Simple steps to creating a strong business

[Music] hello everyone i'm so glad you joined us for this panel discussion we'll be talking about simple steps that you can take to create a strong business i'm your moderator laura redmond i run an accounting firm based in the san francisco bay area this is our 16th year and i'm the co-founder of an app called aero workflow and i've spent many many years writing and teaching quickbooks online certification for intuit our panel discussion today is on the accountant track so that means that the audience is made up of accounting professionals who are searching for simple business strategies to help your firm grow and thrive i've been attending quickbooks connect every year since it started and i know that some of you are really advanced really experienced and knowledgeable and that some of you are brand new to this so this is a great place for you to learn and it's a great community we all share with each other so welcome to everyone i'm going to introduce each of our panelists and let them tell you about the work that they do starting with jenny moore practicing mission hello jenny tell us about the work that you do in our profession awesome well thank you laura yes so my name is jenny moore i am the head of accounting for practice ignition and i also have my own practice as well which is more details ironically 16 years in the making as well laura so kindred spirits there and part of my passion is to research financial technology to help accounting professionals really streamline their organization which is mainly my role here as the head of accounting with practice ignition thank you next we have monty bernard of expensify monty tell us about your role at expensify hey laura hey everyone super excited to be here uh i wear a handful of hats uh but around the office i'm primarily known as the voice of expensify particularly leading the charge and co-hosting our podcast with our ceo david barrett marketing materials creating content a lot of fun stuff there i also work closely with our approved and global guides programs to effectively onboard thousands of new users each week and pete potsos of bill.com pete tell us what you do at bill.com hi yes thank you laura i am a strategic account manager so i work with some of our largest partners and then i have another role as client accounting services strategic advisor so basically that means i've been helping firms build client accounting services practices for oh gosh over 10 years and i've been in the profession for about 25 years working with cpa firms and my role at creative solutions thompson reuters and um and cpa.com before this and so helping lots of firms and i've i've seen them from their very small stages to um to the point where they've gotten so big and they've acquired other firms and uh so it's been fun watching the profession and and and these partners who become friends over the years grow and build their practices very nice so thank you all for being here on our panel today um and as you can see everyone here has worked in or with closely with accounting firms and so we know firsthand that running an accounting firm is very rewarding but also complex and for many of us that requires a mindset from that of the practitioner who is performing the services for our clients doing the work to that of a leader managing a business managing an accounting firm and we know a business is quite different from a job a business needs this framework some kind of structure of systems and procedures to avoid chaos and that framework is what will help us all balance adding new clients or adding new staff or both without losing our minds and losing control over the quality of the service delivery and the profits for the firm so um if we can we want to build that framework to be scalable so that we can grow and that's what we're going to talk about today so let's discuss some of those strategies that can help accounting firms implement and add structure to their firms so they can grow and they can thrive without losing control and we'll start with the first simple step would be to define your firm's services and your firm's clients so what do you do and who do you do it for right i'm talking about like make a list of the services you provide so that you're not just doing whatever somebody's asking you to do and maybe it's not even your niche so do you do recurring services are you paying bills expense reports payroll what kind of services are you providing tax audit and maybe you have one-time projects maybe you do quickbooks online implementations things like that and then define what kind of client you provide that service for or want to provide it for and then you can market and sell it so let's talk about everything related to that um we'll start with pete what if you're not sure who your target client is yeah great question so you know when you when you first start out you're really you know depending on the stage but you you feel like you almost want to take on anyone right and but it makes sense to kind of step back and start by taking a look at your current client list and consider which ones are your favorites and if those clients have anything in common that makes them more desirable so knowing your target client helps you determine whether your service delivery menu fits your desired clientele and then i like to ask the question let's say you were only going to take on one more client the next year where you were about to retire like what industry would you pick or what what type of client would it be if you were only going to take on one more right and the point of that question is like what are you passionate about who do you like working with i mean if you're a foodie do you like going to restaurants then and then focus on restaurants if you feel you know passionate about that so i think it's important given the work that we do is very hard and uh and you know and you get stuck in it you want to you know at least be working with those that you like to work with so yeah it helps you enjoy what