Accountant's Flight Plan

Allocating time and energy toward automation can seem daunting, but truthfully it's just tedious. It’s a matter of selecting the right software and getting support to help integrate. Help could come from a team member or an external coach to help move your clients over 1 by 1. I’ve always said it’s analogous to doing dishes. You can only load one dish at a time, and you can only convert one client at a time. Tedious for sure, but when you think about the potential to scale while reducing your owner hours the temptation to automate grows. The fact of the matter is, it makes your firm highly marketable.In this episode, David and I cover a lot of ground in the realm of automation. We got to see how our perspectives in tech and in brokerage influenced each other and played off one another's viewpoints for the future of the industry. There's some great back and forth here that I think you'll enjoy.

In her coaching, Geraldine focuses on the kind of pricing model you use in your firm, what your client list looks like, and what changes could be made based on your goals; and from there onto how to revitalize your firm with some simple changes to your service packaging and advisory. It was awesome getting to chat with her in this episode and share some commonalities in our coaching experience. In this episode, we both leaned into a common truth – that there’s so much possibility on the table for firm owners – especially in the forecasting and advisory role.

Liz Farr is a CPA and full-time freelance writer for the accounting profession. Her words have been in Forbes, CFO.com, Accounting Today, and the Journal of Accountancy to name a few. Liz is hoping to bring accounting into a more balanced future with her writing partnerships. We discuss how the accounting profession is moving towards automation and how if you don’t adjust you’ll be left behind. Accountants now have the opportunity to offer financial advice and clear reporting to give clients value in a new and exciting way. “The org chart of the future for accounting firms is not going to be a pyramid, it’s going to be a diamond shape.” We talk about how automation will reduce the size of the lower strata of admin/staff and increase the quantity and value of CPAs who can act as advisors and who “connect the dots” for their clients. The biggest message I gathered from our chat was that you can’t be afraid to move into the future and protect your biggest retirement asset, your firm.

In this episode, we quickly connected on how important it is to have a simple explanation of the numbers even for our own businesses. If you stop for a moment and think about what’s possible when you as a business owner get a solid, tactical expression of your numbers, the world gets a whole lot bigger. With better reporting , you can properly formulate a growth plan for your business over the next year, three years, or even 10 years. Without a simple explanation of numbers , your perspective is too narrow. Spencer helps widen the scope of what’s possible with his team at Shift Financial Insights. 

We decided to change up the podcast a little bit and turn the focus inward to give you guys a glimpse into how Accounting Practice Academy came to be.  In this episode of the podcast, we have Ian Brennan (APA’s Creative Director), and my wife Carol Poe (PGA Buyer Specialist/APA’s right-hand woman) who played a pivotal role in the creation and execution of the workshop. This workshop wouldn’t exist without them and there’s some fun stories as to why that’s the case.  The main reason it wouldn’t exist without them, they filmed and produced the workshop! The pandemic left us without a studio or film crew and so, we created our own little film studio in the office. There was a lot of determination and good humor that went into developing this workshop that we are so proud of. In the end, doing this project with a less than traditional film style gave us the opportunity to revise, condense and perfect our virtual course. 

David and I have been friends for years, and when we last spoke I could see him light up as he talked about this new venture he’d been thinking about in the podcasting world. I could tell he was excited and it shows. His new and now-running venture is Your Podcast.Team.“[Podcasting] It’s the rarest  form of online content.” David noticed there were some barriers to entry in the podcasting scene, the technology aspect, the worries about hosting capabilities, “what will I talk about?” etc. but because he saw so much value in the art form he wanted to make a streamlined avenue for anyone to build out there own podcast and that’s where YourPodcast.Team came from.

In this episode, Gina and I dive into the finer points of her hiring process so you can instantly come away with practical, implementable “to-do’s”. She explores common pitfalls most of us are making, simple tweaks in our hiring conversations that make substantial changes, and a workflow to sift through your candidates.

Recently, Brannon had an exciting conversation with Ryan Lazanis. Ryan is a CPA who considers himself more of an entrepreneur than an accountant.  In 2013 he founded a fully cloud-based accounting firm which was acquired five years later with the help of the Poe Group team. Now Ryan is focusing on his passion to help modernize the traditional accounting firm model and foster innovation in the profession. To learn more, check out his website and blog, futurefirm.co.Ryan shares on this podcast how he started his completely cloud-based firm and how there was originally a good deal of push back from other CPAs. He had a revolutionary vision to create not just good client service, but to create an incredible client experience. He also wanted a fun workplace for himself and his workforce that allowed for flexibility and required less of the aspects of the accounting business that he found mundane. Ryan succeeded.

If you want to get out of the bottleneck position in your firm, you have to delegate. The first step toward delegating is Auditing Your Time. Brad’s advice, “Audit yourself…for a week or so just audit. Every time you sneeze document it. And estimate how many hours per month you’re spending on [any given] task.” 

Mitch Baldridge is a CPA based in Houston, Texas and he has been steadily growing his firm, Baldrige CPA, since going out on his own in 2014. His first year, he essentially made no revenue and now he has several employees and steadily growing margins.Mitch found Brannon a few years ago when he was thinking about acquiring a firm. He thought he would purchase an existing practice to help build the capacity and growth he was needing. Instead, Mitch actually ended up being a beta member for what would become Accounting Practice Academy™ (APA). In 2020 he took the workshop again with the first round of members.