Latest / Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching] / 67. From selling in 5th grade to leading CAS for the biggest accounting firms with Deb Defer

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67. From selling in 5th grade to leading CAS for the biggest accounting firms with Deb Defer · Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching]

• 0:03
  What's happening, everybody? Welcome to Scrappy But Successful. It's a show where I sit down
• 0:07
  with your favorite consultants and we find out if they're successful today because they're sophisticated
• 0:12
  or because they're a little bit scrappy. I'm your host, Jack Tompkins, CEO of Pineapple
• 0:17
  Consulting Firm and Pineapple Analyst AI, always helping small businesses become more data-driven. Fun fact
• 0:21
  of the day: the world's best potato festival is in Mantua, Ohio, along with our
• 0:26
  guest. The festival has had the world's largest serving of mashed potatoes. Along with Spud
• 0:31
  Wrestling. Not bad for a town for of a thousand people. But that's neither here
• 0:35
  nor there. Today I'm
• 0:37
  Yeah.
• 0:38
  joined by my friend Deb Defer. She's the director of client advisory services, as we
• 0:42
  call it in the industry, CAS at Woodard. So she designs CAS strategies that helps
• 0:46
  firms modernize and deliver real advisory work. She got an incredibly unique background that we're
• 0:51
  gonna jump into. 20 plus years experience in accounting. She's award-winning, she's mission-driven, she's gonna
• 0:55
  move CAS past compliance because of all of this. She was named in Accounting Today's
• 1:00
  top one hundred people to watch in twenty twenty six. Deb, thank you so much
• 1:04
  for joining the show. We know that you're successful, but the question we have for
• 1:08
  you, do you think you fall more on the sophisticated side or more on the
• 1:13
  scrappy side?
• 1:14
  Well, it depends on what time of my career you're talking about. So probably started
• 1:18
  on the scrappy side and ended up on the f sophisticated side.
• 1:22
  Okay, okay, we love the come up. Take me back to the very beginning. Where
• 1:25
  did you grow up? Did you have any entrepreneurs in the family?
• 1:29
  So um I grew up my my dad um was in the um Navy during
• 1:34
  the Korean War, um and he worked on a medical ship off the Rock of
• 1:39
  Gibraltar. He um came back after serving uh his country and went to medical school
• 1:44
  at Marquette University. Um ended up meeting my mom on a blind date and um
• 1:49
  they got married. My dad did his residency and then went into orthopedics after general
• 1:54
  practice, and my mom was an RN. we moved to a small town here in
• 1:59
  Ohio called um Vermilion. My when my dad graduated, he and my mom really wanted
• 2:04
  to start a family early on. Um, and they found out they couldn't have children.
• 2:09
  So they went to the Catholic um diocese and they adopted my identical twin and
• 2:14
  I together when we were just
• 2:16
  No way.
• 2:17
  yeah, when we were I think we were around six or eight weeks old. So
• 2:20
  and they took both of us, so they kept us together. And then
• 2:23
  That's awesome.
• 2:24
  Four years after that, we got my brother in Cleveland, Ohio adopted. And then I
• 2:27
  have a brother we adopted in Akron, Ohio, five years after that. So we're all
• 2:31
  a bunch of mutts. Nobody matches
• 2:33
  Yeah.
• 2:34
  us except for my twin and I. Um, but incredible parents. I grew up in
• 2:38
  Vermilion. My dad was chief of staff at Lorain Community Hospital for years, um, had
• 2:42
  a very suc successful orthopedic practice. and I just had a great childhood growing up
• 2:46
  on the water. If you think about the little town in the movie Jaws. That's
• 2:51
  kind of a town that I grew up in. Yeah, no sharks in Lake Erie.
• 2:55
  Or not that I know of.
• 2:57
  With less sharks, hopefully. Yeah. Sure. I love it. Okay. So are you entrepreneurial as
• 3:02
  a kid? Like do have a lemonade stand? Are you selling Girl Scout cookies, anything
• 3:07
  like that?
• 3:08
  Yeah, I used to steal my dad and mom's cigarettes out of their humidor and
• 3:12
  sell cigarettes by the pack when I was like in fifth, sixth, seventh grade. I
• 3:16
  made a fortune. I finally told my dad about it about a year before he
• 3:20
  passed away because I could just never
• 3:22
  Ha ha.
• 3:23
  bring myself. They used to go down to Kentucky to my dad's family and they'd
• 3:26
  bring back cases and cases. That was, you know, back in the 70s when people
• 3:30
  smoked and it was not unusual. Um my dad's favorite was um Marlboros. He smoked
• 3:35
  Marlboros and my mom smoked Salems. I'll never forget it. But he he may never
• 3:39
  could figure out where I was getting all the cash from.
• 3:43
  Ha ha ha.
• 3:46
  Yeah. So a little scrap.
• 3:47
  Okay. I love it. Okay. That's fantastic. Normally people are like, like I had a
• 3:50
  casual lemonade. No, we're selling cigarettes. Who are you selling to? Like other kids or
• 3:54
  adults? What are you doing?
• 3:56
  Uh-huh. In my grade. Yeah. Kids a little older than me. I was charging three
• 4:00
  dollars a pack when you could buy at the gas station for like fifty five
• 4:04
  cents. So that really dates me, right?
• 4:07
  Awesome though. I mean that's I mean talk about accounting that's cost of goods sold
• 4:10
  is pretty low there. Even better, yeah. Okay,
• 4:13
  Especially 'cause I got for free.