you do right right so jenny is like any client a good client for a new accounting no absolutely not right laura i think as you know i think of the early days of starting my own practice when i felt like every client was a good client because they had a checkbook you know it's really important to get really specific and know that you know not every client is a good fit for you and that could be for many reasons it could be could be your niche it could be your speciality it could be even something that's you know something as basic as personality and at more details what i learned from many mistakes many many errors is i really had to define who i was working for in order for me to scale my business and who i wanted to focus on because we'll get talking to this a little bit further on but everything else you do in your practice really relates to who you're working for and uh if anyone's interested i always talk about my dragon methodology that is how i pick my clients right to this day and it's something that i keep very true to me and you know similar similar to what uh pete was saying you really need to think about you know almost fictitiously what that ideal client is and really start strategizing your digital experience to speak directly to them to make sure you're attracting them in this new digital age of attracting clients yeah that's so true so monty what makes expensify suited to firms that are on a growth trajectory a great question uh first i want to circle back to pete's comment about being passionate about your clients about what type of client you want to work with um that passion that aspect of your job is really what kind of gets you up in in the morning to do what you want to do and so at the most basic level uh time is going to be the greatest commodity for any company on a growth trajectory we don't want you being bogged down with doing all the you know rigor moral mundane day-to-day tasks that you don't like to do we want you to focus on the types of work in your job that you're passionate about at the base level so time and how to utilize it from start to finish an expensify account can be set up in about an hour not days not weeks an hour the less amount of time your employees your firm is spending on expensify the more successful we see our platform we aim to pretty much automate all functions that we used to spend you know hours on there were things just necessary evils that we used to spend our days and weeks on but now you know we can automate and take care of that we fully believe that the more humans that get involved in a process the more errors will occur so again we try to take that out of the equation the whole point of expensify is to set it up have it but not really need to use it if that makes sense jenny what's the first thing a new business owner should do or could do to get clients yeah that's really important whether it's your own firm and you're looking to to scale forward or you're even helping clients through that process i'm a big advocate for the digital strategy so being able to make sure that you have a digital strategy a digital footprint and that's more than just having a website and just having a linkedin profile it's about using those different channels to weave a web of stories and services and solutions you solve to advocate for your brand it really is the megaphone the big microphone that is now allowing you to be able to be heard so i hear this from so many people in the accounting industry they put the digital strategy last because it feels cumbersome and awkward i know when i was taking my education for accounting we had one marketing course it is so vital and if you're looking at securing those higher value lower turn clients it really involves taking the time to invest in that digital strategy and speaking to them directly through your media assets and your posts yeah that's so true and that really is an example of we don't feel natural necessarily at marketing and sales because we're accounting professionals but that's an example of stepping outside the client work to run a business you have to do marketing sales now so pete what would you say is the most effective marketing tool that you have seen firms use yeah so i believe that the most effective tool and i use this myself um is for small firms and small businesses is to use the customer testimonial so if you've had a recent success with a client and they're just raving about you and sending you text messages or emails like the first thing you want to do is just say hey i'm so glad we were able to help you it just makes me so happy and it would mean a lot to me if you would be open to a quick video testimonial just you know maybe a conversation that you and i have that we could record and then put it up on our website right and you know if if in most cases you know they'll say yes absolutely and my gosh you've saved us so much time um and and uh you've been able to help us spend more time with our family or you've given us peace of mind that this stuff is getting done right i mean that is just great stuff for prospective clients who will be able to make a personal connection with you before they even meet you right and and so i think there's nothing more powerful plus your clients want to see you succeed and they want you to stay in business so that they can continue they can continue to help you grow so you can continue to help them grow right so it's definitely a win-win and um and probably the easiest thing to do that's great and i know i'm reading testimonials when i'm looking at a new service or solution because i want to make sure that it's legit and that what other people have to say about it so um on this strategy that we're talking about remember we're talking about defining your services what do you do as a firm and then marketing and selling it so part of that is like pricing so jenny i want to ask you specifically about practice ignition how it helps accounting firms who are maybe letting go of that hourly billing model and moving to whether it's fixed fee or value