Ep. 49: Katie Thomas - Want to grow your business and become more profitable?

Contact Katie: https://leaders-online.com/contact/

Katie's recent content: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiethomascpa/detail/recent-activity/shares/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
(Foreword) Adam: (00:00)

Hey everyone. Adam here. Before we get started with today's episode, I want to thank you all for joining us each week and taking part of these great conversations we are having, but I have to ask you a favor. If you listen each week and you enjoy this podcast, please go on iTunes and rate us and leave a review. This helps our podcast be able to reach more people. Thank you so much in advance for taking the time. And now here's today's episode 

Adam: (00:22)

Welcome back to Count Me In. I am a podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I am your host, Adam Larson and I'm happy to bring you episode 49 of our series one in which we are fortunate enough to be joined by Katie Thomas. Katie is a CPA who is the founder and owner of leaders online, a digital marketing agency for professional service providers. She is a content creation expert and national speakers strives to guide firms through their digital transformations and grow their business. Let's head over and listen to her conversation with Mitch now. 

Mitch: (00:59)

So in your role, what have you seen as far as technology changing the landscape of the accounting industry? 

Katie: (01:12)

So, Mitch, that's a great question and it's pretty loaded as it could be expanded to a wide variety of areas, but to focus in on a few areas, I'm going to have to go with the collaboration, work quality and efficiency. So with collaboration, the technology available to actually support collaboration has enabled small and large firms to truly reach way beyond the walls of just their building. So these firms can work with clients all over and then also have employees staffed all over. So no longer are they being constrained to a physical location. And then of course efficiency, that's huge. Firms are able to get way more done a lot quicker. And so like bill.com receipt bank and all of those apps available have allowed firms to become more efficient. And then the quality, this is really important aspect of technology. Of course it's great to be become more efficient, but the quality of the work and removing, you know, some of the chance of human error is great because there's, you know, the work is getting done correctly. Efficiency and like I said, collaboration. So tying all of these together, I think a really important piece that you can, you know, take all these aspects and kind of pull out is that we have better relationships both internally with employees and then also externally with class clients because we can focus on the things that truly matter, like the high level work output that needs done and then building relationships rather than just spending our time doing mundane tasks. 

Mitch: (02:54)

Yeah, I think those are all great points. And to just kind of follow up real quick, what kind of results do you think this collaboration work quality and efficiency ultimately leads to for the organization as a whole? 

Katie: (03:07)

It leads to, in my opinion, a lot better, stronger vision and fulfillment of the firm's mission whenever everyone is on the same page, both internally, so the staff and externally the clients, then everyone's working towards the same goal. And no one feels like they're being left out, but they're not on the same page. And the sense of unity that it brings is incredible. 

Mitch: (03:37)

I think that's a great point. So thank you for tying all that together. And I would say the next step of this technology that's available to these organizations is the ability to use analytics. So what is your perspective in regards to organizations embracing analytics and what does that really help the business answer? 

Katie: (03:56)

So with analytics, it's really important to just go to the basics of what gets measured can be fixed. And all of the software that firms are using today is providing data. So your marketing software, your practice management software, your client portal and so forth. And then you need to actually take this data and get it into a single location where you can understand the data and have context around what's impacting the outcomes. So you need to be looking at leading and lagging indicators with the leading indicators. These are the ones that look forward at future outcomes and events. And then your lagging indicator, it's going to look back at whether the intended result was achieved. So for example, let's say a firm has their profit down, that's going to be a past event. It's a lagging indicator. Now we need to actually look at why and see what went into this happening. So some of the leading indicators, you know, we might look at our, is it because we don't have enough new clients coming in the door? Is our client churn rate too high? What are our marketing efforts looking like? And you have to bring all the data together to understand the story and for the data to tell the correct story, you can't be missing half of the pages, right? So it's really imperative to have all this data in one place and then we can take action based off the entire story telling us. 

Mitch: (05:25)

So a big you know, baseline for the analytics that we typically talk about are going up the analytics curve from the descriptive analytics all the way through the adaptive analytics. Ideally, once technology is really enabled throughout the organization. So as people are making these decisions and we have all this data in this one place, I'm just curious what you think. Um, you know, if there are any specific technology tools or certain types of analytics that businesses should be really focusing on to get some better results. 

Katie: (05:57)

So it really depends upon, you know, what technology they're using in terms of what sort of analytics platform is going to work best for them. Because you know, if you're trying to use a piece of software that doesn't say connect with your marketing data that's going to be difficult to look at some of those leading indicators. But for example, a platform like Malartu, they're really awesome at bringing all the data together. A fathom is of course very, very popular in our industry, power BI, they're looking, you know, to get really complex. So there's a whole lot of tools available. And I wouldn't say that there's like a best tool because what works best for one firm or maybe for one of the firms clients to help them analyze their data. It's gonna vary, you know, business to business. 

Mitch: (06:47)

And I think that's a great segue into kind of giving you an opportunity to talk about what it is specifically that you do. So we're accounting and finance, but I know you have a very unique perspective on how accounting and finance organizations can use this data. So what does all of this really mean when it comes to building a sustainable brand for an organization? 

Katie: (07:08)

So when it comes to building a sustainable and strong brand, I think it's alwa...