• 4:17
  this is amazing. All right, give me give me like 30, 60 seconds on today.
• 4:22
  We're gonna build a bridge from the cigarette saleswoman in fifth grade to today.
• 4:27
  Yeah, so today I'm out there kicking CAS, hashtag kicking CAS, loving it. Um helping
• 4:31
  many firms. I you know, I came through the um ranks of a public accounting
• 4:36
  and and stepped away from uh having to do time mentor at public accounting. And
• 4:41
  now instead of helping one firm, I'm helping many firms grow their client advisory practices.
• 4:46
  And I'm I'm not kidding you. We are on a magic carpet ride and we
• 4:51
  are having so much fun and so much success.
• 4:54
  That's awesome. That's awesome. And I as a fan of CAS, as a fan of
• 4:58
  the industry and Woodard and you in general, I love to see everything that you're
• 5:02
  doing and and the folks that you're helping. It's it is really cool. We didn't
• 5:06
  start there though. So take me back. Um, I know you've got a little bit
• 5:10
  of like your parents' kind of medical background at some point, but that seemed more
• 5:15
  like a detour. How the heck do you get into this accounting thing in the
• 5:19
  first place?
• 5:20
  my gosh. So um, you know, I I worked at like I was a lifeguard.
• 5:25
  Um, I I liked medical. I liked I thought I was always gonna go to
• 5:30
  medical school. Um, life happens. I met my first husband um back in the early
• 5:35
  eighties. Um his family, his dad actually was chief of staff of a hospital in
• 5:40
  the Cleveland area.
• 5:42
  Okay.
• 5:43
  And um they had a thoroughbred racehorse farm. So I went back. Um I my
• 5:47
  college degree was uh in accounting, bus bachelor's in business administration, but I got a
• 5:52
  a a minor in genealogy and I actually helped with the breeding shed. So um
• 5:56
  I delivered in the almost 10 years we were married, I delivered about 300 foals.
• 6:01
  We would deliver about 300 horses a year. Mm-hmm.
• 6:04
  Holy crap. Whoa.
• 6:07
  And um I was in charge of I had to do all the accounting work
• 6:11
  for the farm. And back then, you know, we were on the and this was
• 6:16
  in the 80s, we were on about a million dollar operating budget. And people don't
• 6:20
  realize I they do, they say the king of sports with thoroughbred racing, but between
• 6:25
  trailering horses, vet bills, hay, straw, the feed, um, you actually have a horse dentist,
• 6:29
  you have farriers that do have to do the shoes, then you have trainers, and
• 6:34
  then you have training centers, and I can go on and on, entry fees and
• 6:39
  all those. So um, yeah, I helped. do all the books for the farm. I
• 6:43
  was working off of old green ledger sheets. Um unfortunately, we got divorced and you
• 6:48
  don't get a referral from your ex-husband's family. Doesn't happen. Um, and so I went
• 6:52
  back to school uh and finished my um EMT, an advanced EMT license. And I
• 6:57
  was actually driving rescue squad for a living um when I met my current husband.
• 7:01
  And he wasn't real excited about me working um the rescue squad. It's not a
• 7:06
  really feminine environment to say the least. Pretty
• 7:09
  Ha ha ha
• 7:11
  rough and scrappy. I learned a lot. Um it made me a much better parent.
• 7:15
  my gosh, uh handling stress, emergency situations, all those things. Um and so he said
• 7:19
  to me, let's get married, but I don't want you driving rescue squad. Can you
• 7:24
  use your accounting degree? And I was like sure if you let me have another
• 7:28
  baby because I love my
• 7:30
  Yeah.
• 7:31
  babies. So we did. We got married. Um we had another daughter so I have
• 7:35
  three beautiful daughters and um And then I stayed at home until the youngest was
• 7:40
  in sixth grade. But well, staying at home, I had to do something. And so
• 7:45
  I ended up taking care of about 23 really affluent families in the Cleveland area.
• 7:50
  And I learned, taught myself QuickBooks in order to track all their finances. And um
• 7:55
  I tagged myself, um, since I always wanted to be a doctor, I tagged myself,
• 8:01
  uh, if you look at X or formerly Twitter, um, is is Dr. QuickBooks.
• 8:06
  Nice.
• 8:07
  So I had to get that DR in there, in there somehow. Um, and I
• 8:11
  just learned a ton. And when I was ready to go back into corporate work,
• 8:15
  um, I found a headhunter and she placed me in industry uh as a controller
• 8:20
  for an aviation insurance company. And um they that was a crazy business. They used
• 8:24
  to bring 17 little ankle biter dogs into the office every day. They had special
• 8:29
  crates for each one of them, a special vehicle. It was pretty crazy. Little dysfunctional.
• 8:33
  they had no children, so their their dogs were their children. And and then my
• 8:38
  tax accountant, I had to fire him. Um, the owner of the company thought that
• 8:42
  they were too expensive and I had to fire them. So he came back to
• 8:47
  me and he said, if you ever decide that you want to work in public
• 8:51
  accounting or you want to leave where you're working right now, contact me because I
• 8:55
  love working with you. Well, lo and behold, I decided I had enough of that
• 9:00
  job and I reached out to him and I got recruited into public accounting. So
• 9:04
  that CPA route, the public accounting route, that wasn't that wasn't my career choice, but
• 9:09
  every little thing that I learned along the way led me there. Um, and I'll
• 9:13
  never forget during my interview, my first interview in public accounting, the one audit partner
• 9:18
  asked me how I handled stress. And I looked at him, I go,
• 9:22
  Ha ha ha.