pricing whichever but they're pre-setting the dollar amount on the engagement so tell us about practice ignition where that's involved yeah absolutely so using practice ignition within my own firm it helps with both pricing strategies whether it's um you know a deposit prior to work being done maybe an hourly basis but the most common one that you know our industry is moving towards is the reoccurring monthly recurring revenue model and regardless of which strategy you use practice ignition is a great solution but you know speaking to my experience of using it for my own firm what it really helps is being able to streamline what your value is and value will always be subjective just looking at the price of airlines can be subjective for your next trip but really coming down to what has been your experience in delivering these services is a great way to be able to determine what your value is and one great way that practice ignition does that is it helps advocate for your value it's not just like a stand-alone engagement process it's also a selling tool that i also have some of my clients go wow that was a really neat thing that was a really great experience and yeah it's an experience and what they what i've come to learn from using practicing condition again long before my role of being head of accounting for practice ignition is that this is really the first step at taking this engagement taking this route with the client and so when we have our own workflows as a practice owner really tight really polished we're having some really nice engagements we have the new proposal editor where people can pick different packages based on their needs and budgets we can easily embed a loom video i love it because i'm able to take the scariness away from engagements and bring in my personality and my brand the other thing of course selfishly that it does for me as a practice owner is it keeps the invoices tight syncs back to quickbooks online payments are reconciled and also the integrations into platforms like intuit practice management where we can keep our scope creep did i just say that absolutely where we can keep scope creek tight and make sure that we're not working for free and that we're compliant okay so monty what do you say to those who are reluctant to add another app and pay another subscription fee and by that i don't mean that they have 5 000 set up but i think over the past decade we've seen as we all moved to the cloud that people think i've got my one accounting app i use quickbooks online what do i have to have another app now and that's saying they seem nervous about that so tell us what are your thoughts on that monty yeah yeah i mean we've all been there whether it be a new subscription like tv service or whether it be something to help grow your business it could definitely be a little scary it can definitely be that oh gosh another one uh but at the end of the day expensify at expensify we love intuit because you guys intentionally developed quickbooks online as a platform to plug in apps that perform different functions i mean this way qbo can act as a core general ledger and doesn't have to do everything because frankly not everybody needs everything uh at the end of the day again there's almost always a significant savings in time and error created by manual processes i mean that's just fact people make errors people make mistakes once you communicate this to business owners i mean they'll understand that subscription fees are worth the value added by the automation improved process and framework those provided by these apps i mean they'll pay dividends at the end of the day in time and productivity yep that is so true moving on to our second strategy we've defined what our services are in the firm and who we sell them to and the second thing we want to talk about now is to deliberately select your tech stack don't leave this up to the whim of every different client engagement you encounter determine how your firm will perform those services and what apps the firm will use look for integrations and automation jenny can you recommend apps that a startup accounting firm needs yeah absolutely so you know stemming on my own experience of having a firm changing it from a paper-based desktop platform to an online experience like quickbooks online we really had to practice what we preach and so one of the first things i would look at if i were starting an accounting firm right now would be to look at financial management systems like quickbooks online because it is really the single source of truth the house of accounting data and then expand on that experience for your customers with a select few apps that you would choose to specialize in so for instance one of our pillars with my firm is e-commerce well with e-commerce what we're doing is we're really integrating well with different types of data importing apps we also require expense receipt capture applications like dex we also use expensify for a client the other thing you want to look at is how do you eliminate other paper issues which would be paper checks well you can eliminate that with bill.com so as you look at

these preliminary pain points of eliminating paper that's how you can create a core app stack and then as you become comfortable with it and are able to articulate that better to the customer then expand your knowledge into some of the other niches and niches that are out there and perhaps one of them is ecommerce like it is for our firm yeah pete what is the easiest way to increase the perceived value of your services to your potential clients compared to the status quo or to your competitors yeah absolutely so ultimately you want to think about the value of your services from your client's perspective perspective versus how long it takes for you to do the work so we've all heard the term measure what matters so in this regard how quickly you get the information your client means more to them so this is where technology comes into play if you can introduce workflow automation tools and integrations that will