For accounting firms to scale, they need to build a stronger infrastructure of professional HR, marketing, IT and other support systems, says Rachel Anevski, the founder of Matters of Management.
Transcription:
Dan Hood (00:03):
Welcome to On the Air with Accounting Today. I'm editor-in-chief, Dan Hood. Everyone knows about the bare feet of the shoemaker's children, so we shouldn't necessarily be surprised to hear that accountants were full of great advice for their clients about how to manage their businesses. Don't always manage their own practices as professionally as they might. Here to talk about all that. As Rachel Anevski, she's the founder and CEO of Matters of Management, which advises accounting firms and others on management issues and who's personally held a lot of the sort of back office roles at different accounting firms that we're going to be talking about, so she knows where she speaks. Rachel, thanks for joining us.
Rachel Anevski (00:33):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. It's so cool to chat with you.
Dan Hood (00:38):
We've chatted a little bit before about this. This is a big topic and one that's really important for firms and you're super passionate about it. I'm pretty interested in it, so I think we're going to have a good time today.
Rachel Anevski (00:47):
I agree. I mean, I saw you speak a little bit about this topic, and I remember having this moment where I was like, he stole everything from my brain. It's been implanted someplace because you have this talk, and it is entirely my experience, 15 years working in the industry, about 10 outside of it, and certainly I've lived those moments with accounting firms.
Dan Hood (01:13):
Just to be clear, I have not broken into your office and stole your notes at any point, did I not in any way surveilling you or spying on you? That's not just pure coincidence that we are, but it's a topic. I mean, as I say, you paid a lot of attention to it. We're paying more attention to it. So why don't we start diving into it. I want to say for a long time, the vast middle tier of accounting firms, not sole practitioners who don't have a lot of these kind of management issues and not the large firms that are more corporate in their structure and so on, but at Vast, and it really is a big chunk of the profession. They've gotten along with sort of partners doing a lot of their back office work partners or a single overworked office manager. Is that sustainable? Is there a reason for them to move beyond that model? Do they have to change?
Rachel Anevski (01:56):
Yeah, well, so there's lots of stuff that you just said, right? So is it sustainable? Yeah, if you want to just stay exactly how you are today with no improvement whatsoever, so yes, but why would you want to, A growth model or a change model would include a desire and a build or strategy for an infrastructure rebirth or growth. And that's really what's happening with these firms is lots of people go into accounting and they rise maybe to what they call a managing partner or an administrative partner, and they take on all of these roles, and a lot of these roles happen to be side projects or interests, passion projects, and they don't necessarily know the body of language that they're overseeing. They just kind of feel it out, and then it grows with 'em. So it's like the firms that get petered, so that's the Peter principle. They end up working in their industry still servicing clients and kind of hopping along with these other large practice development pieces,
Dan Hood (03:08):
Right? Yeah. I like talking to young people. I'll be the person who handles our recruitment on campus, or I like it. I'll put together our server over the weekend, which means you get the kind of server you get when somebody puts it together over a weekend or you get the sort of approach to recruiting that is some parts are done really well and some parts aren't necessarily done as well, but none of them are coordinated doing it on a part-time basis. I like the way you describe it as the infrastructure because this is pretty, these are crucial functions for any business of any size beyond this. They said just the small practitioner, these are crucial things to have.
Rachel Anevski (03:42):
This is scalability. So in my background, I mean, I have a degree, a master's degree in organizational behavior. I'm getting a doctorate in organizational leadership. This is my talk. My very first billable moment while I worked as an HR director and marketing director in a public accounting firm was to help a 50 person, four partner firm develop their infrastructure for scaling. I mean, they had a great model, but every single partner there was doing 17. And so I mean, fast forward now 10 years, and that firm is rockstar, well-known, rockstar. So
Dan Hood (04:20):
There you go. Well, this is the interesting thing when you look at the numbers and how these things work out. If you look at the big four firms or the top 10 firms, the billion dollar firms, which I guess it's now more like 14 or 15 of them, but one of the key differentiators there is that the number of staff or the number of employees per partner at those firms is something like 15 to one, and the number at smaller firms is something like seven to one, which means that there's a lot of other issues there. But it means is that a lot of those partners are probably doing this kind of work and not being able to focus on the broader partner level type things where they're really good at it, right? It's not just a part-time thing that they're doing is on, I don't want to call it an amateur basis, but let's go ahead and call it an amateur basis. Why not?
