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The Path to Success: Garrick Foy on Transforming Accounting Practices and Building Strong Teams · The Accounting Leads Now Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to CFO Chronicles the secrets behind success the go-to podcast for fractional CFOs and accounting firm owners who want to attract more high-paying clients and increase their revenue.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Hosted by James Donovan from Nine Two Media, this podcast dives into marketing strategies specifically designed for lead generation and client acquisition.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: In each episode, you'll hear from industry leaders sharing their success stories and Thank you to your bottom line.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: Super excited to have you on the podcast today, Garrick.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: We're joined by Garrick Foy, Lone Pine Capital.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: Garrick, welcome to the show and please tell us a little bit about yourself for those who don't know your background.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: James, I'm excited to be show and please tell us a little bit about yourself for those who don't know your background.
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: Thanks, james, I'm excited to be here.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: So a little bit about myself.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: I grew up in Utah.
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: I have been very interested in business from a very young age.
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: You know a lot of kids.
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: I remember four or five, six years old.
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: Saturday mornings were awesome because of Saturday morning cartoons back in the day Right.
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: But for me that was when my dad had his business meetings and I was very fortunate to grow up with a dad that was okay, with me tagging along regardless of the age.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: And so from a very young age I've always been very enthralled with business.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: Didn't seem to matter to the industry.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: That's so cool, that's awesome and we'll get into you selling a firm recently and you know how we've partnered up now and you're helping out coaching our clients and operations.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: But I would love to go back a little bit to, as you mentioned, you were young watching cartoons, attending business meetings with your dad, so how did you get into the accounting world?
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Because that's not something I feel like a lot of children dream of.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: I'm going to get into the accounting world.
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: You know, I hate to say it, but getting into the accounting industry was almost a fluke, and I'll expound just a little bit.
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: So, like I said, even at a very young age, I always wanted to be a business owner.
• 2:22
  Speaker 3: My dad was a business owner and I was very fortunate.
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: I read Rich Dad, poor Dad at the ripe old age of like 11 when it first came out.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: So I've always really liked business.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: I've liked finance when I grew up.
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: We're fortunate to have a lot of universities right around us.
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: But it seemed like, uh, if you didn't know what you wanted to be, you got a business management degree and so I had a.
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: You know a fair amount of friends and and just people in my life that got a business management degree but kept the same job they had when they started going to college and I thought, well, that's not a great return on investment, you know.
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: And um, and I thought, well, you know the universities that were around us.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: The accounting curriculum and business management curriculum were very, very similar.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: You had, you know, different core classes, but you could still cover a lot.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: And I thought, well, you know, if I'm going to be a, I want to be the best business person I can be, and so you know, I think that the more I focus on accounting, that'll help me be a better business person.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: Had I been able to look in the future you know, 15 years and seeing what happened with the digital marketing revolution, maybe I'd have made different choices, but that wasn't a thing back in the day.
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: So, anyway, I got my bachelor's in accounting and took an accounting job up in Salt Lake City and, kind of looking at a master's degree, I was kind of really focused on an MBA, but I also was kind of working with a lot of people that had MBAs and we were doing the same job, making the same money and I thought, once again, that's not a great return on investment.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: And I thought, you know, one of the largest expenses and I'm preaching to the choir because I know that most of your base is accountants, but you know, one of the largest expenses that any business owner uh incurs is their tax bill.
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: And, um, you know I told you that my dad was a business owner and, uh, about 15 or so years ago we sold his businesses and I was able to.
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: You know, I was the COO of his company and so I was able to be a I don't know if it was an instrumental role, but an integral role.
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: I was very privy to the things going on and helped with the negotiations, helped with the contracts, and I got to see firsthand that our high dollar CPA was not really invested in our cash in the pocket.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: Result at the end.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: He wasn't really invested in helping us come up with a strategic tax plan to help protect that or anything like that, and we didn't know really who to go to.
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: Frankly, and it was a learning experience and kind of a turning point for me because I knew that again, I wanted to be a business owner.
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: At that time I wasn't thinking that it would be of an accounting firm, even though I had an accounting degree.
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: So ultimately I ended up getting a master's in tax, specifically because I thought, you know, I'm not going to be able to rely on somebody else to know this technical piece and or at least not rely solely on them, right?
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: I wanted to be as educated as possible.
