Track 1: Best practices in building a CAS practice

One of the fastest-growing service offerings in the history of accounting, CAS is a unique practice area, with its own rapidly evolving best practices. This panel discussion will cover a wide range of important factors, from pricing and service bundling, to finding the right clients, staffing the practice, and much more.

Transcription:

Danielle Lee (00:11):

Hello everybody. Thanks for joining us for this session, best Practices and Building a CAS Practice. My name is Danielle Lee, I'm a Managing Editor of Accounting. Today, I'll be moderating the session and we have a great panel for you today. I will have them introduce themselves and give you a little bit of background to get into their expertise. In CAS, we have Michael Hsu, Hitendra Patil and Ashley Doyen. So Ashley, I'll start with you if you want to give a brief introduction.

Ashley Doyen (00:43):

Yeah. First thank you for everybody for sticking around to stay with us on one of the last sessions of the day, but I am manager of CAS Firm Strategy at CPA.com. I've been with CPA.com for almost seven years. I've been working with CAS practices for just about 12, and I work with them to really understand the challenges that they're facing as they're looking to either create or grow an existing CAS practices or an existing CAS practice and provide recommendations to really drive growth as we continue to see the space evolve.

Hitendra Patil (01:21):

Thank you. My name is Hitendra and for this particular session, I think the only introduction I can give you is I'm the author of this book on ca. This is the only ca book available in the market and I've been working with accountants for nearly 20 years and I do a lot of CAS consulting, getting your CAS practices off the ground or if you already have a CAS practice, how to enhance and make it more productive. Is that Michael?

Michael Hsu (01:47):

Hello everyone, I'm Michael. They put me in this session because they're really worried about putting me up here, but if you've been in and around the accounting industry, you would know that 10 years ago I was pretty loud in here. I run apparently a CAS 2.0 pro pro firm since 20 and 10, so it's called Deep Sky. That's what everybody knows me about, and I am newly freshly back to the accounting industry and the reason why I'm back is because 10 years ago I left the industry because I couldn't find anything that could have helped me build my CAS practice right? Back then, we didn't call it cs, we call it outsource, CFO, outsource accounting, and I left. I went into the entrepreneurial world, I did my stint out there. I did okay. Now I still own Deep Sky and a few other businesses, but last year when I came back, I realized that we're still talking about the same problem and we're still complaining about the same thing.

(02:41)

We're still struggling with the same thing. So I'm back and this time I am back as measure and hack as a methodology that I have created in the last 13 years while running my CAS practice. And what I really want to do, and I want to get real with everybody here, what I really want to do is to be able to help create a community and help the people who are interested in C S, who are interested in becoming the CFO and helping the entrepreneurs, helping the CEO's that they're working with to really elevate and get to the next level. So I encourage everybody, I think all of you for being here the last session or the last breakout session anyways, so ask all the hard questions because that's what we're here for. No surface level stuff.

Danielle Lee (03:24):

Yeah, it's great to see you all here and we'll get into the definition in a moment, but I just want to kind of pull the audience. We want to make this a session, very valuable to you and what you're experiencing. How many of you have a CAS practice currently? Okay, great. So to start, I kind of want to hear your definition of CAS. You were talking about CAS 2.0, kind of getting into all that Hitendra start with you.

Hitendra Patil (03:47):

Can I ask a question to answer that? What is this? Anyone can see? Hundred. Sorry, $100. Okay.

Danielle Lee (04:00):

What else would do you call it?

Hitendra Patil (04:00):

What else? Currency. Currency. What else?

Danielle Lee (04:07):

Yeah, I heard it over there. I heard CAS over there.

Hitendra Patil (04:09):

You heard CAS, CAS, CAS, CAS, that's what we're talking about. Yeah, that's it. Session over.

Danielle Lee (04:16):

Okay. And now the magic tricks begin. Now do a magic trick.

Hitendra Patil (04:20):

Right? But seriously, I think instead of getting into number of services in what you should be doing, what technology and all that, what is CAS? Let me try and summarize that as a simplified as I can. Hopefully that's too simple for you as well. So every business does something and when they do that, there is an accounting leg to that thing. So they do bill payments, they do taxes, so everything has to go in some kind of an account tax, kind of a database. So that accounting leg is what I would want you to focus on. The second way to look at it is if you're going to be aspiring to be an advisor, you're going to tell them what they're not doing and they should be doing so that their businesses become better. So because of you, there'll be some more accounting leg that comes in and any client of yours, if they say they're the ones who are taking care of those accounting legs, then you're not doing CAS. So as much as you can do for your clients as business clients, that's what CAS is. And I just made a quick note not to forget is as an accountant, when you are offering services, it's not just in input equal to output, hence it's accounting, payroll, tax, whatever that is, it's the outcome or the impact of what you do. And if that becomes better for your clients, then you are doing CAS, that's my definition.

Danielle Lee (05:45):

Great. And Ashley, I know the CPA.com has some extensive definitions and parameters around CAS. Yeah. Can you talk about that.