deliver your product faster then the perceived value is much higher uh compared to getting it a month later and so you know i use this analogy of like would you prefer to drink milk the day it came out of the cow or a month and a half later when firms are typically getting financials to them and um so you know the answer is the fresher the better uh i although i use that analogy in wisconsin once and they're like well we call that cheese here but for for most of us though it's really information the more valuable um the the faster it gets to them and so having capabilities in a solution that can reduce the amount of um you know you know human touch or it's sitting in an inbox we we here at build.com we have automation tools that are reading the document for you it's identifying the vendor it's splitting documents apart it's uh assigning the approvals automatically and then you know you can even set things up to auto pay as well too so there's lots of things that we've done to help you get that you know financial statement out as soon as possible where it it's the most valuable monty speaking of value and all the different solutions at our fingertips today how is expensify different from other products in the market what makes expensify unique definitely definitely as a handful of aspects i'll bring up i just wanted to mention that i think jenny and pete are both hitting the nail on the head i particularly like the uh preliminary pain points for eliminating paper i love that that's absolutely fantastic uh and pete hit the nail on the head as well with the less amount of people actually touching the the receipts touching the assets the faster it's there the more valuable it is the faster it's handled i i couldn't agree more uh and when it comes to expense reporting software from my experience most but not all but most fintech platforms are created to be more of an admin first and user second experience which at first glance of course totally makes sense the gears of the back office in a company they need to turn to make the company work but the majority of the market share for expense software is still taken up by excel believe it or not in 2021 people are still utilizing uh spreadsheets to handle their expense reporting uh it's kind of a kind of a silly thing in my opinion but again if it works it works but the most dangerous phrase ever uttered was but we've always done it this way and that has a lot to begin with you know so there's one example right there what happens is a company may spend a ton of time a ton of money building out a solution that checks all the administrative boxes but when it comes to actual user adoption user execution getting them to comply with your workflows can be a lot like pulling teeth because quite frankly it just wasn't built for them it wasn't built to be easy for them at all in a nutshell at expensify we know that doing your expenses sucks it's not fun it's not something you look forward to as a submitter or even as an admin processing them at the end of the week at the end of the month so we built our platform to be user first which at the end of the day helps you again achieve those core purposes honing better adoption ease of use on both ends submitter and admin and of course the accountant team as well and getting you every receipt you need to close those books at the end of the month yeah i don't know i think you're making it kind of fun now okay so our first strategy we're talking about defining your services who your clients are you know yourself you know what you sell as a firm second one we talked about picking your tech stack let's go to our final third strategy and that is defining how you're going to do things you know more so than just what you're going to sell and what tech stack but really um creating procedure guides or checklists or even just some communication within the team about how you do what you do like not just we run payroll that could mean that you're going to do it all different ways even if you've picked a certain tech stack but really getting into how your firm does what they do and then there are so many great certification programs that are available so i would say to definitely get your staff certified so that they're experts and you can use that for a lot of marketing and then start delegating all the work you have your client work to your staff so jenny talk to me about how do you scale a business yeah if i were to break it down uh we call it the triple p approach and if you're wanting to scale your business keeping these three uh p's in mind are really what will do it and one is to focus on your people you can only scale if you let go and delegate you don't want to be working in your practice you want to be working on your practice so having people is really important to carry that out however as i learned very early in my uh you know journey to scaling is people are not mind readers as much as we'd like to think they are so in order to solve that problem you need to write out your processes and that's where apps like arrow can really come in well because you're keeping that consistency of that deliverable to your client what you don't ever want is your client saying that was done different this month or something was dropped or or something was missed or maybe there's some scope creep going on your clients asking you for a bit more which leads you to those platforms and so it's not just enough to write it out and you know have a series of zoom training calls you also need the technology to bring it together within my firm we have a fully remote team i have three team members i have never met face to face and the only way i am able to do what i do with what i do with practice ignition stay sane and also run a practice is by following the triple p approach by having really good technology for my workflows and my engagements really strong processes it's like the recipe of how we're going to do the work and some really awesome people okay i love that people process and technology platforms you got it don't worry true we