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: And so while I was doing that, I got hired at a CPA firm there in Salt Lake City, basically immediately moved over to their business development side, working with small business owners, helping the small business owners create a strategic tax plan that encompassed the entity, their personal, if they have an estate that as well and kind of fast forward a few years and I decided that it was time to actually embark and get into that business owner stage of my life and it's funny, it took a couple of years of looking at businesses before I thought, well, maybe I ought to look at an accounting firm.
• 6:04
  Speaker 3: It's what I've been doing, it's what my background's in Um and the first firm that we acquired was in Southern Utah and, uh, it was really a very small boutique firm and, you know, kind of fast forward over five years we acquired a couple more plus, had, you know, the great blessing of solid, organic growth and a wonderful, wonderful team.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: And um, due to some other life events, like, like you mentioned, you know, we ultimately ended up selling a couple of months ago and and uh, really wanted to kind of focus on working with other firm owners, on, you know, the mistakes that we made, the hard knock lessons that we learned, to help them hopefully not have to learn through the school of hard knocks and learn from somebody else's you know experience, I guess and help them get into a position where, when the time comes, they would be able to also have a successful closing.
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: So perfect.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: well, let's dive into into some of those hard knocks and the lessons learned.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: That's a great overview, and it's, I'm guessing, of those hard knocks and the lessons learned.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: That's a great overview, and I'm guessing, a very quick overview and not diving too deep into a lot of the big learning lessons and the big milestones.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: But now that you are working with other firms and helping them avoid those ditches that you hit and hey, here's the better way to do it, because I've already been down this path what are some lessons that stand out to you as a business owner that would be beneficial for others to ditches to avoid as they move forward with the growth of their firm?
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely so I'm gonna probably sound like a broken record.
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: A lot of this is gonna to be focused on the team, and cold hard fact of this one is that you can't grow a firm without a team.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: I know that a lot of you look at the statistics.
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: There's 80,000 CPA firms in the United States right now.
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: If you are doing over a million dollars in gross revenue, you're in the top like 1200 or something like that.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: So, uh, you know that means that we have almost 78 000 plus firms that are one man and one woman or you know very, very small teams.
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: And so I guess you know we're kind of trying to help them see how to build that team.
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: And they know, right, it's scary being at that small office like that.
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: You have to be, excuse me, everything to everybody, almost right, the buck stops and starts with you, and so like that's a scary place to be.
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: I've worked with a couple of firm owners like that and the stress is just unbelievable.
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: So, anyway, we're going to focus on kind of developing that team and one of the first concerns that comes up when you're talking about developing a team and every business owner that has a team can, you know, viscerally relate is that there's a concern that you know they're not going to do as good a job they're going to.
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: You know, on the extreme side and a lot of firm owners have seen this in other firms or maybe in their own firm is that there's the risk that you know they'll develop the relationship with the clients and maybe steal your clients, and you know just these horrible stories that you know will cycle in somebody's mind in the dark of night, right?
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: Um, and so there's a couple of ways that we tried to come up with, uh, you know, solutions to that.
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: First is we tried to, um, implement something we called the team of three.
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: So you'd have the director of accounting, director of tax, one or the other.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: You would have, uh, the tax person, the tax, whether it's a CPA, ea, and then you would have, like, the monthly business accountant.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: All of them would be touch points for each one of your monthly clients.
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: Um, reason for that was kind of multiple folds.
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: One, you wanted to have the team members be able to specialize deep in their areas, right, I think one of the more challenging places that any of us could be is try to be a jack of all trades, right, you have to be a specialist in payroll taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, estate taxes, you know on and on and on and it's like, and also the accounting side and maybe a little bit of the operations side.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: That's a really tough role to play.
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: Each one of those is a full-time job, right?
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: No wonder the stress is so high on those small firms job, right.
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: No wonder the stress is so high on those small firms.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: So it's better for the team because they can specialize in and really know their trade.
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: It's better for the clients because they have multiple touch points to the firm, right.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: If somebody is on vacation, it's not well, I have to wait on this emergency for four or five days until they get back.
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: I just go to the next person that I already know is on my team.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: And it's better for the firm itself as a whole because if and when those team members leave, that client should have two other anchor points to the firm and to the team and, uh, you know, substantially increases the likelihood of that client staying.
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: So, um, as they're kind of building out the team that would be number one is I would redesign the workflow to make sure that this team of three would work.