Rachel Anevski (05:07):
Well, it's interesting because when you look at the V-shaped model of the small firms to the big firms, it's like an oboe and I mean, and my brain thinks like that. So at a small firm, you may have a couple of partners doing a variety of different things, and then as your firms grow and develop, now we build in the models for the C-suite structure, which I got to tell you, a lot of firms over the last 10, 15 years were afraid of the C-suite language. We are not corporate. We are not corporate. It was like they refused the model. I remember saying to a partner once, well, I'd love to be a COO, and they said, no, we already have it. And they were thinking, well, our board language is president, CEO, COO, but they weren't functioning in those roles. It was just how they signed the paper. Then when you get into the larger firms, now you have individual departments that take on these pieces. So that's what I'm saying. It's like an OBO because you go from small to medium to then having large individual siloed practices that also need to grow up. It's scalability.
Dan Hood (06:20):
So I mean, we start there. We assume that one of the issues there is that if you don't have these structures in place, you can't grow or you can't grow well or effectively, right? You're going to run to hurdles in the face of growth, you're going to run into dysfunction as you try to run a much larger organization with a much smaller organization's infrastructure to use your word. Are there other problems in this? What other kind of problems does this bring? What other reasons should we bring into mind so we can make sure that people, firms are ready to change around this?
Rachel Anevski (06:51):
Well, so it's interesting because when I speak specifically to managing partners that don't have a strong infrastructure or haven't necessarily scaled, their problems are somewhat similar to larger firms, but the larger firms have more access to throw money at the problem or throw people at the problem. But for me, there's really just three major problems. The first one being obviously recruitment and retention, and everyone feels that. But I got to tell you, I wrote an article 16 years ago, and that article is probably, if I rebooted it now, the same issue we're having. It's like since 1920, the first early onset of problems with recruiting public accountants. So it's going to be there, but there's that. There's training and development issues, obviously, and then there's this cultural issue and an employee value proposition issue. And so we have these things that happen, and I don't necessarily think that those are size issues.
(07:56)
Those are industry issues. However, I do think that as you build the infrastructure and you have people spending their entire focus to solve those problems, you have a better chance of fixing them and moving forward and creating opportunity than you do when you're looking at partners who are half the time servicing clients, which is what their intention is. So looking outside of the firm and half the time looking inside of the firm, when you make the jump to then hire someone who focuses on your people, which end up being your product, we're in professional services. That's the product. Everything else is commodity. So when you have people that are looking at the people really spending the time, and I mean that in a variety of different ways and how you sell the people, how you market the people, how you train the people, how you develop the people, all of the people process internal facing, oh my God, it's just a world of change.
Dan Hood (08:55):
Well, I mean, you talked to me, you mentioned earlier that the language, the professional language that goes along with it, and that may seem, oh, well, it's just jargon or I know the jargon of HR or I know the jargon of recruiting, but the reason that jargon or reason an expert you might hire knows that is because they're expert in all the things that go along with it, right? It's like I can learn the jargon of accountant. It doesn't mean that I can be an accountant, but that level of professionalism and the understanding that there are this whole level of activities that go along with recruiting at a high level, recruiting at a professional level, that a partner's just never going to know.