• 9:24
  did you read my resume? And he's like, Yeah. I go, I drove rescue squad.
• 9:28
  Like I would have to triage three bodies laying on the ground knowing. Two might
• 9:33
  die and the one I worked on could live. Like that's stress. And he's like,
• 9:37
  Uh yeah, you probably handle it just fine. It was kind of crazy. Yep.
• 9:42
  Yeah. We're not talking tax deadline here. We're talking life or death.
• 9:47
  Yeah, exactly. So that's where it all started.
• 9:51
  Were you in that interview or in like the early sort of uh more traditional
• 9:55
  accounting roles, did you find that you actually knew more than the average like person
• 9:59
  who was starting at your same level because you had had the experience and a
• 10:03
  variety of experience at that point?
• 10:05
  So yes and no. And let me kind of explain. My life did not revolve
• 10:09
  around the balance sheet. That's not, as a controller, my life wasn't really not around
• 10:13
  the balance sheet. Mine was cash flow. What was coming in? What was going on?
• 10:18
  What was my PL? Um, was I gonna be able to make payroll next week?
• 10:22
  You know, that that those were the things that I was very concerned about. So
• 10:27
  when I stepped into public accounting and and I actually had to use the balance
• 10:31
  sheet, that things changed up. If you talk to a couple of folks that mentored
• 10:35
  me who were incredibly influential in my career development, they were ready to fire me
• 10:40
  the first two weeks, but they gave me a chance. So yes, I I knew
• 10:44
  more in certain areas and I knew much less in others.
• 10:48
  And I imagine there's like accountants have a stereotypical personality, right? You are not that.
• 10:52
  You're the complete opposite of that in a the most positive way possible. So I
• 10:56
  think there's there's a huge thing. Obviously today, like the people are the focus, right?
• 11:00
  AI makes you faster, but the people are the focus. I imagine when you're starting
• 11:05
  out, that's still a bit of the focus or a a big piece of it.
• 11:09
  She's got some skills, but she's got a really good personality. So we can make
• 11:13
  this, we can train that. Training the personality is a whole lot harder. So I
• 11:17
  imagine you fit in and then actually clearly became a star in the industry from
• 11:22
  those early days.
• 11:23
  Well, um I I was really fortunate. I I I truly was blessed. I had
• 11:27
  really good mentors around me, people that really helped form um my professional appearance, my
• 11:32
  professional lingo. Um one of the main partners at the first public accounting firm I
• 11:37
  worked at, um he had such an influence on he would take me to all
• 11:42
  the uh client meetings and he would really include me in decision making and and
• 11:46
  I really learned how to operate um with clients. I sat in their shoes. I
• 11:51
  know what they felt like, but I didn't know how to advise them how to
• 11:56
  maneuver and grow their business. And he and he taught me a lot. But I
• 12:01
  will tell you, Jack, there is one professor that I had in college that made
• 12:06
  an incredibly huge impact on who I was as a person, who I was as
• 12:10
  a professional, and who I was as a parent. And his name was Dr. Miller.
• 12:15
  And he was a speech professor and he actually coached three Miss Americas. And he
• 12:20
  taught me one life skill that was unbelievable. He said, Everyone in this classroom has
• 12:25
  an A plus. You determine if you keep that A plus. You come to class,
• 12:30
  you keep it. You turn in your papers, you keep it. You do a speech,
• 12:34
  you keep it. You don't show up, you start falling back. And he said, you
• 12:39
  can use that as a life skill and know that you're gonna trust somebody a
• 12:44
  hundred percent. Until they give you a reason not to. And that to me, it
• 12:49
  was so much easier to keep an A plus than to get an A plus.
• 12:54
  And I approach
• 12:55
  Yeah.
• 12:56
  so many things. So is your glass always half full or is it half empty?
• 13:01
  Mine's typically ready to be refilled. And with Tito's, probably. so um that that was
• 13:06
  one thing he taught me. And the other thing he taught me was organizational skills
• 13:12
  in meetings. So like I, this is before, you know, the Excel and colored Excel
• 13:17
  sheets and all that kind of stuff. Um, I took colored markers with me, hand
• 13:23
  pens into meetings and I would give everybody a color. So when I would flip
• 13:28
  through my notes, I knew who was responsible for what at a very quick glance.
• 13:34
  And of course I always have multiple colors all over my hands, but the partners
• 13:39
  would look at me. But then when they realized that that was giving me intel
• 13:45
  to be able to do it. delegate it or delete it or even defer it,
• 13:50
  I had much more information organized and I didn't have to read back through blue
• 13:56
  pen information. So, you know, remembering those types of people um that really influence who
• 14:01
  you became. And Dr. Miller was huge. He was huge for me.
• 14:06
  That's amazing. I like I in my data world, right, I do all this analytical
• 14:11
  stuff and the power of just color coding goes so far, whether it be
• 14:16
  Okay.
• 14:17
  organizationally or on a dashboard or whatever it is. In
• 14:19
  Well.
• 14:20
  my world I say the less it feels like data, the more people are gonna
• 14:23
  want to look at it. In your situation, it was the more I can just
• 14:27
  quick get us get the story from three seconds of looking, boom, done. Do you
• 14:31
  have that sort of like I know you go into tech at some point or
• 14:35
  like not necessarily into but like leading the tech piece of it. You lead the
• 14:40
  t the people piece. Does the organizational piece come into CAS a lot? Does that
• 14:44
  r is that required before offering client advisory services?