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: Now, if you're only starting with a team of two it's you and one other person that's fine.
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: Again, I would emulate that workflow and just have it built in that when your team continues to grow, that's when you can just plug in that third team member.
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: The next part that I think that we did is we really focused on monthly reoccurring revenue.
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: It was interesting working with a lot of CPA firms or having friends and talking about what they're doing in their firms, and it was very eye-opening to see how much brutal competition there would be for a tax return that would pay $1 or $1,200 a year, right, and yet almost disdain on the monthly accounting work.
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: And yet that monthly accounting client you know.
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: Correct me if I'm wrong, james, but I believe that you know a lot of the clients that are coming on board to your clients are in the three, four or $5,000 a month range, right, and so you know these, these firms would just tear into each other over a thousand dollar a year client and then look down on a $60,000 a year client.
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: That never made sense in my mind.
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: And so stepping over dollars for pennies, yeah, and sometimes multiple dollars per pennies, you know.
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: And so we really focused on monthly reoccurring revenue for a few reasons.
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: One, on the annual side it was more money.
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: Two, I felt like it was easier to scale.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: Three, it built a better relationship with the client because we were talking with the client every month, multiple times a month.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: One piece that I felt like was really important and kind of crucial in that is at the beginning, when I you know, when we would acquire these firms, they were doing the kind of the old-fashioned prepare an invoice the next month, put it in the mail, wait for the clients to mail you a check might be a net 30 agreement, maybe there are 10 days beyond that.
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: All of a sudden, you're carrying the cost of doing the work 70, 80, 85 days.
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: That's very expensive and pretty difficult to do.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: And so, um, you know, we ended up putting about 90 plus percent of our monthly reoccurring work on ACH to where we controlled, you know a big chunk of our cashflow, and I know that you know a lot of firms there's a little bit of pushback.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: Oh, my clients will never do that.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: So you know we grind into that too, right, it's not like we were in some special niche of the country.
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: That is only okay with ACHs, right?
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: Um, what we ended up doing is we offered a discounted hourly rate, you know, because at the time this was several years ago we were still doing the hourly billing kind of deal.
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: I think we gave them like $5 less per hour or something, if they would sign up at the ACH and pretty much all of them came and then all the new clients we would sign on would do that.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: But having control of your cash flow was instrumental.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: It took our AR down from, you know, in the neighborhood of $75,000 on a regular basis down to about $15,000.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: Right, and I yeah, it's just, I don't think I could overstate that one.
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: So and it made it nice for the clients too, because, you know, just automated it, but out of sight, out of mind, and so I thought it was a really good move.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah there's a couple things that stand out there, garrick, that you're mentioning um one, the net 30, or you know, sending, sending the, the invoice in the mail and waiting for a check.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: Um, I mean, it's not a restaurant, so why are we asking people to pay after the service is done?
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: Most services out there you pay and then you get the service, so accounting should be no different.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: That's the way you should be working with your clients to help with your cash flow.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: And then the second piece you mentioned people are mentioning oh well, my clients don't do that.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: When I hear that, I just think why are we saying someone else's no for them?
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: Ask the question.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: It's the worst case.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: You're in the same situation you're currently at.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: Before you ask the question Best case scenario they say yes and now all of a sudden your whole business changes because you actually have the cash flow and you have money to reinvest in the business and you can go out and make that new hire because you asked one simple question.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: But if you don't ask, you just assume people are going to say no.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: You're going to be constantly pushing a boulder up the hill 100%.
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: No, I agree with you.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: And to answer like that first one, first, or the first topic, as far as why do we build in arrears in accounting?
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: That's a great question.
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: In fact, one of the firms that we acquired didn't they build in advance, and it was probably the only firm I've really looked at that realistically build in advance.
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: And um, I, I loved the concept, unfortunately, uh, so, talking with the, the, the, the former firm owner at that time, I asked her how she did that, right, did she start that way or did she convert to that down the road?
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: And she had converted down the road, you know, mid, mid stride, and um, I believe that she had to basically give them a month for free, in order to convert them from arrears to an advance, right, and for a lot of firms that's that's quite expensive to get that to happen, right, um, is it insurmountable?
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: No, obviously she did it.