Ashley Doyen (05:51):

Absolutely. So I always like to start off by what CAS is not. So CAS is not writeup work. It is not a means to an end to get to a tax return, and it's not bookkeeping on its own. We don't like the term bookkeeping, and it's not that we don't like bookkeeping in itself. Bookkeeping is a necessity to deliver CAS, but bookkeeping without dashboards, without KPIs, that is not client advisory services. So how we define at CPA.com and the AI CPA a CAS is again CAS one A one A, because we do feel that we are at a point in our profession where we should be delivering some level at advisor of advisory within every service level. So client advisory services starting at BPO level work where we're doing dashboarding, we are reporting KPIs. Those are table stakes. From there, looking at controllership level services, and so we define BPO and controllership level services as financial CAS and we at CPA.com created a service level maturity chart that helps demonstrate this.

(07:09)

From there, then we look towards the right side of that spectrum and we look at business insights CAS and under business insights CAS, we're looking at that fractional CFO work, and we're looking at how do you really position yourself as a value officer to your clients? Again, hitting on what Hitendra mentioned of what are, not just what are the outputs, but how are we taking those outputs to help our clients really get back to why they got in business in the first place and inform them on decisions they need to make for their business, but also on decisions they need to make to really continue to provide the services they're looking to provide to their clients.

Danielle Lee (07:58):

Great. And Michael, I know we were discussing you have a 2.0 practice, so can you talk about that and how you define CAS in general?

Michael Hsu (08:05):

Yeah, yeah. I think what is CAS is not the right question. First of all, I agree with what the two of the end of them said. Hitendra said, are you making an impact? What's important? Right? Ashley, towards the end you said, is that fractional CFO? Is that adding value? Is that creating value that's what important? The truth is, you go out there and you say, Hey, you know what? I run a CAS practice. The entrepreneurs and the CEOs out there are going to look at you and be like, I don't know what that is. We can sit here and we can debate and talk about it all day and can feel good about ourselves, but that's not important. The point if, to sum this up real quick, the point is what we're saying is CFOs and accountants are in this unique position to provide tremendous value to the CEOs and entrepreneurs of the world. The point of CAS is to help. It's what he said, are you making an impact? It's what she said, right? Are you providing value? That's what CAS is. And in doing so, in doing so, you guys should be making, you guys should be rewarded. You guys should be making a ton of money from it, right? One line from my mentor always says, value creates profit. So create value. I think the importance is.

Danielle Lee (09:19):

Great. And obviously there's a lot of talk about CAS at this conference alone. There's been a lot of mention of the value in CAS, but we want to kind of drill down into the challenges everyone's experiencing and we kind of want to ask you again, for those of you that do have a CAS practice, just by a show of hands, how many of you are struggling with finding clients? Great. And staffing. Alright, always a big challenge today. Pricing. Okay. Structuring the practice. Yeah. Scope of services or advisory work and managing tech. Okay. Yeah. These are all challenges we've seen and I know our panelists have too, so let's get into.

Michael Hsu (10:09):

Some of those was a huge one.

Danielle Lee (10:10):

It really, it's like everybody.

Michael Hsu (10:11):

Everybody's like few here and there.

Ashley Doyen (10:13):

Well, I hope everybody sat in our technology sessions day.

Danielle Lee (10:17):

Exactly. That won't be so much of a challenge anymore now all the world's problems. Yeah, exactly. Completely didn't you can say, and we'll do that today too after all the best practices. Yeah. So Hitendra start with you in terms of finding clients. What kind of advisement do you have there?

Hitendra Patil (10:35):

So a quick question back to the audience. How many of you find clients by word of mouth or referrals? Who does everyone? So how many of you proactively seek referrals? Actually go out to your existing clients and ask them, I know of a top a hundred firm, there are two people in the firm who have the only job of going back to their clients every quarter. Hey, you did not give us any referral this quarter, so that means our services are so bad, so what can we do better? And the people say, oh, sorry, I forgot. I'll send you clients. That's proactive. But they have a system or method of doing that. That's what I meant by proactive. That's one thing that anybody and everybody can implement irrespective of the firm size. Then if you already have clients, which most of you have, they are your captive audience.

(11:27)

But what I mean by that is they, your clients have vendors, your clients have customers, and your client there is already a referral track. So if you get that client, your client, talk to a few of the vendors and clients of their customers, there is a trust level built in, they'll listen to you versus going cold calling or Facebook groups even for that matter, emailing you through your client. And there is a better mechanism to do that, not just one-on-one, but just say, okay, hey Mr. Client, here is a letter. Can you please send that to your clients and vendors that, look, my accountant does a great job and I can book or pay for my accountant's time for you to talk fee and put them in maybe a room, but you take care of all that mailing expense and all that and you short circuit the process and the trust level is most important to note there.