Rachel Anevski (09:29):
No, and it's so interesting that you say that. I was just talking to a new director of HR for a public accounting firm that has about 400 employees, and she is not from the industry. So it kind of goes both ways, this street, this body of knowledge and the language that we talk, and I said to her, you having a hard time understanding or are partners having a hard time understanding when you communicate to them about reviewing an employee performance review because their mind goes to reviewing a financial statement. So there's that little language piece, and then when you talk about your exempt employees and your non-exempt employees, are they tripped up with what's a tax? No clue? It's a tax exemption. What are you talking about? So to that point, yes, there is a language that aids in the development of each of these areas, and it's a little heartbreaking for me too to see how accountants will work for many, many years and really the monotony of working with the same type of client over and over and over again and then having to retrain new people underneath them to learn the same things that they know gets very frustrating over a period of time that change dynamic.
(10:46)
And so we really do lean on the people that could understand. So it's a tightrope really, your infrastructure people to understand the business of accounting and how that translates into the tightrope between monetizing the people that we bring in so that the company can continue to grow and support the partners doing what they've worked so hard for so long to do service their clients and enjoy that aspect of the career move.
Dan Hood (11:22):
They didn't get into this business to go hire people or to go manage HR or to do it, they got to do it, you say, to serve clients and to wrestle with those kind of issues, the technical issues, the tax
Rachel Anevski (11:32):
And the
Dan Hood (11:32):
Audits and the golfing,
Rachel Anevski (11:33):
I mean, to go golfing with their fabulous clientele to develop and help support the growth of businesses. And there's just so many different reasons to do it. And then they end up having to sit on a committee and talk about what P m s colors are going to go into the new logo that they've created, and it's why are we doing this to ourselves? And not that I don't think that entrepreneurs can service multiple areas, but where have we gone wrong here? And you keep going. I mean, I can tell you, I could tell you all this. Well,
Dan Hood (12:11):
Particularly I'm loving the whole PMM S color reference. It's a great example of jargon that a marketer would totally understand that, but you would've to explain what pmms colors and Pantone colors and all that sort of thing are to anyone who isn't in publishing or marketing. And there's no reason why a partner in accounting firm should learn about Pantone colors and pmms colors just not, their heads should be full with totally different things.
Rachel Anevski (12:33):
I never want to know the inner workings of pro systems love you guys, but it's not for me.
Dan Hood (12:41):
That's not part of my job description. It's interesting because we talk about this, you talk about scalability, that being all of this professionalization of the back office and the infrastructure of the firm is about is enabling scalability, allowing scalability, or now enabling frictionless scalability or friction-free scalability. You can grow while you have partners fulfill all these functions. It'll just be miserable for everyone, varying degrees of miserable. But anyways, one of the things that seems to happen is that the issues that come up often only emerge as you grow. You only start to realize, wait, our marketing is not up to snuff, and we only discovered this because wow, for six months we haven't had any new clients. Or you would sort of discover it as you go, or Hey, wait, why is no one accepting our job offers when we put them out? Or why is no one responding to our ads and all that sort of stuff there? And I've just named a bunch of different ones and there are a bunch of other areas, but are there ones that sort of pop up first that as firms grow, they run into this kind of issue first or this kind of issue?
Rachel Anevski (13:44):
So I love this question and I'll use it as a shameless plug also. So initially, I think as the firms are growing, you should be leveraging consultants, right? The first step is the consultant piece. When the consultants no longer do the job, then there's fractional, there's the shameless case. So fractional CMOs, CHROs, CFOs, the fractional universe is really kind of growing, and these are your director level people, and it's newly emerged, but there's about 75,000 of us now in the industry that do this type of work. So it's gaining some traction for sure. From there, your fractional person should really turn into your full-time person. Again, scalability, your fractional person is there to help you grow. And so chicken before the egg, this is that age old question, which goes first. Sometimes we look at our HR piece as a function of how many employees you have.