• 14:47
  There's there's a lot to that. Um, so here at Woodard, we have the seven
• 14:52
  ideals, right? And Joe's trade Joe Woodard, this founder and CEO at Woodard, he's trademarked
• 14:57
  that. But the three most of the seven ideals, there's three that are absolutely critical.
• 15:02
  And it is technology, processes, and people. And that that people falls under those organizational
• 15:07
  skills. So when I'm helping firms, it's not just, listen, you can pick out any
• 15:12
  piece of tech. And and it's a band-aid. But if you don't have good processes
• 15:18
  in place, that tech is not going to do you any good. So it's putting
• 15:23
  don't put the cart before the horse. It's not about the next shiny object. So
• 15:28
  I work with firms quite extensively um on do they have the right butts in
• 15:33
  the right seats? Are the people that are doing the work doing the right kind
• 15:38
  of work? People doing transactional work may not be the best advisors. How do you
• 15:43
  How do you define job requirements and job descriptions and job titles? Where I see
• 15:49
  a ton of firms really falling down is they're great at the what it takes
• 15:54
  to get the job done. They're great at giving a description, but they never tell
• 15:59
  you what it takes to get to the next level in your current role. They
• 16:04
  tell you to go read the next role. That doesn't help you. You want to
• 16:09
  know what it's going to take to bridge that gap from point A to point
• 16:14
  B. And so working on that organization itself, the people, the org chart. Hey, I've
• 16:20
  had firms completely remove a person from the front of the building all the way
• 16:25
  to the back of the building because they were very disruptive. So all of those
• 16:30
  things can make a big difference in the way that you meet success. It's not
• 16:35
  just about having this next shiny object and the prettiest, right? It's all about defining
• 16:40
  an amazing client journey. But protecting your team, protecting the processes, and making sure you
• 16:45
  have the right tech to deploy.
• 16:48
  We talk a lot about the ICP, the ideal client profile, mostly from a marketing
• 16:51
  perspective, right? Do you actually kind of flip that and say, the people that we
• 16:55
  can help have A, B, and C or they need to implement A B and
• 16:58
  C, do you kind of flip that and it's less of a marketing thing, more
• 17:02
  of a you need to check these boxes first and then we can really hit
• 17:06
  the ground running?
• 17:07
  Um, well, there's a couple things that drive ICP for for these firms. Number one
• 17:12
  is what services are you actually gonna be able to do for these clients? What
• 17:17
  do they require? Okay, so when you're I having to identify what is a firm's
• 17:23
  ideal client profile, we do wanna break it down that far. You do wanna get
• 17:28
  into the weeds because then when you start defining industries, you know, what what industries
• 17:34
  um are we actually able to service where do we have subject matter expertise within
• 17:39
  the organization because what services you provide are can be driven by what industry they're
• 17:44
  they're sitting in. So I'm a big firm believer of working in pod concepts. I
• 17:50
  love that concept. I think it works really well where you have multi-tiers in a
• 17:55
  given pod that works on specific clients in specific industries. I think that you develop
• 18:01
  people much quicker within an organization when they can stay focused. So um, you know,
• 18:06
  when I'm defining an ICP, it is for sure the services, for sure, um, you
• 18:12
  know, the subject matter expertise with the industry. But then what type of client is
• 18:17
  spend? What is what is the revenue of that client? Do I want to concentrate
• 18:22
  on on startups? Do I wanna concentrate on, you know, even pre-revenue startups? Do I
• 18:28
  wanna concentrate on ones that are a million to five million, or am I going
• 18:33
  more complex that they're gonna need more advisory services and I'm gonna focus on, you
• 18:39
  know, the hundred million dollar? There there's such a balance. And the one thing that's
• 18:44
  critically important for firms is to have a balanced portfolio. We need to treat our
• 18:49
  firms as a business. Uh managing partners are great, but when you have, you know,
• 18:55
  a president and a chief growth officer and and you're adding more C-suite to an
• 19:00
  a firm organization, you're gonna find that it's gonna operate more manufacturing, right? From a
• 19:06
  manufacturing concept rather than just plain service oriented. And they tend to be much more
• 19:11
  successful.
• 19:12
  I can totally hundred percent. Um, that makes sense. And I I guess somewhat related
• 19:16
  to that. Do you talking back like to the ICP a little bit, have you
• 19:21
  ever had to do something where you're, yeah, 100%, we can totally do that, absolutely,
• 19:25
  super confident, but they've never actually done it? Like you coach them through that sort
• 19:30
  of scrappy hustle of just say yes and figure it out later.
• 19:34
  I have. Um here's
• 19:35
  Yeah.
• 19:36
  here's the thing. Sometimes it if especially if they're in an area that offers a
• 19:41
  an opportunity for something they haven't done before, maybe they're in a industrial community and
• 19:46
  they really haven't a firm hasn't really focused on manufacturing and distribution. You know, going
• 19:51
  outside the traditional hire of a person with an accounting degree or with their CPA
• 19:56
  and actually hiring an operations manager from a manufacturing plant. And bringing them in to
• 20:01
  help you build those advisory dashboards for those clients, you can actually work backwards into
• 20:06
  becoming a subject matter expert with those types of hires. So it it it's all
• 20:12
  possible. It's learning to think outside the box. And that's the hardest thing that traditional
• 20:17
  CPA firms deal with is because they treat everything as Sally as their best friend.