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: And uh, and it came.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: There were a couple of problems, like if you fell behind in your work, then all of a sudden you were getting paid for work that didn't get done, and then if a client ended up leaving or something like that, all of a sudden it's like you know they had paid for maybe two or three months that didn't get done or something like that became a little bit of a hassle and so we ended up kind of converting all of them back to it was a small piece of our overall larger firm.
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: We ended up converting them back to arrears.
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: I think it makes total sense to do it in advance.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: There were a couple of things that were problems that we kind of ran into.
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: A lot of clients didn't like it either.
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: So one of the ways that we've kind of gotten around billing in advance is when we bring on a new client we'll bill them a onboarding fee and so that way we kind of get paid because there's always cleanup.
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: Right, you bring somebody over, it doesn't matter how good their prior accounting firm was.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: There is always going to be cleanup to get them kind of onto your system.
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: And you know, traditionally firms kind of ate that cost.
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: But doing a you know a fair onboarding fee really helped a lot there too.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: So um, I like, I like the, the onboarding fee on the front end because it is covering costs for for your team to get in there and clean things up.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: It's in the in the marketing space A lot of times.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, onboarding fee, setup fee, initial build out, whatever, however you want to call it, it's the same idea, right?
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: There's work that needs to get done, so this is facilitating that work that's going to happen.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: I think what you were mentioning as well, where you guys would offer, you know, five, $5 off the hourly to incentivize someone to switch to ACH.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: The same thing can be done for incentivizing someone to pay, pay the start of the month or pay in full, as long as there's an incentive and there's a benefit to the, to your client, to do so.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: It's going to make it a lot more enticing and what.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: What comes to mind and I'm I don't run an accounting firm, so you can tell me if I'm wrong on this, especially being the ops guy but having people pay at the start of the month and then potentially, things aren't getting done and you're doing things that haven't been paid for, etc.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: The bigger picture, that almost just sounds like a bit of a systems process that could be buttoned up and then that's like a relatively easy fix and it's solved and you're still paid at the start of the month.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: But obviously just to say that you know 30,000 foot overview.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: It's probably a lot easier said than done, but ultimately most of the times it kind of boils down to is it a?
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: Is it a systems problem or is it a people problem?
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: yep, and I think you're absolutely right.
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: The one part that I would say that uh is outside of the firm's control is that even though we can, you know, sync and automate, get our own logins for a lot of the information to actually complete a month and close a month, we are still relying on the client's help a good chunk of the time.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: Right, um, at least if we're trying to do what I would say is kind of the best job, and if the client isn't super responsive or is kind of delaying their feet, and especially if they're looking at other firms right, if they're looking at other firms, they're not really happy with us and that's going to delay that response time.
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: And so, like, if we haven't closed out those last couple of months because we're waiting on them all of a sudden, that's when uh, the situation would rise where it's.
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: It is a people problem, but it's a people problem that you know.
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: We're outside of our control, if you will, um, or at least to a certain degree.
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: So, but no, you're absolutely right.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: If it's just like work's not getting done in a timely manner, that's because of us.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's a systems problem.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: 100 okay, um, tell me a little bit, garrick, about what you were doing with your, with your past firms, for client acquisition.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: So, with this being a more marketing focused podcast, I would love to hear, and for the other listeners, how did you go out and find new, new clients?
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: How did you generate sales calls for your business?
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: You know that's a good question, james, and frankly, I wish that you and I would have been acquainted a couple of years ago, right?
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: Because I don't feel like I had a great marketing consultant to help us with our firm.
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: This is going to sound probably a little disappointing where it is a marketing focused podcast.
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: Sorry about that.
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: Uh, and you know you can read most the articles online are going to tell you something similar that you know, the best marketing is word of mouth and that always used to kind of bug me, especially as a new firm owner, because it's like I don't have time for word of mouth to work.
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: I need this to work now.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: And, uh, you know, like I said, I wish that you and I would have been acquainted a few years ago, but the best thing that I can tell firm owners is if they will take care of their team, their team will take care of their clients and, in turn, their clients will take care of the firm through, obviously paying the bill and helping them grow their own business.
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: We're able to have, you know, I think over the last five years, which included COVID, our highest organic growth year over year was like 32%, and that was on a marketing budget of a couple of thousand dollars, all because of the team taking care of the clients.
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: Do I think that we could have been better off had I been able to work with you?
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: Then, yes, I do, because we would have been able to work with you.
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: Then, yes, I do, because we would have been able to really kind of dial in.