(14:46)
So a full-time HR person is equivalent to 50 employees accounting. In public accounting, it's a little bit more than that. Sometimes you could kind of put along with a full-time firm administrator or an office manager that has been doing it for a long time up until about 75. Once you get to 75, there's lots of stuff that happens with benefits and all kinds of stuff. So you want a full-time person in there. However, I always look at a growth model of, especially in public accounting and billable hours, is that in order for any new hire, you need a certain amount of new billables. So for me, it's for every two to $300,000 of new revenue, you get an additional person essentially. That would be a growth model for me that would be tied to dollars. And so if you are able, it's so funny because as many accountants as I've worked with, and there's thousands of them at this point, none of them actually sit down and do the math, the accounting of what's the actual number of new revenue to growth? Silly. They tell people how to do this all the time, but they don't do it for themselves.
Dan Hood (15:53):
It's the shoemaker's children,
Rachel Anevski (15:55):
Right? Who's coming back. Yeah. So I'm thinking, I'm married a pool guy and I have a jacuzzi sitting on my lawn.
Dan Hood (16:05):
There you go. Right?
Rachel Anevski (16:06):
So this is exactly right. So for me, it's always sales goes first. That's the first investment. That's the big investment because if you need to drive revenue, so you can hire an infrastructure, the best way to do it is hire Salesforce. And I got to tell you, it's the last one I see in public accounting that gets hired. They hire the office manager, the IT person, the HR person, a controller, a C F O, A C M O, all before they get into the sales component of it, and that's ego driven. So when we can kind of swallow that piece, I think they kind of have it backwards. My first hire in a growth mode is going to be sales and then HR to support the sales because you could outsource the marketing until you need full-time.
Dan Hood (16:56):
Gotcha. Well, and this is stepping separate, but I mean when you're talking sales business developers, that kind of thing, to a certain degree, isn't that person going to be tied to or want to work with the marketing, whether it's a fractional marketer or there's got to be some element of that connected? Like I said, this is probably diving deeper than we need to, but I'm just following here.
Rachel Anevski (17:21):
No, we certainly can. But in terms of scalability, so the marketing function supports the sales function. And again, I guess it really kind is dependent upon size and where you are in your growth trajectory, because some firms are really happy being 17 employees for all of their life. Some want to just be a small mid-size boutique firm. And then as you get bigger by 300 employees, you've got the whole C-suite kind of figured out, and now you're looking at c o O level and some fancy terminology for some other departments. But if we're just looking at kind of meat and potatoes, regular, emerging, mid-size accounting firms, your marketing department should not be both marketing and sales because it's two different sides of the brain. So your marketing is again, looking at your collateral, your support documentation, how we present people messaging. And for me, a lot of dealing with the internal piece of marketing, which is how we talk to our existing employees, and then how do we recruit people that are just like them? So that piece goes there, but it is a true statement that marketing doesn't drive revenue. It supports revenue. You need one in order to get the other, but a sales person who understands your people and what it is you have to present that could bring you the yeses and sign on the bottom line to drive the dollars, that's the injection, if you will, to get more infrastructure quicker.
Dan Hood (19:12):
Right? Yeah. Well, no, and that makes a ton of sense, right? As you say, one of the things about Go
Rachel Anevski (19:17):
Ahead. No, no, I'm just saying even in that time period where you have all of these partners half working outside of the firm and half working inside of the firm, so their sales numbers aren't going to be great either,
Dan Hood (19:30):
Right? Right. Well, the interesting, one of the reasons firms often look and say, wow, do we really need this? Is because do we really need a HR person? Do we really need a marketing person? Is because they know that if they get that person, they've got to pay for it. It's coming out of their pockets to a certain extent. So it makes a huge amount of sense to start with somebody who's actually going to be bringing in revenue that will allow you to support. So no, you're not actually losing any money bringing in this person who will bring in a lot more money, and that'll allow you to be more professional. There's a
Rachel Anevski (19:58):
Lot. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's so interesting because one of the things that I always did when I was hiring young professionals into the industry was I asked them to sell me something, and I asked them to describe to me reasons why they came into public accounting, and I do it that way because they're never told that they're going to be a salesperson. And it's a requirement at the partner level, you want to reach the top, you got to sell, and it's this dirty four letter word that no one wants to talk about. So to me, it's a no-brainer to hire somebody else that does that for you.