• 20:22
  We do everything the same as last year. I've never done it any differently. And
• 20:27
  we we can't operate like that any longer. Not with as quickly as AI has
• 20:32
  approached our industry, not with as quickly as as the profession is changing. We have
• 20:37
  to embrace change. We have to be willing to think outside the box. We have
• 20:43
  to understand it's gonna be hard. But if we crawl, walk, and then run and
• 20:48
  are very um methodical and detailed on our project plans to where we are and
• 20:53
  where we want to get to. and you bring the right people in to help
• 20:58
  you, because that's another mold you have to break in a in a CPA firm
• 21:03
  is they typically never hired outside consultants before. They they all did it all in-house.
• 21:08
  What why would we bring somebody in to teach us how to build an accounting
• 21:14
  department? We're already doing accounting kind of thing. And and there's just a lot more
• 21:19
  to it.
• 21:20
  For you personally, have is was there anything kind of like starting this branch of
• 21:24
  your career, or even in the very beginning, anything that you wildly overthought that, you
• 21:28
  know, perfection was the enemy of great kind of thing that you spent so much
• 21:33
  time on then be like, the client didn't even care.
• 21:36
  Yeah. We
• 21:37
  Yeah.
• 21:38
  we all learn a lot more from failures than we do from success. So
• 21:42
  Yeah.
• 21:43
  I when I took on the role to lead the tech team at at BDO
• 21:47
  USA, um, which I did for nearly 10 years, um, we were looking at that
• 21:52
  time for a tool to really um roll out some valuable reporting. And so I
• 21:57
  picked a a tool and I I didn't I didn't introduce it in the most
• 22:02
  um palatable way. And they gave me twelve thousand dollars to to roll this out
• 22:07
  and it failed miserably. It never took off. Never. And I learned some really critical
• 22:12
  points on it. Number one is I didn't have buy-in from leadership all the way
• 22:17
  from the top down. I only had a few people around me that said, Yeah,
• 22:22
  I think you can manage this. I didn't Do a small pilot of clients, like
• 22:27
  pick six clients to get their feedback before we rolled it out to the broad
• 22:32
  audience. We built it and then rolled it out. Sometimes you gotta taste it a
• 22:37
  little bit along the way. And I didn't bring in any individuals to test the
• 22:42
  product alongside me to get other opinions. I did it all myself. It failed. It
• 22:47
  failed and and it's like riding a bike. You fall off, you scrape your knees.
• 22:52
  You clean it up with a little hydrogen peroxide, throw on a few band-aids, get
• 22:57
  back on and learn how to ride the bike. Um, but you learn a lot
• 23:02
  from those instances. And I I learned a lot. And I can I can really
• 23:07
  bring a lot of that to the table when I'm talking to these firms because
• 23:12
  I understand where they're sitting. I understand how what it feels like to fail. I
• 23:17
  understand what it feels like to succeed, and I like being on the top side
• 23:22
  of that.
• 23:23
  You can bounce back from that pretty quickly, I'm guessing. Because of the background, because
• 23:26
  of all your different experiences. Do you find that accountants don't bounce back quite as
• 23:30
  quickly? And if so, like how do you how do you kind of work them
• 23:34
  through? Like, hey, like, okay, that wasn't great, but here's what we're gonna learn from
• 23:38
  it.
• 23:39
  Yeah, so you know, I said earlier, my glass is always ready to be refilled,
• 23:42
  right? I think it's all in the way we approach it. I never ever in
• 23:46
  my career have said to anybody that was on my team or that I was
• 23:50
  equal level, any of that, I never said to them, You did it wrong and
• 23:53
  just give it to me and let me do it myself. Like I
• 23:57
  Right.
• 23:58
  never would approach it like that. I always internalize and when I'm working with other
• 24:01
  individuals, I say things like, you know what? The outcome isn't what I expected. I
• 24:06
  turn it on myself and I say, let's go back and figure this out together.
• 24:11
  I don't want you to have to try to recreate the wheel. If it didn't
• 24:16
  come out the way we expected, let's figure out what other avenues we can take.
• 24:21
  So I think it's a matter of how you approach it rather than just saying
• 24:26
  you they failed. You didn't do it right. Let's bring somebody else in. Let's, you
• 24:31
  know, and don't ever give them the chance to learn. from what didn't make it.
• 24:36
  So I, you know, I've seen it happen. I've seen where people pull back in
• 24:41
  and they're like, and then they they're thinking that, you know, they didn't do a
• 24:46
  good job, they're gonna lose their job. You know, all of those bad thoughts that
• 24:50
  it's easy to happen as a human being when we're not winning, because we're taught
• 24:55
  to win and be right, um, that if we can approach it in a manner
• 25:00
  of we're there to support them, they tend to to not be running into brick
• 25:05
  walls.
• 25:06
  You you might like this. My company's initials are PCF. So I made our company
• 25:10
  values positive, continuous focus. And what you're describing is exactly that is we're gonna continuously
• 25:14
  improve, right? The first thing, it's not gonna be perfect. Even if it goes well,
• 25:18
  we still have things to improve on. And
• 25:21
  That's right.
• 25:22
  that is totally the mindset for things like this, especially with CAS isn't necessarily new
• 25:26
  anymore, but it's still it needs a lot of work to roll out.