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: You know, the downside of the word of mouth is that you kind of get what you get right and it's hard to specialize in in one industry over another when you're just trying to take the work that's coming in the door right, and especially if one of your clients has referred somebody else, that's always a tricky situation because whether you want to take them or not, you definitely don't want to tick off your current client, you know.
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: And so you try to kind of make that work and you, I think, naturally give a lot of grace, if you will, to that that referral right, even if they're outside of an industry that you wanted to focus in, as long as they're willing to be a good client, basically, um, so you know the services that you and your company, your team, provide, I think would have been just instrumental to increasing our, our growth.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: So I appreciate that.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: It's so true, though, about referrals and word of mouth.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, word of mouth is the best it it.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: You're getting referrals coming from a trusted source already.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: If someone who's used your service, they know I can trust you.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: So, yes, it's a layup.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: Um, I would hope that you're closing 90 of those referrals that are coming through.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: I I always get a kick when people tell me you know we, yeah, we close 90.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: We don't have a problem with sales.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: Okay, cool, how are you guys getting your your sales right now?
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: What are referrals?
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Okay, perfect, you should be closing 90 of them, because the person who sent them over has already been paid all the work and they've already done all the work.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: You just need to essentially facilitate getting started right.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: Losing like going out and finding new leads and new appointments from people who don't know you.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: That that's where getting a predictable system in place works, because, like you mentioned, you could get a referral in one industry.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: Then you're across the map on something else.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: Maybe you don't really wanna work with this person, or they're a terrible fit, and now you have two relationships in jeopardy, so they're great.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: But you also need a predictable system where you know okay, I'm gonna get X amount of opportunities every single month.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: Also need a predictable system where you know okay, I'm going to get X amount of opportunities every single month and if I close X amount, here's our predictable growth and you have a path versus I have no idea when the next referral is coming in and you're sitting there looking at your phone and it's not ringing.
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, 100%.
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: That's a scary place to be right.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the other.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: The other piece on that is the, the kind of irony behind word of mouth, especially when you're getting started.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: Who's referring you if you don't have any clients?
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: No one.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: You haven't spent money on marketing, so nobody knows you exist, but yet you rely on word of mouth.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: So I don't know.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: That one makes me chuckle when we're on sales calls and people are like, yeah, we do word of mouth.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: Okay, everyone technically is doing word of mouth.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: Okay, everyone technically is doing word of mouth, but what else are you doing to get people coming through?
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: So yeah, having a predictable system in place, it just takes out all that guesswork and you know where the next opportunities are coming from and you trust the process and you know all right, I just need to speak to 10 people this month and I'm going to sign two or three new clients a month.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: Perfect, perfect.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: It could be the first two or three people you speak to and you know the next seven on average, are not going to close.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: That's fine.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: Or you have a really good month and then you say, all right, next, next set of 10.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: And you just you look at it from a more data driven, um, you know perspective.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: Yep, 100%.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: And you know, I think you hit the nail on the head with that because, um, you know, while we did have good growth from word of mouth or the referrals, we were very fortunate, uh, and trying to do any kind of sales target.
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: You know, we tried that, but it was like it wasn't reliable, it definitely wasn't predictable and it wasn't systemized.
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: So we're systematized.
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: So, um, no, I think you're 100% right on there.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: Cool, cool, um, what's one thing for everyone listening, garrick, that that you'd want everyone to know, um, if they're thinking about, I mean, everyone should be getting into business to eventually sell their business, their creating, not just build it and then walk away from it, and this asset, just you know, slowly burns off.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: So what's one piece of advice selling, selling a few businesses and acquiring others that comes to mind for you that it's like this is this is a really important metric or this is what you should have in the back of your mind, whether you're thinking about selling in the next couple of years or it's a play, you know, 10, 15 years down the road.
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, the first step and this is going to sound a little cliche because, you know, I know that everybody will say oh yeah, I knew that Knowing it and doing it are very different, and that's to begin with the end in mind, right?
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: Um, begin with the kind of your exit plan, at least roughly formed, right?
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: Um, a lot of businesses, it's like they just get and accounting firms are no different, unfortunately uh, it's like they get added on to a house with no real plan and you got random rooms over here and this, and that you know they get added onto a house with no real plan and you got random rooms over here and this, and that you know they don't have a true system.