(12:25)

So people will be willing to listen to you. One of my clients in Indiana, a smaller firm, and they started with Facebook groups. All that he did was every week he was putting one question and an answer of the clients that he was servicing on that Facebook group. Slowly the group started getting traction and he now has clients from 30 different states for 20 years. In his practice he had clients only in three neighboring states. The key was he was focusing on certain niches and those somehow people started connecting, the business owners started connecting and they started, look, I'm getting value. That means this guy knows about my business. So those are the things that you would possibly want to do. And the third thing I think is you need to really define who your client is. Only then you'll be able to focus on if you want to sell everything to everyone that's never going to work and there are some really good free data sources available, you go to Bureau of Labor Statistics and find what are the top 20 growing industries and that's where you'll find your next business. So if you are already in those niches, great. If not, you might want to think about it. Yeah,

Ashley Doyen (13:46):

I would add on top of that Tundra, I love what you said about the niches. We know that our top performing CAS practices are selecting a niche or niches and creating industry groups around that. And with that being said, it's really the question to ask yourself is where are my clients? And go where your clients are. I've been actually texting today with a firm that I work with and they work with a bunch of Little Caesars and he's at a little Caesars conference right now. And there's a few things that come from that. Not only of course is he networking and getting those clients, but in addition to that, he's learning their language. He's putting himself in a position where he's attending sessions to understand what is important to franchises and Little Caesars specifically, I work with another firm that focuses on dental offices. And when you speak to him, you would think that he's a dentist because he knows the acumen that dental offices use because he's put himself where his clients are.

Michael Hsu (14:57):

I'm going to dig deeper into that. I love it. I'm just going to build on top of this. They have smart panelists. I thought it was you, but it could be someone else at this conference mentioned this, right? Not just go to where your customer is, but who are you? Look within yourself, who are you? Are you a golfer? Are you an entrepreneur? Are you, what's your passion? I carved out this niche in the entrepreneur world and entrepreneur world is big, but I call this niche entrepreneur will between one to $20 million because that's who I am. I go to these conferences and I'm one of them. I'm comfortable. I'm not the accountant that's here to sell me.

(15:41)

So who are you guys? All of you guys are individuals. All of you guys have your own passion, your own network, your own niche. Mania is sitting in an audience. She's our CFO and head of service at Deep Sky. She runs the entire company. Her personality is very different than Pierre, my other one who is in your face. He's all about football. So niche is not just about an industry, but it's also about who you are. Mania is super nice. She's super wish. She's super sweet. She likes to hang out with different type of people than Pierre and they both can carve out a different industry. So I love that we're just getting deeper. We want to get deeper, we don't want to get broader.

Danielle Lee (16:17):

And that was a great part of those, for those of you that saw Amy vets keynote yesterday finding your why and your passion was a big part of that. So love to hear that. I know quite a few people raise their hands for staffing. If you could all touch on that starting with Ashley, if you can talk about that.

Ashley Doyen (16:32):

Yeah, absolutely. Again, one of those topics that we will not solve overnight here, but the reality of staffing is that the staffing challenge isn't going to change. So we have to rethink the way that we are finding talent and how we're staffing our practices. And what's great about CAS is we are in a unique position because CAS operates so different in the services we're providing than the rest of the firm to look at acquiring and retaining talent that may not even have accounting degrees. So when you start to think through the roles that you're filling and the services you're providing, you don't need somebody with a five year accounting degree to fill an AP role. What you do need is you need somebody that understands project management. What you may look for is you focus on restaurants and you find somebody that worked front of house in a restaurant and they have those soft skills.

(17:38)

Soft skills are very difficult to train technical skills. So bring them in and provide them with the technical knowledge. And so taking that further, when we think about financial CAS and those services and business insights, CAS and advisory, I speak with a lot of firms where they say, that's great, Ashley. We see that we as a profession should be targeting these services, but my staff don't have that skillset. So what do I do and how do I find them? Well, you have a few options. You go again into the industry, you're focusing on you. You find somebody that has controller experience or maybe not even, but they know the industry well again, did they work within a restaurant and you bring them in-house or you look at the talent you do have and you say, how do I upskill these individuals so that they stay with me because I'm investing in them?

(18:40)

So we at CPA.com helped the AI CPA a create something called CAS core and we released it last year and it's an upskilling framework that directly aligns with the service level maturity chart that we created. And it lays out if you are going to upskill somebody to a controller role, controller run course, this is exactly the classes they need to take. Controller two, this and up to CFO one, two, trusted advisor one, two. And so they're climbing. And so we know that individuals, again, they want you as a firm investing in them and they want to know what their future looks like within your firm. And so again, providing them with with that training is going to help career map them and help you retain those individuals and help you also deliver on the services that you're looking to build.

Michael Hsu (19:35):

I love the upskilling part, right? The reason why I came back to the CPA world, you guys heard last year, I participated in a conference and everybody's sitting around complaining, oh, we can't hire people, so on and so forth, and we can't charge enough or so on and so forth. And I unmuted myself and say, Hey, look, y'all charge for more because y'all suck.