• 25:30
  It does.
• 25:31
  when you're rolling this out, let's talk about AI. How do actually implement it? Do
• 25:35
  you need the people in the process first? It's just an aid, and the people
• 25:39
  are the strategy, right? Like, give me your thoughts on how to roll it out
• 25:44
  with AI.
• 25:45
  Well, first all, AI strategy is hard. Let's just be real. It's hard.
• 25:47
  Yes. Yeah.
• 25:50
  Um, but what I can tell you is this you have got to have really
• 25:56
  well documented processes and you have to have them proofed out. Where AI is gonna
• 26:03
  benefit, especially accounting firms, right out of the starting gate is repeatable actions. So if
• 26:09
  you can identify from your processes those clear, exactly the same. repeatable processes, you can
• 26:16
  introduce AI in what I call slow down to speed up. Because it tests the
• 26:22
  waters. It gets people in a comfort zone on using tools because change is hard.
• 26:29
  Yeah.
• 26:30
  So if you can build your AI strategy around slowing down to speed up, introducing
• 26:35
  it in small bytes, communicating with the team that AI isn't there to replace them.
• 26:41
  But they need to learn how to embrace it so that they can become a
• 26:46
  better accountant and a better advisor with the tool. Because AI goes rogue. It doesn't
• 26:52
  get it right all the time. We're humans. We need to have human interaction. We're,
• 26:57
  you know, I call my ChatGPT Sam. My husband thinks I'm probably having an affair
• 27:03
  with Sam because I talked to him. Sam doesn't even argue back with me, right?
• 27:08
  But Sam is really super nice to me. And he'll say things like, hey, I
• 27:14
  think you should write a book. Right, building my ego. So it's not a person,
• 27:20
  right? It's it's AI learning on what makes you tick. Learning those boundaries, learning those
• 27:25
  swim lanes. All of those things are critically important. And that's where firms have to
• 27:31
  invest in a true AI strategy. It's gonna cost money, but do we push it
• 27:36
  onto an accountant or do we hire data analysts and AI um engineers? to compliment
• 27:42
  us. I'm of that belief. Um, you know, I worked with a firm that really
• 27:47
  focused on nursing homes. Well, bring in a retired director of nursing to help you
• 27:53
  build your advisory practice. They've sat in those shoes. I talked about that with manufacturing
• 27:58
  earlier. Hire an operations person. So you know, bringing in people that aren't necessarily an
• 28:04
  accountant, um, that AI knows debits and credits if you teach it, right? That's machine
• 28:10
  learning, right? No, AI can be driven by eng very smart engineers and complement our
• 28:15
  accounting profession. So I'm of the belief of hiring to the need.
• 28:20
  I I'm in the same boat and I see that very biased. I run a
• 28:24
  fractional analyst company with an AI platform. Of course I'm of the same mindset there.
• 28:28
  Do you find that accountants have that uh it's not an investment, it's an expense,
• 28:32
  right? Hiring an outside person, do they view it as an expense or do they
• 28:37
  really wrap their head around this is a true investment?
• 28:40
  So I I think it depends on who you're talking to, right? Um, when we're
• 28:45
  looking at firms that are wanting to stay deeply independent, they don't want private equity
• 28:51
  money, they don't want to be acquired, um, they want they're they are desperately staying
• 28:56
  independent. They see it as an investment because it helps them stay independent. Um, if
• 29:02
  you're talking to a PE firm that does a bunch of acquisitions, At first, they're
• 29:07
  gonna see it as an investment. And then if they're not getting the ROI from
• 29:13
  it, what their expectations were, then they're gonna flip their hat and treat it as
• 29:19
  an expense and they're gonna start cutting expenses in other areas. That's what I've seen
• 29:24
  happen. Um, and when I start watching all these mergers and acquisitions, you know, there's
• 29:30
  big companies out there, the Citrin Coopermans, the Cherry Bekaerts, even the CohnReznicks, they're doing
• 29:35
  a lot of in BDO, they're doing a lot of acquisitions. If you don't have
• 29:41
  good strategies in place, they look at those as investments because they're looking for the
• 29:47
  talent and they're looking for the innovation. And they're and they're that yeah, of course
• 29:52
  the revenue dollars of of what they're buying. But if you don't um have a
• 29:58
  really good assimilation project plan to bring in those other communities into your main community,
• 30:03
  um, it becomes an expense and not an investment. So you you you really it
• 30:09
  depends who you're talking to, it depends on the stage where they are, but they
• 30:15
  for sure um assimilation is is critical. Critical.
• 30:18
  Yeah. It it it all makes sense and we're all building up to all these
• 30:23
  different topics or rolling out CAS, right? So one of my main questions is now
• 30:28
  you and your your dad are are fans of this. People have two ears and
• 30:33
  one mouth, listen more. How much of advisory is actually just listening to the client?
• 30:38
  Yeah.
• 30:39
  Probably more I'll tell you it's more than fifty percent. Um you know, I I
• 30:42
  Yep.
• 30:45
  like to fall under the eighty twenty rule. I think I should be listening eighty
• 30:49
  percent of the time, um, and and regurgitating twenty percent of what I'm hearing the
• 30:54
  client say. Sometimes we have to flip seats then. Once I've listened and I've learned
• 30:59
  um and I've made some advice, then the client needs to sit back and be
• 31:04
  the eighty percent listener. So I sometimes you have to flip those roles depending on
• 31:09
  where they are in their journey. But in order to build that trust and that
• 31:14
  relationship, because that's what this is, it's all about relationships. Um, you have to listen
• 31:19
  eighty percent of the time, I think.