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: Also, documentation, right, document your systems and your processes is absolutely crucial, right?
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: You talk with business owners, and I would be kind of interested to hear your experience on this too, james.
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: If you ever had an operational conversation with one of your clients but you talk to them about their business and about their processes and they will almost brag about, oh, it's all up here and it's like wonderful, then your business will never sell on average because when you leave, all that stuff up here goes with you and that new owner all of a sudden doesn't have a predictable system at all, whether it's sales, whether it's operations, anything like that.
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: I'll pause for a second and kind of see like have you had that experience at all?
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: I don't.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: Nothing stands out too much for conversations with our clients, but definitely learning that lesson the hard way with my own business of getting started and thinking someone else should be able to do this.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: I show them once hey, you should be able to do this now.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: It's still something that I'm constantly on the team about.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: We need to make this SOP so solid.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: We need to make this SOP so solid.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: Somebody off the street with no experience could essentially walk through this process and complete what it is we're looking to do.
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: If not, I think there's gaps in this process and it's hard to get your SOPs to that point because they take time.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: But I've also learned that spending hours on an SOP will free up so much time in the future, because now you can truly let go and delegate that task and you don't have to revisit it because you know, okay, I've walked through it, I've recorded it.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: There's written instructions, there's a visual.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: A team member has tried it out with me, you know, sharing their screen or in front of me.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: They've asked questions.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: We filled in the gaps.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: Now they're good to go with it.
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: I don't need to worry.
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: Is this going to get done?
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: And if it doesn't, then we know.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: Okay, it's not a process problem, it's a people problem.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: But it does take time to build all those assets up within your business and I'm assuming it's no different with an accounting firm.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: It really doesn't matter the business you're in, you just need to have the instructions and kind of building off of that I always think of.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: And now, being in business, I laugh at myself when I, when something new comes in the mail that I've ordered and it has the, the setup instructions or how to assemble what it is you're getting, I'm like, okay, this is a really impressive SOP.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: I now know how to build the thing that I ordered.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: Or I get really frustrated when something comes in and there's like two pictures, really unclear documentation, and I'm like how does this go together?
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: Then you're calling support and it's like this is not how to make an SOP.
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: Make it like this, where it's so easy to put together.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: So that's my benchmark when I, when we're making SOPs within the business, like somebody should be able to come off the street and know how to do this thing without, to a to a certain extent, without really having any experience in what we're doing.
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: Yep, no, without a doubt.
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: And you know, I think, that if anybody tells you that a hundred percent of their business is that way, they're probably fibbing a little bit.
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: Uh, you know, at least I haven't seen it yet, and especially cause we're always.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: You know businesses, especially right now.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: You know, over the last 10 or 15 years, like business has changed so much.
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: You think about it.
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: Right, 15, maybe 20 years ago this kind of conversation was like a Star Trek fantasy, almost just in a very short amount of time.
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: And now you know there's countless products out there that can help us.
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: One plan that we've tried to work into our SOPs is also the military uses something called a PACE plan, right, and that's your primary alternate, contingent and emergency, and so, like in a perfect world, this is how we do our sop.
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: What if this person's sick?
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: Okay, who does it fall on to this person?
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: This person, this person, right.
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: Um, and that I felt like gave the team a lot of flexibility and, and really kind of you know, a lot of direction, so that it didn't have to come directly from me.
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: They already knew, oh, somebody's out sick, somebody's on vacation.
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: What do we do now?
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: It's already built into that SOP, right, that's cool.
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: But the next thing that I would I guess this is a little bit of a scary statistic.
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: All of us have heard that 80% of businesses fail in the first year.
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: Most of us know, depending on which statistic you look at, that 80% of the ones that survive will fail between the next five and 10 years.
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: Right, the one that I had never heard is that when you go to sell, 80% of businesses will fail to sell.
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: Only 20% of businesses will successfully sell and, like I said, that's a pretty scary statistic.
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: If you use a business broker, it does go up a little bit, but it's still.
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: You know, most of the time it's because they didn't plan with that exit in mind.
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: They had all those things up in their mind.
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: Or, or you know, their financials financials which, in an accounting firm setting, shouldn't be a big deal, but their, their financials didn't make sense or whatever.
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: And so, um, you know you think about it, not only building the team right now.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: Building the team helps your cash flow right now.
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: The chances of selling down the road, if you have a team in place, triple the odds of your business actually selling.