(19:59)

That's y'all suck. Yeah, that's what I said. And to my surprise in the chats, people are like, Hey, we suck because nobody teaches us how to be better. And that's the truth. The answer to upskilling isn't another accounting class. You guys have all the accounting class. You guys are the smartest accountants in the world. The problem is to get to the next level, to become a true advisor, to become a true CFO. It's communication classes, marketing classes, operation classes. Understanding the business is understanding entrepreneurship. That's what it is. In the last 13 years, and Vanya kind of tested this, she's CFO, I spent more than half a million dollar on educating myself going to Harvard, going to MIT, taking all these classes. That's why I can have the conversation, right? So how do you bring that to your team, right? Ashley's got amazing resources through CPA.com. All these the, what's it called? CAS core? Yeah, CAS core, right? I have a bootcamp. I know some other guys, the some CPA guys have a bootcamp. You have communities.

Ashley Doyen (21:01):

It's literally wrote the book.

Michael Hsu (21:03):

What was that? Oh yeah, Kendra literally wrote, Hitendra wrote the book. You guys don't buy this, but this is the Bible CAS, right? So it it's about learning and upskilling and then getting to that level. It's an investment. It's a small investment. What is 5,000, $10,000 over three days a week when you're making that in one engagement. And then I want to give some, again, actionable stuff when it comes to hiring people, complaining, we can't hire people and all that stuff. The world has changed. Online jobs, stop PH, right? Everybody knows you can outsource to Philippines hiring them. You know, guys know how to train them. You guys know how your clients are going there to hire accountants, but you guys are the better people to hire them and actually train them. What's the difference? Oh, sure, you can do that yourself. You tell your clients that everybody knows, but I can train them, I can teach them, I can educate them.

(21:56)

That's what you guys' values are, right? We have a chart. You guys can feel free to go to my website and download it. We put all of the names of everybody, we put all of our core values across the top and then we say, Hey, are they a fit or are they not a fit? And then on the right we put do they their job roles, do they want it, do they get it? Do they have the skills to it? And then we map all those out and then we either coach them up through upskilling or we coach them out.

Ashley Doyen (22:24):

I think one more thing we don't want to glaze over in all of this too, is how many people have fully dedicated staff in their CAS practice? I see a couple hands. We cannot scale a CAS practice if we don't have a dedicated team. We are not sharing resources with our tax department or any of our other service lines within the firm.

Michael Hsu (22:48):

That's a different skillset.

Ashley Doyen (22:49):

Right? What's going to happen is, well, you can't tell your client, oh, I'm sorry, I can't pay your bills this month because I have a tax deadline. Okay, you're fired, right? So it's dedicated staff full-time equivalents to your CAS practice and it operates on its own. I can't tell you how many firms they say, yeah, we have a CAS practice. We also do a tax in that CAS practice. No, it's not a CAS practice. It's not, I'm sorry. And so dedicated resources, but not just your staff accountants, it's functional roles. It's a AP team, an AR team, a payroll team, your advisors, but not just your individuals that are performing the accounting work and the advisory work, your BD team. Do you have Mark, going back to how do you find clients? Do you have a marketing individual that actually owns CAS? If not, you should, because I can't tell you how many firms I work with and they say, yeah, we have a marketing department for our firm. How much of their time is spent on marketing CAS none.

Michael Hsu (23:55):

And if you can't afford it, you can't afford it. You should be doing it right? The truth, I mean, a lot of when I started, I was by myself. I sure I can't have a dedicated person here and here and here and here. So you still list out all the roles and then you put all the roles, have your name on it. Yep. That's entrepreneurship. That's building a business. And then you slowly swap them out. Yeah, you slowly swap out the ones that's the lowest that you can replace with the lowest dollar.

Hitendra Patil (24:20):

I think from a staffing point of view, if you are using yesterday's staff requirements, here are the qualifications we need. Here's the experience. We need to find today's staff. That's always going to be a big challenge. But at the same time, you got to look at what's happening with technology itself. 10 years ago I ran a outsourcing, accounting outsourcing company for 12 years and what I was doing 12 years ago, now it's do it manually, which means a lot of this accounting knowledge has gone inside the code of the software. So you don't really need people to do that. You need people to be trained as if they're going to be accountants in a company. You train people differently in a C PA firm versus how that the industry treats their accountants inside it because already handling business types of transactions from a business point of view. And if your clients, your staff doesn't understand the business, just understands accounting processes, you're going to be finding very, very difficult to grow your CAS practice.

Michael Hsu (25:21):

But here's the cool part too, right? You mentioned using technology, it's kind of like people are, I hate those news or whatever about oh chat GPT failed the CPA exam. Who the F cares? It's all about how to use chat GPT to leverage. My buddy just got hired as a prompt engineer for $380,000. And so it's about your staff should be the same thing, utilizing technology. They should be the prompt engineer because they have the accounting knowledge, they have the business knowledge, which goes back to the cool thing also the millennials, or I guess they're Gen Z now, the Gen Zs you're hiring today, they naturally come with those skills, leverage it. Don't just try to stuff them back in. Oh, back in the days we walk uphill both ways in the snow and work 150 hours. That's not utilizing them. It's about taking them and it's understanding, Hey, you guys got all these skills. Here's the framework. Here's how I'm going to teach you. Here are our goal. How would you help us get to that goal?