Dan Hood (20:35):
Yeah, no one's good at it except professional salespeople. So let's let them do it because they seem to enjoy it while the rest of us hate it. I don't know why it was
Rachel Anevski (20:49):
The bigger firms now. I mean, that was the first partner level. Those teams became partners quick because they're driving growth. They owned the revenue. I mean, I know the first time I asked to be a partner, I was told to bring us a million dollars worth of revenue. So I get it. I get the reason why you would want to make someone a partner who is bringing you a million dollars worth of revenue.
Dan Hood (21:12):
I keep them there. Yeah. Alright. There's a lot more to talk about on this subject, but we have to take a quick break. Alright, and we're back with Rachel Ky of Matters of Management and we're talking about the infrastructure of accounting firms, the professionalization of the back office, everything from IT to HR to marketing to business development. There's some others I'm sure I've missed. But anyways, all of those things that used to be handled by partners and that at some point if a firm really wants to grow and is determined to get bigger, or if they've gotten bigger by accident, which actually happens, how do they know when it's time to start saying, listen, we got to get professional. What breaks first or what is going to break that? They should be like, oh yeah, now it's time to hire. Even if it is a consultant in a particular area or a fractional person or a full-time person in an area, how do they know when it's starting to get to that? There are things that happen first, things that break first.
Rachel Anevski (22:10):
Well, yeah, I mean a lot of different things, they're falling asleep at 11:00 PM at their desk at night. So capacity becomes one of the impetus to hire outside knowledge competition. So those things kind of drive growth, but also I feel like we start always with the administrative functions, the ones that are now being turned back into billables. So when partners kind of start to feel like it's over their head, it's unmanageable, then we start to look as to what's next. And that's at every level. So even at your mid-size firms that have your C-suite and then that C-suite starts getting crunched and they start saying, Hey, I need some support. So it's a lot of talk. Again, I think that the one that goes first is if you are driving the revenue, that piece goes first and then your internal components, your HR people, because now we're talking compliance legal, and we've been lucky in public accounting for the most part. There's not a lot of workers' comp things that happen. I mean, I always used to joke, what's going to happen? They're going to drop a file on their foot or a computers
Dan Hood (23:39):
Going to, right? They're not going to lose a finger to your 10 key,
Rachel Anevski (23:43):
So you don't have that piece. We don't have unionization. So those big major HR things are out, but you got lots of different leaves. And I got to tell you, hybrid model right now is killing the HR folks. And we've grown up in human resources to go from, again, just kind of paper pushers to strategic plan to partners to now wellness officers and cultural and diversity experts. And it's really kind of grown up as a department supporting public accounting firms because of the continued issue in recruitment and retention.
Dan Hood (24:23):
But I mean, is it fair to say that's all those, you think of all those different things that are getting added onto to the HR departments if a firm has an HR department onto their plate? But I think you could probably say if something similar is happening in all these functions, suddenly it isn't just about making sure that the server works. It's about making sure that everyone can access everything safely. It's about cybersecurity, it's about enabling new tools that will build all the new service offerings that we want to have. And then marketing and marketing and business development also have things like, well, suddenly it's about S E o, and suddenly it's about not just marketing us
Rachel Anevski (24:53):
To clients, right? Yes, you have the procurement of new clients via SS e o, you've got TikTok, now you've got how you present yourself to the outside world and the inside world. So yeah, I mean, that's why I'm saying this kind of oboe looking thing is because the departments have grown up. So you look at the initial need for people and then you look at where those departments then also grow up on the IT side for sure. You could get away with having an M S P for a while, having a partner oversee the M S P. Then you need someone to manage the M S P and the infrastructure and then have that person manage a whole bunch of people. And then what happens is you've developed your whole infrastructure and all of these departments and who is going to manage them. So that's where you end up getting over to your COOs and your chief of staffs. And I love this chief of staff model so much for so many different reasons, even more than I love the C O O model or the C F O model because I really do think it's a conversation piece, and I think a chief of staff is able to understand what's going on and prioritize for the partners and articulate what's happening that is most important in each of those administrative departments to kind of lead where we ebb and flow and where we put dollars and cents and where the priorities are that align with strategy.