need to make t-shirts we'll make some t-shirts it's okay and it's so important in that the piece where you move from practitioner to running a firm building a firm growing a firm and thriving is because you've got to delegate the work now you can't do it all anymore so you have to communicate that and that can cause a lot of bottlenecks because you kind of as the firm owner or partner manager can be the one everyone's waiting on if you don't figure out a way to pass the information on and delegate it well so pete where do you find bottlenecks when you're trying to scale an organization yeah so to jenny's point on people i've seen over over the years where firms will get stalled out on scaling their organization in two places and that is onboarding and then business development or sales right so oftentimes uh firms will rely on one person to onboard all of their clients and then uh and then that person leaves so you know you're you're you know two steps towards one step back right or the other way around right and um and so you know you've got to have a succession plan and a growth plan just to fully support your future needs and make sure that you're you're supported there because that's a linchpin if you will um then the the other uh case where i see slow growth is not having someone dedicated to sales full time right so i'm a recovering cpa turned salesperson and um you know i imagine that for you know most firms you know when they went to school to become accountants and they didn't think they were you know extroverted type people or never really took a sales class and so you know so that is a skill you have to either develop or hire or outsource right and uh you you um you can do it yourself by taking training get a training method i'm a student of spin selling you know i like that you know it's very methodical linear approach to doing things and you know moving people through the sales cycle and it can give you some confidence you know that you're following something and accountants are really good at that um or or you or you hire someone that loves to talk to people and love selling and has had that experience but ultimately someone needs to have the quota if you will or the the goal uh for your growth and um you can't you can't be the delivery person and the sales person uh it's hard to do both right yeah that's so true monty uh we have talked about this important tech stack and now we're talking about defining the processes around it and i mentioned a bit ago that getting your staff certified in it is so important and gives them that expertise so i know bill.com expensify have training programs um a lot of intuits customers are accountants can you tell us how your expensify program expensify approved works for accountants absolutely absolutely and uh to pete's point kind of taking a piggyback off that about finding those different uh scale stallers where you're not able to onboard and bring on new people new clients to to really really scale at that that's one of the biggest and i completely agree and and to combat that we designed our approved program for accountants who want to grow their business and scale successfully over the years we've spoken to thousands of accountants uh at conferences at road shows or having them just write directly into us and the problem they all faced was that they struggled to manage clients multiple different uh uh submission styles so to speak i'll put it i'll put it politely there of expenses i'm sure everyone listening today has plenty of horror stories they could talk about about getting shoe boxes full of receipts envelopes full of receipts what have you it could go on and on you can only do so many of those before you want to pull your hair out uh so we did a study with yahoo not so long ago and we found that unsurprisingly admins roughly spend around one hour per employee per month on individuals expenses so that's some pretty basic math there five employees five hours a month 40 employees well that's an entire week time dedicated to something that can be spent on something much much more productive and frankly that time sync alone that can prevent you from growing those are 40 hours plain and simple that could be spent on again much better uses of your time so we developed our platform to streamline this plain and simple that solution being approved policies so what you're able to do in a nutshell is you're able to build distinct customizable autonomous policies for each client invite their respective submitters and admins and then you'll be able to work with them to fully customize the rules parameters approvals and guidelines for how their expenses are submitted approved and then ultimately exported into quickbooks online you're even able to again securely integrate with your individual uh file for that individual client so you have 10 policies client a client b client c client d they're all secure they're all autonomous from one another and they all directly integrate with that indistinct file uh from your client into quickbooks online we also pull in all the other coding parameters as well so we pull in categories customers projects jobs all that good stuff so your submitters and your admins can check and make sure that all the expenses are coded correctly the first time we offer full comprehensive training three cpe credits heavy discounts and of course free internal use for you and your team nice i love it so jenny back to you you talk to us about the three ps people process platform how do you balance practice ignition your practice and then you have a life how do you run businesses and have a life lots and lots of coffee no no yeah that that that and so i guess the answer would be um you know having balances is really important in anything that we're doing whether it's in our personal life or our professional life and for me uh learning that um you know what that means is you know having my own three children starting a practice from scratch growing to where it is now everything stemmed from effective time management now i know a lot