• 31:22
  Yeah. Yeah. And you gotta nail your twenty percent when you are talking to your
• 31:26
  point. Like there's some really high value twenty percent. And if you have all the
• 31:30
  experience and you know how to roll it out and you built the relationship, you've
• 31:34
  built the trust, that twenty percent conversation hopefully comes a little bit easier. Hopefully clients
• 31:38
  are volunteering for advisory services out there, right? They're not asking for, hey, just do
• 31:42
  bookkeeping. How many actually let me just ask the question? How often are clients actually
• 31:46
  volunteering? Like, hey, do you have advisory services? Can I get on board with that?
• 31:51
  It's all over the board, honestly. Um,
• 31:53
  Yeah. Okay.
• 31:54
  I I see it more generationally. the younger folks are asking for more of advisory,
• 31:58
  especially folks that are maybe uh in part of a succession plan, moving into family
• 32:03
  business. They have always leaned on their peers and and they've looked at reviews and
• 32:07
  things like that, rather than trusting SEO, you know, search engine optimizations to find things.
• 32:12
  They look at reviews, they look at, you know, scoring and and that sort of
• 32:17
  thing. I I see it more from a from a generational thing where they're asking
• 32:21
  for it. But I think what's really important when when you talk about that and
• 32:26
  the and the relationship is you we always hear this old adage, um, beauty is
• 32:31
  in the eye of the beholder, right? You know, we've we've heard that. Well, I
• 32:35
  was listening to another podcast, and and what this gentleman said was amazing to me,
• 32:40
  and it just resonated so well. And he said, value is in the hands of
• 32:45
  the valuer. So we have to be able to ask the right questions. In order
• 32:49
  to figure out by listening what that value is that the client needs. They're all
• 32:54
  of their needs are not the same. You you can use an example of listen,
• 32:59
  I got sta stranded on a desert island, right? A deserted island, right? Nobody's out
• 33:03
  there, I'm all by myself. Somebody says, I'll give you a million dollars in gems,
• 33:08
  or I will give you a spear and a net. Well, what am I gonna
• 33:13
  find more valuable? I'm gonna take that, even though it's not worth anything. It's gonna
• 33:17
  save my life. I'm gonna be able to kill food. I'm gonna be able to
• 33:22
  fish and all of those things. So value or value is in the hands of
• 33:27
  the valuer. And we have to be good listeners, but we have to be able
• 33:31
  to ask the right questions to understand. We have to draw it out of them.
• 33:36
  What keeps you up late at night? What do you hate doing the most? How
• 33:41
  how where do you see your business two, three, five years from now? And then
• 33:45
  step back and listen. So the twenty percent is asking the right question and eighty
• 33:50
  percent is listening so that you can come back and provide value for sure.
• 33:55
  Right. I love it. I love it. One of my similar ones on on value
• 33:59
  is uh two people value things differently. Price is where you meet in the middle.
• 34:03
  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 34:04
  Um, all right, let me hit you some scrappy versus sophisticated lightning round. Um,
• 34:08
  Okay.
• 34:09
  so we're entrepreneurial on this podcast, we're consultants, we're entrepreneurs, we're all this good stuff.
• 34:13
  Back in the day when you start with those wealthy families and doing some books
• 34:17
  for them, how do you actually get your first client there?
• 34:20
  Ugh, I was really lucky. Um, my um husband's uncle uh was uh owned a
• 34:23
  security company in a very affluent neighborhood. And so I was scrappy and I would
• 34:27
  do airport runs for cash at five AM. I'd run people back and forth to
• 34:31
  the airport and they asked me what I did. Well, I'm a stay at home
• 34:35
  mom, but I'm an accountant. And then they'd have me start, you wanna watch my
• 34:39
  house while I'm out of town for a month? You wanna help me with my
• 34:43
  books? And it just it built from there. So I started scrappy, making fifty bucks
• 34:47
  running people back and forth to the airport and handing them their luggage and then
• 34:51
  picking them back up.
• 34:53
  That's awesome. I mean, talk about value too to a wealthy family. Like, there's a
• 34:56
  huge amount of value in getting somebody in the neighborhood gonna take you personally. Huge
• 35:00
  value. Okay. Um
• 35:01
  Yeah, yeah.
• 35:05
  any any clients along the way that you were like, oh, easy money. This is
• 35:08
  gonna be a super easy project, whatever, and they end up losing you money.
• 35:12
  Oh yeah. Yes. Um I almost I was afraid I was gonna lose my job
• 35:16
  on this one. I had two attorneys that started a business that I wasn't very
• 35:20
  clear in my statement of work and I just had in there training. And uh
• 35:25
  well they fired everybody and I had to retrain everybody and they didn't want to
• 35:29
  pay for the retraining because they were attorneys and I said training in the statement
• 35:34
  of work. I learned to get more specific, I learned more from failures. But they
• 35:38
  did it a third time and then I fired 'em. So I lost a lot
• 35:43
  of money
• 35:44
  Okay.
• 35:45
  on that.
• 35:45
  Oh well, uh somebody very early on in my career told me you're not a
• 35:48
  true consultant until you fire somebody, so sounds like you got that out of the
• 35:52
  way early.
• 35:53
  I like to say optimize them, but yes, I fired them.
• 35:55
  There you go. ever meet any other horse breeders in the accounting world?