Dan Hood (26:21):
I want to stop here and talk about this in a little bit more detail. You had mentioned earlier that business developers were one of the first groups brought into non CPAs, brought into leadership accounting firms. There were also some marketers. The early marketers were brought in before a lot of other non CPAs might've been brought in. And this brings just the question, all these functions in terms of firm leadership. At one point, one of the reasons why it was attractive to have partners do this, apart from it being less expensive, was that you meant that the leaders of the firm were on these things, right? The partners are in theory, the leaders of the firm. They were, you could say, Bob, you're a partner. What's going on with recruiting? What's going on with market? Whatever, it's one of your leaders was in charge of it.
(27:08)
But as you start to add non CPAs or non partners to this, how does that relationship with leadership work with firm leadership? And maybe what's the role of firm leadership in terms of, there's a lot of questions here, so let me stick with just how do you manage that in terms of you've got the firm leadership and then you have these other groups underneath them. At what point do they rise up? Do they need a seat at the table, maybe that's the way to put it, or at what point do they need a seat at the table, at the leadership table? Well,
Rachel Anevski (27:36):
I think you see the model changing now, and I remember what it felt like to be a part of an industry that was challenged with work-life balance at the time. Now I'm talking, I've been hanging out with you guys in the cpa, a world for more than 20 years. I was started, I was six. So
Dan Hood (27:59):
Child labor laws, this is why you need HR people. The HR person would've said, you can't have a six year old. You can't have a six-year-old working at our firm. They had to be at least 12. Come on.
Rachel Anevski (28:07):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a hard time. So it was a time where we were first emerging where you had women in leadership roles in public accounting. We still had the challenge of work-life balance, downturns of the economy, people wanting non CPAs wanting to be partners and being told no. And then we now see this kind of entire change and shift. But what also I wanted to say about that shift is we're also seeing emerging things happen with private equity and the corporatization of public accounting firms. And so I think that that's got to be part of the conversation when we're talking about this evolution of infrastructure growth. Because it went from a definite, no, we cannot, and every moment that I could point to in the past 20 something years of no, we can't, we're not that type of firm to where we are today, was specific change and acknowledging change.
(29:12)
And so that's at the core of what needs to happen when you have a partner who believes strongly that they are all things capable. I have gotten my C P A, therefore I am, and I got to tell you, I'm getting my doctorate and I certainly don't feel like I know anything, so I don't know how you get that CPA and you're everything. So it was a matter, I think of time, and again, I'm going to bring back this ego thing. They're credentialed. They have the cpa. CPA is really, really important. And that connotation means that they should be advising businesses including their own. So when they do that and they take that really to heart, hiring somebody else who is non C P a to do that is a little bit of a, it's a psychological
Dan Hood (30:09):
Thing. I'm expert, I'm a business advisory expert. Why do I need to you? Yeah.
Rachel Anevski (30:15):
Again, this we're the connectivity of conversation happens, understanding each other's language and how it translates. It's one of the reasons why when we look to hire someone in marketing, we want someone who has experienced marketing, public accounting firms. I mean, it's so very specific. Sometimes we'll take someone from the legal industry, but we just got, you have to understand what we do here and the language of how we do it. And I don't necessarily know if this is because of the speed in which we do business because the volume requires us to spend limited time developing these functions. And is that why the approach and the challenge between the relationship of the C P A and the non C P A partners sitting at the same table is, it's a great research topic. I got to tell you, because we all breathe the same air, and if we all bring opportunities to the table, there's equivalence.