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: And the reason for that is, you know, you think about it from a buyer perspective.
• 33:32
  Speaker 3: A lot of business owners, you know they.
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: They started their business, they grew it from scratch and then, unfortunately I I see this a lot in accounting firms, in medical offices and construction.
• 33:37
  Speaker 3: I don't know why those three specifically, but that's where it seems to be They'll say oh, you know, I started on on my own.
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: Nobody will really buy this because you'll hear it a ton with well, actually, all three of those.
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: Still, there's nothing for sale here.
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: I have a little bit of assets and that's it, and it's like no, you have a cash producing asset.
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: It has nothing to do with how many laptops you have or if you're a medical office, how many rooms you may have.
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: You have a reputation, you have a relationship.
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: If you can transfer that relationship from you to your team, all of a sudden, you have truly something very, very valuable to sell to a new buyer.
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: And I'm not just talking about PE groups, I'm talking about somebody just like yourself that wants to step in but doesn't want to start at the ground floor.
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: Right, and so building that team, I think, would absolutely, again, not just help your business grow today, but will absolutely make your business more desirable and more likely to sell down the road.
• 34:30
  Speaker 3: So you'll be getting income from multiple sources in that way from the same function now, if that makes any sense.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it does.
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: That's so insightful, garrick.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: Last thing, before we wrap up You're doing some new stuff now.
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: You've sold your firm, you've come on board.
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: You're helping our clients grow and scale their business, running some coaching calls.
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: Do you mind quickly telling me about what it is you're also doing on your own, now that you know, or for anyone who is listening like, how can they get in touch with you?
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: What are you offering to new firms?
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: The insight you have from building and selling a firm?
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: what would, what would some people get from you know, reaching out and having a conversation with you?
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: Well, you know that's a great question.
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: So, as far as getting in contact with me, you know I'm on LinkedIn, facebook, my email is my name at hotmailcom.
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: Pretty basic there.
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: As far as what they would get is they would get somebody who has been in the seat with them right, an actual practitioner who is now doing coaching, not just a coach that hasn't been in their seat and face those challenges.
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: So I know that it took me a couple of years of being a business owner before I hired a coach right, and I always kind of felt like one that was a little too touchy-feely for me.
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: I'm a numbers guy, kind of a deal.
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: Two, I always felt like that was maybe a big business thing, not a small business thing.
• 35:54
  Speaker 3: I can't tell you the change in hiring a coach and having somebody that I could talk to that wasn't an employee, that wasn't a friend, that wasn't my spouse.
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: The last thing we want to be doing is venting, especially the first and last.
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: The last thing you want to be doing is coming home and venting to your spouse every day or venting to your team.
• 36:11
  Speaker 3: Both those things are super destructive.
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: Having a coach that can sit there.
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: Not that your coach would have all the answers, but they can be there.
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: They can be in that seat with you, listen to what's going on, give you some feedback, because we all have our internal dialogue that's going and sometimes that thing is good for us and sometimes it's not.
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: And we need somebody that can sit there with us and kind of call us on our own mental nonsense and help us make sure that we're seeing reality, that's true reality and not just our perspective of reality, right, um?
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: And so, as far as, uh, you know, what they would get is we do weekly calls with our clients, um, to make sure that you know they have somebody that they can kind of count on to just like a uh, a personal trainer on your body, having a personal trainer for the business and your mind.
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: So, making sure that you're making the, the you know strategic steps to get you to where you want to be.
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: That's awesome and I I I'll back that up with what you said.
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: Investing into a coach is it's the greatest ROI I've ever received.
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: It's just having that person either individually or multiple coders to lean on for any questions you have.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, they can help you solve a really small problem or they can help you solve a problem that is going to help you make an extra $100,000.
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: It really depends on the problems you're looking to be solved.
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: So for anyone listening, I would highly recommend getting in touch with Garrick.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: You're amazing at what you do.
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this, and I'm really excited for the continued value that you're going to continue to share with our clients on these weekly calls.
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: So thanks again, eric.
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: Thank you, james, really appreciate it being here.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to CFO Chronicles the secrets behind success.
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: We hope today's episode provided valuable strategies to help you attract more high paying clients.
• 38:04
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• 38:09
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• 38:13
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• 38:17
  Speaker 1: Until next time, keep striving for success and unlocking your business's potential.