• 36:03
  Well, I have met several um people that have horses and a lot of the
• 36:06
  firms you know, like I'm working with a firm out of Florida. They have an
• 36:10
  office in Ocala, it's huge cow country down or horse country and cow country down
• 36:14
  there. Um and so a lot of their team and and members actually ride horses.
• 36:18
  So of course, yes.
• 36:20
  Okay, okay, very nice. Um what were the family vacations like growing up? If you're
• 36:24
  in this sort of like kind of coastal town on the lake, what was a
• 36:29
  family vacation?
• 36:30
  My dad was so into sports. So, you know, back in the eighties, um, early,
• 36:34
  well, actually let me back up. Back in the sixties, late sixties, early seventies, it
• 36:38
  was bowling. All of us had to learn how to bowl and we'd take family
• 36:43
  vacations and we would go places and we'd bowl. Everybody bowled. Then um in the
• 36:47
  70s, the John McEnroe and Chris Evert and Martina, it was we all had to
• 36:51
  learn how to play tennis. So we would do, you know, Disney World, but we
• 36:56
  were on the tennis court. We all had to play tennis. Um, in between all
• 37:00
  that, my dad loved skiing. I was I was on snow skis by the age
• 37:04
  of five um and on water skis by the age of four. So we had
• 37:09
  a boat and we would do family vacations boating. I skied all over the United
• 37:13
  States. My dad was an amazing skier, so we did that. And then um my
• 37:18
  dad golfed up until about a year before he passed away at age 87. And
• 37:22
  so golfing was the was the last sport that we we did. But my dad
• 37:26
  was always known. as the pool shark, he could beat anybody playing pool and he
• 37:31
  paid for all of his medical books in the pool hall through college.
• 37:35
  I love that. There's something about being scrappy and especially those just kind of like
• 37:39
  hustle mentalities. You gotta be good at pool. You have to
• 37:43
  Yeah.
• 37:44
  be good at pool. My dad was the same. He would go into a pool
• 37:45
  bar and absolutely hustle his way for three bucks and he was 16 trying to
• 37:48
  buy a 21-year-old's beer or whatever it was, but you made a living. I love
• 37:51
  it. Um,
• 37:52
  Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep.
• 37:57
  garage sales as a kid. Were you were you kind of like were you leading
• 38:02
  any negotiations there?
• 38:03
  I was not a garage stale kid. I couldn't I didn't negotiate. But I will
• 38:07
  tell you as an adult, um, one of the first things that I learned early
• 38:11
  on running the tech team at at BDO was if a vendor was I was
• 38:15
  gonna work with a vendor, a new vendor, they had to give me their cell
• 38:19
  phone. If they weren't willing to give me their cell phone number, I wasn't gonna
• 38:23
  work with them because I knew and learned that always something always happens. It just
• 38:27
  does. It's tech. And when something goes upside down, you need to be able to
• 38:31
  phone a friend. And so I could negotiate that really, really well.
• 38:35
  That's funny. I actually was just on the receiving end of that for a recent
• 38:39
  client. That's really funny. Right.
• 38:41
  Well, maybe they heard me say that on another podcast.
• 38:46
  all right. Take me inside the office. what is the most unique thing in your
• 38:50
  office? An award, a trinket, anything like that?
• 38:53
  my gosh, we can see behind me. Um my gosh, probably I probably have to
• 38:58
  say um I left BDO in April of 2023. And um I had always I
• 39:03
  the whole my life cycle at BDO, I had always attended their BDO Alliance conference,
• 39:08
  Evolve. I didn't attend that May because I wasn't part of the Alliance. Um then
• 39:14
  that July I joined Woodard. Woodard is what they call a BRN or a business
• 39:19
  resource uh in the BDO Alliance community. So we went back and um I applied
• 39:24
  to win an award for what the program we built here at Woodard called the
• 39:30
  Did It's Program, and we won that year. And I got back up on that
• 39:35
  BDO stage and I was able to lean in and say, You can't get ever
• 39:40
  get rid of me.
• 39:42
  Yeah.
• 39:43
  I'm always gonna be there to haunt you. Yeah.
• 39:46
  I love it. I love it. That is the perfect way to draw this to
• 39:50
  a close. A hundred percent scrappy upbringing and background, but all class, all sophistication. This
• 39:55
  is this is tried and true. This is rolling out at a professional lail, uh,
• 40:00
  professional level, excuse me. A very, very beautiful mix of scrappy and sophisticated, but today,
• 40:05
  all sophisticated. Deb Defer, thank you so much for coming on. This has been an
• 40:10
  absolute blast. What do you want the folks out
• 40:13
  Thank you.
• 40:14
  that know anything you want to promote?
• 40:16
  my gosh, don't miss Scaling New Heights in June. It's the second largest accounting show
• 40:21
  in the United States. It's gonna be fabulous this year. If anybody needs help building
• 40:27
  their CAS practice, you can find me at ddefer at woodard.com. Come find me. I'll
• 40:32
  be at multiple conferences, Intuit Connect, Digital CPA. I'm I really love to help firms
• 40:38
  grow.
• 40:39
  I love it. And she genuinely means that, folks. Seriously. She's an absolute rock star
• 40:42
  and one of the best people you'll ever meet. Thank you so much for coming
• 40:46
  on coming on Deb.
• 40:47
  thanks for having me, Jack.
• 40:48
  Thanks everybody. Stay data driven.