Hitendra Patil (26:22):

Yeah, I remember one of my clients, a top firm from Cincinnati, the owner of the firm, whenever anybody asked him, so who are you? What do you do? He never said, I'm a CPA, I'm an accountant. He said, I'm an entrepreneur and my business is accounting. The moment he says that other entrepreneur relates to him pretty quickly. And he was like that. He never touched accounting software or anything being the owner of the firm. But he made sure that all the processing, everything gets done properly, hired those people. But then the entire firm's approach, because the owner was thinking that was that business friendly approach. Very, very different. And typically, let's say you have dental pain. I hope you don't, but you look for a dentist, you don't look for orthodontist or something like that. The same thing. You go back and you put CAS on your website, your clients are not going to understand. So if here are the 12 problems that we solve for our clients the best and we are the best in it, put that on your website. That's how people will know I have the same issue. I need to go to him. They don't care whether you're a CPA or accountant, not enrolled agent or anything of that sort.

Ashley Doyen (27:26):

It's the exact reason all the data tells us. Many of you have seen our CAS benchmark survey. I know we were handing it out. BPO firms or CAS only firms are growing at a faster clip than traditional accounting firms, and it's not a result that they are. Yours are so much smarter than the traditional accounting firm. It's because they're specializing, dedicating resources and they're specializing. And so love my accounting friends or I'm part of the AI CPA, but they could learn from following suit and dedicating resources because again, the data tells us when you do, they're growing faster.

Michael Hsu (28:13):

Also, not try to turn everybody into entrepreneur because entrepreneurship is, it sucks if you try to make money. There are easier ways to make money. But everybody here, I'm assuming you're interested or at least exploring about CAS. I'm not, we're, I hate the whole like, oh, everybody go to school compliance. No. If you're great at compliance, do compliance. If you're good at international tax, do international attacks because that's needed, right? But whatever you choose to do, choose to do it. Well, if today I'm keep calling on Navya because she's sitting right there. Man's not an entrepreneur, she's an accountant, she's a great accountant, she's a great controller, she's a great CFO. She never tried to do what she's not. And again, go back to, you know, were mentioning a Amy, who are you? What are you doing? And how do you provide maximize value right? Now if that happens to be CAS, that's what we're here for. That's what we're here for, to help you to give you the resources. I'm not trying to convince anybody off the couch. The couch looks super comfortable, but you've jumped off the couch and then you're doing this CAS thing and you're like, oh, this thing is hard. I'm here saying we are here saying we get it. How can we help?

Danielle Lee (29:30):

That is what we're here for. And we saw a lot of hands when I asked about managing technology. So I want you all to kind of address that. Ashley, starting with you.

Ashley Doyen (29:40):

So with technology, again, I said this yesterday, it can become a full-time job in evaluating technology and it can become very overwhelming in identifying where to start. So when I think about a CAS tech stack, I think about, I try to compartmentalize. I really struggle with that word. I don't know why it's, it's a tricky one. Pre accounting, accounting and post accounting solutions. And we want to make our decisions around our, what is our end goal for our accounting solution? And then what other solutions based on the industry can we plug into that? But what's going to determine really what that entire tech stack looks like is your industry and your ideal client. We can't define our tech stack if we don't have that information. And I also said this yesterday, there's a lot of different solutions out there for, say as an example, construction manufacturing, you might decide the best solution for that is Acumatica.

(30:45)

You might decide the best solution for a non-profit with lots of funds and grants that need to be tracked. That's going to be maybe Intacct. Or you might find that you have a lot of small business clients, single entity clients, and QBO services them just fine. But again, we're determining that tech stack based on what the needs of the client are, and then plugging the right solutions into place for things like AP, AR, FP, and A work. And a great place to get started because we're not trying to boil the ocean overnight, is auto automating your AP. It's where we can make the most significant impact in the quickest manner when you're just getting started on your CAS journey. And so again, start there, plug it into QBO or whatever solution it is, grow your practice, grow your resources. Because even if you find that you do need an ERP solution to service the complexity of your clients, you first need the resources that can support that ERP solution. So it may not be something that you change to for two, three years and that's fine, but at least have a vision for it and create your architecture around that.

Hitendra Patil (32:01):

Yeah, I think you touched upon that, but generally, I would always recommend that you take an outside in approach. When you look at technology, your accounting or GL is your system of record, but that's not what really your clients are interacting with. And collaboration is always going to grow with all the cloud technology. And the people will just expect that as a zero level thing. I should not have to call my accountant to find out what happened about this particular bill. I should be able to find out myself making business decisions based on that information. So don't lock that data inside those GL's. So you take an outside in approach, make sure your clients have that access. And hence, if you are in those niches, you definitely need to know what are the software that they're using. For example, restaurants, if they use a POS system or a menu pricing system that has to link back to the GL, you better make sure that your core accounting software has that capability.