(31:17)
And I think it does come back down to a long time ago, there was this conversation that we could not make non CPAs partner because then we would not be considered a C P A firm. That was the language that has gone away for the most part. There's a couple of states that still kind of believe in that. There's something written in, you have to use a really big microscope to find it at this point. But again, I think it's ego driven. I'm a C P A working a cpa, a firm, therefore a non C P A cannot have a seat at my table because they're not what I am.
Dan Hood (31:55):
It's fascinating. We used for a survey. We do, we would ask firms to break themselves down into partners, professionals, and employees. And for years, when people ask, we'd say, well, it's non partners who have accounting expertise. They're probably their CPAs or an ea, maybe in some cases, or a tax attorney that you may have at the firm. Something like that. And now we've started to say, well, it's anybody who's professional. And that includes people with S H R M credentials or tech credentials
Rachel Anevski (32:24):
Or the C ssis. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of us now. Right, right.
Dan Hood (32:28):
And these are all professionals. These are professions with serious credentials, with serious bodies of professional knowledge. I will go ahead. As someone who has no credentials for anything at all, I'll go ahead and, except that I need accountants to like me. I'll go ahead and say the C B A exam, it's a NA plus ultra. It's pretty spectacular. The exam alone is such a ridiculous, terrifying, horrible experience. That alone qualifies them to be like, yeah, we're pretty special even among professionals. But at the same time, all these other groups are bringing on, as we said, these deep bodies of professional knowledge that partners need to recognize, need to be like, yeah, you know what? Maybe they didn't pass the CPA a exam, but they know a lot more about recruiting than I'll ever know our IT guy has.
Rachel Anevski (33:14):
Yeah, it's relinquishing control, right? So it's a little bit of that. It's also like the entrepreneurial spirit and the growth model. I think it's an acknowledgement of, let me do the things that I'm great at so you can do the things that you are great at. It's a mutual respect. It's elevating experts wanting to learn more, be empowered. It's all of these things. And the more confident your company is, I believe the more ability they will allow others to do what is necessary for growth.
Dan Hood (33:49):
Right. Well, yeah. I mean, you could bring in it's all Adam Smith comparative advantage kind of thing. The people who know the thing best should do it. It shouldn't be a part-time thing for, there's a lot more we can talk about as we've talked about this before, and we can talk about it. We will talk about it again, I'm sure, and we can talk about it in a lot more detail today, but unfortunately, we're running up against time. So I'm just going to say any final piece of advice for firms as they look at their infrastructure, their firm back office and say, what should I be doing with that? Or when should I be doing with that?
Rachel Anevski (34:18):
Yeah. Well, I think it's two things, and I love talking to you. So we have to do this again because it's so much fun. But I think that we have some real kind of jobs that are in public accounting that are going extinct that we should look at. Like the bookkeeper, the 90 to $110 billable hour person, they're not making them anymore. They're not interested anymore, and that's a real need. And so I think that we do need to be looking at that on the one end of jobs that are becoming extinct. I know partners are always talking about train your successor. That's one that's not being trained for. There's that. And I also think on the higher end in terms of emerging growth to align your marketing and your HR departments is really, really valuable for so many things to start really thinking about wellness experts because that's becoming competitive advantage in our firms for sure.
Dan Hood (35:22):
Excellent. Alright. Brilliant advice. As you say, that's conversation. We'll continue in the future. But for now, Rachel Nevsky of Matters of Management. Thanks so much for joining us.
Rachel Anevski (35:30):
Thank you so much.
Dan Hood (35:32):
And thank you all for listening. This episode of On the Air was produced by Accounting Today with audio production by Wen-Wyst Jeanmary. Rate or review us on your favorite podcast platform and see the rest of our content on accountingtoday.com. Thanks again to our guest and thanks you for listening.