a snowball. It's definitely a snowball.

How is your role changed in the firm?

Like a million different times. Yeah, well, like I said, I was the chief accountant in the very beginning and chief wrench thrower. Like I still am. I always say I'm the chief wrench thrower because my job is just break stuff.

Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, I wore all the hats in the beginning, so it could be I was the tax prepared tax reviewer. If there was a payroll issue, I would jump in there. If it was a tax meeting or client was buying or selling something or needed new software or whatever it was, I was the person. I don't think I did any tax returns for clients this year. For the first time I've done. Last couple years I haven't done it either. And so you're like, that's a big change for someone who you know, I have a master's in tax, so I would imagine I need to do that. But I didn't. Yeah, it's. My role is way different now. My job is really leading people. My overall role is supporting my team. I have one client. It is the firm. My job is to treat that as my most important client. That's my strategic Advisory client. That is my faux client. That is my people. I manage people. And my job is to develop people. That's my primary goal. You know, I'm very fortunate to have some wonderful teammates around me. My leaders are really good. They've all started, you know, pretty much ground floor with us. We have not hired any outside leaders, really. And to grow and develop them and see them succeed and what they do now to lead other people in our firm is super. I'm super proud of that. And it's probably the thing that just, I mean, it really changed my whole practice. I mean, it changed my life for sure. I know I have people I can 100% trust through the work. And they're going to lead our people with the same vision of what we're going to try to accomplish. And I know they do it with a genuine heart for our success. And I am so blessed.

Yeah.

What's next? What's the future look like for your firm?

That's a good question. You know, our goal is to help small businesses succeed. We've rolled out, you know, doing employee benefits. We really made a big push, pushed over the last few years to really make it where we're trying to help them be better business owners, of which tied to that is the foundations of understanding their numbers, what they mean, how they hire better, how they have great people that they develop and lead and make their businesses better. And so we're doing a lot along with what we call like a one to many approach, where we have our office hours with our experts in all the different areas. We have our workshops every month on different topics on how to be a better business owner. It could be anywhere from how to hire more effectively to, you know, how to compensate a salesperson. Or it could be on just basics like understanding your financial statements, whatever that may be.

Yeah.

And our goal there is we want to be a resource for them. You know, we may not be the expert. We'll make sure we have the right expert in our office or we need to bring an outside person in to have that conversation to help them be a better business owner. It's been fun. Our podcast, the One Step Better podcast is very similar to that, which is how do I be a better business owner? And I love doing that because it's gives us a chance, honestly to just kind of get our thoughts in a line with between Mike and I mainly and kind of make sure we're clear on what we want. We actually do a lot of, I'd say out loud thinking during that podcast, which is like here's, here's our philosophy around this. Is this do we agree? And it's been, it's been a lot of fun. We've done almost 150 episodes of it, so it's been great.

Yeah, I think that's one of the best. The best reasons for owners to be involved in creating content for, for their firm is the act of doing it helps you clarify your own thinking and helps you be a better advisor to your clients and understand even your own business. And where you're going, you got to do the work of processing it.

You've created your own voice. Right. That's the thing for us. I mean all of our leaders and our managers or key people are involved in our content creation. We want them to write. It does help them understand our goal. We do get it edited by a leader who's like, hey, that's not quite right. Let's talk about why that's not right. Now you've basically created a teaching moment.

Yeah.

You basically create them have term paper. So they're all writing blogs. We're all involved in creating content. I want them actively with the mindset of I want to help business owners succeed. So therefore I need to know more about this topic that I'm teaching on. So I need to, I can write about it, I can talk about it. So when the next client calls, we can go, hey, this is the article we wrote about it. Here's the video we did about it. And if you have any questions, I'm here to be a resource for you. That's super empowering for them as a teacher. They have the resources, but also from a client standpoint, they know like, hey, this guy really knows what they're talking about.

Yeah.

You've also really leaned in. I think there's kind of two major paths for most firms. You can either be a take stuff off your plate firm. You know, we take care of the bookkeeping and the compliance and all that or we're the, we make you more profitable. We help you build your business. And you've really leaned into the we want to be the help you build your business type firm. It's not just about getting the tasks done. It's about helping in the, in that larger sense.

The foundation of the work we do is I've got to get your stuff done. Yeah, that's a non negotiable in our world. Like you have to have a regular set of financials. We're make sure all your filings are on time. You're going to know that you're comfortable that everything's being done appropriately. That should be a basic level that our expectation is. That is a foundation. I can't help you be successful if you're not getting this stuff done and you don't have good information to make decisions from. That's just not. Doesn't make any sense to me. So that's our foundation. But step two of that is okay.

Yeah.

Now that that's done, where do you want your business to be? When everybody opened their business in the very beginning, they had a mindset of, I want to run a successful business, and I would love a place that people love to come to work every day, and I want to make some money. And I would love to see my people that work for me make a bunch of money, too. And I want to, you know, my customer. I want to help see them succeed, whatever that may be that they're in, you know, and I love that story. My parents owned a small business, and that's kind of always. I go back to them like, man, if their accountant would have done a better job, yeah, they would have had, like, their business was super successful. And it could have been, oh, my gosh, it could have been even so much better. Just a little bit of guidance and help and support. They just didn't know what they didn't know. And so, yeah, that's the part I love the most. I want to help that business owner succeed.

Yeah.

Sounds like what, what you have done in your business and your firm like that. You want to multiply that and turn that into what, how you serve your clients and, but not, not just through your team.

Yeah, my team.

To do impact more and, and help businesses and, and all that. Well, this is, this is a great conversation. I know you, you talk to a lot of younger, newer firm owners and folks who are newer to pasba. Is there a piece of advice you'd give them, thinking back on your experience?

I always start with use the concept of PASBA as your, your box. What am I doing? Don't, don't look at how dated the content is or whatever. Use the wisdom in the room. But then create an action plan. Don't be afraid to break some stuff and go make, take action on it, you know, and just try to like, you're not going to change your firm overnight. It's an. It's a thing that's going to take your whole lifetime to get to, to where you finally get it to one step at a time. But at that same time, it's taking action, decide, taking action decide then, like, just keep progressing one step at a time. Because, man, day by day, one step at a time, it gets a lot better.

Yeah.

Well, great, Matt. Thanks for being on the show and we'll talk soon.

Can't wait. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate everything, everything you do for us. Very good.

Leave it there.

This podcast, marketing for accounting firms, is brought to you by Benchmark Growth Marketing, a marketing agency that helps accounting firms get more calls booked through their website. You can find us@benchmarkgrowthmarketing.com Connect with me, Matt Banker on LinkedIn.