(32:55)

So again, the outside in approach. And then I also recommend that you keep a technology experimentation budget. You build that unit pricing and profitability. That includes at least one person from your firm who is labeled as a technology champion. So maybe he does six hours a month investigating, evaluating technology, but that's his job. That's his accountable for, and you build that, okay, I'm going to go and trial these three software just to see. It's not that, okay, my technology company stopped supporting this particular software, now I got to go and find you. You'll be very much in a mess. So instead you're looking at, okay, I'm going to put five clients on this newer thing and see what happens. I'll keep running parallelly. Oh, this is better. Now let me show that to my client and let me then move more clients into this. You don't have to change for the sake of change, but if there is something better, why not? Right?

Michael Hsu (33:54):

Love that idea of the test kitchen. Just you got to have a room to test and try before you implement it. You got to bump your head. But I'm going to take a different approach. Don't overthink it. Yeah,

(34:08)

Don't overthink it. My buddy Andy, he sold two businesses, one of them to Visio, you guys might have heard of this small company and runs a 60 million fund just on technology. And I was sitting there, I was talking with him and I go, Hey, you know what? I'd love to build this app. I'd love to do this thing. I would love to invest in technology. And then I was just talking his year off and he goes, I never, I go, you got the skills, you show me how to do it. And he goes, I never invest in technology. I was like, what do you mean you run a $60 million fund investing in only technology? And he says, it's never about the technology. It's always about solving the problem. It's always about solving the client's problem. It's always about solving the problem. And you guys are really good at this.

(34:53)

You guys are accountants. And then having that process, having that repeatable process to solve that problem, and then looking at the process go, which part of this process can I automate with technology? Which part of this process can I simplify with technology? Which part of this process can I make cheaper, better, faster with technology? And then you go out there and you find a solution to put into it. That's it. Don't overcomplicate it. The issue with us firm owners, entrepreneurs or anybody, is that we come to these conferences, we have all these vendors and I'm sorry, accounting today. And then we get attracted to these shiny objects and it's like, oh, so cool. If I implemented this, all of my problems will go away if I implemented zero instead of which one's better? QuickBooks and all of my, it doesn't go away. If your process suck, if your business suck, implementing whatever technology, it's going to suck. So don't overthink it. Go back to the roots. Go back to a basic, what problem are you solving? What's the process that's solve that problem? And then look at the process and decide where can I invest in technology that will simplify it, that will make it better, faster, automate it, make it cheaper. And that's it.

Ashley Doyen (36:03):

That's why I do believe sequencing of change matters. Change management matters. Because exactly, if you make a technology change just for the sake of making a technology change and you haven't really thought through the documentation of how you are implementing that change your standard operating procedures, you are throwing something at the wall to see what sticks. And quite frankly, you're going to end up with an entire CAS team where some people might be using it, some people not. Some clients might be on the solution, some may not. And it's all different. And at that point, again, what's the point? What's the point? There's not one. So there's documentation of what is the objective? What are we trying to achieve with the solution? Creating a baseline of every single client in this industry is going on this tech stack, and this is exactly what that looks like. These are the templates that are being deployed and these are the deliverables within this package. And if we move them up to this package, this is what that looks like. It's got to be defined because without that documentation, everybody is on a different page every single time. That's how it happens. So yes, people and processes and document like that all comes first there again, sequencing matters.

Michael Hsu (37:30):

Can I ask a question and you guys can just shout at how you don't have to raise your hand, right? Because everybody raise their hand when you have problem with technology, what is the question? What is the problem? Anyone? We solved everybody's problem.

Audience Member 1 (37:43):

Yeah. Oh, problems. No, which one to use.

Michael Hsu (37:47):

Yeah. Okay, well.

Audience Member 1 (37:49):

There's so much for that.

Michael Hsu (37:50):

Okay, so did the goal simple, not overthink, not overthinking it. Did that, okay. Okay. That's good. This is a good panel. We're solving problems.

Danielle Lee (38:00):

Yeah, exactly. Well, speaking of that, I did want to turn it over to more specific questions just to make sure we get those in before we run out of time. Otherwise, I have many more questions of my own, but just in case.

Michael Hsu (38:11):

Just shout it out.

Danielle Lee (38:12):

If anyone had it.

Michael Hsu (38:12):

That would make it way more fun than, because we kind of rehearse these, make it hard. Yeah, make the hard ones over there.

Danielle Lee (38:21):

Stump, stump the panelist. You do have a lot of wisdom on the panel here today, as Michael was mentioning.

Audience Member 1 (38:28):

So for those of us who are starting the CAS practice, so what's the one thing that we should take when we get back from the office?

