BONUS | Ep. 10: Rhondalynn Korolak - It's Not About What You Know, It's About What You Can Move Your Client to Do.

Feb 20, 2020

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Count Me In Episode 10 (Part 1) with Rhondalynn Korolak: https://podcast.imanet.org/10

Contact Rhondalynn:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/imagineering/

Rhondalynn's Work & Recognition:

Finalist - Best Digital Start Up - 23rd annual AMY Awards
Top 3 Finalist - Female Fintech Leader of the Year, Excellence in Data and Artificial Intelligence
Top 10 Cloud Accounting Apps of 2016
Top 10 Small Business Apps of 2016

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:05)

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I am your host Mitch Roshong and I am here to share another bonus episode of our series with you. If you recall a few months back, my cohost Adam spoke with Rhondalynn Korolak. She joined him from Australia to talk about how accounting skills translate to effectively running a business. Today we are going to hear the conclusion of their conversation and hear some of Rhondalynn's recommendations for adapting to the evolving accounting and finance world. She refers to it as future-proofing yourself. So let's head over and listen now.

Adam: (00:43)

So how have you evolved your own career from public taxation to a successful business professional in the accounting space?

Rhondalynn: (00:49)

Well, I started off with PWC in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. So my specialization I guess when I went through became a chartered accountant and article was oil and gas taxation. So primarily as you can imagine, me working with a lot of big firms, you know, the sort of shells and mobiles of the world. And it wasn't really until I immigrated about 14 years ago to Australia that I had the opportunity to start working with some smaller businesses. So when I became a permanent resident and a citizen of Australia, I decided I wanted to go out on my own. And the natural inkling, inclination, I guess for me is I wanted to work with small businesses. So I thought that I would go out into the world in a coaching capacity. So I thought I'm going to take everything that I've learned from qualifying and practicing as a lawyer and also a chartered accountant in Canada and I'm going to apply all those skills and I'm going to coach small businesses. And I kind of had a couple of aha moments, right? So aha moment number one is, no, please, please, I'm, forgive me because this is a little bit pre-cloud. So this is going back at least about a decade now. And it was before a lot of the cloud accounting packages even existed. And so I was going out and I was doing Excel spreadsheets. I was printing a lot of reports from my clients. I was giving them traditional dashboards and KPIs and you know, I would go out and coach these people and I couldn't figure out why nobody was actually taking action, you know, because I thought what I was telling them was really important. I was going out with all these KPIs and saying, do you know it takes 92 days to collect your debts and you know, giving them kind of a wrap on the fingers with a ruler. And people were listening to me a lot and they were shaking their heads and stuff and nodding in agreement and they, they knew that it was bad and they knew that they had to do some stuff, but they couldn't actually action it. They, they, they had no clue really what I was saying and what it tangibly meant to their business. So this was my first aha moment. I thought, okay, never worked with small business businesses before. I'm now trying to coach these people, but nobody's taking action. What's the problem? So I learned a couple of things. I learned that the number one problem by far in every single business is cashflow. But nobody wants to talk about it because people hate or they're terrified of their numbers. So that's kind of, you know, the big hairy, um, you know, wake up call for me, number one, number two was 90 some percent of all these people that we're working with, these small businesses, they're completely financially illiterate. So that was another big, huge surprise to me because I just sort of assumed as an accountant that if you had your own business, you might take some time out to learn about financial so that you could operate it correctly. But that is not true. That's not what people do. People go into business because they're good at what they do. They're technicians, they cut hair really well, they do plumbing or electrical contracting really well. They're excellent at selling shoes or you know, operating a retail store or running a restaurant. They don't want to become accountants. And so these were huge revelations to me because I just thought that I could take all this wonderful, you know, insight that I had and all of my accounting and math skills and legal skills and go out and coach people. But I realized that it is not about what you know, it's about what you can move your client to do. And so the biggest things that I learned about making this transition from what might be traditional accounting to more of advice or coaching or whatever you want to call it, is this, we need to find better ways to get leverage on our clients and to actually inspire them to step up and take some action. And that's all soft skills, right? That has nothing to do with learning more about cashflow or learning more about ratio analysis or or trends or cashflow forecasting. You know, in my opinion, we as accountants spend far too much time doing that stuff when, let's be honest, you know, my first client, one of the very first clients that I had was in the aged care business. And when I showed up on the very first day that I was there to coach her, she found out that she had just lost her, her top client. That was where 30% of her revenue. And so all of the work that I had done in preparation for that meeting, reading her financials, preparing cashflow, forecast, all that stuff throughout the window, it wasn't worth anything to her because she had just had a major shift in that business. And so all of that past stuff was irrelevant. And even what I thought the future was going to be like was irrelevant. And the whole coaching was how am I going to put enough value on the table and help her clop back the revenue that she lost so that she can bloody afford to continue in business and to pay me, be there to advise her. And so that was really the big shift for me, right? Is I just thought that I already knew everything that I needed to know from my legal studies and practice and my accounting to do this, you know, job that I wanted to do and I didn't. And so that's when I just became really curious about things like neuroscience, you know, how do our brains process information and make decisions. And that's when kind of my big, you know, lightning bulb or flash moment came for the third time. And what I learned from studying about the brain, and you know, I, I took a deep dive, I read 200 over 200 studies published in, you know, Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford on neuroscience. I took courses on a clinical hypnotherapy so that I could understand a bit better how the brain worked. And what I learned from all of that was this, the parts of our brain that ...