of you just rolled your eyes um but really you know really thinking about time management from my time being a time bank just like we preach budgets to a client we need to preach to ourselves that we only have so many hours in a day and how are we going to do that and by following that triple p approach is how you're going to maximize that pete um if you're a small firm maybe just starting out do you really need to document your processes that is so tedious and time consuming right right well well the answer we've already been stressing it for the past you know 30 minutes here but is absolutely yes so one of my favorite book recommendations when i first started working with accounting firms was the e-myth by michael gerber and one of your favorites i understand and uh so the book is a parable of sort that gets you to think about your business as a franchise and so what would a franchise or have in place for you if you bought a franchise it would it would be all the manuals and the processes and the tools and the equipment that you would need to have in place right and and what makes uh franchises successful is that all of that stuff's been figured out and been presented so if um you're starting your firm out you're sort of building those things and document everything so that way then when employees come in you know they feel like oh this place has got it figured out you know i just go to the you know the workflow tool or whatever that's guiding me on how to do that right um and then the other concept i like to share is the 10x mindset by dan sullivan uh strategic coach check it out it's got a podcast pretty cool so this is where you try to imagine what your business would look like if it were 10 times the size it is today so what people processes in platforms would you need if your business was say let's say one million dollars versus a hundred thousand dollars a year so uh the point of that is that this gets your you and your team to think much bigger versus incrementally and then you know you just go around the room it's like okay what things would we need to have in place you know if we're a million dollar firm or a 10 million dollar firm or 100 million dollar firm and and then you you work through all that how many people what processes what platforms and then it gives you a vision of what you need to put in place and so um most likely you know as you go through that you're going to have documented processes and strategic or um standard uh tech stack and processes and you know things that you do every month so why not start doing those you know today as opposed to waiting till then and you'll get that faster by doing that so sounds like a great prompt for brainstorming sessions among the whole team that's cool that's a good tip i'm going to check out that podcast on e-myth you saw me yay that was a great book really helpful and i'll say i read michael gerber's original e-myth and then also many of you know darren root in our community he and michael gerber wrote the e-myth for accountants so check that out because it's really aimed directly at our profession so thanks pete okay so monty what tips do you have for businesses that want growth but are maybe experiencing growing pains that's a heavy one um i'll be honest i'm not gonna pretend i have all the answers i've never owned a business in the traditional sense and my way before expensify i was a tour manager for for metal bands so not a lot of crossover there but i can't speak to the expensify methodology i've been at expensive five about four years and i think the proof is in our performance and and where we've come from and where we are uh albeit not the most traditional way we're currently one of the highest performing tech companies in the world and there's only around 100 of us so when it comes to actual expense processing and expense report management we operate in every major market and deal in over 200 distinct currencies so internally how do we manage this how do we scale at such a low number in such a high volume well we've built a very very very basic process a very you know simple workflow that's allowed us to basically scale and attach those best practices to allow us to overcome pretty much any challenge presented to us it's very simple there's no secret sauce or revolutionary method behind it at its core we tackle every problem no matter how big no matter how small and we write it down as a problem and solution statement if you can't write it down you don't understand it if you don't understand it well you can't solve it at its core my advice is to not over complicate things write down the problem work on the solution with your team have an open and honest discussion about it and make a plan to execute said solution if you always think user submitter and client first the rest will follow that's fantastic so i guess that kind of covers those three simple steps i want to call out that they are simple steps that we went over today but there was just a ton of information from all of you thank you so much we talked about defining what it is that you sell what services pick your tech stack and then figure out your procedure for how you're going to do it so three simple things but full of great tips from you guys i'd like to add if i may quick testimonial i do use all three of these apps on this panel every single day so when android asked me to moderate this panel i was like heck yeah sign me up so more than happy to be here and i can genuinely attest that if you're not already using these apps they will turbo boost you on the way to a scalable firm and so those are some simple things you can do is just learn how to use these apps if you don't know them already these are kind of the top big most popular apps out there lots of them out there but these are three of them okay on that note i really want to thank you our panel for sharing so much today and i want to thank the audience for listening and i hope you all have a wonderful rest of quickbooks connect and enjoy all the rest of your sessions

2021-11-12 04:05

Other news