Michael Hsu (38:37):

Take one, action. Whatever it is, take one action. Really, we didn't set this up. I know Alan, but we didn't set this up, I promise. I'm going to have a QR code throw up there at the end of the thing. It's called Monday Morning Action Plan. Okay? The problem is, and I get it, I What's that? CEO, right? The conference, CEO, who gets super excited and I learned all this stuff. I took all the notes, I took all the pictures, and I go back and my staff was like, oh, oh, shit, here he comes. He just came back from a conference and we're going to implement 10 different things. I said, just pick one. Just pick one. Do it. Use the Monday morning action plan. Here's what the, here's the one biggest takeaway. Here's what I, I'm going to do, right?

(39:15)

Here's the person I'm going to delegate it to. Here's what I'm communicate how I'm going to communicate it. And then the most important part, create a feedback loop every seven days. Every 14 days or every 30 days. And I'm going to look at that feedback loop and just implement one thing. Again, sequence of change. You guys work with this. You guys work with entrepreneurs. They're like, Hey, how can I help you with your business? I like to grow my top line and my bottom line. And by the way, I've tried to implement three new technology and staffing too. You can't do that. You're not Superman. Long as you have unlimited, unlimited. If you have unlimited money, that's fine. Some people have that, but no one has unlimited time and unlimited energy. Your team certainly don't. So if there's one thing to take away, I think it's just like pick one thing. There's tremendous Jody's session. Yesterday was like, I was jumping up and down in the back if you guys did not hear talking about CAS, right? Pick one thing you want to do and then just do that one thing. And if you want, send me an email. Tell me how you're doing 30 days from now. I would love to hear from you if you have any questions all for you.

Hitendra Patil (40:18):

Yeah, a little bit of a tactical answer there. If you're just starting now with CAS, generally you would start with your existing clients, which means you are, tell them what is it going to be different than what they've been getting from you for so long? And why should they pay you more? Just because you call it CAS. If you go straight.

Michael Hsu (40:36):

Show them, show them, show different, right?

Hitendra Patil (40:37):

Yeah. They have to see the difference. If you go straight to, okay, I'm going to find new clients for CAS, I'm not going to offer to my existing clients. That new prospect is going to ask you the first question for how many clients do you do CASh? What answer do you have? So you've got to start with your clients. And hence that Delta has to be pretty much very well defined so the client can understand, oh, I missed this value for so long. I'm glad that you are doing this as an accountant. I'm willing to pay you for that.

Michael Hsu (41:08):

I love that. Show them and then free for six month and then take it away, right? Don't tell them, don't be like, oh yeah, I'm doing this, so then you have to pay me more, but show it to them. Do it for six months. And they say, Hey, is this helping out? Is this helping you run your business? And if it is six months ago, six months later, I say, Hey, I've been doing this for you for free, and now it's going to cost you $500 extra, a thousand dollars extra. And it should be like, yes, it should be a hell yes. If you are actually helping them. If you're not, then move on to something else. Try something else. Right?

Ashley Doyen (41:47):

I also think in regards to just starting dedicating a CAS lead and a partner in charge of CAS is going to be really important. I work with a lot of firms where they're like, we see an opportunity with CAS. We think that it can be a number one revenue generator for our firm. We don't have any partners or any leads in charge of CAS. Okay. And how many partners do you have in charge of audit? Five. Okay. And how many partners do you have in charge of tax? 10. I'm just throwing out random numbers. And you want CAS to be your leading revenue generator. Tell me how, talk to me about how that's going to happen. It's, it's not realistic. We have to have, because at the end of the day, when we talk about CAS 2.0 at CPA.com, we're talking about a methodology and we're talking about four pillars.

(42:44)

We're talking about practice strategy and governance. We're talking about professional development, we're talking about technology, and we're talking about a center of excellence. And nothing else matters. If your practice, strategy and governance is not in place, your internal communication, your compensation structures to drive change. So if you don't have that partner and you don't have a CAS lead, you can have the best plan in place with everything else, but nothing is going to actually change. So again, I would just really encourage finding those dedicated individuals and then having them start to work through a business plan. And those are things that we can also help with at CPA.com.

Michael Hsu (43:26):

Just again, take that small, make that really small, make that task lead the big, that CAS champion responsible for the one thing that you want to implement.

Audience Member 2 (43:37):

Where do you find template that you can offer under task, CAS flow, fore CAS? Coaching, client advisory is there. So I've done that for, but I've never really, I'm hire other types of people, but I'd also, for me to sell, I need.

Michael Hsu (44:09):

Yes, find me on LinkedIn, send it to me. I'll send it to you. Jody, yes. Were you in Jody's session? He actually had his entire CAS practice up here. I took a picture. I can send you that picture as well. But again, don't overthink. Isn't this overarching thing again, let's take it down to the micro, micro level, right? Daily CAS report. That's CAS. That's CAS, right? Why? Because if you're a business and you're running on CAS, we're today, we're running into a recession, everybody here knows that, right? Anybody disagree that we're running into a recession? The only reason why we're not running into a recession is because rich people are still buying stuff. My buddy Leo still buy fucking million dollar Lamborghinis because they made money from covid, right? As soon as that stop and everybody is stopping, everybody is stopping. LVMH just laid off 600 jobs from a company for my buddy's company, and they're not starting right?

(45:09)

If you're a CEO today, if you're a CEO today, and then you're thinking you are going to spend your way out of the recession, you're hiring people, you're doing marketing and sales like you are crazy. So CFOs, and then I said this on social media, if you're CFO, and I said this to CEO because they're my audience, and I say, and if a CFO is telling you otherwise, fire them. So daily CAS report that is something so small that you doesn't even need a CPA, your staff can do this. As soon as you communicate that reasoning, that value to them, now you say, Hey, we're monitoring your cash on a day to basis, because what's the most important for A CEO? It's your mindset. So you're not worried, do I have money tomorrow? Do I have, that's CAS at a micro level, but still CAS, and then again, which level you say you've done it, so you totally get it right. Does that make sense.

Danielle Lee (46:03):

Ashley and Hitendra, I know you both have resources on this as well, if you want to be more specific about directing.

Hitendra Patil (46:07):

Yeah, sure. So I pulled off this CAS Research through CPA Aline's almost 9,000 responses and a lot of insights in this book. So I actually asked the firms, do you do CAS? Or somebody says yes, somebody says no. So people who say yes, what are the services that you offer versus people who say no? And people who said, no, we don't do CAS offered six different types of services to their clients. People who said yes offered 12 different types of services. There were higher end firms that said about 17 common services. We sell to every single client under CAS. So that tells you, what are you missing? Essentially, when you look at, if you're doing accounting for your client, when you go in their books, you will also know who are the other professionals that they're paying to every month, every quarter. Those are the services.

(46:58)

They're going to somebody else to opt those services, and you're missing out on them. So of course, you'll need to build that capability, processes, reports and whatnot. But you already know what other services that you can offer. Essentially, you don't want any dollar from your client to go to another similar providers of yours. So that will tell you how many more services you would want to offer. You don't get there overnight. Of course, it takes a bit of a time, but at least where you're going. So all those are listed in the book. But again, if you wish, I can just send you a list of that. There's a lot of information available. Don't ask chat GPT. It makes a list of 50 services.

Danielle Lee (47:39):

Yeah, Ashley?

Ashley Doyen (47:40):

Yeah. So we have a lot of professional development resources available on CAS. It's actually, we spend about probably 80% of our time at CPA.com focusing on the delivery of CAS services. And we have workshops. So we have an intro to CAS workshop, which is a workshop that firms that are looking to really explore CAS or start to really put a definition behind it, can attend. It's a half day workshop or even firms that have a CAS practice, but I have new hires coming in that they want to educate on CAS. We'll send individuals there. From there, phase two would be a roadmap workshop where we help you create that business plan on how are we staffing, how are we building a subscription based model? What does our tech stack look like? What does our business development strategy look like? And then after coming out of that, we'll have firms go through a firm assessment survey, and it's taken by two people at the firm.

(48:42)

And we take that survey, the two individuals take it independent of each other, and it provides us with a breakdown of where are there discrepancies in these answers? And I misspoke when I said the four pillars earlier, but we have it categorized by center of excellence, technology, implementation, what are our blue printing? Again, the practice strategy and governance, practice development, upskilling. You go through, you answer these questions and it tells us again, where's there discrepancies? We come in and we do an unpacked session and we say, based on where we feel that there are some items that need to be addressed or some bottlenecks within your firm, this is what we recommend. These are some next steps that we recommend. And so again, we're really here to help coach you along your CAS journey and make sure that you have that strong business plan in place. And then from there, revisiting it. Like business plan should never be a static document. They're evolving. And in fact, some of the most successful firms that I work with, they are so successful because they're okay with failing and failing fast and revisiting that business plan as needed. So again, reach out to us, reach out to me, go to our website. And again, there's a lot available from a professional services standpoint that we can help you with on your journey.

Danielle Lee (50:07):

Unfortunately, we're at the end of time, but I would encourage you to reach out to all these panelists. I know, Michael, you wanted to put a QR code on the screen? Yeah, there we go. There's another resource.

Michael Hsu (50:16):

Yeah, I think we got three. And Tandra's got one. I got two. So I think one, I think this is the one that's a Monday morning action plan. And then the next one, I'd love to ask your client what you can provide. We have a list of 35 questions that you can ask your clients to dig down into what they actually care about, what they value, what they're struggling with. Those are the same questions that I ask on a sales call, right? So you can find out exactly what's needed for. Great.

Danielle Lee (50:43):

Thank you. And thank you all for a great, oh, sorry. Did you have one quick that.

Hitendra Patil (50:48):

Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you for listening in and staying here. I know you guys are hungry.

Danielle Lee (50:54):

Yeah. Thank you for the great questions. Lunch is immediately following this in the main room. Thank you all again for joining us, and thank you all for your great expertise, experience, advice. Thank you.

Michael Hsu (51:05):

Thank you. Thanks guys. Thank you.